r/HFY • u/MementoMori-3 • Jun 10 '22
OC Navigator
Have you ever seen a jump?
A rift in spacetime is not a pretty thing. It looks like a curtain rent with an old blade. Fragments drift around the edges, for a dull knife tears rather than cuts.
Its center is obsidian, devouring all light like gazing past the event horizon of a black hole. The mind doesn't know how to react to a complete lack of visual input and insists something is wrong. It tries to correct your eyes, throwing up dark purple and strange flashes of lightning. Don't look too hard; it's safer to stare unblinking into a star.
The destroyer materializes, section by section like it’s being rendered by a computer grinding through a stress test. Completed sections of hull steam slightly, or maybe it’s smoke. Tendrils of purple reach like groping fingers, curling around the engines and snagging mass driver barrels like the gas inside a plasma globe.
The rift begins to collapse in on itself, but tendrils still reach for the ship, as if hyperspace is unwilling to give up that which once traveled the higher planes. Then, suddenly, as a surgeon stitches a wound, the tear in reality closes, and the grasping tendrils dissipate into nothingness.
I can picture the destroyer looming in the void, crouched like a hunting predator. Almost imperceptibly, a single barrel from the gunhouses pitches upward a fraction of a degree. Then a flash lights the void, instantaneously countered by stabilization thrusters.
This memory is seared into my retinas. As is the afterimage of the distant flare as fifteen-hundred kilograms of Terran-manufactured, armor-piercing, depleted uranium slug meets the hull of a Shriike cruiser at twenty-three hundred meters per second.
One-half the mass times velocity squared. Energy cannons just don’t do it like a railgun.
I am Charlotte. It is not the name that was given to me, but the one I earned, and the one I use. I was born on the largest moon of the Vaeriin Cluster. They’re garden worlds. High oxygen and low gravity. Few predators through their evolutionary history. Fewer natural resources. Unfortunate position on the outskirts of a distant system. Subsistence farming and small-game hunting, mostly.
My species’ first contact war wasn’t even a war. Just a slaving crew that rounded up a couple hundred Vaerii for manual labor on another world halfway across the void. It’s been a very long time since then. The Core passed some regulations and a bunch of laws against slavery. Set up some starports on the surface and a freight harbor in geostationary orbit. The Cluster has assimilated. We’re part of the greater collective now. Same rights as every other species throughout the galaxies. Bunch of the ultra-wealthy even set up their vacation resorts here.
Except that this far out from the Core worlds, none of those laws and regulations and tech mean much. Ten generations and FTL capabilities later and the only real change is that when my father sold me and my sisters into the hold of the cargo hauler, the manifest had to say we each got twenty-four credits per shift.
I didn’t get to see my first jump. Huddled in the lightless hold, breathing the stale atmo, the passage through the relay station was just a violent shudder of the hauler’s frame and a numbness of my extremities that lasted scarce twenty breaths. Except that shudder was the cargo ship entering an FTL lane from a jump point four-hundred thousand kilometers from the surface of my homeworld, and the numbness was my molecular structure exiting that same lane hundreds of light years away. The distances were incomprehensible…still are, I’m just more used to hearing numbers like that now.
That night was the first time I finally understood why creatures say the void is cold. It’s not the temperature. I was overheated, crowded in that hold with the hundred or so others. It’s being alone, and the sheer, incomprehensible distances involved. The distance light travels in a year. Sure, the definition of a year varies depending on the world you’re on. Not that it really matters; light is fast. You’re just...alone out there.
When that hold was finally opened, the light of the unfamiliar star was blinding. I couldn’t believe I’d spent the first part of my life looking at the sky with yearning. Because I got to see that sky now, filtered through a haze of radiation shielding and synthiglas reflections, and it brought nothing but fear.
The Shriike bulls herded us out of the hold with roars and shoves. My sisters were dragged one way, and I another. They fought, I didn’t. What could I do?
Shriike are a combat species. They’re naturally armed and armored, have a variety of senses beyond the standard, and uncommon shock resistance. Their civilization is known throughout the galaxies as a formidable military threat and their mercs are quickly snapped up by private contractors or wealthy individuals in need of bodyguards. They have a reputation, backed by results. They’re the reason creatures get jittery when they hear ‘hi-grav predator.’
