Search the Stars

Soon after Cody fell, The Toadstool lifted them up and out of the mountains surrounding the meadow. 

Ozzy clomped through the hatchway into navigation and settled into the seat beside Zach, strapping in, saying nothing, only making a chuffing sound like he was frustrated. 

Ozzy was low-maintenance. Sometimes too low of maintenance, and Zach was often left wondering what the hell was going on in that long, Pegasion brain of his. He’d learned to assume that if Ozzy wasn’t saying something to reflect that he wasn’t in a good mood, the beast was happy, and it was best not to probe.

They both had something to be grouchy about, but for now, Zach punched instruments on the control panel and furiously powered the thrusters to full speed with the intent of breaking free of the planet’s gravity as fast as possible.

“A bit jerky, Zach,” Ozzy remarked as they roared into the sky. The g-forces pushed them back into their seats.

“That’s nothing. I’m holding back.” He briefly considered swooping back over the meadow and blasting Culum’s men with the thrusters but didn’t want to risk it. Plus, he’d get Cody’s body too.

Shit. Cody.

He’d have to sort that out later. Right now, he had to keep his wits and get them out of there without a ship-to-ship fire-fight. The Toadstool was only fitted with the most basic of weapons. A step up from the dregs of ship weaponry, and therefore hardly enough to fend off security ships in an all-out brawl.

The Red Monarchy ships weren’t too far behind him, but the readings told him he had a three-minute lead on them. He gunned it harder and winced as he felt the pull of the planet raking through his body like his bones were being pressed out through his skin.

Before becoming a self-employed bootlegger, Zach had worked as a pilot for a vast trading conglomerate, New Dominion. He flew one of their largest vessels, picking up shipments and carrying them across the cosmos with a crew of twenty-two. Ten of that crew were security—the others were engineers, navigators, purchasers, pilots, and diplomats. Diplomats had always seemed excessive, but he’d soon learned that negotiations in new zones were touchy business. Back when Zach had done that job, he could only fly one leg of a journey. It took five pilots to get fifty to seventy light years without waiting a month between jobs.

That was where he first saw the Jungle Corporation’s grow operations and where he initially felt the surge of disgust that led him to wonder if there was a better way to grow the psychedelic mushrooms used for Faster Than Light travel. The rest was history, and now Zach was one of the best pilots he’d ever met, if he did say so himself. Which he did because, aside from Ozzy and Anna, he was his own best friend and cheering squad.

And, honestly, he could do everything for his operation, except apparently sniff out a setup.

They broke out of the atmosphere, and soon, the artificial gravity kicked in. His fuel indicator told him he’d barely have enough to scrape by to get back to the Sol system, but there was no time to stop at a station to refuel, nor was there time to scoop from a star.

Focus. I just need to outrun them till we can jump. Not reinvent the wheel.

While Culum was no longer a problem—except that Zach had been forced to leave a crate of his wares behind—the Red Monarchy wouldn’t be backing down any time soon.

In these parts, the only sanctioned flight-grade mushrooms were the massive strains—with caps the size of houses and mycelium, or root systems, that took up entire cities. They were behemoth crops grown by the Jungle Corporation—watered down, genetically modified, nutrient-depleted Frankenstein’s monster fungi that limited pilots to jumps of seven to ten light years because of their toxicity and ill effects on the pilots. Some of the jump distances depended on the size of the ship and the strength of the pilot’s mind.

Zach didn’t know for certain, but he’d often suspected that the corporations like Jungle Corporation were behind the Red Monarchy—lock up your interests by owning the government. Simple.

Zach checked the proximity indicator on his instruments and saw that their three-minute lead had shrunk to two and a half minutes.

He cursed.

Staying positive, he noted that all they needed to do now was put the planet behind them and get out past the sentry units. If they didn’t, the sentries—AI-based drone ships—would trigger a bounty on Zach’s ship if they transitioned onto the Jump Plane before they were outside their boundaries.

The three ships following him were much faster than his, which was the fastest cargo ship he’d been able to afford, even as a bootlegger. Normally the speed of The Toadstool when not on the Jump Plane wasn’t as important as the connectivity of her external instruments for within the Jump—which Zach had splurged on—but well, now he realized what a fool’s premise that was.

He needed to be fast to outrun security dicks like the Red Monarchy.

“I’m going to have to do it, Ozzy,” Zach said in a resolute tone. No matter what Ozzy said, Zach had made up his mind.

“You’re already in trouble. What’s a little more trouble?”

“A bounty’s not exactly what I need at the moment…”

“You’ve had worse,” Ozzy reminded him.

“You got the navigation?”

“Sure thing, boss. You at all concerned about the wyrms?” Ozzy asked, swinging the interface in front of his face. It was moldable and adapted to his eyes, which were positioned on either side of his long skull, like a horse. From Earth.

“Not today, no. I’d take a slew of wyrms over the assholes on our tail. You like that, Ozzy? I’m expressing my utter confidence in you while in jump state.”

“You’re right to trust me, Zach.”

“I know.” Zach’s pilot seat was fitted with a large dehumidifier compartment that kept his stash of Witch Head at the ideal dryness and temperature. Normally he prepped for a flight by ingesting the mushroom forty minutes before jump time, but this was an emergency, and he hadn’t had time to prep.

He grabbed a syringe full of an extract of the Witch Head mushrooms. He inspected the liquid, tipping it up and down to check for air bubbles, saw none, and then jabbed it into his thigh without so much as a pause. Didn’t even sting. 

