“Yeah, they’re off,” she said carefully. Maybe Jackin had caught on that something was going on between her and Griffith. But the two men had always gotten along well—they were friends, as far as she knew. She didn’t know what reason Jackin would have for this kind of despondency toward him.
“The Tempus hasn’t responded to my hails.”
Adequin withheld a scoff. “You know how well comms work near the Divide. Why’re you hailing them?”
His eyes didn’t stray from the viewscreen, didn’t blink. “I’d wanted them to do some measurements on their way out, but … now I think I might want them to turn back.”
She laughed. “Turn back? What are you on about, Optio?”
He finally broke his gaze to look down at his terminal. “I checked it. I double-checked, I triple-checked. I checked it…” His fingers flew through his holographic display, flipping dozens of numbers onto a main dock at the top of the interface. “Forty-nine times.” He turned to look at her, his light brown skin gone sallow with shadowed bags encircling red, bloodshot eyes. “Think the fiftieth time’s a charm?”
Any humor she’d reserved in defense of Jackin’s strange mood fell away. She marched down the steps to stand beside him, locking her eyes onto his. “For what? What’s going on, Jack?”
“We haven’t drifted outward.” He shook his head. “We haven’t moved. Not fifty meters, not a meter, not a single millimeter.”
“It has to be the sensors.”
“It’s not the sensors.”
“That’s not possible. You’re saying there’s less space between us and the Divide, so we can’t have not moved.”
“We can,” he said.
“How?”
“If it’s gotten closer to us.”
“Right, but you just said we haven’t moved.”
He didn’t respond and his dark brown eyes didn’t flicker. Her heart raced and she swallowed hard, struggling to ignore what her subconscious tried to tell her.
“Get there yet?” he asked.
She gave a short, stilted laugh. “Be serious, Jack.”
“I’m being dead serious, boss.”
“Have there been any notifications from the other Sentinel ships?”
“Even if signals were getting through, no one sits nearly as close as we do.”
“Okay, well…” She looked down at his terminal, the display showing a collection of coordinates and numbers she couldn’t interpret. She looked up at the viewscreen, the same display of absolute black it’d always shown.
She took a deep breath. This was just a task, like anything else. A job to be done. What did they need to accomplish the mission?
Step one, before all else, would be to figure out what they were actually dealing with. The implication of this could not be taken lightly. They would need to test Jackin’s findings and confirm the data before they could start throwing around unsubstantiated theories.
“What do you need to get the proper measurements?” she asked. “Something better than a buoy? I’ll put in a request for—”
“When are you going to stop asking for stuff that’ll never come?” His dark brows sunk as his eyes narrowed at her. “When was the last time the Legion granted you a special request? You think they give a shit if we’re swallowed up by the Divide?”
“Whoa, slow down—”
“The signs were all there,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We’ve been riding the thrusters for weeks. The Tempus arrived three minutes early, then entered comms blackout a full twelve minutes earlier than it should have.”