She chewed on her lip. “That’s bad?”
“Of course it’s bad.” Keirth pointed at the console’s screen. “Do you see how many light years we are from the sector?”
She peered at the screen. That was a lot. Oops. She hadn’t meant to screw everything up. “So, um, it would take us hundreds of years to get back to the sector?”
“Yep,” said Keirth. “If we even had enough fuel, which we don’t. Without a hyperdrive, we’re crippled. We can only go to planets close in this system.”
“Are there any close planets?”
Keirth sighed. He threw himself into the captain’s chair. “One. Trioth.”
“I’ve never heard of that planet,” said Ariana. “Is it a colony planet?”
“Not exactly. The people on Trioth have been been there long before we ever settled the sector. They’ve got their own ways of doing things. And I swore to myself I would never go back there.”
“You’ve been there?” asked Ariana.
“Yeah,” said Keirth. “I had a false lead that Risciter was on the planet, maybe a year ago. Let’s just say I didn’t make the greatest impression on the residents of Trioth.”
“Oh,” said Ariana. That wasn’t so good. “So what are we going to do?”
“We don’t have any choices. We have to go to Trioth,” said Keirth.
“But if they don’t like you...”
Keirth threw up his hands. “It’s either float around in space until we run out of fuel and life support and suffocate to death from lack of oxygen or go to Trioth. I pick option B.”
“Okay,” she said. She sat down next to him. “I really am sorry. I didn’t know it would mess up the hyperdrive.”
He glared at her.
All right, then. It was pretty clear that Keirth was not going to be forgiving her anytime soon. Ariana studied her hands, feeling ashamed. She shouldn’t have done what she’d done. Now they were in trouble. But Keirth hadn’t understood that she couldn’t face going back to the sector now. Things were different now that she’d confronted Risciter. She didn’t have any idea what she wanted to do instead, but it was a big universe. Certainly, she had to have some kind of option besides being a spinster for the rest of her life.
Keirth began to pound the keys of the console. “It’s going to take us a day and a half, maybe two days to get to Trioth. I’m setting the course now. There’s no reason for you to hang around in the bridge and screw anything else up.”
“I won’t screw anything up,” said Ariana. “Hey, it’s not like I haven’t ever flown a ship before. I had lessons.”
“And in these lessons they never taught you not to disengage the hyperdrive using a manual override?”
“No,” said Ariana. “I never wanted to switch course in the middle of traveling. What should I have done?”
“Readjust the coordinates, of course,” said Keirth as if she were an idiot. “You can change course in hyperspace, but coming out of it abruptly is bad.”
“Well, I didn’t know where I wanted to go.”
“You should be going back to your family, where you belong. And as soon as I can find some way to ship you back there, I most assuredly will.”
Ariana recognized that she’d screwed up, and that Keirth was less than happy about the situation they were in. But he was wrong to send her back to her family. He didn’t understand. “You don’t know a thing about where I belong. You have no idea how much shame I’d bring on myself if I went back. How embarrassing—”
“Who cares if you’re embarrassed or not when we could die out here in space?”
He had a point. She sighed. “I didn’t think I’d be putting us in danger.”
“Yeah, that’s obvious. Look, I know you’ve just been through hell with Risciter. And that’s awful. But sweetheart, you don’t know the first thing about flying a ship out here in deep space. And as sympathetic as I am, I can’t let the way you’re processing your trauma kill us both.”
Ariana folded her arms over her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said again. He really wasn’t going to let this go, was he?
“I think,” said Keirth, “that it would be better if you’d just leave me alone up here. I don’t really want to talk right now.”
“Fine,” Ariana said, getting up out of her chair. “But you don’t have to be so rude about all of it. It was an accident, you know. I wasn’t purposefully trying to mess things up for you.”