She
She is a study of curves, and the shifting lines tell of give and take, generosity and economy. She is perfectly bilaterally symmetrical, and she moves with a fluidity that belies her strength.
She is flexible, and as she races, she changes direction with such grace as to fool the eye.
Her shape is that of a young thing, and the color of her tells of youth, despite her age. She has reached a level of maturity that adds poise to her motion, but one would easily fail to see it on a cosmetic evaluation only.
The moment I first saw her, I was enraptured, and she has never left my thoughts. I knew that I had to approach her, possess her.
She is a starship, and she will never be equaled.
———
I was nineteen, serving in the Armistice, and my life was a directionless blur of time over work. My intentions had led me as far as enlistment, and while I hadn’t realized it before I embarked, I knew immediately after that I had in my naïveté entrusted my fate to a faith in the wisdom of my elders and betters, only to find that while older, they weren’t better, and were as unaware of me as I was of what I’d do next.
When one enlists into the service of the Communion of Worlds, they lose their expectations of gleaming control consoles allowing their fingers to direct the passage of starships through the void into the orbits of green and blue virgin worlds within the space of a few days. Oh, certainly, those consoles do exist. However, the fingers that caress them could never be a part of some poor backwater proletariat organism such as us. Those lofty digits stemmed from beings that had been bred for such purpose, and our ambitions must be curtailed to being able to simply sharing the same oxygen as they.
The Communion could have done without us in the search for new worlds. Indeed, there were ships searching space beyond the reach of the Mays Engine that contained no life at all. However, for the search within the distance in which humanity could go and return from within the space of a single lifetime, it was a political necessity that such vessels would be crewed not only by humans to steer and decide, but also that any work that could be reasonably performed by humans would be done by them rather than through automation. The Luddite Resurrection Wars which birthed the Communion had seen to that edict.
No Commune could exist without workers. No workers could exist without work. Quod Eram Demonstratum.
No ship had ever been launched that contained conscripts. There had never been a need. The Exploration Directive’s propaganda was the best, and such a path was one of the very few which offered such as we any adventure, any mystery, any path whose ends we could not immediately see an end to. That meant that each batch of recruits consisted of the most independently willed, brave of heart, and self directed youth our respective worlds could achieve, and it explained the harshness of our basic training, the breaking down of each individual into the acceptance of being an element within a corporate organism of steel, glass, and minds.
Such training didn’t always take.
———
At start of shift, you are to be washed, dressed, and fed as you arrive to station. You could either achieve any two of these, or sacrifice some of your four hours sleeping time to achieve the third. I rotated through these options, without ever having risked arriving to my duty station naked. I knew of those who’d tried, usually after having chosen too little sleep for too many shifts, and their punishments had been legendary.
On the day that I’d first beheld her, I’d gone without sleeping. My station was a monitoring post for one of the external moving parts of the Mays drive. I knew that the drive had the ability to step through the curvature of space on a sixth dimensional axes, and that the shape of the drive altered depending on direction needed, but that simple statement’s real meaning was beyond me. What I did know, which had been restated to me by the duty station’s refresher orientation material (a mandatory lecture which I had to pay close attention to on taking station) was that the drive node on the hull of the ship could be moved on six axes, and my job was to monitor that movement during regular test cycles, and in the event of embarkation, so as to ensure smooth operation. Those moving parts were exposed to space, and conditions out there were harsh and unpredictable. Space isn’t as empty as we think, and anything could happen out there.
Not like in here. Each worker was rotated through different duty stations each day. Each duty station’s function had, thanks to generations of refinement, been pared down more and more until each worker’s function allowed him or her to act as what the Commune had designed them to be; a replaceable part.
My station was tedious, yet it was one that I always looked forward to in the roster because it was one of the very, dry few, that allowed the worker to see outside of the ship. There were no windows, no view screens, nor even any map displays for us. A pressure vessel doesn’t lend itself to the introduction of windows, and as to view screens, such things would only prove a costly distraction to us. There were some among us who took shifts as servants on officer decks (such shifts reserved for the especially comely among us) who said that those decks had quite many such displays, however what else would one expect for those who directed the course of the ship? This was simply good practice.
It was on that I caught my first glimpse of her. At her initial distance, I could not make out what she was, and so I had tensed, one hand over the emergency alarm, the other poised over the field generator switch which would engage a protective barrier around my station’s drive node (the extent of my options at today’s station), assuming that the increasing bright spot was a meteor.
However, her oncoming speed dropped, and my hands left their hovering position. Meteors don’t do that, and incoming munitions would if anything speed up.
She reached us, and she gave me her profile as she took station beside us. She was an escort ship, and I knew immediately that she could not be of Commune design. She was too small to house the requisite crew strength, she was too curved to be an attack ship. She was..
She was too beautiful. There was no reason to build such a thing for us, and so she wasn’t ours. Whomever had built her had done so, for no matter what other reasons, than for the joy and pride of having done so, and to have her. And the need to have her myself was overpowering.
She kept station throughout my shift, She was an escort, on top of whatever else she may be. ——
At mess, I broke two laws,
The first was in asking the most beautiful woman on my deck where we were. “We are moving through enemy territory,” said she, “and our officers are all quite anxious to be through this sector.”
“Why?”
“Something about contested space, and passage to our next search vector, “ she said. “It is odd to hear them all using such hushed tones, and so I know very little, other than that for another day, they will all be on edge. I must be very careful in my duties on the officer’s decks until we are through.”
My second violation was in engaging a shift broker. Such people always exist, and we all know who they are despite the harsh punishments they risk. A shift broker can control the duty roster, and use the exchange of favors to allow some of us to decide our next shifts. I wanted stevedore duty, and since we weren’t at port nor anchorage, the broker smirked assuming that I was looking for light duty. She was wrong, and would never collect on the favors I’d promised.
——-
Our cargo decks were quite large, so that shuttles could enter, unladen themselves in a pressurized environment, and then disembark. At dock, this station was a beehive. On route, it was a tomb, and I had it to myself. I was mopping a pristine deck.
After an hour, I stopped, and collected the three things I needed, dragging them over to the bay control booth. This station was another accessible to us with a view to the outside, and I saw her, just behind and starboard of us. Again, my heart swelled with longing, and sped my hands.
The first thing I had needed was a tool kit, which I used to open the control panel in the booth. Because the Commune prized labor, our equipment had to be repairable, and to do that, it had been understandable. This station was one that I remembered well, and so the changes to its configuration that I needed to make were quickly performed.
The second was a pressure suit, which I donned quickly but carefully. I pressed the bay door control.
Things happened quickly. Normally the bay had to be depressurized before this door could open, but I’d just seen to that. The atmosphere within the room, along with the mop and tool set, and myself, were swept out of the bay and into the void.
The pressure suit grew cold. My teeth chattered, and I gripped my third item carefully. The air in this suit would last an hour at most before fouling, but the future could tend to itself. As to now, the suit’s exterior lights switched on.
I oriented on her. There she was, majestic and graceful. Would she notice me? Would she be merciful, or merciless? With such a powerful thing as she, either could be true.
With great care, I put the third thing, a fire extinguisher, on a straight line between its exhaust port, through me, to the place I thought she might be in a short time, and engaged the extinguisher. A cone of retardant and gas left it, changing my path through space. It lasted for far too short a time, and I made tiny adjustments with hands and body that I could not understand or even process on a thinking level. But then, wasn’t that true of every moment since first I had seen her?
My aim was true, my course was set. I watched her carefully. Was that a change in direction I see her making? Soon, I would touch her. Soon, I would know my fate. I approached her, arms held wide, and smiled.