"If by 'where' you mean the Milky Way galaxy and its attendant pair of dwarf galaxies, yes. Plus numerous star clusters. Beyond that, not so much."

"Holy shit." I shot a guilty look at the people I'd dragged along on this fool's errand. "What's the plan, then? We roam the galaxy forever, trying to find another Elder AI? Crap, we should name this ship the Flying Dutchman." I mumbled.

"That is an excellent name, Joe!" Skippy said with enthusiasm. "There, I changed the identification of this ship to Flying Dutchman."

"Flying Dutchman?" Thomson asked, which started an unhelpful round of speculation by the crew, all talking over each other.

"It's a legend of a Dutch sea captain who killed an albatross, which was bad luck, and was doomed to wander the sea forever. Or something like that. The ship can never go into port."

"I thought the guy who killed the albatross was the ancient mariner."

"Duh, of course he was ancient if he had to sail forever."

"Is the Dutchman the squid guy in that Johnny Depp pirates movie? Man, that guy gave me the creeps."

"Yeah, imagine the nasty fish breath that squid guy had."

"No, that wasn't Johnny Depp, he was the pirate with the eye liner. The blonde guy was doomed to stay at sea."

"All right, all right, enough!" I shouted to end the conversation, which otherwise wasn't ever going to end. "Skippy," I looked at him with a tilt of my head, "naming this bucket after a doomed ship is not a way to build confidence in the crew."

"I was only trying to be helpful." Skippy grumbled.

"And we're not your hired crew. If anything, we're pirates." Without sanction from UNEF, we were pirates, outlaws.

"Pirates! Joe, this is your merry band of pirates! Aaargh, shiver me timbers!" Skippy did a decent pirate impression. "I like it! A merry band of pirates, we are!"

I looked around the compartment, scanning faces. This band of pirates was going to be anything but merry, if Skippy expected us to visit every star in the galaxy to locate the Collective. I should have these conversations with a limited group of people, not the entire crew present. "This ship-"

"The Flying Dutchman." Skippy corrected me.

"Fine, the Dutchman," I could see Skippy wasn't giving up on that point, "is not going to randomly wander the galaxy until the end of time, randomly sending out signals to the Collective, right?"

"Course not, Dumdum, we'd run out of fuel. Duh. From Kristang records, I know where they keep Elder artifacts that I recognize as related to Collective components. There's a research facility in an asteroid, that the lizards think is secret, a couple wormholes from here."

That sounded much better. "Ok, so the plan is we, what, get close enough to the asteroid, send a signal to this Elder stuff?"