Author's Note:
This was written and published about two paragraphs at a time over several days on Bluesky. Posts there are limited to 300 characters and this was an experiment within that oddly claustrophobic format. How successful, I don't know, but I think this could be a good story.
*
To the casual observer, had there been any, the abrupt appearance of the Pendragon out of thin air - or, to be precise, the cold, hard vacuum of space - would have seemed like magic, or at least a violation of that most fundamental law of physics: conservation of energy. One moment there had been nothing that would disturb even the most sensitive of scanners; the next, an expanding shock wave like a scream of protest, and a lingering echo concentrated at the very edge of human optical perception.
The indigo aura dissipated swiftly, along with the soup of elementary particles that had been stirred out of the zero-point nothingness, and instead the steel-hulled starship gleamed in the bright radiance of Wolf, the A1-type dwarf star that dominated the system. Had that casual observer been following a lazy, decades-long orbit about Wolf, they might have been startled to see the vessel shooting inwards at a hundred kilometres per second, but such speeds are slow when light itself takes minutes to cross the distance.
On the bridge of the Pendragon, its captain stared out of the window that was not a window. The large display gave a rendering of the universe outside, combining data from a hundred sensors and overlaying with contours of magnetic field strength and other cartographic details. Lorna Therese's attention was not on Wolf itself but on its sole planet, a black dot against the muted, magnified disc of the star beyond. A black dot with a brutal magnetic wake.
"What's the verdict?" she asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
Vesta Kane, at the nav station, hummed some obscurely familiar song as her fingers caressed the interface with the same skill and focus they could pay to a lover, as Lorna well knew. "The gradients are steep. Positional error is close to jump length."
Lorna suppressed a sigh. The irony of space travel was that you could cross lightyears in a span of days, but sometimes it took months to do a fraction of that. Countering that, of course, was a beauty she never tired of, a view that differed wildly from system to system, and Wolf's stellar vista was still unrecorded. Hers perhaps would be the first human eyes to study it.
"Very well," she said. "Take the jump engine offline and adjust trajectory for Cub. No need to wake our guests yet."
"Aye, Captain. I wouldn't mind sleeping through the next few weeks myself."
The Pendragon resembled the beetle it had been named for, its hard carapace presented as a shield to the fierce heat of the star, its soft underbelly clustered with robotic arms and grapples. Fittingly, the ship's bridge was at the head, the jump drive at the rear. Or the arse end, as the engineer, Lyn Murray, liked to call it. Lyn knew the drive systems inside out, and arguably better than most naval engineers. She pressed the com for the bridge. "That variance is getting worse."
"It got us where we need to be," Lorna replied.
"But it may not get us back again, that's the worry."
"Fine, take it apart if you must, but make sure you can put it back together again."
Lyn snorted her opinion of that.
The fourth member of the crew, and the youngest, unbuckled himself from the safety harness. This was Ahsan's first expedition on the Pendragon and now his fifth jump as an adult. He hated jumps through hyperspace. The sensation was like having his balls squeezed, and not in a way he might enjoy. His duties were many and varied, and would no doubt be considered menial and unmanly by those who had bullied him for years. The culture amongst spacers could be brutal and misogyny was rife. Few men would consider serving under a female captain.
Then again, few captains would consider hiring an unskilled, untrained orphan such as himself. "Space is unforgiving," Captain Therese had impressed on him at the start. "If the engines break, you die. If there's a leak, you die. If the power fails, you die. And not quickly." It was a familiar mantra to anyone who spent any time amongst spacers, but Ahsan had never confronted the truth of it before. In the busy warrens of Station Eight, noise and activity were constant, and accidents always happened to other people.
But space was quiet. Sometimes hours passed with only the steady hum of the life support system to reassure him that he was not trapped in a steel coffin impossibly far from civilisation. He pressed the com. "Coffee, Captain?"
"Thank you, yes," she replied. "But check on our guests first."
On the bridge, Vesta Kane completed her calculations. "Fifty eight days. I've laid out course corrections to give us one hour of standard gravity per day."
"Eight weeks of zero g," Lorna muttered.
"And another eight back."
The Pendragon had a small internal wheel that could rotate to simulate gravity. It made a narrow, up-curving corridor between medical triage bays, shower facilities and exercise equipment, but was not a social space. Muscle atrophy continued to be a major health complication for spacers - that and the inevitable exposure to cosmic radiation. Drugs could only do so much to mitigate the effects of both.
The wheel, therefore, was necessary. It was also a nuisance, interfering gyroscopically with the Pendragon and introducing additional complexity into jump calculations. For which reason, it had been locked now for several days. "Let's spin up," Lorna said, entering the commands that would both set the wheel in motion and balance the unanchored ship. "I need a shower. Care to join me?"
Returning to standard gravity, even to the illusion of it, could be psychologically daunting, but there were rewards. Not least, overcoming the protest of her muscles gave Lorna a thrill of victory over age and human weakness. Cajoling her weary muscles back into shape, first by walking circuits of the wheel, then by jogging, was proof in a way, and if needed, that she was as worthy a captain as any man.
More importantly, though, it was an excuse for the indulgences the wheel offered: a long, luxurious shower with warm water; hot, fresh coffee drank from an actual mug; and the intimate company of her second in command. Once upon a time, Vesta Kane had been a blonde bombshell and an echo of that beauty still shone through the cybernetics. A fusion of cold machinery and warm flesh. Of calculation and tender humanity.
Ninety seconds. That was the received wisdom. A human could survive unsuited in the vacuum of space for ninety seconds without permanent physiological harm. Any longer than that, you were likely dead. Vesta Kane had been outside a lot longer than ninety seconds, and it had taken a few miracles of surgery and cybernetics to breathe life back into her. They had made her a poster child for their new technology.
After all, nothing sells like sex and wounded beauty, and Vesta's face and body were already famous. The Space Academy had used her image to sex up their own, and in a way that attracted eager young men far more than bright young women.
The shower was blissful warmth and Vesta's shampoo filled the air with the scent of apricots. The cubicle was designed for one occupant at a time, but Lorna enjoyed squeezing in with her second.
Her fingertips traced the sensitive line where Vesta's titanium shoulder plate transitioned to skin. "Eight weeks, all alone," she murmured. "What are we going to do?"
