LITMIR.BIZ

       JULY 6, 2127 CE

      By the thirty-third launch, running the pods started to feel routine. Six had failed to dive, four more had blown their lids, and the majority had bounced into the normal travel SDs. But seven had gone where no one had gone before. The data from those dives was being processed around the clock. And still, Vanhi hoped for more.

      Today—on what would have been a lazy Sunday back in Arizona, but was a full-on work day here in the glamorous world of convoy living—Vanhi went to her station with an extra spring in her step.

      Mendez Perez—Stone, as he insisted she call him—had offered riveting breakfast conversation. The kind that got her mental wheels turning, and her cheeks flushed with the pumping of creative blood.

      The whole table had listened in on their banter, and Vanhi hadn’t been self-conscious about it in the least. Stone’s friends Justice Jax and Eric Price had both wiggled their eyebrows at each other. And afterward, Gabriel had given Vanhi a nudge as they went to drop off their trays at the cleaning station.

      “It’s not like that,” she’d insisted.

      “Like what?” he asked, feigning perfect innocence.

      “I would like to know as well,” said C from the sundial, sounding an awful lot like a child asking how babies were made.

      She wasn’t about to let Gabriel rile her, so she’d given him a shake of her head and a friendly smile, and happily hopped on the awaiting shuttle.

      Stone hadn’t been far behind. He took up the vacant seat beside her without a word about it, as though it were perfectly natural.

      She wanted to hold on to this feeling forever. This was what space travel was all about. Good people, good ideas, experimentation, wonder, discovery. This was what she’d been fighting for, what she’d compromised for. If she could just keep this feeling close, maybe she could use it to scare away the bad days—the times when guilt came back and Kaufman haunted her dreams.

      In the EOL, everyone took their positions.

      “Give me greens,” she said on each loop. “MID AIM?”

      “Go,” said Mini-Drive AI Manager, Pablo de Valdivia.

      “CHEM EX?”

      “Go,” said Soraya Ebadi, who was in charge of monitoring the chemistry experiments.

      “COM EX?”

      “Go,” said Anju Gautam, who managed communications.

      She ran her checks all the way down the line. Everything was good.

      “ADCO?” she asked last.

      “Go,” said Stone.

      “Then let’s do this.”

      A few minutes later, the dragon fruit of a craft hovered in front of the windows momentarily before Stone sent it on its way.

      The time ticked by as it always did, dragging out while they waited for the pod to achieve a safe distance. Vanhi watched over the team, making sure everyone looked as they should: relaxed, focused.

      “Be advised,” de Valdivia said. “I have telemetry readings in the red …” His finger tracked a line on one screen. It jumped where it should have been steady.

      “Copy. Where is that instrumentation located? Can you patch me the feed?” Vanhi asked.

      “It’s the rear left quadrant,” he said. “Vibrations, there’re—something’s on. Something’s using power, but I can’t—”

      “SD MEC, are you reading the same vibrations?” she asked. De Valdivia’s readout popped onto her leftmost screen. There was a distinct tremor, yes, but the AI wasn’t pinpointing its location. She glanced at the visual feeds. Nothing looked amiss on the test area cameras. But the pod was still little more than a shining dot on most of them. She flipped to the flight path monitor.

      “Starting to get a lean,” said Stone. “Shouldn’t have to course correct this much.”

      “Copy. Can anybody tell me where the aberrant energy is centered?” Vanhi asked, bringing up the real-time system log.

      “It’s pulling starboard,” Stone said.

      “It’s the drive itself,” said de Valdivia. “It’s got to be a malfunction in the AI quantum-reaction regulation. It looks like a compensation, but the main power hasn’t been cued, so there’s nothing to compensate for.”

      “Can we reboot the AI?”

      “Already initiating shutdown.”

      The pod—a blip on her screen—was engulfed in white light.

      Everyone gasped.

      No, no, no. Damn it. “Did we lose it?” She held her breath, frantically hitting refresh on all of her feeds. “Did we lose it?” she demanded, articulating every syllable.

      “No!” It was Stone. “I’m still—it’s fighting me, I can’t—steering’s out, it’s veering back.”

      “Talk to me,” Vanhi said, voice even and expression stern while her heart battered itself inside her ribs. Losing a pod wasn’t new. They’d lost plenty, expected to lose the majority of what they had left. But this …

      The white light flared out, but what was left in its wake wasn’t debris, or a dormant pod. The probe’s hull glimmered with new life. Around it, some sort of field pulsed, fading from petal-pink to tangerine and back again.

      And Stone was right—it was sailing toward the convoy.

      “Convoy Control—”

      “We’ve alerted Captain Tan. He’s standing by to take evasive action.”

      “Copy that. ADCO, TRAJ, any way you can reel it in, get it to stop?”

      “It’s not responding,” Stone gritted, pounding the holokeys at his station.

      “What happened? What went wrong, MID AIM?”

      “I don’t know,” de Valdivia insisted, hands flying over his keyboard, brow furrowed, jaw stiff. “I rebooted. It should have gone dead. Should have—unless … Unless the meters were off, and we weren’t detecting … No … wait, wait …”

      He didn’t have to elaborate. Vanhi’s internal monologue started to hammer out two words on repeat: Oh shit. Oh shit.

      Oh shit.

      The AI wasn’t malfunctioning, it was doing its damned job. It was trying to keep the system from engaging. Somehow the SD drive had started to pull power, to dive, and the AI was trying to hold it back.

      But then they’d shut it down …

      “Are we getting any readings from Thirty-Three’s external sensors? Talk to me, people, that’s not an SD bubble like I’ve ever seen.”

      “I’m getting unusual readings,” called a woman’s voice with a heavy Danish accent—Esmée Jensen, Mechanical Maintenance Officer. “Power surges.”

      “Distance between the pod and the convoy is shrinking, sir,” said Stone.

      Vanhi had her head down, frantically looking for a way to remotely bar the pod’s path or even destroy it. They could launch number Thirty-Four. ADCO could pilot it on an intercept course, crash the two pods—

      “These are similar to the same kind of surge forces found inside SD drives when they’ve hit main sequence,” Esmée called again.

      “Copy,” Vanhi gritted

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