Chapter Twenty-Seven

Cira

Terra-Sol date unknown

Grim satisfaction suffused Cira as Riston embraced the role ze’d been given. Maybe it was only temporary, but the significance of Erryla’s decision couldn’t be understated. A stowaway was serving on the bridge.

She took a moment to scan the faces of the other officers, watching their reactions to seeing Riston in such an honored position. It shouldn’t have been surprising that, aside from some heavy skepticism, the crew didn’t seem to care; Riston’s presence was low on the list of problems to be dealt with. Like establishing an active connection to something. Anything.

Her station was responsible for monitoring long-range sensors and communications, a job made difficult by whatever Lasalia’s programs had done to the system and made nearly impossible by the fact that there was nothing out here. At least when they were in occupied territory, signals and signs of life populated the screens. Novis hadn’t been able to connect to any of them before the jump, but they were there.

Not anymore. Novis had landed in a void between stars. The only signals coming in were repeating blips so weak they were just as likely to be cosmic noise as signals from distant ships. This was why the quadrant had repeaters, relays, and signal stations everywhere; it was the only way to create the speed and reach of transdimensional communication. Without that technological assistance, without even the dubious use of out-of-date satellite transmitters, they were forced to rely on technology as old as or older than the galaxy itself: radio waves.

The farther out Cira scanned, the worse she felt. A ball of fear as cold as the space they were surrounded by was settling in her stomach. There really was nothing out here but emptiness. Not even one of the other missing ships.

Her gestures and commands slowed, and her gaze slipped away from the disturbing blankness of the signal maps covering her displays.

Then she got an idea. Cira began sifting through settings and controls, looking for any way to increase the range or sensitivity of the sensors. The current upper limit, without signal boosters to rely on, was only a couple of light-years. She thought there might be a way to get at least another light-year or so out of the system if she could only remember the right commands. And if there was enough power in Novis to allow it.

Finally, Cira finished reconfiguring the sensors and began the sweep again. It would take a few minutes for the first bits of data to come back. Waiting was the worst, especially with nothing to distract her from the reality of her situation.

Had she played a part in this? She’d brought the kids on board because she wanted to help, to save what lives could be saved, but her motivations hadn’t been wholly selfless. It’d been a way to weild authority in a universe that wouldn’t listen. Each stowaway she’d saved had helped her feel more in control, and there had been times she’d felt almost smug about the deception she was getting away with despite everyone’s watchfulness and intelligence. The rules she’d flouted and the laws she’d flat-out broken hadn’t mattered; she’d been so sure she knew better. No one had caught her or Adrienn—until Lasalia came on board, no one had come close to catching them—and that had thrilled Cira. Some days, it had made her feel like she really might be able to change the whole quadrant one day. And yet…

It’d made so much more sense to blame the early thefts on Riston. If the kids hadn’t been on the ship, would Lasalia have been caught sooner? Maybe. Then again…maybe it would’ve been worse if Lasalia had been the only ghost haunting their halls. Maybe the ship would’ve disappeared as fast as Feris had. Maybe it had only been the presence of Riston, Shadow, Treble, Greenie, and Mika that allowed Novis a chance to leave behind a crumb of information for the rest of the fleet to find and follow.

There was no way to know for sure which was true, but that didn’t make the guilt any less real or any easier to bear. Her decisions may very well have left them all more vulnerable to this attack, and now they were stranded and struggling to deal with the fallout.

For the first time in her life, Cira understood how an action could be just as selfish as it was selfless. Hers had been for years.

The situation could be worse, she reminded herself. Pax ships were built to be self-sustaining and long-range. There were supplies on board to last a long while and the means to grow or create more. In addition, the crew was brilliant, resourceful, and strong. If there was a way for them to return to where they’d started, the Novis crew would find it, and until then, they would work together to endure. And, as an additional measure of good to balance the cargo holds of bad that had been dumped on them, there was Riston. She glanced across the bridge toward zem, barely able to believe ze was here, finally part of the crew like ze’d dreamed of for so long. It was as gratifying as it was terrifying.

And then Riston’s posture went rigid. “Umm…Captain?” Riston’s voice shook, and so did Cira’s hands when she noticed. “I have an update on our position.”

