by Joshua Guess
Jax was passive-aggressive. Let me tell you, there’s nothing in the universe more annoying than an artificial voice in your head just sighing at you all the time. Nothing.
Thankfully, Jax stuck to text-only responses while I finished my prep.
Ready for NIC-to-ship integration.
Go ahead, I thought loudly. Jax generally needed some sort of mental force on my part for a direct command to work. It was the only way to filter out all the background thoughts and other brain activity.
I became peripherally aware of the process as Jax began it, familiar enough after years of flying that the swift addition of streams of information from the ship barely registered on my conscious mind.
“I’m ready,” the speaker in my helmet said in a decent facsimile of my voice.
“Raising the ship,” one of the techs said.
The floor split in the middle here much as it had back on Ceres, though this bay was much smaller since it was only meant for a single ship. My ride rose up from its partially-hidden alcove in the floor, and I barely recognized it.
The Valkyrie didn’t look anything like it had when I named it. The mechanics had added latch points to allow her to dock with the Halo, of course, but the changes went way beyond that. A solid cuff nearly five meters long gripped the middle of the ship, which was the collection of cubesats—small satellites I would drop off at Earth—nestled into a single mass. Two thick protrusions jutted out from the sides at the very back near the engines, making the Valkyrie look a little like an old rocket. I assumed these were for aerodynamics in case I skimmed an atmosphere during the trip. My mission would be bringing me pretty close to Earth, at least in terms of the hugeness of space.
I stepped toward the open pod, but a hand caught my upper arm. I turned to see Jordan, who was trying very hard to show a brave face. He leaned in close to the front of my helmet, face distorted by the thin liquid covering my eyes. Whatever teary goodbye I might have expected, he managed to surprise me.
“Be ready for anything,” Jordan said, so faintly the microphone on the side of my helmet barely caught it. The worried look on his face took on new context, and for the first time I felt genuine worry that perhaps the Home Run wasn’t such a good idea.
Really not the best time for that burst of realization, but that’s life for you.
I nodded to Jordan and entered the pod, avoiding the new mechanical linkages added since the last time I’d seen her. I maneuvered the bulky survival gear around the obstacles to rest on my hands and knees.
Do it, I sent to Jax.
The survival rig came to life around my body, the heavy boots, gauntlets, shoulder guards, and chest plates moving smoothly across me. The closest thing I could compare it to was something one of the old armored superheroes from the days when comic books existed, though no billionaire playboy ever had technology as advanced as this in real life.
My entire body was covered in a thin, flexible metal and ceramic suit within seconds. It would serve to protect me from radiation during the spacewalk I’d have to take later, but the platform was adaptable to almost any circumstances I might face. The protection was total, meaning I didn’t even feel it when the pod began to fill with smart gel.
Soon I floated in place, filling most of the available space in the pod. I had Jax position the mechanical controls to just forward of my right shoulder, then had the suit lock into the pod to keep me from slamming forward. Not my usual way of doing things, but essentially swimming the whole time on this trip wasn’t ideal.
“Clear the deck,” I sent through the local com channel, signaling my readiness to depart. The actual deck didn’t need to be empty, of course. The phrase was a holdover from an older time. I watched the video feeds from the hangar Jax piped into my visual cortex to make sure I didn’t accidentally kill a bunch of people when I took off.
Valkyrie was sealed inside a mobile shell within seconds, the front of which mated with the airlock perfectly. Jax pinged me for final readiness, and I assented.
The background data jumped to the front of my perception as Jax fully aligned the Valkyrie’s systems with my senses. I was used to it, but that didn’t mean the experience didn’t continue to amaze me. It’s tough to explain what it feels like to become a starship, to be able to see in a wide spectrum thanks to your sensor arrays, or to use your gravity drive to feel the fabric of space/time like a fine silk sheet between your fingers.
Honestly, it was pretty fucking great.
“Godspeed, Mister Cori,” came Kitur’s voice through Jax.
Then I launched.
Six
The trip to the Halo was routine. All traffic had been halted for an hour in deference to my mission, so I spent the minutes en route listening to an audiobook. A favorite of mine; The Martian by Andy Weir. I paused the playback when the sensors told me I was five hundred meters from the Halo, and focused on docking.
I could almost feel Jax coiled in the back of my head, ready to leap into control of the ship. He didn’t actually say anything, which might have been better, instead choosing to silently let me know he was there in case I screwed up badly.
I didn’t. I mean, come on, it’s a docking procedure. There’s a reason no great sagas have been written about the act. I slowed the ship within tolerance, used the maneuvering thrusters to rotate Valkyrie into proper alignment, and locked into the Halo without so much as a shimmy upon contact.
Five seconds later, the universe went crazy.
It was an expected sort of insanity, but I stand firm that it’s impossible to ever get used to the sight of the stars bending and stretching around you. I’ve seen a lot of weird shit, but warp travel never gets any less so.
