Compete

by Vera Nazarian

  “Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know, I guess—thinking out loud.”

  How long does it take to die in space? Will it be oxygen depletion? Dehydration? Starvation? Sickening thoughts start intruding.

  The worst part is, I have no real idea of how well Atlantean shuttles handle life support. We never got around to studying it in detail, but from what I vaguely recall, the small personal flyer shuttle’s system gives us about a month of resources, if we conserve everything.

  Great, I think, I get to die slowly, over a month, with Hugo Moreno going crazy next to me.

  More minutes pass. Hugo cusses constantly, both in English and Spanish—I think it helps him to relieve tension, and to be honest I don’t really blame him.

  “Okay,” he mutters, partly to himself. “What, what, what? What does this next instruction say? What does it mean, ‘Sing the exact frequency to match quantum resonance until shuttle acknowledges the match and is keyed. Synch the shuttle to the QS field.’ What the hell is that? Maybe we can start singing some random crap?”

  I frown. “I guess we could.”

  So for the next minute Hugo sets the resonance scanners to “Record” mode and tries keying the shuttle with various note sequences. His voice is shaky and breathless, so mostly the resonance scanners just respond with: “Sequence unrecognized. Repeat sequence.”

  “Why don’t you try it?” he says at last.

  And I do. I sing a few sequences in a much better tone and on pitch. However all I get is this from the scanners: “Sequence recorded.”

  “Now what?” Hugo glances from me to the Emergency Protocol list.

  “I have no idea!” I exclaim. “I don’t even know what we’re doing now, this is bull!”

  “Yeah, well,” he yells back at me. “Why didn’t the Goldilocks idiots just keep an audio recording of the Quantum Stream frequency on file, here in their goddamn shuttle computers? So that we wouldn’t have to go hunting for it on the sonar?”

  My mouth drops. “Because, idiot,” I say, “it doesn’t exist in real time! Hello! Weren’t you listening in class all these weeks? It’s not a real frequency, it’s a quantum one, and it’s in constant flux and in a state of probability! The Quantum Stream is a probability field, not a discrete thing you can record, and if we could just bottle it up so easily, there wouldn’t be a problem now, would there be?”

  Hugo frowns like a thundercloud at me.

  “The reason we have to go chasing the field trace out there is because the QS frequency is modulating! It changes every damn moment! We can only hope to capture it quickly enough in real time and synch to it before it changes again!”

  “Yeah, well, that’s crazy and impossible!”

  “Exactly!” I yell. “That’s why the QSBEP-1 Emergency Protocol almost never works! It’s more luck than anything!”

  “Well, screw this—this—” And again Hugo goes off into curses.

  I put my head down and bump it against my console. I rub my temples, pull at my ponytail, yank it hard, and look up again periodically.

  There has to be something, I think. Maybe I can beat it into my stupid brain.

  Something.

  Minutes turn into half an hour.

  Think, Gwen, think!

  Out of nothing else to do, I sit up again, and make the resonance scanners play back the last known recorded QS field frequency before we Breached the Stream and lost the acoustic resonance charge on the shuttle. A series of five tones sound in a chord progression.

  Hugo turns to me and watches dully. “What is it? What are you doing?”

  “Playing back the last known QS field frequency before we Breached.”

  “Can we use it?”

  “No. It’s useless. It’s no longer the real time frequency of the Stream.”

  Hugo slams his fist on his console.

  “You know what?” I say. “Let’s just go ahead and pretend this is the correct frequency. So I am going to key the shuttle to it. Why not, right?”

  “Whatever,” he mumbles in despair. “Yeah, do it. . . .”

  So I sing the sequence, and the resonance scanners pick it up, and the shuttle hull responds, coming alive with golden lights along the etchings.

  “Hey,” I say with false bravado. “At least we’re not dead in the water. We can pretend we’re going somewhere! Yay!”

  And then I muse. “Okay, what are the next steps in the Emergency Protocol?”

  Hugo reads out loud: “Plot the signal coordinates onto the Navigation Grid. . . . Set new course and pursue the QS field immediately.”

