“They would never have made it there. We come out of the Flow, and we’re attacked by ‘pirates’ who offload the cargo. You and the other crew who don’t go along with the plan die in the attack. Simple, easy, everyone who is left makes a bundle and is happy.”
“The House of Tois won’t be happy,” Gineos said, invoking the Tell Me’s owner.
“They’ve got insurance for the ship and cargo. They’ll be fine.”
“He won’t be happy about Egerti. You’ll have to kill him. That’s Yanner Tois’s son-in-law.”
Inverr smiled at the name of the House of Tois’s patriarch. “I have it on good authority that Tois would not be entirely put out to make his favorite son a widower. He has some other alliances a marriage could firm up.”
“You have this all planned out, then.”
“It’s not personal, Captain.”
“Getting murdered for money feels personal, Ollie.”
Inverr opened his mouth to respond to this, but then Tell Me Another One dropped out of the Flow, triggering a set of alarms that no one on the Tell Me—not Gineos, not Inverr—had ever heard outside of an academy simulation.
Gineos and Inverr stood there for several seconds, gaping at the alarms. Then both of them went to their stations and got to work, because Tell Me had unexpectedly dropped out of the Flow, and if they didn’t figure out how to get back into it, they were, without a doubt, irretrievably fucked.
Now, some context, here.
In this universe there is no such thing as “faster-than-light” travel. The speed of light is not only a good idea, it’s the law. You can’t get to it; the closer you accelerate toward it, the more energy you need to keep going toward, and it’s a horrible idea to go that fast anyway, since space is only mostly empty, and anything you collide with at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light is going to turn your fragile spaceship into explody chunks of metal. And it would still take years, or decades, or centuries, for the wreckage of your spacecraft to zoom past wherever it was you originally planned to go.
There is no faster-than-light travel. But there is the Flow.
The Flow, generally described to laypeople as the river of alternate space-time that makes faster-than-light travel possible across the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, called “the Interdependency” for short. The Flow, accessible by “shoals” created when the gravity of stars and planets interacts just right with the Flow, to allow ships to slip in and ride the current to another star. The Flow, which ensured the survival of humanity after it had lost the Earth, by allowing trade to thrive between the Interdependency, assuring that every human outpost would have the resources they’d need to survive—resources that almost none of them would have had on their own.
This was, of course, an absurd way of looking at the Flow. The Flow is not anything close to a river—it is a multidimensional brane-like metacosmological structure that intersects with local time-space in a topographically complex manner, influenced partially and chaotically but not primarily by gravity, in which the ships accessing it don’t move in any traditional sense but merely take advantage of its vectoral nature, relative to local space-time, which, unbounded by our universe’s laws regarding speed, velocity, and energy, gives the appearance of faster-than-light travel to local observers.
And even that was a crap way of describing it, because human languages are crap at describing things more complex than assembling a tree house. The accurate way of describing the Flow involved the sort of high-order math probably only a couple hundred human beings across the billions of the Interdependency could understand, much less themselves use to describe it meaningfully. You likely would not be one of them. Nor, for that matter, would Captain Gineos or Executive Officer Inverr.
But Gineos and Inverr knew this much: it was nearly impossible—and almost never heard of, over the centuries of the Interdependency—for a ship to exit the Flow unexpectedly. A random rupture in the Flow could strand a ship light-years from any human planet or outpost. Guild ships were designed to be self-sustaining for months and even years—they had to be, because the transit time between Interdependency systems using the Flow ranged between two weeks to nine months—but there’s a difference between being self-sustaining for five years or a decade, as the largest guild ships were, and being self-sustaining forever.
Because there is no faster-than-light travel. There is only the Flow.
And if you’re randomly dumped out of it, somewhere between the stars, you’re dead.
“I need a reading for where we are,” Inverr said, from his station.
“On it,” Lika Dunn said.
“Then get the antennas up,” Gineos said. “If we got dumped, there’s an exit shoal. We need to find an entrance shoal.”
“Already deploying,” Bernus said, from his console.
Gineos flipped open communications to Engineering. “Chief Hybern,” she said. “We’ve experienced a rupture exit from the Flow. We need engines online immediately and I’m going to need you to make sure we have sufficient push field power to counteract extreme high-G maneuvers. We don’t want to turn into jelly.”
“Uuuuhhhhh,” came the reply.
“For fuck’s sake,” Gineos said, and looked over to Inverr. “He’s your minion, Ollie. You handle him.”
Inverr flipped open his own communication circuit. “Hybern, this is XO Inverr. Is there a problem understanding the captain’s orders?”
“Weren’t we having a mutiny?” Hybern asked. Hybern was an engineering prodigy, which advanced him through the guild ranks. But he was very, very young.
“We just dropped out of the Flow, Hybern. If we don’t find a way back to it soon, we’re all screwed. So I’m ordering you to follow Captain Gineos’s directives. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” came the reply, after a moment. “On it. Starting emergency engine protocol. Five minutes to full power. Uh, it’s probably going to mess up the engines pretty badly, sir. And ma’am.”
“If they get us back to the Flow we’ll figure it out then,” Gineos said. “Ping me the second they’re ready to go.” She flipped off the communication link. “You picked a very bad time to have a mutiny,” she said to Inverr.
“We have a position,” Dunn said. “We’re about twenty-three light-years out from End, sixty-one out from Shirak.”
“Any local gravity wells?”
“No, ma’am. Closest star is a red dwarf about three light-years away. Nothing else significant in the neighborhood.”
“So how did we come out if there’s no gravity well?” Inverr asked.
“Eva Fanochi probably could have answered that for you,” Gineos said. “If you hadn’t murdered her, that is.”
“Now’s not a great time for that discussion, Captain.”
“Found it!” Bernus said. “Entrance shoal, a hundred thousand klicks from us! Except…”
“Except what?” Gineos asked.
“It’s moving away from us,” Bernus said. “And it’s shrinking.”
Gineos and Inverr looked at each other. As far as either of them knew, entrance and exit shoals for the Flow were static in size and location. That’s why they could be used for everyday mercantile traffic at all. For a shoal to move and shrink was literally a new thing in their experience.
Figure it out later, Gineos thought to herself. “How fast is it moving relative to us, and how quickly is it shrinking?”
“It’s heading away from us at about ten thousand klicks an hour, and it looks like it’s shrinking about ten meters a second,” Bernus said, after a minute. “I can’t tell you if those are constant rates, either for the velocity or the shrinkage. It’s just what I’m seeing now.”
“Send me the data on the shoal,” Inverr said to Bernus.
“Would you mind telling your lackeys to wait outside?” Gineos said to Inverr, motioning to the armed crew. “I’m finding it difficult to concentrate with bolt throwers aimed at my head.”
Inverr glanced up at the armed crewmen and nodded. They headed over to the hole in the bulkhead and stepped through. “Stay close,” Inverr said, as they exited.