Chapter 7 - Warp

22 Jan 2230

"GREETINGS, PASSENGERS! THIS IS CAPTAIN JASMIJN EVERS SPEAKING. THE SHIP IS ABOUT TO PASS THE WARP BOUNDARY AND ACTIVATE ITS UGOLNIKOV DRIVE. ACCELERATION WILL STOP IN TWO MINUTES. AFTER THIS, YOU WILL HAVE TWENTY MINUTES TO REARRANGE THE FURNITURE IN MICROGRAVITY UNTIL THE SHIP ENTERS WARP AND THE RING STARTS SPINNING. HAVE A NICE DAY!"

Kayden was a little more mentally prepared for the loud announcement this time… which didn’t change the fact that it woke him, Nheka, and Lai up at 4 AM.

"Urgh…" he said as he turned on the lights. "I heard things about warp sickness. Hope I don’t have it. I don’t remember having any extreme symptoms but it usually manifests in adulthood."

"I find it… pleassant…" Nheka said after she slowly stirred awake.

"Your brain works differently. I’m still worried."

Lai, meanwhile, just shrugged. "I never bhelt anything likethat stubh humans talk about. Just weird liiights and tones."

"I am similarly unworried," Ray said.

Soon after, the gravity turned off, and the group went through the motions of preparing the room for the shift, with Nheka’s great help. It didn’t take long at all. The silence, broken for four days by the soft roar of the fusion drives, provoked a ringing in Kayden’s ears.

Much of the rest of twenty minutes was spent looking in anticipation at the viewscreen…

"GREETINGS, PASSENGERS! THIS IS CAPTAIN JASMIJN EVERS SPEAKING. THE SHIP WILL PASS THE WARP BOUNDARY IN FIVE MINUTES. ALL UNTRAINED PASSENGERS MUST VACATE THE DECKS AND ENTER THE RING. HAVE A NICE DAY!"

"I dunno what to expect," Kayden commented.

And then…

Outside, the Celestial Harmony II had already disabled its main engines, but its four lacy ‘wings’ of radiators were still red-hot. Then, it was completely enveloped by an oblate elliptical bubble that, for a brief moment, glowed as bright as the exhaust of its fusion drive. Then, that ended, thanks to light itself being outpaced by the vessel.

Inside the hull, there was a strange sound that was a combination of first whirring, then a few loud clicks, followed by a whine that decreased in pitch and volume until silence fell onto the cabins again. While all this was happening, Kayden could feel space itself fold into an impossible shape where time and distance lost all meaning for a split second, then seemingly normalize, even though everything now felt off in a way that he could not quite pinpoint. The viewscreen, meanwhile, showed first a brilliant white flash, then the usual starfield, although now obscured by constant ripples that caused the stars’ pale light to distort into a field of ghostly, multicolored halos that cycled through every color of the spectrum. "Wow… wait," he paused. "I hear voices. Why do I hear voices? And I feel like I’m about to throw up. I… I feel… oh my god the voices and my belly feels like… argh… loud voices…" His expression was that of extreme discomfort that bordered on agony.

"It will pass…" Nheka said, trying to switch to a comforting voice.

The ring then started spinning, and everything gently settled down again. "The voices and the nausea… stopped? I still hear a faint whispering and I don’t think I will eat anything for the duration of the warp but it’s… tolerable?"

"Yeah this is why they tell everyone without training to go to the cabins," Lai said, gesturing upwards.

"You meat sacks are silly," Ray beeped.

"Yes, so silly for having a nasty reaction to spacetime itself becoming a pretzel around me while going a bazillion times faster than my species evolved to go," Kayden said.

Kayden then looked something up on the ship’s local Internet shard. "Apparently if I had warp sickness, I’d be very queasy even right now so I don’t. Apparently if you have it and are caught in microgravity during warp, you can have seizures and hallucinations like from a bad drug trip. This can cause brain damage or death. Amazing." He paused. "Oh also it says that there is no scientific consensus about what causes the voices and the hallucinations. That’s encouraging," he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

"It ssoundss like a sshrill piping to me, that consstantly sshiftss… No naussea… Maybe I am jusst ussed to it…"

Lai chuckled. "I see waaaaay more interesting things outside of warp than inside."

"Right. Anyways, I don’t feel like sleeping… and I want to pass the time somehow. Any ideas?"

Nheka beckoned him to sit down next to her. "We have not talked about human culture and hisstory enough thesse passt few dayss… I have a quesstion…"

"What is it?"

She curled her lengthy tail around herself. "Iss it really sso common in human ssociety to have ssmall furred animalss at khome and following you around all your life…? Yessterday I sstruggled to ressist my urge to ssnatch at and eat a tiny, I am ssure it wass a ‘puppy’, that wass floating through the hallss…"

Kayden flinched. "What the… you shouldn’t do that," he seemed to be at a loss for words. "We care about our pets like we care about our family. So yes."

"Ssorry… It jusst looked too much like a mragez… A popular ssnack on Akeruh: ssmall, white, fluffy, and eaten whole…"

"...alive?!"

