It took slightly over a week to reach the system Northeast Gate Station was based in. Unlike Kappa Ceti, this system hadn’t even had a name in Miliam’s time. Nowadays it was Heracles’ Rest, presumably because it was part of the constellation named after the same legendary figure. That actually meant that the Astrum Vitae had covered a bit over half of its trip to Delta Boötis, although the last leg would require twice as many jumps owing to the need to halve their length.
Obviously it would also be the most dangerous segment. Northeast Gate Station was placed where it was just barely within response range of the closest fleet, as were all the Eight Gates. That meant the moment they left the system they were outside the zone where protection could be guaranteed by the Gaian Collective. Patrols were done a certain distance past that point, varying depending on if any independent colonies were close to the border, but it was up to luck if a patrol would happen upon a ship in distress past this point.
Pirates weren’t the only danger, although they were certainly the one at the top of Miliam’s mind. There were unknown things in deep space that occasionally wandered into a system, most of which left no survivors. Equipment malfunctions were always a threat, of course, and it was possible for a poorly situated jump to land a ship directly in the path of an object large enough to overcome its barriers but small enough that its gravity wouldn’t trip the fail safes designed to prevent that sort of thing.
All of those possibilities were rare, though, and the most likely case was that Miliam and her crew would simply encounter nothing at all. Space was big and it was empty. People only tended to run into problems frequently in war time, when enemy nations were in the business of raiding, and there hadn’t been a war in this part of space in hundreds of GC years. After all, what did anyone gain by warring? There were more systems unoccupied than anyone could defend, forming buffer zones dozens of light years across between any two countries.
As the Astrum Vitae neared Northeast Gate Station, Miliam saw that the design was different than that of West Gate. There was a large ring around the outside with docking arms branching off of it, but instead of a cylinder through the center, there was a dome. The station seemed to have a much larger circumference than the previous one she’d seen, which allowed it to accommodate an entire forest in its center.
“Wow,” Miliam said unconsciously, taking in the bright green jewel floating in space before her ship. Aoibhe took a peak over her shoulder and smirked at the expression on Miliam’s face.
“That’s a fay designed station. This system was closest to fay space, so it was built like a fay space colony. No habitable planets in this system, so it’s designed to be entirely self-sufficient. One side is an orchard and the other is pure farmland,” Aoibhe explained, overtly proud of what her people had accomplished. The station was essentially a void-born arcology, a megastructure that Miliam never thought could exist in her previous life.
“Are all fay stations like that?” she asked, eyes still locked onto the space station. The dome on the side facing them glittered green in the starlight, only growing more beautiful as the Astrum Vitae approached it.
“Most worlds are too heavy for us, so we got very good at building our own living spaces,” the fay pilot answered. So, yes. This station was a port of entry, but what would the others look like? The ones designed purely for habitation, meant to hold far more people? Miliam was starting to realize the Gaian Collective might be home to more wonders than she’d been able to imagine.
“We’re receiving a hail from flight control,” the dokkaebi twin on comms announced. Miliam wasn’t even going to try guessing which woman it was until her hat plan was implemented. This being a routine interaction, Miliam didn’t really need to talk to them herself.
“Tell them we’re passing through and request a berth, please,” Miliam instructed her comms officer. With that order given, Miliam thought about their pending excursion. Strictly speaking they didn’t need to stop at the station, as they had enough supplies for the two week round trip to Delta Boötis and back already, but the Astrum Vitae didn’t have a clothing fabber. If they didn’t take the opportunity to use Northeast Gate Station’s fabbers, it wasn’t getting done until they returned.
They were stuck here for nearly a day while the capacitors recharged anyway.
The entire crew would be disembarking for this, even Engineer. Although Miliam wasn’t going to require the use of uniforms, she wanted to get them made for everyone just in case they ever needed them. Dress uniforms, essentially. Miliam had asked Abigail if she wanted to accompany them, too, but the offer had been declined. That said, she would still be leaving the ship to see a friend while they were here. Since that meant they wouldn’t be leaving a non-crew member alone on the ship, Miliam was a bit relieved, even if it was unlikely Abigail would do anything suspicious.
