If you think you know somebody who resembles any of the characters here, congratulations, but you're wrong - any similarity between the characters in this story and any real person is purely coincidental, since all of these characters are figments of my imagination.

This is my story, not yours. Don't sell it or put it on a pay site. You can keep it and/or give it away with all of this information intact, but if you make money off of it without my permission, you're breaking the law and pissing me off.

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"Quadrant Command, this is Whiskey Tango Four Zero, over."

"Roger Four Zero. What's your status?"

"All green, QC." Captain Chen replied, sounding as bored as he felt. "Not a peep, not a whisper. We've swept out past Jupiter, including last known locations. Can't find a spook anywhere."

"Roger Four Zero. Don't get sloppy. They don't call 'em spooks for nothin'."

"Roger Command. I'll stay on my metaphorical toes, but it's been three months." Chen answered. "I think they've gone to find somebody else to play with."

"You could be right, Four Zero, but if you're not, and you let your guard down, we're all in deep doo-doo."

"Roger that QC. But I still say they've picked up their marbles and gone home."

"Same story from all patrols, Mr. President." The Secretary of Global Defense said, concluding his report. "Nobody's seen hide nor hair of the spooks for almost six months now. We've even sent scouts out beyond Pluto's orbit without catching even a whiff of their drives. Our analysts believe that gravitic surge we detected several months ago was the spooks leaving the system."

"You could be right, General," President Ramirez said thoughtfully, "but we can't afford to let our guard down. They may have left, but there's nothing saying they won't be back. Either way, if they show up again, we must defeat them once and for all!"

"Of course, Mr. President." The SGD replied. "I daresay we'll have a few surprises for them, should they return, Sir."

"See that we do."

"Come to zero-one-six mark zero-zero-tharee mark one-one-seven." Miko's voice reflected her boredom. She loved the life of the asteroid prospector, as much for the solitude as for the fact that it had already made her and her partner millionaires several times over, but the times between strikes were still the same: endless hours of boring electronic sweeps ending at some unknown point in adrenalin pumping action as the sensors detected a metal-rich rock.

"That's going to take us further out, Miko." Her partner and lifemate, Hermione Sanchez cautioned. "We don't want to run up on any spooks out here."

"Yeah, yeah." She replied. "You know as well as I do the damn spooks don't fuck with non-military vessels, and nobody's seen 'em for months, anyway. I just want to check out this blip I got, then we can head over to the next quadrant."

"Just because they never have don't mean they never will." Sanchez watched her partner with affection as the small Japanese woman concentrated on her computer screens. The numbers and graphs had never meant anything to Hermione. Navigating the Solar System was her specialty, and she was very good at it. It had been mere chance, no, incredible, fantastic, wonderful fortune that had thrown the two of them together as partners in one of the first asteroid prospecting ventures since the advent of the grav-drive.

"Just a few more... HOLY MARY, MOTHER OF GOD!" Miko exclaimed, slamming backward into her seat.

"What the...?" Hemione, who knew her lover to be a lifelong Buddhist, couldn't help but wonder at her invocation of the Catholic icon. "What's happening Miko?"

"I've just had the biggest damn spike in readings I've ever seen!" Miko almost whispered. "If there's even a fraction of the metal out there that these sensors are indicating, we've hit the friggin' motherlode!"

"...Or a goddamn battleship..." Hermione muttered under her breath, checking and re-checking her own sensors for signs of another grav-drive in the vicinity.

The Santa Maria nosed slowly over the large asteroid, jagged peaks and deep crevasses slipping beneath her hull, starkly outlined by the sunlight coming from almost directly astern.

"It's not the asteroid, My." Miko told her, using her pet name for her lover. "Something... something in the shadow... Hit the floods, will you?"

"You sure you want to give away our position like that?" Sanchez asked nervously. A former fighter pilot, she had a great deal of respect for the capabilities of the spooks, and their deviousness.