"Yess… Very juicy and crunchy… And the ssquealss are pleassant…"

Kayden just sat there, stunned and a little horrified. "As if those insects weren’t bad enough", he thought.

"Do you have any further questions?" He finally blurted out after an awkward pause. Lai was looking down onto the two of them, barely holding back laughter.

Nheka used her tail hand to scratch her forehead, in an imitation of a human gesture. "Not right now…"

Meanwhile, Ray jumped off their bunk, nodded to Lai, and pointed at the door. "Eh? Whaddya want?"

"Follow me," they intoned.

"Eh? Sure why not."

The cyborg and the relmai then left the room.

"Why are they being so secretive? Ray, I mean. Gave non-answers to all my questions when I asked. I feel like something’s up," Kayden said.

"Do you want to follow them…?"

"I don’t wanna intrude on their privacy. So not really."

There was silence as Kayden slumped against the side wall, sitting on the bed. "I have a question of my own. You never took off that turquoise coat for the better half of a week, even slept in it. Doesn’t it get dirty?"

"Why would it…? I am not currently molting…"

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"I meant like… Oh, you don’t have skin that can sweat… Right… Sorry for the stupid question."

Kayden went back to his bed, to idly read a historical fiction e-book he had saved to his datapad before the trip. It focused on the early exploration of space by the old, disunited nation-states of Earth, two and a half centuries ago…

***

His reading was interrupted fifteen minutes later by a loud pop, then a sudden jolt that seemed to propagate through the very fabric of spacetime within the ship, followed by a ringing sound. The viewscreen on the wall showed a flash, like when the ship first entered warp. The bubble seemed to flicker every now and then, with the ripples being a lot more frantic.

"What… wass ssat?"

"As if I know? It didn’t sound good. We seem to still be in warp?"

"GREETINGS, PASSENGERS! THIS IS CAPTAIN JASMIJN EVERS SPEAKING. AN UNUSUAL IMPACT TO THE WARP BUBBLE FROM THE INSIDE HAS OCCURRED. THE IMPACTOR WAS VAPORIZED BY THE INTERACTION, AND THE UGOLNIKOV DRIVE HAS BEEN DAMAGED. THE SHIP WILL TEMPORARILY EXIT WARP TO ALLOW FOR TROUBLESHOOTING BY OUR ENGINEERING TEAM. HAVE A NICE DAY!" The announcement was a bit quieter now, presumably to avoid causing undue panic.

"Oh for crying out loud!" Kayden shouted, as the faint voices and distortions stopped, and the starfield reappeared in its usual form. Out of curiosity, Kayden panned the camera so that it faced backwards. The nearer two of the ship’s four still-red radiators comprised a V-shape, between which an orange star was visible, still distinguishable from the others but now more of a large dot, with no visible rays. The destination, Eurydice, on the other hand, was indistinguishable from any other star. He felt a pang of sadness again, soon replaced with awe at realizing the true scope of the emptiness of space. Even traveling at more than six thousand times the speed of light, a rate that made the intra-system leg of the journey feel like a snail racing against a sports car, it would take fourteen hours– as compared to the less than an hour already spent– to get there, after the maintenance was done. And to think that in this void there was absolutely nothing of note, with the exception of dead planemos and comatose brown dwarfs…

"Well, at least it’s quiet in my head again," he continued, then went back to reading.

Two pairs of running footsteps, one soft and the other metallic, were heard outside, and then the door opened…

Lai and Ray stood in the doorway, the former looking rather shaken, with his four pupils darting around even more wildly than usual, which became apparent when he wiped his sunglasses with a small cloth.

"‘Ey Kayten! Ray didn’t even tell me what they were wanting to show me, we were going towards the lift leading to the emergency storage when on the viewscreen on the wall, I saw some mofo in a hardsuit push a long metal crate out towards the bubble! And then it bhucking exploded! The crate not the arm… I could see just the arm. Ray submitted a report and led me away and said nevermind. What?"

"Apologizing. I just uncould articulate the action that I wanted to do," the cyborg said.

Kayden sighed and facepalmed, assuming the worst, before saying "Ray, do you have a recording? You have cameras in your eyes, right?"

"Yes. What is your Dropoff ID?"

"Uh… ‘I like bread’, all lowercase with underscores between words, but ‘bread’ is capitalized and there’s a 19 at the end."

Kayden saw the file appear on his datapad, and opened the camera app to view it. Just like Lai said, only a hardsuited arm was visible on the recording, free of any features that could identify the suit… and the crate looked exactly like those he and Nheka had seen carted away in the ruins– and though it was a common type and not guaranteed to be the one, nor be seen as suspicious to be carted aboard the ship, he guessed that it was one of those. He then saw it slowly spin towards the rippling wall, and disappear in a blinding flash, followed by the same jolt that was seen in the cabin, accompanied by profuse swearing in a mix of English and Liamuju, the relmai language. He visibly seethed at the sight of this pointless destruction of irreplaceable artifacts.

"I’m at a loss. Why would they do that? And this means they have an insider in the crew… ugh. I do understand why the captain didn’t share the whole story, though."

Lai just made a whining noise and climbed back up to his bunk, and so did Ray. Kayden then showed the video to Nheka.

