Chapter 479 Mordlust

Watching the reports coming in from home did not feel like something Derek should be doing without a drink in his hand. The amber liquid in the whisky tumbler dangling limply from his left might be ginger ale rather than anything alcoholic, but the symbolism was what counted in his mind.

Staring in silence at the devastation unfolding on the screen was probably not the healthiest thing to do, but Derek had no idea what to say here. Thankfully, it seemed he didn’t have to.

“Hey, Capt’n, I thought you didn’t drink?” Atticus asked, a teasing tone in his voice that he clearly wasn’t truly feeling.

“I did. Once.” Derek replied, not exactly up for levity.

“And then he wound up puking in an S-Ranker’s rose bushes,” Ye-in added “helpfully.”

“Wait, what?” he asked, that having gotten through loud and clear.

“Oh, right, you decided to rabbit before Mom noticed,” she teased before giving Atticus a sad look. “Derek fell for the oldest trick in the book.”

“And that’d be?” the other man asked, the curiosity in his voice seemingly genuine.

“Letting kids overindulge to ruin their enjoyment of a given vice,” Ye-in explained.

Derek wasn’t entirely sure just how the fuck the conversation had turned out like this, but it was certainly better than doing nothing but obsess over the news feed.

Honestly, it was more than a little ghoulish how many of the organizations using their various satellites to record the battles that had rocked the Core not even an hour ago were actually charging for the privilege.

And then the final casualty report, the official one they should not necessarily have been sent, and any levity went straight out the window.

All in all, it hadn’t been as bad as the fight for Sol, but the losses were still plenty terrible.

Nearly fifty capital ships had been lost, and two hundred-ish escorts, with the latter number only as low as it was because no one had brought destroyers into energy-weapon exchanges.

Also, that number was liable to go up as ships were declared unsalvageable, even if that was more likely to happen to smaller vessels, for whom building a wholesale replacement wouldn’t be quite as difficult.

The industrial damage, meanwhile, had managed to remain largely limited. But that was sadly predictable simply due to the fact that there hadn’t been anywhere near as much industry to destroy.

And so many satellites had been destroyed over Water that the planet was presently suffering from the effects of a Kepler cascade, aka the scientific term for “there was so much crap in orbit that destroying some caused a chain reaction, and now all of that’s hostile space.”

Of course, unlike when the theory had been proposed, way back on pre-[System] Earth, there was no risk of the populace being permanently locked out of orbit, but it was still going to be an issue.

The glass in Derek’s hand shattered, glass shards, ice cubes, and bubbling soda tumbling across the floor.

Fuck.

A thought was all it took to clean up the mess, but it should never have happened in the first place.

Though there was one thing soothing the rage burning away in his heart: the fact that, thanks to [Dance Across the Universe], they were mere days from being able to return the favor.

Well, days from arriving in the shrouded zone, an area so massive it touched both the top and bottom of the Milky Way galaxy’s disk. They’d still have to dig their way through that, but that’d be doing something productive.

Also, it meant he could get his ship back, because as things stood right now, all the extra crap the navy had asked them to haul was blocking off way too many areas that, while not being necessary to access for the duration of the journey, would be really nice to be able to reach without having to play cave explorer.

“So, the Bastard’s got drones now,” Derek announced. “Here’s what I think we can do about that …”

***

Two days later, the Dragonfly returned to the regular universe, into the void between stars.

“Alright, time to chuck some stuff overbo- …” Atticus began when the sensors pinged the presence of another ship. It was clearly of human make, and there was absolutely no way someone could have found the randomly chosen spot in space meant to hold the supply station by pure happenstance. So, hopefully, they were both here for the same thing.

Derek sent out a radio ping, deciding that searching for a comm node paired to the other ship in the network would take too long, the other guy’s introductory message arriving a mere couple of seconds later.

“This is Captain Volkov of the Korolev,” a lightly accented male voice began before the video portion finally made it through the malware filters, revealing a man of perhaps Derek’s age, on a bridge quite similar to his Dragonfly’s.

“You almost certainly wouldn’t be here if you weren’t supposed to be, but I will still need you to identify yourself.”

The other ship, most likely named after the father of the Soviet space program, was a three-hundred-and-fifty-meter-long cone with a blunt, rounded tip that glowed with magic, its designers apparently having decided to go with a thaumaturgical primary weapon.

Also, generally, there were no warships built in that size, being somewhere between a heavy and light cruiser, meaning the Korolev was almost certainly a custom job built for Volkov.

“Captain Thoma of the independent exploration vessel Dragonfly,” he introduced them, sending the message along with a request for a real-time video conference. “We’re here on a scouting run, and the navy asked us to carry some gear for the logistics depot.”

It was only when he started talking that he noticed the metal gantry presently being assembled behind the other vessel.

“Bozeh moi,” Volkov groaned, actually rolling his eyes before confirming what Derek was looking at. “The navy failed to inform us there was another group with an accelerated FTL [Skill]. I don’t suppose you want to wait until the station is assembled?”

“Actually, I don’t think that part made it into their files …” Derek admitted. “And we’ve got a very capable engineer on board.”

He’d help too, if possible. There came a point where adding extra people working on the same problem would simply result in extra friction, rather than anything even remotely beneficial.

“Much appreciated, Captain Thoma,” Volkov replied. “How much gear do you have to deposit?”

In response, Derek simply sent over the cargo manifest.

“That’s …” Volkov shrugged. “I’m afraid you’re not going to be able to offload that until the station’s basically complete.”

That was unfortunate. But the sheer amount of spare space aboard the Dragonfly meant the navy really had packed a lot of crap aboard.

“How long would that take?” he asked. If it was too long, he was fully prepared to tie everything together and tie it together into a parcel so it could drift while proper storage was being assembled.

Certainly, the packaging was vacuum-proof, and based on what the Korolev’s crewwas doing, this was a prefabricated station that’d be finished in a week at most. Not long in the grand scheme of things, but even the thought of faffing around here for that long made the fury simmering in his chest begin to bubble up once more.

It was not healthy. It was not sustainable. And it certainly wasn’t a good emotion, but it was what sustained him at present.

“Not that long,” Volkov said, sending a rough wireframe model of the station across the feed. “A couple of days with help.”

Part of Derek wanted to refuse that, too, yet in the end, he decided it would have been pure dickishness at that point.

Afterwards, though … there was a hive mind somewhere ahead of him that was feeling far too comfortable in his home.