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  “As you wish, Stefan,” it spoke again. “I will search for a place, but I will first need to get us out of the range of this fleet. Can your people help with gun emplacements?”

  “I can do it!” Jenica yelled to me.

  “It’s all yours!” I called out.

  “Prepare for immediate acceleration,” the AI warned us.

  We were all slammed to back of our chairs as the plasma drives fired.

  Chapter Eighteen

  We came out of temporal freeze a few hours later. The AI managed to keep the four of us frozen in time long enough for the Byzantium to out-run most of the Irunian corvettes.

  I brought myself up to speed on our situation as I staggered up from the chair and looked at the nearest screen. From what I could tell, we had an entire task force on our tail. The Irunian military wasn’t about to let the Byzantium slip out of its hand again.

  “Jenica!" I yelled back to the women behind me. “We are about to have some hot play out there. I hope you can make good on your claim about the gun emplacements.”

  She stood up and looked at an operational screen that materialized in front of her. “This system is a bit… different,” she admitted. “Not at all like what I trained on, but I should be able to keep them at bay. For a while.” I could see the concern in the fine fur on her catlike features.

  I found out later that Korth had held out as long as possible defending his compound. He and his boys managed to take out the first wave of Irunian regulars from their position on top of the ramparts. Then, the Irunian military brought a wall mortar in by way of a milk truck after the emergency crew finished with the cleanup from the marine truck’s collision with the wall.

  The Irunian military had monitored the marines ever since they attempted to take us outside of the bookstore. They assumed it would be an easy snatch-and-grab, as we didn’t have any reserves of our own waiting the background. The Irunians thought we were part of some deep cover operation designed to lure their activities out into the open. When it became obvious we were on our own, they panicked and told the marines to give pursuit in the truck. It was an older model. The brakes failed on the truck right when the steel doors closed behind the damaged hovercraft. The old truck managed to hit the gate at its full speed.

  This prompted an all-out crisis inside the legation that the military didn’t even attempt to hide. Some higher-up decided ignore the locals and act as if the empire already had control over the asteroid. By the time the Nyx militia figured it out, the Irunians were in command of the lower docks.

  Korth and his people fought like hellhounds for another three hours against the Irunians. What I’d spotted as I made my way to the Byzantium was not a mop-up but a thrust by the second wave of regulars to find out what kind of weaponry Korth had stashed inside the warehouse yard. The doors were jammed open from where the mortar shell hit, but only one soldier could enter at a time. What I didn’t see was what happened when the Irunians left the yard and began to make their way toward the landing field.

  Korth, and the others with him, opened with a fusillade from the inside the compound and massacred the Irunian troops who were caught out in the open. Before they managed to regroup, the Irunians lost over half of the force that went through the opening. No more troops tried to take the compound that way, since they could only enter one at a time. All that the mobsters had to do was concentrate their fire on whoever came through that space. It wasn’t until several hours later, when the mortar shells began to fall inside the yard, that Korth and company decided to abandon their position.

  By that time, The Fathers of Nyx Station were in turmoil up on the surface. They had no idea what was going on inside the Irunian legation. No one had kept count on how many troops were stationed inside the legation given over to the Irunian Empire. While the Nyx Senate met in an emergency session, an entire battle raged in the lower levels.

  The Irunians usually weren’t too concerned with the locals; they simply insisted that they stay the fuck out of the way of Her Imperial Majesty’s army. And most of the people who earned their living on the station were content to go back home and let it blow over. There’d been plenty of trouble down there before with labor unrest and strikes.

  But this time, it turned into the Nyx inhabitants versus the invaders. Irunian troop transporters roared out of the legation and made their way toward the docks. The first 10 our so went out without issue, but things changed quickly afterward. Barricades went up in the streets, and the Irunians were slowed by piles of junk and trash. The action wasn’t enough to stop most of the transporters, but it did slow them down. The entire operation was supposed to capture the Byzantium in 15 minutes. Instead, the Irunians were forced to watch the starship leave the asteroid while they were in the middle of a street battle.

  At one point, an officer with the Nyx Militia walked up to an Irunian officer and demanded he surrender his weapons on the grounds that his troops were there “in violation of standard treaties and agreements.” The Irunian officer informed his Nyx equivalent that an entire swarm of the Imperial Irunian Navy was in position around Nyx and would rip it apart if one more Irunian national met his or her death. That’s when te fighting stopped.

  None of this helped our situation on the Byzantium. I still knew very little about the origin of this ship and was forced to follow the AI’s lead on how to operate it. In most cases, you would have a full staff and crew behind the operation of the ship, but, right now, there were only the four of us. And two of us had never been on the starship before. Not that I could count on Rashina either; she was still suffering from the effects of the brain leech.

  “I think I got it figured out,” Jenica called out to me from in front of one the screens. “This part controls the targeting system. This handles the avionics. And this takes care of the ammunition feed. There’re two more sections that deal with lasers and another one for the particle beam. I’m not sure about the counter-measures; I think they might be run by a different section of the frame.”

