Arcturus

Captain Arcturus, commander of the Old Bug, gripped the arms of his chair and clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from rattling. It helped, a little. The ancient ship shuddered and groaned around him, protesting the transition from ethereal Subspace back to real space with tortured tremors. No matter how he tensed, the great curve of his shell still bounced against the solid metal of the captain’s chair, in time with the ship’s shaking. He grimaced at the ruckus, accenting the already permanent downturn to the scales around his lips. Don’t let the crew see that, he chided himself. It wouldn’t do to let them know that he was worried.

Not that they were likely to notice. The jump took every scrap of power the Old Bug could muster, so the only light on the bridge came from the crew’s consoles. It silhouetted the heads, shoulders, and shells of the two dozen Torellans arrayed on the arc of the bridge. At least they had gravity up here; throughout the rest of the ship, his people floated in utter darkness, strapped to their chairs and breathing stale air.

His knuckles creaked on the rough metal of the captain’s chair. He squeezed to a rhythm, flexing his fingers and resisting the urge to draw his head back into his shell, to hide away. Even after all these years, he had to steel himself to watch their progress through the front viewport. Outside the thick glass, the gray expanses of Subspace swirled, roiling mists of not-quite-matter that his eyes tried to slide away from. As he watched, the ghostly clouds began to flicker. Brief flashes of normal space, a vast field of black pricked with stars, appeared and vanished, shimmering in and out of sight faster than his eyes could track.

The sight left him queasy: it always had. The stars shifted with every blink, impossible distances covered in seconds. His mouth filled with sour spittle, but he would not, could not let himself turn away. Instead, he fixed his eyes on one point in the flickering and held on, grimly determined, to his seat.

His crew felt it too. He heard tension in their whispers, and out of the corner of his eye saw a couple of heads half retreat into their shells. He scowled at the backs arrayed before him, below the broad arch of the front viewport. Hadn’t he brought them through hundreds of these? The tough old metal shell surrounding them would keep them safe. He would keep them safe, the same as his father and grandfather had done, and their fathers before them. They should know that by now. Another tremor ran through the ship, shivering up his chair and rocking his shell back hard against the back. He ran dull claws along the rough metal arm of the chair, as if to soothe the machine, and felt the places worn smooth by his ancestors. The chair was solid metal, and bolted firmly to the deck, so he felt every bump and jostle of their transition, the vibrations telling him the story of the jump. That was his right, as Captain, and his duty.

“I hate untried access points.” A voice growled over his shoulder, breaking his reverie. Arcturus didn’t bother to turn around. Argo had been lurking there for the last half an hour, a cloud of pessimism offering up a steady drizzle of dire predictions. Every other sane and sensible Torellan was strapped in at their stations, but not him. The aged first officer stood stooped, his wrinkly jowls wobbling. His scales were more gray than green, but for all his age he kept his feet, braced against the ship’s convulsions. “It’s only a matter of time until the Old Bug shakes itself to pieces and leaves us all in the black.” He grumbled. “I swear it’s getting worse.”

“The Bug has been doing this for longer than I care to think, and it will probably outlive us all.” Arcturus answered, still staring out the viewport. The tempo of the flickers picked up, the images blurring. “Maybe it just feels worse on your old bones.”

Argo grunted. “Bad news for you if that’s the case. You’re not far behind me, and you’ll notice I’m still standing.”

“That marks you as insane, not tough. There’s a difference. In any case, this isn’t an untried access point. The survey team came this same way.”

Argo snorted, a baleful sound that echoed across the bridge. “What, a thousand years ago? We could pop out into a planet for all we know.” The comment hung in the air of the bridge, too loud by far. One young crewmember at a console below drew her head all the way back into her shell, with only her eyes peeking out at the flashing lights on her screen. Several others traded nervous glances, though they all kept their hands on their work.

“We’ve never transitioned into a large mass before.” Arcturus pitched his voice to carry, confident and firm, “So there’s no reason to think we will this time.” but his frown deepened even as he spoke. Something about that logic felt wrong to him. He turned the thought over in his mind. Did the fact that it had never happened before mean it was impossible, or just unlikely?

