Data Emissions

I stopped to wait about half way there, next to a shuttle sized snowball. It took Paula three minutes to catch up. Eddie and Wendy were still two minutes away. Considering it had taken three hours to get here, that wasn't too bad.

"So what do you think?" I asked over the short range channel. "Can you beat me to Frost River?"

"You cheated," Paula said, but she didn't sound very convinced.

"Did not," I said. "And I didn't do any tricks with gravity either. Just the wings and my own feel for movement."

"I meant gravity... Haven't you figured out what to call it other than 'riding gravity'?"

"Gravity projection."

"Well," Paula said. "If you had used projection, you would have cheated."

"Your suit is covered with sensors," I said. "Weren't you watching?"

"That would be cheating," Paula said.

I laughed. She had probably nuked me with everything her suit had. "You have my permission to check. In fact, I insist."

"Good," Paula said. "I want readings while you are projecting. You tend to show up as some kind of gravitonic anomaly."

"Anomaly?"

"Two dimensional blackholes; tiny torus wormholes; fragmented gravity waves; a lot of quantum noise that doesn't make sense," Paula said.

"Oh. You never mentioned it."

"Most people don't like it when I aim sensors at them," Paula said.

"You do tend to 'study' people," I said.

"Well, Love, I've got six different quantum sensors built into this suit, and I want to try them--on you--while you are actively using gravity projection. I know you're dying to try it with those wings."

"You'll never keep up."

"My sensors are more than adequate to get a clear picture of you disrupting three-space all the way to Frost River. I don't have to keep up."

"Disrupting..." I paused.

"According to my sensors," Paula said.

"Are you're sensors ready?"

"Yeah."

"Don't blink," I said, spinning away.

It was an awesome ride. I dropped into Relativity 0.595, and I was shaking hands with Buddy less than two and half hours later; The Three Brains were impressed. Paula, Wendy and Eddie were still 40 minutes away.