Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

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Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:15 am

First two reproduced from elsewhere, most recent a bit rambling and unpolished

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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:16 am

Musing in witch-space

Witch-space has changed.

Anyone who says they understand hyperspace is lying, although not as much as someone who says they understand human nature. It is different for everyone, although I can’t prove that any more than I can prove everyone sees the same colour blue.

The final tick of the countdown is the last normal thing you see. Then the instruments go haywire, the stars dance like dervishes and sometime later, if you’re lucky, you thud back into the universe facing a great burning star. But ask people on the same ship how long it took and nobody can agree, nor does anybody agree with the ship’s clock, assuming it functions at all in the trip.

Sometimes, jumps seem to take hours. This one is. I sit here in my pilot’s throne, stroking Katzenstein on my lap. He sleeps fitfully. What if we never emerge, but stay roaring through the neverness forever? Does hunger happen in hyperspace? Do the batteries drain? Can you die? Are there ships with skeletons at the controls, waiting to finally emerge and deliver canisters of dust to frozen stations orbiting brown dwarfs in a dead galaxy?

Questions like this can prey on you.

I wonder if Halsey is still out there, stuck in a jump that takes centuries. Perhaps Starship One will return to see what a mess those of us left behind have made. Perhaps she will find Thargoids making a better job of it.

I looked for her. I didn’t like the woman but I spent days jumping through systems, some of which had never had a human in them before, scanning and searching. It was my first taste of the infinity beyond inhabited space; the terrible majesty and mystery, the ice, the fire, the ballet of gravity, all going on without the slightest regard for the little packets of carbon-encoded memes that have leaned to move about. Nor can we make the slightest difference to most of it; nothing we can achieve can come close to fragging up a star, and nor should it. We are utterly insignificant.

At the end I just wanted to run home, to pull ordinary pettiness and mundanity around me like a blanket. Home is Borasetani, an Alliance system. No habitable planets, so I grew up on a station. A very boring background compared to some. Middle-class in a middle-grade corporate culture, stable, bright at school but not brilliant, just enough to score my pilot’s scholarship. A comfortable life in a comfortable apartment near to the bits of the station with the best acceleration. No great traumas or challenges to spur me on, just a vague idea of wanting to better myself and make the Universe a better place. Not even a great urge to explore; when I finally visited a planet in our neighbouring system with the catchy name of BD+31 2373 (why in the worlds had nobody living there actually come up with a name?) I found it intimidating. All that wide-open space! And while I can cope with the idea of vacuum (wouldn’t last long as a pilot otherwise) it should be behind a nice strong hull and maybe a forcefield as well, that’s only sensible. How can you just rely on gravity to hold your air in? Without coriolis force to feel, how do you know what direction you’re facing?

Well that has changed since then. I do fancy a nice homestead on a planet to retire to, maybe with some animals. But my friend Johnny Gamma has tried it on Earth, and immediately ran away to space again. He said the cows have been genetically engineered to say slogans of the biotech firms instead of mooing (or was that bleating? I get these animals muddled). He swears it’s true. I told him that Witchhaul has proper ancient cattle, but then settling down might get more dangerous than actually flying a ship, way things are going.

Katzenstein yawns in his sleep and stretches, little claws of hybrid fibre-diamond sliding out of his paws. He’s a biomorphic companion, not a real animal; that would be cruel, as well as unhygenic. The claws are just one modification I’ve had made. The program to run straight for the escape pod in combat or other trouble is another. There are other things that I’ve acquired on my travels; I love my Altairian skin clothes and I’d brew up Fujin tea on my Rajukru stove, but permanence is a problem. I’ve had to eject several times now and survived; I’m actually young and arrogant enough to cope with danger, but I still get the cold sweats and flashbacks from time to time. After a while, it didn’t seem worth decorating my cockpit, knowing it could all be lost in seconds.

I have decorated Sekhmet my clipper, though. I’ve never lost her, touch wood (I have a carved good-luck charm round my neck). But she’s up on blocks at the moment. I ploughed all the money from her modules into buying a colossal type 9 freighter. I toyed with naming her Hathor, but I’m planning to sell her again, so decided against it. With all the new dangers appearing, I wanted to work towards the reassuringly massive castle of an Anaconda. But the trading trips are a type of hell. Not just the worry of enemies interdicting your slow and lightly armed ship—and I mean enemies, not pirates. Pirates I can cope with; at worst, you just have to pay them off with some cargo. There are people out there who enjoy killing and chaos for its own sake. Probably not as many as you think or the media makes out, but they exist alright. I’ve had a Type 7 shot out from under me just as I was leaving a station. Sometimes I wonder what by the Waters of Earth galactic law thinks it’s doing; it’s enough to make you into a Hudson supporter.