Normally it would take considerably longer than a day to traverse the twenty or so light years to Earth, but that was where the Halo came in. Much of our technology came from reverse engineering that of much more advanced species. Some we trade with, some from dogfights we managed to not only win but take home salvage from. The Halo was neither; it was a gift.
The species who had given us the technology did so on the promise we’d use it to eventually kick the crap out of the Gaethe, the proper name of the invaders squatting on Earth. Our benefactors, a race whose bodies were composite semi-solid colonies who spoke in a language based on flashes of light, didn’t have a name we could easily use. In a case of miscommunication gone right, they had taken our use of the word ‘friend’ when referring to them as an English word for their species. So they became the Friendly.
The Friendly didn’t actually give us the Halo technology. The exotic materials needed to make it work were way beyond even our technical expertise. Instead they designed and manufactured them for us as needed, which cut a month long trip into a single day. Whether intentional or simply as a necessary part of their function, Halos burned out after about a hundred light years of travel. The one I was using had made a previous Home Run, which meant this was its last round trip.
Warp mechanics being what they are, I had literally nothing to do while the bubble of intense gravitational distortion whisked me toward the home world I’d never seen.
I listened to my audiobook some more.
What? It’s not like I could steer the thing. That’s not how warp bubbles work. In fact, other than the thin armor wrapped around my body, I couldn’t feel much. Warp travel itself involves no propellant or movement by the ship within the bubble. You can move under thrust while traveling in a warp bubble if you needed to emerge from warp already at speed, but that was uncommon.
There was no sense of acceleration as I moved a couple thousand times the speed of light, because space itself was what was moving. My ship and the Halo it was locked into were a sort of cosmic surfboard riding a wave of its own creation.
I’m vastly oversimplifying it, but that’s because I only know the broad strokes. Technology is way past the point where a pilot like me has the ability to fix his ship, so the need to understand the graduate-level physics involved is nil.
Jax harrumphed at me from the back of my mind enough that after I took a nap, I went over the mission specs one last time. I had them cold, but I’d never get a moment of peace from my NIC if I didn’t give in to his demands and follow protocol. Terrorist.
Jax projected the relevant data over my visual field, detailing the trip toward Sol and the brief stop I would make in orbit around Earth. All standard, nothing new, but I read through it meticulously anyway. Jax would know if I didn’t, after all. Being integrated with my brain and nervous system ensured that.
Proximity alert.
The text appeared in the upper right corner of my virtual screen. For a moment I thought it might be a Gaethe ship, then dismissed the idea. It was just Jax letting me know we were rapidly approaching the Solar System. A thrill of excitement moved through me. The warning had been set to let me know when we were an hour away.
Quickly finishing the mission spec sheet, I went through the long list of double-checks needed to go from piggybacking the Halo to using Valkyrie’s own engines and systems for the near future. It was a pantomime at best; Jax was my interface with the ship, and part of his job was constantly monitoring those systems at nanosecond intervals.
The board was green, and when the moment came I was slightly underwhelmed.
The Halo dropped its warp bubble just past the orbit of Pluto. As predicted, the only noticeable change was the sudden clarity of the universe around me. Back in the first days of warp travel, the gravitational distortion around the ship had a bad habit of picking up debris as it bent space, a sort of scoop that kept a thin film of particles and dust just at the edge of the bubble. When you stopped, those bits would flare out in energetic bursts, firing at whatever was in front of you like the coolest shotgun in existence.
That was no longer the case. Field modulation pushed the random space junk around and away, as it was in front of my eyes at that moment.
Sol burned brightly, easily picked out in the field of stars ahead. It didn’t appear much larger than any other star in the sky from this distance, but without the filtering from the sensor array it would have been impossible to look at for more than a few seconds. I stared at it for more than a minute before Jax cleared his digital throat and reminded me in a gently chiding voice that we had work to do.
***
Entertainment wasn’t the only thing the people of Earth sent along on the Ceres project. Almost the entirety of human experience went with us. Every piece of data and history that could be digitized was, and as a pilot I was required to learn a lot about the history of space travel. It certainly factored into the work I did, both as a means of understanding how far we’ve come and what dangers we face, but also to give context on what the technology at my fingertips was capable of doing.
Back during the century or so of manned and unmanned space exploration from the middle of the twentieth to the middle of the twenty-first century, people sent out lots of probes and ships. It took years for some probes to reach other bodies in the Solar system because of the gravity of the sun. The plane of the ecliptic, that slightly curving plate created by the mass of the local star pressing into the fabric of space/time, acted to limit how spacecraft could move.
My ship? Not so much. Fuel limitations and inertia aren’t really a problem.
Valkyrie was too small to have its own interstellar drive, which was fine. Warp on that scale was highly visible to anyone looking for it, and the Gaethe were always looking. The outer edge of Pluto’s orbit was farther than their sensors could easily read, so the Halo was safe.
Instead of falling in a spiral along the disc that defined the Solar system, I engaged the gravity drive. Manipulating it allowed me several options.
