Chapter 11 - Friends in Low Places
Elijah 6.
Now, this was flying. The initial jump into hyperspace had been thrilling, in part because of how incomprehensibly fast they were traveling, even compared to normal FTL speeds, and partly because of how differently the mechanics of the hyperspace engine worked compared to Imperium ships. Or to the technology of any other species he had heard of, for that matter.
He had always imagined piloting to be done in one of two ways: in a strike craft or a smaller ship, using a flight stick, or in a larger vessel using console-entered updates to change the ship's speed or heading. But this... this was like nothing he had ever conceived of. He was flying with his mind.
The uplink to the ship through the interface helmet was a revelation. He 'felt' the ship around him. The sensors were his eyes and ears; the engines were his beating heart, and the weapons were the might of his arms. They were merged in a way he had never even considered to be possible, and yet a small part of him instinctively knew that this is how it was always meant to be.
Traveling through the cosmos wasn't only meant to be a journey; it was meant to be an experience. And he was experiencing it all. He just sat in the command seat on the bridge of the Atlas, a gentle, happy smile on his face, and his eyes, although open, were barely taking in the room surrounding him. He was the ship, the ship was him, and he was flying. He felt so much bigger, not in respect of the fact that he was, theoretically speaking, now a twenty-four-kilometer-long ship, but because his sensors let his mind reach out for lightyears in every direction at once. He studied the internal properties of a comet, so far away that it would take an average civilian ship thirteen hours at hyperspace to reach. He marveled at the swirling patterns of color and light of a passing nebula, then let his 'eyes' wander over the magnetic waves and radioactive particles as they danced throughout it. He watched a planet for a few minutes as it raced past, studying the primitive, marsupial-like lifeforms on there who may one day grow to be the dominant species of that world and maybe evolve - in tens of thousands of years - to a point where they could join the rest of the galaxy in exploring the cosmos. He watched in awe and in wonder as the Atlas raced through the majesty of space.
It was more beautiful than anything he could ever hope to have imagined before. He was so small; the Atlas was so small; humanity was so small, yet all of them were part of a greater whole. An imperceptibly tiny cog in the mechanism of the enormous pocket watch of the Universe. Tiny, yes, but far from inconsequential.
Mostly, though, he delighted in the tiny vibrations through the hull as they passed the edges of a nearby gravity well or the magnetism of a passing asteroid field, the gentle swaying motion as the massive ship swayed and weaved with gentle precision between stars and flowed on the currents of fading solar winds. It was like being on a sailing ship in Earth's ancient past, feeling the Atlas moving with the waves, rocking in the wind, and traveling with the tides and the currents. Flying, he now knew, was not a mechanical series of commands plotted to get you from A to B but was an organic melding of technology with space and time. He was a bird on the wing, not flying in a straight line just to get somewhere; he was traveling; it was the epitome of the school of thought that said life - or in this case, hyperspace travel - was as much about the journey as it was about the destination.
And Elijah was quickly falling in love with the journey.
"You've got that weird smile on your face again," Laura said from the bridge. He hadn't even noticed her coming in.
"If you could see and feel what I am, I'm pretty sure you would be smiling, too," he chuckled as he reluctantly pulled his mind back to the confines of the room around him. She was smirking teasingly at him from her perch next to one of the wall-lining terminals. As far as he could tell, she still couldn't read any of the information on its screen, but in something akin to a small child, she was more than happy to look at the pictures until she found a way to digest the rest. "Maybe you should give it a try sometime," he added, a playful smirk of his own.
She snorted out a laugh. "Oh yeah, how do you think that would go?"
"Your brain would probably melt out through your eyes," Elijah shrugged. "But you'd get an idea of why I'm smiling." He chuckled at her eye-roll before he glanced around the bridge. It was strange to think that this bridge, along with the rest of the massive ship, had once been a bustling hive of activity, but now it was just the two of them. Wu was off somewhere doing whatever Wu did when he wasn't around.
Laura walked over to join him at the central command module, her intrigue overriding her usual reserve. "I'll stick with my terminals for now," she quipped, "but maybe, one day, I'll take you up on that offer."
Elijah nodded, still coming down from the high of the neural interface. "Take all the time you need," he laughed before he turned back to the main view screen, his eyes taking on a philosophical hue that she still wasn't used to seeing from him.
