Page 61 of Collision!
“That’s your captain.”
“He’s probably fine too.”If not, the chime would’ve been louder.Still, Suvan slanted a glance at the device.“He says Delphine reports we will reach the null cloud’s outer corona before the next mid-shift.”He let out a hard breath.“Mariah—”
She put a sweetened fingertip over his lips.“I understand.Your ship might be faster now, but you are still its chief.”With a quick kiss, she released him.“Have a good day at work.Don’t strain your shoulder or your eyes.I’ll see you later.”
Rising, she looked around for their discarded dishes.“I think Lub ate the last donut and drank all the coffee.”
“Goblhobs also eat larfs and diodes,” he said as he messaged an acknowledgment to Nehivar along with the status update for his engines and himself.“It’ll be fine.”
He would make sure of it.Because it was no longer enough to be alone in the depths of the ship.
He wanted more.
Chapter 17
This was the end of the road.If space had roads.Their collision course with the null cloud was full steam ahead.If spaceships had steam.
Mariah stood in the Starlit Salon with the others, facing the viewport.The snack bar had been decimated as if Lub had rampaged through, and she was so glad comfort calories didn’t count when confronting a cosmic mystery.
She longed for Suvan with a power that might bridge space and time.But she knew he was where he needed to be.
At least for now.As for what came next…
There would be a next after this end, she swore to herself.Because nothing really ended.Suvan might not remember their night together, but this voyage hadn’t ended yet.
However, the null cloud looming off their bowlookedlike a black hole, and they were all rocket scientists enough to know that wasvery muchan end.
“That is not a black hole,” Captain Nehivar was saying from his holographic projection to one side of the viewport, flickers of the bridge behind him.“A null cloud is a patch of concentrated dark matter.The quantum-level disorder at its core creates a flaw in the gravitational scaffolding of spacetime around it.That results in a surrounding accretion disk of energy waves.As we approach, the going could get rough, but we will almost certainly not be torn into a collapsing stream of subatomic particles.”
He tilted his leonine head, tufted ears flicking.“Aaaand I’ve just been informed by our chief engineer, that joke was not funny.Chief, if you want to explain instead?”
Suvan appeared in the captain’s place.But instead of the dark profile that had been her first glimpse of him, he was facing the monitor, the many lights of his engineering console shining on his quill-scales.“The signal of the resonark’s entanglement—its echo or its mate—is coming from the cloud.As we cross the energy waves, there will be distortions—bumps to the ship and also warping of perception.”His pale eyes glinted, and his gravelly voice lowered.“Don’t be afraid.We’ve come this far chasing our dreams.”
Mariah felt the shared sigh flow around the gathering.Theywerein this together.Evens might have secretly masterminded their collection, but they’d chosen to continue, to see where this strange thread of longing would take them.
And their chief engineer had powered their ship through the voyage even though he hadn’t signed on with romance in mind.
She looked around the salon, as if she could magically envision the links between friends and lovers, the care of the crew and the appreciation of the passengers.And in a way, the links were obvious: in the glances and touches, in smiles or the alien equivalent, in the hope and anticipation casting into the future.
They had taken the free tickets to the Cosmic Connections Cruise looking for love, and not in their wildest dreams would they have guessed they’d find it like this, out here in the middle of nowhere.
The cloud might be dark matter, as the captain said, but in the viewport tuned to the widest span of wavelengths, an eerie lightshow flickered within the layers of obscuring atomic churn.Like a stop-motion electrical storm of fractal patterns spiraling into nothingness.
“It looks like the resonark,” someone murmured.
But big enough to swallow a hundred speed-date cruisers.
Delphine’s crisp tones crackled through the comms: “Contact with outer cloud wall in three…two…”
The ship shivered, a delicate tremble that didn’t even jostle the bottles firmly secured behind the bar.
But behind them, the resonark flared, bright enough to cast their shadows on the viewport, as if their gathering were suddenlyoutsidethe ship.
As one, they swiveled toward the anomaly.
And the same vision hit them all—
A collective cry from every throat did what the edge of the null cloud could not, dropping them to their knees as every imagination was flooded with the resonark’s energy.
