disengaging from the station before it dropped back into the precise location and moment from which it had been snatched. In three-space, both to human eyes and to electronic recording systems, it did not appear that Howard had left at all. Rather, in an eyeblink it had changed from a mechanically and socially vibrant habitat to an empty, dead shell.
Kestrel was back on station near Howard. Natalia had been through decon and a more traditional shower in the little ship’s one small sanitation chamber. Winters, the shortest of the three crew members, had donated a uniform coverall for her to wear while her only set of clothing cycled through the laundry for a third time. Natalia had her doubts that it would ever be truly clean, but she was lost in Winters’ clothing and she was willing to give the rudimentary military equipment one more try rather than condemn herself to living in this walk-around tent until they returned to civilization. In between decontamination and her shower, the captain—no, the ensign—no, what was his name . . . Matt, Matt had brought her a share of the crew’s dinner. Ground lamb, pan fried. Vegetable mush. Something that almost looked like a potato pancake. After two weeks on iron rations and then two months in and out of stasis, it might have been ambrosia.
The intercom chimed. “Miss . . . Doctor V., you ready for debrief?” It was the other ensign, the one she’d seen during docking.
“Yes, Ensign Cathy.” She was pretty sure she had his name right, although why such a masculine man had such a feminine name she couldn’t explain.
“Wardroom in ten minutes okay with you?” His voice made it clear he was unused to dealing with civilians, or women, or both. He was as nervous as a child at a first piano recital.
“Da, yes.” After a second, “How will I find the wardroom?”
“Sorry, ma’am. That’s our idea of humor. It’s that big room you came through earlier, the only one not crammed with plumbing, drives or command systems. Just step outside the laundry cubby when you’re ready.”
The bell on the dryer sounded during his response. She acknowledged him and quickly changed into her own almost-clean but correctly-sized shipsuit, shoved Winters’ coverall into the unit and started the cycle, and went to tell her rescuers her story.
Natalia had been introduced all around and coffee had been poured. She’d been wrong about one name. It wasn’t “Cathy,” it was “Cathcart” for the big ensign. Winters for the other. Winters was quiet, thoughtful, deliberate. Cathcart looked distracted. It was hard to believe he’d become a responsible officer in the Imperial Navy behaving like this. Probably it was her effect on him. It had happened before. Sometimes she found it irritating that men couldn’t see beyond honey hair and a trim body. Whether because his was the first face of her rescuers that she’d seen or because he was so completely disarmed in her presence, she didn’t mind it now. In his way, he was as striking as she was. He was far too young, though, perhaps ten years younger than she. She continued her narrative.
“. . . by the time I had recalled how to pilot the Bug, it had passed beneath Howard Station. I managed to turn around and mate to the primary docking port, but only after many curses and much fear—I am not a pilot, I am a physicist and an abstract mathematician. I could not open the hatch to Howard’s main docking port. I feared that I had damaged it with my clumsy piloting. I undocked and tried two other ports, the one you forced to gain entry and finally the aft supply port. The latter responded somewhat differently to the clutch of the Bug’s docking collar. I did not realize that the other ports were . . . damaged. That is not the word. Altered, perhaps. Still, I did not realize that the other ports were more than without power. The aft supply port mated more thoroughly to the Bug and responded to power overrides from my little craft enough to open. But the station was dark and I had no way to open the hatch between the aft supply room and the command module.
“There was an EVA suit in there, with a limited supply of air and perhaps two days supply of water in the sipper tank. I took that. I also took a tool satchel that had been left behind, four boxes of iron rations, three canisters of O2 that were strapped to the aft bulkhead, one chemical fire extinguisher and a vacuum-sealed first-aid kit. There was nothing else to take, you understand? I did not choose. I took everything that was small enough for me to move to the Bug.”
Cathcart huddled with Parker for a moment. Parker spoke. “That, what did you call it? That Bug, it had no substantial supplies in it. Four boxes of iron rations plus whatever food paste was in that EVA suit and your own might have lasted a month. You’ve been floating out there for two and a half. Can you explain that?” His tone was friendly, but there was an anomaly here and until it was resolved, none of the crew knew how to trust this stranger.
