When he came aboard the Empire Builder, Ben Hutchins felt a little bit odd. It was the first time he'd been aboard an International Police Space Force vessel since he'd relinquished his field rank in that branch of the IPO, and while he was still chief of the organization as a whole, it took a surprisingly tough mental adjustment to get hold of the fact that he wasn't aboard as part of the ship's company or even as a visiting flag officer. He was, essentially, baggage, a (semi-)civilian VIP, and naval custom called for a whole different set of protocols in dealing with that. Captain Tarrant and his crew were perfectly correct, perfectly courteous, but still, the whole thing was a weirder experience than Gryphon had been expecting.

He put it out of his mind as he made his way from the ship's small docking bay forward to the Steamrunner-class destroyer's main conference room, where the purpose for this clandestine rendezvous awaited. Upon entering, he found the ship's other passenger, the one the Empire Builder had been tasked with transporting and assisting for the past three weeks, examining a small display on the side of a large duraplast cylinder that stood on the conference table. When he heard the door, Anthony Stark straightened and turned with a smile toward the door.

"Tony," said Gryphon, extending a hand.

"Ben," Stark replied, shaking it. "Good to see you. I'm glad you could make it."

Gryphon grinned. "Are you kidding? I wouldn't miss this." He stepped closer to the table and took a closer look at the cylindrical object, which stood about four feet tall. It was mostly white, with four equally spaced bands of dark grey material running from top to bottom. One of the bands had a small holodisplay and keypad on it.

"Is this the prototype?" Gryphon went on, indicating the cylinder.

Stark nodded. "I just finished final diagnostics."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense."

Now it was Stark's turn to grin. "Okay!" he said. Walking to the table, he reached and punched a code into the keypad. "Entering startup sequence... " A green key at the bottom of the pad started flashing; as he pressed it, Stark went on, "Now." Then, backing away, he gestured warningly to Gryphon and added, "Uh, you might want to stand back a little. The transport module panels sometimes... blow off a bit at startup." Gryphon backed up, giving Stark an eyebrow. The inventor shrugged. "I'm still working on it."

For a moment, nothing happened; then, with a faint sound a little like a turbine spooling up, the transport module quivered slightly - after which the four panels delineated by the grey parts did, indeed, blow off, landing on the floor all around the conference table. They left behind the circular base of the module, a small cloud of steam, and... something else.

The object that the module had been concealing was, in shape, somewhere between a cone and an egg, too rounded to be the one and too pointed to be the other. It stood balanced on the slimmer of its two curved ends, held upright by the ring around the module base. Its surface was perfectly smooth and unbroken, a clean and gleaming white except for an ovalish black area near the top that, in shape, put Gryphon rather in mind of a scuba mask. This item sat silently for a moment, and then, with the faint hum of a well-tuned repulsorlift, it rose from the base to levitate above the table. At the same time, it divided, its smooth surface splitting along faintly glowing lines. The topmost part, with the black area, lifted away from the central mass by an inch or two, becoming a "head", while thin panels broke cleanly out of slight recesses in the sides to take up flanking positions as a pair of slim, flipper-like arms.

The black bit on the front of the head flickered. A blue scan line traced it from top to bottom a couple of times, then resolved into a pair of glowing patches that approximated eyes. Looking a little more closely, Gryphon could see that each was made up of many small points of blue light grouped together, like the lamps on a kinescope-style display. The area he'd taken for a featureless black patch was actually a matrix of thousands of these tiny cells, each a fiendishly complex little sensor package.

Fully activated, the hovering droid glided smoothly forward, "stepped" down from the table so that it was at its default altitude relative to the two men, then glanced from Tony to Gryphon and back. The "eye" display flickered with the scan line again, which Gryphon realized, with mild delight, was the way it denoted blinking.

Smiling like a proud parent at a child's piano recital, Tony said, "Enhanced Versatile Engineer Mark XXXV, production number zero zero one, this is Gryphon. Gryphon: Meet Eve."

The droid pivoted slightly to face Gryphon again, then surprised him by raising one arm angled in a salute and saying in a voice that was at once obviously electronic and obviously female, "Chief."

Gryphon blinked, then returned the salute. "Eve. It's nice to finally meet you. Tony's told me so much about you."

Eve lowered her arm, then turned to Stark again, the angle of her head and the shape of her "eyes" changing to mimic an inquisitive expression. "Directive?" she inquired.

