Interview Subject: Aneesh Prutar/Quesan Rakana Akgaod

I am Aneesh Prutar, citizen of Nastellan; my ship name is Quesan Rakana Akgaod. I hereby testify that all events I recount during this interview are accurate to the best of my knowledge, on penalty of perjury.

...You want me to start with my graduation from Shipmind training and early career? That's not strictly speaking related to the war, but alright.

The day after the final round of exams at the fiftieth Starforce Academy in Calinogra Drum, I went about my normal morning routine. I woke up four kiloseconds1 before dawn, cleaned myself, got into my dress uniform, ate breakfast in the Cadets' mess hall, then marched myself down to Assembly.

It's common knowledge that hundreds of cadets pass training with flying colors for each one who ultimately gets a slot as a shipmind. On the other hand, the standards for passing said training are so strict that even the ones who don't get a slot are well-positioned for high-ranking careers in other parts of the military or related institutions. I wasn't worried about passing; I'd happened to catch a glimpse of my exam instructor smiling when I Mindcast back to my body from the stationary shipmind brain they used for training.

And so I waited in one of the academy's many courtyards as the proctoring drones hovered around, inspecting my fellow cadets. There was a very real chance I'd get to become a warship, my mind transferred into a kilometers-long war machine to defend my people and country.

Subjectively, the wait felt like forever. By contrast, my body's internal chronometer only counted out two hundreds before my data-gauntlet received a message notification. At the same time, a proctoring drone hovered over to me and gave the Cyan signal, indicating that it was an official message I was supposed to read.

So I brought up my left arm to just above my breasts, and tapped open the messages program. When I saw what I had received, I was absolutely elated. Not only had I passed shipmind training with almost perfect scores in every department, not only did the psychological assessment indicate that I would be a perfect fit as a beamship, but I'd actually gotten a ship slot allocated to me.

Still, I restrained myself to a faint smile. Assembly wasn't a time for joyful celebration; it was a time for standing to attention in a courtyard. Still, soon the signal came that Assembly was over. I couldn't help myself but do a little shimmying dance, my fluffy fox tail wagging back and forth with sheer joy.

To my left, my roommate Zere asked "So, guessing you got to be a ship?"

I nodded enthusiastically, my pointed ears perked up with excitement.

"Glad to hear it. I passed, but I didn't get a slot."

"Oh well. No offense, but what are you planning on doing now?"

Zere thought for a moment.

"Probably see if I can use the credentials to ride the officer fast-track for the Army or Navy. I was shooting for a carrier slot because I'm pretty good at managing people, and those skills should be somewhat transferrable."

Shortly afterwards, we went our separate ways. Zere went with most of the students to sort out where they'd go after the academy. As for me? I'd been directed to the Integration Lab.

Out of my class of two thousand cadets, only eight had gotten a slot. And lucky me, I was the last in line for getting transferred. One after another, my fellow cadets got into the Mindcast pod, they went limp as their minds were transferred off to their new ship body, and their bodies were carted off to long-term storage.

Soon enough, it was my turn. I got into the pod, the communications jack connected to the patch on the back of my neck, and the next thing I knew I was huge.

Twenty five kilometers in length, 4.4 kilometers hull diameter, and an outer warp torus diameter of 9.7 km. A 418 micrometer diameter Non-Orientable Wormhole pair deep in my core, ready to convert vast quantities of matter into antimatter fuel for my power plant. And thousands of crew motoring around my interior to keep me running smoothly, assisted by millions of drones.

A voice echoed through my mind, asking "Quesan Rakana Akgaod?"

I immediately replied, "Yes?"

"I'm Crew Chief Chessa, and I'll be helping you get used to your new body."

I was listening intently, even as I scanned through the star system's telemetry of the billions of ships and habitats around Nastellan.

"Most of it feels pretty intuitive, especially after all that training. I can feel my weapons mounts, see from all my sensors, and move better than I ever could in my previous body."

