Acting on Impulse
07 May 2021Sally Forth
“Waking up on an uninhabited, barren planet, with three hallucinatory cats. Just another day for me.”Yeah, I said that, months ago. And boy, those days have just kept coming and coming.
Don’t ask me how or why the urge to travel to the heart of galaxy came over me. I’d already engineered Felis Astralis to get around forty LY from a jump. I just stuck a double SRV bay and two auto-field maintenance units into her and set off.
So here I am, just three jumps away from Sagittarius A*! It’s taken….so long. I had some super-geeky shipyard techs install a sleep capsule, sort of retro-engineered from an escape pod, into the ship. So that I could crash out for extended periods of time when the exploration fatigue came over me. I have sat and watched the counter on the nav display, telling me how many jumps are left, slowly count down. Very slowly. But you can’t turn back.
On the galaxy map, as you close on Sag A* you see the stars clustering closer and closer together. And I wanted to see all those suns, burning bright, thronging the sky ahead. But the view has been kind of like any other starfield in the galaxy. Never mind.
I’m calling into Explorer’s Anchorage first. Offload all the data I’ve scanned on the way here, get the ship checked over. Oh, I know there’s no real risk from visiting Sag A*, if you’re careful. But on the other hand it is a super-massive black hole. You don’t fuck with one of those.
Astonished by the fact there are pirates out here! What the hell? Why? Hardly a lucrative trading route, is it? But it has vindicated my decision not to remove the guns from Felis Astralis before I set off. Got interdicted. Kicked their sorry asses. Added the local bounties on them to the credit bonanza I got when I docked and sold my exploration data.
And now, I am staring at...it. Sagittarius A*. Listening to the sounds of its emissions as interpreted by the ship’s sensors. Sat here, just staring at it. Mack, Annie and Gabby are have arranged themselves on my shoulders and lap and are likewise enthralled.
And a strange thought steals over me. You hear tales of Raxxla. Whispers, rumours. Most people don’t really know what it is, or is supposed to be. But I’ve seen the Holdstock Report. Theories of a place where time stands still, or doesn’t act as it normally does. Doesn’t that description just fit a quantum singularity? A gateway. A portal to other places. Wouldn’t that be be ironic? And just a bit hilarious? All those pilots who have burnt themselves out searching for the legend of Raxxla...and here it is, staring us all right in the face. Not that I’m a miserable cynical bitch or anything.
But what if it is? A gateway. Maybe...maybe if I let it embrace me, it will take me to another place. A place where I can be reunited with my husband and daughters, murdered all those years ago. I guess there’s only one way to find out.
My hands drop towards the controls.
*
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to fly a starship when one cat has flopped over the throttle so you can’t use it, another has done the same to the control column? And the third has wrapped itself around your face so you can’t see a damn thing? I’m kind of getting the impression they don’t want me to plunge into the howling gravitational maelstrom ahead.
Okay. Okay, you guys. Message received. We’ll head back to Explorer’s Anchorage and chill for a few days. Take things from there.