Isa immediately started to move onto the ship, but I reached out an arm to stop her.

  ?Let Jara go first. We don’t know what’s inside.?

  She sighed but stepped back, her excitement evident by her bouncing in place.

  I followed Jara onto the ship. Inside was a short corridor that led to a hallway traveling down the length of the ship.

  ?Let’s head left. Jara, fall behind to watch our back while I take the front.?

  ?Aye, ma’am.?

  We made our way towards the front of the ship. A short ways down the hallway were two doors, one on either side. The door on the right had a lock but the one on the left was open. Checking the unlocked door first, I found what appeared to be a conference room very similar to the ones we found up on the ground floor of the base. There was a second door leading toward the front of the ship, but we left it alone for the moment.

  Back in the hallway, we continued on past the doors. ?We’ll come back for the locked door. Hopefully Isa can get us access soon so we don’t have to break into the doors.?

  At the end of the hallway was another unlocked door. Inside, we found what seemed to be a bridge, though a very strange one. Holoscreens covered the walls, displaying the view outside the ship, and a few of those chair-like pieces of furniture were arrayed across the room, each outfitted with a small screen, a few buttons, and what seemed like a data port. There were two other doors—one that led back into the conference room, and one that led into an office. Everything looked to be in excellent condition, something that I was glad for, if quite surprised at.

  ?Think you can get us access from here?? I asked Isa.

  She shook her head. ?I bet we need to find engineering.?

  ?Okay, let’s go look.?

  I led us down the hallway in the opposite direction. We passed three more locked doors on the right. Two doors on the left led into the same large room that seemed to serve as a lounge, dining area, and kitchen of sorts. Past those doors, there was a third door that led to an empty hole leading to a lower floor. We bypassed the hole for now and continued to the end of the hallway. Inside was clearly engineering, with workbenches, computers, and access to the engines.

  ?This should be it,? Isa informed us.

  ?Go for it,? I responded, taking up a guard position with the others.

  Twenty minutes later, Isa called us over. ?Use your comms to send an auth check to this device using this format. Captain first.? Accompanying her statement was a sample bundle of information. Acknowledging it, I sent the auth check as instructed and received a success confirmation.

  She then repeated the process with the others. ?There. Dax is now registered as captain and the rest of us as crew. Now, if you don’t mind, Zia offered to translate the ship’s schematics, so I’m going to get studying.?

  ?Can you send those over to the rest of us as well?? I asked.

  ?Of course,? she replied along with the appropriate documentation files.

  I dove into the manual, avoiding some of the more technical details. As I read, my eyes widened. This was a fantastic ship. It indeed was both air and void-capable, explaining its aerodynamic structure. Not only that, the entire ship was configurable using an automated nanite swarm and miniature service drones. This also meant that the ship could repair itself given enough materials.

  The locked rooms were all cabins that could be configured for one to four people each, with the front-most cabin being the captain’s quarters. Since there were only four cabins, two people would have to double up.

  The hole behind the door was apparently a grav elevator leading to the ship’s hold. The ship also came complete with two molecular synthesizers in the hold and two microassemblers—one in the hold and the other in engineering. While the nanites could act as a microassembler and would when necessary, they were less efficient in terms of time and energy.

  I was especially glad to learn that the ship had synthesizers—so long as we could get the raw materials, we could make more biotic alloy.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  The ship apparently couldn’t be operated without a [Ship Link] augment, so we’d likely want at least three of us to get one—Ontari as the pilot, Ani as the gunner, and me as the captain. Fortunately, our symbiotes had already worked on adapting Velia’s work for our own physiologies, so we were ready to build them.

  After finishing looking over the manual and confirming that there were no hostile defenses, I switched to speaking aloud.

  “Okay, so this ship is awesome, but it’s going to take some work. Ontari, Ani—the three of us need to each get a [Ship Link] built. Let’s get started on that now.”

  I handed over the necessary biotic alloy to the others and asked Lumira to get started. It would take about four days to finish.

  “Now that that’s handled—Isa, I assume you’ve been looking over the technical details about the ship. What needs to happen to make this something we can use?”

  “Well, we’ll need to reconfigure it to be more comfortable for us—the furniture isn’t exactly designed with elvenoids in mind. That’ll take at least a few days. Meanwhile, I’ll want to work with Zia to translate and reprogram the ship to Draconic and better match our design and methodology—I’ll want your help with that, Dax, since you have more experience with imperial ship systems.”

