From the exterior it didn’t look like much.

Not much larger than the da Vinci’s own length of one hundred and ninety meters, it was an elliptical tube of burnished silver alloy dotted with what appeared to be a random arrangement of portholes. It featured no openings for propulsion units or weapons pods, but then, Soloman thought, the Uncertainty Drive would alleviate the need for either. Simply increase the odds you will arrive at where you wish to be and, against all likelihood, there you will be. Or decrease the odds an assailant will be able to hit you, or increase them that an attacking vessel’s propulsion or weapons system will self-destruct or malfunction, and you really have no need for defensive systems.

Ingenious and frightening.

“You’re sure that’s the ship?” the Bynar asked Sonya Gomez.

“No doubt about it,” she said. “That’s the one.”

“Odds are,” Tev added.

“Yes,” Gomez agreed. “Odds are.”

Captain Gold said, “We scanned this section of the debris field when we first arrived in the sector. How could we have missed it if…oh. Of course. Just bad luck.”

“And it cost Bart his life,” Gomez said. “If we’d only caught this ship in our initial scans, we might have known to stay clear of it and Bart wouldn’t have had to die.”

“The ship likely manipulates probability as much as a mode of protection as of propulsion,” Tev pointed out. “No doubt it caused the odds against our sensors picking up its presence to fall to keep itself safe.”

“Then why let us ‘see’ it now?” Gold said.

Soloman blinked as Captain Gold became momentarily, and against all odds, a six-foot marble Corinthian column. Sonya and Tev, their backs turned as they continued their scans, saw nothing.

“Soloman?” the captain said.

“Ah, yes. Well, perhaps it’s determined that we’re no longer a threat, that the odds have been reduced to such that nothing we do can possibly cause it harm.”

“Even if that’s true,” Gold said, “why don’t we simply quarantine this sector and just move a light-year or so down the line and create our pass through a section where there isn’t an unlucky ship impeding our every move?”

Tev shook his head. “We can’t just leave it as is, Captain. Now that we know what we’re looking for it’s plain to see that the area of ill-luck being generated by the Uncertainty Drive is an expanding field. We can’t be certain—if indeed we can be certain of anything while under its influence—where, if ever, the expansion will cease.”

“You mean this bad luck could engulf the entire sector?”

“With our luck, worse,” Gomez said.

“Then what are our options?” the captain asked.

“Who’s to say?” Soloman absently tapped on the tabletop. “With probability so mutable, we stand as much chance of defeating it with a conventional attack as we do by firing spitballs or by doing absolutely nothing. We don’t even know why or how the Drive, as ancient as it appears to be, became operational after all this time.”

Tev said, “I’m afraid I have to agree, Captain. When virtually anything is possible at any time, there’s no way to predict anything with any degree of certainty.”

Gold, Gomez, Soloman, and Tev all fell silent. A glowing blue and red Sarindarian butterfly flitted through the observation lounge, which, for just the blink of an eye, became a smoky, crowded cantina on Intar.

“Yes, I see,” Gold said.

A four-hundred-year-old television program about a wacky red-headed housewife replaced the image of the Uncertainty Drive ship on the monitors.

“Gomez, have you been able to establish communications with the ship?” Gold asked suddenly.

“I’ve tried, but no luck.”

Gold smiled without humor. “What are the odds if you tried again, you’d get through this time?”

She shrugged. “Fifty-fifty, I suppose,” and activated the subspace comlink.

Soloman shook his head in disbelief and said, “You know, of course, I meant that in jest.”

Tev gave him a long, hard look. “I suppose, then, the joke is on you.”

“Captain!” Gomez called out, looking surprised.

“Greetings, U.S.S. da Vinci,” said a soft, plain voice over the comm. “This is the Minstrel’s Whisper, flag-ship of the Khnndak Empire.”

Gold smiled. “We have contact!”

“I am Captain David Gold in command of the U.S.S. da Vinci. We are a scientific expedition representing a Federation of allied planets,” Gold said, now seated in his chair on the bridge. “We come in peace, Minstrel’s Whisper.”

“Yours is a mission of destruction, da Vinci. Your vessel will be held in an infinite-probability field until you can be taken into custody by the Empire.”

Gomez looked up helplessly. “It’s misread our demolition efforts.”

“Who can blame it?” said Soloman. “What concerns me is that it plans on holding us until its creators come to take us into custody.”

“That ship’s a million years old if it’s a day,” said Gomez. “The race that built it, let alone the entire Empire, has probably been extinct for millennia.”

“It’s a computer,” Gold said. “Surely it must operate on a set logic system that we can speak to, reason with.”

“Look what it’s doing to us, Captain,” the slender Bynar said. “I couldn’t even begin to know how to reach it.”

“Chance,” said Tev. “It operates on the calculation and implementation of the laws of probability.”

“Yes, along with the manipulation thereof,” said Soloman. “Which makes it all the more difficult to approach when its ability to affect probability can change, from moment to moment, the very shape of reality.”

Sonya Gomez threw her hands up in surrender. “Then that’s it? We’ll never know how to communicate with the Drive because its very existence is forever changing how we perceive its communication? It’s Schrödinger’s Cat, all over again.”

