“A more efficient atomic structure that’s created by utilising the output of several of our engine modules to force and hold the new alignment. It’s an ingenious setup,” said Abrams with grudging admiration. “Plus, the Sagh’eld’s control hardware is fitted with processing cores way beyond anything the HC uses in its equivalent modules.”

  “Because we don’t require the same level of computational grunt, owing to the fact that we haven’t yet figured out how to alter the alignment of—” said Massey.

  “That’s enough for the moment, gentlemen,” said Lanson. He usually enjoyed talking about the technical stuff, but right now he wasn’t in the mood. “We know the Sagh’eld are ten years ahead of us—”

  “Maybe more,” said Abrams.

  “But whatever the Cornerstone techs learned from their time with the New Beginning, should help us close the gap,” Lanson finished.

  He returned to his seat, his mind already conjuring up new what-ifs. The Cornerstone base had operated under strict security protocols, so perhaps some of their research data had stayed on the planet, rather than being sent off-world. Lanson told himself such a thing couldn’t happen, and yet he couldn’t shake the worry that perhaps he was taking too big a risk by piloting the warship into unknown and potentially hostile territory.

  Balanced against this was the knowledge that cancelling the mission and returning home might well be an even bigger risk, particularly if there was some alien tech up for grabs at the New Beginning’s destination.

  I was promoted to warship commander because the military believed I could be trusted to make the right call.

  “Is Private Teague making any progress with the facilities in the medical bay, Captain?” asked Lieutenant Fay Perry, the question hauling Lanson out of his reverie.

  “No,” said Lanson. “It’s not something she’s been trained for, like we’ve already discussed. Besides, the soldiers seem willing enough to do their own…alternative…testing.”

  “Four broken pinkies so far in addition to Private Chan’s original broken pinkie,” said Matlock, deadpan.

  “One broken pinkie every other day of the journey so far,” said Lanson. “Each of which has been an unfortunate accident.”

  “And each one healing in minutes,” said Matlock. “I wonder how long until we’ll see the first broken leg.”

  “I’ve spoken to Sergeant Gabriel already,” said Lanson. “I’ve made it abundantly clear that I want him and his squad to be one hundred percent battle ready at the end of this journey.”

  In truth, Lanson was as interested as everyone else to discover what exactly the Galos had done to his body, but he certainly couldn’t sanction anything which might jeopardise the mission. Additionally, Lanson was convinced that the broken pinkies were just the tip of the iceberg – the injuries he’d been permitted to hear about, to gauge his enthusiasm for the soldiers’ experimentation. It was almost certain that Sergeant Gabriel was complicit, and Lanson had made it plain that it was time for the squad’s commanding officer to ensure these unfortunate accidents stopped immediately.

  “I’m going to get some sleep,” said Lanson a couple of hours later, when it became his turn for some time off duty.

  Despite having been at his station for sixteen hours, he didn’t feel especially tired, a fact he attributed to having so much on his mind. Hoping to settle himself, Lanson decided to take the long route to his quarters, and he headed aft.

  Something about being surrounded by so much technology – ancient materials from the formation of the universe put to new use – was soothing to him, and Lanson soon felt calm descend upon him. He paused outside the closed door to the medical bay.

  Placing his hand on the access panel granted him access. The bay was compact, with grey-sheeted beds, each ten feet long, installed into alcoves in the forward, aft, and portside walls. Above the beds were flush cabinets, all of them closed. Lanson knew from previous visits that the cabinets contained Sagh’eld medical supplies, though it wasn’t clear what injuries most of them were intended to treat.

  In the centre of the room, a Sagh’eld medical robot hovered silently, its multiple operating arms still, and its numerous monitoring screens blank.

  Private Teague was in the bay, sitting on the edge of one of the beds. She looked up guiltily at Lanson’s arrival, as if this was a break she didn’t think she deserved.

  “Don’t beat yourself up over this,” said Lanson, motioning towards the medical robot.

