Starbound Read Online Free PDF Page A

should see, and miracles no man could describe,” said the Historian.
    Serosian’s words, spoken in all seriousness, sent an involuntary chill up my spine. Maclintock just stared at the Historian.
    â€œThank you, Lieutenant Commander,” said Maclintock to me. “That’s enough for now.”
    â€œAye, sir,” I said, and shut the display off, returning to a standard systems display. Maclintock stood.
    â€œXO, you have the con. I’ve got a couple of dozen novels to catch up on,” he said. Dobrina rose to acknowledge.
    â€œI have the con, aye, sir,” she said. “Enjoy your reading.”
    With that the captain was gone off the bridge. I came and stood next to Dobrina.
    â€œLooks like we’ll have plenty of time for fencing the next two days,” I said quietly to her.
    â€œOr other activities,” she deadpanned.
    â€œUmm. Yes, well, I’d prefer to stay focused on my fitness for the moment. It makes those ‘other activities’ even more enjoyable,” I said.
    â€œSpeak for yourself,” she said, then headed off to do a station-by-station walkthrough. I smiled. I decided getting in plenty of both wouldn’t be a bad way to spend the next couple of days.

    Two days later, we were four minutes from exiting traverse space into the Jenarus system. I was at my duty station sweeping across my boards looking for trouble, but finding none. That made me uncomfortable. I made a quick com call down to Duane Longer.
    â€œHow are we looking?” I asked, fishing for information.
    â€œAll nominal, sir. The sub-light HD drive is scheduled to cut off the moment we break the bubble in the Jenarus system. The chemical impellers will activate automatically and propel us out of the jump space tunnel and into normal space. From there our only concern should be winning the bet,” he said.
    â€œWhich you had better,” I replied. “Thanks, Duane.” Serosian chose just that moment to enter the bridge and take his station, firing up his board with a sweep of the hand. The confusing glut of shapes and colors were a complete mystery to me, and I was glad I’d never had to learn them.
    We all buckled in with one minute to go. Maclintock turned the countdown over to Jenny Hogan at Astrogation.
    â€œThirty seconds,” she called on the shipwide com from her second-tier station. “All systems green. When we exit jump space we will have traveled farther than any Quantar ship in more than two centuries. We are making history.” That was something we could all be proud of.
    I looked to Dobrina, our highest-ranking Carinthian officer, but she had her eyes fixed to her board. Although we had similar duties, monitoring systems and such, I was much more engaged in the smooth running of the systems and she much more in the application of those systems to overall ship’s status. If she saw something she didn’t like, it was within her prerogative to shut that system down. I didn’t have that power, only the power to report problems and then to ride the lower ratings to get things running to her satisfaction.
    â€œTen seconds,” counted down Jenny Hogan. In that short amount of time she would disengage the hyperdimensional drive and shut down our protective Hoagland Field in the same instant, “dropping” us from a bubble of space in an unknown higher dimension and back into our dimension. Then our sub-light HD drive would cut out and our chemical impellers would kick back in, reengaging our mass in a forward motion to exit the large and unusual jump space tunnel at Jenarus. Only when we had exited the tunnel would we find ourselves totally in normal space again and able to navigate normally to the system’s home planet.
    I gripped the arms of my safety couch as Hogan counted down to zero. The cerebral scattering associated with entering a jump wasmuch different than when exiting. While all of our maneuvering actions of