Judgment

Chapter 1

WHO was right, Frost prodded me, bumping me with his shoulder as we stood leaning together in the alley.

You were right.

I’m sorry. He huffed out the words, trying to tease me but apparently too nauseous to pull it off. I didn’t hear you.

I rolled my eyes because I knew it was going to be this way as soon as the warning sirens had begun to blare on the ship. It had been my idea to try to bring the corsair through two thousand plus years of time and space. The return trip, with another person on board, would have been so much easier. We could secure him, confine him to quarters, and more than anything, we wouldn’t have to use a net. I hated the molecular filter and would do anything not to have to employ one. Normally we went by ship through a navigational wormhole, landed in orbit around the planet where we were needed, and then used a smaller wormhole, or string, to reach our location. Unfortunately, the corsair, though it was made for extended galactic travel, could not take the aging process. It had started to pull apart at fifteen hundred years of travel through the fissure and we’d had to leap free. Of course, at that point we were back to a normal thousand-year jump, but we basically ejected, and the ship blew apart not from an explosion but from rapid aging. Already, the mission would be categorized as a failure.

Cher?

You were right, I repeated, all my focus on the instrument on my wrist before it beeped and I was suddenly looking at a three-dimensional holographic map projected in front of me. The ship never stood a chance; I shouldn’t have suggested trying to bring it.

No, he agreed, you should have listened to me.

But I hadn’t started the mission that way—listening—so what would have compelled me to start with his concerns about the ship?

The briefing to debate the operation had already become a volley of words from all sides when Colonel Dorsey had turned and looked at me. And I had known when the man had first opened his mouth and explained what was needed that it would come down to whether I would go. The AWOL scourge was my old partner, after all. If anyone should have been sent to save him, bring him back, or judge him beyond redemption, it should have been me. So as all the other scourges in attendance had declined the mission, agreeing instead to Brekin Creed’s death, the colonel had finally turned his pale blue eyes on me.

Captain Troy?

It was far too dangerous to do anything but ask for volunteers. Close to a twenty-five-hundred-year leap was not something we routinely attempted. From our year, 4510, it was considered risky. Travel in the fissure, the crack in time, was precise to a second at a thousand years. More than that, and percentages got slightly shaved, and even being off a tenth of one could move you twenty years either backward or forward.

So already the jump was problematic, but it wasn’t fair to simply send the pulse that would kill Lieutenant Creed through his compass without first trying to convince him to give himself up and return home. The scourges had been looking for him, tracking his whereabouts, for three years, since he first went AWOL, and had finally pinned him down. The time to approach him was at hand, so someone had to go.

I had been weighing the pros and cons the whole time the room had been erupting in sound, cataloging the many dangers in my head, all the possible outcomes, and mulling it over. But what finally made up my mind for me was not that the worst-case scenario was death but instead that I could fail him, my ex-partner, Brekin Creed, again. That had been my impetus for the nod of my head—guilt. The room had gone instantly, eerily silent.

I’ll make the jump, Colonel, I said with much more conviction than I felt.

No one was breathing.

Are you certain, Captain?

I had wondered why only those of lower rank—the noncommissioned men, not the commissioned ones—had been invited to the