“The captain wishes to inform you that while eight jumps is acceptable given your academic performance at the collegia and being new to the ship, you would do well to endeavor to try and minimize both our travel time and the crew’s discomfort.”
I bit my lip. My aide spoke professionally, mechanically. It wouldn’t do any good to be spiteful, to remind her that their last Navigator might well have tried to shave a jump or two, and was rewarded for his efforts and efficiency by being imploded. That classifying cargo and ship specs might seem by-the-book for a warship, it was wholly unnecessary for a junker like the Eschaton, and what's more profoundly goddamn unwise not to at least give me some redacted hint as to what, precisely, I was meant to push through a tear in spacetime.
So, instead, I nodded.
“This way to the bridge, please. We are approaching close-stellar orbit.” The ship shook as if to emphasize her point, and I instinctively grabbed for the handrail, letting my knees loosen and wobble. “Sea legs” we called it during training. As a vessel approached a star, it’s flares and radiation would begin to act a bit like waves, bucking the ship around. A skilled pilot could minimize the effect, but a good pilot knew to line up the vector of the entry point, no matter what, and let people slide around like marbles if it meant the ship didn’t enter the aether wrong.
There was a split of a gasp from my aide, and I stretched out my other arm, catching hers with what either looked like practised ease or an entirely psychotic gesture. She tensed, and I let go.
“...Sorry about that.” I mumbled.
If she was phased by the shaking, she made no further indication of it, but I did hear her clasp the guide rail as I did.
Bridges were noisy places. The whir and hum of terminals, quiet voices speaking into comms, and the occasional shrill, barked command of an officer. If anyone noticed me entering, they made no sign of it.
My aide took my arm and led me forward before putting my hand on another guide rail, this one a semi-circle, directly in front of me. “You’re crow’s nest, Navigator.” I nodded and swallowed hard. I’d pushed training vessels configured with all sorts of weights and bulks, a few different jump-drives, and I’d double-checked my star charts, but my nerves still prickled.
“Navigator is at the ready!” My aide shouted, raising her voice above the din. Another voice answered her after a moment.
“Good. Pilot?” A deep tone. The captain, most likely.
“On final approach vector. Corrections?”
I slid my hand across the haptic interface of the railing, feeling the tic read out the velocity and direction of the vessel. Lucky me, I had a good pilot. “No correction. Navigator ready.”
“Send him down,” the captain ordered, and a mechanical whirr intensified below my feet. The pedestal I was standing on sank and tilted, slowly but surely, the din of the bridge fading softly away. There was a click and a jamming noise as it locked into place, putting me into the proper “crow’s nest”, a bubble of transparent plastic and polymer that jutted out of the vessel’s prow, like some sort of living figurehead, though the reef of plastic was currently covered with heavy metal shutters.
The pilot’s voice buzzed from a comm, “What’s your name, Navigator?”
I hesitated. “...362.”
The voice repeated, a bit annoyed, “Not your designation. Your real name. I fly with humans, not gears.”
I sighed a bit internally. Some pilots were like this. Superstitious about Navigators, they tried to be nice to us. Treat us humanely, like people. It was a bit forced, after all, I was in even more danger than them.
“Harper,” I answered, undoing the bandages around my eyes.
“Harper? You guys always have odd names. I’m Mezka. You any good at this Harper?” the pilot asked.
“I’d be better if I knew what I was pushing,” I clicked my tongue. Stupid to complain. The pilot might scrap the entry, and then there’d be hell to pay with the captain. But instead, the pilot only laughed, a tinny thing.
“Yeah… well, you should talk to Slevin about that. I’ll introduce you later. Sorry I didn’t jaw with you before this.”
“Mm.” I answered, not sure how long this conversation could last. I heard the grinding of gears as the panels blocking my plastiglass shell rolled away.
“Just take it easy, feel it out. You want me to count you in?”
“Please.” I answered. It was unnecessary, I’d feel the aether kick just as I always had, but I still liked the warning.
“3…” I draped my bandages around my neck.
“2…” Slowly, I let my hands fall back to the metal of the guiderail.
“1…” The voice slowed, drawling as the dilation became to wear in. Somewhere, far away, the jump drive began to reach out to me.
“Entry.” My eyes shot open.