  “I keep telling myself I should be able to figure it out,” said Teague with a half-smile. “I finished a couple of years at medical college before I dropped out and joined the military, and now my mind keeps telling me that I should know how to operate advanced alien hardware.”

  Lanson laughed. “Why’d you drop out of college?”

  “Young and dumb, I guess. Shooting aliens seemed like a better idea than studying.”

  “We’re going to a place no one else in the Human Confederation has ever visited, Private,” said Lanson. “That’s got to make it all worthwhile, right?”

  “Only if we find something worth having, sir. Else it’s just another long road out and the same on the way back.”

  “We’ll find that something,” said Lanson, suddenly sure about it.

  “I hope so, Captain.”

  Lanson stepped back towards the exit. “I’m glad the injuries have stopped, Private.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Teague.

  Having closed the medical bay door, Lanson smiled to himself. Teague had attempted to keep a neutral expression when he mentioned the injuries, but he was sure something had flickered across her face.

  Heading on, Lanson bypassed the mess area, since he wasn’t hungry or thirsty. Soon, he came to the passage leading to his quarters. The original Sagh’eld crew had each been assigned their own room, while the aliens had provided bunks for fifty of their troopers, divided between five different rooms, with a separate room containing only six bunks, presumably for the ground officers.

  Entering his room, Lanson looked around for a moment. His quarters were stark, just like the equivalent on a Human Confederation warship. The bed was narrow and too long, and the mattress was made from thin foam. A small desk was equipped with a Sagh’eld communicator device, and a locker was fitted to the same wall. That locker was sealed, and it wouldn’t open to any of Lanson’s codes. He couldn’t deny he was a little curious to discover what it contained.

  Hanging from a hook nearby was a Sagh’eld officer’s flight suit. Every time he saw it, Lanson felt a shiver without being quite sure why. Despite the similarities between humanity and the Sagh’eld, the two species were overall not alike – at least in Lanson’s experience – and he couldn’t permit himself to identify with the New Beginning’s previous commanding officer.

  Aside from the bed and the meagre furnishings, Lanson’s quarters also offered showering and toilet facilities, accessed through a corridor in the wall opposite the entrance.

  Laying down his gauss rifle, which he carried with him at all times, Lanson rolled onto the bed. Shortly afterwards, he was asleep.

  Several hours later, he was awoken by the sound of a voice emerging from one of the wall speakers in his room. For a for a few seconds, his brain insisted that the voice was part of a dream he was experiencing and that he should ignore it.

  “Captain! This is Lieutenant Turner! Return to the bridge immediately! This is urgent!”

  Lanson finally got the message, and he sat upright. Then, a surge of adrenaline as the words sunk in made him spring from the bed.

  “I’m on my way,” he said. “What’s happened?”

  “Our lightspeed journey ended early, Captain,” said Turner, concern evident in her words.

  Lanson put his suit helmet over his head and snapped the sealing clips into place. “Is there a hardware fault?” he asked through the chin speaker.

  “Negative, Captain. We’re waiting for the calibration checks on our navigational system to complete, but Lieutenant Abrams believes we’ve arrived at our destination.”

  “That’s more than three days early,” said Lanson.

  He grabbed his rifle from the shelf next to his bed and sprinted from the room. A short time later, he arrived on the bridge and dropped himself into his seat. Lieutenant Massey – who’d also been off duty - arrived a few seconds later, looking as if he could have done with another couple of hours in bed.

  “The bridge is yours, Captain,” said Commander Matlock.

  “I can’t send a comm to base from here, Captain,” said Turner. “Since the New Beginning’s navigational system doesn’t know where we are, there’s no routing information along which to direct a transmission.”

  “Hopefully that’s something we can resolve,” said Lanson.

  “Yes, sir. The travel time from here will be months.”

  “I understand that.”

