Carbon laid around in bed well after Alex had left to go do... Naval Intelligence work. Whatever the first day of his new job would entail. He had no idea, but he left a perfectly nice bed and went back to their warren of offices elsewhere on the station at an hour that felt uncivilized. It hadn’t been specified that he had to do it that day, but he wanted to get it done. Stay moving.
Not think about things.
The warm spot he had left under the covers had cooled, which was incredibly rude. A largely immutable feature of physics, yes, but still rude. She tossed the covers back, grumbled, and padded softly into the shower. She’d give them some amount of credit, every Human made shower she’d used had been great. Plenty of pressure and the ability to crank the temperature up so much further than should be safe was exactly what she needed.
What she didn’t need was for the clock to still say it was before seven AM station time when she finally got dried off. He must have shown up at the offices at six, which she recalled was first shift on the CS Haultain when she was overseeing the installation of her drives into the Kshlav’o. It was too early then, it is decidedly too early now. Yet he got up to go deal with whatever they needed him for.
And she was the one that needed to decompress. Mmh.
He wasn’t wrong, she did. He did too. She pulled yesterday’s jumpsuit back on and retreated to her quarters to get a fresh one while pondering exactly what to do with the seven or so hours of free time and the mental resolve to not throw herself into the thresher again immediately. Not that she could, yet. Her contact within the Empire had said a ship had been set to retrieve her. It was probably a few days away yet, perhaps a week, depending on which they sent.
She’d consider the ramifications of that later. Talk about it later. Today she would actively do nothing of import. Take advantage of the fact that she was surrounded by people who were not all deeply traumatized, enjoy life for a little bit without external pressure. How long had it been? Decades? Had she not felt those forces as a child, well before the disaster?
Perhaps it had been never.
Perhaps today would be auspicious. She would start with the rest of that steak.
Carbon pulled her boots back on and cursed herself quietly after she realized she’d left the steak in his room, which she did not have access to when he was not in it. So much for that breakfast plan. The Diplomatic Services team had left a very thorough rundown of what was available on the station on the room’s pad. A handful of restaurants, from the fine dining kitchen that handled the room service here, all the way to a... sci-fi themed retro-future diner. Too many hyphens on that. The one that caught her eye was more of a footnote. There was a cafeteria for station employees.
She’d eaten at the closer of the two cafeterias on the Haultain for a few meals before her dispenser had been installed on the Kshlav’o. Desperate to not eat another meal from a packet. It was similar enough to how the Tsla’o handled dining for personnel on their military ships that it felt familiar, even though it also came with a lot of questioning looks and alien foods that, at the time, she hadn’t done more than scan to ensure biocompatibility.
What in the hells had she even been eating? Ground meat cylinders that must have been some kind of sausage. Everybody made sausage. Fluffy yellow protein slurry. A pastry? Yes, there had been a pastry, heavily spiced and slathered in sugar. How deeply had she been allowing herself to drown in her work that she hadn’t even thought about what she was eating.
Carbon pulled the laces tight and knotted them, tucking the excess away before pulling the jumpsuit down over the tops of her boots. Don’t forget yourself. There had been a layer of arrogance at play there, as well. It was just Human food. Inherently inferior, no sense in paying attention to it. Would you ever admit to having enjoyed it, let alone having eaten it? Of course not. But things had changed.
She had changed. Today would be auspicious for her, at least.
Which is how Carbon had ended up at the cafeteria, sitting in a quiet corner with a tray that had begun to bow under the assortment of food they’d given her when she foolishly and perhaps a little proudly asked to try a bit of everything. Five drinks waiting beyond that. Half the cafeteria staff watching from across the way.
They had said they’d never had an alien come through. Which, given that it was only her CPP badge that had allowed her access to this part of the station, made sense. Several of them had been positively enthused about this. The rest seemed too busy to care.
The absurd variety was what she was coming to expect from Human culinary arts. Eggs - the protein slurry - served four ways. Two types of sausage, bacon and ham - apparently different parts of the same animal. A fruit salad with at least five types of fruit. A waffle with a pancake and egg toast haphazardly stacked on it, all with ample amounts of that milk product they seem to put in everything, and refined tree sap. Four more kinds of toasted bread. Preserved fruit and more of that solidified milk product for the bread. A small bowl of rice, steaming hot and sprinkled with seasonings, with yet another egg cracked on top. Finally, a neatly ordered row of pastry stacked like books that had shifted on a shelf. All of them different in ways she hadn’t caught despite her best intentions.