"Well yes, that means you've integrated correctly. That's good. We'll be done with fitting out in a few kiloseconds, then it's time for your void trials to begin."

"Thanks Chessa. Let me know if there's anything you need me to do."

A few minor things came up before I was ready to leave dock. Then I was contacted through one of my communications wormholes.

"Quesan Rakana Akgaod, this is Coordinator Vikal. You have clearance to leave dock and proceed to GGJ #191 at one tenth c for power plant and gunnery trials. It's not time-critical, so take your time and admire the scenery."

With that, the docking clamps released my hull. I was gentle with my acceleration out of the dock, only running a couple Petawatts through my momentum nodes. It took a couple minutes to orient my tip towards Generic Gas Giant number 191 since I was running at such low power. But soon I was able to fire up my warp drive at extreme low power and get on my way.

GGJ #191 was approximately a kilolight from my starting location, and with my travel speed of 0.1c it would take ten kiloseconds to get there. Plenty of time to think about stuff and take in the scenery, as Coordinator Vikal said.

And there was quite amazing scenery to take in. The further out I got, the more of Nastellan's megastructure I could see at once. Hundreds of rings surrounding our beautiful orange dwarf star, each with up to a million habitat cylinders arranged like the rungs of a ladder.

Through the gaps I could see the countless light collectors swarming around the star for energy collection, along with the starlifting array busily extracting matter from the glowing core of our country. A home to more than eighty quintillion people, all living in a single immense monument to what we can do when we cooperate. We'd actually reduced the star's mass by a tenth of its original value to build all those habitats, and still weren't done with the long-term fuel efficiency adjustments.

Soon enough I was shaken out of my awe by my arrival at one of the standardized pure-Hydrogen gas giants Nastellan uses for long-term fuel storage. 100 times the mass of Earth, striking a good balance between ease of access and reduction of leakage. I brought my warp bubble to a stop, and confirmed over communications.

"Quesan Rakana Akgaod speaking. I've arrived in orbit of GGJ #191. Awaiting orders."

Coordinator Vikal responded,

"Understood. First up we'll be stress-testing your power plant; this will include a slow start and a crash start. Do the slow start first."

I sent back an affirmative, and finally let myself stretch, taking a good two hundred seconds to get up to peak power. My fuel injectors gradually spooled up from the hundreds of grams per second they'd been running to twenty four metric tons per second each. My plasma radiators unfurled from the tiny stubs they'd been to their full 88 square kilometers, even as they gradually heated to a violently blue 177000 Kelvins – the hottest radiators of any ship class in the Nastellan starforce, the rest standardized at 136000 Kelins.

I had nearly two Zetawatts of electrical power coursing through my systems, enough to slag continents and boil oceans at a whim. And I harmlessly dissipated it all as gravity waves with my warp drive and momentum nodes, gradually winding down my power plant to a negligible load.

"Chessa, how'd the slow-start go? I feel pretty great, but you're the people inside keeping things working smoothly, so you might know better than me."

"It went great, Rakana! Your annihilation chambers and other systems handled the load wonderfully. Give us a kilosecond to be careful with the checks, then we'll give clearance for the crash-start."

"Got it."

And so I whiled away the time musing about random things, quite a few of which had absolutely nothing to do with my new life as a Voidskipper. Eventually I got the all-clear, and the crash start test began.

Suddenly slamming my fuel injectors to full power with no wind-up time honestly hurt a bit. The sudden shock really stressed my annihilation chambers, my radiators took just long enough to get into action for my generators and chambers to get painfully hot before they cooled down, and my fuel injectors protested at the sudden increase in their load.

Once again, I gradually wound down to negligible power; Chessa and the crew would need to inspect my power plant for damage, and it would be a lot safer if it weren't running when they did that.

Two kiloseconds later, I got the full report.

"The absolute worst that happened is that you threw a breaker in your starboard generator for a few seconds. All components stayed within their rated strain, and there hasn't been any material fatigue."

"Then why did it hurt?"

