Quorbin practically leapt down to the lab level, wanting to go through and readings he could find. Where would he start? The data from the explosion? From trying to stop? The navigation scanners were left on, had they map everything they had passed? How far had they gone? Terra just sat and stared out the window while she stabilized the ship. She looked around at the stars for constellations she recognized, turning the ship around to get a full view. After about 90 degrees she flinched and raised a higher solar guard level to the view screen. They were near a red dwarf star. Terra moved the aft of the ship so that it pointed to the star and put them in orbit of it. She went down to the lab level to scan for more planets in the system, but instead sidetracked to Quorbin, whose awestruck face toward his console gave her no comfort.
“We went far.” Quorbin’s voice was quiet, as though this knowledge deserved reverence. “We got kicked ahead of our entire predicted course. If we left now I doubt we’d make it back in nine months.” Quorbin looked up at Terra who, by this point, was equally awestruck by the readings. Terra rushed to her console and began a search for any bodies of mass in the system. She found a suspicious amount of debris that was slowly forming a few small moon-like bodies of mass. A further search revealed a similar amount of emptiness they had found along the region they were exploring—empty even for outer space.
“We got pushed to record speeds.” Terra looked through more of the numbers: it might be a record acceleration for a craft this size. She knew the record top speed to be something about 30% faster than what they have achieved, plus it might not even count since it wasn’t due to the thrust from their own ship. In fact, according to the ship’s logs, the computer shifted all power to structural integrity and away from propulsion milliseconds after being hit, thus keeping the ship from being ripped asunder. Terra began to set in a new course to take them back to the Sol system. Near death at top speeds wasn’t new to the experienced and highly accommodated pilot Terra Sentry; getting data from an FTL explosion, of any sort, was new to everybody. All they would have to do is keep cataloging the planets they found on the way home and she would be set. Better funding, better mission, better piloting challenges, better ship—well no, Terra did like the ship. She found it a little cramped with the self-righteous Martian, but she had had a fair amount of say in the ship’s design.
From the outside it looked like a very un-interesting, but tall, rocket. The body was a smooth, silvery, highly elongated eclipse shape. It stood on three short wings that swooped backward and were used for maneuvering. At the top was the cockpit, indistinguishable from the outside; inside, the occupants of the two-man station would almost swear there wasn’t even glass between them and the outside. The main piloting and co-piloting stations were a sort of half-circle pod that adjusted so that the pilots could remain sitting up while the rocket landed upright, but would then adjust forward while the rocket accelerated foreword. When landed the occupants could see all around and above them, save the rest of the ship layering beneath them. While in space, their entire range of view was open, save for the rest of the ship behind them. This open range of sight, along with the perfect balance of the ship, was a dream for Terra and she had grown quite fond of how it handled.
She began to grow frustrated with the navigation however, and called to Quorbin to aid in the course plotting. She called a few times before her aggravation caused her to ask if he was even listening, which she realized was dumb even as she said, but the angry face she pointed to where he was sitting covered this self-doubt perfectly. Her anger faded when she saw Quorbin at his console. Though she could only see his back, his posture in the chair coupled with his stillness and silence left her with an ominous air once again. She took note of how he only didn’t talk when there was something strange or upsetting running through his mind. Despite this note of criticism, she got out of her station and walked quietly to Quorbin.
“What’s wrong?” Terra sounded a rare note of honest concern.
“Do you remember why we’re out here?” Quorbin’s voice was low, his face still glued to the readings on the screen. He looked up only just enough to make the minimal amount of eye contact necessary to let Terra know he was speaking to her. She nodded, and put the slightest amount of pressure on his shoulder to show that she was listening, though his tone was more serious than she ever remembered it being. “There was a whole area of space that, as far as we could tell, was dead. A few scattered stars and planets, but it had less than 20 percent the concentration than the rest of the galaxy has.” Quorbin lost himself for a moment while organizing the data; Terra continued the thought for him:
“The whole region had a curvature—or at least what the long range sensors from Earth detected—leading people to believe it was some kind of massive supernova that had happened thousands, if not millions of years ago, wiping out the whole region of space, light-years across.”
“It wasn’t a supernova. I know stars, they’re like, my thing, and this doesn’t have any of the characteristics that should be there after a supernova. That’s why we survey the planets bordering the region and any we can find inside it: trying to gather information of what happened.” Quorbin finished priming the display with the appropriate data. “When we came out of FTL I thought maybe we had gone so far that I could see the other side of the region and get an exact read of the diameter of the sphere of influence, but….” Quorbin’s voice trailed off, leaving Terra to think that she had found the problem.
