Chapter 32

“So what do we do now?” Marcus was the one who asked the question, but everyone was thinking it.

All eyes turned to Pepper. They were, after all, the Captain now.

“The plan hasn’t changed. We need to get this ship, our people, and the information we carry, back to the Commonwealth. Anything we might do about the Empire is contingent on that, whatever the ultimate decision is. Gold— Ransom— whatever in the galaxy your name is now, how long until we can get into hyperspace?”

“Current estimate is around a hundred hours,” I read off. “Though we won’t know for sure until the hyperdrive lights up. I don’t dare push the gravitic drive any harder than we already are.”

“Yeah, don’t.”

“Thanks, Sam. After that… well, hyperspace navigation is iffy at the best of times, but the trip out here with the fleet took nine days and it should be about the same back.”

As it turned out, we didn’t need to wait a hundred hours.

The next day was one that saw a lot of easing of tensions. Woozy had lots of questions for Marcus about how the Empire used computers. Tann Rober showed no signs of waking. The crew got to enjoy some of the first food algae coming from Lem’s hydroponic garden, which was apparently equally disgusting to human and querral alike. Pepper even started talking to me again, though not about anything of consequence.

Morale was actually recovering, and it was starting to seem like we might make it the whole four to five days without anything else blowing up. Then it happened.

The ship’s systems were becoming something I felt more than read about now. Again. Like I’d been used to as Ransom, before this whole thing started. And this felt like a little tickle at the back of my mind and the tiniest amount of energy started flowing from the hyperdrive.

That could only mean one thing. It had established a connection to hyperspace, just as it was designed to. And that meant we’d hit the edge of the dead zone.

Activity picked up. The connection was still too tenuous for us to make the jump into hyperspace, but it wouldn’t be long now. Sam, Woozy, and their people did some checks on the drive: damaged but entirely functional, was their verdict. The repairs they’d already done and the built in redundancies should see us home.

My bridge was looking better now. We’d managed to get the drones to turn this back into a proper working space, and now it was being put to work.

Pepper was in the Captain’s chair in the middle of the compartment. They were clearly as uncomfortable sitting there as they’d been the last time, but it felt oddly reassuring to have someone there again.

Captain Autumn had lived for their role as the head of the crew. Pepper just tolerated it, an unwelcome distraction from their still all-too-pressing duties as a doctor.

“All right, settle down, let’s do this thing properly. Navigation?”

“Clear,” Juno reported.

“FTL systems?”

“Sam’s team reports go,” Woozy confirmed.

Pepper ran through the checklist, item by item. There were so few of us that some people had to report from more than one station.

Marcus, standing at the back of the bridge and watching the proceedings, leaned in to the wall panel to talk to me. “It’s a lot like our procedure, isn’t it?”

“We don’t normally do it this way, with all the go no-go checks. It’s normally all handled by the shipmind. But we’ve got so much damage that we’re using the emergency procedures where everything gets checked and double checked.”

They nodded to me. “Makes sense. A bad jump shock could tear the ship apart.”

I brought my attention back to the main event, where Pepper was just finishing up.

“…thank you. All stations report go for hyperspace jump. Ransom, would you please get us out of this awful patch of space? I’m ready to go home.”

I sent the signal to my hyperdrive, and everything turned upside down.