Though Bark’s Finest had been severely damaged by Thunder of Sagittarius’ drive-by attack, she definitely wasn’t dead yet. Nor were the pirates about to simply give up with only a few light seconds between them and whatever they were hoping to achieve at the red dwarf they were running towards. Almost immediately the pirates responded to the drive-by attack by… reducing their forwards warp speed to only 80% c?

This decision was unexpected and concerning, but command still authorized another of the cruisers ahead of the pirates to attempt a drive-by attack on Bark’s Finest. Admiral Gentine warped forwards to execute the attack, lasers and particle beams blazing… and was summarily obliterated when she crossed the forty five degree cone in front of the pirate ship, as the pirates had apparently decided to use their own absurdly powerful gamma ray lasers to create a defensive beamwall, closing off the possibility of any further drive-by attacks.

On the other hand, this slower pace meant it was now physically possible to shoot Bark’s Finest from behind, and one of the Cruisers following the pirates to act as spotter got into position to do just that. A fourth of a second and fifty thousand kilometers later, and one of our ships sent a withering barrage of particle beam and laser fire up the pirates’ aft… that proceeded to hit absolutely nothing, as they had apparently managed to anticipate and perfectly time an evasive maneuver.

Of course, we’d suspected that the pirates might do this and had the remaining forty nine Cruisers to her fore projecting beamwalls of their own to make charging straight forwards at c for any significant distance suicidal. However the pirates didn’t do that either, vibrating in place for a brief moment. Then one of the Cruisers near the middle of the formation warped forwards in response to a bit of damage near her aft, and everything became clear.

Bark’s Finest was projecting a set of conical beamwalls that were closing in on each other, with the explicit purpose of forcing our fleet to either Skip out of the danger zone, or die. Despite a number of hits to the radiators the piratical Obliterator Ship managed to hold firm, and our fleet was forced to perform FTL skips to get out of the way of the devastatingly powerful gamma ray lasers. Bark’s Finest didn’t even wait for confirmation that their ploy had worked to clear their frontal cone before they took off at c again, nothing else remaining in the two light seconds between them and their destination star.

This is when Thunder of Sagittarius volunteered to perform one more risky maneuver. As she noted, she was still capable of combat with almost her full capabilities, and far more importantly she was still aligned to Skip into position for a surprise attack on Bark’s Finest. Command authorized Thunder to perform such a maneuver, with the admonishment that she would only be allowed to try it once. The pirates aboard Bark’s Finest were surely on their toes for any more surprise attacks like this, and had proven that they would very rapidly implement countermeasures if they survived.

And so Thunder of Sagittarius aligned herself for her Skip and started configuring her warp metric for FTL in reverse. An agonizingly long quarter of a second later, she catapulted herself through spacetime to arrive within a few thousand kilometers of Bark’s Finest, massive weapons batteries at the ready. She charged forwards with one warp drive, beamwall blazing away even as she readied a Skip with her second functional drive. A mere moment later even more material was brutally vaporized off of Bark’s Finest, even as Thunder’s warp drive fired, skipping across a mere few thousand kilometers, which was still sufficient to get her past the beamwall the pirates were thought to be projecting.

That’s when Thunder of Sagittarius informed us that she was withdrawing from combat; she’d been running her power plant too hot with too many tactical skips, and couldn’t run at combat power until she cooled off or she would slag herself from waste heat. Meanwhile, the pirates must have gone out of their way to ruggedize their warp drive since their Bark’s Finest was still somehow warp capable. While absorbing this level of abuse and still being able to fight wouldn’t have been too unusual for a proper warship, for a converted freighter like the pirates were using it was very impressive indeed.

So with less than two light seconds between Bark’s Finest and the red star, Command authorized any and all Cruisers with an appropriate alignment to Skip into position and project a massive beamwall to prevent the pirates from reaching their goal. Around five hundred were so aligned, and a half second later they had arranged themselves into formation with their full combat load of beam weapons being applied to the task of projecting a beamwall.

It was only a quarter second or so after that when it became apparent what the pirates’ actual plan had been, as their Winterblaster fire finally slammed into the red star and blasted massive plumes of sensor opaque plasma into the vacuum, passing right through the fleet’s beamwall with minimal interference. The fleet tried to react in time to prevent Bark’s Finest from flying into one of the coronal mass ejections, but they were just too out of position, and the light lag most emphatically wasn’t helping.

And so we watched helplessly as Bark’s Finest flew directly into one of the plumes of plasma, shielding them from view. A second or so later all the gravitational wave detectors in the fleet went off as the pirate ship Skipped away. It was clear: Bark’s Finest had managed to escape even given a number disadvantage of twelve thousand to one.

