Noumenon Infinity

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.

The trajectory officer gave Mendez Perez a hearty slap on the back. “Nice going, ace,” Vanhi called to him, tossing a cheeky thumbs-up.

He gave her a shy, endearing smile back.

JULY 6, 2127 CE

By the thirty-third launch, running the pods started to feel routine. Six had failed to dive, four more had blown their lids, and the majority had bounced into the normal travel SDs. But seven had gone where no one had gone before. The data from those dives was being processed around the clock. And still, Vanhi hoped for more.

Today—on what would have been a lazy Sunday back in Arizona, but was a full-on work day here in the glamorous world of convoy living—Vanhi went to her station with an extra spring in her step.

Mendez Perez—Stone, as he insisted she call him—had offered riveting breakfast conversation. The kind that got her mental wheels turning, and her cheeks flushed with the pumping of creative blood.

The whole table had listened in on their banter, and Vanhi hadn’t been self-conscious about it in the least. Stone’s friends Justice Jax and Eric Price had both wiggled their eyebrows at each other. And afterward, Gabriel had given Vanhi a nudge as they went to drop off their trays at the cleaning station.

“It’s not like that,” she’d insisted.

“Like what?” he asked, feigning perfect innocence.

“I would like to know as well,” said C from the sundial, sounding an awful lot like a child asking how babies were made.

She wasn’t about to let Gabriel rile her, so she’d given him a shake of her head and a friendly smile, and happily hopped on the awaiting shuttle.

Stone hadn’t been far behind. He took up the vacant seat beside her without a word about it, as though it were perfectly natural.

She wanted to hold on to this feeling forever. This was what space travel was all about. Good people, good ideas, experimentation, wonder, discovery. This was what she’d been fighting for, what she’d compromised for. If she could just keep this feeling close, maybe she could use it to scare away the bad days—the times when guilt came back and Kaufman haunted her dreams.

In the EOL, everyone took their positions.

“Give me greens,” she said on each loop. “MID AIM?”

“Go,” said Mini-Drive AI Manager, Pablo de Valdivia.

“CHEM EX?”

“Go,” said Soraya Ebadi, who was in charge of monitoring the chemistry experiments.

“COM EX?”

“Go,” said Anju Gautam, who managed communications.

She ran her checks all the way down the line. Everything was good.