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portablecity · 2 years

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Warp Riders!

Chapter 7

The Orb had come to them about a year after they’d officially started running gigs together – the Captain, the Navigatrix, the Engineer, the Bosun, and Lucy. At that stage, they’d pulled off a few good tricks for some high rollers, and they’d gotten cocky.

Mostly clients communicated via parcel coordinates – they’d send galactic positioning system coordinates, and the Nav’d find them on the map, and Lucy’d pilot the flight, and they’d all have a good nap until the ship dinged and they’d haul in a tiny little box with instructions.

They’d drop off scores and pick up payments the same way; they only went planet-side for the runs themselves, and the occasional shopping trip.

So it wasn’t unusual to pick up a faint signal full of numbers and letters; and it wasn’t particularly hard for the Engineer to decode.

It was, notably, a pretty remote corner to go fishing for a tiny box in, but the Captain’d told them that was how the best clients worked; they were too rich and powerful to know the difference between reasonable requests and inconvenient ones. So off they went.

But it wasn’t a box at the coordinates; it was a small, very small, very dark, very hard to find chunk of an asteroid. Lucy saw it first, noticed its dust trail on the scanner. They’d pulled it in, and the first person to pick it up had been the Navigatrix – and that was when things got weird.

First, she froze. For a full minute, no one could get her attention or pull the rock from her hands.

Then, the rock exploded, sending dust across the common room, larger fragments rattling against the ceiling, the floor, the lockers… when they blinked the dust away enough to see, the Navigatrix had pulled whatever was still in her hands right up to her face, and she humming the way she did when charting a drop, but faster, higher, frantically.

When she finally lowered them, she revealed the Orb.

They’d passed it around; the strange sphere of gas that simply… held itself together. It had almost no weight, but it also had no momentum – they could gently push it from hand to hand and it would simply stop midair if they disengaged.

The Captain had taken it first, eyes wide with fear even after the Navigatrix had woken up and laughed with delight. The Captain stared at it for a minute or two, then scoffed at it with some relief.

Next it went to the Engineer, who mostly talked about its mass and energy and glow.

She hadn’t bothered staring into it particularly; she just pushed it around until she got bored, and then gently shoved it over to the Bosun.

The Bosun cast a skeptical eye across it, shook her head, and handed the Orb, though they didn’t know it was the Orb then, to Lucy.

Lucy smiled, like it was all a fun game, as she caught the Orb and pulled it towards her face; but she grew deadly serious as she squinted into it. There was a hint of awe on her face when she locked eyes with the Navigatrix.

“Is this thing – is this a chart?”

The Navigatrix grinned like a mischievous child.

“If I’m right, Lucy, this thing is a chart of time.”

It took a few creative modifications to the ship, but within a month they were ready for their first trip outside of time. The Captain had brainstormed a list of new possible gigs to try if this thing really worked, and she kept them all on task.

First, they went into warp – as usual – but then came the new part: they went all the way through, out the other side of light speed. Suddenly, they weren’t going impossible fast – they were simply floating motionless in a churning, smearing maelstrom of stars.

Then the Navigatrix sat down at the helm and raised the Orb to her eye level. She shoved all ten fingers into its gaseous form and began to stretch it, pulling it wider, taller, deeper, until it became a huge bubble that she was completely hidden within.

Her voice was muffled as she hummed her busy-thinking hum, and the Orb started to churn in sync with the lights outside the ship — and then the ship began to move, driven by the Navigatrix from deep within the Orb.

And once she proved they could move in and out of time at will, the Captain sent word out that they had new, longer term capabilities, and the real fun began.

The Navigatrix started spending more and more time inside the Orb, coming out to locate more mundane locations on the usual computer, or to eat, or to sleep, but very rarely. She was the first one of them to realize that eating and sleeping had become … optional, essentially.

In fact, a lot of things felt optional after a while. The accounts they’d set up once while a century or two in the past were taking care of most of their material needs, and being outside of time really reduced those to almost nothing.

They still did client work, but more for the fun of it; maybe that was why the jobs they took got so much more dangerous.

#Warp Riders!#orb #magic orb #time travel #warp speed #the navigatrix #scifi fantasy #space fantasy #orb and planet

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shelandsorcery · 8 months

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been thinking about the navigatrix, who grew up in the void, mapping the stars as a weightless toddler, learning trigonometry and calculus like other kids learn their first language; forever inherently aware that in space, nothing is ever still; the navigatrix, who, like every one of her kith and kin, left the homeships to help the rest of humanity navigate between the stars, who picked the smallest ship she could find and found herself with a new family and a very criminal career path, all for the love of adventure; the navigatrix, who could hold and read charts of planets, of galaxies, and when the opportunity presented itself, of time.

#my oc shit #sci fi #retro #raygun #space #navigatrix

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ofpd · 1 year

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on the one hand it's needlessly gendered to have different endings for english words depending on the gender of the person they describe and like i think it's best to retire the word actress for example and just always use actor. on the other hand it's really funny to substitute -trix for words that end in -tor unnecessarily

#i used the word ‘navigatrix’ a million times on thursday #navigator but a girl #txt

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transmissionsfromthebattlefield · 1 year

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What A Fantastic Movie I’m In

Someone on last.fm changed the album photo for Simply Saucer’s superb Cyborgs Revisited compilation from the good ol’ fashioned monochrome photo I’m used to to the original cover, the same photo soaked in searing psychedelic YMCK acid. It’s common for black and white photos to be everywhere on last.fm, and I do enjoy the combined old school-and-concise ethos of that mission, but I also appreciate the WHOA TRIPPEN OUT WOOOOOOAH effect of this shakeup.

