Empire Reborn (Taran Empire Saga Book 1): A Cadicle Space Opera by A.K. DuBoff (jenna bush book club TXT) 📕

Saera squeezed his hand. “I’ve watched the replay over a dozen times, Wil, and I wouldn’t have done a thing differently. There was nothing to talk to.”

“Still.” He hung his head.

“Hey.” She rubbed his back with her other hand. “Engaging sooner may have gotten the Conquest destroyed, too. I suspect they were going to take out the station regardless of what else happened. Dwelling on what ‘could have been’ doesn’t alter the present.”

“I know. It doesn’t change the feeling like we’ve been here before.”

“And, as we learned from that, sometimes inaction is the best action to win the bigger war.”

“It hurts all the same.”

She nodded and hugged him, bringing his head to her chest. “It does. But those feelings are what assure me we can trust ourselves as leaders. Though we may push back our emotions in the heat of battle, we feel every decision when the heat is off. It’s how I know, in the moments that count, we’ll make decisions we can live with.”

Wil took a deep, steadying breath. “Some decisions are easier to live with than others, despite best intentions.”

“No matter what, we’re in this together. Just like before.”

“I couldn’t do it with anyone else.”

“Me either.”

In these moments of doubt, uniting as a team was what kept Wil going. He never would have made it through the Bakzen War without Saera and his friends, and he needed to remember he wasn’t alone now, either.

Like in the war, they were at a disadvantage in firepower. Tactics and intellect were what got them to a place where they could make the final push. He needed to start thinking like a strategist again.

Dwelling on losses won’t save anyone else. With renewed determination, Wil sat up and started thinking through next steps.

“We have to get eyes on the enemy.” And they were the ‘Enemy’ now, not just vague ‘beings’ or ‘entities’. They’d attacked and killed his people. The fight was on. “We were trying to replicate the novel circumstances on the Andvari, but we should have taken the parameters and seen what other ways we could get the same result using more reliable means.”

Saera nodded. “I understand why you started with the Andvari’s research before, but now we know it’s not scalable. With what we learned from the scan data captured at Alkeer, we have more options.”

Wil threw out the previous assumptions they’d made about creating a transdimensional image capture of the enemy. “All right, though we know very little about these guys, it’s clear at least part of their essence exists in another dimension. We also know that they hate the use of Gatekeeper tech, which draws energy from another dimension. What do you want to wager that the two are connected?”

“Odds are good enough that I’m not betting against you on it.”

Wil’s face lit up. “I’m pretty sure we did a full analysis of the Gate sphere that opens the portals before we handed it back to the Gatekeepers.”

Saera raised an eyebrow. “Don’t look so excited.”

“Sorry, but we might be able to approach this as an engineering problem. That’s not only something that I can manage, but I actually enjoy.”

“It’s worth exploring,” she agreed.

“I don’t know what else to suggest. If this tech is what makes these aliens so angry, then maybe it’s the solution to interacting with them.”

Wil sent a quick message to the Engineering team so they could get working on a fresh analysis. After the instructions were sent, he sat back on the couch, deep in thought. “It does make sense, in a way.”

“What does?”

“The interrelationship between dimensions—how something seemingly innocuous here like the Gate tech could be wreaking havoc elsewhere.”

“Oh, this is going to turn into one of those conversations.” She settled in.

“Hey, we can either sit around here wallowing in misery or we can try to understand the enemy.”

“Since Option C of lounging on an Alushian beach is out of the question, continue.”

He smiled. “All right, bear with me. Obviously, we know there are many different dimensions, and what we perceive as ‘reality’ are the three physical dimensions plus the fourth dimension of time—collectively what we call ‘spacetime’. Though we don’t tend to think about it, we actually step outside spacetime whenever we do a subspace jump.”

Saera nodded. “That’s true.”

“However, we always remain closely tethered,” Wil continued. “The nav beacons serve as markers to confirm coordinates within spacetime. Even with the independent jump drive, the principle of using fixed reference points remains the same.”

“Right. The boat in the flowing river, as you so adorably explained it when we first met.” She smiled at him while sharing a reflection of the memory in his mind.

How far we’ve come since those awkward teenage years. Meeting Saera had been a turning point for him. She’d been a muse, in many ways—helped him work through a multitude of issues over the years, patiently listening to him ramble while he talked out problems, just like she was doing now.

“So, what if there wasn’t that tether? What if a being didn’t have those restrictions of spacetime?” he continued. “Those are the terms we need to think in with these higher-dimensional entities. They don’t have the same relationship with our reality that we do. To them, spacetime would only be a representation, in the way we might regard a two-dimensional drawing.”

Saera shifted on the couch. “It’s frustrating that, no matter what, we’re bound by the limits of our perception as natives to our perceived reality.”

“Such is the nature of our existence… There are immutable laws to spacetime. Even when we enter a subspace state, we’re just punching out of our spacetime into an encompassing super- manifold to bypass the restrictions of constants like the speed of light. But we still have that tether to our native reality, and limits. We can bend the rules a