Wherever You Go, There You Are
"Captians Space log #50, date... Monday, Location, unimportant! I have been out of gas and drifting on inertia for 51 days now, relative velocity as of lunchtime was... err 200 m/s... That seems a little slow. COMPUTER!"
A shrill and sad voice rang out from several speakers scattered about the large cabin. "Yes, Captain."
"How fast are we going!?"
"200 to the power... of 3 meters per second... Still."
Hiro did the math and smirked "200 times three... is like 600. Hey not bad."
"Actuall..."
The computer tried to chime in before Hiro cut it off "Set a reminder to get bigger screens next time we dock. The numbers are too tiny."
The computer, now seemingly dejected simply replied "Yes captain, reminder set."
Unbeknownst to Hiro, his ship was currently the fastest object in the known universe.
The ship itself was the culmination of several long-dead and arcane technologies that had been thrown together in a way that only Hiro could be proud of. It was a rather ugly and industrial-looking thing, with cooling pipes and radio towers protruding out of the hull in irregular intervals. From any angle, it seemed off balance and lopsided and by no account appeared space worthy. but it was thanks to this that the ship was able to fly at all. Its engine had been pulled from an ancient battleship, and lacking the necessary alignment tools Hiro had installed it several degrees off the Y-Axis. Had the ship been symmetrical the inertial forces would have pulled the ship apart the instant it accelerated, but due to Hiro's poor sense of direction, everything else on the ship had been installed at angles that worked to counteract this. As such the ship could fly in a straight line if it was pointed a little sideways.
This in and of itself wouldn't have caused any issue but the Navigation computer was an HP Pavillion, which Hiro had boot-loaded ancient cruise ship software onto. The computer itself was already confused as to why it wasn't on a cruise ship so it spent much of its time contemplating that fact instead of rectifying the difference between the ship's vector and its angle along the longitudinal axis. When one considered that the ship's antimatter tank was out of a subcompact Honda shuttle. It wasn't hard to see why Hiro was always, very lost, moving very quickly, and very out of gas.
This didn't bother Hiro in the slightest though. Even if he did understand just how dire the situation was, he was in space, far away from the trash heaps of his home planet. Traveling through the stars his mind was filled with beautiful resort planets and bikini-clad women... how much of that was from the brochure of the cruise ship software he couldn't tell. But so long as he was moving toward some destination he was content.
Later that night while watching re-runs of some Space Network romantic dramas, Hiro was drinking the beer that would change the course of humanity's future forever.
"COOMPUTER!"
"Yes. Captian."
"How many beers do I have left?"
"At the current rate of consumption... 2 days... of beer remain."
"Computer! Set a reminder to buy more beer!"
"Memory is full. Say... 1... to delete old reminders. say... 2... to cancel the reminder. or say... help... for more options."
"Never mind!"
Hiro threw the beer can across the room and into the open trash shoot.
"Captain..."
"WHAT NOW!?"
"The... garbage... is full, would you like to jettison the... garbage?"
"Hmmm, I wanted to get the bottle deposits back... I suppose in space no one can see you litter though. Dump it."
Several hundred thousand kilometers away humanity was engaged in the largest military conflict in its known history.
Claxons blared and red lights filled the consoles. Thousands of men and women wearing space navy uniforms ran through the numerous decks of the Space Battleship Tamato. Putting out fires and loading the rail guns in a desperate fight for humanity's survival.
"CAPTAIN! Imperial destroyer launched 12 Torpedos!!! Starboard incoming! 30 seconds out!"
The Captain's brow furrowed. She parted her long scarlet hair with one hand and typed with the other as Her tired eyes darted through the numbers filling the display. after a moment of consideration, she turned to face the ensign at the tactical weapons terminal.
"Get flack to change priority sectors, change fuse delay to 10! Pull Railguns 1-80 off the fighters."
"Yes, Maam!" The ensign began swiping and punching the console with amphetamine-fueled ferver. The main display began to show the guns across the starboard side flash yellow as they were assigned the orders before turning green to show they had adopted the new positions.
"ALL GREEN!"
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
Good, the captain thought if they were lucky the point defense would be able to stop the oncoming salvo. The ship wouldn't take much more. While slow, ship-launched torpedos had insane destructive potential compared to their fighter-based counter-part. If even one made it through and struck the ship than...
"MAAM, ONE GOT THROUGH!!!"
She swore through gritted teeth. "ALL HAND BRACE FOR..."
POP, CRACK, BOOM!
She was thrown upward against the 5-point harness of her seat as the impact rang through the ship like a tuning fork striking the side of a champagne glass. She felt her shoulder pop out of place and across the control deck, anyone or anything not bolted to the ground was violently thrown into the ceiling, before crashing to the floor. She looked around at the chaos. several ensigns lay motionless on the floor, with necks and arms contorted in unnatural angles, and many terminals had gone completely dark.
The captain punched frantically into her console's keypad and looked with horror at the ship's status display, everything in the rear third of the ship including engineering was gone. 100s of bulkheads now exposed to vacuum were closing to hold on to what little oxygen was left.
She punched in the intercom "Damage Control! Report!"
Static come back on the line, looking closer at the status most of the damage control teams were likely to die since they had been moving around during the impact. The Tamato was dead in the water without propulsion and venting atmosphere through the thousands of holes that now littered the ship.
