by M. D. Cooper
She held her breath and a rivulet of sweat ran into her eye. She swiped it way with an angry gesture.
“She slipped over the rim,” Nance gasped.
“Gonna slingshot around,” Jessica said.
Metaphorically and physically.
Jessica spun the ship and fired the drives, heading high over the rim of the ring; Sabrina describing a tight parabola as it peaked and came back down—straight toward one of the black holes that was racing past.
“Nance! I need a lock, NOW!”
“Fuck, Jess…so much noise, we can’t pick up anything!”
Iris highlighted the most likely path Cheeky would have taken, and Jessica aimed the ship as best she could as the waves of gravity and stellar matter threw the vessel about.
Her readout showed that it was over fifty-six degrees on the bridge. She didn’t even want to look at the temperature in the cargo bay, but her eye still darted to the panel above the main holo and saw that it was four hundred degrees.
“C’mon…I need a lock!” she shrieked.
“There! There! There!” Nance yelled back and Sabrina passed the coordinates to Jessica. She altered course and spun the ship once more, aiming the cargo bay door at the infinitesimal spec in the distance.
Jessica looked back to Nance.
Jessica turned her attention back to the drifting form of Cheeky as another gravitational wave from the black holes washed over the ship, pushing it off course once more.
She found herself working faster and faster, leveraging computational power from Iris, until at the last moment, she fired the lateral thrusters and waited for Cargo’s confirmation.
One…two…three, she counted in her mind, trying not to scream from anticipation. Either Cheeky was safely in the cargo bay, or she had burned up in the port engine.
Jessica swore softly. It sure would be nice if Krissy could extend her help to taking out that asshole.
Jessica glanced at the main holo tank and saw two explosions register on scan.
Jessica barely heard Sabrina, as relief over Cheeky’s rescue and the mines taking out Bes’s ship flooded her mind—but just for a second. She still had to dance around the black hole ahead of them.
For a moment, she stopped to marvel at the beauty of the thing; darkness wrapped in light as it fed on matter, held in place by powerful magnetic rails. It was only a kilometer across, but the energy it spewed out of its jets as it consumed the bits of star that entered its event horizon were breathtakingly beautiful.
Sabrina began to buck and shimmy even more, and a panel fell off the overhead and smashed into the deck beside her, before another jolt sent it toward the weapons console. She saw it smash into the console’s chair, and was glad to see Trevor wasn’t there—thank the stars Sabrina had directed them to get into suits.
Suddenly Trevor slammed a helmet over her head, and Jessica winced as it clamped around her neck. She had totally forgotten that she wasn’t wearing a helmet; she would have died when Sabrina vented the atmosphere—though, hopefully the ship’s AI would have reminded her first.
Proximity alarms blared on the bridge, but then fell silent as the atmosphere rushed out of the vessel. At the exact same moment, Jessica fired both fusion engines on full burn, dumping two hundred percent of the recommended volume of Deuterium and Helium 3 into the reactors.
The ring and flaring black hole flashed past less than five hundred meters off Sabrina’s bow, and then they were past the worst of the gravitational waves, with clear dark space ahead of them.
Jessica turned to watch the holotank, praying that Bes’s ship didn’t emerge from behind the ring. Scan was a mess, and they weren’t sure if the limpet mines had destroyed the Excelsia. If that ship emerged from behind the ring, she didn’t know that they would be able to defend against it.
Then an explosion flared at the edge of the ring, and Jessica let out a long breath and slumped into her seat. They’d done it. They were safe.
Jessica didn’t respond, her entire body shaking from the adrenaline coursing through her veins.
There was no response, but Jessica did breathe a sigh of relief as she felt the cold air blowing through the vents. Internal readouts listed it as nearly one hundred percent nitrogen. Cold, but deadly.
She wondered at how she could feel the air so well, and then pain flooded her mind as she realized that her skin had been exposed to vacuum.
She dampened the sensation as her body’s med-readout showed that capillaries across her entire body had burst when Sabrina vented the atmosphere.
the AI replied.
Jessica rose on shaky feet to see Trevor standing behind her with an EVA suit.
Trevor barked a laugh that she was able to hear through the thin atmosphere in the ship while he held up the EVA suit for her to climb into.
Once it was on, she realized just how cold she’d been—a far cry from feeling like she was going to burn to death a few minutes earlier.
She calculated their best vector, and decided to arc gently toward the floating ring. No point in giving their destination away to the TSF fleet too soon.
Jessica debated putting the admiral on, but Finaeus spoke up.
Jessica removed everyone else from the conversation, allowing Krissy and her father to have a few private moments as the ship raced toward the gate.
Most of the TSF ships were well behind them, boosting out from Gisha Station—though a few were near the gate. Jessica held her breath, hoping that they would hold their fire.