“How do I say this?” Natalia paused to reflect. “I changed the scale of the axis of duration within a limited field so that my perceived duration was considerably less than that outside the field.” There were blank looks from the three officers.
“Can you say that again in language we can all understand?” Parker asked.
“No, I do not think I can.” Natalia smiled. “Only, I think, with mathematics.” She paused for a moment. “Are you aware of what we do at Howard Station?”
Winters spoke immediately. “Experiments in probing n-dimensional space from normal three-space.” Parker and Cathcart stared at him, both doing their best guppy impersonations. Winters looked at them and shrugged. “It’s on their website. I looked it up before we left TSFHQ.” Parker shook his head. For a guy who seemed determined to spend his last credit on women and liquor, Winters had an amazing array of useless crap stored in his head.
“Da, correct.” Natalia had missed the byplay. “We seek to introduce a fold in the plane of this reality in order to examine the next.” She shook her head. “It does not work with words. Only mathematics.”
“What does that have to do with making a month’s worth of food last two and a half times that long?” asked Parker.
“Like this,” she said, and she held a fist out with the thumb up, index finger forward and middle finger sideways. “Three spacial dimensions. Length, width, height. In mathematics usually x, y, and z. You move your hand”—she bent her elbow so her index finger now pointed up—“and you exchange x for y.” She paused and looked at them, seeking any sign of understanding. Only dimly, but it was there. “Duration, time, maps to similar axes, but only moves along one of them. If you alter which axis time flows along, you can manipulate that flow. I did that.”
“So you slowed down time?” Winters again.
“Nyet, time moves at a constant rate,” she replied. “Instead I intermittently experienced duration on an axis of greater scope.” She looked pleased with herself for her explanation.
“Let’s pretend,” Parker said, “that we understand the what of this. How did you do it?”
“Axial exchange is a low-energy function. It does not take great power, only an understanding of how to do it, where to push to cause the rotation. I chose an axis of duration with the scope I needed and rotated my little Bug to use it. Periodically I rotated back, or a controller program I wrote did, to check to see if anyone had reactivated the station. I keyed the program to look for any EM signal with Howard’s signature embedded in it.
“It took me so long to set things up that I still did not have enough supplies, so I also set up the autodoc to hold me in an induced coma until the stasis field was permanently ended. From what I saw on the Bug’s consoles, it was a UTS sync signal that triggered the end of stasis and eventually brought about my awakening.”
Winters made a leap. “That’s why you had no IFF transponder. You cannibalized it for your axial exchanger or whatever you call it!”
“And the thruster control board and parts of the nav computer and wiring from other systems. My Bug was pretty much just a, how do you say it, a ‘room with a view’ when you rescued me. I left comm alone, and environmental controls, but many other systems were sacrificed to enable my survival.” Natalia beamed.
“Pardon me, ma’a
m,” Cathcart spoke, “but that sounds risky as hell. A medically induced coma? You’re a physicist, or a mathematician, or both, but not a medical doctor. Why would you take that kind of risk?”
She retrieved the small satchel that she’d brought from Bug Two from where she’d tucked it under her seat and opened it. Holding it so the three ensigns could see inside she said, “Does that answer your question?” There was the equivalent of about two meals’ worth of iron rations in it. “That is all I had left.” She paused. “Starvation is an ugly death. I was in the autodoc for almost two weeks of subjective time, almost two months, perhaps only six weeks in normal space, and I had no idea how long I would have to wait. Decisions like that are easy when you have no alternatives.”
Parker spoke. “So you set up your gizmo and software to control it, climbed into the autodoc, fell asleep and woke up to find us, is that about it?”
“Perhaps.” Natalia’s face fell. “It was not supposed to be sleep, but I did have dreams, or more properly, nightmares.” She shuddered. “Screams, inhuman screams. I could feel when the rotations occurred. As they did, I heard screams in my mind, in my dreams. I cannot explain it better than that.” She collected herself again. “I must not