“Got it,” she replied a moment later. “I’ve found a decent slab of… moon, I think. Either way, it looks ideal.”
A nearby display changed to present the plotted course, with red and blue indicators to show where the broken moon and the wave of death were respectively. There was less distance between them than Adrian would have preferred, and it was clear that Trix had not been entirely honest about having more time. “Jesus! Let’s not waste any fucking time then. Set a course to getting us the fuck out of here.”
“Ready in five… four… three…” she counted down.
Adrian stepped through the door as it opened. His mind on other things, he’d forgotten to account for the difference in gravity and inertial dampening, and the change was enough to make him stumble.
That stumble saved his life.
“…two…” Trix continued.
A flash of a fusion blade arced through the air, slicing into the doorway instead of Adrian. It was held by a creature that had no right to be doing anything, so clearly damaged was it. This was the creature that Adrian had slain outside of Spot, a creature that should have been dead and yet somehow clung to life. He could see the face clearly now, and recognised the cold and dead features of Zripob, and eyes that were most certainly not his own peering from gouged sockets.
Adrian recoiled in horror as the creature swung again, narrowly missing by virtue of surprise rather than skill. The body was as dead as the rest of it, and it moved as stiffly as any zombie should. There were several more just like it standing in close proximity, all of them beginning to move with far greater agility than the half-frozen Chehnasho.
“… one… and zero…” Trix finished.
Dropping the bag, Adrian flung himself to the side to evade the swing of a newcomer, kicked off the wall with his left foot, and booted the zombie into the engineering bay with his right. The lights flickered as the engineering section exploded, vaporising the zombie and anything else in the room, and blasting Adrian and the Zombies down the corridor in an unchecked, gravity-free spin before the lights flickered again, this time into darkness.
The monsters, for that was what they were, carried on that way, grasping poorly at prospective hand-holds and finding none of them. Adrian missed the first, grabbed the second, and looked down a corridor lit only by the white fire of a burning engineering room.
“Fucking Christ!” he shouted as he scrambled to regain his orientation. As usual, things hadn’t gone to plan, but fortunately he still carried the SPAS 12. What he didn’t carry, he realised, was the bag full of ammunition and the rest of his things. Right now he was on a dead ship, surrounded by psycho-zombies, with only 8 shells between him and the grave. “Saunders,” he hissed to himself, “you are a dumb fucking cunt.”
++++
++++
The Dastasji, adjacent to unknown terrestrial world
Scava
It had been eminently satisfying to see the abomination flare into ruin, and thereby protect the secrets of the V’Straki once again. The Igraen were cosmic poison, there was no denying that, and the same held true for their sympathisers. It took gall to make war on the mighty V’Straki empire, proclaiming its denizens as ‘nightmare-beasts’ for the simple fact that they were carnivorous, all while maintaining the delusion that giving up the flesh in favour of a digital existence was perfectly fine. The Igraen were an infestation that would be purged, and that was how Scava thought of them, but they had never accomplished true Artificial Intelligence. If they had committed that crime, then the V’Straki empire would have burned entire worlds to see things set right.
That they had stumbled across one running a ruined V’Straki warship was more than alarming, and had necessitated immediate action of the most vigorous kind. The command crew watched the bloom of uncreation with the sense of disaster narrowly averted, but the mystery would be playing on more than one mind.
“Well?” Jrasic asked, turning an eye towards Artiz. “Did the attack go according to plan?”
Scava smiled to himself; it was just like Jrasic to double-check his victory, even in the face of such significant evidence. That smile vanished when Artiz indicated to the contrary.
“Something escaped,” he said, “on a course for the planet, although it is now impossible to obtain decent scanner results. Shiplord, I think we should assume our work is incomplete.”
That Jrasic was furious was plain to see, but it was not his crew that would feel the brunt of that anger. The Shiplord was wise enough to direct such feelings where they belonged, and there was no fault to be found aboard the Dastasji. “Set a course for the planet,” he commanded. “We will not leave until we are certain. You all know our history, so I do not have to tell you the gravity of the situation in which we find ourselves.”
