N.Barrera: Not my first commission, not the tidiest, but always the finest. Small cabins make for a well-built ship - more supportive walls, more structural mass to burn through before the plasma hits the reactor. That was reassuring. I’ve only been here for fourteen hours and the claustrophobia’s already starting to dial up.
I’m going to enjoy it here. Now if only if I knew where to get a shorter damn bedroll, this'd be heaven rather than the gate outside.
E.Halley: New shipmates shipped on from Kansas ways - they look like they’ve been outta’ mag-train wreck, half of them. Strange eyes.
I don’t know how to commit their faces to wrote - going to have to. We’ve been getting so familiarised with the reconditioning team that it’s taking me aback to see actual backs in those flight positions.
I’ve been talking to logistics, but nobody’s got a com-suit yet. Crew chiefs are up the wall over it - one stray micrometeorite, they keep reminding us. We’re behind fifty tonnes of armour per square foot, I’d remind him, but I’m not hungry to get my leg chewed off.
For the chef’s stew though? Separate issue. Taking Jameson out to holo-tag. No sense in a rec-bay if you don’t get to recreate the Lion’s winning streak every Thursday night, right?
C.Jameson: Well, that first lieutenant up from gunnery schooled me at holo-tag again. If she keeps this up she’s going to get to ship wide championship. From the look on her eyes you’d get the impression that she really loves to put a flame under the ass of anybody with a stripe down from her.
The new arrivals are settling in well enough. I remember when we were still ship-naked, dressed down to the fittings. Every time helm took us through a longitudinal roll somebody in engineering would go crack a rib. Fun times.
We’re routing our engines up and down, scrolling through the drive settings - but cautiously. We’re doing it from five percent to twenty three percent - nice and slow. Not stressing up anything severe, keeping the metal separate. The ship isn’t all brass and knobs, but it’s running cleaner than a Curacao prostitute.
She was our darling in blue, she was. No battleship like her. Some say the Hackers sourced the parts, but I think different - since when have you ever seen a hacker with a battleship? Makes about as much sense as as an icecream sunday sandwich, which sounds like exactly the kind of monstrosity Conrad would try to synthesise out of the tuck tenders.
For a ship that never saw action, she's gone through crews like crap out of a sewer.
N.Barrera: Supplies. Bed rolls, bog rolls, hull bolsters, protein boosters, you name it, the Junkers provide. In bulk, totally unmarked of course.
We're hooked in the the long voyage. I'm looking forward to it. Clear the air running through fresh vacuum. Clean the sides with when she shields charge. Wash the warship for the road.
I don't think the people who screwed joiner to plate ever thought we'd be doing this to her.
E.Halley: El fantasma. Some sick-tricker with a sense of humour. Used to jump out through the codespace - then, poof, gone. Too fast for human eyes to catch, but that's what you get for running active processing in 1024 bit. It's nothing significant. We're running backups for the backups and the VIs know how to check themselves.
Yet there's still old fantasma. The ghost. Not the ghost in the machine - a soul's just sloppy programming - but the quantum kinks in hypercomputing that you just can't get away with ignoring any longer when it starts to glare at yer'.
I'll talk to syst-ops. It's nothing more than a performance lul. So far.
C.Jameson: We like to think that it's a lucky ship. It's certainly shipshape - no slouch for a hack-together of the borderworlds. But it's all Libertonian surplus - we off-the-shelved what we couldn't imitate from the original hull series. If the Hackers could do it with no funding and no prior experience in large ship manufacture, we could do it too. First principles are always the best principles - you can't change physics, after all.
We passed the Magellan star two hours ago. Welcome to the barrier. The wall between the known and the unknown.
You mix oxygen with water and what do you get? You get rust! The entire barrier's a cometary trail - with a little electrolysis and compression, you could breathe it in! I'm surprised the fields aren't swarming with advanced celestial life. Disappointed, frankly.
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