by Dom Testa
“Thanks,” she said with a smile. A minute later she was alone in the hangar, and quickly made her way into the control room.
“Okay, Roc, I’m assuming you have plotted everything out?”
“Not only that,” the computer said, “I have put together a tour guide that points out some very interesting sights along your way, and put together a tasty little snack bag with your favorite treats. Lots of chocolate, of course.”
Despite the butterflies she felt, Triana had to laugh. “I wish. Tell me, I know how much you’re able to control our Spiders, but what kind of help can you give me with this pod?”
“Actually, more than you’d think. I’ve already linked up with the onboard guidance system, and should be able to get you within shouting distance of the wormhole. The final nudge will have to come from you, of course. With your piloting skills it shouldn’t be a problem. Besides, it’s not like you won’t have a visual guide to steer right into.”
Triana crossed her arms and leaned against the console of the control room. “I have to be honest, there’s something that has been on my mind since I first brought up this idea with you. Not once have I heard you say ‘don’t do it.’”
“And I’ll be honest with you,” Roc said. “If I told you that, would it make any difference?”
“Probably not.”
“Well, there you go.”
“But you’ll miss me, right?”
“Do I miss you when you go to sleep at night?”
Triana chuckled again. “Meaning that I’ll be back.”
“Meaning that you could very well be back yesterday, which freaks out even a sophisticated thinking machine like me. Of course, we don’t know anything about the creatures that you’re going to meet. They might want to keep you as a pet. What’s the matter, Tree? Are we feeling a bit needy right now?”
She stood up and looked through the glass into the hangar. “You’re right. Okay, if everything checks out, let’s get going.”
“Get out of here already.”
She grinned, and inwardly thanked Roy Orzini for instilling so much of himself into Galahad’s ornery computer. She was about to fling herself into the most frightening and bizarre experience that any human being had ever known, and Roc’s creator had programmed a talking computer that actually had her upbeat and laughing.
The walk from the control room to the pod reminded her that just a few hours earlier she had been in this hangar to mourn Galahad’s first death. It was not lost on her that she could easily be the second.
She climbed into the pod, secured the hatch, then made her way past the rectangular containment box that held the vulture, past the suspended animation cylinders, to the pilot’s seat. Strapping herself in, she established communication with Roc, and then assisted him in going through a preflight check of the pod’s systems. It differed from the controls of the Spider, but not so different that she couldn’t figure it out quickly. Ideally she would have spent a few hours training, but …
“Securing the bay and opening the outer door,” Roc said. Triana took her eyes off the instrument panel long enough to look out the forward window at the door sliding open before her. A torrent of starlight streamed in, and she felt her nerves ratchet upward.
“Power is at full standby,” Roc said. “Ready for a little ride?”
Triana settled back into her chair and stared at the brilliant palette of stars. “Let’s go.”
She watched the bay door approaching, slowly at first, then picking up speed. Then, in a flash, she was out.
She realized that she had been holding her breath, and suddenly gasped for air. “Calm,” she told herself. “Calm.” She focused on the readings flashing onto the display screens, most of which made sense; Roc would understand the rest.
“Closing the bay door, pressurizing the bay,” the computer said over the monitor. “Your power is at eighty-eight percent, everything functioning like it should. You know, one thing I didn’t consider until now is that you could curl up inside that big cylinder in there and go right to sleep until you pop out the other side of the wormhole.”
“You mean in case it hurts, or something?” Triana said. “No thanks, I intend to experience all of it. I am truly going where no human has ever gone before.” She chuckled and added, “The other day I told Lita and Channy that I needed to shake up my routine. I guess this qualifies.”
“Coming onto course now,” Roc said. “Power at ninety-six percent. Approximately seventy minutes until you hit the bull’s-eye.”
Triana stole another glance out at the stars. “Seventy minutes,” she thought, and again concentrated on her breathing.
* * *
Midday had come and gone. Gap spent a few minutes in his room, then almost an hour in Engineering, expecting the call from Triana at any time. At one o’clock he casually sauntered into the Dining Hall and immediately scanned the back tables, looking for the Council Leader. She wasn’t there.
He was reluctant to page her on the ship’s intercom system; if she was deep in thought about the EVA he didn’t want to pressure her or become a pain. It was the reason he avoided going to her room. There was nothing to be gained by appearing too eager.
But he was eager. He had scoured every bit of data they had on the wormhole, every bit of information that the ship’s computer had on wormhole theory, and he was ready to go. In his heart he knew that it would be safe, that the alien intelligence that had extended the invitation would know what stresses a human being could withstand. And the knowledge waiting on the other side would be …
Where was Triana? Was she anguishing over this decision this much? That didn’t seem like her. Triana took her responsibilities very seriously, but also had no problem making a decision quickly. It was one of the many traits that he admired about her.
He stepped off the lift into the Control Room, hoping to find her there. A half-dozen crew members went about their business, but Triana was not among them.
Finally, he placed a call to Lita. She had not seen Tree for a couple of hours. “You might try Bon up at the Farms,” Lita said before signing off.
Bon. No, that was a call that Gap was in no hurry to make.
