“I like the new ship,” Eukary said as she entered the engineering bay.
Speck and three of the maintenance droids were running through a series of routine checks. Eukary looked around for a bare patch of wall to lean against, but even the smooth, flat portions were covered with mechanical and digital gauges, holo projectors and touch sensitive panels.
“You don’t miss the old one?”
She shook her head. “It was too big, yet somehow cramped at the same time.”
Speck made a face, then shrugged. “Yeah, there was some wasted space, I suppose. This one is definitely sleeker. I mostly like her for the printer. It’s the best in production. And only a few are in use.”
“Yeah? What can she make?”
“Another ship.”
“Get out!”
He smiled. “See, I could, in a 3D printed jump capable single passenger shuttle.”
“That’s insane! Who designed it?”
Speck scratched his head, then shook it. “I forget her name. Vid’redic chick.”
Eukary wracked her brain. “Oh! Aya Chakpal. She’s brilliant.”
Speck nodded. “She’s been at it long enough. She’s old. Even for a vid’redic.”
“How fast is the printer?”
He opened his eyes extra wide as he spoke. “Fast.”
“Nice. Shouldn’t have to wait too long for supplementary craft, then.”
He raised two fingers. “Two hours for insertion craft, tops. One for extraction.”
Eukary was taken back. “Aya... you go girl!”
Speck chuckled, then patted a nearby bulkhead. “Yep. I miss the old girl, but this new girl will definitely do.”
He went on a little longer, rattling off figures for munitions storage, time to print casings, shells, cannisters and warheads. He told her how much space it saved being able to print many of the more involved mechanisms, almost doubling the amount of unprintables they could store. She was particularly impressed with the assembly bay.
“This is a warship,” she said.
“If it needs to be.”
“Let’s hope not,” said Cat. He was standing just outside the bay, leaning in the hallway. “Last thing I want is Speck dead and us floating through space.”
Speck told Cat about the repair suite, and how much denser the new hull plates were than their last vessel. Cat nodded and moved on.
“We’re having a surprise brief,” he said. Looking to Speck; “Everyone’s invited.”
The new H1 had more separation between rooms than the last. The doors were powered but had mechanical releases in case of power loss. Their last ship simply had offset openings between rooms. The conference room was small, but shaped so that it didn’t feel claustrophobic. Eukary remembered how often her and Reev would bump elbows during briefings. It annoyed her at the time, but she missed it.
I miss you too, Ru, she thought. Between the two, Reev got the most attention, for obvious reasons. Eukary determined that if they got their brother and sister back, she would make a point to bond more deeply with Haruspex.
Ishtar came into the briefing room. She patted the bulkhead as she came through the door. “She’s sexy, Speck.”
“Don’t get me started,” said Forge, entering behind her.
“Do you and the new H1 need to get a room?”
Forge was about to reply, but Cat activated his vam, silencing them with a recording of a strange voices.
“Not again,” Eukary said.
Forge balled his fist. “That’s it. I’m done. I do not trust the bastard.”
“Forge!” shouted Aster.
“All of you!” shouted Cat. He waited till the room was completely silent before speaking further. “Needle left this is in Cap’s quarters. Think about that for a moment.”
“Who does that scumbag think he is?” said Ish. “He can’t break into our quarters like that.”
“Not without getting caught by our surveillance tech,” said Forge. Apparently, he’d taken Cat’s admonishment seriously. His fist was open, and he was looking downward at the table, his brow wrinkled just above his nose. “Unless...”
The room quickly grew thick with nervous quiet.
“Say it,” said Cat.
“Unless he had help,” said Forge. Then his fist balled up again. “Son of a...”
“Used to be you could trust folks,” said Ish.
“What’s going on, Cat?” Eukary asked. She felt a cocktail of worried, angry and sad.
“I’ll tell you what happened,” said Aster. “Haleon’s daughters found a new way to breach the Verge. It was the same when they came through before. The galaxy wasn’t perfect, but when they came sneaking in it got progressively worse.”
“And that was when the Verge was clear on the other side of the galaxy,” Eukary mused.
She did not enjoy the memories of walking the blood drenched streets of old Terra. Cities reduced to wartime rubble were one thing, but to see the people you fought to protect dead with their fingers dug into each other’s eye sockets or holding knives that they’d plunged into each other’s hearts and throats, that was a sight no soldier was trained for.
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“Guys,” said Speck, “the duke was making it sound like we came out here to fight the Tangents. But I don’t think that’s the way it is.”
“Of course that’s not the way it is,” said Forge.
“I never liked Salamanca,” Eukary said.
“And Needle’s his pet,” said Isthar.
Cat leaned forward and rested his elbows on the table. “Cap said we need to trust each other. He was right. We can’t trust the new council, or their agents, and there might even come a time when we won’t be able to trust other teams. I’ll be perfectly transparent with you on this; I don’t entirely trust Sol. But I refuse to make assumptions. He’s keeping things from us, sure, but that’s a necessity of command. The Council might not recognize him as a commander, but that’s how he still sees himself. Now, I won’t tell any of you how to think, but my take on this recording is that Needle is still trying to discredit him.
“Now, Speck is right. The Verge first appeared near the Orion Spur. Now it’s appeared near the Phrastus Belt. What factor remains the same?”
“Us,” said Ishtar.
“Us?” Eukary said. “Or Albion?”
“This may be nothing,” said Speck, giving Forge a nervous glance, “but remember how Reev was always trying to get Albion’s computer to have conversations with him? I thought I heard him talking to Solomon about it once. Does anyone know what he was up to?”
Cat rolled his eyes. “I know what he said he was up to.”
