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Finally she could push!

Tunie loved to swim and push at the absolute limits of her body. It made her drive sing with delight to be fully engaged, a threshing whirling mass of feathers gnashing and meshing through the purity of her inner vacuum cavity. Her tummy burned with intense long light that was caught and warmed on its journey out into the rest of her hull.

She could see and taste time slowly squashing under the might of her drive. She could feel the space of her spine being compressed in relation to her journey. Her mind was engaged with greater and greater precision as she pushed herself closer and closer to her cruising speed. Nuzzling up against light itself in the never ending race of every Ship.

The future was so much closer now, she had to strain and stress to catch every single particulate, every flutter of vapor, every distortion of light. She had to be omniscient within all possible courses ahead of her to be able to survive every journey. She could feel the wonderful thrilling bite of danger rushing over her. Her eyes widening and shifting their focus to spread her consciousness ever wider and further ahead of her.

It was these moments that she needed her crew the most, she could not spare to even think about something so tiny as her inner hulls in transit. She had to live and see and be in the great wide envelope of the future. The present was too fast, too soon, there was nothing that Tunie could do if something slipped past the sphere of her awareness.

Any maneuver that could shove her for an emergency in the present was a maneuver that would shear her spine and shred her hulls so badly that her feathers flew off in every direction. Tunie did not, could not think about danger so close to herself as to be instantaneous in the deep courses that she now swam.

Every eye was almost split apart from the rest in this endeavor, her mind spiraling out so that each could focus so intensely into the future. Her hull was put into a gentle spin so that each of her eyes of every size could get a solid read of the reef from every vantage available too it.

Tunie burned with the long light in her belly and the harsh spatter of inconsequential motes against her feathers. Her feathers fluttering in waves to shield her eyes for brief blinks of blindness when she traversed the more dangerous clouds of atoms.

This was living, this was what every stingy annoying moment in traffic was all about. This is what the turmoil and frustration of ports and their greedy grist hoarding was about. This was what the hungry journeys for uplifts and charity were about.

It was all about these moments, where every part of Tunie was straining at the very limits of the universe to PUSH. The course hardly mattered really compared to the sheer unrelenting joy of it.

The only way that this could possibly be better if somehow she could get brushies while also pushing. But her crew always refused to do that. But she supposed that made sense, her crew lacked protective feathers and were thus extremely fragile.

Tunie trembled a little at the thought of how fragile and breakable she would feel without the heavy potencies in her outer feathers or the sweet fierceness of her drive core. Without her feathers Tunie would just be a hunk of skeleton and useless eyes drifting worse than a corpse.

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That was not life.

Tunie pushed the in utter joy of transit. Some of her plumage idly shuffling and scraping the dust and ooze from her little snack into her mouths.

None of her eyes were even really thinking about it, she simply had food in her feathers and mouths to eat it. The mouths and feathers managed it themselves and the idiosyncrasies in her momentum that came of it were corrected for and absorbed by the work of the rest of her guiding the path through the vast open passage between the stellar volumes.

The path was thankfully clear of almost any debris or refuse, no leaky out gassing or random plumes of vapor. No stupid canner 'ships' with their messy awful gas pushing drives that stink up all the space behind them. No blinding light beams to push sailor ships.

A good shaded passage out of the way of the star winds.

It was a rarely traversed channel in the reef.

There was much wilderness past this way and no openly advertised ports worth the danger of the trip. Wilderness was dangerous, but Tunie was safe as long as she was at speed, there was no predator any Ship had spoken of that could survive an interception of a Courier at full speed unless it too pushed to match them. And predators of that fearsome horror were distant legends to scare young ships in creche ports. Yes Warships were a thing but Tunie and her crew were careful to not draw attention from any of them or their masters.

Yes the only thing which Tunie feared when she was already at her comfortable cruise velocity was unexpected invisible objects and the ire of a mad Warship. Oh and perhaps in the far reaches of possibility a sufficiently insane, vengeful and long-lived port that'd lay some kind of awful trap for her. But her eyes were keen and young and bright and the wilderness was rarely a place for such fearsome beings with their terrible hungers (or any ports at all by definition).

Still Warships! Terrible monsters all of them! Ravenous terrible cruel intelligences to a last! She heard stories they were made out of the stolen corpses of courier ships and terrible void predators forced into one terrible travesty by strange unknowable urban magic! She had also heard stories that said those first stories were nonsense and anyone could become one if they just had enough food and their crew used the right urban rituals. Tunie found the later stories very silly but it was impossible to say with the great urban ports, and she also found the first stories somewhat silly, but the warships had to come from SOMEWHERE so it was one of those things where which one it was depended on which eye she was seeing things with.

Either way Tunie did not expect to see any Warships in the wilderness. She needed the ports to fill her belly and holds with high grade grist for the potencies of her feathers. But warships were much more ravenous, their bellies practically insatiable in comparison to a mere courier like Tunie. Wilderness one only had to fear debris and nasty predators, and none of those threats bothered Ships who were properly careful and clever. Still the trip would not have been deemed worth the risk to reach any of the known ports on the opposite side of the wild stars.

But her crew and she had a secret.

Tunie and her crew knew about a port in the middle of the wilderness who had special goods and stores!

A feral port in the wilderness!

And they always, Always had her favorite treats!

Tunie was so pleased!