Arthur shook his head. “No can do, buddy. We’ve got one batch of fuel growing—it’ll be a few days before it doubles.”

“We’re going to use most of it. We have no choice.”

“More than half? But then it’ll be a week before we get production back up.”

“We don’t have a week—”

“What are you guys talking about?” Cole asked.

The two men looked at each other. Arthur raised his eyebrows plead-ingly. Mortimor hesitated, then shrugged.

“You said earlier that you knew what fusion fuel was,” Arthur said.

“Yeah, a microorganism, right?” He tried to remember what Byrne had told him.

“Yeah, well, we breed them. Just like the Navy does, but our own variety.” Arthur frowned. “The problem is, it takes quite a bit of time—”

“Time we don’t have,” Mortimor said. “Quite a few ships from the Bern fleet have already jumped out, and something massive popped into hyperspace last night and went through the rift as well. The thing was the size of a small moonlet. Our informant says Byrne flew the coop along with the craft, which means it might already be too late.”

“Too late for what?” Cole asked.

Mortimor turned to Cole. “These Bern are invading the Milky Way. If we can’t stop them, or close that rift, they’ll extinguish every piece of sentient life they find there. Some of the people you see roaming these hallways are all that survived entire other galaxies. Unless we do something, we might be all that’s left of ours.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding.” Cole looked to Arthur, as if he would tell him it was all a joke.

Arthur shook his head. “The frustrating bit is that the rift is right there in that fleet somewhere, but we have no way of getting to it in order to close it.”

“Wouldn’t they just open another one, even if we did?”

Mortimor frowned. “Not from this side, they couldn’t. What kills me  is that we are the ones who opened the rift.” He took a deep breath. “Over a decade ago, we opened a hole between Lok and hyperspace—”

“Well, not we, exactly,” Arthur said.

“Right.” Mortimor nodded. “The Drenard underground did, not too long before I became a member. They opened two rifts, both leading to hyperspace, one from our central part of the cone and another in the wide part, where the rain freezes.”

He frowned. “It was a backdoor plan, a way to pull what they hoped would be a final raid, ending the deadlock here. They moved an entire army through in a single day. I was there for that part. My wife and I were staying in a house not long after Molly was born. An entire battalion came through one wall and disappeared into another. And then—”

Mortimor fell silent; Arthur shook his head, as if in empathy.

“And then what?” Cole asked.