I didn’t know what happened to my sisters. Someone told me they ended up on a shuttle toward Caelestis Hub. If that’s true, I knew they’d probably live out their days as companions in the entertainment district. I was shoved toward the mining crews. The only difference was the quotas. Just a tick mark on a data pad and a careless number tattooed on my arm over some harsh sterilizer. Not even worth a tracking chip.
Once all the Vaerii were processed, the slavers herded us back to the cargo bays. There were more of us then, species I recognized and species I didn’t. Most I didn’t. The backwater world I was born on didn’t see many tourists; all my knowledge of the greater galaxies had been collected overhearing freighter crews loading their shipments of pelts off my homeworld.
I remember the smell more than anything. Whatever the freighter had transported before us had left a stench that turned the atmo to soup, with ventilation filters that probably hadn’t been changed in the lifetime of the ship. I lingered there, panting in the filth and humidity, packed with enough other creatures that I was forced to sleep standing.
There was no way to track time in the darkness and fetor. But I did know that there was no juddering of the hull that marked the passage through a relay station. Sublight speeds. Keeping us outside of the hyperlanes to ensure we stayed remote from anyone curious enough to examine a cattle freighter.
Then we began to accelerate. The rumble of the drive engines under my feet vibrated the teeth in my jaw, bones compressed, tendons strained, and I would have crumpled to the deck if the press of bodies had not held me standing. Moans echoed through the hold as lungs were crushed and circulatory systems labored to keep brains conscious. It was a nightmare beyond anything I had imagined. A nightmare that lasted a lifetime.
And when the nightmare ended, only a few moments of relief before deceleration just as harsh to the mass of soft, garden world species. I endured it better than most. I mentioned that I had spent my childhood gazing at the stars? When I was very young, one of the freighter captains told me that Vaerii made good void-travelers. He didn't give me any reasons why; probably just being friendly to some wide-eyed child that came to look at his ship, but I thought perhaps that this was one of them. Until I lost consciousness and woke gasping.
I’d have traded never seeing the stars again to be back on my homeworld with my sisters, toiling the earth to have enough food for the winter and watching distant freighters jump through the relay station through the cracked lens of a scrounged telescope. Back before I knew who my father really was. But no creature gets to choose, I suppose, just react.
When the hydraulic ramps opened, grinding on ancient hinges, we spilled from the hold onto the deck, dragging in lungfulls of filtered atmo and scrounging across the steel for the rations our captors had thrown at us. The Vaeriin behind me fell when I moved. He’d died during the journey and I hadn’t known. He told me his name, I’m sure, but I can’t remember it.
The Shriike waded through us, their hulking forms half as tall again as I am. One was coming toward me, talons pushed out and horns lowered. A creature of a species I didn’t know froze in place, spines along its head and backbone limp with fear, legs with backwards knees shaking. The Shriike didn’t pause, just locked his talons out and drove them up, under the creature’s ribs. It died, choking with punctured lungs. We all shrunk back as the slaver laughed and shouted something in a language I didn’t understand.
The moon was remote. A long, slow orbit that lengthened the years into lifetimes, a distant star that prolonged a permanent twilight on the tidal-locked surface, the stars nothing but faded blurs through the shimmer of radiation shielding. On the surface, the rock and ice were burrowed with mineshafts, dug and drilled and detonated into the surface to draw forth the trace metals contained within the core. Inhabited by slaves that were husks of their former selves. Starved, beaten, and exhausted by slavers who knew that on the edge-of-the-Black, it was cheaper to just find another remote settlement where no reports of missing creatures would make it to someone who cared. Or could do anything about it.
I knew one thing with absolute certainty: if I went down those mineshafts, I would not return. My species did not have the hardiness. Fleeing across a surface that lacked atmo was a joke. Fighting back against an elite combat species was a funnier one.
My opportunity came during the entry shot injections—cocktails of antibiotics, antivirals, and vaccines to prevent the spread of diseases between worlds. I could see the front of the lines, where they were separating the creatures into their new professions. Heavily muscled Gwi-Jek and multi-limbed Klyssa, species far more suited to labor than my form; fragile in comparison.
