Shortly after Sita lost contact with Allele the diagnostic report on her scanners came back clean. She immediately ran a sweep of the ice in front of her to the farthest limit of the system. There was nothing out there but the blue melt, it's halo, and the surrounding bed ice. Both pods were nowhere to be seen.
"Jon, Damn it! Allele!" she shouted into the coms at the ice in front of her. Allele had said stay put and Sita would stay as she was conditioned to, but she would also send a distress call to the Rhombolian.
Lepton stood on the ship's bridge looking down into the central core it surrounded. Two hours before one of the search teams uncovered the completely intact control station of an ice mine. The Rhombolian was performing a sectioning for entangled co-location of the find for study near their base camp. The procedure kept the ship locked to its position until the sectioning was complete. He was pleased to see that everything was on schedule when the distress call arrived.
He answered the call personally. Sita told him what happened and asked permission to launch a search for the missing pods. With a controlled and slightly distracted tone Lepton answered, "I don't want to override Allele's orders out of hand without surveying the situation myself. Besides, if they've run into trouble I don't want to be responsible for sending you into the same danger. Unfortunately, we're caught in the middle of processing our first significant find and will be held up for several hours."
Sita, shocked and infuriated, barked back, "Allele and Jon are out there cut off from the ships billet, possibly from each other with only Zeebs to depend on. If you can't depart your location for two hours at best don't you think we should risk my going in pursuit?"
After a long silence Lepton came back on, "No, Sita, stay where you are. I'm dispatching two long range tenders. The ships will establish a safe base for a search. They're slow, but under the circumstances it's the best we can do."
"When can I expect to see you?" She asked.
"I won't be with the search team," he answered, then added, "I'm needed more here."
Livid, Sita pushed back in her chair, disconnected her comms, and screamed. She knew Lepton was Allele's lover. His response was without emotion. She was amazed he hadn't given her leave to pursue her teammates. Why wasn't he heading the search personally? His presence was not needed for entanglement sectioning.
She stared into the maw of the melt. The rescue craft would not arrive for at least two hours. She decided not to wait for the team but follow the trace of their paths now. She would leave a string of marker beacons for the search team to follow and deal with the consequences later. She pulled the base craft back another fifty yards and swung it around to circumvent the melt entirely. If there was something that pulled them in from the melt she might avoid it by approaching where she had projected their probable location to be from another angle.
She visualized her path and target for the craft's trajectory system but became confused. Try as she might she could not focus her thoughts on the data the system needed to proceed. It felt as if she were being spun around whenever she tried to place thoughts of her destination into her mind's command partition. Someone or something had rigged her against her destination, but that would have to have been done at least before they left the Base Camp, and that would mean a time punch back to... When? It could have been done decades ago. No, security would only be lax enough for that after the expedition set off for the rift. But, that was a problem for another day, right now she needed to figure out a way to pursue her teammates.
She thought. She tried placing parallel coordinates but every coordinate even remotely in the vicinity of her target resulted in the same mental confusion. She would have to use the ship's direct maneuvering capabilities with its limited line of sight trajectory system. By focusing on a distant object in the ice she drew the craft along a straight line to that object. When she reached the visual target she looked for another in the direction she wanted to take the craft. This took time. Without a specific target direct maneuvering only allowed for slow close range nudging to carefully position the craft as needed. Targeting increased the range to her perceptible range of vision. As long as she could clearly make out an object she could bring the craft alongside of it.
After only a few such maneuvers Sita found she was able to skip her attention from her target object to another while the craft had yet to reach the point to which it was headed. In this way she kept the craft moving continually and in time even sped up her progress. It required continual attention and great focus, and she wasn't sure how she would finally get the ship to reach her real target without thinking about it. Though she followed a wavering and round about route, she kept reasonably parallel with the track Jon and Allele had followed. At times she was only a few yards from the green funnel her scanners were blind to.
She kept this method up for some time until she began to tire and came to rest beside a gas bubble that lay in bed ice three shafts away from where she'd begun. What she didn't know was that the bubble lay within the invisible green cone she was actually following. For the first time the craft remained within the cone long enough to take readings.
