That was a point he hadn’t thought too hard about, and it put a new, enormously complex spin on the information they had.

“Alright, so the facilities may or may not be mobile.” Eric considered. “Can we track them?”

“Sir?”

“There were no date stamps, as such, but the system recorded data linearly, I assume? We just grabbed the latest information available and chose to work from that, right? Can we check older data on the crystal?”

“One moment,” Miram said, accessing the data they’d acquired from the Autolycus.

She looked up again after a few minutes. “We’ve got something, Captain. Maybe.”

“Don’t sound so certain, Commander,” Eric said dryly.

“Sorry, but we are dealing with an ancient data-storage system that we don’t really understand beyond the basic physical methodology. We can read it, yes, but we don’t really know why they stored data in the manner they did. It’s like trying to decode a newspaper if you know the language, but aren’t familiar with formatting.”

“I’ll take your word on it, Commander. What do you have?”

“The facility listed as part of this system did have a mobile vector,” she said. “I’m putting the telemetry listed on the display, but sir . . . we don’t have the time-stamp data we’d need to plot an actual course.”

Eric nodded thoughtfully, looking at the information.

“Understood, Commander. I don’t think we’ll need it. Steph, stand by to warp space.”

“Aye Skipper, standing by.”

“Not transition, sir?” Miram asked.

“Not this time. Let’s follow this plot and see where it takes us.”

►►►

► Ships warping space and time actually caused a detectable deformation in the very fabric of the universe, using reflected energies to set up and reinforce standing waves in gravity around their hulls. That created an effect similar to surfing a tsunami on an otherwise still ocean, where a ship in question didn’t actually move so much as have the universe move around it.

The metaphor worked only to a certain extent, of course, because of the nature of space and space-time. An ocean, no matter how still, had friction, and although a wave transferred through that medium at speeds very nearly impossible under normal circumstances, a surfer trying to remain in position on the wave had to fight multiple forces, including friction from water and air.

For a wave-riding ship, however, space nicely reduced those variables to a far more manageable level, which was very good because the results of missing your cue while wave riding on a starship were spectacular in ways few humans could comprehend.

So the ships of the Odysseus Task Force spread out, avoiding mutual interference with their warps, and sped through space while standing still.