Descent
Page 8
The slightly less sick look on Trinn's features cleared up in time with mine and she grinned. We spent the next week on reaction thrusters, sneaking back up on the rift. When we were just fifty thousand kilometers away, we came to a full stop and Trinn jettisoned our final buoy and checked its telemetry. A satisfactory ping came from it. She shot me an apologetic smile, “Sorry Commander, with that buoy, this is as far as we go.” I nodded. We couldn't finish mapping the branch due to the appearance of this unexpected rift. I'm sure our engineer could fabricate another buoy, but using our limited shipboard resources for that would cause us to have to start back to Earth weeks earlier than we would like, cutting short our research.
I grinned at her, “Trinn, for the thousandth time, call me Jane! We aren't in the service nor the Contingent. We are just researchers here.”
She sighed in defeat with a mischievous smile. “Sorry, Jane. Old habits die hard.” Damn that smile of hers always made me want to bite my lower lip in want. Hey, it gets lonely on a six-year mission. Of course the five of us have coupled up from time to time, I was just the lucky one who caught Trinn's eye.
I smiled at the memory of interviewing her for the navigator position. To my embarrassment, she had noticed my distraction. Her intelligence and her exotic looks, coupled with her wry humor, had me already deciding I would pass on her even though she was immensely qualified for the position. I couldn't afford the distraction of my attraction to her.
She was in mid-sentence when she saw it, “I was the youngest officer to qualify for fringe mining with...” She had smirked sexily at that point and I almost lost it.
I tried to tell her that we would call her when we decided and she got me all tongue tied by arching an eyebrow in a cute manner. It came out something like, “You... I'll call... we... umm decision.”
She chuckled and said, “You can use my personal number any time you want, Commander.” Then she gave me a little wink. Good god! I was blushing down to my core; I mean, holy bejesus that office was getting hot! The little minx had taken control of the meeting and by the time it was over I had my new navigator.
I'm quite proud of myself, I had resisted her suggestive smile, the rich timbre of her voice, and her swaying hips for four entire weeks into our mission before she lured me into her bed. I'm pretty sure I'm not the commander in her quarters.
I grinned over at Trinn then moved back over to my station while she spun the Dauntless on her axis in our arresting roll and waited a few minutes to be sure the singularity we projected one hundred kilometers in front of us cleared the rift by a few hundred kilometers, then she “bumped” the ship. The action quickly decelerated us to a standstill in a few short hours. I could feel the familiar tugging sensation I got from the inertial dampener system fighting against our internal gravity.
I did a quick calculation of the vector I saw in my hazy vision and tried to figure out which one the new rift seemed to be on. The computer dutifully spit out the only nearby mass large enough to stress the fabric of space in that direction. Thalius Prime? But that was over six hundred light years away. Then it hit me. I blurted, “Bejesus Trinn! We found a nexus!” In the history of the Rift Contingent explorations, only two nexuses have been found. A nexus is where two different rift systems cross. Computer models show this rare event would generally happen at the weakest end of a rift as it crossed an area dominated by a rift between two closer masses.
Computer models only show them extending three hundred or possibly four hundred light years. So this was unprecedented. But I thought of Dr. Kevin Lee. He had been ridiculed when he suggested that rifts were actually expanding and new rifts were forming. But most of the researchers think that is preposterous because almost every computer model shows them contracting. Almost every one…
I shook my head, we still know so little about rifts. I raised an imaginary glass of champagne to Dr. Lee. With this discovery, he was going to be taken a little more seriously now.
I paused to think again, maybe this is why we were taken by surprise, and were almost smeared across space in a spectacular death. Was this a new rift just forming? It was so weak I had almost missed it, just like Trinn. Hmmm... I'll have to look at Dr. Lee's work a little more thoroughly when I get back to my quarters tonight.
Trinn and I looked at each other and smiled. We knew what this meant, since we had used our last location buoy, we would use the tail of this new rift branch for our experiments. This was good, as it was barely a hundred million kilometers wide. I said quietly to her, in case the universe was listening, “Let’s break out the toys.”
She was already on the line down to our engineer with that wild gleam of a gravity wave researcher in her eye. “Yo, Sparky, wind up the Honey Bee! We're going off ship at...” She shot me a questioning look and I held up three fingers. She finished, “Fifteen hundred hours.”
His booming voice replied over the speakers in his heavy Australian accent, “On it!” His voice was tinged with excitement as well.
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