  Why the hell not? I think. And I call up the Yellow Grid, then the Fleet sub-menu, and scroll down to find ICS-2.

  I tap it, and the Destination circle appears on the Navigation Grid next to our shuttle. Since at present it’s not to be found anywhere in real space, the circle designating the ark-ship just floats there, bumping our shuttle circle—adjacent to us, as though the Grid doesn’t know what to do with it or where to plot it.

  “There you are, cute little itty-bitty ark-ship,” I mutter with black humor. And I poke the hologram with my finger to select the Destination.

  And now, all that’s left is to sing the major sequence to activate the Destination.

  “I wish . . .” I mutter. “I wish I could just call you to me, like a hoverboard. Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

  Hugo frowns at me and rolls his eyes.

  Yeah, right. I should roll my own eyes at myself, right about now.

  And then a silly thought from an old physics class comes to me. It’s the notion of quantum entanglement.

  Basically, it’s the idea that two particles can be “entangled” or bound together on a quantum level in some creepy, spooky, mysterious way, and made to share common properties. When separated by any distance, they remain weirdly connected. Whatever you do to one of them has a direct effect on the other, even if it’s billions of miles away.

  Or something like that.

  “Little ark ship,” I say. “This is creepy and insane. But I am going to call you to me.”

  I set the resonance scanners to “Broadcast” mode.

  And then I take a deep breath, and think about the Fleet and the ark-ships, and all the people on them, flying through space in formation, bound together in the Quantum Stream, somewhere out there, encased in their personal quantum bubble, out of phase with the rest of the universe.

  Just a little while ago, I was a part of all that, I was one of you. . . .

  Entangled together.

  I sing the keying sequence in a clear, clean, compelling power voice of perfect focused intensity.

  I call the Quantum Stream itself to me.

  The resonance scanners broadcast my voice into the vast empty recesses of the cosmos.

  I sing and sing, over and over again, desperate and strangely serene, while Hugo watches me, mesmerized. . . .

  And then, as we stare outside the window at the black velvet of space and the flood of stars in the grand nebula, something changes.

  Something out there begins to blur.

  The universe is dissolving before our very eyes, as if a cosmic whirlwind has passed and stirred up the stars and blended them . . . and everything is suddenly off-black, a static wall of grey.

  I’m not entirely sure what’s happening.

  “Oh God! Look! Look!” Hugo points at the viewport.

  Out there in the distance of a few hundred kilometers I see light specks of purple plasma, like a hive of speeding fireflies stretched out in a long linear formation. . . .

  “Holy crap! It’s the Fleet!” Hugo exclaims.

  I stop singing. “Go! Go!” I am crying now, while my head starts to pound.

  Hugo comes alive with a wild yell, then flips to the Red Grid and engages the Thrust.

  We blast forward like a bullet.

  Toward the Fleet.

  We fly up to the exterior formation column #3, and merge into the 5-kilometer space between ships. The all-companying grey f
ield that is the Quantum Steam seems to come with us—indeed, to be all around us—and at no point does it seem like we entered or passed the Boundary zone back into the QS space.

  It’s as if we’ve been inside a mini-bubble of the QS field all along.

  That makes no sense.

  But right now I don’t give a damn. And neither does Hugo.

  We fly the shuttle like crazy, merging into the racing lane—it appears to be significantly free of traffic at this point.

  I suppose the Race is over by now. After all, we were gone for over half an hour. . . . In fact, our Race Clock readout shows 67:06. Oh, well.

  We arrive at ICS-2, enter the shuttle bay launch tunnel past shields of plasma, and then emerge inside and park on the platform that’s now filled with other stationary shuttles. The depot is nearly empty of people.

  Hugo is making gleeful chuckling noises, and he and I grin widely at one another as we turn off the shuttle. Right now, all we’re feeling is crazy relief.

  “We did it! We effing did it, Gwen!” he exclaims, as we climb out and down the ladder.

  Outside, several Atlantean guards wait for us, and there’s Instructor Mithrat Okoi, standing at the platform, pale and grim and unyielding.

  He turns directly at us.

