The message that Rejach Vaanj was watching right now wasn’t live. It had been recorded, encrypted, transmitted to the CSS, decrypted and finally given to them on a memory stick to watch in private. When Administrator Vil declared something regarding their project top secret, everyone within the Southern Conglomerate Space Agency did everything they could to comply. All that effort over the last few years had, according to what Rejach had been told, meant that the Kinship and the Pact both still had no idea just what the Conglomerate were about to do.

And while stumbling at this stage wouldn’t be the end of the world, why ruin the theatrics of the next few days?

“Let me be quick about this Rejach,” Vil said from the small screen that Rejach had been able to find away from the station crew. “You’re not getting the week of final preparations like we planned. You’re launching in 1 day from now. We’re also changing the mission profile. Details attached for Gin and Jel.”

Rejach sat there listening to Vil’s orders, then read the attached documents before eventually summoning Zihaz Gin and Pas Jel to bring them both up to speed on the developments that Mission Control had.

“We’ve barely finished fuelling,” Pas protested, “and they want us to get the Nimma out and moving in a day? We have a checklist the length of the Nimma itself to go through before we even consider powering up the reactor onboard, let alone warming the Cush Drive.”

“The Qlip sensors confirmed the Kinship’s claims of an anomaly at the edge of the system. Which means that since SoCoSA is a public entity such a discovery will have to be released to the public. They should have already released it according to the data from the Administrator, who is pulling all sorts of legal trickery to keep from doing so but is running out of options.” Rejach saw Pas’ protest form, then die before it left their mouth. “Which means, if we’re to act, before politicians get involved and ruin absolutely everything, we have to go now.”

“Oh come on, no one is going to cancel our mission, not least of all when we’re about to win.” Pas looked to Zihaz for support, who shook their head in disagreement.

“Sorry Pas, but I’m with Rejach and Administrator Vil on this. Multiple Senators would call for us to stop while they discussed, dithered, talked and eventually did nothing. Six months on the outside before they’d let Nimma out of the slip all out of an abundance of caution they’d say. Meanwhile both the Kinship and Pact would be at Xemis.”

“And not to mention everyone will demand to know how we know, demand to know information about the Qlip sensors, which would require answering questions that would reveal the nature of the Cush Drive and everything would be laid out in the open.” Rejach saw the moment that Pas finally came around, swayed by the argument of ‘act now, or don’t at all’.

“Fine, fine!” Pas conceded. “We’ll…I don’t know, use the emergency restart checklist that was written for failures around Xemis? And just hope we don’t blow up the Nimma, the CSS, ourselves and a good chunk of Qal’s satellite infrastructure?”

“That’s the spirit!” Rejach exclaimed. “Now, since getting things rolling sounds like your territory Doctor, what do you need Zihaz and me to do?”

The first hours that passed had been hectic and not helped by being in the cramped confines of the Nimma’s small command module. The Kinship and the Pact had built their ships for long missions, trying to bring as much of the comforts of home with them on their trips out to Xemis. The Conglomerate, sinking all their money into building an experiment yet to prove itself, had built a sleek racer instead. The crew hadn’t been a late addition to the design but had been paired down to as little space as needed to devote more mass, more resources, and more time to the Cush Drive and its attendant technologies.

“We’ve got a problem,” Zihaz said quietly from the seat to Rejach’s left.

“Where?” Pas asked immediately and Rejach could hear them immediately craning their head around to check all the engineering readouts they had at the rear of the module. “I don’t see anything.”

“No, nothing with the ship. With the fuel load.” Zihaz had been working on calculations while waiting for a computer self-diagnostic to complete. “Mission Control’s flight plan won’t work. There isn’t enough fuel on board for the whole grand trip.” They handed their tablet over to Rejach, the calculations present there in Zihaz’s pristine handwriting.

It took a few minutes for Rejach to work through Zihaz’s numbers, and barely half a minute for Pas when they got a chance to look them over. “We can do this unknown contact, or we can do Xemis, but we can’t do both,” Pas said, putting to words what they all knew now. “That is if we want to come home.”

“Not sure about you Doctor, but I think our victory parade will be a lot better with us in it, yes?” Rejach turned to look over their shoulder to find Pas shrugging and offering a single nod.

“So, tell Mission Control to pick a destination?” Zihaz asked.

“Might as well. And we need to start thinking of rotating for sleep while we finish the start-up. I’m not launching with either my engineer or pilot half-asleep.”

Mission Control’s response to the fuel issue had taken nearly ten minutes to come back, somewhat due to the need to keep communications encrypted, and no doubt somewhat because someone on the ground needed to yell and scream at such a minor problem. “Thank you, Captain. We’re looking over the numbers ourselves and will advise shortly.”

Shortly turned into nearly six hours later. Rejach had managed to take a few hours of rest aboard the CSS. Pas was sleeping now that the reactor was online and plasma from the fusion reactor was being used to slowly condition the Cush Drive for flight. They had less than ten hours before the latest compressed timeline said they had to launch when Administrator Vil called through.

No encryption, no burst data transmission.

A live call.

“Captain,” the large Qalian that was Administrator Vil said. “How are we looking?”

“Ready to win this race,” they answered. “Or go down in the history books for something else. Either way, it’ll be spectacular.”

“Gin’s math was right on the mark. We screwed up down here.” The communal We that was. Vil was in no way accepting blame for this, just admitting someone on the ground messed up. “Destination is yours to pick.”

“Mine?”

“Win the race, or make the race irrelevant. Up to you, but I figure either way, launching the Nimma at this point is going to win us all the prestige. And you’re the mission commander after all. Make the Conglomerate proud.”

As the channel closed, leaving Rejach and Zihaz in the Nimma’s command module with just status screens before them, silence settled before Zihaz spoke. “I say we go for the anomaly. If there’s something there, we’re famous. If there’s nothing there, we’re still famous. We’re going way, way further out than Xemis.”

Rejach took that onboard, nodded their head, and then smiled at their colleague. “Make our course for Unknown Contact 1 then Major. We depart in nine hours and see what the Cush Drive can do.”