The Wars of Zegandaria by Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov (find a book to read .txt) 📕

- 'Sounds reasonable. We can at least try,' Dislan agreed.

Naturally things weren't going very smoothly, much less pleasantly. Admiral Spears' daughter, Gabrielle, was hanging around. She was only fifteen years old, but she was terribly keen on all sorts of flying apparatus. Despite her tender age, she knew too much. The guarrons somehow liked her because she was too vivacious against the general grey background. She was the soul of this place. Or as they affectionately called her, Gabby.

Equan stabilizers were not suitable for high-end ships because they could not sufficiently stabilize the thrust of large ion engines. The two Voltan shuttles had just such engines. It was not among Elmbaum's priorities to leave them the shuttles with the best engines. His own were rebuilt with tachyon engines, which were an excellent option and fared much better than their ion counterparts. The only reason Elmbaum hadn't set them on fire or blown them up was that there wouldn't have been enough time to get away.

- 'You know this planet is so boring? I've always wanted to escape to someplace really interesting,' she looked at him with that childlike look that would make a rock melt.

Dislan was only working. He had to check some things about the engine thrust. While ion engines could theoretically achieve higher speeds than their chemical equivalents, the thrust problem remained. There was another drawback. If something went wrong, there was no way to make repairs in open space. Everything had to be worked out very slowly and carefully.

- 'I've heard that only criminals and adventurers go to the Unknown Quadrant. But maybe you're more familiar than I am?,' she tried to somehow talk him down.

Dislan was not the most talkative of people. He liked even less to have someone 'grind' on his head while he had serious and responsible work to do. So he forced himself to answer.

- That was the way to talk. In fact, hardly anyone from this planet was there. There are too many unknowns surrounding this place. And maybe it's not exactly what they're talking about either.

- 'Why are you talking in riddles?,' she asked him.

- 'Because it is the very truth!,' he answered her, a little clumsily.

- 'Access to it is simply forbidden by the Military Council. And not only that,' those were apparently the last words to roll off his tongue.

Gabriel looked around. Why did everything have to seem so strange. She just wasn't used to not having a question answered. She was Daddy's favorite daughter. And as such, she should always get what she wanted. For now, she pretended to resign herself to not getting the information she wanted. But only for now. Everyone was going to tell her something sooner or later.

She started walking around among the bustling people, making final preparations before they left the planet. Everyone was busy organizing their own survival. The Guarron wanted to at least take their laser cutters, because without them they didn't feel safe. The humans, on the other hand, were clamoring for more bottles of compressed air. Finally, some balance was achieved.

The two shuttles wouldn't be enough to evacuate absolutely everyone, but they could try to board some other ships in close orbit that had the potential to at least transport some of the passengers to the first waypoint where they could find better ships. Surely they'd come up with something on the fly.

The preparations took several days. Finally everything seemed to be ready. There were no malcontents, but that's why everyone wanted to take one last goodbye to their hometown.

They were going to miss it a lot. The beautiful crimson reflections of the sky that so resembled a molten copper plate, iridescent in different shades. So unfathomable to most of them. Now he would accept them and be their salvation.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: THE CHASE

- 'Zorin speaking,' the sergeant's low, thick voice came over the radio. He'd already earned the respect of Captain Penrose, who was magnanimously ceding to him some amateurish tasks that Zorin was handling brilliantly and had no cause to complain about. Whatever we say, the captain had a keen eye for valuable footage. Even more so for those who might well prove indispensable.

- 'We need to change some parameters on the ship's course,' Zorin voiced his concerns, 'Since you're coming from the colony, the engines should definitely be shut down for a while. Once we get the auxiliary ion thrusters online, we can proceed.'

- 'One would think you were born on a ship, Sergeant, you shouldn't have become a Marine, you should have become a Space Wolf,' the Captain noted.

- 'I'm learning on the fly, Captain Penrose. Sasia is an excellent pilot,' he said rather flatteringly. 'I learned to love the sky from her, too. I hated it before. But now I look at it with different eyes.'

- 'You like to philosophise, my dear,' said Penrose quite seriously.

- 'Heaven can be even more insidious than earth,' he threw in quite seriously.

Sasia had been appointed navigator because she had a more thorough knowledge of calculating trajectories. What she didn't know, she would learn on the fly. And she was a smart girl. She just wasn't into avionics now, but spacecraft. Two weeks was enough time for her to learn some basic skills, at least as far as calculating space courses was concerned.

- 'How long would it take to get there?,' wondered Kenji.

