Jacob couldn’t believe he was flying an actual spaceship. It was every bit as exciting as he had hoped, even though the majority of his trip was done through FTL using the phase coils.
There was one thing he hadn’t taken into account, however, and that was artificial gravity or the lack thereof. After being aboard Melody and the station this entire time, it slipped his mind until he jumped away from the station. Then again, he also assumed all ships created by the Concord Imperium would have such technology. Apparently, that wasn’t the case. It could just be that the transport pre-dated the development of artificial gravity, but he really had no idea if that was the case or not.
Thankfully, he had been strapped into the pilot’s couch as an added precaution when the gravity went away. He had done that more to keep the awkward drone he was controlling from sliding out of the seat than anything else, but it had saved him from floating off the moment the ship transitioned.
Soon enough, the short hop in FTL ended. It was both awe-inspiring and terrifying to think he was floating in deep space all alone. His quick exit was not a malfunction. He needed to verify the ship’s systems were holding together while still within the range of Melody in case the transport needed to be rescued. He also needed to perform a signal strength check on his connection back to the station to determine just how far he could push before it lost signal.
Melody had given him a rough estimate, but it wasn’t like the AI knew for sure. Even the station didn’t have any records of crew members pushing a merged connection past a few light-months, and Jacob planned to push it to about seventy light-years, which was theoretically possible with the repeater’s help.
So long as he had a stable data connection, the distance he could control a drone from was technically unlimited. Lag would eventually become a problem, as even the Concord Imperium’s comm system took time to transmit data across that vast a distance. It just wouldn’t be an issue at the short interstellar distances he was using it for.
The signal looked good, and after a bit of fumbling around, he managed to get himself unbuckled. Before he could float off too far, he pushed himself toward the deck and activated the suit’s magnetic boots.
They clicked to the metal deck, and he stood up.
Walking while using the magnetic boots turned out to be a far greater challenge than he had anticipated. Had he been in a human body, it probably wouldn’t have been too much of a hassle, but the clumsy drone had been programmed to walk ‘normally.’ Changing that required a considerable amount of effort, more than Jacob had time to spend at the moment, so he grumbled as he pushed through.
Convenient handrails along the sides of the corridor helped. There was one along the ceiling as well, which really should have clued him in to the lack of gravity aboard the craft. Had he not focused entirely on making sure the transport was operational, he might have picked up on those details.
When he finally reached the engine room, he found that one of the phase coils had burned itself out. Not a good sign.
Jacob didn’t understand the technology behind the devices, but he thought of them as huge FTL fuses. Whatever energies they harnessed to bypass the limits of lightspeed had to be extremely powerful.
He twisted the thirty-centimeter-wide cylinder to unlock it, then pulled. It’s one and a one-and-a-half-meter-long casing, easily cleared the hole and slowly drifted down to the deck. The lack of gravity might actually be a plus when it came to dealing with the phase coils. They weren’t all that heavy, but they were rather awkward to lug around.
He was glad they weren’t the integrated building-sized ones, as Melody had, as that would have made replacing them impossible.
Jacob much preferred the replaceable style. Speaking of, he had over two dozen replacements aboard. He hoped he had enough. The journey to the mining station was a twenty-jump flight and would take a considerable amount of time, thanks to how slow the phase coils charged as well as their size. Apparently, larger phase coils could also travel farther before coming out of FTL. Melody’s phase coils might even be large enough to make the trip from the station to Earth in a single transition if it were in perfect condition.
Jacob would have packed more coils, but the ones aboard were all they had the material to produce. Unlike the power cores, which used relatively normal materials, the phase coils required some very exotic components to function.
He would have been screwed if the station hadn’t maintained a small reserve of exotic materials.
***
The next few jumps were uneventful.
He checked his signal strength on each recharge cycle, then checked the coils and jumped again. The silence was eating at him a bit, but he endured it. He didn’t want to pop back into his virtual apartment just to listen to Melody go on about how it had a better solution yet again. That had gotten old really fast. And the station AI was not much of a conversationalist. He really needed actual people to talk to.
