The Xiniti sighed, making a noise closer to a hiss which technically came from a nose-like orifice on the Xiniti’s back, but whatever.

He added, “It’s not our intention to leave you alone now. Communications will be accepted and answered, but all our troops are committed due to the nature of the current hostilities. Any assistance we give will require reassignment from somewhere else. Keep us appraised of any troop movements that pass your position.”

Then the communication ended.

Marcus shook his head, “That’s bad.”

He turned toward Rachel, “We just got a communication from a Xiniti General saying that there’s Civil War in the Human Ascendancy spilling over into the Alliance. They’ve withdrawn from their base here and want us to watch for troop movements.”

Cassie laughed, “You skipped the best part. They gave us permission to destroy the planet if Artificer tech gets out of control.”

Nodding along, Jaclyn added, “And no matter how bad it gets, we can’t expect help from them. They said we could ask, but it’s pretty strongly implied that they can’t do anything unless there’s an Ascendancy fleet here—which means that  our solar system becomes a battlefield.”

“I can do without that,” Rachel stared out of the cockpit at the blackness ahead. “You know it’s possible, right? The Ascendancy is officially not allowed to visit Earth, but we’re in their territory and if they reopen the gate, they can pop straight into the Alliance. The Alliance is funding and supporting the resistance, so the Ascendancy might think a surprise attack is worth it.”

As people talked, I noticed that Rook’s ships’ thrusters increasing their speed, throwing out gouts of yellow flame. The color of the flame hinted that the propulsion system might be less efficient than I’d prefer, but that wasn’t my main concern.

I didn’t like the timing. It seemed impossible to me that they’d be able to decrypt the Xiniti’s message, but they might have detected it. That might be enough to hint to Rook that we were behind him.

On the other hand, we were all outside Mars’ atmosphere now—which was the time to start piling on speed.

I increased ours, watching for any sign that they might have a near space drive. If they didn’t, I had options they’d never see coming, assuming that they couldn’t detect what was in near space.

Rook’s ships started their burn, flame trailing behind them in space. Once they reached a certain speed, they stopped. Using my implant to calculate it, they’d take three hours to get to Earth from here.

Hal recognized the drive. It used fusion to create thrust and was commonly used by the Zek, an Abominator ally race that lived out on the galactic rim. They weren’t well regarded for their inventiveness. Rook must have found the drive or plans for it. It was a little disappointing. I expected him to have reverse-engineered more Artificer or Abominator tech by now.

On the other hand, given what he’d picked up on the way out, he might reverse engineer more soon. Worse, he might have grabbed something able to be used without reverse engineering.

That in turn made me wonder if I shouldn’t be cutting open his ships with our main gun.

While we’d protected resistance fighters on the way to the planet Hideaway, Lee had been helping the Xiniti fight an alien race that had found an Artificer cache, activated an artifact and been changed from a race of merchants to a race of expansionist warriors.

That could be Earth and it was exactly why the Xiniti handed us the keys to the planet busters.

“Hey,” I said, “is everyone okay with destroying Rook’s ships if we get the opportunity? I’m trying to work out a way to trash Rook’s ships and all the Artificer-based tech on them while still using them to lead us to Magnus.

“I don’t want to kill anybody, but I don’t see a way to destroy the alien artifacts without destroying people—at least if we’re doing it in space which is our best chance. The problem is that we lose our chance to track him to Magnus. On the other hand, if we let them make it to Earth it’ll be easier to be selective and we might find Magnus, but we also have a good chance of missing something. Then maybe Artificer tech gets out to the general population and we have to destroy the world.”

Jaclyn nodded as I talked, finally saying, “You’re right. We’re risking something either way. Blow them up in space and we lose a chance to maybe find Magnus. Blow them up on Earth, we risk the entire population of Earth. We need to choose our risk.”

“Look,” Cassie said from the front, “if we hit them in space, we’ll definitely miss our chance to follow them to Magnus. If we follow them to Earth, we only might have to destroy the planet.”

Marcus leaned forward toward her, “But infecting Earth with Artificer cooties is kind of a big deal.”

“Right,” Cassie said, “but we only might infect the world with Artificer cooties.”

Rachel waved a hand for our attention, “How about this? We follow them down and  Accelerando and I hit first, practically the second they touch down. We separate them from what they grabbed before they can get away. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Watching the two ships ahead of us as well all streaked through space, I said, “We’re making a lot of assumptions, but let’s try that.”