An arc of lightning zapped the starfighter’s shields and blew through them, then across the fighter’s surface before dissipating on a small piece of space debris. She lost all power. Her forward momentum carried her past the event horizon of the unstable wormhole it flashed several times sending out temporal waves that seemed to warp her and her fighter. It was not a good feeling. In fact, it was some of the worst pain she’d ever felt in her life. It felt like her body was trying to grow and shrink at the same time. She could see a distortion surrounding her, all the stars flickered like she was looking at them through waves propagating through clear water. With one final blast of temporal energy the wormhole collapsed, everything seemed to go back to normal.

“Owe. Never doing that again.”

She wished Bit was active she was way out of her depth. She quickly realized if she’d had her friend connected to the power systems whatever hit the fighter would have wiped her out. She hit her head against her seat.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid. Of course, creating an anomaly in an anomaly is going to make weird stuff happen. What were you thinking? You weren’t, you never think.”

She punched the control surface. She sighed with relief when the lights and systems started coming on one by one. She started pulling up star charts. They were useless. These were the uncharted sectors of Andromeda for a reason, they were on the far side of the galaxy from the Milky Way. If she had reached the absolute coordinates, she was supposed to reach she was the first human to be this far away from Earth. Not that she could ever claim that title. She cursed her lack of a Bit once again as she tried to sift through the stellar cartography data the High Council had provided her with. She needed to find out where she was, so she knew where she needed to go. So where was she?

Perhaps she was asking the wrong question?

*****

Maria had managed to go twenty years without accidentally breaking her desk. The last evasive answer from the League Embassy about when Allison would be out of her meeting with the council did it though. She punched it and it broke in half. She was in fact very close to swearing. Something she had done even more rarely than breaking her furniture accidentally. Her security rushed into the office with their weapons drawn.

“Sorry, desk broke. I am transferring to the board room.”

She sighed and brought up the telemetry data for the unstable wormhole leaned against the board room table and crossed her arms. She would love to be able to get the System’s Alliance Science Division to go over the data but unfortunately even there she was the smartest person in the room, no matter what room she was in. No one else had any experience with temporal wormholes. Her chief of staff cleared her throat.

“President Aurelius, the joint chiefs of staff are waiting to brief you on the latest data from Yellowstone.”

Maria held up one finger without turning to look at the woman.

“Ma’am, they have been waiting for thirty minutes.”

Maria was getting annoyed.

“They can wait another six hours if I deem it necessary, Monica.”

Monica’s heels clicked as she moved to block Maria’s view of the data.

“Ma’am, whatever this is, I can have Science Division make it a top priority.”

Maria was six inches shorter than Monica; The small vampire had never cut an imposing figure. She looked up at Monica.

“Get out before I throw you out.”

Maria’s dark eyes flashed red for the briefest of moments. Monica bolted. Maria sighed and started stroking her old silver crucifix. She glanced to her left and right, what no one else could see was a giant black cloaked figure wielding a massive scythe and a twelve-year-old girl who was bouncing a ball on the wall, both ghostly.

“That goes for the both of you too.”

She sighed and continued stroking her crucifix. It was rare that she was truly alone. There were fettered ghosts everywhere. She pondered the nature of wormholes. She’d been the first to create artificial wormholes that she was aware of. Each one sent a pulse racing through hyperspace at infinite speed even from beyond the edge of the visible universe, they would reach Earth in minutes, and she’d only ever detected hers. What they did not do was send ripples of unstable space-time through real space that had any noticeable energy. Even Project Stargate had been negligible.

Her eyes scanned the display while she stroked the crucifix in her mind’s eye, she pictured the unstable wormhole Allison had created as a geodesic. A cone forward and a cone backwards. They should have detected the pulses at the other end… unless it was in the future, or the past, or she’d managed to slip into an alternate dimension. Or they were too weak. The pulses hadn’t started until Allison had reached the event horizon. Maria sighed. If her mental math was right. Allison had not gone somewhere, but somewhen. Thankfully she had a solution to that.

She opened a comm link to Pluto station. The admiral who had replaced her stood up and saluted.

“Ma’am.”

Maria nodded to her.