Either he got lucky, or the universe was finally giving him a break, because none of the phase coils burned out for the next five jumps.
The jump after that, Jacob experienced two burned-out coils, and he wondered idly about what might happen if all ten burned out simultaneously. Would the ship explode, or never return to normal space?
That would have been a horrifying thought if his mind hadn’t been safely tucked away aboard Melody.
After the twelfth jump, Jacob experienced low-signal strength for the first time, and the ache it gave his mind was enough to throw him back into his virtual environment aboard Melody.
Jacob fell to his knees and grabbed the sides of his head in both hands. He didn’t scream or groan in pain because what he was feeling wasn’t pain or anything the simulation could translate into pain, but the feeling was overwhelming nonetheless.
It reminded him of the spins you sometimes got when you lay down after drinking too much, but also accompanied by a throbbing migraine, static-like pins and needles from lying on an arm or leg for too long, all wrapped in the familiar wool-headed feeling you got during a head cold.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Are you well, Captain?” the AI asked.
Jacob wasn’t surprised to find himself back in his apartment. He tried to speak, but he couldn’t form coherent words.
“I see,” Melody replied, despite the words he was speaking being complete gibberish. “You are experiencing the backlash from overextending your connection to the drone. You need to rest your mind for a few days before returning.”
“What about the transport?” Jacob managed to get out through clenched teeth.
“Was the transport damaged?”
Jacob tried to shake his head, but thought better about that idea as the motion immediately increased the agony he was under. “No,” he replied as his breathing quickened. He wanted to say more, but he couldn’t force the words out.
“Then there is no reason to worry, Captain. The chances of anyone finding the transport or accidentally stumbling across it are so infinitesimally small that you would have better luck winning the lottery three times in a row back on Earth.”
***
It took eight days before Jacob felt well enough to return to the transport. Eight agonizing days as his brain felt like someone had shoved it into a blender and turned it on high. When he finally returned to the ship, everything looked exactly the way it did when he left.
He quickly unbuckled the drone and made his way to the hold. The feeling of strain on his mind was already returning, and he didn’t want another eight-day delay because he was too slow.
Even with the crates of power cores secured to either side, the hold was mostly empty. The only other thing inside the cavernous space was the towering repeater.
Jacob’s boots clicked across the floor, and he started to unstrap the device before he realized an issue. If he unstrapped it, it would just float off the floor, possibly damaging it in the process, before he opened the cargo ramp to eject it from the ship.
With a grunt of annoyance, he left one strap holding the device in place, then he moved back to the control room for the cargo bay and opened the ramp. The ship’s environmental controls were broken, but that just meant there was no worry about venting the ship. Jacob didn’t need oxygen, and the heat provided inside his suit was enough to keep his drone operating without all the bulky thermal management systems he had been forced to strip away when building it. The rest of the vessel’s systems were built to handle the vacuum of space, so they were fine.
Once the doors were open, he tromped back into the hold and undid the last strap. The unit immediately started to float off the ground, and he was glad he had opened the door first.
The original plan had been to roll the repeater satellite out of the ship. The deck was designed with rollers that could be raised from the floor for that very purpose. Instead, Jacob was forced to roll/carry the multi-ton unit to the opening. It was awkward as hell, considering it both outweighed him and was many times larger than his humanoid drone. The repeater wasn’t equipped with handles either, so he was forced to grab whatever he could to maneuver it.
The mass tugged him off the ground about halfway to the open ramp, and he was forced to push himself toward the ceiling and then back down to move the repeater closer to the floor once again.
After what seemed like an hour of wrestling with the stubborn device, he finally gave it one anemic push and sent it slowly floating out the back of the ship.
Jacob waited for the satellite to clear the ramp before closing the ship back up and heading toward the bridge.
Once seated, he sent the station AI a ping to let it know the device was deployed.
