“How old is that bounce?”
A brief delay, then Rose answers, “Four hours, LC.”
Shit. Mary help us, it’s going to be tight. I hope they have good SDIs, the kind with weapons, shields, and titanium plating.
“Wake Commander March and get him up here.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
On my own, I start powering up the phase drive. I want to be ready for jump the minute he slides his ass into the pilot’s chair. Then I bring up the star charts and start making the necessary translations, grimspace to straight space.
We’re here. Need to be there. Got it.
By the time March arrives at a dead run, still buttoning up his shirt, I’m ready to go. His hair is standing on end, but I don’t kill valuable time ribbing him about his dishevelment. As he sits down, I jack in.
His presence floods the nav com when he joins me. Since he just woke up, there are no partitions in place yet. He’s tumbled, inside and out.
Miss you.
Want you.
Love you, Jax.
The feelings deluge me, evoking a shudder. Mary, his loneliness hurts. Surely this qualifies as cruel and unusual. Just when I think I can’t bear to see any more of his quiet, private grief, he shuts it down. Iron curtain.
I expect him to acknowledge the lapse. Instead he offers, Don’t jump us right on top of Dobrinya. Put us out of sensor range.
Ambush? I guess.
That—and we can’t let them know we have a direct-jump-capable ship. If they find out, every Morgut vessel in the universe will receive our ion trail and come gunning for us.
I shiver again. I’ll take care of it.
The phase drive is already humming at capacity, and we’re good to go. This time, surrender comes easy. The drive roars through me, twisting into the nav com, and as one, we pull the ship into grimspace.
Heat pours through me, a volcanic mountain of it, but thanks to the neural blockers and the filter of the implant, I only experience a fraction of it, then I’m home. Magic. Chaos. Grimspace blazes to life inside my veins. Could be my imagination, but I swear each time I do a direct jump like this, using my body as the conduit, the magnetism in my blood gets a little stronger, like I could touch the view screen and alter the patterns swirling in such luscious, hypnotic hues.
But there’s never time to experiment when we pass through. We’re always on the way to somewhere else, where we’re needed urgently. Nobody ever comes to sightsee in grimspace, for good reason.
Dobrinya asteroid. But not too close. Minute calculations. Then I find the nearest beacon and look through. For an infinitesimal moment, it’s as though I can see in four dimensions, both where I am and where I need to be.
Easier, this time—practice really does make perfect. The phase drive responds to my call, and March inputs the commands that result in our arrival at the spot in grimspace from which we need to jump. Once more, we pass through in fire burning white-hot beneath my skin. I feel as though I could shoot lightning from my eyes.
Despite my customary shakiness, I unplug quickly. I don’t want him in my head any more than he has to be.
He’s already checking our coordinates. “This is perfect. We’ll be there in less than ten minutes, but they won’t see us coming until it’s too late. Will you be ready on lasers by the time we need you?”
I nod. “Ten minutes will do fine.”
With trembling fingers, I route the lasers to the cockpit and engage the targeting array. My aim will be for shit if we’re jumped right now, but I should steady up soon. To aid that, I breathe slowly and steadily, trying not to think about what lies before us.
Three Morgut ships.
Even if we take them by surprise, the odds don’t look good. The asteroid Dobrinya seems to grow larger as we close the distance, an enormous dun rock with orange striations, and bits of ice on its extremities. Trenches scar the surface, deep, dark pits wherein bots labor to bring forth the ore.
This is all that remains of Dobrinya’s moon.
Once, eons ago, it had a twin, but there was a collision, which caused a cataclysmic event. Life has not yet re-evolved to humanoid levels on planet, though Fugitive scientists found ruins with incredibly ancient technology. Some historians claim that the ones who seeded the galaxy, the ones who built the beacons, came first from Dobrinya. That’s about all I recollect from my universal history at the Academy.
The outpost clings to the top of the asteroid like an ant colony, a scrabble of buildings and machinery. Why anyone would choose to live this way escapes me, but obviously there’s money to be made. Someone has to sell the provisions and take care of cargo freighters that dock to carry away the ore. Someone has to provide goods and services to the maintenance crews who keep the place running.
“Computer, what do they mine here?” The question makes me miss Constance.
“Searching.” The vast lack of personality in its monotone reply makes me miss her even more. “Uranium,” it returns shortly.
Constance would’ve done a little thinking, tried to add that to what we know about the Morgut attacks and assimilate a pattern from it. Without her unusual autonomy, our ship can only offer exactly what we ask for, leaving us to connect the dots.
“Nanites and uranium,” I say aloud.
March follows my train of thought. “That doesn’t add up to anything good.”
“Definitely not.”
Nanites are used to perfect and improve biological organisms. Uranium is a high-powered fuel. The two together? I have the itchy feeling the Morgut are working on a hybrid; some kind of biomechanical intelligence that requires both. And if they succeed, it will go the worse for us. Because they’re already kicking our asses without such an advantage. Otherwise, I wonder why they want Evelyn Dasad so bad. And why are they interested in stockpiling uranium?