By the time Captain Orbitz returned to Alliance headquarters in the Solar System two things had happened. First his DNA was found at a raided underground Wiki-en meeting place on Mars. Second and more importantly the longest-serving courier in Alliance history with a record 32 trips across branes was officially declared lost. He entered a singularity in the Cygnus Arm and two hundred fifty milliarc-seconds later his ship's quantum entangler had yet to respond. There were no sightings of him at any manned transit points in either Alliance or Alliance-friendly territory. No wreckage was found. The man like so many interstellar travelers before him had simply vanished into the two-dimensional fracas known as inter-brane space. This made Orbitz not technically the oldest man in the Orion Arm but its first born citizen. His long dead mother had given birth to him thousands of years ago. It made him a celebrity.

"Wait a minute," said Orbitz Número Dos. He took a cotton swab from the bowl next to the sink. He knelt by the body and passed the swab over the skin inside and outside the cheeks. "Take this to the lab and analyse it," he said. He handed the swab to Orbitz Number One. "Go," he said. "Now."

Orbitz sputtered his way along the headmast. He spotted his ship, the Argo, lying just beyond the outermost sails. He brought the body onboard. He didn't have much time to hide it. Sara Lee was already approaching from the north. By the time Orbitz shut the hatch to the maintenance module she was already buzzing the airlock. Orbitz let her onboard. "Why are we meeting here?" she asked. "I thought we were going to the Nautilus."

The orbits of Captain Orbitz as told and retold by trillions of Orion systemizens, indeed systemizens from across many a galaxy, never fluctuated from their purpose of helping Captain Tycho "Tych" Orbitz conquer his home galaxy. Tych was firm from the day he resigned his commision as a courier in the Star Alliance to the day he vanished into space. Many were afraid he would come back. Many more hoped he would. They thought he was out pirating somewhere with Lalunia, his pheromonically irresistible great-great-great-great-niece, or ruling a planet with the beautifully blue Sara Lee, or fighting the jilted queen of the Astrazeneca or playing chess with CAROline the computer that loved him. They didn't know he was dead. They had no idea he had died long before he had even resigned his commission. Before he hijacked the tesseract marking the beginning of his rebellion or piloted the stolen ship Nautilus into the singularity the man had physically removed his own dead body from the bridge. He had no choice. At the time the ship was scheduled to be inspected by Star Alliance sanitation officers.