By POW

Unical date: 3752.563.21 (twenty days until scheduled arrival at Kappa Redulans)

Detaching from RS-98 went routinely, and the half-hour journey through normal space to put sufficient distance between his ship and the station before engaging the warp drive was equally uneventful.  The course was already laid in, so the moment the sensors reported that he was safely far enough away, all he had to do was say “Go”.  The mighty engines powered up with a muted hum and then, with barely a flicker, he was suddenly moving at a velocity that few others had ever experienced.  Well, “velocity” was an oversimplification of the situation.  His professors back at the university had tried to instill in him an appreciation for the underlying physics of subspace that made warp travel possible, the way that normal space was folded at a quantum level so that a ship using its warp drive wasn’t “really” moving (such pedantry!) but rather re-arranging space around itself, but Sam’s eyes had always glazed over at the discussions of manifold compression, multi-dimensional vector renormalization, and pseudo-velocity.  As a pilot, he just liked going really fast.

But the novelty of speed had already worn itself out on the first leg of the journey with Bareem.  The two of them had exulted over the pace at which they were traveling… for a few minutes.  Then the reality had set in that it was the AI doing virtually all of the flying, and from inside the ship there was no sensation of speed.  The engines ran so smoothly that the only indication they were on at all was a pervasive, low-frequency hum from the sheer power they were consuming.  It wasn’t like the two men could look out the windows and watch the stars passing by like trees alongside a highway.  No, they were little more than cargo in a grey box.

And so it was only minutes after engaging the engines, having assured himself that all systems were functioning normally and that he was on his way with all practical haste to his destination, that Sam found himself at the door to the simspace, heart thumping in his chest, feeling like a kid on Christmas morning eager to rip into the mountain of presents waiting to be opened.

“Pyrellia, show me a menu of porn simulations.  Male characters only.”

Continue reading Captain Jack and the Race to Redula – Chapter 02: The Simspace →