Astral Date: Unknown
Astrospatial Coordinates: The Dead Rim
Harsh breathing, wavering vision and a myriad afterimages of stars blurred across my fogged visor. A keening siren wailed like an electronic dirge for a soon to be dead ship. The salt of tears and the copper of blood stinging split lips and fouling choking my throat.
A lance of phantom pain in my side every time I tried to stifle a sob. My void suit was breached. Most of it had already coagulated as the symbionic nanites staunched my bleeding but unless I made it to a med-pod, I would drown in my own blood. My vis had been depleted and I knew I needed another hyposhot else I was counting a par’soli to my own death.
Were circumstances better, I would have dragged myself to the med-bay but see, the helm-pit was empty. Someone needed to fly it but I only had a barely sentient synthetic intelligence trying to hold together a myriad of failing systems. Even now, I didn’t need to see the consoles to know that they were fighting off attacks in cyberspace.
I was the last member of my crew in a ship that should have had half a dozen. Navara, Zerau, Ino, Gliss, Sel― each recollection was harder than the last. Each name was a poisoned dagger to my gut.
Treachery; we were betrayed by the very masters that we served. We knew too much they said; we had flown too close to the light of Soli and now we’d been burned for it. But I swore to my crew that I would avenge them even if I had to use forbidden ordnance to do it.
All hope was not lost. No―I had stolen an experimental etheric translation drive just to spite them. The very thing that they killed my people for would be their bane. But for now? For now I would fly. Fly to the Dead Rim If I could― Had to shake off those greasy Galactic Sentinels and their dogged Tiri Class Corvettes. Even now I could hear their loud threats, blaring through the Q-nexus telling me to let myself be boarded. I would have spat if I could; their warning shots only served to affirm that I had made away with something valuable. Even then, my PDS was barely keeping up with their volleys as they tried to batter down my Aegis.
The Dead Rim had been my chance to lose them. It was a region of debris a couple of several soli distances wide, cluttered with the remnants of rogue barren asteroids stripped down for their precious ore and metals. Old ships went there to die, defunct mines littered the void.
Waystations, long past their scraping, meandered around the orbit Krieslari-22b, a sore spheroid of a brown rock barely big enough to be a dwarf planet. Isolated from the rest of its system, the interstellar reject was the home to all manner of dregs left behind by civilization .Space pirates, smugglers and outcasts made it their haven.
The various odds and ends strewn across Krieslari orbit formed two gigantic rings of wreckage which could play haywire with ship instruments. It would have been hard pressed to approach, unless I had a death wish but I already had people after me that wanted me dead. It did not make any difference whatsoever.
But what were the odds that a stray plasma shot would be just what was needed to jolt a defunct warp gate back to life, with disastrous consequences?
What were the odds that a stolen piece of proprietary technology would interact with this destabilised warp gate to create a never before phenomenon, that was theoretically possible but in reality, not so? I could only curse as my voidship suddenly lurched, decelerating as though I’d run into a Norsa squid. I would have broken my neck If I’d been out of my voidsuit―
“Dead stars!” I hissed through my teeth, as instruments went haywire. My free hand flew over the console as I tried to diagnose the problem. Dials and gauges swivelled widely as readings fluctuated across my console. A pit opened at the bottom of my stomach as the SI’s readout sounded like a death knell to my ears.
// Encounter; Space-Time anomaly detected; tachyon and graviton density increasing density. Analysis unavailable for accurate designation. Hull integrity 75 percent and failing,”
The Thulian-class voidship’s hull began to creak and groan under the shearing gravitational forces. Steam hissed as conduits snapped and the lights flickered. Warning alarms and more sirens began fouling my ears as my breath hitched at the gyre of a monstrosity beyond the event horizon. A giant spiral of purple spun like a drain, snagging asteroids and shredding the decrepit hulls of condemned vessels into cosmic dust.
“Turn us around, Turn us around!,” I could hardly get the words out in time. “Shunt main power to vectoring thrusters” I pulled at the yoke sticks but they didn’t bulge
// Vectoring Thrusters one through four unavailable. Approaching event horizon
“Tell me something I don’t know” I snapped at the impersonal intelligence.
// Do you want the good news or the bad news Mistress?
“Spare me the sarcasm,” I yelled back. Who thought it was a good idea to give the SI personality subroutines?
// Observation; the Sentinels are calling off their pursuit; observation supplementary; we have entered the anomalies’ gravity well. Recommendation; usage of appropriated Arcantech is advised. Hull Integrity at 50 percent. Hull breach in secondary hull, aft section, deck one, compartment three. Containment failing…
‘Hah, you must have purged a subroutine somewhere’ I wanted to say but I bit that back as the ship groaned with the sound of rivets popping. But I left that unsaid. With my mortality staring at me in the face, I let out a deprecating chuckle.
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The arcantech we appropriated was an experimental folding drive, a Trans-Aetheric Drive, similar to the multicoloured folding gate going haywire right beyond the nose cone. Folding gates were supposed to be a nebula blue, not a swirling mess of iridescence that made my eyes hurt. The ship bucked again, a worry tearing sound reverberated through the ship’s frame. The smell of something burning was all the prompt I needed to slap down my visor as the air became thin and tainted.
