Adequin closed the interface and returned to stand beside the captain’s chair. “This has been happening more and more frequently, Optio. What’s—” She cut herself off as she realized she’d fully caught up with the actions of the time ripple. She hated when this happened.
Jackin shot her an amused glance as she trudged down the steps to stand next to him.
“How can we fix it?” she asked.
“I dunno.” He scratched his short beard and gestured to the main screen, still showcasing a panoramic, perpetual view of the nothingness before them. “It’s not like I have anything to anchor us to, or from.”
“What about a buoy? Would that help?”
“Only if it’ll stay put itself.”
“I’ll put in a request.”
“Great, so we’ll see that on the other side of never.”
She smiled. “I’ll label it priority.”
“I won’t hold my breath.”
“EX, sir?” the crew foreman, Kamara, called from her terminal across the stairway. She turned in her stool as she tucked a strand of dark brown curls back into her prim bun. “It’s almost twelve hundred, sir.”
Adequin glanced at the chronometer above the viewscreen. “Right. Thanks, Kamara.” She gave Jackin a pat on the back. “The Tempus’s incoming. I’ll go meet them.”
* * *
Adequin left the bridge and headed for Quince Sector, swiping her clearance to steal a shortcut through a narrow maintenance passage. When she arrived at the hangar, the service access door slid open, bringing forth a waft of warm air, tinged with the dense aroma of grease and rubber.
She stepped onto the second-level catwalk encircling the hangar and glanced over the railing to the operations deck below. The once-polished aerasteel decking had long ago lost its sheen, marred over decades of service from when the Argus had been the SCS Rivolus over two centuries ago—one of the most formidable ships in the System Collective fleet at the end of the Viator War. What would have once been bustling with pilots, deckhands, starfighters, and support crews, now sat empty, save for the large repair platform, home to a half dozen workbenches.
On Adequin’s right sat the entrance to the port docking bay, where warning lamps oscillated between red and yellow to indicate the still-open air lock on the other side. On the opposing wall, a massive central bulkhead loomed, beyond which lay a mirror image of the same setup on the starboard side of the ship. The hangar had been split during the retrofit two hundred years ago, when the dreadnought had been repurposed for the Sentinels after the Viator War.
But the second hangar hadn’t been used since budget “reallocations” forced them to discontinue charting and exploration missions. In Adequin’s early days on the Argus, those missions had made her day-to-day far more tolerable. Sure, they literally never found anything, but the possibility alone worked to combat the stagnancy. She’d had to cancel them after less than a year, and though regrettable, she just as often wondered if another four years of vacant star charts and unfruitful element probes would have only served as another unneeded reminder of how truly on the edge of nowhere they were.
The echoing squeal of an impact driver cut through the dense quiet, and Adequin’s gaze lowered to the operations deck.
The chief mechanic, Circitor Josslyn Lace, hung from the truss halfway up the side of a seven-meter-tall mobile service gantry. Two oculi stood below her, one whose arms and hands and pockets were completely full of wiring, parts, and tools, and another who stared up intently, arms hovered as if ready to catch the circitor should she suddenly lose her grip.
Adequin descended the long access ladder to the bottom deck and headed toward them. The unburdened oculus snapped a smart salute, and Adequin waved off the other as they fumbled with their armful of tools in an effort to do the same.