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Commander Keyes was less impressed, however, with the rest of his bridge officers.
Lieutenant Hikowa manned the weapons console. Her long fingers and slender arms slowly checked thestatus of the ordnance with all the deliberation of a sleepwalker. Her dark hair was always falling intoher eyes, too. Oddly, her record showed that she had survived several battles with the Covenant . . . soperhaps her lack of enthusiasm was merely battle fatigue.
Lieutenant Hall stood post at ops. She seemed competent enough. Her uniform was always freshlypressed, her blond hair trimmed exactly at the regulation sixteen centimeters. She had authored sevenphysics papers on Slipspace communications. The only problem was that she was always smiling, andtrying to impress him . . . occasionally by showing up her fellow officers. Keyes disapproved of suchdisplays of ambition.
Manning navigation, however, was his most problematic officer: Lieutenant Jaggers. It might have beenthat navigation was the Commander’s strong suit, so anyone else in that position never seemed to be upto par. On the other hand, Lieutenant Jaggers was moody, and when Keyes had come aboard, the man’ssmall hazel eyes seemed glazed. He could have sworn he had caught the man on duty with liquor on hisbreath, too. He had ordered a blood test—the results were negative.
“Orders, sir?” Jagger asked.
“Continue on this heading, Lieutenant. We’ll finish our patrol around Sigma Octanus and then accelerateand enter Slipspace.”
“Aye, sir.”
Commander Keyes eased into his seat and detached the tiny monitor from the armrest. He read thehourly report from theArchimedes Sensor Outpost. The log of the large mass was curious. It was too bigto be even the largest Covenant carrier . . . yet something was oddly familiar about its shape.
He retrieved his pipe from his jacket, lit it, inhaled a puff, and exhaled the fragrant smoke through hisnose. Keyes would never even have thought about smoking on the other vessels he had served on, buthere . . . well, command had its privileges.
He pulled up his files transferred from the Academy—several theoretical papers that had recently caughthis interest. One, he thought, might apply to the outpost’s unusual reading.
That paper had initially sparked his interest because of its author. He had never forgotten his firstassignment with Dr. Catherine Halsey . . . nor the names of any of the children they had observed.
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He opened the file and read:
United Nations Space Command Astrophysics Journal 034-23-01
Date:May 097, 2540 (Military Calendar)
Encryption Code:None
Public Key:NA
Author(s):Lieutenant Commander Fhajad 034 (service number [CLASSIFIED]), UNSC Office of NavalIntelligence
Subject:Dimensional-Mass Space Compressions in Shaw-Fujikawa (a.k.a. “Slipstream”) Space.
Classification:NA
/start file/
Abstract:The space-bending properties of mass in normal space are well described by Einstein’s generalrelativity. Such distortions however, are complicated by the anomalous quantum gravitational effects inShaw-Fujikawa (SF) spaces. Using loop-string analysis, it can be shown that a large mass bends space inSF space more than general relativity predicts by an order of magnitude. This bending may explain howseveral small objects clustered closely together in SF space have been reported erroneously as a singlelarger mass.