Her eyes tracked left, to the floor. Neither of them spoke for a few seconds. The clock ticked.

“Well,” said Bat-Levi, and then she looked Tyvan full in the face. “What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you’ll tell me,” said Tyvan, simply.

Chapter 15

Bat-Levi’s day hadn’t started well. She’d tumbled into bed at 0200, tumbled out at 0530, and gulped sour replicator coffee before dashing off to meet Joshua at the slip where the Lionwas docked. And now the generator was acting up, and her nose itched. Absently, Bat-Levi brought up her left hand to give her nose a good scratch and was rewarded with the solid thud of her gloved hand colliding with her helmet. She cursed, silently. If Joshua weren’t in such a hurry to get underway, she wouldn’t be in this pickle. She’d never gotten used to EVAs, even though they were required at the Academy because, dollars to doughnuts, put her in a tin can, turn on the air, and she was guaranteed to have to scratch something,every single time.

Bat-Levi blew out, her hair fluttering away from her forehead, but an errant strand glued itself to her sweaty cheek. She wiggled her mouth, trying to dislodge it. Instead, she only succeeded in getting the hair lodged under her tongue. Damn.She tried spitting out. The hair stayed put. Her own fault: She’d been in such a rush she hadn’t secured her hair before ducking into her suit. And she was practically drowning in sweat. She was always so damned hot in her suit, no matter how low she cranked the temp. She made some pfft-pfftspitting sounds.

“What’s that?” Joshua’s voice was tinny inside her helmet. “What’s going on down there?”

“Nothing.” A finger of sweat crawled down Bat-Levi’s back. Hair plastered her tongue. “I’m fine.”

“You sound grumpy.”

“Well, I am grumpy,” she said, talking around hair. She gave up trying to spit it out. “You and your stupid generator.”

“Hey, this is your baby, too.”

“Mybaby.” In vacuum and weightless—and thank goodness for that, because among the many other things she hated about EVAs was how robotic the suits made her feel—Bat-Levi grabbed a handhold and pulled herself over to the panel behind which lay the influx particle siphon of their emissions generator. “I have news for you, Jock-o. While you’ve been hatching your latest scheme, I’ve been sweating it out at the Academy. You didn’t even come to my graduation.”

“I was busy.” Bat-Levi heard the blip-bleep-blatof controls being keyed in. Joshua was at the helm of their ship, the Lion,while she went below deck, suited up, and cracked the magnetic airlock and hatch of a vacuum containment pod bolted to the ship’s belly. “Besides, I knew I’d see you sooner or later.” More bleats. “Anyway, what could be better than spending time with your baby brother, huh?”

“Baby brother, my eye. By a whole two minutes, Jock-o.”

“Hey, two minutes can be an eternity, like now.Are you going to get in behind that panel and tweak that intermix ratio, or are we going to hang out here all day, watching Starbase 32 doing a nice pirouette, way out in the middle of nowhere?”

“Coming,” said Bat-Levi. Joshua didn’t know about Devlin Connolly, and so he couldn’t know that she’d given up a week’s leave on Pacifica with Dev to work with Joshua. But Joshua was the one going full bore after the Cochrane Medal. Joshua had drawn up the specs for a self-replicating nanoparticle emissions generator. The theory was hers, using vacuum energy for fuel. (The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle implied that even under conditions where all sources of energy—whether from matter, heat, or light—were removed, random electromagnetic oscillations remained. The most straightforward example of vacuum energy was the Casimir effect. Two metal plates, in close enough proximity, would come together because, as the plates blocked light energy from getting in between, vacuum energy pushed the plates together. Bat-Levi reasoned that if this negative energy, a limitless power source, could be harnessed into an electromagnetic bottle, it could substitute for the present-day warp drives. The energy to power the ship would come from space itself.)

Joshua made the intuitive leap his twin sister hadn’t: If energy could be removed from space, could this same process open up fissures in space itself, creating gateways to other dimensional spacetime membranes and allow the ship to jump through the openings, like traversing wormholes?

So their generator: a Casimir sink, on a much larger scale. The generator itself was housed in the vacuum pod in an attempt to keep the ambient conditions as close to the vacuum of space as possible (though not as cold). The glitch was that they still had to use present-day technology simply to move the ship around and to power the initial conversion reaction necessary to siphon away vacuum energy. Hence, the problem: The Lionwas equipped with a warp drive, and the tricky part was keeping the intermix ratio of deuterons and antideuterons stable in the face of an influx of additional vacuum energy.

Bat-Levi manipulated a set of Kelly bolts securing a metal panel over the injectors that controlled the nanoparticle plasma stream. The panel floated free, and she peered inside. The plasma was a dark cobalt blue and flowed like liquid, the way fire behaves in weightlessness.

Joshua’s voice came again. “Well?”

“Hang on,” said Bat-Levi. An array of prismatic grids, arranged in two series, deflected the plasma stream, funneling errant particles back toward their central nodal injector point. Each grid functioned independently, and she saw now that one wasn’t self-correcting quickly enough, creating uncontrolled power surges. Bat-Levi pulled a prismatic spanner from her waist and fiddled with the grid’s alignment. “How’s that?”

“Not good enough. I’m still reading a five percent flux in the energy dispersal pattern. That just won’t cut it, Darya. You know we’ve got to maintain an even pattern of energy dispersion, or else we’ll rip out chunks of subspace.”

“Heck.” Bat-Levi recalibrated her spanner and tried again. “Jock-o, have you ever considered giving this a little more time? The last simulator run, the generator did that little runaway surge, and this grid is just not cutting it.”

“Yeah, but only for three-point-four-seven seconds.”

“Yeah,and plenty long enough for our port nacelle to linearly accelerate twice as fast as the one to starboard.”

“And I got it back under control. I know; I’m hearing you.”

“And?” Bat-Levi paused, a Kelly bolt between her fingers.

“AndI don’t want to wait. Darya, you’re shipping out on the Wheedonin two weeks. We won’t get another chance, not unless you stay put.”

Bat-Levi shook her head then realized Joshua couldn’t see her. “Sorry, Jock-o, I’m not putting off my vacation, even for you.”

“You have something better to do?”

Yes.Bat-Levi felt a twinge of guilt. “Let’s just say that I have other plans. Look,” she talked at the canopy over the pod, a habit she noticed all people in suits had: talking up into thin air, “you can do this without me, Jock-o. We’ll play around with the ship today, but if it’s not optimal, then you put it off. Run the test flight when she reads steady across the board.”

“No. You’re part of this, Darya. I want you with me.”

Bat-Levi decided not to argue. She checked the ratio of the influx of nanoparticles across the series of prismatic grids. The ratio fluctuated—enough so that Bat-Levi knew she’d have to make manual adjustments along the way. Not good. Maybe she should play with this longer, and to hell with Joshua’s impatience. But she was cooking in this damn suit, and she knew she couldn’t make the thing perfect.