When Rajia woke, she had no idea of where she was or of the amount of time that had passed. The first thing she noticed was a throbbing pain in her head. This was followed by the realization that her arms and legs were bound, tightly.

She was laying behind two seats in some sort of cockpit. She'd never seen anywhere like this on Nexus. Yet, looking out the cockpit window, all she saw was darkness. She was still alive, so there was that.

She tugged at her bindings, but they squeezed more tightly when she tried to resist them. Shimmying into a sitting position, she took a good look at the material around her bound legs. It was a synthetic fiber rope. If she recalled correctly, the fiber was laced with nano filaments. That meant escape was impossible using anything other than the release mechanism. Even if she'd had something to cut with.

She felt hunger pangs grumble in her stomach. How long had she been here? Rajia tried to piece together her memories before waking up in the cockpit, but everything was still foggy. She had been informed that she'd received a message via ansible by a drone. Since it was the middle of the day, most people were doing various activities aboard the ship. The sleeping area had been empty. When she'd approached the ansible booths she'd heard or sensed someone behind her. That was where her memory cut off. Rajia remembered Victor's warning about the boy that had arrived on their side of the ship: the boy who had called himself Mark. This had to be his doing.

There had to be a comm in the cockpit. She might not be able to operate it with her hands bound, but she had to try. Rajia was not keen on dying in any of the ways that were possible in this situation.

----------------------------

Alex was still in the process of being re-awoken when the ansible call came. Victor thought twice before answering. It might not go over well with HQ if they discovered that students were being re-awoken on the anisble relay stations. Then again, if they were responsible for Dixon now was a good a time as any to share his feelings about it.

Victor opened a comm channel. An older man in military uniform appeared, the same that Victor had seen in the Reactor Club Room.

"The call went through," the man said. His face looked incredulous. "HQ has been trying to contract Nexus for some time now. What's your status?"

"We haven't gotten any calls from you on Nexus," Victor said.

"There isn't much time," the man said. The reception was somewhat better on the relay station, but the picture was still foggy. "We need you to understand your situation. Things have moved many orders of magnitude faster than we had envisioned."

"What's going on? What have you been doing?" Victor asked. Questions bottle-necked in his brain, all screaming to be answered at once. "Why did you free Dixon?"

"Who?" The man said. So, he didn't know the students by name. Victor felt sick as he realized that they might all well be referred to by number. "Listen to me. By now you will have noticed that the rumblings on Nexus have gotten worse. That's because Nexus is slipping out of our space time. We have a matter of minutes before the entangled atoms in the ansibles fall out of sync. At that time communication with HQ will be impossible."

"Does this have to do with the reactor?" Victor asked.

"Yes. And no. It's not a reactor in the traditional sense. It's a space time anomaly that Nexus was built around. The primary purpose of the station is to contain and disguise the anomaly until the eggheads on Aurora can figure out what the hell to do with it."

Victor couldn't believe what he was hearing. Was the combat school a mere cover for a dangerous military secret? What had HQ been thinking?

"There's a lot going on here. You won't be able to tell anyone in a couple of hours, so I suppose I can level with you: the homeworlds will soon be at war. This has been inevitable since before you were born. Nexus is a strategic point of inconceivable value. We sent you, our best and brightest, to protect it. Now I fear that you will be on your own...."

"Slow down," Victor said, processing everything that was being said as quickly as possible. "Why would the ansible atoms fall out of sync?"

A sudden headache attacked Victor as foggy dream fought it's way to the surface. A dream with chiming words.

"The containment field is failing to contain the anomaly. It was tested for over a decade and this never happened. It's happening now. Nexus is being dragged into another dimension of space via a slow wormhole."

"A what?"

Static bubbled on the ansible.

"A slow wormhole. Our ability to communicate will cease in a couple of hours. I've got to close the channel now, it'll need to be open if we're to get Nexus' new directives uploaded in time. You're no longer students, kid, and Nexus is no longer a deep space battle school. From now on you are soldiers aboard the Deep Space Battle Station: Nexus. Godspeed, son."

The channel closed. A circling ring overtook all of the view screens. The new directives were being downloaded, Victor assumed. He felt around for the controls to see if he could stop the download - he didn't trust HQ any more than he did the Nexus A.I., but controls were all locked.

"I'm guessing I missed a few things," said Alex's voice from behind him. The boy was shivering and half-dressed, standing in the middle of the floor next to his open chamber.

Victor smirked as he turned around in his chair. It was good to see his friend again, however miserable he currently looked. "A few," he said, shrugging.

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