Galaxy's End: Book One by LeRoy Clary (pdf ebook reader txt) 📕

“Well?” she tapped her toe in irritation. Bert was usually much quicker to respond to her silliness.

Bert finally said, “Your mother was born on an unidentified planet, or one I have not been able to ascertain, however, she moved to Prager Four when young, perhaps at age six. Your father appears to have been born there.”

“Add another dozen zeros to the odds,” she muttered.

Bert emitted a single ping of sound that seemed to confirm her estimate.

Captain Stone’s mouth hung open. She had heard the questions Kat had asked Bert and surmised the rest before Bert confirmed it. Three of them from the same small population pool on a backwater planet was coincidence enough. Add to that the fact that two were empaths and the other anti-empath and there were not enough zeros left in the universe to calculate the odds.

Empaths were supposed to be rare.

Kat’s eyes were wide, her brow furrowed.

Captain Stone turned to the steward. “What do people call you?”

“Chance,” he said, still holding the napkin to his nose as he stemmed the blood.

He didn’t seem to have caught on to the impact of any of the conversation. His escape had failed, and he expected the worst. That was probably what occupied his thinking.

Captain Stone turned to him and flashed an insincere smile. “This is your lucky day, Chance. Your trip into the airlock has been postponed—for now.”

After her good news announcement, he didn’t appear any happier.

Wary might be a better description.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

 

Kat

 

I listened to Captain Stone, directly and indirectly, threaten the steward while the numbers Bert had given me swirled around in my head. Probably only a few hundred people from Prager Four had ever traveled to other worlds. It was a small, backward, agrarian planet where few ships landed.

The odds of three of them meeting on the same starship were infinitely small. Added to that was the fact that when it was generally believed that only one in several billion were empaths, the odds of us three sitting together at the same table, all from Prager Four in one manner or another, were incalculable.

Not that it was preplanned or anything, but the factors in the equation were somehow skewed—or our facts were incorrect. In other words, we were wrong in our assumption in one way or another. That also meant Bert was wrong—and to my knowledge, that had never happened.

The most likely wrinkle was there were far more empaths than known.

The other was that we were somehow related or involved, the three of us.

Neither seemed likely.

Captain Stone said, “Bill, escort our Mister Chance to a location and appoint a ship’s crewman to stand guard. Let the crewman know this is the person who killed his captain and communications officer, tried to turn the ship over to pirates, or rebels, or whatever they turn out to be, and you’d better tell him to make certain no harm comes to Chance.”

The orders were contradictory. A crewman who learned those things might, and probably would, take matters into their own hands. I said, “Bill, maybe you need to stay there with him. At least, for a while.”

Captain Stone nodded and meekly added, “Yes, I suppose any of the crew or passengers would probably kill him at their first opportunity if there is nobody there to keep an eye on them.”

We watched Bill walk him from the room. Bill seemed conflicted with his odd orders. Chance hung his head and shuffled ahead.

Stone said to me, “We’re due on the bridge.”

When we arrived there, Fang turned in his damp seat and said, “I was about to call you. That ship is slowly gaining on us.”

Captain Stone shook her head. “When we enter the wormhole, we’ll lose it.”

Their attitude towards Bill and I sometimes rankled. Our friends treated us as innocent idiots. It was wearing on me. Not making me angry, but it needed to stop. We were young, poor, and not as innocent as they believed. I said, “Ships in warp and wormholes cannot be followed. Everyone knows that.”

Fang flicked his red tongue in my direction as if snapping a flying insect before turning back to Captain Stone. “I’m not so sure. Permission to take a slight detour at the next nexus?”

“Do it,” she ordered as she took her seat beside him. She motioned for me to sit in one of the chairs behind them.

The myriad of wormholes intersected millions of times. Switching from one to another at those junctions meant a microsecond to several minutes in warp-space as a ship exited one wormhole and entered another. Ships could be tracked in warp, just as we had found we were being followed. The time transitioning a nexus from one wormhole to another allowed someone a brief time to grab a snapshot of a ship, but there was no way to follow another ship while actually inside a wormhole.

My mind was not on the pirates, but the man in custody. Chance. Perhaps Captain Stone hadn’t yet understood how three empaths from the same small planet could be together. Forgetting the empathic abilities, the three of us on the same ship at the same time was almost impossible. That worried and ate at me.

I hesitated to mention it again. I ground my teeth and kept my thoughts to myself. The captain would tell me her ideas when she was ready.

Fang said, “Turning to follow an intersecting wormhole in three, two, one.”

There was no feeling of motion. Nothing to show we had turned or left one wormhole to enter another. My eyes were on the screen that flashed a snapshot of the universe around the nexus.

Captain Stone kept her attention on the readouts and screens providing a myriad of information. A small red blip blinked on and off. She mouthed in