the camera feed to see her at a table with her officer pilot friends, eating sandwiches and discussing something. I take out my PDP and dash off a message to her.
>Mind sitting on the other side of that table, so I can get a better view of your ass? This camera angle is kind of crummy.
I send the message and watch the camera feed with a grin. Halley sits up slightly and removes her PDP from the leg pocket of her flight suit without interrupting the conversation with the lieutenant sitting next to her. I watch as she reads the message on her screen. Then she looks up, searches for the lens of the camera on the ceiling, and scratches her nose with her middle finger.
I smile and send another message her way.
>You’ll have to wait until my watch ends, I’m afraid.
I don’t like the transition to Alcubierre. When the ship enters the chute and turns on its Alcubierre drive, every bone and muscle in my body suddenly develops a low-level discomfort--not exactly an ache, but a disjointed feeling, as if some gentle, yet irresistible force is trying to pull every molecule in my body into all directions at once. My joints and teeth feel loose in their sockets, and my skin prickles with an unpleasant sensitivity. A few hours of discomfort are probably much easier to suffer than the boredom of spending a few years on an interstellar journey, but I can already tell that Alcubierre transitions are going to be my least favorite part of traveling on a starship.
Navy ships are at Combat Stations when they go in and out of Alcubierre chutes because their entry and exit points are fixed in space. The location of the Navy’s transit points is a secret, of course, lest the Sino-Russians simply mine our exit points to ambush our ships when they finish their Alcubierre trips, but every military has its intelligence service, so there’s always a chance of a welcome committee of SRA destroyers waiting for us as we transition back into normal space. Thirty minutes before the end of our Alcubierre run, the Versailles goes to Combat Stations once again.
“Stand by for transition,” the all-hands announcement comes from the CIC. “Transition in ten...nine...eight...seven...”
We transition back into normal space a mere twenty light minutes from Capella A, and forty-two light years away from Terra. There’s no welcoming committee of SRA warships waiting to blow us out of space. I feel the moment the Alcubierre drive shuts down bcause the low-level discomfort I’ve been feeling for the last twelve hours is suddenly gone. The screen of the admin deck in front of me shows that the ship’s neural network has already started its battery of post-transition integrity checks. I divert a tiny bit of system time to show me the feed from the ship’s optical arrays on the outside of the hull, but there’s not much to see out there. Capella A looks a lot like our own sun, a tiny, washed-out yellow orb in the distance, and I can’t make out any other celestial bodies at all. The Capella A system doesn’t look very different from our home system--vast stretches of nothing, punctuated by the glimmer of distant stars.
Out of curiosity, I check the navigational plot. The exit point of the Alcubierre chute into Capella A is much closer to our destination than the chute’s entry point from Earth. We are just fifteen light minutes from Capella Ac--Willoughby--and we will be in orbit in just a few hours. The ship’s long-range sensor grid shows a whole lot of nothing between us and Willoughby. It looks like we’re the only starship around, NAC or otherwise.
“All hands, secure from Combat Stations. The watch schedule will now resume,” the XO announces overhead. “Welcome to the Capella system.”
We start our orbital approach to Willoughby right at the end of my watch. I’m tired and hungry, but I decide to stay in the NNC for a few more minutes to witness our approach to the first extrasolar planet I’ve ever seen.
I’m looking at the feed from the dorsal array when the hatch buzzer sounds. I walk over to the hatch and peek through the viewport to see Halley’s face.
“Hey, you,” she says as I unlock the hatch for her. “Mind if I duck in for a few minutes? I want to fill out this flight log without Lieutenant Rickman chewing my ear off.”
“Sure thing,” I say, and wave her in. She steps through the hatch