"You got anything on sensors?" Miko asked irritably. She could get more than a little short when on the trail of a find, as Hermione well knew.

"No, but... Oh, what the hell! Here goes..." She flipped the switch for the forward floods then slammed back into her own seat "HOLY SHIT! Strap in, Miko! We got to get the fuck outta here!"

Sanchez cursed the clumsy prospecting vessel for not being one of the sleek military killers to which she was accustomed, and the lack of discipline that allowed her lover to sit cross-legged in her accel seat, without harness, while working.

"Wait." Miko said, getting her first glimpse of one of the alien motherships, then, as Hermione continued flipping switches and checking displays: "WAIT, MY!"

Sanchez paused in her preparations for emergency flight to see what her partner was up to.

"It's not emitting anything." Miko said quietly. "And there's an open hatch."

Hermione, still on edge, stared at the alien ship, then at her own displays. Sure enough, the ship showed no sign of having noticed them, or of having anyone aboard. The drives were powered down, as was almost everything else aboard, according to her sensors, and lo and behold, one hatch stood open, it's cover casting a shadow along the vastness of the alien hull in the glare of the floods.

"I don't know, Miko." Sanchez shook her head. "My mother always told me, 'If it sounds too good to be true, it's too good to be true!'"

"Carolina is a very wise woman, My." Miko, said, heading for the rear of the cabin. "I, on the other hand, am not. I'm going to take a look."

"You're not serious!" Hemione watched in disbelief as her lover began donning a scuffed, scratched and patched, but still serviceable vacuum suit. "You're NOT planning to board that thing!"

"Yes, I am." Miko gave her that secretive smile that had so captured her heart on the L5 station a few months back. "I don't know why or how, baby, but somehow I know it's safe. You should probably send a capsule and back off a ways, just in case."

She won, of course.

"You don't think I'm about to let you just walk into the mouth of the lion alone, do you?" Hermione bristled, realizing that she, too, felt it was safe, though she couldn't say why.

"Now, we've been through this before, dear." Miko said sweetly, "You're a tough broad, honey, but I can still kick your ass if you get in my way."

"I know that! You also know I couldn't live with myself if anything happened to you, so move over and hand me my suit!" Sanchez' gruff manner, intended to hide her softer core, had always been transparent to Miko, who stood quietly aside and helped her partner suit up. As Miko had known she would, Hermione grumped and muttered to herself the whole time she was donning her suit.

"Well, if you're going with me, you might as well just land us near that hatch, My." The black-haired young rockhound chided.

Her lover bristled at the thought of putting her precious ship in even more danger, but realized that if anything happened to the two of them, the Santa Maria was just so much scrap anyway. Grumbling even louder, she deftly steered the vessel to within a few yards of the hatch. Hermione set the grav drive to low power and the auto-pilot to hold them on the surface of the vessel.

Miko, as usual, was first out of the hatch, and when Sanchez' boots hit the alien hull beside her, she could feel the slight vibration through the soles of her boots. The suits, intended for exploring, among other things, asteroids with high iron content, came equipped with variable strength boot magnets, which Miko turned on when she felt herself drifting a little away from the hull. To her surprise, the magnets had no effect, but the suit drifted slowly back to the hull of the alien craft, anyway.

"This thing's big enough to have its own gravity, My!" She told her partner excitedly.

"Yeah, but it ain't much, so keep your boots down and don't go bouncing around, Micky." Sanchez held the beam torch like a weapon as she scanned as much of the surrounding area as she could.

Miko hated having the 'o' in her name replaced with a 'y', so naturally, Hermione did it whenever the smaller girl pissed her off.

Using a shuffle-step they had perfected for moving across bodies with very low gravity, the two advanced on the beckoning hatch. It looked like a standard UE manufactured outer door for a single person manlock, the kind used for maintenance access while in space.