  Lanson swept his gaze across the control panel. The New Beginning was travelling at two hundred kilometres per second and the status lights were all green. Sensor feeds of the surrounding space showed nothing other than darkness, though Turner and Perry were clearly hunting for anything of interest.

  Taking hold of the control bars, Lanson maintained velocity and waited to discover what his sensor officers would find.

  THREE

  “The nearest star is about twenty billion klicks from our position,” said Lieutenant Turner. “Otherwise, there’s nothing in our vicinity.”

  “Keep running the local area scans,” said Lanson. “And expand the radius.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Even though the New Beginning was under no apparent threat, Lanson wasn’t feeling entirely comfortable with the situation.

  “Lieutenant Abrams, why did we exit lightspeed so early?” he demanded. “And are we even in the right place?”

  “I’m still waiting on the calibration reports, sir,” said Abrams. “But my gut feel is that we ended up at the place we intended.”

  “There’s nothing out there, Lieutenant. We’re twenty billion klicks from the closest star.”

  “I realise that, Captain. I don’t think we’ve arrived off-target as such, just that there’s likely been some minor variation amplified by distance.”

  “If you’re right, the only explanation for why we’re more than three days early is because our lightspeed multiplier was higher than expected,” said Lanson. “Either that or our lightspeed multiplier increased over the course of the journey.”

  “I’d like to say that isn’t possible, Captain.” Abrams cursed. “But having seen what the Galos did to our propulsion, maybe you’re right.”

  “How long on the calibration report?” asked Lanson.

  “It’s just finishing now. After that, I’ll have to do some analysis of the figures before I can give you a solid conclusion.”

  “Let me know when it’s done,” said Lanson.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Lanson leaned back in his seat. The adrenaline from earlier was subsiding, and he was glad to find that he wasn’t feeling too tired. A check of the time informed him that he’d slept for a little over six hours, so he hadn’t been awoken too early.

  “How much longer, Lieutenant Abrams?” asked Lanson after a few minutes.

  “There’s a lot of data, Captain,” said Abrams irritably. “I working as fast as I can.”

  “The most recent area scans have come back clear,” said Perry. “I’ll increase the scan volume again.”

  Lanson doubted the scans were going to turn anything up, but he let Perry and Turner carry on.

  He was sure that Lieutenant Abrams’ assessment was correct and that there’d been a distance-amplified variation over the course of the transit. Usually, a Human Confederation warship could emerge from a short duration lightspeed tunnel with near enough pinpoint accuracy, but as the journey length increased, inaccuracies in the calculations began to creep in. The same could happen when a warship was operating with reduced – or, in New Beginning’s case, increased – propulsion output.

  Lanson remembered the Gallivant exiting lightspeed at Lorimos a short distance off target, though that journey had been only twenty hours, such that the outcome was an inaccuracy of only a few thousand kilometres. Here, it seemed as if the New Beginning was a long way off its expected arrival point.

  “Well, at least we know the Sagh’eld lightspeed calculation algorithms suffer the same problems as ours,” said Matlock.

  “Given the superiority of the enemy’s processing hardware, I’m sure their warship cores are more capable of handling rounding errors on decillion-digit calculations and—” said Abrams.

  “You were supposed to be working on the calibration reports, Lieutenant Abrams. I take it you’re finished?”

  “No, sir, I’ll get right back on it.”

  Lanson shared a smile with Matlock. Abrams couldn’t keep his nose out of any technical discussion, whether it be about a desktop calculator, the theoretical maximum acceleration a Fury missile propulsion section could withstand, or the processing core of an alien warship. He could usually be relied on to provide solid – often inspired – insight on almost everything tech related.

  “While Lieutenant Abrams finishes his analysis, why don’t we engage in some testing of the New Beginning, sir?” asked Matlock. “We had little time to discover the warship’s limits at Lorimos.”

