I savoured the long walk across the hangar deck, to where my trusted Cobra "Descending Axe" stood parked. After more than two months cooped up inside that metal cage, it felt wonderful to stretch ones legs, and to be able to walk longer, than those twenty-five meters, that are the combined length of the Cobra's corridors.
The ship had now been brought back up to spec, and the few damages it had suffered was repaired. I'd also had it outfitted with a new class 4 scoop - the old class 2 scoop that I'd had fitted for the journey to Sag A-star, had early on in the journey proven itself to be inadequate, and, after that, a constant nuisance. Still, it hadn't made me turn back. I had soldiered on, and made it all the way to the centre of the galaxy, and back. And while what I had found there, at the centre hadn't been the object of wonder I had expected, the arduous journey itself was still something that I had enjoyed undertaking.
Through hardship, we prosper, old chap, I thought quietly to myself, and reached up and placed my hand on the cold metal underside of my Cobra. I let my fingers skim over the gritted red paintwork - I had had everything repaired. Everything except the paint. I actually quite liked the weathered look that it now had acquired, after travelling almost 60.000 light years. Constantly being exposed to the harshness of space and the abrasive dust of all those nameless nebulas, we had visited together.
But, what really sums up that particular journey we've just completed, I asked myself silently, feeling the need for closure.
The almost obscene amount of money paid out by Universal Cartographics for the data from the trip?
A list of statistics on the three thousand plus star systems we'd scanned, broken down into planetary classes and numbers?
No, besides what I learned from Sag A-star itself, and the weathering of my ship's paint, what truly summed up this journey to me, was three very different, but all equally evocative places, that my ship and I had visited on this journey.
The first one I had mentally named "Silent Seas". It was water world, which at first glance had looked to be completely and uniformly blue. It was only when you got in real close to it, that two tiny islands sparked white against the otherwise unbroken blueness. Surprisingly the scanners had shown that the planet had no atmosphere to speak of. Whatever water that might evaporate from those ceaseless waves, that ran practically unhindered across the planets surface, must therefore disappear in some way. Could it be a biological phenomenon? Or perhaps just a chemical one?
Whatever the solution to that particular mystery might be, I simply yearned to be able to land on one of those tiny islands, and to be able to walk in complete silence down to that alien beach. There, I would stand and watch waves ending their lives by finally breaking upon a shore, all in complete silence, after they had travelled for what might have been years, or perhaps even centuries.
Oh, well, one day I still might return there, and do just that.
The second place was "Loki's breath".
I felt a shiver move down my spine, just thinking of that one.
It was dark star system, populated solely by four black holes. Something that was rare, but not in itself remarkably.
No, the remarkable thing was the closeness between the two main black holes in the system. With just one hundredth of an AU on the semi major axis, they were visually moving. Or rather, they would have been visually moving, if you had been able to actually see the black holes. But all you could see was the gravitational distortion of the stars behind them creeping eerily across the darkness.
If you have ever visited a black hole, you most likely know what I am talking about. But in those cases, you would have felt in control of that distortion. You could move closer or move away from it, to make it grow or shrink. All at your command. But here, you had no control over the distortion. You could sit completely still, with reference to one black hole, while the other crept menacingly trough the darkness towards you.
The ships instruments insisted you were in no real danger, and the black holes were just orbiting each other, but that did nothing to stop that unease you felt. Rather like feeling Loki's breath on the back of your neck, knowing the old trickster God was getting ready to spring some devilish mischief, at your expense.
I was not going back to that one in a hurry, not even to get a video of the phenomenon!
The third and final place was "Deep dusk", an Earth like world, that was really nothing like Earth at all.
Situated in an ultra close orbit around a Class T brown dwarf, it whipped around its cold and dim star in just 2.8 days! Furthermore, its rotational period was 1.8 days. By the time it had rotated once around its own axis, in what should have been a "day", its sun would have moved more than half way around the planet, and more than half of its "year" would have gone by.
Just imagine how the life on that planet might have adapted to living under such weird conditions. If ever I had seen a candidate for a Xeno-Zoological expedition, "Deep dusk" was certainly it. All in all another one to revisit, and land on, some day.
I stepped back from under the belly of my cobra, and gave it a final look. I had made more than enough money from the trip to be able to upgrade to almost any other type of ship, but I had quickly decided against it. This ship will do for me. And she now reflects her owner far better than before. Older, and with some patina, but still more than capable of taking on the galaxy, and persevering.
