Cataphractoi

  Miliam had to practically drag Abigail from the vault once she’d taken a handful of extra pictures. Fortunately she had a height advantage over the schor, and the entire structure wasn’t exactly rge to begin with. Once they reached the room where they’d left the projector, she managed to convince Abigail to willingly come along for the sake of not leaving it behind.

  Getting out required waiting for the atmosphere in the airlock to slowly leak out, the reverse of what Abigail had done on the way in, but soon the two of them were thumping their way down the hall, unable to move too quickly while relying on their boots to anchor them down. At the edge of the hallway, though, they would have to either slow down or take a huge risk. More afraid of the potentially-hostile approaching ship, Miliam chose the tter.

  After taking several calming breaths, Miliam pnted her feet at the spot where concrete gave way to regolith and pushed off with all her might, unching herself in the direction of the Astrum Vitae’s airlock. She wasn’t concerned whether Abigail would choose to take the faster or the slower option; Miliam had no intention of taking off just yet, but she did want to get to the bridge as quickly as possible. One nerve-wracking vacation from touching the ground ter, she reached the airlock, stumbling a bit as she crossed the threshold into the ship’s artificial gravity.

  Turning around, Miliam saw Abigail walking carefully across the regolith. Seeing it would be some time before she made it to the ship, Miliam activated her comm and then cycled the airlock.

  “We’re not taking off until you’re aboard, but I want to get to the bridge so I can figure out what’s going on,” she assured Abigail as air began to flow into the airlock.

  “Understandable…but should you leave me behind, I will haunt you,” Abigail replied humorously. At least, as much humorously as she could while panting heavily. It seemed her slow pace was as much due to being unathletic as it was due to caution.

  The instant the airlock slid open, Miliam hurried through and cycled it again from the inside so that it would be ready for Abigail, then went straight for the bridge, removing her helmet as she went. She didn’t have time to remove the entire spacesuit and wouldn’t have even if she could; in fact, she’d probably go ahead and put the helmet back on the instant there was a hint of danger.

  “What do we know about that ship?” Miliam asked as she walked onto the bridge, before she even took her seat. She tried to keep her voice tightly controlled but was pretty sure she just ended up sounding stressed instead.

  “Judging by the size it looks like a cruiser but it’s hard to be sure; they were running dark and I only noticed them because of a fluctuation in their EMCM. A shift change, maybe. They were sitting far enough away that I think they only just detected us a few minutes ago. I never saw any signs of a translocation jump, so they might have been here first,” Eun-ji reported with an undercurrent of nervousness. It was little wonder why; even if the Astrum Vitae were armed, it would never stand a chance against a cruiser.

  “Do they know where we are? We were under EMCM, weren’t we?” Miliam inquired next, directing the second question to Min-ji.

  “There’s no way to hide a jump, and a cruiser would have an entire team of sensor operators. It’s probably safe to assume they know the general area we went in,” Min-ji expined. “We’re still hidden for now, but they might spot us if they get close enough.”

  “Can we make a jump straight out of the system from right here?” Miliam asked of Aoibhe, hoping they could skip an encounter with the other ship entirely.

  “Nay, this rock doesn’t have much of a gravity well, but it does have one. We’ll need to be almost half a light-second away before we can jump,” Aoibhe replied.

  “That…doesn’t sound like much,” Miliam pointed out.

  “Aye. Trouble is, we don’t know where the cruiser is right now, and we won’t be moving at our maximum speed from the start. If we give ourselves away by spinning up the wave drive and the cruiser is close enough to interdict us, we’ll have to travel even further before we can escape,” the pilot expined to Miliam’s dismay.

  “How would they do that? Interdict us, I mean.” To Miliam’s knowledge she’d never read anything about preventing ships from teleporting other than gravity wells.

  “It’s the same EMCM used to defend against translocation missiles, captain,” Min-ji pointed out. That made it click in Miliam’s mind; if creating perturbations in local gravity could stop something from teleporting in, it could also stop them from teleporting out. It didn’t take much of an effect to make a jump too dangerous to attempt.

  “That makes sense, but what about the wave drive? In all of our simutions, we’ve always been able to use it without giving away our position,” she pointed out.

  “It’s not that they’d know exactly where we are, just that they’d know we’re around here somewhere. We’d be gambling on whether they notice us before we get far enough away,” Min-ji eborated.

  “So we can try to sneak past on thrusters alone or sit here and hope they don’t spot us…” Miliam muttered. She knew the ship’s thrusters were much more powerful than those used by, say, the Apollo Program, but even half of a light-second was a great distance to cross. That might not save any time over simply waiting. “How fast can we get there without the wave drive?”

  “…depends how long we burn for, but we’re talking about maneuvering thrusters, not main engines. Even if we exhaust our fuel entirely, we’re talking hours,” Aoibhe responded with a shake of her head.

