The backwash of a launching skiff blew across Fort Ridge’s little spaceport, forcing Kaia to shield her face from the tsunami of heat that washed over her. After the weighty downdraft lessened, she carried on towards her designated skiff. The sleek aerodynamic profile with its swept-back wings sat covered with a thin layer of dirt from this morning’s dust storm. The technicians still scrambled over the small craft like warrior ants over a fresh kill. Kaia nodded to the ground crew, then climbed up the ladder and hopped into the cramped cockpit, starting her pre-flight checks. While they seemed to have moved away from physical trials, it hadn’t helped her mental exhaustion. Now the risk had shifted from breaking an arm while falling off a beam to crashing and becoming a smear on the ground. Progress, she supposed.
A few minutes later, she found her hand hovering over the ignition button, with no memory of completing the safety check. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, then went back to the top of the list, this time paying extra attention to ensure she missed nothing. Finally, after convincing herself that everything was working, she pushed the ignition. The skiff rumbled to life, the air-breathing engines threatening to shake apart the ancient bird. With one last check of her target coordinates, she launched the skiff into the cloudless sky.
The first marker of the day took her toward Hecker’s Canyon, a massive scar that criss-crossed the continent in an ever-branching fractal pattern. She stayed low and angled her skiff toward it. When she reached the coordinates that marked the start of her run, she dove into the canyon and felt a sudden sense of claustrophobia as the walls closed in around her. The beacon pulsed out a second set of coordinates, followed by a minimum speed limit. Kaia cursed and increased her speed to a dangerous level. These fuckers were trying to get her killed!
Outcroppings zipped by at incredible speeds and Kaia caught herself easing up on the throttle. She wasn’t the best pilot of the bunch. Far from it. In fact, she wagered she was the worst of those who remained. Everyone seemed to come back from these sorties with tales of how fast they went, and all of those times were far faster than anything Kaia had managed. Not that it was an equal comparison. The cadre were careful to not have two candidates run the same sections, which made it frustratingly difficult to compare notes.
She banked hard around a bend in the canyon; the skiff coming within a couple metres of the inside wall. She twisted the craft around another curve and flew right into the path of a rock bridge. Kaia cried out and pushed the stick forward. The bridge flashed past, but now the ground rushed up towards her. She yanked back on the stick, kicking up a storm of dust as she narrowly avoided smashing into the ground. Then, with a little yaw and roll, she slid past another outcropping and levelled out as the canyon opened up into a straight stretch.
After letting out a deep breath, she spared a moment to check the map. Halfway to the next rendezvous point.
I can do this, she thought, feeling her confidence settle in. But before she could spend too much time plotting her route, she was back in among the zigzags. Her time to think was gone. All she could do was operate on instinct. That and luck, lots and lots of luck. The winding canyon whizzed past in a dizzying whirl, each curve a nerve-wrenching dance with death. Yet miraculously, she lived.
A beep came from her computer and she spared a glance down. The navigational screen updated with a trajectory that took her up into orbit. Kaia heaved on the stick and the skiff shot out of the canyon like a meteor in reverse. She took the moment of calmness to do a breathing exercise and steady her heart rate. When she was ready, she flipped a switch on her controls and the air-breathers shut off. There was a moment of weightlessness before the spike thrusters kicked in and slammed her back down into her seat. Outside the cockpit, the sky darkened until the first pinpricks of stars appeared. The effect was hypnotic, and she caught herself drifting off to sleep.
“This is stupid,” Kaia said to herself. She was in no condition to fly, and she knew it. Back on the Sewin Hawk, she would have grounded herself days ago, but here she didn’t have that luxury. Instead, she set an alarm to go off before the skiff reached the edge of the Cloud. If the cadre wanted to kick her out because she refused to do something dumb, then so be it. There was no way she was going to fly into that pile of debris this tired. It was a miracle she had not died in the canyon. She checked the coordinates and activated the autopilot, then shuffled in her seat, trying to get comfortable. Finally, she closed her eyes and fell asleep almost instantly.
