Hearts Bleeding Gas and Dust
21 Mar 2018Namita Pear
What a relief, to be interdicted!I was still some two hundred light-years away from my destination, intending to sell off a chunk of my data to the engineer devoted to like-minded explorers, Ms. Farseer. After the recorded talk-show segment of Lave Radio ended, I had switched over to my Hutton library to play me into the bubble; with expert timing, shredding guitars of Japanese metal introduced and almost drowned out a pirate declaring his intentions. Within seconds, his interdictor fired and I was caught in a small battle that I sorely missed, kicking the pedals and rolling the stick around to fight his lazy efforts. Not really sure why they're never successful; I don't have much of a problem when I snag a bounty out of supercruise in my Cobra.
Thanks to this amateur's lack of skill I was never in any danger. All he ended up doing was telling me that I had made it back to civilization, even if by seeing its underbelly.
During the first expedition of mine I felt I had made an entry at every other nebula, and aside from out hiccup before our track really even began, I feel somewhat guilty for having the entire journey pass by without stopping to write. You'll forgive me for this – no mysterious system locks or amazement at my first trip out into uninhabited worlds.
But the sights still amazed me. The bloody clouds of gas and particles that remind of muscle tissue and envelope your entire sphere of view when you're inside of them; towering monstrosities that begin as a splotch in the sky and eventually near you, telling you they exist, and that they're bigger than anything you can appreciate... the feelings you get when you see these things don't dampen.
So excuse the entirety of Wade's and I's journey being summed up in a single log. Excuse how much it might feel like an image-dump, as well. But I will speak about each sight a little, for the zero people reading this.
Veil Nebula, West. I call it the 'Giant Blue Space Slug', but other nicknames are as colorful as The Finger of God and The Witch's Broom. It is a cloud of heated and ionized gas and dust in the constellation Cygnus, a large remnant of a long-dead supernova. Quite impressive just for the magnificent hues, if not for the structures other nebulae offer.
North America and Pelican Nebulae, and a view while leaving. The first of the two images is perhaps my favorite stop on the way, looking at the two nebulae from above. It reminds me of a bleeding heart, and positioning the camera limpet with YIAH in between the 'heart' and the 'blood' made me feel very proud of myself. The second image describes, I think, how I believe a lot of these clouds remind me of blood and tissue very well. It looks like a bloody cloud in deep water. Hope I don't see the space sharks, hahahaha!!!
Black hole in NGC 7822. It is not my first 'space glitch' visited but it exemplifies some of the refraction you get when viewing one, with the bright stars of NGC 7822 mirroring around it. With the anniversary of Mr. Stephen William Hawking's death occuring at the beginning of my venture, and with the nebula in question home to an exemplary number of black holes, I found it fitting to tour as many of them as I could stand to travel to during my final destination...
NGC 7822 Nebula. It is a shame this nebula has no 'accepted' proper name even today, as it is home to a dazzling number of O-Class white supergiants, and black holes, as previously mentioned. The light from this nebula can be seen at least as far out as the Coal Sack, appearing as a bright streak in the stellar background from even immediately after jumps into the brightest of suns. It was rather surreal to near it and see the streak turn into individual pricks of light, but the view of massive, slightly violet stars up close was breathtaking.
But, here I am again. In Kokojina, Ali Dock. Sitting in the common room of its business-class lodgings and enjoying champagne and fresh donuts. Coming home was almost as fun as heading out there, since at this point 'civilization' is just another destination, something to look forward to on the journey. But I think Wade and I are both cowboys now, restless when we relax too much. I don't give us long at all before we step out and do something, maybe even stupid things, just to keep the team busy.
I've been thinking about our heroism, some. We picked up four more lifepods scattered about worlds two thousand light-years from the bubble... though we didn't wake any of them up. Tumbled in with small wreckage and with their cargo of narcotics and weapons, we figured it might be smarter to keep them in the coma and let the authorities we eventually offloaded them to in Terminus take care of the lot.
What if there isn't a Search and Rescue to come back to, one of these days, though? What if, thousands of light-years out and our horizons expanding more as the itch gets greater, listening to recordings and audio dramas and watching all sorts of media, what if one day we come back within standard transmission range and we don't hear anything?
Successes in the Huvaeng De system, the apparent strength of Aegis, and the known strength of the Pilot's Federation do not stop me from worrying about the Thargoids. If anything, it makes me even more concerned; Thargoids aren't idiot supervillains. They are, demonstrably, an intelligent species. More than one war with them later, we at least understand that the odd chaos they try to sow on the fringes of our space has a method to it. If the time comes that blasting them to smithereens stops being the proper course of action, will we recognize that?
Human inclination to diplomacy or peace barely comes through even among ourselves. The further out I go, and the more I leave the problem in others' hands, the less confident I become in whatever the end-state is. Even if this is the beginning of the end, and our species will crumble after seven thousand years of life, I don't think I want to end having not been a part of it.
Even if all I can do is deliver an artifact or two, or keep an anti-xeno weapon on a ship, I'd still like to have done it before the chance to do so is robbed from me, whether by Thargoid- or Human-kind.
To close out my log, I feel it important to state I've officially been the first to discover some planets. I am rather surprised; I thought I would have to go quite far out to do it, but it seems there is plenty to still discover so 'close' to home! Please note that the systems I found them in still have plenty of undiscovered planets themselves, for anyone who simply wants their name out there as fast as possible. The bodies I am now listed in Universal Cartographics as discovering are:
- PLAA EURK XQ-A B29-0 A 2
- PLAA EURK XQ-A B29-0 A 3
- PLAA EURK MC-D D12-37 B 1- which is the largest planet I've ever seen that can can be landed on, by the way.