Shift

16- Locked

So, Lavilla was going to be my pilot. I really didn't want her to come. She was so little. For all I knew, she could've been older than me though. I decided to ask her after Klisa left.

"How old are you?"

"I'm 62 cycles old."

"Cycles, how long are cycles?"

"When all the Suns have passed the moon" she said with a proud look on her face.

Since we got there, that had happened once. It felt like a day. She was 62 days old. If that's how they measured their lifespan, I knew that they must not live very long.

"Won't you miss your friends and family?"

"No, when I come back, I'll explain to them where I went and they'll understand."

"We have few things to check out before tonight." I said, changing the topic. Tonight everyone was supposed to be in position on the dwarf planets.

"Okay, what can I do?"

"Just sit there. This is one of the only things I know how to do." I had to run a few tests to figure out why the Vaba could see us. It was more complicated then I thought it would be.

"Are you sure you don't need help?" Lavilla said after waiting paiently for a few hours. Her hands were folded on her lap and she smiled so innocently.

"Actually, I think we should check with Glisy and Haxol, they might have already figured this out." I knew that they were already going threw data from the new ship. That ship would have had more data then I could ever collect already stored up for analyses.

"No problem!" Lavilla flew us over to Glisy and Haxol's ship. Her hands floated gracefully over the controls. We landed a few minutes later.

I put on a helmet and told Lavilla to watch the ship. She had been doing such a good job of it already. I walked over to Glisy and Haxol's ship and knocked on the hull.

The door slid up and I joined them in the ship. They weren't in the control room so I ventured deeper into the ship. In the back, Glisy and Haxol were playing a game of some sort with short, thin rods and little cubes.

"Oh Brooke, would you like to see the results I got from the ship?" Haxol exclaimed.

"Yes, actually that's what I was coming over here for."

"Well, it turns out, Klisa's new ship, it fanned a beam over the Vaba a few nights after it came in contact with the planet and locked them out of phase. Isn't that just the most impossible thing?" Haxol said, standing up.

"Calm down!" Glisy said, annoyed. "It's different but it's really not that exciting." She assured.

"Sounds pretty cool to me." I said.

"Here, I'll show you how it happened!" Haxol took me over to one of the monitors in the control room and Glisy grudgingly followed. Glisy sat on the bench and listened to Haxol explain again as I watched him point to lines on the screen. I had no idea what they meant but I pretended to be amazed anyway.