"Ok, so does anyone have any more ideas?" Zayd asked everyone at the small table in the morning. He looked at Keisha last.

"Why don't we just blow it up already!" Sturletto shouted. For the last two days, they had been brainstorming ways to get past the time-shield and see what was going on inside the Icarus. Also for the past two days, Sturletto had been very vocal for just blowing it up. Mina had been trying to keep the peace as Zayd had ordered, but it was getting harder and harder as the days went on.

"What is your deal?" Mina broke. "We have all made it obvious by now that we are trying to understand the time differential, not just blow shit up! If you have nothing helpful to offer to the group why don't you just go back to your bunk?" She was standing up at the table now, although you could barely tell with how tall she was.

Sturletto glared at her, "You'd like that wouldn't you? Get all the credit for saving everybody. We can sit here and talk about it for days, but the reality is we need to just destroy it before it gets to the origin date. So why don't you go back to your bunk and wait until this joke of a captain figures it out too." He spat out the words and a little dribble fell on the table. Keisha recoiled in disgust. Mina slammed her fist on the table and walked as far away from him as she could from him.

Zayd stood up too, "Sturletto, come talk to me in the cockpit." He went and sat in the pilot's seat. Sturletto seemed to debate it in his mind whether he was going to obey or not and finally pushed himself up and into the cockpit, the door closed behind him. Mina started pacing and muttering under her breath. Keisha didn't recognize some of the words, but she knew Mina well enough by now to know she didn't always speak the common language as the directive taught. As she paced Keisha sat back at the table and put her feet up on Mina's now empty chair. We can't just blow it up. There's too much at stake to just blow up their only clue as to what was happening.

"Too bad we can't just outfit the ship with that lightwave function you created for the suits." Keisha banged her head on the wall as she thought out loud.

Mina stopped in her tracks, "Say that one more time, please?"

Keisha sat up in her seat, "Oh, I was just saying it's too bad we can't just outfit the ship with the same lightwave function tech you created for the time-suits you made." She shrugged.

"Keisha. I truly think you are a genius." She clapped her hands together and smiled. "I see why that boy likes you. You don't even know how smart you are! It's charming." She walked over to the cockpit door and rapped three times. "Boys, we have an idea."

"We do?" Keisha asked. Sturletto came out with a red face, he looked like he wanted to kill something. Zayd came out with a stone face. Whatever had happened in there, Keisha was glad she hadn't been a part of it.

"What's your plan?" Zayd asked. He stood at the doorway of the cockpit and Sturletto sat down as far away from him as possible on the side of his bunk.

"It's Keisha's plan really." Mina gestured towards her and kept talking, "We can outfit the Velos with the same lightwave function as my suits to mimic the lightwaves affecting the time-shield to blend in and go right through.

"That's it?" Zayd asked, and looked at Keisha.

She shrugged back, "I was just thinking out loud and Mina went with it."

"Talk me through how your lightwave functions keep us from getting stuck in backward time. Walk me through it in layman terms please." Zayd shifted his focus to Mina for her explanation. They had all known she had brought suits to protect them from the time-shift, but no one knew exactly how they worked. There hadn't been enough time before the mission for all of them to be briefed on everything and there had to be a lot of trust that everyone was doing their job the right way.

"The lightwave function was based on a hypothesis that you could mimic different phases of time by producing lightwaves that perfectly synchronized you with the phase. Back on Chronos we first found that people originally from earth experienced time on Chronos differently, a few minutes or so. It made everything seem like it was going just a little too fast, we even had several local jokes about it." She laughed to herself.

"Anyways, we finally had another planet to test all of our theories about gravity and time on and by those two factors, there shouldn't have been any problems we couldn't explain or fix. We didn't actually find out about the problem until people began having babies on the planet. Once the biological matter originated from the planet, the timeshift became more obvious and began manifesting small problems.

"We discovered that the location in the universe where the biological matter was formed was a factor in how we perceive time. With only two planets though, we couldn't quite form a complete hypothesis, that all changed when Klokos was founded shortly after. With three points in the universe, we were able to triangulate the lightwave functions from each place and base it off where in the universe we can expect time-shifts and how much."

She looked around the room to make sure Keisha and Zayd were still following her, she must have decided they were following her enough that she continued, "What we found was this lightwave function that emitted from people and things from these other planets that did not quite line up properly with other biologicals on the time spectrum. A time-shift lightwave was the best way we could describe it. The suits are designed to block our personal time-shift from interfering with the time-phase that surrounds you."

Zayd's forehead was more scrunched than anything Keisha had seen, "What?"

Mina threw up her hands, "The suits keep your time to yourself and don't mess with the time around you."

"Thank you. That kind of makes sense." He and Keisha shared a look and Zayd nodded his head in disbelief. "OK, so how can we make a 'time-shift suit' for the ship?"

