Chapter 271 – A Wrinkle in Space

Emily offers up space within Elisime’s emptier cargo holds to allow them to scrape every last inch of alchemy material from the world-eater corpse, while Silvia returns to The Blade’s bridge to put together a message to Yorn, reassuring him that the coordinates were a false alarm.

They take off towards their next destination: the closest of the Phos Jump Gates, just a few hours after the intense battle with their prey. Emily secludes herself inside one of Elisime’s workshops, leaving behind a visible tear in space in her room within The Blade, where Mensacus stands guard. She experiments on the fresh materials with a single-minded focus, only leaving her Factory in order to bend space between herself and the cargo holds of other ships within the fleet to collect samples, a feat possible thanks to several spatial anchor droids already in place.

Emily loses herself in her work, designing several weapons based on the serpent’s extremely potent, acidic venom. She spends the days drawing up blueprints and brewing different concoctions theorised by several cores always dedicated to the task, using the beast’s vitality-charged blood to try and boost any number of traits, from strength and regeneration to willpower. Every failure loses a near-inconsequential drop of the available testing material and pushes her closer to several new working brews. Some of the failures result in inert, simple waste material to throw away, but a few produce potent mixes with unintended effects, such as healing salves that turn to burning sludge.

Silvia visits several times in the time it takes for the ship to close in on the Jump Gate. She doesn’t interrupt Emily’s focus, slipping in with barely a soft tap of footfall to announce her presence before she settles down on a stool near the workstation Emily’s currently attached to. Most of her visits are spent quietly watching, but she occasionally offers questions about Emily’s current obsession, listening intently to the ensuing lecture despite understanding only half of it.

Emily can tell she’s restless and gets the feeling the vampire would be asking her to spar if she weren’t currently occupied.

Just over a month after the start of her experiments, Emily’s midway through pouring a refined acid solution into a carefully-enchanted warhead casing when Silvia strides into the workshop, announcing her presence with a burst of qi. Emily doesn’t pause her steady pour, but her head snaps up to the vampire with a quiet, questioning glance.

“We’ve arrived!” Silvia grins, raising a challenging brow. “I thought you’d like to know.”

“I do, but did that really require such a loud entrance? Surely you could have waited a few minutes.”

“I could have, but we’re in luck: the next cycle from this end is in two hours.”

“We may have different ideas of luck.” Emily frowns, tipping out the last drops of acid from the large cauldron in her grip before setting it down and taking an alloy panel Pod offers her to seal the open face with. “I wanted a while to study the Gate. Our ships’ plasma-collapsing thrusters are fascinating enough, but this will be my first time seeing technological space-warping on such a large scale.”

“A shame you won’t be allowed close then. Phospherian, the group that owns the Gates, doesn’t like people leaving their ships within scanning distance. For, well, obvious reasons.”

Silvia’s pointed smile isn’t lost on Emily as she shelves any plans to get a detailed blueprint of the Jump Gate.

If only I could utilise The Clock… Nothing happened last time I did…

“A shame indeed.”

Emily finishes welding the warhead shut, the drop of superheated mana gathered on her metal finger fading as she steps back from the work-in-progress weapon.

“But I still want to take a look,” she warps them all out of Elisime in a blink, before leading the way out of her room with barely a glance towards Mensacus, gesturing to the sleeping fox on her bed with her head in a silent command.

“I can understand interest in the Gate, but what was so fascinating about our thrusters?” Silvia questions as Emily warps space around them with barely a thought, pulling them onto the bridge after only a few steps.

“Are you serious?” Emily asks, breaking her stride short of the window to the outside world to look over in shock.

“She is,” Lethia answers before Silvia can, her synthetic tone even and unreadable. “The muscleheads don’t appreciate our toys.”

“Clearly,” Emily mutters flatly, ignoring the vampire’s raised, amused brow and turning to take in the massive, floating rings of metal, each half the size of a planet, just a few thousand kilometres away. “They obviously don’t understand real beauty.”

Lethia responds with an approving hum, equally entranced by the colossal construct despite having seen it and others like it many times before.

“You’d be surprised,” Silvia chuckles, but Emily hardly notices, too busy drinking every smooth curve of metal and glowing energy line exposed on the outside of the Gate, trying to peer into its inner workings through guesswork and theory alone.

“Our ships’ thrusters allow us to travel at speeds beyond light through a complex and highly precise process of destabilising their central plasma-stream and using the resulting collapse to bend the magnetic fields of space around our ships. It essentially burns away the space between us and our destination. It’s not an incredibly stable system, but flying in groups and linking our grav-drives helps to balance that and create a more stable travel tunnel,” she explains without looking over, pointing out towards the slowly rotating rings, stacked to create a short passageway. “Those are one half of two connected points in space, which need a completely different system to work! Do they use power-hungry supersized gravity drives? Linked particles for guidance? Dark matter distortion generators? Goddess knows!”

“I think concentrated dark matter is involved, no matter what else,” Lethia adds. “The energy readings we get when the gates open would suggest so.”

