Chapter Forty-Eight

After Viktoriya had revealed her secret to her parents, there was barely any talk for the rest of the flight to the Mothership Ark.

Instead, they sat in silence with the occasional interjection from her mother to try to stir up conversation.

She was quite happy with the silence, though. Only parting her gaze from the window—from watching the faintly glowing filament thread through space—to eat her breakfast.

Dropship café food was one of her favorites, after all.

Looking down at the planet shrinking in the rearview of the ascending dropship, she saw how one vein of the web touched Earth, encasing it, and projected out into space. Presumably, some of those spiderweb-like strands eventually wound their way to HH190, she pondered.

She just had to figure out how to use them or understand how the web actually worked.

She tore herself away from the window to pick at the waffles the steward laid in front of her. She grabbed the syrup off the saucer in the middle of their table.

“What do you see?” her mother said, finally asking about something remotely interesting.

“When you look out the window, what is out there? What are these glowy, silver threads like?”

Viktoriya placed the syrup back on its saucer and turned to the window again. She caught her father looking at her from the corner of her eye.

He looked worried.

But she ignored him, eager to answer her mother, now that she was being so open.

Looking out the window, she took stock of what she saw. The translucent silver corridor wound its way through space.

“It’s as if everything is connected, just like a universal-sized glowing spiderweb, with the strands suspended and flowing through certain dense areas of galaxies, nebulas. Places with a lot of mass,” she said, looking into the depths of space.

“Like these threads tie everything together.”

She recalled the pulling feeling—the attraction—she’d experienced in her flash-out during the night. The strings were just connecting things. They were pushing and pulling.

Attracting and repelling. Like the magnets in her hand.

She didn’t say what she thought. Her mother was simply trying to understand what she saw—there would be time to talk later about what she thought about all this.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Because that’s all it was at this point. Theories and thoughts.

“The strings are like long interconnecting corridors. Or rivers of a glowing spiderweb,” she continued. “And they go everywhere, connecting galaxies, nebulas… They faintly appear if you look hard enough, but then fade away if you stare at them. But you don’t look directly at them. It’s like you look past them. They are between everything, flowing, from galaxy to galaxy, through solar systems and even across the universe.”

“It sounds beautiful,” her mom whispered, though there was a sadness in her voice.

She smiled weakly, knowing her parents didn’t truly understand. But at least they were trying. She continued to stare out into the overwhelming vastness of the stratosphere.

“It is,” she whispered. “It really is.”

Upon their approach, she viewed the entire vessel in all its glory.

Still, partially under construction, the vertical disk-shaped structure orbited Earth in the low levels of the thermosphere—at nearly the same altitude as the International Space Station. The upper half of the ark was still quite bare, just the steel frame with the entire interior exposed. Though they were far off, she saw the space construction workers—garbed in their suits—tethered to the vessel and building away.

The dropship passed through a force field and into a massive bay area, with thirty other small ships docked inside. Once it landed, they stepped off smoothly. Disembarking the dropship and onto the ark was a surreal experience.

They now stood on the bay floor, lined up with the other passengers of their dropship.

She stared up at the force field, which made a distinct whooping noise each time a ship flew in or out of the docking hangar. It must have been keeping the pressure vacuum stable; otherwise, they would be sucked right out into the frigidness of space.

“Welcome,” a woman in a decorated navy iNASA-Climate uniform called to them as she approached. The workers following her seemed to struggle to keep pace. “My name is Deputy Captain Katrina, and I would like to welcome you all aboard the Mothership Ark.”

The assistants with her began jogging through the lines of passengers, handing out bracelets as they went and helping the passengers put them on.

“Without full biometrics up and running yet, these bracelets are your key to everything,” she said, lifting her wrist to show her own.

The assistant helping visitors with their bracelets motioned to Viktoriya and touched her CyberArm. She quickly pulled it away, shoving her other arm out for him.

She hated when people handled her android arm.

The man clasped the bracelet onto her other wrist, which locked and tightened automatically.

“You are to wear these bracelets for the entire duration of your stay here on the Mothership Ark!” she shouted, pacing at the front of them. “They are unique to you. Programmed for your specific access needs. They are waterproof, shockproof, fireproof, basically, any proof you can imagine, they are it. Do not, I repeat, do not proceed into any area markers stating Restricted Area, Under Construction or you may be sucked out into space.”

The Deputy Captain continued for a while longer, but Viktoriya could hardly focus. There was just so much going on. From the whooping of the forcefield to the military marching by, the ship was buzzing like a hive on a summer afternoon.

“All right, any questions?” the Deputy Captain asked.

Victoriya snapped her eyes back to her, her attention drawn to the front of their group.

The group was silent.

“Wonderful,” Deputy Captain Katrina said, her red ponytail bobbing as she turned to sign a tablet one of her assistants held out. “Don’t cause any trouble, and we’ll get along just fine. Welcome to the Mothership, everyone!”

Viktoriya smiled as a group riding along on hoverpacks zipped by overhead.

Welcome indeed.

This was going to be a lot of fun.