Chapter 17

Xi Pegasi
Mining Station One
September 7, 2057

“The search for Roger Evans goes on. His teammates have vowed to not quit until they find him.”

“Damn, what a mess,” Keith Davies shook his head as he and Kimmi watched Shanna’s ‘evening’ news broadcast.

“Leave it to a man to get the girl pregnant, and then go get himself lost.” Kimmi playfully bumped his shoulder.

Keith laughed softly. “It’s an old tradition. Love ‘em and leave ‘em.” He twisted in midair as Kimmi grabbed his ribs. He rolled toward her and slipped his hand under her loose blouse.

“You’ll be late to work if you keep that up,” Kimmi closed her eyes as he caressed her.

“I’m not on the mining rotation today, anyway.” Keith held the couch’s grab bar and pulled himself down on top of Kimmi.

The comm tone sounded and Keith opened his eyes. He was still on the couch, or over it, and Kimmi stirred under him. “Get the comm,” she murmured sleepily.

Keith pulled himself over to the nearest panel and hit the audio-only key. “Yes?”

“Keith, this is Arif. One of my people found something you may want to see.”

“I’ll be at the control room in ten minutes.” Keith cut the connection and looked for his clothes.

Five minutes later, he entered the control room and settled into one of the chairs. He selected Arif’s incoming message header and returned the call.

“That was fast.” Arif chuckled dryly. “A little background first. You know that Peytor Valsihkova had come out here to set up a deep space array, using one of the spares from the Wells as the base unit.”

“I didn’t know they had finished it,” Keith said quietly.

“They haven’t, or at least they haven’t connected all the instrumentation yet. However, they have been testing the equipment they have installed. Everything was routine until they brought the entire array online.”

“I thought this unit was the whole array.”

“Not exactly. The Wells still has her main array; there are a couple of satellites in geosynchronous orbits that have powerful sensors of their own, and the large moon has an array on its far side.”

“So they’re linking them together?”

“Exactly. It takes awhile to correlate data, but we received yesterday’s scan results about an hour ago. Keith, we found a wormhole.”

The hair stood up on Keith’s neck. “Can we get back through it?”

“We can probably get through it,” Arif sighed, “but Peytor thinks that it’s not the same one that we used to get here. It’s way above the ecliptic and halfway around the system from where we entered. They scanned that area, by the way, and found nothing.”

“Any idea why?”

“I asked Peytor the same question. He has two theories; the wormhole is somehow creating less gravitational disturbance and we can’t detect it, or it’s not detectible at all.”

“We didn’t detect the one at Earth, either, and we activated it,” Keith looked at the display as he thought.