Tony gestured to Gryphon. "You said it yourself, Eve - he's the chief. From now on, you'll take directives from him, or whoever he designates."

Eve's "expression" went blank for a moment while she digested this; then she turned back to Gryphon once more and repeated, "Directive?"

Gryphon kept his smile to himself, but he had one on the inside. Since reading the full specification document for the EVE Mk 35, he'd been thinking about a suitable "final exam" for the prototype once Tony deemed it ready for an informal acceptance trial. It had taken a lot of brain-racking, but he thought he'd finally come up with a good one.

"This will primarily be a test of your probe droid and search-and-recovery functions," he said. Reaching into his pocket, he took out a microcompact datatab. "Your search target information is encoded here."

Eve glided forward and reached an arm toward him. With the same faint light along the otherwise invisible seam lines, the curved tip of her arm divided into four intricately planed segments - three fingers and a thumb, Gryphon realized as they assumed their correct relative positioning. Thus equipped with a hand, she took the tab. For a moment Gryphon wondered where she was going to slot it, whether a socket was going to appear with that same slight glow somewhere else on her gleaming white surface, but no; she merely regarded it for a moment, a blue beam of light playing over it from a spot on her "chest". Then there was a quiet chiming noise, a green light glowed momentarily through her white casing next to the source of the beam, and both lights went out as she handed back the tab.

"The item you're looking for was lost in 2296 on planet 03F8, a few miles from the south gate to the city of Uart," Gryphon told her. "No further information is available. Please find it and return it to me."

"Understood," said Eve, saluting once more. Then, without a further look at either man, she pivoted 90 degrees and glided silently out of the room. Gryphon gave Tony a quizzical look, but the engineer just grinned and pointed to the room's observation window.

A few moments later, Eve appeared in the window, having left the ship via the portside airlock. Entirely unconcerned with the vacuum of space, she banked smoothly to starboard, flying away from the ship and leaving a faint, short-lived blue ion glow in her wake. Then, just as she was about to disappear from Gryphon's view anyway, she suddenly accelerated into a hyperspace transition, her ion wake redshifting and then winking out altogether.

Gryphon turned to Tony. "I didn't finish giving her instructions," he said.

"Sure you did," Tony replied. "You told her what to find and what to do with it when she finds it. That's all she needs."

Gryphon gestured vaguely at the complete emptiness of the immediate vicinity. "I'm not going to be anywhere near here when she finds it," he said. "How's she supposed to know where to deliver it?"

Tony gave his friend a wry look. "Ben," he said. "She's a probe droid. She'll find what you sent her for; then she'll find you. It's all part of the mission."

"Hmm," said Gryphon. He gave the window another glance, looking unconvinced, then turned back to Tony and said, "Well... I hope so. And however this test turns out, I'm certainly impressed with her construction. She's like something out of a vid. Some special effects department's idea of what droids will look like in the 30th century."

Tony frowned. "Hm."

"You look disappointed."

"I was going for 35th."

Gryphon laughed.

Susan Ivanova felt an inescapable sense of déjà vu when, at about 10:30 on an otherwise unobjectionable Wednesday morning, an unidentified ship barged out of the Bajor metaspace gate and caused a textbook anomalous situation.

She stood at the command deck's observation port, observing the vessel with a curious combination of awe and annoyance. Awe because the ship was like nothing she'd ever seen before, and had clearly come a very long way; annoyance because it was blocking her traffic lane, complicating her day, and, now that she looked more closely at it, in truly terrible condition. What she had initially taken for a reddish thermocoat color was, on closer inspection, rust on a hull from which most of the paint had bleached and flaked away long ago. This same rust had, so far as she could see, obliterated any markings the vessel might once have had, leaving it completely anonymous as it drifted in front of the command deck.

"Corwin," she said. "You ever seen a ship like this one before? Because it's a new one on me."

Her ops officer, Lieutenant "Bruce" Corwin, shook his head. "Configuration's completely unfamiliar to me, Commander. Nothing in the recognition database matches either. Judging by her size, I'd say she's either a cruiser or a spaceliner, and I can't see any obvious armaments. She's not responding to hails."

