Ohan gave another small nod—pleased, perhaps?—and turned back to their workstation. They pulled out a scrib and a thick pixel pen. Rosemary’s eyes widened when she saw that the scrib was running a basic sketch program. They weren’t honestly going to puzzle out the inner workings of a wormhole by hand, were they?
“Okay,” Ashby said, buckling his safety harness. “Let’s do this thing. Lovey, patch me through to the techs.”
“You’re on,” Lovey said.
“Roll call,” Ashby said.
“Flight controls, go,” said Sissix.
“Fuel check, go,” said Corbin.
“The interspatial bore is go,” said Kizzy over the vox. “But I can’t find my crackers and you know I don’t like to do this without snacking—”
“Think of it next time, Kiz,” said Ashby. “Jenks?”
Jenks’ voice chimed in. “Buoys are go.”
“Lovey, ship status,” said Ashby.
“All ship systems performing normally,” said Lovey. “No technical or structural malfunctions.”
“Ohan, are you ready?”
“We are eager to begin.”
“Fantastic,” said Ashby. He glanced back to Rosemary. “You strapped in?”
Rosemary nodded. She had checked the buckle three times.
“Right then. Kizzy, start it up.”
Deep down in the bowels of the ship, the bore awoke with a baritone howl. Rosemary was glad that Kizzy had warned her about the bore beforehand. It was the sort of sound that felt capable of ripping bulkheads apart.
Ashby tapped the arm of his chair ten times, evenly spaced. As he tapped, a trembling grew within the hull. The thing on the underside of the ship pulsed and bellowed. The floor panels shuddered.
With a terrible silence, the sky ripped open.
It swallowed them.
Rosemary looked out the window, and realized that she’d never really seen the color black before.
“Give me a heading, Ohan,” said Sissix.
Ohan stared at the readouts on his screen. Their hand was already darting over the scrib, writing equations in a text that Rosemary did not recognize. “Ahead sixteen-point-six ibens. Full speed, please.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” said Sissix. She threw back her feathered head with a cheer as she sent the Wayfarer hurtling through nothing.
There was no real way to say how much time it took to build the wormhole, because, as Kizzy had said would happen, time ceased to have any meaning. There was a clock silently counting minutes and hours above the window, but within the sublayer, they were mere numbers to Rosemary. She kept feeling as if they had just arrived, only to then feel that they had been in there forever. She felt drunk, or worse, like trying to wake from a fever dream. Her vision swam and shifted. There was nothing beyond the screen, though that same nothingness sometimes seemed to shimmer with color and gauzy light. The buoys they launched blinked and drifted, like plankton caught in waves.
Voices blurred all around her, calling out complex terms that would have meant nothing to her even if she could have processed the words at normal speed. Ohan’s voice was the only thing that remained steady, the eye of the storm, directing course changes to Sissix as their hand tirelessly scrawled numbers across the scrib.
“All buoys deployed,” Jenks said over the vox. “We’re ready to set up the lattice.” The words seemed to hang as if the air carrying them had thickened, even though the world itself was playing back in double-time.
“Initiate coupling,” said Ashby.
“Ashby, I think we’ve hit a pocket,” said Sissix.
“Get us out before we get stuck,” said Ashby.
“Ashby, I think we’ve hit a pocket.”
“Get us out before we get stuck.”
“Ashby, I think we’ve hit a pocket.”
“Get us out before we get stuck.”
“Ashby, I think we’ve—”
“Thirty ibens to port, now!” cried Ohan.
The ship lurched and groaned as Sissix jolted them aside. Somehow, despite the artigrav nets, it felt as if they had flipped upside down. Or maybe that they had been upside down to begin with.
“The hell was that?” said Ashby.
“Temporal pocket,” said Ohan.
“Where?”
Ohan gave his readout screen a glance. “Twenty ibens starboard. Five and a half ibens wide. Give it a wide berth.”
“Am doing,” Sissix said. “Good thing we didn’t get stuck.”
Corbin scowled at his screen. “Looks like we did get stuck. Fuel levels are down point-oh-oh-six percent from where they should be.”
“Buoys holding?” Ashby asked.
“Holding,” Jenks and Kizzy said in tandem.
“Ohan, where’s our exit?”
“Three-point-six ibens, ahead,” Ohan said. “Two-point-nine ibens, up. One… no, no, zero-point-seven-three ibens starboard.”
Sissix’s claws flew over the controls. “Ready?”
Ashby nodded. “Punch it.”
The bellowing below returned. Everyone slammed back into their seats, eyes snapping shut. Time returned with a thud. Rosemary caught her breath, and pulled her fingernails out from the arms of her chair. She looked to the window. The view had changed. A red dwarf lay in the distance, surrounded by several planets. One was partially terraformed, with a small fleet of GC cargo carriers and transport ships clustered nearby. A new colony was being built. A sphere of blinking safety buoys hung in the space around the ship, their yellow lights directing others away from the Wayfarer’s work area.
“And that is what we call perfect,” said Ashby. He flicked through the readouts on the panel before him. “No spatial degradation. No temporal tears. We’re exactly where and when we should be.” Sissix whooped. A double cheer came up over the vox, muffled behind Lovey’s congratulations. Ashby nodded, satisfied. “Kizzy, Jenks, I’ll leave you two to deploy the cage. The rest of you, call it a day. Great work, everybody. Well done.”
“You know, Ashby,” said Sissix. “If memory serves, big transport ships like that one there have some nice recreational facilities for weary travelers.”
“You don’t say,” said Ashby with a smirk. “Well, we’ve just earned ourselves a nice paycheck. I’d say that calls for a few hours off ship. That is, if Ohan and Lovey don’t mind keeping an eye on the cage for us.” The Sianat Pair and the AI both voiced their agreement.
Sissix cupped her hands toward the vox. “Party on the carrier in two hours,” she announced. Kizzy’s jubilant cry nearly drowned out Jenks, who was moaning something about SoberUps. Sissix turned back toward Rosemary. “So, newbie. What’d you think?”
Rosemary forced a wan smile. “It was great,” she said. She managed to turn away from the console before throwing up.
Day 132–145, GC Standard 306
THE JOB
“I hate this game,” Sissix said, frowning over the checkered pixel board.
Ashby took a bite of spice bread. “You’re the one who wanted to play.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going to win one of these days, and then I can be done with it forever.” She rested her chin on her fists, sighed, and gestured toward her bishop. The game piece moved itself forward, leaving a faint trail of pixels in its wake. “The fact that you people have been playing this for centuries says a lot about your species.”
“Oh? What’s it say?”
“That Humans make everything needlessly difficult.”
Ashby laughed. “I could just let you win.”
Sissix’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you dare.” She glanced out the Fishbowl’s bubbled window, watching the joints of the new containment cage fasten themselves together. A few more hours, and they could be out of here. Not that they had another job lined up yet, but there wasn’t any reason to linger. They were due for a market stop, and Sissix was looking forward to having her feet on the ground for a while.