“This is not a drill,” Miliam announced with tension in her voice, her spine stiffening reflexively. The twins sucked in air through their teeth and immediately went to work, while Aoibhe gave Miliam an unamused look, thinking it was a joke or an effort to make them take the simulation seriously until she saw the look on her captain’s face.
“Shit, really?” Aoibhe asked, locking eyes with Miliam for confirmation.
“Yes, really! I thought pirates were supposed to be ultra-rare, so why are we running into them in our first system outside the GC?” Miliam asked her pilot, feelings of betrayal in her voice. Not directed towards Aoibhe, of course; more towards Lady Luck if anything.
“We don’t actually know if they’re pirates yet,” Min-ji corrected her softly. Miliam stared for a second before accepting the point, taking a deep breath to calm herself. It didn’t help. This wasn’t a simulation, it was reality. If that ship was hostile she could die. They all could. Maybe she hadn’t really processed that fact until now. Maybe she should have found a safer job, within GC space. The best paying ones would have involved travelling through international space anyway, though, and with the shape the Astrum Vitae was in, safe jobs would barely cover maintenance and wages, let alone repairs.
“Can they see us?” Miliam asked Eun-ji, who was currently in charge of their EMCM. The passive countermeasures weren’t much, but they did make the ship harder to spot, at least in theory. Active countermeasures would have a better chance, but much as Miliam would have preferred to use them at all times, they needed input and adjustment from a living operator and that put a strain on whoever was maintaining them.
“Not right now. They’re a little more than three light-minutes away and we’ve been hidden longer than that. They’d have had a better chance of spotting us if they came in further away, and they’d need to get closer to tag us with an active scan,” Eun-ji answered confidently, assuaging Miliam’s concerns somewhat.
“They’re moving away,” Min-ji reported a moment later. Miliam confirmed on her own screen that the other ship was accelerating in another direction. Looking at the chart of the system, it looked like it was heading for another planet entirely, closer to the edge of the sytem.
“Probably had the same idea as us but picked a different spot,” Aoibhe mused. “Pretty fortunate, actually, since this one was closer to them.”
“So we’re safe,” Miliam concluded, sighing in relief.
“Mmm…well, not necessarily. It’s possible they figured out we’re here somehow and plan to use that planet as cover to teleport around us and ambush us from behind,” Aoibhe pointed out with a mischievous grin. While the suggestion was made in jest, it wasn’t actually implausible.
“Not helping,” Miliam replied testily before trying to regain her composure. “How long will we need to wait before we know?”
“An hour and a half? That’s how long it would take them to get there and then for us to detect them activating their translocation drive,” Min-ji responded.
“…take us around to the other side of the planet, Aoibhe,” Miliam ordered after thinking it over. “I’m not sure how much it’ll help since wave drives are faster than light, but it’s better than nothing.”
“I really don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Aoibhe said in amusement as they began to move.
“What? Why not?” Miliam asked in confusion.
“Aye, well, maybe you should think about what happens when two things collide at the speed of light,” the pilot elaborated unhelpfully. Although she thought about it, all Miliam got out of the experience was a scowl. Technically ships didn’t move at the speed of light. She didn’t actually know what would happen if a bubble of space containing a ship intersected with another object at relativistic velocities.
“I know I’m going to feel like an idiot in about thirty seconds, but how does that work with a wave drive?” Miliam asked in a resignation, covering her eyes with her hands.
“Well, there’s a reason we smooth space back out to decelerate and don’t use out thrusters inside the bubble, you know? Because we’re stationary inside the bubble, and if we move inside it, the bubble doesn’t move with us,” Aoibhe further hinted, apparently determined to make Miliam arrive at the answer herself.
“So…if something else entered the bubble, and it was too big to fit inside, we’d…get pushed out of it?” she guessed. Her knowledge of physics was not nearly sufficient for this discussion.
“Aye. And we’d pass through the spacial distortion to the rear, too, which would crush us like a can.” Aoibhe continued to maneuver the ship around the gas giant they were orbiting. Miliam was suddenly a lot less comfortable with the fact they were moving using the wave drive.
“Wait. At no part of that did the speed of light actually come into play,” she pointed out after a few more moments of thought. It was the spacial distortion that did the damage, not the speed of the bubble.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Miliam, I want you to really think about it. If they approach us faster than light so we can’t see them coming, and we’re in orbit of a planet, then…?” Even though Aoibhe kept her eyes on her displays, Miliam could clearly detect the exasperation in the pilot’s voice.
“Then they…oh.” If they were moving faster than light, that meant they would be crossing the one light-second range typically employed in combat in less than a second. In other words, to maintain their advantage, they would have to approach a gas giant head-on while giving themselves only a few seconds to decelerate at best. Ships didn’t decelerate that fast. On their own approach, Aoibhe had begun to slow down at least a light-minute away from the gas giant.
