Now Markus was convinced that his mother was keeping the coordinates hidden. She probably brainwashed Shirley into keeping the space-time variables secret, too.

Fuck! There had to be a way around the data block. But Shirley or the captain would detect any attempt to penetrate the ship’s security.

Markus had everything he needed to communicate. But without the ship’s space-time values, all he had was a radio with an infinite number of stations, and no way to know which signal was actually coming from home.

Windee Tran didn’t know why she was so smart. She just was. The captain had asked her to realign the space-time filaments, which had been easy. Now she was modeling a tectonic profile for the graviton emitters. That was easy, too.

So now Windee was looking for something else to do.

Lately, she’d noticed Markus trying to back-calculate the navigation data. She assumed that the captain had asked him to. The captain probably thought she was too young. Windee tried not to laugh. Markus was a cool big brother, but his calculations could be slow and crude.

Luckily, Windee was a calculating whiz. And the math looked fun. So Windee went downstairs to her workstation and began defining her variables.

Two hours later, Windee Tran found Markus in the kitchen.

“Hi, Markus! How are you?”

“I am frying donut holes. How do you think I am?”

“What if I said I can find the values for the space-time variables?”

Markus froze. How did she even know what he was doing? Sometimes Windee could be even scarier than Shirley.

Markus shut the fryer down.

“Let me see.”

Windee led Markus to her workstation and showed him the calculations. The issue was back-calculating the time signature of the proper continuum. But Windee had deduced that even though they were separate, they were still part of the same continuum; therefore, they could process the current space-time resonance through a transforming function and extract the discrete frequencies that made it up. In other words—the space-time variables.

Incredible.

No one else outside of Shirley could have done this. Markus could barely contain himself. “You are a genius!”

“Can I tell the captain?”

“Um … Let’s finish our work first. And then we’ll give her the surprise together!”

Windee beamed. “Sure thing, Markus.”

“But right now, shhh. Keep it a surprise, okay?”

Windee saluted and went back into the donut.

As soon as she was gone, Markus dashed not to the kitchen, but to his workstation. He placed it into secure mode and retrieved Windee’s analysis. He was so excited that he could barely enter the data. The methodology was straightforward; the assumptions were sound.

And then, just like that, Markus had exact space-time variables and, with them, a direct connection to home.

And then Markus hurled his workstation to the floor.