“God, oh my God…” Allister muttered, rocking back and forth in her seat. “He’s gone. Itomi is gone. We’re fugitives. Oh God…”

  The lights in the cabin were dim, casting a solemn glow through the air. Yarns and Shishone had gone to the cockpit to talk – Yarns had been panicking over much the same as Allister, the lose of a home, of a future, of safety, and the fear of retribution that lingered over them all – leaving Yu and Allister in the back. Yu sat across from Allister, watching her, quiet.

  Allister continued to mutter to herself. “Oh my God. We’re going to die. He’s going to kill all of us. Just like he killed them, oh God.”

  Yu listened, still as a statue, her mind split down the middle by the axe of fate, weighing both Allister’s sorrows and her own. Her father was gone. That wasn’t the man she’d grown up with, with kind but stern hands, a level head, and a forward thinking attitude. The man she’d known was, verifiably, gone now. And now, she felt… alone.

  Her greatest ally, gone.

  Her father. Just a husk of who he used to be. She shivered, fighting back tears of her own.

  Allister continued to sob and mumble. “Oh my god, we’re gonna die. We’re gonna die.”

  “Shut up!” Yu snapped, sneering at her.

  The woman recoiled, staring at Yu with wide, fearful eyes, as though she’d been bitten by a snake. Yu breathed heavily for a moment, letting the anger wash over her like a wave, rising, then passing, and falling back into the ocean of her emotions. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly, before turning away and saying, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap. We’re all struggling right now.”

  Allister huffed. “Your dad killed my friends.”

  “He’s not my father anymore,” Yu said, a sharp grimace on her lips. “He stopped being my father some time ago.”

  Examining her with a thoughtful, if wary, look, Allister let out a soft sigh and held her head in her hands. “Are we going to die?”

  Yu cleared her throat and ran a hand through her hair. “Maybe.”

  “Oh… oh God, oh no, I’m going to be sick,” Allister said, clutching her stomach.

  “No, no,” Yu said, reaching over and putting a hand on her knee. “Hold it together. I’m trying to, those two are trying to,” she said, motioning to the cockpit door. “You can too. We have to, until we’re at the end.”

  “The end?”

  Yu nodded. “Whatever that looks like.”

  Wiping her eyes, Allister shivered and huddled into herself. “I hate this. I hate it here. I miss my friends, my research…”

  Yu stood slowly, carefully, as to not upset Allister with any jerking movements, and crossed the aisle to sit beside her. Now, the two of them were nestled between a crate on one side and two barrels of water on the other, close together. Yu looked Allister up and down, and then gently put an arm over her shoulder and slowly pulled Allister close to her.

  “Shh, shh,” she cooed. “I know. I’m scared too.”

  “It’s not fair,” Allister said, the tears returning, her voice breaking. “It’s not right, it’s just not…”

  “It’s not, you’re right,” Yu said, resting her chin atop Allister’s head.

  “I lost my husband, I lost my best friend, now Sergei… who do I have?” Allister sobbed.

  “You have us. And I know that might not seem like a lot, but it’s something,” Yu said, squeezing her delicately. “We’re all in the same boat, and four heads are better than one. We can figure something out.”

  Allister looked up at Yu, who caught her gaze and offered a kind, strained smile.

  “How are you holding yourself together like this?” Allister asked.

  Yu shrugged, looking away. “There’s no point in completely losing it, I mean. There’s still work to be done.”

  “But Xiao, your dad, that has to weigh on you.”

  She squeezed Allister’s arm, and let her go. They both sat up straight, the tension between them easing. “It does,” Yu said. “It’s hard. But there’ll be time to grieve when it’s all said and done. Supposing, of course.”

  “Supposing?”

  “Supposing we even get that far.”

  Allister looked at her, dismayed. “You don’t think we will.”

  Shaking her head, Yu rebutted, “I don’t know that we won’t.”

  Seemingly comforted, even just a little, by Yu’s words, Allister let out a long breath. “Xiao’s losing touch with reality. There are bombardment munitions in the Kuiper Belt. There’s some sort of secret project called the, what was it? ‘Manet Vivus’? Sedna isn’t responding. Something big is going on here, and I feel like, as a scientist, I should be able to piece it together, but I just can’t. I don’t understand it.”