“Admiral, I need you to fuel the antimatter generators on level two bring them up to full power and select two of your technicians, ones who know how to be discrete and who know wormhole physics. I will brief them and grant them the access they need.”

The admiral looked confused.

“Ma’am, those generators have been offline for twenty years, why now?”

Maria shook her head.

“Sorry Admiral, you have your orders, proceed. This is classified, you will only discuss it with me and no one else.”

*****

Allison was having real difficulties getting a fix on her location. Nothing was making sense. The only real choice she had was to find the biggest brightest star in her vicinity and set an FTL course towards it. First though she had to fix her shields. Everything else had survived the blast of strange energy but her shields were completely offline, which meant her cloak was completely offline. She was pretty sure this would be the first space walk performed by a human in interstellar space. She used her docking thrustors to slow the fighter from its drift. Since her nav computer had no fix on her current location it couldn’t even give her relative galactic velocity. The only reason she knew she was moving was because the stars were changing position. Eyeballing all stop was not on her things she ever wanted to do.

She formed her helmet and vented her atmosphere into the processors and opened the cockpit. Allison hated being outside of her fighter. At no point during her zero-g training even tethered was she comfortable. At least when she boarded the tour ship, she had Saturn and the rings. Here there was nothing. Just blackness and silence. It was like after her wormhole jump, she had fallen into the abyss. She forced herself to calm down as she inched along the liquid metal armor with various handholds. Her target was the spare power interlinks. The starfighter was tiny in the grand scheme of things, if she had walked this it would have taken less than a second, but here, in deep space it was minutes of careful movements. She opened the storage bay and popped out the spare shield power interlink and let it float beside her while she resealed the bay. She grabbed the interlink and continued her slow methodical path across the fighter until she reached the top and opened the interlink panel.

The shield interlink was slagged. She tried to remove it, but it was fused to the housing. She sighed and looked at her armor’s power indicator. It was steadily ticking down. Keeping her body warm at two degrees Kelvin was chewing through its reserves. It was using power faster than she predicted. She had to act quickly, or she would be an ice cube pretty quickly after it ran out. She sighed and drew one of her Qual’sa pistols. She set it to medium yield. She hoped it would be strong enough to cut the slag out of the socket but not so strong it melted through the housing. She fired a brief blast. Then she punched the slag it cracked in the extreme cold of the interstellar space. She carefully worked her way through the slag heating it up then smashing it off when it cooled rapidly and became brittle. As soon as it was clear she holstered the pistol, grabbed the edge of the housing and slammed the interlink into the empty socket. The remaining slag shattered and floated away. She was in the home stretch which was good because her armor’s power was quickly nearing critical levels.

After sealing the hatch, she carefully returned to the cockpit, sealed it and set the heating unit to max. Her armor ran out of charge, and she was forced to remove the helmet so she could breathe. The air was still thin, and the cockpit was freezing. She decided after this she could never complain about the cold on Eden Prime. The cockpit heated up quickly and once she could feel her fingers and toes, she started checking the shields. She breathed a sigh of relief when they charged and then formed around the fighter. Her armor wasn’t charging. It usually just charged from some form ambient energy, when she was in a solar system or on a planet. She sighed. How would she find her target without star charts? She closed her eyes she was in trouble. She needed help. It was time to call home.

She opened the antimatter interface and slid her finger from magnetic containment to the wormhole comms. She tried to link to the network. It should have worked from anywhere. The wormhole kept failing. Even to Pluto station which was never dark. She slammed her palms down on the control surface. She tried the hyperwave next. Her first target was the embassy. She received no response. She received no response from Silwra either. Both methods had infinite range and instantaneous communication. Something was very wrong. If there was no response from the wormhole comms, then she could not use the wormhole beacons, not that she could have anyway. You needed absolute coordinates for the destination and the origin. Since she didn’t have her absolute coordinates relative to the Milky Way galactic core she was screwed.

Allison screamed into the void, while she got no response it did help her with her rising anger at her predicament. She rubbed her face. She picked what she thought was the brightest star and started calculating its distance by moving the starfighter around at relativistic speeds. Only twenty percent the speed of light but she was able to get a really good idea of how far away it was. Less than a light year. That had to be it. She set a course and speed to reach the star system in fifteen minutes.

