She spared a peak at the generator through a portal adjacent to the magnetically sealed hatch. All the generator’s indicators were green; the flow of nanoparticles appeared stable.
After she peeled out of her suit and stowed it next to Joshua’s, she pattered up the gangway amidships to the upper deck. Joshua’s back hunched over the shuttle’s main control console. Bat-Levi squeezed her way forward to an auxiliary monitoring station. The Lionwas a modified four-passenger shuttle, twelve meters stem to stern and six meters at its beam. With all that extra equipment crammed onto the main deck, the fit was tight.
Joshua looked over as she dropped into her seat. “Ask you something?”
Bat-Levi brought the readings on the nanoparticle emissions generator on-line. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the stability of the particle stream. That damn burp…She fiddled with an injector aperture and changed the collision angle by a tenth of a nanometer. “Fire away. What’s on your mind?”
“You.”
Bat-Levi didn’t look up from her readings. By God, this generator was fickle. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. You met someone.” Not a question.
That got her attention. She looked up and swiveled around to face him. For some reason, she felt a wave of embarrassment, as if her twin brother had caught her in a lie. She and Joshua were more than two peas in a pod; her father joked that they were probably as close to being telepaths as nontelepaths got. Yet, close as they were, she hadn’t told Joshua about Devlin. She wasn’t sure why. Privacy, maybe: Her love life was none of her brother’s concern. But the truth was that she felt, vaguely, like she was betraying Joshua.
Bat-Levi looked into the face she knew almost better than her own. “Yes.”
Joshua gave a contemplative nod. “I thought so. You haven’t been all here, you know? You’ve been a million kilometers away ever since you showed up two days ago.”
Bat-Levi felt heat in her cheeks. “I hadn’t imagined it was that noticeable.”
“I know you, kiddo. So what’s his name?”
“Devlin Connolly.” Just saying the name caused a little tingle of excitement—and longing—to course through her. “Same year as me. He’s shipping out on the Kallman.We’d planned to take a week together before then.”
“I figured. There’s something,” Joshua stirred the air between them with one hand, “in the middle.”
“I was planning on telling you.”
“Darya,” said Joshua, his face serious. His hair was even darker than hers and very curly. He finger-combed a handful back from his high, smooth forehead. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”
“Well, we don’t usually keep secrets, and…”
Joshua eyed her askance. “Speak for yourself. There are some pretty nice women I met at the Cochrane.”
“Really?” Bat-Levi’s curiosity was piqued. She wondered what her parents, dynamic propulsions experts on the Cochrane’s faculty, thought about Joshua’s paramours. “What did Mom and Dad…?”
“I don’t share everything. So, do you love him?”
“I think so.” Bat-Levi nodded, relieved to tell someone. “Yes.”
Joshua reached over and covered her right hand with his left. “It’s okay, Darya. Really. It’s good you met someone.”
“Yeah?” Bat-Levi felt like crying. “You’ll probably hate him.”
“Probably. Actually, it’s more likely Mom will. You know what she thinks about Starfleet…” Joshua caught himself, gave a rueful grin. “Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” Bat-Levi swiped the wet from her eyes. “And it’s not as if there aren’t problems. You know, being posted to different ships, trying to coordinate leaves.” An Academy truism: Most relationships didn’t survive longer than the first six months after graduation. Bat-Levi wondered if other couples believed they would be the exceptions. She knew that she and Devlin did.
“I can imagine.” Joshua gave her fingers a squeeze. “Well, we pull this off, not only won’t Mom and Dad have anythingto complain about, we’ll get the Cochrane, and you’llhave to beat the offers down with a stick.”
“We’ll see,” said Bat-Levi. “Don’t jinx it.”
“Fair enough.” He squeezed her hand one final time. “Time to put on a show for the folks on 32, then let you catch up with your boyfriend.”
“Some show.” Bat-Levi gave a shaky laugh. She waved her hand in the general direction of Starbase 32. Squares of yellow light studded the windows of the blue and gray station, and the shape always reminded her of a slowly spinning child’s top. Starbase 32 hung, by itself, on the fringes of the Federation. The nearest inhabited planet was thirty light-years away. “This region of space is just about as deserted as you can get.”
Joshua pulled up their preflight checklist. “Well, that way, if the generator fails, we won’t take out so many planets at the same time now, will we?”
“That’s not funny, Jock-o.” Because if we don’t do this right, half the ship gets sucked into an interphasic whirlpool.Bat-Levi’s gaze strayed back to the prismatic grid flow indicator on her console. The flow had stabilized, and there were no further indications of trouble. Still, she wished Joshua would run just a few more simulations. That damn flow neverhas settled down.She checked the power couplings on their nacelles and, in an afterthought, the explosive bolts to the nacelles. Just in case.
She stole a peek at her younger brother and saw, with a sudden bittersweet pang, how much more grown-up he seemed. Funny, how she’d left for the Academy and he’d been just a boy. Now they were both breaking out, finding their way in the universe—and probably away from each other.
Her thoughts floated to Devlin Connolly, only this time she felt a little sad. Like she was acknowledging the death of something. Later, she would know: a prophetic thought.
The generator had been online for a half hour into the test flight when Bat-Levi said, “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“Mmmm?”
“The transdimensional rift off the port quarter doesn’t seem stable. Here,” she funneled the information to his control display. “Take a look.”
Her auxiliary console was to Joshua’s left and behind, so she couldn’t get a good look at his face as he bent over the readings. “That doesn’t look too bad,” he said. “The variance in rift integrity isn’t even statistically significant. The simulation proved a tiny variance isn’t important.”
But just how tiny is tiny?“Look, if this were an antimatterinjector, you wouldn’t tolerate a variance of even a…no, don’t shake your head at me, Joshua. Listen, no machine is perfect, and that includes our generator. Now, this thing is taking more vacuum energy from port than starboard. We both know that the dimensional rifts mustbe bilateral and equal. Otherwise, we’ll create an imbalance in the ambient vacuum energy and…”
“And create an energy sink that will theoretically collapse adjacent dimensional branes in a cascade,” said Joshua, his tone a caricature of a displeased schoolteacher, “thereby causing an imbalance in linear acceleration over different areas of the ship. Darya, I designed the simulations, remember?”
“I’m just saying.”
“I hear you.” Turning aside, Joshua shook his head. “Honestly, you’re in Starfleet? Didn’t one of your heroes once say that risk was your business?”
“James Kirk. He was right. He took risks. But he wasn’t stupid.”
“Neither am I.” Joshua’s hands moved over his controls. “I’m going to open up a jump-point. Hang on.”
Facing forward and staring out at the winking docking lights of Starbase 32, Bat-Levi braced herself. What would crossing the threshold of a jump-point feel like? Bat-Levi didn’t know. She’d never been through an actual wormhole, though they’d done simulator runs of gravimetric distortions to warp bubbles caused by an intermix imbalance. Then the effect had been as violent as it was spectacular: a sensation of tripping and the ship lurching then careening through space, out of control. Now she expected the same. Maybe something just as violent, like being thrown from her seat, or a jolt, a quiver running through the ship and shivering up her legs. Something.