The Lost Era: Well of Souls: Star Trek (18 page)

Bat-Levi’s day hadn’t started well. She’d tumbled into bed at 0200, tumbled out at 0530, and gulped sour replicator coffee before dashing off to meet Joshua at the slip where the
Lion
was docked. And now the generator was acting up, and her nose itched. Absently, Bat-Levi brought up her left hand to give her nose a good scratch and was rewarded with the solid thud of her gloved hand colliding with her helmet. She cursed, silently. If Joshua weren’t in such a hurry to get underway, she wouldn’t be in this pickle. She’d never gotten used to EVAs, even though they were required at the Academy because, dollars to doughnuts, put her in a tin can, turn on the air, and she was guaranteed to have to scratch
something,
every single time.

Bat-Levi blew out, her hair fluttering away from her forehead, but an errant strand glued itself to her sweaty cheek. She wiggled her mouth, trying to dislodge it. Instead, she only succeeded in getting the hair lodged under her tongue.
Damn.
She tried spitting out. The hair stayed put. Her own fault: She’d been in such a rush she hadn’t secured her hair before ducking into her suit. And she was practically drowning in sweat. She was always so damned hot in her suit, no matter how low she cranked the temp. She made some
pfft-pfft
spitting sounds.

“What’s that?” Joshua’s voice was tinny inside her helmet. “What’s going on down there?”

“Nothing.” A finger of sweat crawled down Bat-Levi’s back. Hair plastered her tongue. “I’m fine.”

“You sound grumpy.”

“Well, I am grumpy,” she said, talking around hair. She gave up trying to spit it out. “You and your stupid generator.”

“Hey, this is your baby, too.”

“My baby.” In vacuum and weightless—and thank goodness for that, because among the many other things she hated about EVAs was how robotic the suits made her feel—Bat-Levi grabbed a handhold and pulled herself over to the panel behind which lay the influx particle siphon of their emissions generator. “I have news for you, Jock-o. While you’ve been hatching your latest scheme, I’ve been sweating it out at the Academy. You didn’t even come to my graduation.”

“I was busy.” Bat-Levi heard the
blip-bleep-blat
of controls being keyed in. Joshua was at the helm of their ship, the
Lion,
while she went below deck, suited up, and cracked the magnetic airlock and hatch of a vacuum containment pod bolted to the ship’s belly. “Besides, I knew I’d see you sooner or later.” More bleats. “Anyway, what could be better than spending time with your baby brother, huh?”

“Baby brother, my eye. By a whole two minutes, Jock-o.”

“Hey, two minutes can be an eternity, like
now.
Are you going to get in behind that panel and tweak that intermix ratio, or are we going to hang out here all day, watching Starbase 32 doing a nice pirouette, way out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Coming,” said Bat-Levi. Joshua didn’t know about Devlin Connolly, and so he couldn’t know that she’d given up a week’s leave on Pacifica with Dev to work with Joshua. But Joshua was the one going full bore after the Cochrane Medal. Joshua had drawn up the specs for a self-replicating nanoparticle emissions generator. The theory was hers, using vacuum energy for fuel. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle implied that even under conditions where all sources of energy—whether from matter, heat, or light—were removed, random electromagnetic oscillations remained. The most straightforward example of vacuum energy was the Casimir effect. Two metal plates, in close enough proximity, would come together because, as the plates blocked light energy from getting in between, vacuum energy pushed the plates together. Bat-Levi reasoned that if this negative energy, a limitless power source, could be harnessed into an electromagnetic bottle, it could substitute for the present-day warp drives. The energy to power the ship would come from space itself.)

Joshua made the intuitive leap his twin sister hadn’t: If energy could be removed from space, could this same process open up fissures in space itself, creating gateways to other dimensional space-time membranes and allow the ship to jump through the openings, like traversing wormholes?

So their generator: a Casimir sink, on a much larger scale. The generator itself was housed in the vacuum pod in an attempt to keep the ambient conditions as close to the vacuum of space as possible (though not as cold). The glitch was that they still had to use present-day technology simply to move the ship around and to power the initial conversion reaction necessary to siphon away vacuum energy. Hence, the problem: The
Lion
was equipped with a warp drive, and the tricky part was keeping the intermix ratio of deuterons and antideuterons stable in the face of an influx of additional vacuum energy.

