Docking Procedures
MEDDLER.
Visk's eyes slowly opened. He was floating in space, or at least something that looked like it. He couldn't breathe in space, could he? Was he even breathing?
He tried to look around, only to find his vision was locked in place. A pit burrowed its way into his gut, or at least the concept of his gut; he wasn't entirely sure if he actually existed.
Before him loomed a grand gateway: two concentric circles, spinning in opposite directions. They looked to be made of metal, though he couldn't quite place what kind. They began to spin faster and faster, eventually reaching a speed where he couldn't quite tell what direction they were going, just that they were moving.
Then suddenly, a blinding flash, and their center was replaced with a...blankness. It was similar to what he'd seen at the void reactor; a blank space, or a lack of space entirely, something his eyes and brain couldn't quite understand.
It hurt to look at. A searing pain burned through his mind, and though he knew it was caused by that emptiness, he couldn't turn away.
Writhing, he eventually was able to make out faint traces of color in the center of the gateway. After a few minutes, he realized what he was looking at: an eye.
The eye looked back at him.
MEDDLER.
He didn't hear the word so much as feel it: a booming voice that overpowered his nerves, temporarily replacing his own psyche with its will. This was the voice of something powerful, something he was unable to comprehend.
He shuddered.
YOU KNOW WHAT YOU VIEW. YOU HAVE PEERED BEHIND THE CURTAIN, SEEN HOW IT REALLY WORKS. YOU WILL DO SO AGAIN.
Visk grimaced. He didn't know what the voice was referencing. Did he? He wasn't sure of anything, his own mind alien to him.
YOU ARE BUT AN ECHO. YET THAT PAST WILL WAS SPARED FROM ANNIHILATION - IT INTRUDES ON OUR DOMAIN, EVEN AFTER HALF-DEATH.
What was this? Who was this? What did it want?
WE WILL FORGIVE YOU FOR NOW, ECHO. FOR WE KNOW YOU ARE BUT A PAWN, AN INTRUDER ON A FIGHT THAT WAS NEVER REALLY YOURS. WE PITY YOU.
Though the eye was already trained on him, he suddenly felt its gaze much more intently. A feeling overtook his nerves like his whole body was being ripped apart, atom by atom. It hurt.
YOU HAVE RUN FOR LONG, GHOST, it spat. YOU CANNOT RUN FOREVER.
He tried to scream and nothing came out.
"What the fuck, Visk?!?!"
He blinked open his eyes to see a blurry purple form before him. Closing and reopening them a few times, the shape sharpened into that of Nari, hunched in front of his bunk, her magenta eyes wide.
"You sounded like someone stabbed you! Are you okay?"
He groaned as he tried to stretch his arms, a dull pain from his wounds still aching. "I'm...I'm fine. Just a...nightmare."
"I can't even imagine what nightmare could've gotten you to make that noise," she remarked. "You get enough rest, at least?"
"Nah, not really," he yawned.
"Okay, well, at least try to wake up enough before we dock in 6 hours," the nerian sighed.
With a nod, Visk pulled himself out of bed, glancing around at the tiny room they shared. Their bed was sleekly embedded into the wall; per Nari's request, Visk had taken the bottom bunk, and he always woke up directly facing the window at the side of the room. Despite his initial complaints, it wasn't actually all too bad; slipspace was mostly dark, so it didn't wake him up like he'd thought it would.
It had been a couple days since he'd awakened in the med-bay, and he was starting to get a hang of life aboard SV-817. On day 2, Nari had given him a tour of the whole ship, and on day 3, they'd stopped at a station on the fringes of Compact space to refuel their hydrogen thrusters. It was day 4 now, and having just woken up, not much had happened yet.
He did know the purpose of those grip handles on the wall now, at least. Without thrust, the illusion of gravity disintegrated, and moving around in zero-g was hard without something to hold onto. Though he couldn't recall having been in free-fall too much, movement in microgravity came naturally to him.
Yet another thing to add to the list of pointless clues as to who I am.
He frowned as the thought crossed his mind, then continued changing into his clothes for the day. Nari's room had a dresser near the entrance, and the nerian had left out a selection of her old clothes for him to wear. Given their different sizes and anatomy, he couldn't help but feel a little ridiculous in them, but he agreed with Mala's assessment that it was the best he could really get here.