A few shots did lance out, but the stasis shield still had enough power to shed their beams; especially now that no one was shooting at them from behind, and the cooling vanes were deployed.
Ahead, the Ford-Svaiter mirrors around the rim of the jump gate began to flare, the antimatter reactions generating negative energy that the mirrors directed into a single, roiling point.
Iris said.
Jessica saw a strange field emanate from the front of the ship, and watched in awe as the mirrors on the gate turned toward them, moving the roiling ball of negative energy until it met with the field in front of Sabrina.
Then the ship’s sensors went blind, and the universe ceased to exist.
A FAREWELL
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sabrina, between Gisha Station and the DSM Ring
REGION: DSM Ring, Grey Wolf System
Krissy used the private key her father had given her years ago and unsealed the data packet, confirming its checksums. Her eyes widened as she realized what she was looking at.
Enough dirt on the admiralty to ensure they protected her from the Grey Division.
Finaeus replied with a mental smile.
She took a deep breath. If what was in the data packet was true, her father’s crazy theories were real. The Transcend was in great danger—and her father getting to New Canaan would be the first step in saving it. In saving them all.
She winced at the pain she heard in her father’s voice. Their prior encounters had often ended with her saying unkind things to him. Not her proudest moments.
The connection cut out, and Krissy watched the scan data flow in from where she stood in Gisha Station’s auxiliary STC.
The Sabrina was racing toward the gate, moving fast after its breakaway around the mining ring. Around her, engineers were frantically trying to understand how the Inner Stars freighter had taken control of the jump gate, while Krissy allowed herself a small smile.
In a way, it was good to know that they hadn’t figured everything out—that a crew of pirates, an ancient TBI agent, and an old man, centuries past his prime, could best them.
Maybe it meant that there was hope for what lay ahead. If this little group could stand against the TSF, maybe the colonists at New Canaan could furnish some solution to the looming war—and the poison she now knew lay within the heart of the Transcend.
“How are they doing this?” Stationmaster Lloyd asked from Krissy’s side. “It’s like they have total control.”
“I guess they’ve a few tricks we’ve never seen,” Krissy replied.
Lloyd cast her a sharp look. “You’re surprisingly blasé about this.”
Krissy laughed. “I’m alive, my father is alive, Bes is dead. This is an outcome I can live with.”
“That’s almost treasonous,” Lloyd said.
“Almost,” Krissy nodded in agreement.
“Something’s happening,” one of the civilian engineers called out. “The ring’s moving!”
Krissy’s eyes snapped to the main holotank. Sure enough, a control thruster on the ring was firing, turning it, just as Sabrina’s mysterious new mirror touched the ball of negative energy on the focal line.
And then the ship was gone.
A wave of panic washed over her. “Was it destroyed? What happened?”
“No…it just changed their destination,” the engineer replied. “It’s…”
“What is it?” Krissy snapped.
“Their destination…it’s extragalactic.”
PERSEUS ARM
STELLAR DATE: 07.22.8938 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Unknown
REGION: Milky Way Galaxy
From what she could see, there was nothing outside the ship. Not the same sort of nothing as the dark layer. That was still a plane of existence. Here, as far as scan could tell, nothing existed beyond the small bubble of space wrapped around the ship.
Finaeus let loose a string of curses that almost made no sense, unless he was naming every deity in some pantheon Jessica had never heard of.
aeus asked.
Jessica didn’t want to know what ‘or worse’ could be, and didn’t ask.
An instant later, regular space snapped back into place around the ship and Jessica let out a long sigh of relief.
A field of stars never looked so beautiful.
And unrecognizable.
* * * * *
Breathable air had been restored to the ship, and the reactors were running on minimum, slowly charging the SC Batts while the ship cooled down.
The crew—minus Cheeky, who was still unconscious, and Piya, who had written herself into static storage and couldn’t be re-initialized until Cheeky’s brain had recovered—were assembled on the bridge.
“I still can’t believe it,” Nance said. “Perseus. We have to be at least nine thousand light-years from New Canaan now.”
“Way to go, Finaeus,” Trevor chuckled.
Cargo scowled at him. “It’s really not that funny.”
Trevor shrugged. “I’m just happy to be alive, and not adrift in the intergalactic void. Considering our options over the previous couple of hours were jail, being blown up, disappearing into a black hole, getting blown up again, being smashed into bits by negative energy, or dying a slow death in the deep black, the Perseus Arm is practically a miracle.”
A smile crept across Cargo’s face and he began to laugh. “Well…when you put it that way.”
Jessica began to chuckle, and Finaeus joined in, and then Nance and Trevor. A minute later everyone was still laughing their asses off when Sabrina broke in.
“Sorry,” Jessica gasped. “We’re just all really glad to still be alive, I guess.”