We had breakfast and went up onto the bridge, where we sat trying to think up things to talk about other than how unnerving the situation was. With two hours remaining, Richard posted a countdown on the auxiliary display. “Does anybody really understand time/space structure?” I asked.
Shara laughed. “Anybody who says he does is deranged. The math works, Chase, and that’s all we have. Maybe all that matters.” We watched the stars. We’d long since gone to cruise mode, so there was no sense of movement. The Casavant could have been frozen in place.
Shara took to walking around the ship. I tried reading. Couldn’t do fiction. Not under those circumstances. I did a search for Apollo artifacts. Alex, guessing I’d do that, had loaded several books on the subject into the library, but they were all highly speculative. One argued that Dmitri Zorbas had sold them to his father-in-law, another that Zorbas had tried to transport them east, but they’d been taken from him as they passed through Chicago, a large and lawless city at the time. Even more so, apparently, than other big cities.
The arrival time came and went. Shara was back in her seat by then, staring at the clock on the display. “Don’t worry, Chase,” she said, “they’ll be okay. There’s a fair amount of give-and-take in the estimate.” She was obviously scared out of her wits.
But at 11:22, Richard’s voice broke through the silence: “They’re here.”
“Hello, Chase.” It was Nick. “What time is it?”
“You’re twenty minutes late, Nick.”
“It’s JoAnn’s fault.”
“Everything okay?”
“We’re fine.”
JoAnn got on: “Shara, Chase, everything looks okay. We’ll be with you for about five hours, then the process will start again. We’ll go under, but we should be able to shut it down. If it works as I expect, as I hope, we’ll be back in linear space within a few minutes. Your time, that is. If that happens, we should be able to go home and have a parade. And then see if we can convince everybody that we can rescue the Capella. You’re here in case it doesn’t work. If that happens, you’ll have to wait another—what?—seventeen hours so you take us off.”
“Let’s hope that won’t be necessary.”
They were farther out than we’d anticipated. We’d just arrived within visual range when JoAnn got on the circuit. “Best you not come any closer, Chase. If things go wrong, there’s a chance you’d get dragged down with us.”
I pulled onto a parallel course, about ten kilometers off their port side. The ship was gigantic. “We’ll be okay,” I said. “When it starts, how quick is the process? Do you have enough time to manage the controls?”
“When the cycle begins, we get tremors throughout the ship. We should have about a thirty-second window to make this work.”
“Okay. Let us know if we can do anything.”
“Of course.”
She handed it over to Nick. “She’s right,” he said. “You really feel alone in this thing.”
“Well, when we get back to Skydeck, I suggest we do a party.”
“I’m in favor of that, Chase.” He paused. “Something else.”
“Okay.”
“When we get home, I’d love to take you to dinner. Maybe Cranston’s.”
Cranston’s was one of those restaurants where they didn’t put the price of the food on the menu. It wasn’t supposed to matter to the clientele. “I’d enjoy that,” I said.
“Beautiful. I’ll look forward to it.”
“Me, too.” Nick, I decided, was my kind of guy. Along with Khaled. Life was good. But we needed to stay on topic. “Did it really take you only a half hour to get here?”
“It was about thirty-four minutes. We were talking to you guys, then the ship shook a couple of times. But whatever it had been went away, and everything quieted down. A half hour later, here we are.”
“Incredible.”
“Yeah, it is. It’ll be even more so if next time you can stop it dead in its tracks.” He had turned and was obviously talking to JoAnn. “By the way, when it starts again, I’ll have to sign off in a hurry. We don’t get much time to react.”
“Maybe we should get off the circuit altogether, Nick. So you can concentrate on what you’re doing.”
“Your call, Chase. But it’s not likely to happen for a few hours yet. By the way, I don’t know whether you’re aware, but everything we do over here with the drive unit is being forwarded to you. Just in case there’s a problem.”
“That sounds a bit scary.”
“It’s just a precaution. JoAnn wants to make sure nothing gets lost.”
A transmission came in from John Kraus. “JoAnn,” it said, “good luck. Keep us informed.”
Nick responded a minute or two later: “JoAnn’s doing math right now, John. But we’re fine. Waiting for the warp to kick in. We’re still four hours away.”
Richard set another countdown going to mark the time since Grainger had arrived in the target area. If everything went according to plan, it would reappear shortly after being taken down, we’d get JoAnn and Nick off and return to Skydeck. Then we’d sit it out for a few days. If the Grainger remained stable, we’d go back and retrieve it. Eventually, it would be returned to Orion which, Shara told me, was already complaining that its customers wouldn’t want to travel on it after this.
As the countdown proceeded, we simply sat on the bridge, exchanging encouragement and assurances with JoAnn and Nick and with each other.
The long silences made everyone uncomfortable, on both ships, but every topic other than the one that hung over our heads seemed trivial. Nick and JoAnn, at different times, both said how they wished it was over. That they wanted it done with.
So did I. I resisted making any more suggestions that they should clear out of the Grainger while there was still time. That we could swing in close, and I could take the lander over and get them off. Of course, I knew the answer I’d receive, how they had a lander on board if they needed one. I thought about approaching the subject sideways by inquiring whether their lander would be safe, or whether it would also be caught when the warp activated. But that, too, had an obvious answer.
I looked over at Shara. “Do they really have to stay on board during all this?”
“Yes,” she said. “JoAnn has a Keppinger detector with her and—”
“What’s a Keppinger detector?”
“It reacts to conditions in the warp. It gives her the information she needs to make the adjustments to the drive unit.”
“Couldn’t they just install the thing and let the AI take care of it?”
“There’s more to it than that, Chase. JoAnn needs to make judgments about the readings.”
“Great.”