James walked down a corridor somewhere inside the Endurance. They all three walked down the corridor. He could feel Ashley, walking beside him, touching his shoulder with hers from time to time and smiling. Out of the corner of his eye he could see Oliver walking just behind her, his face beaming. The spacecraft crew members were standing along the walls of the corridor. No, not standing. They seemed to separate from the walls and appear before his eyes one after another. They were saying something, but he could not hear what, just a steady hum of voices. Their faces were familiar and unfamiliar. Dabir flashed among them, and then Squadron Leader Dutton emerged from somewhere. Kevin appeared and disappeared, at once behind Sergeant Hancock, who waved his hand affably, from under which Steve suddenly showed up… Steve…?

James opened his eyes and lay motionless on his bunk for a while, not immediately realising that he had been sleeping, and that it was just a dream, and not even immediately hearing an unpleasant buzzing sound.

‘What the hell?’ he muttered, then fumbled for the switch panel and pressed the first button he could find.

‘Leverton,’ came the now-familiar voice.

‘What happened?’ he grumbled.

‘You asked me to wake you an hour before your shift started,’ Ashley’s voice sounded slightly laughing. Or maybe it was just his imagination, or some kind of distortion appeared in the intercom.

He finally managed to find the right button on the panel and turned on the light in the cabin. He was still sharing Ashley’s former quarters with Oliver, and she had moved into Dr Bowman’s former quarters, where they had cleared a little of the containers of some unknown equipment. The girl flatly refused to take over Major Jamison’s cabin. With a familiar movement, pulled on his flight suit, he got up and opened the door.

Coming out into the corridor, he stretched, chasing the remaining sleep away, and walked into the control section feeling much more wide awake.

Ashley was sitting at her usual place near the engineering workstation. She categorically refused to use the commander’s chair, too. Oliver spun around in a chair near the battle station.

‘Hi! How’s it going?’ With those words, James entered the control section.

Oliver saluted ironically and reported ahead of Ashley, ‘Position according to plan, all the systems are functioning properly… By the way, guess the riddle,’ he added suddenly.

‘Which one?’ asked James automatically only then, thinking it was better not to ask.

‘Why is a raven like a writing-desk?’

‘Everybody knows,’ said Ashley slightly annoyingly.

‘And?’ the boy persisted, twisting round in his chair.

‘C’mon, Oliver, because Poe wrote on both,’ said James and, turning to Ashley, he continued, lowering his voice a little, ‘Sounds like you’ve had enough of him.’

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ the girl reacted almost in a whisper, with an indescribable expression on her face.

‘…Well, I’ll give him a fun life,’ said James quietly, taking his seat at the flight control station. ‘Fasten your seatbelts.’

Ashley did not realise immediately, only after James winked at her and reached for the seat belts.

‘What’re you two whispering about?’ came Oliver’s voice.

‘Just wanted to show you something,’ James said indifferently, snapping the belts.

‘What?’

‘A Space Academy where boys become men…’ James switched the artificial gravity system off, ‘…if they survive.’

With a loud scream, Oliver flew up, flailing his arms and legs, which suddenly became weightless.

‘Ah-ah-ah!’ he shrieked, dangling between the battle station and the commander’s chair to Ashley’s laughter. But he soon got used to his new position, stopped flailing his arms, tumbled over his head, and hovered almost in the middle of the control section.

‘Big deal!’ he said ironically. ‘I’m at home in zero gravity… Ouch! Fuck!’ The last exclamation might have meant he hit himself on something, but he did not lose his cheerful mood, which was easy to see from his grinning face. ‘…You call this a survival test? Huh, the test I passed in the Yukon to qualify was a real test!’ The boy’s voice sounded smug. ‘…Guess what, minus 40 degrees, not a soul around for thousands and thousands of miles –’

‘Tell me another one,’ Ashley interrupted him laughing. ‘You couldn’t have had such a test.’

‘Honestly!’ Oliver exclaimed.

‘I don’t believe you one bit!’ the girl giggled.

‘I’m telling you!’ Oliver insisted indignantly.

‘Liar, liar, liar, pants on fire,’ Ashley recited cheerfully.

