A flu virus, Kallandra thought, as her chilled blood struggled to accelerate. Her stomach although empty, agitated and she felt nauseous. None of these concerned her as much as her head, which banged with the mother of all headaches. She tried to feel if it was perspiration or a leaking pipe that soaked her brow but her arm refused to lift.
She tried to call Claude, but her voice rasped like a leaky bellows.
In moments that seemed like hours she remembered the hibernation. Either the three months had elapsed or an emergency was fast-tracking her awakening. Her headache was precipitated by an alarm siren! Again she attempted movement but knew she had to be patient. Gradually, she could twiddle fingers and toes….
* * *
“False alarm.” Claude slumped in a too-comfortable padded seat, and strapped in just in case he was wrong.
Kallandra’s head throbbed from a cocktail of headache, recalling procedures— although that mainly consisted of checking the computer routines—and a niggling something half-remembered feeling. Cradling a coffee, she leant against the cream-coloured bulkhead preferring verticality after being horizontal for so long; a contrast to Claude’s caution.
“How long?” she asked.
“Eighty eight days. After such a sleep we should be bouncing with energy.”
“Claude, you look as dormant as I feel. Should we EVA to check? I don’t fancy losing our air supply while we return to hibernation, if we do.”
“A sensor alerted the computer of a coolant leak in a module over an hour ago but it’s been green since. There’d be nothing to see from outside unless there really is a leak and the outside cam doesn’t show anything.”
“I thought we could independently check fluid leaks?”
“Kal, I’m beginning to feel hungry. What delicacy do we have for petit dejeuner?”
“I suppose that was before they bolted on these extra modules.”
“On the other hand I may not be able to keep any food down, I still feel nauseous. Do you have a headache that feels like a carpenter is working on the inside of your skull?”
“Claude, there are some tasks we’ve overlooked because of this premature awakening. Like I send a signal back to say we survived…. Oh, they’ll know that. Hey we haven’t done the post-hibernation medical.”
He threw up his hands in mock horror. “We survived. Ergo it worked, but I feel so terrible.”
“Me too.”
Claude unbuckled to drift over and embrace her.
She hugged back. “Mind my coffee. I don’t want to repeat this hell of a hangover, and with no booze for hair of a dog.”
He pulled back so they could look into each other’s eyes. “So, you are saying no more hibernation?”
“Claude, if only you could see the yellow of the whites of your eyes.”
He smiled, and placed her coffee carton into a desk holder before another hug.
“You Americans have such a flair for romantic small talk.”
She felt warm in his arms. Comforted, but duty overcame desire. “Let’s plug ourselves into the body checks and see what those drugs have done to us.”
“The basics must be within the expected range or they would have woken us.”
“I suppose so, but they don’t take blood samples—oh, heck with it. Let’s check on the spheres, though I guess they must still be there too.”
Their relative location to the spheres revealed their situation—except distance from Earth—virtually unchanged since the two months before they went into hibernation. A shower, caffeine and glucose later saw her nausea diminish. At the comms console she fell quiet as a memory played catch with her sub-consciousness.
“Got it! Claude, I know why the spheres flicker.”
He turned from a viewscreen to look at her. “Startle me—come on.”
She couldn’t help smiling, both at his words and her unuttered revelation.
“They were nipping in and out of time—our time.”
She expected his face to light up, but he shrugged.
“Could be, but at the speeds we were all doing, and, by the way, we are now at a hundred and thirty three thousand kilometres per hour, they’d have reappeared in a different place.”
“No they wouldn’t, they could move back and forward in time so that…ah, you’re teasing me, aren’t you? Bastard.” Her hand reached behind her for something to hurl at him. Shame it was her coffee carton. Flying in near zero-gravity didn’t mean slow motion, although only a few spots escaped the drinking tube as it rotated. The potential for short-circuit damage led to Kallandra holding her breath.
Laughing, he caught the cup. “So, to communicate with the spheres, who are now grouped together, all we have to do is invent our own time-machine.”
She pulled some paper wipe from a dispenser to catch remaining coffee blobs.