All around me was blinding white. I blinked, willing my “eyes” to dissipate the flash and focus on what I needed to find. The light dimmed, and I saw all around me the aether, flowing, crackling, rivers of inky blackness, trails of smoke and sparks of pitch crackling against an endless white expanse. Every navigator saw the aether differently, hence the difficulty in plotting a course or making concrete observations. But Hamad’s extra lectures paid off. I searched the ink and saw one of the sparking cracks of night peeling through the blinding day. My next jump point. I just had to ease over a single current and then I’d be through it, back out into real-space.
I reached with my hand for the rail, and felt the hook-and-pull of the jump drive tear into my consciousness. Like a rake across your soul, Lam had called it. But I was in. Slowly, steadily, I started to push, willing the drive to coast us gently around the current. The drive hummed, it’s familiar warmth spreading as we eased forward. And then, just as quickly as it came, it went away. The warmth died, and a terrible cold stayed in its place. It was impossible. The sheer stupidity of it. I had been prepared for nearly everything. Tons and tons of cargo. Ancient drives that could barely be controlled. But not this. No one was prepared for this. Every curse I had ever heard flowed out of my mouth in one, elongated, screaming syllable. They’d assigned me a ship with a shutter drive.
And I knew I was going to die.
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“To give them credit, the theory was sound,” Hamad opined, squeaking a bit in the busted-down arm-chair of the common room.
“What are we discussing?” Lam asked, drying his head with a towel, dripping water everywhere. He’d just come from the shower. I tried not to think about it.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
“Shutter drive,” I said, half-bored. “Hamad thinks they were a smart idea.”
“Not smart,” he cut back, “Just… y’know. Interesting. In theory.”
“How so?” Lam humored him. He always did.
Hamad creaked again, “OK. So, in the aether, physics breaks down, right? We know we can push mass with a drive, but we’re not sure how, right? The relationship between force, size, velocity, it all goes out the window. So we do all these calculations, hop in, and let the jump-drive cruise us where we need to go, right?”
“Little trickier than that.” I grumbled.
Hamad clicked his tongue, “Yeah, I know, Mr. Best-Marks-In-Aether-Piloting.” It was still a sore point. Logically, it should’ve been Hamad to take top-score. Even Lam would make sense, given his history with surfing.
“But, we know the jump-drive can push mass, right? Not just cruise. That’s the theory with the shutter drive. The Navigator controls the throttle. You don’t even need an entry point to coast on, the ship can literally flip in on itself, go into aether wherever it wants, pop back out in a localized space, meters from where it was.”
“And if you miss, even a little, splat,” I slapped my hands together for dramatic effect. “A bug on the windshield of space-time.”
“Not if you can really get sink into the time dilation. Take all the time in the universe to line up your shot. It’s just… y’know.”
“No one has that kinda concentration,” I finished with a nod. “Dilate for long enough, your brain will liquify. How long was it the average shutter-Navigator lasted?”
“...Two jumps. Two-point-three, to be exact.” Hamad clarified. He couldn’t resist a factoid, even if it messed up his argument, “But! I heard from a guy who heard from a guy. The average was so low because almost everyone they tried it on splatted. But someone was dragging that average up. Someone made it through, time and time again.”
“Right. An ubermensch Navigator. Screw that.” I waved dismissively.
Lam wheezed, as if considering something. “Not necessarily. We’re always getting better, aren’t we? The old Navigators teach us, we get a little better, we teach each other… we all row together. We get a little better each time. Maybe someday…”
His voice trailed off. We were getting better. But what was the point? Better tools, in someone else’s hands.
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I squeezed my eyes tight. I wanted to scream, and keep screaming, until I vaporized into cosmic dust. I was going to die. I wasn’t an ubermensch. I wasn’t even a particularly good Navigator. Something flashed across my brain. Not despair, but fury. Raw, primal anger. How dare they? How dare they take me out of a bottle, train me up, take my eyes, my soul, make me into this thing, and then, on top of it all, lie to me? How dare they do this to all of us? I had no choice.
I fought back hot, angry tears. Lam’s voice echoed in my head. We all row together. There was always a choice. I could give up, or I could do something about it. I could ram this goddamn ship through a supernova, obliterate it, so no other Navigator ever got called up to where I was.
