Wings of Light., No L and no C this time. Ok, there is quite a bit of c. Options

[jack cloudy]

Next one. Ok, several things first.
1: THIS IS NOT FANFICTION. No, this is a story taking place in an original universe. I hope no one minds.
2: Don't expect regular updates. This is an attempt at a professional novel so I want to plan it out and get all the good stuff in it. Foreshadowing, multiple plot lines, character interaction, cool hardware and a god, or maybe two.
3: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Also known as: Technobabble and Handwaves explain everything.
4: The laws of robotics are not implemented here. Sorry Isaac, but I want them to drive the cool stuff. They don't have time to babysit some organic wimps.



WINGS OF LIGHT

CHAPTER 1: Lights, colours, not here.

Without a sound, the SS Hesphire moved to its destination. It would have been useless to expect any sound as such a phenomenon had a hard time travelling through the vacuum of space.
,,This is your captain speaking. We are approaching the wormhole leading to the Eden system. The estimated time for our arrival is approximately half an hour from now. There will be a short burn for course corrections. We advise that all passengers strap themselves in till we’ve entered the wormhole and stabilized our course. If you require any help, our crew is willing to assist you. Thank you.” The disembodied voice echoed through speakers all over the ship.

With this announcement, everyone dropped whatever he or she was doing and moved to the observation deck. Entering a wormhole was always an exciting event for those who were new to interstellar travel. There were also those who were not new to interstellar travel. They also moved to the observation deck, though for a different reason.

Belonging to the second group was Paul Anthony Detroit. Every single cell of his body revealed him as a true veteran of space. He smoothly sailed from wall to wall, without any of the awkward bouncing of the average tourist. His clothes were tight fitting like those worn by all true space farers, yet without looking like a diver’s suit, oversized pyama or any other kind of embarrassing outfit newbies wore. The passengers he passed were mostly less successful in their choice of clothing. Wide, flowing clothes were fashionable these days yet had the unpleasant habit of getting stuck between doors or flowing away from the areas they were supposed to cover. Easy to use belts for strapping down clothes to the limbs were standard issue on civilian ships carrying passengers.

Thanks to his skill at zero g manoeuvring, he arrived well before the other passengers and secured the best place of all, the ceiling. Instantly, a steward pushed off against a wall to reach him.
,,Please mister, you may want to sit in one of the seats. Free floating during course corrections are not advised.” The young man, barely in his twenties, warned. Detroit looked down at the traditional name tag and smiled.
,,Well mister Rein, I can assure you that part of a g is not going to be a problem for me. Unless the SS Hesphire is using an illegally rigged High-performance Fusion torch and will be running multiple gees. In which case I would have to arrest everyone onboard.” He responded with the cool tone of voice that could come from only one kind of person. Military officers, the high-ranking ones.

The steward wisely backed off, allowing Detroit to enjoy the view. The man looked how everyone else entered the observation deck and got strapped in. There was some chaos but the stewards managed to get their job done and everyone strapped into a chair. He smiled again as he thought of the faces they would pull upon seeing a wormhole.
,,This is your captain speaking. We shall initiate our burn in 30 seconds. Anyone who is not yet secured should grab the nearest support and hold on for the next few minutes. Thank you.” This time, Detroit did follow the advise. He reached out and grabbed a small handle jutting out of the glass dome that covered the observation deck at the nose of the ship.

Little puffs of hydrogen jetted out of the minuscule thrusters spread across the Hesphire’s hull. The long cylindrical vehicle turned its nose around slowly. Two minutes later, the thrusters fired again to stop the rotation. Now the main thruster at the far end of the ship fired. Unlike during the turn, the acceleration caused by the main thrusters was felt by the people onboard. It felt as if you were suspended in the air under a parachute with a gentle breeze pushing you along.
,,This is your captain speaking. We are entering the wormhole in five…four…three…two…one…entering now.”

