Constellation Project Colony

UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge

Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory

1.96 Light Years from Sol

May 2220

Airpop blasted over the sound system as the truck passed through the repaired and automated gate, bouncing and jumping along the dirt road leading towards the buried hangar. Regan McKinley lounged across the passenger couch, a load of junkyard electronics and scrap metal piled high in the back. Summer in the colony was coming to an end and the leaves all around the bunker were turning brilliant shades of orange and red. The air had begun taking on a chill bite during the nights but during the day it was still warm, with a pleasant fall breeze whispering through the trees.

Regan instructed the truck to back itself up against the rear entrance to the bunker. She then called Seth Fiegal to come help her move things into the hangar, the music automatically cutting out as she started her call. Instead of Seth, all she got was a busy signal and a diversion to voicemail. She hung up without leaving a message and called Lily Emmerson.

“Hey babe,” she said when Lily picked up. The two had started dating a few months ago and Regan never tired of using cutesy nicknames with her.

“Yo,” Lily said without preamble, “Seth is fighting with his stepmom, it sounds real heated.”

“Urgh,” Regan groaned, “Can you and Harper come help me move this shit into the Hangar?”

“I can, Harper’s on call with Kamay getting instructions on building the avionics for the reaction control system,” she said, “Start unloading it, I’ll be up there in a few.”

Regan hung up and crawled out of the truck into the fall air. She grabbed an armful of electronics and started piling them into a bin outside the bunker. She’d fill it up then shove it into the airlocked service lift they’d found for ferrying supplies down into the hangar. It had taken Seth a few days to repair the lift, but it had turned out to be worth it as there was no way they would have gotten the fusion reactor into the hangar without it.

Lily clambered up the stairs and snuck around the low slung concrete structure, hugging a distracted Regan from behind. Regan shrieked in surprise, nearly dropping the armful of junk she was carrying then laughed as she realized what had happened, giving Lily a playful shove.

“Come on,” Regan said, “let’s get this stuff unloaded, what’s going on with Seth?”

“Same thing that’s been going on with Seth for like a year now,” she said with a sigh.

“It’s been getting really bad lately,” Regan said, then, more softly, “I’m worried he’s going to try something stupid.”

“Like what?” Lily asked her, dumping another armful of electronics into the pile.

“Like taking Caleb and bringing him here,” Regan said.

“He wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t be so stupid, we have so much riding on this, and Kamay? Her life is riding on this now,” Lily argued, “She’s counting on us to save her from starving and suffocating in hyperspace.”

“Look, I’m not the one you have to be telling that to,” Regan replied, “you’ve known Seth for almost as long as me, you know how he can get when he’s got an idea in his head.”

“What will you do if he tries something?” Lily asked her.

“Stop him,” she said simply, pursuing her lips.

“Do I want to know?” she said.

“It’s probably best if you don’t have the details, just keep an eye on him and let me know if you think he’s gonna do something,” Regan said.

They finished unloading the truck and smacked the button on the lift. It groaned and clanked its way down into the hangar bay. Using the service lift always made Regan mildly uneasy. She wouldn’t be surprised if it completely failed one day and sent them crashing to the bottom of the shaft. It was a short enough descent to probably be survivable, but it would be supremely unpleasant if it happened.

When the hatch opened, for once, there was no music playing. Harper Jordan was talking to Kamay through his implants. With Kamay’s help, he had rigged into an ad hoc tight beam between the two hyperspace portals. His optical camera fed her images as he worked and she gave him instructions. A huge amount of wires and cabling was laid out all across the hangar floor beside the ship, like the nervous system of a creature that had been carefully extracted.

“Oh hey! You got the stuff!” Harper Jordan shouted across the hangar bay as he noticed their hatch open. He switched from his implants to speakers so they could also hear Kamay talk. Regan absentmindedly pulled out her phone and used an app to connect to the ad hoc network so she could talk back. Kamay’s instructions had accelerated the starship construction timeline to an almost unbelievable degree and it was frequently giving Regan a sense of whiplash.

“Yeah!” Regan shouted back as they crossed the hangar floor, “Tom still thinks we’re gonna get ourselves killed. Can we really build what we need for this out of old computers and phones and junk industrial wiring?”

