Supernova Blitz

Chapter 10: A Moment's Rest

Shortly before the humans escape, Jardzen Dzor makes it to the bridge. His spine is aching, even with a regenerator on. He had three of the humans in his actual grasp, and they managed to defeat him. Perhaps these mammals truly are more formidable than he gave them credit for.

However, they are fleeing aboard one of his own shuttles. And, he is finally done playing games. He snarls, "{Ready all cannons. We shall sow the stars with their disgusting fur.}" He winces in pain as he tries to climb into his seat.

His navigation officer cries out, "{Yarjen! The Falight drive! I... I can't shut it off!}"

"{EXPLAIN!}" roars Dzor.

"{We're about to jump! Destination unknown!}"

Dzor is stunned for a moment. That moment was a moment too long. Just as he bellows, "{DROP POWER!}", the screens are flooded with white light, going dark as they overload.

Dzor roars in helpless, enraged fury. Filthy, lesser evolved mammals outwitted him as well? How could this be possible? They still practice government handouts. They have differing languages and nations. They still use rocket fuels and solid projectile ammunition. And, they still reproduce out of control. They are MAMMALS. On Grodurra, they are food. Nothing more. Even on their world, mammals are food.

Jardzen Dzor slumps into his command chair. The pain in his back doesn't register a sound from him. He is completely speechless.

If they kill power now, the ship will disintegrate when the protective bubble dissolves and they impact even photons and space dust at speeds normally impossible for solid matter alone. And sadly, Dzor is still considering it. They wouldn't even know it had happened, it would be so instantaneous. They would suddenly be nothing more than cosmic dust; a memory in the universe inconsequential to its design and forgotten by all but a few.

But then, Dzor was a poet as a hatchling. Now, he is a Baskylla Jardzen. His duty is to the Fievegal, and then his crew. If he draws breath, he will serve them before himself. He sits back, meditating silently as they warp across space. Only time will tell where they have been warped to.

Six hours pass before his crew regains control of his ship's systems. For six hours, the humans have had control of his ship, without a single one of them even on board. Doors wouldn't open, rooms wouldn't pressurize, and the Falight drive wouldn't decelerate. By now, they're probably halfway across a second or third solar system beyond the human system.

The engineering and navigation teams coordinate to initiate proper emergency deceleration, which still carries risks, but much less than the shell dissolving. The ship decelerates, and the virtual field assembles celestial bodies around them while the screens stabilize before recycling. They are inside the heliosphere of a large star, but probably still at the extreme edge of its effective pull, meaning they just 'crossed into' this solar system's boundary. Still, until visuals are restored and manual navigation can be performed, they are as good as in empty space. The computer navigation relies on the gravionic pulse generator to precisely map celestial bodies prior to a jump, and keeps track of all known celestial bodies by relative travel. However, Falight is not an exact science, and while they are untouched by time dilation and can travel unfathomable distances in reasonable times without hundreds of years passing them by, they also are helpless against quantum slopes, magnetohydrodynamics of the space medium, and singularities, which have the strongest gravitational pull in the known universe. A 'perfect' jump usually drifts from the effects of MHD and quantum slopes by several astronomical units, and so the computer navigation will think they are somewhere much further away than they are. Just travelling to Earth took dozens of stops to remap to ensure they didn't drift off course by lightyears at a time. So, while the computer is displaying a virtual starmap around them, Dzor's only accurate indications are the radiation levels consistent with the internals of a heliosphere for a given star, consistent solar wind direction readings, and a light but steady gravitational pull.