The Anomaly

Journey

Making the announcement was the easy part, Ernest was well aware. It did nothing to make what they were contemplating any less dangerous, and before that attempt could be mounted there were logistical preparations to be made.

Ernest knew what had to be done. He wasn't just a navigator, he'd also spent all those years at Miramar station working on drive systems repair. The ship already carried a second headset and had the circuitry to accommodate it. It was there as a backup, but also a tool for teaching trainee navigators, providing full interconnection with the sensor array and even having an emergency override that an instructor could use to take control if needed. What it lacked was any way to give shared control to both users at once.

Benefitting from a common pool of knowledge and experience, the two Ernests were able to work together. They tracked down and disabled the safety mechanism that blocked instructions from the second headset, then jury-rigged a new routing system able to accept commands from both input feeds. It was crude, but it would provide the degree of control they needed. If anything, the risks were in the opposite direction– were they to start issuing contradictory instructions, nothing would prevent the ship from juddering back and forth between the alternate states. The consequences of this would not be kind. They would simply have to rely on mutual cooperation.

Trying to look at it more positively, they agreed between themselves that this act of building a makeshift command system would double as a crash course on teamwork, just as the test drives around the shallows would provide a useful refresher on ship navigation itself. Not a skill you forget, but one they hadn't engaged in for several years.

So they did what they needed to do and within two days had made their first venture across the edges of the Anomaly, making their final adjustments and fine tunings under battle conditions.

Two day's work, another of testing and tuning – now the ship was deemed ready. On the fourth day they rested. For such an arduous journey they would need to start out in the best physical and mental condition possible.

While all this was going on, a negotiation had taken place between Capt'n and captain. The expedition, it was agreed, would take two weeks. The estimated travel time, if all went well, was two days – so even allowing for the fact that all would almost certainly not go well, they should still arrive with ample time to survey what they found and recover any artefacts of value that turned up in the process.

Captain Hans would wait out this time at their current location, if for no other purpose than to record the fact of their non-return and draw the obvious conclusion. Without a navigator of his own there was no question of his mounting a rescue mission, and in any case the time lags on signals sent across flat space meant that it would be months, more likely years, before any distress call could reach him. On the other hand, if they did manage to limp back somehow, he would be on hand to render assistance.

In return, any plunder from the expedition would be split equally between the six of them. The Capt'n had grumbled, but with the Ernests having made this a non-negotiable condition, there was not a lot he could do about it.

#

Later, after a long and reviving sleep, Ernest went looking for Gina, finding her with her brother in the saloon. The young man must have detected something in the glances exchanged between Ernest and his sister; after offering a few cheerful comments as greeting, he excused himself to go off in search of some other entertainment.

Ernest waited until they were alone. "So is it true, what he told me? About this body belonging to your ex-fiancé? That he was a navigator, like me?"