“Cat,” Eukary said, “I know Reev got on your nerves, but he’s a smart guy. Maybe he had good reason to keep questioning Eno and he just didn’t tell us about it.”
“But he told Sol,” said Ish.
“He told Sol,” Forge repeated.
Klaxons rang and the ship’s lighting turned from white to red.
“Maybe now he’ll tell us,” said Cat.
“Already?” Eukary asked. “This is the first point Sol plotted on our charts.”
“Maybe we got lucky,” Cat replied.
They all donned their armor and harnesses, put on their skullforts, and went to the CIC, awaiting Cat’s instructions from the cockpit. Another feature Eukary appreciated about the new vessel was the expanded cockpit. A second chair and room for another pair of people to stand was welcome during shipboard operations. But they needed to be in the heart of the craft, waiting for Cat to direct them where they were needed, so Eukary waited patiently until Cat called her to the cockpit.
“What are we looking at?” she asked. In the viewscreen was a magnified view of the Klippotic Verge. The blue light of Speck’s console clashed with the red light in the cabin, and around the small object floating ahead of them was a violet glow.
“I’m at max resolution,” Speck answered.
“Can we move in a little closer?” Eukary asked.
“If we were in a smaller ship,” Speck answered. “Whatever the Verge is doing to space, its effects are proportional to size. The smaller you are, the closer you can safely get.”
“And those effects are?”
“Show her,” Cat said.
Forge keyed in a series of commands and several probes launched in staggered succession. Each made it halfway to the floating object, and each met a different end, ranging from an explosion to an implosion to one being completely dismantled down to the rivets.
“The first one got sucked in,” Speck said.
“We need something smaller than a probe,” said Eukary.
“You have your orders,” said Cat.
“I’ll print you a ship,” Speck said with a smirk.
The ship took a fair amount of time to print compared to an insertion craft or a missile, and they needed to do some of the assembly themselves, but Eukary was still impressed. It was small, streamlined, and tailored to her.
“You only have a dozen guaranteed jumps out of this tiny little motor,” Speck said as she was strapping in.
“Well, don’t leave without me,” she replied.
Forge came to the little ship and handed her the ‘thermos’, the device Solomon gave him instructions to make.
“For the record,” he said, “I think this is stupid.”
She rolled her eyes.
The cockpit was tight, and she was anything but comfortable. There were still limits to what a printer could manufacture, it seemed. She was still very impressed and let herself smile as she exited the launch bay, narrowly dodging the insertion and extraction crafts in their hooks.
The controls were similar to those of a light starfighter. She took some time to familiarize herself, then slowly approached the object.
“What do you see, Euk?” Cat asked over the comms.
“Hard to say.” She tried to enhance the picture on her viewer, as her window was narrow and there seemed to be a buildup of particles between her and her quarry. An alarm rang. H1 was arming weapons.
She flew closer, slowly, seeing no more clearly than before. She nudged a little closer, and she felt a strange warning sensation.
“I can’t be sure what I’m looking at,” she said. “Im gonna jump out and look.”
“Be careful,” said Cat.
There was an airlock that perhaps a child would feel was spacious. She mag-clipped the thermos to her belt, crawled in the miniature airlock, exited the ship, and wove a field of light around her that propelled her to where she willed to go. Stardust trailed behind her, glimmering radiant in the dark.
“I gotta say, fellas, that this close, the Verge is beautiful.”
She looked all around her, marveling at the sharp cut shapes of foreign hues that marked this bleeding wound in Briah’s flesh. There were gathering traces of the soft, gaseous curvature of her native plane, at war with the strangeness of the Verge. As she closed in, she saw that those disparities were inf act in conflict with each other.
“Talk to me, Euk,” said Cat.
She looked straight ahead. The shape was amorphous, vaguely that of a body, but it was not solid. She reached to touch it and her passed through, trailing violet light like blood. She reported this to Cat.
“Sounds like a phenomenon of the Verge,” he replied. “Come on back. We’ll scout some more.”
“Wait,” she said. The shape morphed into something nearly like a body, and the top focused into a smaller orb at the top. “It’s... changing. Shifting its form. There’s something attached to it. Like an umbilical cord, but it’s, it’s what light would if it was dark.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Everything here is... weird.”
Two points like eyes beamed bright.
“Whatever this is,” she said, “we need to...”
“Euk? Euk? Talk to me, Euk.”
The points of light changed color, shifting until they whorled like those of a Harbinger.
“Cat, I think we got lucky.”
“Is it one of them?”
“It’s taking on a humanoid form. I can’t say for sure yet but... it has eyes, Cat. Like ours. Like... like Reev’s.”
She heard, or rather felt, his voice. Help me, he said.
“Reev!” she shouted. The dark filament stretched between him and the Verge pulsed and white light began to flow back to the breech.
She unclipped the thermos and twisted the top. It sprang upward just over an inch, revealing its controls. Eukary did what Solomon had shown them all to do and the shape before winced, groaned, then began siphoning into the thermos.
“Come on, Reev. Come on!”
She wanted to do something to help him, but she did not know what, so she hovered there in a terrible dream while her comrade’s essence trickled into a canopic jar. Soon there was nothing but her and the filament, and she lashed out in anger at it. To her joy her blast of raw radiance sliced through it and the white light spewed out. She dove forward and caught what she could in the thermos, then vaulted backward and flew to her vessel. Dark tendrils spread around her and touched her ship. The craft glowed bright and hot, then dispersed in a cloud of dust. She flew with everything she had, rocketing towards Harbinger One like a missile. Speck rotated the ship so that the launch bay was facing her, then jumped as soon as she was in.