Limitless Path

“Thanks, we’ll keep that in mind,” Beth said with a small smile. She would definitely consult if she found something like that, but as for inviting anyone outside the team in to take a big cut of the loot, well, better cross that bridge when they come to it.

“You have my number,” Fallon said, stroking his beard.

“Yes, and before we go, can we, uh, get some help with our ship?” Beth asked, glancing at the rest of the group.

“Hmm, oh, yes, sure,” Fallon said, starting a bit and standing, gesturing to them to follow him out.

They followed the Manumitted, moving to a teleportation pad and taking them through a teleport to somewhere Beth hadn’t been before, after which a second teleport had them in a very familiar room. The Hall Master showed up, glanced at their emblems, realized who Fallon was, then disappeared in a puff. Fallon gestured to Beth, who gave a nod and lead the way outside, leading to where they always had their cruiser land when they had need of it. She called the ship down and let it land in front of the group, waiting a minute for it to be settled and then gave Fallon a nod, to which he merely flicked a finger, causing a giant box to appear around the cruiser, though it was just a framework without the sides of the cube filled in. Beth watched as everything within the box froze, space itself turning to syrup and very strange things happening to her perception of everything within the cube before Fallon snapped his fingers and made the cube, and the ship within, disappear. There wasn’t a pop of displaced air rushing back into the empty space, causing Beth to raise an eyebrow at the Manumitted.

“Don’t worry; all safe,” he said with a grin, turning and strolling off. Beth and her team hadn’t really perfect that whole, take a step and walk a mile sort of thing, not without using skills, and they had to scramble to keep up with his pace.

They were back in the teleporter room in no time, and this time they transited through two other platforms that none of them recognized, apart from Fallon, before they arrived at what she assumed was their destination. Exiting the teleporter room, Beth was able to immediately observe that they were on a space station, but not the one that Fallon and Zane used as their home base. This one was, if anything, rather boringly mundane, without any fancy stars or singularities nearby or any weird warps in space, time, gravity, or any other phenomena to make the place stand out much. The station itself was depressingly drab, with pretty simple metal, plastic, and ceramic covering most of the surfaces while the few windows that provided any kind of external view were tiny and made of a partially tinted material. Beth frowned slightly as she followed Fallon to what had to be a hangar bay, the others walking behind her and talking amongst themselves, clearly not impressed with their current surroundings.

“We’re at the closest occupied zone to the coordinates here,” Fallon said, surprising Beth a bit.

“With only a couple teleports?” Beth asked.

“You think Zane and I rely on some inferior teleportation pad system like the CRA uses to get around?” he asked archly with a quirked brow.

“Point taken,” Beth replied with a shake of her head.

“Now, here’s the ship,” he commented, making their cruiser appear with a snap. “From what you said, and what I can sense, this thing is rather capable. We’re but a few light years from the anomaly, so you shouldn’t have any trouble flying over there and checking what’s happening. Is there anything else you need before I go?”

“Nope, I think we’ve got it. Thanks for the lift, in all aspects,” Beth said, giving him a small smirk.

“Very well. We shall intersect at a different time locality,” Fallon said before simply ceasing to exist at that place in spacetime. Beth was pretty sure he had just somehow walked sideways through time to move to the other side of the galaxy in a single step, but she would try to wrap her head around Manumitted nonsense later.

For now, she had to get them on board, get everyone settled on the cruiser, and get permission for the ship that had just suddenly appeared in a docking bay to launch out of the station. The place must have been used to some weirdness, or they just didn’t really care at all, which she had encountered her fair share of during their adventures, and they got that permission immediately. Blood took them out, easing them out of the station and slowly moving them away from both the station and the moon it orbited before gradually increasing the thrust until they were moving at a very appreciable speed. Beth knew it was going to be a bit, so she dismissed everyone else to their own devices, which mostly meant resting in their rooms or relaxing in the mess while they waited. Blood eventually got them to a position she was satisfied with and hit the FTL, spooling it up for a minute before initiating the jump. Once they were sliding towards the destination, Beth did a bit of calculus and some simple triangulation to estimate some distances and times. She figured they had just under two days at their current speed and heading before they got close enough they would have to drop out of FTL.

She was almost dead on with her reckoning, Blood taking them back into normal space about forty-six hours later, the whole team having spent most of the time sleeping or playing card games together. Beth had, perhaps mistakenly, taught the others hold ‘em at some point, and that had quickly become very popular amongst the group for something to do during downtime. They would play in-house poker games with a silver coin buy-in, which let everyone play, including people like Beth’s sisters if they were around, and the team could re-buy hundreds of times without even noticing it. They certainly didn’t play for enough time at any one sitting for even a few tens of re-buys to happen, though Andrea had bought back into a game ten times in a row and gone all-in every single time at one point. Somebody, Beth was pretty sure Val, had eventually tackled her to stop her from continuing to do so, as it was far more disruptive to the game than winning a few silvers was worth.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Beth shook those thoughts off, grumbling as she focused on the scanners and what they were picking up. At this distance, it was still a bit jumbled, and they had at least some time delay, meaning she was seeing things that had happened a couple minutes ago, but they were still able to get a bunch of readings off the spatial anomaly. Just the first bit of data made Beth think that either Zane knew more than he was letting on or that his experience was enough to nail it every time. The spatial anomaly was certainly some type of subspace that acted like a unique instance; their scanners were returning estimates about the stability, longevity, size, mana composition, and far more, but she knew they would have to get very close, at least, to see any precise details. The other problem that she was thinking about was them having to possibly do a bit of an EVA, as she didn’t think just flying the cruiser into the anomaly was going to be a particularly good idea, especially given that they would only have some slight idea of the terrain or topography inside before entering.

