Chapter 4:Drift

“Blackness, dark, and empty.” Quorbin stared at what he saw ahead of him: sure there were the dots of stars, but his scientific mind barely saw them. His mind was wired to include the truth in what he saw: that each of those stars is so far away it was amazing that he could even see them. Terra was never going to forgive him for this if they didn’t find something. He had sent a signal probe toward the Savepoint station nearest their location. Along with the data of their most recent findings, he included instructions for them to spread deeper into the abyss region. He still estimated it would be at least a month before any of them were in position though, so he had wired up some extra external drives to keep some data safe. The fear of losing their proof of anything interesting out here was starting to get downright paranoid for Quorbin.

“I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before.” Terra joined Quorbin on the bridge level with a tablet of star charts and logs she handed to him. “From what I can see this region actually comes within scanner range of a few trade routes to some deep space systems.” Quorbin looked over the star charts she had handed him.

“Which planets are these?” Terra leaned back over toward Quorbin and tapped a few buttons on the tablet. Quorbin looked over the courses and their destinations and after some thought shared his theory. “These are all pricey neighborhoods, really exotic colonies out here. Any ship that’s on these lanes is probably either some high end cruiser looking more at the needs of its rich snob passengers, or cargo ships manned by people too poor to try exploring.”

“But even the initial expeditions that planed out these routes?”

“They might have been set up before they had the sensor capability to realize what was there. Back when our gravity-lock FTL was first established it was really more of grabbing a point and just taking off, it wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now; all you really could scan was where you were and were you ended up.”

“But seriously, nobody realized they were passing by, or in some cases right through, hundreds of light years of emptiness?” Terra looked out the front of the ship inquisitively.

“There’s also the very likely possibility that nobody cared enough to look.” Quorbin handed her tablet back and continued looking through the sensors. Terra relaxed in her seat, but continued to feel an inward uneasiness. As often as she tried to convince Quorbin that the people on Earth weren’t as selfish and self absorbed and he liked to think, his conclusion seemed sound. While her first instinct had been to leave the region free, it was Quorbin who thought maybe someone should check out the big empty region—a ridiculous sounding proposition—but he was one of the few people who was willing to ask and look into questions like why the region was empty, what made it empty, and was it really empty at all. This knack for wanting to be in everyone’s business, or his “sense of exploration,” she assumed he’d call it, was one of a few elements of his character that had made him at odds with many Earthicans, including Terra herself.

Terra sat more upright in her seat, a movement she realized went unnoticed to Quorbin once she glanced over to his station. She had been assuming that he was stereotypical of all Martians since she couldn’t think of any Martians she knew other than a few high society friends of her parents, but most of the system’s exclusive rich club were about the same as each other, so not good representatives of any of the places they lived. Quorbin often accused her of having traits he had seen in other humans on Earth, and so she had just instinctively generalized Mars to be like him. Perhaps this was a misjudgment on her part however: maybe one of the reasons he had been so quick to leave had to do with him having as unpopular ideas on Mars as he did on Earth.

“I think I might have an idea to make this take less than a bajillion years to get through.” Quorbin announced to with more than a small amount of pride in his voice. “I’ve been looking through all the different setting for the long range sensors and I think if I recalibrate them for the amount of emptiness out here I can let us get through faster.” Quorbin projected a hologram of the region ahead of them in the cabin. “The way our gravity scanners work is we have to take in a balance of range and specificity. Gravity is always there but the farther away it is, the weaker the signal is, so to scan something farther away we have to sort of tune out the stronger signals closer to us.”

“Yes Quorbin, I know this. I went to school.” Terra gave him a stare similar to one she would give if someone inquired whether she knew what it was like to be female, however Quorbin was too proud and caught up in own idea to let her mockery of his presentation techniques get in the way.

“SO…” he continued, “The sensors have a reciprocating effect with range and accuracy; if we focus the field to lock onto gravity wells inside the abyss…” A few taps on his screen and a pink, luminous bubble formed around where the ship sat on the blue glowing hologram, its border just inside where most stars ended and darkness began.” We can use the longest range sensors, the gravity ones, to only scan the region directly in front of us as we wander through the center of the abyss. If they detect anything we can just fly over there, check it out, then go back to our original path. It’s not exciting, but I doubt there’s anything out here of interest that doesn’t have mass so it’ll work.” Quorbin sat back, satisfied with his plan. Terra was of course, less satisfied.

“With the gravity sensors down that low we can’t scan for any wells to lock on to, making us blind and unable to reach FTL if loose the gravity locks we already have.”

“Why would we lose them?”

“I don’t know what if we mess up the calibration on the scanners and can’t get them long range again or something?”

