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Skull watched Firefly through again, hoping it would give him some inspiration. There were parallels with reality, with his situation. A slow-moving spaceship, no warp drives or sparkly transporter beams, no energy guns. Well, none that I know of, he thought. Have to ask her about that.
And being locked inside a floating tin can with people you didn’t particularly like.
Still not sure about that, actually. Not sure about anything. He’d come unmoored somehow, floating out here in the void between the planets. He felt himself gravitating toward her but distrusted the feeling. She doesn’t actually want me; she just wants someone now that she has time for her chick brain to start whispering to her. She doesn’t respect me. She feels sorry for me. To hell with that. To hell with all of them. Can’t have a woman that doesn’t respect you.
Can’t have a woman at all, can you Skull?
If you do, she’ll die too.
“Good show, that.” Raphaela interrupted his thoughts, pointing at the video. She nibbled on a food-lump. “I always liked it.”
“Half of you did.” He put some bite into the comment, pushing for distance.
“Both of me did,” she objected without heat. “Raphael watched a lot of television too. He thought the stories gave him insight into the human psyche.”
Skull snorted. “Maybe. Like vomit gives you insight into digestion.”
She didn’t answer. They watched Captain Mal Reynolds get his crew out of another situation, something with Reapers or Reavers or Raiders. Neither of them was really paying attention to the show. They were trying too hard not to pay attention to each other.
Finally he said, “Turn it off please.”
She touched a screen.
“How come you don’t have something better than touchscreens?”
“Like what?” She drank from her bottle of flat, tasteless water.
“I don’t know. Holo-sensors. Something like that.”
She shrugged. “What advantage would it give? A touchscreen is display and control in one, infinitely reconfigurable. The only better thing I can think of might be cybernetic implants, and the Meme...let’s just say they would think putting machines in their bodies as disturbing as you would find attaching a parasite to yourself.”
“What about faster-than-light travel?”
She chuckled. “That’s impossible.”
“What about wormholes? Folded space?”
“Wormholes move the traveler forward in time in direct proportion to their lengths. Nothing moves or propagates through the space-time continuum faster than light. A wormhole is just a tube that moves you a certain distance in a certain amount of time.”
Skull’s brow furrowed, struggling. “So you can’t cheat.”
“Not really. The time spent is always a function of lightspeed. A wormhole two light years long would deposit you at its end two years later. You would experience virtually no time because of infinite dilation, just like Einstein said. Stop worrying about it. There’s no way to gimmick the system. The main thing a wormhole would do for you is give you a free trip. No energy or fuel needed.”
He nodded, thoughtful. “Then how long before the scoutship gets here?”
She touched a screen, read the display. “Just under a year, if they slow down to match orbit with Earth. If they don’t, they could fly through the solar system in a lot less. Say four months. This is presuming I am correct in my calculations and assumptions, based on things like the wavelength dilation and Doppler effect in their transmissions, partial records on the base detailing normal Meme practices, things like that.”
Skull snorted. “Things like that. Sounds like a lot of guesswork.”
“You want to try to refine my guesswork, go ahead.”
“I don’t need to. They’re not going to go to Earth first.”
“What?” Raphaela put her hands on her hips and stuck her chin out. “How do you know?”
“Put yourself in their place. You lost contact with your base. What would you do?”
Her hands lifted from her hips to hug herself, rubbing her arms as if cold. “I’d want to know why.”
“Right. Is that prediction too human?”
She turned to pace the floor, short choppy steps, thinking. “No. You’re right. That’s what they will do.”
Skull smiled. The stubble of his unshaven face gave him a devilish look. “Good.”
