The Collapsing Empire (The Interdependency #1)(2)

“Captain Gineos,” Inverr said, greeting her.

“Ollie,” Gineos said, returning the greeting.

“Captain Arullos Gineos, pursuant to Article 38, Section 7 of the Uniform Code of the Mercantile Shipping Guilds, I hereby—”

“Cut the shit, Ollie,” Gineos said.

Inverr smiled at this. “Fair enough.”

“I have to say you did a pretty good job with the mutiny. Taking Engineering first so that if everything else goes wrong you can threaten to blow the engines.”

“Thank you, Captain. I did in fact try to get us through this transition with a minimum of casualties.”

“Does that mean Fanochi is still alive?”

“I said ‘a minimum,’ Captain. I’m sorry to say Chief Fanochi was not very accommodating. Assistant Chief Hybern has been promoted.”

“How many of the other officers do you have?”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that, Captain.”

“Well, at least you’re not pretending you’re not going to kill me.”

“For the record, I’m sorry that it’s come to this, Captain. I do admire you.”

“I already told you to cut the shit, Ollie.”

Another smile from Inverr. “You never were one for flattery.”

“You want to tell me why you’ve planned this insurrection?”

“Not really, no.”

“Indulge me. I’d like to know why I’m about to die.”

Inverr shrugged. “For money, of course. We’re carrying a large shipment of weapons meant for the military of End to help them fight their current insurrection. Rifles, bolt throwers, rocket launchers. You know, you signed off on the manifest. I was approached when we were at Alpine about selling them to the rebels instead. Thirty percent premium. That seemed like a good deal. I said yes.”

“I’m curious how you planned to get the arms to them. End’s spaceport is controlled by its government.”

“They would never have made it there. We come out of the Flow, and we’re attacked by ‘pirates’ who offload the cargo. You and the other crew who don’t go along with the plan die in the attack. Simple, easy, everyone who is left makes a bundle and is happy.”

“The House of Tois won’t be happy,” Gineos said, invoking the Tell Me’s owner.

“They’ve got insurance for the ship and cargo. They’ll be fine.”

“He won’t be happy about Egerti. You’ll have to kill him. That’s Yanner Tois’s son-in-law.”

Inverr smiled at the name of the House of Tois’s patriarch. “I have it on good authority that Tois would not be entirely put out to make his favorite son a widower. He has some other alliances a marriage could firm up.”

“You have this all planned out, then.”

“It’s not personal, Captain.”

“Getting murdered for money feels personal, Ollie.”

Inverr opened his mouth to respond to this, but then Tell Me Another One dropped out of the Flow, triggering a set of alarms that no one on the Tell Me—not Gineos, not Inverr—had ever heard outside of an academy simulation.

Gineos and Inverr stood there for several seconds, gaping at the alarms. Then both of them went to their stations and got to work, because Tell Me had unexpectedly dropped out of the Flow, and if they didn’t figure out how to get back into it, they were, without a doubt, irretrievably fucked.

Now, some context, here.

In this universe there is no such thing as “faster-than-light” travel. The speed of light is not only a good idea, it’s the law. You can’t get to it; the closer you accelerate toward it, the more energy you need to keep going toward, and it’s a horrible idea to go that fast anyway, since space is only mostly empty, and anything you collide with at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light is going to turn your fragile spaceship into explody chunks of metal. And it would still take years, or decades, or centuries, for the wreckage of your spacecraft to zoom past wherever it was you originally planned to go.

There is no faster-than-light travel. But there is the Flow.

The Flow, generally described to laypeople as the river of alternate space-time that makes faster-than-light travel possible across the Holy Empire of the Interdependent States and Mercantile Guilds, called “the Interdependency” for short. The Flow, accessible by “shoals” created when the gravity of stars and planets interacts just right with the Flow, to allow ships to slip in and ride the current to another star. The Flow, which ensured the survival of humanity after it had lost the Earth, by allowing trade to thrive between the Interdependency, assuring that every human outpost would have the resources they’d need to survive—resources that almost none of them would have had on their own.

This was, of course, an absurd way of looking at the Flow. The Flow is not anything close to a river—it is a multidimensional brane-like metacosmological structure that intersects with local time-space in a topographically complex manner, influenced partially and chaotically but not primarily by gravity, in which the ships accessing it don’t move in any traditional sense but merely take advantage of its vectoral nature, relative to local space-time, which, unbounded by our universe’s laws regarding speed, velocity, and energy, gives the appearance of faster-than-light travel to local observers.