Arguably it was a bad idea to leave the ship unattended in the first place, but as a portal of entry and exit in to the GC, Northeast Gate Station had particularly stringent security. It wasn’t so much that no one would ever try as it was that no one would ever succeed.
Once the ship was docked, Miliam hopped to her feet and clapped her hands. “Alright everyone, go ahead and-” Miliam stopped midsentence when she realized she hadn’t turned the ship-wide comms on and pushed the button. “Ahem. Alright everyone, go ahead and meet me at the airlock when you’re done with your post-flight checks!”
She waited for everyone to acknowledge what she’d said before leaving, soon tailed by Tessa, who didn’t actually have any checks to do because of the current state of their weapon systems.
“So captain what kind of hats can we get? And how much can we customize them? Can I get something fluffy or with a really wide brim or will you give us a base we have to use? Is it gonna have an emblem for the ship on it? Wait does this ship even have an emblem?” Having had a few days of minor interactions with the talkative woman at this point, Miliam wasn’t quite as stunned by the torrent of words coming from her mouth and just skipped straight to answering.
“I’ll pick a design and tell you what part you can change. And there isn’t an emblem yet, but I have an idea for one,” Miliam answered absentmindedly as she descended the stairs. She couldn’t wait to get the elevator repaired. These stairs sucked.
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As the others trickled in over the next few minutes, beginning with the twins and ending with Engineer, whose diagnostics were the most extensive, Miliam looked up a public map of the station and pretended to be part of a conversation with Tessa. As rude as that sounded, she’d learned quickly that Tessa didn’t want to talk as much as she had to talk, and didn’t particularly care if anyone was listening. Once Abigail joined, Miliam cycled the airlock.
“So, like I told Tessa, I’ll find a base for everyone to customize. We’ll all change the same part so the look is consistent. Is that fine with everyone?” A chorus of nods and affirmation followed, save from Abigail, to whom it didn’t apply. The outer door opened and Miliam led the group into the terminal, glancing at her grimoire again. “…Aoibhe, can you lead the way? I don’t know how to read this map.”
With a sigh, Aoibhe accepted Miliam’s grimoire and glanced at the map. “Come on, it’s not far.” The fay woman started walking and Miliam followed in her wake with the others, still trying to figure out the map she had found. It didn’t use the same notation she was familiar with and she couldn’t find the docking arm they were on. Even after finding and consulting the key, she wasn’t able to find her own location, let alone a clothing fabber.
They arrived at the nearest one before Miliam figured it out. She’d taught herself magic but been defeated by a map.
Dispirited, she told the other to give her a moment and found an open booth, calling up a selection of hats to choose from. After looking through the options, she settled on something that reminded her of the hats used by the United States military minus the flared top. It was almost a cross between one of those hats and a baseball cap, with a rigid brim at the front and a profile like a cylinder instead of a dome.
From there, Miliam made it black, added a green, ten pointed star with the name of her ship below it, curved along the bottom of a circle surrounding the emblem. Then she added a stripe and placed it midway down, so that the emblem sat in the center of it at the front, and made it orange for herself to match her eyes. Since the stripe was thick enough to see at a distance and wrapped all the way around, it would make it easy to tell who was who from across the bridge. Satisfied, she printed off the hat and placed it on her head, returning to the others.
“It’s nothing fancy, but how does it look? I think the stripe should make be easy to see as long as no one picks a dark color,” she said to the crew when she emerged.
“Aye, that’d work,” Aoibhe said, indifferent. “I’ll add it as a temporary template so everyone can get one from the other booths.”
“I think I’ll make mine purple,” one of the twins said.
“I’ll go with green,” added the other. Miliam still didn’t know which was which right now.
“Blue,” was all Engineer said.