  Part of Lanson thought it best if he didn’t push the hardware too far in case something broke, leaving all the mission personnel stuck here, far beyond any possible rescue. The rest of him – the part which still took childlike joy in piloting spaceships into dangerous situations - thought that some testing was a great idea.

  Before Lanson could voice his agreement, Abrams announced that he’d finished his analysis of the calibration report.

  “Like you suggested, Captain, our lightspeed multiplier increased over the course of the journey,” he said. “However, that increase was mixed in with several sharp declines in the multiplier, though the overall trend was up.”

  “Can you explain this behaviour, Lieutenant?” asked Lanson.

  “Our propulsion output is changing all the time, sir. The Rodos modules haven’t settled, and I think that’s the cause for the increased multiplier.” Abrams grunted. “Which of course doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding why the Rodos modules aren’t behaving as expected.”

  “So if the increased multiplier explains why the transit ended so soon, why is there nothing here?” asked Lanson. “I take it the endpoint calculations weren’t accurate?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Abrams. “I can’t give you an exact figure, but it’s certain we’re several billion kilometres off-target.”

  Lanson’s eyes shifted to the sensor feed focused on the pinprick light of the distant star. “Scan for planets around that star,” he said.

  “Is the intention to locate every planet, Captain?” asked Turner. “That may take some time.”

  “First of all, I just want to know if that’s a solar system or a lone star,” said Lanson. “If there are planets then that’s the direction we’re heading.”

  “I’ll let you know if I find anything, sir,” Turner confirmed.

  The finding didn’t take long.

  “The sensors on the New Beginning have dedicated amplification modules for long-distance scanning,” said Turner. “I don’t want to be impressed, but I am.”

  “What have you found, Lieutenant?”

  “A single planet so far, Captain, at an approximate distance of seven billion klicks from the star. I’ll keep searching. It’ll make things easier if you reduce our velocity.”

  “Will do,” said Lanson.

  He drew back on the controls and the warship’s velocity gauge fell rapidly. After some brief consideration, Lanson brought the New Beginning to a standstill.

  Ten minutes later, Turner and Perry between them had located six planets orbiting the faraway star. Chance favoured the presence of others, but those ones were almost certainly blind side and therefore not currently detectable.

  “Lieutenant Abrams, is there any way you can study the inaccuracies in the endpoint calculations, to narrow down our search field?” asked Lanson. “If we have to hunt through an entire solar system, then so be it, but I’d prefer it if we had a more efficient method.”

  “Lieutenant Massey and I can check through the data, Captain, but it’ll be a long process.”

  “How long?”

  “That depends on how much accuracy you’re expecting, sir. Let’s say thirty minutes as a starting point.”

  “Fine,” said Lanson. “That gives me a chance to run some practical tests on the New Beginning’s propulsion.”

  Before he commenced, Lanson called up the duty schedule. Lieutenant Turner and Commander Matlock would soon be due their eight hours, and he pondered briefly whether he should offer them a chance to take a shorter and earlier break. Once Lieutenant Abrams had trawled his way through the inaccuracies in the endpoint calculations, the mission might well need to proceed without interruptions. Lanson hadn’t yet decided if he was expecting an encounter with an unknown alien species, but if it happened, he wanted his crew to be ready.

  With a sigh, Lanson made his choice. “Commander Matlock, Lieutenant Turner, you have six hours away from the bridge. Make good use of it.”

  The two officers left at once and Lanson rechecked the duty schedule. Once Turner and Matlock returned, his crew would all be ready for an extended shift. Lanson was sure he’d made the right call, though it was frustrating having to put off the propulsion tests for six hours.

  “The early indications are that we’ll be heading closer towards that star, Captain,” said Abrams. “But you guessed that already.”

  “The only other possibility is that we’re looking for a deep space platform somewhere beyond the nearby solar system,” said Lanson.

  “Or that the Sagh’eld hardware failed to correctly translate the script from the Galos cube, meaning that we’re in the wrong place entirely,” said Abrams.