Second Lieutenant Mea swallowed and looked over at Kalla standing at the Comm station. "Any more comm-traffic from Gateway Station? Or from that....that Thing out there?" Kalla shrugged and looked paler than she usually did. On the monitor to Kalla's right, the emergence of the alien ship into normal space from 'somewhere else' kept replaying. It had come out about fifty kilometers from the freighter and the gravity of the wormhole appearing had pulled them to within just a couple of miles of it. Kalla repeated, "This is freighter, TSF-1899811, out of Maris requesting flight status update. Gateway Station, please respond." Gateway Station finally responded. "TSF-1899811--cut your engines and power down. Stand-by. Advice will be forth-coming." Markam remarked with a dry sound to his voice, "The alien ship registers at ZERO rest mass. We can see it, but they have us. We can rotate through the X,Y, and Z axis but not move one centimeter in any direction. They have canceled our inertia. Instantly and completely. If I can find any OTHER completely IMPOSSIBLE things their doing, I'll let you know, Mea." She almost shouted and pointed at the main viewer, "They just TORE A HOLE IN SPACE and came flying out. Impossible doesn't mean a DAMNED thing to us anymore!" Mea was the eldest and most experienced officer on the "Long Haul 5". At the age of twenty-three, she was trying to remember what the 'First Contact' protocols were. Kalla got a weird look on her face and whispered loudly, "I'm getting a voice transmission from two klicks away on the 441 centimeter band! The Rahkoshan frequency!" Mea jumped out of her seat and felt cold sweat run down her face. It was four hundred years ago, the mysterious radio signals had come out of an area of space on the edge of their solar-system and it was THEM! The Rahkoshans never showed what they looked like, and had great trouble with the common language. They gave humans several marvels of technology over the two years of communications, then simply stopped one day. Now they were HERE. Now. Mea wanted to piss on herself. She swallowed in her achingly dry throat and croaked, "Put it on speakers!" "We smell your fear with our eyes touching yours. Do not be fearing your death from us. We have our questions that we will put through our noses waving in multitude. First thing to do is smell the scent of truth with our eyes. Second thing will be to sniff your eyes with our eyes touching. End transmission." The voice was electronically reproduced and was sexlessly androgynous. It carried no emotion or any human verbal cues. Markam looked over at Mea and tried to joke, "I don't want any alien goombah sniffing my eyeballs, or any other balls." Mea turned and said to them, "If anything else happens, I'll be in the head for a while." She practically ran to the head. Markam looked over at Kalla and said,"Privledge of rank, I guess." He said to himself, "We're doomed." Kalla remarked,"She's just like her dad,Genjiro." Markham said,"I sure as hell hope not! He was in the head when his ship broke up and went down on Balaam a couple of years ago! He was the only survivor..." They both stared longingly off in the direct Mea went. --to be continued-- Media is Poser 6, Vue 6, Blacksmith 2.2, WIngs3d