Still in Witch-space; my thoughts are running in circles. Yes, the hell of trade trips... not just the fear of enemies, not just the drudgery, the repeated jumps, the constant working out of numbers in your head and counting the cycles to the next upgrade, but the plans for the future. Just buying the ship is one thing; equipping it to top standard is another. But then, the mightiest ’conda can be taken down by a few cheap ships, I’ve seen it (and done it) myself. Even if you survive and have insurance, the excess is astronomical. Perhaps Antal is right and the more you have, the less happy you are. But he’s a galactic power trying to expand, so he’s a hypocrite. I also remember being no more happy in my little Cobra, although I was pleased at its ability to run.

I don’t know if it is just me, but since Halsey was lost, Witch-space has changed.

It’s got darker. It used to sing to me, but now it howls.

I might say the universe is so vast, why isn’t there room for us all? But I’m not so naive. We fight each other; if we don’t have a reason, we’ll make one up. Halsey was the lid on the pot, now someone has removed her. The water is hissing, the odd bubble rising to the surface, most seething just below it. Tension has turned into covert conflict, a hundred proxy wars. How long before we lose the “covert” and the “proxy”?

What should I do? My friend Derrida has already pledged to the Empire. The born combat pilot of our little group, he has perhaps always been impulsive. Not amoral; he loves Imperial values for good reasons. What worries me is not that, but some of the people he has already tangled with. Hudson may say he stand for law and decency, but you wouldn’t know it from some of the people fighting for him.

(I often don’t reveal that I’m female, easy enough to do in a spaceship. I don’t find the persistence of the neolithic in humanity reassuring.)

Should I join Winters and fight for the soul of the Federation from the inside? Should I pledge to Mahon the only independent outright humanist, although some of the Alliance governments are feudal or dictatorships? Should I support Aisling, the only benevolent (if possibly naive) contender for the Imperial Throne? Or should I run to Yong-Rui and hope that somehow humanity can progress beyond barbarity?

Here is my throne; here I and sorrows sit, while the winds of witch-space howl to me.

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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:17 am

Rescued Prisoner Statement

Hi, a rescued prisoner wanted me to forward the below:

I will not tell you my name or the system I am from, because there are millions like me still there.

I cannot say what slavery is like in other parts of the Empire, but this I do know: my grandparents were slaves, my parents were slaves, and I was a slave despite working hard every day of our lives. I know that somehow our upkeep always costs more than our statutory pay but the owners build new palaces and post fat profits. I know that my father died in harness although some basic medicines would have treated his heart, and we had credits deducted for attending his funeral. I know that our maximum life expectancy is seventy, which is what the lifespan was four thousand years ago. Women tend to survive longest, but apparently only men have the strength to lead the Empire.

I know that my mother is the toughest and bravest person I know. All overseers are cruel, but we were given a rotten one. The beatings and rapes were more frequent, people died, there were suicides. My mother finally managed to speak to a manager, and the overseer was removed—probably only to receive a light reprimand and be transferred elsewhere. But no slave can be seen to get away with speaking up, even if it helped the corporation. So the black uniforms kicked our door in at midnight. I tried to help her, so they took me too.

When I was fully conscious again, we were in a shipping facility with many others in chains. The building had a corporate logo on the walls, but there were also posters of Zemima Torval. The black uniforms had taken off their helmets. Under them, they looked bored.

They loaded most of us into cryogenic shipment units. There was no sedative jab first, and many prisoners were shivering in their restraints and pleading as the doors were closed and they began to freeze. My mother did not shiver or plead, she spat at the man locking her in. He just finished closing the door and fixed a red sticker on the cargo label.

‘We’re out of freezers,’ said one guard.

‘Use cattle boxes and put them in the first flight,’ replied another.

‘Why the first flight? Does it really matter if they get there alive?’ asked the first.

‘Follow protocol, they do the honours far end,’ said the second.

So the rest of us were locked inside canisters without freezing. They were padded on the inside, with a small window for people to look in and an oxygen unit. When we were loaded onto the freighter, I was flung around like the ball in a rattle. By the time it took off, I had learned to brace myself against the sides with my limbs.

I had never felt zero-g before. I heard the muffled sound of others being sick through the walls, but later we started singing. I joined in as best I could. We all knew what would happen; when the ships bring fertiliser back and workers spread it on the fields, they sometimes find an earring or a surgical plate in it. Do not eat food from Torval systems.

