It also increased — more than marginally — your chances of being eaten by pirates. Gobbled up, left as a few trace elements floating next to the burned-out husk of your ship. Those fuckers waited for ships to jump in. Sometimes by a Bridge, if the pirates were well-prepared, sometimes farther out if they were a lone skiff. Preyed on the few smaller ships still using Endless Drives.
Well, that’s a depressing-as-fuck line of thinking. “You happy with that, Helm?”
“I’m happy with that, Captain,” she said. “Clear for jump?”
“Clear for jump,” he said. Nate felt the thrill. He’d jumped a hundred, a thousand times before, but it never got old. He’d been on a rollercoaster on some frontier world, an attraction with mag sleds and high G. It couldn’t touch the feeling of a jump, and he’d once wondered for a hot second whether he should get in the business of taking people on pleasure trips for the rush. Then discarded the idea, because that meant passengers, and passengers meant people, and hell was other people.
El clicked the comm controls on the dash. “Helm to Tyche. Jump in thirty seconds.” She checked the display, then said, “Hope, get your ass in a crash couch.”
The comm clicked back. “They’re gone?” Hope’s voice sounded hollow, because she was hiding under the cowling of one of the fusion drives.
“They’re gone, kid,” said El. “Get out of that damn engine.”
Nate caught her smile, felt it on his own face. He pressed his own comm controls. “You best say a nice thank-you to Grace,” he said. “Also, talk to the Tyche about why the reactor’s warm.”
“Will do, Cap,” said Hope, and then a click as she signed off. No doubt scrambling for her acceleration couch.
“Captain to Tyche. Captain to Tyche. Helm is clear for jump. Confirm readiness.” He drummed his fingers on the console.
Grace’s voice came first. “Ready, Tyche.”
Hope: “Good to go, Cap.”
Kohl’s voice came last. “Fuck’s sake. Fly, already.”
Nate smiled, clicked the comm off. Looked at El. “Helm, you are clear for Jump.”
“Aye, Captain,” said El. Nate watched her hands reach for the sticks, felt the grumble of the Tyche’s engines through his chair. The soft hand of acceleration pressed against his back, became a firm hand as the holo display shifted again, delta-v from Enia Alpha sidling next to absolute velocity. The hand turned into a strong arm, his head pressing against the back of his couch. “Burn is good, 3Gs, locked in.” El’s voice was strained now, because 3Gs wasn’t like a walk in the park. It was a lot more than the flimsy 0.9G of Enia Alpha, and Nate felt his joints complain. Goddamn. We should have stayed for two weeks. While the Endless Drive didn’t need velocity as a push start, the distance between them and the gravity well of Enia Alpha would stop the Endless Drive from exploding. After a moment, the holo stage cleared, then words filled the space: CLEAR FOR JUMP.
“Negative space bow wave forming,” said El. “All hands, bow wave is stable. Route is green. In three.” Accompanying her words, the big number 3 lit the air between them. “Two.” The number shifted to a big 2, this time flashing.
Kohl’s voice, from the comm, half a holler, half a cheer. All whoop, all adrenaline. Because this was a jump, and jumps were … jumps.
“One,” said El. “Jumping.”
Space in front of the window stretched, pulled, and Nate felt—
His hair, every fiber of it. The skin of his body, a soft glove for all his essence. His arm and leg, whole again, no longer metal. No pain. The pure thrill of acceleration, impossible, unbelievable acceleration. He couldn’t feel it. He was it. He was everything. He was the universe.
Stars stretched, made points of light that streaked past the Tyche’s cockpit.
They jumped.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The air felt hot, charged, like a storm was coming. Nate told himself it was just the after-effects of the jumps. Three down. Four to go. Jumps in quick succession played hell with your view of life. He’d been briefed a long time ago — a long, long time, when he still had two flesh and blood hands that served the Emperor — that it was something to do with human consciousness. About how time was intrinsic to the human condition and that faster than light travel broke all the perceptions of time. The problem, a sergeant with too much attitude and too little love for his squad had explained, was this: going between two points instantaneously was easy. Having sane people on the other side of that jump? Impossible.
The sergeant had gone on to yell at other people, while Nate had gone on to the Emperor’s Black. But the sergeant wasn’t wrong, he was just an asshole. Humans spent all their time breaking the laws of the universe, but they couldn’t break the rules that governed themselves.
“Jump was clean,” said El. She looked at him sideways, hands still on the controls. “Air feel hot to you?”
“I thought it was just post-jump blues,” said Nate.
“No, air’s hot,” she said. Tapped at the console, the holo between them changing. Systems reports cascaded across the display. Life support, green. Hull, green. Fusion drives, green. Minor systems like the auto galley, green. Endless Drive, green and mean, chafing at the stars for another bite at them. Reactor, not green.
Reactor: yellow.
“Hope,” said El. “Hope, we’re reading yellow on the reactor. What’s the situation where you are?”
The comm burst with static — a thing in itself inherently bad — and then Hope’s voice game back to them, worry clear even with the noise on the channel. “Reactor’s not happy. Reactor is unhappy. Also, it’s really hot in here.”
“We get the temperature shift too,” said El. “I’ve got green across the board everywhere else, but that doesn’t mean shit if we can’t muster the juice to make another jump.”
“I got you,” said Hope. “Give me five.”
“You got five. Take all the time you need,” said El, clicking the comm off.
Nate clicked on his own console. Time to find out where in the universe they were. Three jumps in put them in a shitty backwater system, nothing here but hunks of rock floating around a binary star. It had been tagged and bagged, dismissed as useless except to miners, and low value to them, the rocks holding junk iron and some silicates. Hell, the system was near valueless, no high value metals like platinum or fissionables on record. The rocks weren’t even that big. Nothing you could call a planet, nothing with an atmosphere. Terraforming was good business, they’d turned the toxic sludge of Earth’s oceans back to a brilliant blue, but you needed something to work with. Air, for one. You could make your own air, but that took more time than was profitable for the quick-wins corp mindset. None of these rocks were big enough to hold their own air. Sure, they were big enough to hammer the Tyche flat like a bent nail, just not big enough to set up a mining rig on. It’d be ships out here, mining lasers, inflatable sails to catch the debris. And that was low value work, for low value crews. Hell, it’d be great if no one was here at all.