Mare Desperationis
14 Aug 2016Mara Korine
Distance from Sol: 50,818.99 LyHull: 92%
Rovers: 1
Mood: Awed
Let's get the damage report out of the way. I got a little too close to a Class M and took some heat damage. I'm still in great shape, and the Shachi is holding steady at 92%. If we only look at regular travel wear and tear, I've done 3% damage to the ship over 50,000 light years of travel. I expect to take less over time as I learn. The noise that the fuel scoop was making has stopped. It came and went over the last week, but I haven't heard it at all for at least 20 jumps. It was just the metal settling after repeated heating and cooling. That type of reaction is common. I suppose it's finally worn in!
I'm making this log from the middle of the Jodrell Bridge. The gap between the spiral arms here is named the Mare Desperationis. The name translates to The Sea of Despair. I don't think that's a fair description of what it's like out here. In the galactic bulge, the sky was so full of stars it was astonishing. Here it's the opposite. You drop into a system facing a bright star, but when you pull away, the sky is pitch black. Just black. Most stars are too far away and too faint to show up to the naked eye. After a minute your eyes adjust, and you can see a few points of light, but the sky is so dark it feels surreal. When you're preoccupied with the operation of the ship, it feels near. The darkness is a blanket wrapping you up. But sometimes you can feel just how far away it is that you can see. It's a giant hole, deeper than anything ever can be, and you're falling. It gives me vertigo. Somehow the time it's taken just to get here from the Bubble adds to the sense of scale. The universe is so big that I can't begin to comprehend the size of even the local group. Here I am, learning to run the ship on fumes so I'll be light enough to make that 35 light year jump, and 2.5 million light years away is the galaxy, Andromeda. Even with frame-shift and with witch-space, how can we ever reach that far? I'm so lucky to be able to be out here to experience this and to
My next log should come from TOSIA. It's less than a day's travel from here. Once I'm there, I can get to work and do some real science. I wonder how much life we will find during the survey. It's frustrating that we aren't equipped to study that. This expedition is a geological survey after all, not an astrobiological one. I'll explain the details of what we are doing in the next log. For now, I want to find out what is on this memory card I found. I'm feeling a bit nosey.