Building the actual hull and the larger mechanical, plumbing, and electrical systems had been one thing, Regan at least theoretically understood those things, but the electronics side of things remained rather foreign to her and the pace that Kamay threw things at them wasn’t helping matters any. She had been expecting the avionics to take longer than the actual hull, but with Kamay basically holding their hands, it was expected to finish by the end of the month.

“You absolutely can Regan,” Kamay’s voice said over the intercom. “Most people throw out their electronics while there’s still a lot of good parts in them. If you two are ready to get to work, I want you to go through everything and separate it out into three different stacks. One stack of batteries and power system components, one stack of boards and chips, and one stack of wires, cameras, screens, speakers, microphones, and anything else that doesn’t fit into one of those first two categories.”

Harper took a break from his wiring and helped Regan and Lily wrestle the bin out of the lift. Together they hauled into the middle of the room while Kamay kept talking. Regan had spent a long time talking to Kamay and was becoming increasingly sure the woman was some sort of super genius. She was only a few years older than they were but seemed to have no end to the depth of her knowledge base, “Harper, the next thing we’re going to do is assemble the control lines for the reaction control balancers. That will ensure all the thrusters fire in the correct amounts in the right directions for a given three-dimensional translation. I already sent you the firmware so you just need to build the system that will house it.”

“Hey Kamay,” Regan said into her phone, “I need to go talk to Seth and make sure he doesn’t get us all arrested doing something stupid, I’ll be back in a while.”

“That’s fine, you’ve been working really hard on this, I’m impressed with your abilities,” she said back in response.

“You’re one to talk,” Regan said with a chuckle, “Someday, once we rescue you, we’re gonna have a drink and I want to hear the full story of how you know so much about everything.”

Kamay’s laugh sounded like tinkling glass put through a grainy filter, “It’d be a pretty long story, and I’d have to swear you to secrecy.”

“Hey we’re already swearing you to secrecy on the do it yourself spaceship we’re building in this illegally accessed hangar, so no worries,” Regan chuckled back. She gave Lily a peck on the cheek and trotted over towards the airlock to the operations room while Kamay went right back to giving instructions. It seemed like she must barely be sleeping if she was doing all of this while also building her own habitat on that shipwreck she’d been dumped on by her ex.

Regan passed through the airlock and was immediately met with Seth speaking in a nervous angry tone into his phone.

“He’s still my brother too, you can’t just take him away!” Seth was nearly shouting. Regan could tell he was close to tears from the argument.

She met eyes with him as he listened to something his stepmom was saying and she gently set a hand on his shoulder.

“I won’t let you do that,” he said into the phone, voice shakily and unsteady. Helen said something else to which he replied, “We’ll see about that,” and hung up before she could say anything else.

“More trouble in paradise?” Regan asked him softly.

“Helen wants to take Caleb and move to Mt. Washington,” his voice came out as a growl, anger barely restrained.

“What are you going to do?” She asked him.

“Something…” he said, his voice trailing off dangerously.

“Seth you can’t bring Caleb here,” she told him.

“Why not?” He said, “We can all just leave when the ship’s finished, what could they do?”

“Seth he’s thirteen, we can’t take him to space with us, it’s too dangerous,” Regan stressed.

“We’re in space right now Regan,” he retorted, “They can’t arrest us if we’re not here.”

“You know what I mean,” she groaned, “you’re just gonna run away forever, take him and go on the run? Leave your family forever? How is that any more fair to him than what Helen is doing? And I don’t know about you but I’d rather not be a fugitive from the law because I helped kidnap your kid brother.”

“Please don’t try to stop me Regan,” he pleaded.

“Please don’t make me stop you,” she bit back with, “Because I will, this ship is all of ours, you don’t get to endanger everything we’ve built here on a fool’s errand. You don’t get to risk Kamay’s life over it. I will stop you.”

“And how are you planning to do that?” he said crossly, folding his arms in front of his chest and giving her his best tough guy look.

“If I told you it would spoil the surprise,” she said walking off into the bunker before Seth had a chance to respond. She still had three more loads of electronics to pick up from the junkyard.

