Nightingale

FOUR

The blip in question was barely noticeable. The crew fell silent, all staring at the blinking spot, flashing in the distance, hypnotised by it like moths to light.

'So there is something out here after all,' Duma spoke, breaking the silence.

'It would appear so,' Prissy said. The silence fell again, although all of them could seem to hear the cogs turning in each other's heads, calculating and plotting, analysing and deducing the meanings of what they were seeing before their eyes.

'What actually is it Ymal?' Leon asked, turning to him. Ymal shrugged.

'Don't know. Just pulled up the screen for a look, it's got a slightly wider range than the monitors up front, and there it was. Tell you what though,' Ymal began. He turned around, seemingly to gather some sort of composure.

'Hey Nightingale,' he said.

'Hello Ymal, what can I do for you?' the woman's voice was back again, with a soothing, calming quality about it. Leon's heart was stilled very slightly by the simple politeness of it.

'Can you put the hologram map into 3D view for me?'

'Certainly Ymal, one moment.' The hologram before them floated up, drifting, about a foot, and another foot of hologram appeared above and below this line.

'This view shows us in three-dimensional space. We're always in the middle in order to make it easier to calculate the relative position of everything else. The object,' he pointed to the little icon, 'is above us, relatively. It's about half a day's journey to get it in view of the cameras, if it's big enough, on cruising speed, about three hours if we floor it,' Ymal explained.

'But we still don't know what it is. Is there a way to get any dimensions, or any other information on it?' Jenny asked.

'Nightingale,' Prissy spoke, hoping that it would pick up on her wish to speak to the ship. It was the first time she had done so.

'Hello Prissy, what can I do for you?'

'Can you give us any details on the object in quadrant V54, 88B, 490?'

'I shall try, one moment please.' Leon had moved around the table to be on the side nearest to the floating mystery, adrift in the dark. He stood on a chair nearby to be above the hologram, looking down on it with an eagle-eye view.

'What are you doing?' Holden asked.

'Just getting a different perspective on things. Sometimes it helps to go at things at a different angle to help creative juices to flow.'

'What creativity do you need?' Yuki enquired.

'I need to decide what to do,' Leon said simply.

'I am unable to retrieve any data on any object in that space,' Nightingale returned. Prissy frowned.

'You can't? What do you mean?'

'My systems cannot detect any object in that quadrant.' Prissy frowned, she was sure that she had read out the coordinates correctly.

'It's vanished,' Holden said. The other six, who had turned their attention to Prissy and Leon in their various exchanges, looked back at the hologram. Sure enough, the item of interest was no longer there, and the only object still registered on the screen was the lonely Nightingale, drifting ever onwards in a barren emptiness of the universe.

'Nightingale, rewind the recordings of the hologram for me,' Ymal asked.

'Certainly Ymal, rewinding now.' There was no discernible difference in what they were seeing, and sure enough no blip reappeared.