Page 23 of Adrift!
Chapter 8
“Iwas just promised a free fun evening with pretty sunsets,” Remy whisper-hissed in Ikaryo’s ear as they tagged along behind the trio out of the salon. The warmth of her breath tingled against his skin.
They hadn’t been expressly commanded to follow, but they hadn’t been prohibited either, and he had to admit: he wanted to be part of this, just as Evens had reminded Remy.
He cast a sidelong glance her way. “That’s all you were promised. But is that all you reallywanted?”
When she sucked in her cheeks, brow furrowing, he thought she would again reject the aim of the Cosmic Connections Cruise, awkward though it had become.
But then she exhaled in a slow, deflating whistle. “I don’t know.” Just as he was about to challenge her avoidance, she looked up at him. In the dimmed corridor, her green eyes were shadowed but unwavering. “But I…I’m ready to figure it out.”
Maybe she was just talking about the anomaly, but the hint of a blush his enhanced eyes identified in her freckled cheeks made him wonder if there was more.
But this wasn’t the time to ask. The captain, stalking so fast that Felicity was half-jogging beside him, was apparently even more eager to solve this conundrum. Despite his cane, Evens kept up, his steps smaller but purposeful, as if the answer to all his questions waited in the engine module where the anomaly had been—so they thought—contained.
As they waited for Nehivar to input access codes, Ikaryo studied their grouped reflection in the polished bulkhead. The captain, tense with responsibility for passengers he’d never intended to know. Felicity beside him, her sparkle honed todetermination. Evens, obsessed with mysteries that might be more dangerous than a renegade ship.
And Remy, of course, who’d traveled across the galaxy to escape her music only to find that a breath of idle humming had reignited a monster.
Like the anomaly waiting within, they were all caught. By their dead engines in the Zarnax Zone, by the choices that had set them on this path, by their doubts. He’d told Remy every point on the spacetime continuum was so unlikely as to be impossible. And yet here they were.
Good thing he was a bartender and not an astrophysicist.
The portal finally opened with a puff of chilly air. Beyond the corridor lighting, the inner curving wall of the bulkhead disappeared into the gloom behind ghostly fingers of fog. Beside him, Remy moved closer, her shoulder brushing his. At the glancing touch, some of the tension leached out of him.
Could he hope she felt the same comfort?
Because the eerie, broken glow coming from the center of the room wasnotreassuring.
The containment unit was a twisting structure of translucent mineral bounded by thick cables snaking into the murk. The faceted surface refracted the tiny lights of a control panel and several sensors set around the torus, while within the crystal cell, faint glimmers pulsed erratically.
“There it is,” Mr. Evens said unnecessarily, his voice carrying a reverence that made Ikaryo’s augments tingle in unease. “The answer to everything we’ve been searching for.”
“If it’s the answer, you better ask your questions,” came a grumbling voice from the shadows. “The energy signature is decaying.”
“Decaying?” Evens stumbled forward to brace a hand on the capacitorus. “What do you mean?”
“Dying,” the chief engineer said bluntly as he edged toward them, avoiding the lights of the control panel.
Felicity put a hand over her feelings button that had gone abruptly gray. “How can it be dying? It’s just energy, right? Energy never goes away.”
Suvan tilted his head, huge pale eyes glinting. “At the cosmic scale or the quantum one, yes. But separated from the resonant harmonics that match it, this distinct tessellation isolated within this matrix is decohering.” He angled an indignant stare toward the captain. “Which is what you said you wanted.”
“No!” Evens spun around to face them, panic distorting his suave bearing. “We can’t lose it. Not when I’ve just found it.”
Felicity reached out for the captain and leaned into him while the big Kufzasin male gazed down at the smaller Earther. “Our priority needs to be the ship, crew, and passengers,” Nehivar said, not unkindly. “Your research is secondary.”
“But the resonark may be unique in the universe.” Evens sagged. “Or at least vanishingly rare. This chance may never come again.”
“Ellix,” Felicity murmured. “If itisa…a source of love, we can’t let it die.” Her blue eyes were beseeching as her voice dropped to a whisper, and Ikaryo thought only his enhancements would catch the troubled words. “If it brought us together—”
“No.” The captain’s arm closed around her possessively. “I won’t risk losing anyone here.” He squared off to the ship’s owner. “I’m sorry for your missed opportunity,” he said. “And for the resonark, whatever it is. But I’m getting our people home.”
As Evens tried to restate his case, Ikaryo found himself drifting closer to the torus. When the anomaly had first appeared in the Starlit Salon, scintillating between the eclipsingmoon and the startled passengers, his enhanced eyes hadn’t registered anything beyond scattering photons.
And then of course the screaming had distracted him.
But something had shifted in his perception since harmonizing with Remy’s voice. A recalibration in his neural interfaces because of the quantum tunneling between his implants and the anomaly?