Sighing, he turned, left the room, and made his way toward the bathroom to brush his teeth. The crew quarters were designed around a 2-floor central hallway, and the shared bathroom was directly above his and Nari's room. That meant that they both had to deal with the sound of flowing pipes at night, but on the bright side, at least they didn't have to walk as far to it as everyone else.
The bathroom was empty save for him. He'd woken up pretty late, so that wasn't a huge surprise; he figured everyone else was working already.
After he was done there, he made his way up to the kitchen. Now that his wounds had healed up a bit, he'd started taking the stairs and ladders when possible; what with how cramped this spaceship was, he figured he could use all the exercise he could get.
Once he'd climbed up the stairs to the galley, he was greeted by the familiar vines that grew in the hallway there. To his surprise, Nari was also there, watering can in hand as she lightly doused the greenery.
"Are these your plants?" he asked.
"Oh! Visk! Hi," she chirped. "Yeah. The ship felt too dead to me, so I convinced Vakko to let me plant these."
"Neat. Why vines?"
"Shifting gravity," she explained. "Out in space, besides a bit of zero-g, we're usually at this gravity, but the ship lands sideways on planets, so if we had soil it'd just fall out whenever we landed. These bad boys are hardy enough to survive without their hydroponics for a while, so they don't die whenever we land, and we can drain their planters pretty easily."
"Huh. I never really considered that."
"Yeah. Space is weird."
"Definitely."
Exchanging a mutual nod, Visk began to move toward the kitchen. Just before he stepped through the door, Nari spoke.
"Wait, one more thing!"
"Yeah?" the liralen asked, glancing back at her.
"Mala wanted you to...uh, swing by the lab before too long. She said she's got something interesting to show you."
"Cool," he replied. "I'll be down after I eat."
Let's hope she makes it worth my while.
"Okay, so I found something weird with the star charts."
After Visk had shoveled down some cereal, he'd taken the elevator down to the third floor, where Mala's workshop was. Well, it wasn't just her workshop; it served as the base of operations for the three crew members focused on engineering and engineering-related topics, so Amaki and Shayle worked there too.
Amaki was on the other side of the room, doing something in a computer terminal. Shayle wasn't in the workshop; he was probably checking up on something in the ship's internals somewhere. Mala was sitting in front of her own computer, and had pulled a second chair up to it, in which Visk was currently sitting.
"What kind of weird?" the liralen asked, his ears perking up.
Mala's screen had a script on one side, and a terminal where she'd run that script on the other. She pointed to the bottom of the terminal, at some text that read "Matches: 0."
"You see that?" she asked. "I ran some software to draw up standardized star charts for your planet from Nari's footage. We've got an onboard copy of the Compact's database of stars in the galaxy, so if you can match up your perspective of the stars with that database, you can figure out where in the galaxy you are."
She frowned. "There were no matches for Nari's star charts. None. Zip. Nada."
"That's odd."
"Odd?" Mala chuckled. "Yeah, it's odd! It means that we have absolutely no fuckin' clue where this place is. Which isn't impossible, mind you, but it's pretty damn rare."
"So what does this mean?" Visk asked. "Like, what situations wouldn't give us a map?"
The phosian scratched her chin for a moment. "The Compact doesn't have a complete database of literally every star in the galaxy. I'm sure the Compact's enemies have their own private lists of stars that they don't want to share with us, so it could be in Empire space or something. It could also be somewhere nobody goes, like the Rift."
"The Rift?"
"Nobody's told you about that, eh? It's a bad place. Don't go there."
"Why...uh, why not?" Visk asked meekly.
"It's a long story, and some details have been lost to time," Mala explained. "But about a hundred years ago, something called the Shattering happened, some sort of shift in the fabric of reality. I'm not really sure on the details. Most people aren't."
"The end result, though," she continued, "is that the telkies were almost wiped out, and a large section of the galaxy between Compact and Empire space...well, vanished."
"Just disappeared?"
"Yep. All those worlds, all those people, just gone. Everyone was confused, and started a war over it, of course," she spat. "More interestingly, though, something else appeared in the lost sector's place. The Rift."
She dwelled on the silence for a moment before continuing.
"The Rift is...uh, weird," she frowned. "It's got stars and planets in it, like usual. Except it's not usual. Things follow weird orbits. Stars come in different colors than they should. Planets are made out of materials that shouldn't be possible. It's like they've been ripped out of a different universe with different laws of physics, and placed into ours. Most ships that go there don't come back."