The beverages sat like a fence to retain the range of solid foods should their containment within the tray fail. Orange juice, grape juice, a ‘smoothie’, coffee, hot chocolate. With a recommendation to mix the last two to produce a sixth drink.
It took a long time to eat that much, not that she could finish it. The flavors all started to blend together after a bit, almost everything being either salty-savory or overwhelmingly sweet. While it stood in stark contrast to Alex’s attempts to tailor food experiences to her sensibilities, as much as he could at the time, none of it was bad. Far too much sap for her tastes, though. The cafeteria personnel celebrated among themselves when she asked for something to take the still enormous amount of food back to her quarters in, packing it up and removing the dishes despite everyone else having to clear their own. They even brought her a pre-mixed ‘mocha’ beverage that she’d enjoyed in a cup with a lid specifically meant to be drunk through while doing things.
Benefits of being the first alien through the place, apparently.
By the time she’d managed to figure out how to fit everything into her tiny refrigerator - another interesting anachronism. Stasis storage would be so much more effective and the power requirements shouldn’t be excessive, but they put food in cold anyway - it was just past eight. She traded a few emails with Admiral Argueta’s aide, setting up a meeting for that afternoon, and sent Alex one letting him know she’d be doing that. They would discuss her excessive breakfast in person.
All of this had not made an appreciable dent in her day, so she returned to the pad to see what else she could be filling a few hours with. First and foremost was the Exploration Museum. A dozen historical ships, and dozens more smaller exhibits. That should take care of things for a while, even if it was tangentially related to most of her work through her life so far. Station employees even got in for free, and an hour early. Again she set out.
As she sipped her drink in the elevator, the fairly rash idea of simply putting a few holes in a lid that was barely attached to a cup was starting to grow on her. The convenience of not having to unlock something every time you wanted a drink wasn’t something she’d allow in any of the engineering spaces she had overseen, but just out in public it seemed sufficient. Unless you dropped it, or the gravity failed.
The doors opened to a deck that looked like a park. The space was two stories tall and by the smell of it, contained real plants. A pleasant open area that separated the lifts from the museum, the entire wall beyond the trees a mix of polished stone and tall sheets of glass, the nose of a red and very well worn ship visible inside. She tossed her empty coffee cup into a bin and proceeded to the entrance.
“Welcome to the Space Exploration Mus- oh. Uh, it’s uh. Employees only for about another forty-five minutes.” The dark-haired woman in the admissions booth had sounded rather bored before she had swiveled her chair back around and spotted someone she clearly hadn’t expected.
“Good, I have never particularly enjoyed crowds.” Carbon tapped her obviously Human-made ID badge on the scanner and it beeped cheerfully.
“Oh.” The woman - Mei, according to her name tag - looked between the badge, a screen on her side of the booth, and then back at Carbon. She went through this cycle two more times before settling on a friendly response, sliding a museum branded pad across the desktop. “Well then, like I said: general admission opens in about forty-five minutes.”
“Thank you.” Carbon smiled politely and went about her way, the doors unlocking as she approached.
Mei leaned out over the counter, shouting after her. “Oh, the Hōkūleʻa is up on the third floor!”
Carbon wasn’t sure why she thought that was important, but gave her a polite nod and thanked her before passing through the doors.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The red ship that was visible from outside loomed overhead, the initial path into the museum running under it. It looked like a seed that had been stretched out, sleek and packed with sensor equipment pointing out from armored shutters in almost every direction. It wasn’t even a proper ship, the pad informing her it was a drone used by the Civilian Pilot Program to perform primary mapping scans. It had no proper thrust capability, instead just using a rupture drive to- she stopped reading and looked up at it in horror.
The pad continued its narration of the exhibit undeterred. “Due to the enormous amounts of radiation a ship using a rupture drive is subjected to when exiting a jump, the museum only has a full size model. All active units are disposed of in a neutron star at the end of their lifecycle.”
At least Humans had the good sense to not to put a violently radioactive ship in a museum, or those drives on something that had a crew. And, she supposed, the use case was good. Rupture drives on something this small would be very efficient. Keeping the jump points in deep space reduced the likelihood of an exit pulse damaging anything, and the amount of guesswork needed made them almost impossible to track back more than one or two jumps. Alright. That was an acceptable use of such a dangerous technology.