  She turned to Yu, and cocked her head, shooting her a quizzical look. “Can you tell me more about this ‘Vivus’ project? What all do you know?”

  Yu thought for a moment, rubbing her cheek, before saying, “It’s carrying embryos, and has some sort of special engine on it, with a name I’ve never heard of before. It seems incredibly secretive. Apparently they scattered the people who worked on it to remote corners of the Solar System when they were done with it.”

  Allister listened, and then hummed in thought. “What about Xiao? What’s going on with him exactly?”

  “My father is hearing whispers, voices,” Yu said. “At least, this is what I’ve gathered. Seems he’s also gone into some kind of mania as well. He’s been making people disappear, specifically people who, for instance, receive recordings from Sedna, or know anything about his illness, or are, like you, aware of the potential of tholins.”

  “So… tholins, Sedna, and his illness? They must be related,” Allister said. “But where do the embryos come in?”

  Yu shrugged. “I’m lost on that one.”

  “Yeah, I am too,” Allister muttered, her eyes flicking back and forth as she thought. “Well, what do we do now? We need a plan, you know?”

  Yu nodded and said, “We do, and we have a bit of one right now. We’re on our way to Weywot, where there’s a water mining facility there on the ice. It’s one of the least guarded places in the Belt, and we can lay low there for a bit and figure out what our next move is.”

  “Xiao made it pretty clear we’d find no safe harbor in the Belt now,” Allister said. “We’re screwed no matter what we do.”

  “Well… I’ve been thinking on that too,” Yu said. “And I think –”

  Just then, Shishone came over the ship’s intercom. “Hey you two, just wanted to let you know we’re about there. We’re gonna set down on the opposite side of the mining rigs, shouldn’t be much heat back there. We’ll need to figure out something fast though. Not sure how much time we have before someone picks up on our presence.”

  The intercom died with a static bzzzt. Yu looked up, then turned to Allister, and said, “I think we should get up to the cockpit.”

  She nodded, and they stood, heading up the cabin and slipping into the helm.

  Here, Shishone, who was carefully adjusting the flight stick, was chatting with Yarns. They stopped the moment the door opened, and turned over their shoulders for a brief moment, before Shishone turned back to the window.

  The view was spectacular. In the dim light of the faraway sun, the oblong rock-ice moon of Weywot shimmered against its planet’s shadow. Down on Quaoar, there were several of what were called “Monster Rigs”, or massive ice drilling rigs that would siphon ice from the poles, which would then be routed to the storage facilities adjacent to the “Minor Rigs”, or smaller ice rigs, on Weywot. From here, this far out from both, the Monster Rigs were visible, absolutely massive labyrinths of iced-over steel pipes and frosted titanium scaffolding that glimmered in the light. Allister viewed them with awe in her eyes.

  “That’s where we’re headed,” Shishone said, pointing to the small moon. “Setting down on the dark side for the time being. We’ll figure out where to go from there.”

  He took the ship down for what was known as a ‘quiet descent’, wherein the engines were only used for course adjustments, and were otherwise off, leaving the ship to coast under the radar. As the Harbinger approached, he activated the maneuvering thrusters to tilt the nose up, and with a small puff of brown dust from the surface, he set the ship down on its feet with a light bump.

  “And, we’re here,” he said, parking the ship and turning off all of its externals. He sat back and breathed out, his heart racing a bit. “We should be safe here. For a little while, at least.”

  Yu motioned for Allister to sit in the third seat – technically the gunner’s seat – and she took up position behind her, leaning on the crash chair and saying, “So, we made it.”

  Shishone unlocked his chair and swiveled it around, and Yarns did the same, so that they could all see each other. “We did,” Shishone said. “There were a lot of patrols out there, but thankfully this ship has a killswitch for the F-or-F, so we got away without a hassle. Gorsin’s work for sure. But there’s no telling how long it’ll take for them to find us here. We need a plan.”

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “I have a plan,” Yarns said. “We try and get to Neptune. It’s probably the safest place for us right now. If we can get to the orbital base there, we can tell TerraGov what’s going on out here, and maybe they can come to help.”