Later, we heard shouting from elsewhere on the ship, and it began to shake around. I heard strange noises, but I had no idea what lasers hitting shields sounded like yet. I did recognise the clang of something striking metal, then the canister tipped and started spinning. Through the little window, I could see blackness with stars in it, streaks of light, the odd ship, all eerily silent. Then something like a fat metal spider came straight at me with jets flaring on its back and clamped its legs around the canister. The spinning stopped, and we accelerated.

I saw another ship ahead, a long sleek one with wings on either side. Lasers were firing at it but stopping short and splashing over an invisible egg around its outside. I wasn’t close enough though, and suddenly there was a terrible heat and noise. The side of my canister turned white, some of it melted and blew out into space. The air started following it with a dreadful screeching noise. My ears popped and popped again.

The spider must have still been working, because we went under the ship and up to a hatch, wobbling a bit because of the air hissing out. There a metal claw grabbed the container and a few moments later I was in another hold. The hissing of air escaping slowed down and stopped.

I pushed hard against the side of the canister and it was damaged enough that I managed to kick and shove the door open. I was worried the hold might depressurise again if more cargo was loaded, so I pushed myself to the door and managed to open it. It is very hard moving around weightless for the first time but I think you know that.

I closed the door after me and went through several more rooms that were nicely decorated and appointed like managers’ houses are. Sometimes they rotated and moved around me, and I bounced off the walls. Then I found myself on what must have been the bridge. There were two chairs with someone in a flight-suit sitting in one in front of a huge canopy. Through it I could see the freighter firing its guns at us, and another ship that was smaller and rounder getting in between us. Weirdly, I could now hear engines and impacts.

There was a sudden loud hiss. I saw something furry clinging to the wall. It looked a bit like a large cat but it had huge teeth bared at me and its eyes were glowing.

The chair spun around. The pilot was covered in a kind of transparent gel over every part of her except for her face. ‘What the frag are you doing here?’

‘I was in a canister. Am I being pirated?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Get in the other chair and strap yourself in fast. Katzenstein, leave him alone unless he misbehaves,’ she added to the creature. The chair turned back around. ‘Shields holding. Getting more cargo. Computer, memo to get locks on cargo bay doors and a gun. They might try a trojan horse tactic.’

Being pirated was better than getting killed so I managed to push myself forward and get to the chair. The animal followed me, jumping easily from wall to wall and sticking on to them, glaring. When I got into the chair straps snapped around me automatically, then more of the gel oozed out and started enveloping me. I screamed and struggled, thinking I was a prisoner again.

‘Relax kid, it’s to protect you. Good job keeping the fire off Derrida. Can someone scan the freighter and see if it’s got any prisoners left?’

The gel stopped short of my face. I managed to control my breathing and relaxed, at least for a moment.

‘Security’s here!’ said a voice out of the console. ‘I’ll keep them off. You and Johnny get the last cargo.’ The round ship on the screen roared away on a trail of fire.

‘Freighter’s empty,’ said another voice. A second of the round ships appeared with one of the spiders carrying a pod towards it. Then another ship appeared, a stubby triangle. Lasers flared, the round ship lurched and the cannister exploded into a cloud of flaming debris.

‘Frag! Engaging!’ said the pilot. She did something and suddenly it was as if gravity was back, only several times stronger and the ship was standing on its end. The view rocked and spun, then a triangular ship was ahead and lasers from our wings were hammering into it. The catlike creature was clinging to a console with claws digging into the metal, its ears back against its head.

‘Shall we blow it up? We get any guidance on that?’ asked the pilot.

‘Feel free,’ I told her.

‘I got three more hostiles dropping in. Anyone left floating in space?’ asked one of her friends.

‘Got the last one,’ said the other. ‘Jumping out.’

‘Confirmed,’ said the pilot. The computer counted down, the stars went funny for a moment and then we were out of the fight.

‘We’re out of drones. Ready to head home?’ asked the intercom.

‘I’m staying, I have more limpets left,’ said the pilot. ‘See you later.’

‘What happens to me now?’ I asked.

The pilot looked at me. Her face was pale and she had dark smudges under her eyes. ‘You’re not free yet. I have to try getting more prisoners, then we have to escape hostile territory, cross a hundred light-years and even at the far end you’re technically illegal cargo. Although I don’t think Cubeo security is actually too bothered about that.’

‘What, I’m going to be free?’ I gasped.

I don’t know enough about spacecraft to tell you about the rest of the flight. The next rescue attempt did not go so well, and when I finally saw the ship from the outside again in Medupe station, it had holes in its hull.