Not like the Tsla’o didn’t have a few launch platforms that used that same system, but those weren’t something that would end up in a museum.
The next display was satellites. Humanity’s first forays into space. Each model was the first launched by its respective government, rapidly growing from a simple silver sphere to more complex though frail looking designs, over a shockingly short period of time. Tsla’o satellite technology had not come about from something like the ‘space race’ that kept getting mentioned, but rather the constant and careful iteration of technologies. Durable, long lasting equipment was the only thing that would be fit for orbit.
The robots they sent to their other local planets displayed a much less haphazard methodology. Drones of varying sizes, mostly with six or eight wheels, stood on display in mockups of the planets they had landed on. One was loose. A triangular body on six wheels and a pair of cameras mounted on a mast rising from the front, a modern copy of Opportunity cruised around at what was its maximum speed on Mars. Strangely endearing looking, and incredibly durable given how much longer it had run compared to what had been planned. That was engineering worth remembering.
She wandered the rest of the first floor, exhibits expounding on how they went about getting out into the black. Rockets, missiles, a centrifugal launcher, balloons. Launching spacecraft from aircraft. Expanding her understanding of the frantic madness of humanity’s attempts at reaching space. All this ending on an antique module from their first International Space Station. Finally they weren't all just competing against each other at a national level. This was far and away the most stressful museum in existence.
The second floor was crewed flight. From horrific accidents, to the first Humans on the moon and mars, they had just gotten around on chemical rockets and coasting. Putting living creatures on chemical rockets.
Absurd.
The designs started to change once they had figured out ion-impeller thrusters. Space flight became more common as the energy requirements dropped precipitously. Trips to their neighbor Mars took days. Mining the asteroid belt became feasible. New wars broke out.
Then the rupture drive was discovered, tearing holes in space-time to slip through at speeds that shouldn’t be possible, allowing access to any part of Sol in minutes, and even nearby solar systems in short order. New wars broke out.
Carbon scrubbed the audio back to be sure she hadn’t gone over the same piece of narration twice. Nope. New wars just break out all the time for Humans. That’s not unsettling at all.
The first version of the Confederation was born out of these wars. A laser-scored section of armor from the ENS Eurycyda stood here, destroyed at the battle of 61 Cygni. The territories of Sol put together their forces long enough to bring the outlying colonies to heel and dragged them into a loosely defined government. Finally a choice that made any sense at all. Would a proper empire have been better? Yes, absolutely. But a hundred disparate groups all killing each other over trade deals and territory disputes was objectively the worst.
Finally, the biggest step: Waverider drives. No more discarding hulls after they became too radioactive, or giving everyone on a space station a lethal dose of radiation because of a too-close approach. The actual first Human waverider assembly was here, each component clearly recognizable to Carbon, and it was easily the most Human thing she’d ever seen. Gold foil everywhere. They loved their gold foil so much. The plasma conduits that ran out from the reactor were 100 degrees away from approaching an efficient layout. A panel appeared to have been nailed closed. There was tape on the electrical conduit running into the array, which had been arranged radially, if you could believe it. There were a few different flags and manufacturer marks on everything, so maybe it had been built from scrap parts. Carbon relented for a moment. That would have been impressive. Unfathomably dangerous, but impressive.
The third floor marked the beginning of the modern age of exploration. Right there, front and center was a gleaming silver ship that reminded her quite a bit of the Kshlav’o. It clearly wasn’t. The lines weren’t as sleek, and the sensor clusters were visibly dated, but it was a Scout Ship. The Kon Tiki, said the narrator on the pad. The first of its kind.
The first, but her Scout Ship was better. She allowed herself a smirk at that thought, then immediately felt it falter. Alex would love this. He’d probably already been here, probably already knew everything the pad was quietly dictating to her. His delivery would be so much more enthusiastic.
She sought to escape the reminders of him, to get away from the familiar parts of a ship that nearly became their tomb. There was a phenomenal amount of minutia about the Scout Ship program here. Not surprising. Thruster assemblies, a half scale model of the main sensory array, a door to the head from one of the earlier ships. A hands on, exploreable main corridor, complete with cabins, mess, and sickbay. She skipped over it.
