Page 3 of Collision!
At the diversion, Nehivar finally cast his narrowed eye upward.“You do not get a vote,” he growled.
Over the muted wave of amusement, he continued, “The votes will be anonymous: back to port or onward to wherever this haunted Love Boat takes us.”
When a multi-voice clamor seemed ready to answer immediately, he held up one big paw.“Tonight, your personal devices will receive a message from which you can choose.But first, here’s a review ofwhat we know about the resonark and what we suspect.Chief?”
A hologram bloomed from the captain’s datpad showing half a face for half an instant before it was replaced by a projection of the ship depicted within the Zarnax Zone and a neutrally pleasant artificial voice explaining quantum entanglement.
But Mariah wasn’t really listening.
Because that glimpse of a face…
It had looked like part of an ancient stone statue, hard-edged and icy-hued.A gargoyle, maybe, frozen atop some mysterious, distant mountain.A sharp cheekbone, a pointed ear, and a crest of spiny scales.Watching from that huge, luminous eye.
Chief Engineer SuvanAdrakh.She’d read his name on the ship’s documentation before the launch, but he hadn’t been at the recital.She would’ve remembered such an unearthly countenance.
His was the shadow she’d seen in her dream.
Chapter 2
Suvan only half listened to the simplified presentation of the anomaly’s creation and ensuing chaos as he tracked the lingering consequences of the hijacking and the interval spent adrift.
With the containment unit no longer draining power, he’d already restored most of the ship’s primary systems, prioritized by the captain with what seemed like unwarranted input from the blonde cruise director.
Hot tub refill?Entertainment library reboot?Expedited synthesis of something called chocolate?
Maybe he should’ve told them how close they’d come to blowing the engines.
In the midst of the crisis, he’d kept the exact probabilities to himself.Having served with Nehivar for lightyears, he knew the captain’s impatience with maybes.
Andmaybesaying it aloud would’ve made it too real.
There’d been a time—approximately right before this ill-fated speed-dating cruise had launched—when he would’ve scoffed at the concept of manifesting a reality.No one—not even everyone together—couldimaginea force into being.
Ships did not traverse space on the power of wishes.
But at the end of the last duty cycle, he’d watched the refractory crystalline structure of the capacitorus empty and darken, despite all his engineering expertise and faultless fabrication.He’d been left incredulous and alone in the engine module while everyone else was at the recital in the Starlit Salon—and the quantum anomaly had metamorphosed into…
He was not even going tothinkwhat the ship’s owner had called it.
Because that was impossible.
Love was not a fundamental particle or an atomic element, as Evens suggested with essentially no corroborating data.Certainly not a universal law.Love wasn’t a power.Just a marketing scheme for a devious agency exploiting delusional patrons.
Not that it mattered to him.Now that he had power back, he would let the rest of them argue the metaphysics of the resonark until the sputtering end of spacetime while he did what he’d always done: get the ship where it was supposed to go with life support functionally intact.
And apparently help restore chocolate reserves.
When he grumbled to himself, Lub replied with shrill chitters.He slapped his chest and the goblhob leaped from top of the dormant capacitorus into his arms.Lub’s unwieldy bulk knocked him sideways a step as its long claws and fangs snagged in his uniform to grab hold.But the contact was…good.
Not because he needed contact, but because it was a sign that everything was back on track.
Lub had tried to warn them about the ghost in the machine.Goblhobs were uniquely attuned to energy fluctuations, their various spines bristling in response to the slightest variations in load-flow that might indicate a larf infestation.
Worse than the plasteel-chewing vermin?A random idiopathic flux that had apparently infected the otherwise skilled and proficient crew with the urge to date and mate and…worse.
Love.
Suvan grumbled again as he disconnected the long conduits from the capacitorus, like decapitating a mighty beast.He wouldn’t dismantle the device entirely.Might need it again if the captain came to his senses.
