The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

Day 131, GC Standard 306 BLIND PUNCH

Breakfast was laid out on the kitchen counter when Rosemary returned to the Fishbowl in the morning. Two big bowls of fruit (stored in the stasie, by the look of the pale skin), a basket of unfamiliar pastries, and a large hotpot full of some sort of dark brown porridge. Dr. Chef stood behind the counter, chopping vegetables with two handfeet, drying cutlery with another pair. His cheeks puffed out as she approached.

“Good morning!” he said. “How’d you sleep?”

“Not bad,” she said, climbing onto a stool. “Woke up a little confused a few times.”

Dr. Chef nodded. “It’s never easy sleeping in a new place. You’re lucky we had a Human-style bed already installed in that cabin. When I first joined the crew, I had to wait a few days before we got furniture I could fit myself into.” He gestured to the food on the counter. “Breakfast here is a help-yourself affair, as is lunch. Snacks are available throughout the day, so stop by whenever you’re peckish. Oh, and there’s always tea. You can get yourself a cup anytime you like.” He pointed toward two large decanters, perched on the far end of the counter. A rack of mugs rested alongside. There were two hand-drawn labels affixed to the decanters. “Happy Tea!” read one, above a drawing of a wide-eyed, grinning Human with frizzy hair standing on end. “Boring Tea,” read the other. The Human drawn there looked content, but indifferent. The handwriting was the same as the sign on the Fishbowl door. Kizzy’s.

“Boring tea?” Rosemary asked.

“No caffeine. Just a lovely, normal herbal tea,” said Dr. Chef. “I’ll never understand why you Humans like the jittery stuff so much. As a doctor, I hate starting off your mornings with stimulants, but as a cook, I understand how important breakfast habits are.” He wagged one of his pudgy fingers at her. “But no more than three cups a day, and definitely not on an empty stomach.”

“Don’t worry,” Rosemary said, reaching for a mug. “I’m more of a boring tea person myself.” Dr. Chef looked pleased. She pointed at the rolls. “These smell wonderful. What are they?”

The answer came from behind. “Smoky buns!” Kizzy cheered. She jumped onto a stool and grabbed one of the yellowish pastries. She began to eat with one hand and dished out some porridge with the other.

“Smoky buns?”

“Yet another thing from my home that doesn’t have an easily translatable name,” said Dr. Chef.

“He makes ’em every time we tunnel,” Kizzy said, loading up a plate with an additional bun and a pile of fruit.

“They’re good, solid fuel for a hard day of work.” He squinted at Kizzy as she filled a mug with happy tea. “Unlike that.”

“I know, I know, three cup limit, I promise,” she said. She turned to Rosemary, cupping her mug between her palms. “What’s the verdict on the curtains?”

“They’re great,” Rosemary said. “They make things feel homey.” It was true. She’d almost forgotten that she was no longer living planetside until she’d drawn the curtains back that morning and found a stellar system floating majestically right outside. Even though she had traveled between planets before, the notion that she was now living out in the open still hadn’t sunk in.

She bit down into a smoky bun. The bread was airy soft, the unidentified filling rich and savory, somewhat reminiscent of roasted mushrooms. Smoky, yes, but also lightly spiced, with just the right amount of salt. She looked up to Dr. Chef, who was watching her eagerly. “These are amazing.”

Dr. Chef beamed. “The filling’s made from jeskoo. I think you Solans call it white tree fungus. Rather different than the ingredients I grew up with, but it’s a good approximation. And the buns are high in protein, too. I supplement the grain with mealworm flour.”

“He won’t tell us his recipe,” Kizzy said. “Bastard’s going to take it to his grave.”

“Grum don’t have graves.”

“To the bottom of the ocean, then. That’s even worse than a grave. Graves you can at least dig up.” She shook a bun at him. “Some dumb fish is going to eat whatever part of your brain stores this recipe, and we’ll all be lost without it.”

“Better eat them while you can, then,” Dr. Chef said. His cheeks gave a fluttering puff. Rosemary had deduced that the faster the puffs, the bigger the “smile.”

“So,” Kizzy said, turning her attention to Rosemary. “This is your first time tagging along for a punch, right?”

“Sorry, a what?” Rosemary said.

Kizzy chuckled. “That answers my question. A punch is the act of making a tunnel.”

“Oh, right.” Rosemary sipped her tea. Slightly sweet, nothing special. Okay, so it was a little boring, but comforting nonetheless. “I was actually wondering…” She paused, not wanting to sound stupid. “I know I’ll never have to help out with the tunneling stuff, but I’d like to have a better understanding of how it works.”

