Calexa crossed her arms and stared up at the Primean, refusing to be intimidated. The woman who had identified herself only as “S” regarded her with an even gaze, her elegant features revealing only detached curiosity.

Calexa resisted the urge to roll her eyes. S was as Primean as they came; genetically perfect, as cool as the inky blackness of space itself, and blessed with that infuriating and oh-so typically Primean combination of haughtiness and benevolence. Somehow, she’d escaped Calexa’s notice, following her into the lower decks.

A muffled boom reverberated throughout the cabin, accompanied by a great metallic groan. Calexa balanced lightly on her feet as the floor tipped sideways. Lights flickered. The walls shook. Shrill alarms of varying pitch and intensity warned her of things she could do nothing about. Pressure was dropping. Gravity was decreasing. Somewhere above their heads, oxygen escaped through a broken seal.

S didn’t even blink. She lost her balance, broke her fall with her hands, righted herself, and straightened her flowing sea green tunic—the same color as her striking eyes—all in one continuous, seamless motion. If the alarms bothered her, she didn’t show it. “What’s our status, Captain Acura?”

Captain? Ha. Only a Primean would use such an old-fashioned term. Calexa was more accustomed to the things they called her in the Fiveways Bazaar, names like: metalbones, Khral-slayer, and blood-digger. Those were hard-earned names, and they could be terms of endearment or vicious insults, depending on how they were spoken. When people had attempted the latter, she’d been known to separate digits and limbs from bodies.

“The Paxnath are firing on us. They’ve given us two options: surrender, or get blasted into oblivion.” Calexa shrugged, making a conscious effort to appear calm when she was seething inside. The Paxnath stealth-cruisers had taken them by surprise, appearing on their tail without warning. Somehow, the cunning Paxnath had seen through the Medusa’s cloaking. “That’s what happens when you travel outside the designated spaceflight lanes.” She ducked as a ration canister broke free of its housing and hurtled toward her. It smashed into the rear wall, spilling its contents—sealed packets of fragrant aphernium tea—across the metal floor. “Raphael!”

“Cal.” Her navigator’s deep voice filtered through her comm, forming a pillar of calm amidst the swirling chaos. “We need to get out of this killspace right now. We’re leaking power and our shields won’t take another mega-hit like that. The bad news is that more Paxnath have joined the fray. We’re outnumbered five-to-one.”

“Throw some fire at them, abort the flightpath and eat some distance. What’s the nearest J-point?”

“Unknown.”

“Unknown? Are you fucking kidding me?” Calexa groaned, pressing her hand against the wall to steady herself as the ship lurched. S looked her up-and-down in that calm, analytical way of hers and copied her movements, swaying elegantly to one side as the Medusa rocked back-and-forth.

“I’ve located one, but it isn’t mapped. I don’t have any reliable data on its endpoint. It could take us back to the Solar System, or it could spit us out on the other side of the fucking Universe. I don’t even know if it’s stable.” Raphael paused, and the silence—mere seconds—grew long and tense and almost unbearable. Finally, he spoke. “Do we have any other options?”

“Go. Take the J-point, Raf.” It was a no-brainer. Get blasted to smithereens, get captured by Paxnath slavers, or enter a random jump-point and ride the freaky Netherverse to the middle of nowhere. Slavery was a fate worse than death, and it was much worse than surfing an unmapped jump-hole to parts unknown.

Boom! Another blast sent a vicious shudder through the ship. This time, the force came from behind.

“That was one of ours,” Raphael informed her. “I fired back.”

Calexa fervently hoped the Medusa’s powerful triticore missiles had bought them a sliver of time. She’d spent a small fortune on the damn things.

“I need to get to Torandor,” S said, her voice cracking ever-so-slightly. Maybe there were real emotions beneath her flawless porcelain exterior. “Is there any way around this mess?”

“The only way out now is to jump,” Calexa snapped. “I warned you about the dangers of taking the unguarded route.”

“I signed the agreement-waiver. I was willing to take the risk. So were you.”

“Yeah.” For the amount of credits the Primean had offered, Calexa and her crew would have flown to the depths of hell and back. With three Grand Maximums, one could buy a livable planet in the Nykrion System, install a decent planetary defense unit, and comfortably retire. “Too bad the risk comes in the form of Paxnath slave-hunters. Do you even know how they treat their body-slaves?”

S kept quiet. Secrets swirled in her eyes, but it wasn’t Calexa’s place to tease them out. It would be highly unprofessional of her to ask why a pure-blooded Primean and her entire retinue of human servants had hired Calexa and her crew of mercs to ferry them to the refuge-planet of Torandor.

