The lift doors snapped open briskly.
Admiral Kirana Paktu's composure vanished.
She stepped out onto the bridge, her appearance unnoticed and presence unrecognised.
Before, the cargo deck had seemed to her as a vast arena of confusion. The bridge, here, was more like a pressure pot at full boil. Disarray everywhere; test equipment underfoot, consoles open with cables spilling out like entrails, monitor screens disconnected, relays clocking, data buffers laid open, servos whirring, and somewhere, an overload signal protested with its nerve-jangling squeal of warning, warning, warning. Again, Kirana felt apprehension – a sense of perhaps coming into this too quickly, too precipitously, possibly even unprepared – but this was blotted out by her gaze around the wondrous bridge.
It was not as large as the cargo deck. The only bigger places on the entire ship were the fleet foundries, where fighters and capital ships could be manufactured in record time. No, the bridge was not quite that immense. But it had a presence and size all its own. The main floor was spread before her like a sea of people, equipment, desks, chairs, and more equipment. A large sunken disc in the middle of the bridge was home to a holographic projector. It was displaying a diagram of the mothership in the Scaffold, but was configurable to render any image or data in a tri-D format. Spaced around that were control panels for mission briefings.
Beyond the holoprojector was a huge viewport – not a computer screen, as some had wanted, but a single reinforced block of glassteel. It was what every window on the ship was made out of, but because of its size and the risk of it being punctured by a stray micro-meteor, it had been outfitted with external force-field emitter diodes and deflector fields. It looked out on the main arms of the Scaffold, and beyond them, open space. Kirana fancied that she could just see the specks of the tiny support vessels as the hovered nearby.
The command station was the largest post on the bridge. It consisted of a cluster of consoles spaced around a central chair – her chair – and was the point of focus during situations. Elsewhere around the bridge were hives of activity denoting the other posts: Hyperdrive Control, Navigation, Life Sciences, Fleet Intelligence, Communications, Sensors, Medical, Engineering, Internal Security, Tactical…the list went on and on. The critical stations were located on the main floor, and the others were placed in niches in the walls, where catwalks and gantries formed a second level in the huge bridge.
"Admiral on the bridge!" someone shouted, and everyone snapped to attention.
"At ease," she said.
Kirana crossed the bridge, shaking hands or nodding at the veritable army of officers. Then, she eased herself into the centre seat. This place was her command now, and she forced herself to hang onto that first moment, pretending to survey the stations around her. Not that she expected anyone else to be deceived; her fingers grasped the armrests just a little too tightly, and he toyed with her fire-bright hair a little too often. But this was the start of a new voyage into the centre of the galaxy. She would leave Kharak for two years while they surveyed the world the ancient Guidestone had identified as Hiigara, then return home and ferry the rest of her people back to their place of origin. Our past is a lie, she reflected. Their journey started here, now. She tried to appear impassive as consoles were hurriedly reassembled and benchmark tests hurriedly completed. The mothership was not technically finished as yet – all key systems were in and functioning, but some integral parts of the vessel were only forty percent complete. This was a short test-run of the hyperdrive module alone.
Soon, a man who looked to be two or three years her senior, a lieutenant, snapped off a salute and passed her a keycard. "All systems ready for launch, ma'am."
"Thank-you," she said with a smile. With slender fingers, she slid the keycard into a slot on the right armrest of her chair. A green light went on, and a female voice filled the bridge chamber. All other voices were silent as the slight echo of the hauntingly-Kharakid woman spoke in response to Kirana's simple action.
"Fleet Command on-line," Karan Sjet said from the command core. "Requesting sign-in of commanding officer for hyperdrive launch."
"Fleet Command, this is Admiral Kirana Paktu," the green-eyed woman said from her chair. "Signing in. Authorisation code: four-two-zero-one-nine-bravo. Confirm."
A second elapsed as Sjet processed the information. "Voiceprint and keycard permission authenticated and confirmed. Welcome aboard, Admiral Paktu." The voice was pleasant and genuine, unlike the synthesised garble that most computers came up with these days. Kirana smiled and thanked the marriage of metal and flesh for the greeting. "Let's get moving, then." She looked forward to the holographic projector, and behind it, the viewport. "Contact the Scaffold and withdraw main umbilicals. Inform me of the all-clear. All stations, report."
"Helm and navigation, ready. Orbit departure vector programmed."
"Tactical is prepped."
"Mission Medical, in the green."
"Engineering is go."
"InSec standing by. No hazards or unauthorised personnel detected."
"Communications at one-hundred percent. Scaffold has disengaged main umbilicals, standing by for withdrawal."
"Hyperdrive module charged and ready for initialisation. No problems so far."
"Sensors on-line."
"Construction ready."
"Fleet Intelligence active, interfaced with all ship departments."
"Fleet Command on-line," Karan Sjet added. "Preparing for undocking procedure."
Admiral Paktu waited for the Scaffold to send its 'all-clear' signal. Had she pushed too hard, too soon? Had the Admiralty made a grave error in bowing to the whims of the Daiamid Council, which had wanted the mothership operation as soon as was feasible? She shook her head to clear the doubts from her brain. If they not meet the deadline set by the kiithid'sa, doubt would breed among the mothership crew as to whether they could meet a second deadline, or even a third. No, they had to go now. The entire ship seemed to tremor as the Scaffold's maintenance workers withdrew the docking clamps, which meant that they were not entirely under their own power. "Helm, manoeuvring thrusters to station keeping," she ordered. "Hold us here."
"Aye, ma'am."