Kizzy pressed her lips together with excitement. “You want me to give you a crash course?”

“If it’s no trouble, that is.”

“Oh, stars and buckets, of course it’s no trouble. I am flattered and you are adorable. Um, right, okay. Have you taken any courses in interspatial manipulation? Probably not, huh?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“Space-time topology?”

“Nope.”

“Transdimensional theory?”

Rosemary made an apologetic face.

“Aww!” said Kizzy, clasping her hands over her heart. “You’re a physics virgin! Okay, okay, we’ll keep this simple.” She looked around the counter for props. “Okay, cool, here. The area above my bowl of porridge”—she gestured importantly—“is the fabric of space. The porridge itself is the sublayer—basically the space in between space. And this groob”—she picked up a small black fruit from her plate—“is the Wayfarer.”

“Oh, I can’t wait to see this,” Dr. Chef said, resting his top arms on the opposite side of the counter.

Kizzy cleared her throat and straightened up. “So, here’s us.” She swooped the berry over the bowl. “We’ve got two ends of space to connect, right? Here and here.” She pressed her finger down into the porridge, making indentations on opposite ends of the bowl. “So we travel to one end—whoosh—and all the people seeing us fly by are like, oh my stars, look at that totally amazing ship, what genius tech patched together such a thing, and I’m like, oh, that’s me, Kizzy Shao, you can all name your babies after me—whooosh—and then we get to our start point.” She hovered the berry above the disappearing dent in the porridge. “Once we’re in position, I turn on the interspatial bore. Did you see it when you flew in? Big ol’ monstro machine strapped to our belly? It’s a beast. Runs on ambi cells. Our entire ship couldn’t hold the amount of algae you’d need to power it. Oh, and fair warning, it’s noisy as hell, so don’t freak out while its doing its thing. We’re not blowing up or anything. So, yes. Bore warms up. Then we punch.” She slammed the berry down into the porridge. “And then it gets weird.”

“Weird how?” Rosemary said.

“Well, we’re just squishy little three-dimensional creatures. Our brains can’t process what goes on in the sublayer. Technically, the sublayer is outside of what we consider normal time. Understanding what’s going on in there is like… it’s like telling someone—a Human, I mean—to see in infrared. We just can’t do it. So, in the sublayer, you feel that something is wrong with the world, but you can’t put your finger on what it is. It’s very, very weird. Have you ever done daffy?”

Rosemary blinked. Where she was from, people didn’t casually ask about illegal hallucinogens over breakfast. “Ah, no, I haven’t.”

“Hmm. Well, it’s kind of like that. Your visual perception and sense of time gets all fucked up, but the difference is that you’re fully in control of your actions. When you’re studying for your tunneling license—that’s separate from basic tech studies, so believe me when I say I’m super glad I’ll never have to set foot in a school again—you have to practice stuff like fixing the engines or entering in commands after taking a dose of sophro, which is basically a dumbed-down, government-issued version of daffy. Worst homework ever, I assure you. But you get used to it.” She stuck her fingers into the porridge, getting a grip on the hidden berry. “Okay, so while we’re all tripping balls, the ship’s pushing through the sublayer, dropping buoys to force the tunnel open. The buoys are there for two reasons. One, they keep the tunnel from collapsing, and two, they generate this field made up of all the same strings and particles and stuff that normal space is made out of.”

Rosemary nodded. “Artificial space.” Finally, a concept she somewhat understood. “But why do that?”

“So that it’s an easy ride for anybody traveling though. That’s why you don’t notice a difference when you tunnel hop.”

“And none of this messes up the space outside? I mean, here in our space?”

“Nope, not if you do it right. That’s why we’re pros.”

Rosemary nodded toward the porridge. “So how do we get out of the sublayer?”

“Okay,” Kizzy said. She started pushing the groob through the porridge. “Once we get to our exit point, we bust back through.” She shoved a spoon under the groob, catapult style, and raised her fist.

“Kizzy,” said Dr. Chef, his voice even. “If you launch porridge all over my nice clean countertop—”

“I won’t. I just realized this won’t work. My genius demonstration is flawed.” She frowned. “I can’t fold porridge.”

“Here,” said Dr. Chef. He handed her two cloth napkins. “One for your hands, one for educational purposes.”