I could use the standard engines, which were a plasma drive that could propel the ship at a truly ridiculous speed for the trip in, while the g-forces on my body were made tolerable by precise shifts in my local gravity.
I decided against that option, because while the tiny fusion reactor powering the ship would run for a month on the fuel it had, the plasma drive needed reactants I couldn’t replace. I didn’t pick what my fellow pilots lovingly called ‘the catapult’, either, because it would take too long. Doing it that way meant shooting over the entire ecliptic in an arc, and reentering close to my destination.
Instead I chose option three, which is warp travel of a different sort. Essentially it involved creating a microscopic warp lane. Rather than twisting up space itself and using enough power to be visible to anyone in the system, this method bent a thin segment of space into what essentially became a tether connecting me to the large gravity well of my choice.
Jax and I plotted a course that would allow me to fall at ever-increasing speeds toward a planet here, a moon there, and using the gravity wells of our targets to get a nice slingshot toward the next. Think of it like constantly rolling down a hill only to drastically speed up when you suddenly hit a tight curve that pushes you in a new direction.
It was how I preferred to move inside an unknown and potentially dangerous system. The only difference between doing it here was that I knew for sure there were enemies who would kill me on sight.
As my ship did a pretty good impression of a pinball bouncing at increasing speeds between worlds, the disc of Sol grew noticeably from moment to moment. I let Jax worry about the disturbing fraction of the speed of light we were now moving at and let myself enjoy the view.
The sensors saw it long before I did, and they told me where to look.
It was there, the faintest smudge of color against the ebony backdrop of night. What Carl Sagan famously called the pale blue dot; Earth. Sagan had called it the only home we’ve ever known, but for me it was the opposite. Rapidly growing in my vision was the home I had never known. Not really.
Though it was impossible to tell inside the liquid-filled helmet, I wept.
For once Jax said nothing, simply allowing me a moment to bask in the beauty of the sphere coming into sharp focus before me. I was aware of everything in the way you’re aware of the wind and the feel of solid ground beneath your feet. I knew the ship was rapidly shedding momentum as Jax flickered new gravity fields toward distant objects, leeching the speed from us.
None of those expanded senses mattered to me more than my sight. Not at that moment. I didn’t distinguish between seeing the feed in my head via external cameras and seeing it with my own eyes. It was all the same to me, no less glorious for those added steps.
We were moving at more reasonable speeds when we crossed the boundary of Luna’s orbit. The moon was nowhere to be seen, currently on the other side of the planet. Another warning message pinged in my head, the text on the screen a reminder that it was almost time to use the manual release I’d been avoiding bumping into for the last day. It was a basic solution to a complex problem, namely the fact that it was easier to jettison the cargo wrapped around the Val with a mechanical switch than to add a complicated electrical system to do the job.
When the green light flashed across my vision, I gladly pushed the lever. A series of rapid, heavy thunks sounded through the hull as the small charges holding the mass of tiny cubesats ignited, sending them away from the Valkyrie and on to a spot where their minimal maneuvering packages wouldn’t be noticeable. With luck they would spread evenly across the orbit the scientists back home had picked for them, and wouldn’t be detected or destroyed by the Gaethe before they could gather solid data.
I took whatever the breathable-liquid version of a deep inhalation is called and steeled myself. I forced my brain to see the gorgeous planet below as just another mission. I clenched my jaw and put my mind on what came next. It was something no pilot making the Home Run had ever done before.
Seven
Space is big.
I know that sounds like an obvious statement, but stick with me. I’ve endured years of training and education to broaden my understanding of just how vast the black is. Nothing emphasizes how small you are like floating as nothing more th
an a speck against the backdrop of a planet.
Unless you’re doing it without a ship. Then the whole thing makes you feel a hundred times smaller.
The Valkyrie wasn’t going anywhere. I knew it logically. It was in the grip of normal physics just as I was, which meant that without some external influence the slow circular fall to Earth below would remain stable and unchanging. The same was true of my target, a mere dozen meters away. The only actual moving part was me.
I’ve done my share of extravehicular activity, but never like this. The astronauts of old earth were much more brave and suicidal. Those people did this kind of crap all the time. Every time I’ve drained my pod of life support and left my ship, it’s either been because I landed it on some larger body or because I needed to monkey around on the ship itself.
Floating in naked space with a tether trailing behind isn’t on my list of things to ever do again.
I didn’t have to glance over my shoulder to look back at my ship. Val was still being run by Jax, as was my survival suit. And just as the ship was festooned with sensors, so was the suit. A video feed was ported directly into my brain at the first hint I might want to look back.
There wasn’t much to see. Once the satellite package had been deployed, the skin of the Val had gone back to being a beautiful mass of unbroken space. The exterior went dead black for the most part, but speckled with points of dim light to approximate the locations of stars based on what direction it was being viewed from. Space camouflage, brought to you by the various nerds on Ceres who thought up inventive ways for me not to die horribly.
My target was similarly disguised, though from where I was I could make out its shape well enough.