Like the rest of the crew, Scava returned to managing his console. Once, not so long ago, the V’Straki had been unwittingly enslaved by a biologically immortal creature posing as a god. The primitive V’Straki had been convinced by the overwhelming might of a starship of incredible technology, and generation after generation had been indoctrinated into the creature’s foul cult. Only when the creature had been found, in a lair of grand illusions, was it slain. Maybe that would have been the end of it, had their saviour not thought to search further.
Ultimately the creature had been every bit the slave the rest of them had been, fooled by a digital intelligence that offered only lies. That ship had burned to free the V’Straki, and they had reformed to govern themselves, but those scars still ran deep.
“Scava,” Jrasic called out as he rose to his feet. “Attend me in my chamber.”
Scava did so, falling in behind the Shiplord at a respectful two strides distance and keeping his silence.
Jrasic didn’t talk until he had closed the door behind both of them and had poured them both a cup of hard Kuhl-Ad, mixed further with some Arret spice.
“Here,” Jrasic said, thrusting a cup into Scava’s hand. He did not wait for his first officer to start drinking. “Today has been a difficult day, Scava. It is only likely to get worse.”
Scava took a sip, finding it slightly too bitter for his taste but feigning enjoyment anyway; the Shiplord had enough to worry about without Scava’s drinking preferences getting involved. “I am sure we will find the abomination, Shiplord.”
“You will find it,” Jrasic replied, pointing directly at Scava. “As of now, that is your primary concern. You have my authority to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.”
Scava straightened. “Shiplord! I… yes, of course!”
“Artiz will be assigned to another task, however,” the Shiplord went on. “You are only to interfere with his work as an absolute necessity.”
“Understood, Shiplord,” Scava replied. “May I know his task?”
Jrasic stepped over to the false window where an image of their beautiful homeworld slowly rotated. The blue-green world of vast oceans surrounding a handful of tightly packed continents was not a recording, but rather an artistic rendition designed to do the world greater justice than nature itself could achieve. “We have passed through a strange anomaly, Scava, and our coordinates are unknown. The abomination’s words are most troubling.”
Scava recalled them only vaguely, lost to the shock of encountering a true artificial intelligence in the wild. “I think it mentioned a name?”
“It did,” Jrasic confirmed. “An ‘Adrian Saunders’, whatever that might be. It also indicated that it knew what we were, and that our presence was unexpected in this era.”
Scava processed this, and finally understood why Jrasic had poured them both a drink. He took another, deeper swig of his. “We have travelled through time.”
“Yes,” said Jrasic evenly. “If the abomination is to be believed.”
“And if it is,” Scava continued, “then the V’Straki empire is likely no more. Could we have lost the war?”
Jrasic shook his head. “I don’t see how. The Igraens are not a worthy adversary, no matter how many lesser races they trick into helping them. It must have been something else.”
“Then we need to find out what it was, get back home, and stop it from ever happening,” Scava replied. “This is a great chance for us, Shiplord!”
Jrasic mused for a long while before answering. “Yes.”
If he was to continue any further, he was interrupted by his comm-unit, and answered it immediately out of habit. “I am not to be disturbed!”
“I understand, Shiplord,” came the reply, and Scava identified the voice as belonging to Artiz, “but there has been a development.”
The word carried a weight all of its own. Jrasic’s irritation fell away in favour of concern; it was already clear that something serious had happened.
“Explain,” he commanded.
“I am sending you the live video,” Artiz replied, and the image of their homeworld gave way to… nothing. It was nothing but the glowing backdrop of the nebulae. “That,” Artiz quickly resumed, no doubt understanding how it looked, “is where the field of debris was until just a moment ago. The debris is gone. The devouring wave is gone. Everything is gone.”
“How is it gone?” Jrasic snarled. This wasn’t a particularly desirable revelation, although unexplained acts of incredible destruction rarely are. “The devouring wave would not work that fast.”
“Indeed, Shiplord,” Artiz agreed. “If my sensors are to be believed, we should be thankful for the protections afforded to us for the experiment. I am detecting extreme spatial distortions outside of our shields… it appears that someone has re-enacted the experiment on a much grander scale.”
“Warp is impossible?” Jrasic asked.
“Yes, Shiplord,” Artiz confirmed. “As is any meaningful use of our sensor array. All I can tell you is that the planet is our best chance, though I have no idea how long we may be stranded there.”