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***
The buzzing of her alarm woke her. She reached up to rub her eyes, but her hand hit her helmet instead. The impact brought her fully awake, and she gave her head a little shake. She took a sip from the suit’s bladder hose and focused ahead. There floated the Cloud in all its chaotic glory.
The debris shell was monumental in its scope and complexity. The pieces ranged from dust fragments all the way to small planetoid-sized chunks and stretched all around the sun in a sphere of junk. After her first transit through the Cloud, she had gone to the Encyclopedia Galactica to look it up. It turned out that the debris was leftovers of a partially constructed Dyson Sphere that dated back to the Ancestral Empire, the size of which completely baffled Kaia.
She readied herself and plotted out her initial navigational leg. With determination fuelled by stubbornness, she entered the field. The Cloud wasted no time in launching a chunk of debris at breakneck speeds, narrowly missing Kaia’s cockpit in the opening salvo. A shiver of fear ran through her at the proximity, yet she felt a strange yearning to extend her hand through the transparent aluminum of the cockpit and brush the underside of the riveted structure.
Her mind drifted back to her history classes at the Academy and she quoted her favourite professor out loud, “The scars that humanity carries run deep in our psyche. Today, we live in the mausoleum of history, surrounded by the ruins of our past greatness, reminding us of what we’ve lost.”
She had almost dropped out of the Academy right there and then to take up a degree in Ancient History. Instead, her sense of duty only permitted her a minor in History. It had been fascinating to learn about the Great Collapse, or more accurately, learn about how little they knew about that age. Even the Imperial Library on the Shikar Ring only went back to the Restoration Era that started ten thousand years ago. It boggled Kaia’s mind how old humanity must be, to have built all this so long ago. So much lost history.
The proximity alarm blared, pulling Kaia back from her exhaustion-induced daydream to see the hunk of metal right in front of her and closing in fast. She spun her little skiff to point its prograde thrusters perpendicular to her current vector and went to full thrust. The force slammed into her, compressing the air out of her lungs. That burn continued for a full minute, forcing Kaia to take quick shallow breaths. The metal chunk came within centimetres of raking across the hull. Once she was clear, she killed the thrust and gasped for air, relief flooding through her.
That had been a monumentally stupid mistake. The constant tasking from the cadre meant that she only got a moment’s rest during the day and only short sleeps during the night. The pace of the sorties was taking its toll on her, wearing away her resilience. She recalculated her trajectory, trying to shave off lost time, and took another sip from the bladder.
Just as she was about to finish the initial stage, she noticed a sudden flicker in her peripheral vision. She looked around, but saw nothing besides the constantly shifting maze of junk. Even after cranking up the range on the skiff’s subpar scanners, nothing emerged on the screen, leaving her in a state of frustration. All the readings from the Cloud overloaded the computer, making it useless at finding anything out there. It couldn’t even find the other candidates or the cadre that stalked them. She was about to give up when she saw something moving.
It loomed large: a vast expanse of obsidian darkness that slid between her and a drifting clump of ancient metal. She couldn’t quite make out the shape as it faded into the background stars, but what stood out to her was its irregularity. It lacked the sleek design of a typical vessel. The object slipped away from the debris that had allowed it to be visible and then disappeared. Kaia shivered. Whatever the object had been, it drew out some kind of primal fear that she couldn’t quite explain. She searched for it again, but the chaotic profusion of objects cluttered up the scene, each one reflecting distracting sunlight.
She was about to dismiss the sighting altogether when her communication system went live with the sound of search and rescue teams. Bright stars of spike thrusters at full power converged on the location where the object had been. From the communications, she could tell that the search and rescue teams were looking for a candidate, but Kaia couldn’t tell who. She wracked her brain to remember who else was out here with no success. In the end, she had to put it out of her mind and focus on the task at hand, lest she need the SAR teams too. Even so, she spent the rest of her time in the Cloud scanning her screens with unwavering intensity, scrutinizing every blip that she found.