‘I don’t know how to thank you!’ I said.

‘Don’t,’ said the pilot. We were watching as the cargo was unloaded and opened up. Some of the people from cattle-boxes were being taken straight to hospital. ‘There are too many of you, I can’t get to know you all. No scratch that, send me a message sometime and tell me if poverty is better than slavery. Now I need to get into my own cryo-pod.’

‘Cryo-pod?’ I echoed.

She nodded. ‘People died and got left behind today because I wasn’t fast enough, or hadn’t trained or prepared enough. Yesterday I rammed a canister by accident and killed them myself. You try sleeping after that.’ And she walked back into her ship.

My mother’s fate remains unknown, by the way.

A welcoming officer started telling me that they could only give me a small amount to set me up and the next few weeks would be hard, but I stopped her. ‘What can I do to help?’ I asked.

Now I work long hours packaging media materials. I love it. My wages are building up and the overseers say please, order us to take breaks and tell some of us we’re working too hard. The only time off I took was to write this; I’m sending it to the “Bad Asp Joke” wing who rescued me and the media centre if they want to use it.

I see Aisling’s face a thousand times a day on leaflets, posters, photos, data discs. I know what her enemies say about her and I wouldn’t care if it was all true. She saw something wrong and she gathered an army to do something about it.

Keep flying Angels, but sleep well in between.

*

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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Fri Jul 10, 2015 9:18 am

(logbook extract from a few weeks ago. Bit rambling)

The Abyss stares back

I never believed in Hell until I went to war.

Galnet would have you believe humanity isn’t in battle, that the fate of many systems is being decided by ballots, debates and budgets. In some lucky cases it is, but there are still clouds of evaporated blood along the space lanes leading to them. I don’t know who runs Galnet and if they’re in denial or conspiracy, but do not trust the spin and never believe they are telling you the whole truth. Space has not been peaceful since humanity learned to fly, but a few months ago looks like peace from here. There are thousands of casualties every day, armies of irregular forces without flags or uniforms (but visible badges of allegiance, mostly the correct ones) crossing into each other’s space, pirating and fighting. We have a lot further left to fall, but if this isn’t war, I don’t want to see what is.

Nor do I want to see what else it would turn me into. I am already a pirate, a murderer and a war criminal. I am an Angel but if you were to ask the biblical Egyptians, the difference between the Angel of Death and Lucifer would seem pretty meaningless.

If you want another word to go with War, it would be Compromise. I followed my friends off to join Aisling Duval, our heads full of romantic notions about freeing slaves and putting a beautiful, young and virtuous princess on her rightful throne. It didnt start out too badly. You may have read the account of one of the slaves we rescued, and thank Planck his mother was retrieved as well. I was pretty stressed out and insomniac at the time, but now...

Angel Command has told us not to go after Torval. Nobody has been punished but the rewards are hardly worth speaking of either. I thought I would keep going back, but apparently that might jeapardise our long-term interests. I haven’t spoken to the man I rescued or looked him in the eye since. I might disobey Command, because it’s hard to know what they want. They have to maintain deniability, to avoid any blame filtering back to the Princess, but then how do you tell what they’re really after?

We’re not short of competing voices. I am not even sure which of us are officially Angels and which are not. We even have a Hudson supporter openly making speeches about allying with the Republican war-monger. Kevin Massey has moved his family here from the Federation and a shady past, according to rumours and grafitti. He has set up a slick new media organisation with a posh HQ (I enjoyed the parties there) and does a good line in demagoguery. He calls it the People’s Media but is it any more official, or any more reflecting the people than directing them, than any other? And why does that matter anyway, my highest loyalty at least used to be to principle, not any person.

There’s tension here between the Imperial traditionalists like my friend Derrida, and incomers like myself, Kevin and Johnny. Some of them put Empire loyalty first. I came here to free slaves, but that is stopped and I find myself listening to people boast of destroying federal aid ships. Only it isn’t even as simple of that. Some of the Imperials see Senator Arissa as the biggest threat of all. With her influence greater than ours, and possibly an even better claim to the throne than Aisling (I hadn’t realised she was illegitimate as well before I came here and did my research), there is some talk of how to plot against her.

The first casualty of war isn’t truth, or even innocence as such. It’s hope that we can be better. The people of the Federation have flocked to Hudson, making a clear choice for the military-industrial complex. Support for Shadow President Winters is dropping like a stone, as are her fortunes. The Alliance, which I believed to be the best hope for freedom, liberty and human rights, is losing ground rapidly. What is worse, I have sounded out my old contacts and hear more proud accounts of destroying Winter’s aid ships from Alliance pledgers; it is dark over there too, the liberals cutting each other’s throats. The slaver Torval and the annexer Patreus both now hold more ground than the free systems. The Empire is coming to dominate, and the Empire is the only force to commit genocide of a whole other sentient species.

