I could jump further and run faster than most civilian vessels, but even I was going to struggle with the effort required to reach Camrose Station within the time frame demanded. I wouldn’t have time to finesse the transition between normal space and the hypervoid. Instead of a graceful leap, I would have to crash through like a breaching whale.

“Five seconds,” I announced over the internal speakers. The captain clung to the arms of her chair. Her knuckles paled.

“Four.”

Alva Clay kissed the ceramic pendant that hung around her neck, and muttered a prayer in the language of her ancestors. Down below, the Druff whimpered in its nest.

“Three.”

For a second, I pulled back from the shimmering boundary between realities and gathered my energies like a fish preparing to leap into sunlight.

“Two.”

Non-essential systems and peripheral apps slowed as I redirected power to the jump engines.

“One.”

Six: Sal Konstanz

SIX

SAL KONSTANZ

The ship reared and bucked as she pierced the membrane between our universe and the whistling emptiness of higher-space. The deck surged and my stomach went weightless. In order to jump into the higher dimensions, the Trouble Dog’s engines had to drive a wormhole through the fabric of space and time. The process involved some stupefying physics that I didn’t pretend to understand. All I knew—all I needed to know—was that hurrying exposed the ship and its crew to unpredictable gravitational effects, making a wormhole’s maw a dangerous place for all concerned.

This time, we were lucky. I felt invisible fingers claw at my clothes and cheeks. The ship shuddered like a gut-shot dog. My vision blurred like the view through a rainy window. Then, with a final lurch, everything crashed back into place. The views on the external screens changed from star-scattered black to formless grey, and we were through. We were ensconced in higher-space and being swept back to the Camrose System like a paper plane riding the outer edges of an oncoming cyclone.

* * *

Two days later, we dropped back into the universe a few thousand kilometres from our destination. By that point, both the young men we’d pulled from the wreck of the crashed scout ship had died—one from internal haemorrhaging and the other from some sort of infection picked up from being in the water with open wounds. With George gone, we had neither the expertise nor the equipment to save them.