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“Okay.”
“I’ve got night coverage tonight, so I won’t be able to do dinner.”
“I could- I could come sit with you while you do that?” From how he’d found her, he surmised she might be alone on the bridge again.
“That would be nice.”
KIRA
Kira relieved Morgan early. She’d been unable to rest for the long night. Her mind ran a million miles a minute. Kira kept reliving the conversation she’d witnessed between Quinn and Watson. A nagging notion that would not leave her mind haunted her.
Watson screened most everything that came into the Callistar. Would he hide things from her? Or deliberately move them off the main alerts so she’d not see them? His conversation with Quinn worried her. As much as she might have wished to watch the other screens when he’d shown her, the audio kept drawing her back to Watson. Knowing the answer to that question had her drafting a letter to Toke when Quinn entered the bridge.
The console needed a featherlight touch, but hers were shatteringly hard as she hacked away at her work. The doors were so quiet anymore she had not heard him until he said, “Hi.”
At a side console, he took a spot at the table, so he was close, as she said, “hey,” and leaned back with one last keystroke. She noticed he’d not been looking down at what she’d been doing as she turned. Not that he needed to, but his respect for her privacy was noticeable. A beat passed before she asked, “When you worked for Paradigm, did you access their system to find out what they wouldn’t tell you?”
“Not at first. They made sure that the terminals I had access to were on a closed network. As I got older, I managed to find opportunities to get drones into networks I wasn’t supposed to be on. Then I started reading through things via drone.” For a man unused to interpreting other’s body language, he had his own openly displayed, seemingly the more comfortable he became. He leaned forward and halfway squinted.
Her frown deepened as he spoke. There were several communiques she’d not received, or that she had ‘answered.’ She knew she hadn’t answered them. “I can’t imagine being cut off for so long.” It wasn’t comparable in any sense of the word, but she still did not like for things to be kept from her, not like this at least.
“It is what it is.” Quinn quieted, opening his mouth to speak, then closing it, then opening it again. “Is something wrong?”
“I.” She clamped her mouth shut like he had, but she didn’t hesitate for nearly as long. “Watson has been screening my messages.”
“He has?” He matched her earlier discomfort. “You mean without you asking him to, yeah?”
“Yes, without permission,” she elaborated. “He has answered some as well, or simply put some aside.”
“Oh, do you want-” There was no telltale flick up the right to pull a memory, but the pause meant consideration, “To talk about it?”
“Quinn, are you researching how to speak?”
“Yeah, I wanted to…” under his breath he continued trailing off.
“It’s sweet that you try, but I like you as you are, too.”
He cracked a genuine smile. “Thank you, Kira.”
His confidence was becoming of him as he took her hand. Kira had not realized when he’d become so comfortable with such an action. He released when she told him, “you’re welcome.”
Kira shifted her attention back to the console. She closed out her messages, never having sent the one she’d been working on. Crafted in anger and done in the moment of discovery. She knew it was harshly worded, unfair in a sense, so she’d consider it again when a cooler head prevailed.
“I never imagined that I would go into uncharted space.” Her thoughts were errant, not quite as vastly different as his, but while it focused on their mission, it was not what they’d been discussing.
“Me either.”
“We always think we are the pinnacle too.” She glanced back at him with that. “But there’s always stronger and smarter people out there. Hopefully, they’re in a good mood if we come across them.”
“That seems unlikely. If there was a more advanced species out there, they likely would have picked up on some of our deep space transmissions by now. It’s more likely any alien races we come across will be on the same playing field.”
“Logic takes the fun out of wondering, Quinn.” Even with her statement, she seemed to still be having fun if her smile was anything to go by. She turned her seat to face him. Their knees would have knocked had she not folded hers up in her seat.
“It does?” Puzzlement turned to wondering with him, the smallest changes in how he looked easier to pin down the more time they spent together.
“Yes, because if you take away any chance of the possibility, you can’t imagine the possibilities.”
“Okay?” He arched his brow. “I mean, if you don’t eliminate any possibilities, I guess, yeah, we might find some other alien life. I suppose it’s possible they are using a high end of the radiation spectrum for communication. Maybe they are simply so far beyond us their technology no longer looks for stuff on the lower end?”