Still, we certainly weren’t about to just give up. With how much radiator damage Bark’s Finest had taken the time they’d be needing to get ready for their next skip would be far longer than normal. Couple that with having just shy of twelve thousand Voidskippers on hand to look for them, and we were feeling pretty confident of our chances to locate the pirates and finish this once and for all.

The analysts immediately started narrowing down the possible locations that Bark’s Finest could have skipped to, and this time we didn’t need to send agents on a galaxy-spanning fetch quest to dig up leads. With the performance of their ship, the second the pirates spent obscured from our sensors wouldn’t have allowed them to turn more than ten degrees. Given that we could immediately rule out them having skipped right into the sun, that limited their possible locations to a cone ten degrees wide.

And so the fleet started scouring the possible volume for the location of Bark’s Finest. There were a few practical matters to consider when doing so. First, light lag would still prevent anyone from seeing the pirate ship drop out of FTL outside their new light cone. Second, a cone ten degrees wide and two light years long was huge. Even if we only covered a single straight line down that cone the spacing between individual ships would still be just shy of three kiloseconds at c, and we wouldn’t be doing that due to needing to cover an entire quarter of a cubic light year.

Even with the best possible spacing for full coverage, there would still be slightly over half a Megasecond before we had sensor data from the entire volume.

Given the long time-scale it didn’t make sense to stay plugged into the combat stream for the entire time, so Max and I disconnected. As our awareness returned to the auditorium at BoSI headquarters, Max asked “So, we’ve probably got some time before we’re needed for anything else. Anything you want to do in the meantime?”

I thought back to my headmate, replying “Lunch, probably. We should see if Grom is off-duty too. I’d also like to meet that agent who asked for a distraction back in Bouccan; we apparently share a lot of preferences in morphs and I’d like to trade notes on it.”

Max thought for a moment, before replying “Sure, I’ll check around on the networks to see if either of them are available.”

A couple kiloseconds later, Grom and us were both waiting in line at one of the cafeterias present at BoSI headquarters. After some waiting we reached the counter, and picked out our meals. I loaded up my tray with steamed tubers and sausages in a thick sauce while Grom got himself another boring set of feedstock sticks, noting that he’d simply use the electrical outlet in the booth to recharge.

And so we headed back to the booth we’d picked out, finding Kit already there with her lunch ready, despite her not having been in the cafeteria when we got in line. I raised an eyebrow as I sat down, and Kit shrugged as she replied “I brought my own; I’ve got some weird flavor preferences that the kitchen doesn’t like dealing with. Something about spoiling everyone else’s appetite.”

Curious, I took a sniff of the mashed something-or-other on Kit’s plate and immediately shut off my sense of smell as the odor hit me, recoiling backwards.

I noted Kit’s tail brushing against mine under the table even as she disbelievingly asked “It’s not that bad is it Madeline? This is considered a delicacy back home in Ghouf.”

I winced, before replying “Yes it is in fact that bad. Are you sure you’re running on the same biochemistry as the rest of us?”

Kit thought for a moment, before noting “You know, I really should look into that. I mean I should seeing as this is a BoSI-issued body, but it would explain why everyone else I’ve met since leaving my home cylinder has such differences in taste.”

There was a brief pause, before Kit asked “Anyway, you three presumably wanted to talk with me about more than my odd culinary preferences, so what’s actually on your mind?”

This is when Max spoke up “Some time ago, Shen gave us the recording of your experiences after you asked for that distraction. We wanted to meet you, and ask if we did a good job.”

Kit smiled, noting “I couldn’t have asked for a better distraction. The chaos and violence you caused were amazing for keeping the focus of attention off what I was doing, and you kept it going for more than long enough for me to achieve what I needed to.”

I hummed happily at the professional praise as I stabbed a sausage with my fork and started eating it. After chewing and swallowing, I remarked “Glad it worked out for you; we got our head blown off to get you that distraction and ultimately had to be extracted as a black box.”

The conversation and meal carried on for about a kilosecond afterwards. Sadly there didn’t seem to be much to build a friendship off of between us and Kit; aside from some superficial morph preferences, a little bit of humor, and professional topics we just didn’t have much of anything in common. Adding insult to injury a lot of those professional topics were classified and had the relevant memories either encrypted or suppressed, meaning that we couldn’t do much more talking on those than we already had. So when we finished our meal, we went our separate ways without much intention of arranging any meetups in future outside a mission that demanded it.

A bit less than half a Megasecond passed waiting around at the BoSI headquarters when Shen popped up out of the metaphorical woodwork and informed Grom, Max and I “The pirate ship Bark’s Finest has been located and her crew induced to surrender, with boarding of the Skimmers they were trying to escape on soon to follow. You know the drill, recorded briefing followed by a Mindcast trip out there. Plug into this cable; we’ll be saving some time by having your body autopilot to the bunks after you and Max leave.” his carapace swirling through a psychedelic pattern of spirals as he proffered a high-bandwidth uplink cable with a scanning probe on the end.

