He ran an anxious hand through his hair. “I could try some things, I guess. Recalibrate the sensor array, maybe.”
“Do you think it’d work?”
“Honestly, no.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay. What about a Hermes?”
“Not sure now’s the time to go off on a charting mission, boss.”
“Void, Jack,” she said with a glare. “I mean, could we use a Hermes to travel to Kharon Gate, send a message directly from there?”
“Well sure, except it’d take like fourteen weeks to get there.”
“Not at warp speed.”
“The Legion doesn’t give us warp cores with the Hermes. You know that.”
“I’ve got a warp core.”
Jackin laughed. “The fuck you do.”
She maintained her level stare.
Jackin’s eyebrows shot up. “Damn. Really, boss? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It’s classified. It was the first thing I requested when I got here.”
“Really?”
“Well yeah, it’s not safe to leave two hundred people stranded in space with no FTL capabilities and shitty comms.”
“Ya think?” Jackin said dryly, then shifted his weight and crossed his arms. “Okay. Show me this warp core.”
They left her office to the amidship vestibule, then took a lift to the hangar, turning down a barren corridor lined with doors leading to unused storage facilities. Adequin pressed her thumb into the control panel beside one of the doorways. It confirmed her identity and the door opened. A single aerasteel case sat in the corner of the room.
“That’s it,” she said. “It’s the only thing I asked for they ever actually granted. Took them eighteen months, but they sent it eventually.”
Jackin knelt beside the case and opened it. He reached in and pulled the core out, a sleek metal canister the length of his forearm. Three long, narrow glass panes revealed the core’s contents—a white-blue glow emanating from within.
Jackin turned it over in his hands, squinting and leaning closer. “One problem, boss.”
“What?”
“This guy’s almost entirely depleted.”
She knelt beside him. “What? Shit. How? It’s only a couple of years old.”
“It probably came that way,” Jackin grumbled. “They probably grabbed the shittiest one in the warehouse and shipped it off without even looking at it.”
She frowned as she rubbed the back of her neck. “Can we refill it?”
Jackin leveled an incredulous look at her. “How would we go about that?”
“It needs acium, right? What do we have that uses acium?”
“Fuck, well,” Jackin stammered, “I don’t know, but even if we had some, without a fueling station, how do we get it into this thing?”
“I don’t know, Optio, that’s your area of expertise.”
“I’m a pilot, and I know the ship’s systems, but I’m no astromechanic. Put power in this and I can make it go, but how the power gets in it to begin with is beyond me.”
She bit the inside of her lip, dreading her coming statement. “I think I know someone who might be able to help.”
CHAPTER NINE
Forty-eight hours. Not half bad. He’d lasted longer than he’d expected, to be honest.