Chapter 112: Wanderer-7’s New High

Leo didn’t touch a throttle lever, and his boots didn’t press against any pedals.

Through the crystal cradles, his mind reached down into the newly forged heart of the ship, down past the reinforced Graventhal frames and the seven slate battleplates... going straight into the four violet-glowing iridium rings that Harper and Elena had bolted in ahead of the ion reaction chambers.

He could feel the power compressed inside them, wound tight like a steel spring waiting for someone to let it go.

The guide in the small of his back gave a sharp ecstatic twitch and pulled his whole awareness toward the far horizon.

’Let’s see what she can do...’ Leo thought.

He opened the throttle all the way.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The Wanderer-7 didn’t accelerate so much as detonate forward.

The four paired coils engaged at once, caught the raw boiling plasma exhaust, squeezed it four times tighter and fired it out through the rings in a continuous deafening roar of deep violet and turquoise fire.

WHAM!

The surge hit the hull like a fist and overwhelmed the inertial dampeners for one breathtaking fraction of a second.

Every person on the bridge was crushed flat into their seats.

Harper let out a breathless "OOF!" as the harness pinned her chest, Camila gasped and clutched her armrests while her dark curls whipped back off her face, Elena’s knuckles went bone-white on the console rail, and her jaw dropped in pure physical shock, while Aoi made a sharp strangled squeak as the force pressed her glasses flat against the bridge of her nose.

On the mezzanine step, Chloe simply slid a meter backward on her bottom with her sleeves flapping.

"Oh...?"

Outside the canopy, the stars stopped drifting and started to smear.

The cold pinpricks of light stretched into long radiant streaks of white and violet and rushed past the glass at a dizzying speed as the corvette tore through the vacuum.

BZZZT-PUMP!

Across the tactical hololith, the velocity readout shot straight up in a vertical spike.

[Acceleration: +22.4 km/s in 1.8 seconds!]

[Cruising Velocity: 6 km/s ? 28.4 km/s!]

[Hull Integrity: 100%]

Twenty-eight point four kilometers every second... It was a speed that turned asteroid fields into blurred grey ribbons and folded the long empty distances between worlds down to something a person could actually cross.

Deep in the command throne, with his dark hair whipping around his face and the raw thrumming power of the ship pouring straight through his nerves, Leo threw his head back against the leather and laughed.

"AHAHAHAHAHA!"

It was a loud wild roaring laugh of pure joy that rang across the whole bridge.

He couldn’t have stopped it if he’d tried... He’d been flying since the day he’d climbed into this throne, and he’d never once felt the ship want to go as badly as he did.

"HOLY HELL!" Harper screamed over the roar of the cooling fans, and her shock broke into a wild manic grin that split her freckled face from ear to ear. "LOOK AT THAT! THE REACTION MASS IS COMPRESSING AT NINETY-SIX PERCENT! SHE’S TELEPORTING!"

For one moment, she twisted around in her harness and looked straight at him, grinning, with her eyes shining then she seemed to remember something, and she turned back to her console.

CHIME!

[Cruising velocity increased by three hundred and seventy-three percent... This unit’s estimate of the Master Captain’s recklessness has been adjusted accordingly.]

The bridge broke into breathless disbelieving laughter.

Elena shook her head in dazed wonder, and Camila clapped her hands together with her whole face shining.

WHOOOOOSH!

Through the starboard canopy, a flash of neon violet light streaked across the dark.

The Mirage surged up alongside them with effortless liquid grace and rode the corvette’s plasma wake like a dolphin surfing the bow wave of a ship.

Its six thrusters purred at a high harmonic pitch, untroubled by the burn and its iridescent hull shifted from deep amethyst to shimmering magenta under the starlight as it banked in close and hung twenty meters off their forward quarter.

BZZZZZT-CLICK!

"WHOOOOOO-HOOOOOO!" Vexa’s scream nearly blew out the speakers, and she was laughing so hard they could hear her slapping her console. "LOOK AT THAT CHUBBY LITTLE GUNBOAT GO! I KNEW those coils would fit your manifold! You’re doing twenty-eight klicks and your stabilizers are barely twitching, Leo! That’s gorgeous! That’s absolutely GORGEOUS!"

Leo grinned with his hands resting easy in the cradles.

"She’s got good bones, Vexa! Don’t blink, or you’ll be eating our exhaust!"

"In your dreams, Captain Handsome!" Vexa giggled. "The Mirage doesn’t eat exhaust, she serves it! Keep that throttle pinned... The first jump corridor is a million kilometers out, and I want to see if you can hold this formation through the gravity shear without crying for your brakes!"

"She’s going to be insufferable for four days," Elena observed to no one in particular.

"She’s going to be insufferable forever," Harper muttered, without looking up from her targeting screen.

The turret reticle sat dead center on the Mirage’s tail and hadn’t moved a millimeter.

They tore through the dark together, two darts of gunmetal and purple cutting an unbroken furrow of fire across the cold silence of the outer sector...

At station three, Jin-Ah leaned forward with her dark bob falling over her brow and her fingers flying across her slate as she plotted their new course through the connected lanes.

The numbers settled into a clean finished ledger.

"Captain," she said, and her voice rose clearly over the hum of the conduits with a deep, quiet satisfaction. "At a sustained cruise of twenty-eight point four kilometers per second, I’ve recalculated our transit across the three intermediate systems to Nexus-Prime."

She looked up and met his eyes across the dais.

