Slipspace

My sleep was fitful that night. I was relieved after my conversation with Marcus, but the stress from Kruger was still affecting me. I hated getting mad like that. It always left me feeling tired and worn. I couldn’t say I regretted anything that I’d said, but I still hated losing my temper.

When my alarm went off in the morning, I began waking up but then realized I didn’t need to get up for work. Upon that epiphany I canceled the alarm and laid back down. I was able to doze somewhat, but my internal alarm wouldn’t allow me to sleep any more despite my fondest wishes.

And so, with longing for the comfort of the bed in my heart, I got up less than an hour later. Once I was finally up, though, it wasn’t too hard to actually get going. Knowing that I was going to have to make a rougher flight today, I did want to make sure I was as ready as possible.

Flying around the debris fields in the system was a simple affair. With the correct computer equipment, travel through the slipspace gate network was routine. Even interstellar travel using a displacement field drive wasn’t overly complex under a practiced hand.

Atmospheric flight was another matter, though. Purpose-built shuttles were adequately equipped to handle the extreme stresses of re-entry without serious difficulty, but still required a much higher level of maintenance and available power to be able to reach escape velocity even after landing. A ship in space was free to maneuver however the pilot wanted as long as respect was paid to local gravity wells. To reach a planet’s surface was a very different monster, though.

To make matters more interesting, the Oxide was built using a construction bee as a large portion of the hull. Those small craft were never intended to deal with those rigors. I had built my ship well and it was approved for those operations; indeed, it had performed them before. That never took away from the morbid thrill of making that trip again though.

I pulled out my day bag to pack some clothes for my visit to the embassy. I didn’t want to look shabby for my new identification pictures, but also still needed to wear my jumpsuit for the flight down. With absolute pleasure, instead of taking out the uncomfortable clothes I had worn to dinner with the Ericksons, I packed a pair of more feminine-cut black slacks that I kept hidden in the back of the wardrobe along with a loose tunic top in a very nice twilight blue. Other accessories and a small makeup kit joined them in the bag.

I wasn’t incredibly experienced in dressing up like this, but I had practiced enough in the privacy of my own room that I was confident in my ability to make it look good for the short time it would be needed.

Bag packed, I changed out of my pajamas into my flight suit. I still wasn’t a big fan of the way it clung to my body, but safety was paramount, especially given the flight plan for the day. The looser clothes wouldn’t satisfy safety regulations. It was a necessary evil.

“Hey, Vox, get me reports for local space traffic and available planetary approach windows. I’ll also need weather information for Treysana airspace.”

This would be only the third time I had been to the capital city of the Telemachus system. The first was when I had arrived in the system a number of years back in order to register my residency and local ID. The second was to register the Oxide with the Vessel Registrar. It certainly wasn’t one of the mega cities of Sol, but it was far from the podunk town I’d lived in before on the planet.

“Information has been downloaded, would you like me to read it aloud?”

I shook my head. “No thanks, Vox. I’ll take a look once I get to the ship.”

“Compliance.” My eyes rolled. The AI was so good at (supposedly) emulating emotions and yet she made such robotic responses to some things seemingly at random. With a person, I would have sworn that they were purposely trying to throw me off. The same assumption couldn’t be immediately made for Vox, but it still left me suspicious.

Bag in hand, I left my unit and walked to a cafe in the promenade. Usually I would just get breakfast from a vending machine or the cafeteria, but I wasn’t in that kind of rush today.

It felt nice getting to relax in the smaller and more laid back restaurant. It wasn’t an upscale joint like the Sindiri Lounge, but it was a significant upgrade over the cafeteria. I took my time eating my fork and knife omelet and hash browns (plenty of ketchup on both). A cup of black coffee accompanied the meal and it was hearty indeed.

Once breakfast had been consumed and my bill paid, I took the lift into the spire to speak with the leasing agent that covered hangar rentals. The eviction was going to take my apartment away, but I needed to provide notice before I could vacate my hangar and workshop.

The woman took my notice without issue and set my date of vacancy for within three weeks to give me some extra time, just in case. There were some empty platitudes about ‘thank you for your patronage’ and ‘we’re sorry to see you go’. It was customer service at its most basic.

I couldn’t say that I would miss the job or the station too much. It had been a good stop for me on my journey to fulfillment. Sure, I had done some amazing things in Telemachus. The Oxide was an accomplishment any engineer could be proud of and being able to make the money I did was a feat in and of itself. I would never regret my time here, but I was looking forward to the great beyond.

My musings carried me all the way back to my hangar. Vox obviously saw me entering and the lights were coming on even as the door was opening. The rust bucket sat stoically in the central room and I gave it a soft smile. The same smile graced the nacelles on the rack they had hung from for the last two years. I would be mounting them at long last soon. Excitement bubbled in my heart.

A beep alerted me to a message and I opened my holopad. My excitement only grew as I looked over the missive from Sisko and Yates law firm, confirming to me that the name change had been filed and awaited final signatures in the local embassy. I could hardly believe how fast it had happened. Truly, the power of money was great. I hated its power over my life, but the stuff could be outright useful when applied correctly.