I of course accepted the scanning probe and ran it along my spine, the recording of finding Bark’s Finest playing as soon as the connection was established. Unlike the combat stream, this particular recording was from the perspective of a single specific ship, namely another Quasar-class cruiser named Ergosphere. I barely had time to accustom myself to the divergent sensory feeds of Ergosphere before losing myself in the recording like I had with Kit’s use of my distraction.

The first thing I saw that gave me any notice of Bark’s Finest’s location was an explosion slightly less than half a Megasecond away at c, consistent with a Voidskipper that had Skipped way too far in one hop. I quickly informed the rest of the fleet of this, even as I aligned my nose towards the site of the blast and fired up my Non-Orientable Wormhole reactors to Skip power. I felt the heat build in the tandem cores of my power plant even as the warp drive readied a Skip, releasing a fraction of a second later as I evaluated the scene from up closer.

The ship I was looking at was definitely Bark’s Finest, but on the other hand she’d definitely seen better days, even discounting the front four kilometers of her length having been blasted off and the gashes down her sides from the two times Thunder of Sagittarius performed a drive-by attack. Her entire warp drive was outright missing, the only parts left being the shattered stumps of the support columns. Similarly, her aft looked like it outright melted for a while, with several noticeable fractures through her hull. There was a tiny section of functioning radiator panel flush with the hull that was glowing brightly indicating that they at least had some power generation going, and they were accelerating at approximately a fifth of a meter per second squared, having already achieved a velocity of ninety kilometers per second away from the system they’d left.

That said, those hideously dangerous Winterblaster turrets were still intact enough that they might be capable of firing, and I had a couple seconds before the signals of my arrival reached them. Not wanting to risk it, I quickly extended one of my weapons batteries from under its armored cover and fired a short burst of precise laser fire before Skimming around at c for a half-second to dodge any Winterblaster fire that might have come my way in the interim. A few seconds later I got confirmation that my beams had struck home, getting a front-row seat to two of the Winterblaster turrets being removed. A half-second or so later I got a line of sight on the other two turrets and summarily removed them too.

Only now did I dare come closer than a light second or so, cruising up to the crippled pirate ship and matching velocities along side her even as another hundred or so Cruisers skipped to within a couple light seconds.

Switching one of my lasers into signaling mode, I transmitted “Bark’s Finest. This is the RUV Ergosphere. You are under arrest for piracy, resisting arrest, and possession of weapons of mass destruction. Surrender within ten seconds, or you will be summarily vaporized.”

A second passed with no sign of activity. Two seconds passed, then a third, and a fourth. Five seconds passed, and I started extending my full array of weapons instead of the single beam battery I’d used to declaw the crippled pirate ship. Six seconds passed, the hatches for my weapons batteries finishing their opening sequence. Seven seconds passed, my weapons sliding into place. Eight seconds, and still no action.

Then I happened to get a look past the open door in Bark’s Finest’s hull. What I was looking at was obviously a Skimmer bay, with enough room for five of the sub-light warp ships. However, the number of warp ships actually present in that hangar was a solid zero. Ah. It made sense that the pirates would have abandoned their crippled starship, but now we just needed to figure out where exactly they’d gone from here.

Fortunately Skimmers were by definition incapable of exceeding the speed of light, meaning that all we needed to do was start looking for heat signatures. Thermodynamics took no prisoners, and with the energy levels needed to run even a Skimmer’s warp drive there just wasn’t a way around running a radiator to dump your waste heat. Given that as a military Voidskipper operating in the Frontier I was expected to navigate through as-of-yet uncharted regions of the interstellar medium, I was very well equipped for this with extremely comprehensive arrays of astronomy equipment.

So between the other Cruisers and myself, we quickly managed to pick out five distinct heat signatures all receding rapidly… one of which was noticeably red-shifted into the long wave infrared, indicating it wasn’t moving by warp. I volunteered to check the red-shifted heat signature, while the rest of my sister ships went after the Skimmers.

So I carefully gauged the distance, before warming up my warp drive for another skip. What I quickly discovered was an object moving through space with a velocity of 0.95 c. Getting closer and following after it using my warp drive at skimming power, I quickly determined that the object was in fact a wormhole mouth, with a large number of coolant pipes running out from it and looping back around to act as a radiator.

Immediately it slammed home what the pirates had done to conceal their actual escape vector, and I warned the rest of the fleet not to perform any more Skips until this wormhole was destroyed, lest they get stranded in an alternate universe by a causality violation. It was already too late for me in that regard; I’d been displaced the instant I skipped, since I was now in a position where I could have altered my own past were I in the same universe.