"Because it was a significant stress; got within 10% of the safety level. Don't want you doing it that abruptly too often unless you really need to."

Soon, it came to gunnery testing. Now the reason for coming out here became clear: a gas giant of this size would be a suitable target for stress-testing my guns without breaking anything people cared about.

I was pretty gentle with warming up my power plant for the third time; I took about thirty seconds to get up to full power. Well; nearly full power. That done, I opened up with my impressive arsenal of electron beams and x-ray lasers. Billions of beam pulses rained down on the side of GGJ #191 facing me; each pulse from my e-beams had energy equal to a low-yield nuclear weapon, while each laser-pulse "only" delivered energy equal to sixty tons of TNT.

As I slowly rolled to let all the guns on my cylindrical hull get a turn to fire, I couldn't help but muse on the sheer destruction I could unleash. Any target stupid enough to sit there and take it would die almost instantly, but that's exactly why dodging was the order of the day in space combat. After all, it takes rather a lot of beamfire to reliably hit a target that's pinging all over the battlespace at the speed of light.

After three hundred seconds of spinning around and shooting up a gas giant, Chessa contacted me.

"That's enough Rakana. We've got good wear data on all your guns now."

I promptly stopped my rotation and began winding down my power plant from near-combat load. That was exhilarating, but it would be best not to waste fuel. Sure the water I ran on was cheap, but it was still finite.

"I think I've been doing pretty good so far. Next up is the maneuver tests, yeah?"

"That's right! Put your hull through its paces."

I promptly zipped up to the speed of light, even as I rapidly turned at a right angle from my previous orientation. With 350 Exawatts for my momentum nodes to use on turning and active compression, I could snap to any orientation I wanted in a fraction of a second. Combine that with being able to instantly warp to c forwards or backwards, and I was having an absolute blast pinging all over GGJ #191's orbital space. Heck, I even did a few tight circuits around the planet's equator, just because I could.

After a few kiloseconds, I got a call from Coordinator Vikal.

"Had your fun?"

"Absolutely! It's just so much freedom!"

"Glad to hear it. You've finished the first stage of your void trials, though you'll be doing the gunnery part again later once a few minor issues with your lasers are corrected. As for now? You're going interstellar."

"Where to?"

Vikal answered, a tone of mirth in her voice.

"Nowhere too far, just a few of our allied Steads. Need to make sure your warp drive is up to snuff, and this way if something goes wrong it'll be pretty easy to get help to your location."

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I was then sent a flight plan. Ah, skimming to the edge of the system's temporal control zone at half c, then Voidhaven as the first stop.

It took another ten kiloseconds to reach the boundary, Nastellan shrinking in the rearview as I went. Then I was clear, the last of the TCS nodes falling away behind me.

"Quesan Rakana Akgaod, you are clear for superluminal travel."

"Registered."

I promptly fired up my power plant to almost eight hundred Exawatts, my triple-torus warp drive churning spacetime around me. Then a fraction of a second later, I went screeching across a light year of space in a microsecond.

The stray interstellar gas and dust I'd ran over exploded in my face of course, but the interstellar medium around here was relatively thin, so it didn't really hurt. As soon as my sensors cleared, I could clearly see the rogue planet known as Voidhaven, the lights from their top-level cities glittering in the black.

I throttled down my power plant and warp drive so my crew could inspect them, even as one of the Voidhaven patrol Skimmers2 tagged me with a tightbeam radio transmission.

"Well if it isn't a new skipper; was told you'd be showing up here. Nice ta see ya. Ya staying a while, or just passing through?"

I replied,

"Passing through. I'm still on my void trials, so I've got to put my warp drive through its paces."

"Fair enough. So they've got ya doing the circuit then?"

"Yeah; I've got thirty more Steads to visit on the initial flight plan. I don't believe I caught your name?"

"The name's Nature Documentary, Nate for short. You?"

"Quesan Rakana Akgaod."

"Right, you go in for those formulaic structured naming schemes over there in Nastellan. Can't say as I understood the appeal, but in your case it flows nicely. A lot like that Nagato lass who came by fifty kilos ago."