"I have a feeling that's where I come in." Keisha frowned.

"Right again!" Mina said. "I believe we can use our own ship's holographic technology to create a sort of bubble around the ship and on the outside, would emit the same lightwave frequency as the Icarus and the inside would contain our own lightwave emissions."

"No way." Sturletto rose from his bunk, "I'm not trusting that kind of kooky science with my life."

"It's no kookier than your idea to blow it all up! Stars only know what would happen to us all." Mina shouted.

"You forget I was there on Klokos when you first published your paper on this whole 'Biological Timewave Function' crap and you were laughed out of the room. Nobody would fund. you, nobody wanted to be even remotely related to you. When I heard you had found a spot on the Pytheas, I thought someone must be playing a cruel joke."

Zayd interrupted before Mina could, "Is that true Dr. Mirlaj? Has this tech ever been tested?"

Mina shifted around on her feet, her face looking at the floor. "It has. Just not on people."

"See!" Sturletto shouted, "She's a fraud and she has no business being on this mission. Everyone's lives depend on us and you want to entertain her wack job theory when we know we can just blow it up and get back to the Pytheas?" Zayd's face darkened, Keisha could see the debate happening in his mind. He wanted to try to save the Icarus, but he didn't want to do it at the risk of everyone else on board the Pytheas.

"Mina," Keisha said. "Is that how the Pytheas was still moving forward when everything else was going backward?"

"It couldn't be." She said. "I haven't been able to produce anything more than these six suits since the publication of that paper. Sturletto was right about one thing, no one wanted to work with me after I published that. Except for one person." Sturletto gave a sarcastic look at her. "That one person was Captain Anna Katapodis. She approached me several years after and said I might be able to find a home for myself and prove my theory true if I worked on the Pytheas. She funded the six suits. That was it though, I've barely spoken to her since then."

It was Keisha's turn to stand up now, "Think about it Mina, what else could keep the Pytheas 'time to itself' if not your lightwave function theory thingy?" She went straight to the main computer and started looking through deep file settings of the AI and found one called Time-shift Lightwave, and opened it up. "Is this familiar to you?" She stepped aside and Mina started scrolling through it.

"Yeah, this is my algorithm," Mina said. "What is my algorithm doing in the AI database?" The four of them were quiet.

Keisha finally broke the silence, "I have my own theory on how it got here, and I think it was on purpose. I also think we already have this time-shift wave thing applied to our ship. I think that's how we made it here. We probably just have to modify it to match the Icarus more precisely."

"You can make this work Keish?" Zayd asked her.

Keisha stopped tapping on the computer, "Yeah. I think it will, give me an hour or so to triple check everything but then I think we're good to go to the Icarus." She smiled a big genuine smile at him and got back to work on the logistics of changing it to work with the Icarus' time-shield with Mina.

"This is a bad idea." Sturletto pushed his way to the cockpit and closed the door behind him. The three of them stopped for a moment and then went back to work.

By the end of the hour, they had modified the algorithm to get them through the time shield. Zayd ordered Mina and Sturletto to their seats and Zayd took the controls, while Keisha sat in the navigator's seat. Sturletto had insisted on wearing the suits as they entered the time-shield as a safety net. Zayd agreed in order to keep the peace and they were all wearing the stuffy orange suits inside the ship.

He drove the ship in slowly to the time-shield and as they went through the Icarus came into full view. Keisha gasped, "It's beautiful." The ship sparkled and a rainbow of colors shone everywhere. It was tall and the side of it was shaped like a scalene triangle with rounded edges. As they circled the Icarus she saw it was a pyramid and all of it shone with a radiance Keisha had never seen before. On the backside of it, they found the docking bay and connected as best as they could.

The inside of the ship looked almost brand new. The hallways had padded carpet and the walls were white on the top with a red shiny bumper that covered the bottom half. They walked single file, Zayd, Keisha, Mina followed by Sturletto. Everything was quiet aboard the ship. It didn't take long to find the supernova viewing platform as it took up the entire top floor. It was a huge room with floor-to-ceiling windows across the entire room. It had red chairs that matched the walls in the hallway and were placed at intervals along the wall. All but two chairs were filled with rotting corpses. Skeletons worn by age were reclining comfortably as Rigel reformed in front of them. Keisha's heart fell. We're too late to save them.

The team fanned out and started searching the room. It felt strange to be in space on such a comfortable ship. As she looked around it was obvious the design of the ship was to make their viewing of the star as comfortable as possible. The seats, the padded floors, the various accouterments all the people had been given, all to make the occupants at ease. The back of the chairs appeared to have names monogrammed into the back of them and Keisha walked by each seat, touching the name of the lost. At the end were the two empty seats. She read their names, Kline Tempus and Charlotte Rose.