“There may be another way. Remember that quantum mechanics briefing we had from Miss Avano? What was her first name? Gabby? It doesn’t matter, but—”
“Gabriella with the beautiful deep brown eyes,” Claude said, his eyes drifting upwards.
“That’s her. Trust you to remember. Anyway, she said that when objects are moving, time changes too. And that when objects change speed rapidly, time changes more so.”
Claude slowly shook his head. “I see where you’re going but she also said those time decoherences were only known to occur at quantum levels, and in a probabilistic way.”
Undeterred, she continued. “And near black holes, large masses, tiny masses, close to speed of light travelling and varying in between. After all, time is bound up with mass and energy.”
Claude turned to check more console data screens. “I know. Different forms of each other, but how can we make use of such theoretical nuances?”
“I’m just thinking out loud, but if we program ourthrust rockets to max forward and retro in—”
“Not in time to the sphere’s flickerings? I don’t think the engines can react fast enough. If they could, Mon Dieu, the Apoidea would be torn apart.”
“We’ll try it as fast as the system says it’s safe and then increment the speed. I know it would be more like a traffic light changing but maybe the fact that we change velocity vectors to their pattern, although slower, would alert them to our existence.”
“Especially if we light ourselves up again. Aren’t you the clever one ma fleur?”
Claude looked into her eyes. She felt a tingling up her neck, and could sense her heart hammering too fast for a levelheaded pilot.
He reached for her and held her left hand. “This won’t work, Kallandra.”
“Maybe not…but nothing ventured….” She lifted her other hand to his arm.
“What would Derek say?”
She hadn’t expected him to refer to her fiancé just as they were, possibly, about to…. “I imagine he’s written me off. I didn’t think you’d care what he thinks.”
“No, I meant…. Never mind.”
It was her turn to look at him quizzically, but she knew then that he wasn’t talking about being playful.
“Claude, when we tell Derek our stop start plan for the Apoidea he will be as pleased as a poked grizzly bear.” She wondered whether to withdraw her hands from his.
“Then we’d better not tell him.”
Kallandra smiled. “Mission Control has feeds; they’ll know what our engines do, eventually.”
Kallandra felt the ship’s ever-present vibrations, like the busy bee Apoidea was named after. But now she experienced a new buzz. An emotional resonance she hadn’t felt in Claude’s presence before, and shouldn’t now. Human magnetism seemed to throw rules out of the viewscreens in extreme situations. He spoke and yet she had to concentrate to absorb his words.
“…which engines do you refer to?”
He must have felt it too. Oh God. She brushed her lips against his chin.
“You need to get closer to your razor, Claude.”
“Not now though, eh?” They hugged, and their movement caused them to drift in the near-zero gravity. She felt his warm body through his thin pertex T-shirt, and breathed in his smuggled deodorant—a blend of Cedarwood and musk. Was he deliberately tugging at her senses? His hands roamed over her back and into her shorts, and she didn’t resist. This was wrong, yet right; inappropriate for professional pilots on a mission, yet inevitable; inexcusable, yet…wonderful.
* * *
Glowing from shame, exertion and a too-hot post-coital shower, Kallandra considered the latest message from Mission Control. Because they were over a 160 million kilometres from Earth, radio signals took over ten minutes to travel, so at least she was spared having to make instant feedback. To reduce signal loss at this distance the communication from Houston was radio only.
Capcom’s voice belonged to Elaine Stringer. An obsession with dark chocolate had contributed to her plumpness, but for intelligent calmness she was unbeatable.
Kallandra had spent many silly hours in bars with Elaine.
“As you know, Major Harvard, we have monitors on the Apoidea sending us feedback from your ship’s vital stats, and more than just the forward views of the spheres.”
She wondered where the internal viewcams were in relation to their X-rated activity. Ah….
“NASA has a live feed from some of your cams onto their website and several TV shows….”
“No, no! Claude, come here.”
“…there seems to be a glitch and we’d like you to run a diagnostics…”
She sighed with relief as he shouted, “Not now, ma cherie.”
“You turned the cams off?” She found the button and touched it on again. Then, as she started to laugh, she remembered their medical sensors. Implants sent vital signs via the onboard health monitor computer to Houston.
