Chapter 18

Sepia star system, outer system.

Approaching hyperspace limit.

"Captain, we have crossed the hyperspace limit." Formally said Normensk, the navigator.

Sarah nodded. It was about time, Gries' freighter, the Flowers, wasn't exactly the fastest ship around, and it had taken them most of an entire day to get the outer system with that ship's pitiful 50 gs of acceleration.

"Very well. Coms? Get me a channel to the Flowers."

"Aye aye ma'am!" Said the communication as she bent over her console, and a few seconds later, a holographic screen popped up in the main display, showing captain Gries.

"Captain Ciel-étoilé, my navigator reports that we have crossed the hyperspace limit. I assume yours has signaled the same?"

"Indeed captain Gries."

"Very well. No change in the jump plan. Jumping to the Calver system beacon, 30 astras per day."

"Very well." Sarah nodded and cut the screen, before looking at Normensk. "Prepare for jump to the Calver star system, limit speed to 31 astras per day." That way they would arrive slightly before the freighter, and will be able to sweep the beacon for hostiles without having to worry about defending the lumbering freighter. They could go faster, but she'd rather avoid hanging around a hyperspace beacon for a long time, even with a mercenary license and a legitimate contract that would make system authorities very suspicious.

"Aye aye ma'am. Preparing for jump. Lowering shields." Sarah tensed up slightly. It was technically possible to execute a hyperspace jump with your shield online, but only for specialized ships, like the Directorate Navy's assault battleships, and even then there were significant tradeoffs. That meant that a ship was at it's most vulnerable when entering or exiting hyperspace. "Hyperspace field up. All systems green. Hyperspace coordinates locked in. Hyperspace jump in 5...4...3...2...1...Jump."

Sarah waited for a second, then nodded. She didn't know why, but she always expected...something when they jumped into hyperspace. Some people claimed they could feel when a ship jumped, but she'd never met one herself. For her, and everyone she'd ever met, there was no shudder, no...nothing. Just brutally your sensors went crazy and you were in another dimension.

"Jump complete."

"Excellent." Sarah turned towards Elteria's hologram. "Stand the crew down from battlestations, and switch to hyperspace watch rotations." Which was basically having a single person on the bridge, and a skeleton crew in engineering. After all the only thing that could threaten them here was if the hyperdrive, or the power core, failed. The latter could be fixed, the former...There were failsafes. They sometimes worked. If they didn't....Hyperspace had the peculiarity of converting all matter within it to energy -that was why you needed a hyperspace field, which was essentially generating a bubble of realspace around the ship and carrying it into hyperspace-, so they wouldn't even know something had gone wrong before being turned into exotic radiation.

"Aye aye ma'am!"

*****

"Captain on deck!" Shouted one of the engineers as Sarah came through the door to engineering, and the captain shook her head, smiling.

"Come on people, we've been over this. No one else on the ship announces my arrival anymore." Well, except on the bridge, mainly because that meant 'get the hell out of the command chair'.

Turral stepped out from behind one of the towering converters that made up the power core, and shrugged as she cleaned her hands on a rag.

"I still think it's necessary. If only because we manipulate a lot of dangerous stuff here, and we expect our peers to just know where not to step when something is underway. There's a reason people don't usually visit engineering ma'am. Speaking of which, what can I do for you captain?"

Sarah smiled.

"I'm here to check on our newest crew member first and foremost. And sample the latest batch of moonshine. Afterwards I'd like to have a discussion about fabricating replacements for the missiles we expended in Sepia."

Turral rolled her eyes.

"Sure. The newbie's by the still. Just don't expect much, Cindy went a bit too heavy on the spices. And I'll prepare some estimates for you."

Sarah chuckled and shook her head, before making her way through the engineering compartment. It didn't take her long to find what she wanted -for all the enormous importance of engineering, and the massive space it occupied within the ship, most of it was occupied by machinery-, and she rounded a corner, to find herself facing a slightly exasperated blonde engineer, Cindy...and an outright quivering Seria.

"Captain." Said the engineer as she threw in a perfunctory salute, and Sarah returned it, before looking at Seria with a raised eyebrow.

"Are you alright? You look like you've just seen the devil."

"She thinks she has. Apparently she hasn't quite digested the fact that we're mercenaries, not navy. Or whatever her textbooks and holovids told her the navy was."

