and the mini-SD drives. “Mini-drives” was a misnomer to challenge all misnomers. While the SD drives that powered the convoy ships were the size of small office buildings, these were still the size of a studio apartment, the pods themselves matching single-family homes for square footage.
As the shuttle approached Breath’s docking platform, Vanhi caught sight of the resupply ship out of the corner of one window. It had originally been intended as the garden ship for Convoy Twelve, now, too, repurposed. It slid slowly away, putting enough distance between itself and the convoy to turn on its own SD drive for the brief jaunt back to Earth.
Bye, Swara. Safe journey.
She suppressed an impulse to wave at the ship, not wanting to seem silly in front of the new recruits.
Docking went smoothly, as did badge-check and equipment dispersal.
While the new hires lingered to unload their gear, Vanhi beelined for the breakroom, where she prepared a cup of oolong. Taking a deep breath, she savored a calm moment before the workday began.
The new crew members would be finding their stations in the mission control room now, settling in. Everything felt fresh, hopeful.
Today, she told herself, today we’ll sink a pod into a new SD.
After preparing herself a second cup, she hurried to the mission control room, angling for her station in front of the curved windows, eager to stare out into their testing ground for a moment before beginning.
One hundred and fifty-eight crew members worked mission control, either in the official control room, or in backrooms for supplementary support. The primary mission control room was also known as the Experiment Observations Lounge, the EOL, and it was stuffed to the brim with staffers working side by side at crowded console banks spanning across seven terraced platforms. The room was curved, much like an amphitheater, and the platforms provided a stadium-like view of the outer windows.
The ship’s long inner hall also sported a bay of tall windows, allowing special visitors to watch as a launch commenced.
The flight director’s platform jutted out from the right side of the room, and gave Vanhi an excellent vantage point for observing her staff and the experiment field. Opposite her station, on the left wall, were several projections of various readouts.
As she took her seat, Vanhi dialed her chip phone into the “loops.” This would let her communicate with any member of mission control directly at any time.
Once everyone was settled, she checked in with her newest crew members, including the shift’s pod attitude determination and control officer—Stone Mendez Perez, the man who’d commented on her sundial. He would control the pod like a drone, directing its flight pattern to the testing ground, then retrieving it if and when it reemerged from an SD.
She also had a new pod flight dynamics officer, thermal operations resources manager, mini-drive artificial intelligence manager, and a handful of others ready to test their grit.
She’d have all of their names committed to memory soon, but for now, she was eager to get to work.
After forty-five minutes of check-ins and verifications, the countdown was ready to begin. They began at T minus ten minutes. The bay doors opened. Everyone focused on their monitors.
“Pod number nine, gravity-repulse thrusters primed. Ready? Three. Two. One. Lift off.”
On her screen, the experiment pod—ovoid and spikey, like metallic dragon fruit (some enterprising younger workers had gone so far as to paint the bodies of the first five pink-and-green as a sort of christening)—glided away from the corrugated floor, sailing out into blackness.
Vanhi’s eyes flickered to the testing ground.
It didn’t look like much, the empty grid of space only a hundred kilometers out. But it was her Bikini Atoll.
She hated that she thought of it that way, that Kaufman had forever tied SD drives and nuclear weapons together in her mind.
But he’d been right about the danger.
So far they’d run eight successful launches, but had only two successful new SD breaches, though preliminary data showed it likely at least three of the others had slipped into the already-verified travel SDs, thrown there when they effectively “bounced” off the subdimensions they were trying to access. Those pods had all been retrievable.
The other three that had failed to breach? Most of their twisted remains were back on Life being disentangled and scrubbed of radioactive elements before they could be studied. One had imploded. Another exploded. The third had slowly, yet systematically, dissolved into a cloud of its base elements.
Thank the stars they’d decided to put off animal testing. Not even bacteria had been allowed aboard.
Each pod contained, besides its drive, an array of sensors and one hundred experiments. The tests looked for new atmospherics, matter state-changes both internally and externally, gravity changes, spontaneous subatomic particle creation, shifting photon behavior, electromagnetic transmission, and a whole host of other differences and data points.
Vanhi had also designed several experiments to carry organics—bacteria, algae, bees, spores, and even dogs. But as with Kaufman’s original SD discovery, they wouldn’t dream of sending anything living until they’d routinely gotten back their inanimate test subjects.
This wasn’t important solely for the safety of the animal subjects, but also for the sanitation of their local star group. If they lost a pod—if it dove and failed to reemerge as directed—it could have been destroyed on the other side … or it could have surfaced someplace and sometime that they’d never think to look. It could drift in regular space and come to land on some rock or another, bringing with it an infection. Contamination.
She was determined to make sure that never happened.
Over at the ADCO station, Stone had his gaze fixed intently on his dash, making sure the flight path was steady and everything fell within mission parameters as he guided the pod to the activation point.
He was experienced—just over forty, a little younger than she was—with a sharp jaw and cupid’s-bow lips, now set firmly in concentration. His shaggy black hair had waves that curled at the ends; it fell into his face as he leaned forward over the joystick, and for a moment Vanhi thought he looked more like a kid playing a video game than a professional remote-pilot.
She noticed herself noticing him and quickly looked away. Now was not the time to be pondering the aesthetics of her new crewmates … no matter how pleasing those aesthetics might be.
With a blush, she refocused on the pod.
It was twenty-five kilometers out now. She checked in with the technicians monitoring the nonpassive experiments. Everything was still a go.
Observation buoys and communications buoys lined the path out to the quadrant where the pod would officially dive. This made it easy to track, easy to watch even as it grew imperceptible from the EOL on Breath.
“Pod in position,” Mendez Perez said after a time on her loop.
“MID AIM, are we ready to cue up the drive?” Vanhi asked.
“Everything looks green.”
“Good. Dive in three, two, one—now!”
From the outside, the beginnings of an SD bubble looked like warped space, with stars reflecting and shifting over a curved surface. The lensing engulfed the pod, made it look like a shimmer on a pond, until the spot went black, then disappeared altogether.
On all cameras, the pod had vanished.
“Dive appears successful,” Vanhi announced. She clapped her hands and cheers went up, as they had thus far after every nondestructive run. Hopefully, in a few hours the pod would resurface, giving them vital information about a brandnew SD.