As if to highlight the severity of the situation, the display burst into a sea of purple-blue torment with no distinguishable centre. It swirled, apparently haphazardly, and burst into briefly-lived white vortices that recalled the last moments of the experiment all too well.
Jrasic nodded. “It would seem the choice is made for us.”
++++
++++
The Amber Radiance, empty space adjacent to Agwar
Adrian Saunders
“Are you there, Laphor?” Adrian shouted into his comm-link as he pulled himself away from the slowly spreading mess in the engineering room. Normally when things exploded, they were done with it in a moment, but this time it seemed like an explosion that wanted to slowly devour the ship. It spread along the walls like vines of molten ruin, as though it were seeking out everything that might be consumed. That was merely embellishment, of course, but it didn’t make the danger any less real, and Adrian was well on his way to getting the fuck out of there.
There was no answer from Laphor, only the roar of static as raw power flooded the electro-magnetic spectrum. That wasn’t a good sign, but it didn’t mean he was going to give her and her crew up for dead, especially when Trix was still in the room with them. Finding the path back to the command deck was going to prove difficult, however, when one end of the corridor was melting into an inferno, the other was filled with space-zombies, and the whole place was generally unlit.
“Nobody is going to believe this shit,” he said as he drifted down towards the zombies, his eyes picking out the fading glow of inactive fusion blades. “Fucking wormholes, fucking zombies, fucking space fucking dinosaurs. I mean… fucking seriously!”
He fired at the first zombie to approach, detonating the head with enough force to spread a fine ochre mist into the air, and once again Adrian was glad to be wearing a vacuum suit. Having better shit to do than fight the undead, Adrian took the next turn and put on some speed. All he needed was to get everyone to an escape pod, and the zombies would burn with the rest of the ship.
Space turned to jelly ahead of him as a river of glowing power passed through the ship, carving away the passage ahead and a significant section of the port-side facilities. He stopped to let it pass, turned to see the zombies still advancing, and threw himself across the gulf.
The leap was slow, proceeding at a steady rate, and gave him the full view of what was going on outside. The results of his last attempt paled into insignificance against the maelstrom that now appeared before him. Massive swirls of white light burst in and out of existence as a writing mass of purple-blue energy crawled across the torn fabric of space. It made him feel like screaming, and maybe he did, for the scene still filled his mind even after reaching the safety of the other side of the breach.
“Oh… ohhh… God,” he muttered incoherently as he grabbed for purchase. He felt sick from the sight of it, feeling as though the universe had been screaming straight into his brain. He felt that, for all his crimes, this was the one that was most profound. It was not a good feeling.
“Adrian?” he heard over the wash of static. “Is that you?”
It was Laphor.
“Holy shit…” he said, relieved to hear the voice of another living being. “Yeah, it’s me. I don’t think your ship is going to make it.”
“Uh, yeah…” she replied. “A big blast of purple just melted away a chunk of command deck. Do you know how I know this was your fault?”
He didn’t answer, only waited for her to continue.
She didn’t delay. “Everything got worse, that’s how!”
“We’re not dead yet,” he told her, “but you need to get to the escape pod. If we can get to the planet—”
“Going to a deathworld in an escape pod is as good as death for us!” she shouted back. “It was one thing in proper ship, but this… this really is just suicide with extra steps.”
He pressed on. “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” he quoted.
“Death. World,” she emphasised.
“Life finds a way!” he quoted again, grasping at straws. What did it say about him if the best encouragement he could come up with were cheesy lines from irrelevant movies? “Look, basically, if you’re not fucking dead then maybe you’ve got a shot!”
“Fine,” she hissed. “I was already going to do it anyway. I just wanted to make a point of telling you so.”
She was going to be delightful company, he just knew it. Still, leaving her behind wouldn’t sit well with him, no matter how annoying she might get. Maybe it was his army training, but Adrian never did like the idea of leaving a man behind, even if that man was a female alien mercenary who was—until very recently—out to kill him.
“So… apart from that, I just ran into this Chehnasho I used to know,” he continued conversationally. “Last time I saw him I was kicking his corpse off my hull.”
There was a hesitation. “What?!”
“I was just making a point that there are worse things than just dying,” he sniped back. “How’s the escape pod looking?”