I’ve been feeling the psych quite a bit these past days, to be truthful. Barbarella has been on my brain something fierce. As I get back to navigatrixing the trials and tribulations of Planet College, I guess I feel myself a tiny bit of its titular heroine, albeit less dumb (let’s be frank, she was pretty dumb) and more post-Babs Jane Fonda mugshot. At least, that’s what I’m trying to convey for myself. This is the semester I start going all in with the May 4 commemoration, after all, so I’ve got to get into that FTA ‘tude somehow. (Jane was scheduled to speak at the fiftieth back in 2020, but we all know how that went. NEAT.)

There’s a Barbarella remake in the works, apparently, which I only learned of fairly recently even though it was announced months ago. They’ve been trying for one since I think the nineties with actresses such as Drew Barrymore, and each try has ended in a quiet whimper of an abortion. This makes sense considering that Barbarella is a movie that could have only been made in 1968. How to you expect a modern audience to react to certain parts of that movie? Fittingly, there’s a plot summary for an early 2000s attempt (which of course I can’t find again for the life of me), and it sounds absolutely nothing like the original. Interesting if put in the right hands, but not faithful to the source material. Maybe it’s closer to the source material’s source material, which I am not yet familiar with. (Thanks to Mahvel’s subliminal effects on pop culture at large, I always forget that Barbarella is a comic book movie.)

That terminated remake seemed to take a more overtly political bent than the original, with lots of societal inequality and having your innocent past shattered before your eyes and the like. The original is also political, but in a super subtle way that is, obviously, drenched in copious amounts of sex. It is so sexy, in fact, that all anyone talks about regarding it is whether or not it is sexist. There’s surely a lens other than the feminist one that people can take about this movie* (while still recognizing Jane Fonda’s eternally radiating wonderfulness), and it doesn’t have to be an extremely serious one. Our world is more absurd, technologically advanced, and, frankly, stupid than ever, just like a Barbarella adventure. And what do we do? We refuse the laugh. It’s insane. And if you don’t recognize the insanity you can’t sustainably live.

2023! Less knee-jerk puritanical reactions, more embracing and exploring the trappings of liberation and all its hidden ugly corners, the pure intertwining with the reprehensible in perfect yin-yang union. If that remake actually happens, it is going to be awful.

* And I consider myself a feminist!

#blog #Barbarella #films #movie remakes #things I enjoy #Simply Saucer #absurdity #psychedelic shit #I'm a fucken navigatrix or something #FEMINISM #trippy

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parchmentleaves · 3 months

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Lady Essiala Ariathia ban Vor'cle

No game this week, so a brief entry about Lady Essiala instead. Who is the lady behind this journal? Linked above or copy-pasted below.

Lady Essiala Ariathia Sorjiik den Morgenstern ban Vor’cle is the Navigator Primaris of the void-ship Gloriosa Lux Misericordiae Imperialis, a role she has held for just over a standard decade. She is a bookish and reserved woman who prefers the solitude of her library to the hubbub of human interactions, and uses her noble bearing as a mask to conceal her terrors and inner loneliness.

Child of Vor’cle

Essiala is a scion of House Vor’cle, an ancient and vaunted House of the Navis Nobilite that eschews sector and planetary politics in favour of broad-ranging interests and connections throughout the Imperium of Man, including at the very heights of power. Vor’cle Navigators guide ships of nobility, adepta of the mighty Adeptus Terra, Rogue Traders, and even the dreaded Inquisition. The House maintains its own fleet of void-clippers – fast courier voidcraft that crisscross Sectors, Segmenta and even the Imperium itself bearing information too dense, complex or secure to risk astropathic communication, as well as individuals wishing swift and unobtrusive transport across the stars.

She was born on one of these void-clippers, the lean and ancient Morgenstern, and is a child of an esteemed and stable gene-lineage that has been free of genomic instability for over a millenium. Children of the Sorjiik lineage tend to a greater height, leanness of build and paleness of skin than even most void-born, with many also possessing entirely black eyes well-suited to finding even the fainest of lights in the darkness of the void. Essiala shows all these traits and, like many children of her line, prefers her quarters set to lower local gravity and dimmer lumination than ship standard.

House Vor’cle is less hidebound than many great magisterial Houses of the Navis Nobilite who might rely on their breeding and connections to secure contracts of navigation. The Vor’cle instead educate their scions and inculcate a deep curiosity about the universe into them. They in turn record everything that they encounter on their long-ranging travels across and beyond the Imperium and send their reports back to the House archives, where they may be used to further the obectives of the House and its allies. This cavalier disregard for the virtue of ignorance has led to multiple long term feuds between the House and factions of the Ecclesiarchy.

Dark Apprenticeship

Decades of scholarship and apprenticeship taught Essiala well the lessons of her House. She served as a Navigatrix Tertius and learned the practicalities of navigation aboard multiple ships with distinction and no issue save for a short-lived daliance with a bright-eyed void-mistress that ended when Essiala ascended to the rank of Navigatrix Secundus and was assigned to the void-ship Revenance.