The bag was tossed into my storage locker and I actually took the time to secure it when I climbed into the ship. It was going to be a bumpy ride and I didn’t want anything flying loose. The cargo bay was entirely clear so I didn't have anything to worry about there. With a few quick button presses, communications came online and I began filing my flight plan.

Flight plans for planetary approaches added a level of complexity to the process. On top of my usual clearances for local traffic, I had to talk to planetary traffic control as well to secure a window for my descent. It added another ten minutes to the work, but soon afterward, I was submitting the entire thing to both authorities and getting my ship through final preparations for flight.

Since descent took relatively little fuel, I wouldn’t need to fill up before departure, but I would likely have to take some on before leaving the surface. Escaping the planetary gravity required hard burns of the engines which consumed ample amounts of fuel, nearly as much as a standard FTL hop. True spacecraft just weren’t designed to cut through aerodynamic drag like an orbital shuttle and the bulbous front end and manipulator arms of the Oxide definitely didn’t help the aerodynamic situation.

All the mundane paperwork done, I was able to get departure clearance from D’reth STC and left my hangar behind. Since the station was already in orbit, it was relatively simple to drop my orbital altitude to the parking orbit dictated by the PTC. Waiting for half an hour for my window to open was a bit annoying but I passed the time idly listening to music and daydreaming.

“Oxide-77,” Came the comms channel finally. “You are cleared for descent. Maintain entry speed at or below seven-five-hundred meters per second and trajectory angle of three degrees. Contact Treysana Spaceport approach on channel one two zero below five-zero-thousand meters.”

I repeated the instructions to the control authority and got a ‘readback correct’ in return. After a deep breath, I engaged retrograde thrusters and began dropping my periapsis to match the required three degree descent. It didn’t take long before I began seeing exterior hull temperatures begin to climb. Transferring power from the core to the field emitters, I engaged the magneto-plasma shielding to help disperse the heat.

What started off as a light shake became a rattle through the entire spaceframe of my ship, metal braces groaning under the stress. I was pushed deeper into my seat as the g-forces grew. Looking out the window, I could see an eclectic aura of the blue plasma from the shielding and the fiery red of the burning air around me that made for quite the lightshow. Temperature gauges across the control panel were going all over the place as my ship and I plummeted from orbit.

The shields held against the abuse, but I had to increase the power flow to the emitters to keep their strength up. The altimeter’s numbers raced faster than I could keep up with and I found myself holding desperately onto the flight control sticks whenever I wasn’t sparing a hand to adjust settings. As the Oxide bit into ever thicker air, a wailing sound began singing from around me, created by the rushing air melding with the harmonics of the shield emitters.

After a harrowing ten minute descent, the flames, shaking and screaming air died down and I was finally able to see the orangy sky of the planet clearly. Ventral thrusters fired to slow my descent further until I was able to maintain a steady altitude. My relief was palpable, but I wasn’t done yet.

Treysana Spaceport local control took over my approach from there. The violent entry into the atmosphere was behind me and now I just needed to fight my way through quickly thickening air traffic around the capital city.

Flying the Oxide in atmosphere held very little in common with the orbital operations I was used to. In space, my ship was nimble for its size and responded quickly. Through the air, it turned into a clumsy and sluggish bear to deal with. I had to constantly keep ventral thrusters running just to keep it from dropping like a rock and every course correction required significant manipulation of maneuvering thrusters and the small air brakes on the engine pylons. A brick with rockets strapped to it would have flown nearly as well.

Once I broke through the cloud cover, the city of Treysana loomed ahead. It was a big city, by all accounts.

Even after the corporate rush abandoned the system, many people stayed behind on Telemachus IV. Lives had been established, cities built, businesses grown. Telemachus was no longer the utopia it had once been proclaimed to be, but it was still a gateway to the outer ring with a lot of business going through it. On a planet that had been largely stripped of natural resources, Treysana still stood as a metropolis with a thriving population, the center of business for an entire system.

Much like D’reth Station, it was obvious that not all of the infrastructure was shiny and new, but skyscraping buildings gleamed on the horizon nonetheless. The location of the spaceport in the city outskirts was apparent as I approached. The dense city abruptly gave way to a large swath of low but long hangars and a commercial terminal that was bustling far more than the station ever was. These were the people that were taking flights around the planet and getting on shuttles that would be flying directly to different places within the system and through the gate network to systems beyond.

Final approach was pretty direct, thankfully. Orbital trips carried priority over local traffic simply due to the speed and rarely good flight characteristics involved. One final burn of my ventral thrusters brought me and my ship to a landing on a large wheeled pad on a less densely populated section of the tarmac that was dedicated to private pilots. Scorching the pad was unavoidable on the surface, but these pads were built to withstand that abuse.

A large sigh escaped me as the relief sank in. I had reached the surface.