“The region wasn’t spherical like you predicted?”
“It’s cylindrical.” Quorbin activated the display. Terra watched as the monitor displayed the stars of the galaxy, then began mapping out the dead region, at first looking like a perfect sphere, but as it formed a half circle it began to stretch backward, burrowing closer to the heart of the galaxy instead of caving back in on itself. As it moved back toward the center of the galaxy it snaked to and fro in slight intervals until finally the map reached the edge of the sensor capabilities. Terra put more of her weight on Quorbin’s shoulder as she leaned closer to the monitor, trying to take in all she had heard and seen.
“It looks like whatever did this followed a course; it doesn’t seem to follow any kind of natural direction, but I can’t think of anything significant out here to guide it.” Terra’s mind kept rolling through what she saw.
“Because anything significant out here was destroyed a hundred thousand years ago.” Quorbin adjusted his seat while he thought further. “We need to go into it.”
“What?” Terra removed her hand and twitched back from Quorbin. “What are you talking about? We’re already way past where we were supposed to go. Plus, from what’s just happened, we have enough to get some serious funding, not to mention recognition. We have everything we need! Let’s just go home.” Quorbin went from awestruck to agitated while he leaned back in his chair. This lack of agreement sent Terra another step back from her shipmate. “Quorbin, lets go home.” Quorbin just rolled his eyes at her suggestion. “Oh, common, your home, my home, we live in the same damn star system you can go to Mars, hell, I’ll drop you off—“
“That’s not what I meant, you cavegirl… I mean…” Quorbin hung his head as he stood, his stance and tone suggesting an apology, but instead he moved on with his point: “What I meant was look at how close this thing was to home.” Quorbin leaned over and activated the holographic display, putting an image of the galaxy in the center of the room between him and Terra. With a few motions the path of the empty region showed itself as the galaxy slowly rotated. Then with a gentle motion Quorbin tapped a single star as it passed in front of him. A slight ping sounded and the star tripled its intensity. “Look at it, look how close it came to Sol, to Earth, to Mars, to our home!”
“Quorbin, its hundreds of light years from Earth.” Terra spoke with clarity, but calmly.
“It spans for THOUSANDS.” Quorbin enlarged the region to show his point. “We know nothing about what caused this! Who’s to say it can’t happen again and this time AT Earth!? And even though it’s a long time to us a few hundred thousand years isn’t that much to the universe this thing could still be going, who knows how long something this powerful could last!”
“So you think there’s something out there causing a hole in the galaxy and you want to probe it?”
“WE NEED TO KNOW WHO DID THIS!” Quorbin suddenly turned away, the split second Terra did see of his face revealed the ratio of shame and regret present in the look of someone who had let something slip.
“Who?” Terra squinted her glance toward the uncomfortable Quorbin, who was failing to pace in the cramped lab. “You… you think that there was intelligence behind this.”
“You said yourself that it doesn’t follow any natural path.” Quorbin tried to regain any credibility in the conversation, and possibly his sanity, from what he could tell of Terra’s current opinion of him. She became more enraged as she continued.
“You want to find some super weapon to bring back and take apart and make you—“
“I don’t want some kind of weapon!”
“Just because you’re a scientist who comes from some tree-hugging botanist colony doesn’t mean you can’t be as power hungry as any other egghead who wants people to respect them cause they got beat up too much when they were a kid!”
“I’m not power hungry!”
“Half the problems we have aboard this damn ship are from the fact that you built a power reactor with three times the output we needed for the systems, I’d say you’re a LITTLE power hungry!” Terra stormed through the hologram, disrupting what the yelling hadn’t already destroyed in the serene display. “I am not going after some Holy Grail of destruction that may or may not even exist! And even if I thought some alien race was behind it, I certainly wouldn’t go looking for them!” Terra moved around to keep herself in front of Quorbin, whose body language was obviously trying not to face her.
“Terra even if we did go back now, what is it exactly that we have? Some readings that don’t make sense of a meteor we can’t prove is there, and data that says we almost blew ourselves up that look more like we tried to jump start the course so we could go home early!”
“Oh, common there’s no way we could have gone that fast under our own power!”
“Yeah we could.” Quorbin’s tone and body language changed suddenly to a more natural matter of fact display. Terra wouldn’t follow the distraction, though.
