We wait in the hangar for Cheq to show up. The Oxy-Gate activates, but nothing comes through. It closes itself, and suddenly Cheq's ship is parked in the hangar.
His hatch opens and he jumps out gracefully. "How's my cloaking look? I reverse-engineered it from Faiyoh's schematics."
"Faiyoh's schematics?" I ask.
Titan pats my shoulder from behind. "Yeah, that actually ties in to what the surprise is. Follow me."
He leads us around the corner and into the recreational room where I see Knight talking to an older woman with some grey in her otherwise dark brown hair. Once Knight locks eyes on us, she turns around and burns a gaze into Titan's entire entity.
"So, this is the kid that took your place, huh? Sorry, Nev, that trip to Beta-Ray's jailhouse wasn't meant for you, it was meant for that fool with the permanent smirk behind you." As she says each word, I can only feel submissive under her authoritative, firm voice.
"Faiyoh?" I fumble. She crosses her arms and grunts behind her teeth.
Titan steps between us. "Cheq managed to track her down using a few context clues from your trip to Haorzoh. Tell him."
Cheq joins Knight's side, keeping him and Faiyoh separated. "Using your camera feed, I saw that Faiyoh left a physical note attached to the wall. That must mean she had to physically have visited Haorzoh to leave it there. I gave the estimated time and closest locations to draw a path she might take to quickly hide from any incoming ships."
Knight finishes, "We found a powered down fighter jet orbiting around a small colony station not too far. We took a chance at sabotaging it, but it turned out to be Faiyoh--- our guess was right."
"And now I'm stuck on this dirty ship surrounded by dirty thugs led by the galaxy's biggest jackass," Faiyoh says.
Titan flinches at the comment. "Hey now, I'm letting you walk around this dirty ship freely. It's a courtesy that you're not sitting in the same chair your partner was in."
"How kind of you to not treat me as a prisoner of war. Should I kiss the ground by your feet to prove my gratitude?"
"Sweety, wait until we get some privacy. Semper had some interesting things to say when we had our chat. In fact, he said a certain employer decided to hire the great Faiyoh for some security breaching."
Faiyoh turns her back on him and walks to the bar's counter with confidence. She grabs a small glass with a stem and pours herself one of our luxury wines. "I've always known how much you despised rules, but honestly, Titan, torturing confidential records out of a fellow mercenary? How could you?"
By instinct, we all back away from her and her drink, but Titan steps forward and takes a seat on a stool to comfortably face her. This is a battle of charisma and wits now, and hopefully, Titan has the edge.
He lazily leans on the counter. "Believe this right now, there's not even any money in it for us. I'm doing this because this is something much greater than a paycheck. I'm helping to protect our galaxy."
She takes a sip of her blush wine. "The greater good, is it? You don't have an altruistic bone in that decrepit body of yours, you never have. So tell me why or what is making you have a drastic change in your heart?"
He sits straight and raises his chin. We all lean in and wait for his response. "Maybe I found something I care about more than just myself."
"It only took until your 50's to finally mature."
"You're older than me, you know...by a lot."
Her steady hand holding the glass springs to his face and covers him in the expensive wine. I doubt he'd be madder about being covered in the stuff than having it be wasted that way.
He wipes his face with a gloved hand. "A glass of that is fifty credits, I'll let it slide for now."
She actually cracks a smile after keeping a frown since I've met her. "What's wrong? You don't usually smell like booze until 17:00? Be happy that you're starting early."
Cheq and I crouch low and I feel tense while I wait for Titan to start screaming or to do something crazy. I've never seen him so disrespected before.
"You're not going to do it."
"Do what?" she asks.
"You're not going to draw my temper out this time."
"Oh? So sure of it this time."
"You won't because what I need from you is far more important than keeping my dignity intact. Faiyoh, please, I need you to tell me about the jobs you took from Angel Vanguard."
Her strong posture begins to fold, and her eyes start to soften up. "Did you really mean it when you said you found something greater than yourself?"
"I did."
She steps away from the counter, letting Titan take up the whole tablespace. She casts her piercing eyes over all of us, and when they get to me, I feel my world shake. "Prove it to me."
He shakes his head. "How do I do that?"
She puts her hand on the counter. "You know how."
He looks down at where she's pointing. Her nail taps the wood a couple of times, she retracts her hand, and he stays looking at the spot in silence. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a personal-credentials-device, loads up a screen, then shoves it into his chest so that no one can see it.
"You really want me to do this?" he asks.
Faiyoh seems stunned as she doesn't say anything. She just looks at him with downturned eyebrows and frosty pupils. There's a presence of an aura that something seriously important is about to happen, and I grow more anxious as the silence gnaws at me.
He puts the device face down on the counter in front of her. "Here. Now you know just how badly I want that information."
She shakes her head several times, reaches for the device, but keeps it face down so that she doesn't see it yet. She locks with his gaze and instantly she no longer looks like the one in control. Even though Titan is the one sitting, he seems like the bigger person in charge of the whole room.
She closes her eyes, breathes deep enough that her chest inflates, then slowly turns the device toward her. She skims over the screen and purses her lips, and then she looks at everyone in the room before returning the device back to Titan.
"Now you know my real name," he tells her. He tells us too with the way he projects his voice.
"You told her your name?" I ask, nearly shouting.
"Yes."
"Mercs aren't supposed to--"
"I know. Let's just chalk this up as a special reason."
My head spins as if I just hit a high. My mind races at a thousand light-years a second. No mercenary is to ever share their real name under any circumstances. If this gets out into the circle, Lux-Roulette will be forced to elect a new leader.
