Red Planet Girl, you're the one for me
I'll take you on a rocket ship to infinity
Faster than light, we'll travel the galaxy
Red Planet Girl, you're my destiny…
You woke up feeling like somebody had superglued your eyes shut, grasping ineffectually around for your watch until you could turn off your alarm. Johnny Rivers' Cosmic Dream kept singing happily as you knocked your watch to the floor and realised from the sound and timing of the impact that you'd somehow slept in 1g; you must have been
tired, to have done that without acclimation.
Explains why you felt like shit.
You rolled out of bed stiffly and pulled the gravity down to something civilised, then snatched up your watch and glanced out the window. It was stupid, not like you'd see an Aquillian pirate if one was out there, but the instinct to look was too strong. There was nothing but the funhouse distortion of stars rendered in bright blue from relativistic effects as the rocket roared through space.
Actually, not quite nothing. If you craned your head, you could just see the top of your support vessel's FTL ring, sharing the bubble to conserve power. Somewhere out there were pirates, waiting for a target just like that; hopefully your presence, and the short dash you'd be making between sensor coverage, would be enough to avoid a fight.
Still, even with the danger, life went on. You'd been in what you called the 'danger zone' for five days, the area where if you spotted the enemy on your sensors and called for help, the enemy would beat Star Force there. It'd be three more days until you made it to your launching off point, where you could regroup covered by a constellation of Orion guns. Eight days was long enough that the tension no longer felt real; it was just another week.
A cloaked warship could drop out of space atop you at any moment, yes, but today you had a doctor's appointment, and that had to come first.
---
"Okay, this'll sting, but just for a second," Doctor Samojlenko said, jamming your arm with some mysterious medical device and glancing at her medical scanner. "Hurm."
"Is that a good noise?" you asked, trying not to show how uncomfortable the pinch your arm felt. "Have I passed the blood test?"
"This is not a blood test, I am checking the integrity of your DNA. It is…" she paused.
"More retrovirals?" you asked, and she nodded grimly.
"I am sorry, but better to deal with this now then when it has become a host of interesting cancers," she said, inputting something on the computer screen next to her. "Not as intense as your last round, perhaps two-thirds dose. Now I will do the blood test."
Another device dipped near your arm and did something mildly painful, and you glanced away when you saw the red in the small tube at the top. The doctor pulled the vial loose and inserted it into one of the devices at the side of the room, punching in orders for various tests. As the computer hummed and figures scrolled across the nearby screen, she drew up her tablet.
"More or less in line with your last numbers, good. Vitamin D levels are better… how are you feeling with regard to your body?"
Oh, fun question. Still, your first checkup with a new medical tech, it'd have to come up. You briefly reminded me to bring up any complaints if I had any, but… nothing we'd not talked about.
"Good, I feel good," you said honestly. "Everything feels right."
"I'm glad. Still, we're coming up on time, so I think it's best if I replace your implant now," she said. "Same levels, don't you worry."
You turned to present your other arm, trying not to think about how the tube going up to your arm was removing a small capsule from under your skin to be replaced. That tube was a tiny chemical machine which synthesised selective estrogen receptor modulators from chemicals already floating around in your bloodstream, tailoring your endocrine system for exactly the outcomes you wanted, a careful androgyny which had taken a bit of experimentation and some computer modelling to achieve.
Two hundred years ago, it'd have been left up to genetics! You sometimes wondered how they survived back then, thrown haphazardly into whatever puberty came up whenever it happened. You'd have been more or less fine, as happy as you were with things as they were, but it'd be a nightmare for me, and our poor brother…
Then again, everything was different back then, before widespread genetic modification cleaned up some of the messier loose ends of evolution. That hypothetical person watching the moon landings back then wouldn't have been able to survive growing up on L5, their nerves unravelling and heart weakening under the lowered gravity, nevermind dealing with puberty or DNA degradation.
You didn't
get baseliners; and you couldn't imagine discovering you were one and not immediately rushing to the doctor to have them
fix it.
"That's it?"
"That's it, you're fit to resume duties," the doctor said, disposing of the tip of her medical tool into the sterilising recycler. "When are we next stopping?"
"Um, not until we make it to the next system," you explained. "It's not safe to stop here. Why?"
"Given the nature of our mission, I was hoping
Yaeger-A could get another organ printer online for us, in case-"
LEVEL TWO ALERT. LEVEL TWO ALERT.
"... of that." she finished, as you hopped off the examination table and grabbed for your tablet, already out the door as you flipped through sensor screens.
There, seven-tenths of a light year away, there was a shape, probably a vehicle, the energy levels consistent with a smaller warship at FTL. You stowed the tablet and jumped into the moonchute, pulling yourself up by the handles in long motions, catching the ones by the bridge level and swinging out into the airlock before opening the door.
You arrived just in time to see the shape vanish from sensors.
"A cloak," Specialist Kroshtnyr said immediately. "Must be." Evelyn rose from the captain's chair and nodded in agreement.
"Our Aquillian friends?" you asked.
"I imagine so. I doubt they spotted us before we spotted them, so I don't think they'll have friends," Evelyn explained. "They could be running, but…"
"Probably not?" you asked. She shrugged.
"This is why they use cloaks, it gives them time to decide. They'll measure us up and make a decision, but
Yeager-A is an incredibly tempting target, both in terms of potential material gains and in the damage it would do to the Union. If they pass us up, it's to get friends."
"But friends means splitting the loot," Specialist Struna pointed out. "How greedy do we think they are?"
Satkol
growled in response. Even without your universal translator on, you could tell exactly what she meant.
"Yeah, that's my guess," you concurred. "Time to contact?"
"Computer?" Evelyn asked, as she clearly didn't know off the top of her head. There was a crunching noise from the bank at the edge of the room.
"Presuming the vessel is a
Raptor-class light combat vehicle, estimated time to contact five to nine hours. This will vary with the depths of their cloak and their approach vector, but common tactics of such raiders make it likely to be one extreme or the other," the computer replied. It sounded cheery and agreeable. Why wasn't it like that with you?
"That's a hell of a window," you pointed out. Evelyn shrugged.
"That's space combat, get used to it." She said. "But it means we have time to prepare. Let's go over our options."
---
ALRIGHT. Mmmm, new systems smell. I'll be going over everything we need as we need it, but let's start by setting the scene and defining capabilities.
You are travelling at FTL right now, and so is your enemy. Your enemies, however, are doing so under a cloaking device; this slows them down, but makes them much harder to spot on sensors. You can still try, but you may need to expend a lot of resources doing so.
You are escorting Yeager-A, your resupply vessel. It is big, lumbering, poorly shielded, and armed with just a single little laser turret. It needs protecting! It is currently within about 1 kilometre of you, sharing an FTL bubble.
Cloaking devices work by hiding a vessel partially inside a separate universe formed by folding space in on itself. They can't stay cloaked forever; the heat will build up inside and they'll need to vent it eventually.
You're three days out from your destination and well beyond range for anyone to run and help in time.
Feel free to ask questions about your capabilities, circumstances, or tech, or make plans if you have any. It's okay if the plan is 'wait and see', though! In the meantime I'll update everything to the new systems.