Suddenly both Jon and Allele's pod's were detected. Sita double checked her instruments. her scanners must have been compromised indicating that Allele and Jon may have encountered something she still could not detect. She would have to proceed with caution. She nudged her craft laterally and panicked when unbeknownst to her it left the rogue phase cone and lost the pod's signals. Moving back into the cone they returned and by nudging the craft side to side and up and down she determined the area she could depend on for receiving their signals.
The pods were within ten feet of each other and appeared to be in orbital rotation around a common point. The pods registered as fully functional but unmanned. There were no signature beacons from either of their Zeebs. She had to get to them and quick. If the Zeebs were shut down, both Jon and Allele's monads were dormant and Sita had no idea what amount of damage that would mean. She decided to try the long range trajectory system again, this time directing the craft to follow the pod signals rather than their coordinates. It worked and the craft began moving toward the distant objects at it's maximum propulsion.
That wasn't fast enough for for Sita. Refocusing the craft's phase envelope forward leaving more open space in front to move more freely she was able to push her speed well beyond the craft's ordinary capacity.
When she arrived at the site she found the pod's orbital rotation was violent and arbitrary as if they were attached to the back of an invisible sphere that spun and bucked to shake them off. The pod systems were on and functional. The bendway hatches were activated but did not have enough range to reach the surface if they had made an emergency escape. Fearing the worst she began to search the surrounding bed ice for their zeebs. There would have been icequakes from matter displacement had they materialized in the ice itself and there hadn't been any. Sita brought her craft around to face the two empty pods at a total loss for what to do.
She decided to try widening her search. Perhaps they had left their pods before they became trapped in their strange rotation and were hold up in an open fissure pocket somewhere nearby. As she backed away from the pods to begin Allele's identity signature suddenly appeared in Jon's Pod. Stopping she hailed Allele. No response. Getting a sense of the center of rotation for the two pods, Sita allowed her mind to relax and fall in rhythm with their orbit. When she felt attuned to their movement she fed the information to the trajectory system to bring her craft into the same rotation alongside the pod to get a visual through the window. Allele was not at the pod's controls. The pods barely had room for one person. The only way Allele could be in the pod and not visible would be if she were lying in the floor curled behind the seat by the bendway hatch. She decided to make the phase envelopes of the crafts kiss causing minimal engorgement to enable running a scan on the pod's interior to see if it was safe to open the bendway between them.
Sita eased her craft alongside the pod. The ships bounced away from each other as their envelopes engorged but with a second forceful push the engorgement was maintained. The pod's medical emergency alert was trying to send a distress but hadn't been readable. It warned of Extreme Pareidolic Trauma. She wasted no time locking the bendway hatches between the two craft and moved to climb through.
Allele lay curled on the floor of the pod, eyes wide open but unresponsive, Sita got halfway into the pod to grab hold of her meaning to drag her into the base craft. It was only once inside that she saw another shocking sight. The pod's physical hatch was thrown open, something that Sita had not seen from the outside. Beyond to opening was a wide cavity that emanated a green light also filling the interior of the pod. The light had not been visible from outside either. She also felt something very strange. The lower half of Sita's badly was still in the observation craft and while she could feel the ship's movement in rotation with the pod's, her upper body that was in the pod itself felt perfectly stationary. Looking into the cavity outside the pod she could see where the other pod's physical hatch was also open accessing the cavity as well. Then she saw something that shocked her to immobility. Jon's zeeb lay on the floor of the cavity, his monad missing.
A great crack suddenly cut through the cavity and Sita knew she had to get Allele out of the pod before the cavity collapsed. Every muscle of Allele's body was in a spasm that made her feel rock hard And impossible to move through the bendway. After several tries Sita succeeded despite motion sickness from having the top half of her body stationery in the pod while her lower half rotated wildly with the base craft.
With Allele safely on board she closed the hatch and attached her to the the ship's surrogate array and prepared to make an emergency linkage between herself and Allele. She'd been trained for this but had never been in an actual trauma incident before. She opened the linkage, closed her eyes, and allowed herself to sink into the craft's billet and Allele's delusion. Just then the cavity collapsed and the green rogue phase blinked out leaving Jon's Zeebs and the two pods in phase with the bed ice. The resulting ice quake opened a fissure clear to the surface. The observation craft was still out of phase and so remained untouched. Inside Sita and Allele psyche's were in a world of their own.
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