A warning tingle ran through the back of his skull from his cybernetic implant. A gentle reminder that he had more important things to focus on at the moment. He let the earlier thought go and leveled a warning glare at Argo over his shoulder. On anyone else, that look would have sent them scuttling for their shells. On his first officer, all it prompted in return was a matching glower. Argo wore gray coveralls like the rest of the crew, a double slash of purple over showing across the front. The garment wrapped over his shoulders and behind his neck, leaving his shell bare and his tail free but covering his chest. It wrapped his arms to the wrist and his legs to the knee, with more purple banding at the hems. Those marked out his rank, contrasting with the three streaks of purple marking Arcturus’ own, otherwise identical clothing. For the space of several breaths, they locked gazes. Argo’s black eyes were almost lost in the wrinkled folds of his leathery scales. Arcturus saw them drop down for the briefest moment, and the older Torellan gave a heavy shrug, the motion bunching up the tough cloth of his uniform. "It could happen." He muttered, but quietly this time.

That flicker of the eye was as close to an admission of guilt as Arcturus was likely to get from Argo, so he let it go, turning back to the front viewport. The flickers had become a dizzying blur, blinking back and forth too fast for the eye to track, and the ship rattled towards a crescendo along with them. Focusing his attention on the implant in his skull, Arcturus pictured his crew in his mind’s eye and felt a distinct “click” in his thoughts as the Link opened to them.

It was a peculiar sensation. Stray thoughts leaked through the Link to him from the whole crew, and a sense of their individual emotions, ranging from nervous to calm and everywhere in between. He even detected a sense of languid torpor from a couple of oldsters asleep in their acceleration couches, somewhere deep in the bowels of The Old Bug. Fear verging on panic tinged a few of the minds in the Link, and for them he forced a calm confidence into his mind before transmitting. “All crew, prepare for final transition from Subspace to real space.” He stared gamely out at the blurred, vibrating starscape. Don’t look away. Only a few more moments…

Argo hunched low, his broad feet settled askance and his claws clenched at the deck plating, as the ship’s trembling and bouncing grew fiercer. A second young crewmember had pulled back into his shell, and more than a few others were halfway there. Someone retched in the darkness out of sight, and vomit splattered on what he hoped was the deck. Decks were easy to clean. Of course, he hadn't had to scrub a deck himself in decades, the old reflex was still strong.

The ship gave a final, lurching jump and the flickering outside resolved an instant later into the blessed black of normal space. The abrupt change pressed Arcturus hard into the straps of his chair, and forced Argo to concede a step forward and a grab at the arm of the captain’s chair to keep himself upright. He straightened to his full stooped height with a grimace. “You hear that?”

From the depths of the Old Bug, Arcturus counted three different alarm klaxons wailing. Three wasn’t bad, not bad at all. Relief washed through the Link with the crew. “Final transition complete.” He said, speaking aloud and sending through the Link at the same time. “All crew to stations.” He let the Link drop with that, with some relief. It was a strain holding it open to everyone at once. The Crew’s section chiefs would handle the fine details from here, setting their assigned crew to the thousand tasks that awaited them. “Argo, you’re on damage control.”

The first mate was already in motion, striding through the deck crew before they could even hit the releases on their harnesses. "Junko, Vigil, and Doja," he said briskly, rapping their shells with his knuckles as he called their names. "Go see to those alarms before we're all sucking vacuum." They weren't in any real danger, Arcturus knew. Otherwise, the alarms would be louder, and more obnoxious by far.

The named crew unclasped their restraints, trundling off. They would soothe the Old Bug and bandage its hurts as best they could. There was always something to fix after a transition. The violent shaking would tear loose piping and wiring, the veins and nerves of their ship. Those klaxons didn’t mark everything that would need repair, either. The whole ship would need to be checked over before they made another jump, right down to the smallest nut and bolt, and that required a concentrated effort from the entire crew.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Arcturus took a slow, deep breath and blew it out through his nose, turning his mind inward to his implant again What’s next? At the prompting, it offered him a mental checklist of steps to take, now that the jump was finished. First step…He keyed the power to the jump drive off from his own console. With the transition done, that power was available again for all the things that made the ship livable. Bright white lights clicked on through the command deck, making his eyes water. The temperature control systems came back to life with a distant whirring. All the excess heat from the jump had to go somewhere, and "somewhere" in this case meant dumped into the black of space. The crew found their feet, claws clattering on the deck plating as they jostled past each other. A klaxon fell silent, and relieved voices chattered below him, signaling an easy fix.