( Heavenly Traveler Vehicle) 天国乗用船

JDSV Shinjuku III FSV Peter Kropotkin

Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory

1.84 Light years from Sol

May 2220

Kamay Alcoseba sawed, smashed, and tore apart the shipwreck she called home, ripping metal from the walls and yanking wires, pipes, and cables out from beneath them. She fed mangled chunks of metal into her jury rigged smelting system and from that printed out new pressure vessels. The vessel she was constructing in hyperspace had grown large enough that she could spin it to produce gravity, and as construction continued apace she was spending less and less time in the ruined Japanese generation ship.

As her bootstrapping process accelerated, her hyperspace gantry grew larger and larger, faster and faster. She wondered idly if HENGE realized how much of the shipwreck she would manage to steal before it’s drones showed up; it would amuse her if her salvaging disrupted the rogue daemon’s plans a bit.

While she worked she talked the teenagers on Jericho Ridge through their own starship construction process. None of the work they were doing was particularly complicated, but she had to simplify the instructions a lot so as to not overwhelm them. Well, except for Harper, he seemed to follow everything she said remarkably well. It was nice talking to someone other than HENGE, the Free Sky Tribe, and that detective who had been hunting her. She wondered what happened to him after HENGE took over the system. Good riddance she thought, the man was smart enough to repeatedly get close to catching her but not smart enough to realize the importance of what she was doing. More trouble than he was worth really.

Initially, Kamay had only planned to build a few modules, just enough to survive, but as she streamlined the fabrication process it became easier and easier. She printed enough to make a ring she could spin for a weak form of artificial gravity, printed structural members to hold the whole rig together under thrust, printed more modules to act as zero-gravity sections, and at this point, she was mostly just keeping at it for the hell of it. The work kept her busy and kept her from going stir crazy while waiting for her new friends to come pick her up.

She finished another section and pushed it through into hyperspace, linked it into the rest of her gantry, then climbed aboard and took off her spacesuit. The heavy lifting had left her covered in a sheen of sweat and after descending into the ring she hopped through the shower she’d rigged up. The ring’s spin only provided about a third of a gee, that was the best she could do structurally without putting in a lot more work, but it was good enough for a martian to feel comfortable.

Kamay lounged in her crash couch and checked the news feeds from the system. HENGE was well on its way to taking apart Mercury. Venus had increasingly sizable holes punched out of it. The Earth was now caged in a pair of orbital rings, and the Martians were doing…something, very large scale around the red planet. Things were changing so fast, it was odd to realize she was actually having trouble keeping up with the pace of the news. It was a foreboding change for a girl who’d always felt like a big fish in a small pond. The universe had become a much larger feeling since the aliens had been found. It was scary, sure, but it was also rather exciting.

“Hey Kamay,” Regan’s voice said into her implants.

“Hey,” she said back, “Did you need something?”

“Nah I just wanted to talk to someone,” Regan answered, “it’s the middle of the night here and everyone else is asleep.”

“Why aren’t you?” She asked.

“I’m just getting kinda nervous about this thing with Seth,” the younger woman told her, “the one I told you about with his parents and his little brother, I don’t want him to do something dumb that wrecks our plans. Well, that and the idea of blasting off into hyperspace is in general just kinda nerve wracking. I’m sure I’ll be fine once we’ve been in hyperspace for a while and I don’t think we’re going to explode or depressurize, but the waiting is pretty intense.”

“Yeah I know the feel, it’s not the experience that’s bad, it’s the anticipation of the experience,” Kamay told her, “As for Seth, did you end up taking my advice?”

“Yeah,” she said then went quiet, “I really hope I won’t have to use all of it though.”

“You’ll figure it out, you’re a tough kid Regan,” Kamay said.

Regan laughed, a hoarse chuckle, “Yeah right, I’m a sheltered good for nothing fuck, I’ve never had to really do anything hard in my life. You’re the one who managed to get stranded on a shipwreck and is building her own station to escape.”

“Hey, I have experience with building things,” Kamay said, “You don’t, and you nearly built a whole ship on your own anyway.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said in response. Kamay started to say something back but then an irritatingly persistent alarm started going off. Kamay frowned and sat up, looking for the source of the message, found it, and the frown deepened.

“I’m gonna have to call you back Regan, something just came up,” she closed the channel and brought up one of the exterior cameras she’d rigged up. HENGE’s construction drones had just dropped out of warp.

“Hello Kamay!” The AI said cheerfully over another channel she kept open with it. “I hope you’ve remembered your deadline. I’m here to dismantle the Shinjuku III for mass.”

