The strain of TELEPORTING the ship nearly 10,000 lightyears was significant. It had completely drained Duke’s Mana pool and he was glad that he was sitting down. He supported himself on the navigation console as the ship’s systems reoriented to the new location. Mira, on the other hand, was a bit more vocal about the change in location.
“What, in the name of Gregor, happened? We are in the…I have no idea where we are, but the ship is telling me we just traveled 10,000 lightyears in a blink. How is that possible?”
Aurelia answered, deadpan, “Duke.”
Lya and Mira both looked over at Duke who smiled back. “I told you fuel wasn’t going to be an issue for this trip. Kindly take us to the closest rocky planet in this system, I have a few things I need to take care of over the next hour or three.”
Mira, ever the professional, set the course for the ship and quickly headed for the identified planet. It, like the entire system, was a barren world with no atmosphere and little more than stagnant dust being blasted with radiation by the local star. Not really a place worth visiting, but she would do as Duke asked if it meant getting her ship out of debt. She might even stick around for a while in thanks, but this guy was terrifying. It was like having a living plague walking next to her. He killed so easily and with such terrifying violence that she knew she needed to get away from him somehow. But, for now, she would play nice to get what she wanted.
As they approached the planet, Duke got back up out of the seat having recovered. “I’m going to hop on down to the surface for a while. I’ll meet back up with you after a couple of orbits.” He did not wait for a response and TELEPORTED down to the surface.
With fully recovered Mana, Duke began creating and planning dungeon cores. With his increased Mana regen, he was able to recover the Mana from creating a core in as little as ten seconds. He flew across the planet in a somewhat random pattern. One of the odder things he had picked up as a combat pilot was that people are particularly terrible at randomness. It helped when in combat to know that there is always some measure of predictability to a person’s movements and choices. This had led him to study the data a bit and found that using the digits of pi actually was more random than people’s “random” choices. He spent an entire month chasing down that rabbit hole and found that Euler’s number was an even better choice as it was more difficult to recognize, especially when he started at the 10th digit, so he applied the pattern to his dungeon placement.
Duke didn’t expect anyone to find the dungeons on this planet but wanted to start spreading his dungeons out as insurance. It took him a little over four hours to plant another 1,000 dungeons on the planet, but he was rather satisfied with the result. He returned to the ship which startled everyone on the bridge. Lya jumped and Mira put the ship into an emergency evasion pattern.
Aurelia chuckled and downed her “to go” drink that Travis had prepared for her. “It’s just Duke. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.”
“Some warning next time please!” Mira called out as she steadied out the ship.
Duke sat down at the navigation console, nodding his head. “Do you have some sort of communications gear that has interplanetary range?”
“Of course we do. Having a communications station would be bloody useless without it. Backwater trash. Seriously. Have you never been on a ship before?”
“Quite literally, the first, and last, for that matter, ship of this kind I was on was destroyed mid-journey. I didn’t exactly have time to ask too many questions.”
Mira and Lya looked over at Duke. Lya spoke first. “What kind of ship was it and how was it destroyed?” Interest dripped from her voice – she wanted this story.
Duke replied, “It was an Octuul Clone Army ship. They thought they had me trapped onboard and headed for their base. Apparently TELEPORTING while the ship was in exospace caused all sorts of havoc, destroying the ship.”
“You TELEPORTED while in exospace? How is that even possible? That’s an entirely different dimension.” Mira responded.
“Yeah, there’s no way that should be possible.” Lya added. “Hollis would have spent decades observing and researching how you did that. He was scientifically obsessive like that.”
“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how it works other than my TELEPORTATION is at a very high rank and it allows me to do all sorts of things that no one else seems to be able to do.”
Lya responded. “First of all, TELEPORTATION, TRUE TELEPORTATION is just not seen at all. In all my time spent dealing with quintillions of records, I only came across one person who was able to even move themselves across a room. What you are doing defies reason and what was thought to be the limits of possibility.”
“The system did call the Ability ‘vanishingly rare’. I guess that is what it meant.”
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“I would say so.” Mira nodded in agreement. “What were you doing down on the planet for the past few hours? I saw you flying around and stopping every few seconds.”
“I was setting traps for anyone following me.”
“Really?”
“No, but that’s as good an explanation as I am willing to give right now. We don’t know each other well enough to go into that just yet. I planted some things that, if messed with, will most likely kill the person messing with them. So, they are as good as traps, but not really the same thing.”
“Um, ok. What now, Mr. Mystery?”
“Don’t we have another 50,000 lightyears to go?” Duke asked, knowing the answer already from looking at the navigational console.
“Pretty much, yes.”
“Then we move on to the next waypoint.” Duke smiled as he, once again, TELEPORTED the ship about 10,000 lightyears closer to their destination. It was another dead system, and he felt the strain on his Ability just like last time. As he recovered, he reviewed how the “core planning” adventure affected his Ability. It had jumped the Ability a full 40 levels to Practiced 62. Another jump like that and it’ll rank up. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do at Adept rank! He also saw that his TELEPORTATION Ability had ticked up to Grandmaster 45. Only 595 levels to go until its next rank up. Come to think of it, that’s not too far away if I keep pushing its limits like this. If I can push it two levels a day, that’s less than a year until it ranks up.