  “Cadets, attention!”

  Both Hugo and I salute. Yeah, I know, I’m not a Cadet, but everyone always forgets. What can I do?

  “The Quantum Stream Race is over! You are late, and you’ve just earned yourselves a disgraceful Score that puts you in last place! Where have you been, Cadet Moreno, Cadet Lark?” Instructor Okoi roars at us.

  We stand, our gleeful euphoria fading.

  “We were—not sure, sir!” Hugo says quietly. And he glances at me.

  I take a deep breath and speak haltingly. “We were outside the Quantum Stream, sir. Somewhere in interstellar space . . . for the last half hour, sir. We got lucky somehow. And—and we got back inside.”

  “You what?” Now Mithrat Okoi is staring at us hard, and his brow is furrowed in a frown.

  Hugo and I stand stiffly, trying not to look directly at him.

  “Are you saying you Breached and you managed to return somehow?” There is anger and disbelief in the Instructor’s tone. “Impossible! How did you get back?”

  “We—” I begin. “Okay, there was just interstellar space and no QS field trace, even though we kept listening for it. So we just tried a bunch of different things—”

  “And nothing was working,” Hugo adds. “Until I told her to sing a frequency—what was it, oh yeah, the last recorded QS field frequency that the resonance scanners had saved.”

  I ignore the blatant lie that Hugo just told—about him telling me to sing it when it was my idea all along—and continue. “I keyed the shuttle to the last recorded frequency, sir. But—”

  “But what?”

  “It didn’t seem to make any difference. What I tried next however, might have been the real solution—”

  Instructor Okoi cuts me off to check his handheld gadget that starts buzzing. “Enough—save your explanations,” he says to us, looking up after a moment. “Command Pilot Kassiopei informs me that you are to go directly to his office—both of you—right now! Go!”

  We salute again, then turn and head at a run for the shuttle bay exit.

  We arrive at the CCO, panting for breath, and terrified, yet strangely upbeat. The guards allow us inside, and as we enter the office, there’s the CP. . . .

  Aeson Kassiopei is pacing near his desk. My heart immediately lurches wildly at the sight of him. What I feel in that moment is indescribable—joy, relief, madness. . . . Oh, how I want to rush at him and hug him, because I thought I’d never see him again—

  The moment he sees us however, he whirls around and stops.

  My God. His expression is terrifying. His gaze—it has the impact of a thunderstorm and it buries us with furious intensity.

  “Moreno and Lark! Where have you been?” The words come down like hammer blows. He is not using a power voice but he might as well be.

  I cringe, and Hugo cringes also.

  All my crazy happy feelings at the sight of Kassiopei—they have been obliterated and replaced with fear. My breath has been knocked out of me.

  But I force myself to look up and meet his gaze. “I am very sorry, Command Pilot,” I say. “We were making our final turn in the Race when we Breached out of the Quantum Stream. And then we somehow got back in.”

  “You certainly did.”

  Aeson Kassiopei is looking at me—only me alone, ignoring Hugo completely—and together with boiling fury there is something haunting and primal in his eyes.

  My pulse starts pounding again.

  A moment of silence.

  “Your shuttle,” Kassiopei says. “It disappeared completely off the Fleet Grid. Missing for forty-nine minutes.”

  “Yes, that would be the time we were out there in interstellar space . . .” Hugo says carefully.

  I nod.

  “And then,” the Command Pilot continues, glancing at Hugo briefly but returning all his attention to me, “and then ICS-2 Shuttle #72 miraculously reappeared.”

  “Yes . . .” I say softly.

  Aeson Kassiopei frowns at me. I can tell his breathing is strangely elevated as he holds himself in check . . . just barely.

  “Here’s the thing,” he says. “In the exact moment when shuttle #72 reappeared on the Grid, the global QS sensors registered a sharp irregular change in the frequency of the entire Quantum Stream. But that is not all—the new QS field frequency was the same as that of your incoming shuttle.”

  “So . . . what does that mean?” Hugo mutters.