Her years aboard the Revenance took her into the Halo Stars beyond the frontiers of the Imperium. She saw strange aetheric phenomena and curious alien ruins, decimated remnants of fallen civilisations far older than that of Man, and steered the ship through terrible warp storms to find safe refuge in the light of the Astronomicon once more. An incident occured on one voyage where she had the honour of steering the ship while the Navigator Primaris was recovering from injuries following a skirmish with Orkish pirates. The ship’s Gellar field, likely suffering some minor damage in the prior engagement, fluctuated during a turbulent ana-surge within the Immaterium and something attempted to coalesce through the cracks into the Navis spire.

A shapeless darkness with a voice of ash and burning violet eyes appeared on before Essiala and begged for her to open disable the safeties on the Aciens Horrens, the heavily warded portal through which the Navigator views the Immaterium, and allow it inside. It offered power, knowledge, all the sweet temptations fit to lure her into obeying its pleas. She refused and, in a moment of righteous anger, tried to turn the power of her Third Eye on the blasphemous thing. The entity simply laughed in amusement and departed, leaving her with words.

“Such fire you have. And such fires you will see Beyond. Three and three and all will burn as bright as you. May they consume you by delightful degrees.”

Essiala found herself marked and shaken by this dreadful encounter. All food tastes of ash in her mouth and her dreams echo with the three-eyed entities mocking laughter. In response she threw herself into studying all she could find about such blasphemous foes, so that she might face and destroy the entity if she encountered it once more. And to this day she takes great care to maintain a personal shrine to the Emperor in her quarters, praying to Him on Earth and all His Saints each morning after a night of fitful, restless sleep.

Navigator of the Gloriosa Lux

The incident on the Revenance earned Essiala her elevation to the rank of full Navigatrix, after sufficient psychoexamination and deep testing to ensure that the entity had left no taint upon her soul. She was assigned to fulfil House Vor’cle’s contract of navigation with the Void-ghast Dynasty, an ancient rogue trader family now fallen from the heights of their past glories, and she assumed the duties of Navigator Primaris aboard the Void-ghast’s only true void-ship, the Sword-class frigate Gloriosa Lux Misericordiae Imperialis.

Lady Essiala worked well with the Gloriosa Lux and her Lord-Captain Eleazar Void-ghast, steering the vessel on nearly a dozen expeditions into into the wild space of the Koronus Expanse and bringing her home safely each time. Each voyage brought new wonders and new terrors, and always the subtlest hints of some meaning behind the words and the sinister laughter haunting her nightmares.

Lord Eleazar’s sudden and unexpected death upended everything. Gloriosa Lux was forced to return to anchorage, spending nearly a year in limbo waiting for the heir to the Dynasty, the Writ of Trade, and the Lord-Captaincy to be found. Essiala spent the time reading, writing notes for future memoirs, and attempting to make sense of her dreams. She could feel a pattern forming, though it was still too diffuse and subtle to fully grasp.

Finally, after interminable politics and delays of transit, Lazarus Void-ghast was declared Lord of the Dynasty and the Gloriosa Lux Misericordiae Imperialis has set sail once more into the Koronus Expanse…

#rogue trader #rogue trader ttrpg #ttrpg character #navigator #warhammer 40k

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skinks · 11 months

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when we were growing up going on family holidays in the car my mum would have the map and my dad would drive and call her the navigatrix. and so now if you’re in my passenger seat with google maps open bc I don’t know where tf we’re going then you are automatically my navigatrix. symbiotic relationship

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ao3feed-brucewayne · 7 months

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Batgirl vs. The Alien Invasion

read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/aEdYV0N by Misstakenmanips When the Joker launches Batgirl into outer space, she's rescued by a mysterious and beautiful Astro-Navigatrix from the 401st Century! Words: 9310, Chapters: 4/4, Language: English Series: Part 4 of Batgirl 66 - The Miss Taken Stories Fandoms: Batman (1966), Barbarella (1968) Rating: Explicit Warnings: Rape/Non-Con Categories: F/F Characters: Barbara Gordon, Joker (DCU), Alfred Pennyworth, Barbarella (Barbarella), Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Oswald Cobblepot, Selina Kyle, Harleen Quinzel, Pamela Isley, Jonathan Crane, Victor Fries, Clancy O'Hara, Jervis Tetch, Edward Nygma, Jim Gordon Relationships: Barbara Gordon/Barbarella Additional Tags: Crossover, Tentacles, Tentacle Sex, Tentacle Rape, Tentacle Monsters, pew pew pew, Alien Sex, Alien Invasion, Batspin, Vore read it on AO3 at https://ift.tt/aEdYV0N

#IFTTT #bruce wayne #batman #the caped crusader #the dark knight #dcu #ao3 #ao3feed

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queenlucythevaliant · 3 years

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Who my soul loves

She had no name, but this was not so strange a thing. Her father called her Daughter and she called him Father, on the days when they bothered to use words at all. Once, when the world was newly made, her father had danced through the Narnian skies, fleet of foot and bright of spirit; the creatures of the earth had called him Ramandu, then.

Daughter had been young when her father had grown weary of the skies and been carried to his island to rest. She had scarcely been beyond the nebula-nurseries of her birth; certainly, she had never been noticed by even the most meticulous stargazers below, and thus she had never been named. As short as her time in the heavens had been, Daughter knew what it was to be a star. She did not miss it, but sometimes she longed for it.

As I said, it mattered little that she had no name. Daughter was name enough.