“It’s just a change of the settings; it involves me pressing a few buttons and you sitting there doing nothing like always.” Terra glared; she did not wish to be reminded that she often had nothing to do on this ship. “All I have to do is change them back.” Terra stared longer.

“That’s the kind of statement I would post on a website of famous last words.” Quorbin was annoyed at this reference and did not wish to display the humor he found in it. “It seems a little riskier then you’re making it out to be.”

“It’ll be fine.” Quorbin offered reassurance instead of sarcasm…..this time……. He input the modifications to the sensors, and then looked up at the display, waiting to see what popped up… Nothing changed. More emptiness. It was unlikely there would suddenly be something right now that they didn’t already detect (this course would take them about 3-6 months to scan entirely), but when they were done they would still be able to reach home within a reasonable variance to their scheduled arrival date. Terra laid in the course, and off the ship went: snaking through the tunnel of barren darkness, waiting for something interesting to happen. Then she once again decided she was hungry and went for a snack.

Terra began rummaging through the crate of food that was meant to have flavor instead of the nutrient packs designed to actually keep them alive. They saved a lot of space and money for a long term mission like this, but some more common food was brought along as well to keep the body used to digesting normal food. Terra typically earned her athletic body through an active lifestyle of scaling things, climbing things, sometimes fighting things, and now she found herself looking at the backs of packages for nutrient information, realizing that sitting around on a ship all day meant she couldn’t eat quite the same way she did when she was spending her free time playing paintball or laser tag. She missed laser tag, though all she could remember of it now was the long rant from Quorbin about how it was a misnomer, that firing a gravity wave developed for anti-riot squads at other people had little to do with lasers, or that he wasn’t really sure he could be aggressive enough to really be a good player. Terra, however, expected the game to be a satisfying experience and was eager to have an excuse to knock Quorbin on his ass with a pulse weapon of some kind, even a child-friendly, non-lethal one. A few quick insults to his manliness and Quorbin was memorizing the game’s rules and practicing his aim. She did admit, privately to herself, that he had earned some respect in her eyes the way he took getting thrown into a wall at the fault of her aim and got back up into the fight all 17 times—the first game. She remembered each of them fondly every time he annoyed her.

This instance of attempted bonding was part of the time period before the mission launched but after they realized that lack of funding meant the two of them would be stuck by themselves on a ship for a year. They had decided they should get to know each other a bit before getting thrown into this situation so that they would get along better. It lasted all of a week, at which point they then decided to see as little of each other as possible until they absolutely had to. The two knew they couldn’t kill each other while they were on the mission, since obviously there would only be one other person to blame and all…

Terra decided she would risk the possible extra weight and opened her snack joyously. She sat in the makeshift space between the stacked crates, leaning up against them while she happily chomped and crunched. She got up only for a moment to activate a panel on the wall of the room to allow some music to play while she waited for something to do, preferably something that didn’t blow up and try to smash her face. Though she knew it was only a matter of time before she became so bored she would risk that too.

Quorbin stared out into empty space, no longer pure black from the distortion of FTL travel. He could hear Terra’s music playing from two decks down. Although he was sometimes bothered by her selections, her tastes were growing on him, as he figured his were growing on her. He felt a slight hint of sleep come upon him and after a quick look at the time realized that it was rather late. He found himself missing the day/night cycle a planet offered—something he always wanted a planet for—even though he enjoyed space flight so much. The satisfaction he got from surviving off a system of his own design and moving throughout the galaxy as he willed was infinite. Many people would find the idea of having to produce your own air a scary thought, but he often felt that part of the allure of space travel for all humans, present and in history, came from the feeling he got every time he looked at his reactor. As his mind drifted off, he wondered what Terra got out of this. He had seen her piloting first hand, not only as an outside observer but from the seat next to her. At first the experience was terrifying, but he slowly began to feel the comfort in having such an accomplished pilot guiding their ship. His first realization that he was getting used to her came from him noticing how he slowly began to think very little of any other pilot’s ability. Terra always referred to being “one of the best” as a pilot, and they had not once had an argument where he spoke against that claim.

Quorbin played some of the videogames he had brought with him, thought about watching one of the movies he brought, but decided it was time to sleep. He left the ship to guide them as they had programmed and dropped down to the lab area, double checked his equipment was working properly, and then dropped down another level. Terra was already pulling out the crate of sleeping gear. Trying to dismiss the comfort he felt in the fact that their day night timing was yet another part of their lives they were forced to have in common, Quorbin dropped down to the engine room, just to have a look around and check on things.