“Yeah I remembered it,” she told the AI with a grimace. She had more than finished the vessel she was constructing, at this point she was just stealing mass from the AI to be petty, but it’s drones had showed up in the middle of the night as she was getting ready to sleep, which threw off her plans a bit. Still, she launched herself into action and started activating automated systems she had prepared as quickly as she could manage.

Her smelters and printers were mounted to rails. When she activated the system, the last of the air supply from the shipwreck was shifted into her vehicle and the main transfer portal opened one last time. The rails automatically extended themselves and linked to the rails on an open ended module on her vessel. With a burst of electrical power the whole assembly was shoved down the rails into her module. As it reached the end of its track the cabling attached to it tugged the portal generator rings into hyperspace.

The drones had just reached the wreck when Kamay closed the anchor portal, slicing in half the girder connecting her to the shipwreck. Then, the largest pair of functional actuators she could cobble together activated and the rails shoved off the wreck. She activated her transponder and closed the transfer portal before it could start tunneling through the walls. Lastly, she reactivated the anchor portal and extended her antennas and masts back into real space so she could keep an eye on things. The shove had imparted enough velocity to her that the shipwreck was slowly receding into the distance. She was flying free in hyperspace.



“Bye HENGE,” She told the AI as the drones went to work on the wreck.

Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel

FI-EMV Stoneburner

Hyperbolic Stellar Warp Trajectory

27,109 Light years from Sagittarius A*

June 2220

It had been a long four months of trawling the Hyades in search of the Better Margins. The Stoneburner had spent most of that time in warp bouncing between systems. What little time they’d spent out of warp had been a nerve wracking combination of laying sensor drones, scanning for the rogue survey ship, and avoiding the alien mining operations which were busily stripping the cluster down to empty space. Owen McGregor was pretty sure in another few years the open cluster would be gone entirely, graded down to empty space.

The Stoneburner had arrived at the arranged rendezvous point earlier than the Gravity’s Rainbow or the Animal Farm, and he hoped that the two ESS destroyers had fared better than they had. If none of the search vessels or drones had found the Better Margins, they would be forced to return to Aldebaran empty handed. It could be that the Better Margins had been destroyed or they could have already left the Hyades. The trouble was, none of them had any way of knowing.

Owen and Kaito Pendragon had once more broken out the magnetic chess set and spread it across an unused console. Owen was actually winning a good deal more consistently, which he took as a sign that his son in law’s attention wasn’t really on the game. Concern for Alice had proven to be a bonding experience for the two men, and as the days continued to tick by with no sign of the Better Margins, that concern had only grown.

It continued to grow when the Animal Farm dropped out of warp beside them. Captain Faraday reported seeing no sign of the Better Margins, but they had gotten a first hand look at a reshaper harvesting operation, including a start being yanked out of space by giant impossibly strong claws moving at relativistic velocities. Their worry had reached a near boiling point when the Gravity’s Rainbow also arrived without having found the missing survey ship.

“So now what?” Kaito asked Anthony Faraday over the tightbeam as the mining ship’s captain awkwardly paced in zero gravity.

“We can’t waste more time on this wild goose chase,” Captain Faraday told him, “With everything going on, the Accord needs all hands on deck back in Sol. Captain King and the Gravity’s Rainbow will accompany you back to Aldebaran and assess things there, while I take the Animal Farm back to Sol. If there’s any messages you want to send with us, tightbeam them over in the next twelve hours, then we’ll be moving out.”

“I don’t suppose you’d allow us to keep looking?” Kaito asked. Owen was shaking his head even before Anthony responded.

“That’s a negative Stoneburner, we can’t authorize a continued human presence in the Hyades with a known Reshaper presence, pack up your toys and head back to Aldebaran,” he said, cutting the feed.

“Damnit!” Kaito said, slamming his fist into a handlebar, “If something’s happened to Alice I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“There’s nothing we can do at this point,” Owen pointed out to him, “And she might be fine, Zephyr might have already packed it in and headed back as well.”

“Or she might have gotten them all killed, we have no way of knowing,” he grumbled.

“Well we’re not gonna find out hanging around out here,” Murphy’s voice said over the intercom, having been listening in, “I’m gonna lay us in a course for home.”

