What I picture Starsnatcher to look like. Credit goes to Steve Bowers and the Orion's Arm Universe Project.

Crick waved their tentacle over the table's surface. They summoned a holographic representation of a binary solar system.

"I believe you have a right to know what awaits us once we cross the wormhole," Crick transmitted.

Twelve wormholes surrounded that system. One for us to pass and eleven more from which the 

Starsnatchers could call reinforcements at any time.

"Right now, however, we must focus on one specific enemy," Crick continued.

The map zoomed in on one specific starship near the wormhole.

As Crick told us, it was Starsnatcher.

It looked wrong. Everything about it.

Its shape wasn't even remotely rocket or arrow-like as in any other ship I had seen so far.

Instead, its ovoid shape made me think of an egg from which an alien queen could hatch at any moment.

There were no thrusters on it, no crew module, and nowhere to store the fuel. These portions certainly existed, but they couldn't be seen from the outside and that was probably the point. If we wanted to bomb it or board it, we didn't know how.

A smaller ship flew next to it for scale. The Dragonfly. Assuming correct scaling, the Dragonfly's length was between 1/3 to 1/4 of the oval's diameter, depending on the axis.

Wasn't our ship, like, one-and-a-half miles long?

"You are observing a reconstruction from the heat signatures we have, as the ship is invisible," transmitted Crick.

"Invisible?" I repeated.

I hope I didn't earn myself a death sentence by interrupting the Captain.

Crick remained calm. "Yes, you understood the concept I transmitted well. This ship does not fly through conventional reaction mass like our ship does. We do not understand how it flies at all, but this is not important at the moment. What is important is that this, along with its efficient cooling mechanisms, makes it difficult to detect.

"It is not invisible to our heat sensors though. It is invisible to the naked eye and very likely also to the heat sensors of humans. This is why they could abduct you so easily."

Had I only had a chair to sit down on.

Eerie stuff. Stealth in space was hard and these guys were good enough to fool our heat sensors completely? Did they have better ships that could even hide from the Seizers?

"The ship's surface material absorbs the heat in the interior, distributes it evenly, and radiates it into space. We hypothesize that this is to hide the inner portions. However, heat signatures are not distributed equally. There are regions of greater intensity."

A ring of deep marine blue was drawn around the craft. It extended perpendicular to the direction of travel the ship took.

"We must concentrate our missiles and boarding pods on the ring," Crick transmitted. "There is a problem though and that problem is called velocity. I am sure you are familiar with the concept of delta-velocity."

I transmitted an affirmative mindwave.

In rocket science, delta-velocity refers to the maximum speed a rocket could attain if it burned up all its fuel. There's no friction in space, so unlike a car, a rocket doesn't have to use fuel constantly. Every use of fuel speeds it up and once it has used up everything, it reaches a defined velocity.

"This ship's delta velocity lies at a quarter of lightspeed," Crick continued. "However, we are only allowed to accelerate up to six percent of lightspeed. This is because we need to fly back eventually and because decelerating to a stillstand takes as much fuel as accelerating to our maximum speed.

"Additionally, the rate at which we are allowed to accelerate presents a problem. If we accelerate faster than half of our homeworld's gravity, the ship might overheat. If it overheats, the magnets could fail and the antimatter would destroy all matter it touches.

"Do you believe our enemy suffers from similar constraints?"

No-one affirmed this question.

Crick changed the hologram to include stars in its background. The stars raced to the left to show Starsnatcher's movement. However, their movement slowed down over time, showing a change in Starsnatcher's speed, too.

"According to our data, the enemy decelerates, likely towards a specific goal. Moreover, it avoids confrontation. It is heading towards a planet or a space station where it will share information gathered from spying on us.

"We must calculate its target point and then make sure that our ships encircle it by the time it arrives. These ships will bombard it with boarding pods containing autonomous drones that will retrieve the humans."

"We won't arrive on time though?" I asked. "Well, not 'we' as in 'our ships', but 'we' as in 'this ship' if you understand what I mean."

"Indeed, we are a supporting role right. We will take the two humans you mentioned after everything is over."

Their plan made sense. We were the only ship with a crew that could die.

That didn't change the fact that I was left with a sore feeling in my stomach though. It felt heavy despite the half-gravity.

"Plenty of time to play to kill with virtual space battles, isn't it Professor?" Helix asked.

"I will annihilate your fleet," Crick replied.

The two could live with playing the side-character role.

I couldn't. If all I had to do was sit down and wait, how should I make up for helping Sye?

"Is that all we're gonna do?" I asked. "Sit down and play games?"

"General is responsible for our position in the fleet, not me," Crick transmitted. "Besides, you have the option to hibernate."

I frowned. Hopefully, my mindwaves captured that.

"You don't feel like this is meaningful, do you?" Helix asked. "That's what you were concerned about in the train."

