Peter Delaney
This was suicide. I kept repeating that over and over to myself – but it didn’t change the fact that we were still en route to the dark zone.
We’d just arrived.
My entire crew was tense. I needed to be out there on the bridge with them, but instead I was in my office. I stood with my hands clutched behind my back, my face directed out of the porthole. I stared at space.
I was more comfortable in dark zones – not that I would admit that to anyone. But they were what space truly was. They were space without the veneer of modernity. They were the cold void – uninviting and waiting to rip you apart.
I stared at it just as the computer beeped. “We have detected a drain on engines,” my second-in-command warned. His voice shook with real fear. He’d once been on a heavy cruiser that had been completely destroyed by the infinity drive.
I nodded. “Continue.”
“Sir—”
“Continue,” I said, my voice snapping around the room.
The communication ended.
I opened my eyes again and stared at the void. I waited for it to reach out and swallow me. I clenched my hands into fists. My nails went right back into the indents I’d already created in my palms. They were still there, getting deeper. Perhaps I should’ve gone to the med bay and got them fixed, but it didn’t matter. Scars had a point. Scars showed that you could put up with pain.
So I just forced my nails in harder until there was another beep.
“Sir, we’ve detected something,” it was my second-in-command again, and he was breathless.
My eyes opened wide. “What?”
“A ship has just opened up some kind of… jump route. It’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen—”
“Is it still open?”
“Yes – but we are approximately 10 minutes away from it.”
“Use absolutely everything we have to get there as fast as we can,” I whispered. It was telling that I wasn’t using the full volume of my voice. When interacting with my crew, I did so like a gun to their heads. Now I couldn’t manage it.
I was relieved that I was right – though maybe I wasn’t completely. Maybe I would have preferred if I’d been wrong and Scott had been somewhere else in the galaxy – far away from danger. But the last hope I had that he could be good had already withered up and died.
“We’re en route to the jump point now.”
“Is it a permanent jump route, or does it close off?” I demanded.
“It appears to be permanent.”
“Do everything you can to fight off the draining of our engines. It doesn’t matter how many energy crystals you have to use – you will get us there.”
“Yes, sir.”
I closed my eyes as the communication ended. I opened them and stared back at space. I smiled.
All a man has to do to truly live his life is find out what he must do next.
And I knew.
I knew every step I would have to take, every gun I would have to fire, and every man I would have to kill.