Chapter 4

"If I'm going to hunt pirates, I should go to where there are the most pirates. Don't you agree?"

Bruce nodded his head in agreement. "Now that your whole crew has been converted to ESP capability, you are the most powerful force in the galaxy. You could rule the galaxy if you wanted to; Brenda and I are glad that you don't, Heartfullofjoy."

"Of course I don't; that would make me no better than the pirates I hate!

"Back to the question at hand. There is reputed to be a large conglomeration of pirates in this sector." Heartfullofjoy lit up a hologram of the galaxy and shaded a sector in orange (her favorite color). She was all in orange today in observance of her birthday.

Bruce and Brenda blanched! Earth was in the shaded zone! Brenda blurted out, "Oh, Heartfullofjoy, our home planet is right near the middle of that sector! We have to do something!"

"We will do something! This group of pirates is particularly vicious. They have been known to loot a primitive culture of all its valuables and kill every living thing on the planet. They appear to do it for the joy of destruction, if not for any other reason. Often, the planet they assault is too primitive to have enough of value to pay the cost of the attack; the pirates must just write it off as the cost of entertainment.

"How should we go about finding the pirates? Wouldn't POV be the best way?"

Bruce spoke up, "Let's try something I've wanted to experiment with. Let's divide that sector of the galaxy up into 25 chunks and have each member of the crew join us in using POV to search her assigned chunk. That would let us cover an enormous fraction of the galaxy in a very short time and give the crew some practice in using POV in a coordinated effort."

"That's a great idea! I'll organize it right away."

The crew was assembled in the mess hall and the project was explained. The crew was decked out in their festive colors and it looked like an Easter Egg convention from Earth. They were prepared to party for Heartfullofjoy's birthday, and this looked like a good way to start.

Brenda was chosen to select the search volumes at random, so the crew members were assigned numbers ranging 1-22. The hologram of the target segment of the galaxy was displayed and divided into 25 chunks. A random number was assigned to each chunk and that number became the marker for a crew member. Heartfullofjoy, Brenda, and Bruce took the remaining three chunks.

People began searching their chunk of space as soon as it was assigned. Before long, one of the freight handlers shouted, "I've got 'em! There's a bunch of pirates in my chunk!" She was immediately awarded the victory in the first game of the day.

Bruce POVed the indicated chunk and saw that there were 16 ships of various types in the area and some of them were distinctly weird looking. Most were of the symmetrical form as in discs, boxes, and tubes. But one was certainly a recognizable dragon and another looked like a spiral! Oh, well, an FTL drive didn't care what was wrapped around it, it all moved together.

Brenda mind-scanned the crews of the ships and did not find a single individual who was not a certifiable sociopath. Each of The Bright Journey's crew was assigned 8 of the pirates to dispose of in nearby stars. The freight handler who had found the pirates was told to select one of the ships to be her own. The rest of the crew would gamble for the remaining ships.

A discussion, loud and exuberant, broke out as they tried to decide what gambling game to play. A variation of BINGO won out and they settled down to play. Brenda was declared to be a neutral party and asked to preside over the game. She agreed and Bruce looked at her like he thought she was crazy. Brenda just laughed at him and launched the first round of the game.

It took several hours of play before the ships were all parceled out, but the 16 ships were finally divided among the players. There was a problem, each ship needed three people to run it properly: a captain, a navigator, and an engineer. There just weren't enough people aboard The Bright Journey to man all these ships, so a compromise was reached. Heartfullofjoy's navigator and engineer wanted to stay with her and the few remaining crew were allowed to join whomever they wished on the other ships.

There was a problem, now, in finding adequate crews for each of the vessels. But, first things first: the people were mind-trained in all three jobs so that emergencies could be covered, though this wasn't likely to happen to ESPers. Heartfullofjoy suggested that they return to their home planet and recruit the necessary additional crew members, but tell them only the minimum necessary for them to understand what they were being asked to do. They would be converted to ESP capability only after they had been scanned by Brenda and they had moved back into space.

Each captain TPed her ship back to the planet and they took up a parking orbit a safe distance from the planet. Each captain contacted her friends to invite them to be crew members of a force designed to rid the galaxy of pirates. There turned out to be no problem in recruiting, in fact, each ship picked up more than the minimum necessary crew (Brenda and Bruce wondered how much the availability of the new cosmetics helped sell the project). This was good, because they needed enough surplus people to crew any newly-captured pirate vessels.

Once the new people were all aboard the various ships, they jumped to a vacant portion of space and everyone collected in the largest cargo hold among the 17 ships. The new people were introduced to Brenda and Bruce and ESP was demonstrated. Nobody turned down the chance to be converted, so that was started immediately. Once everybody had been converted and trained, which took two days, a grand plan for policing the galaxy was explained.

Until they gained some experience, the ships would operate in pairs. Each pair would be assigned a patrol sector and they would be responsible for clearing out the pirates in their sector. Heartfullofjoy, Brenda, and Bruce, aboard The Bright Journey, would supervise the operation and be available for backup as needed. Patrol sectors were assigned and the ships jumped to their duty stations.

Everything was quiet for a while, so Brenda and Bruce decided to learn the universal sign language from Heartfullofjoy. The mental part of the learning was easy with the use of mind-training, but the muscle-memory needed for some of the most intricate ideas had to be practiced over and over until it was mastered. At one point, Bruce suggested that they grow a tail to make some of the body motions easier to do.

By this time, Bruce and Brenda had stopped wearing clothes. They were not needed for warmth or other protection with the TK armor in place, and there was no need for modesty since Bruce and Brenda were the only humans around. If the need ever did come up, they could just render opaque the appropriate places on the TK armor. This was probably going to be their most difficult adjustment when they returned home.

Things were so quiet that Bruce was getting bored, though Heartfullofjoy and Brenda, being female, were able to keep each other amused by talking about this and that and laughing at the foibles of males of any species.

Suddenly, there was a cry for help broadcast to all ESPers from one of the patrol ships. What looked like a large invasion fleet was attacking a planet totally unable to defend itself. Bruce and Brenda gasped when they realized that the planet in question was Earth!

The first order of business was to protect Earth! Bruce jumped them to the vicinity of the moon and formed a TK shield in the upper atmosphere completely surrounding Earth. This would be the defense of last resort.

The attacking force had sent a rain of asteroids and comets toward Earth, enough to destroy all life on the planet, even deep in the oceans. Heartfullofjoy detailed half the ships' crews to using TK to deflect the incoming bodies away from the earth, but not into other bodies until they reached the sun.

There were hundreds of attacking alien ships. This was no pirate attack, but a concerted effort to wipe life from the Earth. What was going on? Heartfullofjoy called for a nerve block on the voluntary muscles of the people in the ships while they investigated the situation. She used POV to find the leader of the attacking expedition and she, Bruce, and Brenda jumped to his ship to question him.

Brenda did a deep mind-scan and found that this was a religious war, of sorts. An oracle of great significance had told them that the people of the third planet of this sun were destined to be the most powerful race in the galaxy unless they were destroyed, and it had to be done immediately. Otherwise, his race would shrink to insignificance and their god would no longer rule. A holy war had been declared and all of his race's resources had been diverted to destroying the people of planet Earth. It was an all-or-nothing effort and, in the process, his people had been reduced to abject poverty.