"I'm gonna just sit on my ass for months in here!"

"Three months, to be precise," Helix cut in.

"You will hibernate," Crick repeated. "You will not even realize the passage of time."

"Professor, this is not helpful," Helix transmitted, then turned to me. "You won't just hibernate all the time, don't worry. I'll make sure you get the combat and medical training you were promised. That won't feel like a waste of time, or will it?"

It won't. Preparing to help others wasn't the same as actually helping others, but it was the second-best option.

"Moreover, if the training regimen is adequately arduous, it ensures a feeling of retribution for what you did," Crick added.

That, too.

We departed from the table.

Helix then led me through a door in the wall. I'd have fallen down had they not warned me that a ladder hid below the door.

The room we arrived in looked less like the interior of a dome, but more like the inside of a tube. With no end in sight, it went full-circle around the habitat module. Satellite images of moons and planets with black vegetation decorated the walls, confirming my suspicions that the Seizers were avid terraformers.

"This is the centrifuge," Helix transmitted. "We can't accelerate forever, so when we don't, we have to produce our artificial gravity by spinning."

We stopped at a bed shaped like a coffin and covered in purple cushion. Judging by its dimensions, it was made for a variety of species, as both a human and a Seizer could have comfortably fit in.

Helix picked up a syringe from behind the bed and gave it to me. "This is your bed. If you want to hibernate, we inject nanobots into you that keep you in a coma-like state without harming you. You don't even age! The bed is mobile because when the acceleration stops and the centrifuge spins, the direction of gravity will change from 'towards the thruster' to 'to the sides'."

I let the syringe slide through my hands. "And, what about the training?"

Helix again picked something from behind the bed. I expected yet another syringe, but no, they showed me a wire.

"It contains VR nanites," Helix transmitted. "They do what the name says and have the side effect of keeping you conscious even as the rest of your body is in stasis. I will be there, so you can tell me when you want to go into stasis and for how long."

I played with the syringe in a way you could call stimming. Then, I descended into the bed and let the syringe sink into my body, followed by the wire Helix attached to my head.

Getting in a VR was wonderful. Back on Earth, I often paid attention in bed to see if I could feel the transition from being awake to dreaming.

The VR had this transition built-in. The bed around me blurred and faded into a rocky desert that resembled the type you found in Arizona. There wasn't any wildlife that marked this place as "alien", only hills, boulders, and canyons. Even gravity was adjusted for my needs.

Helix didn't have an avatar, but I still heard their mindwaves.

"Round one of your combat training. You learn to take cover when enemies arrive."

I didn't have to wait, as the virtual enemies announced their arrival through rattling tracks.

Of course, they had to start with tanks. Why use soldiers when you can simulate everything?

I scrambled behind a boulder.

I couldn't shoot back, but I suppose that wasn't the point. The point must have been to remain hidden until the enemies moved on.

Two tanks rolled nearby, their cannons swung around like sniffing bloodhounds. I moved my head so that it faced the boulder.

Turning around carried the risk of making noise, but looking at them carried the risk of them seeing me, too. Thus, just tilting my head further behind the boulder was my best option.

Unfortunately, I bumped the face of the rock while doing so.

A cannon went off.

The virtual reality dampened sounds to the point that cannon blasts felt like in a video game.

Didn't make me any less shocked.

My virtual avatar exploded. I found myself in a dark void with Helix.

"Good idea with what you were doing," Helix said. "Unfortunately, you must learn to observe your environment more carefully. Try again."

I tried it three more times and died for a different reason each time. One time, I took cover too late, another time, I stumbled while doing so and the final time, even Helix admitted that I just had bad luck and couldn't have done anything to save my skin.

"I suppose you weren't in the army, were you?" Helix asked.

"Nope. We have automated drones on Earth."

"So do we, but we believe that being in the army turns you into a stronger citizen. Anyway, we'll find something you're good at."

This time, I was sent into a black room on whose wall hung a white board with a red square in the middle.

Next to my feet lay a beryl handgun. The item was as long as a 9 mm Beretta, disregarding the hand-sized battery-grip with a tiny lever protruding behind its magazine. Dozens of rows of coils winded inside the translucent barrel.

I picked it up. This was a weapon I recognized too well from ego-shooters. A true science fiction weapon popped into existence out of my geekiest teenage dreams. A Gauss gun.

The wirings inside the barrel produced a magnetic field accelerating bullets to supersonic speeds. In video games, this was the type of technology necessary to stand a chance against futuristic armor.

To give my fingers something to do, I let them slide over the barrel. So smooth, so warm. It was no heavier than a bottle of water, even someone like me could carry it.

Could they produce such perfect triggers outside of simulations, too?

I pointed the weapon at the wall with both hands. I shot. A thunderclap hollered as the weapon dropped out of my hand, its recoil injuring my shoulder.

