Chapter 2:Fast

“I’m telling you, there’s nothing out there, it’s a huge gap of empty space.” Terra searched though the star charts they had and couldn’t find anything remotely likely to have been the origin of a comet that wrapped itself in its own gravity field. Terra held her face in her hands and let out an aggravated sigh. “These reading aren’t enough to prove anything either, even if people believed us it’s not enough to attract any funder’s attention.” Finding his silence unusual, she looked back at Quorbin to see if the jerk was even listening. He was sitting awkwardly at his flight station, still trying to work through a face that displayed obvious discomfort.

“I’m gonna analyze the data we got further, maybe we can figure more out about it.” He was no longer rubbing his chest, but instead cringing every time he touched it. Terra got up and went over to him.

“Let me see that, you got nailed pretty hard back there.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Don’t be a guy about this, I don’t want to put up with you whining about how bad you got hurt saving me for the next nine months.” She pulled him out of the chair carefully and followed him to the lab level. Quorbin stood facing away from Terra, holding a chair for balance as she unlocked the first aid kit and pulled out its med scanner. She turned to Quorbin and began the scan of his back: bruising, but no breaks—something was wrong deeper, though. “Turn around.” Quorbin maneuvered himself to face her, still doing a terrible job of hiding the pain on his face. Her face turned into a rare look of concern as she completed the scan. Cracked ribs and even worse bruising than his back. “Take off your shirt.” Quorbin silently began pulling the red t-shirt off carefully, his lack of a sarcastic reply already an ominous sign of his injuries. The bruising was a deep purple that left a blotchy imprint of the corner of a crate across his chest. Terra felt an instant sense of guilt. She didn’t like when people picked up a check for her, so getting a cracked rib for her left her staring for a minute till a groan from Quorbin brought her back to looking through the first aid box.

Terra tried to start some conversations about their next move while applying the regen-gauze before using the bonding laser to repair the crack in his ribs. She was only half paying attention though; she wasn’t going to be able to feel right until the injuries he had were gone or started healing. Quorbin winced at her touch on his bruised skin but finally managed to speak through the pain: “Next thing you know I’ll be having to rescue you from a super-villain while you’re chained to a wall in a sexy slave costume.” Terra kept bandaging.

“Yeah, then I would really hate you.”

“Fine then I’ll just let him kill you and join him to take over the galaxy.”

“Join who?”

“The super-villain trying to kill you.”

“It’s far more likely our roles would be reversed. In fact I’m so certain of that I think you should start picking out sexy slave costumes.” Terra felt much better once the bruising began to recede. A lifetime of privilege and being waited on had left a disdain of people doing things for her. She specifically tried to be troublesome in her youth to have something she could claim for herself. If all the adults and house staff told her not to do it, they probably won’t try to do it for her. Even her own father, who was a pilot in the military himself, often tried to use his status to boost her career. She tried to remind herself that she would probably be running home for facial reconstruction if it weren’t for Quorbin. Still, her “I don’t need your help” stigma ran deep.

“Here’s your shirt back.” Terra outstretched her arm toward Quorbin with the red t-shirt draped through her hand. “You’d think after spending your whole life on Mars you’d be sick of the color red.”

Quorbin paused only a moment while considering her inquiry. “Kind the opposite actually, stops me from getting homesick.”

“You were all but strapping a rocket to your back trying to get off that rock.”

“You miss Earth at all, cavegirl?” Terra rolled her eyes at what she knew was coming next. “Cause I think I have some sticks and rocks in samples we took, I’m sure you could try and make a fire if you rub them together hard enough.” Terra could have left it alone if he had simply given an “I don’t want to talk about it,” but now he had started with this crap again, and she didn’t have anything else to do, so she let out her frustration at their dead end comet investigation on his ridiculous arrogance and perused, once again, the line of questioning as to what made the humans on Mars better then the humans on Earth.