“Yeah yeah,” Kaito said, “Owen get on the shipwide, tell everyone that if they have any messages to send to Sol to package them and dump them in a file, we’ll send them all over to the Animal Farm in ten hours, I’ll be in my quarters, don’t disturb me.”

With that the captain stormed out, leaving Owen and Dianica Botheys to exchange looks on the now otherwise deserted mining information center.

“Chess?” The golem asked him.

Plateau Class Orbital Ring Station

MCSC1 Acidalia Orbital

Synchronous Orbit

17,228 Kilometers from Mars

June 2220

The council convened in simspace in an amphitheater-like structure on the surface of Mars. Ivy Czininski, Vedika Srivastava, and Evangeline Daedalia stood before the heads of their respective agencies. Thaddeus O’Neil, the high Coordinator for Survey, Fiora Conti Speaker for the Council of Consciences, and Julian Margravine as the representative of the Pragmatist’s Guild, which had no true head member. In addition to the three human representatives, THEMIS was also in attendance, wearing a generic Martian naval officer’s uniform. The meeting had been called before they’d even had time to disembark completely. Ivy had quickly shuffled herself into a side room in the Survey Headquarters aboard Acidalia Orbital. She collapsed into a chair in a waiting room and activated the holoconference link on her implants.

Ivy was glad to be back in Sol, although the circumstances cast a dark cloud over their return. She was, and she suspected they all were, hoping to not find the Reshapers nearly so close. Eighty eight lightyears was practically a stone’s throw in interstellar terms, barely out of their backyard. It meant they had even less time to prepare than they had hoped.

When the Empiricist had come out of warp above Mars, they had been treated to the rather remarkable sight of a new orbital ring enclosing the red planet. Strange structures were growing up and down from the ring, like giant metallic flower petals, while enormous mines on the surface could be seen all the way from orbit. The Martian Socialist Republic had completely changed stances and was moving at high speed, preparing to flee Sol with everything not nailed down, including Mars herself if the files she’d only had a chance to glance at were to be believed. The rather remarkable feat of moving an entire world would have been a generational milestone, something to celebrate for decades to come, but with the threat hanging over all of their heads she doubted anyone would be celebrating any time soon.

She wanted to get out of this meeting and see her wife and son before anything else bad happened, but protocol came first, and this meeting was important.

“So you found them?” Thaddeus said without preamble as Vedika’s placeholder avatar was finally replaced by the orange eyed woman, signaling the start of the meeting.

“We found them Sir,” Ivy confirmed, “Have you had a chance to look at the files? The ships they’re using as primary harvesting platforms…”

“I’ve glanced at it,” he said, “But are you sure about the scale? A ship ten AUs across?”

“The science team confirmed it,” Vedika said, cutting in, “We deployed drones into hyperspace and took numerous scans and measurements, the vehicle is massive in every sense of the word. It doesn’t appear that they ever actually stop moving in one system, which makes sense considering the energy cost of accelerating and decelerating that much mass. They just coast along harvesting everything as they go.”

“How much mass does the vehicle have on the hyperspace side?” Julian asked her.

“Something in the neighborhood of a hundred and fifty times the mass of our sun,” Vedika answered.

“How does it avoid collapsing on itself?” He asked.

Vedika shrugged, “We have no idea, the materials science is centuries beyond us, but we’re guessing based on external readings that there are probably a number of high mass objects inside of it. If they take entire stars, it might take a while for them to digest the mass it intakes.”

“Did you witness them transmitting any of the mass they ingested elsewhere?” Thaddeus said.

Ivy looked to Vedika who looked to Ivy at the same time, Vedika answered, “We didn’t, and we thought it was better to get the information on their presence back to Mars as quickly as possible instead of waiting around to watch their entire harvesting process.”

“I think that was likely a good call,” Fiora said from behind steepled fingers, “We need to update our timetables on when the Reshapers are likely to reach Alpha Centauri and Sol, time is of the essence.”

“I have already forwarded all information regarding the timetables to the relevant organizations, bodies, and individuals,” THEMIS said.

“Good,” Thaddeus said, drumming his hands on the stone surface that made up their virtual desks, “Do we have anything else to cover here? I have their reports, and I’d like to let the crew of the Empiricist get some well earned R&R before throwing them back into the fray.”