“Unpowered,” came the flat reply. “what in the void is going on out there? Zripob is dead… I saw you kill him! That was part of the reason we’re working together!”
“Not gonna lie, he’s looked better,” Adrian returned.
He drew to a stop as space lensed around him, distorting light and sensation before suddenly snapping back to regularity. Again there was the feeling that everything was jelly, and again Adrian ignored the experience in favour of increased speed.
“I really hope we get power back, and soon,” Laphor mused, and Adrian guessed she’d just been through much the same thing. He couldn’t give an answer, though; this was the part where maths took a backseat to chaos, and reality churned until it finally settled. If they were lucky it’d be much the same as before; if they weren’t—and based on recent events, they probably weren’t—then anything might happen. Once upon a time he’d gone to see a movie where a whale randomly popped into existence above a planet, before shortly plummeting to its death. It was explained that this happened due to it being so unlikely, but it was clearly also something which the writer had supposed might be greatly amusing. It hadn’t seemed a particularly clever joke at the time, but now that he found himself thinking of it, Adrian reckoned they’d be fairly well off if that was the worst that happened.
“It shouldn’t be much longer,” said Adrian, although he really had no idea. He had the feeling, though, that they’d soon find out if they were getting out of this new mess in one piece.
He reached the command deck door to find it surrounded by the bug-brained zombies, all of whom turned at his arrival to face him with empty sockets. In the fragmented light it was something straight out of a horror game, and Adrian spent three more shells before he came to his senses and finished the job with an inactive fusion blade. Lacking any weapon except for their own limbs proved unhelpful to these creatures, and while the void would no doubt be quick to claim them, Adrian still made sure to follow the old, zombie-killing technique, and destroyed the brain in each twitching corpse.
The door to the command deck wasn’t something that could be easily opened without power, especially not by those species common to the Galactic Dominion. It needed the manual override to be pulled before applying significant force to the door, and normally required tools. It posed almost no challenge to a Deathworlder who knew what he was doing, even one as injured as Adrian, but still wasted valuable minutes. With the inevitable zombie surge coming from within the ship, and deadly lines of strange power slicing in from outside, every moment was one that counted. With that in mind he didn’t close the door behind him, only briefly glanced at the enormous hole in the command deck, and went straight for the unit that housed Trix’s mind. He whirled as he unplugged it, sure that somebody—probably that fucked-up version of Zripob—would be poised to attack, but there was nobody but the floating corpses he’d just dealt with. “I’ll be joining you now.”
He met the mercenaries mere moments later, finding them standing around in the darkness beside the escape pod with no way in. The door was sealed by power, and none of them had a solution.
“I see everything went to plan!” Laphor hissed angrily. “You owe me a ship!”
“I owe a lot of people a fucking ship,” Adrian replied sharply, “you can take a number. Yeah, things didn’t pan out like I’d hoped, but we’re here and we just need to play the waiting game.”
She glanced past him, and took an involuntary step back as her expression turned to one of horror. “You didn’t close the door!?”
He turned around, and was welcomed by the sight he’d expected earlier. The other end of the passage was dimly lit in purple, where the light of the anomaly bled in through the hull breach. Several broken forms were now silhouetted against that glow, and all of them were plainly aware of where their prey was hiding.
“By the void!” murmured one of the mercenaries. “Shipmaster… what is this nightmare?!”
Laphor shook her head. “It’s nothing the Human Disaster can’t handle. You said you met Zripob again in the corridors…”
“Yep,” said Adrian, taking a step forward with his fusion blade drawn, and considering his disadvantages. He was smaller than most aliens, though his presence could certainly dominate the room, and that meant they had better reach. They were slower, but they were more numerous, and in a vacuum they only needed one solid hit to get the job done. He opted to shoot at the nearest, sending it spinning backwards in a spray of blood and ichor, and followed up with a second shot at the next in line. He noticed that they paused, clearly not understanding the limits of human weaponry, and thusly unable to come to a solution. The lights on the escape pod were alone in flickering back on, and that could not have come at a better time. The fact that fusion blades also started working again was of lesser comfort.
“What about the rest of the power?” Laphor asked, confused.