Tev nodded slowly, then said, suddenly, “Yes. Yes, it is.”

Soloman peered at the Tellarite. “Something?”

“Yes,” Tev said, a sudden surge of strength returning to his voice. Soloman realized that the S.C.E. second-in-command, like everyone else aboard the da Vinci since being caught up in the influence of the Uncertainty Drive, had been acting somewhat out of character. For Tev that meant a certain hesitancy in his voice and his usually unshakable confidence. The Bynar had been surprised that Tev had so readily accepted the fantastic explanation of an Uncertainty Drive, but now he realized he likely had been desperate for any outside explanation of their situation. Better they were under the sway of some scientific conundrum than that Mor glasch Tev had somehow become fallible.

“Schrödinger’s Cat is a hypothetical expression of uncertainty,” Tev continued. “A cat is placed in a box with a radioactive atom, a vial of acid, and a Geiger counter. Should the atom decay and the Geiger counter detect an alpha particle, the acid vial will be broken and the cat will die. But before the observer opens the box and observes the cat’s fate—and, by extension, the state of the radioactive atom—they are in superpositions, that is the state of being both dead and alive, or decayed and undecayed, simultaneously. It takes the observer opening the box to ‘observe’ the cat and determine its fate and, again by extension, the fate of the radioactive particle.”

“And…?” prompted Gomez.

“And the one piece of the equation that remains unchanged,” said Tev with no hint of smugness, unaware that for several seconds, he had, most improbably, became totally naked, “is the box.”

Soloman blinked, averted his eyes and then smiled. “The box,” he said, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“What about the box?” asked Gold.

“The Drive is the box, Captain,” said Soloman. “Whatever else happens around it, the box remains the box: a six-sided cube with very definite and precisely definable characteristics.”

Now it was Gomez’s turn to smile. “So the Drive isn’t affected by the skewering of probability.”

“I don’t see how it could be,” said Soloman. “It would need to operate within a sphere of unaltered probability, if only to serve as a baseline for reestablishing normalcy.”

“So however bizarre it is here,” Gold said, “the Drive itself should be perfectly normal?”

“In theory, yes, it should be,” said Soloman. “And that means there’s a good chance I can reason with it.”

And about as good a chance, he thought uneasily, that the Drive had completely taken leave of its senses.

Pattie and Soloman walked toward the shuttle Shirley sitting in wait on the docking bay.

“I’m sorry I can’t go with you,” Pattie said, rising up on her hind legs.

Soloman shook his head. “Two of us would double the chances of something going wrong.”

“I understand,” she said, clicking in concern. “I’m just worried, that’s all.”

“I doubt I’m in serious danger,” Soloman said. “I’ll just be trying to establish a dialogue with the Drive.” As he spoke, the Shirley impossibly became a passenger shuttle that disgorged a host of bipedal beings before closing its doors and sliding down a magnetic track to its next stop.

“Well,” said Pattie. “Your ship could disappear out from under you, or you might become a species that finds your environment poisonous, or—”

“Or any number of equally remote ‘what-ifs.’ Haven’t you noticed, Pattie, that for all the strange things that are happening, it is all of a mostly innocuous, if not disconcerting nature? I don’t think the Drive wishes us harm, just to render us harmless.”

“What happened to Bart was not innocuous,” Pattie said sadly.

“No, of course it wasn’t,” he quickly agreed. “But his death was certainly, even among a crew of forty individuals undergoing an extraordinary run of bad luck, an anomaly. However, if you consider all the many trillions of beings that exist in the universe, all the possible interactions, encounters, and outcomes…well, really, how unlikely is it that, even under normal probability, just about anything might happen at any given time?”

The Shirley returned to its original spot, waiting for Soloman to board.

“In fact,” said the Bynar, “you would no doubt find remarkable the case of elderly twentieth-century Earth twin brothers, both killed not two hours apart, hit by trucks while riding their bicycles on the same stretch of road.”

“Yes, that sounds fairly remarkable,” she agreed.

“Because they were brothers, dying so close together in so similar a manner?”

Pattie nodded. “Of course.”

“Except the fact of their relationship, though of great interest, is irrelevant to the equation. You would likely have found the story less remarkable had I told it this way: Two elderly men in the same hometown died within two hours of each other, each riding a bicycle along a busy motorway in a snowstorm.”

Pattie chittered. “Ah, I see what you mean.”

“The truly strange things—the impossible appearances of beings, the improbable transmutations of objects—those are without a doubt caused by the Drive. But, ignoring that Bart regularly consumed peanut butter, and considering only that allergic reactions in humans can, in some cases, strike without a prior history, it might just be that his death was, truly, a freak accident. Perhaps having nothing to do with our proximity to the Drive and more to do with the random universe we are accustomed to dealing with.”

“We’ll never know, will we?” Pattie said. A rivet popped from the bulkhead overhead and dropped down on the Nasat’s head with a dull thud against her exoskeleton. A second and third followed before she could scramble out of the way.

“Are you okay?” Soloman said.

“Concerned,” she said. “There are no rivets used in the construction of this ship.” Pattie’s antennae quivered and she said, “Go, Soloman. Go talk to that crazy computer before what little luck there is keeping us alive runs out.”