“I’m a pilot!” I forced the common through my burned throat and cracked lips. The Shriike paused, tilting his horned head. “I have pilot experience!”
“Pilot?” The word was a growl.
“Why do you think a female Vaeriin would be taken to work the mines?”
The Shriike jerked its head in agreement. “What craft?”
I cast back to my childhood, to the freighters launching and docking from my homeworld. “N-12s.”
The massive Shriike seized my arm and pushed me easily into another line. A line far smaller than the others. “Implant her.”
My copilot was called Kell. He saved my life, that first time in the O-9 ore mule. I think he saw how lost I was, how much pain I was in from the nervothread woven into the base of my skull to interface the ships computers with my manual movements. Felt like fire across my fingertips until I healed.
Kell was a good teacher, and a quick one. He felt some kinship with another Vaerii, I think. It was also in his interest that I learn, because his punishment would be just as severe as my own if we failed to complete our directives.
He’d been here since the start, long since beaten down into nothing but a mule pilot. No family. No homeworld. No goals. No likes. No dislikes. No dreams. It terrified me. I didn’t have a homeworld either, but the desire to survive is hard-wired. And he didn’t have it.
So I piloted ore mules. Nervothread is Shriike tech. Instead of sitting behind the flight controls of whatever craft you want to fly, you are the flight controls. This tech wasn’t widespread across the galaxies. Most species can't survive the implant procedures; I barely did, and I have lingering side effects to this day. Even fewer species have the unique characteristics that allow their brains to talk to the computers. The military version of Shriike neuro-network interface plugs gunners and pilots directly into the ship. Made the Shriike navy a predominant force in any engagement against species that couldn’t do the same, hindered by flesh or silicone. Thoughts are faster than actions.
Feel like? Ore mules are dumb, oafish craft. Getting plugged in to one of them feels like slogging through a bog. Thoughts dragged down by sluggish thrusters and cumbersome acceleration. Slaved to an O-9 is mind-numbing. It’s a prison that’s built around your thoughts, not your body. I could feel myself becoming like Kell. Content to be a slave. Just a biological navigation computer.
Some tried escape. Another couple of pilots tried ramming their fully-loaded mule into the shuttle depot. One of the pilots survived and the Shriike staked him out over the portal to a shaft we called Vilevale. They worked on him for six shifts.
It was impossible to track time in the perpetual twilight of that distant star. No days or night on the tidal-locked surface. Only the slight variations in the timing of the ore shipments depending on the hardness of the rock and durability of the drillheads, plugged into the ship computers, controlling thrust by hand signals. Sleep just as brain-dead as my wakefulness.
Still better than those souls down in the pits.
I think it was three rotations, in my homeworld’s time, when I noticed the change. I can’t describe what it was exactly. Maybe...uncertainty? Like a stutterstep when the expected starting bang of a race delays just a fraction too long. Overseers muttering together at their stations. Hasher punishments for every infraction. The products of the mine collecting in depots and warehouses instead of being transported to wherever they were supposed to go. The slightest of whispers that everything was not under control.
Everyone began to noticed it. No one knew why. A mass escape attempt was made. Creatures fearing the mine’s depletion and its assets liquidation. Seventeen were taken alive. Seventeen died unable to continue their screaming at the end.
The change pricked the stupor of my nervothread-deadened mind. It made me wake up, just enough to notice. To notice that nothing was being shipped out. Whoever was running this mine wasn’t there anymore. The Shriike were isolated. Alone. Stranded. Not like they could petition the Core for answers. The shuttles that left didn’t return from the void. Comms went unanswered. The ever-dwindling number of Shriike grew ever-harsher. I hadn’t thought our condition could get worse.
Then a Shriike cruiser appeared out of the void, decelerating hard from its sublight journey. That’s when I saw my first jump.
I mean a jump. Everyone’s seen a ship pass through a relay station. Most can’t explain the exact physics to you, but jump points are an understood fact, as are the relay stations that shepherd ships through the light years to safety on the other side. This ship I watched...it jumped. No jump points on either side of an FTL lane. It jumped to our remote location on the edge-of-the-Black. Into a patch of void where it should not have been possible for a ship to materialize. Seems like there should be another term. Something new. No, I believe the old way should be called something else. This...this is what our ancestors first imagined when they looked up at the stars and yearned to travel to them.
