“Well, that’s because we’re about two light days out from Haven right now.”

“What?” Marcus interrupted. “That ain’t possible. I didn’t feel us go to FTL. And even if we did, ain’t no way we got that far out so quickly. Hell, it ain’t even been an hour since the shootin’ ended.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Josh suddenly realized. “And how the hell did you guys shake that Ta’Akar cruiser?”

Nathan realized the conversation wasn’t exactly going in the direction he had intended. But the tone struck by Josh and Marcus, although probably not intentional, was a bit accusatory.

“It’s kind of complicated,” Nathan offered, hoping to avoid the issue of how all together. Unfortunately, he could tell by the looks on their faces that they weren’t going to let it go that easily. And to make matters worse, the workers-whose interests had previously been separate from those of their higher-ups-were looking like they were about to unite with them. Nathan looked at Jessica as if hoping for a hint at what to say or do to appease the group.

“Might as well tell them,” she said. “They’re going to find out soon enough.”

“Well,” Nathan began, “we have a device-we call it a ‘jump drive’-that allows us to instantly jump to another point in space. We can jump up to ten light years at once.” Nathan looked at the group, all of whose mouths hung open. “So as soon as Josh and Loki got us back on board, we simply jumped away.” There was no response. A second later, not knowing what else to say or do, Nathan made a gesture with his hands of a ship jumping from right to left.

“Bullshit,” Marcus replied after a moment of silence.

Josh had a completely different reaction. “Hot damn!” he cried, the words nearly exploding from his mouth.