On the now brightly lit bridge, his navigation chief, Yerry, turned keen eyes up towards him. Double slashes of green highlights stood out on her uniform, crossing her chest from left shoulder to right hip; green for her division, and two bands for her position. Her slender build made her look younger than her years, and she had the energy to match. Between that vigor and her keen mind, she made an excellent Section Chief. Arcturus nodded to acknowledge her. “Let’s have it, Yerry. Are we in the right spot?”

She gave him a satisfied grin. “Right where the computers said we’d be, Captain. About three days out from the asteroid belt. Permission to launch the probes?”

“Launch probes.” He confirmed, mentally crossing that one off the list from his implant. It vanished, and he felt another three items pop into existence to replace it, crowding for his attention. Yerry was already turning to her work, briskly issuing instructions to her the navigation crew and jabbing at her console. Distant vibrations announced the probe bay doors sliding open. Autopilot would get them to their destinations, but Yerry’s staff would keep a close eye on them as they scattered through the solar system, nudging them into place. Once they reached their assigned orbits, they would gather and return a host of information to the crew, building a detailed map and cataloguing every rock worth mining. From his vantage point, Arcturus could see the swarm dispersing on her screen. Hundreds of probes the size of his fist, zipping away far faster than the Old Bug could ever hope to move. Even the most distant would be in position in a matter of days.

Yerry glanced back over her shoulder to him, and then jerked her head at the machine that occupied the space next to her. “Our arrival report should be going back to Efree shortly.”

Arcturus nodded, hiding a grimace of distaste. The machine was their long-range subspace transmitter, a squat, gray metal box as large as Yerry’s work console, largely featureless save for a few green status lights. As he watched, they began to flash, indicating that the report of their safe arrival, and a host of data about their journey, was being condensed by the ship’s computer into a packet for subspace transmission. The trip here from Efree had taken the Old Bug nearly three years, but the report would be in Efreet hands within a matter of days. Arcturus hated it; it felt like having one of his furry masters breathing down his shell.

Deliberately turning his eyes away from the flashing lights, Arcturus hit the release on his own restraints and stood, stretching his legs and grimacing at the slight ache in his knees. They always hurt worse after a jump…by the black of space, maybe Argo was right and he was getting old.

But not old enough to stop. Not by half. Duty called, and so long as his mind held, he’d answer, no matter how his body complained. He stomped one foot on the metal floor with a satisfying clank. “Engineers!” He barked. They appeared in front of him in a clatter of claws. Steady Roddel, grumpy Hark, and young Reel, his daughter, took up positions in front of him in a loose line. Where Arcturus and the rest of the bridge crew wore their coveralls, the three engineers sported pressure suits that covered everything but their heads. Bulbous, bulky, and uncomfortable, but necessary for work in the black of space. Roddel and Hark waited calmly, their helmets under their arms, while Reel bounced from foot to foot, defying the heavy suit.

Arcturus fought down a swirl of emotions as he looked at his daughter. He didn’t see himself in her face, but he saw her mother, Vorona; the same gently curving scales of the eye ridges, and the same sharp jaw. No surprise that she was eager; this was her first real job, and after spending three years running simulations, he was grateful that she had stopped to put on a suit before jumping out the airlock. Then again, she actually seemed to enjoy running training simulations. She’d checked out every last one in the ship’s library, using her free time to run them again and again, like it was some sort of game. And it had paid off, too; he’d seen her scores, she could probably do most of the tasks in her sleep at this point. Still, he wouldn’t have sent her out into the black of space if he could have avoided it. He wouldn’t have asked it of any of his crew, really, but the work had to be done.