He stood at his workstation and once again studied the data.
* * *
With just under ten minutes to go, Triana saw it. It was nothing like she expected.
For one thing, it didn’t look like a hole at all. It was a jagged tear, a black rip in the fabric of space, a painful wound. Dust swirled around it, painting the opening in a vivid framework, the way a child created a dark outline in a coloring book. It seemed alive, fluctuating, pulsing. Triana tried to place where she had seen something similar, and finally settled on the medical image she had seen of the human heart, the pulsating valves pumping the blood.
Small tremors passed through the pod, not nearly as violent as what accompanied the wormhole’s opening and closing. According to Roc, they were likely the winds of space-time that leaked out. The tear was smaller than she had expected, too. Of course, she reminded herself, it didn’t need to be large; it was merely a passageway. She could not drag her eyes away from it.
With less than three minutes remaining, she once again made a conscious effort to steady her breathing; she willed her pulse to slow.
What had Alexa called it? Her Zen place. Triana closed her eyes, and her thoughts tumbled out.
Her father, tucking her in at night when she was five, reading not one, but two books to her.
Her father, talking to her when he fell ill. His last days, when she was unable to communicate with him at all.
His death. Her transfer from Colorado to the Galahad training complex in California.
Dr. Zimmer.
The launch. The encounter with the mad stowaway. The narrow escape from death.
Saturn. Titan. The Cassini.
Gap. Bon. Her developing friendship and reliance on Lita.
The Kuiper Belt. The Cassini Code. Merit Simms, and the near mutiny of the
crew.
The vultures. Her confrontation with Channy. The wormholes.
Alexa’s death. The image of her carefully wrapped body disappearing through the bay door opening, spinning slightly as it rocketed into the cosmos.
Her father.
Bon.
The approaching wormhole.
Alexa’s childhood, her stepfather, her real father.
Dr. Zimmer.
The jagged rip in space …
Ripples in time …
Darkness.
“Thirty seconds,” she heard Roc say. She opened her eyes and drank in the spectacle as it closed in. She felt tears on her face, and realized that she had been crying for quite some time.
“Fifteen seconds,” Roc said.
She swallowed hard and watched the rip in space envelop the entire window. How could there be no light whatsoever in that forbidding space?
“Dad…” she managed to say as the pod penetrated the opening.
Suddenly, light.
She screamed.
29
Gap found Lita working at her desk in Sick House. She looked up and said, “Hey, what’s up? Did you find Tree?”
“No, I was hoping you’d heard something from her.”
Lita shrugged. “She’s probably either in her room, or up in the domes. She likes to walk up there and think.”
A vision appeared in Gap’s mind of Triana walking along the dirt paths of the domes … but she was not alone. He pushed the thought away.
Plopping into the chair across from her desk, he picked up a glass cube that Lita kept as a memento. It was filled with a mixture of sand and pebbles taken from the beach near her home in Veracruz, Mexico, a happy reminder of a joyous childhood. He turned it from side to side, watching the sand settle, then shift.
“I love this,” he said. “I should have put something like this together before I left home.”
“My mom did it,” Lita said, eyeing the cube as he rolled it from one hand to the other. “She gave it to me during my last trip home. You have no idea how much it comforts me when I get down.”
“And it’s fun to play with,” Gap said. He placed it back on her desk and rubbed a hand through his hair. “By the way, I didn’t get a chance to tell you what a great job you did this morning at the service. You probably hear this all the time, but your singing is beautiful. I know that … well, I know that Alexa would have really appreciated the song. It was perfect.”
Lita looked down at her desk with a flush of embarrassment on her face. “Thank you. I hope so.”
He tapped a finger on his leg nervously, unsure of how much further to go with the discussion. “I didn’t know Alexa nearly as well as you,” he said. “But I know how close you were, and … well, I’m sorry again for what happened.”
She offered a soft smile. “You know what I miss about her already? Her devious sense of humor. She really lightened things up around here.”
Gap laughed. “How about the time you guys called me when the heating system went down? Alexa was the one firing most of those shots!”
Lita grinned. “I remember. You missed her best material after you shut off the intercom.”
After a few moments their laughter faded, and an uneasy silence spread between them. Gap picked up the cube again, then put it back down.
“Listen, there’s something I want to ask—”
He was suddenly knocked out of his chair as the ship lurched. He grabbed at the desk as he fell, breaking his fall slightly, and then his gymnastics instincts took over as he rolled onto the floor. A slight shimmy of pain arced through his left shoulder.
Grimacing, he struggled to his knees. Lita had also been thrown from her chair, and lay in a heap a few feet away. Scrambling to her side, he braced her shoulders.
“Lita! Hey, are you okay?”
She groaned, then sat up. “I think so.” Rubbing her elbow, she said, “I don’t know how many more of those we can take. Can they give us a break here?”
An alarm raced through Gap’s mind. “Oh, no.”
“What is it?” Lita said.
He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he pushed himself to his feet and leaned across her desk. “Roc! I hope that wasn’t what I think it was. Not before we had a chance to launch!”
