“How unlikely are they?” Aileen asked.
“Very. They are large enough to cover an entire system, for sure, but our normal-space and hyperspace are not perfectly aligned. For the storm to perfectly cover an entire system is improbable.”
“How long ago did the alert go out?” Aileen asked.
“Twenty-two minutes ago,” Khan answered.
“That’s six minutes after I left the meeting,” Aileen said slowly.
“Coincidence?” Adept Garani asked from behind her.
“Maybe,” Aileen said, thinking hard. It could be a coincidence, but her instincts told her otherwise. And she had survived for a long time by following her instincts. “The Sowir once blocked our communications through hyperspace. Does this look like that?”
Khan frowned and turned to his station, after a few swipes a series of graphs and things that Aileen couldn’t even begin to understand appeared. “It’s… it’s similar, for sure, but I don’t know what a hyperspace storm looks like. I have no point of reference.”
Aileen turned to the adept. “Get Björn, and activate protocol G-39,” Aileen ordered. The adept turned immediately and left running.
“Normal-space communications still work?” she asked Khan, who nodded.
“Get me the Jewel.”
A few seconds later, a hologram of Jewel’s Ship Master appeared.
“Sentinel?” Ship Master Vota asked from her command chair.
“Vota, I need you to get the ship ready for departure from the system, and for you to get the ship to high alert. We might not be leaving quietly,” Aileen ordered.
The Ship Master merely nodded and started executing her orders. “We’ll be ready to depart in ten.” With that, she closed the connection.
“Contact the shuttle crew at the port, let them know to be ready. Then go to the armory, get suited up, and meet me in the main room.”
Aileen turned and went straight for the armory, picking up her rifle and then going to the main room where she found Björn already dressed up in light armor. Adept Garani sat at the table and was checking his weapons.
“You sure that they are planning something?” Björn asked.
“No, but I’d rather err on the side of caution,” Aileen answered as she triggered the command for her Sentinel armor to go into combat mode. A few moments later, Khan, dressed in the same armor as Björn, joined them.
“Did you set everything up?” Aileen asked.
“Yes, I already put in the command,” Björn answered. That meant that all the Empire’s computers would delete their data, just as nanites were released to dismantle every piece of technology. The dismantling took a few minutes, so the data scrub was an added precaution.
“Alright. I might be wrong about all this, but I doubt that Erasi will change their minds. If I’m wrong, we’ll just wait out the remainder of the day on board the Jewel,” Aileen said.
“And if you are right?” Björn asked.
“Then they don’t want us to leave, or to contact our people. They might not know that we are aware of their reinforcements, so they need to keep us stalled until they are ready to attack.” Aileen looked around the room. “Let’s go, we’re using the back door,” she said, and started towards the room in the back of the compound. The Tarabat officials had offered the Empire a prime real estate as their embassy, but Adrian had refused and had purchased this compound. Under Erasi laws, that was acceptable, and the compound that he’d found had everything that they needed. It had once been a place of business for a criminal element, which was exactly why it suited them. It was in fact three small buildings smashed together. It had enough room for everything a diplomatic team would need, and it had been planned that trading elements from the Empire could set their business there as well for protection. Sadly, they hadn’t reached that point.
But one of the things that wasn’t on any scans of the buildings was the ‘back door.’ It had been added by the previous owners as a means of escape, and it would serve Aileen and her people now. She reached one of the back rooms and approached a wall. She put her hand on a seemingly ordinary piece of the wall, and a moment later a door slid open. She and her people entered and went down into the tunnel, which eventually led them to a small alley behind a building across the street from the Empire’s compound.
Aileen took the lead and they started towards the port, which was about twenty minutes away on foot. They stepped into the street and walked in the open. They didn’t really stand out that much; in their armor, the only thing that others would see was a biped, like the majority of other races. And they were among the throng of other aliens all moving about their business. Aileen debated calling for a grav-car but decided against it. She didn’t know if the Erasi were monitoring those services or not, and didn’t want to tip her hand. When they were about halfway to the port, three Erasi military shuttles flew over their heads going in the direction of the Empire’s compound.
“Pick up the pace,” Aileen said over their suit comms.
They started walking faster toward the port, but then Aileen noticed several transports moving towards the port.
“Crap,” she said, and opened a channel to the shuttle crew. “The Erasi are moving on you. Lift off and come pick us up.”
“We’ll be at your location in three minutes,” the shuttle pilot responded.
Aileen motioned for her group to take positions in a side alley and wait. The port might have defensive guns, but Aileen doubted that they would try to shoot the shuttle down; there was too much traffic and too large of chance of debris hitting the streets, a drawback of having a port in the middle of a city. A few minutes later, she saw the shuttle approach towards them on her HUD, and she commed and told the pilot to land in the street. Hopefully the people on the street would move.
Just as the shuttle was preparing to land, she saw it jerk upwards as three streaks of light entered her view. The first one missed, but the last two struck the shuttle’s shields and exploded, making a part of the shields visible and engulfing the shuttle in flames. For a moment, Aileen thought that the shields had failed, but after the explosions cleared, she saw that it was still there.
She quickly opened a channel. “Get to the Jewel right now,” Aileen ordered.
“I doubt that we can get to atmosphere, Sentinel,” the pilot said.
“Skim to the Jewel, don’t let them catch you,” Aileen ordered. She couldn’t believe that they had attacked the shuttle over the city, and she knew that it couldn’t stay there for even a second more. The Erasi seemed unconcerned with the damage they could inflict upon the city if they destroyed the shuttle.
“But that would… Yes, Sentinel,” the pilot responded, and closed the comms. He understood what skimming from the atmosphere would do to this part of the city. The pulse that occurred when a ship entered skim was much greater inside the atmosphere; the shuttle’s drives would blow all running electronics through a large radius around it. But Aileen saw no choice. Either the Erasi destroyed her shuttle, killing her people and who knew how many others on the ground, or they skimmed from the atmosphere. Which she knew would cause deaths as well; inside the range that the pulse would cover, shuttles and grav-cars would lose controls. But Aileen laid the blame for any death at the Erasi’s feet. They hadn’t even warned her shuttle to land, they’d just opened fire. Not that her people would’ve obeyed, but still. It told her that they were prepared to do anything to stop them from leaving or contacting her people.
Aileen then opened a comm to the Jewel. “Ship Master, as soon as you pick up the shuttle crew, you are to leave the system, skim away immediately, I don’t care about the damage that you could do; if you need to fight your way out, then do so. Get to Sol and let our people know. Hopefully you will be able to come get us later with more ships,” she ordered, just as the shuttle oriented towards the orbit while it evaded another wave of missiles.