My shot didn't even scratch the board.

What I did succeed in was injuring my virtual self.

"Weren't magnetic weapons supposed to be silent?" I asked.

"Yeah, but bullets that break the sound barrier aren't silent."

"Can I try something different maybe?"

The simulation changed again. It wasn't even that I changed the room, rather, the board and the gun disappeared and a nanofactory replaced them.

It was blue-ish rather than black like the one I was used to, but it had the same characteristic hole in its roof.

In the background, shots were fired. I probably had to solve a task quickly before the enemy claimed me.

"Your gun is broken and you need a new one," Helix transmitted. "What do you do?"

"I put raw matter into the nanofactory and then transmit what I want to print to the factory!"

"Go ahead."

There was a pile of dark sand behind it, probably a mixture of carbonates and silicates, for me to put into the factory. When I did so and sent my transmission, the factory didn't react.

"It's broken, how do you fix it?" Helix asked.

I removed the roof of the nanofactory like a lid. Nanofactories were compartmentalized into two chambers, one for disassembling matter on a molecular level, one for re-assembling it again. Perhaps I had just put it in the wrong one?

"The chamber was right, the factory is just broken," Helix transmitted.

I pushed the factory left and right on its wheels, searching for a hidden tool or a button I could press. After a while, I just pushed the factory around without paying attention. There was too much background noise for me to focus. Blame it on my autism and my sensitivity to sensory overload.

Before I found anything, I was shot in the back and returned to the dark void where I faced Helix again.

"What you should have done was ask Crick for a robot to repair the factory," Helix transmitted. "Had our ship been boarded by enemies, you would have died. Do you need a break!"

"Never!" I replied. Then, when I realized how melodramatic that sounded, I added, "Well, at least not now. Only after I succeed at something."

My VR ended and I woke up in my "bed" again. While I hadn't slept, I still felt tired. "Tired" in the sense that I lacked any desire to get up and do something. Think of the sense of fatigue you feel after an awful day at work rather than after an intense workout.

I wondered if I should ask Helix to do push-ups now. It felt like cheating in this half-gravity. On Earth, I always sucked at them. I couldn't tell if it was just due to my poor motor skills, if I was too lazy, or if I lacked anyone to impress. I just hated workouts in general.

What could I do here?

"It seems like you won't succeed at anything any time soon," Helix transmitted. "Maybe we should count on you not getting into fights. You'd mess up anyway."

Helix could be so blunt if they wanted.

"But something tells me you wouldn't be satisfied with that option," Helix continued. "You just love to subject yourself to suffering. I don't know, are you humans perhaps aware of the concept of a hedonic treadmill?"

"Heard of that, but can't remember right now."

"The hedonic treadmill describes how we just aren't getting any happier, no matter what. On our home moon, we have no poverty, close to no crime, and quality entertainment, yet some people still don't feel happy. They become violent and want to restore the natural order for some reason. Others, like me and Professor, need to leave our virtual realities and find challenging adventures to become happy."

In a way, that made sense. We solved diseases, then we got overpopulation. We solved, overpopulation, then we got an aging population.

The reverse is also true. Just like how happiness creates suffering, suffering creates happiness. That's why people find yoga so calming.

That was also what Iris meant when she told me I needed to man up.

"You're saying I need to suffer more before I can become a true warrior," I transmitted.

"That's not what I'm saying. It's a rather self-destructive train of thought. It's why the terrorists think we must go back to our primitive ways. My talk about the hedonic treadmill was just speculation to understand you. To be blunt, I thought you were bored here and needed something to do."

"That's how I'm interpreting your speculation though. Send me into the VR again!"

"As you wish."

This time, I wished for Helix to carry me out of the coffin and give me a different dose of nanobots. Like that, I could perform some of my virtual exercises in real life, too.

I did push-ups, rock-lifting, and other exercises in an environment simulating Earth's gravity.

I still sucked at them, but various motivations allowed me to push through. Motivations such as reminding myself of Iris' words on how hard times require hard men and how hard the times were.

There was also demotivation though. Helix did have a point that my train of thought got similar to that of Sye. That I did this to please my caveman ideals of masculinity, as physical strength was no match for machines.

I collapsed. There was a reason I preferred jogging on Earth. The stuff you did in the gym required focus. My mind, however, constantly wandered, full of internal dilemmas.

There was no way I could live like this for several months non-stop.

I asked for different lessons. More on how to hold a gun, how to do nano-first aid, and how to drive on some scooter-tank vehicle. There were breaks of nanostasis in-between, sometimes up to a week.

Eventually, the others informed me that we were already two-thirds done with our journey towards the wormhole. Unfortunately, they also had bad news to share.

There was a distress call from one of our ships stationed there.

Trouble waited for us at the wormhole.