Rhiannon picked disinterestedly at her food,
watching out of the corner of her eye enviously as the other officers in the mess for
midmeal cleaned their trays. Food didn’t interest her at the centon. Little did,
except for Leah. I used to laugh at people who felt this way, she thought
dismally, then wondered why it bothered her so much. I am a mass of contradictions.She was so wrapped up in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice Commander Akamas enter the room, glance around briefly, then make unerringly for her.
“Lieutenant Rhiannon,” he commented, standing beside her,
hands clasped behind his back in an officious way. She started a little and looked up. He
continued, “You seem to be off your food. Unfortunate. It’s almost edible
today.”“I don’t...feel very well.”“Sick?” Akamas asked, with thoroughly false sympathy.
Troublesome as she could be, he liked Rhiannon; she was too easy to tease.“In a way. I think I’m in love.”Akamas smiled and patted her on the head. “Tragic. No more
forays amongst the similarly-inclined female officers for our Rhiannon, she’s in
love. It’s terrible to see that you have fallen so far and so hard, Lieutenant.”“It is,” muttered Rhiannon.“If you can keep your mind off your hormones for a few centons
I have a mission for you.”Pushing her tray aside with distaste, she rose and replied,
“Lead the way, sir.”Once they were in the corridor and out of range of curious ears,
Akamas said, “It’s actually an emergency, Lieutenant. We’ve had a pair of
vipers up and disappear.”“How can two vipers just disappear?”“Evidently it was easy for this pair. They were on a deep probe
and we lost contact with them about fifteen centons ago. They’ll be out of fuel in a
centare; Fleet Commander wants to send someone after them. Here’s their flight
plan.”Rhiannon examined the printout Akamas had handed her as they waited
for a lift. The vipers had been exploring well away from the abandoned Cylon listening
post at near-light speed. “They were a long way out.”“There seems to be some kind of gravitational and magnetic
disturbance in that direction that’s visible on long-range scans. Commander Aeneas
and Adama decided to check it out.”“By the time we reach them they’ll be powered down to life
support only. We’ll have to use tractor beams to bring them back, that or have them
abandon their vipers and use rescue spheres to transfer them to the scout. Preference,
sir?” she asked as the lift arrived and they got in.“Your discretion, Lieutenant,” he said, setting the lift
to hangar-bay level. “Your scout and crew are waiting.”“Anything else I should know, sir?”“Just do your usual quality of work, Lieutenant. I’m not
worried about you.” The lift doors opened, revealing the hangar bay beyond, and he
waved her out. “One more thing, Lieutenant. Love is not a fatal affliction. It’s
rather fun.”She winced. Her discomfiture was evidently more apparent than
she’d let herself think. “I’ll keep that in mind, sir.”“I am quite serious, my dear Lieutenant.” He smiled and
the lift doors snapped shut as he was whisked away back to the bridge.“Easy for you to say,” Rhiannon muttered.The warp scout was parked near the bay entrance, several
orange-coveralled ground crew busy around it. Ares was standing near the nose conferring
with their crew chief, while Leah was checking to make certain that the safety pins on the
landing gear and gear bay doors had been removed. An armament crew was working on the
upper laser turret; finished with whatever they had been doing they snapped an access
cover back in place, removed the safety pins, and clambered down the slope of the hull to
hop agilely to the deck as Leah finished her inspection and disappeared into the airlock.
Rhiannon went up to Ares and said, “Well?”“Ready when you are,” he replied a little stiffly. She had
the impression he was barely resisting the urge to address her formally as captain; he
definitely was avoiding using her name. Not too happy, she thought, but he
brought it on himself.And me? she wondered as she followed Ares into the scout. Insanely happy, face it. It’s absurd, how all those stupid love songs I used to sneer at suddenly make sense, how awful! I feel vaguely brain-damaged. Maybe I should just stop analyzing it and enjoy it. That’s always been one of my problems.
