CHAPTER 2 - WARP

It was only a few hours until the ship would reach the warp boundary of the Flamerider system, thanks to the proximity of the Starbase to that important threshold.

Kuw and Rachel were walking through a corridor… for a given value of walking. The very high gravity, created by the ship's acceleration, made it difficult for them to even stand.

"It feeeels like I have rocks for bones," the relmai said, stumbling and nearly tripping over a cable, her thin legs not intended for such a high gravity.

"Don't worry, you'll get used to it!" Rachel said, patting her on the shoulder with a heavy hand.

"Oh I knooow I will, just have to get my hard-g muscles working again after months of sitting around on NA."

They turned a corner and reached a ladder leading upwards. On civilian ships, there were lifts, but here everyone was expected to be able and in good shape, thus a lift would simply waste mass for no reason.

A few crewmembers were in the mess hall that the ladder passed through, like the cook Sean Mainey, or one of the lower-rank engineers Temo Sabauri, eating small portions, but overall the hall was not as occupied as it would be during lunch hour. Neither of the two women were hungry, so they continued upwards to the hab area.

It perhaps resembled an unnaturally small motel, a short corridor with many doors. The command staff shared a room with five bunks, as opposed to the usual eight. Rachel took out her datapad and slid it across the door's surface, causing it to swing open with a click.

Perhaps a civilian would have expected the 'bridge' crew of a starship to have luxury accommodations, and the ships they would be most likely to encounter did. But not this one. Efficiency, after all, trumps comfort. The bunks were, at least, fitted for physiological differences where it was relevant: Artur's was much heavier, double-reinforced with superalloy girders, and low to the floor; whereas Patch simply did not have one to compensate for the increased mass, as well as simply out of a lack of necessity. Instead, the fractal robot simply had an alcove where a mattress and frame section would be, with a charging port. The four 'normal' crewmembers, meanwhile, had regular bunks on the second and third levels, with Elektra's being above Patch's charger and Rachel and Kuw being above Artur's. There was a small square viewscreen on the wall that showed the star-studded expanse of space. There was an inconspicuous, ID-locked door that led to Jamaad's private quarters.

As the two were placing their personal belongings into the compartments under their mattresses, the door opened and Elektra walked into the room.

After greetings were exchanged, the amphibian-like genemod sat down and said "Leaving Patch aside, we have more high-integration cyborgs than I had expected. I'm a doctor, not a mechanic, so I suppose it can fill my role if one gets injured."

Rachel stroked her chin. "Is Patch the only full robot? What about the ship AI?"

"Nope, we don't have a sapient onboard AI. The pseudosap model is good but feels soulless from my brief convo with it. They all do to me."

"Hmm, that makes sense. The Eternally Successful had one, but as far as I understand, it led to a bunch of legal kerfuffle where the ship itself got considered personnel. But she was nice. I still send her letters!" The catgirl then glanced down at the empty charging port. "Do you consider Patch soulless?"

"No. Misguided, yes, but it's still a person like you and I. It has an immortal soul like any sapient being, and can be saved. But perhaps it is rude to talk about someone behind their back."

Kuw put down her datapad, which, unlike Rachel's black rectangle, more resembled the world's smallest laptop, and chimed in. "Rude? Noope nope nope, that's a silly humie convention. It's not like Patch can hear us talk, soooo what harm is it?"

The hum of the engines, which was permeating the air in the room, suddenly strengthened even more. Elektra nearly fell off the bed.

The relmai suddenly froze up, then looked down at the pillow and threw it off the third 'floor' of the bunk bed. It fell with a blinding speed and landed with a loud, flat slap. "Yeaaaa, I deffo need to get used to this."

"So, Kuw," Rachel said, "I take it that they don't allow the usual relmai brand of fun here?" She giggled.

"Well, yes, not exactly thouuuugh. They banned hallucinogens but we're still allowed our usual euphorics and, well, they outright encouraged me to microdose some… what do ya Terrans call iiiit… adrenaline? Performance enhancers? Stuff like that."

"Oh. That kind of explains how you act, huh. I saw a few vids from relmai ships. Looked like a flying nightclub. I have no idea how you could concentrate on anything."

"Well I have no idea how you can feel overwhelmed by anything, soooooo…" The relmai said, waving her hand around.

***

Patch clambered down the ladder into the engineering deck, and scanned it with its cameras. Unlike the quick-response console in the CIC, which only controlled the basics of the ship's systems, the entire walls of the room were coated in knobs, dials, screens, buttons, and valves. Various pipes and machines took up the entire port end of the room, while many crates and tools were stacked to the starboard.

Several engineers were busy fiddling with the various interfaces, frequently running back and forth between various screens as alerts flashed. Noise of all kinds echoed through the room, from clanging to shrill beeping.