// Secondary Hull Integrity at 44 Percent.
The ship’s helm-pit was suddenly veiled in crimson glow as the main lights went out. I felt the weightlessness of losing arcanised gravity.
// Main Conduit failure switching to auxiliary power.
My gut sunk further as I prepared for the inevitable. There was no other way about it. I triggered my esper Speciality, Throttle Mind. I braced myself for the migraine that would ensue, I had overdrawn my aether during the escape. I felt the lifeblood of the universe bolster my mind.
Gritting my teeth, time slowed as I pulled up a holo view of astrogation data. To favoured stars, the trans-etheric drive had its systems isolated from the mains. They hadn’t scrubbed the last fold point. My finger wavered on the console―it was further than I would ever like to travel. I wanted someplace near, someplace familiar that reminded me of my crew. But we can’t always have everything.
With a finality, I breathed my answer.
‘Punch it!’ I conveyed my thoughts to the SI’s psychoneural interface.
// Fold Drive engaged
The void ship slowly spun, caught in the whims of the rogue phenomenon but the hum of the drive kicking in was a balm to my despair.
// Etheric capacitance opti…opti…maaaaal…
All the consoles inside the helm-pit winked out. The impersonal voice was silenced. Hope broke; I was too late. I closed my eyes and screamed my throat raw. I screamed in defiance of the Fateful Stars. Then I slumped in defeat.
“ I am sorry,” I said to no one in particular. The ship spun as I took in light’s last flicker as the rift loomed outside the view screen. The last thing I saw outside the bow ports was a dizzying kaleidoscope of colours that seemed to sear into my retinas before everything devolved into an inky black darker than a Zyntherian night.
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Astral Date: Unknown
Astrospatial Coordinates: Unknown
Pain. Pain? I always imagined dying to be utter annihilation of self. Nullity. Nonexistence. I was agnostic, pragmatic. Open to the fact that there were creatures that dwelt in the void between. Creatures that existed outside of existence itself, regarding our fleeting lives and the lives of the stars as mere moments in their purview. Beings existing in higher dimensions that our minds would be too fickle to conceive.
The Zealots of Solus who worshipped the Mother Star spoke of a life beyond the transcendence of soul. If the transcendence of soul involved feeling like your very being was being de-atomised from the inside out I did not want it.
I could hear myself screaming as mote after mote of my body decohered, misting away into nothing. Flesh, blood and bone vaporised and fuzzed as though they were a hologram with faulty photomaterial transducers. Nerves pulsed afire with immeasurable pain. My scream joined the din of alarms grating against my ears, begging for a release that would never come.
I knew I was thrashing because when the harness came undone, I found myself floating in null gravity. And though I could not bring my awareness to bear, I knew that I was no longer the only thing in motion throughout the ship. Extra Vehicular Assistant droids had been deployed. If I wasn’t in so much agony I would have teared up with joy; It meant that the SI still retained some manner of function.
I felt a hyposhot delivered to my neck through my exosuit sockets and immediately felt my limbs go limp. The fire searing through my nerves turned into a glacial chill and I stopped spasming as they strapped me into a gurney. Fog and sluggishness encroached the corners of my mind, a flicker of lights blurred across my vision.
Doors grated through as the bots forced their way to get me to the med pods. Unintelligible mumbles spilled from my mouth as more of me went numb. I only realised that my brain was still firing because Throttle Mind had not gone into cooldown yet and I wagered that the SI had known that because they communicated through the psychoneural interface as the droids emplaced me into the med-pod.
Strings of text scrolled through the corner of my retina, a projection from the Psychoneural Interface.
// Observation; You are suffering from temporal decoherence, that will cause your indisposition. As you are the last surviving member of the crew, recommend authorization of handover directives to enable continued operation of the ship.
“ Confirm,” she rasped, wrangling the words out of her throat. I was losing mass and quickly. The hyposhot had augmented her symbionic nanites but they were losing the fight. At a glance I could tell that was being put in stasis as a cold translucent liquid of blue green started filling up the med pod. While one EVA droid was removing my visor and exosuit, another was initiating the startup sequence. The atmosphere was already thinning, it was cold even with my undersuit
// Acknowledged; Handover protocols in effect for emergency cryostasis. Please provide authentication…
I felt consciousness begin to fade away, as the psychoneural interface clicked into the socket at the base of my spine.
‘Rylith-Aero-Nevidia-Two-Avaruus-Null’ I psycasted. I was grateful I’d interfaced in time. I could no longer move my jaws and there was not much of my lips remaining either. As I closed my eyes, more text continued to scroll across the surface of my consciousness.
// Acknowledged. Handover Directive authentication pattern Rylith-Aero-Nevidia-Two-Avaruus-Null accepted.
//Hand-over directives confirmed…
//Initiating cryostasis sequence…
//Activating ship-wide emergency protocols…
// Deploying Emergency life buoys
// Connecting to the Quantum-Nexus…
Then I fell into a dreamless sleep and everything went black.