“And I’ll make mine red. Pick a booth and you’ll find the design under temporary. Engineer, we’ll pay for yours from the ship’s business account,” Aoibhe said as she stepped back out. The group dispersed into several booths to pick the shade they would use on their hats. Miliam, the only one that had one already, waited outside, wondering why Tessa had been uncharacteristically silent just then.
A couple of minutes later everyone filed back out with their new hats and Miliam got her answer when she saw what Tessa was wearing: a hat to Miliam’s exact specifications, but with seven colors in the stripe making a full rainbow. Knowing what the rainbow was associated with in human culture- hundreds of years ago, anyway- but also that Tessa was an elf, Miliam wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a gag.
“…Really?” Aoibhe questioned as she caught a glimpse of Tessa.
“You never said it had to be one color, so I chose all of them! Already made the hat, no takebacks,” Tessa replied, clutching the hat protectively. Miliam being her boss, she could probably make Tessa pick one color and stick with it, but honestly, it wasn’t that big of a deal.
“It’s fine Aoibhe, it’s not like we even have a dress code,” Miliam said in resignation. Then she realized she had Tessa and two admitted pranksters on her crew and regretted admitting to that. Maybe if she didn’t draw any attention to it no one would notice. “I do want to get uniforms made for special occasions but that’s a bit more complicated. Should I just pick a premade design or do we have someone that could design one?”
Expecting no one to answer, Miliam was surprised when Engineer silently raised a hand.
“…you know how to design clothes?” she asked the enigmatic dragonewt, who nodded twice and turned tail to get to work. “Huh. I guess I’ll just let them cook. Okay, Eun-ji, Min-ji, which hat is whose?”
“The purple one is Eun-ji’s,” said the twin that was wearing a green striped hat, who was presumably Min-ji.
“Great, thanks. So, let’s give Engineer a few minutes to design us a uniform, get them printed, and then head back. And…let’s pick up a deck of cards on the way. We don’t need anyone on watch while we’re here, so let’s have a game night.”
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Codex Entry: Quantum Entanglement Communicators
Communicating over stellar distances is a conundrum that all space faring societies run into at some point. Signals cannot be sent at speeds faster than light because the further the signal gets from its source, the more mana is required to maintain its speed. Creating wormholes to pass signals through faces a similar problem, as even holding one open for a few seconds can be incredibly costly, which is part of the reason why translocation drives only connect two points in space for the shortest time achievable.
Currently there is only one workaround for this issue, and that is quantum entanglement communicators or QECs. This form of communication is difficult because of quantum mechanics, which dictate that the mere act of observing a particle alters it. Scientific methods of creating entangled pairs exist, but magic is required to use them for communications.
Creating a QEC is one of the most difficult and complex processes known to modern magic. Only a few people in any given nation are capable of carrying it out, and it is passed down from master to apprentice simply because so few people can even learn it that the number of apprentices available is limited. The primary challenge is isolating an individual atom and its entangled twin, but the system used to prevent observation from affecting each particle is nearly as difficult. Once completed, it is possible for one QEC to observe its housed particle while the other acts on its own, essentially creating a single channel for the transfer of information.
Once a pair of QECs has been made it essentially has no shelf life barring unforeseen accidents, but a limited number are made a year, so access is highly limited. Their primary use is for defense: hidden sensor stations linked to their sector’s flagship allow fleets to react near-instantly to hostile incursions or even smugglers and pirates within their domain. Flagships are further linked to central fleet command for coordination. Communications grids between colonies are another official use; the outermost colonies are linked to a colony with a hub, and these hubs are linked to further hubs up the chain in a hierarchy utilizing the fewest QECs possible.
In some nations, a limited number of QECs are sold to the private sector each year and these are almost universally used for financial purposes. Synching bank accounts instantly using QECs is much more convenient and allows a person to make a purchase in any linked system immediately. Banks without this ability or with insufficient QECs maintain branches with unconnected accounts- money exists only in the system it is deposited into until an affiliated courier processes a transfer, which is much less convenient but equally secure.