Those pulling duty away from the bridge listened in on the shipnet, while the others drifted by ones and twos into the contact lab, edrec compartment, or onto the bridge itself. Among those who came to the bridge was SC Glen Harrod, commander of the Dove. But he made no move to displace bridge captain Alizana Neale from the pedestal, choosing instead to stand in the back with the talkative, almost childishly giddy techs and awks. Dove had come out of craze eighteen times before, and there was no technical reason why the nineteenth should prove any more eventful than the others. “Craze” was a fanciful description of what the D-series Avidsen-Lopez drive did to the local fabric of space. Only a few Service researchers claimed to fully understand the “why” of the AVLO power plant. It was commonly known that it was a gravity gradient drive (dubbed the pushmi-pullyu because of the twin bow and stern field projectors). It was also commonly known that to go beyond that casual description, it was necessary to deal with Driscoll’s abstruse grand unified field theorem.
