“That’s a lot of time to be flying ghosted,” Surch had said, his mouth hidden behind the brown hand that stroked his trimmed dark beard, when the Forseti’s senior officers were first presented with a flight plan at their mission briefing back on Earth. Admiral Sarita Fan stood by the display, hands clasped in front of her, waiting for the room to process her presentation. Captain Pueson sat at attention, while Meslina had her arms crossed and was leaning back in her chair like Surch.

Boro interlaced his fingers and pointed towards the map. “At least there’s the layover at Yshot Station.”

“I’m afraid it’s not that kind of layover,” Admiral Fan corrected. “The Station has been made to look mostly decommissioned, and there will be no disembarking. You’ll be flying there light to make good time and then stock up to the brim for the next leg of your journey.”

“Yeah, about that, Admiral,” Surch said. “From Yshot Station out beyond the Thorian frontier in what’s basically a straight line? No offence to all you good folks in Intelligence but unless you’ve got someone on the inside steering this, I don’t see how we can stay off the Thorians’ sensors, even when ghosted.”

The other woman with Admiral Fan, shorter by a head and with the kind of presence that made Boro forget that she was even in the room, stepped into the light of the wall projection. “Your concerns are perfectly valid, Lieutenant Guraty, but you will have all the help you’ll need.” The Intelligence officer, who thought that introductions were an unnecessary frivolity and therefore didn’t choose to share her name, looked down at her personal terminal.

“I have a feeling we’re not going to like this,” Surch said and shifted uneasily in his chair.

“Me too,” Meslina added.

The display switched to a photo of a now-familiar Thorian face. The three officers of the Forseti groaned, while Captain Pueson sat implacable but for the air escaping through his slightly pursed lips.

“If there’s anything you’d like to say,” Captain Pueson said without taking his eyes off the display, “now is likely the only time to do so.”

The officers cast each other brief glances, professionalism and outrage vying for control under the surface, but before anyone of them could formulate a coherent sentence, the Intelligence officer continued.

“We had been working for quite some time to identify a viable asset. Mikarik may not be the ideal candidate to take down the whole Empire,” the pause and expression on her face suggested that this had been an Intelligence idea of a joke, but the room didn’t budge from its stone-faced stare, “but his experience should serve to be useful on this mission. He spent two decades doing commercial freight including a stint with the Anthar Kai where he also served for a year aboard a pirate hunter. Nearly six years in the Thorian Navy.”

“The Navy?” Surch asked with a whistle but the interruption was ignored.

“Deserted several years ago during the Nabak Insurrection where he earned two Hard-to-Kill medals – an honour that only a Thorian mind would be twisted enough to cook up for enemy combatants.” That one actually did get a chuckle out of Surch and Meslina. “There’s no place for him left in the Empire, and he’s been doing for-hire work on the borderlands. He knows enough about both commercial and military ship movement across the Empire to be able to plot a course that would keep you ought of sight.”

Surch threw a sideways glance at Boro, who was starting to feel a bit unsettled under the Thorian’s digital gaze.

“I understand he’s got a colourful resume,” Boro started, “but he’s still a Thorian. Doesn’t their little collective hive mind prevent them for serving other interests?”

The Intelligence officer shifted a little and put on a smile. Boro was certain that it was not meant to be friendly. “A ‘hive-mind’ is not exactly how we would describe Thorian collective empathy, and individual Thorians have almost as much capacity to be self-serving as the species itself. That said, it had long been rumoured that there are those among them that are severed from this collective ability to feel the mood of the species. ‘Netkarthi’ is what they’re called in their general parlance, though mostly the concept is dismissed as a bogeyman, either a myth or a figment of foreign propaganda. But regardless of what the Thorians’ official line is, it is our understanding that they do exist, and that Mikarik is one of them. If there’s anyone to rely on for this mission, it’s him, and you can be assured of that.”

“You have to pardon my crude metaphor,” Boro replied in response to the Intelligence officer’s assurances over the Thorian’s viability as an asset, “but if you tell me a lion’s got no teeth or claws and ask me to spend a night in its cage, it doesn’t mean I’ll be sleeping. Between Nabak, the Hatvan Troubles, and the Last Gasp, we’ll have people who either fought against them or knew somehow who did.” He could feel Meslina stiffen in the chair next to his. “There’s got to be a better way. If you can just go back to the previous screen.” The Intelligence officer obliged. “Admiral, you said we’re getting a full load of provisions at Yshot Station in any event. So why not just take the longer way around – would be far easier to snake down the border of Vaparozh territory, head a ways deep into Dead Space and then follow the borders of the Thorian Empire. And with barely any ships around, we can make better time without comprising our ghost.”

Admiral Fan stepped in then and the Intelligence officer once more took a step away and absorbed nearly her entire presence back into herself. Boro made a mental note to keep track of her, but moments later found himself neglecting to remember that she was around.

“Your proposal, Commander Stevin, would still put you almost a month outside of your estimated arrival,” Admiral Fan explained. “A month that you likely don’t have.”

“Better get there a month late, than not get there at all.” Boro hadn’t bothered to consider the possibility that his retort was out of line, but then Captain Pueson added his voice to the conservation.

“We will get there, Commander Stevin. And we will get there on the timeline urged by our Iastret allies.”

“If the Iastret want to get there that badly, then they should fly there themselves, they’ve got a much shorter trip, and the wings for it to boot.”

