Rules and points

 The spaceship’s drives hummed as the power increased.  Sat in the command-chair on the bridge, Captain Rascal bounced gently up and down — he had the gravity on the bridge kept at a quarter of one-G especially for this — waiting for the moment that Yemoi, the navigation officer, would announce that they were ready to enter hyperspace.  His eyes glittered with excitement and his fingers, slightly short and stubby for a baseline human, gripped the arms of the command-chair as though to stop him from bouncing away from it.  Which, given that Captain Rascal was short and light and built like a jockey, was entirely possible in the reduced gravity of the bridge.

The bridge doors opened on the left side and Rascal looked casually over to see who was arriving.

“Vizile!  Get over here you old reprobate!”

Vizile, the First Officer, forced a smile onto his long, thin face.  His skin was ruddy, a consequence of being born on one of the four Fire Worlds, and his hair was jet black and he looked, to Rascal at least, like a picture of a demon from old mythologies.

“Captain,” said Vizile in a level tone that completely belied his actual mood.  “I think we should consider—“

“Engines at full power,” said Yemoi, speaking over him.  Vizile raised a red hand as though to try and stop her speaking, but she continued, “Entry into hyperspace is now possible.”

“Don’t do that yet!” yelled Vizile.  Rascal grinned at him.

“Mark!” he yelled, equally as loudly, and Yemoi pressed some buttons on the desk in front of her.  Vizile’s face spasmed as he tried to both grimace and stop himself grimacing at the same time.  It looked like the effort hurt.

“What’s the matter, Viz?” asked Rascal.  The transition into hyperspace was smooth; from the perspective of the bridge the only thing that changed was that the viewing screen greyed out.  Whatever was out there now was impossible to see as hyperspace contained no photons.  Energy exchange was mediated through some other means that was still being intensively studied.

“I think we might have left someone behind,” said Vizile.  His voice was tightly controlled and he was trying hard not to sound angry but he sounded like someone had stepped heavily on his foot and he was trying not to scream.  “I have been unable to find Merance.”

“We did leave her behind,” said Rascal.  Now that they had entered hyperspace and there was nothing to anticipate he had slowed his bounce and was sitting almost normally in the command-chair.  “Her shuttle didn’t reach us before we departed.”

Vizile rubbed a hand over his face.  His skin paled with the the pressure, only gradually reddening again as he hand was lifted.  “She was en route?” he asked.

“Maybe?  I dunno,” said Rascal.  “Is there a test for that?”

“I mean,” said Vizile, “she was travelling to us when we left?”

“Oh,” said Rascal. “Why didn’t you say so then?  Yes, she would have been about three minutes away.  But she was late, and you have to have rules, don’t you, Viz?”

Vizile drew a long breath.  He had, as he acutely remembered, sat down with the captain a few days ago to discuss having rules and obeying them, particularly with regard to using the ship’s instruments (such as the Butcher) in ways that potentially (or definitely, in the case of the Butcher) harmed the planetary life around them.  It had not been an easy, or pleasant, conversation, and he had been walking figuratively on eggshells ever since waiting to see if Rascal was plotting revenge.

“I think, Sir,” he said after a pause, “that we did discuss that rules can be treated as guidelines at certain points, and that making a point and breaking a rule can both be problematic.”

“Did we?”  Rascal grinned again and despite himself Vizile smiled back.  The Captain’s mood was oddly infectious.

“Yes, Sir,” he said.  He rarely called Rascal ‘Sir’ and was hoping that the man would notice this sooner or later.  “Yes, and I think you were making a point there, that didn’t need to be made.  Weren’t you?”

Rascal’s smile never faded or faltered.  “Not for you, old bean,” he said.  “For Merance.  She needed to learn not to be late, right?”

“I… I… suppose so,” said Vizile who wanted to sit down somewhere quietly and work this out without Rascal derailing his train of thought.  “I… I mean, we can always go back for her.”

“No need!”

Vizile’s train of thought derailed thoroughly and catastrophically.  He blinked several times, trying and failing to guess what Rascal might mean.  Finally he gave in.

“What do you mean?” he asked, his tone full of trepidation.

“She was close enough to get pulled into hyperspace with us,” said Rascal.  He started bouncing again, which Vizile considered a bad sign.  “She’s sort of following us.  She should pop out at the other end when we do.  Give or take a half-million kilometres.”

“Wha— that— how—“  Vizile struggled to find any words and he took a couple of steps backwards while his brain short-circuited in every direction there was.  Yemoi looked up from the navigation console, which was doing little at this point except showing the expected time to departure from hyperspace, and addressed the captain.

“The shuttle’s too small, Sir,” she said, and it irked Vizile just a little than the ‘Sir’ was sincere.  “It’s not got the stability to withstand hyperspace travel.  It’ll probably disintegrate when it emerges.”

“Let’s hope Merance gets into a space-suit before that happens then!” said Rascal cheerfully.

