Laia's clone dissolved the moment the bugs launched their attack on us, turning to mist as she uploaded her memories to her main core. I had no idea how she managed that it was yet another mystery filed under "too many questions, not enough time."

  We jumped.

  The new system was underwhelming, much like a padlock convention; a faint star, a few rocks, and a single small, red planet orbited by a gas giant at the edge. Cold. Dense. Nothing about it looked special, unless you were desperate or you had a sublight engine that could transform atmospheric gases into a weapon.

  I was both.

  Laia had flagged the planet during our initial planning. Its blend of pressure and chemistry was just volatile enough to be useful. Or suicidal. It matched every warning in my sublight engine instructions.

  The moment we arrived, slipstream windows bloomed behind us. Dozens. Clean and precise. The insectoids poured through as if they'd never lost our trail. They had no heat signature, no engine flare, just pure movement. Organic. Silent. Fast. Masters of slipstream, their approach was expected.

  "Three swarms," I said, eyes locked on the displays. "They're gaining."

  Lynn muttered, "Didn't expect them to be this quick."

  We killed the sublight engines, letting inertia carry us in. The gas giant swelled in the viewport, its striped clouds turning slowly, catching faint starlight. Silence hung heavy in the virtual bridge with just the steady heartbeat of ship systems and Kel's nervous fingers tapping the railing.

  "We sure this is going to work?" he asked.

  "No," I replied. "But it should."

  The clouds thickened around us as we dropped lower. Temperature climbed. Pressure crawled across the hull like a warning. We waited, letting the swarm follow us in. Closer. Closer.

  I lit the engines.

  The ignition wave caught instantly ripping backward through the cloud layer in a flash of orange and violet. Not fire, exactly. More like a chain reaction folding in on itself, pulsing with pressure and heat. The lead swarm caught the worst of it. Drones spun apart mid-air, wings sheared off by the shockwave. The rest turned too late.

  "Now," Laia said.

  I hit the jump.

  The moment stretched. The dimension window wasn't stable. It wasn't supposed to form within such a dense cloud. The path I was meant to follow collapsed. Instinctively, I latched onto new routes, just like during my emergency jump. Following pure intuition.

  Soon we left slipstream, but I didn't know where.

  We dropped into empty space.

  No pursuit this time. Just the quiet blink of damaged shields and the cooling hiss of the ship adjusting pressure.

  Kel leaned against the wall, sweat clinging to his brow. "Tell me we're not doing that again."

  Lynn checked her console. "We can’t even if we wanted to. The fuel's low."

  "Dangerously low," I confirmed, feeling a hunger more intense than when I first arrived.

  Stolen story; please report.

  But we were alive.

  And for now, that was enough.

  The long-range scanners pinged a nearby system. It had identified some Helium-3 reserves inside. I adjusted the course, slow and deliberate, keeping burn minimal.

  “Guess we bugged out a little too hard,” I quipped. Someone groaned. I took it as approval.

  On the virtual bridge, Laia hovered midair, wings pulsing softly as she sifted through corrupted nav-data, attempting to piece our shredded star charts back together. Fragments of constellations flickered around her like a shattered puzzle, slowly realigning into something recognisable.

  I wasn't helping much as I was too busy watching the fuel gauge flashed stubbornly in the red. We weren't going to make it much further. I was having serious concerns about being adrift in space.

  Stewie broke the silence first, leaning forward with hesitant optimism. "What about the lander? We can attach some harvesting drones.Its reactor isn't picky, it will burn just about anything radioactive. Plenty of that floating around out here." He looked away afterwards like he didn’t expect we would take him seriously. But he wasn't wrong. Compared to my refined tastes, the lander's reactor was essentially a garbage disposal and perfect for desperate times like these.

  The rest of the crew jumped on the idea immediately. Lynn, Kel, and Mira were all eager for the lander's maiden voyage, especially if it meant not drifting powerless through space. I studied their faces, scanning for unease or hesitation or clues for some gut feeling like Kel had shown earlier but none came. Just cautious excitement. So, I agreed.

  Stewie immediately brightened at the suggestion, eyes gleaming as he declared, "I'll pilot it!"

  Kel opened his mouth as if to object, hesitated, then closed it again without comment but the faint crease between his brows said plenty.

  I decided to ask what everyone else was clearly wondering. "Stewie, have you actually flown before?"

  His enthusiasm faltered slightly, but before he could answer, Mira quickly stepped in. "Oh, he's great!" she insisted, with perhaps a bit too much confidence. "Well—on simulators, anyway. Back on New Horizon, when we used to sneak into the training room."

  I resisted the urge to sigh audibly. Simulator training. Wonderful. Then again I had no training. So I guess it was above me.

  The lander's launch was exactly as rough as you'd expect under the circumstances. For the first thirty seconds, Stewie wobbled through space like a newborn deer discovering gravity for the first time. But he recovered quickly, I would say more quickly than I'd anticipated, actually and soon enough, they were soaring smoothly toward the distant system, harvesting drones secured snugly in the cargo hold.

  I watched them go, silently hoping they'd bring back fuel that to satiate this hunger.

  With the crew off collecting fuel, I turned my attention back to Laia, whose wings had gone still which was never a good sign.

  She looked up, her tiny, glowing eyes solemn. "I finished mapping our position. You're not going to like it."

  "I figured," I said dryly. "Just give me the bad news."

  "We crossed into Kall-e space," she said simply, and I felt my core tense at the name. The Kall-e didn't like visitors, especially human ones. I had no idea what humanity had done to end the war but it had angered them, but Laia’s advice was blunt: "We should stay out of their way."

  "Easier said than done," I muttered, scanning over damage reports flooding my internal systems. The slipstream drive flashed warnings at me, dozens of angry red indicators insisting that pushing a highly sensitive multidimensional engine through an exploding gas giant might have been unwise.

  Who knew?

  Laia didn’t take the news well. “That complicates things” she said being sitting down quietly.

  I tried to focus elsewhere, on something I could effect, turning my attention to the holographic models of the insectoids we’d fought. Those strange, alien organs responsible for their slipstream travel had been mapped in detail, but biology wasn't exactly my specialty. There were 4 different organs identified that helped with navigating, mapping and opening and closing the slipstream. I would need an expert to help if I was going to get anything useful out of it.

  The tunnels, however, were another story. I spread out the intricate maps Laia had retrieved—twisting, glowing paths of slipstream currents. Already, I recognised some familiar routes, like tracing the rivers I'd sailed without even knowing their names. I had started to highlight them on the map for her.

  "Looks like chaos to me," Laia murmured, hovering beside me, eyeing the twisting routes sceptically.

  "Maybe," I replied, "but there's a pattern here. We just have to learn how to read it."

  I lost myself in that work, charting routes and currents, trying not to think about the persistent ache. But just when my anxiety began creeping in again, I felt the quiet, gentle surge of replenishment—the first trickle of fuel from the lander filtering through my hungry systems.

  The crew had done it.