Chapter 272 – A Wrinkle in Time

Emily returns to The Blade’s bridge to find the room as deathly silent as the rest of the fleet. Everyone she left behind still remains, drawing breath, but they wear grim expressions, and none can bring themselves to shatter the contemplative quiet.

“We’re-” Pod finally says after a few moments of staring listlessly at his mentor. “We’re the only ones left?”

She nods wordlessly, looking to Silvia with concern as she feels a veritable storm churning just beneath the woman’s skin, her qi carefully held in and smothered so as not to affect everyone else around her.

Rotwin, who found his way from his room to the bridge at some point while Emily was running checks on the fleet’s condition, lets out a harrowing, keening howl of grief. Emily tries not to think too hard about Rotlith’s corpse, feeling The Clock sitting heavy in her arm as acceptance settles over her.

“What could have done this?” she asks, her tone glacial and her fingers tapping restlessly against her thigh.

Pod meets her gaze, and understanding passes between them without need for words. He swallows his shock and takes on a contemplative expression.

“The ships were undamaged, no signs of instability from the Gate?” he questions, offering up something to get the ball rolling.

“None. The only damage was to the corpses. Clean cuts. Almost too clean, though, so I wouldn’t discount spatial damage.”

“As far as I know, there’s no such thing as a ship that can navigate within a Jump Gate to intercept other passengers,” Lethia adds in. “Someone would have to be able to teleport straight in, like you can with your beacons. Are you sure no one else can use them?”

“Positive. They’re encoded to my mana signature. However, if someone’s strong enough to attack with spatial magic that I can’t even detect traces of, they likely wouldn’t need to. Especially if they’d marked our ships before we entered the Gate.”

“You think we were being watched going in?” Silvia asks, her tone even despite the rage burning in her bright crimson eyes. “Why? No one seems to be here to collect our empty ships, and they didn’t even take any cargo, so why would anyone need to slaughter my crew!”

A flicker of qi bursts out with her frustration, pressing down on everyone on the bridge’s shoulders and closing around their throats like claws waiting to tear. Emily pushes the pressure back with her own energies, turning her gaze out to the sea of stars around them.

“Why indeed,” she mutters, casting several detection spells and sending them out to check for any observers.

She finds nothing, but the unsettling feeling of being watched lingers in the back of her mind, so she throws up several anti-observation spells, trying to block all external sight. The feeling remains.

“Any sign of anyone trying to hijack remote control for the ships?” she asks Lethia, watching the ship’s main processing core with her own machina to try and understand how the other mechanic is attempting to do so herself.

“No, none.”

“Strange…”

Emily’s gaze drifts down to her left bicep, where The Clock is hidden behind only a few layers of alloy plating, just waiting to be used. Her mind tells her that it’s the right choice, that judging by the scale of their loss, it’s worth any extra risk it could bring. However, as she goes to release the machina holding the activation mechanism back from firing, the sinking feeling of foreboding in her gut gets worse, her instincts screaming of unseen danger.

“What is it?” Silvia asks, cutting through Emily’s silent consideration.

Emily looks up to see all eyes fixed on her, waiting for an explanation of her mutterings.

“It’s just, I can’t see why someone would do this. It looked far too intentional to be anything natural, and if no spoils were claimed, you don’t seem to think you’d have any enemies strong enough to go this far just for the sake of it. So, I fail to see why.” Emily frowns, releasing the tension in her arm anyway and starting the countdown to rewind. “My instincts are screaming at me that I’ve made a mistake I can’t take back…”

***

Emily blinks back into focus halfway through the refining process for her newest bomb’s acidic payload. She doesn’t pause her work, continuing the process through to the final stage before setting the product aside and making for the ship’s bridge.

“Can you slow our approach?” she asks as she steps in through a ripple in space, her entrance near silent. “The next cycle from this end is in sixteen hours, and I think it's best if we don’t hang around too long with so much valuable cargo.”

“Sure,” Lethia nods, making the required adjustments without complaint. “How’d you know the right departure time?”

“I managed to bounce a request to their BlackNet portal.”

“Could you use that connection to get us travel permissions before we arrive? Speed up the process a bit more?”

“Sure.”

Emily returns to her room to do just that, building a quick program to send messages to an address grabbed from the Gate controller. She sends over their ship IDs and grabs Silvia to authorise payment before returning to the bridge to wait. Silvia follows her, not questioning but silently watching her closely, intrigued by the sudden urgency on display.

Lethia calmly reports their progress as they approach the Jump Gate, counting down till their arrival as a digital counter on the canopy before them, only a couple of seconds off, counts down towards their predicted entry slot. Emily repeatedly casts several anti-observation and tracking spells.

They drop from lightspeed and into a max-speed cruise a couple of hundred kilometres from the Gate, rapidly approaching. It only takes a few seconds for them to close the distance, receiving a positive entry check from the Gate controller in the process. They shoot into the gaping hole in existence, entering the supposed safety of the isolated spatial tunnel.

Emily reaches out with her mana to feel the other ships moving with them. Already straining against the unstable space surrounding them to keep track, she doesn’t exert herself to try and penetrate their barriers as well to check inside. Nor does she move herself to check in person. She merely confirms their continued existence as she tensely waits for the test’s results.

The few minutes of bated breath finally run out, and they tear free from the Jump Gate’s gravitational pull, shooting out into open space. Lethia redirects the fleet again, calling for everyone to follow her lead, but receives nothing back in return.

Emily Blinks away to check before she can even ask, but the moment she sets foot on the first ship, she knows she’s failed.

“Exactly the same,” she mutters, frowning at the familiar headless corpse in the hall before her, feeling a rage spark deep in her chest, burning away at the sinking foreboding still ringing in the back of her head.

