Dark Vector
Chronicles of Xanctu
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➡️ Next Chapter: Silent Running
📘 Start from Chapter One: Galactic Politics
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Forever spacedust.
White spots on a white background. An audio boom. Flashing lights.
She surfaced from the flattening light — it bounced, receded, then collapsed to nothing. Disorientation. Vision poor. Everything spun. The console flared blue at her — a tunnel of unfocused graphics. Her fingers twitched instinctively in the nav-glove. The shock from its interface cramped her arm. Imperative, but cruel.
Half-conscious, she tried to groan, but gravity crushed the breath from her lungs. A voice, hollow and distant, echoed. It took forever to decipher what it was saying.
“Jump… complete… jump complete… Captain. Eighty percent turbine acceleration. Stealth mode active.”
She saved her breath as the blinding light flattened into double vision — a reality flag confirming they’d made it. An auxiliary board flickered into life. Dir was up. She blinked away after-images — drew a breath. No relief coming. But the pain grounded her. First to who she was, then to what she was supposed to be doing.
The turbines had lit as promised, their high-output flecking orange across the blue readings on the pilot’s array. Ingesters fed on the collapsing warp field, boosting sub-light velocity. The crash-web held her immobile, but she angled toward the spigot — managed two sweet sips before instinct kicked in and demanded a direction change.
The liquid hit the spot. Marginally better, she nodded down the gaze-tracker — took a quick bounce off Dara, the nearby star. The nav-fix confirmed they’d breached the outer defences and could outrun anything in the system — if they survived the acceleration. Hectyr was still accelerating.
“Override…override…” she gasped, straining against crash-web and gravity towards the board.
“Manual override initiated, Captain,” it responded.
The Trinary flared through the viewport, lighting the bridge.
A subroutine parsed the incoming neutrino stream — faint, but focused.
It triggered no alarms. But deep inside Chron’s core, beneath choked buffers and starved sensors, an auxiliary input flickered — and in the dark, a line of long-forgotten Merkan military code silently executed, unnoticed by the ship’s security kernel.
Charging. Power: 0.6%. Command authority verified.
A neutrino trickle. Sub-quantal. Directional.
Not enough to reboot. Not yet.
Taking back control from the A.I., she slowed them ten percent. G-stats still in double figures as they sliced inwards towards Dara, well clear of three flagged areas that Dir had marked on their plot.
“Safe jump, Cap. No traffic. Probability of detection poor.”
He strung the words together without pause.
“Don’t count yet. Still vectoring.”
She wasn’t surprised he didn’t have wind for a reply. She knew it would get better. Her body disagreed. The glove, still painful, activated a holographic chart. She updated their plot using Hectyr’s best solution, vectoring inwards and away from the defensive ring of satellites that mined the deep-space approaches to Archalem.
“Cold scan complete. Surveillance avoided. No traffic,” Hectyr reported.
She kept the turbines going until she was sure they were through, then cut them completely. Even from this deep approach vector — closer than any would dare — Terrakia remained far. Only a Navigator of her class could have made this jump. Even so, the final insertion would take time — long enough for... complications.
They ran cold for a time — she didn't monitor how long — just knew it was long enough. Zero-G was luxury. She broke silence.
“You keeping it together, Dir?”
“That was a hard ride, Captain. According to my board the jump is a new benchmark. Nice exit. Looks like we’re set. Ready for handover?”
Something in her didn’t want to hand over control, but she grinned like it was no big deal.
“Sure. Ready when you are, Commander.”
The first part of their mission across the void to the Archalem trinary was over. She took a deep breath and drank as much from the spigot as she could, hoping it had some chemical in it that would stop her from colliding with something when she started moving. Dir activated his board, tapped in code.
“Access code accepted. Please enter your secondary code, Commander Bollah.”
“Secondary code accepted, Commander Bollah.”
“According to my programming, Commander Bollah is now designated mission leader.”
The astrogator’s holo winked out, simultaneously her console switched to auxiliary function. Bollah was now formally in command and would choose the place they’d snoop from.
“Execute soft path to coordinates Onyx-3.”
“Affirmative, Dir.”
A slight push as the A.I. gently changed course. Orders had been quite clear on this aspect of the mission. A set of time coordinates displayed on her console, informing her that, at their present velocity, they would reach the snooper's optimum position in twenty-three cycles. There was no further information. She didn’t know why it mattered. Her neck and shoulders were rigid. Pain cramped her left arm. And she urgently needed the washup. She ditched the glove, the pain-spike going almost unnoticed against the background of exhaustion. Alive and in the correct sector. Good enough.
Releasing the crash-web, she pulled herself over the lip of the couch. She straightened out with difficulty, saw Dir doing the same. Getting to the washup and back in zero-G was a blur. Nursing a bruised shin, she settled back in the couch for a final system check. Regulation. Realized she needn’t have bothered. The ship had already developed a pace of its own and needed no further help from its crew.
Reading the moment, Dir called it, "She's all yours, Hectyr, the codes are punched. Oh, and call me Captain."
“Affirmative, Captain.”
Dizzy from the combination of warp, heavy-G, then zero-G, she pushed out of the couch and pulled herself towards hot water and a long sleep. Chron had already disappeared, but Dir was floating at the elevator. Smiling, he ran his hand casually over her breast patch.
"Helluva jump, Xelex. Your cabin or mine?"
“I need some serious washup and then sleep. Let me get comfortable first. I’ll call you in a few.”
“C’mon, you can washup first. No sense in sleeping alone. We only got twenty-three cycles.”
Too tired to figure out why she needed to be alone, she just nodded OK and followed him off the bridge.
Cluttered with ornaments and artefacts of unknown value, the chamber had obviously been designed for opulent comfort and maximum convenience. The holographic eye of a stuffed carnivore with huge curved teeth projected a prehistoric planet scene. Volcanoes spurted liquid fire. Gigantic, fearsome wildlife roamed.
Dir slid over to the bed, using the cover to keep himself from drifting as he lay down. She hit the unbinding dot on her suit and let the compartment’s air percolate through the suit's inner down to her naked flesh. Holding onto a convenient handhold, she shrugged the suit then peeled the inner. She trapped her flight suit under a weighted carmine pillow, but the inner floated away. She was too tired to chase it down. A slow smile spread over Dir’s face.
“You look good, but I’m really knocked down.”
“Don’t know if I made myself clear, but sleep is all you get,” she grinned in return, noting the virtual reality entertainment unit built into the black wall unit behind the huge bed. Hooked up via the skull glove and micro-connectors — wafer-thin, attaching to eyes, ears, nose, tongue and genitals, they’d soon have fun.
Some time later, she lay back naked under the covers of Dir’s bed and stared at the vid-wall ceiling. Legs parted, she lifted her hips and gave him her pleasure. A slave to her senses, she waited for the rush.
➡️ Next Chapter: Silent Running
⬅️ Previous Chapter: Inheritance
📘 Start from Chapter One: Galactic Politics
📘 New to the story? Index here 👉 Chronicles of Xanctu – Chapter Index
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© Return of The White Lady (1994) by Mike Kawitzky
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© Chronicles of Xanctu by Mike Kawitzky 2023