18.0

This makes no sense,” Sofia said. Safe inside the control room, her alarm had transmogrified into irritation. “It’s not time to fire up the drive. Uncle hasn’t signed off on the calculations, nothing’s been secured for thrust, and the sarding ship is pointing the wrong way!”

Ravi looked at her sharply. She was right, of course. The front of the ship was still aimed at the Destination Star. Turning on the drive would simply make the ship move faster. She was speeding up, when the whole point of Braking Day was to slow down. It made no sense.

And yet it was happening. Sofia was standing on the deck. The force the drive was exerting was very weak, but it was strong enough to hold her down. So long as she didn’t wave her arms about, anyway, which is what she was doing now. The motion dragged her off her feet in the direction of the ceiling.

“Archie’s hooks!” she muttered.

Ravi half-floated, half-fell into a couch. The console in front of him was part of a backup control system, designed to operate independently if something went wrong on the flight deck. It took only the flicking of a few switches to cut it off from the hive entirely. Anonymity protected, he grabbed a data jack and plugged himself in. Bits and bytes flooded through his implants, swamping his biological senses. It was as if he was floating inside the drive itself, surrounded by swirls of white-hot energy.

Part of him was terrified, the other part exhilarated. He wasn’t ready for this, he knew. He didn’t have the training. He was blinded by light, deafened by the raw output of power. But he needed to understand. Preferably without blowing out his implants.

Even though he felt outside of it, he made his body take slow, deep breaths. He forced his mind to make sense of what it was seeing, to remember it was just data, just a simulation. Slowly, through the sheer exercise of will, the light became a little less blinding, the noise more manageable. Patterns began to emerge. Flow and counter-flow, eddies and weirs, valve gates and choke points. A seething river of energy trammeled by banks, and dams and channels. Except in one place. An overflow pipe. A sluice gate in the dam. Energy, errant and angry and curious, had found it and was pouring through, screaming its rage into the blackness beyond.

From somewhere out of sight, behind him maybe, a small, distant voice. Worried.

“Ravi? You okay?”

With groaning effort, Ravi choked off the flow of data until he could dimly see and hear the world around him. He reached around to the back of his neck and disconnected the jack. The sudden silence was deafening.

Sofia was staring at him, her face pinched. She gave him a weak smile.

“You looked like your head was going to explode,” she said, her voice heavy with relief.

“It felt like it,” Ravi admitted. “Next time, I’ll just fire up the monitors. Do it the old-fashioned way.”

“Was it worth it, at least? Did you find anything out?”

“Yes.” He didn’t bother to hide his mystification. “The drive is firing, all right. But barely. That’s why the gravity’s so low.”

It was Sofia’s turn to look puzzled.

“How’s that possible? I thought the drive was either on or off. All the nav calculations have been done assuming a single number for thrust.” She looked mildly put out. “You could get a lot more creative with a variable.”

Ravi shrugged.

“The drive is designed to be on or off. When you’re blasting zillions of tonnes of starship across twelve point four light-years’ worth of interstellar space, you don’t really need to be subtle. But even though we call it ‘the drive,’ it’s really nine thrusters bundled together. Mechanically, each one of them is independent. It’s the software that links them together. Rewrite the software, and each thruster could take on a life of its own.” He looked carefully at Sofia, to make sure she was following him. “Right now, one is on, eight are off.” He laid a careful hand on the console. There was no hint of vibration. “You know what? If you were up in the wheels, you might not even notice. Even in the hubs, you might just think you’d overcompensated or something. As thrust goes, it’s pretty pathetic.”

“Are the thrusters all the same size?”

Ravi nodded.

“Then why are they doing this? What’s the point? Burning fuel just for the hungary of it? The math makes no sense! They make us go a tiny bit faster only to have us slow down again on Braking Day?” She sat down on the edge of a couch, suddenly disconsolate. “This whole thing is sarded up.”

“You know what else is sarded up? Whoever’s doing this is doing it in secret.”

Sofia threw him a sharp look.

“Think about it. This isn’t like turning on a light. You can’t just press a button and ta-da! the drive is on. There are interlocks, systems to prevent an accidental firing. The whole thing is surrounded by protocols and procedures. There are simulations, and tests, and warmups, and warm downs, and launch teams, and committees, and warnings to the crew, and none of that has happened! Almost no one knows this is going on. Except us. And we’re not meant to be here.”

Sofia looked thoughtful.

“Could we have done this? You know, by accident? Like you say, we’re not meant to be here. Is it possible we tripped a switch or something?”

“No,” Ravi said patiently. “Interlocks, remember? You can’t just turn the drive on. There are too many safeguards. You could do a crash startup in an emergency, but even then, you’d need three officers, with three separate keys, to access the system simultaneously.” He shook his head firmly. “This has nothing to do with us.”

Sofia stared up at the ceiling, as if she could see through it to the icy kilometers of gantry on the other side.

“Uncle must know about this,” she said quietly. “And the Captain.” She sprang up again, agitated, and flew off the deck. She had to brace herself against the ceiling to get back down. “But why would they do it? This is just . . . just stupid.”

“What about BonVoys?”

Sofia was staring at him like he had two heads.

“It makes sense,” Ravi insisted. “Isn’t the whole point of being a Bon Voyager for the journey to go on forever? Maybe they hacked the drive. Maybe they want us to go so fast, we can’t slow down in time to make planetfall. Or maybe they want to burn off so much fuel, there isn’t enough left for braking.”

Sofia shook her head.

“The BonVoys I know would tell you that the whole point of being one is to protect an innocent world from people. Not stopping is one way, sure, but it’s not the only way. And if they’re clever enough to hack the drive, which they are, they’re clever enough to know this is never going to work.” She pointed emphatically at the ceiling. “Sooner or later, someone up there is going to wake up and realize something is wrong. They can’t accelerate the ship fast enough or burn enough fuel to make a blind bit of difference before that happens. If this is a BonVoy plan, it’s the worst plan ever, which means it can’t be BonVoys. But I’ve got no clue what the Captain thinks she’s doing. This whole thing is . . . pointless.”

Ravi wanted to argue with her, but Sofia was right. Any BonVoy smart enough to hack the drive would be smart enough to know it wasn’t worth the effort. He opened the airlock in the ceiling with a quick burst of code.

“Time to go.”

There was a retractable ladder folded into the ceiling by the airlock door, clearly meant to be used when the ship was under thrust. But the gravity was so weak, it wasn’t worth the effort.

Sofia made to jump up and then stopped.

“The radiation,” she asked. “Is it safe?”

“Totally. The elevator’s designed for this. It’s even better shielded than the control room. Your radiation alarm won’t even twitch.” He jumped ahead of her, soaring effortlessly through the hatch. “Whatever’s going on,” he said, “we won’t find the answer down here.”