Chapter I

Ordin checked his watch for the third time in five minutes. He sat at the small metal table, emersed in the endless traffic of the central area of the spaceport, as he anxiously awaited the appearance of the final member of his crew. Looking for a way to relax, he took a sip of the green fluid suggested to him by the nearby Frrern. It had the opposite effect... he swallowed hard and tried to suck the taste out of his mouth.

Slowly, Ordin became aware of a shadow being cast on him from above... He looked up and saw the featureless silhouette of a humanoid, looking down at him. The shadow spoke, shyly. "Uh... Are you...?"

"Edan Ordin, Commander of-"

"Yes, the Alliance Research Ship Ir Miilas. I'm Creta Mirin, the replacement copilot." Her smile was only barely visible in the reflected light of the table.

Ordin stood quickly. "Ah, thank Sajuuk. I thought we'd never find you. Let's get to the lock--we have to launch within the next eleven minutes." The two of them scurried off down the crowded corridors to the bay where the ship was waiting. It was a fairly small vessel among all those in the bay, hardly the size of a frigate. With a body of solid silver and a trim of glue and gold, the spacecraft was almost completely streamlined but for its huge engines and a cluster of antennae and sensory equipment jutting out of an opening on the dorsal edge of its long, sleek spinal support. This was by far the nicest research ship either of them had laid eyes on.

The Commander was just beginning to calm himself when he reached the steel ramp and turned to see the woman behind him. His pulse quickened, the blood seemed to drain from his face, he became pale. "You're Taiidan."

Creta was still, taking in the expression of subdued fear on Ordin's face.

"Never mind. I-I'll show you around. Have you been briefed at all?"

She shook her head as she followed him down the tube into the cabin of the ship. "No, not really. I was called here from the capital just a few hours ago... They didn't tell me much, other than that I had to fill in for your copilot."

"Yes, he was injured earlier." the huge, heavily reinforced doors sprang open, revealing a dimly-lit, low-ceiling interior. "Welcome aboard the long-range research vessel Ir Miilas, Traveler's hope. This is one of three ships involved in the Galactic Council's Cartographic Rendering Project."

"Sorry, I'm not familiar with it."

"I'm not shocked." Ordin coughed from the smell of freshly-welded metal. "Every fourteen years, ships are launched to three points of view around the galaxy, where they each make detailed scans and record the positions of all visible stars. When all of this data has been properly analyzed, the result is a very reliable model of the galaxy and all objects in it. It is not a very well-known event we're participating in, but it is truly priceless to hyperspacing and navigation."

Another crew member emerged from a door at the edge of the room. He was a short man, with a holographic display suspended over his eyes. He introduced himself. "I am A'Kuul, the hyperspace engineer."

"Hello. I'm..." she started, but the man had disappeared again. She wasn't surprised; she knew that Hyperspace mathematics had the tendency to dull one's life beyond the numbers. Only a few had ever really understood the infinite, fractal patterns of Hyperspace, and those few who did had generally been bordering on insanity. She shrugged it off.

Ordin spoke up. "You probably won't have much work on this mission. All the navigation is done by computers, we just don't like to fly without a full crew."

"Of course." She took a seat at the console at the front of the room, and looked out into the bright yellow-orange nebulosity of the core regions... Endless fields of thousands upon thousands of stars. She smiled, never tiring of that raw beauty, in all her life in the core regions. She'd seen these clouds nearly every day since her first work piloting freighters, and yet their glow never ceased to entertain her. When she was completely relaxed, she decided to see the rest of the ship.

When she stood, however, she froze. The commander was sitting in his chair, his eyes fixed tightly on the same window. But his face was twisted into a look of sheer disgust, or anger. He didn't seem to be aware of her presence... He was drifting, out there, and he was unhappy, almost tortured by what he apparently saw. His eyes remained completely still, cold, not even blinking, locked into the star fields with a hatred that showed in all his tormented features.

Creta slowly, silently, walked away from the scene, through the door behind Ordin's chair. The commander's face still lingering in her mind, she moved forward into an elongated, narrow room with ivory walls. It was hard to see. The deeper she proceeded, the more she saw that these walls were an endless, intricately woven mesh of circuitry, tubes, pipes, relays. She found herself, at the center of a great machine, trapped inside it. Everything was active here, there was live energy flowing through every centimeter of the place... It almost felt claustrophobic.

The lighting in the room was dim, but it seemed to come from everywhere. There were no lights on the ceiling or floor; rather, everything there was giving off a faint and continually fluctuating glow. She left no shadow, and yet she herself appeared as darkness, the only thing there that was not providing its own illumination.

