Witch-space has changed.
Anyone who says they understand hyperspace is lying, although not as much as someone who says they understand human nature. It is different for everyone, although I can’t prove that any more than I can prove everyone sees the same colour blue.
The final tick of the countdown is the last normal thing you see. Then the instruments go haywire, the stars dance like dervishes and sometime later, if you’re lucky, you thud back into the universe facing a great burning star. But ask people on the same ship how long it took and nobody can agree, nor does anybody agree with the ship’s clock, assuming it functions at all in the trip.
Sometimes, jumps seem to take hours. This one is. I sit here in my pilot’s throne, stroking Katzenstein on my lap. He sleeps fitfully. What if we never emerge, but stay roaring through the neverness forever? Does hunger happen in hyperspace? Do the batteries drain? Can you die? Are there ships with skeletons at the controls, waiting to finally emerge and deliver canisters of dust to frozen stations orbiting brown dwarfs in a dead galaxy?
Questions like this can prey on you.
I wonder if Halsey is still out there, stuck in a jump that takes centuries. Perhaps Starship One will return to see what a mess those of us left behind have made. Perhaps she will find Thargoids making a better job of it.
I looked for her. I didn’t like the woman but I spent days jumping through systems, some of which had never had a human in them before, scanning and searching. It was my first taste of the infinity beyond inhabited space; the terrible majesty and mystery, the ice, the fire, the ballet of gravity, all going on without the slightest regard for the little packets of carbon-encoded memes that have leaned to move about. Nor can we make the slightest difference to most of it; nothing we can achieve can come close to fragging up a star, and nor should it. We are utterly insignificant.
At the end I just wanted to run home, to pull ordinary pettiness and mundanity around me like a blanket. Home is Borasetani, an Alliance system. No habitable planets, so I grew up on a station. A very boring background compared to some. Middle-class in a middle-grade corporate culture, stable, bright at school but not brilliant, just enough to score my pilot’s scholarship. A comfortable life in a comfortable apartment near to the bits of the station with the best acceleration. No great traumas or challenges to spur me on, just a vague idea of wanting to better myself and make the Universe a better place. Not even a great urge to explore; when I finally visited a planet in our neighbouring system with the catchy name of BD+31 2373 (why in the worlds had nobody living there actually come up with a name?) I found it intimidating. All that wide-open space! And while I can cope with the idea of vacuum (wouldn’t last long as a pilot otherwise) it should be behind a nice strong hull and maybe a forcefield as well, that’s only sensible. How can you just rely on gravity to hold your air in? Without coriolis force to feel, how do you know what direction you’re facing?
Well that has changed since then. I do fancy a nice homestead on a planet to retire to, maybe with some animals. But my friend Johnny Gamma has tried it on Earth, and immediately ran away to space again. He said the cows have been genetically engineered to say slogans of the biotech firms instead of mooing (or was that bleating? I get these animals muddled). He swears it’s true. I told him that Witchhaul has proper ancient cattle, but then settling down might get more dangerous than actually flying a ship, way things are going.
Katzenstein yawns in his sleep and stretches, little claws of hybrid fibre-diamond sliding out of his paws. He’s a biomorphic companion, not a real animal; that would be cruel, as well as unhygienic. The claws are just one modification I’ve had made. The program to run straight for the escape pod in combat or other trouble is another. There are other things that I’ve acquired on my travels; I love my Altairian skin clothes and I’d brew up Fujin tea on my Rajukru stove, but permanence is a problem. I’ve had to eject several times now and survived; I’m actually young and arrogant enough to cope with danger, but I still get the cold sweats and flashbacks from time to time. After a while, it didn’t seem worth decorating my cockpit, knowing it could all be lost in seconds.
I have decorated Sekhmet my clipper, though. I’ve never lost her, touch wood (I have a carved good-luck charm round my neck). But she’s up on blocks at the moment. I ploughed all the money from her modules into buying a colossal type 9 freighter. I toyed with naming her Hathor, but I’m planning to sell her again, so decided against it. With all the new dangers appearing, I wanted to work towards the reassuringly massive castle of an Anaconda. But the trading trips are a type of hell. Not just the worry of enemies interdicting your slow and lightly armed ship—and I mean enemies, not pirates. Pirates I can cope with; at worst, you just have to pay them off with some cargo. There are people out there who enjoy killing and chaos for its own sake. Probably not as many as you think or the media makes out, but they exist alright. I’ve had a Type 7 shot out from under me just as I was leaving a station. Sometimes I wonder what by the Waters of Earth galactic law thinks it’s doing; it’s enough to make you into a Hudson supporter.