They fall into easy conversation as the Gates charge for several hours, receiving a message from the Gate controller halfway through to confirm receipt of Silvia’s payment. More and more energy channels light up as the seconds tick by, until, eventually, the metal constructs are releasing enough light to challenge a star. They pick up rotation speed as they pulse, arcs of plasma leaping between each ring, creating the illusion of a burning tunnel and tugging on the space around them.

Emily can feel space bending even from within The Blade, and watches in awe as it snaps. A crack erupts into existence at the centre of the spinning rings, both held in and forced open by the crackling plasma surrounding it, stretching wider and wider until it fills the first segment of the Gate completely. The gaping hole in the centre of the glowing metal ring, the Gate itself, is otherworldly, an empty gap in existence folding in on itself in a way that hurts to look too close. If she focuses, Emily can just about make out streaks of plasma travelling like veins through the inner walls of the portal, but it doesn’t look like any of her spatial spells, even those touched by her affinity for lightning, and feels leagues stronger.

Lethia receives another message from the Gate controller, this time informing them of their position in the launch queue. They watch several of the other ships floating in wait nearby throttle up and vanish into the Gate, and it doesn’t take long for their turn to come, another confirmation message coming through before Lethia orders the fleet to move as one.

They rapidly speed up into the gate, slipping into its distorted gravity field and watching their sensors go haywire in response.

“Crazy,” Pod exclaims, looking between their wildly fluctuating data readouts and the odd black abyss outside, darker than even the loneliest stretches of space they’ve flown through so far, yet dotted with faint sparks of twisted light all the same.

“Jump Gates are certainly an experience,” Silvia agrees, frowning as she feels the familiar, overpowering sense of being pulled in all directions at once.

“How long will we be in here?” Emily asks, doing her best to parse through the dizzying flood of input from her innate spatial awareness.

“For us, only a few minutes,” Lethia says. “By universal standard time, a few days.”

“And how many light-years are we travelling?”

“Not too far, only about two million.”

Emily chuckles as her apprentice baulks at the scale, equally floored but faster to adapt, and tries to reach out with her mana and sense how the spatial tunnel is working around them. She’s unable to gain much, but she does at least brush against the other ships flying with them, confirming they’re still there and calming the small voice in the back of her head whispering that they’re unsafe.

Eventually, the wonder has to end, and the empty nothingness before them twists, shaping into the familiar image of empty space with tens of ships floating in wait at the edges. Their fleet slips from the mouth of the exit Gate, receiving a message telling them to clear the way quickly.

Lethia complies, pushing The Blade’s throttle up and changing their heading towards their next light-speed initiation. But, while the excitement on the ship’s bridge is fading and Emily turns to head back towards her Factory, the rapid tapping of fingers and the low hum of sparking machina suddenly cuts through the quiet.

“We have a problem,” the head gunner’s synthetic voice cuts Emily’s footfall short, and they all turn to face her, expressions set. “I’m still seeing all of our ships on sensor, but they’re not changing course, and none of them is responding to comms requests. I can send override commands to pull them into our wake, but it’ll take me a few to pull up camera feeds to check what’s going on.”

“I’ll go look,” Emily offers without hesitation, weaving together a quick Blink and reaching out to her anchors in the other ships’ cargo holds. She still feels them, all waiting undamaged.

Silvia meets her gaze and gives a firm nod before she vanishes away from the bridge, blinking back into existence at the foot of a large chunk of scale and muscle. The flesh sample appears untouched, as does the door out of the hold, but Emily quickly finds the source of their problem when she steps into the hallway beyond.

There, lying on the floor unmoving, is one of the unawakened members of the crew. They’re wearing one of the crew’s skintight protective suits with the Heavy-Blade emblem emblazoned at the centre of their chest, but their helmet’s missing, sitting a few metres away and only connected to the armour by a still-wet line of crimson liquid.

Their head is missing too.

Emily floods the ship with machina in an instant, building a detailed image of every room in her mind. Every crewmate she finds is in the same state, lying or sitting with their head rolling nearby. The pilots are still in their command chairs on the bridge, and several other corpses are in relaxed positions, unaware of whatever danger befell them.

“Check one complete, Ship MS34Q,” Emily reports to The Blade with a wave of machina, her tone flat and void of all emotions as her cortex buzzes with activity, trying to find any stray data points that would point towards what happened. “Crew dead on arrival, all with matching wounds: decapitation. Remain on high alert, I’ll continue on to check two.”

She doesn’t wait for a response before Blinking into a second cargo hold, letting out a flood of machina to find this ship in the same state of deathly disquiet. Once again, not a single wound gives her any hint of what could have happened; all split far too clean for a struggle, as if one moment their heads and shoulders were meant to be connected, then the next they weren’t.

“Check two complete, Ship MA03R. In line with check one, not a single breath on board.”

She Blinks to the next ship.

“Check three complete, Ship MA42F. In line with check one.”

Another.

“In line with check one.”

Another.

“In line with check one.”

Another…

The entire fleet is dead in the water, and Emily can’t tell why.