“Having fun?”

Corey slipped into the cockpit and took a seat in the copilots chair. Tooley had been camped out in front of her sensory array for cycles.

“Time of my life, bud,” Tooley grunted. “Scanning a couple million miles of dead, empty space.”

“Isn’t this usually faster?”

Tooley had calculated safe FTL jumps hundreds of times before, and it was usually a matter of ticks, with very little effort required on Tooley’s part. This jump was taking cycles’ worth of manual effort.

“Yeah, because I can cross reference it with recent scans from other travelers, or station security scans,” Tooley said. “Nobody ever scans this dead space, though. I got to do hundreds of sweeps to ensure everything’s going to be safe for as long as I need it to be.”

Formulating a safe route through the void between galaxies wasn’t the cakewalk one would expect it to be. While the vast abyss was ninety nine point nine nine nine (etc) percent empty, that last fraction of a fraction of a percentage point could kill them in a heartbeat. Rogue planets and drifting stars floated through the void, creating random obstacles in the otherwise featureless abyss. Tooley had been keeping her eyes out for any such obstacles for far too long.

“How many times have you blinked in the last cycle?” Corey asked. “Your eyes look red.”

Tooley stopped to rub her eyes for a moment. Now that Corey was pointing it out, they did sting.

“Son of a bitch,” Tooley mumbled. She’d gotten lost in staring blankly at the endlessly repetitive readouts. “I got to take a break, use the little pilot’s room at least. Plug in and keep an eye on things for me, would you?”

Corey tapped a screen near him, synching it with his translation chip and turning the readout into a language he could actually read. Though the symbols were now familiar, their construction and organization was still impossible to decipher. Apparently these complex mathematical readouts had something to do with gravitational masses, but Corey didn’t know how to turn the numbers into actually helpful information.

“I have no idea how to read any of this, you know.”

“Consider this your first lesson,” Tooley said. She pointed to a row of the data readout that ended in a large red zero. “That should say zero. Nothing. Sometimes it may say one, maybe even a two, for just a tick. If it says more than that, or for more than a tick, you start shouting, got it?”

“I can do that,” Corey said. He didn’t know space flight, but he knew the difference between a zero and a one. Most days, at least.

Tooley stepped out to stretch her legs, move around, and rest her eyes, and let Corey take over monitoring duty. It didn’t take him long to see how Tooley had gotten sucked into the pattern. A new line of numbers appeared every few seconds, sprawling out into a blur of red symbols that danced before Corey’s eyes. He made sure to keep an eye on each one.

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A cycle later, Corey felt very close to falling asleep. His diligence, and his consciousness, were waning rapidly when he got just the wake-up call he needed. In a heartpounding turn of events, the readouts showed a five for a moment. Then immediately dipped down to zero.

“Hey Tooley, there was a five for a second there,” Corey said. Tooley started to shout back from the common room. From the sounds of things, she was lying on a couch.

“Probably just an asteroid rolling through. Is it gone now?”

“Yeah, it’s-”

Corey turned back to the monitor. The five was back. Then it left, and was replaced by a twelve.

“Uh. Tooley? The numbers are getting bigger.”

Before Corey’s eyes, a twelve turned into a twenty-seven, which turned into a forty-six.

“How big?”

“Well, we’re up to, uh, sev- ninety.”

“Ninety!?”

Corey could hear Tooley jumping out of her seat and storming to the cockpit. She slammed into her seat and reactivated her data readout to see what Corey was seeing. As she did so, a few more lines of data came in, hovering in the range of the mid-nineties, occasionally approaching one-hundred.

“What in the burnt…”

“Tooley? What does ninety mean?”

“This is all a measure of relative gravitational influence on local space,” Tooley said. She kept her eyes locked on the readouts as she explained. “Zero is normal empty space, zero-gravity. One-hundred is a black hole.”

“And this is a ninety? What the fuck is it?”

“One way to find out,” Tooley said. She flipped on new panels, opening up new data streams and new room for more calculation. “Farsus, did you already fix the long range scanners?”

“Yes!”

“Fix them again,” Tooley shouted. Farsus walked over to the helm, opened up the panel that contained all their scanning tools, and double checked his work.

“Everything appears to be in order,” Farsus said. “Unless the parts Morrakesh gave us were fundamentally flawed. Is the scan not returning correct data?”

“I sure fucking hope not,” Tooley said. “Take a look at this math for me.”

The rest of the crew started filtering into the cockpit as well, though they held no hope of comprehending the readouts on Tooley’s screen. Only Farsus could even begin to make sense of the complex physics on display.

“That’s...odd.”

“Odd is an understatement. That’s dead space. Something like that isn’t supposed to be there.”

Kamak looked at the math and saw a whole bunch of big numbers he couldn’t understand, but which seemed to have Tooley very worried.

“So it’s what, a rogue planet, wandering star, some other shit? Is that going to make travel hard for us?”

“No, the mass here is all wrong,” Tooley said. Her blue brows furrowed as she focused harder on the complicated readouts. “It’s smaller than a moon, but causing a mass distortion bordering on a black hole. Something like that...hold on.”

Tooley turned the ship slightly to the right, aiming their scanners in a new direction, and collected a new set of data. One monitor continued to display the old set of numbers while new information rolled in. Though they still could not make sense of the numbers, the crew could see a concerning pattern forming. Whatever Tooley had just aimed at was a near-match to the anomaly hiding in dead space.

“It’s a match,” Tooley mumbled. “Bigger, but a match.”

“A match to fucking what, Tooley?”

Tooley gripped the arms of her pilot’s seat tight and looked up at Kamak.

“A Bang Gate.”