“Maybe one of those energy beams hit the reactor,” Adrian suggested, glossing over the unfortunate truth. “Either way, this is our exit plan. Open it up!”
They didn’t need further instruction. No sooner had they leapt inside than Adrian was closing the door behind them, and subsequently initiating the ejection process. They tumbled together under the explosion of sudden force, spinning wildly with the pod as it struggled to correct course and make for the planet. The constant fluctuations in power were noted by all, as was the increasing intensity and longevity of those white vortices, and they stood in silence as the pod fled the burning corpse of the Amber Radiance for the relative safety of a Class Eleven Deathworld.
“Right then,” he said, turning to face his fellow survivors. “I don’t need to tell you that this isn’t going to be fun.”
“We’re very aware of that,” Laphor assured him, and the rest of the mercenaries nodded. “We don’t see we have any other choice if we want a shot at living.”
The lights fluctuated again, as did the kinetics, and all eyes turned to the navigation display; it seemed the tormented void wasn’t quite ready to give them up.
“We’re losing velocity,” Laphor reported. “That can only mean that… everything…. is pulling us back.”
Adrian licked dry lips as he took in the information. The little pod was recalculating their trajectory over and over as it fought the increasing forces behind it, and now it seemed that their future was back on that razor’s edge. They all watched the changing numbers, the varying trajectory, and the roiling chaos in the void with the same wariness that one regards a deadly animal. They had done all they could, and now their fate was down to fate alone.
“Hope we’re all feeling lucky,” Adrian commented as the numbers edged towards doom. Out there the angry void called to them, clawed at them, hungered for them. He swallowed; it felt a hell of a lot like being in the eyes of a spiteful god.
Finally it was the gravity well that saved them, disrupting the strange forces enough to allow the pod a return to full power. All of them sagged with relief as they reached the edge of the atmosphere and shot through the heavens like a bolt of fire, heading directly for the area where a thousand Hunter ships lay in ruin.
“The fuck?” Adrian asked upon noticing that. “Why the fuck is it taking us there?!”
“It’ll automatically navigate towards the most significant signs of technology,” Laphor explained, paling as she understood the significance. “You did kill them all, right?”
He looked at her. “If I didn’t…”
There was really no reason to end that sentence; Adrian was in no condition for a pitched fight, and they all knew what would happen if Hunters had survived the battle. The escape pod overshot the massive wrecks—already overcome with new vegetation—and landed lightly in a broad flat area that, from above, had seemed a grassland. At ground level, however, it was something closer to reeds of unnatural size—at least twice as tall as the escape pod—and obscured the small vessel completely upon landing. The sinking sensation that followed was less about dread and more about the state of the ground.
Laphor looked to Adrian. “Why are we still moving?”
“Stupid fucking ship landed in a shitload of mud!” he swore, looking at the steadily rising level of the ground outside. “We can’t park it here!”
He moved over to the navigation panel, checking power levels and giving the little vessel a solid amount of thrust. A groaning, and then a slurping sound, was followed by an unwanted power surge that forced the system to reboot into diagnostics.
“I’m guessing that’s not good,” said Laphor from beside him.
“Escape pods are built for space,” he replied, “not for a fucking bog. I reckon some water’s got into something it shouldn’t have. It’s not going anywhere… except deeper into the mud.”
The mercenaries looked at him in horror; clearly the challenges of off-roading were not something they’d ever dealt with before. “We’re going to sink into mud?!”
“I was planning on getting out before that happened,” he said. “Grab the supply kit, and anything else that might come in handy. We’ve got a bit of trip ahead of us.”
They grabbed what little they could, while Adrian forced the door open and checked his pockets to make sure Trix was still with him. Satisfied that he had everything he needed, he cut a swathe through the reeds with a fusion blade, letting them topple forward and create a sort of thick mat that sank only slowly under his weight. “Right,” he said, venturing forth and repeating the process, “follow me, and keep your eyes peeled.”
“You think there might be Hunters?” Laphor asked warily, taking up position directly behind him as she led the survivors of her crew away from the sinking pod. Maybe their nerves were worn from the recent events, but wariness was better than the outright terror that normally accompanied their mention.