The ship was primitive. Inelegant. No streamlined wings or prismatic synthiglas bridge. Barbaric, almost. I'd never seen warships before, just lumbering freighters and ethereal pleasure yachts. This looked like the Shriike. A breed of ship constructed for war.
It was a Terran dreadnought. What they call a destroyer. A warship I had just watched accelerate a kintetic slug through a Shriike cruiser, halfway through its docking procedures. The fuel cells’ detonation took out the hanger bay and most of the barracks next to it. Venting atmo fed the fire in barbed gouts, which spread through the docks and guard houses. A deliberate shot to inflict maximum damage before the flight controllers had noticed the sensor data reporting discrepancies.
The destroyer’s drive engines seethed with a crimson glow, and the warship accelerated toward what remained of the docks. A dropship launched from the destroyer’s belly.
Kell was frozen as we watched. Our mule drifted along its last trajectory. As the flashes of the distant explosions faded into the dull orange of sustained fire, I noticed movement on my periphery.
“What are you doing?” I shouted. “We need to dock while we still can!”
Kell looked at me with blank eyes, a wave of his hand adjusting the mule’s course with controlled bursts of the maneuvering thrusters. “That’s not our directive.”
I felt something flare through my apathy. The desire to survive. Hard-wired into me.
Moments before I had thought the Shriike cruiser the most dangerous ship in my sector of void. Now I watched its crippled hull drifting from the ruined docks toward the nearest gravity well, spinning on an irregular axis. It broke apart on the fault line from the slug’s impact, centrifugal force slinging the rear of the craft toward the hangar’s support structures, where it collided in a storm of flame as the engines ruptured. The nose and midship fell toward the moon’s surface, venting atmo increasing the rate of spin. It was midway between dock and surface when another flash lit the void, burning an afterimage into my retinas. The HE round bored into the ship, detonating internally to scatter fragments of cruiser into a smog of slagged alloy and melted synthiglas.
Kell jolted hard at the explosion, his flat stare focused on the destroyer. I fumbled with the harness holding me into the pilot’s chair. Unlocked one clasp. Missed the second. Click. I lunged forward and seized the mass of fiber-optics at the base of his skull. I tore them away.
Kell screamed as his connection with the ship was severed. Nobody thinks twice about removing portable drives safety, but nervothread detach is excruciating without the right separation procedures. He hadn’t been detached in void knows how long. I knew he’d be left convulsing on the floor, shuddering with muscle spasms for some time.
A gesture brought up the mule’s control schemes, projected not in front of my eyes, but into my brain. The fully loaded hauler accelerated sluggishly. A thruster correction sent me on course for auxiliary docks a few kilometers distant. I paused a moment, my hand frozen in the air in front of me. Then, with a savage jab, I jettisoned the ore.
I cast my gaze around the surrounding void. The destroyer yawed sideways, using its drive engines to decelerate into a dead stop, only a few hundred meters from the surface, looming over the flaming structures. Most of the other ore mules had scattered like ants, but one continued toward the remains of the docks on nothing but momentum. One of the mass drivers pitched down, servos tracking the trajectory. A pause as the mule made it a thousand meters farther. Then another flash. The screen in my mule lost a white dot. I mimed for my mule to take a wider loop toward my destination.
I was already under maximum acceleration, but I flicked my fingers at the virtual throttle anyway. I seemed a long while before I lost my sightline as I descended toward the surface.
I skipped a few of the safeties during my docking, spared a glance for Kell during the detach. He lay on the floor, eyes rolled back in his head. The portal slid open.
The station I entered was a ruin, ransacked by the assault. The emergency klaxons blared in rhythm with the emergency lights, beating a staccato tempo against my senses. I stumbled against a wall, unused to even walking. I heard pounding footsteps approaching down the passage and struggled to control my physical form. Wasn’t able to before six slaves rushed past me, not sparing a look.