A moment later, the tension building inside his head evaporated like morning fog as the sun came out.
Jacob sighed in relief and popped back into his virtual space for a quick break. Now that the repeater was online, he shouldn’t experience anything like that again during the trip.
***
Sha’la yawned and rubbed at her tired eyes. She was nearing the end of one of the slowest shifts she had been on for months. Another yawn threatened to come when a beep on her suit tablet alerted her to an incoming vessel. She smiled despite her fatigue. A ship meant she would be doing something other than sitting at the watch station bored out of her mind.
She checked the ship’s data and was confused for a moment as it didn’t have an active registry. Then she realized the ship had never visited Vorlos Station to receive a registration.
It was rare for someone outside of the normal traders to come and visit their little mining outpost. People were going to gossip about that for weeks.
She sent the vessel the standard welcome packet and landing instructions, then she stood and stretched her stiff muscles before exiting the watch station. The little shack in the center was the only structure on the massive landing platform.
Sha’la had been a port liaison for years, so she knew where to look for the incoming vessel based on its course. The massive environmental shield overhead formed an invisible hemispherical bubble over the station’s landing pad. Having the shield was so much faster than having individual hangars or even just one large hangar with a similar environmental shield. This way, ships could come and go on multiple vectors, and you didn’t have to worry about repressurizing the area each time.
She had worked at stations that had the older systems, and it was awful. Nothing made a captain crankier than traffic delays. She understood. Ships weren’t cheap to operate, and every second lost was money lost. She just wished that when they complained, they would do it to someone who could do something about the problem, and not her. Being the target for their ire was the main reason she had moved to Vorlos, even though the position was far less prestigious than her previous appointment. Thankfully, complaints at Vorlos were far fewer than at her previous stations.
After only a moment, she caught sight of the ship as the station lights glinted off its hull. As it entered the shield and came in for a landing, she cocked her head in confusion.
“Never seen a ship like that,” she muttered. It looked old.
Sha’la had seen plenty of outdated ships in her time, but this relic of the past made those look like they were fresh out of a shipyard by comparison. She could tell it was ancient by the exposed gravitic panels. Half-dome panels like that had gone out of style generations ago as gravitics became more efficient and compact. Not even the uber-rich would use something so outdated and inefficient as accent pieces on their period correct luxury yachts.
There was no shimmer from the top side of the craft to indicate additional panels, either, which probably meant no onboard artificial gravity. That would have been a rough trip. It was obviously a transport of some type, but it lacked any design aesthetic she was familiar with. Not too much of a surprise, she hadn’t been around long enough to see every ship in existence, but most vessels came from a few dozen well-known manufacturers, and they all had their own distinct style.
She blinked her large black eyes and looked away from the gravitics. Her species, the tiyau, were one of the few with photoreceptors broad enough to pick up the wavelengths produced by gravitics. To her, they appeared like sparkling jewels, which is why she had to look away. It wouldn’t cause her any injury, but it would cloud her vision for a time if she stared for too long.
As Sha’la blinked away the afterimages, she wondered if this was a first contact situation. She quickly shook that thought out of her head. The ship had confirmed the receipt of the landing instructions she sent and was approaching the correct spot on the pad. That meant whoever was onboard understood Trade Common and had a compatible system to respond.
If it were some unknown alien visitors, the pilot wouldn’t have known what to do. Much like her, if it were an actual first contact. There were whole protocol books dedicated to first contact scenarios. Technically, she was supposed to know what those were, but nobody really bothered with them unless you were part of some expedition mission or lived near the frontier border. And while their station was near a border, nobody was likely to come from the dead zone other than criminals or privateers, which did happen occasionally.
The ship awkwardly lowered itself on its gravitics before extending its landing struts and setting down with a screech of sliding metal that made Sha’la grit her teeth and close her eyes. Luckily, her work helmet dampened the noise. After shaking away the annoyance, she mentally marked the pilot as inexperienced before making her way to the vessel.