The Eschaton hissed and bellowed in it’s moorings, the sound of heating and cooling metal, pumping coolant, and the steady grind of not-well-oiled machinery. It sounded like I felt. Ornery. Tired. Heartbroken. I tapped along until my cane found the plate of loading ramp, and leaned at parade rest as I was taught to. Navigators were hardly heard, and best not seen to boot. We were to wait in darkness until someone so graciously deigned to address us.

I didn’t have to wait long though, “Name and Designation?” came a call a few meters up the ramp. Masculine voice, likely the quartermaster if he was bothering to address me.

“Navigator 362, Harper. Yeoman-Class,” I answered mechanically. No one likes an uppity tool.

“Ah.” There was a frown in his voice, “Your aide will be along in a moment. Wait there.” Aide. That was a lark. As if anyone on the ship was subordinate to us. But they did want someone checking up on us, making sure we didn’t bang into too many bulwarks.

There was a sharp tap on my right side and officious tone, “Navigator? I’m your aide. This way.” The voice was feminine, a bit sharp, but not malicious. Hurried. I followed along behind it. The hissing of the ship became muted as we crossed from the entryway into the cramped corridors of the vessel, allowing me to put a hand on the side of the wall and walk along with it.

Walls, especially ship walls, were a Navigator’s best friend. There was an indent at each corner or break with a few lines of tick we could read to tell us which way to the galley, the bridge, what have you. The Eschaton’s walls were a bit rough, sanded to coarsness over it’s career of bangs, scrapes, and near misses.

My Aide didn’t speak to me again until we arrived outside a door, my number in tick hurriedly engraved next to it. She tapped a holo-panel’s surface next to the door, “Your ident-chip will grant you access to your quarters, the galley, the bridge, and any other areas of the vessel you are authorized to visit,” she explained. I nodded in her direction and swept my wrist over the holo-panel, and the door hissed as the pneumatics fired to open it. I stepped through into my quarters, the Aide following on my heels.

“From your left, along the wall is a desk. On the desk is a tic-terminal with haptic interface, where you will receive the intended destination of the vessel for you to review, along with star charts and course-plotting tools you should be familiar with. You will also have access to this tic-terminal through an interface on the bridge, but you should endeavor to complete all navigational tasks ahead of jump-time.”

I followed along the wall until my foot banged lightly against the desk. It felt oddly chintsy, like it was made of a cheap plastic. The edge was scratched, with a quick note in tic on it.

“Watch your step.” A message from my predecessor, too late to make a difference. Ass.

Continuing along, the next wall you will find the closet, with your personal effects and uniforms.” She paused, a catch in her voice. Some Navigators got lost down the tunnel of their studies and needed help changing in and out of clothes. I wasn’t one of them.

“Next?” I asked, brushing past the awkwardness.

“Next along the wall is the lavatory, with sink on the immediate right, sani-stall to the left of the sink, and the head across from that.”

Sani-stalls. Eugh. Water was precious in space, so we made do with the weird foam-like sani-gel. Thoroughly unpleasant.

“Finally, along the last wall, directly to the right of the entrance is your bunk. That completes an account of your quarters, Navigator,” She ended the description with a tap against the wall to the right of the door, likely to let me place her in the room. All in all, it was a useful description, and she seemed to have bothered paying enough attention to Navigator etiquette to not just shove me into a closet. To be treated with professionalism, if not respect or warmth, was at least some small blessing.

“Will you require anything else, Navigator?” She asked.

“Nothing at the moment, thank you,” I replied. “When will we be departing?”

“In approximately three hours, at which time you will be confined to quarters for the duration of the day. Our first jump is scheduled for 1600 hours tomorrow, and you are expected to lay in your course by 1400. Clear?”

“As crystal.”

The hiss of the pneumatic door confirmed her exit, and I was left alone. Alone, for the first time in how long? I’d heard they used to keep us isolated, from decanting, all through our training. Worse than the darkness was the silence, the isolation. The loneliness that set in with nothing to feel, nothing to hear but a proctor’s drone. It drove quite a few of us insane, so they at least let us mingle while we studied. But each of us had to face the loneliness once we were assigned out. Some dealt with it better than others.

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I sighed and made my way to the cheap desk and tic-terminal. Sitting down at it and feeling the buzz of the haptics at my fingertips was oddly comforting. Tic was a “modern” innovation, before I’d been decanted, there’d been such a thing as braille, and I suppose tic was close to it, though with dashes instead of strictly being dots. The holographic sensors and haptic interface let the words scroll past our fingers, reading slower of faster with a twitch of the wrist. It took some getting used to, but was fairly intuitive. I scanned across my terminal, checking for the destination my aide had mentioned.

