Roarke blinked. “Rifts don’t move.

  “Elliot, You’re telling me we dropped out of FTL because of a seven-thousandths-of-a-percent drift?”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “INA zero-tolerance protocols require abort on any exceedance, regardless of magnitude.”

  Hale leaned back. “He’s right. The rule exists because tiny deviations sometimes precede catastrophic ones. They can’t risk it.”

  “INA always goes too far,” Mavik said. “That’s why I don’t trust them.”

  Roarke rubbed his temples. “So what caused it?”

  Another processing pause.

  “Unknown,” ELIOT replied. “All readings outside δ-thresholds remain statistically insignificant and cannot be analysed.”

  “The Rift moved,” Hale insisted.

  “So no fault?” Roarke continued.

  “No fault detected.”

  Roarke let out a long breath. “Fine. Annoying but fine. Once everything’s online, we replot the jump and resume.”

  “Understood,” ELIOT said.

  Roarke leaned over Hale’s shoulder. “Elliot, run those numbers again.”

  Hale stared at him.

  “It’s not that I don’t trust you, Alaryn,” Roarke said. “It’s just that I can’t believe it.”

  Hale exhaled, then nodded.

  “Then let Elliot confirm it.”

  “I am already performing an independent correlation,” ELIOT said. “No predictive filtering. Raw astrometric reference only.”

  Roarke straightened slightly. “Good.”

  While they waited for the analysis to run, Hale turned to Mavik.

  “Why did you call it that? Tiamat?” she asked.

  “That’s what they called it when it was first discovered. They thought the Rifts looked like dragons. You can see it can’t you? Tiamat, the Great Dragon from ancient myths, was the first. It was classified as an anomaly.

  “Then they found Nidhogg, Glaurung, Jormungand, and others. All with the same structure. All celestial mysteries. Those names capture them better than AOR-seven-zero-five-six-whatever, don’t you think?” Mavik said with a hint of wonder.

  Hale’s expression hardened. “Names aren’t data, Doctor.”

  Mavik glanced at her, then back to the Rift. “No,” he said. “But they’re how people make sense of things that don’t fit the data.”

  “That doesn’t give them meaning,” Hale replied.

  Mavik smiled, faint and unreadable. “Meaning isn’t always the point.”

  “Well, that name carries a lot of weight. A personification of chaos. I would rather you not mention it here.”

  “I never took you for a scholar of ancient history,” Mavik said, raising his eyebrows.

  “I’m not, but my sister, Cassie was. She took those stories seriously. Too seriously. There were groups, people who saw the Rifts as something to worship.”

  “Those groups weren’t always as dangerous as the headlines made them,” Mavik said. “I studied a few of them early in my career.”

  “Well, this one was,” Hale said, her gaze fixed on the Rift. “They took her on an unauthorised expedition to a Rift. The official record says the expedition never came back. I never saw her again.”

  “I see,” Mavik said.

  They were interrupted by the hiss of a stasis pod opening.

  Evan Carrick’s wiry frame stepped out. The engineer stared at the view screen.

  “Who the hell authorised a stop this close to a Rift?” Before anyone could answer, Carrick sat cross-legged at his console and began typing.

  Mavik slid in front of him, blocking Carrick’s screen. “The medical officer has to declare you fully recovered after stasis before you’re allowed to undertake any mission critical duties.”

  “That’s bull, and you know it,” Carrick said, trying to push the doctor out of the way.

  “Still, I need you to undergo an examination,” Mavik insisted.

  “What is it?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m fine. Now let me get on.”

  “OK. Check. Chief engineer Evan Carrick is cleared to resume duties.”

  “Why didn’t the captain and I require a check?” Hale asked.

  “You were de-stuped. You’d never have passed a competency test.”

  “Where’s Rook?” Carrick asked, looking around the bridge.

  “He’s busy emptying our supply of tapering drugs. It’ll take a lot more of them to bring him out than you needed. And his enhanced immune system is probably fighting anything it considers foreign.”

  Carrick snorted. “Figures.”

  Mavik walked over to one of the pair of closed stasis pods and examined the indicators. “He’ll be here to brighten your day soon enough. Make the most of the peace while you can.”

  Roarke tapped the arm of his chair. “Right now, I need engineering brains not muscle and attitude.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Carrick didn’t look at him. His fingers were already moving across the console.

  “All systems are go, why are we still sitting here?”