No questions asked. That was one of the cardinal rules of the Fiveways, and it was the reason small mercenary outfits like theirs could charge big bucks. The bigger the risk, the bigger the price. Danger money was always tempting, but it was also a gamble.

This time they’d been unlucky.

“Should’ve stuck to killing Paxnath,” Calexa muttered under her breath. S raised an eyebrow. If there had only been one Paxnath stealth-cruiser, they could have returned fire, crippled the damn thing, and boarded it. But five fully armed Paxnath ships was too many to handle.

“Sorry about the turbulence. I’m nearly at the J-point, Cal.” Raphael was still on the comm. “You sure about this? I don’t even have rough co-ords. We’re going into completely unknown territory.”

The walls shook with the force of another blast.

“Do you even have to ask, Raf? Do it.” As she gave the order, Calexa watched S closely. The tall woman’s stance was deceptively relaxed. Her slender arms hung loosely by her sides, and her unnaturally green eyes were clear and serene. She radiated… nothing. No panic, no fear, no tension. That hint of desperation Calexa had detected earlier—that tiny, almost imperceptible crack—had vanished. Perhaps she’d imagined it.

“Where will the jump take us?” The Primean’s voice didn’t waver as the Medusa rode the shockwaves, shaking violently. They dropped to the floor.

“Wherever the Netherverse decides.”

A thrill of uncertainty coursed down Calexa’s metal-impregnated spine. They hadn’t been forced to make a Panic Jump in a long, long time. What they were about to do was incredibly dangerous, but if they didn’t go now, they were dead.

“Incoming!” Raphael yelled. “Our shields are fucked. I’m going to go.”

Calexa grabbed S by the shoulders and rolled as a wave of energy smashed into the Medusa’s starboard side. She found a handhold and hauled the Primean into her landing seat. “In you go,” she grunted, her bionic joints absorbing the impact. The automated restraints came down, locking S into place.

Boom! “Come on, Raf!” Calexa hung onto the handhold with all her strength as the Medusa shook like a piece of space-junk in an asteroid storm. “What are you waiting for?”

Silence. Raphael was probably concentrating, or maybe they were already touching the edge of the Netherverse. The comms always went dead when they entered the Silverstream.

Calexa’s suspicions were confirmed when a faint electric tingle rippled across her skin. Beside her, the Primean had gone still. S lifted a shaky hand to her mouth, as if she were about to retch.

A loud roar engulfed the cabin, drowning out everything else. Then, as quickly as it had started, the sound died away. Calexa hauled herself into the seat beside S. “First time riding the Netherverse?”

Unable to speak, S merely nodded. Despite the fact that S was a self-righteous, stuck-up, untouchable Primean, Calexa felt a sudden stab of pity for the woman. “For some reason, your kind don’t tolerate inter-dimensional travel well.” Her voice softened. “Take a deep breath and close your eyes. Trust me, it gets better. In a moment, you won’t feel like emptying your guts all over my floor.”

“H-how did you know?”

“I just know.” The debilitating nausea Primeans experienced when entering the Netherverse was something she’d learned about from the two halfbreeds on her crew, but Calexa wasn’t about to spill the beans on the twins. Primeans got all funny when it came to things like genetic purity, and breeding with humans was strictly forbidden.

For ‘ethical’ reasons, the offspring of such unions rarely survived.

A low hum reverberated throughout the cabin, and suddenly the whole damn ship—the seats, the floor, and the metal walls—bristled with a faint static charge. If they were near a viewport right now, they would see a stream of silver-blue light outside. Calexa’s scalp tingled as her short brown hair rose into the air. She couldn’t see her reflection, but unlike S, whose braids curved over her head in neat, orderly rows, she probably looked ridiculous.

The hair-raising static was just one of the strange effects of riding through the Netherverse—nicknamed the Silverstream—a parallel dimension where thousands of light-years could pass in the blink of an eye.

“Don’t worry,” she said dryly, “we’ll be back in the Universe soon. We’re probably already there.” Was it possible to be in two places at once? Inter-dimensional travel did funny things to the space-time continuum. Fudge the co-ordinates and one could overshoot the mark by a thousand light-years. There were even reports of spacecraft existing in two places at once. Like most space phenomena, the Netherverse was poorly understood, but some were crazy enough to ride it anyway, throwing their fates to the mercy of the Silverstream.

“There’s no way of predicting where we’ll end up, is there?” S had regained her composure a little, but her voice was taut with apprehension. She’d probably never encountered anything like this in her sterile, predictable, perfect Primean world.

“Nope. Just pray that we end up close enough to some semblance of civilization.”

And beg the stars that the aliens we encounter won’t be of the enslaving, flesh-eating, or kill-on-sight varieties.

Calexa’s thoughts ran to dire places, but out of consideration for her paying customer, she kept her mouth shut.