“I think that’s all,” Julian said, “Vedika, I will need to speak to you and Cale Rouschev at some point as well regarding future assignments, we don’t typically keep two Pragmatists aboard one survey ship, but that can wait until later, Fiora, any closing comments?”

Fiora cocked a slight smile, “Evangeline, good job keeping all of their heads on straight, keep up the good work.”

‘Aye,” Evangeline said with a soft bow.

“Alright, meeting adjourned,” Thaddeus said, vanishing from the simspace, his presence already requested for another meeting.

Ivy disconnected from the simspace and sighed as the room she was in returned. She let her head lull back against the cushioned chair and watched out the window as another orbital slowly overtook them on a lower orbit. It was going to be a long few years.

Constellation Project Colony

UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge

Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory

1.96 Light Years from Sol

June 2220

The Chasing Daylight was finally finished and their departure time was scheduled for the next morning. Seth was still in awe of what they’d accomplished. He had taken the final steps himself, painting the name across the side of the hull in bright red vacuum safe paint. There had been a small celebration involving drinking and weed and partying. Harper had put on music over the intercom and they’d all eaten far more pizza than was healthy. It was an impressive accomplishment that filled Seth with a sense of pride. With Kamay’s help, what had been a long term pipe dream had come together almost faster than he’d believed possible. Looking at the squat mass of the ship, his ship, it was almost enough to make him cry.

Once everyone had fallen asleep, Seth slipped out of the bunker and made his way to the truck. He didn’t care what Regan had to say about it, he wasn’t going to leave his little brother behind with his overbearing stepmother and drunk of a father. It was nearly four in the morning on colony time, neither of his parents should be awake, making the task of sneaking Caleb out fairly straightforward.

Seth input the directions to his parent’s house into the truck’s automatic navigation system and that was when the trouble began. As soon as he set the commands, the truck would simply erase them and reset, steadfastly refusing to move. He frowned and tried again a few more times, only to get the same result. When he input the directions on his phone and tried to transfer them to the truck’s computer, they stuck for a moment but then erased themselves yet again.

Seth’s frown deepened. This must have been what Regan had meant when she said she would stop him, but he wasn’t to be deterred so easily. He switched from automatic to manual mode, unfolding the steering column from beneath the console and gently began nosing the vehicle forward. He didn’t have very much driving experience, but he had enough to get across town and back. The vehicle rolled forward a few feet before the systems completely shut off and powered down.

“Damnit Regan!” he said pounding his fists on the steering column. Her sabotage had been rather thorough. If need be he could just walk, but it would be a long enough hike there and back that he’d be cutting things rather close. He decided to pop the hood and see if he couldn’t just bypass the computer entirely.

Clambering down out of the cab, Seth opened the hood on the truck and began pulling the plugs on the truck’s computer system. He’d halfway finished the task when he was interrupted by an ominous click from behind his head. He turned and came face to face with Regan, staring him down with a small utilitarian handgun.

“Seth, step away from the truck,” Regan said, voice deadly serious.

“Regan?!” Seth backed away, holding his hands up, eye twitching as fear and anger battled out in his head, “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I told you, I’m stopping you, we’re going to get on the ship and leave, you’re not going to bring your little brother,” she spoke in a calm and level voice, hoping that the fear she was feeling wasn’t leaking into her tone.

“Or you’ll shoot me, is that it?” He said angrily, “We’re supposed to be friends and this is how you treat me?”

“I was hoping you would get discouraged when the truck wasn’t working and not need to do this,” she said, feeling her voice starting to rise in pitch, trying to keep the tears out of her eyes, “Just go back to the hangar.”

“You know I can’t do that,” he said.

“And you know I can’t let you leave,” she told him, blinking back her tears.

“So you’re just gonna shoot me in cold blood?” he demanded, “Who put you up to this?”

“Seth go back to the hangar!” she practically shouted, her voice becoming somewhat panicked and shrill.

“Regan,” he said.

“Seth,” she replied, “Go back to the hangar, I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

Her hands were starting to shake, the situation was starting to get increasingly dicey.

“You’re not going to kill me,” he announced, “You don’t have it in you.”

Keeping his hands raised, he began to close the distance between them.

“You’re right,” she said, lowering her gun and shooting him in the leg.