- 'It's hard to say,' Penrose turned to him. 'But one thing I know for certain. There are a lot of things that can change. For example, we use subjective time when we make a time jump from point A to point B. But here we go for the first time. We don't know at all what is waiting for us on the other side of the tunnel. Everything has to fall into place though. We are professionals. If Elmbaum wants to get there, then we can do it. And no worse than him.'

- 'We'll have to get through the posts in Star Quadrant Forty-Five before we make several consecutive jumps to Quadrant 426. The shuttles' armaments are up to par, but not that up to par. We might have problems,' Linus voiced his concerns, the same one who'd ribbed the Captain about his briefing on the Richwater.

- 'The Emzirou is an extraordinary project,' the captain muttered. 'One of the few fitted with tachyon engines. An impressive ship!'

The crew bustled about doing their job as best they could. Adjustments had to be made to the calculations. Too much serious work had to be done. And there was no one to wait for them!

They had to change everything fundamentally.

An interesting example could be made of everyone's childhood, when each day seemed very long, and to the adult it was rather short and monotonous, as were many of the other preceding days.

- 'This universe is just a protostellar cloud,' Penrose waxed poetic. 'And look what it's evolved into in all its existence.'

In preparation for making a flight at superluminal speed, some preparations naturally had to be made. The first, and most serious, was to don special nanosuits to enable the bodies of the crew to bear the difference in acceleration. Second, the tachyon engines had to be set up as well. It was well known from physics that by losing energy, the tachyons accelerated. But here we had to recall that the different tachyon engines were not the same. ‘The Emsiru had a special kind of them, which, besides having built-in ion stabilizers before reaching full power, could also warp space through the so-called ‘warp engine’ .

Acceleration was reached relatively quickly. However, one thing had to be taken into account. When space was curved and a material body was able to pass through it, the final destination had to be accurately calculated.

Penrose had experience with the Cicada constellation in Stellar Quadrant 415, but had no idea what awaited them in the 426th quadrant.

The space shuttle was about to be put to the test.

- 'I've done time jumps,' Kenji admitted to himself. 'It would be interesting to participate.'

- Very well, Rear Admiral, you will be in charge of specific parts of the space mass calculation project. The set parameters are very important, especially in case we manage to deal with a possible ambush on the other side of the time tunnel.

Kenji set to work on the calculations. He had to hurry.

Everyone donned their nanosuits and began to mentally prepare for the leap into the unknown.

^^^

The time-space jump was successful, with the mass transfer calculation of a material object in space definitely being Kenji's doing. He was simply brilliant. But that was how exhausting this whole exercise had turned out to be. They managed to recover the ship's course. Having also had to use Sebur Nag as an intermediate station.

There they had to refuel with provisions and also some other things. Yes, it was a primitive planet, but it was the only habitable one in a range of many light years away. They decided to spend the night in the capital city of Naras Tu. This strange city was anything but modern. It couldn't compare to Ensarian or Imgradon. It couldn't, and it shouldn't.

The Violin People, as we might call them, were comfortable on their home planet, as they were not required to do anything extraordinary. All they had to do was work and produce plexoniars, which was the planet's main export commodity. The other, and only, attraction was the dance festival. The people of this planet loved to dance. And they did it laughing. That's how they felt about life.

Kenji, Captain Penrose and company agreed that there could hardly be a more relaxing place to rest before making the next series of hyperspace jumps. And it would have all gone quite harmlessly and uneventfully if Kenji hadn't decided to take a stroll through the countryside. Aside from the aforementioned four polis, there were two villages on the entire planet - one of which, Himun Sor, was Paley's burial place. Gordon had, after all, placed a modest plaque out of respect for the admiral. Even a scoundrel like him followed some most elementary rules.

Kenji chose Himun Sor for his walk. And it was there that he walked through the cemetery park. He wouldn't have noticed the admiral's grave by the initials alone, but it struck him that it didn't match the style of the rest of the cemetery.

Kenji decided to take a look around. What was his surprise when he realized that the buried man was actually a resident of Zegandaria. Because Paley wasn't a name peculiar to the local population. When he saw the initials 'J. L. Paley' he slapped himself on the forehead. How had he not thought of that! It was the admiral. But what was he doing here?

Eventually things began to spiral out of control as he noticed the strange behavior of the locals. They were pointing fingers at him and whispering to each other. It was beneath his dignity as a military aviator to take them on, but he couldn't ignore them either. He didn't speak the native tongue, though he spoke more than twelve languages, including an intergalactic dialect of the Star Federation that united the planets from Quadrant 0 to