About the only thing we can agree on here is that nobody likes Archon Delaine, even if they sometimes give him his due for cunning and ferocity. Some liken him to Ghengis Khan of old, and say the Mongol horde came to be a force for peace and stability in the end. That’s untreated biowaste. He slaughters civilians to cow systems into line and turns the families of the purged into marked slaves. He sends his best men deep into our systems to kill at random. Morally he is as matte black as it gets... unless it is us doing it.

Yes, before I met any raiders in our space, I had flown on a raid into Delaine’s territory. Early on, I found one of his recruit pilots flying from system to system. I have killed more pirates and criminals than I can count, but this was different. First off, he had a clean legal status. Secondly, he was posing no threat to me. Thirdly, he was a graduate of the pilots federation, which made him one of us, almost. The PF doesn’t just take anybody with a license or a ship. It offers scholarships to those of proven aptitude, and actually sets some of us up with a loaned ship to get started. We are always able to recognise each other in space if our scanners are working properly; if you see a hollow marker, you know it could be someone who had been to school with you or your friends, and what is more, you know they probably have far more than usual ability.

Which is all wrong in itself. Everyone out there is a person, even if a bad person. Every inorganic, impersonal metal shape that explodes in your sights has flesh and blood in it. Being a PF graduate just removes some of the illusion that helps you sleep at night; you should actually feel worse about the others, because PF ejector seats and escape pods are far superior to standard issue.

But whatever the morality, here was a novice pilot in a cheap ship, minding his own business, no evidence that he had done anything wrong yet (although having pledged to Delaine, he was certainly intending to). So I blew him up. He didn’t have a chance; I had the superior ship, the more experience. He struggled, jumping again but I interdicted him again. He’d probably never even faced a big ship capable of catching his Cobra before. I can only imagine his terror, but I do not recall his name.

Derrida and I felt bad enough about it that we let the next few go. I am not doing that again, not after what they have been doing in our systems. The Code pirates used to have at least a pretence of honour. Now they have joined Delaine, they have abandoned it. Some of the most notorious pilots in the galaxy are working for the warlord, most of them using terror tactics.

So we become monsters in turn, and I don’t mean bellyaching over killing a novice on his side. Delaine rules his systems by fear, and finances his operations by slave labour. Hostages are taken and turned into marked slaves, as are the families of people executed. They are shipped about his systems, and even Federal Security protects them and his thugs where he has taken control. The way Hudson tolerates this shows he cares about his position more than actually protecting the Federation. At this distance from Aisling space, there is little hope of rescuing the slaves, and there are not even any facilities to accept them. So we kill them instead, and are well rewarded for doing so. Delaine must be stopped or in the long term he will do more and worse. It’s not even like those wars where you bomb enemy civilians. These are victims of Delaine we are killing and bereaving. We tell ourselves the only way is to smash the human shield he is holding up, and the only means to liberate the survivors is to make them fear us more than they fear him. They need to know that being taken as a hostage is a death sentence, and they may as well die fighting an army with superior weapons. It is too cruel to be countenenced, final proof that no benevolent deity exists.

I would say I do not deserve to sleep at all, but I sleep better, albeit with a gun beside me and my robot cat with its poisoned claws. The other day I took a mission to stop smugglers who turned out to have kept their legal records clean. I wasn’t going to fail a mission and sully my reliability record, so I killed them anyway. The murder charges and bounties appearing on the display were nothing new, in fact I was disappointed not to reach a total million on my head. I took another mission to kill someone I thought was a terrorist, but turned out to be a mouthpiece with another clean record. ‘What’s another murder?’ I asked myself. ‘The large-scale law treaties have collapsed, it’s only a local bounty. They’ll stop posting it in a week and then I can always pay it off with part of the reward money. If I’m bothered.’

I am returning to my temporary base after completing another couple of missions. Pirate hunting this time; the old-time kind of stupid local pirate you don’t feel too bad about. I also had to take out several of the old-time kind of stupid local bounty hunter along the way; that nearly-million on my head makes some people lose THEIR heads, right before their lives. I took those missions because normal problems and disputes don’t stop when bigger ones are around, they just get worse. Also, the pay structure for supporting Aisling is stupid. Any merits between 1,500 and 10,000 I earn this week are essentially wasted, they would bring me no more pay. Getting the top rung would mean effectively going full-time special forces, living behind enemy lines and doing nothing but harrying and raiding (not to mention the murdering) all day between brief rest periods, avoiding their defenders. I’m not that dedicated or tough. Nor am I that good, if I stop fighting evil when there’s no further money or rank in it. Only fighting evil is pretty evil itself, as I have said.

