Desjani raised one eyebrow at him. “Warm welcome?”
“A lot of people on Old Earth were nice to us.”
“And a number of other people in this star system shot at us. I guess that also qualifies as a ‘warm welcome.’” She nodded toward her display. “It appears that Lieutenant Cole isn’t coming along after all.”
Geary took a look at his display, seeing that Shadow had pivoted and was rapidly moving away from Dauntless, heading back into the star system, back toward Sol and the battered Home of humanity.
Tanya paused, perplexed. “You know, I’ve gotten so used to Lieutenant Cole’s status reports that I might actually miss them.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. Seriously. For the next few days I’m going to be wondering off and on what Lieutenant Cole and his cutter are doing right now, what Lieutenant Cole is thinking right now, what Lieutenant Cole had for dinner…”
He grinned. “From what I understand, when one ship is in a hypernet and the other is in normal space in a distant star system, the concept of right now is ambiguous at best.”
Desjani looked thoughtful. “One of my friends went into high-end theoretical physics. She told me a few years ago that one of the ongoing debates was whether humanity carried our own sense of time with us to other stars, that the presence of humans in the different star systems was what produced a unified sense of time among them despite the span of light-years between them. Don’t look at me like that. It’s actually a profound question that we don’t know the answer to.”
“We don’t know what time is?” Geary asked.
“Not really. Some ancient scientist said that time is what prevents everything from happening at once. My friend told me that, too, and said the quote still pretty much summarized everything that we know about time. I never forgot that quote because it reminds me of how little we know even today about the most fundamental things.”
He gazed at his display, looking past the depiction of Sol Star System to the galaxy and the universe looming beyond. “There’s so much we want to learn. So much we need to learn. Why do we as a species spend so much time trying to destroy ourselves when we could be spending it trying to understand ourselves and the universe we live in?”
Tanya shook her head. “Maybe they’re related. Maybe whatever drives us to want to learn also drives us to compete in ways that can destroy us.”
“The Dancers may give us some insight into that,” Geary suggested.
“Yeah. If we can ever figure them out. Understanding the Dancers may be harder than understanding time.”
Her hand went to the hypernet controls. “Destination set as Varandal. The Dancers are within the radius set for our hypernet field. Request permission to head for home, Admiral.”
“Permission granted.”
The stars and everything else outside the ship vanished. Unlike jump space, with its gray monotony and strange flashes of light, when traveling by hypernet there was literally nothing outside the bubble containing Dauntless and the six Dancer ships. And, literally, Dauntless and the other six ships weren’t moving. But in sixteen days, they would pop out of the hypernet gate at Varandal, hundreds of light-years away, thanks to the mysterious and still-dimly-understood quantum connections between the gates.
Geary could sense the tension on the bridge relaxing and feel the same sensation inside himself. “Do you ever find it odd,” he asked Tanya, “that we’re more comfortable right now?”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” she asked, stretching like someone coming off a long and grueling task. “No one, and nothing, can touch a ship once inside the hypernet.”
“Yeah, but, according to what Jaylen Cresida told me, that’s because while we’re in the hypernet we don’t actually exist except as some sort of probability wave.”
She made a face at him. “That’s just how the rest of the universe sees it. From our frame of reference, we exist, and I’m not going to let you ruin a chance to unwind by overthinking things.” Desjani turned to face the bridge watch team. “Keep an eye on things. Pass the word for half-watch shift holiday routine for the rest of the day.”
“You are in a good mood,” Geary muttered as they left the bridge.
“I can start ordering floggings again tomorrow. For now, I’m going to talk to my ancestors for a little while, our ancestors that is, to give them some thanks for the safe recovery of my two lieutenants, which it wouldn’t hurt you to do, either, before I try to catch up on some paperwork.”
“I’m going to look in on sick bay, first,” Geary said. “I want to see how Castries and Yuon are doing.”
“Not all that well,” Desjani said with a grimace. “But you’ll see.”
It wasn’t one of the blocks of time set aside for routine sick call by crew members concerned about nonemergency medical issues, and there weren’t any medical emergencies at the moment, so when Geary reached sick bay, he found Dr. Nasr sitting at a desk deep in study. Nasr only gradually became aware of Geary’s presence, blinking at him like a man coming up from deep sleep. “Is anything wrong, Admiral?”
“Nothing beyond the usual at the moment.” Geary always felt uncomfortable in sick bay. He had been brought to Dauntless’s medical spaces after being recovered from the damaged escape pod in which he had drifted, frozen in survival sleep, for a century. From here, he couldn’t see the bunk in which he had awakened, disoriented and dazed, to learn that everyone he had once known was long dead, and that while he was supposedly dead he had been turned into the myth of Black Jack. Even his first sight of Tanya, an officer inexplicably wearing the Alliance Fleet Cross which no one had earned for almost a generation in Geary’s time, was bound up in the shock of those moments.
He suppressed his uneasiness, trying to look unruffled as he gestured toward the bulkhead behind which Lieutenants Castries and Yuon were confined in medical quarantine. “How are the patients?”
“You can view them remotely,” Nasr advised Geary as he brought up a virtual window.
Geary peered into the window floating before him, seeing Yuon and Castries in the small compartment. They were sitting with their backs to each other, as far apart as the tiny space permitted (which was barely beyond touching distance), pieces of the Marine battle armor they had been cut out of piled between them like a wall. Far from betraying romantic involvement, Yuon and Castries were acting like a brother and a sister who could barely tolerate each other’s existence. “How much longer do they have to stay in there together?”
“Two weeks, four days more,” Nasr said. “I am certain that Lieutenant Castries could provide you with the exact hours and minutes remaining as well if you asked it of her.”
“Lieutenant Yuon doesn’t seem too happy, either.”
“The feelings do appear to be mutual,” Dr. Nasr agreed.
“No signs of infection yet?”
“None. You will be informed immediately if there are any signs.”
Geary watched small medical devices crawl up the right arms of Yuon and Castries, both of whom studiously pretended not to notice. “How often are you drawing fluids?”