Something of his thoughts must have showed on his face, because Reel shot him a quick, impudent grin. Arcturus rubbed at his mouth with his hand, and then fixed her with a hard look. Daughter or not, he would not let himself treat her any differently than the rest of the crew. He held her eyes until her fidgeting slowed and stopped.

“It’s time to start setting up the processing platform.” He said gruffly. “Have you all completed your suit checks?” He’d seen them do it before the jump, but he had to ask. After all, it was on the checklist. They nodded in response and Reel rocked up onto her toes impatiently, then caught herself and settled back on her heels with an effort. Arcturus’ mouth quirked in a half-smile before he could stop it. “Tool checks?”

“Yes, Captain.” Roddel answered. As team lead for this project, he was responsible for signing off on every piece of equipment. He’d be a good choice for a chief of engineering, with a little more experience. That position had been empty since Yorad had died of old age a few months back, after they’d already left for this journey. No help for it, but the loss still hurt, and it meant Arcturus had to run the section until he found a replacement. He eyed Roddel for a moment, considering, until his implant tickled him, reminding him that he hadn’t even scratched the surface of his post-jump checklist.

“Equipment has all been calibrated?” Arcturus asked, moving on. He’d worry about promotions later.

That was Hark’s responsibility, as technician. “Yes, yes.” He replied, rolling a bolt driver between his palms. “Let’s cracking well get on with it.”

“Language, Hark.” Arcturus said, eyeing the technician. “Okay, you’re cleared to begin work. Check everything twice!” They met that with more nods. It was all in the simulations, and they had their own checklists of tasks, supplied by their own implants, but they’d tolerate their captain telling them what they already knew.

He dismissed them with a wave and made his way to the wide front viewport. It stretched around the front half of the bridge, and Argo had a screen pulled up there, beneath the field of stars. The first mate flipped past schematics and diagrams, muttering to himself. The wizened Torellan paused when Arcturus reached him, with a stylized diagram of the system on the screen. Arcturus settled his hands on the edges of the console and looked at it with his first officer, contemplating the tasks before them.

Argo broke the silence after a moment with a satisfied grunt. “It’s a nice little system. Four rocky planets in close, four big gas giants further out, and that swarm of asteroids splitting it down the middle."

Arcturus nodded, eyes on the screen. Those asteroids, easier to mine than a planet, were the main draw for the system. Green symbols marked the second, third, and fourth planets as possible settlement targets. The third one swirled with green and blue, marking it as a living planet. He tapped at it with a blunt claw. “That one will be interesting. I’ve only seen two others with native life in my career.”

“I’ve seen a few more than that.” Argo said with a flip of his hand. “It’s never anything too exciting.”

Arcturus raised the crest of scale over his eye at that. “You’ve been down to them?”

“No, I’ve just seen pictures from the probes, same as you. The Efreet will like it, though. Maybe we’ll get a visit from them!”

Arcturus repressed a shudder, and Argo grinned a crooked grin at him. He knew that everything about the Efreet bothered Arcturus, from their flat, furry faces to their strange, cruel sense of humor. Arcturus hadn’t met very many High Races, but he thought the Efreet must surely be the most disturbing.

“I’d just as soon if they didn’t.” He said, with quiet vehemence.

“Careful now,” Argo admonished with mock severity. “They hold our debt. You wouldn’t want them to think they’re unwelcome in this beautiful system.”

“They’re welcome to it, just as soon as we’re done and gone.” Arcturus wrinkled his nose. “It is a beautiful system, though. And a rich one.”

“It is that.” Argo agreed, and flipped the screen to a graph with a swipe of his claw. This one showed a steadily falling line, representing the debt still owed by their people. “We might be able to actually see the line move, this time.”

Arcturus considered it grimly. That line represented the cost of their ship, the interest they owed, their implants, their training…and necessary repairs. “So long as we don’t break anything expensive.” He reached past Argo and closed the chart with a swipe of his own claw. There was no use in dwelling on it. Thinking about the distant generation that might finally be able to buy out their ship and their implants…Well, it felt a lot like staring into the gray nothingness of subspace, and it was about as productive. For the thousandth time, he wished there was another way to see his crew free.

“Come on.” He said to Argo, turning away from the console. “We have work to do.”