“Ah!” said Kizzy, cleaning the porridge from her fingers. “Perfecto.” She held up the clean napkin, gripping two opposite corners. “Okay. You know the big grid-like spheres surrounding tunnel openings, with all the blinky warning lights and crackly lightning stuff coming off the joints? Those are containment cages. They keep space from ripping open any farther than we want it to. You have to have one cage on each end of the tunnel.” She gestured with the corners of the napkin. “So if we’ve got one cage at this end, and another cage at this end, we’ve got to construct a tunnel that effectively makes it so that this”—she stretched the corners far apart from one another—“is the same thing as this”—she brought the corners together.

Rosemary frowned. She had a rough idea of how tunnels worked, but she’d never been able to make the idea stick. “Okay, so, the cages are light-years apart. They’re not in the same place. But… they behave as if they were in the same space?”

“Pretty much. It’s like a doorway connecting two rooms, only the rooms are on opposite sides of town.”

“So, the only place the distance between those two points has been changed is… within the tunnel?”

Kizzy grinned. “Physics is a bitch, right?”

Rosemary stared at the napkin, struggling to make her three-dimensional brain work with these concepts. “How do you get the cages in place? Wouldn’t it take forever to travel from one end to the other?”

“Gold star for the lady in the pretty yellow top!” Kizzy said. “You are totally correct. That’s why there are two different ways of building a tunnel. The easy way is what we call an anchored punch. These take place in systems that already have existing tunnels connecting them to other places. So, say you want to connect Stellar System A to Stellar System B. Both System A and System B already connect to System C. You drop a cage in System A. You hop through the existing tunnel from System A to System C. Then you hop from System C to System B. You drop the second cage, then you punch back to System A.”

Rosemary nodded. “That makes sense. Sounds like a roundabout way to get there, though.”

“Oh, definitely, and it’s rarely a two-hop trip like that. Especially if the tunnels connect to different planets within the system. Usually takes us a few tendays to get between jobs, sometimes more if we’ve got a lot of space to cover. That’s part of what Sissix does, charting the fastest ways to get between existing tunnels.”

Rosemary took a second bun and cracked it open. A puff of steam rose from the fragrant pocket within. “What if the system you’re tunneling to isn’t connected to anywhere?”

“Aha. Then you do a blind punch.”

“What’s that?”

“Drop a cage at one end, punch through, and find your way to the other side—which is crazy hard to do without the second cage to guide you. Once you get back out, you’re working against the clock to get the cage up. Cages are self-constructing, so all you can really do is deploy the pieces and wait a day. But still, you have to deploy it as soon as you get out. Having a cage on one end of the tunnel and none on the other makes things inside unstable. At first, it’s no problem, but the longer you wait, the faster it starts to tear. If that happens, it all goes to shit. And when the fabric of space goes to shit, you’ve got a really big problem.”

“Like the Kaj’met Expanse.” Learning about the Kaj’met Expanse was something of a rite of passage for youngsters, the moment when you realized that space, for all its silent calm, was a dangerous place. The Kaj’met Expanse was a Harmagian territory, half the size of the Sol system, in which space had been completely rent asunder. The pictures from there were terrifying—asteroids drifting into invisible holes, planets snapped in half, a dying star leaking into a debris-crusted tear.

“Yeah, that’s a leftover from way back when the Harmagians started building tunnels. All the first ones were blind punches. Had to be. No other way to get from system to system except for going FTL.”

“Right,” said Rosemary, nodding. The ban against FTL was one of the oldest laws on the books, outdating the founding of the GC. While traveling faster than light was technologically possible, the logistical and social problems caused by what basically amounted to time travel far outweighed the gains. And aside from the administrative nightmare, few people were keen on a method of transportation that guaranteed everyone you knew back home would be long dead by the time you reached your destination. “But why not get between systems with a… oh, I don’t know what it’s called. The things deepods use.”

“A pinhole drive. Right, so, a pinhole drive dips you in and out of the sublayer really fast, like a needle and thread. They basically make a bunch of tiny, temporary tunnels to get between places super fast.”

“That much I knew.”

“Okay. Pinhole jumps are fine with a little bitty single-person craft like a deepod, because the holes it makes are too small to do any real damage. Without a cage, the hole closes right up. Think of it like a baby blind punch, only the trajectory is mapped out with a series of marker buoys ahead of time, so the deepod is always following the exact same sublayer path. That’s also why deepods have designated travel lanes in populated areas, and why they’re equipped with multidimensional warning beacons. You don’t want a deepod jumping out of the sublayer into your hull.”

“You can’t use pinhole drives with big ships?”