"Okay," Faiyoh starts, "I believe you."
Titan swivels around to face her again. "Angel Vanguard wiped out Kroyoza without actually being there. Any remote device would've been pinged and destroyed. How are they slipping past Paxes Defense Force without tripping alarms?"
"When I launched a mission with an elite squad of Angels, they used a technology that I've never seen before, not even from Cheq, to travel quickly through the galaxy. It's almost as if they warped space itself to create a shorter distance for themselves."
Cheq walks forward. "Wait, what do you mean they warped space? Are you talking about teleportation?"
"It's not the way I'd describe it, it isn't like the teleportation we'd typically see with fixed coordinates and subatomic molecular travel. It's more like a portal."
"I"m not following," Knight says, "you're saying that they don't actually beam through space, but rather pop into another spot without affecting the space between the points of start and end?"
"I didn't follow that sentence at all," she replies.
"I've got it!" Cheq shouts and hurries out of the room. We hear his sporadic stomping all throughout the Motley, it sounds like he's visiting plenty of rooms. He comes back wheeling in his favorite whiteboard and a black marker.
"Is it time for a physics lesson?" Titan asks while turning in his stool to face Cheq.
"It's the only part of the day that's fun for me," he says.
He begins to draw a straight line going across the board horizontally, then he adds two circles on each end of the line. He points to the circle on the right. "This is Angel Vanguard's base of operations," he points to the circle on the opposite end, "and this is Planet Thucara and the city of Kroyoza."
"So far I'm with you," I say.
Cheq motions for the base to move to Thucara. "If the Angels decided to fly a straight course to Thucara, their convoy would easily have been spotted by Paxes and promptly obliterated with the fixed defenses."
"Right. No reports were ever broadcasted that they were sighted in the galaxy. So that means they didn't come with a straight line of a massive convoy," Titan says.
Cheq draws a parallel line mimicking the same route of travel, but this time it's a dotted line. "This represents normal teleportation. You still have to take the same route, but it's a lot quicker and you're traveling on a molecular level. That means that even though you can't be seen by the naked eye, you're still physically taking up the space that you're traveling through."
Faiyoh explains, "As small as you make yourself, you'll still be setting off the alarm Paxes has to detect all cellular lifeforms in any state they're in. So regular teleportation wouldn't work either."
Cheq now draws a circle in front of the base of operations on the solid line, then draws another circle in front of Thucara. "There would be one way, in theory, to avoid detection, and that is to not enter the hostile space at all, but instead merely appear there without traveling with conventional means."
"But how is that possible?" I ask.
"By somehow contorting actual space to make it to where you need to go is not several light-years away from you, but a mere twenty or thirty klicks instead." He draws a curving line between the two smaller circles to signify a different route altogether, but not existing on the same plane at the same time. He even writes "False Space?" to confirm his perspective.
"Incredible," Knight comments. "They're bending reality to not just shorten the distance, but to make it to where it doesn't exist for them."
Faiyoh brings a finger to her lips as her eyes hone in on Cheq's board. "So that's how those CN-Gateways work. They set them up and fly right through, and suddenly you're on the opposite side of the galaxy, or in a completely different one."
Cheq puts his marker down. "My guess is not only are they sending small forces of troops through those gates but heavy artillery as well. It would be as simple as firing into the gate with Planet Thucara already targeted on the other side."
"This is giving my head a whirl," Titan says, "but this does explain how Angels are being spotted in the galaxy that seemingly came from nowhere. Something tells me that Beta-Ray wasn't just being a nuisance when they decided to attack Paxes at the outpost. They may have been hired as a distraction so they could launch the artillery strike on Kroyoza."
I stand in the middle of everyone. "So now we have an idea of how they're zipping around so quickly and remain undetected, but what do we do with this information?"
Titan gets up and puffs his chest out. "Why, we use it against them of course! Faiyoh, is there any way we could use these...CN-Gateways?"
She looks up into the ceiling and taps her foot. "I only followed after them, I didn't activate the gate myself. What I do know is that the gate won't open for my ship, I have to be a tag along. That means the Angel's fighter jets have a program that lets them use it."
"No doubt encrypted," Cheq comments.
Titan walks to him and crouches slightly to level their eye contact. "Cheq, do you think you could break that encryption if we delivered the chip to you?"
His eyes light up. "I'd spend days without sleep studying an Angel Vanguard piece of technology, there's no way I'd quit before finding an answer!"
"Wait," Knight says while crossing his arms, "you're about to suggest that we track down some stray Angels and try to capture them without damaging their ships."
Titan smiles. "How'd you guess?"
"I'm not comfortable with that plan. Angels aren't your typical pilot, they're quite the elite soldier. I'm not even that confident in taking one down with the intent to kill, much less handicap myself by trying to preserve their ship during the battle."
"I know it won't be easy, but it has to be done this way. Cheq, I need you to track down all sources of strange harmonics within the galaxy. One of those has to be a sudden appearance of a few Angel jets, we just have to get good at finding out which one it could be."
"I'm on it, boss," Cheq leaves for the navigation room.
"Knight," Titan says as he faces his most senior member, "you're the best at combat both on the ground and in the air. We're going to need you to teach a crash course on how to fight these elite soldiers."
"There's so much to teach in so little time. I'll put together a routine," Knight strides out and I see him head for the training room.
"And Nev, can you give us the room for a second. I want to... say thanks to Faiyoh before she leaves."
Faiyoh raises her eyebrows, Titan's smile turns sheepish, and I hit the door before anything else can be said.