*
Okay, so Fiori had been right and I completely wrong. I woke sometime later, stiff and aching, although my arm felt just fine and I could even move it. I was in my bed. I mean, the bed I had once slept in every night, here on the Lythion, in my room with the orchard and the gazebo, and the sound of birds chittering.
It was a soothing sound…until I remembered what had happened. “Lyssa!” I sat up. Then wished I hadn’t sat up so fast.
“Colonel?” Her voice was polite.
“Where is everyone?”
“Diner, boss.”
That was a touch of the old days. I nearly smiled. “I hope you printed new clothes for me. I got the last ones dirty.”
“In the printer, boss. I’ll have a steak waiting for you.” The speaker clicked softly, her way of letting us know she had cut the connection.
I was suddenly starving. I moved over to the printer, the stiffness easing just from a few simple movements, and scooped up the clothes folded and sitting in the printer maw.
I dressed quickly, for I still felt cold. That would linger until I’d recovered from the blood loss, I guessed. Food would help with that.
I found Dalton and Fiori and Lyssa in the diner as advised, but they weren’t eating. They sat around the end of the corner table, heads together.
As I passed one of the little table-and-benches sets, I paused, for the table had been lowered down to the height of the benches on either side, and a soft pad laid over all three. The boy, Ophir, was asleep with his thumb in his mouth, a warm blanket over him. He had been washed and dressed and tended. His hair was dark blond and curled in soft waves. His eyelashes were sooty fringes against his pale skin.
A tail thumped by my foot. I bent slowly and carefully, and spotted Darb beneath the bench, his golden eyes gleaming in the dim light.
“Good boy,” I told him, straightened and headed for the table and eased onto the bench next to Lyssa.
A small 3D screen emitter sat between them, and the rocky ball we had left behind floated in the middle of it.
The waitress put a dinner plate in front of me and handed me a steak knife and fork. The steak on the plate was huge. The pile of mushrooms beside it gleamed with butter and smelled of garlic. My mouth watered.
“Go head,” I told the three at the table. “I’ll catch up.”
My arm twinged as I wielded the knife, but not enough to stop me using it. The first mouthful of steak was ambrosial, and I didn’t give a damn that it was printed.
I ate steadily and tried to pick up the threads of the conversation between the three huddled around the 3D holo. They were laying out a timeline of what had happened on the ship.
It was a shock to me that we had spent barely thirty minutes in the Ige Ibas. My surprise told me how out of practice I was with field operations. My subconscious had extended my subjective experience of our time on the ship. Once, when I had been in active operations all the time, my sense of passing time had been cooler and more accurate.
Lyssa pushed her fingers beneath the barren planet and moved it to one side. That pulled the Ige Ibas into view. She used both hands, spreading them apart, to scale up the display. The Ige Ibas grew to about ten centimeters, which was barely a quarter of the screen dimensions.
She moved the Ige Ibas to one side as she had the planet, and the alien mothership slid into view. Unlike the Ige Ibas, the mother ship filled the tank.
I lowered my knife and fork, staring at the thing.
My first view of the ship had been front-on, and even now, the memory seemed foggy. I couldn’t sharpen the details in my mind.
I was sitting to one side of the screen tank and therefore looking at the flank of the ship and now the details were perfectly clear, and I could see why I’d thought my eyes had been failing me.
At the front of the ship, hanging in space like a curved curtain, was a pale, see-through…fabric? Metal netting? It looked misty and insubstantial. My first glimpse of the mother ship had been through this…whatever it was.
A second curtain hung behind the mothership. The curtains bracketed the ship, fore and aft. There didn’t seem to be anything holding them to the ship, either.
“What are they?” I asked, pointing at them. “Solar sails?”
“If they were, there would only be one of them at the front of the ship,” Dalton pointed out. “Having one at the back is useless.”
True.
“We think…I think it is some sort of FTL drive,” Lyssa said, crossing her arms and scowling at the tank.
I might have choked over that, but we’d seen our first aliens, today. An unknown type of FTL drive was nothing, after that. “Why do you think it’s an FTL drive?”
“Because those sheets are at the front and the back,” Lyssa replied. “They could be compressing space at the front, and then decompressing it at the back.”
“To what end?”
“To shift space around the ship. The ship could then go faster than light and not turn into light molecules itself.” She glanced at me. “The theory has been around since Terran times. No one ever figured out a practical application and we already had the array and wormholes, anyway.”
I thought about that, while taking another bite of steak and mushrooms. “Okay, let’s assume it’s their FTL drive. Only, when the ship was firing at us, the curtain thing wasn’t there.”
Lyssa moved her finger in the air in a clockwise circle, and the alien ship in the tank drifted forward. She had slowed down actual footage of the ship so we could analyze it. As I watched, the curtains in front and behind