“Ok even if you’re not pursuing this out of some power trip, it has to be out of some morbid curiosity.” Quorbin gave a questioning glance toward Terra. “Quorbin, you found an abyss, and you want to dive into it as deep as you can.” Terra moved closer to him as her voice softened. “I get that you don’t want to talk about what happened back on Mars that made you want to leave so bad, and I know you’re in no hurry to rush back, but you need to think about this: we don’t know what caused this, we don’t know what the side effects of destruction on that level might be, we don’t KNOW if we’re in any danger from it—“
“All of those are the EXACT reasons we came out here.” This time Quorbin took a step towards Terra, who retreated only slightly. “Everything about a mission like this is to find out if there is something out here that answers all of those questions.” Terra could see it in his gaze and the way he spoke: this was as close as he might ever get to a plea. An actual plea from Quorbin, a beg for her allegiance to something he himself only believed in from some obscure faith he had that maybe, just maybe, an entire galaxy full of emptiness and stars had something worth discovering in the spaces between.
Terra did not share his faith.
Her eyes dotted around the lower half of her field of vision as she took a slow step back away from the passionate idealist before her… then another step back… and another. With each step Quorbin’s heart sank a bit more at the visual of losing two things he didn’t realize until that moment were so important: the love he’d found for diving into the unknown, and the faith Terra had so reluctantly put in him. Quorbin diverted his vision from her once again, feeling some kind of shame he couldn’t explain. He hadn’t even thought about the fact that going here would keep him away from Mars until she had brought it up. Every time one of them thought they we’re over such a thing the other brings it up. As Quorbin looked around for something to distract him from his lasting moment of vulnerability Terra finally looked up at him. With every moment that passed she felt a piece of the respect she had gained for herself over the years slip away as more and more memories of times she had fought to be taken seriously surfaced.
Terra tried to convince herself that he simply wasn’t as used to these type of defeats—as he probably usually preaches science to other science geeks, so it went over well—but being on this side of one of these debates left no feelings of accomplishment for her.
“Help me plot the course back.” Terra walked to the lab’s piloting station. Quorbin was left almost frozen, standing in what felt like the darkest corner of an evenly lit room. Terra only looked up at him as she heard the bang of his fist against the hull of the ship, a split second before he leapt down the hatch to the living quarters level, and from the quick footsteps and second bang of feet against metal, into the engine room. Likely to sulk or brood, she thought to herself, but any and all shreds of humor had left the room with him.
Quorbin stood in front of his reactor, staring into the yellow glow that radiated from it. Terra’s words had made their way to every facet of his mind, leaving an echo ringing between his ears. Was he really only interested in this abyss to get away from home? Was he growing power hungry with every thought about the cause of this destruction? He looked up at the reactor; he knew the power output was a problem because when he started making it the ship was supposed to be bigger—but even then he had added all kinds of modifications to amp it up even more. Quorbin hunched over and rubbed the back of his head with his hands. He rubbed frantically for a split second when he heard footsteps growing near, leaving the back of his hair ruffled. He heard Terra’s boots slowly hit each peg of the ladder leading down to the engine room, and watched from the corner of his eye as she came and sat next to him, her elbows resting on her knees, like his, but her fingers intertwined before her while Quorbin’s arms crossed in front of him. The silence stood for longer moments than it felt.
“Is that really what the data looks like?” Terra looked at him only briefly to make sure he heard. Quorbin sighed and shook his head slightly.
“That’s probably what that asshole commander will say.”
“He’s an admiral actually…”
“…oh wait, yeah, he’s the one that’s—“
“That’s my dad, yeah. And you’re right he probably would say something like that.” Terra wasn’t sure if they were bonding out of mutual disdain for her father or if Quorbin hated her a little more for being related to the admiral. “So this ship could really reach that speed if we tried?”
“Well, no, we could create the power needed for it but I don’t the ships made to go that fast. We could be back in a week or so at top speed, unless you wanted me to ignite more of that Goop stuff.”
“NO, no…..nono….. I’ve had just about as much fun with that as I think I’m ever going to.” Terra had a rule about only trying the same near death experience once. She wanted to live a little, not push her luck. “What are you really hoping to find out there?” Quorbin kept his gaze at the reactor.
“I don’t know. Something. Anything. Proof that it’s worth coming out here to explore all these stars, or even the gaps in between them. Quorbin sat silently again. He had preached his ideals on this case once; he might not ever again if things kept up. Terra had gone over everything after Quorbin had waltzed out. They really didn’t have enough to go home with, and she realized she would rather fly through this boring blackness then go home early and empty handed. She had also begun to notice that, for some reason, Quorbin being this upset made nothing else feel right. She tried to shake as much of the possible regret she considered out of her demeanor.
“Alright.” Terra turned to face Quorbin as he lifted his head, inquiring the full meaning behind the word she spoke. “Let’s go deeper.”
