Here's the bad news: You're lost.
Faster-than-light travel is supposed to work like this: The ship's caster makes the sigils that get displayed on the ship's hull. The caster encodes multidimensional state vectors into a compressed, symbolic code so routing information can be read by the transdimensional machinery of an extinct, alien civilization allowing shortcuts through spacetime.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, and it works pretty well most of the time.
There are the other times, though, when ships wind up someplace other than the intended destination or just disappears entirely. At times the casting is probably to blame; the internal state of the caster has always been a hard to control variable. Sometimes there's just a glitch--an act of God or gods in the machine, you might say.
You experienced one of those other times. You’re lost in a distant part of the multiverse, a long way in space and time from where you wanted to be or where you’re from. You're alive, which makes you better off than some, but the chances of you getting home again are slim.
Now here's a bit of good news: You've been found. A lot of the lost wind up limping into the Ring. Nobody knows why; something to do with local spacetime, I think. It's like the place where objects bouncing through the conduits come finally to rest. Anyway, Mother has taken you in, like she does all the lost ones that show up on her doorstep. This is Mother's station.
Now, Mother opened the door, but you've got to find a way to make a life for yourself here. We all earn our keep. The Company will be glad to give you place to live, credits to spend, and a job to pay for both. You'll want to stay in this sector, it's mostly humans and humanoids--oxy-breathers from a rational, four dimensional universe--around here. The aliens in other parts of the station, well, you have to be prepared. And you won't be. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The job? I'm not going to lie to you, it will be dangerous. It's important work, the Company will tell you that, but it doesn't always make sense from the boots on the ground perspective, you understand. You'll see a lot of weird stuff out there, but keep your head, do the work, and you'll come home. Probably.
This is a follow-up to this post.
The station's segregation system reminds me strongly of the way CJ Cherryh's Compact Space stations are run. Oxy-breathers with fairly comprehensible psychology on one half of the place, and the species that think of oxygen as a deadly toxin (and possibly a liquid) and can barely communicate enough to make basic commodity trades on the flip side.
ReplyDeleteThe FTL-runs-on-ancient-alien-tech reminds me of Glen Cook's The Dragon Never Sleeps, although there the "system" was intended to be an FTL phone network and the younger races hanging their ships off the "lines" to travel is definitely a violation of the terms of use.
Cherryh's Compact universe was a thought with that description there, specifically the term "oxy-breathers."
ReplyDeleteThe Cook work sounds interesting. I should check that out.
The Dragon Never Sleeps is well worth a read if you like Cook at all. A bit long, but it's one of his few one-and-done standalone novels, and the setting has some interesting quirks above and beyond the FTL system.
ReplyDeleteMuch as I enjoy Cook's fantasy work, I kind of wish he'd done more scifi. What there is of it is quite good, but most of it's long out of print and written when he was still fairly new. Love to see what kind of scifi an older, more experienced Cook would produce.
Paying the rent on a space station feels like a good reason to go adventuring. In that context, it's pretty clear why you (a) need cash and can't just live off the land, and (b) have chosen to accept the risks of adventure in order to get that cash.
ReplyDeleteThe magical nature of FTL travel is intriguing here, because it suggests that the starting characters are from a science fantasy or steampunk setting, along the lines of Spelljammer or Eberron, but they've ended up in a region of superior Weirdness, and also possibly a place where the science-to-fantasy ratio is different than back home.
Could be, thought I wasn't considering the sort of fantasy of Spelljammer and Eberron.
ReplyDelete