“You can, but it’s not a good idea. Holes that big really wear on space, and if you have a lot of them relatively close together, like you would in a deepod lane, they could potentially tear into each other. As a once-in-a-while thing, doing pinhole jumps with a big ship is okay. But if you were sending something the size of our ship in and out of the sublayer as often as a deepod—yeah, that wouldn’t be good. Also, pinhole drives are expensive as hell to install, so pretty much no big ships bother with them. Now, if you really need to get somewhere fast—and I mean need, like serious business need—you can put in a request for a pinhole tug. A tug can drag a big ship to wherever it needs to be. Same risks apply, but tugs are super regulated, and they’re careful with how they use them. You have to get approval from the Transport Board to use a tug. You see tugs for things like, I dunno, if you need to get a med ship to a bunch of refugees fast, or if the government’s sending someone outside of GC space, where we don’t have tunnels. So, for ordinary stuff like tunneling, using a pinhole drive isn’t worth the cost, or the risk.”

Rosemary took a long sip from her mug. The boring tea was growing on her. Something sweet and unassuming was the perfect compliment for the smoky buns. Dr. Chef sure knew what he was doing. “Blind punches sound pretty risky on their own, though.”

“They are. There aren’t many tunnelers licensed to do them. That’s why we get paid well. Well enough, anyway.”

“This ship does blind punches?” Rosemary didn’t like that idea. Burrowing through the space in between space without a clear idea of where you’d be coming back out did not sound like something she wanted to tag along for.

“Yup. We’ll be doing one today.” She patted Rosemary’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. I know it sounds scary, but we do this all the time. Trust me, we’re super safe.”

Trust me. This coming from the tech in a grubby jumpsuit with to-do lists written on her sleeve. Rosemary needed a little more reassurance than that. “How do you know where the ship should come back out?”

“Well, we don’t. The best any computer program can do with a blind punch is an educated guess, and that’s not good enough. That’s why you need a Sianat Pair.”

“You can’t do blind punches without a Navigator, not legally or practically,” said Dr. Chef. “You need someone who can comprehend what’s going on in the sublayer. Someone who can visualize what’s going on.”

“An AI can’t do it?” Rosemary said. She knew that there were still things that technology couldn’t do, but being reminded of it always surprised her.

“Nope. Think about it,” Kizzy said. “AIs can’t be any smarter than the people who create them. We can code in all the crazy math and theories we want, but we can’t make an AI do things that we don’t understand ourselves. And not to freak you out, but we definitely don’t understand the sublayer. We’ve got ideas about it, sure, but the only species who really gets it are the Sianat. Which means the only people who could make an AI on par with a Sianat Pair are the Sianat themselves. And they sure as hell aren’t going to do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s heresy,” Dr. Chef said. “The Sianat believe that the abilities the Whisperer gives them are sacred gifts. They believe that since the virus doesn’t affect other species, other species aren’t meant to possess those abilities. They’re happy to do the work for us, but they’re not going to share their understanding, not even with software.”

“Interesting,” Rosemary said. Weird, she thought. “Okay, so, regardless of what kind of a punch you’re doing, isn’t it possible that you can come out not just in another place, but in another time?”

“Absolutely,” Kizzy said. “That’s why we do our very, very best not to fuck things up. Oh, that reminds me!” She hopped off the stool and ran over to the vox in the kitchen. “Lovey, can you get me Jenks, please?”

There was a pause. The vox snapped to life. “Mmmwha?” said Jenks on the other end.

“Come get your smoky buns, sleepy, before I eat them all,” Kizzy said.

“What time is it?”

“Ninth hour, ish. You’re late.”

“What? Are we at the punch site yet?”

“About an hour out.”

“Shit. Kizzy. Kizzy, I am so hungover.”

“I know.”

“This is entirely your fault.”

“I know, sweetie. Come get smoky buns.”

“Don’t ‘sweetie’ me. We’re not friends anymore. Are you in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Chef, please tell me you have some SoberUps on hand.”

“There’s an unopened box in the med bay,” said Dr. Chef, puffing his cheeks.

“Okay,” sighed Jenks. “Okay.” The vox clicked off.

Dr. Chef gave Kizzy a look. “Just what did you two get up to last night?”

Kizzy took a bite of porridge. “Waterball semi-finals. I thought it would be more fun as a drinking game.”

“Who was playing?”

“Skydivers versus Fast Hands. Jenks and I each picked a team, and we had to drink when the other scored.”

“Who did you pick?”

“Fast Hands.”

“I take it they won?”

Kizzy grinned. “By twelve.”