“…we registered heightened levels of biological stress symptoms…concerned you guys might have an emergency…”
She did have an emergency of sorts, and now she felt guilty. Sure she could rationalise her actions—as Claude did. They probably wouldn’t make it back so why not experience some pleasure while they could? It was ingenuous for Claude to disable all the cams, but Derek was going to guess what happened. He wasn’t stupid.
“Major Harvard and Captain Lapointe,” Capcom said.
“Oh dear, Elaine has gone all serious on us, Claude.”
“They know then?”
Elaine continued: “Before the break in the cam link we overheard your intended risky engine procedure.”
Kallandra paused the recording. “I’d rather them have heard our screams and grunts than know too early of us teaching the engines to do the rumba.”
“That’s your maverick test pilot persona speaking, mon cherie. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Flight Dynamics Officer came up with better ideas. Let’s ask him.”
She mumbled, “I suppose so,” before playing the rest of Capcom Elaine’s message.
“The Flight D.O. is sending you a file. We know that you could override any remote stops we put on your manoeuvres, but please listen to his comments. Over.”
“See,” Claude said, “he is sending us advice.”
“I don’t believe it. Knowing the Flight Officer, he’s sent us a long list of don’ts or…hey, I wonder if you’re right? Maybe he has ideas of using the lateral thrusts, which can turn on and off rapidly.”
A couple of minutes later Claude shook his head and unplugged his earpiece.
“No, just a reminder of engine tolerance factors, the likelihood of us breaking up if we exceed them, and why not set up a drone.”
“I guess we kiss goodbye to the warranty on this little rocket ship then, because we are going to emulate the spheres flickering. A drone would be too small for them to notice and it wouldn’t have the engine power.”
Claude shrugged. “All right, even if it’ll be the slowest flickering they’ve seen.
Actually, Kal, I’m not convinced we should—”
Not wanting to hear his doubts, she interrupted. “Without trying we’ll never know if they might have seen us. Just tagging along isn’t working. Hello, another urgent message from Capcom.” Grateful for the distraction, she let Claude listen to the new message while she prepared the rocket programming. Did Elaine and Disraeli think she was a kamikaze pilot? A smile grew as she realized they’d probably remembered those white-knuckle test flights she did while in the USAF not so long ago.
“They want us to download new programming code for the navigation computer and for us to go to hibernation for as long as it takes.” Claude gave her a combination grin and quizzical look telling her he didn’t think she’d go along with them.
“They can want. I felt ill waking up from the short version, and I don’t relish being asleep for ever, probably decaying while the spheres continue without knowing of us.”
“Then, there’s that box we ejected. Mon Dieu, Houston must know what we did with the cams and sensors we overlooked. Why didn’t they say anything, if it was innocuous?”
“Exactly. Erm, Claude, are they listening to us now? Or in ten minutes when the signals reach them?”
“No. I’ve allowed digicams but with no sound except for when we want it. But unless we sever the incoming telemetry I don’t think we can stop them taking control of the Apoidea if they wish.”
She guessed that would be Disraeli’s intention with the new programming code.
But if he really wanted a totally compliant crew he wouldn’t have picked her. She guessed Claude would do as he was told by Houston. His middle-class Quebec upbringing conditioned him more than her rapscallion childhood on the outskirts of Phoenix.
“OK, Claude, I suppose we’d better download their new code, but not into the nav computer until I’ve had a chance to run it through a computer simulator. God, there’s so much to do. The spheres doing anything different?”
“Not a thing. Perhaps they, too, are hibernating.”
“Maybe. Well, we’re gonna damn well wake the bastards up.” Her impatience, tempered with self-preservation urges, saw the engines re-programmed and all set for their attempt to communicate with the spheres. Probably for the last time, she thought, if they disintegrate, but she had faith in the integrity of the Apoidea, after all, her Derek built it.
An hour later, strapped in and counting down the last ten seconds, Kallandra felt nervous but at peace. They’d transmitted details of their programming back to Earth along with her promise to use Mission Control’s program codes if their micro-time experiment with the engines was unsuccessful but they’d survived. What could be more fair?