Pandora's Chase

Chapter Thirty-One

"Are you busy?" Chase asked as he interrupted Severine in the cockpit. She was reading a rather tattered book. It barely had a paperback cover anymore. The title was unreadable.

"Extremely," she said, lowering her boots from an open space on the dashboard and looked out ahead of the ship.

Chase followed her glance out the cockpit window, and his lungs sucked in every molecule of air in front of him as he gasped. Off in the distance was a magnificent bright white streak. At the front of it, a huge dark blue mass and the white cloud pushed out a thick cushion in front of it before streaming back behind it like a massive sideways teardrop. It left a glorious tail of white and blue.

It was a monstrous sight to see it sailing through the big and black all alone and they were speeding past it. Beautiful to see at this distance, treacherous to experience close up, for she was still cooling down from her last run in with a recent star. For a while he stared at it and could almost hear her roar as her outer crust cooled and cracked. Chunks of ice and rock popped from her body as gases released. Debris trailed behind her, desperately trying to keep up.

"A comet." His heart thundered inside his chest, and with every pound his heart made, the etching on his chest reciprocated with a sharp sting, as if to keep watch over him.

"Well, aren't you the teacher's pet?" she snarled.

Not knowing what to do with the shot she took at him, he just kept looking at the comet. "Where's it headed?"

"Not sure. We're too far out from any gravitational pull from our solar system. From the scans, she looks to be almost on a straight course. I sure wouldn't want to be in her path though."

"I guess we're going pretty fast then if we're flying by it," he said, hoping for an estimate from Severine. Getting answers as part of a natural conversation would mask his intent on getting the information he needed. He felt sly in this moment.

"We're going about half the speed of light and that thing is probably going maybe five hundred kilometers a second," she answered.

"Half the speed of light?" Chase nearly shouted, playing his dummy part well.

Severine laughed. "You're really not from out here, are you?"

"Nope," he confessed, bowing his head a little. He perked back up, though, fearing to show too much weakness. "Hey. Half the speed of light? That means we'll be ready for a jump soon, right?"

"Looks like maybe another couple of weeks."

"That's not too bad," he said. Hoping to keep her talking about the subject, acting like he was examining the cockpit and added, "So how does this work?"

"How does what work, Chase?" she replied, obviously annoyed the conversation wasn't ending.

"The ship. Space travel. Jumping. All of it."

Severine sighed, not excited about explaining this to him. Especially one she might have to witness someone putting a bullet into in a couple of weeks.

"C'mon, just tell me. I'm bored. There's nothing to do," he pleaded.

"Fine," she said, "it has partly to do with string theory and the idea that when you manipulate something in one part of space-time, that the exact same thing across the galaxy will experience the same effects. Something like that."

"Okay, makes sense. But how?" He added, laughing in his head, thinking of Jax running around the house behind his mother. 'But why, but how, but why', he'd go on and on.