"The journey will take precisely four days and we’d even arrive on the fourth one if we’re this fast..."

The bridge settled into a quiet contented hum as the crew fell into their watches and the long burn began.

Dinner that first night was the loudest meal they’d ever had.

Camila had made something she called a celebration stew, which seemed to involve every vegetable her garden beds could spare and most of the dried peppers she’d haggled for on Driftmark, and she ladled it out in the little mess alcove off Deck One with a towel over her shoulder and her cheeks flushed from the stove.

The ship was so smooth now that nobody had to hold their bowls down.

Harper told the story of the cable winch three times, and it got better every time.

Elena corrected her about the tonnage twice and then gave up and let her exaggerate.

Jin-Ah read out the new fuel consumption figures, and somehow, in her flat precise voice, they sounded like poetry.

Chloe sat curled on the bench against Leo’s thigh with her mug of lemon water, swinging her boots and watching everyone with half-lidded contented eyes, like a cat by a fire.

Halfway through, Harper took her bowl and stood up.

"I’m gonna eat in the armory," she said. "Got a feed mechanism half apart down there..."

"Harper, sit down," Camila said gently. "The feed mechanism will still be there in twenty minutes."

"So will the stew." Harper flashed her a quick grin that didn’t reach her eyes, squeezed Camila’s shoulder on the way past and was gone down the companionway.

The table went a little quieter.

Elena watched the empty hatch with an odd unreadable expression and then went back to her bowl without a word while Leo put his spoon down, and Aoi, sitting across from him, shook her head very slightly.

’Why are women so confusing...? What does she want...?’

Leo picked his spoon back up.

’If she wants to say something, why not come up and say it?’

When the meal broke up, Elena stayed behind.

She wrapped two thick slices of Camila’s bread in a cloth napkin, added a twist of the pepper salt Harper liked and walked down to Deck Two with it held in front of her like a diplomatic document.

The armory hatch was open.

Harper was bent over the turret’s feed mechanism with her bowl of stew going cold on the bench beside her and the lathe was silent.

She wasn’t working at all... Harper was just standing there with a spanner in her hand, looking at nothing.

Elena set the napkin down on the bench beside the bowl.

Harper looked at it, and then at her. "What’s that?"

"Bread," Elena said. "You’ll find it goes with the stew you aren’t eating..."

"Did Camila send you?"

"Nobody sends me anywhere, Bell." Elena brushed a fleck of grease off the edge of the bench with one fingertip, frowned at it and wiped her finger on a rag. "I simply refuse to have my chief mechanic fainting into the coil housing because she was too busy sulking to eat... Those rings cost eighteen thousand Zuni."

For a second, Harper’s jaw worked like she was going to snap something back then the fight went out of her shoulders, and she picked up a slice of bread and tore off a corner.

"Thanks, Princess," she said, very quietly.

Elena paused at the hatch without turning around.

"Whatever it is," she said, "it’ll still be there after you’ve slept. Things generally are..."

Elena left, with her heels clicking away down the corridor, before Harper could see anything on her face that might have looked like concern.

Later, when the ship had dimmed into its rest cycle and the corridors glowed a soft low amber, Leo climbed back up to the bridge and found Aoi alone in the cartography pit.

She was standing in front of the three-dimensional star map with her hands folded behind her back, watching the blue flight vector unroll across four days of empty space.

Her glasses caught the pale shifting light of the chart, and in the quiet she looked younger than she did in the daytime, and more tired.

"You should be asleep..." he said from the top of the steps.

"So should you." She didn’t turn around, but he could hear her smiling. "I wanted to see the route once more without anyone talking over it. It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Three systems... I used to teach students about lanes like these from textbooks, and I never once thought I’d see one."

Leo came down into the pit and stood beside her then he reached into his jacket and took out the folded paper.

"I got you something on Driftmark."

Aoi looked down at it then very slowly she took it from his hand and unfolded it.

It was the star chart from the stall, printed on real heavy paper, with the lanes inked in fine silver lines and the systems marked in a careful old-fashioned hand.

The one she’d touched and then walked away from.

’A-ah...’

For a long moment, she didn’t say anything at all.

"You saw that," She said finally with her ears turning red.

"I see most things you look at for that long."

She ran her fingertips along one of the silver lanes, exactly the way she had at the stall, and he watched her throat move as she swallowed.

When she looked up at him, her dark eyes were bright behind her glasses.

"Nobody has bought me a present since my mother..." she said. "I’d forgotten what it feels like."

"Well," Leo said, and his ears were going warm, "now you remember."

She laughed under her breath as she folded the chart back along its creases with great care and held it against her chest with both hands, and for a second, he thought she was going to say something else.

Her lips parted as her eyes dropped to his mouth and came back up again.

"Goodnight Leo..."

"Goodnight, Aoi."

He climbed the steps and left her there, and he didn’t look back, which was probably the only reason he made it to his own cabin.

Down in the cartography pit, Aoi stood alone in front of the glowing map with the paper chart pressed against her heart.

She looked at the four glowing segments of the transit line.

...One day... Two days... Three days... Four days...

A soft warmth began to rise from beneath the collar of her navy tunic, crept slowly up the slender column of her throat and dusted the tips of her ears in a delicate burning rose.

"E-eh... Stop being so embarrassing..."

She stood perfectly still in the quiet pit with her heart skipping a strange fragile beat against her ribs, and she realized that she wasn’t counting the days until they reached the planet.

She was counting the nights.