It was difficult, later, to say how long she lived with her father there at the beginning of the end of the world. Time passed slowly, rhythmically, like waves lapping at a shore. The number of sunrises she greeted did not well correspond to her maturity. Perhaps it is best to say that by the time the Dawn Treader arrived on the island, she knew a great deal of the world and very little of its people.

Daughter would say later that she loved Caspian at once; this was a half-truth. When she heard the young king say, Lady, I hope to speak with you again, she felt a surge of fierce affection for his sweet, fumbling earnestness. Affection turned to joy when he returned to the island and made good on his word, and soon sweetened to love.

What is your name? asked the king. Caspian and Daughter were sitting together by the shore of the island, watching the sun set in the distant West. Her hand was in his, and his thumb rubbed slow circles across her knuckles.

My name is Daughter, she replied, but you must not call me that.

What, then?

What am I to you?

Beloved, whispered the king.

They were quiet after that, Caspian and his Beloved. She did not know what he was thinking, but she enjoyed the way he looked at her.

He asked her to marry him two days later. He was faltering, earnest, and she loved him for it. When she told him yes, he beamed.

You have captured my heart, Caspian told her, pressing kisses to both of her hands, my darling, my bride.

And so it was that Beloved left her father behind, and the birds, and the singing, and the sunrise. She moved into the quarters that had been the Lady Queen’s, and she saw Caspian every day. Rynelf taught her how to trim a sail and called her Lady Star. Drinian showed her the Dawn Treader’s navigation instruments, and Beloved taught him the names of stars he had never seen before. Navigatrix, he called her.

Caspian called her many things, but Beloved was his favorite. Sometimes, when she was at her happiest, she called him You who my soul loves. Caspian would beam and run his hands along her fingers, or else he would chuckle and kiss her. You are altogether beautiful, my love, he would say, there is no flaw in you.

When they dropped anchor in the Lone Islands, Caspian took supper with the Duke and Beloved accompanied him. When they arrived at Bern’s residence, Caspian began to introduce her. My fiancé, he began, then paused. I am Lady Star, Beloved cut in. Bern clasped her hand in greeting. You are very welcome, my lady, he said.

Narrowhaven was in far better condition than Caspian had left it; the Duke had made short work of the place. Thus, the king found himself rather less busy than he had anticipated, and with plenty at time to spend at leisure with Beloved. On a cool, breezy day, they went to Felimath together. They were accompanied by a guard, but it felt private all the same. The wind whipped cowlicks into Caspian’s hair; Beloved laughed and laughed.

Not long after returning to Narnia, Caspian took her as his bride. He cut a charming figure, with a crown on his head and a long ermine-edged robe trailing behind him, but Beloved loved him for his earnestness, his warmth.

The Narnians called her Queen and Queen Star most of the time. Queen Radiant became popular after she became pregnant, because she grew hotter and brighter as Rilian grew within her. By the time he was born, Beloved’s hands were painfully hot to touch, but Caspian gripped them tight all the same.

You are beautiful as Cair Paravel, my love; awesome as an army with banners. Turn away your eyes from me, for they overwhelm me.

After she was gone, the Narnians called her Beloved.

#i'm sorry i just can't stand 'liliandil'#it's too... floral?#like #i get what they were going for #i do #i just can't get on board with it #and this way i get to incorporate some Song of Songs #(I did not initially plan on incorporating Song of Songs #but Narnia could always use some more Bible allusions so...)#anyway #narnia #caspian X #ramandu's daughter #the voyage of the dawn treader #pontifications and creations #into light #Leah stories

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starsailorstories · 2 years

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The tale of the deeds of the Holy Suns ☀️

The title is less unwieldy in the original lol.

This is the Deep Root of a lot of Basilean cultural stuff. It isn’t Why Things Are The Way They Are, but it’s often employed to justify it. A lot of this story (particularly the end) comes from actual prehistoric astronomy conducted by pre-planetary astraeas and then passed down through the projection art tradition.

I’m going to have to do a reblog for each section, since I can’t put them all in one post

Anyway

There was a time when all things

were spread in kind about the universe.

The children of the Mother walked

alone and seeking through the vales

of the vacuum.

By the flame which Luca brought,

the keen eyes of Levinoxia,

Lady of the Void, then spied a little scrap.

She asked her what she was.

“I am what I will be,”

the proto-cloud replied,

“Whether beast or sun,

Sword or drum,

Art or fortune.”

The goddess bent to her

And laughed, and told her:

“All you touch, void-voyager,

will be bright with my lady’s favor

no matter from what deep medium

it may come.

For whatever you will be,

you will look now into the blinding flame

and understand, and be finally wise.”

And cradled in the hand of the changer,

the cloud began to change.

Her core drew together;

her eyes opened and her sides

spread in tendrils

and trembling in the raiments of the goddess

was a scironis,

the first to breathe.

So was the form

which Jenya first invented for herself.

Propelled by the winds

of the lantern-core the goddess placed

into her head,

she was taken towards the nexus

of the first latitude

and hardly dared to look,

yet the navigatrix of her way

intended her return

or at least to meet her,

traveling the lines

of the young and unmapped universe.

#sweet chariot #worldbuilding #conlangs

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runekeepershymnal · 3 years

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Hey, here’s a fic and an art!

So if you’re into The Raven Cycle / Pynch and would like to read the fic I wrote for @ravencyclebigbang, you can find it on AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/33705250/chapters/83771521

It was inspired by the incredible artwork of @navigatrixart which I hope I did justice, and was beta’d by the incredible findyourstars on AO3.