Bat-Levi manipulated a set of Kelly bolts securing a metal panel over the injectors that controlled the nanoparticle plasma stream. The panel floated free, and she peered inside. The plasma was a dark cobalt blue and flowed like liquid, the way fire behaves in weightlessness.

Joshua’s voice came again. “Well?”

“Hang on,” said Bat-Levi. An array of prismatic grids, arranged in two series, deflected the plasma stream, funneling errant particles back toward their central nodal injector point. Each grid functioned independently, and she saw now that one wasn’t self-correcting quickly enough, creating uncontrolled power surges. Bat-Levi pulled a prismatic spanner from her waist and fiddled with the grid’s alignment. “How’s that?”

“Not good enough. I’m still reading a five percent flux in the energy dispersal pattern. That just won’t cut it, Darya. You know we’ve got to maintain an even pattern of energy dispersion, or else we’ll rip out chunks of subspace.”

“Heck.” Bat-Levi recalibrated her spanner and tried again. “Jock-o, have you ever considered giving this a little more time? The last simulator run, the generator did that little runaway surge, and this grid is just not cutting it.”

“Yeah, but only for three-point-four-seven seconds.”

“
Yeah,
and plenty long enough for our port nacelle to linearly accelerate twice as fast as the one to starboard.”

“And I got it back under control. I know; I’m hearing you.”

“And?” Bat-Levi paused, a Kelly bolt between her fingers.

“
And
I don’t want to wait. Darya, you’re shipping out on the
Wheedon
in two weeks. We won’t get another chance, not unless you stay put.”

Bat-Levi shook her head then realized Joshua couldn’t see her. “Sorry, Jock-o, I’m not putting off my vacation, even for you.”

“You have something better to do?”

Yes.
Bat-Levi felt a twinge of guilt. “Let’s just say that I have other plans. Look,” she talked at the canopy over the pod, a habit she noticed all people in suits had: talking up into thin air, “you can do this without me, Jock-o. We’ll play around with the ship today, but if it’s not optimal, then you put it off. Run the test flight when she reads steady across the board.”

“No. You’re part of this, Darya. I want you with me.”

Bat-Levi decided not to argue. She checked the ratio of the influx of nanoparticles across the series of prismatic grids. The ratio fluctuated—enough so that Bat-Levi knew she’d have to make manual adjustments along the way. Not good. Maybe she should play with this longer, and to hell with Joshua’s impatience. But she was cooking in this damn suit, and she knew she couldn’t make the thing perfect.

Working as quickly as her gloved fingers allowed, Bat-Levi bolted the panel back into place. Then she clambered into a small airlock, waited for the lock to repressurize, and scrambled out of the vacuum pod. Battening down the magnetic hatch located amidships, she keyed in her coded combination, waited for the iris to constrict and seal. Then she popped her top. There was an audible hiss, then the relatively cool, dry air of the shuttle hit her face, and she blew out a great breath of relief. Then she pulled the hair out of her mouth and gave her nose a good scratch.

She spared a peak at the generator through a portal adjacent to the magnetically sealed hatch. All the generator’s indicators were green; the flow of nanoparticles appeared stable.

After she peeled out of her suit and stowed it next to Joshua’s, she pattered up the gangway amidships to the upper deck. Joshua’s back hunched over the shuttle’s main control console. Bat-Levi squeezed her way forward to an auxiliary monitoring station. The
Lion
was a modified four-passenger shuttle, twelve meters stem to stern and six meters at its beam. With all that extra equipment crammed onto the main deck, the fit was tight.

Joshua looked over as she dropped into her seat. “Ask you something?”

Bat-Levi brought the readings on the nanoparticle emissions generator on-line. Her eyes narrowed as she studied the stability of the particle stream. That damn burp ... She fiddled with an injector aperture and changed the collision angle by a tenth of a nanometer. “Fire away. What’s on your mind?”

“You.”

Bat-Levi didn’t look up from her readings. By God, this generator was fickle. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You met someone.” Not a question.

