Chapter 115: Attack

“Are you insane? And break up the set?” Itto said. “No. Not a chance. Now get on that squat bar. I want to see how much you can lift.”

“Too bad. I had a weapon that wanted one of those.”

Sean lined up under the squat rack, ready to lift.

“Before we get started here, what’s your strength score? Just generally. To the nearest 20.”

“With equipment? Forty. On the dot.”

“Any skills that enhance it? I’m talking “lets you lift heavier weights” type of language, or anything like it.”

“Nope.”

Itto loaded up the bar with several weights. “That should be pretty close.”

“You can’t calculate it exactly from the score?”

“No. I’m not a math guy. Even If I was, there’s variance. Even if your skills don’t say they affect a stat, they sometimes do. And everyone has movement skills and combat skills that screw with how they move. There’s variance. That’s what I’m curious about, right now. Most people can’t do much more than that without some kind of stat efficacy bonus. I want to see what you can do.”

He finished adjusting the weights, clamping them down securely before giving Sean the signal to lift. Sean did a couple reps. It was heavy, but manageable.

Itto put some more weight on. Sean lifted it. They went through several iterations before Sean finally got to a weight he couldn’t budge from the bottom of the squat and the weight room’s auto-spot function kicked in to bail him out.

“Oof. Yeah, that’s the limit for me.” Sean turned around to see Itto gawking at him.

“I bet. You have any idea how much that was?”

“No.”

“340 units.”

“I don’t understand those weight measurements, Itto.”

Itto put his hand to his brow in frustration. “I can’t convert them to whatever rural measurement system you are used to, either. It doesn’t matter. That’s more than a quarter more than you should have been able to lift, Sean.”

“Oh, yeah? That’s pretty good.”

“Pretty good? How in the hell can you do that, Sean? Do you have an efficancy bonus? Some kind of achievement?”

“I…”

“Nope, nevermind. Don’t tell me shit, Sean. Don’t tell anybody anything. Whatever hardware or software is letting you do this is not something you want people knowing about.”

“It’s that serious?”

“It’s that serious. Don’t even lift in public, Sean. Just fighting is fine, because there’s so much chaos in a fight. But something like lifting a defined weight? There’s people who could figure this out from that.”

“Ah. So no more weights then, I guess.”

“No, that bridge is already burned. You pretty much have to trust me, now.”

Sean thought about that, and was surprised to find he did trust Itto, known blackmail and smuggling be damned. The little dude could have kept his mouth shut about all this if he had wanted to, and was giving him warnings instead. Even besides that, he just sort of had a vibe around him of someone who didn’t snitch on other people unless they gave him damn good reason to think they deserved it.

The rest of the day was lifting, quantifying what Sean could do. His VIT and regen meant that there really wasn’t much need to rest due to fatigue, but Itto enforced at least some breaks, claiming that boredom screwed with form, and bad form made the process go slower even if injuries weren’t that much of a concern.

By the end of the day, Sean felt stronger. Probably. It was hard to say.

“Remember that it’s small increments, Sean. Small, small improvements that add up. Stats make it faster, but even being stronger than the strongest system-less man on your old planet’s a small difference. You need to go further than that. That takes time.”

Itto had said the trip might take days, but traffic ended up being particularly bad, apparently due to some kind of system-generated monstrosity on one of the main routes to their destination. Eventually, Itto gave up on travelling much for a while, doing the space equivalent of pulling off to the shoulder of the road and taking a nap.

“It’s going to be days before it’s worth travelling again. I hope you brought some books.”

Sean hadn’t. He just lifted, slept, ate, and lifted some more. It was boring, but boring with a purpose. He could handle that. After a week, his lifting started to show some actual improvements. Itto claimed that was great, and he didn’t argue.

“Fuck. Fuck. Dammit.” Itto was hustling by Sean’s room, banging on his door as he went. “Sean, get up. We’ve got trouble.”

Sean scrambled out of bed and ran to the bridge with Itto. The little man banged some buttons on a blinking console, lighting up a screen of sorts mid-air.

“I’m going to answer this call. The sensor is centered on me, so they won’t see you. Keep your mouth shut and they won’t know you’re here.”

The screen flickered on, displaying a blond man in a military-like uniform. It was one of Eike’s species, if Sean didn’t miss his guess. There might be other species who looked similar, but this guy also looked like a bit of a dick, which made it that much more likely Sean was right.

“I’m glad you decided to answer, finally.” The man said, visibly annoyed.

“My apologies, Captain. You caught me working on my engines. It took me a while to get up here.”

“Ah.” The captain said. “Is that why you are parked? Engine trouble?”

“Something like it. And keeping away from the route while things aren’t moving. You understand.”

“I do.” The captain said. “It must be nice to have help with it.”