Leah was already at her post, running checks on her instruments, her
faint glow contrasting with Ares’ glower. Wonderfully tight-knit crew I have
here, one who loves me, one who probably hates me, Rhiannon thought. In a
businesslike fashion she handed the viper patrol’s flight plan to Leah and said,
“Lay in a pursuit course, best sublight speed.”Leah took it, smiled at her. Rhiannon found herself smiling back,
told herself firmly, all right, enough, stop acting silly! and turned to Ares and
said, “All right, let’s run down the checklist and get it off the ground.”“Right,” he replied.Strange things happen at near-light speed. Even a collision with a
particle of dust can be fatal, so it was essential that navigational deflectors be at
optimum efficiency. The gamma ray flux would have cooked the scout’s crew alive had
not their shields been at full power. Time slowed down; it would take what seemed to them
far less than a centare to reach the presumed location of the missing vipers while several
centares would pass back aboard the Columbia. Even vision was affected. The
starfield seemed to collect into a mass before them, with blackness all around it. A
computer display showed a corrected view of their flight path on the instrument panel.They had been mostly silent since they’d left the ship; the
atmosphere aboard the scout was distinctly uncomfortable. It was a relief when Ares sat up
straighter in his seat and said, “What’s that?”Rhiannon looked over at him. “What’s what?”“That black spot on the screen.”“Something wrong with the computer?”“I don’t think so,” Ares said, and a quick check
confirmed that. “It’s getting bigger...scanners indicate there’s definitely
something out there.”Checking the readouts, Rhiannon said, “It’s some kind of
magnetic or gravitational disturbance, and we’re heading right for it. Slow to
one-half light speed.”“Slowing. That must be what the scanners aboard the Columbia
picked up.” With the reduction in speed, the void was now clearly visible outside the
front ports, growing rapidly to obscure the stars ahead. “That’s an optical
illusion,” Ares said. “It’s some kind of gravitational disturbance for
sure, and bigger than it looks...the light from the starfield behind it is warped around
it so you can’t see it until you’re nearly on top of it.” He glanced at
Rhiannon.She voiced what they were both thinking. “It could be
artificial. Like a stealthing field, on a huge scale.”“It could be,” he agreed.“It’s affecting our navigational systems,” said Leah.“Your implant?”“No.”“If those vipers are in there...,” Ares began.“It’s going to be hard to find them,” Rhiannon
concluded. “We don’t have a choice. Leah, can you get us back just using your
implant?”“Yes.”Assuming, Ares thought, it doesn’t fail again.
He wondered if he should mention that to Rhiannon, but he saw her jaw tighten and knew
she’d come to the same conclusion on her own.“We’re going in,” Rhiannon said, and Leah reached
back behind her right ear where the switch for her implant was located under the skin, and
activated it.The darkness closed around them like a shroud as they entered the
void. Several of the instruments overloaded and shut down to protect themselves. Most of
the others displayed impossible readings.“No scanners, nothing,” Ares exclaimed in frustration.
“How are we going to find them?”“Switch to unicom.”The result was a static-filled hiss. “Communications are pretty
severely affected,” said Ares.“We have to assume they didn’t go very far in. They were
due to turn back fairly soon after they would have reached the void anyway. Leah, set up a
search course.”“Working on it.”“If we get close enough, communications ought to be able to
punch through the static. It’s not much of a chance, but it’s all they have.
Make a record of this so I don’t have to keep repeating it.” Rhiannon pressed
the transmit button and called, “This is COL-480 to Alpha patrol, please
respond.”“Got it. I’ll set it to repeat every twenty microns.”“Course laid in,” said Leah.“Good. Execute.”In the end they found them, neither too far inside the void or off
their flight path. Fortunately the two vipers had stayed together and were drifting near
one another, out of fuel. A quick experiment showed that the scout’s tractor beam was
useless inside the void, so the two viper pilots donned their rescue balls, inflatable
spheres stowed in their seat cushions, and Ares put on an EVA suit and towed them over to
the scout.“‘Thanks’ sounds so inadequate,” the flight
leader, Lieutenant Fallon of Columbia’s Alpha squadron, told Ares and
Rhiannon sincerely.“I second that,” his wingman, Ensign Merten, agreed.“Our pleasure. We need no thanks. Duty, you know. Of course you
can buy us a few rounds later,” Rhiannon said.Leaving the grateful pilots in the common area, Rhiannon and Ares
returned to the bridge and took their places, Leah surrendering the pilot’s seat to
Rhiannon. She seemed a little gray from the strain of having her implant activated
continuously and Rhiannon took her arm, concerned. “Are you all right?”“I’m...holding up as long as we get out of here pretty
soon.”“Right, let’s do it. Give me the course and we’ll be
out of here.”Ares spoke for all of them when he let out a sigh of relief as the
stars appeared around them again and the systems settled back to normal. “Out,”
he said.“Set a course to return to the Columbia, best
sublight,” said Rhiannon.After she’d done so, Leah deactivated her implant. “I
think I need to sleep,” she said, and she left the cockpit.“I don’t doubt it,” said Ares. He looked over at
Rhiannon, saw her obvious worry, and said, “Look, I’m sorry I’ve been
acting like an astrum lately, but...well, I know you care for her. I don’t
necessarily understand it....”“That’s all right, neither do I. I’ve been in like
before, in lust several times, but this...is very strange.”“You’re in love with her.”“That does seem to have happened. I’m sorry, Ares,
you’re wonderful, but not my type.”“Evidently not. My father said we’d have to have a
conversation like this,” he added.“There, you see, your father’s not so bad.”“I just don’t understand him.”“You don’t have to.” Rhiannon checked some of the
readings they’d taken inside the void with their few operational instruments.
“Do you suppose this is what we’ve been looking for?”“Do you mean you think Kobol could be on the other side of
that, or even inside of it?”“It could be.”“That void could be endless. We couldn’t scan the other
side.”“Nothing is endless, not even the universe,” Rhiannon
corrected. “Have you ever read the Book of the Word?”“Well...no.”“It’s mostly a load of patriarchal felgercarb, but
there’s a lot of real history in it. It says that when the people left Kobol, they
passed through a black void.”“That sounds suspiciously allegorical to me.”“That’s what people have always assumed, but maybe not. I
know Adama doesn’t think so. I wonder what he’ll say when he hears about
this?”