“Yes, sir,” the petty officer said, starting to get her breathing under control.
“I’ll be sending my compliments to your senior chief. Outstanding effort, sailor. Take a moment to clean up, and we’ll round up a cart to drive you back.”
“Thank you, sir,” she said, then gave him a sharp salute and left.
Part of the self-pity trap that Singh had realized it would be easy to fall into was the terrible sense of being utterly alone in his job. He needed more interactions with his fellow Laconians. With his ship, and the sailors under his command. He needed these reminders that he wasn’t working alone. That hundreds of like-minded and dedicated professionals shared the dream of the empire. Singh made a mental note to spend more time on the
He rolled his monitor out onto the desktop and dropped the small black chip on it. “Transfer all files and wipe,” he said, then when the monitor blinked its acknowledgment, snapped the little black chip in two and dropped it in the recycler.
Admiral Trejo’s face appeared on his monitor. Singh found he was a little excited. Trejo was a man with even greater responsibility than his own, and one who handled it with dedication and grace. He was a man who always knew the right thing to do, and did it without hesitation. If Singh wanted to spend more time with the Laconian sailors like himself, he wanted to
Trejo’s face blurred into motion, and his expression became one of puzzlement, and maybe even fear. “Sonny. Something’s happened, and we have no idea what it is or what to do about it. We need some help.”
He paused, and something like dread took root in his expression. “It seems we’ve taken on a passenger of sorts.”
Singh watched the message play out in fascination and then horror and then fascination again.
The object—there really wasn’t any other word to describe it—was a floating sphere of light and darkness hovering about three feet off the deck in a corridor on the
Mercifully, the person with the pipe stopped doing it, and Trejo began speaking.
“As you can see, the anomaly doesn’t seem to exist as a physical object. It doesn’t appear to radiate on any wavelength, except for visible-spectrum photons. Not one sensing device we’ve aimed at it can even tell that it’s there, but we can record it and see it just fine. Being in the same room with it, looking at it, it’s quite disorienting and causes double vision and severe headaches.”
As if in response to this, four sailors set up a curtain around it using poles and blankets. While they worked, Trejo continued. “It’s moving with us. With the ship, because we’re still under thrust and it hasn’t moved a millimeter since it first appeared. I’ve tried making some minor course adjustments, but it keeps us as its frame of reference. I’ve included all the data we’ve collected on this file, but I can tell you that its first appearance almost exactly matches the moment when we destroyed Pallas Station. It also includes a nearly three-minute blackout shared by every single person on this ship.”
The sailors had finished setting up their curtain, and left. Trejo pulled his monitor close, so his face filled the screen. He lowered his voice, as though telling Singh a secret.
“If this is some new weapon of the inner planets, we need to understand it and now. Blacking out a crew for three minutes, the
Singh sank back in his chair, and rubbed his face with both hands. What if everything, including the attacks on Medina, had just been a distraction? What if the inner planets needed time to bring some new superweapon to bear, and feints and jabs from the Sol fleet and his own insurgents were just to create confusion and buy time?
“Major Overstreet?” Singh said to his monitor.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll need a cart with an armed guard. I’m going to the
“Copy that, sir,”
Singh took another data chip out of his desk, laid it on the monitor, and copied all the files Trejo had sent. He then told his monitor to wipe everything. He placed the chip into a lockable metal briefcase, and waited for his ride to arrive.