“I have specific instructions to give you at this point,” the computer said, with no trace of humor in his voice. “It will require that you gather the Council immediately in the Conference Room. We have a lot to talk about.”
Gap and Lita exchanged a look. “What’s going on?” Lita said.
Gap slumped back into the chair. “Oh, Tree,” he said, burying his face in his hands.
Quit yelling at me. You’re just taking your frustrations out on an innocent computer, when you know in your heart that there’s not one thing I could have said to Triana to stop her from going. It’s not that she’s stubborn, she’s just … Okay, she’s stubborn.
However, here’s something that you should probably consider: if this wormhole does indeed deposit her into the waiting arms of an advanced alien civilization, can you think of a better representative from Galahad?
See? We’ve come full circle, back to the brain versus the mind. I understand where your emotions are coming from, but admit it: your intellect is telling you that she was the one who had to go.
Which leads to some extremely important questions. First, what in the world is going to happen to Triana? Have we seen the last of her? And if she does somehow return, will she still be the same Tree?
Then there’s the issue of Galahad’s Council. With this wildly unexpected turn of events, who takes charge? I can’t believe that Dr. Zimmer would have planned on his Council Leader jumping into a borrowed space pod and plunging through a wormhole into either (a) another part of our galaxy, or (b) some parallel universe. Well, maybe he did, but probably not likely. Does Gap automatically assume the reins? Lita? Certainly it couldn’t be Bon … or could it?
Or maybe someone not currently on the Council would like to throw his or her hat into the ring.
And besides, there’s still a lot of space out there. If it’s been this heart-stopping so far, what might be lurking beyond the next dust cloud?
Before you get too worked up, try to remember that our intrepid young star travelers still have their intellect, their courage, their training, and me. There, feel better?
One thing that troubles me is that Bon now has complete and total access to the Cassini, whenever he feels like it. Is that a good thing? Is he the type to heed Triana’s warnings, or is the pull from Titan’s masters just too strong?
I recommend that you make plans to join me for the next dizzying adventure. If you just can’t wait, find the nearest wormhole and take a shortcut.
Excerpt from
Cosmic Storm
by Dom Testa
Available in October 2011 from Tor Teen
It was actual paper, something that was a rarity on the ship. It measured, in inches, approximately six by nine, but had been folded twice into a compact rectangle. One word—the name Gap—was scrawled along the outside of the paper, in a distinctive style that could have come from only one person aboard Galahad. The loop on the final letter was not entirely closed, which made it more than an “r” but just short of a “p”; a casual reader would assume that the writer was in a hurry.
Gap Lee knew that it was simply the way Triana Martell wrote. It wasn’t so much impatience on her part, but a conservation of energy. Her version of the letter “b” suffered the same fate, giving the impression of an extended “h.” It took some getting used to, but eventually Gap was able to read the scribbles without stumbling too much.
And, because he had scoured this particular note at least twenty times, it was now practically memorized anyway.
He looked at it again, this time under the tight beam of the desk lamp. It was just after midnight, and the rest of the room was dark. His roommate, Daniil, lay motionless in his bed across the room, a very faint
snore seeping out from beneath the pillow that covered his head. With a full crew meeting only eight hours away, and having chalked up perhaps a total of six hours of sleep over the past two days, Gap knew that he should be tucked into his own bed. Yet while his eyelids felt heavy, his brain would not shut down.
He exhaled a long, slow breath. How just like Triana to forgo sending an e-mail and instead to scratch out her explanation to Gap by hand. She journaled, like many of the crew members on Galahad, but was the only one who did so the old-fashioned way, in a notebook rather than on her workpad. This particular note had been ripped from the binding of a notebook, its rough edges adding a touch that Gap could only describe as personal.
He found that he appreciated the intimate feel, while he detested the message itself. The opening line alone was enough to cause him angst.
Gap, I know that my decision will likely anger you and the other Council members, but in my opinion there was no time for debate, especially one that would more than likely end in a stalemate.
Of course he was angry. Triana had made one of her “executive decisions” again, a snap judgment that might have proved fatal. The rest of the ship’s ruling body, the Council, had expressed a variety of emotions, ranging from disbelief to despair; if they were angry, it wasn’t bubbling to the surface yet.
Now, sitting in the dark and staring at the note, Gap pushed aside his personal feelings—feelings that were mostly confused anyway—and tried to focus on the upcoming meeting. More than two hundred crew members were going to be on edge, alarmed that the ship’s Council Leader had plunged into a wormhole, nervous that there was little to no information about whether she could even survive the experience. They were desperate for direction; it would be his job to calm them, assure them, and deliver answers.
It was simply a matter of coming up with those answers in the next few hours.
He stood and stretched, casting a quick glance at Daniil, who mumbled something in his sleep and turned to face the wall. Gap leaned over his desk and moved Triana’s note into the small circle of light. His eyes darted through the message one more time, then he folded it back into its original shape. He snapped off the light and stumbled to his bed. Draping one arm over his eyes, he tried to block everything from his mind and settle into a relaxed state. Sleep was the most important thing at the moment, and he was sure that he was the only Council member still awake at this time of the night.