Far Horizon (Juggernaut #4)

Eight

The morning strolled by at the same pace they explored the station. There was no hurry for the day to end. Soon it would be over and when tomorrow came three new journeys would begin, each one of them separated from the others.

Jayce paid for everything, of course. Ellie assumed this would be one more thing which would endear him to her. Tila couldn't fault Jayce for his generosity, she reasoned. But what Ellie considered a generous and selfless act, Tila viewed as the antics of someone showing off their wealth.

Later, they sat on benches facing the stars and eating ice-cream from wafer cones. The transparent skin of the dome was behind fencing and an architectured landscape designed to force distance between the dome panels and the people inside.

Nina and Malachi swapped cones with every bite, exchanging a fruit sorbet in one cone for creamy white coconut in another. Ellie jealously guarded her strawberry cone. Tila picked chocolate. There were a dozen more flavours to choose from, most of which were more familiar to Ellie than to Tila and Malachi, as she had recently spent more time planetside than either of them.

Jayce, of course, had already finished his. He tried dropping hints for Ellie to share what she had left, but Ellie, often so eager to please, had drawn a hard line under sharing strawberry ice-cream with anybody. Ever.

Nina and Malachi sat the other side of Ellie, so asking them for a bite felt awkward. Tila, sat on the end of the bench on Jayce's right , but asking her to share with him was clearly out of the question.

With nothing else to eat, and while the others were quiet, Jayce started the conversation.

"Hey, Malachi. Are you really going to work on a warship?"

Malachi nodded as he wiped stray sorbet from the corner of his mouth. Nina helpfully took both cones while he did this. She did not give them back.

"A decommissioned warship. It's pretty old but we get to learn all the systems. Some of the tech hasn't changed much. Things get faster and smaller but the principles are the same."

Nina nudged him carefully with an elbow. "Tell him about the jump system," she said, while negotiating two cones.

"What about it?" said Jayce.

"It's analogue. Can you believe that?"

"What's analogue?" said Ellie between bites. Her eyes stayed laser-focussed on her cone.

"It doesn't use computers," said Malachi.

"The ship doesn't use computers? How is that possible?"

"Only the jump system. They used an analogue system to calculate jump coordinates because they couldn't get the same accuracy from a digital calculation."

"But...how?"

Malachi shrugged. "I don't know yet. Something about lasers and circles."

"Spheres," said Nina. "Lasers and spheres. Three dimension calculations on multiple planes of reference. I've been reading up on the code."

"So they do use computers," said Tila.

"But analogue measurements," said Malachi. He noticed the cones were almost gone. "Hey!"

"You already know what systems you've been assigned, then?" said Tila.

Nina reluctantly handed Malachi the sorbet cone, then swapped it at the last second for the coconut. "No we don't. They split us into teams when we get there, and each team has a different assignment. The idea is we work independently on our own parts of the ship and collaborate with the other teams to incorporate all the fixes."