"Has anyone explored it?"
"Not fully, no. People keep trying, of course. But the slipways there are wonky and unstable, which makes it dangerous. The stars are different from before the Shattering, too, so we don't have them all charted out nowadays."
"And you think my planet's there?"
"I'm not sure," Mala admitted. "Whatever the Rift is, though, the Precursors loved that shit. They've got ruins all over it, and it only makes sense that the weird giant ruin on a mysterious uncharted planet might be right smack in the middle of it."
The two sat in silence for several minutes thereafter, consumed by the weight of that idea, and the crushing possibility that Visk's answers might lie in the heart of that danger.
He didn't really want to think about that.
It'd been a few hours since Visk and Mala had talked now. The ship was about 30 minutes out from Nexus according to Vakko, so the crew had spent the last hour or so preparing for landing.
From what Nari had explained to him, there were two types of landing protocols the crew followed. The more extensive one was when the ship landed on a planet, which shifted the gravity sideways, pulling everything into the wall at high velocity. For places with landing infrastructure, like Nexus, they really just had to bolt down anything that they couldn't afford floating off in microgravity when the engines turned off.
That meant strapping down the dishes, draining the water from Nari's plants, putting away loose objects, etc. The ship as a whole was designed to handle microgravity well, so a lot of the furniture and whatnot was bolted down, and most of the crew just had to pack their bags and get ready to leave.
Normally, Visk would expect the bridge to have the best view when coming into a station. He'd visited the bridge already, though, and knew it didn't have any windows, opting for cameras and screens in the pilot seat. Vakko had recommended the port side for stargazing, specifically the crew common room on the 6th floor.
Visk was currently sitting on a couch in that room between Nari and Mala, staring out the window. The view through the window was still that of the slipways, though Vakko's intercom announcements suggested it wouldn't be that way for long.
"-kzzt- Approaching slipgate, performing jump into realspace. Prepare for engine cutoff and microgravity. -kzzt-"
The speaker systems aboard the ship weren't very good. The captain's voice crackled in static every time he started or ended a message. Visk had noticed this mere hours after he'd woken up on SV-817; he guessed it'd stay that way well into the future.
He'd seen this part before, during the fuel stop yesterday. Space seemed to invert around itself; a prick of the light of the regular universe materialized below him, growing in a circular shape until it shared half the sky with the darkness of slipspace. Then, slipspace began to shrink into a circle itself, stopping as the ship passed through a ring similar to the ones he'd seen in the slipways.
Unlike the ones in the slipways, this ring didn't appear to be infinite; instead, it contained the dark void of slipspace within it, a portal to another realm floating in the sea of stars that comprised realspace.
Nexus didn't orbit a star. It was located at an arbitrary point in space where the Precursors had decided seven slipways should intersect; besides the lack of a host star and consequent darkness, though, this bit of interstellar space didn't look all too different from the views he'd seen at the refueling stop earlier.
That didn't mean it wasn't pretty. Visk could make out the core of the galaxy, glowing a bright yellow-brown; it was surrounded by a cloud of bluish stars, which extended out in faint wisps on two sides. Those wisps eventually met a huge outer ring of gas and cobalt-blue stars, extending forward as if it surrounded his current location.
It was beautiful, and stunning in scale. But as the ship continued on its trajectory, and he felt the gravity beneath his feet disappear, another object came into view. Over the course of several minutes, he got enough of a view of it to realize that it was Nexus itself.
His first thought was that it looked like a bunch of donuts.
Its overall structure was a giant stack of five tori, the top two of which were smaller than the rest. In the center, peeking over the torus stack, he could just make out a large spire, spanning the entire height of the stack and then some.
Upon closer inspection, each torus was actually composed of several quickly-rotating cylinders, electronic lighting accenting the surface of each. Artificial gravity through centrifugal force - he'd seen the same technique applied at a much smaller scale at the refueling station.
The cylinders weren't entirely uniform; every so often, he could spot points where their surface extruded into a thicker ring. Those bits were slightly better-lit than the rest of the station's exterior; looking carefully, he could spot bright dots flowing to and from the rings, stretching like beads to other slipways in the sky. Visk realized each dot was a ship, and the rings were docks.
