Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Seven Rings

The interior of the short-range D-1 stealth cruiser was completely dark and completely silent. There was one single window, and no cameras to reduce the amount of electromagnetic signature that they might leave behind in any other ship. On the outside, the ship was flat and sharply angled not dissimilar to the B2 Stealth bomber of old, designed in flat angled planes to mask it from radar detection.

Colloquially it was known as the Shrike, and Adam was more than well aware that this piece of equipment cost about a trillion units or more, of course he was not unaccustomed to operating machinery that cost that much. His favorite jet, an F-90 Darkfire was only a little less expensive, and he didn't even want to think of the cost that had gone into creating the Omen.

What came after a trillion?

he shook himself and tightened his grip on the controls, a joystick for each hand and a few, mostly unused, pedals at his feet. They would not be needing those until they entered atmosphere, and that was likely to take a while. Behind him, in the engine compartment, he could hear the soft hum of the warp core waiting and ready to send them to their new destination.

Outsider, space was a vast expanse of blackness dotted here and there by a small cluster of stars. This particular cluster included a binary system as well as two other independently rotating system, not to mention a theoretical third star which the Celzex harvested with their Dyson creation. There were no planetary systems around the binary pair, and it was suggested that the Celzex used that to harvest some sort of energy, though none of them could have said.

He took a deep, nervous breath.

It was only staring to dawn on him how insane all of this was. The Celzex were the most powerful species in the galaxy, and they would not hesitate to blow their little stealth craft out of the sky if they were spotted. The Celzex were extremely secretive about their solar systems, and guarded them jealously. Adam wasn't even sure they were going to make it past the first few hundred yards into the boundary of their solar systems knowing that they might have some sort of unknown special technology that would weed him out

Of course, even if the Celzex were that powerful, their ship was still unlikely to be spotted. This was an entire solar cluster, and there was no way even the Celzex could police all of it all the time. They wouldn't show up on radar or emission scans. The only time they would be picked up on thermal imaging would be right after the warp core fired, and before the advanced cooling system kicked in, which was about a tenth of a second after the warp.

He would need to d this carefully.

They didn't know much about these particular solar clusters, and so his coordinates would have to be mapped by hand in comparison.

Lord Avex shifted in the copilot seat, "I will take over now."

Adam turned to look at the fuzzy little creature staring over at him, and nodded once. He didn't want to get into an argument with the emperor's son, and so gave up his position willingly.

"You remember our deal." The fuzzy little creature growled, and Adam nodded, reaching into his pocket to recover the sleeping mask he had brough for the occasion. He unclipped form the Pilot's seat and went to the back compartment where Sunny and Amelia were glaring ate each other from across the Isle and Ramirez was looking between them like a nervous dog caught between a wall of fire and a wall of water with absolutely nowhere to go.

"Blindfolds on. He ordered, and the group did as commanded, all accept for Amelia, who went very slowly and almost reluctantly.

Adam shut the door to the cockpit in case she got any funny ideas, sat next to sunny and pulled on his own mask, buckling himself into the seat and waiting for the warp core. It used to be that the smaller warp models were more aggressive in their warping capabilities. You would get on a short cruiser to mars and arrive covered in your own Vomit from the experience. It was at one time that the Martian international spaceport had recovery rooms for travelers who arrived in that way. However, after so many years capitalist industry got ahold of the technology and D class warp cores –the ones more commonly used by commercial flights inside the solar system –were geared more towards luxury. At this point the warping of a D class core could rival only A1s in smoothness.