  “Makes sense. Anyone else have anything to add?”

  “We’ll need to check the hold for stores,” Ani replied. “I suspect it’s mostly empty. Hopefully we can find supplies to fill it up, both construction materials and foodstuffs. From what I can see, the microassembler appears to have the capability to convert nutrient paste into proper food, but it requires configuring, which should mean we can feed various types of plant and animal matter into the synthesizers to produce the paste then use that in the assembler to produce edible food.”

  “Excellent. We should get started locating supplies, then. We’ll start by moving our food stores from the shuttle to this ship, then look for construction supplies in the base. Isa, get started on the reconfiguring and programming while the rest of us ferry supplies.”

  “Aye, captain.”

  We spent the next few hours carrying supplies from the shuttle to our new ship. During one trip, it occurred to me that I didn’t know if the ship had a name. When I asked Isa, she said it didn’t have one so it was on me to name it. I let some ideas percolate in the back of my mind while I worked.

  Once we had all the shuttle’s supplies loaded, it was time to rest, but the next day, we explored the rest of the underground base. We found a few caches of metal and wood, so we loaded those into the ship. From reviewing the ship’s documentation, we found that it had a grav-based loading system, making it easy to get the supplies into the hold from the ground.

  When I returned to engineering at the end of the second day, Isa rushed over to me in a very bouncy mood.

  “Pet! Look at this! It’s amazing!” she said, slinging a datafile to me over the comms.

  I skimmed the file, but I struggled to parse the technical language.

  “What am I looking at?” I asked.

  “They called it the sidestep drive. It’s a fucking interstellar-scale ship teleporter!”

  My eyes widened. “No fucking way, teleportation is impossible.”

  “With mana it is,” she explained. “They somehow harness aether to power it!”

  “What? How? Aether is… aether!”

  “I haven’t been able to figure out that part, but this ship uses aether in multiple systems. Besides the sidestep drive, it has combined aether-mana weaponry and aether-mana shields. I get the impression that the weaponry and shields were standard, but the sidestep drive was only found on certain ships because it was expensive to build.”

  “Shit, this is for real?” I said, finally starting to understand some of the documentation.

  “I’ve checked it out. The drive exists on the ship. Whether it works or not, we’ll see.”

  “This is amazing!” I paused. “Perhaps too amazing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I sighed. “What do you think the empire is going to do with this technology?”

  Isa thought for a few seconds before her eyes widened. “Shit.”

  “Exactly. I’m a literal princess, and I’m not convinced my father will behave if he finds out teleporting ships are possible.”

  “Well, there are some limitations to the technology. The main problem is that it takes roughly five hours to charge the engine with aether, and it’s not safe to store it long-term, so you pretty much have to charge it immediately before sidestepping each time. The drive also has distance limitations, but they’re still enough to travel between nearby star systems in a single jump.”

  “Still. Imagine teleporting a fleet of warships into an enemy system. And with my father, I expect he’ll decide everyone is an enemy once he gets his hands on this.”

  “It might be helpful to know that this ship has stealth capabilities.”

  “How does that help us?”

  “Their definition of ‘stealth’ is pretty broad. The ship can project an illusion over itself to make it appear to be another style of ship, and this illusion should hold up to pretty much any inspection or sensors. It can also hide from sensors, and its black hull makes it difficult to see visually, at least in the void.”

  I nodded slowly. “So you’re saying we pretend to be a regular ship, maybe some sort of luxury private ship, and keep our true nature hidden. You realize that means we’d be abandoning our posts in the navy.”

  She waves off my concern. “They already think we’re dead. The only problem is our identities—if someone tracks us down, that’d be a problem.”

  Lumira chimed in at that point. ?I think I can replicate the functionality of Dax’s Infiltrator module without even needing any biotic alloy, though I’d need to work with Zia using your [Computational Warfare Suite] to make it work.?

  “Will you be able to share that with everyone?” Isa asked.

  ?Of course, who do you think you’re talking to??

  We both laughed. “Excellent. I’ll talk to the others about new identities as soon as we can. We might even be able to get away with using our existing names, just create new identification.”

  “I’ll get back to work on the ship, then.”

  “Good luck, Isa, and thanks for telling me about this.”

  She smiled. “Of course, Pet.”