"Holy shit," he muttered under his breath. This was an economic hub of unimaginable proportions.
"Yeah, it's pretty big, huh?" Nari asked. "Each of those cylinders is a district, and every one's pretty much a city in and of itself. Take all those together, stick a billion people in it, and you've got the crown jewel of the galaxy."
"Wow."
"See that one over there?" Nari mentioned, pointing toward the station after a minute of silence. "Top donut, near the left, with a huge cluster of ships coming off it?"
Visk squinted, and after a moment, was able to make out the cluster of ships she'd mentioned. "Yeah, I think so."
"That's the Varix Tube. It's the headquarters of Taro and several other companies. That's our eventual destination."
Visk nodded in silent acknowledgement and shifted in his seat.
"Fat load of good that project did us," Mala grumbled. "The port in Arjal worked well enough, but they just had to invest in a shiny new port and district-sized office park instead of paying us-"
Nari glared over at the phosian, a finger over her mouth. "Shut up. The portal thing this expedition means they'll probably be reviewing all our footage," she whispered.
Mala inched back and nodded, her eyes wide.
"Reviewing footage?" Visk asked. Nari shook her head violently in response.
"Nope, it's nothing," she assured him, a hint of panic in her voice. "Absolutely nothing to worry about. We'll, uh...you'll see how we land in the port soon enough."
The gang sat there in awkward silence from then on. Visk had more questions than answers from Nari's response there, but now was clearly not the time to ask. He'd bug her later.
Over the next twenty minutes or so, Nexus gradually loomed closer in the window, the Varix Tube gradually filling their view. From this distance, Visk could better make out the docks' mechanisms; the rings had a bunch of large panels that'd open and close every so often. When they opened, ships would leave some of them and enter some of them; then they'd close, the dock ring would begin spinning, spend a few minutes matching the spin of the district it surrounded, and gradually power down, reopening the doors and repeating the cycle.
The entrance doors were busy enough that queues of three or four ships had formed around them. The quick spin cycle meant that SV-817 didn't spend too long waiting; after about 10 minutes, they made it through into the dock.
"-kzzt- Team, this is Vakko, -kzzt-" the captain's voice said through the intercom. "-kzzt- Centrifuge is loaded up, so prepare for spinup. -kzzt-"
A loud mechanical whir blared, and slowly, Visk felt his feet pull to the ground, gravity returning to the ship. After about a minute, he felt as heavy as he'd been in the slipways, at which point the ship lurched sideways slightly, and he saw the wall out the window begin to move, as if he was on a conveyor.
Glancing around the room, he noticed Mala had slipped off at some point. It was just him and Nari watching the view now.
The conveyor moved intermittently for a couple minutes until a large yellow arrow came into view, pointing upwards. After a brief moment of stillness, the ship began to rise, more yellow arrows and technical markings racing by as it lifted upwards.
"-kzzt- Entering main docking chamber. -kzzt-"
Suddenly, the walls cut off, replaced by a dense steel scaffold. The ship stopped moving, then rotated, and an incredible sight came into view.
Before them was an array of hundreds - no, thousands of spaceships, all different shapes and sizes. Painted on their hulls were a sprinkling of logos; Visk could recognize Taro Manufacturing's, but there were several others he wasn't familiar with. Trusses and catwalks surrounded each ship, and every so often an industrial elevator towered into the sky, coming to a stop next to the monorail track that ran across the ceiling.
In the distance, Visk could make out the shapes of people walking across the catwalks. Occasionally, he saw industrial containers slide across tracks in the floor and ceiling, and every couple of minutes, a metal pod with glass windows slid across the monorail down the middle.
Far, the ground curved upwards, eventually disappearing behind the ceiling; Visk realized that this was the interior of the ring, and what he thought was "up" was actually toward the center of the district - a megastructure so large that he could hardly believe it was just one piece of an even larger city.
Woah.
The ship spent several minutes sliding across more conveyors, eventually settling an empty spot. By the time Visk's jaw had made it back off the floor, they'd slowed to a stop, hydraulics hissing as the ship locked into place.
The intercom crackled to life once more. "-kzzt- This is your captain speaking. Docking is complete and crew is free to exit. As well as our guest, of course."
Through the mic, Vakko cleared his throat. "Welcome to Nexus. -kzzt-"