In the best hand I could, which was not great in vacuum gloves, I graced the ship with the best name I could give it. When uncontacted aliens look up and see the lights of our engines, I'm hoping it's what they'll see.
Unidentified Funky Object. Hell yeah.
"Right, Nyiko, it looks good. Let's get back in: supply manifest won't double-check itself!"
---
In the next 48 hours of preparation, you only stepped foot out of the ship once more, to handle transfer paperwork. The crew began filtering through the airlock in ones and twos, finding their quarters and getting to work preparing the ship to finally launch, and you spent nearly all that time in your tiny office, either working on your tablet or conferencing with Mission Control. On the day before launch your corvette arrived, a modular little cylindrical craft not unlike the ones
Mendel-5 had carried, though you noted you had far more weapon modules for it in storage.
You slept your first two nights in your quarters, in a comfortable bed located just under the window in what really did feel like a closet. There was an ammunition box for one of the sandblasters protruding from the deck above directly over your bunk.
It was nice having your own quarters, though, because you could set the gravity down to a comfortable and familiar 0.35g. Every other posting, you'd either had to compromise with a roommate to something a little higher, or it was that awful six months on
Cassini-8 station which was spun up to a full g for some gastly reason.
The day of launch itself filled you with a particular nervous energy, to a degree you'd never really felt before. Monty made a point to tour the ship now that the crew were all here, talking with section leads and building rapport, and you took the front as often as you could to try to at least familiarise yourself with the faces of everyone onboard. You were hardly the most social person, but it was important.
This is when you ran into Specialist Evelyn Rosa Paz, whose name and record Monty had seen in the logs and noted down. He'd be meaning to talk to her, but you'd been up front overseeing the installation of the ship's data tapes and she'd apparently had the same idea; it was a lot of people moving through the airlock at once, a good place to have a manager.
"Specialist Paz..?"
She turned, and you
just spotted the twitch in her hand of her almost saluting. She was an older woman with tawny skin and short-cropped grey hair, held by modern medicine in that strange space where she could just as easily be forty or eighty. There was an audible hiss from her legs as she turned from what you presumed was an artificial leg or legs. Her sleeve's patch was the old blue and red of Solar Patrol's original flag, and her sash was
covered not only in certs, but the pins of service medals dating back to before you were born. You didn't know if there was anyone more decorated in Star Patrol; certainly not in active service.
"Captain Smith," she said simply. You got the distinct impression just from her face that she was judging you, presumably because of how young you must seem to her. "Good to finally meet you."
You could hear the absence of
sir, like a lack of punctuation.
"And you, Specialist. If you have a moment?"
She nodded and indicated with a hand, which is when you noticed that one was artificial as well. You descended out of the cargo bay and found a small niche between life support equipment, out of the way of crewmembers running about.
"It's an incredible honour to have you on board," you started, immediately feeling you said the wrong thing. Maybe her face was just like that, she always looked so stern? "As I'm sure you know, this is my first command, and your experience would be an enormous boon. I was wondering if you'd be willing to take on XO duties-"
Her face wasn't just like that, because she could smile. It didn't soften her features any, but she could.
"Kids, we all know that's why I was put on this pod, it's why I took the job. I'm not worried, though."
"You're not?"
"I've read your record, you've already done the hardest part. You don't can make calls and avoid freezing up under fire. Everything else, I can help a captain with. That…" She paused. "Can't teach that."
"Thank you, Specialist." She waved it off.
"Don't thank me yet, we got a lot of work to do. You taken a look at the crew records, right?"
"Yeah, Monty has at least."
"Then you know that the crew's almost as new as the ship, right?" she asked. "Getting people for a post like this isn't easy, most people who want it are in Star Force. Hell, I'm surprised you're not."
"I almost was, but Monty hated the idea," you confessed.