She looked ahead and saw that the room expanded into a circular area, just three meters away. She moved reluctantly onward and made out more detail here... Suddenly her brain seemed to understand the patterns in the world, and she made out the structure of the place. This circle had a higher, slightly domed ceiling, and in the middle of it, a cylindrical column grew from the floor upward. The center of the column seemed to glow even more brightly than the surrounding machinery, and as she came close she realized that it was partially transparent.

And there was not just its appearance... There was more to this room than just what she could see. She heard something... A very quiet, rhythmic sound that seemed to come from inside her rather than around her. Her ears strained to hear it, but it was definitely there... It sounded like music.

Suddenly she was shaken from her thoughts by the sudden motion of a shape nearby. She turned and saw A'Kuul raise himself up from behind a small pyramid-shaped device in the corner. He looked just as preoccupied as ever, with the displays over his eyes printing out endless number sequences, and several bizarre tools in his hands. His face was still blank, but he had paused in his work. Whether he was just thinking about his machines, or taking a moment to study the strange Taiidani copilot that had invaded his workspace, he had stopped for a moment.

Creta shivered inadvertently. "I did not know Kushan technology was so... complex."

A'Kuul tilted his head as if confused, but his face remained solid. "This is not Kushan technology."

The walls took up their pleasing mezzo-soprano voice once again, and gave off a short flash of luminance. Creta stared, questioningly.

"This hyperdrive unit is Bentusi-made, given to us for this ship's use only." he said, in a dark monotone.

Creta looked around, astonished. She recalled her one encounter with a Bentusi trade ship... She'd been flying supply runs for the old empire, before the fall... She had only seen it briefly, streaking across the nebula and disappearing in the bright galactic core, like some mythical creature returning to its nest in the heavens... She had actually questioned herself as to whether or not it had actually ever been there. Certainly her imperial overlords would never have provided any information. The memories of her work in those years provoked a deep shudder. These were experiences she was willing to forget.

She was tense from the sudden and vibrant recollection of her imperial career, but the quiet humming from the singing ship was calming, and she soon felt all her worries and regrets drip from her thoughts. She returned to the present and looked back at the small man. "Why did the Bentusi give you this drive?"

"For the magnitude of this hyperspatial jump, a greater wavefront force generation capability is necessary."

"Hiigaran drives just don't do so well for this kind of work." another voice appeared from behind... Another man standing from behind the column. This room was quite eerie, simply because it seemed one could never be sure how many people were there, hidden.

Creta turned around and saw him, a taller man with the first real smile she'd seen all day.

"I'm Ziir Nabaal, second engineer." he shifted the tool to the other hand and made the Hiigaran sign of greeting.

She nodded and introduced herself.

Ziir started for the console he'd been working at. "It will be good to have a Taiidan in the crew. A sign of friendship between out two cultures, do you agree?"

"Yes, I suppose." Creta answered. The engineer's friendliness lightened her mood.

Just then, the commander leaned in through the hatch. "One minute to launch." His dark voice echoed through the singing room, making the song fall silent. The two engineers secured their equipment and made their way back to the bridge. Creta followed them and took her seat beside the Hiigaran pilot, who looked only momentarily at her and produced nothing more than a forced smile. She tried not to let it get to her... It was all she'd ever received from most of the Hiigarans she'd met. She could almost see their point of view.

 

* * *

The Ir Miilas had detached from the lock and had attained a safe distance from the station, far out away from all space dust, debris and other vessels. The silver ship, still reflecting the brilliant orange of the surrounding space, aligned itself with the coordinates of its destination, in final preparation for the transit through hyperspace. When the computer had achieved perfection in the ship's alignment and mathematical algorithms, the Bentusi drive came fully alive.

A golden light became dimly visible, refracting through the sparsely distributed molecules of hydrogen and assorted gasses, like a halo around the craft. The glow moved like a phantom through the surrounding space, then gently dissolved. Now the space began to twist, expanding and contracting, revealing how truly amorphous it was. No more than gelatin, the space around the Ir Miilas began melting around the hull. Then the golden light returned, in a square of infinite radiance pulsing with the energies of beyond, materializing at the edge of the ship. The vessel remained absolutely still, as the burning shape moved over the hull, moving the molecules the stars, thousands of lightyears in seconds, to the far reaches of the galactic rim and beyond. Into the unknown. The glow gently subsided, the space re-solidified as if nothing had ever been there. Ir Miilas was enveloped by the void.