14JAN3309 Callie Nain, Call-Sign CMDR Half-Lock
It’s Inverse Time Dilation
Nain One (V2L-45B) had been a -show since the news about there not being any news about Coral. Cadence was still on leave, doing who knows what, and I’d been watching the increasingly large intelligence gap opening, separating me from my crew and my NOS colleagues. For a PFRC pilot, there’d always been a relative degree of ignorance about what it is we’re conducting and it suited me well: as a K-double-N, I’d been protected from most of the legal ramifications for my activities by that very same ignorance. Fines… a night in a prison colony… the occasional hunter sent to tax me… those things are all straightforward. This degree of darkness in my own vessel was something new to me and I made sure Clara knew it.
“We’d been waiting for Cadence to return from leave” she mumbled, rising to her feet before lunging at me. After a few tense moments, I asked her to let go of my magboot because I could feel my tibia about to disengage from its joint and she continued, “I could barely get the clearance to tell Carl and Orion’s been gnawing on me since. You know about the information divide between KNs and K-Doubles.”
“Tell Carl about what?” I asked. Cadence and I were Carl’s last K-Double-Ns, and Coral and Clara his last KNs. The latter two never let Cadence and I forget. Being trainees for his PFRC unit, it didn’t seem to be that big an issue to either of us, but to Coral and Clara the magnanimity of the difference was an ever-present chip on both of their shoulders. Cadence once made the mistake of pointing out that Clara herself had been transferred out of Fatbus school and she found herself without a blanket or socks for a week, searching in vain for a canister that mysteriously ended up damaging Carl’s FDL Shadow as the thing plummeted toward Kokary. “… and since when did we have any need to wait for Cadence for any reason?”
She looked at me, squinting, before looking toward the corner of the room just above my left shoulder. Her eyes darted back toward me, before shooting toward another corner of the room behind my right shoulder. She scratched her chin, mumbling, “Meet me in the briefing room. Carl and Orion are waiting.”
I watched her carefully as she straightened-out her hair, which had been shaken loose from the tightly wound bun she normally wore when on duty. The thick, black cord bound together with multiple bands slowly wrapped into itself. The two pins she used to fasten the knot stared at me as she turned to walk from my quarters, sitting atop her head waiting for me to make a move in the wrong direction. The quiet that enveloped me was broken within moments by a buzz at the compartment door and I collected myself. When the door slid open, Carl stood in front of me with a half-smile on his face and he turned slightly, motioning me to walk with him to the briefing room.
“Cadence is in Sol, doing some work for the Sol Worker’s Party.” He said it in the cool tones that I’d become accustomed to growing up under his tutelage, and I was immediately suspicious. I avoided eye contact as we continued along toward the command deck. The ship had been relieved of a majority of non-essential crew in the immediate, with far less traffic expected in the nebula, and we were alone in the corridors. I waited for him to continue, trying my best to feign interest in Cadence’s activities, nodding my head and darting my eyes around as if to consider potentialities.
“She’ll take this briefing via holofac. It wasn’t easy to convince her. She said she’d been doing fine, as things are, but she’s not happy with having her ships aboard without being able to do any real flying.”
I paused mid-step, glancing at Carl, who’d been watching the corridors pass with mild interest, and turned my eyes again toward the coming compartment door, which slid open with immediacy. I wondered at what kind of work she’d be taking. She’d always been so dumbly invested in piloting a vessel, to the exclusion of everything else that makes a person a person, that I couldn’t imagine her doing anything else. I imaged it must have been hell for her during those months at the helm of Nain Incorporated. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what Carl was thinking starting a front corporation using our operations surnames, but I’d kept it to myself. I heard The Charge well before we’d entered the briefing room on the command deck and we joined Orion and Clara, already gazing at The Face. Cadence’s face floated next to The Face, wearing a vacant expression. The Charge faded and I turned to Clara, “What’d we miss?”
She pulled her eyes away from the absence that used to be The Face and her eyes locked on mine. I saw Cadence’s holofac disappear from the corner of my eye. After a moment, she took me in and started, “Clearance and need-to-know provided. So here’s the situation…” The briefing was little more than a rundown of the facts on Coral’s whereabouts and what to make of the Keystone Endeavor, which is what they’d taken to calling the situation.
“That is hands down the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say to me, Clara.” Orion’s head jerked toward me, tearing itself away from Carl, with whom he’d been in conversation.
“Easy there, pilot.” Clara glanced at Orion, stepping in between us and giving Carl a curt nod over her shoulder. Carl reached over to take Orion by the elbow, causing Orion to shake his arms about with a laugh and follow Carl toward a GALMAP chart of The Run.
“I,” she stopped, her eyes looking toward various areas of the briefing room in rapid succession, “know it sounds strange, but Orion thinks it's the best course of action we have going for us.”
I’m not really sure why we’d have needed a course of action. Having heard the information she’d provided Carl about The Zero’s status update on Coral, the only thing it sounded like to me is that Coral was sitting in Keystone and she’d gone bonkers. I made clear to Clara that I thought so.