‘If I’m lying, I’m flying,’ the boy replied in the same tone.

‘I don’t wanna upset you, Oliver…’ James tried to be as serious as possible, though he could barely keep from laughing, ‘but you really are flying now, in every sense of the word.’

‘Fuck!’ came from the ceiling.

‘Watch your mouth, kid,’ said James.

‘I’m not a –’ the boy began as usual but was cut off by James. ‘Instead of just hanging around,’ said he, ‘check the sensor readings on the battle station.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Oliver replied deliberately, with a comical salute, and moved to the right side of the command section. ‘There’s nothing there,’ his voice sounded again. ‘Oops!’

James thought that despite the boy’s boasts, he was not very good at moving in weightlessness, but Oliver’s next shriek made him turn as far as the seatbelts allowed him.

‘…Look at that!’ cried the boy.

‘At what?’ asked James. Oliver jabbed his finger at the screen that displayed the long-range sensor readings.

‘I haven’t got a clue what it is,’ he said at the time, less emotionally, ‘but there’s something there.’

James unbuckled his belt and tried to stand up, instead rising above the chair. He had completely forgotten that the artificial gravity system had been turned off. He had to remember his zero gravity skills again.

‘Look!’ Oliver still kept pointing his finger at the screen. ‘What does it looks like?’

James did not immediately recognise what he was seeing.

‘I can tell you what it doesn’t look like,’ he said. ‘It’s not an enemy vehicle. It’s more like… Ashley,’ he called out.

‘Stop messing around!’ the girl uttered angrily. ‘Switch on the artificial gravity.’

‘Come on,’ James waved his hand. ‘You’re an astronaut.’

‘Only a formal,’ came the reply.

James came back to the flight control station and re-activated the artificial gravity system, feeling his own weight and standing up on his feet. The sensor data on the station screen did not change. Obviously, the shuttle’s sensors detected nothing yet.

‘Are you sure,’ he asked. No answer followed within the next few seconds.

‘Who?’ Oliver spoke up.

‘You.’

‘I can see it with my own eyes,’ said the boy. ‘And you see it too.’

Ashley left her chair and walked to the battle station where James had returned.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘There it is!’ Oliver jabbed his finger at the corner of the screen. ‘Do you know what that is?’

The girl shook her head negatively.

‘I’ve never seen something like that,’ she muttered.

‘I have,’ said James. At last, the vague memory in his mind took shape. He had seen something similar on the sensors once during one of his training flights in the Neptune system. Squadron Commander Dutton had said that was how the sensors had mapped Psamathe – one of Neptune’s farthest moons. ‘Oddly, the shuttle’s sensors show nothing,’ he muttered.

‘Distance,’ said Oliver, jabbing his finger at the screen again. ‘Look at the distance. You said the weapons system sensors are more long-range.’

‘What is it?’ said Ashley

‘A planet,’ said James, ‘hmmm… or another celestial body. And… if I’m not mistaken… we’re going onto orbit around that… object.’

‘Known? I mean the object,’ Ashley asked. Before James could answer, Oliver chimed in.

‘Exactly,’ said he. ‘There are no unknown objects in this area.’

Ashley hummed.

‘Well… and what is this object?’ she asked, stretching her words a little. Oliver shrugged.

‘No idea.’

‘I thought you had a ton of ideas about everything,’ James said snidely. The boy frowned.

‘I’m a technician,’ said he grumpily, ‘not an astronomer.’

‘Okay…’ James looked at Ashley. ‘It’s a good time to turn to our cleverest artificial assistant.

Oliver, try sending the data to its brain. Is that possible?’

The boy immersed himself in studying the battle station’s control panel. At first, only his grunts and mumbles could be heard, then a cry of joy.

‘The easiest way is via an intranet,’ said he grinning. ‘All I need is an access code. Everything here is classified.’

James entered the code.

Oliver’s manipulations at the control panel remained mysterious to him. What worried him most was that, according to the sensor readings and now the navigation grid, the shuttle was being pulled inexorably towards this unknown celestial body about which he knew nothing but which must have had a considerable mass for its gravity to be able to capture the shuttle at such a distance.

