This week's prompts are from BRAVO101 and Kyryst with 'in defence of Earth' and 'badass starships', bringing us back to the setting of Beyond the Wall and checking in with an old friend as we do so. Enjoy!
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What the Tide has Brought:
Tak-tak-tak-tak. Peliska’s hooves cracked out a rapid cadence on the sentinel station’s floors as she ran from her quarters up to the command deck. Buddy was hooked under her left arm. She skidded through the doors to the station’s small bridge, setting her stuffed animal down in the first officer’s position by rote as she came to a halt at the sensor console. Its screens were flashing an urgent red in time with the throbbing high-pitched alarms that filled the corridors.
Beneath the sirens, the station was repeating its warning over and over. “Proximity alert. Hypermatter tide encroaching within safe limits. Proximity alert.”
There it was; an overwhelming pustule of hypermatter bulging towards Sentinel Station 942. Despite being infinitesimally small compared to the Great Barrier as a whole, the surge was the size of a main sequence star. It swelled from the churning surface of the Great Barrier like the extending pseuopod of an amoeba searching for a fresh morsel to envelope. Peliska froze. There was nothing she could do. The station’s thrusters couldn’t push it half as fast as that bubble was moving towards her. She couldn’t call for help; the EM interference from the storm had already cut communications. Besides, even if she could send a distress call, who would come? None of the other sentinel stations were in a position to get here and the guardian station wouldn’t bother. Sentinel stations, like the Shamed that crewed them, were replaceable.
A life pod couldn’t even get out of the way of that swell. It was faster than the station, but not fast enough. She wanted to run. She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry, to curse the universe for the unfairness of it all. She didn’t do any of those things. Instead, the Shamed picked Buddy up from where she’d put him and sat back on her haunches holding her childhood toy, the only true companion she’d had for this long, lonely vigil. She had no one else to be with her, so she held him, watched the screen and waited for the end.
Her family would receive a neat, formally-worded letter informing them of her death in service of the Intragalactic Provisional Governing Council, impersonal and sent from obligation, not because they cared. Her life would be more drop in the bucket. One more weight on the scales so that someday they would balance out and her people would be forgiven. She’d never expected to see such a thing, but she hoped that future might yet come to pass. Maybe this would be the tipping point. She didn’t think so, but that hope was all she had left.
The alarms screamed louder as the swell reached two million kilometers from the station, demanding action but there was no action she could take that would matter. One point five. Radiation counters ticked into the hazardous zone. One million. Gravitic shear shook the massive station to its very bones, like it was on the cusp of being torn apart before it had a chance to be swallowed by the Barrier.
Peliska found herself hoping that it would. That would be a quicker, cleaner end. No lingering with radiation sickness, starvation and dehydration. A few moments’ pain was better than days of suffering.
Nine hundred thousand. Eight hundred thousand...
...nine hundred thousand.
Peliska’s eyes widened as she stared at the plot. One million. One million point two. The tide was receding, withdrawing as quickly as it had come, falling back in on itself. The Barrier’s surface rippled with hypermatter tsunamis taller than gas giants as all the mass-that-wasn’t-actually-mass collapsed into it.
Radiation counters dropped back to ‘caution’ levels and from there to normal. The gravity waves faded, leaving the battered station intact. Peliska’s ears twitched, her tail wagging in anxious disbelief.
“Warning,” the station noted. “Proximity alert.”
A new threat had presented itself. As it had withdrawn, the hypermatter tide had pushed out a collection of debris that had been caught up in the tides and pulled to the surface. The young woman set herself down in the sensor board. Composition was varied. Particles of ice, chunks of rock. Debris from starships and stations that had hadn’t been as lucky as Peliska’s. Some fragments were the size of thumbnails. Some were the size of asteroids.
The young woman scooted over to the tactical console, quickly tasking the interception grid to deal with the most dangerous pieces of debris, those on a projected collision course with the station itself. The others she logged for local navigation charts. There were two bits of wreckage that were larger than the rest; one looked like half a starship, with both its front and aft ends tron away. Judging by the shape, it was – had been – a freighter or gas-tanker.
The other ship... it was fairly small, but it looked like it was completely intact. That was odd enough on its face, but the design – a dark, pointed chevron with short, forward-swept wings – didn’t match anything in the station’s files. She sent a pair of service drones to tractor both wrecks and bring them in. From the freighter, she wouldn’t get much, but the other vessel intrigued her. She’d never seen anything like it, and as it drew closer, the initial scans were confirmed. It was almost completely undamaged.
As far as Peliska knew, nothing could survive in the Barrier for any length of time without some level of damage from the physics-defying laws within, but this ship... it wasn’t just intact, it was giving off weak energy readings. It might even be operational. That was even less likely than being in one piece
Her ears were as perked up as they could go, the Shamed looking from the screen to her stuffed animal companion. “What do you think?” she asked Buddy. “What is it?”
He didn’t give her any response, but that was the same answer that both she and the station had. This wasn’t... well, she wouldn’t say impossible, but it was highly anomalous.
What are you? She wondered, eyes focusing on the image of small vessel as her drones went out to reel it in. And where did you come from?