The swarm absently hoped that was the case. It was becoming more and more tedious to replace drone ships that had been blown from space-time by a method that couldn’t be determined, tracked, or countered.

What had to be done would be done, but it would be so much easier for everyone involved if this annoying example of the red band would simply accept their fate. There was work to be done elsewhere, other worlds to cleanse of the filth that had infected them.

Other stars to bring back to the whole.

“Enemy ships’ course is unchanged, Captain.”

Eric nodded. “Good. I want best speed for the heliopause, Commander.”

“Aye Captain,” Steph said. “Course is engaged. We’re warping space for the heliopause.”

Eric murmured his response, surprised by the different feel of this ship over his Odyssey. The slight jolt of acceleration that the centrifugal gravity and CM systems had never quite been able to mask on his previous ship was entirely missing here. All he felt was a slight flutter in his guts as though he were falling, and nothing else. Luckily everything seemed to fall right along with him, so no harm, he supposed.

The Odysseus was a marvel of a ship, that much he could admit, but Eric missed his old chair.

“Enemy ships are matching speed,” Michelle said. “Correction . . . they’re . . . Captain, they’ve increased speed to overtake.”

Eric twisted, his face a mask hiding the concern he felt rush through him. “How long to overtake?”

“We won’t make the orbit of Neptune, Captain.”

“Damn, that’s fast,” Eric hissed. “Do we have any more speed?”

That set off a flurry of debate behind him, and he had to run his seat to look at the Priminae engineers who were arguing. Eric let them go for a moment, the translator barely keeping up with half of what they were tossing back and forth, before finally breaking in.

“I asked a question.”

The chief winced and looked over at him, shaking his head. “Not safely, and likely not even if we remove the breakers, Captain. The Drasin have never shown this level of speed before. We did not even believe it was possible within the realm of practical physics.”

That honestly didn’t surprise him much. The Drasin had ways of confounding physics, to his mind at least.

“What keeps that speed from being practical?”

“Primarily the fact that the heat generation increases exponentially,” the chief answered. “Within the space-warp, eventually you reach levels of heat that only existed briefly in the history of the universe, right after the first instant of expansion.”

“Lovely,” Eric turned back.

He remembered that bit about the theory of the Alcubierre drive mechanism, and knew that Priminae ships devoted massive parts of their infrastructure to heat pumps and reclamation tools. It didn’t surprise him in the slightest, however, that Drasin would be able to use more speed.