"Commander Phon, why have you ordered my crews to perform a full engine inspection?" Ship Commander Brennon glared at me from my video display. "That will waste an entire day! A full inspection isn't due for nearly two weeks. A routine service inspection should be good enough."

I looked back at him coolly unimpressed with his displeasure. I had already made my request through normal channels, but it had gone ignored, so I went around the normal chain of command and had instructed his Chief Engineer, Michael Droemer, to take care of it. "Under normal circumstances, I'd agree, but we're going to be traveling under H-drive for some time."

"What do you mean?"

"If you paid attention to the daily briefing, you'd know the fleet will be traveling between two star systems that are not directly connected by transit stations. They are about a quarter light-year apart and we're going to make the trip in about a month or less."

"A month?"

"Or less."

"That's not possible."

"We may have to skip a few routine service inspections, thus the full inspection now."

"You can't do that! The QWEGs and the engines must be shut down and serviced after every ten hours of use."

"We'll have to find a way to make do with less."

"But, what about the support craft? Many of them can't even make C2."

"They'll have to forego servicing entirely."

"They'll never make it. The QWEGs will destroy themselves and possibly the whole ship as well."

I hesitated. This was true and I wasn't happy about this part of the plan, but then we were just about to take on the entire Moiarchy, and this part of the journey was the closest thing to danger the support craft were likely to face. "Most should make it."

"Whose stupid idea is this?"

"Shines Like the Sun." I thought that might shut him up, but after taking a moment to digest the news he muttered.

"That stupid Cack is going to get us all killed."

"Would you like to log a formal protest?" I asked.

"Of course not. How stupid do you think I am? But I would like to know why."

"The short answer is that Faded Glory has disabled the gate to the inner sphere. The longer answer is that this will allow us to bypass most of any defense force they might have gathered and allow us to strike deep into the heart of the Moiarchy. Shines Like the Sun has been cultivating the loyalty of various nobles for years. He believes that a strong show of force now will convince them to switch their allegiance to him.

"I sure hope it's worth it."

"If this works, the war may be over before it starts."

"Sounds like famous last words."

* * *

In interstellar space, there is no sense of movement. Not even at a relative speed of three times the speed of light. The Torchbearer just seemed to hang alone in the infinite darkness. Another ship could be inches from the hull and yet be completely undetectable without the gravimetric sensors. The cosmic dust and hydrogen we encountered along the way would simply be scooped up and carried along as it fell within the field of the Quantum Wave Effect Generator. If we were to hit a ship that was not traveling under the power of the H-drive, that ship would find itself torn apart at the atomic level and spread across our hull. No one knew what would result from a collision of two ships with active QWEG fields. Two Cybernetic Awarenesses trying to observe two objects with overlapping fields would probably collapse the fields unevenly. It would almost certainly destroy both ships, though how violently was anyone's guess.

The engines ran for days and the engineers, the few times one saw them outside the engine room, appeared tense and quiet. Due to the increased time spent under H-drive, the ship's commander stepped up the crew's routine inspections for matter degradation. It also kept the crew occupied. Once, when a section of hull was found to have lost a small but measurable amount of mass, commander Brennon shut down the QWEGs and waited in empty space while repair crews reinforced it. This made the ship late to arrive at one of the few prearranged meeting points and it upset Sunshine considerably.

Yet at every stop, one or two support ships failed to arrive. It wasn't known whether they had merely fallen behind, been left crippled in the depths of interstellar space, or been destroyed. The slower support craft, however, never stopped for service inspections and no one would know how many would survive the trip until those who did had arrived at their final destination.

Without the supply ships, the force quickly began to run out of both food and spare parts. The supply masters would barter with each other for what they needed at each repair stop, but it became increasingly difficult to find critical components. This became a special problem for the Torchbearer about a week and a half into the trip. I had been sitting in my office/quarters endlessly rerunning the last fleet simulation trying to come up with a better strategy when the H-drive suddenly quit.

I didn't realize it until I glanced up at the gravimetric sensors and noticed the tail end of the fleet speeding away from us at three times the speed of light. I flashed messaged the duty officer on the bridge, a Ship's Sub-Commander Joanna Torres. "What's happened?"

"Equipment failure," came the terse reply.

"It's not the AI is it?" That was the one part of the ship that was irreplaceable. The AI had to be grown into the ship and took years to train into something useful.

"No. The master engineer says it's the QWEGs."

"Is it repairable?"

"It would be...."

"But?"

"But we don't have the parts for it and—oh, blast it!"

"What is it?"

"We've lost power as well."

"One of the TCR generators?"

"All the TCR generators!"

This was not something fixable. Unless one could somehow recognize, locate and capture a tachyon in the wild, it took a working TCR to start another reactor—one of the reasons the technology could be traced almost solely back to the Cacks who got it from the Crawdads. We Solarians had stolen the technology from a captured Cack scouting craft just before the war.

The sick feeling of disaster hit me like a punch in the stomach. "How is that even possible?"

"I don't know yet."

I glanced at the gravimetric sensors. "What about the other six ships?"

"What ships?"

