At the Helm
STARDRIFT – Episode 1: Dead Reckoning (Scene 4)
There was a crackle from the radio unit. Maybe everything wasn’t running perfectly, then.
“Unit Breaker, Fest stop gate control. Confirm codes and coordinates.”
On a space liner the Captain would give the order by confirming the destination. The Navigator would calculate and enter the codes and coordinates for the Ripple Gate. The Officer of the Watch would confirm and the Helmsman would orientate the ship accurately and control the rate of approach.
On the Unit Breaker Vizier had to do it all, and even though he was a bit rusty and had to triple check his codes, he loved it.
“Got it!”
“Unit Breaker, repeat?”
“Coordinates and codes entered.”
There was no time to think what would happen should he reach Nustral, or even if he should be heading there. The fate of the seven sleepers was in his hands and he needed to get them away from Fest Stop, Jel Darm, Cira Warten and whatever deal was concocted between them.
First leg to Nustral was what he could do right now, to Prion Gate. He had the coordinates at hand.
“Unit Breaker, you are cleared for Ripple jump. Greetings to old underspace.”
Vizier breathed out slowly. The replaced transponder codes were not rejected. It could have been a mess if it was. It was the only way to run a diagnostic on it.
Also, it seemed the communication between the cargo bay and gate control was a bit slow. They had said nothing about Jel’s disembarkation, and Vizier did not want to hang around until they had questions.
He pushed himself back into the pilot seat, fastened his harness and gripped hold of the helm control.
“Right, you rusting bathtub, here we go.”
The old Ripple Gate on Fest Stop was an arch bolted onto a flat side of the asteroid. Newer gates were free floating in space and on average four times bigger. It still dwarfed the little old Unit Breaker as Vizier pushed through the shimmering haze of the active Ripple.
Immediately the familiar lightness overcame him. A feeling that your blood was rushing through your veins not with a slow pulse, but with a happy jaunt. Because the ship was so small the experience was more intense, giving him a tingle that made his hair stand on end and a lightness to all his limbs. Everything around him brightened in colour, with a rich glow coming from inside everything and then there was that smell, indescribable except to say that somehow it smelled like life.
Gate Flies would get hooked on this sensation and then take repeated short trips back and forth until they burn out their ships or their own nervous systems. Vizier could understand that, the sensation was like your senses being dialled up to full potential and more, but only for a few second and it was gone and all you had was the soft rustle of passing through underspace.
This also only lasted for a few seconds when a shudder ran through the whole ship making every loose bit of equipment rattle. It jerked Vizier back into the moment. He had nothing to do with this.
It wasn’t some turbulence that past though, it kept going. The shudder became a violent shake and the cockpit began to feel like a box of loose metal pieces tumbling down a hillside.
It won’t be long before that was what they would be.
Every jump between Ripple Gates took exactly seventeen minutes and thirty-one seconds, no matter how far you travelled. But it was a very long time and it was unlikely that the ship would last that long. Not at this rate anyway.
Vizier glanced over the cockpit controls. There was nothing he could do, almost everything was flashing and beeping. Which meant a major systemic feedback and that could only be sorted out by getting down to the bottom of things. That meant the Grill Drive in the bowels of the ship.
He climbed hurriedly down the access ladder behind the cockpit and made his way down the narrow service corridor running along the bottom until he climbed through the hatch into the Grill Drive bay with the twin plasma turbines on either side.
Sparks were arcing back and forth between the two turbines and Vizier threw up his arm to shield his eyes and edged in closer to get to the direct access control point. The smell was a nauseating mixture of burning wires and noxious gases and the rattling and shuddering reached a peak.
Just as Vizier reached the control screen where he had to hold up both his hands to block out the bright flashes and take note of any information it all stopped.
The silence was deafening by the absence of any sensory input, as if his body wanted to keep shaking when there was no need to. Only gradually he became aware of the whooshing sound outside the hull, the completely normal and expected noise of passing through underspace.
It should have been a relief but it wasn’t. What had caused the malfunction, and was it now fixed or just dormant, lay in wait to pounce later with a vengeance?
Nothing indicating anything to check on the drive controls. Back to the cockpit then, maybe there was a diagnostic he could run. He doubted it. The Unit Breaker’s system was pretty much linear in design, straight forward in that there was few sub systems and relay channels.
He only had a moment to think about and bask in the uneasy silence when there was a loud clatter right above his head. Something heavy had dropped in the cargo hold.
A ladder at the back of the Grill Drive brought him out at the back of the hold. The moment his head rose above the floor he swivelled and looked at the small cargo stack in the middle. From here everything still looked secure.
But on the other side a strap had slipped and a crate had shaken loose and had fallen down onto its side. It was a crate with a stasis unit inside.
