Into the Black

Having completed ‘negotiations’ with the local Yakuza, it was time to get out of Imperial space, the sooner the better. There were two ways to go about that, of course. The first would be to fly in hyperspace until we got to the edge of Imperial space. That was a trip of two or three months, flying at 300c. Without stopping.

On the other hand, we could go through the Gateway, to one of the 15 other gates in Known Space. Accessing the gate required dialing in a series of seven symbols. Six of them were to tell the address of the gate you were trying to get to. The seventh was the ‘origin’ point, where you were coming from. Each gate had twenty-six symbols, and each symbol was used in an address only once. As far as anyone knew, twenty-five of them were identical across all the gates, with the twenty-sixth being unique to each gate. That meant there were 127,512,000 possible combinations. Almost one hundred and twenty-eight MILLION possible gates out there.

Punching in the wrong address would do much worse for you than writing the wrong address on a package you sent through the post office. No one knew exactly what would happen, because no one had survived the attempt. After the news of the attack on the Imperial Palace showed the universe that Nomads could return from death, someone paid a Nomad to try diving a random address.

Even the player doesn’t know what happened, because going through the gate deleted his character. All he got was a message saying that he had been erased from existence. The company was nice enough to give him some extra character points when he made his new character, but still, it hurt to lose all your progress to that point.

Fortunately for us, all standard navcomputers had the symbol sequences for the 16 known gates listed in their databanks. The gates were large enough to fit a superdreadnaught through them (or rather, superdreadnaughts were made to be no larger than what could fit through the gate).

Now, normally this would be a prime invasion route, but the gate was only large enough to fit a single superdreadnaught through at a time, and could only be dialed to one point at a time. The Gateway was two-sided, so one side was for ‘outgoing’ traffic, and the other for incoming. These were set features of the gate, and couldn’t be changed, meaning that any invasion force had to fly directly into the teeth of a barrage of missiles and heavy ship weapons. Of course, if the area around a gate could be captured, that allowed for rapid reinforcements, which is precisely what they were used for in war.

We had lined up with other ships taking the scheduled trip to Aquaria, one of the gates inside the Confederation of Allied Planets. It was still about ten minutes until the scheduled gate opening, but we’d gotten there early, so we were second in line. The last of the transports heading to another gate within the Empire had just gone through, when all hell broke loose.

Three Imperial frigates showed up, dropping out of hyperspace just outside the defense envelope of the Fleet Base. Their broadcasts pegged them as part of the First Fleet. More worryingly, they started heading towards the gate, doing detailed scans of all the ships in line.

Raven looked at me, her eyes wide. “Captain…”

I nodded. “Yeah, I know. They must have recovered the black box from that destroyer we sank. The Prince’s flunkies are looking for us. And it won’t take them long to find us if they have a detailed profile of us. The Raven is distinctive enough that the ID change isn’t going to do much. We’re going to have to get out of here fast. The second the gate powers down, I want you dialing for Aquaria. Going into the Confederation will shake them off, for a while.”

“On it, Captain.”

While I waited, I discretely raised shields, and began warming up the engines. That in itself wasn’t too unusual, since few people went through Gateways with their shields down, and we were almost to our assigned travel time. But we were cutting it close. One of the frigates had just started to scan us when the gate powered down.

“PUNCH IT!” I didn’t need to say it, since Raven was already dialing the gate, but it settled my mind as I opened the throttle up to full darting past the transport in front of us as we shot forward. The sudden move caught the frigate unprepared, but their gunners were well trained, and the frigate wasn’t the only Fleet ship within weapons range. As the last symbol on the gate was dialed, creating an energy curtain that looked like water within the gate, our shields, only just upgraded to military grade, were straining under the incoming blaster fire.

“Missiles incoming!” I cursed as I heard Carissa’s cry from the sensor station. We were almost there… And then we were through, just before missiles could slam home against our weakened shields!

Gate travel is… unsettling. The physics says that it all happens in an instant, or near enough, but actually going through the Gateway feels like someone put you on a roller coaster. The ‘experts’ say that it is just an illusion, a trick of the mind. As for me, well, now that I’ve been through it, I’m convinced you’re actually ‘feeling’ the transfer between A and B, as you get routed through the gate network to wherever you’re headed.

