“Teleporting in three…two…one…zero.”

Miliam had grown used to the strange sensation of being in two places at once caused by teleportation, so she hardly noticed this time when Aoibhe reached zero and the Astrum Vitae appeared five light-years from Northeast Gate Station. She’d now done this routine enough times that she hardly needed to think before issuing follow up instructions…and what thinking she did do went to identifying that Min-ji was on sensors. This was the first time it actually mattered, though. Miliam and her crew had officially left the Gaian Collective now.

“Min-ji, any ships out there?” she asked, prompting Min-ji to give her report. One might think at first that hours were needed to determine if a system was empty or not, given light speed constraints, but that wasn’t entirely true. A ship at the edge of the system five hours ago would be visible five light-hours away right now. The data was out of date, obviously, and anything they saw was as likely to still be there as it was to have moved or teleported out, but it was enough to tell them immediately if they should be on guard.

This close to GC space, the chances of a hostile ship being present were low. The Astrum Vitae may have left controlled space, but the immediate periphery of the GC still received intermittent patrols, making attacks dangerous. It was impossible to monitor systems more than a few light-years away, though, because the number of stars within just ten light-years of the border was truly mindboggling. Even at five light-years away, patrols would already sparse, but they could still serve as a deterrent.

But if an attack were to happen, it would be now. Ships were most vulnerable at the moment after teleporting, when their sensor data was badly outdated and their capacitors were drained. Being close enough to spot an arriving ship the instant it arrived was akin to striking a goldmine for pirates because it meant that ship didn’t have enough data to calculate a teleportation to any system but the one they came from, and a complacent captain could have made the mistake of performing a jump too long to reverse without first recharging.

Of course, if reversed, it meant pirates had to be unfathomably lucky to catch a ship at the right moment for an attack. There was a reason pirates were so rare; in addition to having more lucrative career options just by virtue of owning a ship, successful attacks were more chance than skill.

“Nothing so far, captain,” Min-ji reported.

“Any good hiding spots?” Miliam asked next, glancing at the system map. There were a lot of planets and moons to choose from, but she wasn’t really sure what made one good for hiding. Hopefully someone else did. Technically it was possible they’d be walking right into someone else’s hiding place, but Miliam wasn’t about to sit right out in the open for the next ten-odd hours.

“This gas giant has a lot of moons,” the dokkaebi replied as she highlighted one planet in particular. “We can use them for cover, and the gas giant’s magnetosphere will provide us with a bit of cover from active sensors, but we can’t get too close without a barriermaster.”

“Sounds good. Aoibhe, take us in, please,” Miliam requested, leaving it to Aoibhe to decide where best to park.

“Aye, firing up the wave drive,” the pilot acknowledged. Space warped around their ship and carried them towards the nameless planet Min-ji had pointed out. They would arrive in less than an hour, which was longer than Miliam would have liked to be out in the open but only a small fraction of the time they’d be spending here. In the meantime, she checked in with Tessa and Engineer, making sure her half-repaired scrap bucket was still holding together.

Nothing had failed so far, and the trip from West Gate to Northeast Gate had taken enough time to easily qualify as a shakedown cruise, so Miliam was fairly confident the Astrum Vitae would be able to hold itself together. It helped that Engineer was competent with repair magic. Miliam hadn’t fully understood what that meant when she heard it from Aoibhe, but there were a lot of things onboard that could be fixed just by restoring the condition of a single stressed component. A lightbulb could last forever when one could just put its filament back together any time it wore out.

“Are we doing a simulation today, captain?” Eun-ji asked over her shoulder. Of all the crew, she had the least to do right now, mostly just being on standby in case a hail came in or she needed to fire up the EMCM.

“Once we’re hidden, maybe. I’m not sure how many we’ll be doing while we’re out here though. We might miss something if we’re all focused on a sim,” Miliam answered. Abigail had said any external changes would end a sim immediately, but Miliam worried about whether they’d be able to react as quickly if they had to switch gears from sim to reality so suddenly. Min-ji in particular would have to flush her mind of whatever she’d been analyzing, absorb a new set of data, and figure out what they were dealing with all at once.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Maybe she needed to have the crew run drills on exactly that scenario. It’d assuage her fears, if nothing else. But maybe it was better to be afraid than it would be to let her guard down. No...there were probably other situations that would prepare them for, anyway, so it was best to add it to the schedule.

Miliam went through the simulations list to find something similar while waiting. There wasn’t anything explicitly geared towards a sudden change in sensor data like that, but she found that there was a way to schedule multiple simulations to play in sequence, as well as an option to automatically abort a simulation after a certain amount of time has passed. That was probably meant for scenarios where objectives had to be completed in a limited amount of time, but she could use it for this as well.

