Page 55 of Collision!
He swiped a shaking hand across his brow.“That is what woke me like a scream in the night.Not a dream, but a nightmare.”
Suvan squared off to the ship’s owner as the captain growled, “Save the spectacle for your next brochure, Evens.Everyone here has already voted to follow the resonark’s course.”
Mariah cleared her throat.“Can we get there before the echo fades out?”
When Suvan shifted to face her, his pale quartz eyes glinted.“Yes.But I’ll need help.”He lifted that piercing gaze.“From everyone.”
+ + +
“Even rocket scientists would seriously question filling a capacitorus with a quantum-phase plasma cascade based on the rampages of a lovelorn energy monster to turbocharge a speed-date cruiser,” Remy stage-whispered.
Mariah ignored the snark, because she was trying to make sense of the plan that Suvan seemed to be knitting out of nothing with no time to lose: something-something optimized quantum simulation, blah blah entanglement bleed, yada yada localized encapsulated distortion, etcetera and so forth…
She focused on the condensed version.“So half of us sing the resonark into over-emoting while half of us capture the emissions and then…we go really fast?”
“And I make sure we don’t explode,” Suvan said in that deadpan way of his, except she could no longer tell if he was joking.
As everyone on the Love Boat I split to their tasks to reunite the resonark with…whatever was fading at the other end of its quantum song—its mate, if the captain was right—Mariah paused under the prismatic sphere hanging in her knotwork.
“Why didn’t you send me a dream?”she whispered.
There was no answer.
“Mariah.”Suvan waited in the salon doorway.“You’re with me on the engine team.”
She didn’t quite understand why she needed to recreate her knotwork in the containment unit—that had been the something-or-other about mirror network effects—but she followed the engine team down the long, slanting corridor into the depths of the ship.
“How’s your head?”she asked quietly.“And your shoulder?”
“As I told the captain and the doctor, I am essentially recovered.”His pale gaze slanted to her.“Except for the memories from several duty cycles before my accident.I took a remedy to aid cognitive repair, but…I suspect it only intensified my dreams.”
“I wish you had more time to rest,” she said, trying to keep the fretful tone out of her voice.
He rolled his shoulder.“Not on this cruise, it seems.”
When they caught up to the other passengers, she couldn’t ask anything more.
Like what else other than quantum-phase plasma cascades he might’ve dreamed about.
To her surprise, the engine module was lit to Earther-bright levels.Which made sense since everyone on the team had been chosen to be compatible with each other—except Suvan.
And of course that was who she’d fallen for.
She’d never believed in curses and star-crossed lovers, but…
As Suvan ordered everyone to their duties, she had no more time to mope.
Anoushka had been assigned to assist Mariah with the weaving while others modified the capacitorus.In the brighter work lighting, the resonark’s old prison looked like a giant disco ball donut twisted into a mobius strip, with each translucent honeycomb facet catching different wavelengths of the light.
“I was a project manager on a few bridges,” Anoushka said.“Weaving isn’t so different, just string instead of steel.Although the underlying structures of your designs are a bit…nebulous.”
Mariah nodded.“When Felicity asked me to knit some art for Remy’s recital, I needed something fast and loose.I was inspired by spiral nebulas.”
While her hands automatically sorted the tools of her craft, she looked around the module for Lub but guessed the goblhob must be hiding from so many intruders.“So, you and Fahrol?”
That innocuous question ignited Anoushka’s dark eyes and a soliloquy on the delights of Graveri courtship rituals.If love could be writ in string or steel or song, Mariah mused, certainly they could speed to its summons across spacetime.
The whimsical weave she’d done for the recital was easy enough to recreate, especially with the extra hands and the thick, oddly sticky cable Suvan had provided for the knotwork, but they still ended up needing a break.
