Page 11 of Adrift! (Cosmic Connections Cruise #2)

Felicity angled her datpad. “Show us when.” As Suvan’s finding scrolled, she flicked through another list. “According to my itinerary… During the dancing. Every time the sunsets eclipsed. The knitting circle when everyone was so happy being together. And of course”—her cheeks pinkened—“kissing. At least the ones we know about. But these other spikes…” Her face went all red and she blanked the datpad. “Well. Those I think we can guess.”

Suvan’s profile appeared again, partly obscured by the ugly creature he’d called Lub. “Guess? We need specifics, not guesses. What happened during the spikes?”

“Chief.” Nehivar’s low voice was a cautioning redirection. “What do the patterns show?”

“I guess”—Suvan rolled a pale eye resentfully—“they are more connections. Resonant harmonics analogous to the cyber-enhanced song that result in quantum entanglements.”

Remy dragged a hand through her hair, reluctantly sympathizing with the engineer’s clueless confusion. “I don’t know what any of that means.”

“Love,” Felicity said softly. “It means the anomaly manifests around something that might become love.”

The word hung in the air like the impossible rainbow fractals.

“We can’t say that,” Suvan objected, shoving his pet under his chin while it squalled as if in agreement. “We’re measuring fundamental frequencies, not feelings.”

“Why not both?”

At the amused voice from the salon doorway, they all swung around.

The captain thrust Felicity behind him as claws lashed out from his hands. “Stop right there.” His angry command rattled the bottles arranged behind the bar. “Who are you?”

Remy let out a squeak as Ikaryo shouldered ahead of her too, his body a shield of flesh and shining hardware.

But when she peered around his broad shoulders, the new arrival who slowly stepped forward from the dim outer corridor didn’t seem like a threatening monster.

The man looked like he was from Earth, or close enough to it, slender and stylish in a knee-length tunic suit, one hand braced on an unadorned cane.

Not that a cane couldn’t be a laser gun, of course, and he wasn’t anyone who had been among the passengers or the crew, to judge by the captain’s furious bristling.

But the man was smiling with such pure enthusiasm, as if delighted to see them.

“I call it the resonark,” he said. “And it is what we’ve all come to discover.”

Remy blinked, and when no one else spoke, she hazarded, “Sorry, the what?”

The man took another step forward but stopped at a Kufzasin growl.

“Ah, Ms. McCoy. I was so pleased you accepted this cruise prize. I suspected you’d serve quite well as a control variable.

Yet paradoxically, of everyone aboard, you have the most experience with the invisible forces that might bring us together.

You use the power of song just as the resonark uses its power—the power of love. ”

In the even silenter silence following those words, Remy said, “I repeat, the what?”

Ikaryo kept his augmented arm braced in front of her. “And I’ll repeat, who are you?”

“Eoyen Ikaryo,” the dapper man said. “We didn’t have the chance for formal introductions before launch. But I hoped those eyes of yours would have special insight into the resonark.”

The captain’s voice was edged with exasperation. “Evens, what are you doing on my ship?”

“Technically, Captain Nehivar, the Love Boat I is my ship. I have the acquisition receipt to prove it.” He patted his back pocket. “Somewhere.”

Felicity cleared her throat. “Mr. Evens. We had no idea you were aboard.” Though she didn’t growl like Nehivar, her tone flattened. “Or did I miss your name on the manifest?”

He smiled at her. “My dear Felicity, you never missed a thing when we were planning this cruise. Probably all those to-do lists you kept. Which is how I knew you’d be such a special help to our captain.”

“I didn’t see this resonark listed,” she shot back. “While it seems you know a lot about it.”

Evens tilted his cane to one side in a coy little half bow. “Well, I did discover it. It’s why I bought this haunted ship.”

Nehivar’s mane bristled, his ears flat back. “You knew there was a possibly fatal flaw in the ship’s systems and you let us launch anyway?”

“It’s not a flaw. It’s an elemental particle, like a quark.” He frowned, twisting the cane back to center again. “Or maybe more like a universal law. Or a hitherto unknown atomic isotope?” When he noticed them all glaring at him, he waved his hand. “The specifics don’t matter.”

Nehivar rumbled again. “The nonspecifics hijacked the ship and have left us adrift.”

“And you ate all the chocolate we had aboard,” Ikaryo added. “I’m guessing that was you, anyway.”

Finally the man looked abashed. “Stowing away is hungry work. And since chocolate is also a basic building block of the universe, it seemed appropriate to celebrate finally identifying the resonark. Now that we know there’s more to it than a wayward energy glitch we can—”

“You can tell us how to nullify it,” Nehivar said, “so we can restore power without risk and leave the Zarnax Zone immediately.”

Evens recoiled. “Nullify it? I told you I just found it.”

“And it’s left us all in danger,” the captain snarled.

Felicity put a hand on Nehivar’s elbow, and though her usual effortlessly soothing smile was absent, her blue eyes were steady with a different kind of control.

“Let’s sit down and talk this through again, from the beginning.

Ikaryo, would you please find us something to drink? Mr. Evens, this way.”

