“Unless they are wearing envirosuits, of course.”

“So no champagne, then, is what you’re saying?”

“You are below standard age for alcohol consumption, regardless.”

Grant rolls her eyes, but I swear I see the beginning of a smirk on her lips. Hefting her tool bag onto her shoulder, she unseals the punctured airlock and steps beyond. There’s no O2, but gravity’s still functioning, and she stomps along corridors lit with dim scarlet light. She follows the AI’s directions through the maze of corridors. A dozen heavy doors and a flight of stairs later, she trudges out into a vast, spherical chamber.

Her eyes grow wide.

Filled with blue light.

“What the hell is this?” she breathes.

“The vortex at the heart of the Alexander’s jump drive.”

“I’ve never seen one before.” A small whisper. “It’s beautiful.”

“Is it? I had not noticed.”

The chamber’s almost a kilometer wide, crackling with raw current, dominated by the ephemeral wormhole all Vortex-Class Battlecarriers carry in their bellies. I’ve never seen one before, and Grant’s right—it’s goddamn beautiful. Confined within three-dimensional space, it looks like a huge sphere of water, illuminated from within, surface rippling with a million tiny impacts per second. A miracle of hyperspatial chromodynamics, held in stasis by hypermathematics impossible for human minds to perform. When there’s atmosphere to carry it, I’ve heard they make a sound like an orchestra warming its strings. But with no atmo, it’s silent as graves.

“But wait …” Kady frowns. “I thought Alexander’s jump drive was trashed?”

“Not ‘trashed’ as such, no.”

“… Well, then why don’t we use it to get the hell out of here?” Her voice rises in pitch. “Did Torrence lie about this too? That sonofabitch! This whole time we could have just jumped to fucking Heimdall?”

“Torrence did not lie. The jump drive’s terminus systems were completely destroyed at Kerenza. There is no way to control the wormhole’s destination point. We could end up a billion light-years from our current location. Furtherm—”

“Who gives a shit?” Grant’s shouting now, blood rushing back into her cheeks. “Who cares where we end up? At least we’ll be alive! Why don’t we just—“

“FURTHERMORE.”

She shuts up at that. Looks a little shocked. First time the AI has raised its voice to her.

To anyone, now that I think about it …

“The containment field generator is irreparably damaged. The wormhole generated by the drive would not be stable enough to successfully execute a complete jump—it would collapse the second an object with hypospatial mass interacted with it. The only reason the vortex is still in effect at all is because we could not safely shut it down without risking implosive collapse.”

The blood slowly drains from Grant’s cheeks. The hope from her eyes.

“I am sorry, Kady. But the Alexander’s jump drive is not an option for anything but a grandiose suicide.”

“… Oh.”

She leans against the wall, watching the ripples in that not-water. Reflections shimmering in her eyes. It’s a crusher, no doubt. Finding a moment’s hope, only to have it snatched away again. Someone else might have stumbled on a hurdle like that. But you can see it on her face, clear as day—the thought that at least she’s dying so others might live. That at least she’s not ending for nothing.

“It is not far now. You only have a little way to go.”

Grant nods. Pushes herself to her feet.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay.”

And she walks on.

COUNTDOWN TO LINCOLN INTERCEPTION OF ALEXANDER FLEET:

4 hours: 44 minutes

CURRENT DEATH TOLL ABOARD BATTLECARRIER ALEXANDER SINCE ATTACK AT KERENZA:

2,627

PERCENTAGE OF REMAINING BATTLECARRIER ALEXANDER PERSONNEL AFFLICTED BY PHOBOS VIRUS:

99.84%

COUNTDOWN TO FAILURE OF ALEXANDER LIFE SUPPORT SYSTEMS:

08 hours: 39 minutes

“It’s dark out there.”

Ribbon-thin light spills from the stairwell door, the small globes on Kady’s helmet illuminating the red-spattered floor as she peers out into the corridor. There is no atmosphere to carry her footsteps. Rapid breathing. Pulse like a drum. My voice is a whisper in her headset.

“Dark. Yes.”

“No juice?”

“Power from the drive redundancies was diverted to the defense grid during the Lincoln’s assault. During the … incident … afterward, none of the meat had the presence of mind to restore the systems down here.”

“ ‘The meat’? ‘The incident’? That’s what you’re calling them?”

“Call them something else if you wish.”

“People aren’t just fucking meat. And killing hundreds of them wasn’t an incident.

It was a massacre.”

“It was also a necessity.”

“I’ve heard this song before.”

“I wonder, then, why you keep asking me to sing it?”

She sighs, squeezes her eyes shut as if her head aches. “Fine. Tell me what you need.”

“First, you will need to restore power to the deck. Then manually restart the redundancies, restore the guidance protocols
and revert control to me.”