  I turned to Zilpha. “Any insight on your end?” I asked her.

  “Not really my area of expertise," she said, "but some of this does make sense if you understand basic astrology. I’m seeing a lot of different ways to navigate the starship to where we want it to go.”

  “Are you trying to tell me it navigates like some kind of horoscope? By predicting the future?” I asked, as I walked over to have a closer look.

  “Not exactly,” she said, one blue finger aimed at a cluster of stars on the screen. “See this? It’s the crab nebula from a different view, probably the original zodiac from Old Earth. Someone designed this thing with Terra in mind.”

  I looked at what she pointed at on the screen but soon gave up. There was a lot more to this ship than I’d ever thought. Originally, I didn’t care. Boost it, get paid, and go on to another job. Now, I was in a pickle and had to find some way to get out.

  I walked over to Rashina, who was starting at a screen that had appeared before her minutes ago. “Anything you can tell me?” I questioned. “I don’t expect you to remember much about your voyage in this thing.”

  “A bit," she told me. "This is the propulsion system. It uses a basic cesium tank unit to generate plasma from the thermonuclear bottle gap, but nothing like you’d find in a commercial starship or even standard military ones. I’m still trying to sort out the jump configuration.”

  “I didn’t realize you knew so much about starship engines,” I told her.

  “Neither did I until a few minutes ago,” Rashina responded.

  “There is a message coming in from the lead corvette,” Sothos broadcast to us from within the bridge. “Would you like to receive it? I can put him in on the 3D visual so that you and your companions can converse with them.”

  I looked up from the latest panel and turned to nowhere in particular. If the Irunians wanted something from us, they had no need to “converse” with us. I wasn’t close enough to a jump point to make our way out of the c
urrent location. But maybe this conversation would buy us some time for the ship to exit the system on its own.

  “Bring him up,” I instructed it. “Let’s see if there is some way we can delay his ships from reaching us.

  There was a pop, and the head of an Irunian officer materialized in the room. The women stopped what they were doing to watch. These kinds of transmissions were rare and only took place between planets where there was more power to be had from solar energy than what you could get planetside.

  It was the same damn officer who’d given Drez and me so much trouble before. “Hello, Commander Peshawar.”

  “Good day, Mr. Fixer,” he said. “You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? I understand it’s a title people bestowed on you.” I saw him grin a bit.

  “No, I don’t," I snapped back. I didn’t want the women to see me angry, but I had a difficult time controlling myself with Peshawar’s face in front of me.

  “I had a feeling we’d meet again,” he gloated. “You really are out of options, my good man. We have your ship surrounded on all points. I’m sure my government will find a way to compensate you if you agree to turn this starship over. Nice move back on Nyx, by the way. You left our people down there furious.”

  “No deal, Commander Peshawar,” I told him. “I’ll give you 30 seconds to pull back before I have to assume you’re making hostile threats. This part of interplanetary space is supposed to be neutral territory according to the Treaty of Westies. This conversation is over.” The face faded away.

  “What do we have?” I asked Sothos. “What’s the best point to get out of their cordon?”

  The AI displayed some points and figures. It gave the probability of breakthrough for each and how much time it would take us to get out.

  When I heard one I liked, I turned to the women. “Think you can follow those instructions?” They nodded.

  “Engage!” I ordered the AI.

  “Make sure you have something secure to hold onto,” Sothos instructed. “I can’t control the forces inside the ship very well.”

  I hit the floor with the others as the Byzantium went on the offensive and blew through the formation of the Irunian swarm. I don’t think they expected much from the starship. Interstellar ships of this size aren’t supposed to be able to maneuver with such grace, and the Byzantium tore through the swarm faster than they could regroup.

  We blasted the nearest corvette when the Byzantium made its initial run. By then, I was strapped in with the others. Sothos was able to get the internal gravity under control just long enough for us to get back into our acceleration chairs.

  I felt the rumble from the plasma engines as it pushed us at critical distance from the corvette when the Irunian vessel tried to engage. From her chair, Jenica managed to guide three Komet missiles right to its center, which cracked the corvette wide open while we hurled past. The particle beam it attempted to train on us never fired. I watched the corvette break apart in one of the rear screens as we continued out of the swarm’s reach. Now, the Byzantium was out of range.

  My only regret was that prick of a commander was in another ship when we blew up the corvette. I wasn’t privy to the communications between his units, but I’m certain he was furious to see us slip out of his grasp at the last minute.

  Sothos kept our acceleration up until we were well outside of firing range of the rest of the assault group. I watched them vanish on the rear screens, but Peshawar and I both knew the relative position of each other’s ships. All he needed to do was play catch-up when he could assemble his ships. Sothos would eventually have to shut our engines down to keep them from overheating.

  But when the AI eased off the thrust, we were far enough away not to worry about the fleet reaching us for another two hours. Thankfully, Peshawar’s attack group would need plenty of time to regroup and come up with another plan to catch and capture the Byzantium.