“This is a Deathworld,” he said simply, skipping over the obvious Cruezzir contamination of the area, and the complicated web of consequences that would be the result. “Hunters could be the least of our worries. Fusion weapons only; your pistols aren’t going to do much against anything around here.”
They nodded, making sure they all had their weapons in hand; coming armed for Deathworlder had been a stroke of luck, even if that Deathworlder had been Adrian himself.
“You should also know,” he continued, “we’re headed towards the Hunter wrecks.”
“I saw them as we flew past,” Laphor said. “I don’t think they’ll ever work again.”
“Maybe not,” he conceded, “but that doesn’t mean we won’t find anything of use. We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, and even a broken ship is better than a cave… unless you like the idea of camping on a Deathworld?”
Unsurprisingly they did not.
++++
++++
The Devastator, outer boundaries of Agwaren Star System
Jennifer Delaney
Fearing that any movement might be their last, and equally that inaction was the wrong approach, the crew of the Devastator spent a harrowing amount of time in tense readiness for more of the purple lightning. It had been long enough to fray every nerve they had, but there was no question that it had been warranted; whatever that energy had been, it had been obviously deadly, and they’d had no better plan that waiting in the gloom and hoping they had time to dodge the crackling ribbons.
Jen released a breath she hadn’t known she was holding as soon as the lights came back on, and leant over to heave in great gulps of air. In this, she noted, she was accompanied by the other two humans in their group, while Corti and Gaoian looked on in confusion.
“Thank Christ that’s over!” she said, her eyes darting between scorch marks. They were present on the walls, floor and ceiling wherever the purple lines had passed through, and reminded her of a welding mark.
Darragh nodded in agreement, meeting Jen’s eyes as she glanced in his direction. “Damned lucky that none of us got hit. It’s properly over?”
“I think it is,” Chir confirmed, already at the nearest control panel. “At the very least least, it’s over for our purposes. We’ll aim to get out of here as quick as we can.”
“And Adrian?” Askit asked. “The way I see it, we’re barely in a state to save ourselves.”
Chir was slower to answer this one, and met the gaze of each of them before doing so; it was common enough knowledge that the Corti hacker wouldn’t give up on Adrian lightly, no matter how it seemed, but it was hard to get over the prejudices against his kind. “I don’t like it, but… you’re correct. I know you—”
He stopped at the sound of rapidly approaching claws on steel, and stepped back just in time to evade the sprawling tangle of a V’Straki technician exiting a maintenance tunnel at high speed. Xayn flipped to his feet, finely balancing with his tail, and checked each of them in turn before relaxing. “You are all alive.”
“So far as we can tell,” Darragh replied.
Xayn bobbed his head. “Good. The energy bursts left me concerned. Are we heading back to locate Adrian Saunders?”
“We were just saying that would be a good way to end up dead ourselves,” Keffa replied curtly; she had less tolerance for the strange Saurian creature than the rest of them, and was happy to hold his glare with an equal one. “Are you really telling me this ship will hold up to more of that stuff?”
“No,” Xayn replied, “it would likely disintegrate and kill us all. Adrian gave orders to depart, which we must, but our current concern is the damage to the warp drive.”
Chir grunted in annoyance, his hand drumming on the edge of the console as he read through the diagnostic report. “So I see. We can still produce a warp field, but our range is very limited. I think it’d be better to work on that problem far away from here.”
“Is that safe?” Jen asked; she knew how easily a dodgy warp field could quickly lead to fatal results.
“Safer than here,” Chir replied, and activated it without further consideration. The hum deepened as the warp field generators received power, but with an additional unhealthy sound that was just on the edge of human hearing. Gaoian hearing being what it was, Chir’s ears twitched in irritation. To Jen, whose sense of warp travel was normally a barely perceptible tingling sensation, there was now an additional sense of uneasiness.
“That doesn’t sound healthy,” Darragh remarked, looking at the generators with concern. “It’s not going to explode, is it?”
He’d meant it only semi-seriously, but Xayn answered it with uncomfortable bluntness. “No, it is far more likely that the warp field will implode and scatter our bodies across the Ilrayen Band.”
“Think of it this way,” Askit replied sardonically, “we always wanted to see the stars, and here’s our chance.”
