onedgeb

An hour passed. It was a silent hour, as neither of the two astronauts even attempted conversation. Everything was going smoothly, but that was about to change.

They had at last put the moon between them and the Earth. Rita shut down the conventional fusion drive and prepared to bring the Contaka Drive on line. But before she could, Saunders made a mistake. He spoke.

“You don’t like me, do you?” he inquired plainly.

Rita put down a bundle of wires she was using to physically hook up the Contaka Drive to the main control panel and said, “What?”

“You don't like me,” he repeated without much emotion.

“What do you mean? I approved your assignment as my navigator didn’t I?”

“Yes, but I’ve got a feeling you did so in order to ensure your own place on this mission. You didn’t want to give them a reason to dismiss you as mission commander, and I’d bet that rejecting the pilot they recommend would have ruffled more than a few feathers at Command.”

“You know, for a kid, you’re one arrogant little . . .” Rita managed to stop herself before she let loose a series of expletives. She took a moment to compose herself. No reason to lose her cool; after all, she had been expecting this confrontation. The pilot had guts talking to a senior officer like that, she had to admit. She straightened her uniform jacket, then continued. “I . . . admit that you wouldn’t have been my first choice to take part in this, no.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because you were the least experienced of all the candidates, that’s why! Because some of the people that applied have been Nupax ‘nauts since the beginning. Because you’ve never even flown in space, just a simulator. And because . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to admit it, so he did so for her.

“Because I’m the President’s son, right? That’s what all the other ‘nauts-in-training said when I got high marks in my courses at Nupax Academy! I obviously got help from my dad, because I couldn’t have possibly done this on my own, right?”

Alvarez refused to dignify that accusation with a response, though it was completely accurate. As for the young man, he was clearly upset. His jaw was trembling slightly as if he were about to cry.

They just sat in silence for nearly a minute. Rita began to feel a slight pang of regret. Maybe she had prejudged him. Maybe she hadn’t given him a fair chance. But, as a commander, she was not about to apologize to an ensign.

She silently finished connecting the wires and otherwise preparing for the much-anticipated trial run of the Contaka Drive. Within five minutes, the set-up was complete. She silently, emotionlessly took her seat at the command console once again. After using the ship’s internal scanner array to make a couple of final checks on the system, she sighed and set her gaze forward.

“Ensign Saunders,” she began stoically, “activate the Contaka Drive and bring the wormhole-generation grid on-line.”

This moment was not turning out to be as exciting as Alvarez had imagined it. The thrill was gone before it ever arrived and, thanks to Saunders, had been replaced with pure tension. Still, she waited a few moments for the wormhole to appear, hoping its legendary beauty would instill some awe in her. But nothing happened.

She turned, scowling, to face Saunders, about to repeat her order. She found the young man already staring at her and was at a loss for words. His stare was arctic, a combination of bold determination and utter hopelessness. It was quite unnerving for Alvarez. Her angry scowl disappeared and was replaced with a mix of shock and sympathy.

“Yes, sir,” Saunders at last replied with more than a hint of bitter contempt in his tone. He typed some commands into the console, doing as Alvarez had ordered him. Both of their gazes slowly shifted forward again, out the viewport, searching for the wormhole.

It appeared, but its beauty was no match for the tension aboard the Hermes. Saunders guided the shuttle through the dimensional gateway. They entered hyperspace, the wormhole closed behind them, and Saunders set a course for the Alpha Centauri system. At the speed they were traveling, the trip would take about four hours.

Continue . . .