“I grew up in a city with over a hundred million people living in it; most Earthicans live in cities, how the hell does the rest of the star system think we live in caves, or is it really just the Martians, who live on a planet that’s been dead since humanity was even around! Not to mention Earth is still the cultural, economic, entertainment capital—and influential world—for all of humanity!” This argument was built on many such arguments that had accord before the mission even began: the Earthicans and Martians—while working together regularly and, by all means, needing each other—often were like oil and water on a personal level.

“Yeah, you’re really a pristine example of what humanity is all about, going most your lives in a place too bright to even realize there are other planets out there.” A metaphor often used in similar arguments between Earth and Mars, using the imagery of bright city lights blocking out the stars as a way of saying Earth only thinks of itself.

“Humanity CAME from earth!”

“No, most of humanity LEFT Earth.” Best estimates put humanity’s numbers at around 20 billion, only about 5 billion lived on earth, about 20% under the oceans. “They got tired of going their whole lives without seeing a tree.” Quorbin began heading for the hatch down to the living storage.

“Central Park is full of trees! Hundred story trees! MY FAMILY OWNS A PENTHOUSE IN A TREE!”

“Wha, that… that does the OPPOSITE of help your argument!” Quorbin dropped down the hatch.

“And all your precious trees ALSO came from Earth you freakin hippie!” Terra made her way to the piloting bridge. “And you’re welcome for fixing your broken torso!”

“Yeah, thanks for being all helpless.” Terra looked for something to throw, found the med kit, and chucked it over at hatch, not hitting Quorbin, but making a loud enough sound to be annoying. Quorbin stuck his head out the hatch leading to the lab level Terra was exiting upward. “I’m totally leaving you to die with the super-villain! No matter how hot you look in a slave girl costume!” Quorbin went back to running diagnostics in the engine room, still steaming over the argument between him and the cavegirl. Even her hotness in the skintight cybernetic flight suit couldn’t make up for how much she aggravated him. Well that’s not true all the time; she looked damn good in that suit. This line of thought relaxed Quorbin enough to realize it would be awesome if he purged the atmosphere system into space WHILE going faster than light, and he began making the preparations necessary. He thought about telling Terra so she could watch too, but he was still too mad at her.

Quorbin was mostly mad that she made him think about Mars again and why he was so eager to leave. He remembered the anger he felt at himself the day he landed on Earth for his scholarship, how sluggish he felt in the higher gravity of Earth; he had been taking the vitamin supplements meant to help people adapt to different planet’s environments when planning an extended stay. Eventually he developed the extra muscle mass needed to walk around without sweating, his lungs adapted so he didn’t feel asthmatic, he even started to like a lot of the food, which he didn’t realize could be so different. He vaguely thought about the strange looks he would catch from Terra, though he tried to dismiss them. He didn’t consider himself a vain person, but she never explained it when he caught her and he sometimes caught himself thinking that maybe adapting to a new planet had left him deformed in some way he didn’t see. But he didn’t want to think about it.

He felt a strange glow of happiness when he thought about the day the two of them met. He assumed it was because they didn’t know each other at all, so it was probably the best part of their tenuous relationship; arguing and conflict had followed within hours of their first “Hello.” I think she had longer hair then, he thought to himself. After taking a moment he set up the rest of the prep work to purge the atmosphere system.

Terra sat in the pilot’s station on the top level, idly watching the distorted glow of the universe whisking by at faster-than-light speeds. Her mind ran through some of the things taught in school about how the universe changes when going so fast, the way laws of physics change, how to handle the throttle differently, the way direction can be shifted with navigation. She let her mind wander, but unsuccessfully relieved the aggravation at losing any leads on the most interesting thing that had happened during the whole trip. She leaned her head to the side as she heard the familiar mechanical shifts of the atmosphere system purging, however her bored facial expression turned quickly when she heard what seemed suspiciously like an explosion outside the ship. Her suspicious confirmed when the ship suddenly gave her whiplash and the hull began to let out the siren howl of strained metal. Her piloting instincts instantly kicked in and she gripped the controls. She looked forward, but was instantly confused. She shook her head and tried to remember the training: she let her eyes relax—remembered the pictures they showed about what something farther away or closer looked like, how speed was translated—and gazed outward.