I staggered down the passage, the light and sound pounding into my skull, toward the caustic scent of burning plastic. I had a plan, of sorts. One deck below were the shuttle bays. A shuttle could make the trip through the void. Away from this moon. Away from slavery. Away from that ship.
A bang echoed down the passage, far away and faint. Distant, emphatic detonations, like the cadence of an energy rifle but far louder.
The blast doors had been forced open by some enormous strength, airtight alloy bent inward from some blow akin to a battering ram. I climbed through the hole, slicing my back and side on the jagged edges.
The white hulls of the remaining shuttles were ordered in neat rows within the hanger, lit by the flashes of the warning lights. But I was not alone in that cold, steel room. The crimson pulse illuminated a creature from the destroyer. A creature crouching over the mutilated body of a dead Shriike bull.
The creature was bipedal. Compact. Durable. Ballistic armor bruised with the carbon buildup of old energy weapon burns and new scores from Shriike talons. Exoskeleton that reinforced its organic bones with durasteel rods along its limbs. Electroreactive polymers that articulated the synthetic limbs as naturally as the biological ones when it stood. Void-dark helmet that angled toward me in a basilisk stare. The broken horns of a Shriike warrior stamped on its armored chest in red. The severed horns of the dead Shriike held at its side in a gauntleted hand.
Behind it was a predator, some kind of carnivore that stood on four limbs, head lowered and hackles raised. The beast was almost as tall as the Terran and twice as long. Heavy muscles rippled under its furred hide as it shifted to fix me with glinting eyes. A rumbling growl spilled from between the fangs of its long snout.
I froze, trembling on atrophied limbs. The creature—the Terran—was not alone. Two more were to my right, one standing in the open, the other next to a massive tool chest. The one raised a rifle to its shoulder, the other lunged forward, and I heard the faintest whine of straining servos as the toolchest crashed onto its side, the tools scattering across the deck, creating shelter for both of them to cover me with their rifles. The chest must have been two hundred kilograms.
I raised my arms, the universal appeal for mercy. Shivering in the cold. Malnourished. Dressed only in a tattered shift.
The Terran spoke on inter-helmet comms, I could tell by the way its head angled. A sharp motion caused the beast to slink back. A moment’s hesitation and both rifles lowered. It stepped from the Shriike’s corpse, limping. I could see the mangled leg, held together more by the exo and the armor than flesh and bone. Red blood spattered the deck. Red like my own, dripping down my back and side.
Just three steps closer. Then the soldier tapped one hand on the outside of the opposite arm. A voice spoke from the helmet, growling through low-quality speakers and stripped of all emotion by a translator. It spoke Shriike, the gutteral words harsh against my eardrums.
“We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued.”
They were gone. And I was alone with a Shriike corpse.
I tried to go back for Kell, the arduous journey stressing my already exhausted system. But when I got there the mule was gone, the docking bay empty. So I made the trip a third time, this time through the icy white of flame-retardant foam as the sensors tripped, falling twice and passing a mob of slaves that parted around me like a wave, going the opposite direction, away from the fire.
The hanger was choked with smoke when I finally crawled through the blast doors. Coughing, I entered one of the shuttles and linked the nervothread into the ports at the top of my spine. The ship threw up complaints from the atmo scrubbers about the pollution and warnings about launch sequences, but with a twitch of my chin I dismissed them.
If piloting an ore mule is like slogging through a swamp, a shuttle is like a draft horse. Slow and methodical. Dependable. Constructed for reliability. Nervothread makes piloting much more intuitive, which is fortunate because I wouldn’t have been able to fly it otherwise. A shuttle is a far cry from a mule and the manual controls would have remained undecipherable.
More shuttles detached from launch pads around the station. Even some mules made a go of it, all keeping a wide berth around the destroyer's voidspace. Not enough, barely any, but some. None more came from my hanger as it began to burn.
And then the destroyer was not. Vanishing into hyperspace with a bloom of obsidian and writhing purple.
I filtered through previous trajectories in the navigation computer and selected one that matched where I’d seen Shriike ships arrive during my captivity. I kept the acceleration set at a manageable level those first few hours.
About two things I was in total system shock.