The short jump landed her with in spitting distance of the League fleet. She was elated that she’d scienced herself out of a bad situation. Her sense of accomplishment slowly faded when she closed on the fleet. It had been obliterated. It was a debris field. Large bulbus red ships she did not recognize were bombarding the planet. That would make things complicated, but she couldn’t stop now. She accessed the data beacon tracking code. Her receiver quickly narrowed it down to the northern continent. It took a few more minutes for her to get a fix on the location, or well as close a fix as she could manage with the bombardment going on. Thankfully it was in an uninhabited part of the planet and seemed to have been spared the bombardment.

Allison’s FTL alert started screaming at her and a fleet of green organic cylinder ships flashed into existence and started firing on the attacking fleet immediately. She had no idea what was going on, but she wasn’t about to try and take on two fleets of capital ships. There were over sixty ships involved in the space battle. She took what scans she could as she weaved her way to the planet’s surface. She was pretty sure after the SA Military tracked her FTL jump they had a pretty good clue who it was, she was literally the only starfighter pilot rated for a hundred light years per hour. Any intel she could get could possibly lessen her punishment.

The planet was H-class. If it wasn’t home to a civilization that was being bombed back to the stone age it would be a great find. Her scans told her everything she really needed to know about the two alien species locked in battle. The System’s Alliance was screwed if they decided to invade. Their shields and weapons were several orders of magnitude stronger than Alliance tech. It was no wonder the League fleet was destroyed so quickly and easily. Allison found a very sturdy cave with a mouth big enough for her starfighter to slip inside. It put her several kilometers away from the data beacon, but it was better that the fighter was in some form of shelter until she could get an exact fix on the data beacon and remote control the starfighter to the location.

Her armor was starting to recharge. The terrain was hilly leading into the mountains a few hundred kilometers away. It was a heavily forested tall trees that would be a correlation to blue spruce on Earth dominated the area. There was a foot of snow. The temperatures were more moderate than Eden, only -10 C. Allison tugged on her coat and hat. She set her armor to minimal life support settings. She hoped it would recharge faster if she wasn’t draining it trying to keep warm.

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She pondered what aliens would think of a sixteen-year-old human girl trudging through their forest in a bright pink coat and Eden Apples soccer team wool hat. She was glad she was in shape because the gravity here was higher than Eden Prime. Not by much but even a fraction of a G would be noticeable the longer she walked. This was more like 1.3 times Eden Prime gravity. Everything just felt heavier. She’d have to make sure she took that into account if the data beacon was big enough that she needed to use her antigravs as a tractor beam.

She saw signs of large predators in the snow. Clawed paw prints. She reached down and set both her pistols to max. She could not take any chances and if one of the hostile factions were going to get their hands on the data beacon, she’d have to make sure no one could get it. She hoped the League standards were the same as System’s Alliance if it is vital data and it cannot be retrieved it needs to be destroyed.

The ground shook beneath her feet and she started to hear artillery. She wasn’t getting closer to the battle it was getting closer to her. She hurried her pace still using her own muscle power. Her armor was slowly ticking up. She’d need it for weapons fire. It wouldn’t matter if she was tired or not when the plasma cartridges started flying her way, the only thing that would save her would be her armor. She heard voices up ahead right on top of her objective. She swore. She tried activating the holo-web but it fizzled out immediately. She whispered, Shitballs.

She drew both pistols and dashed into the clearing of smashed trees the beacon had caused when it made landfall. It was five meters long and a meter in diameter. It looked damn heavy. The aliens guarding it looked like human Sal’nash. Or well yellow skinned humanoids wearing chitin armor. She just started shooting. There had been six of them and before they could react they were all puffs of turquoise mist. She was in luck; They had already loaded the data beacon onto one of their winter terrain vehicles. They were treaded and had sled trailers attached. After a quick scan she identified the accelerator and the stop, which is pretty much all she thought she’d need. She was trained for this sort of thing. Adapt and overcome, use the enemies equipment against them. Not that she was sure these were the enemy. They looked enough like Sal’nash that she was less than eager to start a conversation.