Honestly, the way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if I showed up asking Delaine for a job in another few weeks having lost the last shred of conscience, faith in human nature or value on human life. All this working for someone supposed to be one of the nicest powers in the galaxy.

One ironic thing is that I don’t even think of myself as a combat pilot. Obviously I can look after myself, but my ranks in exploration and commerce are higher than my rank in combat. The expensive Python I have just bought is as much a result of prudent judgment and avoidance of risk as of hunting and fighting.

That may be about to change. The radar shows two other ships ahead of me. One is also pledged to Aisling, a commander early in his career flying a cobra. The other... is a Vulture, a heavy combat fighter able to challenge ships worth ten times as much, often used even by those who can afford something far larger.

Pledged to Archon Delaine. Master combat rank. Graduate of Pilot’s Federation.

I hear my heart pumping as I set course for him. He has to be kept off the Cobra, and in any case cannot be allowed to run about our systems. I order Katzenstein to hide in the compartment under the ejector seat, we may have to use it.

He is twisting and turning, I can’t get behind him to establish an interdiction tether. No wait, that’s because he’s trying to interdict me. I fly straight and let him; he has the more manouverable ship after all. I drop my throttle to zero and sure enough, we both drop into normal space. I try to steady my fingers as I deploy hardpoints, put the throttle back up, send power to weapons.

There is not a word exchanged throughout the encounter. We go straight to the business of killing each other.

He comes at me, weapons blazing, my shields shuddering under the impact. I only just pull my huge ship around to face him as he rams me. The impact makes me taste blood. He just piled straight into a ship vastly larger than his. He is psychotic, focused on death.

His ship is faster and can turn on a dime. I shove the throttle full into reverse, turn off flight assist, roll desperately and hit the vertical thrusters as I try to pull the red blip back to the front of the radar. At least my turrets will...

My turrets aren’t hitting him. Space has turned into a snow-globe of chaff. High-end combat specialists often fit multiple launchers so they can blind sensors for minute after minute. I’m not good enough to hit much with fixed weapons so I rely on gimbals, turrets and signature tracking. All of which are now useless. Only one of the smallest hardpoints on the ship is fixed, I was persuaded to put it in so I could practice. I fire at the racing wedge as it comes around to shoot me again. All my other bursts of fire are flailing wildly through the blizzard, consuming power and building heat. Oh yes... cancel the target lock and gimballed weapons will fire straight ahead. I do that. Most shots miss but some of them are hitting him. How many of my guns still work? I honestly can’t remember the last loadout I managed to put in. I might check or set the turrets to fire forward, but that would mean taking my eyes off space for vital seconds, seconds that might kill me.

He comes around again. I fire as best I can, he...

Another skull-stabbing collision. He’s mad. My shields are nearly gone. He’s beating me. I need to use a shield cell to rebuild my defences, but I can’t power them at the same time as the weapons. I pull in the hardpoints. Negative g tries to pull my head off as I take evasive manouvres. The whine of capacitor cycles sounds and a shield layer glows back to health. Where is he?

He is seven kilometres away. I don’t get a chance to check the damage data before he is gone. High-energy wake left behind; he has fled the system.

He wasn’t beating me after all, I was beating him. I have survived.

Still nothing to boast about; I just forced a smaller ship to retreat. But even though my arms are shaking as I set a course for home and my heart is still at combat speed, even though I will be removing dried blood from my nose tomorrow and even though the fight will probably not be how I remember it when I review the recordings, I am feeling satisfied.

Despite everything, there is still a difference between them and me. And it’s not the difference between predator and prey any more.

*

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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Flip » Sat Jul 11, 2015 10:03 am

Very good as usual, Straylight! Thanks for sharing!
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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby UnmarkedBoxcar » Wed Jul 15, 2015 4:32 pm

Straylight is my spirit animal.

Or my spirit guide.

Or both?

Thanks for another dose of good ole fashioned Straylight goodness. :D
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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Wed Jul 15, 2015 5:35 pm

Thanks, but be careful choosing your spirit animal! She is perilously close to psychological collapse at the moment; not just all the stresses outlined above, but she was in the great failure at 34 Pegasi and then spent several days in desperate diplomacy to stop the false-flag attacks igniting civil war between Arissa and Aisling's forces. Oddly, the last straw was when the history of the Empire got re-written on Galnet. She's now wondering if she can trust anything.