Necks were stretched in awkward positions, eyes seemed to bulge out of their sockets. The stars disappeared, to be replaced by pure darkness. Slowly, a hint of disappointment spread across the two dozen or so faces gathered on the observation deck. Detroits smile grew bigger.
,,No lights, no fancy colours, no humming sounds, no sudden acceleration. This ain’t your average holovision show. Welcome to real space. It is boring, it is slow and it rarely takes you anywhere interesting. At least you won’t find bad looking aliens with worse looking rayguns at every corner.” He spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. Then, he laughed. Yes, the passengers would be angry with him for the rest of the trip but why should he care? It would only be a week or so and then he would be back where he was supposed to be. On a ship of his own. One with guns, big guns.
“And twenty-two wormholes away from the action.”

[jack cloudy]

Finally, the next update. Lots of talking in this one.




The Glorious Rustbucket shot off, back into space.
“There she goes. It looks like your program works, for now.” The human commented as he watched the ship shrink into a tiny dot. Once the Bucket had disappeared beyond the horizon, he redirected his gaze towards the alien wreck that was half submerged inside the rock.
“Alright, my job is mapping wormholes while you are the military type with knowledge of how to blow up things in the most spectacular fashion possible. So what do you make of this thing?” He asked the Geno.

The Geno took the time to inspect the hulk before drawing any conclusions.
“A simple design. Nothing fancy but it gets the job done. A metal frame holding all the necessary systems like fueltanks and the combustion chamber, no exterior shell to cover everything up. The crew area is as far away from the engine as possible which appears to be an early fusion variant, if that oversized radiationshield says anything. It has been modified somewhere in its life to hold a small missile box. Easy to attach and eject, can fire a lot of explosives quickly but not handy for any fight longer than a single salvo. It also has serious reload issues.” He spoke flatly without any emotion. His eyes focussed on every single detail he saw. Now he was examining the rock it was embedded in.

“I think that these guys or girls ,or whatever gender would be most appropriate, pissed off the wrong people. If you can built interplanetary spaceships, you don’t need to worry about a meteor big enough to crack the planet. Anything like that would be stopped and redirected before it got even close. No need to weld on a bunch of little improvised missiles. No, whatever did this was definitely a lot worse. When the planet cracked, its outer surface had turned into a liquid state. This ship tried to get away but couldn’t get enough acceleration to escape the big brick heading its way. That’s why it is half inside the rock, the lava sealed it in with the back end first before cooling off and turning into solid rock. It did manage to lower the relative velocity enough to survive mostly intact, with the exception of the bits that have gotten into contact with the lava.”

Both men gazed upon the mysterious wreck some more. What the Geno had said sounded right, though it was also frightening. The power to destroy planets was nothing new. In warfare, it all came down on sending a projectile at such high velocities that the kinetic force from the impact shattered the target. This principle could be upscaled pretty much without any limits. The only practical limit was the amount of thrust required to bring a projectile to the required speed needed to shatter a planet. Even with the most advanced engines available, such an undertaking would require truly massive amounts of fuel. Who, or what, was willing to go this far?

The human looked at the crewpod at the far end.
“Now that shape looks vaguely familiar. I can’t be sure though.” He muttered.
“Hydras. No way to mistake that shape for anything else.” Was everything the Geno said in response. The human’s eyes widened. Hydras, the only known sentient race besides humans and also the only ones who had been involved in a galactic war for the last few decades. He shivered as his mind conjured the well-known image of a snakelike creature with three tentacles at the front, just like the Hydra Heracles fought in the stories. But the alien itself wasn’t the only frightening thought.

“So they had spaceflight centuries before we had. I don’t know what’s more scary, the fact that the Hydras were already out in space back then or the fact that we somehow managed to close the technology gap.” The man muttered. The Geno nodded silently, his eyes now fixated on a small sphere that hung in the center of the skeletal frame.
“True, their ships are better than ours, though not by much. The war isn’t all that exciting nowadays. We just send a swarm of missiles down the wormhole whenever one of the snakes tries to come trough. What bothers me is that we found a Hydra ship all the way here, nearly thirty wormholes from the frontier.” He complained.
“You know what? This thing can’t have gotten that far, it’s too primitive. I think we might just have found the Hydra homeplanet, or what’s left of it.”

This post has been edited by jack cloudy: Dec 10 2006, 10:28 PM