Beacons in The Dark

Chapter 54 - Levity Returns

"Number the stars and bewilder thy mind" - Poet's Guild motto

Mauhim was travelling idle through the black of space, heading back to the outsider planets - Rexians weren't favorably looked upon in the Imperial galaxies - something his fathers had told him about wars and deprivations; though it had never really gone through his mind what that would mean.

He had always lived in the lap of luxury, a Rexian Prince with a fine aquatic palace, several great mothers and fathers to make his DNA strong, and he thought that when the Rexian Kingmoot took place, he would be able to slay the other princelings and claim his right as the Warlord of Rex.

But sometimes he thought differently, maybe joining some small fringe guild in the Imperium where the rules were a bit more lax, where he could make a life by himself without having to go through the constant struggles of royalty and the battle training it incurred.

He was crossing through the center of an Imperial Galaxy, the Emperor's home galaxy at that, and he felt very brazen because of his updated camo field that shielded him from nearly anything. Inside the luxurious cockpit of his personal craft, a red light began to beep on one of the auxillary panels.

He slid over to the panel and placed a wire from it into a node in his neck as the data was relayed instantly to his mind.

"What?!" he almost shouted, though there was no one there to hear him if he would have. There was a wormhole opening here in the midst of deep space - which was not possible.

With his 8th dimension black storage box, this could definitely mean humongous trouble; things that tunneled through him and slid through dimensions did not get along too well.

And opening his viewscreen he really did shout as he saw ripples in the space a few lightyears away...and on the monitor, flickering on and off,  there was a small planet - there one second, gone another.

And no matter what warp vector he set in or how hard he tried spacefolding to leave the area, his ship was being pulled, via his dimensional storage tank towards the ripple - sensors indicated that he'd be in it within the next hour; so he did the only thing he knew how.

He wanted the coffee...but his life was valued even more.

Insectile fingers flashing over the command consoles, the black box appeared behind his ship, and the whole craft began to shake and rumble, coils of black nothingness reaching towards him through the dark from the flickering planet.

He jettisoned the cargo towards the rippling planet and fired up his fold engines once more. With a great sigh of relief, he found himself moving away again, back to Rex, but he had never got to try that coffee that he so very much wanted.