She revved the engine and black smoke choaked the air. She leaned forward and accelerated weaving between the trees. The one-man snow crawler was remarkably agile. The sounds of battle had gotten much closer. It felt like they were right on top of her. She rushed to the fighter and turned off the cloak so she could see what she was working on. She sighed. She could do it without using antigravs, but she’d need to dump one of her missile packs. They’d weigh a couple of tons in this gravity. Luckily, she had two aft of her wings underneath her atmospheric engines, someone from the twenty-first century would call them scramjets. They allowed the fighter to reach hypersonic speeds, and even escape velocity. On her old fighter it is what she used to ignite the rogue planet’s upper atmosphere.

She hated losing ordinance especially in the middle of a massive battle but losing antigravs was worse. She punched the panel that would open and disengaged the locking clamps for the missile pack. It crashed to the ground destroying the housing and scattering the HVAPK (High Velocity Armor Piercing Kinetic) missiles across the ground. The next part was going to be the hard part. She tossed her coat and hat into the cockpit. She flexed her arms and pushed blood to her muscles. Then she engaged her armor’s superstrength. It took almost all she had to roll the data beacon into the bay recently vacated by the missile pack. She closed the bay door.

She was feeling proud of herself when she heard a whistling, which was shortly followed by an explosion the shockwave from it sent her flying into the cave. By the time she’d managed to shake it off she saw more of the chitin wearing humanoids approaching. She used her remote control to cloak the fighter and then tapped patrol mode. She scrambled out of the cave and fell into a snowbank that had formed under two bushes. She realized she could understand them, they were speaking in Qual’sa. Really badly, but it was Aryna’s native language. They didn’t seem to… smart. It was like listening to a bunch of six-year-olds arguing over what a toy was, only they were trying to figure out what the missiles were. They finally agreed they were some form of weapon system. Their next debate was if they should keep them or call the boss lady, boss lady was exactly the term they used. Allison decided to make the decision for them and used her link to the starfighter to arm and remote-detonate the missiles. In preparation for the coming fireworks, she scrambled further away from the cave.

The explosion lit up the darkening night. Allison let her helmet form. She’d need the armor to stay warm since her coat was in her starfighter’s cockpit and it was patrolling at three thousand meters. She realized she desperately needed to find a clearing so she could land the fighter and get out of there now that she had the mission objective secured. The battle in her vicinity had intensified. Flashes of blue and red light were lighting up the night sky as the ships continued their battle far above. On the ground she could hear the roar of loud engines and the whistling of artillery.

She had studied World War 2 in the history of humanity. Like everything a thousand years later there were a lot of details they guessed at, but she’d seen World War 2 movies and one series that stuck with her, Band of Brothers. Her dad had wanted to watch it. She was amazed at how well they captured the chaos of battle, now that she was experiencing it for herself. Stray bullets and energy blasts were shredding trees sending wooden shrapnel flying everywhere. Allison just kept running around trying to find a clearing, anywhere she could land the starfighter so she could get out of this nightmare fuel.

After narrowly avoiding one artillery blast too many she found a rock formation to take shelter in. Unfortunately, it was also near the front line. In her black armor she was easy to miss in the dark. The chitin wearing humanoids had archaic fuel burning monstrosities with thick armor and brutally large weapons. They were fighting a race of lithe humanoids in blue pearlescent armor. The lithe humanoids used fast attack vehicles and energy weapons. They had shields, the Chitin wearing ones did not.

The brutes were winning just by shear weight of numbers. Even with orbital fire support the lithe humanoids numbers were dwindling. Finally, all weapon fire ceased. Allison looked around the rock, she expected the lithe humanoids to be dead, but they had dropped their weapons. In front of them was a Qual’sa in armor that looked like it was formed from pure platinum. He had long pale blond hair and eyes like sapphires. He reminded her of Vaedrick, only this guy was hot. He dropped his energy sword and it fell into the snow and turned itself off. He spoke.

“You may have me, just leave these people in peace.”