"You're not missing much. Point is, we have a lot of transit time ahead of us, and I suggest we spend as much of it as possible running exercises for the crew. And not just sims, you understand, I'm talking damage control, emergency aid, and manual drills. They're gonna need it."
"Agreed," you said, letting out a deep breath. "We should also make double-sure the downwellers are carrying their breathing gear, I notice they tend to forget…"
She nodded grimly.
"Take it from me, that's a mistake you only make once. One way or another," she confirmed. "I'll draft up a drill schedule. And, Captain, one last thing. I need your permission to take a firearm on-board."
"... oh?"
"Just an old regulation spacer pistol, deforming bullets, hull safe, and it'll be in standard arms lockup. Just… prefer to have a slugthrower as backup."
"Of course," you assured her, and with a gesture that wasn't
quite a salute she pushed back out into the hall. You didn't know how comfortable you were with her old slugthrower, exactly, but you needed to get on her good side. There was a reason you were nervous; you were appointed in charge of the program by Mission Control, sure, but somebody like Specialist Paz could get the crew to impeach you easy as breathing.
But with her on your side… a mission like this would be easy.
---
You didn't even enter the bridge until fifteen minutes before launch. You'd intended to, but you had so many other things to do that the formality had simply escaped you. The bridge was buried in the lowest deck of the hab sphere, with reinforced walls and the surrounding hallways acting as a sort of spaced armour. Even compared to the spartan bridge of
Mendel-5, it was small and cramped, the ceilings lower, machinery intruding even here.
And there was your chair, a crash-couch slightly raised above the others, four-point harness and the two banks of controls against the arms, built so it could pivot against g-forces and keep you eyeballs-in if the worst came. You sat back, leaning against the headrest to ensure it was in the proper position, then started running through the controls. You'd taken the con before on the
Mendel-5, but you just wanted to make sure all the buttons did the same thing. Around you, the first shift bridge crew started filtering in, Specialist Paz among them.
"Signals, patch us into flight control and signal the crew to prep for acceleration," you instructed. "Everyone in their couches or bunks, just in case one of our inertial sensors misbehaves." Make it clear right from the start how seriously you were taking their safety, on a mission this dangerous.
"And, uh, put the countdown on screen," I added. Somebody snickered, but from the smiles around the bridge I could tell it was appreciated. On the screen, an image of the ship from one of Luna Yard's cameras appeared, with giant white letters counting down from 18:49 flashing up. Along the side of the screen were the engineering readouts showing preparations, the magnetic coils warming up in the enormous particle accelerators and the turbines spooling up as you prepared to go off station power.
After technical checks and some brief conversation with Mission Control, you clicked through your comm controls until you were addressing the whole ship.
"This is Vehicle Commander Smith, we're T-minus 15 minutes to ignition," you said, then realised you were at a loss. This was more my speed, after all, and I was all too willing to take over. "And Vehicle Commander Smith. Now, we're on a tight schedule; we need to move before central command changes their mind and takes their rocket back. Get ready to move; once we clear initial engine tests, we want to clear our systems as soon as possible;
Yeager-2's already waiting, and I'd rather not miss our date."
I paused; this next part ought to be talking about the dangers ahead, and you'd be a lot better suited, right?
"Star Patrol is meant to go into the unknown, and together we'll go farther than anyone before. But we'll be doing it in the most dangerous region of known space short of hopping the Aquillian DMZ. It is imperative that we are on our guard, that the ship and crew is always ready for anything. Whatever happens out there, we must be ready."
Ooh, grim. Let me end things on a lighter note, shall we?
"But, hey, better than station posting, right? Now, everyone strap in, we're about to fly."
You were sure you came off incredibly cheesy. Of course you did. But it was your first post. It was allowed. Paz didn't seem too disappointed, really. Just a little.
"
Yeager-1, locks disengaged," the flight controller recited. On screen, the docking bridge and stabiliser arm both retracted away from the ship, pulling far back to clear the FTL ring. "You are clear to proceed to launch sector."
