This month’s first update is a new chapter from All the little lost boys and girls. Duty Before Glory is on its way to DROP 47 and its final fate. Join us as its destiny unfolds. Below is a snippet from the chapter as the ship’s chapter ruminates on their current situation and we see the cracks start to form…
~
Alexei threw the covers back and got out of bed, his bare feet padding across the floor to the washroom. It used to be his routine that, after getting out of bed he’d take a moment to enjoy the starfield. His cabin was in the battlecruiser’s central core, well away from the outer decks but its windows dutifully relayed the view from outside. He used to enjoy that morning view. All those points of light, so fragile and so small, had been a reminder of what he was fighting for. Now, every time he looked out the windows…
Darkness there, and nothing more.
He could have changed the view, putting up starscapes, planetary horizons or anything at all, but each time he’d gone to do it, something had stopped him. This, he supposed, was also a reminder of what he was fighting for… or fighting against. No more poignant a metaphor for the current situation than an all-enveloping darkness.
The man flipped the lights to his washroom on. Here too, the light felt dimmer than it should be. The first part of their journey had lasted three days. Three days of tepid, risky slips as they left Position 32 to enter the nebula, following the breadcrumb signals of buoys and relays. They’d covered more ground than they otherwise would have, guided deeper into the nebula by the beacons like a man chasing a siren’s call through nighttime waters. Each slip was shorter than the one before it, starting at a mere handful of light-years until their last FTL jump was only a billion kilometers.
With the last of their slips, they’d truly left the Mists behind and were now deep in Acheron, crawling at speeds that would have made the crews of vessels from centuries past shake their heads in secondhand embarrassment, but doing anything else was insane. The dust and fog were so dense here that slipping was impossible and so thick that nav shields would burn out within seconds at even moderate levels of thrust, leaving the vessel exposed to a torrent of particles striking their hull at c-fractional speeds. Only a snail’s pace prevented nav shield burnout and even then, they were still taking constant nibbling damage as their hull plates and superstructure were scoured by dust, rock and ice.
No one designed ships to fly into a sandstorm. Duty Before Glory had already lost several pieces of its fake outer shell to the incessant scraping of dust over the ship’s hull, wearing through welds and peeling away riveted connections. Space was supposed to be silent, but when Alexei walked along the outer decks, he could swear he heard scratching outside, like invisible fingers sliding along a window.
Let me in. Let me in.
~
My patreon / subscribestar / twitter
Proximal Flame's Fiction 