From what she could tell they were moving faster than they were before—a hell of a lot faster—and it seemed that the explosion had pushed the tail of the ship sideways until they were almost flying backwards. She tried to maneuver, but they had lost their gravitational anchors. How fast were they going? She tried to have the computer re-engage the gravity lock automatically, but the annoying “I can’t do what you’ve asked because I feel like being difficult” screen came up. She yelled for Quorbin, but couldn’t get an answer over the sound of the screeching hull, which she realized was really, really bad. She looked around the controls to see if she could kill the power, but she couldn’t do that from where she was. She slowly let her hands off the controls, and, as she suspected, the ship had stabilized. The idea of Newton’s First Law was truer than ever in faster-than-light space. Terra dropped down the levels, searching for Quorbin, finding him in the engine room passed out against a wall.

“Quorbin wake up, wake up!” She shook him slightly and touched his head, looking for the spot in his hair where the blood was coming from. It felt like a minor cut, not bad enough to make him pass out; it must have been the gravity shift: the aft of the ship had been pushed forward until it was above the cockpit, so she felt very little compared to how fast this area of the ship moved. Quorbin came to just as she figured he would and let out an instant “Ouch,” mostly to her finger being in the cut on his head. “Get up, we need to stop the ship, we’re off course.” As they rose, Terra looked him over for more injuries. He seemed fine, but drowsy; like he had been deep asleep and was still putting his consciousness back together.

“Did we hit our own light boom or something?” His slightly watery eyes looked around, checking for ship damage.

“I don’t know but right now I need you up top to slow us down.” They went upward with Terra looking back to check on Quorbin along the way. They took their seats and began calling out readings to each other.

“We’re moving too fast to pick up any gravity sources to lock on to and I can’t maneuver without them, or slow us down for that matter, but even then, I’m not sure how to re-enter lower space outside of our gravity lock.” Terra got more scared the more she explained it. “Cutting engine power seems risky.”

“The reactor isn’t powering anything, or at least nothing with propulsion, I think we’re still ridding a shockwave”

“Shockwave from what?”

“The reactor runs pretty hot to power the FTL equipment, and we vent a lot of that through the propulsion system. It’s highly radio-active, amongst other things, so when I vented the slime from Goop out of the atmo system I think the exhaust ignited it and it exploded, creating the shockwave pushing us forward.”

“Wait how is that even possible?” Terra tried sorting out everything she knew about FTL physics in her mind but no answers came out. “What the hell was that stuff?”

“Just particles in the atmosphere like the layer of crap that seemed to be all over the planet. I didn’t have the equipment to analyze it thoroughly, just like I don’t have scanners to confirm what I just told you, but it seems likely; except without better readings trying to stop us is going to be a shot in the dark.”

“What do we know about the substance?” With a few taps on his screen a hologram of the atomic structure of it projected between them. Quorbin had no good explanations. “It looks odd, like its off balance.” Terra paused and stared, almost lost in her own mind, searching for the words. “There’s no symmetry to it.” Quorbin was about to point out the absurdity of the molecule looking pretty as being important, but then he looked again at the 3D model. Upset at himself from not seeing the forest from the trees, he realized she was right; the substance seemed broken off in a strange way.

“I think your suggesting that maybe this is actually a decayed substance of something else, which might be right. I can’t figure what it would bond to though, maybe not another molecule, a particle? Something physically smaller but contained by broken part?” Quorbin read out anything he could think of before Terra spoke up, so under her breath it was as though the word escaped from her thoughts instead of being said intentionally.

“…gravity?”

“Wait, what? You’re saying this is a physical substance capable of bonding to a graviton?” Quorbin looked baffled.