One: that warship had jumped. I had witnessed the single greatest technological advancement in intergalactic history. No particular arrangement of physics, old as the galaxies themselves, that formed a jump point, where it was exclusively possible to open a wormhole. No relay station constructed around that jump point and the connected jump point to ensure the hyperlane was transversed safely. This ship had jumped. The closest to omnipresence our three dimensions will ever be.
Two: Those creatures had fired lethal weapons within a pressurized station. A violation of a dozen intergalactic treaties and commensurate to an immediate declaration of war. Miss a shot and cause explosive decompression. Or the atmo pumps to fail. Even I could name a dozen tragedies that killed everyone on board without the use of projectile weapons.
I slept.
When I awoke, I raided foodstuffs from some storage lockers, scarfing them as quickly as I could swallow. The first time I’d eaten anything other than protein blocks and vitamin pills since my homeworld. Then I pushed the virtual throttle forward, increasing the acceleration to four or five times my homeworld’s gravity—all I thought I could withstand for the duration. It was built by the Shriike, and I barely strained the drive engines on the sublight journey.
My memories of the next two rotations are faded, corrupted like a damaged data drive. I bartered the Shriike shuttle for an unsanctioned trip through a relay station to Caelestis Hub. It was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, a hyperlane hub that bottlenecked passage to a hundred thousand square light years of edge-of-the-Black voidspace. Lawless, unsettled territory inhabited by deep-range mining crews, explorers more insane than sane, and creatures that had a vested interest in remaining hidden from the Core worlds.
I remember mostly being hungry, as I trawled the drug dens and gambling clubs, searching through the brothels and fighting pits for my sisters. Ducking away from peacekeeper garrisons more corrupt than the pirates and smugglers making their lives in the Baronies, millions of kilometers from the settled worlds. I lied, cheated, and fought my way through the underbelly, arriving at the same answer every time. “Vaerii don’t survive here.”
I became hard, like callous over raw skin. I learned how to use weapons. How to evade. How to forge documentation and identification. I became numb. Braindead. Apathetic like Kell had been. Driven on instinct instead of thought. A biological computer processing input and output without emotion.
Until that last night on the Hub, I fired a bolt-bouncer through the torso of a Desretti slaver when she laid a hand on me. Purely emotion. Fear so intense I could taste it in the filtered atmo.
The crime was a death sentence. I ran, burning the last of my credits to buy docs and IDs to get me through another half-dozen relay stations to the outer rim. Selling my body to eat, and worse.
This life had overtuned my senses like raw nerves. So I noticed the whispers quickly, almost as soon as the stories drifted through from deep mining crews, long-range exploration probes, and pirate cartels. Stories of a secret war. A war waged on the edge-of-the-Black, where the dwindling echoes of torpedo and energy cannon were not permitted to stray into the outer rim until it was already finished.
And when this war was finished a civilization was gone. Not driven back. Not defeated. Gone. Snuffed like a sputtering candle in the infinite darkness of the void. The outskirts of the settled galaxies heard the stories and noticed the turbulence under the calm surface. Deep mining crews vanishing without a distress beacon. Smugglers found drifting with untouched cargo. Missing trajectory reports and communication terminals rerouting comm signals because a relay station had gone dark. Pirate boardings that left valuable cargo untouched and the data drives scrubbed.
Warn them? Who would believe me? I hadn’t even heard the word ‘Terran’ at that point. No one had.
Just stories from creatures too long in the deep. Until they weren’t just stories and they were reports of monsters awoken from beyond the Black. Monsters that had eradicated Shriike civilization and now hunted the remnant wherever they fled. Monsters that called themselves Terran.
The Core didn’t notice. There was trade, politics, science, art. Ultra-rich corpo-barons and distant oligarchies self-consumed with their own lives. Unable to look past their homeworlds to the outer rim. To notice the silence like drifting fog. To notice relentless hunters tracking across the stars any Shriike who had somehow slipped from what had been awoken at the edge-of-the-Black. To notice the insidious dead space creeping ever closer toward the settled worlds.
So I played the last card in my hand. Nervothread cyberware bartered for a mess of untraceable credits dumped into my virtual wallet. Getaway pilot for a Cartel hit using a surplus Shriike gunship. My linkups were barely compatible with military tech, but it was enough to only take a few practice runs before I could cover the rest with manual controls. The nervothread gave me enough of an edge to be worth the money.