Space was big, but this was one instance where three hundred thousand kilometers was actually a close call. To put things into perspective, that was less than the distance between Earth and Luna. The planet they were orbiting was closer to Jupiter in size, with somewhere around seven dozen satellites and the furthest of them being nearly twenty million kilometers away. That wasn’t even counting the smaller asteroids that could still give a ship a very bad day. Passing within a light-second of this unnamed planet still carried an incredibly low risk of actually hitting anything directly, of course, but if the Astrum Vitae managed to be directly between the oncoming ship and the planet, they’d have to pass even closer, and no one was crazy enough to risk that when they had less than a second to react and no ability to dodge.
“Right. That would be suicidally stupid,” Miliam said with a groan. “I’m probably just being paranoid anyway, but at least we’ll probably be able to see them coming.”
Maybe it was a good thing this happened, though. This encounter was giving Miliam exposure to something she hadn’t experienced in the simulations: the time scale that void combat took place in typically. It could take hours for two ships to reach each other across a stay system, even surpassing the speed of light. The information lag was frustrating, to boot. She wasn’t waiting an hour and a half to reach something. She was waiting that long to even find out if she was in danger in the first place.
Minutes dragged on as Miliam mostly just stared at her displays, wishing she could cast her eyes across the star system. Even with literal magic at her fingertips there was little she could do to speed things up. Distance, duration, precision. Those were the three things that drastically increased the cost and difficulty of any spell. Any method of gathering information half a star system away necessarily involved all three. Reaching across hundreds of millions of kilometers to figure out what a ship only one hundred meters long was doing for any amount of time rapidly became more expensive than even activating the translocation, which saved a significant amount of power by only being in use for a fraction of a second.
If nothing else, this was giving Miliam an excellent understanding of what the daily life of a naval officer was like.
“At least we have a pretty view,” Eun-ji commented suddenly, a couple dozen minutes into their vigil. Miliam looked over at the dokkaebi woman and followed her gaze to the window, where Aoibhe had rotated the ship to face the gas giant nearby. When Miliam had ordered for the ship to be moved, they’d ended up on the side of the planet facing the local star, giving everyone on the bridge an excellent look at it in the light of day. It was primarily blue like Neptune, but its atmosphere was stormy, resulting in streaks of other colors and shades.
All Miliam could manage was an awed “Wow.” She was reminded again why she’d chosen to keep the ship instead of cashing out for a cushy retirement. It was for sights like this. The Astrum Vitae was floating hundreds of millions of kilometers away from this blue Jupiter, but it still loomed large in the forward window just like Earth did from the surface of Luna. One of the closer moons was passing in front of the planet, casting its shadow upon the surface, amounting to little more than a small circle Miliam could barely even identify.
As she stared at the cloudy blue orb in the distance, Miliam wondered to herself what a typical captain would be doing right now. Would they dismiss the crew on the assumption they were safe? They might decide they’d likely detect any attack before it arrived at least. Or would remaining on alert be the most common choice? It might be that she was being overly cautious, but she could just as easily have worried her way into the correct course of action.
There was a constant urge to ask Min-ji if anything new had popped up on sensors, but that would be like a child asking their parents if they were their yet on a road trip. Distracting her sensor tech with inane and repetitive questions would be the opposite of productivity in Miliam’s opinion. Her mind wandered back to when she’d accused Aoibhe of making her captain because it was the least important job on the ship. That hadn’t actually been far from the truth. While Miliam had to make decisions here and there, the majority of the actual work was done by the others.
What did it even mean to be captain? Was it mostly just paperwork, which she hadn’t exactly been doing, and telling people where to go and when to do it? Was the bulk of her job just deciding which contracts to take and then sitting around while the crew completed them? One thing was certain: all this waiting around was giving Miliam far too much time for introspection and she didn’t like it. She nearly burst from her seat in joy when she realized several minutes had passed beyond the estimate Min-ji had given for when they’d detect it if that other ship used its translocation drive.
“Min-ji, what’s the verdict?” she asked in a tightly controlled voice.
“Looks like we’re clear,” answered Min-ji. Miliam nearly sighed as the tension fled her body.
“Alright, thanks. Good work everyone. Min-ji, you’ve got watch for another couple of hours. Eun-ji, I’d like you to take first watch after our next jump.” Miliam almost advised them to stagger their sleep schedules before remembering dokkaebi had a natural twenty-hour circadian rhythm. As they needed only five hours of sleep, they could both be awake right through Eun-ji’s next shift and still have time to get a full night’s rest before reporting to the bridge for the following jump.
“I dunno cap’n, they might just be making the jump from further away from the planet. Can we really be sure?” Aoibhe asked with a shit-eating grin. Miliam’s eye began to twitch as she glared at the pilot.
“Would you like to take the rest of this shift and the next two after it and find out?” she asked in an overly-sweet voice, as if she were offering a boon.
“Worth it.”