She has been just drifting in space for the last few days. She may be heading off on a mission to Sag A* to get perspectice, or even go become an asteroid hermit. Katzenstein may be a better role model!

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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby UnmarkedBoxcar » Wed Jul 15, 2015 9:38 pm

Straylight0 wrote:Thanks, but be careful choosing your spirit animal! She is perilously close to psychological collapse at the moment; not just all the stresses outlined above, but she was in the great failure at 34 Pegasi and then spent several days in desperate diplomacy to stop the false-flag attacks igniting civil war between Arissa and Aisling's forces. Oddly, the last straw was when the history of the Empire got re-written on Galnet. She's now wondering if she can trust anything.

She has been just drifting in space for the last few days. She may be heading off on a mission to Sag A* to get perspectice, or even go become an asteroid hermit. Katzenstein may be a better role model!


Asteroid hermit... a very tempting idea.

Katzenstein is my hero! And probably an acceptable role model.

I approve. :D
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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Mon Aug 03, 2015 9:53 am

The Long Flight Day 1

Distance from Chona: 500 LY
Distance to Sagittarius A*: 25,500 LY

I left the station quietly in the small hours of the standard-time morning. I wanted to avoid goodbyes—no, I wanted to avoid seeing whether there would be any goodbyes. We are all wrapped up in our own problems, own obsessions. Johnny has been quietly working to expand and secure Aisling’s influence, with great patience and perseverance. Derrida has been pursuing glorious combat with enemy aces, between taking breaks to stop this obsession destroying him. Both have been mentoring a promising young pilot who I have sadly not yet met.

Me... I wound up a diplomat. Not the course I would have chosen, it is a famously slimy and disrespected career. I would have preferred pretty much anything else; I dabbled in journalism for the People’s Media, and although I received good words in-house and local news, nothing was ever picked up by Galnet. I am fairly certain they are biased and have a mistaken editorial policy, which is more comfortable than doubting my writing abilities of course.

I think it was the fiasco of 34 Pegasi that turned my soul’s trajectory downward the most. Derrida, romantic fool that he is, issued a great challenge to Archon Delaine’s forces, jointly with all other powers. I did not believe them worthy of such a challenge and was concerned that they might send ships with false IFF codes to attack us. You probably know what happened; the most notable combats happened between what were apparently Imperial Allies. I was one of the few casualties of the night to non-friendly fire. I had shown up because I could not do otherwise when my comrades went into danger, no matter my misgivings. I ejected alive yet again, only this time, I lost an arm. Fortunately not my main arm, and I can afford a cloned replacement. It still feels odd using it, and the difference in the skin age stands out.

But the business brought a lot of things to the fore. Some of our pilots fell out with each other. I flung myself into limiting the damage between us and the Lavigny Legion, and investigating what had happened. I worked with an intelligence officer who is a real character; I can’t say anything more about him here, his identity is secret. This expanded into studying pirates, double agents, space psychopaths and fifth columns. The contacts I made lead me being appointed a civilian lieutenant of the Prismatic Imperium (grand new name for the council of Chona) and a liaison to the Angelic Council. Of course, you then find out that these people are merely human, with their own faults. You also discover that the great and grand system supposed to guarantee the flags of ships throughout the galaxy, issuing and verifying the IFF codes, is deeply flawed—my detective friend regards it as totally useless. It is truly shocking how easily an enemy pilot can have “Allegiance: Aisling Duval” or whatever appear on your radar when they get ready to shoot you in the back. Or when they attack our allies to sow distrust and the seeds of civil war. And so a lot of them do.

But we can be our own worst enemies. I knew we had some egos in our ranks, which is par for the course. But some are monstrous. We had an organisation—I won’t reward them by mentioning their name—apparently hired for Black Ops. However, I heard of them attacking our own side. There have been some flimsy pretexts given, such as the victims were working counter-productively, or showed disrespect. In retrospect, I don’t believe a word. They were involved in the friendly fire at Pegasi and their leader rather unwisely started making hate-filled speeches in public. My investigator friend went to scope them out... and they apparently killed him. It turned out later he had faked his death, but this was only the start. Our psychotic co-pledgers felt insulted by the Lavigny Legion over something... so they attacked Arissa’s capital in force. It was an effective terror strike, followed by another one by a mercenary group who they are suspected of hiring (other suspect is our old friend the Archon). They are space-crazy killers, we would be safer if they were against us. Yet even after this, they have not been disowned by Angel Command, not even officially. My own public role as an investigating and prosecuting magistrate lead to threats being made against me. I can deal with enemies in the open, I can survive fighting behind enemy lines, but watching shadows in your own adopted home-world takes its toll.