"Thank you, flight control. Helm, take us out on steam," you instructed. There was the slight jolt, and on screen hazy white cones leapt from around the rocket nozzles as the ship pushed off, propelled by superheated water boiled by the reactor.
Already, you were playing with power that would have cut Apollo's trip to the moon down to a quarter of the time, and inside, you felt five years old again. Imagining how it must have felt to be Gagarin, Armstrong, or Levchenko, watching the old videos of chemical rockets and counting along with flight control. Maybe it was having a Terran parent, but while a lot of people took living in space for granted, this never stopped being special to you.
The ship receded away from the perspective on the screen, switching to another camera as you began to rotate into position. The countdown ticked down, nearing that magic 00:00:00.
"Final checks. RSC control," you called.
"Go," Astrogation replied.
"Main reactor and containment."
"Go," from Engineering.
"Computer control and communication."
"Go."
"Inertial compensation."
"Go."
"Artificial magnetosphere."
"Go."
"Forward energy screens.'
"Go."
15
14
13
12
"Flight control?"
11
10
"
Yeager-1, you are go for engine start."
9
8
"Roger, control. Helm, prepare for primary antimatter ignition."
7
6
With the flick of a switch, the accelerators for the main engine were taken off standby mode, poised to fire, precisely aligned to converge just outside the engine bell.
5
The enormous magnetic fields projected around each engine focused, ready to harness the most energetic physical reaction in physics into a controlled cone.
4
"Primary ignition." On screen, the zooming camera caught a flash as the accelerators test-fired, the first antimatter annihilation. All green.
3
Locks released in the ready tank, water harvested from the rings of Saturn and Oort comets pressurised against a nozzle that would direct them into the atomic maelstrom.
2
Four long plumbs of ghostly glowing pink plasma, hydrogen and oxygen ripped from one another in an instant, roared into existence from the vapour straining against the nozzles. The ship was already moving, the stars scrolling behind it as the camera attempted to keep up.
1
"Hit it."
You were pushed gently back into the seat from the tiny amount of bleedthrough allowed by the inertial compensators as the antimatter torches ignited and
Yeager-1 streaked off. Within a minute, you'd gone too far for the camera to track, and you switched the main viewscreen to orbital plots. Acceleration tests nominal, the ship burnt in preparation for a trans-neptunian orbit, and then the FTL drive took you there in just a few minutes. The sun was just a particularly bright star, the Earth a pale blue dot, your home invisible.
It never stopped being humbling.
"Oh shit," somebody muttered behind you, staring at the screen. "I think I left the oven on."
---
Two Weeks Later…
Space was big. We have access to all the most advanced technological representations avaliable, I can simulate zooming all the way out from my mom's apartment on L5 to Alpha Centauri and back again and see how small and far apart everything seemed under the unfathomable distances, my brain still can't fully comprehend it. We're in a ship which could outrun light itself and give poor old Einstein a heart attack and space was still too big. If we pushed the reactor and expended a fair percentage of our antimatter we could make Alpha Centauri in just a few hours and it was
still not enough.
That was why the beacon networks existed. When humanity had first encountered it, we just blew as much of it up as we could, and then relied on seeding thousands of manned and unmanned fusion-powered antimatter tankers along our advances to act as relays for combat ships constantly running at those emergency speeds.
In retrospect, it was an impossibly irresponsible way of waging war, and it had only worked through dumb luck, humanity's excessive space industry, and our enemy's serious strategic and economic deficiencies. Now, the benefits of a network of stations whose links acted as boosts for the space-warping effects of FTL engines was plainly obvious, and we'd gone and carved apart the largest, oldest, and most well-developed network of those stations to pieces in five years of brutal war.
So getting out to the edge of the old Empire took a while. There were still gaps, places where we had to go off-road to the next beacon, crawling at a light year a day until you got to the next one. Most of the stations were still Aquillian in origin, looking like enormous and decaying gothic spires of gold and white marble, but many were of human design now.
