I drank cold coffee from a shell casing.
26 Aug 2016Harry The Hatchet
He stirred some strong substance in an used small munitions shell casing. Then, with some scooping instrument, filled a mug with it."Pleiades Punch" the man grunted as he thrust it to me. The strongest coffee I could imagine, in the mildest mug I could of picked. I looked at the side of it, rolling the drink in my shaking hands. It said:
"PRE Labratories, serving through research."
I couldn't help but laugh as I sipped the concoction. It was strong with a metallic sting, a bitter fuzz around a pleasent flavour. It was coffee though, and it was good. I watched the chaos in the hangar. The Labratories of PRE had been taken over by a Fed war party to fuel the current power squabble with the Empire in the system.
Carts, which had previously enjoyed transporting light little experiments were creaking under mounds of munitions, their backs straining and wheels groaning. The researchers must of been confined elsewhere, for here were mercenaries and machineheads, piling ropes of heavy bullets into loading canisters and smashing them into scarred ships. My own ship, with it's face ripped clean open, it's mouth covered in red moon-dust, shards of canopy glass, and neatly burned holes, sat ticking over in the hanger as people began their efficient work on it. Fighting for the Federation paid well but without the fanatical taste for democracy it didn't pay well enough. Even here at the labs, collecting my pay and having Roach repaired, safe and sound, it still didn't pay enough.
Crack, crack, crack. Canopy Comprom- hisssssssss...nothing.
I closed my eyes for a moment. It was so sudden. The thump of revolving barrels, spitting red hot rounds. The crack and rip of the metal around me bursting to shreds. The canopy hissing, creaking then exploding. The suck of the pressure almost pulling me out of the seat. I punched the throttle forward, and felt the acceleration. I let the ship spin out into the blackness. I was cradled in this wreckage since my seatbelts held me firm. Emergency breaks stopped the belts budging long before the canopy burst, at least in the time frame of nano-seconds. Still in shock I let my metal shell spin, glide off from the battle. Who ever shot me to pieces made no attempt to finish the job, thankfully. It took some moments then, but I slowly came to and examined the damage around the area where my neck could move to see. It was maximal. The ship's console blinked in and out of existence, the interface weaved into the canopy was all but totally destroyed. Using the temperamental nav ball, I directed my ship towards the rough direction of PRE Labs.
I've never been in Witchspace without a canopy before. I expected it would freeze me to death instantly, or perhaps because the seal of the whole ship was broken I would be sucked backwards through the chassis and turned to liquid as soon as the ship shot out of reality. I listened to the FSD whir up and braced for what ever may happen to me in Witchspace and we popped. The first thing I felt was absolutely nothing. Not the absense of anything painful, like what a quick death would grant you, but quite literally the absense of feeling at all. As if my mortal existence glided just out of reach or perhaps that I left it behind. Universes, stars, clouds of dust, everything slipped by. Then I was filled with a warmth of blood. Then the heat of the star as it popped before me. The universe around me slipped and melted into place. Painting itself into a rigid normity that always surprised me post-jump. How everything that ever was, and ever could be, liquidized, streaked on by as whispers, then re-arranged back into the 'everything' again just so that I could get from A to B at a speed impossible by it's own rules. How it happened so consistently and continously for everyone with an FSD. I always felt that all it would take was to reach out and merely prod a streak of light out of alignment as it passed, and the resulting inconsistencey in reality would cascade and violently throw the fabric into some grand cosmic wreckage.
The less we think about Frame shifting, perhaps, the better...