Duke was pulled out of his musings by the sound of an alarm going off. An automated voice shouted loudly, “Alert! Alert! Proximity Alert!” He snapped his head to the viewscreen to see a massive ship bristling with weapons dominating the viewscreen.
“What the fuck is a Landassian Heavy Cruiser doing all the way out here?” Mira asked as she silenced the alarm. “They haven’t armed their weapons, so we’d better act nice. And maybe we can get out of this intact.”
“How fucked are we if it comes to blows?” Duke asked.
“We’d probably last through the first shot or two because they are too close to effectively bring their heavy cannons to bear. But in the end, we’re fucked, fucked.”
“Right. Lya, make nice with the big scary ship before I have to take drastic action.”
“What the fuck are you going to be able to do to something that big? It’s at least five hundred meters long at the keel!”
Duke concentrated, focusing his Abilities on it and got a very quick mapping of the ship before responding. “I can take the ship apart if needed. It will be messy and not a really good option, but if it comes to it, I’ll keep it from destroying us. Be ready to get us the hell out of here if need. Otherwise, I can just get us the hell out of here and forget the damned thing entirely.”
“If we run from them, they will brand us a some sort of pirate vessel and it will cause us trouble when we get to our destination.”
“And if we destroy their ship?”
“Probably the same, but they may not be able to get a call out first.”
Lya interrupted them both as she responded to the Landassian ship. “Yes, this is the hunter ship, Iron Reaver. We are en route to Sanction for trading, resupply, and refit.”
She turned to the others and spoke. “They want to know what we are trading. This sounds like a shakedown to me.”
Mira shook her head. “Landassians don’t do that sort of thing. Buy me a minute – I want a deep scan on them if I can get it off without them noticing.”
Duke jumped in. “Tell them we are trading minerals. Bulky and not terribly valuable but enough to convince then that we are down on our luck and not worth the shakedown.”
Mira nodded in agreement as she frantically engaged the stealth channels on her scanning systems. “No way I could do this if we didn’t have full cores. The stealth systems burn through cores like crazy.”
Lya called back over the communications system. “We are carrying minerals for trade. Are you in need of assistance?”
“Understood. We will prepare to receive your shuttle.” Lya closed the channel and looked back to the others. “Looks like they mean to board us.”
“Gotcha, snailsniffer!” Mira exclaimed. “There’s considerable internal damage around the bridge, armory, and engineering sections of the ship. That there is a mutiny ship!”
“So, no chance of them sending a message to any authorities, right?” Duke asked.
“Exactly.” Mira responded, her mood significantly elevated.
“So, what’s our move then?” Aurelia asked, checking the looseness of her sword in her scabbard.
Duke grinned evilly. “Anyone want to steal a stolen heavy cruiser? I hung out with enough Navy pilots to know that nobody cares what happens to mutineers. I assume that is the same here?”
“Yes, very much so. But they have to have a thousand crew on that ship. We can’t wade through them all no matter how tough we are.” Mira responded.
“Shuttle is inbound. Twenty-six minutes until contact.” Lya added.
Duke broke from his concentration. “There are seventeen crew on the shuttle and four hundred-sixteen still on the ship. The mutiny must have been particularly bloody.”
“It’s not a thousand, but that’s still a lot. I doubt we could carve our way through them before they could get a shot off at our ship.” Aurelia said.
“Probably not, but what if they all decided to take some shore leave on that lovely planet on the starboard side?” Duke continued to grin.
“How are you going to convince all of them to leave the ship and go to a desolate planet?” Lya asked.
“I wasn’t planning on giving them a choice in the matter.” Duke responded.
“Can you really do that?” Mira asked.
“Probably not all at once. I was thinking about sending them in order. Like bridge first, then engineering, then weapon systems. Then I would just grab the remaining in groups.”
“Don’t you have to see your targets or something?” Lya asked.
“Yes, if they were far away, that would be a problem, but this ship snuck up on us and is only a hundred kilometers away. I can see them all inside the ship. It helps that we are in space. If we were on a planet, I would have trouble getting enough clarity at this distance with all the other terrain features and living things providing interference. Like this, I’ve got them all locked-in.”
“Are we really going to do this?” Aurelia asked.
“Our choices are limited.” Mira responded. “We can let them dock and show them all the minerals we don’t have and see where that gets us, or we can take some offensive action.”
“We have minerals in our hold.” Duke responded. “I just filled it with stuff I had lying around in my INVENTORY. Some of it might even be valuable, so we do have the option of letting them see and making decisions from there.”
“OK, let’s do that.” Lya agreed.
“You three get down to the hold. I’ll keep an eye on things from up here and go on the offensive if needed.” Duke ordered. The three women headed down to get into place.