10 Another Fall
Had he really just kissed her?
she thought.
Had she kissed him back?
Yes, she had hugged him. Friends hugged. Team members hugged. Families hugged. She had always thought of him as family. Like a big brother.
He wasn’t unattractive or anything like that, but they had been close for so long. She had never even considered Ethan in that way.
Well, maybe that wasn’t true, she relented.
Still, this was too much to take in right now. She had gone to check on him out of concern, and he had sprung this on her. She simply didn’t know how to react, how she should react, or how she could react.
Ava forced herself to focus on the light on the ceiling above her. She locked onto it, a diode strip that ran the length of the ship. It was an iridescent white-blue. The light could change or pulse to signal different warnings, shifting to red, purple, or amber.
She breathed and counted, then exhaled and counted again.
She was close to calm when she heard boots striking metal from aft.
“Ava, did another ladder get the better of you?” Kane asked as he strode toward her prone form. He looked tired and concerned.
Without even thinking, she shot to her feet and hugged him. She almost let out a sob but held it in. Still, he felt her body heave with the attempt.
Shocked for only a moment, he dropped the data sheets he had been carrying and hugged her back protectively. He held one hand against the back of her head while the other rubbed her back, whispering that everything was okay.
She hugged him tightly, feeling safe but still lost. They held each other in the lower main until Ava collected herself. She loosened her grip and stepped away. Her father released her, placed a hand against her face, and wiped away the tears that had escaped with his thumb.
“What happened?” Kane asked.
“Ethan kissed me.”
“What?” Kane asked.
“He kissed me,” Ava said again. “Right on the mouth.” She gestured toward her face.
“What?” Kane asked again, this time in relief and disbelief.
“I’m not saying it again,” Ava said as she fidgeted in place.
“That was because Ethan kissed you?” Kane asked.
“Yes?” Ava answered questioningly.
She was beginning to feel self-conscious about where this conversation was going.
“Oh my God, Ava. I thought someone had died,” an exasperated Kane said.
“Well, okay, but this is still a crisis,” Ava argued.
“Oh?” Kane said, now beginning to laugh with relief.
Ava’s face began turning red again. “Oh, I don’t know, Dad. Maybe because I have a lot of confused feelings about it. Maybe because he is a member of my team, and that is weird. Maybe because he is my oldest friend. Maybe I don’t like him like that, but what if I do? What if I hurt him? What if he leaves? Pick any of that,” Ava shout-whispered as she noticed someone farther down the lower main lean their head into the corridor to see what was happening.
“Okay, okay. Yes. That is a lot, but all of that can be sorted,” Kane explained as he tried to calm his own breathing, knowing that laughing would only stress Ava further.
“Sorted? Sorted? This is massive, Dad. How am I supposed to sort this? Figure it out? How? I’ve never done this before. What the hell, Dad?” Ava continued to shout-whisper.
“It will be okay. After we go over this matter in engineering, we can all sit down and talk things through,” Kane said as he placed a steadying hand on Ava’s shoulder.
“Are you quite finished out here? We have an important interrogation to begin,” Curry interrupted from directly behind Ava.
Ava jumped and spun to face him. Her suit protected her from much of the movement, but she still felt a stab of pain and swore under her breath.
“We will uncover your secrets before long. You might as well confess,” Curry said.
Ava looked at him in shocked confusion but managed not to say anything. She gestured toward Curry with one hand as she turned back to her father.
“What is he on about?”
“Curry, lead the way,” Kane said, then turned to Ava. “Follow him, and I will show you.”
Ava pointed toward the data sheets scattered across the floor.
“Oh, right. Help me with those,” Kane said as he bent to begin picking them up.
Ava bent and helped. She didn’t bother to orient or sort them, instead piling them together and handing what she had retrieved to the captain once he had gathered the others.
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“Thank you. Shall we?” Kane said as he motioned down the hall.
Ava followed Curry down the lower main and through the next door into the engineering office. There were four desks and a large central table. Above the table was an adjustable folding arm with a powerful light at its end, useful for deciphering blueprints and schematics.
Isaac was already inside, poring over data sheets on the central table.
Curry crossed the room, grabbed a chair from one of the unused desks, brought it back to the table, and motioned for Ava to sit.
Ava looked at him quizzically but sat nonetheless.
Curry then pulled the adjustable arm down and shone the light directly into Ava’s face.
“Tell us what you did to the artifact,” Curry demanded.
Isaac reached out and snatched the light from Curry.
“Give me that.”
Isaac returned it to a neutral position above the table.
“For God’s sake, Curry, it is highly likely she has no idea why she is here,” the chief engineer chastised.
Isaac turned to Ava.
“Ava, Curry has compiled an impressive amount of data from his scans of the artifact. Some of those scans he performed deliberately and diligently by hand. Others came from instruments he set up to study the thing while attending to his other duties.”
