A Billion Miles Ch1
09 Feb 2021AtomicBlaze23
A Billion Miles.Chapter 1 The Black Hole
My name is Jeremy Ross. I am Commander and Pilot of the
H.T.V. Myrmidon. My ship is run by me and my Artificial Intelligence Assistant, also known as an A.I.A. Her name is Ruby, she helps with route plotting, cargo management, weapon aiming, and morale. Honestly I don’t know what I’d do without her, she’s helped me a lot.
But I’ll get straight to the point…
* * * *
“Ruby, what is the time?,” I asked.
“The time, sir, is seven fifty-five pm Ship’s Time,” she replied. “Thank you Ruby,” “No problem Ross!” she replied energetically. We were on our way into the Cathiuss V system to drop off some cargo, electronic components again.
“Ruby, approximately how long will the jump take?” I asked. “The jump is 3.234 light years, making the jump take approximately... one minute and thirty seconds.”
“Thank you again, Ruby. Charge the Jump drive.”
“Charging, aligning to target… ...Ross, we have an issue.”
“And what is that?,” I asked.
“Insufficient power in Capacitor, would you like me to shut down some systems?” “Yes, ruby shut down some background systems and redivert power to the FSD.”
“Shutting down… ...activating Jump drive.” I noticed a signature on the radar before she started the countdown.
“Firing in four…, three…, two…, one…, engage.”
Suddenly the space and stars I knew were slowly being distorted until they formed a circle around the ship, leaving nothing but blackness in front of me. There was a slight G-force change, and suddenly space was moving around the ship at speeds unbelievably faster than the speed of light. Stars, Nebulas, Planets, seemingly other galaxies passed by, but some moved by so fast you couldn’t tell what they were. As we neared the end of the one minute and thirty second jump, I noticed the ship’s speed decreasing far too quickly. Something was wrong.
Suddenly, the ship dropped out of the jump, alarms were blaring and the Heads Up Display read FSD Failure. This is gonna be bad. The Frameshift Drive had failed, the ship spiraled out of supercruise. I checked the radar for nearby ships, but there were none. It was at this moment I noticed the distortion around a spot of nothing but black. Then I knew..., we had jumped directly into a Black Hole, that is why the FSD failed, Ruby did it!
The ship has it’s own safe disengage of the Frameshift Drive, but it takes over fifteen to thirty seconds to safely disengage, so Ruby being as smart as she was, unsafely disengaged the Frameshift Drive, to prevent flying into the nothingness of the black hole.
Almost as quickly as I realized this, Ruby was already positioning the ship to face out of the blackness, and charging the FSD, “Nice save, Ruby!”
"Thanks!,” She replied. The ship was starting to violently shake as we approached the Event Horizon, otherwise known as The point of no return. Nobody has ever lived to tell a story of escaping the Event Horizon, because you couldn’t. The FSD fired, sending us into supercruise, and we slowly limped our way out of the black hole. Even at full throttle in supercruise, it was hard to escape a black hole.
The distortion that I could see was now leveling out to be normal space, and so I knew we were out of the black hole’s danger zone.
Interestingly enough the black hole seemed to be the “Star” of this system; there were planets orbiting the black hole. I’ve read about this happening, however I’ve never seen it myself. Because there was no star in this system, it was quite dark, making it impossible to find a station to repair the ship on. “That black hole must have done a number on the Hull of the ship.” “Yes, the ship’s hull percentage is approximately at ninety seven percent,” Ruby replied. “Show the target destination on the HUD, please.” “Target Destination is Finnegan Station in the Cathiuss V system”
“Thank you, Ruby”
“Ross, would you like me to get the ship around the black hole so we can proceed with the jump to the Cathiuss V system?”
“Yes Ruby that would be appreciated,” I replied. The ship throttled to one hundred percent, and the ship started to move around the system at over ten times the speed of light. When we arrived at the other side of the black hole, the ship throttled to fifty percent and started to align with the target Ruby had put on the HUD for the Cathiuss V system.
“Charging drive…, firing in four…, three…, two…, one…, engage.”
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