[b]Observation Deck 1B, [i]As God and Heinlein Intended[/i], Low Erebos Orbit[/b] When he was young, Nicolas Fermi had visited the Flats of Light on an archeological survey, in search of ferryman fragments. They traveled to the dig in an armored truck with no windows. When Nico and the other scientists emerged, they wore protective goggles--the kind you wear when you want to fool yourself into thinking that you can stare at the sun. But hiding his eyes behind polarized filters as black as the sky itself didn't seem to help--he stumbled from the truck, clutching his helmeted head in pain. The light seemed to infuse everything in burning agony. By the time he reached the camp, stumbling blind across the salted ice, Nico felt as though the blasted light permeated his very bones, attacking him with bitter, ultraviolet cold through gaps between his gloves and coat. [img]http://i.imgur.com/7ozQISH.png[/img] Erebos was far worse. The heatshield blocked the heat and most of the radiation, but Erebos enveloped them even then. Lashing spokes of plasma flared out around the ship, like waves licking over the bow. Nico knew the flares were thousands, tens of thousands of kilometers away, but he still felt them through the bulkheads, as though the god of the dead still held a grudge against Fermi for surviving Erebos' Cancer. He can't help but squint and blink, despite all that dense metal between him and the sun. Nico keeps thinking back to his time on the Flats, when, in blinding moonlight, he had met Reines for the first time--a native of Flats of Light--an unblinking man of forty whose eyes, chapped, cracked and bleeding, would never see again. Klaxons rouses him from the waking nightmare. "Alert. Centrifuge spindown in two minutes" the accent unmistakably Slavic--yet another rooskie. Nico wonders how half the spaceforce was crewed by the goddamn sandpeople, when less than a million actually lived in the White Sands. Probably the only people insane enough to crawl inside a Bessel. But then, by that measure, the crew of Icarus was probably pulled from the South Pole. Gravity lessens from the comfortable 0.7 gravities, and in a minute Nico is weightless. He checks his watch, and, finding he has a good fifteen minutes to kill before burn, velcros his cup to the table and floats off in search of company. __________________________________ Under the excruciating pull of gravity, Boris is not a happy man--even the mild 0.8 gravities he is subjected to in his quarters was point-eight too much. But for whatever reason, burns didn't bother him so much, even at three gravities or more. Maybe it was the knowledge that his suffering was finite, or perhaps the roar of the engine, but the jolt of acceleration was simply never so bad as the steady, nauseating crush of coriolis. Sergi and Dimitri join Boris in a cheer as they become weightless, and Gregory starts passing the bottle around again. Ivan--the new kid, who replaced Viktor after he died of radiation poisoning on Mnemosyne--looks increasingly pale, and passes. A man passes by the open airlock--old and wrinkled, definitely not crew, and so Boris calls out to him "Hello friend! You are scientists, yes? What is name?" Nico catches his arm on the door, arresting his motion before replying. "Yes. Fermi." Sergi speaks up "You make bombs yes? We love you! Join us! Tell us about where we will be going." "And who we are killing" laughs Boris, taking another swig from the bottle and offering it to the old man. Nico had tasted the blasted stuff before--nearly pure alcohol, fermented from a tuber--the only thing to grow in the White Sands. The rooskies ran their dune buggies off the stuff. It felt like it was burning a hole in his throat, but Nico managed to keep the foul brew down. "We're off to *hick* MS-1044-2. Yellow sun, a bit bigger than ours. Two gas giants--we'll be arriving at the near one--and half a dozen rocky worlds. We think." "Yellow sun my ass" Gregory shouts, provoking more laughter from his comrades. "You will have to excuse my friend here, he is not, how you say, with the times" Boris says with a smile, then leans in close to Fermi and whispers, loud enough they can all hear "and he thinks the aliens came from Streila". This time, even motion-sick Ivan laughs. "Bullshit" is all Gregory says. Fermi laughs quietly, looking at the bottle in his hands "So you don't believe there are other stars out there?" Gregory