Fortuna. An outlier system, minor in importance, with some mining colonies and deep-ice hauling. A 5-hop jump, 4 if the cargo wasn’t too bulky and the drive cooperated. I flicked the interface towards the cargo manifest and felt an angry buzz. Classified, read the tic. I hmmed, annoyed. Not knowing the cargo made my life more difficult. I couldn’t calculate the jumps as precisely up-front, I’d have to feel out the weight in the moment. Not impossible, but not ideal.

I put in another flick, looking for some information on the infamous jump-drive. If I could get a hold of a manual, I might be able to put together a reasonable guess at my predecessors fate, or at least avoid it myself. Another buzz. Classified. Were they joking? Pushing an unknown tonnage with a drive I knew nothing about? Did they want to vaporize in the mantle of some angry star because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing?

I flicked angrily across the terminal. More Classified notices. All they gave me was the navigational suite, some star-charts, and a destination. It was absurd. I considered my options.

Complain to my aide. Likely she didn’t have anything to do with it, and might make a perfunctory note to the captain of my complaint. Instantly, I’d be tarnished as “difficult.”

Option Two. Find someone on the engineer staff, try and get the lowdown from them. Difficult, though not impossible. Harder would be finding someone with the patience to explain the drive-tech to me, let alone the inclination.

Last option, and the one I pretty much had to take: Plot a safe, circuitous route, leaving a margin of error wide enough to push a planetoid through. Eight jumps, minimum. If this was a fast-runner or an important mission, the captain would be furious. But that wasn’t very likely. Worst case, the crew would be annoyed by the jump-sickness, but we wouldn’t all splat because I decided to try and guess what the hell kind of metal I was pushing.

As an added bonus, it would take me longer to calculate all the jump-points. I sighed and pulled up the star charts and navigation tools. It was time to work.

Plotting a jump-course was an exercise in tedium under the best of circumstances. The ship would accelerate to an entry point, usually just on the lip of a star’s gravity well, using the momentum to accelerate to near-lightspeed and break into the aether. There was a technical term for the aether, non-congruent z-space something or other. Essentially, it was a side-dimension to our own, one that was less picky about things like “time” and “space.” A ship could pop in, navigate a few currents of space-time dilation, and pop right back out half-way across the galaxy. In theory. In actuality, longer jumps required more navigational time, though the difference was measured in seconds. Spend too long in the aether in one go and you’d likely “splat”, getting caught by a wild current that dumped you far off-course with no hope of slipping back into the aether, dropping your ship into the middle of a star, or, best case scenario, flinging the atomized corpse of your Navigator across the cosmos and dumping your ship pretty close to the entry point. Besides, more navigational time required higher mass-slingshots, the largest of which were stars, and more powerful jump-drives. There were theories about using planetoids, rocks, hell, even the ship itself to slingshot into the aether for fast, rapid in-system jumps, but after the shutter-drive program was shut down, no one bothered to try anymore. Effectively, there was a minimum and maximum distance for every drive, every tonnage, every ship. And I was missing every single variable.

Star charts were best-guesses, observing the aether was difficult, since looking at it had the nasty probabilistic effect of altering it. The work of course plotting was consulting the charts, comparing them, and trying to find an approach vector that would get us into aether somewhere close to where we wanted to be and leave enough time to navigate the currents. The safest approach was to aim small, short time in the aether, shallow entry vectors, short hops between systems that were near-adjacent in the aether. Aim small, miss small. So that’s what I did. It was a tedious, boring grind, matching together star charts and calculating vectors, but at least it was safe.

By the time I finished the work, someone had brought in a thin meal of nutri-paste, which had long since gone cold (if they’d bother to heat it). Still, there was a ration of water and a crunchy bar of something we called “not-granola” back at the collegia. I dumped the paste and gnawed on the not-granola, thinking about Hamad and Lam.

I hoped their situation was better than mine. Hamad was probably doing well enough, buried in schematics and charts, finding new discrepancies and adding addenda to every diagram or tic-spiel he could get his hands on. Think about Lam put a tightness in my chest. I tried to tell myself it would be better if he was happy. Lost in his work in the quiet, zen-like way he handled every indignity of the collegia. To think of him miserable was unbearable, but to imagine him too happy was it’s own pain, that he could let go, as he had of his pre-decanted life, he could let go of me. I felt ashamed for hoping that he felt like I felt, and I squeezed my eyes tight and shook my head, trying to get rid of the thought. I shuffled my way to my cot, laid down, and tried not to cry. It wouln’t bring back my family, my home, and I didn’t want any of these fucking people to see the bluish-purple stains where my tears would soak through the clean white gauze Lam had bandaged for me.