8

The decision had weighed heavily upon her, but Lita felt confident of her choice. Certainly both Mathias and Manu were qualified, but only one of them would be her new top assistant; the other would be disappointed. She had developed friendships with each, so it pained her to know that one would be dealing with an emotional setback. But it was simply the way it had to be.

She quickly checked her e-mail, then left Sick House and made her way to the Conference Room, where she found Manu already waiting.

“Prompt, as always,” she said, smiling at him before grabbing a cup of water and taking a seat.

“My dad was big on making a good impression,” he said.

“You’ve certainly done that.” She sipped at her water, then leaned forward on the table. “I won’t keep you in suspense, Manu. I just spoke with Mathias a little while ago. He’s been a terrific member of the Clinic team, and was a strong candidate for the position. But I’ve decided to offer you the spot, if you’re still interested.”

He beamed at her. “Absolutely! Wow, that’s great. Thank you.”

“You’ve earned it,” she said. “Now, just promise me one thing.”

“Name it.”

“Remember all of those questions you asked during the interview? Well, don’t stop asking them. In fact, I want you to work on answering a few of them, too.”

Manu sat back and looked thoughtful. “I have one question right now, if that’s okay. It’s a bit personal.”

“I’m sure I can handle it.”

“Well … since we started talking about this, I’ve thought about what happened with Alexa. I wasn’t there the day it happened, and I guess I’m just wondering…”

He seemed unable to finish the sentence. Lita volunteered.

“Wondering how you would handle a life-and-death situation on the ship?”

He nodded. “Yeah. I’m not worried about any of the work that we’re doing, and I know I could pretty much handle an emergency situation when it comes up. But how exactly do you prepare for … that?”

Lita rubbed her forehead and considered the question. “You don’t prepare for it.”

He looked confused. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that the medical training that you had before we left, and the extra work you’ve put in during the first year, will give you the knowledge you need to handle the situation. But I don’t think you can mentally prepare for the worst.”

She paused, and her mind instinctually drifted back to conversations she’d had with her mother. Maria Marques had tried to condense her many years of medical experience into several short lessons for her daughter, helping Lita to understand not the book knowledge necessary for Galahad’s five-year voyage, but rather the psychological strains that a ship’s doctor would need to manage. During her toughest incidents since the launch, Lita found that she often fell back on those intimate discussions with her mom.

Maria had faced her own share of professional crises, one in particular which was personally devastating. Although it affected her on many levels, she maintained her devotion to her calling and served the medical needs of her hometown in Mexico, fighting her way through the personal pain. It was a lesson that Lita clung to during her most trying times.

Now, she stared across the table at Manu, and once again reached back across the mind-numbing distance to her home by the sea, to her mother’s wisdom and love. She offered a smile and said, “Nothing that you do to prepare yourself for that moment will ever replicate the actual emotions that you’ll feel when it happens. All you can do is wait and see how you’re built for it. You can’t read about it, you can’t do any exercises to train for it, and you can’t learn from someone else; you have to experience it, and then learn from it. Hopefully you’ll be able to apply it the next time it happens.”

Lita stopped and tried to gauge Manu’s expression. He seemed to be processing everything that she was saying. He nodded, just a slight dip of his head, and pursed his lips.

“I see what you’re saying. I just hope that I handle it as well as you did.”

Lita lowered her head, ashamed that he would see the truth in her eyes. Afraid that he would look inside her and reach a different conclusion, one that she felt stained her somehow. A long silence followed.

Finally, she looked up and tried one more smile. “You’ll be fine, Manu. I know it.”

In her heart, she hoped that someday she would be, too.

*   *   *

The noise level in the Dining Hall had tapered off a bit, but Hannah still found it distracting. With her dinner tray neglected beside her, she glanced back and forth between the table’s small vidscreen and her workpad, which was perfectly aligned with the table’s edge. She would occasionally squint at something on the screen, then bend over her workpad and modify the figures that flew from her stylus.

Her ordered, logical mind worked best when left undisturbed, but that was impossible on this night. More than a dozen crew members stopped by, either before or after their meal, to wish her good luck in the upcoming election; she graciously thanked each of them. A handful of people sat down beside her for a moment to express their surprise at her willingness to campaign, given her shy reputation; at this, she could only offer a shrug. How could she explain something that she herself couldn’t quite understand? But now that the dinner rush was waning, she settled into her work.

It was her mother who had first exposed her to the beauty and magic of puzzles. Some of Hannah’s favorite memories as a child included long, cold nights in Alaska, curled up with her mother in a blanket on the couch, each of them furiously trying to solve a word or number puzzle. Often they would download the same puzzle, and then race to see who could successfully finish first. They each kept a bag of chocolate treats on the table before them—Hannah’s favorites were the chocolate-covered macadamia nuts—and the winner could select anything from the other’s collection. It added a new level of competition to what was already quite fun for Hannah, and from that moment on she was hooked.