‘I’ve done it.’ James heard Oliver’s voice. This time, Ashley understood immediately.

‘Computer, determine the object parameters according to the information received,’ said she clearly. James had expected to hear, ‘Unable to comply’, but the artificial intelligence had no objection.

‘Complying,’ came the familiar voice. There was a moment of silence in the control section. Then the artificial intelligence began again, ‘The object parameters: radius approximately… mass estimated…’

James had no time to grasp the figures. Nor, it seemed, had Ashley.

‘On the viewscreen,’ she asked. The main screen ahead of the flight control station went dark and a moment later showed two columns of data produced by the artificial intelligence. James looked at Ashley, and she looked at him.

‘What does this tell us?’ she said as the data filled the viewscreen.

‘Nothing,’ James replied. ‘Maybe you set the task incorrectly. Ask it to compare the object’s parameters with the parameters of known objects in this sector.’

Ashley nodded understandingly and repeated the request. ‘Complying,’ the mechanical voice reported. Oliver seemed about to interject, as was his wont, but remained silent. For a few instants, there was a pause.

‘How long will it take him to comply?’ muttered the girl. Numbers appeared on the screen, changing downwards. James grinned.

‘This is the answer to your question.’

‘Too long,’ Ashley said unhappily. The numbers on the screen showed 30 minutes and 25 seconds.

‘Makes sense,’ James chuckled. ‘How many known objects are there in this sector?’

‘No idea.’

‘Me too, but I think there are more than two.’

The numbers on the overview screen suddenly changed. Instead of 30 minutes, the computer promised to have finished its mental work in 10 minutes. James thought something had gone wrong with the shuttle’s artificial brain and could not help laughing.

‘What’s so funny?’ asked Ashley.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just… thinking…’

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

‘About what?’

‘About what the hell it was that has brought us here indeed.’

‘Do you think –’ she paused. ‘Were we knocked off course by this… um… object?’

‘Maybe, maybe,’ he muttered. ‘Or we miscalculated.’

‘Impossible,’ Ashley said firmly. ‘I double-checked all my calculations.’

‘Maybe you should have triple-checked?’

Ashley pursed her lips, offended. James suddenly felt funny. Besides, he thought, Ashley looked really cute with that expression on her face. But all these completely irrelevant thoughts went away immediately. They were faced with a problem that required an immediate solution.

‘Anyway, we’re off course, significantly off course,’ said he. ‘And I’d really like to know why.’

He thought to himself that he might have made a mistake in entering the data, too, but he did not say so. Whichever of them was wrong, it meant nothing now and therefore changed nothing. And then, another thought came to him. The shuttle’s artificial brain behaviour during manoeuvres in orbit around the planetoid after the transport ship had exploded had not been random. The artificial intelligence had refused to obey the commands of the operator Major Jamison had assigned to Ashley, all the while arguing that the procedure was not recommended. What could that possibly mean? Then, by tricking the artificial intelligence, they were able to make all the necessary calculations and still put the shuttle on a return trajectory. However, the question remained as to who was actually controlling the shuttle during the flight. Together with Ashley, they adjusted the course twice according to the calculations, but these commands were carried out by the same artificial intelligence. What, if…

‘Operation completed. The object parameters do not correspond to the parameters of known objects of the Solar System,’ the artificial intelligence declared.

There was another pause, broken only by the quiet ‘singing’ of the instruments.

‘Wow!’ Oliver exclaimed suddenly, his face beamed. ‘Planet X! We’ve found it!’ He looked at Ashley, who, judging by her face, clearly did not share his excitement, then looked at James.

‘Honestly,’ James said, ‘I’d rather think about how to get back on course.’