You can also find Navigatrixart on instagram.

Brief summary: Ronan Lynch is having a boring evening in while his roommate is away, and receives an unexpected, sleepwalking guest.

Link to Navigatrix' art!

(Oh god am I missing anything? Please let me know if I am. Blargh.)

#the raven cycle #the dreamer trilogy #pynch #pynch fanfiction #trc big bang 2021 #trc #tdt #navigatrixart

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portablecity · 2 years

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Warp Riders!

Chapter 20

The drips were louder, echoing all over the cavern. She didn’t feel like sitting up and checking, but the Captain thought the water must be meters lower than before. She was probably going to be stuck on this island till high tide again.

That is, unless she was on a particularly climbable island, and the squared off edges of the flat bit did not bode well. Ruins, ruins, everywhere on this damn moon.

“It’s like the whole damn thing is built of these horrible blocks!”

“The what? Oh-” and the Navigatrix was moving.

The Captain could hear her voice, talking to someone outside as the last pieces of disturbed gravel rattled down the cavern. Disturbingly, she didn’t hear them splash.

Caving in to curiosity, she sat up and turned her headlamp back on.

“Oh, shit.”

The water was gone – completely gone from anywhere she could see. And she was indeed resting atop a steep pile of overlarge stone bricks, stacked upon one another haphazardly, stretching hundreds of feet in the air above a sandy, silty floor. In fact, it was one of many.

In fact, it really did look like the only thing holding up a layer of sandy soil and foliage was piles and stacks of these worn out bricks. What the Captain had read as cliff walls were, closer to the bottom of the drained lake, clearly made of the same blocks.

The lake floor was sand and gravel and rubble, except for where the current of the draining water had revealed, underneath, bricks. In fact, it almost looked like the vertical piles were originally evenly spaced, as if this … cavern, had been made intentionally.

Grimacing, the Captain looked up to the ceiling – and mercifully she saw something that looked more like a natural cave. There were mineral deposits dripping down, and thin tendrils that could be roots. If there were ruins involved, they were hidden well.

Scuffling noises returned, the scrabble of gravel as it moved underfoot.

“Navigatrix?”

“Just had to secure the rope; heading your way now.”

“No, wait! Tide’s out, it could come back at any moment!”

But the Navigatrix’s headlamp was illuminating the tunnel now, growing brighter. The glare flooded the Captain’s eyes as she made it to the end of the tunnel.

“Lovely to see you, Captain!” Then the beam pointed away, at the rest of the cave, and the Captain could see her, loaded down with climbing harnesses, rolled-up raft, another rope, who knows what else. “Not what I was expecting, I have to admit.”

She started winching herself down the steep cliff side.

“Navigatrix, seriously, it’s going to flood again, just wait.”

“No – huff – I don’t think – hff – – that I’ll bother with waiting.”

She paused to salute the Captain.

The Captain pulled herself closer to the edge of the flat block she was reclining on, to better see as the Navigatrix landed on the cave floor and shook out the cramps from her legs and arms. She immediately bent down to poke at some rubble.

“Hey! No time for research!”

“There’s bones here, Captain.” She pulled out what was visibly a femur, even from a distance. “Human bones.”

“Are you – are you collecting them?”

Muffled, as she was half bent to the floor sifting through sand, the Navigatrix shouted “I promised the Engineer!”

Finally she started walking over the slimy, rubble-strewn terrain, picking her way towards the base of the Captain’s tower of blocks.

The Captain strained her ears desperately to try and catch any hint of water crashing back into the cave. The drips felt like a cacophony.

She looked down, and once again the Navigatrix was bent over something half buried in the sand.

“You are going to get very, very wet if you don’t hurry up!”

“Do you still have your scanner, Captain?”

“What?” The Captain had to pause to check. “No, no it fell first, then me.”

The Navigatrix pulled a rattling pile of rust out of the sand. “Well, I found it.” She tucked it into her pack. “Trust me, you’ll want to see it.”

“Could you please focus?”

“It’s fine, Captain, I’m sure–”

And that’s when the gurgling noise came back, but much louder.

#Warp Riders!#serial fiction #scifi fantasy #adventure #rescue #the navigatrix #the captain #whoops

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shelandsorcery · 2 years

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Warp Riders

A novella.

(version 1)

By Shel Kahn

stories.portablecity.net

Chapter 1

The thing was, they’d been living out of time for … well, some time, and maybe more than anything else it was the feeling of time, real time - linear time - passing, that made the planet grate on her so much.

They’d been there for something like 30 hours so far. The planet - well, honestly, it was a moon - was facing the lit side of a gas giant, and night never really fell. The lighting options seemed to be either a greenish sunlight or a warm planet-lit dusk. It made the Captain uncomfortable.

Their poor fallen ship was immersed in a briny lake at the moment, but there had been a couple hours under that green sun where the pull of that gas giant had tugged the water away, and she’d got a good look at it.

And they got some supplies out, which was the main thing.

The Bosun had a proper camp set up above the high tide line an hour after that, and the Engineer got her surveying equipment out, and the Navigatrix laid out all her charts on the flat slabs and got down to work figuring out where they’d landed.

The Stowaway even sat down and started putting a cooking fire together with dried lakeweed, following the Bosun’s instructions.

But the Captain didn’t really know what to do with herself, to be honest.

