Wreckers: A Denver Boyd Novel by George Ellis (ebook reader ink .TXT) 📕

Batista and Edgar looked at Desmond on the monitor. He thought for a few moments before responding, his eyes searching for the right words. Finally, he nodded.

“Nothing in life is easy,” he said. “But I also don’t plan to be fooled twice. They won’t be surprising us anymore. Not with the proximity beacon we attached to their ship before detonating the unmanned drone. If the Burnett comes within 50,000 miles of us, we’ll know. And this time I’m going to have reinforcements.”

Before we cut the transmission, we agreed on beam silence until we reached Jasper, or if the situation changed. Edgar would send any pertinent info to the Golden Bear as needed. Desmond was in good spirits, buoyed by the confirmation that the Rox had the sought-after cargo on board.

When he disappeared from the screen, I turned to Batista.

“When did my brother contact you last?”

She pretended to be surprised by the random question, but I saw through it. She sighed.

“Yesterday.”

“And he knows about how much of this?”

Batista eyed Edgar, wary of passing along too much information. I waved her concerns away.

“I think we’re past the point of keeping secrets on this,” I said. “At least I hope we are. My goal is to get out of this alive, then get as far away from the center of the verse as possible. The only way we do that is by laying all our cards on the table.”

I thought it was a pretty good little speech, but neither Batista nor Edgar said a word in response. I was about to try again when Batista cleared her throat and looked at Edgar, who shook his head as if to say “don’t tell him.”

Batista crossed her arms. “The reason the Burnett keeps sneaking up on us isn’t because it has stealth capabilities.”

Edgar growled his annoyance, but Batista proceeded anyway.

“It’s because they have a warp drive.”

It took a moment for that to sink in. I looked at Edgar, who reluctantly nodded.

“Like…an actual warp drive? We talking Star Trek level?” I asked.

“I don’t know what Star Trek is,” Batista replied.

Edgar nodded. He’d clearly been making progress in the sci-fi category of the Stang’s entertainment catalog. “Star Trek level.”

“Then that’s what is on the Rox too,” I said, mostly to myself as the other two people in the room already knew the answer.

“Yep,” said the fourth person in the room. It was Romy. She leaned in and frowned. “The Burnett has a partially-working warp drive installed. It was a prototype. They can go three times the speed of the Stang. Fast enough to sneak up on anybody in the verse, no matter how careful their radar is. The Rox, on the other hand, has the finished product. They stole it from our lab on Mars, where we developed it for the feds. That drive? That one is a verse-changer. We’re talking 100 million miles per hour.”

“You’re telling me the most dangerous ship in the verse has warp capabilities?”

“No,” she said. “They haven’t installed it yet. The man they need to do that got religion after he realized how terrible his invention would prove to be if it fell into the wrong hands. Which inventions always do. Most hands are wrong. He’s on Jasper. The Rox isn’t going to Jasper to destroy it, they’re going there to threaten to destroy it if the man, Albert Marcum, doesn’t activate the drive. And the only way to install and activate the drive is to –”

“Disable the ship,” I said, astounded.

“Only they don’t know that yet. Or at least that’s what Slay is betting on.”

We all looked at each other. All the cards were on the table…almost.

“Why are you telling us this?” I asked Romy.

“Because I don’t want to go back to the Burnett. And I don’t want the Rox to have warp capabilities. From what I’ve heard about that ship, I would never outlive the guilt if people like that were alone in their ability to use the device I helped create.”

* * *

Warp speed was supposed to be the stuff of science fiction. In the classic show Star Trek, one warp was roughly equivalent to the speed of light. Or about 186,000 miles per second. According to Romy, the speed achievable by the new drive was 30,000 miles per second. Not nearly the speed of TV and movies, but fast enough to travel across the verse and beyond in mere hours, as opposed to lifetimes.

It made contact with non-humans not only possible, but inevitable. And until the technology was widespread, it would give ships with warp capabilities an insane advantage over traditional vessels in matters of war and commerce.

Plus, it was really freaking cool.

Dangerous, sure. But cool. Ever since I was a kid, I’d dreamed about being able to escape to far-off planets and galaxies. As big as the verse was, it was also pretty small at the same time. A warp drive would change that forever.

There were always rumors of warp projects in labs across the verse. These scientists over here were close. That genius at the university has an idea. One problem always stopped them dead in their tracks, however: navigating around objects in space at warp speed. Satellites. Meteors. Planets. Crashing into (and through) a planet at 3,000 miles per second tends to be pretty fatal.

Enter a 5-foot-tall emo kid with a knack for physics and navigational theory.

Somehow, the girl in the leather jacket who spent 99% of her time glued to her handheld cracked the problem that had stymied some of the brightest minds in the galaxy.

And now she was feeling pretty nervous about her role in the project.

“There’s more,” I told her.

After the meeting broke up, Romy stopped by my quarters again for another heart-to-heart chat. I was starting to get the vibe she’d never been close with her parents. I was a dad type in her mind. That made me feel both old and uncomfortable at the same time.

She looked at me and wanted to