“Tell her about the anomalies. Don’t demand that she explain them,” Curry interjected.
“Engineer Curry,” Kane barked. “Calm.”
Curry looked the opposite of calm, but he managed to step away from the table. He activated the room’s holo screen and began pulling up vids and data displays. When he finished, he stepped back and pointed at them accusingly, though Ava still had no idea what he meant.
Kane sighed, and Isaac rolled his eyes.
“What Curry is referring to is the data collected by his instruments while he was not present. He cross-referenced his findings with the ship’s ambient sensor systems and vid recordings and found a connection. Whatever this hunk of Old World junk is, it is reacting to you, and only you,” Isaac said before motioning toward Curry. “Bring up only the temperature readings and clip nine.”
Curry rearranged the screens to declutter them, revealing a vid clip of the cargo bay. He enlarged it, and Ava realized it was from when she had been there just before speaking to Stanley, having only recently finished her attempted apology to Curry.
Curry made an adjustment, and the vid shifted to thermal imaging.
Ava could still make out the shapes of herself and Stanley, but much of the surrounding detail was obscured or hazy. Occasional bright patches of yellow and red revealed conduits or powered machinery.
The yellow-red human shape of Curry turned and exited, but Ava remained. She sat on the ground and leaned slightly backward against something.
The moment her back made contact, a large box-shaped form sprang to life behind her, turning instantly red but fading toward yellow near the point of contact.
Ava watched with wide eyes and a slack mouth.
She remembered then that where she had leaned had felt warm. Hot, even. It had soothed her aching muscles wherever it touched her without becoming hot enough to hurt.
She had partially believed she imagined it.
“Run the Curry trial for touch-sensitive response,” Isaac ordered.
Curry closed the current vid and opened another. This one was already displayed in thermal and showed a man glowing red across his body and limbs, with his hands and face appearing yellow, likely where fabric blocked some of his body heat.
Curry sat and stood, then moved and returned. The vid continued for some time, showing him trying different poses and even throwing himself into a seated position. It was obvious he had grown increasingly desperate to provoke a reaction.
It hadn’t worked, Ava realized.
He had been trying to make it react to him the way it had reacted to her.
“I thought I imagined the heat when I sat against it,” Ava said to the quiet room. “Still, this was only one time. Nothing else strange has happened with it.”
“Other than when it teleported you to the ship?” Kane asked dryly.
“Well, yes. And that,” Ava conceded.
“No, girl,” Curry interrupted.
Ava stiffened.
“Wrong. This was merely the moment that made me realize what to look for. The block, as I call it, has displayed many minor anomalies that I initially believed were erroneous readings. Upon review, they are all accurate and perfectly explainable,” Curry said in a rush.
He pulled up several vids in rapid succession. Each showed the artifact lighting up in thermal imaging, though more faintly or only along one particular side. In several, the warm point appeared to travel across its surface.
“Okay,” Ava said. “That only proves my point. It does this anomaly thing all the time, not only when I’m there.”
She stood, intending to leave.
“Actually, Ava, every single time there was a heat spike on that thing, you were in the cargo hold. It seems to react every time. Even when you were sitting on the upper catwalk, the top corner nearest you would light up. When you walked through, the heat tracked you as you passed,” Isaac said.
Ava sat back down, defeated.
Then another thought came to her.
“That isn’t true, though. In the first vid, it didn’t light up immediately, and I had already been in the room for some time before it reacted.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said as he leaned one hip against the table. “It only seems to do anything when no one is within ten meters of it.”
“Meters?” Ava asked.
“Sorry. It’s an old unit of measurement. As you know, the universal standard uses feet, yards, and miles, but there was once a system called metric. Some more classically trained people use it to demonstrate how well-read they are,” Isaac explained.
“I use it in my journaling and convert the data back to standard for my reports,” Curry said, unbidden.
Ava stared at him.
“It’s my hobby,” Curry explained as he pulled up additional vid footage, zooming out to show a person on the upper catwalk or walking toward the lift station.
Each time the yellow-red outline of a person entered the room, the artifact began shedding heat.
“It is actually the common unit of measurement in Concordian space,” Kane said.
“So how far is that in feet?” Ava asked.
“Thirty-two point eight zero eight three nine eight nine five repeating,” Curry said before adding under his breath, “I have to end it after eight decimals. An unjust rule imposed upon me by a tyrant.”
“Yes, well, it is consistent and exact,” Isaac continued. “Whenever anyone other than you comes within that distance, it releases its heat and matches the ambient temperature. We determined it was unlikely for something to be programmed to an exact distance of thirty-two point eight zero eight feet, but quite likely for it to use exactly ten meters.”
Curry muttered the remainder of the decimal under his breath.
“Fine. So it uses a strange measuring system and warms up. What does that mean?” Ava asked as she leaned against the table.
“It means,” Kane said, “we need you to spend a couple of days in the cargo bay.”