nods, slowly, and Fermi speaks again "One can only hope" before draining the rest of the bottle. ___________________________________________ [b]Forward Command Bridge, [i]As God and Heinlein Intended[/i] Low Erebos Orbit[/b] "Confirmed, Captain. Cargo is secure; both Bessels and all the probes are accounted for. All twelve Serbers are in tubes and ready to deploy. We are ready to jettison the fuel tanks." "What about the ordinance?" "All warheads are accounted for, first salvo is racked sir." "Good" Francis doesn't turn, but continues to stare out the polarized screen, watching the lancing red spots play across the interior heatshield. Four of them, each over 100 gigawatts, scorching his heatshield. Together, they almost doubled [i]God and Heinlein's[/i] thermal power, and he'd be damned if that didn't make him uncomfortable. Sticking a continuously detonating nuke between the hab modules was bad enough. Francis looks down, chewing his unlit cigar, and glares at the aft dorsal camera feed. Sure enough he can see them, through the static--four more Saint Ulam battlecruisers, boosting them into the great funeral pyre. "I want the warheads pointed retrograde. We don't know if they'll see us coming." His weapons officer flips several switches, and the missiles rotate to point aft. "I've set the computer to run gas flare equations and compute a firing solution while we're in-transit." "We've reached thermal saturation sir." "Jettison tanks, sound the alarm" Francis Eklund says through his cigar, and makes sure the belts on his acceleration harness are secure, then checks the digital readout to his left. "Burn in thirty seconds, mark." "Mark" and then, through the shipwide comms "Burn in twenty-five seconds. Brace yourselves." Francis spends the next two dozen seconds wincing at the reactor alarms, threatening the bridge crew with imminent containment failure and thermonuclear destruction. "Sundiving in 3... 2..." the radio officer is cut out by the roar of the engines, and Francis is slammed back in his seat. Two g's--the upper limit of what Ulam was designed to handle. "Saint Ulam Protects" the whispered, sarcastic prayer never fails to bring a smile to Francis' lips, even among the sounds of panic and chaos. "Entering chromosphere!" his crew have to shout to be heard now. "Trajectory locked, boost complete, stepping down thrust to match friction." The engines dial down to much more reasonable levels, and Francis realizes he hasn't breathed in almost a minute. "Are we within the jump range? Report!" "All systems are responding. We're okay" announces Damage Control. "Uh... We're in the jump zone... I think" the scope officer "the gradiometer is going haywire." Tapping a control above his left arm, Francis reaches up and grabs a mic off the wall. "Icarus, we're ready to jump. Can you confirm depth?" After several seconds and no response he asks again "Icarus, can you confirm depth, over." The reply surrounds them, alien, booming and distorted, emanating from the edge of the photosphere. "You are within the margin. You are cleared for long-jump." Francis jams the key into its lock. Outside the bridge, they can see the Sundiver ring begin to spin. And then Erebos is gone, replaced by swirling, indistinct colors. ______________________________________ "We are horizontal, moving up toward [i]i[/i]" Fermi says, addressing the bridge crew. The damage control officer, Darren snorts, "it's [i]j[/i]. We're at [i]i[/i] right now." Fermi, annoyed "everyone needs to be asleep before a 1ยบ phase shift has occurred." "Why's that?" George, the communications officer, trying to be funny. "That's when the monsters come out." ______________________________________ [b]Cryo Tray 1, [i]As God and Heinlein Intended[/i], Haven system, unstable polar orbit around Jackal Three hundred thousand years later[/b] Francis awakes, unlit cigar still in his mouth, to blaring alarms. He floats out of the open cryo pod--filthy xenos tech that, but it kept him from waking up as a pile of dust. Around him officers and technicians race down the tubes to their posts. Unused to moving quickly in zero-g, it takes him almost two minutes to make it to the bridge. The gas giant looms above him, aurora glimmering, filling the sky as sun once had, so very long ago. "Captain, we're aerobraking!" The greatest fear of any sailor, to be swallowed ship and all by the murky green sea. [img]http://i.imgur.com/gdv3fdM.png[/img]