Back in his parents’ quarters, Kik held the single void suit that could fit them. Two bodies lay before him, and one suit. He had to make his toughest decision up until now, and possibly for the rest of his life.
His mother, who smiled at him and taught him, who nursed him when he was hurt. His father, who he had laughed with many times, who would show him games and songs.
Only one could live. He knew that there was no way around this fact.
If he hesitated, both would die. The oxygen would run out and they would choke in their sleep.
He knew he had to act. If he didn’t, everything would be lost.
His attention was drawn by his father’s shivering, and then his decision was made. The emotional part of his brain withdrew, and cold logic took over in its place. Survival of the fittest.
His mother would survive if he gave her the suit. Her wounds were light, and her condition was stable. His father, on the other hand, was weak and could die easily even if he was given the suit. His condition hadn’t improved in the two hours since he had been given the antivenom. In fact, it had gotten worse. Perhaps he might be saved with time and medical treatment, but neither was available.
Already both his parents were breathing more heavily. He had to hurry.
His resolution set, Kik pulled his mother out of the bundle of clothes and started to put on the void suit. He slid the one-piece main garment over her arms and legs, sealing it along the back like a ziploc bag. He then slid on the gloves and boots from her old suit, and reattached the helmet. The last step was attaching a compressed air bottle, which he had brought from the storage room along with the suit. The bottle would nominally last for eight hours, but a little extra was added for safety. It mirrored the one on his own back.
Finally, once the last part was locked, the suit deflated as it expelled the impure air inside and aligned naturally to his mother’s body, accentuating her curves slightly. Her visor fogged from her breath for a second, which disappeared as her lungs rediscovered their natural rhythm. Her suit was sealed; she would survive.
His father, on the other hand, was suffocating. His breath accelerated, fluctuating wildly in speed as he was unable to get enough air from the carbon dioxide filled atmosphere. Gradually, over the course of almost twenty minutes, his breaths slowed and eventually ceased. The whole time, Kik held his father’s hand, trying to grip it as tightly as possible, telling even his father’s unconscious mind that somebody was with him. He had torn apart the clothes wrapping him, to see him at the close.
In the end, minutes after his father had stopped breathing, Kik looked up, holding back tears. His father’s deep blue eyes were open, possibly by chance, or maybe he came to in his final moments. Perhaps it was just Kik’s imagination, but his mouth seemed to be curved slightly into a smile. Kik didn’t even notice his own blurred vision or the tears on his face.
Kik lay on his father’s chest, but he couldn’t feel anything. Not the usual warmth, not the sound of his breathing, not even a heartbeat. “This isn’t right,” he said to himself. “There must be something wrong. My spacesuit. I have to take it off. I can’t feel his warmth because the helmet is in the way. I can’t hear him calling me because the microphone is off. If I take it off I’ll hear him. I’m sure he’s calling for me now, waiting for me. He has to be…”
He started reaching up to the buckles on his helmet. One, two, three. All of them were undone, all that was left was the flimsy seal. He gripped the sides of his helmet but stopped before he pulled. He was pierced by his father’s eyes. Blue as the ocean he couldn’t remember. Blue as the sky on the surface. Blue as the lands which were waiting for him. But also somehow blue as the night sky, as the limitless darkness between the limitless stars.
They were open, unblinking, slightly unfocused. Their usual direction and fire were gone. He slowly closed the buckles holding the base of his helmet shut, as the salty taste of his tears helped him focus again, find his grounding in reality.
His father was dead. He could mourn later. For now, he needed to figure out what to do with the body. He tried to pick Garet’s body up, but even in the low gravity he couldn’t be moved. Kik walked outside and pulled out a piece of the grating, like he had done before when moving his parents to the quarters. Bringing it inside, it barely fit through the doorway. He rolled his father onto it before lifting up one end and dragging it out.
Once in the corridor, he looked left and right. The recycler caught his eye, but he rejected it without a second thought. That was no burial.
Instead, he carried Garet in the opposite direction towards the starboard aft weapons bay.