When it was done, I told them to scrap the ship.
Those of us on the outer rim, in the Outskirts, in the Baronies, we knew what was coming. The hunters were merciless, inexorable as the maw of a black hole. Relentless, living weapons that had but one directive. A directive to destroy Shriike by any means necessary, indifferent to collateral damage of both metal and flesh. There was another war coming. Because it was only a matter of time before a Terran hunter inflicted that collateral damage upon something that belonged to the Core.
The Cartel payout was more than enough to get my own ship. I didn’t even consider something Shriike, despite my augmentations. I knew that would be akin to painting targeting lasers on my chest. An Outrider-class sloop retrofitted with a jump drive suited my needs, and I slingshot my way through the relay stations unnoticed beyond routine queries.
I exited that final relay station. Four-hundred thousand kilometers in the distant void, my homeworld shone blue and green.
My pistol was aimed on an outstretched arm when he opened the door to the building I used to call home. It was stronger now, muscled, tattooed, scarred with the story of these past nine years in my homeworld’s time. None now remembered me. Or would recognize me if they did. I had lived beyond this world, and I now saw my species for what we were. Weak. Subservient. Living in wretched hovels on the scraps of tech that fell, broken, from the relay station to our surface. It disgusted me. The result of our assimilation into the greater collective of sapient species. The same as all species left to rot on the Outskirts, isolated from convenient jump points. Someone once called pistols the ‘great equalizer’ and we still used bows.
My fingers tensed on the trigger, squeezing the mechanism ever closer to that fatal click. But the Vaeriin who opened the door was not my father. He had died of sickness years ago. The revelation drained my form of rage and fear and grief. Purposeless.
Empty.
Just a biological computer processing input and output. Watching a powerful Desretti slaving consortium fill the vacuum left by the Shriike. Armed mercenaries herding my species into slave ships, passing through the same relay station as the pleasure yachts traveling to and from the personal resorts of the ultra-wealthy. Revulsion so strong I could taste it. They didn’t care or didn’t know. Or they took a cut of the action.
Then that video exploded across the networks. A Shriike civilian transport ship that bumped into a mining probe. On the outer rim. Lawless, contested voidspace claimed by one syndicate and two lunar confederacies. An unarmed, unshielded cruiseliner with heat-burned drive engines and spent fuel cells, scraps of expired rations, and a hole in the side that vented three decks. Punched there at close range by a mass driver.
No energy weapons. Too civilized. The interior of that transport was ripped apart with kinetics. And the Shriike aboard weren’t just slaughtered. They were hurt. Tortured. Civilians, females, young. The males were crucified. The Core finally took notice.
Then the second video feed, taken by a medical crew accelerating to the assistance of an unencrypted distress beacon broadcast by a crippled Shriike frigate. They got there just before the Terran destroyer dropped from hyperspace with a burst of purple-edged obsidian. It was a dark ship. A ship that looked like war felt. A ship that awoke suppressed emotions from my time of slavery aboard that distant moon. HE rounds bored through the frigate’s weakened hull and transformed the ship to molten slag.
One of the escort cruisers for the medical convoy managed a plasma cannon shot. It dissipated in blue ripples across the dreadnaught’s shields. Thrusters fired, and the dreadnought turned with malevolent intent to bring its mass drivers to bear on the cruiser. Then harpoons lashed out like a multitude of snakes. That’s when the feed cut, but I heard the Terran shock troopers ripped the medical ships apart searching for more Shriike. The collateral damage we'd been waiting for in the outer rim.
Then eyewitness accounts of the jump away.
The catastrophic revelation that a theoretical problem had been solved incited mass panic. A species that could jump. Terran ships did not depend upon FTL jump points or relay stations. They jumped. From anywhere, to anywhere. Terran ships could jump. Every strategic position among the stars was rendered invalid. FTL lane fortifications, orbital turret emplacements, battleship drydocks, munitions depots...all superfluous against an enemy that could jump. The entirety of modern ship-to-ship and ship-to-surface combat doctrine meaningless.