Chapter 2

They agreed after the second or third cycle that the green sunlight was awful, and most of the crew took to sleeping during the sunlit parts of the day, and puttering around in the planet-lit dusk.

On the fourth night, as the dusk brightened on the horizon and the rest of the crew were filing into their mercifully dark tents, the Navigatrix pulled the Captain aside. She gestured with her eyes to the Stowaway, who was dusting themselves off fastidiously before going to bed.

“Have you made any progress on talking to them yet?”

The Captain frowned. “No.”

“When were you thinking of figuring that out?”

“I wasn’t. I’m busy.”

They were standing on the edge of the high plateau, and the Captain watched the tide pull the lake water away from them.

She had been flying with the Navigatrix for years before they left time; they used to work so well together. But now the Navigatrix had this … this pitying look on her face, and it was getting on the Captain’s nerves.

“You don’t seem to be doing that much,” she said gently, her eyebrows tightening a bit. It was infuriating.

“Well, no, I can’t, can I? Because someone crashed my ship on this damp moon while I did a routine computer reset!”

The Navigatrix did not have the grace to look at all guilty. And, to be fair, none of them knew how things had gone this wrong; they’d been safely outside time.

“Well, Captain, it seems somewhat urgent that you prioritize communicating with our quiet friend.” The Navigatrix paused, and leaned down and put her hand on the Captain’s shoulder. “I think they may know more about this whole debacle than we guessed.”

The Captain didn’t sleep after that; she just stared at the seam of her tent as it leaked green sunlight.

—

Chapter 3

The Stowaway had shown up after their last gig. The four of them had fled back to the ship after things had gone sideways. They’d quickly battened the hatches and dropped through the warp, back out of time, and it was only afterwards they noticed them hiding in Lucy’s old bunk.

They weren’t a crew that got stowaways; the Engineer had set up very fiddly locking systems on all the doors of the ship, the sort that took a whole choreography of twists and turns to unlatch. So the first thing the Captain asked their guest was how the hell they’d gotten in.

But the Stowaway didn’t tell her. Couldn’t, maybe.

They opened their mouth and made noises, but not noises anyone thought of as, say, words. Noises that kind of slid in one ear and out the other, warped and slippery, without leaving any meaning behind whatsoever.

So the Engineer got them a keyboard to type on, and they frowned and made a good effort, clicked all the keys, and hissed audibly as the screen filled with punctuation and numbers, continuing to add more for a few seconds even after they raised their hands.

So the Bosun pulled out her personal notepad, tore off a sheet, and handed an analogue pen to the Stowaway. They all gathered round and watched as their guest wrestled with the pen, sweating and huffing, failing to make it put anything on the page that resembled a word.

At which point, the Navigatrix threw her hands in the air and called it futile, and they left the Stowaway in Lucy’s old bunk, locked the door, and spent another hour arguing as a crew over whether it was worth the risk to drop back into time immediately and kick them off.

In the end, they hadn’t really gotten around to it, was the thing.

There was always a lot to do between gigs, even without the pressure of time weighing on them. The ship needed repairs, their equipment had to be patched up, and this time, so did the crew themselves.

It didn’t take long for the Bosun to talk the Captain into unlocking the bunk and putting the Stowaway to work in the kitchen; and now it felt almost like they’d always been there, in their terrestrial outfit, silently doing odd jobs in all the quiet corners of the ship.

That was the thing about living outside time; it was hard to be sure of duration.

—

Chapter 4

The smell of coffee brought the Captain out of her tent as the green sun set. The Bosun and the Stowaway were working in quiet organization around the makeshift stove, and the Navigatrix was pouring herself a mug. No Engineer yet; her sleep cycle seemed to be slightly different.

No one was wearing their uniforms properly anymore. The Bosun had stripped down to her work tank; the Navigatrix had abandoned the ceremonial cape and gauntlets. The Captain would have worn hers, but evacuating the ship had cost her most of a sleeve.

The green light had an uncanny effect on the Navigatrix’s copper hair; sometimes it almost looked black in the light. The Captain thought it gave her a bit of an occult air; pale face and dark hair and those long, long limbs.

She was kneeling as she added spices to her coffee, and when she looked up and caught the Captain’s eye, she shot a wry half-smile through the haze of the stove.

“Guess who just finished the pot.”

“First time you’re awake before me and this is the shit you pull.”

She made her way over to join the Captain, and gestured with her cup.

“Want a sip?”

“The way you spice it? I can smell it just fine from over here.” Cinnamon and cloves, pepper and a pinch of salt and something sweet. “Impressed you got the Bosun to rescue your spice rack.”

“Got her to grab my best mug last night, too.” The Navigatrix nudged the Captain with her foot and proudly showed her the faded logo.

“Navigatrix, you piece of shit.”

The compass rose, sword and skull were all there, framing the cafe name, “Pirate’s Cove”, in melodramatic pink.

“That’s a fucking latte mug from the cafe on Ereb.”

“Oh, it might be!”

“This is when you tell me that you stole a shitty mug -”

“- well, now -”

“- from a cheesy theme cafe -”

“- okay, but -”

“- on the last planet we got arrested on?”

She winked. “You know I love a keepsake.”

The Navigatrix had never been the most straightforward person - folks who read star charts rarely were - but after they’d found the Orb, she’d become fully enigmatic.

The Captain hadn’t had this banal a conversation with her in, well, since they’d first left time. She didn’t trust it.