That got her attention. She looked up and swiveled around to face him. For some reason, she felt a wave of embarrassment, as if her twin brother had caught her in a lie. She and Joshua were more than two peas in a pod; her father joked that they were probably as close to being telepaths as non-telepaths got. Yet, close as they were, she hadn’t told Joshua about Devlin. She wasn’t sure why. Privacy, maybe: Her love life was none of her brother’s concern. But the truth was that she felt, vaguely, like she was betraying Joshua.

Bat-Levi looked into the face she knew almost better than her own. “Yes.”

Joshua gave a contemplative nod. “I thought so. You haven’t been all here, you know? You’ve been a million kilometers away ever since you showed up two days ago.”

Bat-Levi felt heat in her cheeks. “I hadn’t imagined it was that noticeable.”

“I know you, kiddo. So what’s his name?”

“Devlin Connolly.” Just saying the name caused a little tingle of excitement—and longing—to course through her. “Same year as me. He’s shipping out on the
Kallman.
We’d planned to take a week together before then.”

“I figured. There’s something,” Joshua stirred the air between them with one hand, “in the middle.”

“I was planning on telling you.”

“Darya,” said Joshua, his face serious. His hair was even darker than hers and very curly. He finger-combed a handful back from his high, smooth forehead. “You don’t owe me any explanations.”

“Well, we don’t usually keep secrets, and ...”

Joshua eyed her askance. “Speak for yourself. There are some pretty nice women I met at the Cochrane.”

“Really?” Bat-Levi’s curiosity was piqued. She wondered what her parents, dynamic propulsions experts on the Cochrane’s faculty, thought about Joshua’s paramours. “What did Mom and Dad ... ?”

“I don’t share everything. So, do you love him?”

“I think so.” Bat-Levi nodded, relieved to tell someone. “Yes.”

Joshua reached over and covered her right hand with his left. “It’s okay, Darya. Really. It’s good you met someone.”

“Yeah?” Bat-Levi felt like crying. “You’ll probably hate him.”

“Probably. Actually, it’s more likely Mom will. You know what she thinks about Starfleet ...” Joshua caught himself, gave a rueful grin. “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Bat-Levi swiped the wet from her eyes. “And it’s not as if there aren’t problems. You know, being posted to different ships, trying to coordinate leaves.” An Academy truism: Most relationships didn’t survive longer than the first six months after graduation. Bat-Levi wondered if other couples believed they would be the exceptions. She knew that she and Devlin did.

“I can imagine.” Joshua gave her fingers a squeeze. “Well, we pull this off, not only won’t Mom and Dad have
anything
to complain about, we’ll get the Cochrane, and
you’ll
have to beat the offers down with a stick.”

“We’ll see,” said Bat-Levi. “Don’t jinx it.”

“Fair enough.” He squeezed her hand one final time. “Time to put on a show for the folks on 32, then let you catch up with your boyfriend.”

“Some show.” Bat-Levi gave a shaky laugh. She waved her hand in the general direction of Starbase 32. Squares of yellow light studded the windows of the blue and gray station, and the shape always reminded her of a slowly spinning child’s top. Starbase 32 hung, by itself, on the fringes of the Federation. The nearest inhabited planet was thirty light-years away. “This region of space is just about as deserted as you can get.”

Joshua pulled up their preflight checklist. “Well, that way, if the generator fails, we won’t take out so many planets at the same time now, will we?”

“That’s not funny, Jock-o.”
Because if we don’t do this right, half the ship gets sucked into an interphasic whirlpool.
Bat-Levi’s gaze strayed back to the prismatic grid flow indicator on her console. The flow had stabilized, and there were no further indications of trouble. Still, she wished Joshua would run just a few more simulations.
That damn flow never
has
settled down.
She checked the power couplings on their nacelles and, in an afterthought, the explosive bolts to the nacelles. Just in case.

She stole a peek at her younger brother and saw, with a sudden bittersweet pang, how much more grown-up he seemed. Funny, how she’d left for the Academy and he’d been just a boy. Now they were both breaking out, finding their way in the universe—and probably away from each other.