text: Jude made the final incision and sponged away some blood as the Cesarean Section made birth possible. Purple fluorescing lights strobed across the surgical site, cleansing it of anything dangerous as Jude set the force-fields to gently pull the baby from its dying mother. Following strict medical procedure, Jude severed the umbilical cord as Laura, the newborn boy's mother, died from her brutal injuries. Jude proffered the child to Laura on two slender manipulator arms, as she was programmed, but her subroutines, now noting the death of the mother, signaled her UltraCortex to refrain from making a verbal presentation. Instead, the baby was simply inserted into a life-sustaining cubicle and immediately sedated. Jude opened a channel to the bridge. "Laura's child has been delivered. It- It- It's a boy," the damaged robot stated flatly. "However, Laura has succumbed to her injuries and has passed away." Jude's word selection was careful to avoid undue distress. Captain Quain stared at the fiery wall on the main viewer. After a long silence, he managed, "acknowledged" and thumbed the button to sever the channel to the medical bay. "I'm open to ideas..." He looked around the control bridge at his officers and men. Frightened gazes met his and he did his best to look confident. One man spoke. "We can't break the star's gravity -but can we use it?" The wiry young man with his slicked-back blond hair and eager StellarCorps expression gave the Captain hope. "What if we push the engines to max and calculate a slingshot trajectory to get us to that small planetoid? If we can catch onto it and establish orbit, we may not be home but we won't be fried." The young fellow looked into the fires of the Zoroaster star with grave concern, his face illuminated by flickering orange sun-flame. The Captain listened to the gasps of approval from several officers and nodded soberly. If nothing else, it was something to try -and some sort of hope. He thought about the hundreds of lives aboard the UES Ptolemy and clung to any hope at hand. "Alright, then. Lt. Simms, I want you to handle the warp drive, make speed for 9 recursions. Commander Kelleway, make calculations for the maneuver. Take Carstairs and Tamaguchi with you. Everyone else, man your posts and prepare for warp. All stations report!" With practiced suave, the captain resumed his stalwart pose in his chair and exuded confidence to fuel the officers as they readied the ship for an escape from certain death. But it was all for naught. The calculations of the desperate men of the Ptolemy flung the crippled starship across space like a boomerang, first angling and then slingshotting around the star to the men's cheers. Unforseen variables wrestled with conjecture and programming to emerge the victor, however, and as cheers turned to cries of despair, the little ship from the faraway blue world slammed into the planetoid it had hoped to orbit with ferocious force. The great spine of the ship cracked in the silence of space and its rent skin ejected people into the freezing vacuum. From the Captain's eyes, it seemed to happen in slow-motion. First the walls buckled and cracked, and crewmen cried out or leaped to their feet. But as the force rippled through the ship, whole support beams undulated and the safety of walls became the vacuum of space and bulkheads were shorn and torn apart like tin-foil. For a few moments, the Captain, suddenly propelled into space and tumbling, managed to survive. As his face froze and his eyeballs bulged he saw his ship one last time. Crumpled in some places, exploding in others, the majority of it somehow remained intact, albeit embedded into the surface of a bleak and empty world and he thought of all the souls committed to the cold wastes of space under his command. And then he died along with everyone else. Well, almost everyone else. Deep within the protected heart of the ship, still mostly intact and even lit by back-up generators, the medical bay survived. Jude was barely functional but managed to run the few remaining sensors to gauge the situation. The crew was dead. All of them. The ship mostly powerless, totally defenseless, had 47 separate hull breaches and the engines were floating off somewhere near the port bow. The only life-sign came from the very room Jude was in; from the incubator. Jude swung her large, angular white arm laboriously around the thick anchor sticking up from her main console. Sensors at the end of the armature scanned the baby. Remarkably intact. Jude instructed the ship's computer, which was operating on generators and cut off from half of it's data-cores, that Jude was the only independent agency aboard and convinced it to slave all functions to her. Jude's "mind" was a complex quantum computer located within her armature base, separate from the ship's simple AI but Jude connected directly to the mainframe now and allocated all of the ship's resources to a few rooms including the medical bay. She reassigned the entire 4-year-mission's worth of food and water to the child, and made the requisite requisition forms out digitally to approve the transfer, even if she knew no one would ever read the logs. She was doing everything as she was programmed to. Jude would make food, education and eventually the entire ship's remains available to this lone surviving human child. She fed him with protein beams and replicated milk until he could eat rations. She used forcefields to guide him into walking upright. She taught him to speak, to read, and the critical thinking skills needed to master any subject in the databanks. At age 9 he learned how to repair and reconnect the rest of the data-cores. When he learned all he could about his lost home and the many people who died the day he was born, he wept bitterly. He knew he would never be found by Earth again, of course, as the chances of another deep space exploration vessel even deciding to visit this uncharted system were nil. He would never know another of his kind. He would know only what computer files could tell him. He would don a generation-old spacesuit to weld sections together over half a life time. He read every book on board the ship, even those he had to rescue by omnibot and vacc-suit, and dreamed of returning triumphantly to the planet Earth. He kept a meticulous log and diary, talked with Jude for hours every day, and named himself David. And one day, at the age of 41, he flew away. Jude's faltering mind was installed in the main computer slot of the makeshift starship David had cobbled together over 31 years, using a small section of the med bay as makeshift control room. Jude gently nudged the controls to power the engines he spent 9 years capturing and bringing in to the new Ptolemy. More of a raft in space than any starship Earth had ever made, the Ptolemy II roared to life and began a single warp recursion. It wasn't going to be fast, but the ship was on it's way to Earth. A repeating signal was the first vanguard of the P II to reach Earth outposts. "My name is David. I am the last survivor of the UES Ptolemy, lost in space in 2218. Please do not attack this ship, I am friendly. Repeat; My name is David. I am..." The media got ahold of it faster than David's engines and a host of starships and transports crowded the space lanes above the planet Earth to watch him arrive. Politicians and Commentators choked the communications channels as the Ptolemy II, looking for all the world like a derelict apartment building lashed to 2 engines, sputtered to a halt in Earth orbit. Medical and repair ships were immediately dispatched as government and public held their breaths in anticipation. Jude arthritically rotated it's single, dirt-smudged camera-stalk to look at David, sensor information filling the working sections of the screen. She examined his long-dead body, still resting in the control chair as it had for centuries, as David always knew it must, and her subroutines calculated that informing a dead person of their destination was illogical and unnecessary. "David, my son. You *made* it. You have come *home*" she said anyway.