13. Do your own research as they say

A lonely ship in distress, lost to the darkness with tens of thousands of souls on-board. A tiny freighter as the only hope to get to it’s estimated position in days. Their bridge left the comms open, multiple chat threads running continuously on the main screen reminding the crew of what is at stake. The brutalistic excitement starts to eat into them too, over decades nothing of such extraordinary happened, as humanity spread out into the cosmos, distance became an almost impenetrable wall for information, knowledge, even relationships.

A stark contrast to a small globe where everyone learned about the washing room habits of strangers on the other side of it every five minutes. At least we shared our now still, the travel did not modify our perception of a shared timeline and we could still be in touch from time to time using the new point to point devices. It wasn’t that we did not have our means, it was that we had nothing much to say. Petty issues and drama of another world a thousand lightyears from you didn’t had any more meaning when your smallest problem is what to eat the next day if your crops fail on the new moon, planet or station you colonized yesterday. Though we explored space for hundreds of years, we are still just stumbling children barely knowing how to get the best out of our toys.

Maria threw her glasses off with a loud bang, her breathing could be heard over the thin walls as she tried to compose herself. Vince caught himself thinking and wandering off of his duty at the conn, fortunately they were flying in empty space alone and the pristine state of sensors and computer meant their automats would catch any serious mistake or danger in time, even avoid them. Humans were just maintenance for the machine gods. After all he stayed at the conn until Maria finishes her research, thinking the minimum he could do after shutting her down is be there as a support, the time slowly ticked away without any spoken word on the bridge. Vince called in Greg to take over the conn,

• “Maria, let’s take a walk” — as she pulled up her gaze to Vince, he could see her exhaustion and, maybe, doubt?

In a moment they were out on the corridor, their ion drives push gave a comfortable .6 G, wasn’t needed for their actual travel, but humans never handled zero G well for long periods so long range ships were built with low-maintenance engines to provide some artificial gravity from time to time and now they needed it more than ever. If they find the stricken ship, going to be hell of a rescue operation, or a salvage one.

• “I never saw you like this hon, why is this so important to you?” — instead of the expected fight, that she will burn with her usual passion, she just walked designated, step by step besides Vince until she almost broke down in tears.
• “You rarely called me on my name” — her lips bending slightly up while her eyes watering, then she pulled Vince around her. In a few moments of silence, they both felt like they are back in their twenties, their second date she did the same making Vince smile in nostalgia. He thought he never gonna meet her again after that as she disappeared for months, though not unusual with today’s distances.
• “Okey, it is enough of me like this…” — she spoke like a fresh avalanche, first at slowly, word by word that springs into a roaring burst of sentences — “Never really told you about this, when we met, before our second date, I got the news that my parents’ ship lost contact, they were traveling on a cruise liner at the time. I bought the tickets for them so we could meet on that planet and they could celebrate their thirtieth anniversary on the way in some luxury. If you remember, I disappeared for a while. Tried to find them at the time, with everything I knew and I could do without money, but I failed. The ship is still lost to this day, it was never found. This whole thing brought it up and I can’t sleep without thinking how many of other Marias going to wait for their families to never arrive at the next port. And I failed again.” — Vince chew on her words.

Their hug extending, both of them facing out to watch the stars flying by as long lines. A view they admired together a lot during the years and the clarity of mind it provided for them again and again, the cosmos as their coach and therapist at times.

• “No, you did not fail, I did by not being your team-mate as we always were. As we always should be, including Eddy too.” — Vince’s new found determination, to help his beloved, to be her foundation spread quickly — “Let’s do this together.”
• “Eddy is too young”
• “He is not a kid anymore, he can pull his weight already, run us through your work and delegate to us”
• “You don’t know much about astrometry… though you know people. The lead scientist does not even talk to me, I need his data to a triangulation.”
• “Consider it done, and hey Eddy!” — their son was just around the corner, Vince not sure how long he was standing there as he did not notice him earlier. — “Let’s help your mom, if I understand it right, triangulation is not enough for space, it will still provide two distant possible points, we need other ways to narrow it down.”
• “Yes, right, we could reach out to Kodiak station for the transponder data” — Maria’s eyes started to shine as the new ideas rushed into her mind, what support can do to your performance is astonishing.
• “Sure, mom.”

So their work cut out for them, first time as a whole family, father, mother and son working on a shared goal with all their capabilities, Maria never felt so energized and so loved.

Eddy scouring the Net to find any publicly available data, reading forums, posts on bulletin boards, even some applying to some private groups under anonymity, writing search queries. Vince video calling the scientist, though first had to get through his assistant. And Maria’s sole focus on gravimetric equations, wave harmonies and Alcubierre drive theories, though she needed a novel way to detect the gravitational waves, to filter through the noise of pulsars and black holes swallowing stars for breakfast and to pinpoint a small ship, like finding a canoe in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. She was close to her breakthrough.

She could feel it more than ever.