Unlike the slow ripples of silence that had spread out from Riston in other moments, this time it overtook the bridge in a flash. Even Erryla stopped midsentence to focus on zem. She turned and closed in on Riston’s station. “Is any of it good news?”

Cira wished she was close enough to reach out to zem when, for an instant, Riston looked scared to the point of passing out. “N-no, sir.”

“Then give me the bad news,” Erryla said heavily.

“I, uhh.” Riston cleared zir throat and began again. “I started with the relative position of the cataloged pulsars we could trace, and according to my calculations…we’re well over ninety-five thousand light-years away from Paxis.”

“Ninety-five thousand?” Ma’s usual control was gone. Horrified incredulity filled every word. “I knew we’d gone far, but… Are you sure?”

Riston nodded. “Yes, sir. From what I’ve gathered, we’re barely inside the boundaries of the Milky Way.”

In the moment that followed, the loudest sounds in the room were the pings of incoming alerts and the sniffs as several of the crew lost the fight to hold back tears. Cira couldn’t cry. Her throat tightened, but tears wouldn’t come. That would change eventually, after reality had sunk in or after she’d finally gotten some real sleep instead of trauma-induced unconsciousness. The pit that would try to capture her then would be nearly impossible to climb out of if she let herself fall too far. But that would only come later.

“Ninety-five thousand light-years. And that’s assuming we could travel in a straight line,” Erryla said. “Am I right in assuming a straight path isn’t possible because of the galactic center?”

“Yes, sir.” Riston tried to enter a command. When it didn’t work, ze closed zir eyes, bit zir lip, and tried again, slower. A map of the galaxy appeared on the bridge’s main display. “The jump literally put us on the opposite end of the galaxy from where we were.”

Cira closed her eyes. The burn of impending tears got worse. With the mass of the black hole at the center between them and home, they’d have to go around it and every other obstacle in their path. All several million of them, if Cira had to guess and round down.

Although, it probably didn’t matter. Every route would mean decades of travel before they reached even the outer edges of occupied space, and that was without taking into account period stops for repairs or gathering supplies from habitable planets. So much could change by the time they returned. The way the war had been going recently, there might not be much of an occupied quadrant left.

The whole situation made her current role more important and more precarious. She couldn’t act with her own goals in mind anymore. Every action each person took from this point forward would have immediate consequences. Something as simple as not starting a water ration early enough could kill in a situation like this. One wrong decision could begin a chain reaction that cascaded out of control faster than anyone could stop. Just like the one that had landed them out here in the first place.

An alert rose in the holofield above her display, the yellow bright against a field of blue. It captured her attention and got her hands moving again. Something was out there, but the computer wasn’t sure what. It was compiling information on composition estimates, distance, volume, and size and comparing that data to a record of every ship and celestial body humanity had ever encountered.

Probable Match: Pax Feris

Certainty: 62.3%

Of all the emotions she expected to tip her over the edge, relief wasn’t it, and yet the words hovering in front of her began to blur as tears gathered. The certainty percentage was so much lower than she was used to seeing from the computer, but given where they were, it was unlikely that the computer could be wrong.

“Sensors found a ship at the outer limit of their range.” Cira wiped her eyes with her left hand and tried reaching for a display command with her right. She winced as something in the elbow of her cybernetic arm sparked. Stars, as soon she had the chance, she really had to get Mama and Adrienn to fix whatever had broken in her arm. Gritting her teeth against the sharp glints of pain traveling up into her shoulder, she turned the chair and completed the command with her left hand. “The computer is over sixty percent certain it’s Pax Feris.”

“Botran.” Relief lightened Erryla’s words. Someone was out there. “Is Pax Amitis in range?”

“No.” Cira couldn’t force the sensors to be better or reach farther, but she scanned, and reset, and scanned, and reset, and scanned, and—“Nothing. There’s…there is absolutely nothing else here. Without any real reference points, it’s hard to even know where ‘here’ is.”

But wherever they were, they’d better figure out how to keep the ship in one piece because it would be a long, long time before any of them walked familiar ground again.