Caldswell, still in symbiont form but with the scales off his head, had already occupied the captain’s chair. Mabel was nowhere to be seen, which probably meant she was back with the engine, but Basil and Hyrek were standing on either side of the captain. All three of them were staring at a big display screen covered in xith’cal chicken scratch and a big, round shape surrounded by a red cloud. As I got closer, though, I realized the haze on the screen wasn’t a cloud. It was dots, thousands of little red dots so close together they blended into a whole.
“Let me guess,” I said, pointing at the big round thing. “That’s the tribe ship”—I moved my finger to the thousands of red dots—“and those are the lelgis.”
“We’re doomed,” Basil moaned. “The xith’cal were fighting them before, but then everything stopped. Now they’re just sitting out there like hawks waiting for us to leave the nest.”
“Flying into that is not an option,” Caldswell agreed. “We’re just going to have to jump from here.”
“Are you crazy?” I shouted at the same time as Basil’s terrified squawk. “We can’t jump from inside a tribe ship! Every bit of debris is a variable in the jump equation, right? Even if we had a gate all to ourselves, which we don’t, we couldn’t figure a safe jump from a dirty floor inside a ship filled with atmosphere. The margin of error from the dust in the air alone is enough to get us lost in hyperspace for a hundred years!”
“You’d rather die to lelgis?” Caldswell asked, hitting a button on the enormously complicated panel beside him. “And we do have a gate to ourselves. Xith’cal tribe ships have hyperspace computers that provide far more accurate computations than our own gates can manage.”
“I thought we couldn’t get into the xith’cal computer,” I said.
We couldn’t before, Hyrek typed at me. But there’s no one left to stop us now, is there?
I stared down at the captain, who was sitting in the chair, working the xith’cal console like an old hand. “How do you know all of this?”
“Before my current employment, I was one of the captains the Republic Starfleet charged with stopping the xith’cal,” Caldswell replied. “I picked up a few things.” He glanced at Nova. “I’m sending you the jump coordinates now. How fast can we fly?”
“I’ve already got all the ship’s variables in, I think,” Nova replied, biting her lip as she fed the captain’s coordinates into her wall of incomprehensible math. “I’ve never worked with a system like this before.” She turned and flashed us a nervous smile over her shoulder. “Will a fifteen percent margin be acceptable?”
“I’ll take those odds,” Caldswell said, tapping a xith’cal-sized button at the top of his console. “Hold on tight.”
I felt the familiar vibrations of a hyperdrive coil spinning up. Xith’cal coils must have been better than ours, though, because the jump flash washed over us almost immediately, and as it finished, the whole ship tipped.
There’s usually a little bump when you enter hyperspace. This time, though, it was more like a mountain. The xith’cal ship lurched and rolled, dumping us sideways before the gravity cut out. But the turbulence lasted only a few seconds before the stillness of hyperspace took over, settling everything. The gravity came back a few moments later, dropping us to the floor.
“Where are we going?” I asked, pushing myself up.
“Dark Star Station,” Caldswell said, pulling himself to his feet. “The lelgis can track a ship through hyperspace, so we can’t outrun them with a jump. All we can do is go somewhere they won’t follow.”
I almost choked. According to Brenton, Dark Star Station was Eye headquarters, and Maat’s prison. “I can’t go there,” I said quickly.
The captain looked at me, but I held my tongue. He might be sitting around in his scales like it was no big deal, but saying Maat’s name in front of the crew still felt too dangerous for words. Fortunately, it didn’t seem necessary. Caldswell was already on the move. “I figured you couldn’t,” he said, hopping out of his chair. “That’s why we’re dumping you first.”
“Excuse me?” I said, but Caldswell was already jogging off toward the rear of the ship. “What do you mean, dumping?” I demanded, running down the hall after him.
“The only reason we were able to jump before they blasted us was because the lelgis didn’t want to risk getting near the infected tribe ship,” Caldswell said. “But even though they didn’t see us leave, they certainly felt us. Jumping from inside got us a head start, though, and I intend to make the most of it.”
By this point we’d reached the rear of the small ship. It was a crowded storage area not unlike the Fool’s cargo bay, but much smaller and mostly taken up by what looked like an escape pod, which Caldswell immediately started unhooking.
“The coordinates I gave Nova were for two jumps,” Caldswell said, hitting the winch that lowered the emergency ship. “The second is to the Dark Star. The first is to a nice, crowded little Republic cash system just inside civilized space.”
My eyes went wide. Cash systems were nothing but automated farming planets. They normally didn’t even have defense grids, much less anything that could stop the lelgis. “Why the hell would you do that?”
“Because that’s where you’ll be getting out,” Caldswell answered, jumping down to the lower bay where the tiny ship was now waiting. “We’re going to stop, dump you, and jump again before the lelgis can catch up. With any luck, they’ll be too busy chasing the target they expect to look for one they don’t.”
“Hold up,” I said. “You’re going to leave hyperspace, kick me out in the middle of nowhere, and then jump again in the hope the lelgis keep chasing you?” Caldswell nodded, and I gaped at him. “That’s a terrible plan!”
“Terrible plans are what we’ve got,” Caldswell said, opening the emergency ship’s glass canopy. “Get in.”