And for the next few days it would be allowed a well earned rest here in its hangar, while her owner enjoyed the pleasantries of Goldstein Port.
And after that, well, who knows what new wonders we might discover together, out there in the deep black ...
The ship had now been brought back up to spec, and the few damages it had suffered was repaired. I'd also had it outfitted with a new class 4 scoop - the old class 2 scoop that I'd had fitted for the journey to Sag A-star, had early on in the journey proven itself to be inadequate, and, after that, a constant nuisance. Still, it hadn't made me turn back. I had soldiered on, and made it all the way to the centre of the galaxy, and back. And while what I had found there, at the centre hadn't been the object of wonder I had expected, the arduous journey itself was still something that I had enjoyed undertaking.
Through hardship, we prosper, old chap, I thought quietly to myself, and reached up and placed my hand on the cold metal underside of my Cobra. I let my fingers skim over the gritted red paintwork - I had had everything repaired. Everything except the paint. I actually quite liked the weathered look that it now had acquired, after travelling almost 60.000 light years. Constantly being exposed to the harshness of space and the abrasive dust of all those nameless nebulas, we had visited together.
But, what really sums up that particular journey we've just completed, I asked myself silently, feeling the need for closure.
The almost obscene amount of money paid out by Universal Cartographics for the data from the trip?
A list of statistics on the three thousand plus star systems we'd scanned, broken down into planetary classes and numbers?
No, besides what I learned from Sag A-star itself, and the weathering of my ship's paint, what truly summed up this journey to me, was three very different, but all equally evocative places, that my ship and I had visited on this journey.
The first one I had mentally named "Silent Seas". It was water world, which at first glance had looked to be completely and uniformly blue. It was only when you got in real close to it, that two tiny islands sparked white against the otherwise unbroken blueness. Surprisingly the scanners had shown that the planet had no atmosphere to speak of. Whatever water that might evaporate from those ceaseless waves, that ran practically unhindered across the planets surface, must therefore disappear in some way. Could it be a biological phenomenon? Or perhaps just a chemical one?
Whatever the solution to that particular mystery might be, I simply yearned to be able to land on one of those tiny islands, and to be able to walk in complete silence down to that alien beach. There, I would stand and watch waves ending their lives by finally breaking upon a shore, all in complete silence, after they had travelled for what might have been years, or perhaps even centuries.
Oh, well, one day I still might return there, and do just that.
The second place was "Loki's breath".
I felt a shiver move down my spine, just thinking of that one.
It was dark star system, populated solely by four black holes. Something that was rare, but not in itself remarkably.
No, the remarkable thing was the closeness between the two main black holes in the system. With just one hundredth of an AU on the semi major axis, they were visually moving. Or rather, they would have been visually moving, if you had been able to actually see the black holes. But all you could see was the gravitational distortion of the stars behind them creeping eerily across the darkness.
If you have ever visited a black hole, you most likely know what I am talking about. But in those cases, you would have felt in control of that distortion. You could move closer or move away from it, to make it grow or shrink. All at your command. But here, you had no control over the distortion. You could sit completely still, with reference to one black hole, while the other crept menacingly trough the darkness towards you.
The ships instruments insisted you were in no real danger, and the black holes were just orbiting each other, but that did nothing to stop that unease you felt. Rather like feeling Loki's breath on the back of your neck, knowing the old trickster God was getting ready to spring some devilish mischief, at your expense.
I was not going back to that one in a hurry, not even to get a video of the phenomenon!
The third and final place was "Deep dusk", an Earth like world, that was really nothing like Earth at all.
Situated in an ultra close orbit around a Class T brown dwarf, it whipped around its cold and dim star in just 2.8 days! Furthermore, its rotational period was 1.8 days. By the time it had rotated once around its own axis, in what should have been a "day", its sun would have moved more than half way around the planet, and more than half of its "year" would have gone by.
Just imagine how the life on that planet might have adapted to living under such weird conditions. If ever I had seen a candidate for a Xeno-Zoological expedition, "Deep dusk" was certainly it. All in all another one to revisit, and land on, some day.
I stepped back from under the belly of my cobra, and gave it a final look. I had made more than enough money from the trip to be able to upgrade to almost any other type of ship, but I had quickly decided against it. This ship will do for me. And she now reflects her owner far better than before. Older, and with some patina, but still more than capable of taking on the galaxy, and persevering.
And for the next few days it would be allowed a well earned rest here in its hangar, while her owner enjoyed the pleasantries of Goldstein Port.
And after that, well, who knows what new wonders we might discover together, out there in the deep black ...