On the speakers, Karan Sjet began to run through each system as she brought it up to operating capacity. The admiral let it blend into the background until she saw that their departure vector was clear.
"Manoeuvring thrusters forward, helm. Take us out."
The helmsman's right hand played the thruster controls and the mothership began to inch out of the Scaffold. Metre by metre, hundreds of thousands of metric kilotons jetted forwards, like a newborn leaving the womb, a child leaving its mother, a lover leaving an embrace. Girders slid past them, and it was as though they had left the safe clutch of the dock forever. Outside, they were watched by tiny figures in work suits who hung to those girders. Some waved, others merely watched with what seemed to be weary satisfaction. No, the others were waving too. It would have been hard to be out there and not be moved by the sight of the giant crescent-form mothership emerging majestically from her orbital chrysalis. Below them, Kharak was a darkening shape, dominating the full half of the sky beneath the slim profile of the ship. The sun was just now beginning to set on this side of the planet, and a last atmosphere-flare of sunlight reflected for an instant as a harsh actinic burst against the bonded ceramic hull. Kirana felt the grace of their departure from the dock, and now felt the cool winds of space cleaning the skin of the mothership. The soft pulse of the main engines – not entirely complete, incapable of moving the mothership but functional nonetheless – filled her being with its throbbing rhythm, tightly-leashed thunder. This barest of intermix power output was required for the ship to hover as it was, now in orbit around their desert prison.
A fresh buzz of movement accompanied the mothership crew as they launched their meagre fleet of support craft. Ten scout starfighters were circling in the void, conducting combat trials and tactics tests, while a research vessel emerged from the starboard docking bay, accompanied by the boxy resource collector craft. Both of them began to go through a series of thruster diagnostic sequences to ensure that there would be no problems later on; no ship they possessed had a hyperdrive module, although it was assumed that most capital ships would require them. All small support ships had to dock for any hyperspace jumps. Admiral Paktu watched the holoprojector as it cycled through information on the support vessels. Finally, she turned as a crew member from Hyperdrive Control called out to her.
"Ma'am, we're ready," he said simply.
This is it.
"Alright. Fleet Command, initiate pre-jump procedures."
"Attention, all personnel," the voice of Fleet Command said. "Prepare for hyperspace jump. Abort systems at one hundred percent. Sealing internal pressure doors…now." The bridge was filled with the sounds of heavy blast doors sliding into place around all the ingress/egress points. No movement about the ship was permitted now, in case of any side effects of their test flight. "Fleet is now docking. Stand by."
"Ready to engage hyperdrive," the HC officer said.
Admiral Paktu stood up and gazed tenaciously out into the void.
"Permission granted. Let's go."
A new sound began to crescendo…the grating hum of the hyperdrive module as it prepared to generate a gateway into hyperspace. The module itself had been backwards-engineered from a relic found in the ruins of the First City, Khar-Toba, and only a few test prototypes had been built before they had installed the final version into the mothership. Kirana desperately prayed that it would all run according to plan. "Computational cycles complete," the HC officer called over the hum, which was now quite audible, "and gate geometry is ready. Projection is occurring…now!"
Kirana looked out through the viewport.
The void was blank.
Then, it tore open.
A perfect line of bright blue light incised space as a thin, hairline slash. It lengthened until it was slightly wider than the mothership itself, and then grew vertically, first into a square, then upward into a rectangle that blazed in the darkness of space. The hyperdrive module controlled the shape of the quantum waveform meticulously – she had expected it to look somewhat more organic, but realised that it was a product of infinitely-complex science, and so it was no surprise that it was a purely geometric shape. Kirana had done some research into quantum waveforms so as to be somewhat knowledgeable into the subject; most of it had gone over her head, a realm best left to astrophysicists and quantum mechanists. She did recall that the hyperspace front was the result of a high-energy field generator that accelerated ordinary particles until they punctured through the barrier between space and hyperspace. She had no idea how that happened, but she did know that the waveforms had to take linear shapes in order to stay stable, given that the generator module couldn't bend such a rift between dimensions into a curve. She felt her muscles tense as the quantum waveform reached full height, then started moving back towards the mothership, a pane of frozen starlight.
The forward-thrust sensor spires were the first parts of the ship to disappear. A rim of sparkling azure lightning spread out from them while the hyperspace gate made contact and engulfed them. The bridge was set near the front, so it would soon follow. Kirana saw the waveform reach the forward viewport and slide through it with no hint of resistance whatsoever. She smiled as she realised that destiny was coming to take her away, and in that one moment of jubilance, she uttered a phrase that her kiith treasured.
"I can smell the sea," she said delightedly.
In one swift motion, the wall of otherworldly, cobalt energies swept over her and the rest of the bridge crew, momentarily locking them in time. The spell broke after a second or so, and the front viewport was filled with a streaking tunnel of pure hyperspace. The HC station nodded a few seconds later, saying that the mothership was at full integrity and had entered hyperspace without a hitch. Admiral Paktu could not suppress a grin. "This is the beginning!" she called into the empty space, and every Kharakid turned their attention to her. "This is the beginning of a new journey. The end of a long exodus, but now the beginning of our return home. In a few seconds, we will reach the outer sectors of the Kharak system, proving that the hyperdrive is fully functional, and in another month, the mothership will leave our system: this time, for good. It is all thanks to you. Your hard work will ensure that we reach Hiigara." She took a deep breath, watched as everyone around her tried to focus on her rather than the hypnotic light show outside. "Our future lies out here. Our past is something that we shall treasure, but we must look to destiny."
Standing here, in the frozen limbo of hyperspace, it was very easy to believe her.