God, I’m tough. He would have laughed at his self-deprecating joke, but the specter of loss hung over him. That wouldn’t do well as he entered jump state. He tried laughing. It was hollow.

Didn’t matter. There was no other choice.

“Just watching the cam facing the ships on our tail. Not to alarm you, but they’re coming into firing distance.”

“Why would that alarm me? I’d love to have someone fire on The Toadstool. They probably know we’re going to disregard the sentry boundary.”

“Likely.”

“Well, bad news for them, they’ve got shitty jump mushrooms.” He smiled as he said it, feeling a surge of pleasure at knowing how good Witch Head was. 

“They’ll still try to follow.”

“Let them bring it. I’m ready. How much longer till they’re in firing range?”

“Calculating. One moment please… twelve minutes,” Ozzy said.

“The injection should start working soon. But it’ll be close.”

They soared along, listening to music over the navigation deck speakers. It was a playlist Ozzy had made solely for fast getaways.

“I like that song. What’s it called?” Zach asked.

“‘Outrun the Bastards,’” Ozzy said.

“Oddly fitting.”

“It was made for moments like this.”

“Thanks for looking out for us. Wish it hadn’t come to this, quite in this way, if you know what I mean,” Zach said. “Wish Cody was here to joke with us.”

“Someday, I plan to pay Culum back,” Ozzy said matter-of-factly.

That was how he was, Zach’s Pegasion first mate. When the words left Ozzy’s mouth, Zach knew it would be so.

Or maybe he was feeling the Witch Head already.

The borders of the view screens showing the forward and rear cam angles pulsed and glowed, rising out of their position surrounding the screens, popping off and seeming to move. The console where Ozzy sat seemed to spark and shudder with shimmering, vibrant colors that began to stretch to the metal floors of the flight deck and the rug, bolted down despite the artificial grav.

A fizzing super-skeletal structure seemed to rise out of the fabric of reality right in front of Zach’s eyes. Colors danced and split into fractals and imploded on themselves. Reality began to unzip itself like it was two-dimensional. The view screens turned to blocks and collapsed into each other, opening the inside of the ship to the vacuum of space as everything appeared to become a two-dimensional construct.

The mushrooms were working.

Zach took a breath and popped open the armrests, revealing pockets shaped for human hands. He jammed his hands into them and felt the cold metal close around his fingers. They were essentially gloves that connected him to the ship. His body was a network of neurons, and the sensors were a way to extend the reach of his body and mind.

“The Watch is on,” Ozzy said. He was the Watch. Official title, Navigator, but when they faded onto the Jump Plane, that job description became the Watch. Part of his job was to make sure that Zach’s mushroom trip didn’t get out of hand, that he stayed aware enough to keep them on course. The Watch was a necessary aspect of the Jump team—the psychedelic effects of the mushrooms were powerful, even for a trained pilot like Zach, whose mind had been disciplined through countless trips.

Zach leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

Even with his eyes shut, he could still see. His vision expanded past the boundary of his body. He sensed the Red Monarchy ships right behind him. They were still thousands of kilometers away, but as his mind drifted into the altered state, his consciousness swelled.

The Red Monarchy pilots were preparing to follow Zach’s ship onto the same paths on the Jump Plane.

He needed to move The Toadstool now. Waiting gave the Red Monarchy time for their pilots to increase their Jump Ready state.

Zach focused, which in this case, was like letting go.

Though his eyes were closed, the way onto the Jump Plane wasn’t like falling asleep or dreaming, which was often what a psychedelic trip could feel like. For piloting a ship, it was like becoming larger than his body. His awareness became massive. He sensed the connections between the mundane, or Material Plane of existence, and the Jump Plane. These connections were attached to everything by billions of streams of energy, like veins, like the mycelium that underpinned a mushroom colony, which was a microcosm of the galaxy, the universe.

Everything.

Zach pushed and nudged here and there, and his grip on the material world relaxed, and he inhaled deeply through his mouth—the sound of which echoed in his ears loudly and with a sort of time-dilation effect—and moved himself onto the Jump Plane.

His ship and everything in it went with him.

Darkness outside The Toadstool folded them into its shroud. They were enveloped by the utter black for a moment. And then, as though Zach’s presence sparked a genesis, thousands of tiny veins of light flashed and grew before them, stretching out around them like a net of alabaster stretching through obsidian.

Zach oriented himself.

With his third eye, he looked in every direction at once, seeking the landmarks through the in-between space, using the lights that flickered and flashed to see the superstructure between space-time.

Bulbous clusters of energy that pulsated here were balanced on the Material Plane with planets and stars. These formations were like Jump Plane roots, attached to space-time by the growth of a body into the light of a star. Veins of light pulsed around the ship, forming millions of pathways.

He spied the unique formation in the Jump Plane that he’d come to know as being located in the constellation Orion, the Witch Head nebula—the inspiration for his newest strain of flight-grade mushroom. Zach set them onto a fizzing blue connection that he could see snaking through the black backdrop of the Jump Plane.

Ozzy was somewhere near Zach, adjusting their thrusters to increase their speed and shorten the length of time it took them to traverse forty light years.

The stream would carry them at least ten light years. Then he would transfer to another stream without exiting the Jump Plane and still another until they had gone the forty light years back to his quadrant and away from the Red Monarchy ships.

He settled in for the duration, absently listening with another part of his mind to Ozzy’s recitation of travel time.