It was nearing the end of their fifth day on patrol, one that had been uneventful and was in no way unlike the countless other patrols Kres'indh'rora and her squadron had flown over the past two years. She tried not to let it bother her, but in times of peace such as this there seemed to be little necessity in patrolling the space between the Chiss Ascendancy's border colonies. Sure there was the occasional skirmish with space pirates and the occasional foreign freighter or exploratory vessel that had to be warned away from Chiss space, but the vast majority of patrols were generally as dull and monotonous as this one.
Now a lieutenant, Kres'indh'rora was the picture of an eager cadet when she first graduated from the academy. As the daughter of a pair of Csillan farmers who were themselves the latest in long lines of farmers, the allure of the unknown of space, its infinite beauty and splendor, was what had first drawn her to CEDF. Sure, the prospect of improving her family's standing in the Ascendancy's familial hierarchy had its own appeal, but after spending her life knowing little beyond her family's farm amidst Csilla's icy wastes, there was no resisting the freedom offered by the Chiss Expansionary Defense Force.
Upon acceptance into the academy, Kres'indh'rora threw herself into her studies, achieving top marks in most of her classes and quickly earning placement in the pilot training program. While the farmgirl's first foray into the flight simulator was less than stellar, she proved to be a quick learner and quickly became one of the academy's more promising pilots. By the time she was done, she found herself graduating a year early and consistently outperforming students with more experience than her.
As much as the simulators had prepared her to fly and to fight, nothing could have prepared her for the unfettered vastness and beauty of open space. Her first patrol with the CEDF's Sabre Squadron wasn't everything she had imagined as a starry-eyed cadet; it was more. It was open, boundless, and full of untapped wonder, a field filled to the brim with twinkling stars, rocky asteroid fields, and swirling nebulae, a vast expanse of uncharted, unexplored, and uncertain territory. But most of all, for the young farmgirl, it was freedom. Out here, it didn't matter what her family wanted, or what their standing in society was, or when the harvest was coming. Standing, familial expectations, and the march of the seasons were all wiped clean in the CEDF. All that remained were Kres'indh'rora's duty to the Ascendancy and the feeling of true freedom as her Clawcraft drifted peacefully through the void.
In the intervening two years, her enthusiasm had waxed and waned over time. While space was indeed freer than her time on the farm had been, the restrictions imposed both by her duties to the CEDF and by the innate limits of Chiss hyperdrives still left her limited. Her role as a patrol pilot in the outer colonies meant that Sabre Squadron routinely followed the same familiar routes month after month, which were limited even more by the need for navigational anchors for the Clawcrafts' hyperdrives to lock onto. Only the occasional pirate skirmish or foreign contact alleviated the monotony, and while she excelled in combat situations, they were few and far between.
The lieutenant let out a long yawn as she stretched in her seat. Just a couple of hours left and then they would make the jump back to Ornfra, where she could finally lay down and get some much needed -
"Attention to any CEDF ships in the area." A voice echoed through the cockpit, causing Kres'indh'rora to jump in her seat. "This is an emergency transmission from Shevtai colony. An asteroid has managed to make it past our sensors and is on a direct collision course with the planet. Estimated damage if impact occurs is catastrophic. We are requesting immediate assistance in Shevtai from all ships in the area."
The lieutenant sat stunned as the message began repeating. The Chiss were meticulous in their monitoring of local space. For even a small asteroid to slip past colonial and interplanetary sensors was incredibly rare. But one capable of wiping out a colony? In all of her history courses at the academy, she had never heard of such a thing happening. Which likely meant that it hadn't.
There was little time to dwell on it, however, as a new voice was overriding the old, coming through the squadron comm channel. "Sabres, lock on to Shevtai's nav anchor. I know you were all looking forward to finally getting some sleep, but we've got a colony to save." Kres'indh'rora voiced her acknowledgement with her squadron mates as she began the maneuvers that would lock her ship's hyperdrive onto Shevtai's navigational anchor. "Sabre Four," the commander continued, eliciting a second startled jump from the lieutenant, "please relay the distress call on towards Csilla before you jump." And then, without waiting for a response, "Rest of Sabre Squadron, initiate jump on my mark. Three. Two. One. Mark."
