Kanti stumbled sleepily into the physics lab. He stifled a yawn and waved hello to Chendra.

“Still adjusting to the new schedule?” she asked, looking up from her work.

“Yeah, I’m sleeping some of third shift and some of first. It’s the only way I get to see anyone while they’re awake,” he explained.

Kanti took some sandwiches out of his bag and set one down in front of Chendra. “Did you break your phone?” he asked.

Chendra finished assembling the device and smiled as she set it down in front of Kanti. “This is my latest project. When you tap the screen, it sends a beacon to engineering, and then it activates a quantum resonator.”

Kanti looked at the device and then back up at Chendra. “Looks like a phone.”

She grinned wide. “That’s the idea. We really don’t want the krakun to find out we’re doing this experiment.”

Kanti nodded as he took a bite of his sandwich. It was decent enough; very flavorful meats and cheeses, but a little soggy and messy for his tastes. “I like the sound of that! So, what’s the experiment?”

“When we’re ready to do the next maintenance cycle on trinity, I’m going to take this down to the recycler and tap the screen. The engineering chief will shut trinity down half a second later, after he gets the signal.” Chendra unwrapped her sandwich. “So for that half a second before it powers down, the resonator will have a chance to interact with the quantum echo being generated by the recycler.”

Kanti shrugged. “Still not following you.”

“Hang on a second.” She walked over to another lab desk and picked up the musical instrument lying there. “My boss brought his dirembo in when I told him your theory. He’s hoping that we’ll be inspired by having it here in the lab.”

Chendra pinched the top string down to a fret and carefully plucked at it with a claw. The note hung in the silent lab and slowly faded away. “Let’s say that this string is the trinity. My hope is that by adding a resonator, it will work as if adding a little more string as it plays.”

She plucked at the string again and then slid her pad down a fret. The note faded quickly this time, but before it did, Kanti could hear the pitch drop. Chendra laughed. “It’s harder than it looks! But you get the idea.”

“So for half a second, trinity will play a different note than it usually plays?”

“Right! That’s what we hope will happen, at least.” She set the instrument down and picked her sandwich back up. “And during that half second, we’ll have every last piece of test equipment on board focused on the gate to see if there are any changes.”

Kanti took another bite and wiped his muzzle with the back of his wrist. “So why half a second?” he asked around a mouthful of food.

Chendra shrugged. “That should be enough time for us to take lots of measurements and photos, but we’re hoping that since the gate is shutting down anyhow — a half second later — that the krakun won’t notice if anything funny happens.”

Kanti stared at her a while. “Funny?”

“Well sure! No one really knows what will happen. Perhaps the trinity will shut down early? Or maybe nothing will happen at all.”

“Okay, but why all the…” Kanti’s eyes lit up with sudden understanding. “You think the krakun watch us… constantly… through the gate?”

“Well, of course!” she said. “They’d be crazy not to. The krakun may be a lot of things, but they’re not fools.”

Kanti stared at her blankly. “I don’t understand. You think they’d watch the gate to make sure we don’t experiment with it?”

“No, probably not that.” Chendra set her sandwich down. “But they’d have to be worried about us deviating from our projected course. What if we used the gate to start scooping up an asteroid belt? We’d probably destroy ourselves in the process, but there’s only ten thousand geroo on board.”

She looked seriously at Kanti. “But Krakuntec is on the other side of that gate. A meteor bombardment could kill billions of krakun. They must have automated systems watching us through the gate — ready to pull the plug if we ever tried to rebel.”

Kanti stared down at his paws. The thought was pretty grim. If the krakun ever shut off the gate, then the entire trinity would shut down. They’d be left adrift, unable to use the drive. He felt as if he’d been working all this time without ever noticing the knife held to his throat.

He could do nothing about the krakun, though. So he tried to push despair out of his mind and focus on more cheerful things. “But it could also work, right? Your experiment could…”

Chendra took another bite of her sandwich and grinned wide. “Maybe… just maybe… we’ll see the view through the gate change for half a second before trinity shuts down.”

“Yeah?”

“It may not shift much, if it shifts at all. But if it does, that will give us our first data point. We may get a lot of insight into how the gate works — insight that we never had before.”

Kanti slid to the edge of his seat. “And then we’ll be able to turn off the gate while leaving the rest of the trinity online?”

“Perhaps some day,” Chendra said, returning her attention to her sandwich. “It takes a lot of data points before you can make a theory, and a lot of theories before you can apply one.

“This first data point will be us starting to saw at our shackles.”