Moving his father’s body into the room, he managed to heave him onto the chair before the targeting controls. The controls themselves had been smashed by the pirates, but the viewport was still open and the chair was undamaged. Kik rested the body’s head so that the eyes gazed out into the field of stars outside. He reclined the seat back slightly then rested his father’s arms on the armrests and his chin on his chest. He stepped back and paid his respects to his father, who could now almost be resting. He left the eyes open, though, to gaze at the stars which had ever fascinated him. “Rest in peace, Dad. I’m sorry your faith wasn’t enough. You believed in me, and I couldn’t...”
His words choked in his throat. He gripped his hands into fists and stood there trembling, until he couldn’t bear to look at the body any longer.
After dragging the floor panel out behind him, Kik closed the door on his father’s resting place. He replaced the floor panel and moved on, a heavy, dragging feeling in the bottom of his chest that felt as if it was hard to move and breathe. He pressed on, however, searching through the ship for oxygen bottles, unused or empty. The unused ones would be used to store the air he breathed out to remove the oxygen and be run through again. This way, far more than the eight hours of air could be kept up with just two bottles and an air purification system.
He brought back nine bottles, six full and three empty, in addition to the two he was wearing and the one on his mother, to which he soon attached a second. He also put a spare in each suit in case something went wrong with the first. This left six bottles on the floor between them, enough to completely refill both suits. The suits held three slots for oxygen for just this purpose - failsafes on top of failsafes. There was no room for error in space, as Kik had just been reminded.
Now their safety for the next sixteen hours was possible, and their suit would give them warning in case something went wrong. There were at least six hours, probably more, until the ship was done with the collection of fuel for the remaining two jumps.
It hadn’t been four hours since he had woken up, but Kik was too tired, too exhausted to do anything. He put his arms around his comatose mother and drifted off to sleep, hoping he wouldn’t dream.
Later, he woke with a start, shaking his head to clear it. He wondered what time it was, then realised that he had broken his suit’s watch a few days ago. He’d have to ask his mother to fix it. Looking around, he realised he was in his parents’ room. He hadn’t been here for years, not since his father kicked him out and made a separate room for him while mumbling something about siblings. He had never gotten any though. His father…
An image of his father unmoving and bloody, and another one of his unfocused blue eyes flashed across his mind. With them came a wave of mental pain that made him want to curl into a ball and become a rock. But his mother was lying wounded in front of him and needed his attention. He was walking on a tightrope. If he stopped he would fall, and he would not fall alone.
Shoving all his concerns aside, he moved in a grey autopilot state, thinking only as much as he needed to to get his next task completed.
He walked back to the bridge, noting the bloodstains and scrapes from the chaos a few hours ago. He pulled out the navigation console and blinked away the notification about the hazardous carbon dioxide content. Beneath it, the console read, “Appropriate heading achieved. Ready for jump. Please confirm.” Before he jumped, he closed the collection arms, as FTL travel could tear fragile parts off of ships. Then he tapped this screen, and the “Yes” option when prompted. A countdown began on the screen as the ship accelerated, and when it reached zero the void cannon mounted on the prow fired.
It shot out a projectile made of a mix of septeurium and dark matter. The mixture shot out in front of the ship, but as the ship accelerated it began to reach the speed of the projectile, and soon it was gaining behind it. A few seconds before the prow touched the bullet, the space around it changed. The radioactive septeurium caused something similar to a nuclear reaction in the dark matter, sucking in the surrounding dark energy and temporarily upsetting its balance across the universe. This dark energy then spread out again to retake its former place, but dragged sections of space with it, creating a small wormhole. When the bow of the ship touched this disturbance, it was dragged through by the fluctuation as logic asserted itself again and plugged the holes in the universe with true matter.
The intense changes in energy and gravity around the ship made Kik feel as if he was throwing up through his anus, but that was nothing compared to entering the wormhole itself. The chair felt as if it was growing spikes against his back, and moving his hands through the air felt like swimming in jelly. The inside of his spacesuit momentarily smelled spicy. This sensual orchestra quickly receded to be replaced by an absence of sensation as all colours greyed out and sounds faded, until his mind wandered from lack of stimulation.