The newest person on the job, a dark-skinned, long-haired man named Radd Grant, jogged up to Patch and said "I did not expect this to be so intense… it's a small ship."

"The ship is small, but we have to extract every single percent of engine performance."

Radd nodded and went back to his station, while the robot personally inspected the Ugolnikov drive control panel. It was just a blue screen with lots of various charts, numbers, and bars that kept shifting around. Patch silently lamented the lack of a direct interface here, for anti-ECM reasons, and instead pressed a few buttons to engage the spool-up process an hour in advance. While this would put extra strain on the crystal in the warp chamber, thus reducing its operational lifetime by a year or two, it would squeeze out around three extra percent of in-warp speed. A variety of different levers had to be flicked in a precise order to minimize the risk of drive failure during this maneuver– a procedure so delicate that Patch did not trust its organic, imperfect underlings to perform it.

***

The hour had passed, and Jamaad's voice echoed through the intercom in every room on the ship. "This is Captain Jamaad Warren speaking! We will be entering warp in three minutes. Please hold on tight, keep yourself distracted, and take your Hyperstabilizane."

The captain himself was the only one who remained in the CIC. Even Artur got up and left for the hab module.

…

First, the hum of the four torches immediately cut out. Everything not bolted or glued down floated up into the air. Then, there was a very loud clanking sound that echoed through every room in the ship several times, rising in pitch with each clank. The three Terrans in the officers' quarters reached into the medkits located under the mattresses and each swallowed a single little pill. Meanwhile, Kuw drank some colorful, swirling liquid from a small bottle.

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A whirring was followed by a series of clicks, followed by a whine that decreased in pitch and volume until there was silence.

And then, space itself seemed to bend into an impossible shape, then seemingly normalize. The starfield on the little wall-mounted viewscreen flashed white, then became a shifting, rippling rainbow of colors.

But those in the room did not pay attention to the light show outside. They, as per the instructions of the captain and the standard operating procedure, tried their best to distract themselves from what was now going on inside their minds.

Rachel's attempts to play a turn-based strategy game were stifled by the fact that voices and whispers constantly intruded into her head, almost as loud as the soft-edge playlist blasting through her headset. They talked in many different cadences and claimed to be everything from the Prophet Zoroaster to William the Conqueror to the hit video game character Johnny Jerboa. Many patterns danced across her vision like fish in an aquarium, just as colorful and just as aimless, but unlike fish they were inedible. She mewled and kept playing. This tiny, orderly world felt much safer than the nightmare outside.

Artur turned on his internal BCI. The wolf-man did indeed think that these things were mostly useful for entertainment, but what he was about to do certainly counted as such. One second, he was lying on the bunk and staring up at the 'ceiling'. The next second, he was in some kind of semi-ethereal wireframe dimension where he used a flamethrower to incinerate abstract monsters while leaping from cube to cube. With every creature slain, the voices grew a bit fainter, while the power metal grew a bit louder.

Elektra pulled the blanket over herself, took out a miniature pocket Bible and began skimming through the pages, quietly reciting verses she deemed relevant. She did so in a steady yet passionate voice, keeping a certain rhythm. Verses about resisting temptation, verses about the weakness of the forces of Hell in the face of faith, verses about keeping one's mind clear. And perhaps the holy book did hold some kind of power, or maybe she simply convinced herself that it did. The voices did not seem as loud now, even with the lack of a soundtrack.

Kuw, meanwhile, was prevented from perusing her culture's usual method of dealing with warp-madness by StarNavy regulations. Instead, the relmai coped with the eldritch tones in a broadly similar way to Rachel drowning out the voices… but only broadly. The incredibly screechy alien music blared so loud that Elektra could hear it from across the aisle even considering the headset, and the game more resembled a tornado of colors than anything visually coherent. Her snout contorted into a grin as she leaned further into the datapad, fighting mayhem with mayhem.

And just a few meters away, Jamaad breathed deeply as he floated around the CIC, staring intently at various monitoring screens. The voices screamed loud and often, but he powered through them. Sometimes, it felt like a rusty nail was being hammered into his brain. And yet he kept his face stoic, not wincing or shedding a single tear even as what sounded like a billion nails were scratching a million chalkboards. Someone had to be here, checking up on every system and the state of every crewmember. The risk was small, but the possible consequences were simply too devastating.

Patch, meanwhile, nonchalantly maintained the Ugolnikov drive, pacing between two consoles. It was the only living being currently in the engineering deck, and the only unusual thing the robot felt was a static-like buzzing.

This pandemonium went on for exactly eleven hours. It stopped as abruptly as it started, with a loud clap, a flash outside, and everything returning to normal.

A familiar voice, sounding rather exhausted, echoed over the intercom.