The Atlas continued on, a silent behemoth cruising through the endless night, guided by sentient thought and propelled by forces that bridged impossibilities. Their journey through the cosmos was underway - it was the start of a new chapter in his life, one that he could feel in his bones - the dance between man and stars, human and machine, the tangible and the ethereal. They were voyagers on the greatest expedition of their lives, making history with every light-year. For the moment, the three of them seemed to be enjoying the moment; even Wu - wherever he was - had a spring in his step and a sparkle behind his eyes as he went about his business. But the time was soon approaching when the joys of this flight would be replaced with the seriousness of the work that had to be done. He returned his attention to the myriad of tasks at hand, the ship humming steadily under his care.
The Yrdian Nebula rested quite happily, as it had done since time immemorial, on the edge of what was now Imperium space. Within it, floating peacefully in the void's gentle embrace, was the Primus and the Mariner fleet that now controlled it. Wu had explained, somewhat briefly, what sorts of things could be garnered from the Mariners in return for their expertise in restarting the Primus's reactor core, and he imagined that Wu would return to the bridge before too long to explain the plan in more detail, they were only three hours away, though, so time was starting to run out.
Laura, for her part, was leaning her elbow against the headrest of her chair and gazing in an almost childlike look of wonder and awe out the main viewscreen. Elijah knew exactly what she was looking at and couldn't blame her for her wide-eyed transfixion. He had never seen anything quite like it either. During normal travel through hyperspace, when looking out the front of the ship, typically showed a tiny pinprick of brilliant white light, and from that single central point, a wave of light and color washed around the exterior of the ship, blinding its occupants to the sights beyond it. A brilliant point of luminescence that blossomed into a blinding radial bloom, obscuring the universe's grandeur to anyone trying to watch it.
Apparently, it would seem, Ancient technology worked on a slightly - vastly - different set of principles. Even though he had downloaded the entire working knowledge of the ship's technological abilities into his head, a veritable library of long-bequeathed knowledge from his forebears - the architects of everything he now controlled - in a way he was supposed to comprehend naturally, it was still hard for him to grasp. The entire database was in the Ancient language, which, in many cases, simply didn't translate. It was a lexicon devoid of anything recognizable as a written word, instead being made up of elaborate, intricate pictorial representations of ideas and concepts beyond human comprehension. So, trying to rationalize it in his mind using human language was simply not possible.
There was no pinprick of light before him; what he was seeing was something altogether different. A swirling vortex of distorted space, it was akin to a cosmic window onto creation's alchemy. What Elijah discerned as a current of shimmering space - he sort of knew - was, in truth, a pulsating maelstrom of space-time itself, a distortion as broad as the Atlas's robust frame. It radiated outwards in waves, distorting the view like heat warping the air above a summer road, then, in a heretical defiance of FTL tradition, it waned into translucence. The curtain of warped space, whether shifting beyond the reach of humanly visible light or truly disappearing, granted them a panoramic vista of the cosmos rushing by. The reason the Atlas traveled so fast was not just a product of its speed but also the fact that it was literally distorting itself around them.
It was pretty heady stuff.
There were still no streaking lines of stars, though. That wasn't how physics worked. But each star seemed to wobble slightly and change position. The light he was seeing from each distant star was the light that had reached his exact position after however long it had taken to travel there--billions upon billions of years in some cases--and it made the whole cosmos seem like a living, breathing,
moving
entity, roaming past the Atlas more than the Atlas was moving through it.
Most importantly, in that endless vista of silent, nomadic stars was the tiny but rapidly growing speck of light and color ahead of them: the Yridian Nebula.
"We will be arriving soon," Elijah murmured to Laura in a hushed voice, as if speaking normally would banish the beauty of the sights before them and dump them unceremoniously back into normal space.
"Hmm? Oh, right," she blinked and pulled her gaze away from the viewscreen. "I should, um... I don't know. Should I start getting my ship ready?"
"That depends on if you are leaving us, young lady," Wu's aged but still mischievous voice echoed around the bridge as he stepped onto it. Elijah didn't need to turn to know that teasing, knowing smile would be painted onto his lips.
"Wait, what?" Laura's eyebrows tried to look surprised, confused, and concerned all at once... and somehow succeeded.
"I don't know why you look so surprised," Wu shrugged as he walked past the two of them and dropped into the chair previously occupied by Laura. "Do you think I would have given you quarters if you were going to be ejected from the ship after only a few days? I imagine that the Mariners will want permanent representation on the Atlas, especially if they agree to our terms, and I thought - considering your interest in our little ship - that you'd quite like that person to be you."
Laura's face contorted even more. Elijah glanced up at her and smiled to himself before turning his eyes back toward their destination. Laura clearly wasn't a person used to being speechless, and her face now had excitement and trepidation added to the aforementioned shock and confusion. He had to admit, it was a pretty good look on her. Or at least an amusing one.