  “It means—” The CP pauses, while his gaze bores into me, again ignoring Hugo. And then he says softly: “What happened was impossible—a fluke. Consider yourselves lucky to be alive.”

  I stare. Hugo stares.

  Aeson Kassiopei looks away from us and begins to pace. “Cadet Moreno,” he says. “You are dismissed. Return to your barracks. Your QS Race Score is 23 out of a possible 100, which puts both of you in the dismal #624 last place for this ship. Be glad you are alive.”

  “Thank you, Command Pilot,” Hugo says. “I am. . . .”

  And he salutes, gives me a fleeting nervous glance, and exits the office.

  I remain alone with Aeson Kassiopei.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  For a few seconds neither one of us says anything. And then Kassiopei goes to his desk and sits down in his chair. He leans back and puts his hands behind his head.

  “Sit down, Lark. We need to talk.”

  I approach his desk stiffly and take one of the visitor chairs. I sit motionless, watching the level of his chin, because right this moment I find it very hard to meet his eyes. Because again, the feelings inside me are churning . . . such an unstable mixture of joy, relief, terror. . . .

  “All right, what really happened out there?” he says in a hard voice, watching me. “Tell me everything.”

  And I do. I speak haltingly, trying to skip the parts where Hugo and I froze up so badly and lost valuable moments at the very beginning. When I’m done, I look up.

  Aeson’s expression in that moment is raw and terrifying. I see that he is now leaning forward, with his elbows resting on the desk, and one of his hands is clenched in a fist, pressing hard against the polished surface.

  “What you did,” he says. “It is not something that has ever been done by anyone who is not of Imperial Kassiopei blood.”

  I blink. “Oh. . . . What did I do exactly?”

  “You keyed the Quantum Stream to yourself.” His gaze sears me like fire. “It had nothing to do with the shuttle you were piloting. It was all you. You did not merge back into the Quantum Stream by matching its natural frequency. You did something that forced the Quantum Stream to match its frequency to yours!”

  “But—” Suddenly I am feeling breathless and faint. “How does that work? I thought you could only k
ey orichalcum objects?”

  Command Pilot Kassiopei exhales. “Orichalcum can be keyed because it has unusual quantum-level properties. It happens to be uniquely unstable at the quantum level, permanently. Orichalcum is a transitional metal, always in quantum flux, and for that reason it can be manipulated in unusual ways.”

  He pauses, runs his fingers slowly along the surface of his desk. “To acoustically levitate an object in regular 3D space, sound waves must bombard the object from three directions, surrounding it. Orichalcum, being in quantum flux, entangles itself with sound waves at a molecular level so that at any given moment its particles instead surround the sound. It ‘wraps’ itself against sound, creating the same effect. Instead of being surrounded by sound waves, it surrounds sound waves at the quantum level.”

  “That’s wild,” I whisper.

  “The reason I tell you this is because you need to understand that quantum level manipulation lies at the heart of everything—all our technology.” He never takes his gaze off me. “What I’ve just told you is something no other Earth scientist, no Earth human being knows. And the reason I tell you this is because your abilities are amazing—even for an Atlantean.”

  I breathe very slowly. “Wow. Thanks—I guess?”

  Aeson Kassiopei continues watching me, and after a time his face darkens. “I—” he says suddenly. “I didn’t know what to think in that moment when you were gone. That moment when your shuttle dropped off the Fleet Grid, was—”

  His words trail off.

  There’s silence.

  I meet his eyes.

  “In short—I am very glad you made it back,” he speaks at last, almost gruffly. No, that can’t be right. . . . Is he in some kind of discomfort? No!

  “I’m glad too.” And I allow myself a tiny little smile.

  But he immediately frowns, his expression hardening, as though slamming on a mask. “Now then, what happened today needs to remain a secret. There will be questions raised by the Commander, but we will not be disclosing details of the Quantum Stream anomaly to anyone else. The public will only know that you and Moreno managed to get back by normal means—you found the right frequency, matched it, keyed the shuttle to it, et cetera. In fact, do whatever it takes to convince your own Pilot partner that’s what happened, so that he also doesn’t talk in a way to raise suspicions and questions.”