Seth collapsed to the ground howling in pain, while the ringing sound of the weapon firing was impossibly loud in the cold and clear night air. Regan looked at the gun slightly dumbfounded and shoved it back into the holster she had behind her back.

“You’re a fucking idiot you know that Seth,” she told him crossly.

“You shot me!” he exclaimed.

“Come on, let’s get you back inside and patched up,” she said.

“You actually fucking shot me!” Seth shouted in irritation and pain, “You’re fucking crazy.”

“I warned you,” she said, dangerously, “Now let’s go, mister, before you bleed all over everything.”

She offered him a hand and he looked at it like a dangerous animal before hesitantly taking it. Hearing the commotion, It didn’t take long before Harper and Lily came running out of the bunker armed with flashlights and panicked expressions.

“What happened?!” Lily asked breathlessly as she saw Regan helping Seth limp his way back to the stairs.

“Minor medical emergency,” Regan said.

“She shot me!” Seth complained.

“You what?!” Lily and Harper both gasped.

“Yeah, yeah,” Regan replied blasely, “Come on help me get him inside.”

“Regan what the hell,” Harper demanded.

“He was gonna run off and kidnap his brother and ruin everything and wouldn’t stop for anything less extreme,” she explained, “it’s just a sachet shot, hurts a lot and bleeds a lot but won’t do any long term damage, there’s not even a bullet to remove.”

“Where did you get a gun?” Lily asked her desperately as they wrestled Seth down the stairs. Seth, realizing the wound was just painful and bloody but not that severe, started trying to get away from them but Harper stood at the top of the stairs blocking his path.

“Bought it off Tom,” Regan explained, holding onto Seth’s arm with both of hers to stop him from going anywhere, “I figured we might need to protect ourselves in space, this type of round is designed to be mostly nonlethal and not harm the pressure vessel on a ship.”

“Regan!” Seth growled, trying to break out of the two girls’ grips. Harper shut the hatch and locked it.

“As over the top as it might have been, Regan did the right thing trying to stop you Seth, this can’t keep going on,” Harper said calmly.

“So what am I supposed to do?” Seth demanded of him.

“You’re supposed to come explore hyperspace with us and be the captain of the ship it was your idea to build,” Regan said, still wrestling him down the corridor, “Now come on, captain. You’re better than this nonsense”

“He’s my brother Regan, I can’t just abandon him,” Seth said, voice cracking up, tears starting to pool in his eyes.

“You’re not abandoning him, you asshole,” Regan said, “You’re just not kidnapping him.”

“Regan is right you know,” Lily said, also continuing to wrestle with the larger teen, “We’ll be back here, it’s not like you’re leaving Jericho forever.”

“Unless you do something stupid like kidnap a minor on your way out,” Regan added in.

“This isn’t even a particularly long trip Seth,” Harper said, continuing to walk behind the trio, ready to tackle Seth if he broke out of their grip, “This is just a quick pickup as a maiden voyage, in and out, three day adventure.”

“I hate all of you,” Seth grumbled as he stopped fighting and let them drag him down the corridor.

“Glad to hear it cap’n,” Harper teased as they pulled him into the hangar.

Δ

“Final checks completed,” Regan said from the operations console aboard the Chasing Daylight, “Lily how’s everything look on your end?”

“Everything looks good here,” Lily said from the console across from her where she was monitoring the connections to the hangar systems. There was a slight hitch to her voice, still slightly spooked from the events of the night before, but she put on a brave face and refused to let it get to her.

“Ready to open the gate then Cap’n?” Harper said from the engineering console at the back of the room.

“Yeah, yeah,” Seth grumbled from the pilot’s seat, “Lily, pump the air out of the hangar.”

“Aye,” she said, activating the hangar bay controls. The roar of the fans was barely audible through the hull and quickly faded away to nothing as they were left in a vacuum.

“Alright Harper,” Seth said, “Open the portal.”

With Kamay’s help, they had changed plans. Instead of building a portal vertically and pushing the ship through it, which would make redocking somewhat difficult, they had rigged up an ad-hoc portal that spanned the entire floor of the hangar bay. When Harper flipped the switch, the portal opened, and the centripetal force of the colony’s rotation flung the ship free into hyperspace with a stomach churning drop. A strange purple cloud rippled through the interior of the ship as they crossed the event horizon, and then they were in hyperspace.

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