"Why would that..." Sarah stopped, and then started laughing. "Oh! You mean the still? Alright Seria, yes, homemade alcohol is usually restricted aboard naval vessels." Not necessarily because people couldn't handle it, but because the crew usually 'spiced up' the drink, which could give it....interesting properties. Especially as some of the 'spices' were hallucinogenic in nature, and having someone tripping anywhere on a warship was usually a bad idea, when you didn't have an AI watching carefully for exactly that kind of idiocy anyway. Sarah strode forward, both women stepping aside to let her through, and grabbed a bottle carefully racked next to the unmarked cylinder, looked critically at the reddish amber liquid within it, then unceremoniously opened it, and took a swig.

Wew, heavy on the spice indeed, thought Sarah as she brought the bottle back down. That stuff was strong, to say the least. Her implants were currently busy analyzing just what she'd drunk, and apart from the fact that half the substance names were longer than her own, it was harmless. But Turral had been right, the engineer had gone too heavy on the spice. The taste of the alcohol was barely discernible underneath it all!

Sarah turned around, and waved the bottle a bit for emphasis.

"But this is a mercenary ship. Which means that instead of pretending the still doesn't exist like any good captain does, I get first pick on the good batches, and a cut of the profits." Sarah turned towards Cindy. "And Turral was right, this is too spiced up. Stars Cindy, did you just throw everything you had on hand?"

The engineer shrugged.

"I was trying a new configuration, thought the different spices would go well together. Didn't work out. Well, you live and you learn."

"Fair enough. In any case, Seria." Said Sarah as she carefully closed the bottle, before setting it back into it's rack. Not the most hygienic of things normally, but the bottles self sterilized, both their surface and their contents. "How are you adjusting onboard the ship?"

Seria licked her lips, then shrugged.

"Everything's alright, but, well...my family is still onboard, so that makes it easier. Which reminds me..."

"Yes, we're getting them a safe haven out system. We'll see if they want to set down in one of the systems we visit, but otherwise I'll get them to Adernis, with enough money to buy passage to any system they wish to go to within half the Protectorate."

Seria nodded. Adernis was a regional trade node, mainly because it was one of few truly industrialized systems in the area, and thus imported a massive amount of materials from neighbouring systems and exported a variety of advanced systems that couldn't just be spit out by a universal fabrication platform, like fusion power core fabricators, that kind of things. It also meant that it was fairly easy to book passage to any system in the sector from Adernis, or go to another regional hub to try to get to a system in another sector.

"Thank you."

"No need to thank me, I gave you my word after all. So, have you found a post aboard the ship, or are you still bouncing around between the different sections?"

Contrary to most mercenary officers, Sarah rarely recruited people for a specific post. When a new crew member was brought in, they just bounced around for a bit, until they found a section that needed them and they fit in. It wasn't even remotely efficient, but the gunship could basically run itself anyway. The humans were more or less here to back up Elteria, not the other way around. It was a bit more critical to keep the marine complement at capacity, but fortunately Hector had a gift for finding good, reliable people.

"Not....really yet?" Seria shrugged, which given the...loose way she wore her suit, particularly open towards her cleavage, was slightly distracting for Sarah. "But I'm leaning towards engineering. All the stuff here....it's fascinating. Even the most basic of the ship's systems are dreams I didn't even knew I had! As for the power core..." Seria shook her head. "I'd tell you it was impossible if Turral hadn't let me measure the input and output. It's like....magic."

Sarah chuckled.

"An old terran author once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is effectively indistinguishable from magic. But believe me, if one day you see what the Infinite Systems Federation is capable of, you'll think our tech is positively mundane compared to theirs."

Seria perked up.

"You've actually seen some of their stuff in action? I mean, I've heard about the Federation, but I've never seen even a single example of their technology."

Sarah sighed, leaning against the wall. Well, machine technically -a shielded heat exchanger for the converters apparently, according to her implants-, but it was so large it basically qualified as a wall.

"I have. One of the dubious advantage of the Near Verge is that you tend to attract the Federation's attention more than most nations. I've been aboard Federation ships, yeah. Mostly Imperial, but a few Hyperdimensional and even a proper Federation Navy warship once."

Seria nodded, almost literally drinking in her words while Cindy stepped back and leaned against the wall as well. Those were stories she was used to hearing, but few on the ship had seen as much as the ever so elusive Federation as Sarah had, so everyone usually listened when she talked about it.