Another fun fact about gate travel is that the velocity you’re going when you hit the gate is the velocity you’ll have when you leave it. Which means a whole lot of pain if you’re going too fast to avoid a collision on the other side. That’s why most people don’t cross the gate’s path too closely, and why you’re supposed to be going less than your top speed when you go through.

Along with the earlier than normal activation, a freighter speeding out at breakneck speeds caused the Confed ships guarding the gate from their end to move into high alert, especially when missiles started following me through the gate. With a quick course correction, I made sure I wasn’t lined up with anything, and then hit the hyperdrive at a sedate 20c. A light hour away from the gate, we left hyperspace.

Turning all our stealth gear on, I set a course for Aquaria IV, a desert world (ironic, given the name of the system) that was a major supplier of ‘health goods’, according to the basic information I had. I’d need to log on to the local networks before I could figure out more, but I didn’t want to do that until I’d had a chance to see what was happening.

An hour after we started coasting towards Aquaria IV, the light of our surprise entry to the system caught up to us. It was a quirk of FTL drives that we were able to ‘see’ the records of our own entry to the system in real time. Thanks to the quick jump, the four missiles that followed us through the Gate lost contact with the Raven. Unfortunately for that whole ‘peace’ thing, the missiles acquired a Confed corvette. The ship was badly damaged, but didn’t explode, so there was hope that some of the people lived.

When one of the Imperial Navy frigates came through the gateway after that, they received a VERY warm welcome from the Confederation Navy ships. That frigate was wiped out in short order, their shields and point defense unable to overcome so many ships firing at them.

The same thing happened to the next two frigates, who had continued the pursuit of my one little freighter. Unfortunately, the one-way nature of the gateway meant that the first frigate couldn’t send back a report of their doom, meaning all three met the same fate before the gate shut down.

Two corvettes turned away from the defensive fleet at that point, and began moving on the course I took fleeing the gate. They were going to start a wide area search for me, damnit. Well, fortunately I didn’t exactly advertise where I came out of hyperspace, and I was coasting as stealthily as the Raven, with her sensor-eating paint job could do.

By this point, the rest of the crew had made their way to the bridge as we’d secured from the crazy emergency maneuvers. Cali was the first to speak up, “What the hell happened? Why’d we go jackrabbiting around?”

I sighed, and leaned back in my chair. “Three frigates from the Sol fleet showed up, and started scanning the outgoing traffic. Seems they found the black box of that destroyer, and were able to get enough of a read off it to figure out where we were headed, and brought detailed sensor scans with them. If the Red Orchids were able to put two and two together in time to hit us, it isn’t surprising that the new Emperor and his fleet were able to do so, too.”

“Anyways, we skipped the line at the gate, ran through before anyone could kill us. They sent missiles after us as we went through, but then we did a microjump of one light hour, so the missiles mostly killed one of the Confederation ships. I think point defense took care of at least one of them, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The frigates followed, right into the teeth of some VERY unhappy Confeds.”

Jaynie shared a look with Cali, and then turned back to me, and nodded. “So what’s the plan, Boss?”

I grinned. For the first time since I escaped, it looked like we’d have a chance to relax for a while. Sure, we laid over to get the work done in Alpha Centauri, but I hadn’t been able to really relax, always expecting the Fleet to come hunting for us, which is why I kept the Riku façade up as long as I did. I was back in my ‘normal’ skin again, and our pursuit would take a while to catch up to us, if they were even willing to devote the resources to tracking us outside of Imperial space.

“Well, we’ve made it out of Imperial space, so assuming we don’t do anything to really attract the Confederation Navy’s attention, we should be able to shake half our problems, at least for a little while. There’s two inhabited worlds where we might find some extra work that’ll get us headed towards the core of the Confederacy. Aquaria IV is a desert planet, and Aquaria V is an ocean planet. There’s also some outposts on the iceball that is the sixth planet, and a few stations around the system.”

I took a breath, and said, “We’re heading for the desert.” I held up a hand to stifle groans from most of the group. “Our current kit only needs a little adjusting for working in the desert or the arctic. We’d need all new gear to work underwater, and I’m not taking us to an ocean planet if we’re not kitted to survive on it. The population of Aquaria IV is higher than that of Aquaria VI, so that means more potential work for us, and more potential money.”

That shut everyone up. Everyone liked being able to breathe and function in the area you were visiting, and money was always a good motivator. Plus, salt water was hell on your gear.