I didn’t want to do any such thing, but I didn’t want to stay here and fight with Caldswell either. So, with a long breath, I jumped down onto the lower deck beside him and hauled myself into the tiny alien escape pod. I was trying to figure out how I was supposed to sit on the xith’cal’s strange, long bench seat when I realized Rupert was getting in, too.
I hadn’t even seen him come into the back bay, but he was here now, dumping a black nylon duffel bag on the floor by my feet before plopping down in front of me, sliding between my legs on the long seat that had been built to hold one female xith’cal, not two people, one of whom was wearing armor. I was trying to get enough room for my knees when Caldswell handed Rupert something else. I was about to point out there was no way that thing was fitting when I recognized the sleek metal box.
“My armor case!” I cried, snatching it out of his hands.
“I grabbed it off the Fool before I left,” Rupert said, and though his voice was all business, I could hear the pride in it. “I thought it would be useful.”
I was so happy to see my case that I didn’t even care that it took up all the room I had left. If Rupert and Caldswell hadn’t both been looking, I might have hugged it. As it was, I wedged my case into the back of the tiny ship and leaned against it.
“Don’t let her do anything stupid,” Caldswell ordered as he closed the glass flight canopy over our heads.
I gave the captain a nasty look, but he’d already left, getting clear of the little ship as Rupert started the tiny engine. His head was still bare, which I took to mean that our escape pod had air for now, but I sealed my suit anyway, just in case.
“Can you even fly this thing?” I said as he settled his hands on something that looked sort of like a flight stick. “I thought you couldn’t read xith’cal?”
“It’s a simple ship,” Rupert answered with a shrug, reaching up to flip a row of switches along the cabin’s top. The first three toggles seemed to do nothing, but the fourth sealed the ship with an audible pop. “See?” Rupert said, looking back with a smile. “Best guess works.”
That did not make me feel better, but I didn’t get a chance to voice my opinion. Not three seconds after Rupert sealed our ship, the jump flash rolled over us again. I’d barely recovered from the feeling of being pulled back into time-space when the floor opened and our little ship was sucked into the vacuum of space.
We didn’t fall. Falling is impossible when there’s no down, but we did tumble out, and it was awful. We hurtled out of the ship, spinning like a pinwheel into the void. After what felt like hours, but was probably only a few seconds, Rupert turned on the thrusters, evening us out far below the stolen xith’cal ship.
But while we’d been spinning, Caldswell had been working. High above us, the hyperdrive was flaring back up. The door we’d dropped through hadn’t even finished closing before the ship vanished again, flashing and fading as Nova jumped them back into hyperspace.
I’d never seen a jump done so hot on the heels of another, gate or no, but like all Caldswell’s crazy plans, there was a good reason. Seconds after the stolen xith’cal ship vanished, four lelgis cruisers rippled into existence in the most beautiful hyperspace flash I’d ever seen. It was like they simply coalesced out of light, and the moment they appeared, they started circling.
Even though I knew it wouldn’t do a bit of good, I held my breath, staring up at the hunting lelgis ships through the escape pod’s glass canopy and praying as hard as I could that they wouldn’t spot us. We were very small, small enough to look like space trash, and Rupert had cut our lights. He was holding as still as I was, and that made me feel a little better as we sat and waited.
For once, though, it seemed luck was on our side. After fifteen endless seconds, the lelgis fleet vanished as beautifully as they’d arrived. The enormous ships slid back into hyperspace like all of space was only oil floating on the surface of a sea of light. For a moment, I swore I could actually see the brilliant eddies spinning in their wake, and then the ships were gone, leaving nothing but emptiness behind.
I waited another five seconds before I let out my breath, flopping back as far as I could in the cramped little cabin. Rupert relaxed too, his shoulders slumping. Then he was back to business as he reached out to check the escape pod’s bare-bones console.
“We lost some time on that jump.”
I stiffened, though I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d done three ungated jumps now in less than three days. It had to catch up with me sometime. “How much?”
“Not centuries,” he said. “But I won’t know for sure until we check in with the Republic’s standard clock, which we can’t do in a xith’cal ship.”
That made sense. “So what now?”
“We find somewhere to land,” Rupert said. “This emergency vessel has limited fuel and no hyperdrive, so unless we set down and get another ship, we’re not going anywhere.”
“We have to land a xith’cal ship on a Terran planet?” I said, horrified. “What’s your plan for not getting shot?”
“Luck,” Rupert answered, turning the ship out into what looked to me like the endless black void. “And rank. We’ll figure something out. Right now, my objective is to get you somewhere safe until I hear from Caldswell.”
“If we hear from Caldswell,” I muttered.
Rupert actually chuckled. “You’d be surprised. Brian Caldswell tends to land on his feet. He’ll get through.”
I believed that; what I couldn’t figure out was how I was going to keep avoiding the lelgis. The captain might be leading them on a merry chase at the moment, but I knew they were always waiting for me in the black space on the other side of the virus. The moment I killed a phantom, even by accident, they’d find me. I slumped against my armor case, wondering grumpily what Caldswell had meant when he’d said the lelgis wouldn’t go to the Dark Star. Was it because they were afraid of the Eyes, or because Maat was there?