As Corwin said that last part, though, the mystery ship made a liar of him. His panel suddenly bleeped with the tone of an incoming message. He looked down at his display, blinked twice, and then looked back up at Ivanova. "Commander, I'm receiving an IPO priority break code. I think it's coming from the unidentified vessel. It's code A-one-one-three - special agent requests permission to dock. My comm protocol says the Chief's to be notified."

Ivanova scowled. "What the hell are they playing at now?" she wondered rhetorically. Then, not so rhetorically, she asked, "Probability that the signal's been spoofed?"

Corwin shook his head. "Almost zero. It's triple-encrypted and on the appropriate variable sub-ether band."

Ivanova looked out the window at the strange vessel for a further long moment, then sighed.

"Give them a place to park, Lieutenant," she said resignedly. "And put me through to Headquarters."

The ship was nearly the maximum size that B6's internal docking facilities could handle, both in length and beam. Ivanova glanced at Gryphon as it arrived, but he shook his head; he didn't know what it was either. With its sleek lines and gently curved armor plating, it was a handsome vessel, or it would have been had it not been in such fantastic disrepair, but its shape was entirely unfamiliar.

Then, as the tractor beam projectors snugged it up to the docking platform, powerful floodlights in the bay ceiling played over the curving upper surface of the mystery ship's hull forward, and the different angle and intensity of the light revealed the faded outlines of markings that had been invisible in the ambient light outside the station.

Gryphon's eyes matched the pattern first, after a couple of false starts in which his brain tried to work out whether the faded lettering said anything in Standard or Cheltarese, the two most likely languages for starship identification markings. It didn't; the characters were in an obscure, long-dead Minbari dialect. The only reason Gryphon recognized them at all was because he'd gone through a phase, some years before, in which he was fascinated by legendary shipwrecks and ghost ships.

So it was that he gasped, realizing all at once that what they had before them was one of the most legendary ghost ships of them all.

"My God," he murmured.

"What?" Ivanova asked. "What is it?"

"It's the Queen of Ranroon," Gryphon said, gazing in awe at the derelict vessel.

Ivanova blinked. "No way," she said.

Gryphon nodded. "Look," he said, pointing to another near-invisible marking just forward of the letters. "There's the death's head."

"The Queen of what?" Garibaldi inquired, completely lost.

"The Queen of Ranroon," Gryphon said. "One of the great ghosts of the spacelanes."

"Treasure ship of the ancient Minbari warlord Xim the Despot," Ivanova filled in, seeing that Garibaldi still hadn't caught the thread. "They say she was carrying half the riches of the Rim back to Minbar when she was lost to a hyperdrive malfunction in... " She paused, dredging her memory - it had been many years since she'd first heard the legend of the Queen, back in her plebe year at Starfleet Academy. "... 5500 BSC or so."

Garibaldi blinked. "You're saying this ship is eight thousand years old?"

"If the legend is true," Gryphon confirmed. He walked slowly across the platform to stand in front of what looked like a boarding hatch. "I wonder which of my field agents found her... "

A moment later, the hatch ground slowly open, corroded metal shrieking in protest, and he had his answer.

EVE-35-001, her formerly immaculate white casing scuffed and smudged, glided out of the Queen of Ranroon's docking corridor and halted in front of him. Two panels on her chest appeared and divided with that same white-edged glow, reveaing a small storage compartment, and a small tractor beam delivered the item within into Gryphon's hands. Thus divested of her cargo, Eve sealed her plastron again, the seams glowing and vanishing altogether, then saluted.

"Directive accomplished," she reported.

Dumbfounded, Gryphon looked down at the object she'd just placed in his hands: the left gauntlet from the Mark III Griffin power suit he'd been forced to strip for parts and abandon back on 03F8 more than a century before. For a few seconds, he just stared at it as if unable to process all he was seeing before him. Then he turned, handed it to Ivanova (who took it automatically, then looked at it in complete bafflement), turned back to Eve, and returned her salute.

"... Damn," he said admiringly when he was able to find his voice again.

To his surprise, given the blankly businesslike way she'd accepted the assignment a month earlier, Eve seemed to find this amusing. Her "eyes" adopted an upward crescent configuration and she bobbed in place, making a sound that, though filtered and electronic, was unmistakably a bubbly giggle.

From behind Eve, the still-astonished Gryphon heard a distinctly mechanical sound, like tracks moving across steel decking, followed by a second, more mechanical voice asking curiously, "Ee-va?"