  Yu shook her head. “There’s no getting out of the Belt now. We’re lucky we could even make it here, and that’s only because of fortune. Arrokoth, Eris, and Quaoar are all close right now.”

  “Then we wait until they’re spread out again and then jump,” Yarns suggested.

  “Can’t,” Shishone said. “Could take a year or more for them to spread again.”

  Yarns cursed under his breath, but Yu spoke up now, saying, “I do have a plan.”

  “What’s that?” Shishone asked. Allister took looked up at her inquisitively.

  She nodded. “Xiao said we’d find no safety in the belt. Well, that’s not entirely true. There’s one place we might be able to get to without too much trouble. And it might offer us some clues as to what’s going on here in the first place.”

  They all stared at her expectantly, and she stared back, waiting to see if any of them understood. After a few moments, Allister’s eyes widened, and the spark of recognition illuminated within them.

  “You… you don’t mean?”

  She nodded.

  “No,” Allister said. “How would we even get there? Xiao has to have been watching it closely. There’s no way for us to get there undetected, if, if we even wanted to go there in the first place.”

  Shishone shot Yarns a confused look. The boy appeared just as lost as he was. “Where?” Shishone asked.

  A grim expression befell Yu’s face. She hesitated, looking at them all, before saying, “Sedna.”

  Allister sunk into her seat.

  “What even is Sedna?” Shishone asked.

  “Sedna,” Yu said, “is a deep space radar and telescopic center on a planetoid that has the longest, most elliptical orbit of all inhabited Kuiper Belt objects. It has an orbit of something like eleven thousand years and swings wide out of the Belt and into the Oort Cloud. It makes for a perfect place to set up a telescope and research center, but getting there is – was – difficult. But from my understanding, it’s orbit has been speeding up. If I’m right…”

  She pulled out her PDA and began to type on it. Her expression was grim, but determined. Allister leaned over to see what she was doing, and found her to be inputting numbers into a star chart.

  “And I am. We can jump there in a month’s time.”

  “We don’t have a month,” Shishone said, frowning. “Xiao’s forces will find us within a week, I’d bet.”

  “Then we leave for Sedna and meet it in the middle.”

  Allister protested, “But something is wrong on Sedna. It’s not safe.”

  Yu looked down at her. “It would offer you a chance to find out the fate of your husband.”

  That seemed to catch her off guard. She blinked, and looked down at her lap for a moment, lost in thought. Yu, taking the silence under her command, patted the back of Allister’s seat and continued, “If we can get to Sedna, we might have a real shot at getting some answers, and maybe even finding a solution to this issue.”

  Shishone thought for a moment. “But how would we get there in the first place? Patrols are everywhere. A jump, even for an NRT ship like this one, would cause quite the radar signature.”

  Yu smiled deviously. “That, my new friend, is where ingenuity comes in. Or, we could call it brute force. Whichever you prefer.”

  His eyebrow crept up his forehead as he stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, we cause a diversion.”

  Yarns piped up now. “How would we do that?”

  “We have a few missiles, and there are some tempting targets on Weywot. A good boom or two would alert the whole Belt to our presence here. And when they come swarming, we’ll already be gone in the chaos. Use the boom to make the first jump, and then jump from there.”

  Shishone’s eyes widened as he soaked in the proposal. “That… that might actually work.”

  She grinned and nodded. “Not bad for an ape, right?”

  “Not bad at all,” he said, coyly returning her smile. “But what about the people on the rigs?”

  “Not the rigs,” she said. “The storage. A well placed explosion, right in the center of one of the storage units, should minimalize casualties.”

  He mouthed an ‘oh’, and fell into his own thoughts. It could work. If they detonated a few of the water storage facilities, not only would Xiao know they’d been there, but he’d have no choice but to divert resources to the facilities for damage control. In the hectic chaos, they would have a chance at slipping under the radar and escaping toward Sedna.

  As he thought, Allister said, “Do we have the supplies to make it there in the first place?”

  Yu nodded. “We have plenty. I stocked us up on MK2. Had to pull a few favors with the foreman, but from the looks of it, it doesn’t matter if I hold up my end of the bargain or not. We’re good on supplies, either way.”