The only way this trip could worse at the moment was if he had killed somebody. Vizier rushed forward and pulled the crate away from the stack. He had to flip it over on its bottom. It took a lot of grunting and shoving, as he strained to tip it. It weighed several hundred kilograms and fell back onto the hold decking with a loud clunk that reverberated like a dull bell throughout the ship.
Frantically Vizier undid the latches and lifted the lid to check the stasis unit. At first glance it seemed to be working fine. The amber control panel had a steady glow and the metal alloy box was a solid thing.
Except there was a faint hissing noise from some gas escaping and looking over the alloy casing Vizier could see a crack at the foot end. A pungent gas was escaping. It was acidic, forming a yellow residue that gathered in small droplets, and etching grooves into the alloy as it oozed down the side.
The gas from the chemical reaction between alloy and leaking acid was sharp and he could taste it on the tip of his tongue. It made him cough and his eyes water.
Vizier wrapped a hand over his nose and mouth and leaned in to see if the diagnostic panel could tell him anything. Numbers and symbols bounced across the screen but they were meaningless to him.
What did he know of stasis units and life signs and such? Nothing, he knew the basic idea but he had never even been in one himself. It was only used in medical facilities and for very deep space travel and exploration.
He could however see when the display changed. The seemingly random mad run of information paused and went into a slower pulse of symbols. He didn’t know much but he could recognise a countdown.
It seemed the unit had a failsafe system or a backup program to run and it must also have detected the escaping liquid, which must run some part of the system.
With fascination and horror Vizier watched as the control panel ran through a step down process and it dawned on him that one of his seven passengers was waking up. No clinical environment, no medical team standing by, nothing but him as a welcoming committee.
Thankfully the crate was acid proof. And soon the reservoir of acid must have leaked out and the noxious gas dissipated. This was just before the countdown ended and the same display flashed on the screen over and over. What should he do now?
The stasis unit lid released automatically and as the seal broke there was another hiss and release of gas. Vizier pulled back but this had another smell, sweet and heady and mostly vapour that quickly faded.
Now there was something Vizier could do. He grabbed hold of the lid and slid it off the top and dropped it alongside the crate. Gel like fluid sloshed over the edge of the unit and into the bottom of the crate. In the right environment there might have been a pump to remove this before the lid was opened but this was out in the wilds now.
The inside of a stasis unit was not a nice soft bed, it was a glassy half-tube filled with opaque suspension liquid. Vizier plunged his hands into the liquid and felt around for the body. A residual numbing effect made his hands and forearms tingle.
He found a skinny limb he pulled on and lifted, grabbed hold of the slippery torso and dragged the body out of the unit and crate and onto the cargo hold decking.
Covered in suspension liquid, looking pale and slimy and hardly human, completely naked, and also hairless because the suspension liquid would have dissolved all that, it—no she—lay there, completely still.
She could be dead. That would leave Vizier with a corpse to deal with.
She wasn’t. She first coughed softly, then loudly, then retched violently and brought up suspension liquid. Of course it was in her lungs, and stomach as well. Vizier hovered between revolted and edging away and concerned and leaning in.
The spasms stopped. She lay still, shaking with shallow breaths, head down on her arms, legs pulled up in foetal position.
What was needed was a cloth, or a towel. There was nothing in the cargo hold. His kit was in the cockpit and he had no idea what was in Jel’s cabin, but that was closest.
Vizier jumped up, rushed up the ladder, and to Jel’s cabin. He ripped open the door, grabbed a sheet from the bunk because that was the first thing he saw, and then a shirt hanging over the bottom end of the bed and rushed back.
Using the sheet he dabbed at the skinny female body, wiping off suspension liquid as best he could. The stuff was no longer body temperature, cooling off very quickly when not under pressure and was getting tacky as well, sticking like syrup, but by some chemical process beginning to smell like sewage.
She started shivering as Vizier kept wiping until he got to her head and lifted it and wiped across her face. She turned her head towards Vizier, opened her eyes slowly, looking odd without lashes or eyebrows. Her eyes were clear and dark and she saw Vizier and then she smiled softly, her lips moving as if she wanted to say something but then didn’t.
Then she closed her eyes again, as if she was exhausted and in desperate need of a nap, never mind the 200-year sleep she had just come out of.
The Unit Breaker did not have a medical bay. It would have a first aid cabinet but that would be good enough to deal with cuts and burns and broken bones. This was something else. Did she need fluids, a medical check-up, or something else?
If she did there was nothing Vizier could do but get someplace where there was medical facilities. While still considering his options, sitting on his knees next to the small body wrapped in a damp sheet, a ripple coursed through the ship like a whisper.
They had gone through the exit gate, back into normal space. Vizier had to get back to the cockpit. Gate control on this side would expect a live one at the helm.
© 2025 Gerhi Janse van Vuuren