“Uh, I could if I wanted to take the trouble to take over cameras and monitoring systems. But I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even see your ship coming. I was concentrating too hard on the Navy fleet coming after me to blow me up. It can affect your concentration.”

Kemp snorted. “How’s that working out?”

“Well, I took them over as well. Same process. I gathered all my nanites that I’d manufactured and tossed them toward the ships. Those that made contact simply worked their way through the hull into the ship and infected its systems. We learned a lot from the Mad Astra and the isolation module, so it was pretty quick.”

“We?”

“Me and the computer. I’ve kind of come to accept that this is a partnership. With the computer as senior partner, unfortunately.”

“Are you losing control?”

“Not yet, but the computer is becoming more opinionated. And communication is improving, by the way. The computer admits that it had to do some reconfiguration to deal with me.”

“Well, that’s interesting.” Kemp rubbed his chin. “Do you have a more complete picture, yet?”

“Hold on, Doctor,” Captain Jennings interrupted. “Ivan, what about my ship?”

“Sorry, Captain. You just got caught in the by-spray of nanites. If you’d come in on a different course, you’d have been missed entirely. Of course, I’m going to withdraw my nanites. You guys are friends. In fact, done. Except for communications, because we still need to talk.”

Jennings nodded, evidently satisfied, and gestured to Kemp to continue.

“Yeah, so, complete picture?” Kemp reiterated.

“Not complete yet, Doc, but I think the problems we’re running into now are terminology and culture. Kind of W.T.F. moments.”

“So…” Kemp prompted.

“You might want to get some coffee and sit down,” Ivan replied.

“I thought you couldn’t see us,” Narang said.

“I can hear you shuffling your feet once in a while. And the doctor slurps his coffee. Sorry, Doc.”

Kemp laughed. “Yes, I do, and I know it.” He looked at the captain with a raised eyebrow.

“Sadly,” Captain Jennings replied to the unasked question, “one of the few things my ship’s A.I. cannot do is deliver coffee on demand.”

Kemp nodded, and all three headed for the captain’s Ready Room, leaving Generus alone on the bridge. They got coffees, sat down, and Jennings hit the intercom button.

“All right, Ivan, we’re seated, with coffees, and we’re all ears.”

“Right. Well, here goes. The big question for years with the Drake Equation was why we don’t see more civilizations in the galaxy. There was always speculation that either some of the variables were very, very heavily against life forming, or there was some other factor that hadn’t been taken into account. It came to be called the Great Filter.”

“So there actually is a Great Filter?”