She would have to inform the crew about it ahead of time, and she worried that would change how they reacted, but it would still be a valuable experience if they didn’t know when the first simulation would terminate. Probably. Miliam had to admit she was kind of doing this all on the fly and still wasn’t confident the simulations she’d had the crew doing were actually accomplishing anything. She’d read that it was her duty as captain to ensure the crew was well-prepared and could work together, but there hadn’t been a whole lot of detail on how to do that.

“I think I’m going to schedule the simulation to cut out and switch to another one partway through- kind of like what would happen if we had an emergency for real. So we can be prepared in case that ever happens. Okay?” she announced to her bridge crew. No need to tell Tessa and Engineer until she heard what the other thought about it.

“Um…what if an actual emergency happens before it switches?” Eun-ji asked timidly, flummoxing Miliam for a moment. Fortunately Aoibhe rescued her by pointing out the obvious.

“I imagine the cap’n will know based on the timer. Right?” the pilot asked without looking away from her controls.

“Uh, right! I’ll know when it’s supposed to happen. If something weird happens I’ll just let you know it’s not a drill. By saying…’this is not a drill.’ Yes.” Miliam was glad everyone was too busy to look at her and make that awkward response any more awkward. It seemed like for every moment she had where she sounded like a proper captain, she had to follow it up by fumbling the moment she tried to do or say something that wasn’t rehearsed.

She decided to distract herself by letting Tessa and Engineer know about the plan. Though, if she were being honest, she didn’t actually know what Engineer did during these drills. It’s not like the ship could simulate damage in the engineering bay. And the ship’s reactor provided as much power as its systems could handle; there was no need to reroute power to the engines or whatnot. But the only response she ever got back from them when announcing a simulation was “I. Under…stand.” So at the very least they didn’t seem to need any clarification on what they should do while the rest of the crew ran sims.

Tessa was still saying something when she closed the connection, but Miliam wasn’t sure what mining drills had to do with anything, so it probably wasn’t important.

“What else…I guess we need to change the watch schedule, but I probably shouldn’t distract Min-ji while she’s busy,” Miliam whispered under her breath. With the Astrum Vitae transitioning to a pair of five light-year jumps per day, the twins’ ability to work both comms and sensors was going to come in handy. Typically a ship this size would probably have two or three operators on each station working in shifts, allowing a sensor technician to be present on the bridge at all times. But a bad sensor technician was worse than not having one at all, as they could easily misinterpret data where the ship itself would have at least defaulted to an alert.

With nothing else to do, Miliam stared at her displays until the ship finally reached its destination. Eventually the Astrum Vitae pulled into the orbit of the planet, parking amid its myriad moons. It would be difficult to detect here, and even any trace of its passage would be gone within a few hours as light made its way to the periphery of the system. Before beginning the planned simulations Miliam took a few moments to stand and stretch, and then she took her seat again and announced they were starting.

The simulation proceeded well enough. Crew synergy was improving over time, but it was still a bit too soon to ramp up the difficulty or add in new complications. The scenarios they ran weren’t too different from the first she’d selected, where they had to escape a single hostile ship in their own weight-class. They’d done variations on that general theme like detecting an ambush from a ship hiding under EMCM or navigating a tightly clustered asteroid field under pursuit.

That last one sounded unlikely, but according to Abigail, it was more realistic than one might think. Delta Boötis had been ravaged by a cthulid. There wasn’t a single planetary body left intact in the entire star system. Concentric asteroid fields ringed the central star, and the inner-most field was closer to it than Mercury was to Sol. While that was an enormous distance with a radius measured in millions of kilometers, the event that caused all of that destruction had happened only five hundred thousand years ago at the latest. An unfathomable amount of time for a human, but a mere blink of an eye on a galactic scale. The asteroid fields hadn’t fully dispersed yet, leaving clusters that could be true navigational hazards in some places.

Miliam had given her orders and was monitoring the situation when suddenly, an alert rang out and the words ‘Simulation Aborted’ appeared onscreen.

“Oh, I guess that’s the second simulation,” Min-ji said to herself. “A single ship was detected teleporting in sixty million kilometers from us.”

Min-ji was already beginning to collect sensor data and Eun-ji and Aoibhe remained relaxed. That seemed to confirm one of Miliam’s worries; that simulations weren’t the same as real experience and her crew might not react the same way in an actual emergency. Which was unfortunate, as right now, only Miliam knew the truth.

“This is not a drill.”