Blood flew them in close, bringing them to a stop, at least relative to the anomaly; everything in outer space was always moving and it was all about how fast an object was moving in relation to another object. Blood had stopped them a handful of miles out, just close enough that they could see it with the naked eye, and Beth was made rather suspicious when she gazed at the anomaly and saw that it very much resembled the edge of an event horizon. Around it boiled a massive ring of gases and matter that spiraled outward, for the most part, which was different than what would be happening around a singularity, but the resemblance was a bit uncanny. She sighed as she realized she was going to be going for a bit of a walk as, again, she was both the strongest among the team and also had the greatest ability to break out of any weird space that isolated or moved her somewhere. Hell, if she got teleported or moved halfway across the universe, she could still get back to the team quickly, given her level of both power and wealth.

The rest of the team observed from the bridge as Beth armored up, using a set of equipment to make sure she didn’t, well, suffocate as she moved out of the ship, though even that would actually be difficult for her at this point. She was pretty sure oxygen was more of a suggestion than a requirement now, at least for very long periods, hours trending more into days, but she dismissed those thoughts as she moved forward, not exactly used to navigating in zero-g. She didn’t really try to move around, but instead just cheated and teleported a couple times, pulling up next to the anomaly and getting a good look at it with all her senses, including her understanding of space and spatial mana. She didn’t feel any danger from it, not directly, and she determined that there was a rather enormous space inside, taking a few readings with a small device that Val had enchanted to pick up fine detail and relay it into Beth’s communicator. When she had spent about fifteen minutes studying it and taking readings, she had a very good idea what they were in for, and turned and took a single step, a little awkward in space, appearing on the bridge of the cruiser.

“Well?” Val asked, trying to play it calm as Beth disabled the armor attachment that kept a bubble of breathable air around her, though she was clearly excited.

“Well, it’s going to be fun,” Beth said to general groans. What she considered fun even her highly experienced and rather powerful team considered deadly, but they didn’t spend any time arguing the point, instead immediately going over the readings. They’d had days to sit around and rest; now, it was time for some action.

“These readings don’t make sense,” Blood grumbled right away.

“Let me transform the output,” Beth grunted, moving over to a console and using her understanding and knowledge and refine the data.

What appeared on the main screen was an area that was a rough obloid, and the dimensions were pretty staggering. Beth figured the space was about fifty percent larger than Sol system, the solar system containing Earth, and had a dozen signatures that indicated some type of land or area that might a planet. The place didn’t seem to have a star, despite being the size of a large solar system, though she wasn’t sure what some of the readings meant. It did look to have a wide range of beasts, at least in terms of level, though it was hard to get accurate readings on such a precise level when doing a broad sweep from outside the pocket space. The data they had gotten, especially once Beth had filtered it using her understanding of space and spatial twists, was likely enough to satisfy Zane and Fallon’s curiosity, but the team wasn’t going to just let such a massive opportunity go to waste, nor be claimed by the first intrepid explorer that happened to stumble by.

They geared up to dive into the subspace, though they didn’t leave the ship; Beth’s examination had revealed that the space was stable enough for them to fly the ship inside. Besides, if they ship got really banged up on this misadventure, she could always guilt Zane into paying for repairs. Or even just get him to buy a ship of equivalent size and value to this one, though she was already extremely fond of their little cruiser and didn’t want to see it damaged unnecessarily. Flying the thing inside would also not be a problem as the entrance to the subspace was about the size of a city block, if not a bit bigger, and their cruiser was not bigger than that, not even measuring from nose to stern.

Dropping through the hole in space, for that is what it most looked like, was a very quick transition, though only Beth was unperturbed by that. The others had clearly expected some kind of crazy distortion and some sort of blast of lights and colors and weird sounds, but this wasn’t a Mortaine teleport. Instead, the ship passed through the opening, or the very front did, and the rest seemed to be sucked in in just the matter of a few hundredths of a second. To the team on the bridge, it didn’t happen all that fast as for them, even just one hundredth of a second was still, or could be experience as, quite a bit of time; accelerating perception and cognitive processing speeds was something that stats did, that stats had to do, so that people could keep up with the pace that their stronger bodies moved and acted in combat. The team was able to observe the ship being fully pulled into the distortion and how the transition was a brief period where the ship went through what looked like a short tunnel with varying gradients of gray color before they were suddenly back in realspace, flying forward slowly relative to what was in front of them.

Beth had been a bit wrong about the data in that there was a small star in the center of the pseudo solar system, though it was a bit unusual as it was rather bright given its overall volume. Beth was betting it was one of those stars that burned much faster and hotter, even with less mass, and also burned out a bit quicker, though she was wracking her brains a little to remember exactly how the chart for star sizes and burn rates looked. Whatever the case, it wasn’t really an issue, as the star wasn’t going to explode in the next ten minutes, or even ten millennia, according to the reading the cruiser was picking up, though it did appear to be a decent bit of the way through its lifespan. Beth had to wonder about the readings a bit, especially the last part, as this place had just formed and it was clear that it was a pocket space and not somewhere in their galaxy or even universe. There were no stars hanging outside the edge of the system, and none of the readings indicated that the ship could detect any kind of celestial body or energy source any farther than a few lightdays away. They had arrived at a point that would have been about Jupiter’s orbit, were this Sol system and assuming the star was at the very center.