So either it has a heater inside or it was extremely hot when it started its trip. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. It’s not very heavy, so it’s probably thin. If there’s no internal heat source, it’ll cool off very fast in the air here.

The room still smells like ammonia. Yuck.

I float down to the lab. I don’t know where to begin. So many things I want to do. Maybe I should start by just identifying the material the cylinder is made of? Something harmless to the Blip-A’s crew might be incredibly toxic to me and neither of us would know it.

Maybe I should check for radiation.

I drift down to the lab table and put out a hand to steady myself. I’m getting better at the zero-g thing. I think I remember seeing an astronaut documentary saying some people handle it fine, while others really struggle. Looks like I’m one of the lucky ones.

I’m using “lucky” loosely here. I’m on a suicide mission. So… yeah.

The lab is a mystery. It has been for a while. It’s clearly set up with the idea that there’ll be gravity. It has tables, chairs, test-tube trays, et cetera. There’s none of the usual stuff you would expect to see in a weightless environment. No Velcro on the walls, no computer screens at all angles. No efficient use of space. Everything assumes there will be a “floor.”

The ship can accelerate just fine. For a good long time too. It had me at 1.5g’s for probably a few years. But they can’t expect me to just leave the engines on and fly in circles to keep gravity in the lab, right?

I look around at each piece of lab equipment and try to relax my mind. There has to be a reason for this. And it’s in my memory somewhere. The trick is to think about what I want to know, but not stress about it too much. It’s like falling asleep. You can’t really do it if you concentrate on it too hard.

So many top-of-the-line pieces of equipment. I let my mind wander as I scan across them all…

Chapter 8

By the time we reached Geneva, I’d completely lost track of what day it was.

The computer models for the Astrophage breeder weren’t lining up with the real-world performance. Though I had managed to breed up almost six grams of Astrophage so far. When all was said and done, the aircraft carrier’s reactor just couldn’t generate enough heat to speed up the reaction any further. Stratt kept vaguely saying they were going to provide a heat source capable of keeping up, but nothing had come of it yet.