“That’s quite enough, Commander.” Pueson’s voice dropped by a few degrees and Boro made sure to keep his eyes on Admiral Fan and off his Captain. “One of the founding principles of the Outer Rim Confederacy was to show that we could do better; that the rest of the Known Reaches had been missing out while Humans languished in their own little corner of space. This means showing that we have an ability to work with anyone out there, even with someone who had formerly been an enemy.” The Captain stood then, walking in measured steps to stand next to the Admiral. He may have initially chosen to sit with his people, but now he stood in front of them like a class of sullen schoolchildren – the message was clear as to who was in charge at the end of the day. “There are aspects of this mission that are uncomfortable, I’m not going to deny you that. But at all times you have to keep in mind that if we’re successful, we may be able to redraw the political map of the Known Reaches with the ORC, and by extension, Humanity, at its highest place. And once we’re there, I expect that we can show that military and technological superiority can be shared instead of hoarded, and it will start on this ship. Is that understood by everyone?” Captain Pueson’s expression was a mix of warmth and sternness that only made Boro queasy, but he nodded and agreed along with the other two, and the Captain seemed sufficiently pacified, though did not relinquish his new spot at the head of the room.

If this sermon was any indication, this was gearing up to be a longer trip than Boro anticipated. To either side of him, some of the tension seemed to go out of Surch and Meslina’s spines, and they nodded. Boro always suspected this soft spot in Surch ever since their Academy days, one of the things that likely prevented him from rising as high as Boro had if they were in the same graduating class. Meslina though had initially struck him as someone who would have resisted this gradual erosion of the pride that Boro believed should have been the core tenet of Humanity’s continued foray into the Known Reaches.

Boro, for his part, believed that it was no coincidence that the Human feet that included his father had been so instrumental at the Battle of Krevali and the Thorian’s defeat in the War of the Last Gasp shortly thereafter. Humanity, as other races would put it, even those who spent millennia under the boot of someone else’s empire, was late to the party. What these others had not considered, and what apparently more and more of the Navy high brass were losing their grasp on, was that the outsider’s perspective gave Humanity a fresh outlook, a clearer view into the stagnation that gripped the Known Reaches, where, save for the Last Gasp, the landscape had for years been defined by minor tussles. As a countermeasure to the Thorian Empire, came the ever-increasing idea of cooperation amongst all those who were not Thorian, which solidified the status quo, and therefore Humanity’s place on the periphery.

“To your earlier point, Commander Stevin,” Admiral Fan continued with a light smile, “part of the Iastret research team that has been studying Drain Vortexes since their last appearance and that have been instrumental in identifying their potential will be joining you on board as well.”

The Admiral then continued into a more detailed breakdown of what they were up against, complete with slide after slide of charts and graphs that made Boro think that if he hadn’t paid much attention to astrography during the Academy days it was decidedly too late to start now. And in any case, he had sufficient understanding to let the Iastret do their business without confounding him too much.

What Boro did know, is that Drain Vortexes were, by and large, a useless cosmic phenomenon. Appearing within or around the Known Reaches once every twenty or thirty years, they allowed for well-shielded ships to travel through them over great distances in a fraction of what it normally took, which on the surface sounded appealing, but the wormholes usually led to some random desolate spot in Dead Space and had the irritating tendency of collapsing on themselves without warning after only a few months. When the Iastret lost several ships to the sudden closing of the last Drain Vortex, leaving more than a hundred of their people stranded about six years from Iastret space with provisions to barely last a year, one would have assumed all interest in the wormholes would have faded. This would have been true for pretty much any other species, except the Iastret were crafted from a different cloth, and as though proving the utility of the wormholes would somehow avenge their lost people, they set out to dissect the data they had collected in earnest.

What they found was whereas the technology currently used for faster-than-light travel was able to skip a vessel along the surface of subspace, the Drain Vortexes acted as a whirlpool that created a passage of normal space through the surrounding subspace. They further concluded that with the right equipment and technical expertise the details of which made Boro’s mind slip through his own Drain Vortex to a secluded beach somewhere in the Mer Pacific, a ship could penetrate through the walls of the wormhole, and find itself fully immersed in subspace. From there, provided that everyone on board the ship survived the journey, which the Iastret whole-heartedly assured they would, the data that would be collected would be analyzed to allow the ship to puncture a hole back into normal space, and then freely back and forth, cutting down interstellar travel times down to fractions.

To get this mission financed, the Iastret had essentially promised the whole galaxy, if there was anything worth it out there beyond Dead Space – a crossing that would theoretically take almost half a century would take less than a year. And similarly, a crossing of the entire Known Reaches would be a matter of a mere couple days and not six months.

The Iastret were smart. This was a truth generally acknowledged, like the fact that the Thorians were arrogant bastards, and that the Hatvan were stuck-up bastards. But were the Iastret smart enough to break through the surface of subspace without crushing the ship to the size of a grain of sand? Boro wasn’t sure how keen he was to be a willing participant in that experiment.

Not to mention that what remained unsaid during that briefing, despite hovering like a cold razor against the necks of the whole crew, was the main reason why the ship had to maximize its provisions at Yshot Station. This wormhole’s other end was flung out about a four years’ journey into Dead Space. If it were to collapse when they were on the other side, or worse, while they were still in it, best case scenario was being stranded several years’ journey from home without a single planet with even a shred of organic life along the way.