Eve's optics blinked, then looked surprised. "Oh!" she said. Moving aside, she gestured with one finlike arm, as if making an introduction, and said, "Chief... "

Rolling up from behind her came a smaller, much earlier robot - a squat box-shape with tracks on either side, spindly hydraulic arms, and a turreted head that looked like nothing so much as a pair of binoculars. The new arrival bore the scars of long and rugged service, reminding Gryphon slightly of the ship the two robots had arrived aboard, with streaks of rust, flaking paint, and a general air of hard-traveled sturdiness.

To Gryphon's stunned amazement - he was beginning, abstractly, to wonder how many iterations of "stunned amazement" he could manage before his brain locked up altogether - he recognized the tracked robot immediately. It was a U.S. Robotics E-class WALL unit, one of the small trash compactor/utility droids that had once, several centuries before, been ubiquitous in the human-influenced galaxy. The old SDF-17 had had hundreds of them aboard, but Gryphon hadn't seen a working one for at least 200 years.

The WALL unit rolled right up to Gryphon, raised itself up on its suspension, and extended a two-fingered flat manipulator in a clearly friendly gesture. As the bemused Chief of the IPO shook its hand, it spoke, after a fashion. Its "voice", Gryphon realized, wasn't the automatically adapted speech of a Standard vocabulator, as a protocol droid would speak with. Instead, it was a rather cleverly adapted series of electronic sounds, almost as if an R2 unit had figured out how to speak to humans with only its regular industrial communicator.

"Waaaaall-E," the small robot introduced itself - himself, Gryphon corrected himself, for something about the robot's bearing carried an undefinable, but also unmistakable, air of self-awareness. He found himself immediately charmed.

"Well, I'll be damned," he heard Garibaldi remark behind him.

Gryphon released Wall-E's hand and turned to Eve. "Friend of yours?" he asked, unable to keep the smile from his face. He had the distinct impression that, had the surprisingly broad range of the more sophisticated robot's "expressions" included the ability to blush, she would have.

Gryphon's little smile broadened slightly as he realized that she, too, showed the telltale signs. When he'd dispatched her on her test mission, she'd been cool, businesslike - a clever machine, but a machine all the same. Now, she was clearly more.

That was quick, he remarked wryly to himself. I don't know whether Tony will be pleased or depressed.

"Welllll... " she said in answer to his query, pivoting to face slightly away from her battered companion and attempting unsuccessfully to look nonchalant.

"Ee-va!" said Wall-E in a tone combining reproach with dismay.

She remained turned away for a second more, then relented and turned back, extending her arm. Gryphon watched, fascinated anew - he wasn't sure he'd ever get tired of seeing that system work - as her "hand" separated and unfolded. With an air of relief and enormous contentment, Wall-E opened his own manipulator and laced his fingers with hers.

Then, looking the Chief straight in the eye, Eve declared firmly, "Yes."

Gryphon sighed, but his continued smile put the lie to his show of resignation. "Another mouth to feed," he said.

"Eee!" said Wall-E, apparently pleased with his reception.

Turning to Garibaldi and Ivanova, Gryphon addressed the former first. "Put a couple of guards on this bay, will you please, Michael? We'll figure out what to do with the ghost ship later."

"I'm on it," Garibaldi said with a nod.

"Thanks. Commander?"

"Chief?" Ivanova replied.

"Would you do me a favor and ask the Turing advocate to meet me in my office after lunch? It looks," he said with a smiling glance at Eve, "as if I have some very expensive equipment to lose."

Ivanova blinked, caught his meaning, and couldn't help but smile herself, just a little. "I'll set it up," she said.

"Great. Thanks. And thanks for calling me so quickly." With a sly edge to his grin, he took the gauntlet back from her, tucked it under his arm, and added, "I told you this job would be more interesting than a survey of the Dark Sectors."

Then, turning, he gestured for Eve and Wall-E to follow him and set off across the docking bay toward the exit, announcing as he went, "C'mon, let's get you two cleaned up. You look like you've been through a war."

"Debriefing?" Eve inquired as, hand in hand, she and Wall-E followed.

"Eh. It'll keep," Gryphon said.

"Field Test" - a Future Imperfect Mini-Story by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
Eve and Wall-E created by Andrew Stanton
© 2008 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited