Journey to Empty Space

[Keb 0]

Journey to Empty Space

 

T’Fodder, the little Romulan scout ship, had launched quite smoothly. Keb’s preparations for the mission had paid off. She’d had three good flight plans for the return trip already drawn up; the one that passed near Space Station T’Rex was supposed to be the easiest and fastest. Easiest and fastest, that is, if there wasn’t a Romulan squad ship right on one’s tail.

 

T’Rex was known for the Eridonium mined there. The naturally occurring compound on several nearby asteroids was brought to the station for processing. There was a reasonable amount of traffic in the immediate area, due to the mining operation, and a few supply ships and traders stopped by to pick up the processed compound every now and then, but compared to other places in the region, it was sparsely populated. Since Eridonium had many known uses and was suspected to have many others—everything from medical to ship components—it fetched a good price and seemed a plausible destination for T’Fodder and its crew of scientists.

 

Even so, Keb was starting to feel uncertain about her choice. She dutifully reported her speed corrections to the squad ship, hating herself each time. It would have been so much more dramatic to simply cloak and speed away—so much simpler. She felt like she was feeding information to the enemy. And yet, had they cloaked or sped away, that would have given them away instantly. The squad ship would give chase, and could certainly trace their own cloaking and warp technology’s signatures. There would be more ships after them. If they tried to get back to Manticore, the Romulans would probably discover the Federation ship as well.

 

She twisted, for the billionth time already, the ring that Beran had put on her finger. Escaping this was going to require a lot of patience, and she wasn’t the only one in the crew who was short on patience at this point.