Several warp drives had been introduced over the past several millennia of galactic exploration, but the void cannon was the most commonly used. All the previous examples had major flaws. Matter teleportation was instant and still sometimes used, but required vast amounts of energy and was easily affected by gravity. That meant you would often end up inside a sun, depending on where you were going. Speed-of-light destruction/recreation, where a ship was analysed down to its component molecules and destroyed, then recreated at another gate years later, was, needless to say, far too long and controversial, not to mention processor-intensive. These problems were in fact benefits of the void cannon.
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Hydrogen was essentially the most common normal element in the universe, and dark matter, although hard to acquire, was even more common in space. Septeurium was difficult to produce, but the difficulty was waived in space with few large celestial bodies around, or alternatively close to suns in areas high in cosmic radiation. This abundance of fuel led to the creation of vessels such as the nebula travellers, like Kik’s ship. These ships could almost live off of the universe itself, when provided with enough internal equipment and the people to fix them.
This led to a resurgence in generation ships, this time faster than light, being built to colonize the vast reaches of the galaxy. However, these had a fatal flaw. Their size meant they required immense amounts of fuel. Enough that a month harvesting at a nebula might be too slow.
In the end, most of these were scrapped. Nebula travellers were mostly dropped too, as more efficient but larger processors meant most septeurium production was completed on ocean planets rather than in space. Ships just carried more fuel instead of the heavy, outdated and expensive fuel production equipment. They were still used casually, sometimes in sporting contests, but on the whole not widely.
When this happened, many nebula travellers were repurposed. Others were kept by collectors. Yet others were trashed and dropped in junkyards all over the galaxy.
This was what had happened to the ship Kik was in now. His mother had found it when she was younger and fixed it up to be her own. It had stuck with the family ever since.
Kik slowly woke up as the ship emerged on the other side of the wormhole. He opened his eyes to a black backdrop dotted with white stars. It wasn’t the inside of a red nebula that he had last seen before it was overtaken by the twisting and writhing…
Jumps always upset Kik’s stomach. Narrowly avoiding vomiting down the front of his suit, he took a drink of water from his internal supply. The flow of liquid down his dry throat reminded him of how hungry and thirsty he was, and he pulled out a ration pack from his pocket.
It was marked “meat flavoured”. He grimaced at the likelihood and specificness of that statement, but dropped one in the suit processor in his arm anyway. It was mixed with water and fed to him as a sort of disgusting, not meaty at all slurry that again almost made his efforts not to throw up useless. Taking another sip of his meal, he reopened the ship’s fuel collection array and looked around at the system he had found himself in.
There was a single star of indeterminate nature, probably a white dwarf, surrounded by no planets he could see. There may have been others in the shadow of the sun, but without anything to bounce a signal off they would take time to discover. An utterly empty and boring existence compared to the rest of the galaxy, despite its history stretching back hundreds of billions of years. There were a few small asteroid fields, but they weren’t large enough to be given credit as proper asteroid belts; they were more asteroid clouds.
The only interesting feature in the system was a large comet, several million kilometres from the ship. As the autopilot made its wide adjustments for the next jump, he admired the kilometres-long tail of glittering dust and ice shards, even if it was just a dot at this distance. After a few minutes, though, that lost its appeal too, and he walked off to fiddle with the weapons systems.
The weapons on this ship were mainly low-energy lasers with short range. They were currently set to slag any debris that, based on trajectory, would strike the ship, and this was their primary function. The manual controls inside each weapons bay had been smashed but the automated controls and weapons still worked for the most part.
There were four weapons bays on the ship, one on each corner. Leaving aside the one his father lay in, Kik prioritised the two at the bow. These ones seemed to not have been broken as badly. Still, the mass of smashed panels, wiring and mechanical components defied his comprehension. Port, then starboard, he decided to leave them alone since they were working as they were.
He also made sure the airlock was working properly. The starboard one he had tested earlier, but he had no idea about the port side. When he reached it, he checked for proper operation of the pumps and the doors on both sides, and it seemed to work without problems. With this, the only things broken on the ship were the delicate controls and the hydroponics tank, which shouldn’t take too long to fix planetside.
