Jacob took in a deep breath and let it out through his nose while he stood inside his virtual apartment. He was psyching himself up to dive into Melody’s systems. It was far from the first time he had done this, but the previous times he had merged into the massive vessel, it was only to use the sensors and cameras. Now he was activating all of the ancient vessel’s dormant systems and taking full control.
He grunted as he struggled to get the ship’s reactors to come back to life. They had been shut down for maintenance, and the ship had transferred to station power nearly six months ago.
The experience was similar to pumping a bellows on a forge, and Jacob soon found the correct rhythm he needed to wake up the massive power plants. The lights throughout the vessel pulsed to life. It was a process he was very familiar with, thanks to the time Melody did the same. At some point, the reactor became self-sustaining, and he stopped having to pump.
The feeling of having so much energy flowing through him was electric, pun unintended. He felt like a kid on too much sugar.
Jacob tried to shake the feeling off, but man, was it a rush! He wondered if this was how AIs felt.
Eventually, the sensation started to mellow out, and he could focus on the next steps to undocking. He didn’t need to worry about the Astryx wondering what he was up to either. A few weeks ago, the remaining ship had left without warning.
He wouldn’t say he was sad to see them go, but their abrupt departure was worrying, especially with the rumors Barry was hearing. Those rumors all came from merchants, since Barry’s contacts in Astryx space had gone quiet. Even Representative Chalto couldn’t be reached for questions.
The comm system was still working; Jacob had verified that by reaching out to Hallik to see if he knew what was up. Unfortunately, the amuni bounty hunter only knew that something had happened, and everyone was spooked.
An attack large enough to spook the entire Astryx council? It had to be the t’uk. Barry agreed, and the station was put on active alert.
The timing wasn’t ideal. Jacob wanted to stick around and help, but he also needed to get to Earth as quickly as possible. If the t’uk had finally decided to act, it meant Earth was in trouble sooner than predicted.
The multiple-kilometer-long vessel shuddered as the enormous docking airlocks retracted into the station and the thick armor plate slid back into place.
Jacob did one final system check, and everything was green. He gave the signal to the station to release the other docking clamps.
There was a series of deep clangs as the massive arms released the ship. Jacob waited for them to pull away before he pulsed the gravity drive to move the vessel out of the docking cradle.
He was glad the cradles were so large, because the ship moved like a drunken horse. Jacob corrected the sideways slide caused by the station’s own gravity, but with so much mass, counteracting even a small movement was a monumental effort.
Jacob cleared the last cradle section by only a meter, earning a reprimand from the station AI, despite his position as Head of Station Services. He chuckled at that. He couldn’t fault the AI; he had nearly crashed into the station, causing significant damage to it and the ship before he even departed. It would have been an inauspicious start to his journey.
His departure hadn’t gone unnoticed by the merchants coming and going or by the station residents as a whole. Jacob could see people lined up along some of the station’s few windows, while others were certainly gathered around the entertainment displays that showed traffic coming and going.
That latter bit had been Katherine’s idea. Apparently, even aliens liked to watch ships coming and going.
The cradles were on the opposite side of the station from the public docks, so there was no worry of running into anyone. Despite that, some of the outgoing ships changed course to give his vessel as much room as they could.
It was appreciated because Jacob had to turn around. He could have flipped the ship around its central axis, but he wanted to get a better feel for how it handled. The slow turn took over half an hour before he was facing away from the station and from Astryx space.
Jacob was sure many people aboard the station would be wondering why he was going the wrong way. He didn’t let that stop him from accelerating.
The titanic vessel groaned in complaint as Jacob pushed the gravitics harder than ever. Melody’s original gravitics had been replaced with newer, more powerful ones. It would never be considered fast by any stretch of the imagination, but it was significantly quicker than it had been when they first arrived.
Jacob watched the sensors as they slipped into the black of space. Soon enough, they broke free of the gravitational influence of the station, and he felt it was safe for him to begin powering up the phase coils.
The planetary conditioning vessel’s phase coils weren’t constrained by gravity, but it was also freshly repaired. He didn’t want to put any additional stress on the vessel than he had to. Especially since the massive phase coil banks aboard the vessel were still using the older, more energetic space-time layers to transit.
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A thrum ran through the ship as power flooded into the building-sized coils. When they were ready, Jacob began plotting the transition endpoint. This was where he would finally get to see how far the ship could go in one transition.
He wasn’t surprised one bit when the endpoint passed Abyss Pearl’s transition range. Then he doubled and tripled the distance, gaping in surprise when he finally reached the ship’s maximum range.
“Holy shit,” he said in awe.
Melody was capable of transitioning five times farther than the much newer systems aboard Abyss Pearl. That meant the trip to Earth would be much quicker, assuming the cooldown period between transitions was the same.
Jacob said his goodbyes to Barry and Katherine, then activated the phase coils. The ship transitioned so smoothly that Jacob wouldn’t have even known if he hadn’t been actively monitoring all the sensors.
