Chapter 4

Anna shivered a bit as she began to reattach the interior panels on the hull, “Such good memories.” She thought.

“Luisa is gonna get a workout tonight!” she mused with a naughty, happy grin on her face. Lisa wasn’t her usual type. She’s a tall, marathon runner slender woman with hard muscles that rippled delightfully when she laughed, and long shining cascades of completely impractical coal black hair. Smiling, she was as carefree as a sunrise. But when she got serious, it was like she was made of steel and her pretty face left no doubt she meant business. She was so good at managing her focus, one second, she would be cute and almost... ‘girly, girly’, the next she was all professional.

Lisa or Lieutenant Commander Hernandez (Ecuadorian Navy), the ship’s second in command, and Anna had been an ‘item’ since the third week of training. Luckily, the prohibitions on relationships between senior and junior military personnel didn’t apply to Anna since she was a civilian ‘Systems Specialist’. There is no way she could have kept her blue highlights if she were in the military, even if it was the USSF or Space Force.

The robotic drones that would replace the larger, armored exterior panels were piloted by the other Systems Specialists, Staff Sergeant James Rica (Spanish Army) and Lieutenant Mike (Takeshi) Motobu (Japanese Air Force).

The fact that they were out here in interstellar space still seemed an impossibility...

At twelve Anna got interested in an inconsistency in some equations she was looking at when she took a break from playing the latest release of C.O.D.

Seeing the inconsistency, she forgot about the game ... having found a much more interesting game to play.

The equations were describing dark matter and dark energy. For years the physics research community had been trying to understand why certain equations didn’t match up to observations made in the lab and with other equations that described other aspects of fundamental physics so well.

By the time she was done, she had come up with something entirely different, a new way to explain what was missing. After a long and complicated explanation later, we come to the idea that the universe has a fundamental energy ‘wave’ superimposed on it. This wave was at a low ebb, low tide you might even say. She was sure it was a continuous wave, but its wavelength was so large and its speed so slow, she wasn’t really sure what its wavelength was. As it rose, Anna discovered, it could be ‘tapped’ to power any number of items. The method of tapping it though ... was not at all what one expected in a physics lab. Instead, it looked more like something from a wizard’s tower.

As a result of this discovery, Anna became quite famous. The military wanted to put her in a lab immediately, to get her to work on understanding her discovery. Universities from all over the planet offered scholarships that bordered on the ludicrous. Luckily, between her parents and her very sympathetic senator she was given the chance to decide for herself what she would do. Anna wanted to finish high school and hang out with her friends, especially Sofi. So, in the meantime she found herself ensconced in her own work area at her high school, working out more and more of the intricacies of ‘mana’ manipulation while doing her best to be a ‘normal’ teenager.

Thankfully, the publicity died down to almost nothing within a few weeks of the announcement of her decision.

Her time with Sofi and her other friends was so precious to her. Not just the amazing sex, but the relationships she built over that idyllic time were still important to her today. Motivation to get back to her friends and family kept her focused on making the repairs to the ship.

Something had happened in the ether. Something had hit the ship. She didn’t think there was anything in the ether but obviously that was a mistaken assumption. Hopefully the troves of data shared by the people of Eloxian, the Eloi (yeah, it was weird how the name of those people lined up with the famous story ... but the universe is a stranger place than we even conceived at the time) would answer a lot of the questions she and so many others had. Luckily it wasn’t major damage and they had spares on hand to make the repairs.

As she waited for the airlock to cycle and allow her to remove her space suit, her mind drifted back to her time in high school.

Given she was feeling so sexy, it was natural for hot little flashes of memories to flit through her mind. Sofi by the pool tan skin glowing in the summer sun and how sexy her breasts and pussy looked, the skin pale from the protection of her suit. The tan lines only served to draw attention to those oh so lickable areas. Jocelyn, with a megawatt smile, eyes seeming to glow as Anna watched her cum. And others, so many warm little shocks sent to her hard nipples and very wet pussy by those flashes.

“God Im such a horn dog!” she good humoredly chastised herself.