  “That’s a good question,” Roarke replied. “Why are we still here, Elliot?”

  “Initiating FTL at this time is not advised,” ELIOT said.

  Carrick frowned. “Define ‘not advised’.”

  “Local reference stability has not yet converged,” the shipmind replied. “Departing now would introduce unquantified error into the jump solution.”

  Hale looked back at her console. “I told you. The Rift is moving.”

  “So what? Things in space move all the time,” Carrick insisted. “Just add it to the parameters.”

  “Other things move predictably,” Hale replied. “Their courses are known, plotted. This is different. Rifts don’t move. Moreover, their stability is factored into plotting the FTL jump trajectories, like way-points. If they’re moving, who knows what could happen. The scope for error is boundless.”

  “Tiamat awakes,” Mavik said.

  The bridge fell silent.

  “Doctor,” Roarke said. “Enough.”

  Roarke’s brow furrowed. He thought for a moment, then said, “We move under fusion drive. Away from here. Elliot, how far will we need to get?”

  “Unknown.”

  Hale frowned. “Elliot. Our current STL course?”

  There was a fractional pause.

  “All trajectories referencing the Rift are now subject to cumulative error,” the shipmind said.

  “But we don’t use Rifts for STL. Just fire up the fusion drive and vamoose,” Carrick said.

  “But all of our navigation charts reference them,” Hale said, frowning at the display.

  Carrick swore softly.

  Roarke closed his eyes for a moment. “So it’s not just how far we need to run from here.”

  He opened them again.

  “We don’t know how certain here is.”

  The heavy silence was broken by the hiss of a stasis pod opening, followed by thudding footsteps as security officer Tarren Rook stepped out. He glanced at the final closed pod, then stared down the gathered crew.

  “Who the heck goes into stasis with a gun?” Carrick asked, noting the holster on Rook’s belt.

  “Institutional anxiety,” Mavik said.

  “Status update,” Rook demanded.

  Roarke held his gaze. “We’re holding position. Navigation anomaly.”

  “Unacceptable. We should be moving,” Rook said flatly.

  “This isn’t a routine delay,” Hale said. “The local reference frame hasn’t stabilised.”

  Rook looked from her to the displays. “Can we fly or not?”

  “Sub-light propulsion remains viable,” ELIOT replied. “However, chart confidence is degraded.”

  Rook nodded once. “Then we move.”

  “No,” Roarke said. “Not until I say we do.”

  “Officer Rook,” Mavik said, walking up to stand in front of the man who towered above him and placing a hand on his chest.

  “What?”

  “How are you feeling?”

  The officer looked at him with contempt. “I am fully operational.”

  “Check.” Mavik said. "Security officer Tarren Rook is cleared to resume duties." The doctor returned to his chair.

  Rook’s jaw tightened as he watched the doctor leave before turning his attention back to the crew. “I’m responsible for the occupant of pod six.”

  “And I am the captain of this ship,” Roarke said in a measured tone.

  Hale frowned. “What’s the occupant of pod six got to do with this?”

  “That’s classified,” Rook said. “But delay is not acceptable.”

  Carrick glanced at Roarke. “You’re asking us to risk the ship for one person.”

  “I’m saying waiting carries its own risk,” Rook replied. “One I won’t quantify.”

  Hale’s eyes flicked back to her console. “Prolonged delay will begin to impact the pod. Whatever the margins are, they’re not infinite.”

  Roarke drew a slow breath. “All right. That’s enough.”

  He straightened in his chair. “This decision is mine.”

  “Fine,” Rook said. He marched over to the closed pod and stood next to it like a sentry.

  “Couldn’t you have left him in stasis?” Carrick whispered to Mavik.

  “Not my call, unfortunately.” The doctor shrugged.

  “Why do we even need a security officer?” Carrick said.

  “We don’t, but whoever is in pod six evidently does,” Roarke replied. “It’s none of our concern. We’re just the courier.”

  The captain stood.

  “All right,” he said. “Enough paralysis. We can’t wait around for INA to update the star charts, who knows how long that could take.”

  He moved to the helm console the centre of the bridge.

  Hale looked up sharply. “Captain—”

  “We are not initiating FTL,” Roarke continued, cutting her off. “But we are not dead in the water either.”

  “Fusion drive. Low burn. We navigate by the stars.”

  Carrick blinked. “That’s… old-school.”

  Roarke gave him a thin smile. “It worked for a few thousand years.”

