Author's Note: My thanks to everyone who's reading this story, and my apologies to anyone who knows what happens to the missiles in Hitchhiker's Guide. I just couldn't think of a good equivalent, I'm afraid, so this chapter is dedicated to the memory of the sperm whale and the bowl of petunias.

(-*-)

"Ok…" Gabriel said, as the warning systems confirmed the presence of Krippkethan guided missiles attacking the ship.

"Ok." He said again, because he was really hoping an idea would come to him soon.

"Ok," he said, one last time, in a hopeless attempt to look together and cool under pressure. "We need to take evasive action. Castiel, move, I'm going to fly this thing."

"But, Gabriel…"

"No buts. Move."

After slight hesitation, Castiel stood up and let Gabriel get to the controls. Gabriel touched a button and the whole ship lurched violently. Gabriel looked around.

"What was that?"

"That was you forgetting that you don't know how to fly a spaceship." Castiel was still smirking, the severity of the situation clearly still making its way through the fog that surrounded his brain. "Bobby, can you get us away from here?"

"Well I would…" Bobby's gruff voice crackled through the speakers, sounding oddly distant, "but most of my processing space is taken up with another problem right now."

"Another problem?" Balthazar was incredulous. "What is more important than not dying right now?"

"Ask the human." Bobby sneered. "He's the one who confused the shit out of the DinerMatic. Now if you'll excuse me." Bobby excused himself. Everyone turned to glare at Dean.

"What?" Dean protested, really wishing this day would cut him a break already. "How the hell was I supposed to know this would happen?"

Gabriel muttered something along the lines of "under-evolved mud-monkey", and returned to the controls. The ship lurched violently again, and started taking on a much more downwards trajectory.

"Balthazar…" Gabriel battled against the controls. "I don't suppose you know how to fly this thing?"

"No."

"Crap."

"Let me." Castiel stood behind his semi-cousin, eyes darting over the various displays.

"Yeah, sure. I'm going to let a seasoned stoner pilot my new ship."

Several warning lights flashed on and off, angrily.

Castiel pushed his semi-cousin out of the way and began tugging gently at the controls, handling them with the firm calmness of an expert hand. The ship sailed around in a sharp circle, zipping between both missiles and swooping in low over the planet.

"Where the hell did you learn to do that?" Gabriel yelled, staring up at Castiel from the floor. Castiel didn't take his earth off of the visi-screens.

"GTA four…"

"What?"

"Oh." Balthazar helped Gabriel up. "It's an Earth thing. You see…"

"Don't care." Gabriel decided, running over to watch the visi-screens with Castiel. "Have we gotten rid of the missiles?"

"No, they're still after us." Castiel sucked in air through his teeth. "And we're too close to surface to do any serious aerobatics right now. I don't know how long I can stay ahead of them…"

"We're going to die, aren't we?" Sam sighed, setting everyone's teeth on edge. "No, knowing my luck, you'd all die and I'd just get blown up, and remain as a conscious limb or something. Or a disembodied head."

"Sam." Castiel barked from the controls. "Will you please shut up about your…" a horrible noise which sounded something like a giant trying to eat a tin-can sandwich reverberated through the ship, covering whatever Castiel said.

"What?" Gabriel asked. Castiel shook his head.

"I was just saying I don't want to hear anything about robot h…" Sirens wailed over the speakers, as Bobby's voice stirred again.

"Well, that other problem should be fixing itself right about now, but I'm going to go ahead and say it's too late to help here. Sorry boys; it's been a pleasure flying with you."

"Why don't we just hit this button?" Dean yelled over the screeching sirens. He pointed to a red button on the console.

"Ten seconds to impact."

"What?" Castiel yelled back. Dean pointed to the button.

"That's the Leap of Faith thing Balthazar said about, right? Why don't we just push it?"

"We can't…"

"Eight seconds to impact."

"Why not?"

Castiel thought for a moment, before turning to Balthazar and Gabriel, who were staring at the visi-screens with blank, mute terror.

"Six seconds to impact"

"Can anyone think of a reason why Dean shouldn't initiate Leap of Faith drive?"

"What?"