A woman who was wearing a heavy cloak with a fur ring around the hood stepped out of one of the brute’s vehicles. She wore black gloves. The male Qual’sa fell to his knees in submission. The woman pulled down her hood. Allison’s hand went to her helmet’s face plate. The woman was Aryna’s identical twin, only her skin was black, not the brown skin of her mother. Her eyes were like rubies and she had a malicious twist to her lips. She had long silver hair. Her dress was revealing. She was like Aryna’s photo negative gothic twin sister. The woman approached the male Qual’sa and wrapped her hand around his chin, pushing it upwards.

“So, my twin sister sent you to protect these primitives. A futile effort.”

He looked up at her with a burning hatred in his beautiful sapphire eyes.

“We serve the ancients Ne’Qual’sa scum I die in h-”

The woman reached out her hand; His defiant words died in this throat as he clutched his chest and suddenly his bones reversed themselves. Allison nearly vomited at the sight. His still beating blue heart was skewered on a single rib bone that extended from his chest. Each pulse caused blue blood to spray on the white snow. The woman turned her back and waved her hand towards the lithe humanoids.

“Kill them all.”

Her army opened fire without hesitation. She looked up and quirked her head to the side.

“Well, since you morons are incapable of winning a space battle, I suppose I should intervene.”

She reached her hands up and the blue flashes of energy in the heavens ceased. Then one by one the massive green warships that had appeared started falling from the sky causing great fireballs as they burned up in the atmosphere. Allison was paralyzed with fear. Was Aryna this powerful? What exactly was she living with?

Allison forced herself to look out from her hiding place again. Six of the larger chitin warriors as she had called them where kneeling in the snow with their heads bowed. Aryna’s evil twin was walking back and forth in front of them with her hands folded behind her back. She did not look happy.

“Where is my data beacon?”

The largest bowed his head further.

“Tearyni we no find. Scouts find, then we find Scout snowcrawlers, one missing, no scouts. We follow the trail. Find cave strange weapons snowcrawler, no data. Soldiers die when weapon boom.”

Tearyni slowly removed her gloves and slapped them in her left hand.

“You truly are dumber than a sponge. Those bothersome lizards are here. That means their bothersome friends, the overly intelligent globs of cells are here, and they have cloaking fighters. It’s a cloaked fighter landed in snow, how hard could it be to find, you have eyes don’t you?”

She snarled and reached out her hand. She’d been relatively quick with the Qual’sa. This one she slowly compacted his chitin around him digging it into his yellow flesh. His screams echoed through the forest. Allison curled up and tried to ignore it. He fell to the ground. She looked at the rest of her officers she pointed at the next largest in the line.

“You, you’re in charge now. Fail me again and you will take twice as long to die as he did. Get me my-”

She lifted her head.

“We have a spy behind that rock.”

Allison scrambled to her feet and bolted she found herself heading towards more of the Ne’Qual’sa’s forces. She turned around and decided maybe she could just take her out. She charged Tearyni unleashing a withering barrage of fire. Several of the chitin warriors burst into turquoise puffs but though she was trying desperately to hit Tearyni none of her shots made contact with the woman. Her arms wouldn’t quite go where she wanted. She had drained their energy completely and found herself dangling in the air at Tearyni’s mercy.

“Interesting weapons. They remind me of my own sidearm. Are you one of my sister’s assassins?”

Tearyni’s face twisted as if she was trying to get something out of her. She looked vexed.

“Interesting. Your mind is like a durasteel hull. Impenetrable. Well, that makes things interesting. I wonder what you are under that black nano-skin of yours. Will you bleed blue like me?”

Allison could feel pressure from all sides. Her armor’s protection was working against whatever power Tearyni was exerting but the power which was already low was being depleted rapidly. Eventually it hit critical levels and her face mask cracked, then sunk into the black armor. Tearyni smiled.

“Oh, there you are. Goth version of Aryna. How… accurate. Where is my dear sister?”

Allison forced herself to think of anything but Aryna. She thought of shooting Tearnyi in the face.

“Such violent thoughts. So, what are you?”

Allison kept thinking of campy vampires she’d seen in movies. All the fake weaknesses.

