Kill by Numbers: In the Wake of the Templars Book Two by Loren Rhoads

fields, jumping into suns. Then they accused workers of sabotage. Mellix interviewed a whistle-blower, a Shtrell engineer who was assassinated shortly after they spoke. Mellix worked through the documents the guy smuggled out—and they point to a flaw in the drive’s design,” Coni finished.
    The four of them gazed at Raena as if they expected her to piece it together on her own.
    She struggled to catch up. “How many ships are affected? If it’s only ships built in the last five years …”
    Vezali corrected her. “A lot of older ships have been upgraded. A lot . Maybe most.”
    “This news is going to seriously disrupt interstellar travel,” Mykah said. “It will halt tourism, trade, shipments of food and medicine, relief efforts …”
    “Everyone is going to be afraid to leave wherever they find themselves stranded right now,” Coni said. “The whole galaxy is suddenly full of refugees, until they can find a ship with pre-tesseract technology on which to travel.”
    Raena sank onto the bench next to Vezali, who shifted her tentacles invitingly to make room. The galaxy will grind to a halt, she finally understood. “Is he sure?”
    “Mellix is the most trusted journalist in the galaxy,” Mykah said. No one contradicted his hyperbole. “He wouldn’t have announced it unless he was absolutely certain.”
    “We were about to watch the evidence,” Vezali said. “We thought you would want to see it, too.”
    “Yes,” Raena said, touched to be thought of when they were all obviously so stunned. “Thank you. But first, before you start— we are okay, right? We’re not suddenly going to get trapped in tesseract space?”
    “We’re fine,” Haoun said. “We haven’t been able to afford to upgrade our drive yet.”
    Vezali nodded her eyestalk. “The Veracity still has its original Earther drive. I’ve been hoping we could replace it, but updating the living spaces and media capabilities took precedence over the engine, for the time being.”
    “Thank the stars,” Coni said.
    Mykah jumped up to rummage around in the galley. Everyone watched him silently, puzzled by his behavior. He returned with a bottle of green on a tray with five glasses. “I get the feeling we’ll want a drink to absorb this news.”
    “What about the gate system?” Raena asked suddenly. She didn’t understand exactly how they worked, but the gates were Templar tech for the masses. When the Templars controlled galactic trade twenty years ago, the gates provided checkpoints where the Templar could track who was moving what around their galaxy. Although several different FTL drives existed, most people used to travel through the gates.
    “The gates don’t go everywhere you might want to,” Haoun explained.
    “And a lot of the new tesseract ships are too big to go through the gates,” Vezali explained. “Until the technology improves to allow bigger gates, or the big ships can be re-engineered to have their drives replaced with older tech, they’re grounded.”
    “How long is that going to take?” Raena asked. She envisioned ships lining up at shipyards, ready to be retrofitted.
    “Old-tech engines of every size are going to have to be recreated practically piece by piece in factories that have switched over to something else. And how are you going to get the new engines delivered to the ships, or get the ships to the factories where the engines are being made? It will take a while to sort it all out,” Haoun said.
    The evidence Mellix laid out was meticulous and complex. Raena didn’t understand a lot of it, but it boiled down to the fact that the tesseract drives were based around Templar technology. There was a lot of math—and experts to explain the math—for how the drives worked. The math also accounted for the times when the drives malfunctioned. Apparently, the Templar had workarounds. So far, the surviving galaxy had not discovered them.
    “Fucking Templar tech,” Haoun said, as he poured another round