I chuckled internally. Nate seemed like a pretty nice person; shame that Skimmers got the short end of the stick most of the time. They were small and cheap, which meant that they were expendable enough to do most of the dying. Really hoped that wouldn't come to pass any time soon.

Anyway, a few kiloseconds later I got the all clear. My warp drive was certified ready for the rest of the flight plan, and this time I wouldn't be stopping at each Stead for a while, since we needed to see how I did with multiple Skips in quick succession.

So I pointed my nose towards my next destination, transmitted a farewell to Nate, and off I went.

The series of Skips I did screaming through the void made my hull glow white from the sheer heat. I didn't have the benefit of a Lane here, so I was just brute-forcing my way through the interstellar medium. And the interstellar medium really didn't like that.

It honestly got kind of painful towards the end, my monopole-doped exterior hull sending all sorts of thermal alarms. Thankfully, it was over very quickly. Twelve seconds for the whole succession of Skips, most of that time being spent turning. By a quirk of my flight plan, I'd actually wound up back at Voidhaven at the end.

Nate was there to greet me,

"Rakana, are you alright? Your entire front half looks like it's melting!"

"I'll be fine Nate. My hull stayed under its melting point, though only barely. I just need a kilosecond to cool off."

"Well, that's good to hear. I still don't quite understand how you Voidskippers put up with that sort of pummeling on a regular basis."

The pain having subsided, I couldn't help make a joke,

"We're just built different, I guess."

There was a moment's pause as Nate mentally compared his five hundred meter hull to my twenty five kilometer one, then he broke out laughing.

"Heard that one before, but it was definitely well-placed!"

"Glad you enjoyed it."

A few kiloseconds passed while my warp drive was inspected again. Then I got the all-clear to come back to Nastellan.

I'll spare you the details of the trip back, because it was honestly uneventful. Soon enough I'd returned to my slipway, carefully docking back in place using my momentum drives.

A cheerful voice from the docking facility made itself known over comms.

"Welcome back, Rakana! We've reviewed your Void Trials, and though you did pretty damn good there's a couple things that don't quite measure up to spec. We'll get you fixed right up, so you can be at absolute peak performance. I'm Penny, by the way."

"Nice to meet you Penny."

Anyway, what followed was Megaseconds of testing and adjusting and getting everything just right. I barely saw a percentage point's worth of improvement in any category; Penny and the rest had done good work to begin with. But even that tiny little margin could mean life or death in a real fight, so I thoroughly appreciated the attention to detail.

I did eventually pass my void trials, and got assigned to Shoal 9906; it's this big docking station for warships about four kilolights up and – oh never mind I'll just tell you what my first day on duty there was like.

I just want to dispel a nasty myth first: the Nastellan Starforce does not and never has tolerated any form of bullying or hazing among its personnel. It undermines unit cohesion and morale, while also having nasty mental health effects on the victims. So no, new shipminds aren't subject to all sorts of creative torments on arrival.

Instead, I was greeted by an Artillery Ship going by the name of Guudang Nogarke Oandep.

"Welcome to Shoal 9906, Rakana. We were told you would be coming."

I responded,

"Nice to meet you! Anything I should know about this place that didn't get put in the briefing?"

Someone else (a Flanker by the name of Rushina) butted in-

"The mooring crews will polish your hull up nice and shiny if you ask politely! It feels really good."

I took a moment to process that, before replying,

"That's good to know, but not quite what I meant. I'm more wondering if there's any tips and tricks it would be handy to know for doing my job effectively."

Nogarke answered "We're mostly by the books here in that regard. There's all sorts of unofficial ammenities you can partake in during downtime, but for on-duty the only oddity that comes to mind is Logistics Officer Endiol; she's very good at getting the supplies we need shipped here before we run short of anything."

I was already pulling into dock as I replied, "Thanks, that's really good to know. Guess she's already accounted for my fuel needs, then?"