  “Urgh…I think it’s probably safer for us to hunker down. Min-ji, do everything you can to make us undetectable,” Miliam ordered, hoping it was the right choice.

  “Right!” replied the dokkaebi woman on the comms station.

  “Tell me when you get tired and I’ll take over,” volunteered her twin at the sensor station.

  “What rotten luck, though…what was that cruiser even doing out here?” Miliam wondered, the door behind her opening partway through. She twisted in her chair to see Abigail had entered; strictly speaking she should have asked permission first, but Miliam didn’t feel like standing on ceremony right now. It wasn’t like the Astrum Vitae was a huge and important ship with secrets to steal, anyway.

  “I may merely be paranoid, but it would seem to me there is only one reason for another vessel to be stationed in this system,” Abigail suggested as she took up a position to Miliam’s left.

  “You think they were looking for the vault too? How would they even know about it, and why would they just be hanging around instead of looking?” Miliam questioned.

  “I believe it is exactly as I feared. The information I received made its way to someone else. Through a member of my own source’s crew, perhaps, who knew which system it was in but not the precise coordinates,” the schor replied, csping her hands behind her back. “Still…a cruiser? Are you certain?”

  Miliam looked to Eun-ji, who was listening in. Realizing the implied question, she answered. “Not completely, but it’s definitely bigger than us, and I can’t see it being a battleship. Even a frigate or a destroyer would be bad for us though.”

  “For what it’s worth, I’d bet on it being a cruiser. Frigates and destroyers don’t usually operate alone; they’re escort vessels,” Aoibhe added to Eun-ji’s analysis.

  “Then we can rule out independent actors. That ship is almost certainly affiliated with an official navy. Neither the Gaian Collective nor any other friendly navy would deploy a cruiser to a remote system such as this merely for something of only archaeological value, which means we are almost surely dealing with a mirazar ranger,” Abigail deduced.

  “That seems like a bit of a leap,” Aoibhe replied skeptically.

  “Yet another term I don’t know…” Miliam groaned. “What’s a ranger, exactly?”

  “The Unnac Imperium cssifies its ships by role instead of tonnage, but Abigail’s mostly just being pedantic,” Aoibhe expined while staring the schor in the face. She looked over to Miliam after Abigail huffed. “In practice it’s what we’d call a cruiser, but calling it a ranger means it’s meant specifically for independent action instead of running with a fleet.”

  “Okay. So, why would they care about the vault?” Miliam directed the question to Abigail in particur.

  “The mirazar have not had quite so positive an experience with the Observers as humans, as one might surmise from their own term for them: the Abductors. Not a single Observer experiment upon the mirazar was successful, resulting in at least two dozen transpnted poputions that died out entirely on foreign worlds,” Abigail expined heavily. “They took that personally. It could be considered a national goal of theirs to usurp all Observer technology they can find and destroy all traces of them as a culture.”

  “Then they definitely don’t want us getting out of here with those memory sticks,” Miliam realized, eyeing the case Abigail had stored them in. Her first instinct was to offer them up in exchange for their lives, if she were being honest, but she cmped her mouth shut and forced herself to think it through first.

  There was nothing rational about what Abigail had described. The mirazar were acting on nothing but hatred of the Observers. In that case, what were the odds of them actually accepting a deal like that? Slim to none, surely. In reality, the only method currently avaible for viewing the contents of those storage devices resided in the vault, but the mirazar probably wouldn’t accept the risk that data might have already been copied from them.

  If Miliam tried to surrender, the most likely outcome was that the mirazar first extort the artifacts from her and then blow the Astrum Vitae out of the void just to be sure. But that didn’t really change anything; her choices still remained the same as before Abigail had arrived- or so she thought.

  “Captain, the cruiser is approaching! They’re drawing their wave drive down now!” Eun-ji announced, spoiling Miliam mood further. Part of her was close to making a vow to develop some type of faster-than-light sensor technology just to avoid exactly this situation.

  “Define ‘approaching.’ Are they coming right towards this asteroid?” Miliam asked, hoping they were only coming in their general direction.

  “Yes; they must have determined it was our mostly likely destination based on our starting position and course,” Eun-ji answered.

  “They’ll definitely find us if we stay here. It’s too small of an area to hide in if they’re willing to do a dedicated search,” Aoibhe said, turning back to her controls as if she’d already predicted what Miliam was going to decide.

  Admittedly, Miliam wasn’t sure moving was the best decision either. Obviously if the mirazar cruiser noticed something moving away from the asteroid they’d immediately assume it was their prey. But sitting still just meant giving the mirazar all the time in the world to search for them, and the twins could only maintain their EMCM for so long.

  “Min-ji, Eun-ji, put everything you have into the EMCM. We just need to stay hidden until the asteroid is between us and that ship- then we’re going to make a break for it.”