‘We need to get into orbit and start exploring,’ Oliver insisted heatedly. ‘And give it –’

‘Exploring what? James asked, catching himself talking a bit heatedly. ‘As for me, what we need to do now is to think about how to get out of here, and when we figure that out –’

‘But this is… a discovery of century!’ Oliver waved his hands around with an excess of emotion. ‘I mean the planet. Astronomers have been looking for it for so many years. Over a hundred years! We’re supposed to be exploring everything here now. Well, not everything, of course, but the planet’s main features. Does it have an atmosphere or not, and what does the atmosphere consist of and stuff like that… I mean… it’s like… it’s almost like Voyager’s first flyby of the Jupiter system; imagine that! I’m not talking about the scientific significance. All the astronomers thought it should be a super-Earth, twice or even a third the diameter of the Earth. But this planet is smaller than Pluto… well, Mercury… hmm… I guess…’ The boy paused, seeming to suspect he was being carried away again, ‘…am I making any sense here?’ he said then.

‘No, but it doesn’t matter,’ Ashley reacted. ‘You said the shuttle’s AI brought us here?’ she looked at James.

‘I didn’t say that, just thought,’ said he. ‘Are you reading my mind?’

‘Of course not,’ she replied. ‘I guess I was thinking about it, too.’

‘So you don’t want to explore this planet at all?’ Oliver chimed in again.

‘We’re not explorers,’ James cut in.

‘What do you mean, not explorers?’ The boy seemed surprised.

‘Just the usual,’ James reacted, slightly irritated. ‘Our mission is to bring equipment and spare parts to Endurance to repair the damage, as you know. There’s no mention of exploring planets unknown to science in our mission statement, so you’ve got to make do with what you’ve got.’

‘Aren’t you at least just a bit interested in what we’ve stumbled upon?’ There was genuine surprise in the boy’s voice. ‘I’m telling you, this is the discovery of the century!’ Oliver waved his hands emotionally again. ‘We should drive stakes, give it a name, and write to the IAU –’

‘IAU what?’

‘The International Astronomical Union,’ said the boy, with meaningful intonation, ‘the only recognised authority for assigning designations and names to celestial bodies.’

‘Uh-huh, they’re just waiting for us and our discovery,’ James laughed. ‘By the way, we can’t even contact Endurance.’

‘No matter,’ the boy brushed it off and continued excitedly. ‘Firstly, we have to give the planet a name. I suggest naming this planet… Ashley,’ he blurted out.

‘What?’ said the girl, obviously not understanding what had happened. James did not immediately understand either and only then realised what the boy meant.

‘Are you nuts?’ he clapped Oliver on the shoulder. ‘It’s an icy world, with a surface temperature just above zero Kelvin. At that temperature, even nitrogen freezes and falls as snow, and you’re proposing to name this icy hell after our Ashley?’

‘Well, um… okay,’ Oliver stretched, a little disappointed. ‘What name do you suggest?’

James looked at Ashley, she smiled embarrassedly. ‘Annwn,’ said he.

‘What?’ Oliver snorted incomprehensibly.

‘Annwn. Pronounce, Ann-oon. That’s the Otherworld in Welsh mythology.’

‘Otherworld? What is it?’

‘Actually, it’s not really known. Some believe it’s the realm of the deities, and some believe it’s the realm of the dead. There are various interpretations.’

Oliver scratched his forehead. ‘Well,’ he said after about half a minute, ‘let’s get this… what’s-its-name. Now we need to get onto orbit and start exploring –’

‘Not now!’ James cut him off, not hiding his irritation. The boy, clearly offended that no one shared his enthusiasm, walked back to the engineering workstation, muttering something, and sat down there.

‘Well, what’re you going to do?’ Ashley continued questioningly.

‘What’re you going to do?’ James retorted with a smile. ‘You’re the commanding officer.’

‘I’m not a pilot,’ said the girl. ‘You’re a pilot. So, as the commanding officer, I ask you, what are you going to do?’

‘When did a pilot make a decision to bypass a commander?’ James muttered. ‘Unless it was when he became the commanding officer.’

‘When the commanding officer doesn’t know how to fly a spacecraft,’ Ashley said, embarrassed. ‘I know this situation is unusual, but that’s what we have now. So what are you going to do?’