“Something blue maybe?” Terra waited for him to catch on, then continued when his face turned from confused by the suggestion to realizing it. “That comet was flying awfully close to that planet, so if it didn’t come from the system, there might be more of it wherever it came from, and there’s no way to tell how much of the stuff was on it since we couldn’t get a reading on the mass of the comet because its gravity field was distorted.”

“But still, an entire planet? Those comets would have had to have been coming fro…… and the planet was COVERED in the stuff it…… I….. I think you’re right.” Quorbin sat back in his chair, at a loss for words, trying to figure out what his next move should be. “Ok, so, I took a cosmic level bonding agent and used a radioactive match to light it on fire.”

“And then it exploded.” Terra wanted to emphasize that.

“And we’re on its shockwave, and because of being in FTL Land there’s no other force strong enough to stop us.” Quorbin’s eyes flickered around; Terra thought he looked kind of cute when he did that, all deep in thought, but she was more focused on making sure she didn’t beat him to death (with his own skull she planned to rip out) for putting them in this situation. Things felt a little better once Quorbin’s face lit up and he snap-pointed at her. “But it’s expanding! Expanding as its area increases, but the energy stays the same!” He looked through some readings on his console.

“So, we’ll slow down?”

“Uhm, no. The point is its effect on us is dissipating, so we only have to worry about the extra momentum in gave us.” Quorbin fiddled with some settings. “All we need to do is use whatever gravity source is ahead of us and reverse its gravity, till its opposing force slows us down enough for our sensors to get a gravity lock and slow us down below FTL.”

Terra settled into the piloting station and got ready to get out of this situation as quickly as possible and slow down. She chuckled to herself for a second: she never thought she’d see the day she didn’t want to go fast.

Chapter 1: Bored

Miles of vines stretching ten stories above the ground like clouds in the dense atmosphere, blooming flowers in every color of the spectrum while four winged birds nest on trees growing on the backs of six legged walking mountains that would strike cycloptian awe into dinosaurs with a backdrop of a ringed planet whose moons sparkle like diamonds from the reflecting mercury pools that dot their surface. Wouldn’t that be cool?” Quorbin said while he day-dreamed the imagery to distract himself from the reality of what laid outside the ship: a disappointing scene of a flat, gray, dull landscape with scattered puddles and groups of mold in the pattern of droppings on the backdrop of a gray sky with just enough blue in it to seem un-exotic. “Or a planet of supermodels, I’m still open for that.”

“I stopped listening when I heard you take a breath to speak.” Terra was completing the preflight checklist, equally unimpressed by the planet Quorbin had nicknamed “Goop” due to his more than accurate assessment of what the surface seemed to be covered in.

“Do you think we’ll ever find the fabled cheeseburger planet?”

“We’re exploring the galaxy not looking for supermodels and cheeseburgers like a frat boy.” Terra took her eyes away from the piloting console just long enough to give a squinting glare. She too wished for a cheeseburger, but admitting this would involve agreeing with Quorbin.

Quorbin stared blankly across the small room for a moment while his console stored the scientific data to the mainframe storage.

“You look really nice today.” Most athletic girls in skintight cybernetic flightsuits did.

“You’d look good without a suit.”

Quorbin was intrigued by the suggestive tone

“Outside the ship.”

Quorbin was further curious

“While in space…”

Quorbin went back to what he was doing. Or at least he tried to, but at that same moment Terra hit the thrusters in gear, launching the ship upward and accelerating to escape velocity, leaving Quorbin no longer typing but clinging to his chair for dear life. Quorbin knew that Terra was well aware protocol was to issue a warning to all crew before an escape velocity burst began. He was also aware that she giggled slightly when the 1.5g burst left him flat on the floor. His only retort was his own squinting glare once they left the field of various gasses composing Goop’s “atmosphere”—in the loosest sense of the word.

