It’s hard not to feel a little dizzy when staring out the viewport, like looking down toward the ground from an extreme height. Or into an endless black sea that will simply swallow us whole without remorse or leaving behind any sign of us.
“How’s our charge?” I ask Voller. If we get into trouble out this far, the only vessel in range and capable of picking up a distress call would, ironically enough, beus. If we were where we were supposed to be. Which we’re not.
“Yeah, yeah, we’re fine on that,” Voller says, waving a hand to dismiss my concern. “But can we get the hell out of here now?” He leans forward to peer upward through the viewport. “We are way outside of known territory and I would prefer not to get smacked by some piece of shit asteroid or whatever.”
Voller actually sounds a little uneasy for the first time since I’ve known him.
“Understood,” I say. “As soon as we clear the signal.”
He groans.
“So, Nysus, you’re saying that whatever we’re getting is from the ship itself,” I say.
“You got it,” Nysus says.
Voller scrubs his hands over his face. “There is no ship!”
Lourdes glares at him. “There’ssomething. It doesn’t have the echo a ghost signal would. And it should be right here. But I’m not getting any collision alerts. I can’t see anything through viewports or on the cameras.” Lourdes waves a hand toward the six monitors lined up on the sides of the small panes of thick glass at the front of the bridge.
She sounds frustrated. And understandably so. We have cameras outside to cover almost every conceivable angle of our ship and the surrounding area. But we don’t have scanners like the larger transport, military, and exploratory vessels. Short-range sniffers moving from one beacon to another just don’t need them. We make short hops in known space, between points that have been mapped, tracked, and visited for years, well outside the traffic lanes used by the big boys, so there’s little danger of running into something.
But out here? Everything is a little less certain, a little less defined. More like finding your way through the forest instead of following the well-paved, mag-lev highway.
So… now what?
“Turn on the stern-side working lights,” Kane says from behind me.
I glance back to find him leaning against the bulkhead, arms folded over his chest.
Voller gives him a scornful look. “Pretty sure I would’ve noticed if we flew past it, chief.”
Kane ignores him and steps up even with me. The open space in the center of the bridge is tight with the two of us. His arm brushes against mine. “And angle our current position to negative twenty-five percent.”
Suddenly I see where Kane is going with this. “Do it,” I say to Voller. We all have our blind spots. As born-and-raised planet-dwellers, we have one in particular.
Voller shakes his head but does as I ask, muttering under his breath the whole time.
“Put the rear-camera feeds up on all the screens, Lourdes,” I say.
The brilliant beams of light that we use to illuminate the beacons so we can work—tightening or replacing all those tiny screws—snap on. The monitors flash the sudden burst of brightness, blotting out the images on-screen in a wash of white until the camera adjusts and then…
“Holy shit,” Voller breathes.
On the monitor, a ship floats on the perpendicular to us, like a shiny metallic wedge of lemon in the dark tea of space.
“I don’t… how did you…” Lourdes gapes at the images. Admittedly, it does feel more like a magic trick.Look over there, and ta-da!
Kane grins at me. “There is no ‘down’ in space.” It’s a phrase that’s repeated, over and over again, in Verux commweb team training, to the point where it’s become a joke among the commweb teams. On a previous tour, one of my team members, Gerta, posted a sign in the head over the toilet—“There may be no ‘down’ in space, but there sure as hell is one in here. Aim, please.”
But the idea that something is just as likely below you as it is above is a hard concept to wrap your brain around for those of us who grew up with dirt beneath our feet and the sky overhead.
The urge to smile back at Kane is too strong to resist, and I give in. Just for a moment.
He holds my gaze for a second too long, and a feeling of connection zips through me, like a pleasant shock of electricity.
“Wait, wait,” Lourdes says, drawing our attention back to her. She squints at the monitors and then gets up to look over Voller’s shoulder, until he waves her away like a buzzy mosquito. “We’re still at least twenty kilometers away. That means…”
“It’s fucking huge,” Voller says flatly, not happy at being proven wrong on such a large scale, no doubt. “What do you expect us to do with this, TL? No way we can transport passengers from a ship that—”
