Warp Riders – 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.”

Warp Riders – 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. 

Warp Riders – 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.

Warp Riders – 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.