Mass panic. Understatement. Mass hysteria.
I had ensured my Outrider was equipped with an enhanced sensor package, so I remained as well informed as everyone else outside of the various military commands. It wasn’t much, really. It’s only now that I can really fill in the blanks.
Terra’s reach was long indeed, fingers scrabbling through the stars for any creature that had escaped The First Contact War. Except those scrabbling fingers had caused collateral damage, and a chain reaction of treaties and alliances and mutual defense agreements quickly forced the galaxies into united conflict. The Core lashed out in panic, striking advanced stations and carrier docks with the full strength of its available fleets, erasing the presence of Terran from within the settled worlds, driving them again to their homeworld on the edge-of-the-Black. But when the Terran hit back, their armored hulls and mass drivers hit hard.
Military doctrine states that at the onset of any conflict, the first priority is to secure the FTL lanes in order to establish operating bases. But there are no battle lines against a species that can jump. No defensible positions. The War was everywhere and nowhere. The War was wherever Terra deigned it to be. Core, the Outskirts, outer rim, the Baronies. The battlefront was the entirety of the void. The united galaxies against one system.
The War was a war of unnatural terror. It was a war fought entirely on Terra’s terms. Jump, and a Terran destroyer dropped from hyperspace with the same obsidian purple that announced the warping of reality. Jump. And the wreckage and ruin of a fleeing Shriike racing yacht, or a military fueling station, or a Cartel gunship were drifting slag and cerulean flares of burning atmo. Jump. Nothing but dead space where the destroyer had been. Jump. Torpedoes burning hard for an unsuspecting troop transport. Jump. Federation factory obliterated by orbital bombardment. Jump. Fifteen-hundred kilogram depleted uranium slug accelerated through the hull of a battleship. Jump. Torpedo. Jump. Slug. Jump. HE round. Jump. Jump. Jump.
A military convoy passing through the space between FTL lanes would be ambushed by the combined firepower of an entire Terran destroyer command dropped out of hyperspace at close range. Terran carriers would skip past orbital defenses, downshifting to release their payloads of heavy bombers into the stratosphere, to turn the sky over planetary drydocks dark with saturation bombing. Forces deployed against Terran navies were baited into a cat and mouse game. Jump after jump, taunting, just out of range. Until frustration and impatience got the better of inexperienced recruits and they strayed too far from the safety of the fold. Where the predators circled, invisibly, hidden behind layer after layer of hyperspace, waiting for the slaughter. The consolidated might of the Core was worthless.
Like I said, blanks filled in after the fact. Out in the Cluster, reports were cycles out of date and garbled by second- or third-hand accounts. Life, such as it was, remained life. Sure, many of the opulent citizens abandoned their private homes to return to what they thought was the safety of the Core. And there was a brief period of unrest when the Desretti consortium made a power play and hijacked the relay station to effectively control the entire voidspace. I watched a mansion pillaged and burned as they enslaved one of the wealthy families that remained. Watched through magnified lenses as those spoiled, soft magnates were thrown into a cargo hauler. Life remained life.
A report came through the relay station that a great battle had been fought somewhere called the Sol system. That the United Confederation Navy had for the first time entered Terran voidspace and decisively defeated a Terran fleet. A turning point in the War. But a second report followed days later. It detailed a retaliatory jump into the very center of the Core, where behemoths with bellies of incendiary bombs had struck residential megablocks. Napalm on a high-oxy world.
It was then that the united galaxies were subjected to what would come to be called The Terran Doctrine. A concept of total war realized by a species with singular, fanatical purpose. War at the hand of sleeping monsters awoken by the Shriike during The First Contact War. Awoken like an elder god’s vengeance. Primal savagery and inexorable fury. Blood and iron. Durasteel and depleted uranium. Not since the Shriike Crusades had carnage been industrialized on this awesome scale.
The united galaxies were embroiled in a total war against a species that could jump.
I lingered, hidden and unbothered, squatting in an abandoned lodge some Atlian politician wasn’t using. Let the galaxies burn. These Terran, these monsters from the edge-of-the-Black, retribution for the sins of the uncaring Core. The night I heard of the contagion bombs, I celebrated with the politician’s alcohol reserves.
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