Dr. Chef exhaled a disparaging rumble and fixed his beady eyes on Rosemary. “Some advice? If Kizzy ever says the words ‘you know what would be a great idea?’, ignore whatever comes after.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Kizzy said. “All my ideas are great.”

Dr. Chef studied Rosemary, considering something. “You know, I always sedate myself before a punch. I’ve never gotten used to the sublayer, so I find it easier to sleep through it. No one will fault you if you care to join me.”

“Thanks,” Rosemary said, “but I think I’d like to see how it’s done.”

“Attagirl,” said Kizzy, clapping Rosemary on the back. “Don’t you worry. It’s a kick in the head, but it’s a fun kick in the head.”

An hour later, in the control room, Rosemary was buckling the safety harness on her chair when the Sianat Pair entered the room. Rosemary could not help but stare. She had seen pictures of Pairs before, but seeing one in the flesh was different. Ohan had a lanky, four-limbed body, with broad feet and unsettlingly long fingers. He—they walked all fours, back bowed, rather like the archival vids Rosemary had seen of Earthen primates. Ohan was covered from scalp to toenails with dense, ice blue fur, trimmed short and decorated with shaved fractal patterns that revealed coal gray skin beneath. Their eyes were enormous, long-lashed, and visibly wet (Rosemary had read the night before that overactive tear ducts were one of the Sianat virus’ many quirks). Their furry face looked relaxed, almost drugged—a look that was corroborated by their loosely-held shoulders, the slowness of their motions. They wore robes, of a sort, a snug garment so simple in design that it seemed like an afterthought. Rosemary knew it was unfair to judge other sapients by Human social norms, but Ohan gave her the impression of a stoned college student, showing up late to class in nothing but a bathrobe. She reminded herself that this stoned college student could outmatch an AI when it came to interdimensional physics.

“There’s the other half of my team,” Sissix said with a friendly smile. “This should be a fun one, hmm?”

Ohan nodded once toward her, moving with polite formality. “We always enjoy our work with you,” they said.

“Hey, Ohan,” Ashby said, looking up from his control panel as the Sianat Pair took their seat. “How are you today?”

Ohan sat hunched on their back haunches. Their joints folded up tightly, making the Pair appear much shorter than when they walked in. “Very well, thank you, Ashby,” they said. They curved their head toward Corbin, before turning their attention back to their workstation. They flicked their long fingers over the controls, bringing the visual readouts to life. Several seconds went by before they raised their head again, noticing that something in the room was different. Their head turned toward Rosemary, owl-like. “Welcome,” they said with a single nod. As they spoke, Rosemary could see a row of flat teeth. She had read that Pairs filed down their carnivorous points. The thought made her shiver.

Rosemary returned the nod, making sure not to break their gaze. Chin down, eyes up. That was how the Linking reference said Sianats greeted others. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said. “I’m looking forward to seeing you work.”

Ohan gave another small nod—pleased, perhaps?—and turned back to their workstation. They pulled out a scrib and a thick pixel pen. Rosemary’s eyes widened when she saw that the scrib was running a basic sketch program. They weren’t honestly going to puzzle out the inner workings of a wormhole by hand, were they?

“Okay,” Ashby said, buckling his safety harness. “Let’s do this thing. Lovey, patch me through to the techs.”

“You’re on,” Lovey said.

“Roll call,” Ashby said.

“Flight controls, go,” said Sissix.

“Fuel check, go,” said Corbin.

“The interspatial bore is go,” said Kizzy over the vox. “But I can’t find my crackers and you know I don’t like to do this without snacking—”

“Think of it next time, Kiz,” said Ashby. “Jenks?”

Jenks’ voice chimed in. “Buoys are go.”

“Lovey, ship status,” said Ashby.

“All ship systems performing normally,” said Lovey. “No technical or structural malfunctions.”

“Ohan, are you ready?”

“We are eager to begin.”

“Fantastic,” said Ashby. He glanced back to Rosemary. “You strapped in?”

Rosemary nodded. She had checked the buckle three times.

“Right then. Kizzy, start it up.”

Deep down in the bowels of the ship, the bore awoke with a baritone howl. Rosemary was glad that Kizzy had warned her about the bore beforehand. It was the sort of sound that felt capable of ripping bulkheads apart.

Ashby tapped the arm of his chair ten times, evenly spaced. As he tapped, a trembling grew within the hull. The thing on the underside of the ship pulsed and bellowed. The floor panels shuddered.

With a terrible silence, the sky ripped open.

