Tight Rope
03 Aug 2017Evgeniya Asimova
The two suns wandered millions of years in their gravitic embrace, in a loving swirl of secret communion, unaware of humans and our petty ambitions, illuminating the darkness of space, irradiating a romance whose scale we cannot comprehend. In compact rotation, the larger – living, glowing, orange – and the smaller – dying, dulling, purple – danced through oblivious eternities, sensible only of each other, and of the light and heat they were giving birth too. They did not get lonely as we do. The orange sun still smiled happily on her terminally-ill lover. And the purple sun thrilled to receive the rapturous beams, his love more densely compressed with each passing millennium. The sun-lovers were steadfast, waiting patiently for the time when they finally would be fused, and would jealously guard their shared piece of sky long after our civilisation had been extinguished like the briefly burning wick that it is.When Evgeniya jumped in on this scene, the suns did not heed her. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!” she screamed in her little cockpit. But she could have been a mosquito between two thick-skinned elephants, so insignificant was she and her ship in that moment. The suns busted into her perception like... like... there is no simile to describe what this incredible event was like. She was suddenly sandwiched between two giant burning balls of gravity.
“Warning. Temperature critical...”
That was another reason why people paid top whack for information about unexplored systems. Without definite information, it was possible for the ship's computer to send a pilot almost directly into the gapping mouth of a sun. There were failsafes, of course, which meant the pilot was unlikely to die. At least, they would not die immediately. But the ship could pick up treacherous heat damage, modules could be disrupted or destroyed, and the pilot might never make their way back to civilisation. Evgeniya had used her Lypaunov Junction Oscillator (a kind of rare manual reckoner) to help her calculate part of the path through to the system; she thought she had estimated within safe margins. We will have to forgive her: it was the end of her journey, she was grown tired. She was a relatively inexperienced explorer at that stage of her career. Really, she was lucky to have got that far. Her ship might have been destroyed in any number of places along her journey. Life is always finely balanced. A small error might be the end of you, especially out there in the ink.
And how was she to know that there were two suns waiting for her?
Evgeniya fought with the flight-grip. She set her thrusters to maximum. But she was like a fly stuck to glue-paper, with vainly buzzing wings.
“Warning. Temperature critical...”
At last she began to push forward, but painfully slowly. Her shields were diminishing, modules were turning off to stop themselves from boiling, her hull was being sabotaged. If one of her thrusters broke, it would be the end.
A big crack across the canopy is a Commander's worst nightmare. Especially if you are an explorer, over 100 jumps from the nearest space-station. The thick glass of the canopy kept out all that howling pain and endless darkness of the indifferent sub-zero universe. Evgeniya raised her eyebrow at the still slender fissure, as if a doubtful look could re-seal it.
She held her breath. When she finally saw the distant constellations of stars and the nebulas in the night sky, when the glare of the suns died down behind her, only then did she breath again. She did not dare to look at the damage she had taken. Instead she looked at the map her scanners had made of the system. Empty. Not a single planet. A complete waste of her time. “Shit! Shit!” she whispered to herself. She would have thumped the dashboard, but she was worried doing so might split the ship in two. Her heart was thumping too loudly as it was.
She calmed herself. She ran a diagnostic. Two of her cannons had been destroyed. Her sensors and thrusters were quite badly damaged. Her Frame-shift Drive was offline. Thankfully her ship could repair itself. To an extent, at least. She run the auto-repair, and the ship powered down. The dashboard, the familiar glow of its holograms and telltales, flickered and disappeared. Modules went off and came back on again. She was breathing emergency oxygen through her space-helmet for several minutes. All in all, she sat in eerie darkness for twenty minutes. It was the longest twenty minutes of her life. But the Frame-shift Drive came back on line at last. Perhaps it would get her home. She was relieved.
But of course, there was the crack. The one in the canopy, I mean. The terrible horror that no Commander ever wanted to see.
Nothing could be done about that now. She could only cross her fingers and make her way carefully but quickly back to the nearest space-station. She plotted a course. She could not take any risks. Things were too finely balanced. She had some allies in the Maia system who could help her. She looked at the line across the map of the galaxy, that linked all the systems she would have to pass through. 103 jumps.
The whole ship vibrated as the Frame-shift Drive charged. There were awful noises that she had never heard her ship make before. And a loud bang as she jumped into Witchspace.