+Events of Resurrection+

Junebug awoke to the tone of an automated alarm. She had fallen asleep beside Neil who was also stirring as the sharp tone repeated rhythmically. With the practiced ease of a veteran, she rolled out of bed and pulled on a pair of cargo shorts and a loose white tshirt. She was buckling her gun belt around her waist by the time Neil was awake enough to manage speech.

"What is happening?" he asked sleepily, familiar enough with the ships alarms to know this was an wake up call rather than an emergency. Junebug clicked her belt into place and pulled on her boots before glancing back at Neil, remembering that he had still been frozen in the cryo-pod when she had set this up. She grimaced slightly and touched the activation stud that slid her door open before looking over her shoulder.

"We are Junctioning," she told him, "I told Lonny to wake me when it was time." Neil sat up with a startled look but Junebug was already striding toward the bridge by the time she heard his startled:

"We are what?!"

Junctioning was a rarely used technique of astronavigation. The RIP was filled with swirling currents which starships used to navigate the gulfs between stars. All ships gathered navigational data about current conditions to keep an accurate picture of what was going on. Ordinarily pilots tried to avoid areas where currents intersected and created swirling eddies that even computers struggled to predict the outcome of. There were however, exceptions. If you could time it correctly it was possible to move from one current to another as their tips brushed, though the stresses on the ship could be severe. The advantage of this was that, if you survived, you could cover great distances quickly as the violent energetic shift had logarithmic rather than linear relations to distance in real space. The other advantage was that such conjunctions, from which the term junctioning was derived, did not reoccur in any predictable fashion. This meant that once a junction was crossed, other ships would find themselves separated by vast distances if they could predict the route of their quarry in the first place. Pirates and other criminals sometimes used the trick to escape pursuers, but only exploration vessels did it regularly.

"Why are we risking the ship we just got back together?" Neil asked pulling on his shirt as he raced to catch up with her. Junebug stepped onto the bridge and Taya turned to grin at her. Taya let out a low whistle and Junebug high fived the younger woman with a smirk. Junebug slipped into her captains chair and checked the readouts on the holo, all was going well.

"The Cyloneikians," she began, frowning over the awkward word.

"Cylos? Cyclops?" Taya suggested helpfully.

"The Cycylops," Junebug agreed, "Cant have failed to see we stopped in orbit and picked something up." Few ships had any real stealth capability, the technology did exist but it was enormously cost prohibitive as it had to be a nearly complete thermal containment as well as hull that scattered radar and microwave. Gregorious might well have noticed them deviating from their predicted plan to retrieve Neil's cryo-pod and might be suspicious. He might not imagine it was Neil, perhaps assuming it was research material stolen from Pradec's facility or even Pradec himself his death elaborately staged, but there was no point in taking risks with a powerful man's paranoia. Junebug was punctilious about fulfilling contracts, it had been the Cyclops themselves who had declared Neil dead and thus voided the marriage arrangements, all she had done was show them the footage and act sad, but they might not see her technical defense as legitimate and it wasn't like a court on Cylonieka was going to find in her favor against their masters.

"Right," Neil said sitting down in the pilots couch and bringing his holo live.

"Well if we are going to do this we might as well do it right," he said his old confidence returning as he settled in behind the controls. Taya was grinning like an idiot, evidently enjoying the fact that Junebug and Neil had finally gotten together. It was also likely that she didn't fully appreciate just how dangerous this stunt was, essentially a controlled version of jumping out of the Terran cruiser into the open RIP, a maneuver that had all but destroyed the Highlander.

"Thirty seconds," Neil said and Junebug pulled her restraint harness on, buckling it down over her shoulders and hips. Taya followed suit a moment later, a slight worry beginning to show on her face.

"Lonny, where is Saxon?" Junebug asked.

"Maintenance bay 2," Lonny replied. The Hex didn't have sleeping quaters, the Highlander being originally desiged for six crewmen who shared bunks when between shifts, this meant that Neil Junebug and Taya filled the available quaters. Fortunately the Hex seemed more comfortable in the hotter areas of the ship back beside the fusion reactors and so had moved his few possessions into a kind of nest he had built in the secondary maintainence bay. According to Neil Hex did not attach the same amount of emotion to living quarters as humans did, and in any case everyone was happy to have the lizard well aft.

"Well he heard the alarms, if he isn't strapped in that is his own look out," Junebug replied, glancing down at the chronometer.

"Ten seconds," Neil reported, adjusting the flight controls slightly to compensate for the increasing turbulence. Outside the viewpoint the golden swirl of the RIP began to shimmer and twist as though they were approaching the bottom of a vast waterfall. There was a sudden flash and a huge jolt that slammed Junebug into the side of her chair despite the efforts of her harness. Sparks flew from several control panels and a half dozen displays went dark. Smoke coiled from one of the air vents and there was a persistent hammering noise of machinery warped and still attempting to function.

"Extracting," Junebug gasped and pulled the toggle that cut the RIP engines. The golden light winked out of existence and for a second Junebug felt the panic of having been struck blind. The panic faded as all reactions to transition did and her brain caught up to the fact that she was seeing a star field. Given that one didn't know conditions on the other side of the Junction it was imperative to drop out at once until the sensor logs could be reviewed and navigation updated.

"Lonny do we have an astronav position?" Junebug asked. There was a noticable pause which told her the answer before the computer replied.

"Charting in progress." That meant the computer had no idea where they were and was now attempting to chart the brightness of stars to fix their position. Exact positioning relied on recognizable stellar phenomenon, but at worst the computer would give them a rough location in relation to the center of the milky way.

"Radio signals at about 20 light years," Taya reported as she worked over the sensor console. Junebug nodded and felt relief. A twenty year old radio signal was a pretty good sign of human habitation in the vicinity, hopefully someone who could sell them some updated navigational charts.

"Ok, lets make sure that we haven't broken anything to badly and then plot a second jump."