It swallowed them.

Rosemary looked out the window, and realized that she’d never really seen the color black before.

“Give me a heading, Ohan,” said Sissix.

Ohan stared at the readouts on his screen. Their hand was already darting over the scrib, writing equations in a text that Rosemary did not recognize. “Ahead sixteen-point-six ibens. Full speed, please.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” said Sissix. She threw back her feathered head with a cheer as she sent the Wayfarer hurtling through nothing.

There was no real way to say how much time it took to build the wormhole, because, as Kizzy had said would happen, time ceased to have any meaning. There was a clock silently counting minutes and hours above the window, but within the sublayer, they were mere numbers to Rosemary. She kept feeling as if they had just arrived, only to then feel that they had been in there forever. She felt drunk, or worse, like trying to wake from a fever dream. Her vision swam and shifted. There was nothing beyond the screen, though that same nothingness sometimes seemed to shimmer with color and gauzy light. The buoys they launched blinked and drifted, like plankton caught in waves.

Voices blurred all around her, calling out complex terms that would have meant nothing to her even if she could have processed the words at normal speed. Ohan’s voice was the only thing that remained steady, the eye of the storm, directing course changes to Sissix as their hand tirelessly scrawled numbers across the scrib.

“All buoys deployed,” Jenks said over the vox. “We’re ready to set up the lattice.” The words seemed to hang as if the air carrying them had thickened, even though the world itself was playing back in double-time.

“Initiate coupling,” said Ashby.

“Ashby, I think we’ve hit a pocket,” said Sissix.

“Get us out before we get stuck,” said Ashby.

“Ashby, I think we’ve hit a pocket.”

“Get us out before we get stuck.”

“Ashby, I think we’ve hit a pocket.”

“Get us out before we get stuck.”

“Ashby, I think we’ve—”

“Thirty ibens to port, now!” cried Ohan.

The ship lurched and groaned as Sissix jolted them aside. Somehow, despite the artigrav nets, it felt as if they had flipped upside down. Or maybe that they had been upside down to begin with.

“The hell was that?” said Ashby.

“Temporal pocket,” said Ohan.

“Where?”

Ohan gave his readout screen a glance. “Twenty ibens starboard. Five and a half ibens wide. Give it a wide berth.”

“Am doing,” Sissix said. “Good thing we didn’t get stuck.”

Corbin scowled at his screen. “Looks like we did get stuck. Fuel levels are down point-oh-oh-six percent from where they should be.”

“Buoys holding?” Ashby asked.

“Holding,” Jenks and Kizzy said in tandem.

“Ohan, where’s our exit?”

“Three-point-six ibens, ahead,” Ohan said. “Two-point-nine ibens, up. One… no, no, zero-point-seven-three ibens starboard.”

Sissix’s claws flew over the controls. “Ready?”

Ashby nodded. “Punch it.”

The bellowing below returned. Everyone slammed back into their seats, eyes snapping shut. Time returned with a thud. Rosemary caught her breath, and pulled her fingernails out from the arms of her chair. She looked to the window. The view had changed. A red dwarf lay in the distance, surrounded by several planets. One was partially terraformed, with a small fleet of GC cargo carriers and transport ships clustered nearby. A new colony was being built. A sphere of blinking safety buoys hung in the space around the ship, their yellow lights directing others away from the Wayfarer’s work area.

“And that is what we call perfect,” said Ashby. He flicked through the readouts on the panel before him. “No spatial degradation. No temporal tears. We’re exactly where and when we should be.” Sissix whooped. A double cheer came up over the vox, muffled behind Lovey’s congratulations. Ashby nodded, satisfied. “Kizzy, Jenks, I’ll leave you two to deploy the cage. The rest of you, call it a day. Great work, everybody. Well done.”

“You know, Ashby,” said Sissix. “If memory serves, big transport ships like that one there have some nice recreational facilities for weary travelers.”

“You don’t say,” said Ashby with a smirk. “Well, we’ve just earned ourselves a nice paycheck. I’d say that calls for a few hours off ship. That is, if Ohan and Lovey don’t mind keeping an eye on the cage for us.” The Sianat Pair and the AI both voiced their agreement.

Sissix cupped her hands toward the vox. “Party on the carrier in two hours,” she announced. Kizzy’s jubilant cry nearly drowned out Jenks, who was moaning something about SoberUps. Sissix turned back toward Rosemary. “So, newbie. What’d you think?”

Rosemary forced a wan smile. “It was great,” she said. She managed to turn away from the console before throwing up.