“There’s a woman in Keystone, check. She’s claiming to be a Novus Ordo Siderum pilot, check. There are records of her parents being members of Novus Ordo Siderum, check. They’re talking about Coral, Clara.” She looked at me with a disgust that must have had roots centuries deep, her upper lip curling at the left side of her mouth. I watched her shoulders flatten out and her arms turned palm-sided toward me, with a barely perceptible clinching of her hands. Her voice hollowed as she spoke, her altissimo cracking in tension as it rose above its normal range,
“Watch yourself…” she started, the words enunciated coldly and with slow, agonizing precision, “the information came directly from The Office, culled from a status briefing received from Keystone’s NOSCOMPROTOCOL channel. I don’t know what it is that you seemed to have gotten into your head about us over on the KN side of things, but we don’t take the words of another, under these conditions, without an understanding of the burdens we live with, as KNs. According the information received from Keystone, the Coral we’d trained with is no longer aboard that ship. You have your orders and I, as your Primis Aseptus, am to secure your compliance and cooperation and I will do so by any means necessary, when it comes to the safety of another KN…”
She paused, her eyes never once leaving mine, looking away and squinting for a moment. I could feel my attention waning and I began turning my head toward Carl and Orion, my eyes never leaving her face, and she turned her eyes back to me, "… Even if it is just Coral we’re talking about. We stay put. The briefing mentioned a station in one of The Run systems, Ring Mine, controlled by Deep Space Mining. The Zero wants to know if this might be one of our front-facing corporations and why one of our front-facing corporations would put itself into a system on The Run. The information received contained a photograph of Coral at the station. If it’s one of ours of not, why was Coral there and what happened to her after she left?”
I looked away from her. I’d been called in from a three-year research term on a pirate king to provide carrier support to two girls I hadn’t seen in years, barely caring enough about them when I was in their acquaintance as a trainee under Carl. I looked back at Clara and responded, “I’m just supposed to ignore the possibility that Coral’s imagining that she’s been experiencing time dilation, and the gigantic elephant in my carrier?”
“I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about.”
“What happens if the woman onboard really is just Coral?”
“That’s impossible, Callie. What you’re suggesting is that The Office just decided that Coral’s belief in her experience of time dilation, and its accelerated relative aging on our part, would mean that when she gets back here she’ll have traveled back in time to the point that we’re all the same ages we were when she left. Now who’s saying dumb stuff?”
It’s Inverse Time Dilation
Nain One (V2L-45B) had been a -show since the news about there not being any news about Coral. Cadence was still on leave, doing who knows what, and I’d been watching the increasingly large intelligence gap opening, separating me from my crew and my NOS colleagues. For a PFRC pilot, there’d always been a relative degree of ignorance about what it is we’re conducting and it suited me well: as a K-double-N, I’d been protected from most of the legal ramifications for my activities by that very same ignorance. Fines… a night in a prison colony… the occasional hunter sent to tax me… those things are all straightforward. This degree of darkness in my own vessel was something new to me and I made sure Clara knew it.
“We’d been waiting for Cadence to return from leave” she mumbled, rising to her feet before lunging at me. After a few tense moments, I asked her to let go of my magboot because I could feel my tibia about to disengage from its joint and she continued, “I could barely get the clearance to tell Carl and Orion’s been gnawing on me since. You know about the information divide between KNs and K-Doubles.”
“Tell Carl about what?” I asked. Cadence and I were Carl’s last K-Double-Ns, and Coral and Clara his last KNs. The latter two never let Cadence and I forget. Being trainees for his PFRC unit, it didn’t seem to be that big an issue to either of us, but to Coral and Clara the magnanimity of the difference was an ever-present chip on both of their shoulders. Cadence once made the mistake of pointing out that Clara herself had been transferred out of Fatbus school and she found herself without a blanket or socks for a week, searching in vain for a canister that mysteriously ended up damaging Carl’s FDL Shadow as the thing plummeted toward Kokary. “… and since when did we have any need to wait for Cadence for any reason?”
She looked at me, squinting, before looking toward the corner of the room just above my left shoulder. Her eyes darted back toward me, before shooting toward another corner of the room behind my right shoulder. She scratched her chin, mumbling, “Meet me in the briefing room. Carl and Orion are waiting.”
I watched her carefully as she straightened-out her hair, which had been shaken loose from the tightly wound bun she normally wore when on duty. The thick, black cord bound together with multiple bands slowly wrapped into itself. The two pins she used to fasten the knot stared at me as she turned to walk from my quarters, sitting atop her head waiting for me to make a move in the wrong direction. The quiet that enveloped me was broken within moments by a buzz at the compartment door and I collected myself. When the door slid open, Carl stood in front of me with a half-smile on his face and he turned slightly, motioning me to walk with him to the briefing room.
