Quantum space ruptures, or “slips” as they were commonly known, were the space equivalent of the splashing water a fast-moving heavy transport car made when driving through a puddle of water or mud. They were transient, unpredictable, and completely random.
A result of the quantum warp drives of a capital-class vessel plowing through the gravity well of a planet, those holes in space and time were much like the phenomenon that gave birth to them – gates to another point in the universe. Unlike conventional “warping”, they were impossible to target at specific co-ordinates and inherently unstable.
Another thing that anyone who survives passing through one of those anomalies must remember is that space is huge, extremely dangerous, and mostly empty. A slip was just as likely to put your ship disabled and a thousand light-years from the nearest star as it was to drop you straight onto the event horizon of the nearest black hole.
As such, going through one was a complete and utter act of desperation, one made usually by escaping convicts, defeated pirates, runaway slaves and the occasionally desperate warship captain.
And “Dead End” Dav, apparently.
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Powering on the scanner array he put together on top of the ship, Dav sat back and sipped on his cold instant coffee ration – it had more after-taste than flavor, but the caffeine was a god-send after a nearly six-hour long spacewalk. That catheter did not sit right with him even after all this time in space – there was simply no replacement for some me-time on the john, folding or not.
As the computer set to work on locating familiar star formations, Dav let the dark brew jolt him up, then crashed into sleep a few minutes later when his body overcame the substance.
About two hours later, a bleeping tone woke him up – the computer was done with it’s work.
Wiping sleep from his eyes, Dav glanced at the life support status monitor – damn, six days – and took a look at the results.
As expected, most of the data was crap – the scanner was shit, meant to be used as a last resort, and he went through a rift. Simply being alive was a miracle.
That didn’t make not finding a single familiar star feel better.
What did, though, was the massive amount of metal detected floating in space, and emitting a faint but steady signal.
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Dav had heard many stories, and watched many Holos centered around those finds – often themed around horror and occasionally the one-off b-tier smut flick.
A Hulk - Drifting in space for who knows how long, a forgotten ship that might’ve made the same desperate decision he’d made, which could potentially contain the way out of this mess. It was probably out of power, but with an experimental reactor in his bomb bay that could power a city for just about forever, he could sort that out. Probably.
Bringing up the keyboard again, Dav punched in the navigational data, compensated for the screwed propulsion, and set the messed up bomber on a three-day limp towards the unknown vessel.
Sure, it was a stupid idea, but it was also the only one he had.
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Over the course of three days, Dav had gone through most of the porn the previous pilot stashed on his ship, found and consumed the secret beer and snack pack in the spare emergency vac-suit locker, and was halfway through an old movie about a bunch of 22nd century humans fighting alien bugs with bodies made mostly of blender blades when he nodded off.
The proximity alert for 60,000 kilometers woke him up with a loud claxon that quickly died in a shower of sparks and the smell of burnt plastic.
Dav hurriedly turned the shit around and began a breaking burn at as full a throttle he could afford – apparently the navigation computer got fried when he fell asleep and all his programmed maneuver sets were out the airlock.
While 60,000 kilometers might seem like a lot for a dirt-stomper – which was how pilots referred to the planet-side population, usually not to their faces – it was in fact very little, when you were going at 35,000 kilometers an hour. Relativity was a bitch.
While the ship was breaking, Dav attempted to bring up the camera feed and have a closer look at the vessel he was approaching, but somehow, all of his sensor arrays besides the most basic stuff for collision avoidance was fried. His best guess was electromagnetic interference from the vessel, though it could be electronic warfare as far as he knew. He heard of old ship that kept “fighting” even though their crew was long ago turned into so much dust, just because there was no one to push the “stop” button.
Eventually, the busted bomber slowed enough to allow Dav to turn the front-facing canopy towards the mystery vessel, some 30 kilometers from him.
Looming on the other side of the transparent polymer was a metal behemoth unlike any seen before by human eyes. It had to be at least 10 kilometers long, and one kilometer wide at its narrowest point. Shaped like a massive bird of prey, it’s “underbelly” was lined with countless tendrils that at closer look appeared to be great manipulator arms of some sort. While Dav couldn’t see a weapon poking out, the beast’s size alone could allow it to harness physics as it’s weapon, shrugging off ramming by virtue of its naked hull against anything below battlecruiser-level, which usually ranged at the 1 kilometer length themselves.
Suddenly, Dav’s ship shook, and all of a sudden all of his hairs stood on end and the computer went dead. He was familiar with this since he did the same to his friend in flight school and wrecked a trainer space-fighter – someone was pulling him using a tractor beam at full power, strong enough to pin a destroyer in place with no chance of escape.
He considered panicking but then gave that up, he’d already had a nervous breakdown and his air was running out. Instead, Dav grabbed the meter-long monkey-wrench off to his right and prepared himself.
Whoever was giving him the spacefaring version of an atomic wedgy was going to answer some questions.