The next few seconds after the blast were, in the absence of better words, eventful, as the shockwave hit the ship, driving reliance forward like a cork in the waves, as Reliance used the sudden boost in speed to activate the slip drive. Blasting clear of the detonation at white-knuckle speed. Jenel meanwhile tried her best to hold the crumbling systems together long enough to get out of the slip. Nara on the other hand? She was not handling it quite so calmly, curling up into a tight ball just out of boom range of the major control consoles. She’s a sweet kid, but over the years she’s been around some fairly unstable kit.

A quick scan of our wake, showed a trail of debris in vaguely “this was once a bit of a ship before it was thinly laminated across the cosmos,” state.

“This is going to be close, we’ll drop out of slip soon, then jettison some trash, and hope they think it’s debris, and hop another few times on local drive to keep them off our trail,” Jenel suggested.

“Captain, I would like to request we never, ever, ever attempt that technique again, reporting structural damage on all decks. Major engine errors and I do not think that you are really supposed to bump start a slip drive at all really, least of all via explosion.”

“No promises, if it stops my crew and ship from becoming flotsam, then I’ll do whatever it takes.”

“Understood Captain, but frankly I do not believe it would, the amount of damage we sustained in that jump even post repairs, it is impossible to say for sure, where, or even IF we would ever slip out again. My engines or not, what you would call a traditional configuration, and I am certain your crew would not want to fall out if slip in a reality where you breathe hydrochloric acid.”

It took me a few seconds to realise what that meant, and thinking on it I almost considered whether it would be a better plan to go back to The Cartel and give whoever replaced Zane permission to slag us. This bucket of bolts had a bloody PROBABILITY DRIVE? That was a pretty damn good reason to never let The Cartel get their hands on her, I guess. It isn’t technically a rule of space-faring, but it is a pretty good rule of thumb that you do not hand reality, probability, or causality, warping technology to any organisation that could fill out a lawful evil slot on the old alignment charts. Especially not ones that, if tinkered with, could blast a hole in the multiverse itself. That sort of shit is really bad for business.

“So, just to clarify, you have been floating round out here all this time with a probability-based slip drive?”

“Correct.”

“Oh BOLLOCKS.”

*************************************************************************

Back at Cartel HQ, chaos reigned, they had sent out two ships in pursuit, and now both had vanished, Kain scrambled from console, to console, while around him people who had worked with him for years, eyed him with barely disguised contempt.

“Waddya mean we lost The Wrecker?”

“I mean, sir, ship go boom, crew go bye-bye, your plan fail.” Snarled Dyne he was also in line to inherit the job, but only if a bunch more people were killed, then again with Kain in charge all he had to do was wait, His turn would come soon enough. He didn’t relish that idea, mostly because sudden power vacuums sucked, for everybody around them. They also tended to be rather hazardous to your health if you are assigned to them. Still, he couldn’t really bring himself to be respectful to a walking skid-mark like Kain.

“Watch how you talk to me, boss is dead, that means I’m in charge, and I will be treated with all due respect.”

Dyne didn’t even respond, he didn’t need to. Kain tried the whole loom threateningly thing that usually served him so well. Dyne was practically the poster child for combat stim augmentations. When he flexed it was like watching a transforming toy, because for every muscle that moved, another had to move out of the way first. He was the master of the threatening loom, and his expression right now showed exactly how much respect he felt Kain was due, in that he felt the mould growing in the grout in the showers was worthy of a marginally higher rank.

Kain considered making an example here, they realised to do so would probably backfire on him, better to send somebody dispensable later to deal with the issue, preferably in a way that couldn’t be traced back to him. For now, he’d back down.

************************************************************************

Deep in the bowels of the base, the machine picked up pace again. After a series of whirrs, shrieks, and wails, that sounded like the AOL dial-up tone played through a speaker from an old Nokia, possessed by the souls of the damned, a message flashed up on a single monitor.

“Job 1 of 1 starting”

The machine kicked into life, as the green liquid was sucked into the machine with a disturbingly organic sounding SLURP. A few moments later a long armature, sounding suspiciously like an old printer, got to work.

This job had been in the works for a long time, and at one point in time a servo drone had to come in and manually clean the heads, but they existed for one purpose, and they would fulfil it. More than once, the entire process halted due to an absence of “magenta organics colouration.” The drones tried to bypass this block, of course, by ordering a black and white facsimile, yet the damn machine just kept insistently demanding Magenta. Until after turning the entire base upside down, (discreetly of course, when one is trying to take an action covertly, an unsubtle ransacking tends to be an undesirable outcome.) Of course a few, more trustworthy of the crew assisted, some of them were in on the secret, and weren’t big fans of Kain themselves.