“Cadence is in Sol, doing some work for the Sol Worker’s Party.” He said it in the cool tones that I’d become accustomed to growing up under his tutelage, and I was immediately suspicious. I avoided eye contact as we continued along toward the command deck. The ship had been relieved of a majority of non-essential crew in the immediate, with far less traffic expected in the nebula, and we were alone in the corridors. I waited for him to continue, trying my best to feign interest in Cadence’s activities, nodding my head and darting my eyes around as if to consider potentialities.
“She’ll take this briefing via holofac. It wasn’t easy to convince her. She said she’d been doing fine, as things are, but she’s not happy with having her ships aboard without being able to do any real flying.”
I paused mid-step, glancing at Carl, who’d been watching the corridors pass with mild interest, and turned my eyes again toward the coming compartment door, which slid open with immediacy. I wondered at what kind of work she’d be taking. She’d always been so dumbly invested in piloting a vessel, to the exclusion of everything else that makes a person a person, that I couldn’t imagine her doing anything else. I imaged it must have been hell for her during those months at the helm of Nain Incorporated. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what Carl was thinking starting a front corporation using our operations surnames, but I’d kept it to myself. I heard The Charge well before we’d entered the briefing room on the command deck and we joined Orion and Clara, already gazing at The Face. Cadence’s face floated next to The Face, wearing a vacant expression. The Charge faded and I turned to Clara, “What’d we miss?”
She pulled her eyes away from the absence that used to be The Face and her eyes locked on mine. I saw Cadence’s holofac disappear from the corner of my eye. After a moment, she took me in and started, “Clearance and need-to-know provided. So here’s the situation…” The briefing was little more than a rundown of the facts on Coral’s whereabouts and what to make of the Keystone Endeavor, which is what they’d taken to calling the situation.
“That is hands down the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard you say to me, Clara.” Orion’s head jerked toward me, tearing itself away from Carl, with whom he’d been in conversation.
“Easy there, pilot.” Clara glanced at Orion, stepping in between us and giving Carl a curt nod over her shoulder. Carl reached over to take Orion by the elbow, causing Orion to shake his arms about with a laugh and follow Carl toward a GALMAP chart of The Run.
“I,” she stopped, her eyes looking toward various areas of the briefing room in rapid succession, “know it sounds strange, but Orion thinks it's the best course of action we have going for us.”
I’m not really sure why we’d have needed a course of action. Having heard the information she’d provided Carl about The Zero’s status update on Coral, the only thing it sounded like to me is that Coral was sitting in Keystone and she’d gone bonkers. I made clear to Clara that I thought so.
“There’s a woman in Keystone, check. She’s claiming to be a Novus Ordo Siderum pilot, check. There are records of her parents being members of Novus Ordo Siderum, check. They’re talking about Coral, Clara.” She looked at me with a disgust that must have had roots centuries deep, her upper lip curling at the left side of her mouth. I watched her shoulders flatten out and her arms turned palm-sided toward me, with a barely perceptible clinching of her hands. Her voice hollowed as she spoke, her altissimo cracking in tension as it rose above its normal range,
“Watch yourself…” she started, the words enunciated coldly and with slow, agonizing precision, “the information came directly from The Office, culled from a status briefing received from Keystone’s NOSCOMPROTOCOL channel. I don’t know what it is that you seemed to have gotten into your head about us over on the KN side of things, but we don’t take the words of another, under these conditions, without an understanding of the burdens we live with, as KNs. According the information received from Keystone, the Coral we’d trained with is no longer aboard that ship. You have your orders and I, as your Primis Aseptus, am to secure your compliance and cooperation and I will do so by any means necessary, when it comes to the safety of another KN…”
She paused, her eyes never once leaving mine, looking away and squinting for a moment. I could feel my attention waning and I began turning my head toward Carl and Orion, my eyes never leaving her face, and she turned her eyes back to me, "… Even if it is just Coral we’re talking about. We stay put. The briefing mentioned a station in one of The Run systems, Ring Mine, controlled by Deep Space Mining. The Zero wants to know if this might be one of our front-facing corporations and why one of our front-facing corporations would put itself into a system on The Run. The information received contained a photograph of Coral at the station. If it’s one of ours of not, why was Coral there and what happened to her after she left?”
I looked away from her. I’d been called in from a three-year research term on a pirate king to provide carrier support to two girls I hadn’t seen in years, barely caring enough about them when I was in their acquaintance as a trainee under Carl. I looked back at Clara and responded, “I’m just supposed to ignore the possibility that Coral’s imagining that she’s been experiencing time dilation, and the gigantic elephant in my carrier?”
“I haven’t the slightest clue what you’re talking about.”
“What happens if the woman onboard really is just Coral?”
“That’s impossible, Callie. What you’re suggesting is that The Office just decided that Coral’s belief in her experience of time dilation, and its accelerated relative aging on our part, would mean that when she gets back here she’ll have traveled back in time to the point that we’re all the same ages we were when she left. Now who’s saying dumb stuff?”