"The Imperial ones were....impressive. As golden as every legend says of course." Seria and Cindy chuckled at that, and Sarah smiled. The Empire of Mara was famous for it's massive use of a material they called 'imperial alloy', which was a complex and extremely resilient meta material that had a peculiar golden color, at least in most of it's forms. This had the side effect of making most of the Empire's ships look like they were dipped in gold, same for their power armor, or hell, their guns. "But otherwise, almost...mesmerizing in it's brutal simplicity. Apart from the bridge, everything was just....slick, efficient. Not very different from what we'd expect in many places, just a thousand times more effective. Except in one way, the super-capital ships are just....straight up scary to be onboard. You know what quantum translation is?"

Seria nodded.

"It's the Federation's way of getting around, right? Some sort of....teleportation?"

"Basically yes. One of their engineers tried to explain it to me, but I barely understood the first few sentences. It's what allows a nation as huge as the Federation to exist in the first place." The Federation was, after all, spread over eight thousand galaxies. Even hyperspace had it's limits in travel time, and trying to keep something this large relatively close together would stretch those limits to their breaking point. "Point is, they found a way to create a 'quantum translation grid' on their larger ships, which allows their personnel to just...teleport anywhere on the ship they have access to. Imagine Elteria, but it's actually someone just appearing out of thin air, and everyone is doing it." Sarah shuddered. "I think they invited us onboard that ship just to destabilize us to be honest."

"Wait, you've been onboard one of their super capital ships?"

"Yep, a Catalyst-class super-destroyer, from the Imperial Army of Mara." One of the Empire's odd quirks was that they didn't have a Navy, Marine Corps, ect, they had a single, unified Army with every branch under the same centralized command, including the Frontier Fleet, although they usually had far more leeway than the other branches due to their particular duties. "They were over for the anniversary of the treaty of the Ashen Stars." Sarah waved her hand as Seria opened her mouth. "It's an old treaty, made back when the nation we came from had a huge war with another one in the Near Verge. It was a massive genocidal bloodbath, and only Federation intervention put an end to it. They sent the big guns to remind us to play nice. That or to stretch their legs, they don't seem to have a lot to do with their super-capital ships." Which was the understatement of the eon. As far as she knew, the last time the Federation had truly been at war it had been a hundred thousand years ago. Their military must have been pretty desperate for an excuse, any excuse, for them to actually pull out the warships that were just rotting in their naval bases and throw them around the universe to stretch their legs.

"I...suppose they wouldn't, no. What about the other ships you've been aboard?"

Sarah shrugged.

"The Federation Navy one was the most bland actually. Mostly because it was based on an Imperial cruiser." Most of the Federation Navy's vessels were apparently just modified versions of those used by their member states. "It wasn't that different. Much less golden, and a bit less spacious in places, but that was it. The Hyperdimensional one though..." Sarah shrugged, and smiled as she surreptitiously checked if her AI was actively listening on the conversation, and discreetly cut the cameras in the hallway for a few seconds. "You might want to ask Elteria about it. She actually accompanied me onboard, although fair warning once she gets going about it she will not shut up. Especially about the Cores she met onboard."

"They're the Hyperdimensional Republic's AIs, right?"

"And their hereditary dictatorship, yeah. Well, as hereditary as AIs get anyway." Which was hilarious if nothing else, because the Empire of Mara was actually a democracy, the Emperor or Empress was an elected official, albeit for a one century term, while the Hyperdimensional Republic's President was effectively a constitutional monarch, what with their 'presidency' ending at their death or resignation, elected by something resembling a feudal parliament. "They're....fascinating. And a bit scary honestly. But that's probably my human instincts speaking. They were less condescending than I feared, but...well, their culture is all about the AIs protecting their human charges, and it shows. Their duty stations are actually built inside escape pods, so the Core can just jettison everyone if they feel like they risk losing the ship. It's a bit...weird. Oh, and there are warning signs and safety holograms everywhere. I'm surprised they let any human risk serving onboard a warship at all honestly."

"Uh...." Seria chuckled. "Is Elteria so fascinated by them because...?"

"She wants to protect us?" Sarah shrugged. "Maybe, or she was just fascinated by the most powerful AIs in the Known Universe. But you have to remember, Elteria sees everything onboard this ship, although she has most of it under privacy lock. Every injury, every death in combat, everything. Even I would start getting some dreams of just wrapping us in cotton if I had that same curse."

Seria opened her mouth, then closed it.

"....Fair enough. I hadn't thought about it that way."

"It's alright." Sarah sighed as a ping from Turral appeared on her implants, accompanied with an estimate for the missile fabrication. It....didn't look good. Especially time wise. Well, time to negotiate the fabricator schedule again. "Now if you'll excuse me, I actually have some work to do here. See you around ladies!"