Still in Witch-space; my thoughts are running in circles. Yes, the hell of trade trips... not just the fear of enemies, not just the drudgery, the repeated jumps, the constant working out of numbers in your head and counting the cycles to the next upgrade, but the plans for the future. Just buying the ship is one thing; equipping it to top standard is another. But then, the mightiest ’conda can be taken down by a few cheap ships, I’ve seen it (and done it) myself. Even if you survive and have insurance, the excess is astronomical. Perhaps Antal is right and the more you have, the less happy you are. But he’s a galactic power trying to expand, so he’s a hypocrite. I also remember being no more happy in my little Cobra, although I was pleased at its ability to run.
I don’t know if it is just me, but since Halsey was lost, Witch-space has changed.
It’s got darker. It used to sing to me, but now it howls.
I might say the universe is so vast, why isn’t there room for us all? But I’m not so naive. We fight each other; if we don’t have a reason, we’ll make one up. Halsey was the lid on the pot, now someone has removed her. The water is hissing, the odd bubble rising to the surface, most seething just below it. Tension has turned into covert conflict, a hundred proxy wars. How long before we lose the “covert” and the “proxy”?
What should I do? My friend Derrida has already pledged to Patreus. The born combat pilot of our little group, he has perhaps always been impulsive. Not amoral; he loves Imperial values for good reasons. What worries me is not that, but some of the people he has already tangled with. Hudson may say he stand for law and decency, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the people fighting for him.
(I often don’t reveal that I’m female, easy enough to do in a spaceship. I don’t find the persistence of the neolithic in humanity reassuring.)
Should I join Winters and fight for the soul of the Federation from the inside? Should I pledge to Mahon the only independent outright humanist, although some of the Alliance governments are feudal or dictatorships? Should I support Aisling, the only benevolent (if possibly naive) contender for the Imperial Throne? Or should I run to Yong-Rui and hope that somehow humanity can progress beyond barbarity?
Here is my throne; here I and sorrows sit, while the winds of witch-space howl to me.
Anyone who says they understand hyperspace is lying, although not as much as someone who says they understand human nature. It is different for everyone, although I can’t prove that any more than I can prove everyone sees the same colour blue.
The final tick of the countdown is the last normal thing you see. Then the instruments go haywire, the stars dance like dervishes and sometime later, if you’re lucky, you thud back into the universe facing a great burning star. But ask people on the same ship how long it took and nobody can agree, nor does anybody agree with the ship’s clock, assuming it functions at all in the trip.
Sometimes, jumps seem to take hours. This one is. I sit here in my pilot’s throne, stroking Katzenstein on my lap. He sleeps fitfully. What if we never emerge, but stay roaring through the neverness forever? Does hunger happen in hyperspace? Do the batteries drain? Can you die? Are there ships with skeletons at the controls, waiting to finally emerge and deliver canisters of dust to frozen stations orbiting brown dwarfs in a dead galaxy?
Questions like this can prey on you.
I wonder if Halsey is still out there, stuck in a jump that takes centuries. Perhaps Starship One will return to see what a mess those of us left behind have made. Perhaps she will find Thargoids making a better job of it.
I looked for her. I didn’t like the woman but I spent days jumping through systems, some of which had never had a human in them before, scanning and searching. It was my first taste of the infinity beyond inhabited space; the terrible majesty and mystery, the ice, the fire, the ballet of gravity, all going on without the slightest regard for the little packets of carbon-encoded memes that have leaned to move about. Nor can we make the slightest difference to most of it; nothing we can achieve can come close to fragging up a star, and nor should it. We are utterly insignificant.
At the end I just wanted to run home, to pull ordinary pettiness and mundanity around me like a blanket. Home is Borasetani, an Alliance system. No habitable planets, so I grew up on a station. A very boring background compared to some. Middle-class in a middle-grade corporate culture, stable, bright at school but not brilliant, just enough to score my pilot’s scholarship. A comfortable life in a comfortable apartment near to the bits of the station with the best acceleration. No great traumas or challenges to spur me on, just a vague idea of wanting to better myself and make the Universe a better place. Not even a great urge to explore; when I finally visited a planet in our neighbouring system with the catchy name of BD+31 2373 (why in the worlds had nobody living there actually come up with a name?) I found it intimidating. All that wide-open space! And while I can cope with the idea of vacuum (wouldn’t last long as a pilot otherwise) it should be behind a nice strong hull and maybe a forcefield as well, that’s only sensible. How can you just rely on gravity to hold your air in? Without coriolis force to feel, how do you know what direction you’re facing?