Fuck it. If I couldn’t do it for me, I could do it for my brothers and sisters. I’d smash this rotten husk of a sick joke scrap heap across the heavens.
I concentrated. Feeling for the drive, the drift of the aether. I was halfway down the dilation. Seconds were days now. I could push it further. I felt the slight tingle of the tic interface beneath my fingers. Microscopic pulses of electrons. Concentrate, concentrate. They ticked past, slower and slower, like grains getting stuck together in an hourglass. Seconds. Days. Weeks. Years.
I opened my eyes for an hour. Turned, saw the blink of a distant sparkling tear. My hand pulsed towards the throttle. Slowly, slowly, we turned. Micron by micron. Inch by inch. I lined up to take my shot. The tear glimmered in the distance. Aim small, miss small.
My eyes watered, crisps of distortion at the edges of my vision, creeping towards the center. I kept my eyes locked on the tear. Almost. I was so close now, even as my vision sank into a pinprick of darkness.
And then, I opened the throttle.
The drive roared like an angry beast, it rushed through me, through the ship, and we were off, skipping across the currents, blasting through them like they were never even there. On the scale of micro-seconds I adjusted and turned, skipping over waves, feeling the line I’d drawn to my exit. To my death. I hoped it would be quick.
I felt the tear grow all around me, and the time dilation began to slip away. A small mercy. Smashing through a star probably hurt a lot less if you didn’t stretch the experience out over an aeon. The roaring grew, louder and louder, deafening in it’s shaking fury, until I couldn’t tell if I was screaming or the ship was. Time sped past, focusing to a single point that went on to infinity.
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Death wasn’t so bad. It was bright. Brighter than it had any right to be. I hoped Lam would be there. But there was only the light. And then, it started to burn, and with a howl of agony, I realized I was still alive.
“The gauze, the gauze you idiot! Put it back on him!” There was a crashing of clumsy hands, and the gauze slipped back over my eyes, binding the lids shut against the impossible, blinding light of our demented universe.
I groaned, miserably. Why wasn’t I dead?
“You missed, by the way. If you were aiming for Fortuna.” Someone spoke, a bright, chipper tone. “Ow- Hey!”
“Shut up, Slevin.” The pilot’s voice. I could hear it better now. More mature, less mechanical and static-y.
“The captain wants him back on deck to make a full report.” That was my Aide. Officious as ever, but a tinge of anxiety in her voice.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that,” drawled Slevin. “Not ‘til we get our stories straight, Valle.”
I groaned again, gritted my teeth, and asked the question I was dreading, “Where are we?”
“A lovely system with the charming name of DS-512. Oh? Haven’t heard of it? Well that is because we are on the wrong fuckin’ side of the cluster. We are deep in it now. You threw us straight off the grid, deep, deep in Collective space.”
“Focus. The Collective doesn’t matter right now. You got us here, you can get us back again, yeah?” The pilot spoke, Mezka. “Wait, first of all, do you remember anything of what happened?”
“This… ship… has… a… shutter... drive.” I gritted my teeth and spoke over a wracking headache. Silence ensued.
“...What.” My aide. I guess Valle was her name.
“...Technically, this ship has a converted shutter drive-” The bright, chipper tone.
“...What.” Valle again. “And no one thought to tell me, so as to potentially warn our Navigator, that we are flying with a drive that, under ideal conditions, has a fatality rate approaching 99 percent?”
“...Hey! I didn’t break it. It was supposed to run like a standard jump drive, coast on through. But he- he did something to it! The aether shielding plates ended up embedded three decks down! The conversion held for years!”
Ah. Blame. Hello again, my old friend. Screw it. They could airlock me for all I cared. Let them find their own way home.
I twitched a bit as something occurred to me, a tiny dot in aether, a floating orb I had seen at the corner of my vision as I first awoke, “...How long have I been out?”
“Three days. Give or take. The captain ordered us to drift back towards the nearest stellar body until you woke up.” Valle answered. I got the impression that she, like Hamad, couldn’t resist answering a question she knew the answer to.
I struggled to sit up. “We have to leave. We have to get out of here. The Collective’s seen us, they’ll be on us in-”
And then, all hell broke loose.