"I said…"

"Four seconds to impact."

"Can anyone think…"

"Two seconds to impact."
"Oh, son of a bitch." Dean snarled, slamming his fist on the Leap of Faith button.

Meanwhile, out in the hall, the DinerMatic had been scanning its database of psychosomatic occurrences in carbon based life forms, and had finally come to an understanding that food heavy in saturated fats or sugars (in moderation) was indeed beneficial to the psychological states of species such as humans. Content in the knowledge that it would not be contradicting its own primary function, the machine happily spat out a cup of coffee and an apple pie into the empty space of the corridor.

At the very moment Dean initiated the Leap of Faith drive, the ship began passing through every point in the galaxy and, at an improbability factor of two to the power of three million, eight hundred and twenty nine thousand, one hundred and thirty to one against, the pie slipped through an exhaust vent, flew through the air and landed squarely in the guidance controls of one of the missiles, causing it to malfunction and throw itself into the other missile. Dean had initiated the Leap of Faith at just the right moment, and blindly hoped to just the correct degree that it would help.

The Impala reappeared just in time to witness the explosion.

The crew of the Impala reacted in unison.

"Huh."

"Hey Earthman." Gabriel punched Dean on the arm. "Good thinking. You saved us all."

"Yeah…" Dean shrugged, smiling. "Don't mention it."

"Oh. Ok then."

"I… wait, what?"

"Cas, take us down somewhere safe. Sam, get to the captain's quarters. We need to have "thank god we're still alive" sex. Now. No one come look for me." Gabriel stomped off, followed by the depressed cyborg.

"I was…" Dean looked around, utterly lost. "What just happened?"

"Yeah." Castiel shrugged. "They do that. I probably should have mentioned it. Oh shit, I hope my mice are ok…" Castiel slapped on the autopilot and ran from the bridge. Dean turned to Balthazar.

"Has life always been this weird and I've just never noticed it?"

"Possibly." Balthazar sighed. "It was a Thursday, on Earth."

"Yeah…" Dean sighed. "What of it?"

"Nothing. Just, if this had happened on a Monday, I could have understood it. Nothing ever happens on Thursdays. Ah, well. Shall we find ourselves some drinks?"

"I've just found out the only other human in existence has been turned into a giant sex toy. I don't think I can drink enough."

"Gabriel and a manically depressed cyborg." Balthazar sighed, leading the way to the bar that hid at the back of the bridge. "I'm not sure who I feel more sorry for."

(-*-)

Gabriel Angeles features in several entries of the Bloody Invaluable Book, ranging from Prime Ministerial biography to his involvement as a Retroactive Missionary in the (perhaps rightfully) short-lived campaign for the "betterment of lesser developed times". Indeed, much has been written about Angeles (and a surprising amount of it autobiographical), but little has been written about his role in engineering the first true cyborg; a human consciousness in a robot body.

It had begun shortly after the Earth had entered its' twenty first century, when Gabriel had gone to the far-flung, overlooked planet in hopes of locating his semi-cousin Balthazar. Balthazar had gone to the Earth to write a report for the Book, and fallen out of contact. Gabriel had not found his semi-cousin, but had found himself rather hopelessly infatuated with a rather nice law student by the name of Sam. When the time came for Gabriel to give up on finding Balthazar and be dragged, kicking and screaming, back to his Prime Ministerial duties, he hit upon the idea of taking Sam with him. Together, Gabriel and his human saw the universe and made love to each other in ways neither had ever dreamed possible. All in all, they lived happily ever after… for about five years, at which point the various people Gabriel owed money to managed to kidnap the human and demand that Gabriel pay up for all the space ships, private hotels and custom made fluids that had facilitated the seeing of the universe and the "making love to each other in ways etc etc."

Gabriel was then faced with a dilemma; what with the phenomenal amounts of importing and exporting between planets, no one intergalactic currency was truly safe (see entry: The Universe Top Trumps Figures) and could collapse and become obsolete at any moment. Gabriel needed to get a lot of money, fast, and in a currency that had a stable worth to the universe. He remembered Earth and its inhabitants, who were strangely possessed with the idea of working themselves to death to get money, before blowing it all on the latest fad. He teamed up with his drifter semi-cousin, went down and set up chains of yoga classes and health food shops. He made the money in no time, and left Earth before Health and Safety had a chance to see the fruit parfait.