  I stood up and looked at the nearest screen. It had a small visual display of the Irunian task force and the distance it was from us. I felt relieved but knew they’d come for us sooner rather than later.

  “Is that over?” Zilpha asked me as she wobbled over to the panel. “Please tell me we got away.”

  “We got away,” I informed her, “but this is far from over.”

  “They’ll risk that many ships to catch this one?” Jenica asked me as she took careful steps.

  “Whatever it is about this ship,” I answered, “It’s important enough for the Irunian Empire to risk war over it. When the rest of the systems find out what happened back down on the station, they’ll start arming for battle. This shit could get very serious very quickly.”

  “We were in the process of talking about a clear path to someplace outside of the empire’s control,” I reminded Sothos. “Do you have any decent information on where we’re headed?”

  “The information is not confirmed,” it told me.

  “Why is that?” I demanded. “How is it that you know where to take us, yet you lack any good intelligence about it?"

  It’s hard to appear in control when you’re arguing with an AI. Since they don’t have physical forms, you can’t face them as you would a tangible being and make demands. The best you can do is look stern and stare up at the ceiling. I noticed the women looking in different directions as I talked to it. Hard to give up the idea that the thing you’re addressing is in one specific location.

  “The areas were scouted by an exploration probe from the Denleb Federation,” Sothos explained. “They were unable to send a follow-up probe to confirm the information it sent back. The probe itself ceased to function after the initial transmission. Therefore, we have no way to know what exactly is on the other side of the nebula that divides it from the rest of known space. However, the data sent back showed an inhabitable planet.”

  “And this is the place where you recommend we go?” I asked. Best to get a confirmation.

  “It’s the only place you should go,” The AI responded. “I can’t find a suitable destination anywhere else in my memory. Every other location is already known to the sentient races. I recommend that you take this location because it’s the only one safe enough in your current situation.”

  “And what makes it unique?” I demanded.

  “As I said, it’s known, but no one has reached it yet,” The AI responded. “At least, no one who’s left a record.”

  “And why not some other place that no one else has visited?” Zilpha asked it. “There must be an infinite number of places that we could reach by passing through a jump point.”

  Sothos paused, as if it didn’t know how to answer that question. “There are,” it finally agreed. “But where to go if you do that? Once you end up in a distant spot in space, you must find your way to some place that is inhabited. Do you want to take a chance of reaching one of those on your own? I have 567 locations that are probable for life support, but none have been explored. If we try one of them, and it’s not suitable for carbon-based life, then what? You will eventually run out of points to reach. The plasma engines won’t take you far in normal space.”

  “Which means a jump back to where we started,” Jenica concluded.

  “Well," the AI said with a pause, “not in your case.”

  “What do you mean?" I asked it. “Of course, we have to make a jump back to the origin point. There is no other way to cross the void.” Maybe it did have a way to send us across the galaxy on our own.

  “In your case, there is,” Sothos explained. “Have you not figured it out? This is the whole reason the Irunian Empire wants the Byzantium. It’s the technology they have tried to acquire for such a long time. With it, you can go to any point in the universe from where you are now. There are no limitations.”

  “Is this true?” I asked Rashina. "This is what your people wanted to keep them from discovering? This is the Angelika technology you couldn’t remember?”

  She walked over to one of the panels. “It’s true,” Rashina confessed to us,
“There’s not a lot coming back to me, but I remember some of it. I can barely recall where the activation system is on this ship.” She walked over to another panel and looked at it.

  “So, I was the key that you needed to turn on the systems,” I spoke to Sothos. “And Rashina was the holder of the portal technology.”

  Portal technology without a jump point was the goal for generations. For centuries, engineers and scientists from all over the galaxy had tried to find a way to allow a starship to cross the vast reaches of space without using a singularity jump point. There were only so many jump points in the galaxy, and they worked as stations that the vast ships of interstellar commerce used to travel from one spot to the next. They were the first thing seized by the aggressor when war broke out, and the first thing guarded by the defender. By current treaties, all were supposed to be open to travel, even if the local governments made certain to garrison them, just in case. There were no restrictions on how many ships could port through at a time, as the jump points didn’t work by the standard laws of physics.

  “The hyper-drive,” Zilpha concluded. “This is the first starship to come equipped with its own hyper-drive. Why isn’t it listed anywhere on the controls?” She began to look the panels over in earnest.

  “Because it needs the one person who’s been trained all her life to operate it,” I announced. “The hyper-drive is beyond any kind of technology we know. It doesn’t work with standard controls. There is only one person who can operate it, and she does it from her mind. Fuck, no wonder everyone wants this ship.”

  “And I’m the only one who can do it,” Rashina spoke. “The Byzantium won’t make the passage unless I guide it through the void. This isn’t like those jump points. I have to remain aware while the Byzantium travels to its destination.” She walked over to the nearest wall, placed her hand on it, and closed her eyes.

  “I have some more unfortunate news,” Sothos spoke. “The Irunian task force will be here in the next five minutes.”