Quorbin walked to the corner of the circular room containing the hatch to the lower level and dropped down to the living quarter/storage area and began reading the label of the crates taking up most of the room. As they went through more of the supplies there would be more room freed up and more space for the two them, but at the moment they were only 3 months in and a 4x10 area on the floor was the best they got for sleeping arrangements. Quorbin once again considered sleeping on the floor of one of the ship’s other levels, but between the awkward and not large enough floor space of the lab deck, the reactor a foot away from him in the engine room, and the fact the Terra refused to let him into the top piloting station without her presence, all options leaned to sharing. Quorbin found the crate containing the tools he needed and proceeded down another hatch to the engine room.

Anything that seemed slipshod or unpleasant aesthetically about this room never reached Quorbin's mind, for every time he dropped in through the hatch he took a moment to stand and smile at the center of the room where it stood: an Atlas Reactor. His Atlas Reactor. Quorbin had spent three years constructing it in his parents’ basement—of course, due to the immensely scientific population of Mars, most people’s “basements” were facilities as good as any laboratory, but the principle still stood. The Atlas Reactors were modeled after stars, and—having a similar lifespan—Quorbin always felt pride knowing that he had built something that, if properly maintained, would outlast generations. After taking his moment he moved over to the atmosphere converter on the wall, a device meant to filter through native air and replace the ship’s, creating a bit of “airflow”. Small details like that help stop people from growing crazy in a cooped ship. Quorbin had suspected that the thick humidity of Goop contained a lot of the particles covering the surface; a suspicion confirmed when Quorbin removed the inner panel and watched slime drip out of the filtration chamber. After taking another moment to be grossed out he began cleaning out the system.

Back in the lab level, Terra was just finishing setting in the course to the Savepoint station. There were six set up along the pathway they were meant to explore as giant back-up drives for the data they collected in case their systems were damaged. They were sent ahead of the intended path of the exploration mission when it was first proposed; before the funding got so tight, before a planned full crew became two people stuck in an small ship taking data like a survey team. She looked through the astronomical charts to plan out the details of their course: cross checking the most interesting to fly against the most promising of planets and scientific anomalies. None connected. She leaned back and let out a sigh. She wanted this job so badly because of the promise of being able to fly in space humanity hadn’t been in since before FTL travel—if they had been there at all—yet time and time again she was left taking boring routes through open space where the idea of cruise control was overkill. She thought about taking them through an asteroid field on the other side of the system and avert the (potential) interest of the other planet, but Terra couldn’t bring herself to do it. The one thing she and Quorbin agreed on was the importance of discovery on this mission. This could be considered the “character building” years they wasted doing grunt work or the most fascinating element of either of their carriers—and they both had worked too hard to let it go to waste. She plotted the course to the planet, blew the edge of her bangs out of her face, then looked around the lab level for something else to do……………anything else to do………something……………she decided she was hungry and headed for the hatch down.

Quorbin finished cleaning out the part of the filtration system the ooze had seeped into and put the panels back together. He knew the internal part of the system was filled with the stuff and considered the most fun way of purging it. He then realized he was spending time considering how to make cleaning a filter system more interesting and rolled his eyes. Maybe if he plugged the filter system through the reactor’s particle field? “No” he thought, shaking his head. “Not everything can be solved by plugging it into the reactor, the awesome, AWESOME reactor, plus then we might get radioactive air. Vent it into space? It would look like the ship just sneezed……….ew…….” He was running out of ideas.

“TERRA! What’s a fun way of purging the atmosphere system?” Terra’s head popped in upside-down through the hatch.

“I’m going to pretend you never said that so that I don’t have to admit how little we have to do.” She retreated back up to the storagelivingquartersspace to finish looking for a snack.

“How long until we reach the other planet?”

“It’s only a few weeks out on neutral thrust”—which was acceleration derived from allowing the radiation buffers to naturally expel through the thrusters at the same rate the reactor charged them. The Atlas Reactor was capable of unleashing the power of a small star, but most of the power in principle was folded in on itself and used to contain the reaction. When the reactor is running on idle, so to speak, it is relatively self-contained, yet there still exists an excess. “If we have the fuel to do it we can make an FTL burst.”