He had expected it to bull through the other layers of space-time like it had when Meldoy first risked the trip to the station, but it had been effortless.
“She really had been on her last legs,” he muttered as he settled into the apartment to monitor the vessel.
It was going to be a long, boring voyage, but he would be there for every moment of it, because it was too risky not to be.
***
“Sir. One of our forward scouts has detected something on long-range scanners.”
Captain Tealo looked confused. “There shouldn’t be anything out here. Have they sent the scan data?”
The operator nodded, and soon the data appeared on Tealo’s display. The scout ship hasn’t approached the object, but there was clearly something of manufactured origin less than a light day from its position. It was a complete fluke that their transition exit had landed them close enough to detect it.
“Tell them to close in and get some better scans. If this is some sort of early warning buoy, I want to know.”
It didn’t take long to get an update.
“It appears to be some sort of relay, sir.”
“A comm relay?”
“No, sir, but it is made from Concord components. It doesn’t appear to have any sort of alert system, but it does have asteroid proximity sensors.”
“Shields or weapons?” Tealo asked the operator.
“No, sir.”
He paused in thought. He didn’t know what the object was or what it was doing out here, but if it linked to the humans in any way or allowed for communications of any type, it needed to go.
“Tell the scout to plant timed charges on the device to coincide with our arrival in the human system. And tell them to make sure to link the weapons to the proximity sensors.”
That would ensure the device was destroyed around the same time they destroyed the comm node near Earth. And if anyone came to check on the device, the proximity sensors would ensure they couldn’t get close enough to disarm it.
***
Sael slipped into a discreet off-the-books hangar on Jastu. The lights came on at his entrance, and he walked across the pristine floor to the small ship waiting inside. The environmental systems had kept the space and vessel in peak condition.
The judicator fleet had arrived for blood, and all his attempts to stall them had only made them more insistent. Sael was forced to abandon his position to avoid being questioned. The plan for the humans was now off the table, but recalling Captain Tealo wasn’t an option. That was fine; Sael didn’t care if the humans got wiped out. In fact, their planet would make the perfect staging ground to rebuild, so he was planning on joining Tealo’s fleet in the human system. They would be there for months sterilizing the world, so there was no reason to contact him and possibly leak the planet’s coordinates.
The original plan was in shambles, but that was no reason to give up. They had plenty of contingencies in place.
While some of the t’uk conspirators had already committed suicide for the mission, the smarter ones had managed to vanish. Admiral Korfis and Chairman Senlor were among that group. Despite all Senlor’s talk, the man wasn’t about to die for the cause.
Sael powered up the small runabout and transitioned from inside the hangar, a privilege only available to Supervisors and above.
When he finally reached his destination, the ship appeared inside a thick nebula of gas and dust. He pushed through the haze surrounding the vessel, following a blind set of coordinates until he finally emerged in a small, cleared-out sphere of space with a Concord shipyard in the center.
The shipyard wasn’t as large as the one the humans had found, but it was still fully equipped. It was also the heart of production for Xylos’ power cores, not their primary production yards, as everyone assumed. It was a secret hidden from almost everyone.
Sael passed the massive number of ships arrayed in the cleared space as he approached one of the smaller hangars and landed.
Korfis and Senlor greeted him as he stepped out of the small ship.
“I hope the station wasn’t too hard to find,” Senlor said in amusement.
“It was not,” Sael admitted. Without the coordinates, it would have been nearly impossible to locate it in the massive gas cloud. He could have passed within a few million kilometers and flown right past it without knowing it was there.
The facility’s existence had only been rediscovered a few hundred years ago.
“Is the fleet ready?” Sael asked, changing the topic.
“The ships are, but we are still having issues converting volunteers.”
Sael knew the process of merging was hard on their species, but he hadn’t realized how difficult it would be. “Will we have enough?”
“With the more advanced AIs and the volunteers we are pulling from stasis, we should just have enough to command the vessels. The combat drones are another story. Those will have to be AI-operated, and we all know how risky that can be.”
Sael knew they were playing with fire by implanting their people and using the merging technology, but at this point, the risk was worth it.
“Do it,” he said. “We must secure our position at all costs, and the Astryx are as weak as they will ever be.”
The overall mission might have failed, but they had still destroyed over eighty percent of the Astryx fleet personnel in a single coordinated strike. If they could defeat the rest, victory would be assured.
Convincing the rest of the populace that the humans were behind everything would be a bit harder, but with the t’uk acting as the defense force, they wouldn’t complain too loudly. Most Astryx species were former low-tier Concord species, bred for submissiveness. They would gladly return to that role given the choice. The rest would fall in line or face the same fate as the lau.
The t’uk would not make the same mistakes of the past, allowing their lesser to grow in power and challenge them.
Senlor looked like he wanted to say something, but the Chairman of the t’uk consortium kept his mouth shut.
It was a smart move, because Sael was in no mood for an ‘I told you so’.