Polaris Rising (Consortium Rebellion, #1)(71)

“I hope not. I’m going to jump us a few hours out from XAD Six to give the FTL time to recharge before we get close enough for them to notice us. But if we run into a patrol it might get tricky. Better to be prepared.”

I plotted our course then brought us into full stealth. The visual cloaking wouldn’t hold through the FTL jump but the lack of external communications would. Full stealth hobbled our own ability to locate foreign ships, but it prevented our ship from sending out enough signals that anyone in the sector could spot us. Once I’d surveyed our exit point, I’d lower the stealth level enough to see who else was out there.

After waiting another minute to be sure no one needed extra time, I pressed the jump confirmation button. The lights flickered and my stomach dropped, just as it would on any conventional FTL jump. Interesting. The alcubium FTL must use a lot less of the ship’s energy in order to be so smooth.

The ship lurched then punched back into normal space with a shudder that was in no way normal. Warnings flashed red across my screen. The FTL was critically overheated, so I put it into emergency shutdown and cooling. I dealt with the fallout from the various connected systems as fast as I could. We skated a hairsbreadth from catastrophic system failure.

My hands shook as the warnings dwindled, then disappeared. We’d made it.

We’d made it.

“What was that?” Rhys asked.

“Conventional jump with the FTL. Even though the system said it was good to go, once we jumped, the drive overheated.” I headed off his next question. “I have no idea why, but I intend to find out.”

“Are we dead in the water?” Loch asked.

I shook my head. “Not totally. The main engine wasn’t damaged and I shut the FTL down before it took damage. But I have no idea how long the FTL drive will need to cool before it’s ready to jump again, even if we add back the alcubium.”

“The what?” Rhys asked.

The jump had shaken me to the point where I wasn’t watching my words. “Alcubium seems to be the element that allows the FTL to jump faster than normal. I suspect Rockhurst is mining it on the planet we’re going to check out.”

I watched him make the mental connections. “If they own the drives and the resource that powers them, they’ll be unstoppable,” Rhys said.

“Yes. They’ll certainly outfit their military ships first, once they scale it up. They can jump in, attack, and jump out before our reinforcements can arrive. It’ll be the fall of House von Hasenberg and likely House Yamado. It may already be too late to stop them, but I have to try.”

“The Consortium may be far from perfect, but I’d take it over a single House dictatorship any day,” Rhys said.

I turned back to my console. “Let’s see who else is out there,” I said. I tweaked our stealth level so the scanners could check surrounding space. When the results started streaming in, I frowned at the screen and tweaked the settings again.

“What’s wrong?” Rhys asked.

“I’m picking up a whole lot of empty space,” I said. “Getting faint signals from the planet, but nothing in orbit or in a wider patrol.”

“A trap?” Loch asked, finally joining the conversation.

“Possibly. Or I’m completely wrong about the importance of this planet.”

“Or Rockhurst doesn’t want to call undue attention to their little project by having a flotilla guarding it,” Rhys said.

I rubbed my face, feeling the weight of responsibility and divided loyalties. I had a kid on board, but that kid would have a shitty future if Rockhurst steamrolled the other Houses, not to mention most of my siblings would be on the front lines if it came to war, the first to die.

And, more selfishly, if I found enough information, I could bargain with Father for the freedom to choose my own path in life.

“I have to get a closer look,” I said finally, “trap or not. But first the FTL must be functional. After the emergency shutdown, I’ll have to go down and manually start it up again.”

“Loch and I can handle that,” Rhys said. Loch didn’t seem super enthused to be volunteered, but he didn’t disagree.

“Thanks. While you do that, I’ll go through the logs and see if I can figure out what happened.”

They left and I dove into the diagnostics. It took a bit of backtracking but I finally found the root of the problem: the drive had been much too hot at the beginning of the jump. Turning off the alcubium had also turned off some sort of accelerated cooling.

Adding alcubium made the drive operate at a higher temperature but with better cooling. And because the engineers who built the ship had bolted the alcubium on a standard FTL, the safety coding was a mess—the fail-safes hadn’t caught the fact that the drive was too hot for a standard jump because it was within spec for an alcubium-boosted jump.

I disabled the six-hour jump. Conventional jumps would have to wait the full two days for the drive to cool sufficiently. Until the safety coding was fixed, we’d be taking conventional jumps slowly. It was overly cautious, but we’d come close enough to disaster that I didn’t want to risk it a second time.

After Rhys and Loch went through the manual startup for the FTL, I enabled the alcubium again to help bring the drive temperature down. Plotting a jump course showed a fifty-five-minute cooldown. With the alcubium once again in use, I had to believe it was within spec. If I started doubting every command, I’d drive myself crazy.