“It’s not the power that’s an issue Cause my reactor is awesome It’s a matter of overloading the graviton accelerators which almost blew out last time we tried an in-system jump.”

“Cause of the reactor.”

“MY REACTOR IS NOT…..my reactor isn’t the problem. The specs for the FTL drive are different than what I built it for and we didn’t have enough cash to spring for a proper converter. I had to rig one up out of parts from a ship that crashed by my house like, 80 years ago.” Quorbin moved around the reactor to the wall containing the FTL boosters and plugged in the diagnostic unit. Terra found her snack and sat next to the hatch cross-legged, chomping in between words and sentences.

“I still wanna try a websling once you get everything synced up.”

“There’s not enough planets to even make that work and I doubt these systems could handle an interstellar websling”—a maneuver named after the way an old comicbook character from Earth would shoot spiderweb from his arms, attach them to a building tops and swing. Only instead of web it was gravity and instead of buildings it was planets and stars.

“The system’s not important, it’s the same idea the numbers just change *crunchcrunch* I mean I knows it’s not practical for surveying cause we’d move too fast, but at least for a return to the Savepoints, or something.”

“Actually I started working on a protocol for it a while back as an emergency end run to back home.” Quorbin finished with the boosters and began scanning the converter he made for any decay, not wanting it to blow up while terawatts of power ran through it. Terra stopped mid-crunch.

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“………………….thank you?”

“Not a problem.”

The silence that followed was strangely peaceful and calm: Terra thought that maybe after all these weeks together, maybe they were finally getting along, maybe he had learned to get his head out of his ass and just do something nice for someone to make up for his lack of regard for basic courtesy and had overcome his general arrogance, maybe-

“Feel free to just sit there snacking, cavegirl. I can take care of everything else.” Asshole. Terra closed her snack and went to find some music to play that Quorbin hated, even if she hated it. In mid-stride she found herself against the wall of the living deck, along with all the unsecured crates. In the distance half a dozen alarms sounded from the cockpit two levels above. The force holding her against the wall was at least 3 g’s and felt like it was still increasing slightly as a strange hum from the engine room grew. In front of her a crate not quite properly secured to the opposite wall began to shake its way to falling the 10 feet to her face. At 3 g’s a crate that was normally 30 or 40 pounds falling that far… This wasn’t looking good. Tension grew as her attempts at movement grew more and more futile.

“Quorbin!......Quorbin!!!!..................QUORBIN!!!!!!!!” It seemed as though at the last minute Quorbin appeared from the hatch in a feat of strength and agility that no one would have bet on, including Quorbin himself. He made a daring lunge for the crate, which snapped out of place as he leapt, while the flux in gravity created the most painful scenario possible for him. The crate managed to miss his outstretched hand and nail him in the chest, and then another shift managed to allow his shoulder blades to ram the corner of one of the secured crates. He then had to very painfully roll the crate he was struck with off an area of his chest he was sure was bruised into the makeshift aisle created by the secured crates, and then the change in the center of gravity caused him to drop toward the pinned Terra, whom he had to awkwardly avoid smashing. This culminated in an almost instantaneous sense of pain he expressed in an awkwardly high pitched “…ouch.”

The gravity stabilized to about 2 g’s and Quorbin used his awkward stance on the wall over Terra to help her sit up, then they helped each other stand.

“What the hell was that?” Terra asked in a whisper, still holding onto Quorbin for balance, looking around like the gravity shift was a person still sneaking around whom may pounce again at any moment.

“I don’t know, the extra buffers in the engine room kicked in so fast it took me a minute to realize what was going on. Could you tell if it was a change in thrust or an external gravity-“ The thrill of standing on a wall left them suddenly as they hit the floor: Quorbin’s bruised back hitting the floor, and Terra hitting his ribs.

