[h1]Aboard the Secret Service[/h1]

“Abe, the drive is ready.”

Pulling himself up into the central spine of the ship, Abe and several other crewmen came up into the bridge. Through weightless space that pushed themselves sailing into the scaffold and glass cone of the Secret Service's main bridge and went about taking spaces at the terminals along its edge. Michele, who had long been at her preferred spot of the ship had taken her station at a dedicated communications terminal to utility at the far end of the space ship. Her loud voice ran through the procedural moves that was ingrained among them through old careers in Federation circuits before absconding, or having become enforced by practiced comfort impressed on each other over time.

Abe took a position at a point at the furthest tip of the Secret Service. All around him was empty space. The light of the alien dwarf star they were in far orbit around shone in muted glory over distance and through tinted glass. All the same, the unblocked, unperturbed, and pure light that shone forth cast the face of the Secret Service facing it in stark reliefs of hard sharp light and deep impenetrable shadows, almost as if the ship phased itself into space itself. The wide wings of it spun leisurely through space, the wreckage of the alien vessel they had sought out, retrieving its central data storage unit – its black box – formed a sort of soft particle cloud around them, letting in the light by itself sending dancing beads of sharp shadow along the lighted portions of the craft's hull.

“Generator ready and waiting, giving the order?” Michele called out to Abe.

“Cut it.” Abe ordered, and she relayed the order. With an audible clang and loud hydraulic hiss that screeched throughout the ship the motors that kept the Secret Service were in rotation were killed. Space though being a vacuum left no resistance for the wings to slow on their own, and a steady hum filled the air as the momentum effectively sought to stall itself against the ship's axis, eventually bringing the entire thing into a gentle rotation. It wasn't much to change the level of gravity in the glass bridge, but Abe was deftly aware that the star in the distance, and the even more distant stars and constellations beyond and around him were starting a slow crawling rotation.

They'd need all the power they could, at least to prevent a short or brown out in the system. She was old like that.

“Process is completed, gravitational rotation has stopped.” Michele said. While it was technically true it wasn't so much mechanically. The far wings continued to move and at a faster rate than the central axis, which itself began moving when the generator was shut off. He nodded and looked down at his terminal for the first time.

In binary, green-on-black colors a map of the local area in the galaxy appeared and several nearby stars were within range of a warp jump. There wasn't much of a plan, and they could go to any one of them. But they did have a destination he and the crew had opted to visit on simple curious volition: a binary system that appeared to have the flicker of several planets in orbit, perhaps terrestrial.

“Do we have any last minute doubts?” Abe asked, jokingly, “Anyone want to go home, back to their mothers?”

There was a confidence-inspiring silence among the technicians present and that confirmed all he needed to hear. With the strokes of a few keys he confirmed their coordinates and set along the order for a jump of a few light-years. Minutes later the Secret Service filled with an electrical humming, followed by a pop. Abe looked out and around, as space seemed to bend away from him, like a rubber sheet with a design printed on it shapes ahead of them fell into a distorted hole. A small black dot, darker than the ambient space behind it formed and as soon as it appeared 'ripped'. Space now was distorted like a doughnut, the light of stars on either side stretched and bending into it. Even the alien sun's light and shape looked as if it was being bent into the worm hole they had carved into space.

They passed through, as seamlessly as if it were walking through a door. It wobbled a little, the quantum energy that had bent space into this loop holding out though as the Secret Service left one system, and disappeared into another. There was no sound as the hole closed behind them, and the electrical humming of the quanta generators ceased.

“Roughly seventy-two hours before we're recharged. We just crossed six-point-twenty-seven light-years.” Michele reported, for posterity's sake.

Abe mused to himself as he looked out into space and watched the debris they had dragged in with them into the new system continue their slow orbit of the Free Fairer ship. One he saw in the now new binary light was vaguely man shaped, a frozen corpse of a figure dressed in a gray-blue kimono.

“Well, here we are!” he cheered, looked towards the new suns they were in distant orbit around. At the distance they were at, the light of the two was merely an oblong dot far from them, like looking at Mars from Earth at its closest, it Mars was doubled. They had to be at its system's very edge.

Some very bright objects orbited nearby, other planets. Their light brighter and larger just enough to distinguish them as objects for sure. “Well comrades, another jump well accomplished. Let's get us in close to the stars so we can heat up and charge. We'll have some fun in the meantime.” There was excitable happy chatter among the few there as they started filing out. The Secret Service lurched again as the rotational motors kicked back in and the regular rate of gravity was restored. No warnings sounded, no sirens flared. So all was in the green.