Halo_ The Fall of Reach - Eric Nylund [56]
He sat in the Commander’s chair and watched his junior officers at their stations.
“Incoming transmissions,” Lieutenant Dominique reported. “Status reports from Sigma Octanus Four and also theArchimedes Sensor Outpost.”
“Pipe them through to my monitor,” Commander Keyes said.
Dominique had been one of his students at the Academy—he had transferred to Luna from the Université del’ Astrophysique in Paris after his sister was killed in action. He was short, nimbly athletic, and he rarely cracked a smile—he was always business. Keyes appreciated that.
Commander Keyes was less impressed, however, with the rest of his bridge officers.
Lieutenant Hikowa manned the weapons console. Her long fingers and slender arms slowly checked the status of the ordnance with all the deliberation of a sleepwalker. Her dark hair was always falling into her eyes, too. Oddly, her record showed that she had survived several battles with the Covenant . . . so perhaps her lack of enthusiasm was merely battle fatigue.
Lieutenant Hall stood post at ops. She seemed competent enough. Her uniform was always freshly pressed, her blond hair trimmed exactly at the regulation sixteen centimeters. She had authored seven physics papers on Slipspace communications. The only problem was that she was always smiling, and trying to impress him . . . occasionally by showing up her fellow officers. Keyes disapproved of such displays of ambition.
Manning navigation, however, was his most problematic officer: Lieutenant Jaggers. It might have been that navigation was the Commander’s strong suit, so anyone else in that position never seemed to be up to par. On the other hand, Lieutenant Jaggers was moody, and when Keyes had come aboard, the man’s small hazel eyes seemed glazed. He could have sworn he had caught the man on duty with liquor on his breath, too. He had ordered a blood test—the results were negative.
“Orders, sir?” Jagger asked.
“Continue on this heading, Lieutenant. We’ll finish our patrol around Sigma Octanus and then accelerate and enter Slipspace.”
“Aye, sir.”
Commander Keyes eased into his seat and detached the tiny monitor from the armrest. He read the hourly report from theArchimedes Sensor Outpost. The log of the large mass was curious. It was too big to be even the largest Covenant carrier . . . yet something was oddly familiar about its shape.
He retrieved his pipe from his jacket, lit it, inhaled a puff, and exhaled the fragrant smoke through his nose. Keyes would never even have thought about smoking on the other vessels he had served on, but here . . . well, command had its privileges.
He pulled up his files transferred from the Academy—several theoretical papers that had recently caught his interest. One, he thought, might apply to the outpost’s unusual reading.
That paper had initially sparked his interest because of its author. He had never forgotten his first assignment with Dr. Catherine Halsey . . . nor the names of any of the children they had observed.
He opened the file and read:
United Nations Space Command Astrophysics Journal 034-23-01 Date:May 097, 2540 (Military Calendar) Encryption Code:None Public Key:NA Author(s):Lieutenant Commander Fhajad 034 (service number [CLASSIFIED]), UNSC Office of Naval
Intelligence Subject:Dimensional-Mass Space Compressions in Shaw-Fujikawa (a.k.a. “Slipstream”) Space. Classification:NA
/start file/
Abstract:The space-bending properties of mass in normal space are well described by Einstein’s general relativity. Such distortions however, are complicated by the anomalous quantum gravitational effects in Shaw-Fujikawa (SF) spaces. Using loop-string analysis, it can be shown that a large mass bends space in SF space more than general relativity predicts by an order of magnitude. This bending may explain how several small objects clustered closely together in SF space have been reported erroneously