Page 40 of Infiltration

Kila blinked. “They disappeared into it? While the ship was phased?”

Sleep was coming whether Ilid wanted it or not, whether Kila ordered him to stay awake. The doctor had already warned there would be no further stimulants used on Ilid for the rest of the day. It was a relief to escape. “Yeah. Yes, sir. Phased. All phased.”

He drifted. If the captain had more questions, he didn’t hear them.

Chapter Ten

“They may be from a separate dimension we suspect we dip into, able to enact different levels of phasing. It would make sense, given our encounter.”

“How do you mean, Chief?” Kila leaned against an engine compartment as he spoke to Lokmi.

“Okay, so though we use it a lot, we don’t have a full grasp of how phasing actually works. A lot is theoretical. We may be accessing a second dimension or a sort of border between dimensions…this is the prevailing theory, this between-area—”

Kila sighed. “Don’t get too brainy on me, okay?”

Lokmi kept going. “We’re equalizing certain wavelengths so we can walk around in the between-place but avoid falling through the floors—”

“I’m a tool head, Chief, not a scientist. Keep it simple for the big, dumb Nobek.” He heard how tired he sounded and waited for Lokmi to tease him.

For a wonder, his Imdiko complimented him instead. “You’re smart enough to grasp it if you really want to, but okay. The basic idea is, we can only go so far into this theorized dimension or the border between it and ours. We sneak through to straddle it and our own.”

“We sneak in just enough in the other so we seem to disappear in this, but we still operate here.”

“Right.”

“I’m with you so far. Keep going.”

“What we witnessed orbiting Bi’is failed to register on our scans. My guess it was phased farther in the secondary dimension than we were or the border area I mentioned, an overlap where they’re coming from a dimension we don’t access…we were both existing in a dimension between dimensions.”

“Getting beyond me again, Chief.” Kila managed a smile for his clanmate to apologize for the terse tone.

Lokmi went to a computer bank and brought up a holographic screen. Using his fingertip, he drew three circles on it, the smallest in the middle slightly overlapping into the others. “This is the theory I’m working off of. The big circle on this end is where the Darks come from. The big circle on the opposite end is us. This little circle is the between-place or a different dimension we’re each accessing from our respective universes.”

“Why wouldn’t it be a simple overlap between the two spaces?”

“The science you don’t want me to explain doesn’t fit as well. Especially if they’re more phased than we are, which Ensign Ilid’s account of them disappearing in the plasma generator suggests.”

“Suggests means we don’t really have answers, only guesswork.”

“I think we’re close, because we witnessed the opposite.” Lokmi grinned. “We saw a huge craft or creature…I’m tending toward a biological entity at this point. The whole bridge saw it, Captain, and not out of the corners of our eyes. It was less phased during our initial encounter. When we altered course to get a better look at its silhouette, we revealed we’d detected it. The smaller darks sent to the planet surface phased deeper afterward, so a few of us who have a particular development of our brains caught glimpses of them, if at all.”

Kila considered. “They phase just enough to escape notice from most of us. If they phased any more, they’d pop back in their own dimension.”

“Or the in-between. That’s my guess.” Lokmi held up his hand. “I know, you hate guesses. Given the little evidence we have, it’s my best theory.”

Kila sighed.Theorywas just a fancy word for guessing in his book. Unfortunately, it was all they had.

* * * *

Nako’s marauder

“We’re entering the debris field. Identification on the components show it’s the remains of the missing spyship,” Terig reported to Nako. His stomach churned.

“My weapons commander concurs,” Captain Kila said over the com.

“Diagnostics is reading the ship’s trajectory from its orbit around Bi’is. It appears to have been taking the direct route to Laro Station.”

“They must have decided to finish the job you and Admiral Piras started, Captain,” Nako sneered.

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