Kik returned to the cockpit for the second FTL jump, which would take him somewhere outside the orbit of Lanos. The computer had almost completed its hour-long course change to face towards its destination system. He closed the collection arms and waited for a few minutes for the “ready to jump” prompt to appear, and once again prompted the system to jump towards Lanos.
This jump was similar to any other jump, in that no experience happened twice. Inside the wormhole, his brain mimicked random sensory effects to alleviate the stress of not sensing anything. This time, he heard faint bubbly music, smelt cinnamon and saw patches of bright colour flash before his face. But after a short time, his vision greyed out once again.
When he emerged on the other side, he registered a brown and dusty blue planet filling the left part of the viewport. It had a banded sea near the equator and another towards each of the poles. There were two supercontinents divided by these wide seas, running parallel to the equator.
There were several large stations in orbit, some linked to the planet with tethers many thousands of kilometres long. At the base of each of these tethers the brown of the planet turned to the grey and steel of inhabitation, with light flowing from the cities in their night cycle. These harsh grey mats stood out against the otherwise muted tones of the world’s surface.
Kik looked down after he had taken in the destination and gazed at the controls. He had never piloted a ship on planetary approach before, he realised. He had rarely used the navigational controls either, only for setting long easy jumps which his parents were too unmotivated to do. Now that the other controls were broken, he had quite a problem on his hands.
He had arrived too close to the planet for his abilities. His speed couldn’t be slowly brought down like he might have otherwise attempted. He was angered for a second by his own lack of foresight, but forced himself to breathe slowly and calm down.
All he had to do was make a loop around and he would reach his destination a few hours later than planned. He selected a change in course, moving the destination to a point far clear of the planet that he could slingshot around and reach easily. The ship responded, firing thrusters and then its main engine to bring him into the correct orbit. The acceleration pushed him back into his seat. The shipboard gravity weakened as it counteracted inertia. He continued onwards, unaware of the consternation his actions were causing.
Halfway through the orbital maneuver and everything was going smoothly. He had almost reached the north pole, close to opposite the point he had arrived at. His speed had picked up significantly, and the light upper atmosphere was forming a slight cone of fire over the nose of the ship.
Suddenly, the hull vibrated and the ship started to lose speed and change direction. The computer automatically fired the opposite thrusters to compensate, but the change in course continued. The ship groaned from the exerting forces upon it, a vibration that Kik felt through his seat and the soles of his boots. Wondering whether they had struck some debris that the weapons had missed, he checked the sensors.
According the the display, there were three other ships clamped to the outside of his ship, attempting to direct them off their course. Kik was confused for a second, but figured they were tugs that came to slow him down, and deactivated the AI pilot system. The engines and thrusters shut off, and the pull exerted by the three other ships became more evident. They pulled him off course away from the planet. Watching the screens, Kik could see that he was being redirected slowly but surely towards a ship in high orbit that the computer had registered on arrival.
Kik wanted to get to the planet as soon as possible for his parents, but comforted himself that this was saving him time from his long slingshot. Perhaps there would be a medic on board. As they were brought closer he could see that the ship that he was approaching was a large one, perhaps half a kilometre long.
A bay opened along the side, a section of the plating folding out from the ship. The tugs directed his ship towards it then disengaged. The ship was grabbed by a mechanical arm and pulled into the hangar, and then, at last, it stopped.
Kik jumped out of the pilot seat and ran to the airlock, to be greeted by the barrels of three rifles. A trio of silver combat armoured, weapon bearing shock troopers stormed aboard, followed by groups of other soldiers.
When the mysterious ship had arrived in system, it had immediately been hailed by the planet’s traffic control guiding it onto a flight path. However, the ship hadn’t responded to any kind of hail, as Kik’s communications had been destroyed by the pirates without his knowledge. It had instead sped up, crossing several already established approach paths and causing outbreaks of swearing in the air traffic control staff.
Furthermore, as the ship had slingshotted around the planet, the other thing unbeknownst to Kik and the ship’s computer was an obstruction that had lain on their path. Initially hidden by the curvature of the planet, another space station was floating above the oceans covering the North Pole. The slingshotting path of the mysterious ship that had recently arrived in orbit would have taken it within a few short kilometres of the installation, and the defence forces had taken action.