Vagrancy

[Kazinsal]

The first few months weren't so bad. There was a sense of unity in knowing that the denizens of the Octavarium Fleet were still self-sufficient. But cabin fever began to take its toll. While several of the ships were long-haulers with ample cabin room, the whole of the fleet was only designed for eight, maybe ten thousand people. Twenty thousand would be a squeeze. Thirty thousand was simply not sustainable.

Two weeks into their exodus, the fleet had entered interstellar space. They were along the edge of the Barrier, where the rocks were out of reach but still accessible in case, by immensely low chance, someone found them. Their course was straight for the Cortez system, which once would be accessible through Magellan, but their access to that system had been cut off originally by the Gallic siege and later by the instability of the jump hole leaving the Kansas system. Instead, their only option was a nine lightyear marathon through interstellar space.

Since the discovery of jump holes and later the construction of the jump gate network, linear interstellar travel was all but ancient history. Only deep space probes and hydrogen atoms were likely to be encountered during their two year trip through the interstellar medium.

A few days later, aboard the OCS Repentenace, the Montante-class gunship that served as the temporary command ship of the Octavarium Fleet, Lieutenant Florence Clemens had an epiphany.

"Cruise restrictors!" she shouted, bursting onto the ship's bridge. As far as command decks go, that of the Montante was not particularly large, and was prone to echoing when someone on it was particularly loud.

Her interjection startled the man seated in the captain's chair. "Lords alive, Florie!", he shouted back, turning his seat slightly and angling his head towards her, wincing slightly as the reflection hit him from what felt like six directions at once. "Is there something you want to tell us, or are you going mad already? Because we've got two years to go."

She cleared her throat. "Sorry, Kane. What I meant to say was, I think we've got a way to cut down on the length of our journey significantly."

Kane stood up and turned around. The autopilot had already been engaged; he was just filling a chair and taking in the blue-white sights of the void between Liberty and Bretonia. "Okay, followup questions. What are cruise restrictors, and is this going to get us killed?"

"In reverse order, no, it won't, and on top of that, you've willingly been in engineering bodges of mine that are more dangerous than this." She smirked. "Inside the confines of a system, there are certain aspects of the heliosphere that make it dangerous to go much faster than about five times the speed of light via a self-sustaining superluminal reference frame. Trade lanes sustain a static superluminal reference frame, so they're only limited to the stability of the power plants and synchronization between sequential trade lane rings, which these days caps out at around eighteen cee. All modern cruise engines are capable of surpassing five cee, but for efficiency and safety purposes, they're restricted to between four and four and a half cee depending on the model and size of ship. And marketing, of course."

Kane blinked. "But we're outside the heliosphere of any system, so we can go faster?"

"Precisely. Deep space tests have proven that up to ten cee is safe. Most of our ships can only go up to eight cee outside of a heliosphere, but that'll still halve our transit time to Cortez. The fleet will have to drop out of cruise for us to remove the restrictors, and we'll have to put them back in before we reach Cortez, and it'll take about 24 hours each to remove and replace them."

Kane paused for a minute. "You're sure this won't kill us?" he asked again.

Florence smiled. "You can shoot me if it does, sir."

"Go for it. I'll broadcast to the fleet that we're stopping for the maintenance operation."