Wait. Gloves! I took them off to call?—
"Well,shit?—"
The fragment erupted in light.
A sharp, electric, wrong sound tore through the lab. All the debris on the workbench rattled. The fluorescent lights flickered and then surged. Then the fragment blazed with new light, light that shouldn't exist, light that had no color and every color all at once, and suddenly, Charlie's body locked stiff.
Then the light swallowed her.
The phone receiver dropped to the floor of the lab with a crash, swinging from its cord and spinning in the empty space. Her office chair swiveled in rapid circles, eventually slowing to a stop a foot away from where Charlie had just been. She never got the chance to hang up.
Two thousand miles away,in a house in Shelbyville, Indiana, Katie Wickett stood in the hallway outside the kitchen of her Mom's house.
She'd heard the phone ring while Mr. Henderson was explaining something about the gutters, heard the answering machine pick up, heard her Mom's voice on the recording, causing her heart to clench.
Then she'd heard Charlie.
She stood in the hallway and listened, because Charlie's voice on the machine sounded different from Charlie's voice on the phone. It sounded honest.
She heard the apology. She heard "strongest, smartest person I know." She heard "I trust the woman you've become." She pressed her back against the hallway wall and slid down to the floor, her hand over her mouth, her eyes watering through her smile.
She heard "More than the sky, the stars, and the universe," and she almost laughed, because it was so perfectly, impossibly Charlie, an engineer who measured love in astronomical units.
At that, she was reaching for the phone on the wall, smiling, ready to pick up and tell Charlie she was a sentimental idiot and she loved her too, when she heard it.
A sound. Strange, electric. Something Katie couldn't identify.
Then Charlie's voice, sharp: "Well,shit?—"
Then nothing.
Katie grabbed the phone. "Charlie? Charlie!"
Silence. The line was dead.
She hung up and dialed Charlie's lab number. It rang. And rang. And rang. Nobody answered.
She called and called, every number she could think of.
Katie stood in her parent's hallway with the phone in her hand and the last thing she'd heard from her sister echoing in her ears.
She knew that something had happened. Something that had nothing to do with lawyers or gutters or insurance paperwork. Something she wouldn't be able to change.
She dialed the number one more time and pressed the phone so hard against her ear that she'd later discover it left an indent.
It did nothing but echo that infernal ring.
Meanwhile, on an interstellar spaceship called the Emberkind CV-0417, out exploring among the stars in an area of Coalition space, a Kaelari captain named Reyna Solas was having a very bad day.
? EMBERKIND CV-0417, SECTOR AUREL, REGION 12 ?
"What do you mean, I need to take onthreeAetherfin?"
Captain Reyna Solas of the Emberkind spoke slowly and deliberately, trying her best not to let her voice climb to higher decibels.
"You're the only vessel able to transport these creatures safely," Admiral Vondra said through the wall display in Reyna's office. Vondra, a Lithyn from the ocean world of Abyssar, sat in her pressurized aquatic chamber utterly still, a rough-hewn stone figure in dark water, her geode eyes catching what little light the ocean around her hadn't already swallowed. When Vondra spoke, micro-vibrations rippled across her mineral surface, and Reyna's Voxlink translation system rendered them into a voice that was calm and immovable and deeply, personallyinconvenient. "No other ship has a zero-G containment field to support their needs, Reyna."
Did she just call it a 'containment field?' Please tell me my little translation implant isn't broken. I don't want to add a minor surgical procedure to my day today."I understand that, Admiral," Reyna said.