“I guess I’m glad you still found time to plot a route out of there, in between your thievery and cafe patronage.” The Captain felt herself getting angry. “Let me know when you make any headway on figuring out this novelty-tchotchke-free moon.”

But the Navigatrix never seemed up for a fight when the Captain wanted one, and she nodded as if that was a reasonable thing to say.

“You know, it’s a refreshing challenge, using analogue methods to locate us, both galactically and temporally. The light does complicate it.”

They both turned to watch planetrise, and watched a flock of aerial creatures scatter as the pink rays brought colour back to the landscape.

The Captain tilted her head back, trying to find the darkest part of the sky; between sun and planet, not a single star was visible.

“Talk to the Engineer. Get your equipment up and running. We need to know when we are.”

—

Chapter 5

The Engineer was a helpful person at heart; she just, often, found herself worn out by the disinterest - honestly the ignorance - of everyone else regarding the inner workings of the equipment that kept them all alive.

That day, as she lay on her side in her tent smelling fresh coffee, she was building a radio.

She’d done the trek to the ship with the Bosun at low tide, under the heat of the green sun, and returned at a run with two clanking bags full of scrap parts from the upper store room, all mercifully dry, and a soldering iron she was going to hook up to their solar battery.

And, not that anyone asked, but the Engineer had also rebuilt the solar battery, so that it would work efficiently with the green sunlight. And she and the Stowaway had taken the camp stove apart and put it back together twice already, as they’d sourced new materials to combust.

She had a few radios in mind; one to communicate short range, so one person could work on the ship repairs and another could stand atop a hill and watch for the tide. Another broader, more sensitive receiver, to scan the system for noise.

And a third radio-like tool that she was particularly proud of, that would connect wirelessly to the ship’s research computer, where she had, before the crash, been building an ingenious translation software that she was confident would unlock the words of the Stowaway.

The Captain liked them all to have formal roles on the crew, but the Engineer had taken to thinking of the Stowaway in less rigid terms, referring to them as “kid” and “short stuff” and mostly, while they collaborated, “hey you.” It’d be nice, she thought, to learn their name.

The most delicious part of the communication puzzle, to her, was that the Stowaway clearly understood everything they said, or wrote, or typed. The kid was an active listener, and they followed instructions perfectly. She even caught them reading the waterlogged battery manual.

So, in her engineering mind, she pondered the similarities between the physical locks on the ship doors, and the linguistic lock on the Stowaway’s words, and the strange, locked-in-place feeling of being immersed in the flow of time again. Maybe she just needed a new kind of key.

—

Chapter 6

The Bosun watched her superior officers bicker while she brewed another pot of coffee over the open flame. She and the Engineer had made good time earlier, wading waist deep through the receding lakewater to maximize time on the ship, and she’d been able to secure a few treats.

Were they treats if they were usually just parts of everyday meals? Well, they’d had a week of breakfasts on shore by now with only rehydrated emergency rations, and real toast felt very special after that. Flame-toasted toast, even. Fancy.

The Bosun thought of herself as the ship’s mom, which was the only time she ever had any interest in parenting, thankyouverymuch. She liked doing the daily cleaning, keeping meals on schedule, nagging everyone into doing their laundry properly. It was the best job she’d ever had.

Ship life had been pretty new to her, but old dogs learned new tricks all the time, and if it was going to be camp life for a bit now, well, she wasn’t particularly worried. They’d get some basic food testing equipment off the ship soon and then this moon would be her oyster.

She handed the frozen loaf to the Stowaway, who deftly sawed it into thick slices with a mean looking knife that the Captain really wasn’t sure they should have access to. “That kid’s too good with it for my comfort,” she’d said. The Bosun found a lot of comfort in knife skills.

As soon as the bread started toasting properly on the stove, the smell gathered everyone together. The Engineer even emerged, clearly not having slept since the ship run, raw wires tucked into her braid. The Stowaway flipped a slice, revealing a golden crisp, and they all sighed.

Tomorrow night she thought she’d try and crack open the deep freeze. The whole storeroom was going to feel like a treasure trove, honestly, if the Engineer could find her blow torch and finally tear open the crumpled door.

She couldn’t stop thinking about all the leftover curry she’d packed in there; she wasn’t sure how old it was, but maybe being outside time meant that didn’t matter. The Bosun had found that thinking too much about the Orb and time and such was useless; she’d just check by smell.

—

Chapter 7

The Orb had come to them about a year after they’d officially started running gigs together - the Captain, the Navigatrix, the Engineer, the Bosun, and Lucy. At that stage, they’d pulled off a few good tricks for some high rollers, and they’d gotten cocky.

Mostly clients communicated via parcel coordinates - they’d send galactic positioning system coordinates, and the Nav’d find them on the map, and Lucy’d pilot the flight, and they’d all have a good nap until the ship dinged and they’d haul in a tiny little box with instructions.

They’d drop off scores and pick up payments the same way; they only went planet-side for the runs themselves, and the occasional shopping trip.

So it wasn’t unusual to pick up a faint signal full of numbers and letters; and it wasn’t particularly hard for the Engineer to decode.

First, she froze. For a full minute, no one could get her attention or pull the rock from her hands.

When she finally lowered them, she revealed the Orb.

They’d passed it around; the strange sphere of gas that simply… held itself together. It had almost no weight, but it also had no momentum - they could gently push it from hand to hand and it would simply stop midair if they disengaged.

