She wouldn’t worry until that mumble morphed into something louder.
“Eighth time’s the charm, maybe.” Blake wriggled out of the console, clutching a scorched electronics module. He set the ruined part with the rejects already littering the deck. “Oh, hi, Dana. How’s Carlos doing?”
“Stable, is all I can tell you. Still out of it. How are things here?”
Squeezing past Antonio, Blake settled into the copilot’s seat. He shut the access panel with a shoe tip. “A good question. Marvin, try the main displays again, fore and aft views.”
The infirmary, where Li and Rikki continued to monitor Carlos’s condition, must be even more crowded. But the women’s voices—when they rose above the drone of the ventilation fans—were calm. The tone struck Dana as positive.
Unlike what came from the repaired holo projector. Ahead: countless unfamiliar stars. Aft: formless, foreboding darkness.
So much for her deduction upon hearing they had overslept. That Endeavour’s velocity had peaked early, for reasons unknown. That the ship had crawled, comparatively speaking, making the trek to Alpha Centauri at “only” a few percent of light speed. That if nothing else had gone according to plan, at least they knew where they were and where they were headed.
Wishful thinking, it seemed.
“All right, Marvin,” Dana said. “Explain what happened, why you kept us in cold sleep for so long, and where we are.”
“I cannot say where,” Marvin said. “Somewhere beyond my chart files.”
Dana frowned. “You must have some idea.”
“The cloud may be the Coalsack: that is the closest dark nebula to Sol system. If so, still relative to Sol system, we are on the nebula’s far side.”
“Past the Coalsack?” Blake said. “That’d be more than six hundred light-years!”
“That’s about right,” Antonio said. “I have bearings on several beacons.”
Who could have put beacons out here? Dana pinched the bridge of her nose. Behind her eyes, a killer headache waited to pounce. “What are you talking about, beacons?”
“Natural beacons. Pulsars.” Antonio kept prodding his datasheet as he spoke. “Some neutron stars emit regular RF…pulses. Each star pulses at a unique rate, related to…its rotation. With bearings on a few known RF sources, it’s just geometry to find our location.” He did something to the datasheet, then handed it to Dana. “Our coordinates.”
She felt like Marvin: off the charts. The coordinates were mere numbers, meaningless. They might just as well have read, like the periphery of some medieval chart, Beyond this point be monsters. “Why did you bring us here, Marvin?”
“The cosmic string brought us here,” Marvin said. “I did not have sensors to characterize it. I only know that it pulled us in. It required the DED and the fusion drive to achieve orbit.”
And what an odd orbit it must have been! Thin as a proton, Antonio had called it. The cosmic string was like a line in space, a line along which they had spiraled to exploit the locally faster light speed. She downed another swig of the hot coffee. It once more refused to warm her.
“But why remain along the string?” Dana asked. For forty-five years!
Antonio was only too happy to theorize.
The stuttering, hesitant torrent of words went over her head, and Dana realized she had let curiosity get the better of her. How they had gotten here, so far from home, no longer mattered. Because home was gone. What mattered was that they were here, escaped from the GRB.
And that having survived, she had a job to do. They all did.
She said, “Antonio, excuse me for a moment.” Because lost or not, dangers might lurk nearby. “Marvin, how fast are we traveling?”
“Relative to the interstellar medium, we have slowed to about one-tenth light speed. That is estimated from measured radiation levels. I waited to wake everyone until you could move about the ship in complete safety.”
The interstellar medium was as close as the galaxy came to a perfect vacuum. Dana asked, “Other than that, what’s our speed?”
“Relative to what?”
A damned good question, for which she had no answer. “What’s nearby?”
“Nothing is within radar range.”
Peering into the holos, she saw not a single star with a visible disk. Thermal readings from the hull confirmed that the ship was deep in the interstellar deep freeze.
“How far to the closest stars?” she asked.
“I don’t know which stars are closest,” the AI said.
“So where are we headed? Why are we under acceleration?”
Marvin said, “We came off the string at near-light speed. We are not so much going somewhere as we are slowing down. I don’t know where to go.”
And she did? “Antonio? Suggestions?”
“I’ll look into it.” Antonio straightened on the armrest. “About our flight along the string. I have some thoughts…what may have happened.”
“Good,” Dana said. “You and Marvin carry on while I check on Carlos.”
Blake nodded. “I’ll get you caught up later.”
His recap would be simpler and more succinct than anything she could hear by staying. “Great,” she said.
A few steps returned her to the infirmary.
Carlos was lying on the fold-down cot, beneath a thin white sheet. He had sensor patches on his forehead, wrists, and, to judge from wrinkles in the sheet, on his chest. A saline bag hung nearby, the IV tube coiling and swooping to his arm. To Dana’s untutored eye Carlos appeared jaundiced, but on the nearby scanner the EEG/EKG traces were steady and only scattered amber entries interrupted the many readouts in green. He was awake.
Dana asked, “How are you feeling?”
Carlos patted the sheet. “This wasn’t how I pictured first getting naked with you women.”
It was empty bravado, the bluster of a man terrified by a close call—and too macho to admit it. Behind Carlos, Li rolled her eyes.
Dana let the effrontery pass with, “It’s good that you’re well enough to make jokes.”
“Jokes?”
Dana turned to Li. “What can you tell me?”
Li shrugged. “Not much. Metabolites, neurotransmitters, platelet counts, a hundred proteins and trace-metal concentrations are off-kilter. But so are mine, if not as dramatically. So are Rikki’s. When I test the rest of you, and I will, I expect I’ll find much the same.