By the time he had gotten the money to Sam's captors, however, the surprisingly fragile human was in a vegetative state.

Not to be put out, (nor to create another massive debt at the hands of the hospital), Gabriel skimmed through his old "Engineering and programming" books from grade school, and managed to come up with a way to download the human's consciousness into an as yet unassigned robot body from Sirius Cybernetics. It was not a complete success (the cyborg was prone to manic variations in mood and temperament) and he found that he had been too drunk at the time to remember exactly how he had done it, but he had. And now, Sam and Gabriel were stuck with each other, like it or not.

Dean didn't know any of this. All he knew was that, when Gabriel returned to the bridge, followed by the slightly less depressed-looking robot, he really, really didn't want to think about how it worked. Then Balthazar commented that Gabriel had a spot of what looked like oil on his jeans, and Dean grimaced at the blush that spread across Gabriel's face.

It was at that point that Castiel wandered on to the bridge, and (much to Dean's relief) distracted the conversation with what was possibly the most important and influential thing he would ever say.

"My white mice got out of their cage, I think they're loose. Has anyone seen them?"

"Screw your damn mice." Gabriel said, still scratching at the oil stain on his jeans. The importance and influence of Castiel's statement was not immediately obvious to his shipmates. Balthazar, in particular, had more pressing matters to attend to.

"We're here, guys. We're on Krippketha! We should go out and find whatever's worth finding on this god-forsaken dust-ball."

"But my mice…"

"They're only mice, Castiel." Balthazar rolled his eyes. "Does it really matter?"

It is possible that Balthazar and Gabriel would have had more of a complete comprehension on the subject if they knew that humans were only the third most intelligent species on planet Earth and not, as is often thought by most independent observers, the second.

"Computer." Gabriel said. "Run a check on the atmosphere."

The computer beeped for a few moments, before Bobby's voice ground into the speakers.

"It's good for oxygen, but it smells funky. Are you sure you want to go out there?"

"Yes, thank you, Bobby." Balthazar sighed, drumming his fingers against the ship's door.

"Just… I'm getting a weird electromagnetic pulse coming from somewhere inside the…"

"I'm sure we'll be fine." Balthazar sighed, clearly eager to get exploring. Bobby hummed for a moment, before the ship's door swung open and Balthazar nearly fell through it.

"Your funeral." The computer chuckled as everyone trudged out into the cold air of the desert planet. Castiel cleared his throat.

"Gabriel, are you sure? I mean, we've already been attacked once, and that was before we'd even landed…"

"It's dead." Gabriel stated. "We are the only living things on this planet."

"Yes. And now we're here, we may as well have a look around." Balthazar grinned, gazing around the landscape.

"Wow, you really were starved out there on Earth, weren't you?" Gabriel laughed.

"Hey look!" Balthazar pointed. A small tunnel led down underground, looking rather like an ancient Egyptian subway entrance.

"That…" Gabriel smiled, sharing his semi-cousin's excitable grin, "is definitely worth a look in. Hey Earth man?"

"I have a name." Dean scowled.

"Yeah, whatever. Do you think you could stand out here with Sam? Keep watch?"

Balthazar and Castiel slipped through the entrance, armed with torches and not a lot else.

"Keep watch?" Dean repeated. "I thought you said it was a dead planet?"

"Yeah, but… you know, insurance." Gabriel shrugged, shooting Dean a wink. "Don't go making any moves on my robot, Earth man. Thanks, buddy." So saying, Gabriel ran off after the other aliens. Dean sighed and sat down on the ground, staring out at the pre-dawn horizon. He turned to yell down the tunnel.

"I hope you all get some kind of mummy curse!"

"They probably will." Sam intoned, standing perfectly still. "That, or they'll breathe in some sort of long dormant bacteria that their immune systems have no chance of coping against. There's a good probability one or more of them will die down there."

Oddly, that didn't make Dean feel better.