"This is Captain Jamaad Warren speaking! We have arrived at the Martin's Void system. In case you don't know, this is officially the start of the far frontier. Basically no real authority here. We will gravskim while burning for around twelve hours. I know all of you want to sleep now, but Weapons Officer Artur Greenpaw, Sensors Officer Rachel Beka, and Comms Officer… Kuw… must man their posts until further notice. The burn will start in one minute."

The Canid didn't even wait for the gravity to come back before getting out of bed, saluting the camera in the corner, and leaving.

Rachel sat up and checked the time according to the onboard clock. 23:11. She did indeed feel very drowsy.

"This was… rougher than I am used to," she said. "Didn't think it would be that bad."

"A consequence of how fast we were going," Elektra said. "You'll get used to it after a few more jumps, and hyperspace won't feel as bad."

The blue empath-genemod skimmed through the crew manifest on her datapad. "Nope, nobody's got an acute reaction. Good. I think I'm going to sleep."

Kuw, meanwhile, giggled at the captain's utter resignation trying to pronounce her name. "No time to waste talking, just goooo!"

The relmai pushed out of bed and was in mid-air as the hum of the engines resumed, sending her flying face-first onto the cold metal floor. Her squirrel-like tail fluffed out even more than usual as she yelped some kind of swear in her native language.

"I'm okay!" She said as she wiped off a nosebleed with a small, colorful cloth and sprinted down the hall as if nothing happened. Rachel followed, less recklessly. Then, Elektra turned off the lights with a simple gesture and began trying to fall asleep.

***

Rachel pressed a few buttons and initiated a sensor sweep of the star system. There were no windows anywhere on the ship, so the monitor of the sensor console was the only view outside from the CIC. The visible-light readings were concentrated in a tiny box in the corner, only showing some stars as expected. In seaship terms, the general appearance more resembled a submarine than a surface ship. And just like a submarine, the Pheidippides had to rely on non-visual sensors to collect information about its surroundings. Many other boxes provided information on every object in the system… of which there were not many.

There was just one planet, uninhabited and airless, orbiting a lonely white dwarf star. Both were only visible in infra-red wavelengths. Considering there was no hint of a planetary nebula, Martin's Star must have spent hundreds of thousands of years as a white dwarf. This decomposed corpse of a star system, like many in the far frontier, had no colonies and no Starguard outpost. There were still many ships of many types and flags, their torch drives gleaming amid the cold background radiation, each on the most optimal trajectory to skim up the drive and leave the system as fast as possible. Each of them tried to keep far from the others, and this atmosphere of distrust was apparent even on the abstract white-and-green display.

"Nobody's within hailing range. Or weapons effective range for that matter," Rachel said. "So we're safe. Let's keep it that way. Sorry Kuw, no talking today."

"Acknowledged," Jamaad said, as the relmai sighed. "With that in mind, I think everyone's hungry."

The mess hall was not large compared to the ones in non-military ships, but since it still took up an entire deck, it was the largest room on the ship. Most of the tables were occupied by crewmembers of various species, who ate eagerly. One side effect of warp travel was an acute sensation of hunger, and thus Sean did not hesitate to make very large portions.

The four organic officers present, of course without the inorganic Patch, sat around a table reserved for them. Three of the plates had the same dish: a tangle of bright green, clearly artificially-colored slimy noodles, dotted with light brown filets of fish. Meanwhile, the dish that had been given to Kuw was very different: a deep bowl full of what resembled oversized, gelatinous burdocks that seemed to shimmer in various colors.

"Whatever you have looks tastier than this algae," Rachel said, the noodles crunching in her mouth. "This fish is lame too," she spat out a misshapen, rigid fin.

Kuw shook her head after chewing and swallowing a 'burdock'. "Nooooope nope nope. Miuswak tastes like paper if paper was three-d. But I know it's very nutritious."

"But it looks so pretty."

Jamaad looked up from his meal. "All relmai food does. Even the bland stuff. At least we have a modular CELSS so it's possible to have alien food at all."

***

11 Apr 2231

Everyone's belly was full of this rather utilitarian food. Though it was not at all exciting, they felt sated. The crew was preparing to go to sleep, though Jamaad was not in the crew cabin, having left to perform some last-minute checks.

Soft snoring began to resound in the cramped room, only lit up by the extremely faint starlight.

…

BRRRAAAM! BRRRAAAM! BRRRAAAM!

The lights turned on and pulsated red as a deafening alarm resounded through the entire hull. Only after a few seconds did the lamps return to their usual coloration.

"General quarters! General quarters! Suspicious vessel approaching!" Jamaad shouted.

Elektra jolted out of bed. "Oh for the love of God…"

"Fuck! Is this an attack? So fast?" Rachel jumped and ran to the door.

Kuw seemed to switch to her native language, but it seemed like she was swearing even more profusely as she followed.

Only Artur felt unfazed and almost gleeful. The Canid strolled outside, quickly overtaking the rest. "Time to roll!"