“We need to get up to the bridge and figure out what just happened.” Terra moved from on top of Quorbin to the ladder upward in a seemingly graceful, yet driven, motion.

“I’m gonna just…take a moment here and……uuuhhh…..”

Terra was in her flight seat on the upper level of the ship in seconds and began reading through the logs of the last few minutes. The ships systems were fine, so it was definitely an external gravitation source that had caused her to get rescued by the lab geek, the idiot, leaping into danger when she called, all……….heroic- focus! Terra, focus! Where was it? She looked through the orientation of the ship, turning the helm to point where whatever-it-was could be right as Quorbin took his seat to the right and slightly behind her, rubbing his chest while wearing a look of more than mild discomfort.

“It was definitely external. I’m pulling the ship around to see what it was,……………what is THAT?” Floating by in the opposite direction they were heading was a comet of some sort: gigantic, and glowing an unbelievable blue. It coasted by them, leaving a glowing trail miles behind it. The comet was almost entirely covered in uniform craters, each spouting a mini-volcano of illuminating particles. Quorbin’s pain was instantly displaced by his fixation and he began intently working at his console.

“Scanning now… Its weird this doesn’t seem large enough to have caused what it did, unless……. Yeah, see those particle fields?”—he pointed—“those are graviton wells, a bigger concentration than I’ve ever seen naturally: this thing could create a tide if it passed close enough to an ocean. Most of the gravitons are just circling it, which is odd. I think that blue stuff is binding with them somehow. What the hell is that?”

“How did it get so close without us detecting it?”

“Uhm, we’re not detecting it now…”

“What?”

“Well its obviously THERE and I have a read on the gravitons, but I can’t seem to see anything on sensors about the body of mass itself, or what the blue thing is. The fact that there’s blue light is about all the sensors see.”

“Even then how did it get so close?”

“I’m back tracing its course now; keep it in range of the sensors.” Terra accelerated toward the comet, and then matched its speed and direction as they passed by Goop.

“Is it going to orbit?”

“No, its course doesn’t match anything possible for an orbit around this planet or this star. I think it came from out of the system.” Quorbin looked up at the object, perplexed.

“Should we move and try and sample it?”

“No way. If that thing is made of pure gravitons it’ll get exponentially worse as we get inside its field there. It’s leaving some kind of decay trail behind it; let’s see if we can track the source.” Terra turned the ship around and Quorbin set the projection on the main window to show the trail left behind. Terra accelerated towards its horizon. The trail followed back for a bit and then dead-ended.

“Did we lose it?”

“No, it just stops there.” Quorbin bounced his eyes between the console and the window. “I think this is why it snuck up on us, it didn’t start doing whatever it did, or maybe even exist, before this point.” The two of them stared out at the view, confused, and then excited they had finally found something to do—which reminded Quorbin he needed to purge the air filters. “I think I can track where it was before this; we should pursue it till its source. It does go deeper into the territory we’re scanning.”

“Sounds good to me. Send me the readings to lay in the course. Was your diagnostic done in the engine room?”

“Almost, give me a sec to secure everything.” Quorbin jumped out of his seat and headed down to the engine room, being reminded of the very painful bruises for the first time in a few minutes. He closed up the panels he was working on, double checked all the numbers, then pounced on the ladder leading upward and yelled the all clear. He started to climb, but then stopped as he heard the engines purr, taking a last moment to look back at the reactor: the 4 panels on its sides began to glow brighter and brighter and he heard the systems filter the power being sent to them; saw the components of the entire room light up with purpose as they came on line for the various tasks of sending a body of mass past the speed of light. Then at last he smiled as he heard the final sound—despite the fact that most people claimed it impossible to hear through all the paneling, he always could hear it when the reactor got to work: the sound of a burning fire of a star packed into a can he made in his parents’ basement. At the very least, he thought, I’m not bored anymore.