She activates The Clock again, ignoring her screaming instincts.

***

Emily follows the calming brewing process through once again upon return, finishing and setting aside the bubbling acid solution before she turns her mind to the current problem. She asks Lethia to sync up their arrival with entering the Gate again anyway, despite not thinking it’ll do much to help, before Blinking away to another ship in the fleet to reinforce the enchantments on her spatial anchor robots. She checks through them one by one, boosting the strength of their signals to make sure she’ll be able to leap between ships despite the spatial instability within the Jump Gate.

She returns to The Blade just before they arrive, taking her place on the bridge to watch events play out once more.

They slip through the Gate on a narrow margin with their approved entry time and enter the distorted space tunnel where most of them will die. Emily waits for a minute before vanishing from The Blade’s bridge without a word, appearing in Ship MS34Q’s cargo hold. She immediately releases a machina scan and finds everyone moving about their duties as usual, bracing against the spatial distortion affecting them all, but otherwise unbothered.

She takes it in for less than a second before Blinking away again, moving to the second ship on her checklist. Once again, everyone’s alive. It’s not until her sixth Blink that she sees a change, ending up in a ship full of still-warm bodies. The next ship is the same, so she circles back to MS34Q, only to find everyone butchered already.

Before she can Blink to check another ship, Emily’s head snaps towards the wall, looking through it towards where The Blade is flying nearby. A sinking sense of dread fills her, washing away any other consideration as her predictive instincts take priority.

All cores turn to a single purpose. She tears a hole in space in a blink, pulling herself towards her children’s signatures in her room as burning machina floods her cortex, sharpening her focus to a knife’s edge and killing her emotions.

It takes less than a breath for Emily to scan both of her children with sight and machina when she arrives on The Blade. It takes less than a breath for her to activate The Clock without a thought.

She shuts her eyes and waits for the seconds to roll back, letting out a slow breath she didn’t need to hold and relaxing the machina reinforcing her cortex.

Emily scans the ship before time can stop. Everyone on the bridge is dead, but there’s no sign of Silvia, dead or otherwise.

She ignores the maelstrom of elements raging around her, scorching plasma turning the ship’s walls to molten slag that end up frozen in place as her breath stops.

***

Emily follows the relaxing process of refining her acid payload, ending with a perfectly sealed cauldron tucked away in the corner of the workshop before she steps out of her Factory. The moment she sets foot in her room, she reaches out to brush a hand across Mensacus’ shoulders before turning to her bed and falling in.

Silica wakes with a chittering giggle, squirming in her mother’s arms for a few seconds before settling with a huff. Emily buries her face in her daughter’s sandy fur, deleting from her memory the image of her and her brother lying in pieces with their cores shattered.

They’re targeting me. They never touched The Blade in loops where I was aboard, but the second I leave, they act despite Silvia still being here.

Her cortex blurs with cold calculations.

They’re likely ninth circle to move that fast, that undetected, but there’s a small chance they’re weaker. There was no sign of Silvia: she may have been moved because they couldn’t kill her quickly.

She lies with her daughter for much longer than it takes for her to make a decision on what to do next.

Eventually, she heads to the bridge, peering over Lethia’s shoulder with a blank expression.

“We need to redirect.”

“Why?” the head gunner questions without looking back, already sending a message to call Silvia over.

“A hunch,” Emily replies, her tone unwavering, earning her a flat stare in response.

“You’re crazy, no.”

“What’s this I hear about crazy?” Silvia purrs before Emily can respond, striding into the room with flickers of qi trailing behind her.

“She wants to change our route because of a hunch,” Lethia says dismissively, turning back to her control console as if the matter is finished.

“You do, do you?” Silvia turns to Emily, scanning her with an assessing gaze.

“Yes.” Emily meets her gaze with one filled with ice, not a flicker of doubt, nor anything else, present. “I have very good instincts, and they’re telling me we die if we enter the Phos Jump Gates.”

“Really?” Silvia narrows her eyes, falling silent for a few moments before nodding. “Okay, where do we go instead?”

“The long way. Just head straight for Xeroph.”

“There’s no way you’re listening to her,” Lethia hisses, glancing over her shoulder at her Vice-Captain.

“I’ve seen her dodge blows I threw with the full intention of landing,” Silvia says slowly, grinning at the frustrated gunner. “Her instincts are nothing to scoff at. Besides, I haven’t seen her this tense since we first met.”

Lethia relents with a sigh, changing their flight course and sending out messages to redirect the rest of the fleet.

But before Emily can feel relief, as she turns to leave, Lethia huffs, drawing her attention back. Dread settles in her gut before the woman even speaks.

“That’s weird, I’m not getting any responses. No one’s changing course.”

Emily Blinks to another ship to check before she can stop herself. They’re all dead.

She activates The Clock without returning to The Blade.

***

Emily sets to seeing the calming brewing process through once again, trying to ignore the mounting sense of impending doom that hasn’t left since she first hit rewind in the Gate.

“That is a fascinating little trick you have there,” an aged, feminine voice she’s never heard before fills the workshop, sending Emily’s heart through her stomach as she spins to face the threat, her left arm splitting in half to charge a full chamber of plasma.

She meets the unconcerned gaze of a woman who looks like she’s made of fine porcelain, glossy, pale, and smooth, with a rippling black dress that seems to draw in all light around it. She’s leaning against one of Emily’s empty workbenches with an almost bored expression on her impossibly-perfect face, not a single echo of her presence in the surrounding mana and machina suffusing the space.

“Would you care to share?”

She can’t hit rewind.