"That wass indeed unexpected… Sshould we do ssomething?"

"Nah I gave up on that plan. I never fully shared it but it was also stupid. Let’s just wait," Kayden shook his head.

"It jusst doess not feel right to jusst remain here and do nothing…"

Kayden thought for a bit. "Yeah if you grew up here in the frontier you’d learn to not dig too deep into things like this by yourself. It’s better than it was ten years ago apparently but still."

"Perhaps… I am a little unssettled by thiss, alongsside many other thingss about human ssociety."

"Like what?" Kayden raised an eyebrow.

"Leaving asside my issuess with you giving rights to thinking machiness, your loosse control over your worldss iss jusst sstrange… Almosst ass if every world iss itss own country, not a part of an united whole, working together in perfect kharmony…"

Kayden began to explain. "Oh, we tried that, and then in the 2180s we kinda fought a civil war over this. Millions died, and most of the canine genemods seceded in the chaos to form their own Black Fang Republic. Meanwhile there was an uprising of human supremacists who massacred genemods in the froniter before being put down and chased out from Terran space. Anyways, the central government won… But it was a Pyrrhic victory. To prevent further conflict, the United Nations of Earth rebranded itself into the Terran Federation and gave home rule to every colony. However, it keeps them under special zones that give the metropoles some exclusive economic and political intervention rights. It calmed the people. Things have been mostly quiet since then."

Nheka listened intently before responding. "I ssee… I haven’t heard much about thiss, so bear wiss me… I remember hearing about ssome kind of rebellion, but not a civil war… Iss that related…?"

"Oh, the ‘Fnor IV Rebellion’ is the official name for that whole mess. But everyone knows it was a civil war."

"Makess ssensse… It iss jusst very sstrange, the thought of an entire group of coloniess rebelling… It iss hard for me to comprehend one persson rebelling againsst ssociety with ssuch violence without a very, very good reasson…"

"Well, they did at least think they had a very good reason. Certainly they weren’t as oppressed as your people were, but there were many taxation issues et cetera," Kayden said.

"Yess, that iss what I was getting at… I ssimply cannot imagine rebellion outsside of ssuch circumsstancess… And I mean that literally… You humanss are chaotic, for ssure…"

Kayden shrugged. "I don’t really understand you guys either. Let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to offend you."

"Fine…"

He then looked away. "Hey Lai! Are you still awake? I gotta ask you something."

"Eeeeh?" The relmai put down his datapad. His movements were noticeably twitchier than before, and his voice was distant.

Kayden sighed. "If you’re not too baked to remember, where exactly did you see that guy throw the crate from?"

Lai’s response was delayed. "Eeeerrrm… Port side near the reception room? I thiiiink. Raaaaay, can ya conbhirm?"

"Confirming."

Kayden thought for a bit, then checked the ship’s map on his datapad. The only external airlock in that area, aside from the main docking airlock which nobody would be stupid enough to dispose of a crate out of, was one of the engineering airlocks. The engineering deck also held the ship’s non-emergency cargo bay, though one reserved for various supplies and tools.

He relayed that information to his friends and added "I think they know already so I won’t waste the captain’s time, but this is interesting to know. Someone in engineering is deffo in on it."

"Great… Ssimply amazing…" Nheka hissed. "...it feelss weird ssaying wordss while meaning sse exact oppossite thing, but it iss intriguing…"

"We call it ‘sarcasm’. Interesting that you never had the concept of it…"

Nheka paused before responding with "The thought of it jusst did not come to me…"

"Right. On an unrelated note, which one of you is currently active?"

"Takhghari, again…"

Nheka then reached into a pocket of her coat and retrieved her datapad to check up on any status updates with regards to the repairs that had arrived. "Apparently it wass jusst a few blown capacitorss… It ssayss that repairss will finissh within half an hour…"

"That’s great, I was worrying if we’d be delayed for hours more… or days… the ship's life support would be able to handle it, but my nerves wouldn’t."

Kayden took the time to eat some crackers right then and there, as the mild nausea had subsided. Rations were running out, and he might have had to resort to disgusting life-support food during the next leg of the trip: the approach to Alacrity. He supposed that they’d be able to stock up on proper food once they arrived at the planet.

"Yep… Only two bags left. Imagine if I took something less dense." He said, looking at the food pile located in the drawer with a sigh. "What about you two?"

"I am down to one ssingle khiuzz inssect… I have been keeping my coat cold on purposse to sslow my metabolissm… Meat-moss tasstess awful and sstinkss…"

Lai just shook his head and gave a thumbs up, as if saying to not worry about his food situation.

***

Very soon, the intercom on the wall again boomed with the captain’s voice.

"GREETINGS, PASSENGERS! THIS IS CAPTAIN JASMIJN EVERS SPEAKING. THE SHIP’S UGOLNIKOV DRIVE HAS BEEN RESTORED TO FULL OPERATIONAL CAPACITY. HAVE A NICE DAY!"

And once again, there were the usual noises of the drive turning on, followed by the same bending of space itself. The four travelers were quiet while the ship continued on its journey, as if nothing had happened.