"Ktah!" Kres'indh'rora cursed quietly to herself as she watched her squadron jump off without her. Two months since their last break from the monotony of patrol, and she got stuck with relay duty. She quickly set to work, compressing the transmission into a tightbeam data burst that would reach Csilla much faster than any normal transmission or ship was capable of. While it only took a matter of minutes to finish the transmission, the tension she felt in waiting was agonizing. When the computer signaled that the transmission had successfully been sent on towards the capital, she let a long-held breath and, muttering another frustrated curse, finished locking on to Shevtai's nav anchor and made the jump to hyperspace.
One benefit of the Chiss nav anchor system was the impact it had on ship design. The network of beacons scattered throughout Chiss space made the entire concept of complex astrogation computers and the corresponding equipment needed to guide a ship to a specific set of interstellar coordinates irrelevant. This was in no small part what allowed a small ship like a Clawcraft to fit a hyperdrive in the first place. Additionally, the nav anchors reduced the risk of astrogation errors to near-zero odds. Since the system was established, the number of hyperspace accidents numbered in the single digits, and were usually attributed to pilot error.
It was largely because of these factors that it took Kres'indh'rora several minutes to realize anything was wrong. There were no alarms, no sounds of mechanical failure, no abnormal vibrations in the ship, and no changes in the starlines streaming past the cockpit, only the passing minutes as the stars flew by. Minutes on a clock that kept ticking. And ticking. And ticking.
What is taking so long? Kres'indh'rora thought to herself. The jump to Shevtai should only have been a minute or two at most. She glanced down at the reentry timing, frowning at the blank display. She had noticed it earlier and thought it a display bug. But with each passing minute that became less and less likely. A cold pit began to form in her stomach as she began to realize the gravity of her situation. With trepidation, she began a full diagnostic on the ship's navigation and hyperdrive. With that running, she pulled out a datapad and started work on the calculations needed to determine her fighter's relative position given her departure point, time, and hyperspace velocity. I really hope I'm wrong about this, she thought as she worked, because if I'm not, there isn't a lot I can do about it.
By the time Kres'indh'rora finished her calculations, the diagnostic had also finished. While the diagnostic showed nothing wrong with the Clawcraft's hyperdrive or astrogation systems, her own calculations confirmed that she was indeed well past the hyperspace dropout point for Shevtai, which had been more than a minute before she started her calculations. By now, she was likely passed the Chiss border, hurtling towards the galaxy's core and getting farther and farther away from Chiss space with each passing second.
All Kres'indh'rora could do was sit back, dumbstruck in her cockpit. There was really only one explanation: something had destroyed the Shevtai navigational anchor, most likely the very asteroid they had been sent to intercept. Her first thoughts went to her squadron. Had they made it in time? And if they had, had they and the other Chiss ships in the area managed to save the colony? Or were they, too, along with any other ships that had been en route at the time stranded in hyperspace like she was? It was impossible to determine, and she would likely never find out. Because her next thoughts were much darker: I am going to die here.
There were only two things that could pull a Chiss ship out of hyperspace: a nav anchor or a gravity well. The former was no longer an option, and the latter was exceedingly unlikely. It was theoretically possible for a planet, star, or other center of mass to pull a ship out of hyperspace. Indeed, it was the primary reason the academy taught astrogation, because while Chiss computers couldn't handle the incredibly complicated calculations needed to do an unassisted hyperspace jump, it was still important to make sure there were no gravity wells between a jumping ship and the destination anchor. However, the vast emptiness of space made the probability of randomly running across a gravity well exceedingly unlikely.
