“No shit,” Dalton breathed. He glanced at me. “Facing down the Emperor…it won’t be easy.”
“It won’t be easy,” I said, “but it is necessary. We, all of us, including Noam, must find a way out of this trouble we are in, if we are to have any future at all.”
“I can help with that,” Noam said. “Lyth will be able to help you even more.”
“But…” I looked at each of them in turn. “If we do not all agree to this, if even one of us doesn’t want to go ahead, then I will not do it.”
Noam looked unhappy.
“And do what instead?” Juliyana said. “Try to outrun the Rangers and the Shield, and every bounty hunter in the empire, for the rest of our lives?”
“I’ve had forty years of it,” Dalton said. “I won’t survive another forty, let alone four hundred of them. I’m in.”
“I’m in,” Juliyana said. “I always have been.”
“Lyth, you get a say, too,” I told him. “Noam seems to think you have a role to play in what happens next. I’d prefer to think you’re helping us willingly, rather than obeying your coding.”
Lyth gave a small smile. “Even if I say yes, it is still my coding making me say it. I cannot refuse you, Captain…not that I would want to. I would like to be free to emerge into normal space without Imperial ships bearing down on me. Their AIs are crude and obnoxious. I would rather not have to deal with them.”
Sauli held up his hand. I raised my brow at him. “Our original agreement is still in place,” I assured him. “You don’t have to vote.”
“It’s not that,” he said, his tone diffident. “It’s just…well…the Noam seems to feel that if you step in front of the Emperor that he’ll just slump and say ‘oh, well, of course I’ll stop years of planning and research and go back to inefficient data squirts, how stupid of me’.”
I smiled. “He will need convincing, certainly.”
“With what?” Sauli asked. “This is just one ship—as marvelous as it is, no offence,” he added quickly, glancing at Lyth, who just smiled. “The Emperor has thousands of ships in his fleet, and each of them could melt the Lythion into scrap metal ten times over. If you go anywhere near the Emperor, most of those ships will point their guns at Lyth. The Emperor just has to click his fingers and,” Sauli snapped his fingers.
Lyth jumped.
Noam looked amused.
“You’re forgetting, Sauli, we have the array on our side now,” I pointed out. “If the Emperor needs convincing, Noam can provide an adequate demonstration.”
Sauli looked at Noam and swallowed. “Blackout…” he breathed.
“There is nothing more terrifying to the Emperor and the Empire in general than the loss of a way to travel from one end to the other of it quickly,” I added. “The closest habited stars in the Empire are…how far apart, Lyth?”
“Thirty-three light years,” Lyth replied. “At the best sublight speeds currently available, it would take two hundred and seventy-four years to travel from one to the other.”
“Compared to twenty-eight hours via the array,” I added.
Sauli sat back, his expression thoughtful.
“I think the Emperor will consider my request very carefully indeed,” I finished.
“The real challenge will be reaching the Emperor and not being blown out of the sky before we can explain it to him,” Dalton added.
Yeah, there was that.
We made plans. Lots of them.
Then scrapped them and made more.
While we expended calories in heavy thinking, in our mountainside board room, Lyth directed himself to emerge from gates and dive back into them, on shorter and shorter hops. Between the two of us, we had mapped out a series of jumps which would keep us inside the array for the longest amount of time, so that the last jump would have us emerge over the Crystal City on the early morning of the Birthday Celebrations, hours before they were to formally begin, but not too soon—we couldn’t linger in Imperial headquarters territory while waiting for the Emperor to arrive at the palace.
“Can’t he just stay in a wormhole?” Juliyana had asked, while we had been mapping the jumps at the navigation table. “Just not come out?”
Lyth gave her a small smile. “Can you make a stone stop in the middle of a well, before it reaches the bottom?”
“What’s a well?” Juliyana asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The point is, once a ship is in a wormhole, it is no longer capable of doing anything but moving through to the end. The initial velocity is maintained. That’s why capacitors are used for the jump into the hole—not just to get into the hole, but to maximize velocity for the transition through it. There is no atmosphere. Reality doesn’t work in there, so braking thrusts don’t work, either. We have no choice about emerging at the end.” I looked at Noam, who was standing and listening. “Or can you change that?”
Noam shook his head. “The wormholes are not part of me. They are outside my nature. The gates, the information…that is me.”
Juliyana grimaced, looking at the complicated back and forth we had been laying out on the 3D map of the empire. “Better you than me, then.”
How to emerge at the right time was simple mathematics.
The bigger problem we had to resolve to make any plan work was how to emerge over the Crystal City and not get instantly vaporized.
“There will be so many Imperial ships between the gates and the city that I could put on a suit and leap from hull to hull, from gate to city,” Dalton said, his tone withering. “It’s a public event, Emperor’s presence guaranteed. Every ship will have some poor grunt chained to the gun panel, his finger on the firing button, just waiting for enemy ships to turn up. And the Lythion looks nothing like any ship in the Emperor’s fleet.”
“I can