Without waiting for Hermione, Miko stepped into the opening, and drifted slowly into the interior of the lock. As soon as her boots touched the inner door, the outer door closed, and she could feel vibration as air rushed into the lock. Gradually, the sounds of rushing air filled her ears as enough air entered the lock to carry the sound, until a green light came on at her feet, and the inner door popped open, dropping her softly onto a metal platform. Miko hit the standard lock control without thinking, and the lock recycled, pumping air out to allow the outer door to open.

Since her guages showed the air to be breathable, and detected no biohazards, Miko popped her helmet and placed it on the platform beside her. Freed from her initial preoccupation, Miko looked around her for the first time as the airlock cycled inward once more. Lights were coming on throughout the vessel as if spreading out from her point of entry and the young prospector stared in amazement at what she saw. The entire enormous hull was open and filled with a complex web of cables. Wherever two or more cables came together, a transparent, spherical bubble was formed, as if cables and bubbles were made of the same material and the cables somehow extruded from the bubbles. Some bubbles were large, some small, and some, like the one in which she stood, attached to the outer hull. There were double diaphragm entry points in each bubble next to each cable anchorage, suggesting that whoever crewed the vessel traveled hand over hand along the cables between bubbles. One would have to push through both diaphragms to get to the interior of the bubble, but it looked as though the diaphragms could withstand a great pressure differential.

"Holy cow!" Hermione breathed softly as she removed her own helmet. "It's like a giant spider web!"

"Not quite." Miko replied. "There's a kind of logic to it, if you think about it. This thing could take quite a beating in a meteor shower or a battle without suffering much real damage. I mean, look at it. Each compartment is self-contained, and automatically sealed off from the rest of the ship. All it would take to be battle-ready is for the crew to get into vacuum suits."

"Yeah," nodded her partner, "and the cables would act as shock absorbers, so it would take a direct hit on a bubble to damage anything in them."

"Most of the bubbles are suspended by several cables, so even severing one or two cables wouldn't do much damage, unless there's something vital in the cables, like life support or communications." Miko said, staring in wonder at the vastness of the ship's interior. "I think we need to get to that one."

Miko nodded in the direction of a large bubble that seemed about half a mile away, and Hermione shrugged, saying "Yeah, I don't know why, but I think you're right."

Without even thinking about it, the two left their helmets and pushed through the pair of diaphragms near a cable that seemed headed in the right direction. Fortunately, the air between bubbles was also breathable.

Hand over hand, they pulled themselves to the next bubble, but instead of going through, swung from cable to cable until they reached another one that seemed to go in the right direction. Three more transfers, and they found themselves pushing into the largest bubble they had yet encountered. As they did, a standard Earth technology display lit up, showing the features of a man and a woman.

At that very moment, every television set on Earth simultaneously displayed the visages of two people - a man and a woman. As if waiting for something, they stood motionless for a few moments, then the man began to speak. No one noticed for long moments that he spoke through each television in the language of the watchers.

'I am Prototype Ten. This is my partner, Prototype Nine. We were created to fight terrorism, but became much more than our creators intended. The unity you now enjoy is the fulfillment of that imperative. That's right - we are the 'spooks' you have been fighting. We mourn your dead with you, but while you are mourning, know that the actual count of deaths is less than half what you believe it to be. Many of your brothers and sisters have, through their own free will, joined in our cause. You've wondered about the disappearances - those were recruits to our cause. The times when no remains were found in the wreckage of destroyed planes, tanks, etc., all for the same reason.

"We regretted the necessity to become enemies to our own people, but the only other way for you to achieve the unity, strength, and prosperity you now enjoy, would have been for me to become your dictator, a solution I found even more repugnant than this one. Was it all for nothing? It was not. As most of you are aware, Earth and its people are far better off than before the 'spooks' appeared. I do not flatter myself that you will thank us for having done what we have done, but I'll leave you with one more thing: This broadcast has been triggered by the discovery of our parting gift by two of your asteroid prospectors..."