‘I’m going… I’m going to…’ James collected his thoughts and was stalling for time. The easiest thing to say was that he had no idea what to do, because he really had no idea. Finally, another thought occurred to him. ‘I’m going to increase the power of the main engine a little so that we pass this celestial body on a flyby trajectory,’ he said. ‘We won’t return to our previous trajectory… I mean, we won’t return right away. But we’ll have time to calculate a manoeuvre for return. Oliver…’ he turned to the engineering station, ‘you’ve already mastered tensor calculus, and proved Fermat’s Last Theorem. You can start calculating. I need –’

‘Fermat’s Last Theorem was proved in the twentieth century,’ the boy responded grimly. ‘But I know what you need. It’s a piece of cake.’

‘Great! Do it.’

‘Do what?’ said Ashley.

‘He knows,’ James said back. ‘Actually, the first thing we need to know is how far off course we are. Then, we need to calculate how much we need to increase our speed to escape the planet’s gravitational field and the manoeuvre to return to our previous trajectory. Am I making myself clear?’

‘Not clear,’ Ashley said with annoyance in her voice. ‘You’re forgetting again that this isn’t your fighter.’

‘Not at all.’

The girl had a pensive look on her face.

‘Anyway, it shouldn’t have happened,’ she said and continued, seemingly catching James’s puzzled look, ‘The trajectory was calculated correctly, I’m one hundred per cent sure. Moreover, Cooper engine –’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Oliver interjected. ‘Remember what happened to the Pioneers.’

‘Pioneers?’ Now Ashley’s face has a perplexed expression.

‘Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11,’ said the boy. ‘These spacecraft were launched in the mid-twentieth century to explore the outer planets of the Solar System, as far as I remember. But later, NASA decided to continue the mission while the spacecraft would be able to transmit information to Earth. They flew further, but suddenly, it appeared that both spacecraft were moving more slowly than expected. NASA specialists and other scientists have been thinking for a long time about the reason. Was it the influence of unknown Kuiper belt objects or even dark matter? Only later did they come to the conclusion that the cause was gas leaks from the spacecraft’s radioisotope thermoelectric generators.’

‘Fascinating!’ Ashley grinned. ‘There’s only one detail. We haven’t radioisotope thermoelectric generators, and any gas leaks we haven’t, too.’

‘Yeah,’ Oliver nodded in agreement after a short pause, ‘we haven’t…’

James missed what Oliver said next, only hearing Ashley’s reply. The plan he had come up with had seemed flawless at first, but now, one question after the other was coming to his mind. How far away from the planet’s surface should the shuttle be so that the effect of a gravitational slingshot would work? Gravity-assisted flybys can not only add momentum but also subtract it to decrease the energy of the shuttle’s orbit. Will the shuttle get back on course to the rendezvous point if it exits this gravitational slingshot at a 90-degree angle to its current trajectory? Which way will that slingshot throw them? The thoughts raced through his mind at such a rapid pace that it seemed as if he himself was running at a fast pace.

‘Wait!’ cried he. ‘We cannot calculate anything now –’

‘Why not?’ Oliver turned around in his chair and looked at James, perplexed.

‘Because! We’ve been diverted from our previous trajectory. Do we know which way?’

‘What do you mean, which way?’ the boy laughed.

‘I mean, whichever way that ice thing pushed us.’

‘Rubbish!’ Smile disappeared from Oliver’s face. ‘I have all the parameters of our flight before we enter the gravitational field of this planet,’ he continued in a rather harsh tone. ‘It’s clear and simple.’

‘Just like that, clear and simple?’

‘Sure,’ the boy replied in a confident tone. ‘Maths doesn’t lie. I'll upload all the parameters now…’ his fingers run over the touchpad of the engineering station, ‘and we’ll get a complete picture… Or not…’

‘Brilliant!’ said James and recited,

‘He thought he saw an argument

that proved he was the Pope.

He looked again, and found it was

a bar of mottled soap.’

‘T’s not funny,’ Oliver snorted disgruntledly and staring back at the engineering station screen as he continued his work. The next couple of minutes were filled with the sounds of instruments and Oliver’s fingers tapping on the touchpad. James glanced furtively at Ashley. She remained silent; her eyes seemed to be looking somewhere beyond the command section.

