With the Shipmaster - Carbon now, Alex supposed - gone, and nothing to do but sit in a dim room while pinned to the mediboard, listening to his body breathe without his input... Alex didn’t find sleep quickly. Presumably whatever the crash protocols injected him with was still in his system, keeping him functional. Which if there were pirates or an actual crash, would be useful. Right now, it was keeping him staring at the ceiling for hours, only able to turn his eye far enough to see the clock on the wall. When he did finally find sleep, the dream came almost immediately.
He pushed himself up out the the cockpit of the simulator, blinking in the bright lights of the sim bay as the shroud retracted from his pod. He had a stupid sort of grin on his face, an enthusiasm that permeated the whole of his being. “If that’s what the next generation of Waverider drives is going... I can’t wait to get my hands on the real thing.”
There was a little hiccup in his dream here. Something interjected a curious sense of superiority, maybe smug satisfaction. There was a word for it, he just couldn’t remember. It wasn’t his word.
“I think everybody is interested in that right now, Pilot Sorenson.” Ed Brzezinski reached down and helped him up out of the sim pod. A massive, bald man who was his trainer in the scoutship program, an old pro who’d been out in the black a dozen times. Ed had never called him Pilot Sorenson.
“Are they going to have these ready for my ship?” He was eager to know when he would finally get his assignment. He had spent years getting ready for this assignment, even doing three months at a Navy boot camp for zero-g training. They should have put him on one by now. “You know I’ve been getting kind of... restless seeing other scouts deploy while I get held back again and again. But if the trade off was the new engines? I guess the wait will have been worth it.”
“As a matter of fact, they will. Your charge will be ready in just about another month.” Ed looked... Alex wasn’t sure. Sad, tense, hopeful and worried, all at the same time, boiling just below the surface. He had never seen Ed as anything less than confident, so quick with a smile he could have been an actor playing a role the entire time Alex had known him. There was more happening than he was letting on.
Another hitch, a flicker of an emotion that wasn’t his, this time pleased at his insight into someone else’s emotions.
“That’s great! Is it new? Will I get to name it?” First pilot always got to name a new ship. He felt like a kid in a candy store at the prospect, his mind running down the top three names he had prepped-
Ed cleared his throat, bringing Alex out of his reverie. “No, it’s already named.”
“I guess that makes sense.” It wasn’t unusual for ships with the first run of new technology to already be named, particularly when it came to engines. Everybody involved wanted their fingerprints on it. “What’s it called?”
“Kshlav’o. Bridge builder.”
“I don’t recognize that language.”
“It’s Tsla’o.” Ed paused, hesitated, glancing around before continuing with an unusual amount of caution in his voice. “Your engineer is going to be one of theirs. A Lan, a Shipmaster.”
“Tsla’o? They’re putting me on a ship with a fucking dog?” His voice practically cracked, starting to make a scene in the quiet hum of the sim bay. He didn’t have any particular problems with the Tsla’o. Hadn’t even met any. That didn’t mean he wanted to have to deal with one of them, let alone get stuck with one in a scoutship.
Raw, utterly visceral disappointment.
“Watch your mouth.” Ed’s face twisted with anger for a moment before he caught himself and his voice dropped an octave, eyes gleaming with a hard edge as he leaned in to Alex. “Come to my office. You need to see something.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Alex hadn’t thought he’d said anything particularly bad. Nothing he didn’t hear a dozen times a week out of other pilots, but given the way that people moved out of Ed’s way, he had fucked up pretty impressively. Goodbye future opportunities. Ed slapped the control panel, closing the door behind Alex and dropped himself into his desk chair without saying a word. Alex sat silently across from him with the hope that he might be able to salvage his career as a pilot still just barely kindled in his heart.
Ed just stared at his monitor, hands resting on the inputs and clicking through quite a bit while he looked for something. When he found it, he swiveled the screen around to Alex. Just a video, time lapse, of a blue and green planet spinning slowly. The original timestamps were in a flowing script he assumed to be Tsla, modern English numerals tacked on after the original recording just below it. It ticked forward three minutes every second, must have been taken from a geosynchronous satellite as the landmass below never changed.
He missed it at first. A black speck a few hundred kilometers from the western coast. It expanded, a ragged spot and then a gray-black smudge spreading across the atmosphere. The playback sped up, each tick an hour forward. The continent dipped into night and then came back around to day, the streak had widened by about double. Alex’s blood ran cold as he watched it envelop most of the planet, finally understanding what he was looking at. “Was that a volcano?”
There was a hitch again, longer this time. Sorrow so bad it hurt.
“Sort of. A caldera. Ejected more than nine thousand cubic kilometers of debris into the air. A ten on the Volcanic Explosivity Index, which is rare on inhabited planets.” Ed had calmed significantly, his normally cool demeanor sliding back into place. The old pilot continued, “That was about two years ago, they came to us for help about a year later. Asked for discretion, so it’s not a public knowledge thing despite how much material we’ve sent their way. Scientists figure it’ll take about a decade for the ash to come down and who knows how long to fix up the biosphere. In the meantime, most cities have functioning shielding, but they’re still trying to offload the remaining one and a half billion refugees on planet.”
Alex nodded, unable to look away as the video looped and the volcanic smear spun on the screen again, shrouding more and more of the Tsla’o home planet in darkness. He understood the limitations of atmospheric craft and ash was one of the worst things to fly through. It would stick to everything, and it was abrasive. There were ways around that, but even small craft would require dozens of modifications to survive multiple trips without spending a long time in maintenance. Maybe some atmosphere capable warships with fully sealed systems... but good luck landing those in a city. “It’s dead, isn’t it?”
“Basically. We’ve been helping with the offload, giving shelter where possible without making a scene,” he gave Alex a sharp look. “Getting their shipbuilding capability back up has been a nightmare, I’m told. A lot of their manufacturing was done on the ground on their homeworld, and a lot of their experienced engineers are dead.”
Even if they weren’t building new ships, they would still have to maintain the old ones. Alex didn’t know the numbers of what the Tsla’o fleet looked like, but if the main source of parts was gone, it would be dwindling by the day. “Guessing there’s not a lot of interoperable technology.”
“A lot of things are similar enough,” Ed shrugged. “They love quickweld and we’ve got the Lamarr refit dock in orbit, so they can replicate specific parts on site, at least.”
“Good. That’s something at least.” The last few minutes had changed his perspective significantly. “How are they doing?”
Just a tiny glimmer of approval. A choice that hadn’t been wrong.
“Everything they’ve got is crammed full of refugees, they’re constantly short of food, medical supplies and everything else. So, about as shitty as you’d expect.” Ed swiveled his monitor around again and leaned back in his chair. “That is why we embarked upon this little project. The Kshlav’o uses a scoutship frame that was nearing completion with Tsla’o engines refit into it.”
“Yeah, I get-”
Alex would have sat up bolt upright, startled from sleep by the door to the medical bay opening, but he was still fastened securely to the mediboard. His eye swiveled down to find Carbon returning, cleaned up and dressed in a plain black jumpsuit. She sort-of looked at him, eyes dull and sick as she scanned the room and then proceeded to the medical dispenser.
“What’s up?”
Carbon didn’t respond, save for her ears twitching. She switched it into Tsla and started dialing things in, each press on the screen slow and methodical. She shifted as she tapped out a few doses and Alex recognized one the handful of important Tsla symbols they had made him memorize on the screen.
“How much radiation did you take?”