Well that has changed since then. I do fancy a nice homestead on a planet to retire to, maybe with some animals. But my friend Johnny Gamma has tried it on Earth, and immediately ran away to space again. He said the cows have been genetically engineered to say slogans of the biotech firms instead of mooing (or was that bleating? I get these animals muddled). He swears it’s true. I told him that Witchhaul has proper ancient cattle, but then settling down might get more dangerous than actually flying a ship, way things are going.
Katzenstein yawns in his sleep and stretches, little claws of hybrid fibre-diamond sliding out of his paws. He’s a biomorphic companion, not a real animal; that would be cruel, as well as unhygienic. The claws are just one modification I’ve had made. The program to run straight for the escape pod in combat or other trouble is another. There are other things that I’ve acquired on my travels; I love my Altairian skin clothes and I’d brew up Fujin tea on my Rajukru stove, but permanence is a problem. I’ve had to eject several times now and survived; I’m actually young and arrogant enough to cope with danger, but I still get the cold sweats and flashbacks from time to time. After a while, it didn’t seem worth decorating my cockpit, knowing it could all be lost in seconds.
I have decorated Sekhmet my clipper, though. I’ve never lost her, touch wood (I have a carved good-luck charm round my neck). But she’s up on blocks at the moment. I ploughed all the money from her modules into buying a colossal type 9 freighter. I toyed with naming her Hathor, but I’m planning to sell her again, so decided against it. With all the new dangers appearing, I wanted to work towards the reassuringly massive castle of an Anaconda. But the trading trips are a type of hell. Not just the worry of enemies interdicting your slow and lightly armed ship—and I mean enemies, not pirates. Pirates I can cope with; at worst, you just have to pay them off with some cargo. There are people out there who enjoy killing and chaos for its own sake. Probably not as many as you think or the media makes out, but they exist alright. I’ve had a Type 7 shot out from under me just as I was leaving a station. Sometimes I wonder what by the Waters of Earth galactic law thinks it’s doing; it’s enough to make you into a Hudson supporter.
Still in Witch-space; my thoughts are running in circles. Yes, the hell of trade trips... not just the fear of enemies, not just the drudgery, the repeated jumps, the constant working out of numbers in your head and counting the cycles to the next upgrade, but the plans for the future. Just buying the ship is one thing; equipping it to top standard is another. But then, the mightiest ’conda can be taken down by a few cheap ships, I’ve seen it (and done it) myself. Even if you survive and have insurance, the excess is astronomical. Perhaps Antal is right and the more you have, the less happy you are. But he’s a galactic power trying to expand, so he’s a hypocrite. I also remember being no more happy in my little Cobra, although I was pleased at its ability to run.
I don’t know if it is just me, but since Halsey was lost, Witch-space has changed.
It’s got darker. It used to sing to me, but now it howls.
I might say the universe is so vast, why isn’t there room for us all? But I’m not so naive. We fight each other; if we don’t have a reason, we’ll make one up. Halsey was the lid on the pot, now someone has removed her. The water is hissing, the odd bubble rising to the surface, most seething just below it. Tension has turned into covert conflict, a hundred proxy wars. How long before we lose the “covert” and the “proxy”?
What should I do? My friend Derrida has already pledged to Patreus. The born combat pilot of our little group, he has perhaps always been impulsive. Not amoral; he loves Imperial values for good reasons. What worries me is not that, but some of the people he has already tangled with. Hudson may say he stand for law and decency, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the people fighting for him.
(I often don’t reveal that I’m female, easy enough to do in a spaceship. I don’t find the persistence of the neolithic in humanity reassuring.)
Should I join Winters and fight for the soul of the Federation from the inside? Should I pledge to Mahon the only independent outright humanist, although some of the Alliance governments are feudal or dictatorships? Should I support Aisling, the only benevolent (if possibly naive) contender for the Imperial Throne? Or should I run to Yong-Rui and hope that somehow humanity can progress beyond barbarity?
Here is my throne; here I and sorrows sit, while the winds of witch-space howl to me.
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