The tale of woe never ceases. There have always been tensions between what you might loosely term the Imperial supremacists and the humanists. I have only participated in one raid against the Federation to prove my loyalty, and never attacked a civilian vessel. I am not proud of having done even that. I was very pleased when the 13th Legion made a truce with Winters; however, some of our pilots left and formed a splinter group who have never recognised it, and have been raiding her ever since. We have had some very loud voices who hate the Federation, and Winters in particular; I think their visceral hate for her goes well beyond what is reasonable or justified by her being closer to our borders. Their arguments began going well beyond the civilised; they made personal attacks and slurs, impugned loyalty, implied treachery. I had to ban one of them from the public square, which of course lead to more trouble. After that the home front became quieter, but the outer front did not.

That truce is now history. It had already collapsed, the Wolves were now counter-attacking against us. When Legate Andariel sent them a dignified message that the treaty could no longer be upheld, the Winters commanders responded with fury and insult. I know that they feel under siege, but still, it was a very poor spectacle on their part.

I suspect the new trans-Imperial Council got to Andariel over ending it formally... the other Senators don’t like the advantage that Aisling’s general good standing gives, and want us to be embroiled in war like the rest.

Speaking of internal politics... the Emperor is of course awake, and will be legitimising Arissa as his chosen heir. The Empire could do a lot worse; she believes in slavery but makes sure they receive their full legal rights, nor is she a war-monger. I respect her soldiers; their discipline and strategy, while not perfect, is a lot better than ours, and their honour is high. But still, I feel a sense of impending doom. Hopefully this is just paranoia.

It is worth mentioning that I moonlighted as a logistics analyst. I calculated just how much of our effort was getting wasted, and how much effort the Archon was wasting. The results weren’t cheering.

All the time this has been going on, the Archon has been laughing. He remains under heavy attack, but he survives, and even grows. He is not bothered by casualties, not with so much eager cannon fodder. What could we do if we stopped fighting amongst ourselves or against enemies who do not repress their own people, and focused our effort properly? The suffering continues.

I went back to the field. In the last three days, I have destroyed over a hundred Archon ships, most of them prisoner transports. In that time alone, I have out-done many war criminals of the last millennium, in the name of freedom and justice. In the end, I choked on it. I could not continue.

So I returned to base, outfitted Nephthys for an indefinite period in space, and slipped quietly out of the station. No fanfares, no burned bridges; I just set the controls to leave humanity behind as quickly as possible. When inhabited space was gone, I heaved a sigh of relief.

I am taking the Long Flight. I am going to the darkness at the burning heart of the galaxy, and I am going to stare into it.

*

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Re: Extracts from Straylight0's logbook

Postby Straylight0 » Tue Aug 04, 2015 9:03 pm

Day 2

Distance from Sol: 803 LY
Distance to Sagittarius A*: 25,041

I left not expecting to learn anything I did not know already. We are negligible in a vast and uncaring Universe. Its centre (well it may as well be; there IS no centre as such), the closest thing we have to a god, is a vast and utterly impersonal black hole which obliterates everything that gives us meaning. In the end, it may swallow the last particle of all humanity and our works.

What I did not expect to find was hope.

I have not travelled a huge distance; I am taking my time, exploring, resting when I want. I now understand why we still have diamond-glass canopies on our ships; when your own eyes see something no other human has ever beheld before, it is a thrill. I’m sure it will get old before this trip is done, but for now, it is still fresh.

Then I found life. Ammonia-based plankton in the atmosphere of a gas giant; may sound small, but these things being what they are, their combined living mass will exceed even modern humanity many times over.

I took Nephthys into the upper atmosphere. The jets will have hurt some of them, but they shall survive; they are not sophisticated enough for sorrow, they just live. They may not be smart, but at night their bioluminescence makes intricate patterns in response to temperature, currents, gas pockets and disturbance. The wake of my ship made great swirling vortices and sweeps in a million hues.

On the day side, I set the controls to hover and walked out along the upper deck. When I held up my hand, I could see them, tiny dots against the white of the glove. They have no idea they are now the meta-species Straylight0-1, but now I have discovered them, they exist for our wonder. A billion years from now this garden will still be thriving, micro-plants basking in the sun, tiny animals dancing in the clouds.

Crying in a space-suit is a messy business, but you can still feel better for it.


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