One of the stations we emerged next to was built right next to its dead alien counterpart, both orbiting a beautiful trinary star system. The massive older station was torn open, still surrounded by pieces bound lightly by its gravity, the skeletal support structures exposed. One of the crew said it reminded them of St Andrews Cathedral and, when I looked up the pictures, there certainly was a resemblance.
Life as a Vehicle Commander was very different from the sleepy tactical post on a genetic survey ship. Even as Captain Čapek's XO on the back half of the mission, I still often felt somewhat superfluous, almost a burden sometimes. Like a vestigial organ, trying in vain to remind a crew of wide-eyed researchers of the readiness protocols. We did maybe three action drills in my two years on the ship.
Yeager-1 did three action drills on its first day. We performed damage control drills by flashlight, computerised battle simulations, and emergency first aid. We cycled every crewmember we could through the bridge and fought every enemy we had in our databanks. I wouldn't say we were a well-oiled machine by any means, but we came out on top more often than not. If it performed anything like this in real life, than
Yeager-1 was a surprisingly frightening vessel.
It wasn't without its teething troubles, though. Even triple-checked by the yards, we started finding problems within the first day, mostly with power junctions. There was a lot of electricity moving through this ship and a lot less space for wiring than most contemporaries. A week in, I emerged from my office and almost stepped on an orange-clad engineer tearing up the deck plating to chase down a loose cable. It wasn't too concerning; the travel times to the frontiers were long enough that they could act as shakedown cruises.
As we got farther and farther out, the stations got older, and somehow both grander and sadder. The Aquillian Empire was
ancient, and the version of it we fought was far from its peak. Some of these stations looked less like constructions and more like small irregular moons from a distance, their massive docks hollowed-out cities. One had broken apart, orbiting a shrouded, Venusian world, and become a beautiful ring system of glittering steel components. A tiny light showed a UAS drone scooping up components to be recycled.
We were three beacons from the end of the chain when the distress call arrived.
---
Your watch chimed as you were reviewing simulation performance, trying to determine what to work on next. You routed it through your desk and flipped on the intercom.
"Go," you asked.
"You're needed on the bridge. We've picked up a distress call just off the network, it reads Star Rescue. They said they're suffering an unknown power failure in a degrading orbit, they need a boost, and they recommend caution. They're the second ship to suffer the failure."
The hell were Star Rescue doing out this far? They stuck close to the beacons, and close to Earth. They didn't have the numbers to go much farther.
"Route us there immediately. How long?"
"They said they have four days before their orbit gets bad. We're 27 hours out."
Space was big.
"Alright. Take us to Alert 3 and get scanning, and keep talking to them. Get us all the information you can," you ordered. You had a day to prepare, that was more than long enough.
Apparently, the events were pretty straightforward. The Star Rescue ship
Holdfast had been on route to a training exercise with one of the Aquillian micro-breakaways at the edge of the DMZ when it had picked up a distress call from a hydrogen gas tanker which had suffered a power failure over the atmosphere of a nearby gas giant.
Holdfast had dropped in, connected to the ship and tried to jump-start its reactor, and when that was a bust they made the hard choice to evacuate the crew and boost away.
They didn't make it far before their reactor died too.
They needed a rescue, but they were in deep trouble. You needed more information.
===
Write In Questions. Each question's answer will give a point of Insight, which is a resource you can spend. You can only bank up to 3 Insight at a time, but asking more questions isn't bad. So this isn't really a vote; I'll answer everything that comes up.
Asking questions doesn't raise the Alert Level, so there's no reason not to ask them! See, game is improving!
Oh yeah, mechanics have changed a LOT, and are still being adjusted, but the core mechanics in the main documents still work. Next update will have ship profiles, character sheets, and the combat rules we'll be using if that comes up.
the joys of designing a game for the table and running it on a forum