The puzzle at this particular moment, however, had more riding on it than a piece of chocolate. The potential danger suggested by the brief failures from Galahad’s radiation shield was, in fact, deadly. For while space might appear empty, it teemed with high-speed, high-energy charged particles, moving at ferocious speeds. Each star’s blast furnace spewed radiation into its planetary system, and the galaxy itself seethed in a lethal dose of cosmic radiation.

Earth’s powerful magnetic field shields it from the majority of harmful particles. Generated deep beneath Earth’s surface, in the molten iron that makes up the liquid outer core, this field effectively surrounds the planet. Radiation particles are diverted around Earth, repelled much the way a ship’s bow pushes water to each side. Galahad’s defense system was designed to work in primarily the same fashion, using electromagnetic forces to bend and push the cosmic radiation to the side as the ship cut through the vacuum of space. Without this shield, crew members would quickly be subjected to deadly cell mutation and damage.

What’s more, now it appeared that each successive jolt was causing extensive and lingering damage to their only defense. In a sense, a timer had effectively been started. When it ran out …

Hannah read and then reread her notes. She was juggling multiple ideas, a collection of possibilities that might explain the shield dilemma. Just as one idea would take center stage in her mind, she would find countless reasons why it didn’t make sense. Then another idea would shift into the spotlight, to be analyzed and tested. Promising scenarios were filed away for later study, while others were immediately discarded.

She snapped the page on her vidscreen to the graphic supplied by Galahad Command prior to launch, the one which plotted the positions of the outer gas planets, the Kuiper Belt, and beyond. She furrowed her brow as she scanned the page. It had been impossible for the scientists on Earth to guarantee what the teenage crew would encounter this far out; the best they could manage, given their limited information, was an educated guess.

No humans had ever passed this way before. Hannah and her crew mates were pioneers.

She wondered if this stretch of space held the answer to the breakdown in Galahad’s radiation shield. Not within the shield itself, but something … out there. She turned her attention back to her notes, then to the screen, then the notes. Space, she thought; what is different about this portion of space compared to the billions of miles we’ve left behind? What has changed?

She rubbed at the sore spot on her knee and, glancing around to make sure she was unnoticed for the moment, rolled up her pant leg. She examined the purplish bruise which had blossomed there, a painful remnant from her awkward encounter with Gap and the table. “Klutz,” she muttered to herself.

With an exasperated sigh, she sat back and tapped her fingers on the table. “Roc, have you got a second?” she said.

From the vidscreen’s speaker came the computer’s deadpan voice. “Well, part of me is assisting Lita with some crew records right now. Another part of me is tied up in Engineering, trying to iron out a bug in the artificial gravity grid; can’t have someone walking down the hall and suddenly end up bouncing against the ceiling, now can we? Plus, there’s a literature session going on in school right now, and I’m getting all sorts of queries about some guy named Twain. Oh, and the usual mundane requests from the remaining two hundred crew members, things generally not worthy of my vast intellect. I’m stretched like taffy. But for you, Hannah, I can easily spare a second. Maybe more.”

She smiled. “Thank you for devoting a sliver of that magnificent brain to helping me. I’m wondering about this.” She tapped the vidscreen graphic with her stylus, highlighting a section. “I’ve factored in the solar radiation at our back and the Milky Way’s radiation hitting us straight on. I’ve even considered that we might be absorbing some form of radiation from your good friends, the Cassini.”

“Hey, what do you know?” Roc interrupted. “The hotshot from Alaska tosses a joke. Who would have thunk?”

Hannah’s smile returned; she had always envied Gap’s unique relationship with the ship’s computer, the easy manner in which they exchanged good-natured barbs while still maintaining a close working relationship. Although not exactly in her nature, she had wondered if her own relationship with Roc might expand if she adopted a similar approach.

“But none of that seems to add up,” she said. “I mean, rather than an obvious outside influence, I thought it might very well be something about the basic properties of space. Would you agree?”

“Yes.”

Hannah waited for more, but nothing seemed to be coming. “Uh … okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

“Sure. That was easy. And not much more than a second. Of course, my curiosity is piqued. You’re assuming that the problem is, to put it delicately, a deformity in space. Am I reading you correctly?”

“Maybe,” Hannah said. “Do you see where I’m going with this? And, if so, do you think it makes sense to keep checking it out? Let me know if you think I’m wasting time here.”

Roc paused, and she could almost imagine his artificial brain flickering with activity before he answered, “I say continue.”

She let out a deep breath. “Okay, great. Thanks again.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Roc said. “And now, if you’re finished with me, I have to help someone conjugate a verb in one of the romance languages.”

Hannah again tapped her fingers on the table. She sighed, absently rubbed at the bruise on her knee, and let her mind begin its inevitable calculations. It might be a long shot, but it was at least something to explore. And it might—might—be the answer they needed to solve the radiation mystery.

Which ultimately might save their lives.