What few guns remained were still shooting, loyal, and mindlessly executing their last orders in a pathetic death rattle. The Captian watched as Enemy Fighters made quick work of them. every second more of the ship turning crimson.
"So this is it, huh." She sat there as people ran between consoles and put out fires. She looked at them while wondering what was the point.
Their force had suffered massive losses across the board at the hands of the Imperial fleet. This was humanity's last stand and they had lost. She curled her lip as tears started to fog her vision.
She keyed the general intercom "ALL HANDS ABANDON SHIP."
They hadn't even made it passed the vanguard. The entire human fleet was decimated by nothing more than enemy destroyers and strike craft. Far in the distance, the Imperial capital ship glowed in the darkness of space like a jewel on a pendant. Just out of reach it was a prize humanity could never win. The Captain began to laugh morbidly through her tears.
"As if humanity could ever defeat gods."
"MAAM!" One of the few remaining ensigns yelled out from across the room.
"Ensign, I said abandon ship! Now go!"
"I was sending the SOS out, and some things just showed up on subspace scans in the local cluster."
"Nothing is going to change our situation ensign! Now get into an escape pod before I throw you in one myself!"
"JUST LOOK AT IT!" The ensign threw the data over to her console.
Infront of the captain was a string of numbers reading what seemed to be complete gibberish. According to the computer several thousand small objects made of mostly alluminum and cardboard where about to pass through the system at 2.5 times the speed of light. She let out a gallows laugh at the idea.
"Ensign we are so screwed that even the computers have lost their minds."
"But MAAM! I double-checked and the objects are showing on visual feeds from the SUDAR!"
She frowned, it would be one thing to have the computer spitting out bad numbers but another to have the SUDAR feed resolve them visually. Maybe the Ensign is mistaken. She looked to another panel across the room to see the number of escape pods decreasing steadily.
"Send everything you got over to my console, and get out of here. You're going to miss your flight."
"But Maam!"
"THAT'S AN ORDER!"
The ensign hesitated and looked around the empty bridge for a moment before saluting and running off the bridge. The Captian looked at the status readout across the ship as the pod bays emptied and the last guns went silent. She patted the armwrest of the chair.
"You did good old girl"
She thought about the 20 years it had taken her to get to this point, The late nights spent in the simulation rooms or buried under piles of paper work. Captian Kotori Fubuki, now well in her 30s couldn't help but feel it was all a waste... Perhaps if she had lead a quiet life on the frontier she could've lived out her life and died of old age before the empire ever found her. Maybe a nice house with a big yard and a few reliable husbands would've suited her. As the SUDAR scan resolved on her console she was taken out of her nostalgic stupor.
Her eyes went wide as the 3D representation of a garbage heap the size of a spaceship mateirialized on the display. She flipped through the numbers again to be sure. It was impossible, but there it was staring her in the face. How did they miss this. The SUDAR scan had been blueshifted beyond the hypothetical maximum. The computer likely saw an error and didn't trigger any of the standard collision warnings. But if this was happening the implications where horrific.
Drifting infront of the main object was an ort cloud of pizza box sized debris, with the estimated vector and mass each one of the small objects carried the kinetic energy of a several gigatonne warheads. The few ships remaining where still fighting, She had to warn them! Kotori Scrambled to push the keys for fleet wide comms. She checked the time to impact.
"NOW!?!?"
A distant Imperial destroyer burst into brilliant star fire as an object the size of a beer can struck the hull at 2.5 times the speed of light. This caused the nearby molecules to undergo nuclear fusion. Nearby The USS IWAMI, Tamato's sister ship, was struck by the shock wave, her hull bent and cracked under the pressure and soon her own reactor burst forth its light into the darkness of space. This in turn cause a chain of explosions as the reactors of other ships reached out to touch their neighbors. Freind or foe... no one was safe. All around the battlefeild, frigates and strike craft made futile attempts to avoid the malestrom. One by one they collided with relativistic pizza boxes and there explosions reached out to embrace their comrades.
Kotori was awestruck. It was as if a god had come from the cosmos to deliver judgement on this war. She focused on one of the few remaining monitors, which held the Imperial Capital Ship into focus. Slowly the leviathan began to list to one side, bringing its guns to bear on some invisible point in the distance. It began to unload its ordinance on the invisible spector, the initially cooridinated salvos became Increasingly frenzied and sporatic as weapons over heated and missile tubes emptied. Then suddenly...
Hiro was enraptured. The Romantic drama he had been binging since yesterday was finally getting to the good part! The wife who was also a drug addict had gotten pregnant with her drug dealers baby but the husband had yet to find out. Now the drug dealer was black mailing her and threatening to reveal the truth to her husband if she didn't participate in a scheme to burn down the local pub for insurance money.
"Where do they get these ideas from!?" Hiro pondered the various ways the plot would unfold as he hovered inches from the small monitor.
The computer chimed having awakened from sleep mode. "Captian, there is something you should be aware of."
"NOT NOW COMPUTER! I'm watching my shows."
"As you wish Captian."
PING... PING.... PONG. Hiro looked up from the monitor to the front of the ship where the noise had originated.
THUD THUD. The ship jerked slightly as if it had hit a speed bump going a little too quickly. Hiro turned back to his show seemingly disinterested.
"Computer, What was that?"
"Nothing... Anymore Captian."
"Ah fair enough, well keep an eye out. We should be running into someone eventually."
"Yes, Captain."