The Captain had taken it first, eyes wide with fear even after the Navigatrix had woken up and laughed with delight. The Captain stared at it for a minute or two, then scoffed at it with some relief.

Next it went to the Engineer, who mostly talked about its mass and energy and glow.

She hadn’t bothered staring into it particularly; she just pushed it around until she got bored, and then gently shoved it over to the Bosun.

The Bosun cast a skeptical eye across it, shook her head, and handed the Orb, though they didn’t know it was the Orb then, to Lucy.

“Is this thing - is this a chart?”

The Navigatrix grinned like a mischievous child.

“If I’m right, Lucy, this thing is a chart of time.”

First, they went into warp - as usual - but then came the new part: they went all the way through, out the other side of light speed. Suddenly, they weren’t going impossible fast - they were simply floating motionless in a churning, smearing maelstrom of stars.

And once she proved they could move in and out of time at will, the Captain sent word out that they had new, longer term capabilities, and the real fun began.

They still did client work, but more for the fun of it; maybe that was why the jobs they took got so much more dangerous.

—

Chapter 8

The Navigatrix found camp life surprisingly nice. She’d spent most of her life in flight; two or three more days and this would be the longest she’d been terrestrial since a brief stint in her teens.

She loved watching the sunset as they woke up, seeing the green rays turn blue and slide below the horizon; feeling the warmth of the planet glow on her back as the lake rushed in to high tide. There was faunal noise here, random and textural and sometimes quite annoying.

The wind was incredible, pushed around predictably by the solar cycle, but always a little surprising as it pulled at her hair and tunic like a living thing. So different from the forced air of any ship she’d been on. Sometimes if she turned her head just right, it hummed to her.

But none of it drowned out the silence she felt outside the Orb.

The crash had happened when she was out, arguing with the Captain about the computer; no one had been on the bridge at all, and they ended up doing the landing from the emergency controls in the back of the ship instead of trying to rush through all the tunnels and ladders.

And it was good they did, because the bridge took a serious hit upon impact, crumpling from the side in such a way that the sealed doors folded into locked origami steel structures. The Captain’s attempts to get into it while things were still hot had nearly taken her arm off.

So the Orb was, for the moment, locked up, away from the Navigatrix, and she felt like she’d lost a limb - or maybe more accurately, a sense.

Now time was all around her and she couldn’t feel it, couldn’t see it, couldn’t hear it at all, and oh, how she missed it.

—

Chapter 9

They’d crashed on a very accommodating moon, it turned out. The weather was clear, the temperature mild, the air breathable, the flora and fauna both edible and minimally aggressive.

The only discomforting element was the ruins.

They were so well incorporated into the landscape in some places, it was almost hard to notice them. All that was left was stone and metal, but enough of it was there to intrigue the Engineer.

“Just one day trip!”

She and the Captain were arguing while fishing in the briny lake. There was a stone plaza - or maybe a stone roof - that protruded out into the deeper part of high tide and made for good hunting; the construction of it was tantalizingly mysterious.

“We need you focused on getting us out of here, not settling in.” The Captain sighed and started pulling her line back in. “I need you to make the ship livable enough we can get inside and repair it.”

“I just need to collect some data; I can examine it after we leave.”

“No!”

Around the camp stove at dinner, the Captain found few allies.

“They’re creepy,” said the Bosun. “Ruins don’t work like this, so evenly spread out. I say send her out for a day.”

“Don’t you want to get out of here? We need the ship working!”

The Navigatrix raised a hand -

“I agree, we can’t ignore how strange this place is. But if you can’t spare the Engineer, Captain, you could send someone working on less urgent things?”

“Everything is urgent right now! Are you angling for a day off too?”

The Navigatrix gave the Captain a withering look.

“Supervising is not an urgent role, Captain. Why not go take a walk tomorrow.”

The worst part was, everyone else agreed.

—

Chapter 10

She tossed and turned in her tent later, trying to get some sleep, unnerved by the casual tone everyone had about being stranded here. Didn’t they want to get back through the warp? Escape time again? They’d had plans, schemes, jobs to do; important jobs, she thought.

When they had been flying outside time, everyone had been so… professional. The Engineer kept the ship’s systems running; the Bosun kept things comfortable; the Navigatrix kept track of where and when they were; and the Captain stood at the helm interface, making decisions.

And Lucy had - Lucy’s job had been - the Captain’s mind stuttered for a moment, like missing a step on a stair.

…Lucy had done a little of everything, she remembered. Lucy filled in all the gaps, covered breaks, watched the prox sensors, kept point from the ship on jobs…

The Captain huffed in her camp roll, trying to block out the tide of emotions that hit her as she remembered them running back to the ship, proud of their haul, ready to take off, only to discover Lucy gone. A quick “goodbye, good luck” left flashing on the helm screen.

It was so angering, such a betrayal, so pointless - they lived outside of time! They were immortal! They could pull off heists and runs and jobs no one else had ever dreamed of! The Captain could not understand why someone would walk away from that life.

It still stung, she had to admit. It still made her angry. She was lying in a tent on a moon with her ship half drowned and her crew going around telling her what to do, but she all she could really care about was how mad she was at Lucy.

What was wrong with her?

—

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#scifi #mutual pining #space wizard #orb #novella #space opera #adventure fiction #wlw #lesbians in space #warp riders #chronomancer #space thieves

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