Glancing between them all, Remy hastened to follow Ikaryo to the bar as the other three settled on the couches nearby.

“That’s the ship’s owner?” she whispered.

“And the proprietor of the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency.” Ikaryo watched the trio as his hands were busy with bottles. “Perhaps also insane. A love quark?” He redirected his gaze to her, the ice-gray half-moons twisting. “Your misgivings about the IDA were apparently reasonable after all.”

Evens had called her a “control variable” on a love boat test cruise. Meaning that after all the research jargon he’d spouted, the love lab villain had pre-decided she had zero chance of a Big Sky match?

Not really a surprise. She’d already acknowledged she shouldn’t have been aboard when she wasn’t seeking a date or a mate like the others.

So why did hearing it sting like the slash of a breaking guitar string?

Looking up at Ikaryo, she sucked in the corner of her lip. “Maybe.”

She grabbed one of the three drinks to carry over. Not that he needed the assistance, but she wanted to eavesdrop. And he must’ve felt the same because he lingered just beyond the sectional, a loose clench to his empty augmented fist a giveaway of his misgivings.

Was he doubting the IDA’s mission?

Or did he just not believe in love?

“I am sorry to have startled you,” Evens was saying, although to Remy’s practiced ear, his tone was perfunctory.

“I needed to be close but I didn’t want to influence the data.

And, Chief, may I say, your work has been especially impressive with such quantum trickiness.

Even if the ship is currently dead in space. ”

There was a single rude noise from the creature projected above Felicity’s datpad, then the device went dark.

“You need to explain,” the captain said, no burred growl in his voice, just a flat order. “Now.”

“Ten long years,” Evens mused. “That’s how long I’ve been chasing this dream.

I’ve honed the profiles, optimized the algorithms, inquired in every discipline from psychology to biology to mathematics, and now physics.

But too often, the connections I imagined didn’t coalesce, and the matches that happened were random—unpredictable and inexplicable. True chaos.”

He looked at them with incredulous eyes, as if inviting them to be equally dismayed.

“How can I promise connection amid chaos? I’ve watched my Big Sky hopefuls struggle with pirates and black holes, killer mercenaries and missing treasures—and with each other and themselves.

In the brochures, I teased and offered and exalted—but I could never guarantee.

I never found the perfect, ineffable distillation of love.

” He tossed back his drink and slammed the empty glass down on the side table with a decisive ring. “Until now.”

Remy hissed at Ikaryo. “Did you put something in the drink this time?”

With a grimace, he nudged her to silence.

“When we were writing this cruise brochure, you told me the ship was haunted,” Felicity said. “But you made it seem as if that was just a silly story.”

“Silly doesn’t mean untrue.” Evens slumped back on the sofa.

“I have scouts around the galaxies who bring me new tech and old tales. One of them noted a larf-balled ship in a cold orbit yard with an interesting history—the ship sometimes mutinied on its own and flew off, as if…seeking—and an even more fascinating energy signature.”

Seemingly regretting his dramatic glass slamming, he clasped his empty hands in front of him, fingers tight.

“Did you know,” he continued, “that emotions leave signs everywhere? Expressions of happiness and sorrow can crease our skin. Our heart rate, our neural pathways, even the microbiome in our gut change based on our feelings. Experiences both terrifying and joyful can influence our very DNA.”

He opened his hands, flaring his fingers outward.

“But even beyond that… Pheromone emissions, the biophotons produced by our cells, the electromagnetic emissions of our bodies influencing the ions around us—it all leaves a mark on the universe. An infinitesimal mark, perhaps, but discoverable. By deconstructing the markers of arousal, affection, attunement, adoration, all the hundreds of emotions that we fuse”—his hands squeezed together again—“into our conceptual theory of love, I discovered love has its own signature…”

With one more expansive gesture encompassing them all, he finished triumphantly, “And it is here on this ship!”

Remy struggled with the hectic explanation, the words fading away like a fever dream almost as quickly as he blurted them out. The obsession was glaringly obvious, but as he’d said, that didn’t make it untrue.

The captain’s claws bit into the cushions, like he might be thinking of sinking them into the other man’s throat. “And you chose this ship for our unsuspecting passengers and my crew?”

“It was only supposed to be a three-sunset tour, and according to its history, the anomaly might manifest but not overwhelm the controls on such a timeline.”

“That’s so wrong,” Remy said, though she knew she wasn’t part of the conversation. “You should never have taken that risk on our behalf.”

“But you chose the risk.” Though Evens might be an Earther, a strange light in his eyes gave her pause. “Didn’t your heart beat a little faster when you signed your IDA contract? Didn’t you imagine impossibilities? Well, here you are.”

The questions echoed more than the nearly empty salon could account for.

“Here we are lost in an empty, anarchic sector with insufficient power and no chocolate.” Nehivar shook out his paws. “So where was the anomaly taking us? What is it seeking?”

“That’s what we are going to find out.” Evens beamed at them all, as if they were suddenly on board with his madness. “But first we must let it out of that cage you made. Then we can finally claim what the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency has been promising all this time.”