The full version of Starchasers and the Junksea is available on Patreon

In the empty bridge of the starship Bronco, the ship’s computer had been operating in low-power mode for three standard days now, sipping at power while it cycled idly. It had only one task each iteration, sending out a pulse of beats across the local spectrum of sub- and super-luminal bands in a cry of distress. The rest of each loop was given over to awaiting a response that would never come. And so the Bronco’s computer, like its crew, had chosen to fill its time with games, attempting to devise an algorithm that could calculate complex pathway polynomials in the time between distress pulses. It was getting quite good at it.