“Why are you here, Allison, what a quaint name… Duchess Allison, you’re one of the great house elders. Oh, how we have fallen. One as small and as pathetic as you ruling a house.”

Allison’s next image would never be repeated in a mission report but it ended with Allison stuffing what she would use to protect her underwear from her period in Tearnyi’s mouth. Tearyni snarled.

“I think we need to open you up a bit more, so you won’t be so resistant.”

Allison cried out as the pressure increased exponentially. She felt as if her bones were going to burst out of her skin. Several of them fractured but just before she would have died her fangs came out and her eyes flashed silver. She felt a well of power expanding from her very core. She screamed.

“Enough!”

Her scream radiated out from her blasting away whatever force Tearyni was exerting then smashing trees, the ground, Tearyni’s army, their drop ships, and their tanks. Nothing was left untouched for almost ten kilometers. Her starfighter went flying upwards and finally adjusted itself back at pre-telekinetic explosion patrol route.

Allison was the only thing untouched by her own explosion, but she was not unscathed, she had blood running out of her eyes, nose and ears from the abuse Tearyni had hurled at her. She fell to her knees. Tearyni was on her knees. She had several tree branches sticking out of her. She was gasping for air. Allison leaned down still gasping for breath. She slowly picked up each of her pistols and slid them into their holsters. She could feel her body already mending slowly.

She stumbled towards Tearyni who was slowly dying as her lungs filled with blood. Allison looked down at her. Tearyni coughed up blood and glared at Allison.

“I will find you. Allison of the noble house Wanjala and I will make you suffer. I will destroy everything you love and hold dear then I will kill you slowly. There is no place you can run.”

Allison extended her fangs and her eyes glowed with a golden light.

“No, you won’t, I’m not running, you’re going to die here in a snowbank you sadistic psychopath.”

Allison grabbed Tearyni and tore into her neck with her fangs. She gulped down the rich blood of the Ne’Qual’sa Queen. She drained almost all that was left and dropped the vile woman, who fell to the ground on her back. Her ruby eyes burned with hatred then her head lulled back as the last breath escaped her lips. Allison rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth then licked the blood off of it. She stumbled towards the fallen Qual’sa and picked up his sword. She used the weapon as a cane to approach her fighter which had just landed a few hundred meters away. Her leg bones were struggling to knit themselves back together. It took her a monumental effort to get into the pilot’s seat, she tossed her coat in the rear seat and launched the fighter. She thought some uncharitable thoughts about the planet as it vanished beneath her.

The data she had in her cargo bay was truly of the utmost importance. If the Ne’Qual’sa had returned to the Andromeda Galaxy… and they were anywhere near as strong as Tearyni… Aryna was not safe, no one was safe.

Allison fled the site of the battle by jumping to FTL. Now that she had a star as an origin point, she could use her fighter’s sensors to identify other close stars. She used this technique to leapfrog across several systems she found Ne’Qual’sa vassal forces in each. She leapfrogged through several more systems to be safe. The system she decided to use as her new home base for surveying was home to four gas giants and no terrestrial planets, that was fine by her. She had enough alien H-class worlds for one day. She’d just plain had enough for one day.

She tried reaching both the SA and League on FTL comms. She had been hoping the initial failures were caused by some form of jamming because of the ongoing battle. Now that she was several hundred light years away, she was hoping whatever was interfering was out of range. Her hopes were dashed when she received no responses.

She sighed and pulled out a ration of Synth-O. She finished that and replaced the bottle, then she pulled out an MRE. These were the self-warming kind all she had to do was activate it by pressing two tabs and it would heat instantly. Since it was her fighter, she got to choose the rations. The one she was eating tonight was a butter chicken and rice.

Allison was exhausted and decided she needed to get some sleep. She parked the starfighter in a deep crater on the innermost gas giant’s moon. She shifted some antimatter to the omega reactor and set it to power her cloaking device. Maria had helpfully taken into account long missions and with the press of a button the liquid metal that made up her two seats shifted and formed a single person bed. She pulled her pillow and blanket out and got ready to sleep. It wasn’t the most comfortable bed in the universe, but as she snuggled under her blanket after her exhausting trek across the high-G world, it felt like a slice of heaven.