I tagged my gravimetric data for her. We were sitting in between six other ships all sitting dead in space.

"That's not good," she said.

I picked a ship at random and sent off a message querying their status. They were doing the same thing, asking if we could relight their engines. Fortunately, their QWEGs were still functional. Time logs, however, showed they had all lost their power only a few microseconds before we lost ours. It was almost the same moment our QWEGs malfunctioned.

The fleet noticed our absence and began turning around to find out what had happened. They wouldn't have stopped for the support craft. The support craft had been left to look out for each other and they were probably better equipped to do that. But the fleet couldn't afford to lose a single warship much less seven. 

"It looks like the fleet is coming to our rescue. Let me know if you can find what you need on one of the other ships," I told Sub-Commander Joanna Torres.

"Commander Brennon is on his way to the bridge to take command, but I'll let him know."

I sat in my room as long as I could stand it, then slaved my com to my netpiece and went out prowling through the ship. I ended up in the empty C&C and pulled up the holo display of the fleet, then booted up all my com screens. When I could take it no longer, I flash messaged commander Brennon. He ignored the first couple of attempts then answered before I could initiate a command override of his com system.

"What's the status of the reactors?"

"We'll have them lit in a moment."

"Good. And the QWEGs?"

"We're working on them," came the irritated response.

"When are they coming back online?"

"Look, I already have Sunshine breathing down my neck. However long it takes, it's going to be even longer if everyone keeps interrupting me."

I ignored his insubordination for the moment. "Have you found parts?"

"No. The ship engineers have already set up a parts-exchange throughout the fleet. If anyone needs anything, all the engineers know about it. We've checked with all the other ships. No one has the parts we need."

"Can you fabricate them?"

"Yes, but it will take a few days if not weeks."

"That's not acceptable. Have you checked with the Cack engineers?"

"No. Their equipment is not compatible. But Sunshine is sending some engineers over anyway."

I left the bridge and headed for engineering. Most of the ship's critical components were buried in the core of the vessel. Engineering, however, was in the rear third of the ship, sandwiched between the TCR power plant with their massive anti-matter batteries and both the QWEGs and the AI/com hub. I opened a hatch and drifted down a tube that was nothing more than the twisted space between data cables, and environmental and power conduit. The feeling of living in the bowels of a giant machine was more pronounced now than ever.

I came across an assistant power technician. "Where's the chief?"

"Sir?" The kid tried to come to attention in zero-G then hastily pointed to a group of people huddled in a cloud of floating debris.

For a moment I feared something had exploded, then I realized the chief master engineer was directing a bunch of technicians in dismantling some equipment while a swirl of assistant technicians brought requested tools and took away removed parts. "Thanks." I drifted over and watched, knowing better than to interrupt.

A group of Cacks, with rows of tools and equipment strapped to their bodies, brought in a large plastic lump. How they got the thing into the room, I had no idea. There must have been some sort of cargo entrance I didn't know about. The lump turned out to be some sort of oddly shaped crate. They opened it and pulled out a strange glittering multi-branched piece of equipment. At least I assumed it was equipment as they pushed and pulled it around, apparently trying to fit it to our equipment while chittering loudly to each other. It looked something like an enormous dark ceramic bonsai tree.

Once our engineers had the area cleared, they mostly stood back and watched the Cack technicians work. Chief Droemer saw me and came over. He was a squat late-middle-aged fellow who looked like he'd been built for muscling heavy equipment around in tight spaces.

"Think that will work?" I asked.

"It better. They ripped out the entire quantum phase interferometer."

"We'll just have to assume they know what they're doing. They did get to space before us."

He watched them while stroking his bristly salt and pepper mustache. "I suppose..."

"If you want to continue fabricating the failed parts, however, I wouldn't blame you."

Chief Droemer grimaced. "Oh, we're doing that right enough. I just hope we can finish before their tree wilts or something."

"Any idea what caused this?"

"Near as we can tell, the QWEGs failed due to normal matter degradation. Somehow this caused stray particles to enter the reactor which interacted with the tachyon stream, flooding the reactors with virtual particles and causing the tachyons that actually sustained the process to get lost in the shuffle."

I had been around spaceship engineers all my life, so one might think that some of this kind of talk would have sunk in by now, but I was struggling to just get the general idea of what he was saying. "So, this explosion of virtual particles snuffed out the cascade reaction?"

"You could say that."

"Could they have affected the other ships?"

"Absolutely."

"Even though the logs show their reactors failed before ours?"

"That would be expected. Tachyons naturally move faster than light and thus backward in time. As the number of virtual particles increased into the past, they could easily have caused similar interactions with the other ships' power systems."

"Right, well, I'll leave you to it then." Not having anything useful to do, I returned to my quarters. On the way, I noticed how irritable the crew was. Having been locked away for most of the trip, I hadn't realized how great a toll the fear of spending eternity trapped in a lightless void had taken on the crew's morale. The research station was still three days hard travel away. I hoped our delay wouldn't cause Shines Like the Sun to cancel the anticipated leave. The crews needed a chance for rest and recreation almost as badly as the ships needed supplies.