Sean’s hand impulsively went to the tracking-blocking jewelry Itto had fitted him with.

“It would be, Captain, but I’m afraid it’s just me here. With days of work ahead of me, it looks like.”

“Now, Itto.” The captain said, smirking. “Do you really think we’d come all the way out here without some reason? That I’d be talking to a nothing like you without cause?”

Itto smiled. “No, I guess not.”

Sean watched as Itto’s hand came down on a button, the communications cut out, and the stars outside the window went crazy, blinking out and appearing in new configurations every second or so.

“What the hell was that?” Sean said.

“An attack.” Itto was punching furiously at buttons, scowling at the console ahead of him like he was angry at him. “He was trying to feel me out, to see if I’d just give him what he wanted without him trying to work for it.”

“What does he even want?”

“Best guess? You, probably.” Itto swore, loudly, and banged on the console. “Dammit, they tracked us.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, Itto.”

“We are in a… OK, so you get that the universe isn’t that big in terms of how fast a ship can go. Do you understand that it’s still big as hell, anyway? In terms of trying to find something in it, I mean. There’s lots of space to look through if you want to find something.”

“Sure.”

“What the ship is doing right now is making a lot of high speed jumps, semi-randomly. But nothing’s really random, and a good enough navigator can track the pattern and follow anyway. And he is. I’m scanning our wake and they are matching us, jump for jump.”

“Nothing we can do?”

“Nothing we can do. In five minutes or so, we are going to go into a long, long jump, one that would have put us out of their range if they weren’t tracking us. And when we come out of it, they’ll be right there, and blast us out the sky. At least that’s what it seems like, seeing how many ships have joined them.”

Itto continued cussing and swearing as the other ship successfully tracked them jump to jump, right up until the stars winked out as the ship began the long jump. Sean sat there, trying to think of anything he could do.

“Itto?”

The little man was leaning against a wall, apparently out of things to try.

“Yes?”

“Are we committed to this jump? We can’t cancel it?”

“No. It’s a set velocity in a set direction for a set amount of time. Nothing can change it. Same for them. They couldn’t quit right now if they wanted to.”

“Huh. And our chances of death when we come out of this?”

“Certain.”

“Got it.”

Sean slid out of the co-pilot’s seat, dropped to his knees, and put his hands on the ground.

“Don’t get mad if this kills us, Itto.”

“What?!”

Sean pumped a charge of Hard Time. The entire ship shuddered.

“What in the ever-loving hell are you doing, you idiot?” Itto bellowed, his voice much louder than his frame implied was possible.”

“I’m trying something.”

“To kill us?” Itto glanced over at some display, then back at Sean. “Did you slow us down, somehow?”

“Not quite. We are going the same speed. Always have been.”

“That doesn’t make sense. We are behind where we are supposed to be. By seconds.”

“Yeah, that tracks. Is the ship going to blow up if I do it again?”

“It’s going to blow up if you don’t. How many times can you do that?”

“In five minutes or so? I don’t know. Let’s find out.”

The ship hated what was going on, at least judging by the blaring alarms and creaking frame that sounded every time Sean pushed it harder and harder against time. But by the time they were coming out of the warp, he had managed to put them almost a full minute behind schedule, which according to Itto shouldn’t be possible for anyone, at all.

“OK, get ready. When we come out of warp, the hope is that they’ve sped off looking for us. We’ll have to run again, and hope we get lucky.”

Sean got ready, to the extent he could. Mainly he just let Hard Time recharge and caught his breath. And then they dropped out of warp.

“OK, now we jump…” Itto said, before cocking his head to the side, in confusion. “What the hell?”

They had come out of the jump in an asteroid field of sorts, surrounded by various floating rocks, most of them rounded but a few with jagged, sharp edges like they had been recently broken apart. And amongst all that were little glittering pieces of metal, floating alien corpses, and the general impression that things had gotten very, very weird.

“Sean, any ideas what happened here?”

“Besides Jeff getting involved? Nothing. Could we have caused it somehow? Slowing down?”

“Not a chance. At those speeds, we can’t affect them and they can’t affect us. Or we’d be space dust.”

Sean shrugged. “Then no idea. Honestly. It could be absolutely anything. They are all gone? All the ships? Just like that?”

“Looks like it. There’s wreckage from multiple crafts, and nothing at all on the sensors besides that. And I’m a pilot, a tech class. I juice these sensors pretty well.”

A few minutes wait came and went without anyone chasing them.

“So what now? Back to the highway?”

“Are you insane? You don’t think they sent a message out once that entire time? We need to get out of here, fast, and get out of sight for as long as we can. This is trouble, Sean.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means you go back up to the weight room, pick out your favorite weight, break up my set, and make whatever weapon you were thinking about. There’s only a few places in this part of space where they won’t go, which means we need to go there. Things are about to get a lot harder.”