  Now, Yarns said, “What about the way back?”

  She gave him a wry glance. “That supposes we come back in the first place.”

  “What?”

  “I’m saying we can figure it out when we’re there. There’s no telling what’s going on out there. Could be dangerous. It’s a risk and we’re gonna have to take it. But I’m hoping there’ll be supplies.”

  When Shishone finally spoke again, he turned up to Yu and said, “What about your contact? Can he help us?”

  “I’m going to contact him before we jump. Let him know what our plan is. He gave me a tightbeam radio that links directly to him. Risky to use, but I’m thinking one last time won’t hurt,” Yu said.

  “Alright. So it’s a plan. You contact him, and I’ll start planning our escape. Yarns, you’re in the gunner’s seat. When I say fire, push this button here,” he said, pointing to buttons and switches on the center console, “and here. Then flip this switch, and push this button, and you’ll fire one of the missiles. I’ll load targeting data into the system, so you should just be good to fire.”

  Yarns gulped, but nodded, and said, “Okay. But I’m nervous. I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  Shishone smiled a sad, soft smile. “Honestly Yarns, I don’t think anyone has.”

  “So it’s settled then,” Yu said. “I’ll go contact the Admiral, and let him know what we’re doing. You two figure out our escape. Allister, I’d like it if you took a minute to breathe. You’ve been through a lot.”

  Allister offered her a weak smile. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Yu said, squeezing the back of her chair.

  With that, she turned and headed back into the cabin of the ship, where the radio was sitting in a net connected to the wall. She reached in and pulled out the small black transmitter, and loaded it up. It had minimal battery life left, but it had enough. Clicking the button on the side, she spoke into the microphone.

  “Admiral, it’s Yu. Do you copy?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Admiral?”

  Then, a response came. “Yu?” came the Admiral’s voice. “Oh, it’s good to hear from you. Have you any idea the ruckus you’ve caused?”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “It’s a lot.”

  “A lot doesn’t even begin to cover it. The whole Belt is locking down.”

  “Look, Admiral, I don’t have much time to talk,” she said. “We’re jumping to Sedna.”

  There was another pause. “Sedna?”

  “Yes. We’re going to Sedna. Do you think we can make it?”

  “How are you planning to do that?”

  “We’re going to detonate a missile on the storage on Weywot,” she said.

  His voice shifted, sounding more interested than tense now. “You’re doing what?”

  “Just trust us Admiral. We’re jumping to Sedna under the chaos we’re about to cause. Will you keep an eye on us when we return? It’ll probably cause a commotion.”

  “Listen, Yu,” he said. “I have many loyal men under my command, but Xiao has more. There’s not much I can do, but… I’ll keep an eye out for your transponder when – if – you return. And you’d better. You’re the only one I’ve really got out here who can make a difference in the way things are going.”

  The gravity of the situation weighed down on her mind like stones dragging her deep into murky water. “We’ll be back, Admiral. That I can promise you.”

  “No,” he said, “you can’t. But I’ll take your word anyway.”

  She smiled halfheartedly. “Okay Admiral, I need to go. We’re about to kick off our plan. Be on the lookout for a commotion from Weywot.”

  “I’ll try and cause a diversion for as long as I can. Make sure you make it out of there in one piece, understood?”

  “Heard, sir,” she said. “And thank you. For everything.”

  “It’s been a pleasure, Ms. Solarum. Be safe.”

  “You too.”

  The line died, and with that, so too did the battery in the radio. She clicked it a couple of times to test it, but it was, for sure, dead. So, she tucked it back into the wall web, and took a deep breath. Now was the time for action.

  She turned and headed back into the cockpit, where Allister, Yarns, and Shishone were tensely discussing the plan. As she entered, they turned to face her, and she announced, “The Admiral is on our side. I think we can pull this off.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Yarns said. “I kind of just wanna get this over with…”

  “Agreed,” said Shishone. “If it’ll take a while to make it to Sedna, we can rest then. Let’s get this going.”

