From This Distant Shore, To The Next

Posted on Mon Dec 11th, 2017 @ 4:07pm by Captain Remas McDonald

891 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: S1: These Are The Voyages...
Location: Star System 'Far Far Away', USS Traveller
Timeline: MD 2, 23.00

Somewhere, out there in the vast nothingness that is space, a politician was giving a speech.

It had huge words in it, great words, with vast meanings and elegant complexity that made him sound like a sage speaking before the masses. In reality, the real sages were the offices of interns and speech writers who had toiled over the speech for months. They had made sure every paragraph worked out in the politician's favour: was this group left out, did they feel sidelined, was this phrase somehow offensive?

In the end, the ten minutes of oration was backed up by nearly three hundred hours of prep work.

And the people who really needed to hear it, who were ‘The trailblazers on a brave limitless frontier for all sentient kind’, were too busy to care. These were men and women of Starfleet, the best and brightest, and they would not fail. Enemies of progress had come for them, and in doing so had united the crew of the Traveller in a way not possible before then. They had no time for speeches, they had work to do.

The final countdown began.

The Accelerators ungainly frame checked its alignment one more time, ensuring it was pointed in the correct direction and orientation. This did not mean it was aimed directly at Messier 4, as the gravity of a trillion stars, black holes, quasars and other astrological events warped and twisted the path. But it was aligned: all systems green.

With a final burst of energy the Accelerator’s rings, now spinning at a hair's breadth beneath light speed, came to a sudden and terrible halt. They glowed with an energy drawn from a giant blue star, tempered at their core by an energy beginning to seep out of the bubbling foam of creation itself. And that energy had to go somewhere, had to be channelled, had to be used before the universe got tired of allowing this cheat code to exist.

The Traveller vanished in a blaze of light.

High-speed cameras caught part of the launch before their housings on the nose of the Accelerator melted. It looked for all the world like the Traveller’s faring had begun to stretch out, whisking away slice by slice as intestinal details of the layout of the ship became apparent. Other sensing devices caught glimpses through the energetic backwash, but all of it was expected. You don’t get a free glimpse into the fabric of reality, not without paying a price.

And then they were gone. The fairing containing the Traveller, her supply freighters and the colonists were no longer held within the Accelerators rings. The rings themselves still glowed a brilliant white, trying to shed heat as the destructive energies they had harnessed warped and wrecked them. They would never work again, but that was also a given. The Accelerator was a one-way street.

Which was why, buried in the heart of one of the auto freighters, the seed core for a second had been planted. The blocky machine didn’t look like much, but the advanced industrial replicator could over time perform the same engineering miracle with guidance. It would just take time.

Time enough to learn some, if not all, of the secrets of Messier 4.

For the crew of the USS Traveller, the launch seemed shockingly uneventful. Warnings of the hazards of phase space acceleration had led many to believe that such a transit would be a violent assault on the senses. Instead, there had been a high, ringing sound like the ship had been stuck like a bell...and then nothing. If anything the only excitement came from the communications department when the subspace network ping timed out.

The fairing parted, spinning away before transporter beams reached out and snatched the pieces back, reverting them to base matter for the replicator feed banks. The elegant clockwork of the fairings release was timed with the launching of the cramped narrow ships tucked like ducklings behind the Traveller.

The Auto Freighters, named after great explorers from across the galaxy, remained in line with the Traveller’s course. Magellan, Watney, and T’kuv were not elegant vessels. Little more than a command and control module at their front and a few hundred meters of cargo containers and mission modules before blocky warp nacelles and impulse engines made up the rear. The colony barge, a similar design to the freighters, was named Acheron. A wholly owned vessel of the Briarwood Colonial Initiative.

Acheron, Briarwood? Clearly, someone had been in a need to dare the universe into making things interesting.

Below the Traveller spun in all its majesty the disk of the Milky Way. Somewhere, down there, the Federation toiled with politics and the minor calamities of nation states. And above the Traveller, glowing like the moon of old, was a fairy fire of stars that promised adventure.

They weren’t quite too far from home, but they weren’t in Messier 4 yet.

“Set course,” Remas said with a grin that spoke of the boyish wonder he felt.

And so it was done. In a week, two weeks, the Traveller and her small flotilla would arrive in Messier 4.

If only they knew what was to come, what wonders and horrors awaited them, the question might be asked if they would have gone at all.

 

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