‘Well,’ said the young technician finally, leaning back in his chair. ‘There shouldn’t be any questions now. The only thing left to calculate is how close to the surface we have to fly to take advantage of the effect –’

‘You’ve just learnt tensor calculus, and you’re calculating something that a whole bunch of scientists have been working on for years!’ James thought he said it harsher than needed, but it was too late. ‘A couple of minutes before this fucking thing appeared on the sensors, you told us the position was according to plan. Do you know anything at all –’

‘I know what I’m doing!’ cried Oliver, frowning. ‘By the way, this has nothing to do with tensor calculus. There’s a programme I just have to modify a bit to use the parameters of the planet we discovered. As you can guess, they’re not in the database yet.’

‘Theoretically?’

‘And practically. T’s not complicated. Okay, t’s not as simple as I said, but the programme worked more times in most cases. My modifications just –’

‘Your modifications?’ cried James. ‘You’re a super-duper programming guru?’

‘The programme will give us the raw data anyway,’ said the boy without emotion.

‘Are you sure?’ James had just yelled.

‘I’m sure!’ Oliver responded in the same way.

‘Scout’s honour?

‘Scout’s honour!’

‘You weren’t a scout!’ Out of his eye’s corner, James noticed Ashley grimace.

‘I was!’ the boy yelled. ‘And as you know, a Scout once, a Scout forever –’

‘Shut up, both!’ cried Ashley. ‘You two are so keen to show each other that you are grown-ups, yet you act like kids!’

There was silence in the control section. James heard only the ringing in his ears.

‘I’m done, by the way,’ Oliver said calmly after about half a minute. His face showed no trace of the anger he had just burnt with. ‘Wanna check my calculations?’

‘I wanna,’ Ashley said.

‘Please be so kind,’ the boy laughed. ‘I wondered if I was wrong.’ And he winked.

James felt really bad that he had lost his temper. A Space Force pilot should never let his emotions get the best in a situation like that.

‘What do you say?’ Oliver’s voice came to him.

‘Nothing,’ he replied, wondering that he not only thought it; he said it out loud.

‘It seems that’s alright,’ said Ashley.

‘Are you sure?’ Oliver asked wryly.

‘Check,’ the girl replied, giving him a mischievous look and suddenly burst out laughing. Oliver laughed, too, and James felt himself nearly cracking up with laughter.

Later, it seemed to him that for the next few minutes there was nothing but wild laughter in the control section, bouncing off the bulkheads and drowning out all other sounds.

‘It was… a stress response,’ said Ashley when they gradually stopped laughing. ‘Are you okay?’

Oliver said nothing; James shrugged.

‘Maybe,’ said he.

‘We-ell,’ Ashley stretched out, ‘so –’

‘Let’s get to work,’ Oliver finished after her.

The tension had disappeared as if it had never existed. A moment later, James was staring intently at the screen at the flight control station, where Oliver and Ashley’s calculations were coming in. It was hard to make sense of the mathematical expressions without the help of a computer program that translated pure mathematics into a set of commands for the engine, but the flight plan that appeared as the program ran made perfect sense to him.

Half an hour later, it was done. As he studied the flight plan again, he thought it looked realistic and feasible. There was one last thing to do.

‘Ashley, have you checked everything?’ he asked, just in case.

‘You bet I have, three times,’ she said. ‘I even ran the simulation through the on-board computer.’

‘So we should be able to do this?’

‘No doubt,’ Oliver said instead of Ashley.

‘I’m not asking you, kid,’ whispered James.

‘Jimmy!’ Ashley’s quiet voice reached him. ‘Enough! It’s time to start the programme.’

James continued to enter the data and then started the programme. An error message appeared on the screen; he pounded his fist on the console.

‘Why ‘m I totally unlucky?’ he exclaimed.

‘Maybe you made some mistake,’ said Ashley.

‘Impossible!’ he shouted. ‘I checked all the dates twice.’

The girl smiled slyly.

‘Maybe you should have checked three times?’

‘Fuck!’

‘Mind your language, kid,’ said she with the same mischievous smile on her face.

‘T’s not funny,’ said he. ‘And by the way, even a king used to say that word in similar situation.