Finally the pathway through all of this dumped her out before a crisp white ship, bulky frame just barely fitting into the two story tall exhibit area. Clearly an evolutionary advancement from one of the early Waverider equipped ships shown on the previous floor. RV Hōkūleʻa. The name had been written in a stylized script on the first plaque, along with the various details of the craft. Beside it, a video played on loop.
A feed from what was obviously an optical camera panned slowly along a gas giant, dozens of rings sliding into focus as it went. It hesitated and stopped before rotating away - the ship had rolled to bring the camera around to something else. The resolution shifted a few times as the magnification indicator in the corner spun up, a pale red speck slowly resolving into what was clearly a Haskan-class frigate, wearing the gray and red paint the Imperial Navy used until about fifty years ago. The bow came into focus, marking it as the Kshtal specifically. The first ship to make contact with Humans.
All of this was laid out on the next plaque: The Hōkūleʻa had made contact with the TIN Kshtal, a patrol frigate investigating unusual gravity signatures reported by a sensor net in a solar system at the edge of Tsla’o space. They overcame language and cultural barriers to forge the first bond with those who would become the only friend and ally that Humanity has ever discovered among the stars.
There was a bench nearby, and Carbon sat down for a while. How could there be such a vast discrepancy in how this event was portrayed? She’d never even heard the name of the Human ship until now. That was why Mei had yelled it after her. They actually cared. They celebrated it. Kept an entire space ship inside to commemorate the event.
The Kshtal had been decommissioned and stripped for the fleet. She’d seen it listed in a scrapyard she had frequented for parts while training to become a Lan.
She sighed and looked down the path, a few regular visitors starting to filter through. Down the other direction there was a display with a life-size picture of a Human standing next to a Tsla’o. Probably the respective captains of their ships, if she was reading the old Imperial uniform correctly. The human sort of reminded her of Alex. Similar build but taller, darker tan skin, and black hair, the sleeves of his jumpsuit rolled up and showing off extensive markings on his forearms, geometric patterns that reminded her of how ascetics had plucked their fur back on Schon. He had a relaxed demeanor with a very welcoming smile. The Tsla’o projected beside him did not seem as nearly at ease - the gray-furred male stood with a stiff spine and carried the severe countenance that many Imperial Navy Captains ended up with.
If her father hadn’t been using her as a prop when he dealt with Humans she would have never seen one of them before the disaster. They were touched on only briefly in her history lessons, never pictured and only briefly described. Humans had this awful picture that had probably been taken when he took his command, and they just blasted it on the wall all day for anyone to see.
Carbon set the pad to the side and rested her head in her hands. This wasn’t decompressing at all. It wasn’t making what she was supposed to be taking a break from worse, no, but it had introduced an entirely new problem. How could her people treat those that view them as friends with such disdain?
Her spiral was interrupted by someone sitting down at the other end of the bench. The voice that spoke was light but aged, her words coming in a cadence faster than Carbon was used to hearing. “You look like you have something you need to talk about.”
She sat up, momentarily as stiff as that Captain she’d just complained about. The woman across from her fit the voice. Silver hair and wrinkled skin, a wisp of a Human in a casual floral dress and woven hat that had no purpose indoors. “I would not want to burden someone with my problems.”
The woman laughed. “I’ve been to this museum three times in as many days. Great grandkids go nuts for it but... I’m begging you, burden me with something other than watching the Apollo launch video again.”
That got a smile out of her. “If you are watching you grandchildren, I do not think I would-”
“Oh, don’t worry! They’re with my son and his wife, who like all this... ship stuff as much as they do. I’m just here because they wanted to get me out of the house.” She leaned on the arm of the bench and waved a hand dismissively. “Not really my first choice of destinations, but after a few days here... It’s still not even in the top ten.”
Despite the stresses that her revelations had unleashed Carbon found herself laughing. They had been too secretive for too long. Obscured too much. Today was a day to change. “Very well. If you really wish it so.”
“I do. Now cough it up. Don’t leave anything out.” She slapped a hand against her knee, and seemed enthusiastic about having a total stranger - someone not even from her species - vent their problems to her.
Carbon had to take a minute to think about this. There was a lot. Some of which she wasn’t even going to touch on, or couldn’t due to the amount of paperwork she’d signed specifically stating she’d never talk about it without clearance. Probably start from the most recent and work her way back, easier to keep track that way.
“Humanity believes us a friend and ally, but we have never once reciprocated that properly.”