Chapter

“Ext-ra-ra-ra-ra….”

The universe fractured like wafer thin glass. The syllable dragged out multiplying into endless infinities. Sayeeda had the crystalline impression of infinite variations of herself making the same vocalization. It swelled in her mind like a chorus, the disparate notes melding and merging together into something so profoundly beautiful and transportative that, had the frozen instant allowed it, she would have wept.

“...ction,” she choked as the Highlander crashed back into the real universe, the heavenly choir coming apart like stained glass tumbling from a bombed out cathedral. The effects of entering and exiting the RIP on the human mind were unpredictable and ranged from the bizarre to the agonizing. Gripping the arm of her flight couch, Junebug thought that she prefer the pain. Her head buzzed with migraine precursors as she fumbled for the controls for the sensors. Beside her at what would be the navigators console, Taya Cho'lan wretched noisily. Even experienced starfarers never got used to the psyche shattering effect of travelling between universes, but, with practice, they learned to work through it.

“Beckett’s Node, eight million kilometers sunward,” Neil commented, his voice sounded drained but he was clearly functional, more functional than her anyway. The run had been a rough one. Lacking proper astrogation data due to their blind jump away from Fornax and their extended vacation in cryosleep, working their way back to civilization had been a challenge. Lonney, the ships AI and Neil had come up with a plan that involved microsampling the star fields from three separate but calculated jumps. The strategy had allowed the computer to triangulate a rough position for them on the star charts and to estimate the RIP currents well enough to make a longer jump at least theoretically survivable. It was all fun and games for Lonney of course, his silicon brain didn’t suffer the same nerve destroying shock that the repeated insertions and extractions inflicted on the crew.

Beckett’s Node was massive space station, the size of a small city, which orbited one of the moons of the gas giant creatively named GSC-26. The moon, if it had a name it wasn’t, mentioned in the star charts was apparently uninhabited. Judging but the string of small craft heading down to the surface though, uninhabited wasn’t the same thing as unvisited. Still more craft boosted too and from the nearby asteroid belt, servicing various small scale minion operations if Sayeeda was any judge. She felt tension that she hadn’t realised was carrying ease from her shoulder blades. Beckett’s Node was a nowhere station, far from any stars she had visited, but given the last few weeks, part of her had began to wonder if they would ever make it back to what she thought of as civilization.

“Unknown Freighter, This is Beckett Control, identify yourself,” a voice sounded from the communications board. A glowing green diode indicated that the freighter was being targeted with a laser communicator, probably from a relay station on one of the nearby asteroids which GSC-26 had gathered into a belt. It struck Sayeeda as unusually good security for such a minor world, but perhaps they had experienced trouble with pirates in the past.

“Control, this is independent Freighter Highlander, inbound from… Fornax,” she responded, stumbling over their point of origin. The uncharted world they had stumbled on had no name that she had been able to discover and so she had to default to the last world they had visited before that. Of course it was vanishingly unlikely that anyone at Beckett’s Node had ever heard of Fornax, given it was located half a galaxy away on the other side of human occupied space.

“Roger that Highlander, state your business,” the voice responded. In the corner of her eye Junebug could see that Taya had recovered from her fuge and was tapping buttons on her console. A moment later a holographic update sprang to life on her plot position indicator, tagging the source of the transmission as an asteroid a few hundred thousand kilometers distant with the notation ‘rebroadcast station 21-A’ in small green writing. The girl must have figured a reciprocal to the laser and plotted out the position of the station, Junebug shook her head, the girl was proving to be an asset despite her privileged upbringing.

“We need to make repairs and are hoping to take on cargo,” Junebug responded. Although they had managed to get the Highlander airborne it still bore serious damage from both the crash landing on Quetzalli’s World and whatever had savaged it in the RIP during the previous jump. Large section of the hull were open to space except where thermoplastic sheeting had been hastily welded into place and the majority of her thrusters were only functioning on the most improvised of jury rigs. Worse than that one of the two reactor cores had been damaged badly enough that it had to be shut down until they reached serious repair facilities. The later had forced Neil to rewire the ship almost completely in order to power the most vital systems and had occasioned much swearing and rendered a number of random subsystem inoperable.

“Roger Highlander, we are patching you into the system net, keep your weapons powered down and obey all local ordinances, control out,” the voice, bored now that whoever had the communications duty realised that the Highlander was nothing out of the ordinary, concluded. A text message reading ‘System Net Available’ scrolled beneath Sayeeda’s display. Glancing back at Taya she touched the text with a finger and a computer interface sprang to life, listing available docking bays and their facilities.

“Highlander Out,” Junebug replied closing out the connection in proper but probably unnecessary fashion. With a few quick key strokes she sorted the available docking bays and selected one which was operated by one of the larger repair facilities on the Node. Having none of the local currency, some sector or corporate credit she hadn’t heard of, she was forced to agree to pay nearly twice the regular rate within forty standard hours of docking. The computer assigned them a birth without further human interaction.

“Alright people,” she said, pressing back into her seat as Neil began the burn which would carry them in to the station, “Welcome back to civilization.” 

[@POOHEAD189]