‘Which king?’ Oliver interjected.

‘Charles the third… or maybe William the fifth, I don’t remember.’

‘Okay, boys…’ It looked like Ashley had decided to get things back on track. ‘…All that being said, historical parallels aren’t going to help us. No king has ever been faced with a situation like this before. And if I understand you right, Jim, we don’t have much time.’

‘You understand me right,’ James said grumpily.

‘So,’ the girl continued, ‘we must concentrate on finding a way out. Do we have any other options?’

‘We’ve no other options,’ James snapped. ‘The programme was correct; there were no mistakes in entering the parameters. I checked everything more than once; you can be sure of that.’

‘Calm down, Jimmy…’ She got up and walked over to him. ‘…Let’s have another look at that. Maybe we simply missed something…’ Emphasising the ‘we’, she ran her hand gently over his head, giving him a warm and cosy feeling.

‘Okay, let’s have another look,’ said he quietly.

‘That’s right,’ said she with a smile, leaning over his shoulder and staring intently at the screen. Her breasts touched his shoulder, sending a spark through his entire body. Some extremely extraneous thoughts appeared in his mind. They were pleasant thoughts, but not the ones he needed right now. Oh no… James pleaded mentally, fearing he might not hold back any longer. Ashley could not hear him but moved away a little. It has become easier for him now.

‘I see what’s wrong,’ said she after a long pause. ‘This is not yours but my mistake. I didn’t take into account the gravitational effects of this thing… I mean, the planet or whatever it was that pulled us in –’

‘I took it into account,’ said he, jabbing his finger at the screen. ‘This is the standard equation for the escape trajectory calculation in the vicinity of a planet.’

‘Gravity has nothing to do with it,’ came Oliver’s voice, and he himself suddenly appeared behind the pilot’s chair. ‘I mean, it has, but that’s not the point,’ he went on. ‘Did you use the test programme?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ James said irritably.

‘Me too,’ said Ashley and continued, ‘I think one of us made a mistake, but not a fatal one, so the test programme just missed them –’

‘No one of you made mistakes,’ said Oliver. ‘The error occurred on its own. The test programme that checks the correctness of the main programme found no errors. But it’s a dumb programme, like a spell checker. It checks by a list, like if by the rules there should be a comma, so put a comma, there should be a subject and a predicate in the sentence, so… Well, you know what I mean. But there are too many parameters, so somewhere might be a little mistake, not a mistake, just an inaccuracy. The programme also has its own periods and commas, but they are labelled differently.’

‘Alright, what do you suggest?’ James asked. The boy scratched the back of his head thoughtfully.

‘Firstly,’ he said, after a short pause, ‘check the joints. I mean the fragments where the subroutines join. There might be… well, sorta syntactic trifles that the programme doesn’t take as a guide to action because it doesn’t know… you know, like a fork without a clear indication of where to go, you know?’

‘And that’s all?’ said Ashley. She touched James’s shoulder with her breasts again and again, causing his mind to think thoughts completely inappropriate to the situation, so he missed what Oliver, who was also leaning over the console, said. The boy's fingers were running along the touchpad. Lines of programming code scrolled across the screen.

‘Yep!’ exclaimed Oliver suddenly. ‘I found it!’

‘What?’ James asked mechanically.

‘Never mind,’ Oliver shook his head and fixed something in the code with a few strokes of his fingers.

‘It should work now,’ he said smugly.

‘Scout’s honour?’ James grinned.

‘Scout’s honour!’ the boy grinned back. ‘Hit enter, man.’

James grinned again and hit enter.

Nothing happened. Nothing happened at all. Suddenly, James felt a sense of déjà vu. ‘It had happened before’, flashed through his mind.

‘What a –’ he began, another well-known voice cutting him off.

‘That procedure is not recommended.’

Already expecting something like that, he flinched anyway.

‘Bloody fucking hell!’ cried he.

‘It caught us again,’ said Ashley. The smile that had lit up her face a moment ago was gone. There was no need to interject what she meant. It was clear without any further ado. They were trapped again, and there was no way out of this trap.