Kraken Mare (25 page)

I won’t bore you with the details of my night out, mostly because I’m afraid I’ll slip up and tell you more than you need to know. I’m a firm believer that those sorts of things should remain private. Call me old-fashioned.

Anyway, once we were finished and I self-consciously hurried into my rec clothes on the side of my friend’s bed, she placed her hand on my shoulder and drew me back to her. Her touch was cold. It made goose-flesh prickle all across my skin.

“Here,” she said. “I want to show you something.”

The light in the room from the viewport was even worse than it had been in The Captain’s Quarters, but any navigator knows a coordinate datapad when he (or she) sees one.

“What’s this?” I asked, accepting the chart from her outstretched hand. It took all of my willpower not to look her in the eye, and even more than that not to look further south, but I was uncomfortable and the datapad was a useful distraction.

Sitting up in bed without bothering to pull the sheet around her, she kissed me softly on the neck and tapped the screen. A new menu opened on the display. Star charts. Constellations. It didn’t take me long to realize the destination she’d programmed was Marvek, exactly where the Hummel was headed. It took me longer to notice that the simulation course she’d set was different than the standard flight path for fleet ships.

“Just a theory we’ve been testing here,” she said, wrapping an arm over my back and resting her chin on my shoulder so she could scan the readings along with me.

I stared at the rainbow schematics on the display screen, trying to make sense of the rapidly reassembling solar systems as the simulation ran at high speed. I was too disoriented to follow, either from the rapid progression of the fleet craft on the datapad or from being half-dressed in the middle of the night with my beautiful—and naked—companion making too much contact. A girl I’d loved since before I knew how to love.

“A theory on what?” I asked, trying hard to hide how clueless and small I felt.

The question triggered a change in her. She lost the sexy, dark-haired mystique and vulnerability that had melted my brain into my gravity-equalizing boots. In their stead rose the look of an appraising, powerful fleet officer who might as well have been wearing seven layers of clothing beneath a full spacesuit. In the end, I felt equally overwhelmed. Lost. Amateur. Swallowed by everything about her. We started dating as teenagers, remember. When you know someone that long, I think you subconsciously revert to your old self in new encounters with them, no matter how hard you try to exist as a separate, novel entity. Which is all to say that, in relationships, some things never change.

“We think we can cut the duration of supply runs in half using these launch points.” She swiped her finger across the datapad to restart the simulation, tapped the screen to pause, and then pointed at a set of tiny, flashing blue dots spread across the galaxy. “Basically, if you circle these stars with the right propulsion and time your orbit-break perfectly, you can use them as a slingshot to the next point. It’s not just the mass relationship of the star with the warp bubble that drives FTL travel anymore. They’ve been testing propulsion with naturally-occurring gravity slip-streams and plasma tubes on the Sol facility.”

I furrowed my brow and stroked my stubble absently, watching the simulation again with renewed concentration. “Why only these stars?”

“Like I said, the presence of natural gravity slipstreams with a unique energy spike. We’ve identified them around these specific bodies so far. You can use any one of them, or all of them if you want to go really far.” She dropped the datapad on the bed and shot me a sly grin. “It takes an expert navigator to pull it off, though. The coordinates have to be laid in manually during the slingshot.” She fell back to the pillow and pulled at my gray rec shirt with eyes that positively glowed in the starlight. I was hungry for her. Then again, when wasn’t I? “If you don’t want to try it because you don’t think you can pull it off, I totally understand.”

“Oh really?” I glared at her, feigning an injury to my pride that felt all too real.

Then she giggled and I couldn’t hold back.

Some two days later when we re-boarded the Rockne Hummel, I presented her suggestion to Captain Gibbons. Based on my personal recommendation, he accepted the proposal—no doubt eager to return home—and two-thirds of us went into hyper-sleep. The rest kept watch, but they never saw what went wrong. It happened in the blink of an eye.

By the time I woke again, we were already fucked.

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