"That she has Rakana, drink up."

Once I was fully moored and the fueling hose connected, I happily followed Nogarke's advice. That cool pure water flowing into my tanks3 was absolutely wonderful.

All that aside, that was my entry of service into the Nastellan starforce.

My life at Shoal 9906 quickly settled into a rhythm. A Megasecond for maintenance downtime, during which I very much enjoyed getting my hull polished nice and shiny. Then it was off for a patrol around the edges of Nastellan's temporal control system to try and catch anyone trying to sneak up on us for another Megasecond, and back to Shoal 9906 for maintenance again.

I also got to know my fellow shipminds based at Shoal 9906. Quinab Rushina Ebaxang was absolutely hilarious when she was off-duty, and also proved to be something of an ace in the Shoal's gaming scene. I got my aft kicked in all sorts of fighting, action, and racing games. Though I still outdid her in puzzles and shooting.

Meanwhile, Nogarke completely bucked the "cold sniper" stereotype for artillery ships, on account of being an incredibly passionate mathematician. I hadn't been all that interested in mathematics for their own sake before, but listening to him ramble on and on about it, I couldn't help but be taken in to at least some degree.

I also befriended a couple shipminds whose duties were much more focused on interstellar space; a Nazak class deep space cruiser by the name Nazak Quanater Udenog, and a Xofang class secondary carrier named Xofang Jangkali Esaveil.

Quanater was something of a curious rascal, constantly prowling for gossip. That said, when it came to her duties she was extremely serious. That's something I really appreciated from a ship with a worst-case magazine detonation energy that could vaporize the entire Shoal if she were docked at the time. Hence why she only armed her torpedoes if she was going to actually fire them. She also had a few thousand Skimmers assigned to her miniature carrier bay, and they could be pretty interesting to talk to.

That said, while Quanater was a cruiser with a bit of everything to work with, Jangkali was a pure carrier. Without my shipmind brain's excellent ability to parallelize and keep track of quadrillions of things all at once, I'd have had absolutely no chance at getting to know all of their Skimmers as people, considering nearly a quarter-million of them were assigned to them.

In terms of personality... honestly I thought Jangkali was a well-meaning hardaft. Yes they were highly competent and the seriousness they treated their duties with was well-deserved. On top of that, they were excellent at managing people and staying on top of logistics. Seriously, lightening up a bit in your downtime is encouraged by Starforce regulations for a reason. But no, they stayed absolutely serious and professional all the time, even for the most casual conversations.

Ten Megaseconds after my assignment to Shoal 9906, I got selected to take part in a military exercise – specifically, one about advanced artillery ship target spotting in a chaotic temporal control environment, along with tactical Skips under similar conditions.

To elaborate a bit, the idea that a superluminal warp bubble can only go in a straight line is a bit of a misconception. You can set up turns and jinks in the warp trajectory before starting the Skip, but it's way too inefficient to be useful for interstellar travel, it requires additional hardware in the warp toroids that's really expensive, and the angles you can make those jinks happen towards are really limited.

But for stuff like letting artillery's shots detour around obstructions and tactical Skips to get in and out of a combat zone, it's a truly invaluable capability to have. Just naively putting a TCS node between the enemy artillery and what you're trying to protect doesn't work if they can shoot off to the side, then have their shot go in reverse and come back to hit you. It also makes spotting for artillery a lot more flexible, since you don't need to get your spotters out of the way of your own shots to anywhere near the same degree.

And for ships, being able to plot faster than light zig-zags could be an absolute lifesaver if it came right down to it.

Sorry, I got a bit off track there. Yes, I served for approximately fifty Megaseconds – you know, the standard interstellar customary year – before the war started.

1A kilosecond is 1000 seconds; between 16 and 17 minutes

2A Skimmer is a smaller warp-equipped spaceship that cannot exceed the speed of light.

3Since a NOW power plant can technically run on anything you can pump, water is the most common fuel in use for Voidskippers. It's cheap, reasonably dense, and easy to work with.

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