The view zoomed away from the face of the man to show the interior of a strange, bubble-like compartment and the stunned faces of the two prospectors. "Miko Sato and Hermione Sanchez have discovered this alien spacecraft that we left for you as both a launchpad to the stars and a warning. When you have learned enough about the operation of this craft, you will be able to build your own 'Faster than Light' starships. This will require the continued cooperation of all the peoples on the planet. I have told you that it is also a warning. This craft was captured while it and a whole fleet of similar craft were attacking another star system less than one hundred light years from Earth. The attackers were driven off, but not annihilated, so they are still out there. If you are wise, you will heed this warning and prepare yourselves to defend against real enemies. This means not only building on your current state of unity and what you have learned from fighting the 'spooks', but seeking out and forming mutual defense pacts with other beings on other planets."

"If that is not enough to keep you working together, Nine and I will return. If we must return, we will be very angry! If we have to come back, it will be to punish you, not to unite you, so take that to heart! Oh, yes - as a result of the experiments done to us, and some things we learned to do on our own, we are no longer aging. The scientists who conducted the experiments that produced us can verify, by comparing our current images with photos that were taken when we were part of their program, that we have not aged. We will be around for a very long time."

Will surveyed the expectant faces - more than eight thousand of them. He didn't need a sound system for this speech, his own abilities amplified his voice and made sure that each person received the appropriate translation.

"People of New Earth, we salute you!"

He waited for the cheers to die. The colonists had chosen the name themselves and while it didn't show a lot imagination, it did seem appropriate.

"As promised, you have a fair new planet to call your own, safe, for some years, from the anger of your former countrymen. Those of your family members who have chosen to join you are now at your sides. Those whose Earth families are not here must form new ones. You have sacrificed a great deal to give humanity a new lease on life, and while, at the moment, they may not be very pleased with you, time and history will ultimately show you for the heroes you are.

"Now, it is time to start your new lives. You must work hard and quickly to increase your population, build a new civilization, and build a foothold in space trade. Since you already know the secrets of the alien FTL drive, you have a head start on the people of Earth in developing trade and mutual defense pacts with other races while Earth is still trying to figure out the alien technology. Tina and I will shepherd your colony for ten years, gradually disengaging from you until, at the end of that time, you will no longer have any contact with us."

"Why don't you just stay on?" A voice in the crowd asked. "You know you're more than welcome!"

"We appreciate the sentiment, and would like nothing better, but ultimately, you must depend only on yourselves, and you won't be able to do that with us around." Will said. "When someone has the powers we have, it is too easy to apply them, all in the name of good, while creating the ultimate evil for a society - a weak, dependent society that is unable to fend for or defend itself. That is why, once we are convinced that you have the necessities for building your new world, it will become harder and harder to convince us to do anything on your behalf. More and more, you will have to find your own solutions for problems you face. The only ones we will handle are those that we created by placing you here, so far from other help, and which you can't reasonably be expected to solve for yourselves."

"Well, it can't be much worse than being plucked from an exploding tank!" One person shouted.

"Yeah! Or getting teleported out of fighter after fighter, just as they were being shot down!" Said another, female voice.

"Or finding yourself suddenly transported from in front of your TV to an alien spaceship!"

It became sort of a game with them for a few minutes to compare stories of the hair-raising adventures each had had in the course of becoming New Earthers, and Will, grinning, let them continue until they ran down.

Finally, he joined in again. "Okay, so our recruitment methods were a little, er, unorthodox..." he waited for the laughter to die before continuing, "but from now on, there won't be anyone to teleport you out of danger, or shield you from enemy fire. You'll have only yourselves to depend on. The good news is that many of you are and were, long before you joined our cause, tough, resourceful individuals, and I have no doubt that you'll be able to handle whatever comes along."

The cheering went on for several minutes this time. When it died, Will continued, "Now, we have a colony to build and a shipyard to plan, so what do you say we get to it!"