Spoon harvest

Four hundred years ago, give or take a handful of years (and that depended on whose hands you were looking at, as well), the civilisation known to historians as the Spoon somehow managed a mass destruction event.  They'd spread out a little from their home planet, colonising various asteroids and small moons in their system, and as far as we could tell, they'd destroyed anything small enough to be either blown up or put into a orbit that fell into their star.  Two moons were too large for that, and one of them had been dealt with quite effectively by redirecting a large asteroid onto a collision course with it.  The other moon still retained traces of their civilisation, mostly worked stone and some tiny caches of artefacts, but the big giveaway was really the lakes of metal where big things had been melted down to slag and left to harden.
The home planet had also been razed, but more had survived, as might be expected from a longer inhabited planet.  Sealed underground chambers had been found, some including mummified remains, and some containing unpleasant traps.  On a small island far away from the continental landmasses a village had been found, apparently overlooked when the main destruction had occurred.  And in orbit around the planet, seemingly forgotten, was a satellite network that still contained plenty of data.
We were investigating them, mostly on the pretext of finding out why they'd done it, and either preventing ourselves from doing it, or making sure we were only in the audience stands and not on the playing fields if we couldn't.  The majority of the research was taking place on and around the home planet, but there were teams sent out to other points of potential interest in the system.  We were a scouting party; our job was to look for things that were out-of-place and report back about them.
That is, out-of-place if you were a Spoon.  And that's what made the job so hard.
Briana pointed to a small hill.  She and I were stood on some kind of wide, shallow plain that had mountain ranges on two sides, shallow foothills on most of the a third, and kind of ran out into sand, and eventually a sea on all the remaining bits.  The mountains loomed, in the proper sense of the word, and gave anyone coming here to see them nightmares sooner or later.  This was the moon that had suffered the asteroid collision, though that was the other side to where we were, and so the atmosphere was thinner and shallower than its gravity could retain because much of it had been blown away, and the mountains were new.  They poked up well beyond the top of the atmosphere, and computer models I'd been running put it as touch and go as to whether they'd ever be back inside the atmosphere until they'd eroded.  There were no foothills on this side, just a sheer wall of rock that rose out of the ground up nearly a mile and a half before the first wrinkles and creases appeared.  In a few thousand years time, I thought, they'd be great for mountain climbing, but right now they were a lethal temptation.
"Do you think that's a man-made hill?" she said.  Her eyes were too large for her head, as were mine; we had had a number of small surgical alterations to make the job easier.  Everyone said that you could have them reversed at the end of the job, but I didn't know anyone but Auntie who'd survived to retirement, and she was now too fragile to risk that kind of surgery.  I looked, my overlarge eyes taking in more of the electromagnetic spectrum, and focused down from panoramic view to a tight view.  Muscles around my eyes tightened, and a second set that had taken me four months to learn how to use adjusted my corneas.  Effectively, I had a built-in zoom function, which was kind of cool.
"No," I said, shaking my head.  The atmosphere here was slightly viscous, though no-one had put forward an explanation for it yet, and it was like shaking my head underwater.  A little bit too slow.  "I think this is just the result of high-speed geology.  Water was thrown up when the mountains were, creating a glacier up near the top.  When the atmosphere thickened enough to reach it, it thawed out enough of the bottom to release the ice-mass, which then crashed down, skating down across this area and finally creating that sea."
"That's stupid," said Briana, which was her come-back to anything I said that she didn't like but didn't know how to argue.  "So where did the hill come from?"
"Rock and mud deposits either torn off by the glacier's descent, or left behind by the glacier as it melted."
"While it was rocketing down to the seashore?"
"Geologically fast," I said.  "It probably happened over a hundred years, which is bullet-fast for geology."
"Let's take a look anyway."
I shrugged; we'd not found anything interesting yet, and though I was pretty certain the hill was just terrain, it beat standing around looking for anomalies.
"Hey, what's that?"  Briana stopped, but I'd heard it too.  Something had tinkled.  We looked down, and Briana spotted it first: a slim metal straw caught half-under her boot.  She lifted her foot to see what we'd found, and it popped upright and started pushing out of the ground.
"Hey!"  She stepped back, and there was another tinkle.
We looked around; all the way behind us metallic straws were pushing their way out of the ground, rising eerily fast and swaying and clinking together as they did so.  We didn't need to say a word, we both just ran towards the hill.
When we reached it we looked back and saw that, like a field of wheat, there was now a field of swaying, clinking metal straws, each nearly ten feet high.  The edge of the field was perhaps a minute's walk from us, and seemed to be fixed.  Caught up near the tops of the straws were small rocks and clumps of dirt, some neatly skewered through.
"What the hell?" I said, and I could see from Briana's face that she'd been thinking exactly the same thing.
"Some kind of harvest crop?" she said.
Maybe.  Maybe we'd just found a Spoon harvest.