Page 34 of Hijack!
She plucked the ring of stretchy ribbon from his palm, so quick he didn’t even feel the brush of her fingertips. “Left it? Or you took it?”
“My people are enticed by shiny little things,” he admitted.
With a deft twist, she bound her hair. “You’re not going to tell me the kiss was a mistake?”
“Even if it was?”
Slowly, she let her hands drift down to her sides again. “I think some things are just…like a ghost that exists separate from explanations—and then disappears.”
He wanted to ask if ghosts could leave a mark like his teeth, but he knew she was being wiser than he.
With more effort than it should have taken, he stepped back. And as she paced him to the command module, the silence between them seemed to rival the danger of the vast space outside the precarious bubble of the Love Boat I.
+ + +
It was perhaps a dismal measure of their dire situation that the chief engineer bothered to appear in the command module console hologram. But, Ellix reflected, maybe it would’ve been better for Lub to present their options since it would’ve made about as much sense coming from the goblhob’s undershot jaw.
“The specifics don’t matter,” Suvan finally declared after they all stared at him in silence for a bit, “because none of you could understand it, and it might not work anyway.” When the engineer’s pale gaze angled to Ellix, his tone shifted from surly exasperation to something more tentative. “This is the best I’ve got.”
Ellix inclined his head, understanding the unvoiced apology and desperation. He recognized the sentiment because it had been in the engineer’s voice when they’d launched a makeshift welder against pirates.
The hologram conjured by the Ravkajo engineer now depicted an odd angular torus, with manufacturing and operating specs flickering across the console too fast to interpret. As a depiction of the anomaly’s shadowy fingers appeared within the torus’s empty core, simulated beams of light froze it in place.
“If it works,” Suvan continued, “the contra-field in the containment unit will focus and neutralize the target wavelengths. That should give us back control of the ship. This all presupposes we have enough correct information on the anomaly. Which we don’t.”
“Run the specs again,” Ellix said. “Slower this time.” He scanned the notations, applying what he knew of physics and fabrication. “It looks like this unit would require two thirds of our engine power.”
“Possibly more. By my calculations, once we isolate it, we’d still have enough power for life support and a long-distance emergency transmission, once we reset the array.”
“Propulsion?”
“Minimal.”
So they might take back control, but there wouldn’t be much left to control. But they were too far off course—farther every moment—and running too dark to expect help to find them; thetruth was, space was mostly too big and too empty to wait for rescue.
“Do it. What do you need?”
“Griiek and I can handle the construction. I think Styr would be of help with the tuning since it understands electromagnetic frequencies. The unit will be too large to transport through the corridors, so the distortion will need to manifest within the cross matrix of the containment field.”
Though he didn’t look over at her, Ellix felt the weight of Felicity’s attention on him. He was glad his Kufzasin fur hid any capillary betrayal in his own skin. “We’ll figure out a lure. How long for assembly?”
Suvan looked away. “As long as it takes.”
Ellix pointed at him. “Sooner than that. Griiek and Styr will join you in the engine module. Please make sure the portal is unlocked for them.”
“Yes, Captain.” The chief engineer’s tone sounded resigned.
Ellix wondered if he should be more worried that the grouchy engineer felt desperate enough to allow interlopers. “Delphine, what do you have on our trajectory?”
“Absolutely nothing,” the pilot said morosely. “The apparent path aligns with no labeled ports of call or other known destinations. Until here.”
On the main view screen, a single line arced across the depiction of empty interstellar gas. And at the end of it…
“Is that a black hole?” Felicity whispered, as if it might hear her.
“The next worst thing,” Delphine said. “A null-space cloud.”
An ill-defined patch of concentrated dark matter complexified by quantum-level disorder, creating a flaw in the gravitational scaffolding of a cosmic structure. So, not guaranteed destruction like a black hole; merely a likely one.