Quorbin remembered a conversation he had overheard unintentionally between Terra and her richer-then –should-be-reasonable parents. Her mother has expressed an unreasonable amount of concern about her being alone with a strange man on a space ship for a year, even though she had met Quorbin quite a while ago and due to being involved in the same project as Terra, saw her often. Terra had explained that if she couldn’t feel safe in the same room as some geeky nerd who spent more time sitting in front of a computer then she did rock climbing would render all the time she had spent in martial arts classes, military combat training from her father, as well as centuries of progressive female empowerment entirely mute. While Quorbin couldn’t understand why she insisted on saying things like geek and nerd as though it was a bad thing, he was slightly aggravated that she sighted her combat skills in the argument instead of his strength of character, which he had. Though as difficult and irritating as Terra found her parents, Quorbin found them a hundred times worse, especially her mom, and so if her argument that she couldn’t simply overpower Quorbin was what it took to silence her intensive criticism, he would let sleeping dogs lie. Also she wasn’t really lying about being able to take him; even with the added muscle mass he had from earth’s higher gravity she could really kick his ass.

Quorbin climbed back up a deck and began laying out his sleeping bag, which was actually a thin mattress and a thin blanket made of special materials to act as efficient as a space blanket, but the nuance had stuck. At first the amount of space they had arranged to sleep in seemed far too small, since they didn’t want to have to talk to each other, let alone actually bump into each other physically. However as they got used to the arrangement and each other it became less of a problem. In fact they were more than often finding each other asleep already at different places. In front of monitors, in the piloting seats, once even Terra found Quorbin sitting against the wall in the engine room, his tools still in greasy hands. Part of the reason there was any hope of having this mission even work came from the fact that despite the constant arguing and differences of most opinions, other people could instantly tell how well the two of them were able to work together. Possibly because these differences allowed them take on the many, many obstacles the project had run into in a diverse amount of ways. One could always find the answer and the other could always find the way to execute it. So due to the mutual respect found through either side rarely being able to truly one up the other, blankets often found their way across the backs and shoulders of whoever was found asleep in a strange place. Though only one other party to blame, the awkwardness of such rivals excepting such a courtesy was too eerie for either side to find willing to address.

Still the idea of both of them sleeping in the same 5x10 foot area, or 5x10 mile area, hadn’t been the first choice for either of them. This level was the only one really made to accommodate sleeping properly, insomnia and long term deep space voyages did NOT mix well. The idea of alternating sleep schedules was brought up many times, but they discovered in the training the received that not only was it conducive to sanity to keep standard day night cycles as real as possible by doing things like a steady sleep schedule or eating different foods at certain times, but it was counter-productive to such efforts to have some crew on New York time and some on Australia time. So eventually they came to agreements and rules, and the 8 hours a day they spent asleep became the calmest, quietest times they were ever in the same room together.

Quorbin lay with his feet towards the ladder and hatch of the deck and his pillow pushed up against the stack of crates. Terra laid the same, after too many instances of and alternated pattern causing each other to get kicked in the face. Terra plugged in a large pair of headphones and set them around her neck while she sifted through a display of her music. Quorbin had a similar set up, but found he enjoyed the hum of the engines and reactor a far more soothing tone.

“How long do you think it’ll take us to find something?” Terra asked while still scrolling.

“I guess it depends on if were near the beginning or the end of what happened out here.” Quorbin answered while gazing at the ceiling of the deck, watching the stars go by from his mind’s eye view of how it would look seeing through the ship.

“Oh damn, I forgot.”Terra got up and walked around the edge of the crate stack, passing into a small area of space Quorbin could not see from where he was and she began to change of her skintight cybernetic flight suit and into a pair of thin sweat pants and t-shirt with a logo for the branch of the space military fleet her father was in. Quorbin closed his eyes out of respect even though she was out of view, the original rules for her changing involving him being turned the other direction, blindfolded and wearing headphones. He had said he could just leave the room, but she insisted he be where she could see him. He had suspected she really just didn’t wasn’t to admit that his was a much simpler and better idea.

“Done.” Terra spoke casually as she re-assumed her position on her sleeping bag, without showing how she too was uncomfortable with how comfortable they were becoming with each other. “Tomorrows the start of month four right?” Quorbin agreed. “Well, see you then.” Terra replied with a yawn, she put on her headphones, turned her back toward Quorbin and pulled up her blanket to her neck.

Quorbin raised his hand and snapped twice, a holographic display of environmental controls emitted before him. He slightly weakened the artificial gravity to make sleeping on the metal floor more comfortable, dimmed the lighting to about half a Terran moon, then pulled his blanket about waist high, put his arms between his head and the pillow, and let his mind drift.