  Allister nodded, and Yu said, “I agree. Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Yu then uploaded jump coordinates into Shishone’s PDA via a linking cord and then took Allister into the back cabin, leaving Yarns and Shishone up front. Yarns took his place in the gunner’s seat, and Shishone revved up the engines, careless of his signature. It didn’t matter much anyway, not at this point, not with what they were about to do.

  “Alright Yarns, you ready?” he asked.

  Yarns, shakily buckling into his crash seat, said, “I guess so.”

  “I’ll take it. Let’s go.”

  The Harbinger’s engines roared to life, and the ship leapt from the ground, its feet retracting into its body as they rose into the dark. It adjusted course at Shishone’s behest, and soon began creeping at a modest pace up the length of Weywot, to the upper pole, where a large rectangular facility sat collecting water from the rigs.

  It was a huge, boxy building, the water storage facility, with large tanks lining the outside of it in vast rows. Towers crept up here and there, and there were launch pads to the side, where RPT cargo ships sat docked, loading up on water shipments for the rest of the belt. Shishone hovered just outside of sight of the facility and turned the nose of the ship to face it head on. There was a deafening silence in the cockpit, a tension between them, as they both understood the necessity of what they were about to do. This was one of the main storage facilities for the water out in the Kuiper Belt. Without it, the Belt would surely struggle to produce enough water for the crops on Eris.

  But with the way things were going, they had little choice.

  “Go ahead and spin it up, and wait for my signal,” Shishone said.

  Yarns began to sweat. He reached down to the console with hesitant, shaking fingers, and pushed the buttons that Shishone had shown him, and then flipped the switch. The screen on the console lit up and read “ARMED” in bright red letters.

  “Alright, it’s armed,” Yarns weakly said.

  Shishone swallowed dryly and steeled himself, gritting his teeth and tensing his muscles. In his mind, he did a countdown. As soon as they hit the facility, they’d need to start the jump. Thankfully, the coordinates that Yu had provided were solid, and would get them to their second jump point, where they’d make the leap to Sedna itself. To answers.

  Three.

  There was no turning back from this. There was only forward.

  Two.

  Hope could still be found, but it was running thin at this point. A thread where there was once a rope.

  One.

  The time was now.

  “Fire.”

  Yarns reached down and pushed the button, and a hiss could be heard from within the ship as it buckled lightly. From the left wing, a small, thin metal rod with a hot fire blasting out from behind it shot off from the Harbinger, headed for the facility.

  Yarns and Shishone watched, enraptured, silent.

  It flew straight as an arrow, before dipping down and then, it collided with the top of the facility in a fiery boom, a rupturing ball of an explosion that shot fire and shrapnel into the low gravity of Weywot. Sparks, metal debris, detritus, and ice all flung out of the roof as orange warning lights began to flicker all throughout and outside of the facility. The fireball illuminated the moon in a horrifying orange glow as though some great candle had been lit on its surface, and when it dissipated, the hole left in the facility was massive and destructive. Pieces of the metal roof hovered in low orbit, some falling to the ground in a hail of shrapnel, causing even more damage to the ships and storage warehouse.

  “We need to go,” Shishone said. Yarns said nothing, but he could feel the agreement in the air.

  Loading up the PDA coordinates into the ship, he spun it around to line up with the trajectory, and kicked the engines into high gear, initiating a the non-rapid jump. Already on his radar, he could see several gunships blinking into existence near Quaoar. They hadn’t the time to hesitate. He flipped switches that activated the ship’s nuclear fuel pellet valve, and dumped them into the furnaces of the engines. The ship lurched, pressing them both into their crash seats, and soon, it was as if they’d never been there in the first place. At nearly one thousand kilometers per minute, these jumps were unsustainable in NRT ships, but for their purposes?

  It was a successful jump.

  He coughed and shivered. The sickness was starting to get to him, even if he was putting on a brave front. His body was starting to ache though, and he felt like he hadn’t slept in years – though, to be fair, he hadn’t slept in days, so his perception of time was obviously warped, he reasoned. Still, he stifled another cough, and repositioned the Harbinger for the second jump.

  Having slipped right under the noses of Xiao’s incoming forces, and now in open space, they were on their way to Sedna. And what awaited them there, Shishone thought, whatever nightmares they would be. And answers.