1. Warp
It was always difficult to sleep through a warp. When you're on a ship, the rocking and shaking of the engines gets comforting after a while. Not in warp. In warp the ship is so perfectly still you'd swear we were docked to a station.
It didn't help that this Darkstar variant was old enough that there were only four bunks. The pilot was to sleep in the chair. With the steering column, maneuver sticks, and throttle jutting out at odd angles. The windows in the cockpit had dimmers, but that was like staring at a sun while wearing sunglasses - still not a good idea. It was impossible to get in a comfortable sleeping position in the pilot's seat. Or the co-pilot's seat, which was empty for this mission. Or on the grated metal floor, on the button panel, or leaning against the wall. Eventually I decided not to go to bed and palmed open the door to the galley with my messy brown hair in my eyes.
The lights were off, but a casual flick of the wrist solved that.
If only a casual flick of the wrist could fix the coffee machine...
I climbed down the stairs to the common area. Loud snoring penetrated the exploration craft's thin walls. Janus once said he could rattle the scan probes with a belch from the port observation bay. Indeed, ten liters of Mexam later, the computer reported not only a probe error, but also a minor structural failure in the engineering bay, a shield destabilization, and Wang's offensive remarks from the navigation room below the cockpit. This was also the incident that broke the coffee machine. Now, the snoring was rattling the double door that led to the crew quarters in the two-story tall block to my right, and shaking the carpet-covered common area in front of me. Including the red velvet couch.
I opened the refrigerator and poked my head in, only to slam it shut when all I found were standard-issue MREs. There wasn't a can of Mexam in sight, nor anything that was, at the very least, lacked the consistency of plastic. Wang always uses two heat charges to cook his MRE, and even then the entree is still as hard as metal. The corp doesn't give the frontier explorers enough money - that's why we're stuck with old Darkstars and MREs instead of the inner sector boys' Pegasi and working refrigerators.
You'd think that a company as kind as Civre would at the very least fix our vid-screen in the common area, but they still haven't reconnected it to the long-band networks. We're stuck with the recorded tapes and whatever Niranya can scourge up when the planet we're exploring has a Wi-Fi connection.
Currently, Wang was passed out on the couch with his head lying on the shag carpet, so I tiptoed out of the common area and stuck down into the secluded sanctuary that was the navigation room.
Verdict said we'd have another twelve hours of warp left, so I immediately walked out and left the blue holo-table to display the warp route that we'd already seen a million times.
The big Rock that was Janus was still shaking the ship, so I slipped past Wang and climbed the stairs to the med bay and A.I core. At the very least, Verdict wasn't crazy. You'd think a one-hundred-year old A.I would be at least slightly insane, but Verdict had an almost grandmotherly attitude towards us. Although, admittedly, her avatar of a blond woman in green medical scrubs was beginning to fritter around the edges. Trevor thought she looked like Marilyn Monroe. Wang was at least a little bit confused on why, and Janus and Niranya still didn't know what to think. At the very least Verdict tried to make friends with them, but so far the only friend she's attained is Trevor, who regularly works on her systems as well as helping Janus with the more "practical" parts of the ship.
One of them being the probe bay which was under the AI core, and the comm array that jutted out of the port crew quarters. Janus was always trying to adjust the comm array so Niranya could actually use it, and Trevor was always stuck trying to remotely move it while Janus floated outside in a space suit. The airlock was conveniently located on the starboard side of the ship, below Verdict's room. It was currently filled with a few boxes of scrap metal, and Janus's ill-fitting space suit. The Rockman usually only wore the helmet anyway.
Across from Verdict's room was the med bay, which "healed" you by injecting thousands of nanites into your bloodstream. While very efficient, it wasn't very comfortable, nor was it very pleasant to undertake. The needle was designed to penetrate through a Rock's natural dermal plating. It could do everything from decontaminating a wound to mending a broken bone, but other than that you'd have to go back to populated space (or at least a station) and see a doctor. Nanites still can't cure cancer.
The stark white med bay was beginning to depress me, so I left the nanite generator behind and climbed down the other side to the rear atrium, where the port observation "bay" and the three-man shuttle hung out for most of their lives. The shuttle was broken, as usual, and Janus was still trying to dislodge the stray bullet that had found its way into the engine when we were exploring an industrial-era planet last month. It was worse, because I was expected to fly the damn thing, and it definitely did not like me. The number of times that the shuttle was failed to start up is countable only via an algorithm that Verdict made up last week (it was a simple 1+100x, where x is the amount of times I'd forgotten the keys to the Darkstar in the locked cockpit). At the very least I could catch a glimpse of whatever we were landing on. Wang and Niranya never really saw anything special - Wang needed to give us navigational advice, and Niranya was the comm specialist. Trevor usually led the expeditions, with Janus and I trudging along behind him.
The hangar bay was covered with a fine layer of mechanical tools, so I gingerly stepped over them. I could've sworn the shuttle hissed at me as I walked past.
The streaks of a million stars whizzed by the big window, but it was already boring me, so I ignored it and climbed into the tiny egress port at the rear of the vessel. There was a set of stairs above me that led to the aft observation platform, which jutted out of the side of the ship like a blister. I could see the square thing mocking me as I climbed down the plastiglass tube. It was still hot and stuffy in here, even though it was big enough for Janus to climb through. Although, admittedly, Janus isn't very big.
I felt the room shaking the second I squeezed out of the egress tube. There is no better feeling than the floor slightly vibrating under your feet. I come here during long warps to relax, even though sitting next to an activated Tokamak isn't exactly the safest thing to do. It bugs me that the old Darkstar is still powered by an outdated fusion reactor instead of the newer antimatter reactors they have in inhabited space. At the very least, the fusion reactor generates more vibrations than the antimatter ones. Those are silent and deathly quiet.
There were two small windows on either side of the engineering atrium, with the heat radiators visible through them. When cloaked, warped, or under attack, the vanes would retract, but when in normal operating mode the vanes spread wide on the side of the Darkstar like they were wings. The critics loved this when Darkstars were first produced. Now, they prefer their chromite-plated luxury cruisers and pleasure liners instead of barebones exploration vessels.
Which was fine by me. Our Alcubierre MK-III was far faster that the newer tachyon-latchers. Those are bound to the jump beacon networks unlike our ring, which can go anywhere so long as there's a detectable gravity well.
The engineering atrium had an entire wall dedicated to the warp drive, with the other two covered with various buttons for the generator, radiator vanes, reactor, and the thermal engine that pushed the Darkstar forwards.