Chir waited until the sound grew uncomfortable before terminating their transit. He seemed less than happy upon examining the damage report a second time, and looked up towards Xayn a short time later. “Can you keep a field up and running?”
Xayn took a look at the results, and clicked his teeth. “Those few [minutes] did a lot more damage… maybe I can manage to cobble together something, but it will not be anything good.”
“It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to work,” Chir told him, then turned to address the rest of them. “We are now almost one-tenth of a lightyear away from the situation… I’m hoping that will be far enough.”
“Where does that put us?” Keffa asked, stepping over to the next nearest console.
As their erstwhile navigator, Darragh had the answer already. “The middle of nowhere. We’re sitting in deep space.”
“At least that means nothing is trying to kill us just yet,” Keffa said, satisfying herself that he was correct. “God… there’s equal amounts of nothing in every direction.”
Xayn returned to the maintenance duct with far less enthusiasm than he’d exited it with, glancing up to look over at Keffa before he did so. “You are smaller than the rest of us.”
She blinked at him, glancing at Askit and the Gaoians, all of whom were more diminutive. “What?”
“While possessing Deathworlder strength and constitution, clearly,” Askit added, looking to Xayn for confirmation. “As someone who kept her own ship from falling apart, you’re the perfect assistant.”
Chir nodded. “Help Xayn however you can. The sooner we bandage the warp drive, the sooner we can rest. Darragh, I need you trying to find a suitable destination, the rest of us will be dealing with minor repairs. Jen… you’re on outer hull duty.”
“Understood,” she said with actual willingness. Space travel sounded a lot more fun than it actually was, and that went double for space-walks. Given all the events of the past few months, however, and the last few hours in particular, it’d be nice to have some boredom to balance things out. “I’ll go grab a repair kit, you just let me know what parts need fixing.”
“Before I start looking for holes,” Askit interrupted, “I should perform a thorough check of the computer systems. It would be a serious problem if there were serious data issues of any kind.”
“Could that happen?” Chir asked.
“Could any of this?” Askit returned. “A wise leader would let the engineers engineer, the navigators navigate, and the cyber-geniuses cyber-genius.”
Chir glared at him, but gave him the go-ahead, and the little Corti wasted no time before scurrying off towards the computer core. Jen thought little of it until, upon stepping out into the starlit hull, she heard the Corti’s voice as though he were in the suit with her.
“Now that we’re alone,” said the Corti, his voice clear inside her head, “I think we’d better talk about the situation.”
“How am I hearing…” Jen began, before realisation set in. “Ah, you’ve bloody well hijacked my translator, haven’t you?”
“The others intend to return to the nearest star-base,” he continued. “Our travel speed will mean that trip takes some time. But you were out here for a reason.”
“Scouting Deathworlds,” she confirmed, although after recent events it all felt like yet another life. “They suit humanity, and that’s just about all that’s out here.”
“Not true,” Askit said. “This is the kind of place where civilian vessels will never travel. Unlisted military sites, many of them unaligned, and even more of them abandoned, abound. Secret.”
“And you would know these secrets because…” Jen asked.
“Because I asked nicely for them,” Askit returned sarcastically. “Is it not obvious? Jennifer Delaney, I tell you this because our purposes align, and because you are not as dumb as a box of rocks, as Adrian might have said, were he here.”
“And because Chir wouldn’t trust you?” she guessed.
“There’s that as well,” Askit replied. “But he does trust you. And… you do have a way with words.”
Jen paused, weighing her options. Not all that long ago she had found herself leading a disparate community of pirates, all from a remote mining base. This wouldn’t be altogether different, and there was no doubt that Earth would like to know about any abandoned—or active—military bases around prospective colonies. Even if she ultimately returned to her own mission, it would still be more convenient to have a local base of operations to work out of. “You’ve got a map of everything around here?”
“I’m not sure it’d be possible to have everything,” he conceded, “but I have the information acquired by the Directorate Intelligence Corps, and they are typically thorough. We have a deal?”
“We do,” she agreed, although it reminded her uncomfortably of a Faustian pact. Where this particular decision would take them, however, was less of a certainty.
“It was lucky that you kept that data tablet with you since you crash-landed, then,” he said meaningfully. “Because now it’s full of interesting places to visit. You’ll find it in your room.”