Beyond that there was no other way to exit hyperspace. While larger ships could willingly drop out of hyperspace early, it was deemed too much of a risk to include that option in CEDF Clawcraft. An early drop out was more likely to kill a pilot than anything on the other side of a planned hyperspace jump, either through damage to the hyperdrive, inability to lock on to a new nav anchor, or dropping out on top of some astronomical anomaly. On top of that, ship designers were unable to contemplate any reason for a single Clawcraft to drop out of hyperspace early in the first place, because that would mean separation from a pilot's squadron, the only logical implication of which would be desertion.
In a dark twist of irony, it was the Chiss's belief in the safety of their form of hyperspace travel that was now going to be responsible for Kres'indh'rora's death. Her only hope was to hit a gravity well of some sort, and even then, if it wasn't near a habitable world she would still die of starvation. As a scout craft, this particular variant of the Clawcraft was stocked with a week's worth of rations. She had already gone through about half of that during her squadron's mission, and while she could extend the remaining supply with further rationing, it would do little to increase the odds of her long-time survival.
In essence, Kres'indh'rora was now on a one-way ticket out of the galaxy, likely to die before journey's end, and there was nothing she could do about it except sit back and enjoy the ride.
The first few hours were unsurprisingly uneventful. Kres'indh'rora spent much of it crying and struggling to come to terms with her situation, but eventually the exhaustion of her five-day mission caught up with her, and she drifted off to a fitful slumber. When she awoke, she found herself surprisingly calm. While her situation was no less dire than it was before, sleep had cleared her mind and given her renewed focus. She was a Chiss, after all, and she was not going to give up easily. So she set to work, retrieving her datapad and reading through everything she could on astrogation and Clawcraft hyperdrive systems. While Clawcraft didn't have manual hyperdrive overrides, larger ships did, which meant that there may still be a way to modify her own hyperdrive to work the same way. The trick, of course, was to do so with only the tools available to her and without getting herself killed in the process.
On the astrogation end of things, she also needed to make sure she didn't strand herself in the middle of nowhere, or in a nebula, or at the edge of a black hole's gravity well. Ideally, she also wanted to drop out in a system with habitable planets, a challenging prospect given that if her calculations from earlier still held true, she was likely halfway to the core by now, well outside Chiss space and beyond any planets that would actually be in her datapad's database. The only thing she had to go on was old probe data, which at most would give a listing of systems with planets in the habitable zone.
Surprisingly, it took less than an hour for her to find a way to force her hyperdrive to disengage. It wouldn't even require much tinkering. All she had to do was recode her ship's computer to think the Clawcraft was approaching a gravity well, which would in turn cause the hyperdrive's proximity failsafe to engage, dropping her out of hyperspace. The coding itself would still be a bit tricky, since she had to make sure not to screw anything else up in the process, but it was decidedly safer than trying to tinker with the hyperdrive or other parts of the ship while in hyperspace.
The astrogation aspect was the hard part, requiring her to first figure out the exact route her ship would be taking based on its initial trajectory and ongoing acceleration. From there, she had to manually match that trajectory with systems from old CEDF surveys, while also taking into account varying degrees of stellar drift depending on when the initial data was obtained. In the end, she only found one system, about halfway between her departure point and the opposite side of the galaxy, and it was coming up fast, leaving her about an hour to rig the hyperdrive override and calculate the exact timing to initiate it.
By the time she had everything ready to go, she only had a handful of minutes to spare. She leaned back in her seat, watching the chronometer and waiting tensely. As the dropout point approached, she hovered her hand over the button that would trigger the override and counted down the final seconds. "Bav, niuh, g'ev, rat, rar, vzah, vzo, cssah, ba, in'a," hitting the override on in'a. The blue and white of the starlines streaking past the Clawcraft's cockpit refined themselves back into the black and white of normal space, a field of stars spanning the ship's view. A field of stars that was notably devoid of planets.
Well, shit.