If there was one thing there was too much of in space, it was time. A "high-speed" warp-space pursuit could mean days; a short hop between stars, a week. The time is what makes spacers and those who make their living in the starlanes crazy; hours upon days upon weeks, with the same group of people, in the same small enclosed ship, with no escape.

These are the tales of the starship Diplo, in the endless time between places you never heard about.

8

It wasn't that Feit or Cliff were good at chess that'd gotten a few others in the small lounge idly watching; if anything it was more the opposite, as the game held the fascination of a train wreck. Maybe the few other crew were just watching for lack of anything better to do.

"Check."

"You sure you want to move there?"

Feit raised an eyebrow. "...yeah..."

"Absolutely sure?"

"...Why wouldn't I be? It's check."

"...Just making sure, since yanno, that might be just what I needed..."

"...whatever. Check."

Cliff mulled over the three pieces he had left, to Feit's four. Most of them were halfway across the board. And unfortunately, there was no way to get a pawn to move backwards. "Hey, over there!" had only worked once, and had gotten a dustball-squabble. If he could just get some kind of diversion, that would sufficiently distract Feit, he might be able to just move the piece and maybe Feit wouldn't notice...

The doors opened.

"Thought I'd forgotten our score to settle, did you?"

In the half-second recognition that the Crimson Scourge was levelled at the game, Cliff decided that Albel in one of his violent moods was probably overkill as distractions went, while it was true that Feit had forgotten the game in favor of realizing exactly how far across the ship he was from any weapon.

Albel dove to the attack. Cliff and Feit dove to get out of the way. The rest of the crew dove for the nearest cover. The battle was over in a matter of minutes, and the Elicoorian stalked out smug, leaving his target in pieces on the floor.

It was almost five minutes of dumbfounded silence while the others in the room processed what'd just happened. The chess board was salvageable, the pieces intact, but the table had passed on to the great beyond, hacked to a hundred little metal slivers.

Feit regained his wits and his feet, going straight to the door; but "WHAT DID THE TABLE EVER DO TO YOU!" only got cackling in response.