Still, the Retroactivity Protocol indicated that if I landed in a branch timeline I was supposed to aid the local version of the RSU to the best of my ability before I Mindcast back using the comms wormholes I had aboard; if I forced the pirates to eject their radiator hole and subsequently destroyed it, then past me would be able to spot the heat signatures from the pirates’ escape Skimmer and go after it directly without getting caught like I had.

So I prepared to broadcast an ultimatum through the pirates’ radiator hole…

That’s when the recording abruptly changed perspectives to another cruiser by the name of Madame Relativity, and it only took a brief moment to be immersed in her perspective too. She’d already been warned about the Timewall the pirates had set up, and the potential hazard of cross-temporal stranding it had caused. As long as that Timewall existed the pirates had every single Cruiser who’d visited Bark’s Finest effectively held hostage by the laws of causality, but crucially there wouldn’t be any such temporal displacement occurring if we managed to find and destroy the other end of the wormhole first. Even a Skimmer emitted gravitational waves when at warp, though they were much weaker than a Voidskipper and needed fairly close proximity to detect.

And so the course of action selected was to establish a perimeter at a bit farther out from the current location of Bark’s Finest than the Skimmers could have possibly gone, then wait and listen for them to come by. Given that the distance between the Voidskippers making up the perimeter would only be a bit more than eleven kiloseconds, we expected results in fairly short order. Of course, we also had to leave a great big hole in our perimeter near the radiator hole, to avoid losing any more ships to the timewall.

I’d been waiting for about five kiloseconds when I registered a gravitational wave detection consistent with a Skimmer in operation. Immediately I alerted the rest of the fleet, and a task force was formed to properly arrest the fleeing crew of pirates. I got assigned frontrunner duty while another Cruiser was put on spotter duty.

So one skip later I was skimming along in front of where fleet telemetry said the pirates were. I readied my transmitters, and began broadcasting “You are under arrest for piracy, resisting arrest, possession and use of weapons of mass destruction, and unauthorized Timewall construction. Surrender immediately or face summary vaporization. You have ten seconds to comply.”

It only took the pirates two seconds to drop out of warp and transmit a message of “We surrender. Standing by for boarding.”

So far, so good. Still, getting that Timewall taken care of was of the absolute highest importance. So I followed the ultimatum with “We know you are carrying multiple pairs of Non-Orientable Wormholes. Jettison all of them now, including the one you’ve got connected to your coolant loop.”

Considering just how much mass wormholes had, it wasn’t surprising that jettisoning them took the pirates several kiloseconds. Still, soon enough five wormhole mouths had been packaged up in confinement rigs and ejected from the pirates’ Skimmer. We already knew which ones were which, so another ship collected the two pairs that weren’t being used in an impromptu Timewall to deliver them back to the Red Star Union. As for the other wormhole? That one was earmarked for demolition, so as to dismantle the Timewall that was currently causing so much inconvenience.

Considering the extreme energies that tended to be released when a wormhole got demolished, we all mutually agreed that a minimum safe distance of several light seconds would be appropriate. RSU protocol for wormhole demolition called for dumping mass energy through it until it destabilized, and given that all of that energy would subsequently be coming right back out as a result it was of critical importance not to be too close to the literally planet-cracking explosion that would ensue.

Given that it would take several gigaseconds to sufficiently unbalance a wormhole of this size with laser fire, and we simply didn’t have that sort of time, it was agreed that fabricating specialized demolitions equipment would be the most sensible course of action. That basically amounted to a gigantic pump to move thousands of tons of matter through the wormhole per second, along with a big tank of water and a fusion reactor to run the pump.

That’s about when the recording ended, and I found myself wearing a standardized military synthmorph in one of the Mindcast bays aboard Madame Relativity, with Grom similarly booting up. The morph wasn’t to my preference, but the military had very firm opinions about excessive customization so there wasn’t much complaining about it would help. I quickly hauled myself out of the pod and began tugging myself along through the micro-gravity corridors of the Cruiser’s honestly quite small habitat section, compared to the entire size of the ship. We quickly met up with a hundred thousand or so other agents, all currently loading into boarding shuttles.

I quickly climbed into one of the shuttles myself, rapidly finding a seat in one of the compact utilitarian rocket craft. I quickly clipped my seatbelt into place, then took stock of the equipment I’d been issued, currently stowed in the under-seat compartment. A laser pistol, along with several dozen compact memory units for storing minds and a portable Mindcast probe with slots allowing it to write to three drives at once. Good, nice to know we were being properly equipped to restrain the people we were arresting.

Safely secured in my seat and with my equipment checked, I settled in to wait, watching through the shuttle’s telemetry feeds. The massive shuttle bay door retracted inwards then slid to the side revealing the void of space beyond. Then the nuclear thermal rockets on our shuttle activated, and we found ourselves accelerating across the few tens of kilometers between us and the Skimmer full of pirates.

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