"I want to hire your ship," said the white-haired gentleman as he wiped sweat from his brow.

 

Captain Pinnack shook hands with the nervous old guy and said, "It's an honor to meet you, Senator Lotis. She's a beaut, isn't she?" Pinnack motioned expansively at the dilapidated intersystem ferry with the name Star Sprinter emblazoned on its hull.

 

"Hmph," said the senator. "Is she fast?"

 

Pinnack smiled proudly and said, "Faster'n God's own speed limit. She'll carry three-hundred souls. How many ya got?"

 

"Just my family and me. Six of us, altogether."

 

The captain shook his head in confusion. "What? You want to hire the whole ship for just six people? You know how much it costs to hire me and my ship?"

 

"I'll pay you," Lotis replied, "twice your normal rate."

 

"Uh, okay sure. Where are you going?"

 

The senator pulled a handscreen from his vest pocket and read, "The Ross system. There's a new colony there, isn't there?"

 

"Yea, I heard of that. Ross 128 b I think it is. Supposed to be a nice place."

 

"Can you take us there? Like, tomorrow?"

 

"Whoa, Senator! I'll need some time to close up shop here myself. You know how these things work. I won't be coming back here for a long, long time. At least by Earth clocks."

 

"I need to get there as fast as possible. There are people here on Earth who want to hurt us."

 

That last part worried Pinnack. "Look, I don't want any trouble, sir. But I can have you wherever you're going lickety-split. You'll go to sleep and wake up when the trip's over. It'll feel like just a short nap."

 

"I know how this works!" the senator screamed. Then, in a calmer voice, he continued, "I'm not talking about perceived time of flight. I need to get there in fifteen years or less, by the ship's clock. These men, they'll follow me, no matter where I go or how far away. I've taken something from them. Something important to them."

 

Pinnack laughed nervously and explained, "That's not the way it works, Senator. Ross is something like eleven or twelve light-years from here. We'll need to plot a course with at least three or four hops in it. It'll take twenty-five years ship's time to get there."

 

"That won't do," the Senator shook his head. "Can we not just fly straight to the colony planet? I need the extra time, Captain, to buy weapons and prepare my defense before they arrive there to kill me and my family."

 

"Near-light-speed navigation is not as accurate as you see in the movies, Senator Lotis. It turns out, the uncertainty principle of Werner Heisenberg applies both to very small things like electrons, and very large ones like galaxies and solar systems. In both cases, the universe allows us to know where we're going or how fast we're going there, but not both at the same time - at least not with any accuracy.

 

"The speed of light isn't a constant. It's merely the fastest we can go while knowing anything at all about where we might end up. Which is why my job as an astronavigator is so difficult, and why I get paid the big bucks."

 

The senator stopped listening about halfway through Pinnack's soliloquy, but he forced himself to wait for the captain to finish. Then he said, "I'll pay ten times your normal fare."

 

Captain Pinnack continued trying to talk the twitchy senator out of his crazy plan to outrun the bad guys, but in his head he was already plotting quantum probability spheres and waypoints that had some chance of reaching Ross 128 b in only two hops.

 

* * *

 

Colonel Baylor was the first to step off the troop carrier and onto the surface of the alien planet. A thousand more soldiers began filing off the ship behind him. The temperature was pleasant here and the air breathable. The sun was dimmer than Sol and much closer to the planet. It would take some getting used to, but they had plenty of time for that later. Their first, and only, mission here was to find the senator, the traitor, and execute him according to the law.

 

"Are we certain he came here?" Baylor asked his adjutant.

 

"Yes, sir. We're sure of it."

 

"Then find him," the colonel said gruffly.

 

That night, as they camped under strange constellations and ate rations, the adjutant returned to say they had found something on the far side of the rolling hills to the east.

 

"Is it him?" asked the colonel.

 

"We're not sure, sir. But the transponder signal looks promising."

 

"Assemble the men. We'll march at dawn."

 

The next morning as the alien red dwarf rose, Colonel Baylor led his battalion through a pass in the hills, fully expecting to be met by an enemy army at least as big as his and probably dug in by now. To his surprise, he found only the rusty wreckage of an intersystem ferry embedded and mostly buried in the sand. The faded letters, Star Sprin… were still visible on its hull.

 

"It looks like a navigation error, sir," said the adjutant. "By the time they dropped into impulse drive, they were already too close to the planet to stop."

 

"Terrible way to go," Baylor commented. "But the old bastard deserved it."