  Hale frowned at her display. “Our charts—”

  “I know,” Roarke said. “They’re unreliable. So we strip it back. No Rift-referenced solutions. No extrapolated frames. Just inertial vectors, stellar parallax, and continuous correction. Like our ancestors did when they first crawled out of their gravity wells.”

  Mavik tilted his head. “Flying by the stars,” he said. “How romantic.”

  “Practical,” Roarke replied. “And it gets us moving.”

  Rook spoke. “About time.”

  “Elliot. Engage fusion drive. Minimal acceleration. Maintain current orientation. No automated course corrections.”

  There was a longer pause than usual.

  “Captain,” ELIOT said, “manual stellar navigation will significantly increase cumulative positional uncertainty.”

  “I am aware of that,” Roarke said. “Do it anyway.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  The deck vibrated softly as the fusion drive came online; a steady, physical push.

  Hale exhaled without realising she’d been holding her breath.

  “All right,” Carrick said, watching his screens. “We’re burning. Relative velocity climbing. Nothing’s falling apart yet.”

  Hale’s eyes flicked between the stars ahead and the reference grid she was rebuilding by hand. It was crude, compared to what the shipmind could normally do.

  “Hale, keep plotting for an FTL jump. Once were far enough away, plot us a course back home. The universe can’t have changed that much since we’ve been gone.”

  Hale froze.

  “Captain,” she said quietly. “That’s… not right.”

  Roarke turned. “What.”

  She pulled the main display back to the forward view and overlaid the new stellar fix.

  They had moved. The stars around them had shifted.

  The Rift had not.

  “The relative vector to the Rift is unchanged.”

  The words seemed to hang in the air, wrong in a way that made the bridge feel smaller.

  Carrick leaned forward. “That’s impossible. If we’re burning away, the angular separation should—”

  “I know,” Hale snapped. “I know what it should do.”

  “It’s maintaining position relative to us,” she said. “Not absolute position. Relative.”

  Mavik whispered, “Like it’s… keeping pace.”

  “No,” Hale said. “Like it’s expanding to keep us close.”

  “Elliot,” Roarke said, his voice very calm. “Confirm.”

  “I am confirming,” the shipmind replied. “Current data indicates that AOR-7056-001 is preserving a constant spatial relationship with this vessel.”

  Rook’s hand rested on the rail beside pod six. “So it’s following us.”

  “Rifts don’t do that,” Hale said. She wasn’t arguing anymore. She was stating a fact that no longer mattered.

  The alarm on pod six blared.

  Hale’s console flared red as warning cascades spilled across her screen.

  “Pod six integrity compromised,” ELIOT said. “Stasis field stability degrading. Correction load increasing beyond design limits. Estimated time to containment failure: six minutes.”

  Roarke straightened. “We don’t have six minutes.”

  Hale stared at the Rift, still centred in the forward view, vast and patient and utterly unmoved by their plight.

  “No,” she said quietly. “We don’t.”

  “Mavik, how long will the cargo need to taper?” Roarke asked.

  “I’ve no idea. I don’t know who it is. No data on age, sex, weight, metabolic profile. Nothing. I can give you an average of sixty three minutes.” He shrugged.

  “Start taper anyway. Rook!”

  “What?”

  “Do you have that data.”

  “That’s classified information.”

  “Do you have it?”

  “I am not a liberty to say.”

  “Rook!” Roarke’s face was inches away from Rook’s. “If you don’t give us that data now, your precious cargo could die!”

  “That is an acceptable mission outcome,” Rook stated bluntly. “Compromising classified data is not.”

  Roarke growled in frustration.

  “Mavik, what happens if the stasis field collapses with the cargo still stuped?”

  “Doses are calibrated to the effects of the stasis field which considerably reduces their efficacy,” the doctor said, shaking his head. “Once that goes down, they’ll be hit with a massive overdose of sedatives. If they don’t immediately go into shock and die from organ failure cascade, they might be lucky to end up in a coma. On the upside, they wouldn’t feel a thing.”

  “What if we de-stupe?”

  “Again, without physiological data, it’s impossible to say. INA crews are trained, they are exposed to stabilising drugs throughout their careers, but still, de-stuping is a last resort, even for experienced crew members. If this is citizen lambda on their first trip, it could be the same outcome as doing nothing, only they’ll be conscious to experience it, at least for a moment.”

  “Rook?!”

  The security officer was inscrutable.

  “Five minutes to stasis containment failure.”

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