“Wait, this ship doesn’t have a kinetic sensor?” I cried.
“It’s a simple transport vessel. Of course it doesn’t have a kinetic sensor.”
“What is a kinetic sensor?” Mimic asked, head turned towards me curiously. To give her credit, she seemed completely calm about the situation, which was more than I could say about myself. “And why are we saying it so much?”
“It’s a mechanism that’s used for space navigation that involves sailing through large amounts of debris or other possible collisions. Very useful for a mining vessel to have.”
“But not so much for a tiny transport ship.”
“Don’t worry,” Gonzales said, somewhere between sarcasm and blind optimism. “I’ve got this in the bag.”
“What bag?”
“I just— You know what? Never mind. Just hold on!”
I complied, and just in time. Gonzales swooped upwards in a tight circle, giving me a brief feeling of weightlessness, before she slammed downward and to the side.
Large rocks appeared across the windshield, dotting space like little brown flecks that were rapidly becoming bigger. I couldn’t even count half of them before we were past them, more green bolts shooting past us as we delved into the thick of it.
My thoughts couldn’t quite process all the dips, dives, turns and tumbles Gonzales took us through in our wild escape. I didn’t even know how she was managing. Occasionally, we scraped against the side of one of the floating space rocks, causing us to ricochet this way and that, but no one said anything when we did. We were all waiting with bated breath, seeing if we would survive the absolutely impossible.
My fingers wrapped through Mimi’s as we hurtled through. The blasts of the mining ship grew less wide and searing as we gained distance, and as the seconds passed, a tiny sliver of hope began to form in me. Maybe we would make it. Maybe we weren’t about to be forcibly boarded and executed in the name of science.
“There it is!” Ciangi yelled, breaking the tense silence. “One click on your two o’clock! Punch it!”
I looked in the direction of her shaking finger, trying to see what she was pointing out. If I squinted, I could almost make out an area of space that seemed to warp and buckle under its own weight, as if the very fabric of reality itself was being ironed into neat little pleats.
“Here goes nothing!”
Gonzales did indeed ‘punch it’ and we went hurtling forward through the lip of the void.
For a moment, it seemed as if the entire universe halted, just hanging in the balance like someone had pressed pause on a net-flick. And then, just as suddenly as it had halted, everything sprang back into motion.
Stars, planets, and bursts of colors spun by us as we sped through the cosmos. It was almost as if we were caught in some sort of interdimensional slipstream as we rushed through the folds of the wormhole.
I looked over to Mimic, and her features seemed to blur and extend in an impossible fashion behind her, like I was seeing several dozen after-images all stacked on top of each other. Although maybe that was just from the violent rattling of my head from the ship withstanding the force from traveling to…wherever it was we were traveling to.
“I think I see the ending!”
It took all of my effort to turn my head forward and look back out the nav-window. Sure enough, I could see the kaleidoscopic myriad of colors cut off, leaving the cold, dark voice of space beyond the circle. I never thought I would be so happy to see that particular darkness, and yet I was immensely relieved.
“Now, let’s see if we can survive exiting through the event horizon.”
Okay, maybe not immensely relieved.
The rattling grew worse as we approached the circle that was our ticket back to reality. Maybe my brain was going to end up as pea soup before we made it to safety.
Teeth clenched together, knuckles white as I gripped the armrest of my chair, and heart safely lodged in my throat, I held on for dear life as we hurtled forward. I couldn’t tell how much was Gonzales pouring all she could into the engines, and how much was the wormhole forcibly vomiting us forward.
Then, just when I was sure I was going to lose it, we shot out of the other end and into space. A cheer erupted from the others, but I could only breathe raggedly as exhaustion overtook me.
“I can’t believe that worked,” Gonzales said, sagging in her seat like someone had let all the air out of her.
“If you did not believe that it would work, then why did you say that you had it in this bag of which you speak?”
“False bravado,” the engineer/pilot answered honestly, not bothering to lift her head from where it was resting on her arms. “I’m full of it.”
“Amongst other things.” Ciangi remarked, patting the darker woman on her back. “You did good, especially for a weapons engineer.”
“What do you mean especially for a weapons engineer?”
“I mean, we all know the scope for that field of research is much narrower than most of mechanical or nuclear engineering.”
“Just when I think you might have pulled that stick out of your—”
I sighed and looked to Bahn. I didn’t have the energy for their semi-playful, semi-spiteful banter. “So, where are we?” I asked him, finally unbuckling myself. I could feel bruises starting to form on my shoulders where the straps had been and knew I would certainly regret those marks the next day.
Bahn didn’t answer, instead crossing over to regard the screens of the nav-station that Ciangi had abandoned to bicker with Gonzales. I watched as he looked from one to the other, and then the other, until he finished examining all of them and returned right back to the first screen.
“Well?”
“We are not anywhere.”
“What do you mean, we’re not anywhere?” Gonzales said, breaking away from her conversation with the other engineer to crane her neck in our direction. “I see stars. I see moons. We’ve gotta be somewhere.”
“Well, if you’re going to argue semantics, then yes, we’re somewhere. The issue is, this somewhere is not anywhere on our maps.”
“What? That’s impossible!”
“And so is sailing through the eye of an unexplored, unregulated wormhole in a transport vessel, and yet here we are.”
“So, what?” Ciangi asked. “We’re just lost in sp—”
“Don’t finish that,” I said, cutting her off. “Let’s not jump to conclusions. Maybe we’re just in a really obscure system that’s buried in the database.”
“Perhaps. Let me search now.” The taller of the coin twins quickly punched in a code and started what I recognized was a coordinate search. I had seen one run before back during my very first job when a virus had infected the autopilot and caused the ship to fly to a paradise-resort planet without the proper authorization. We had thought that we were lost at first then too, but had quickly discovered the error.
Maybe this situation would be solved just as easily.
Several more moments passed before Bahn finally sighed and sat down.
“Nothing,” he said, gesturing at the array in disappointment. “Not a single map, constellation match or even similar system. Wherever we are, no one has ever been here before.”
“So, you’re saying that we somehow shot to a part of space that is completely undiscovered?”
“Looks like it.”
I sat back into my chair, my legs growing weak in awe. Although humans had only had long distance space travel for a little over a hundred years, our telescopes, satellites and drones had been busy mapping the known universe for nearly five hundred. We had charted out lightyear after lightyear of space, even ones we wouldn’t explore for another one hundred years.
And yet…here we were. Someplace we couldn’t possibly be.
“Higgens?” Mimic asked quietly, her small, delicate fingers resting on my arm once more.