I left him standing in the hallway and made my way to the bridge. The large space had half a dozen terminals for the various crew I didn’t have. At the front, a wide screen showed a divided view of the outside cameras. The safety perimeter was already raised around our ship, warning of an imminent launch.

Kee, Eli, and Anja were all in place. Anja looked at home at the engineering terminal. Eli was in his usual spot at the tactical terminal, but his station had become more of a catch-all for everything that we didn’t have crew for. Kee glanced up from the nav terminal, where she also handled the ship’s systems. “I have a route to the wormhole,” she said. “We’ve got clearance to launch. They told us not to return.”

Anja winced.

“Yeah, I figured as much,” I said as I settled into the captain’s terminal. I smiled at Anja. “No worries. We’ll just stock up before we head through this part of space again. I wouldn’t want to give them my money anyway.” I turned to Kee. “How long to Bastion?”

Kee sent the route to my terminal. “Five days if we don’t have to wait too long for wormhole access.”

Starlight’s Shadow was not the fastest ship in the galaxy—it wasn’t even close. Torran had probably made the trip in less than half the time if Lotkez was a newer Valovian ship, but he would have to settle for a slow return trip. No matter how essential speed was to the investigation, Starlight could only go so fast.

Our route crisscrossed through space, taking us through three wormholes. Getting from point A to point B was never straightforward—not if you wanted to arrive in less than a millennium. Earth still hadn’t received any radio transmissions from the Valovian Empire that hadn’t been relayed through the wormholes by ships, drones, and satellites, and the Valoffs’ territory also resided within the Milky Way.

Space was unimaginably vast. Without the wormholes, humans wouldn’t have been able to venture much beyond our small solar system. It was pure luck—bad luck, some would say—that we’d run into the Valoffs more than a century after humanity’s first successful wormhole round trip. Up until that point, humans had thought that we were alone in the universe. Or at least in our galaxy.

The initial meeting had not gone well. Subsequent meetings were not any better.

And, as far as we could tell, Valoffs also relied on the wormholes for space travel. They jealously guarded the ones in their territory. If they’d developed standalone faster-than-light technology, they hadn’t used it during the war.