2- The Amelia: Amelia Rising

“Navigator Raleigh,” the commander called. “Navigator!”

The navigator in question pulled her head out of the clouds and focused on her commander and the controls in front of her. “Hm. Yes?”

The commander sighed. “Raleigh. Concentrate.”

“Yes! Sorry.” Raleigh shuffled her feet. “Commander.”

“We’re disengaging soon.”

Raleigh blinked in surprise and turned, looking through the ship towards the cockpit where the Amelia’s pilot was humming to himself and messing with the controls. “Right, ma’am. Where are we going?”

“We’re headed for Rigel.”

“Rigel?”

The commander nodded. “Rigel.”

“…what’s at Rigel, if you don’t mind me asking…?”

“Iridere,” Commander Charis stated, staring at the moveable star map on the wall. “We’re going to Iridere.”

Raleigh raised both eyebrows in astonishment. “Iridere?! Nobody goes there because of Corrix, not unless you’ve got some very interesting stealth systems…”

“Well, we go there. We’re to do a full Ring run starting at the Core and heading all the way out to Xovan. Base wants a biosurvey of Wenyrev and we have goods that I’ve agreed to pick up to deliver to Xovan and Ferolus so there’s really no point in not doing a full run…”

Shrugging, Raleigh relayed the commands to Vari, their pilot.

“Really?” she heard him shout from the cockpit. “Iridere?”

“Yes,” the commander shouted back. “Really. Now get us out of here!”

The ship trembled slightly, and Raleigh felt a spasm of excitement. She loved setting out. Every time the Amelia set out, no matter how many times they did it, it never seemed to get old. She felt the docking clamps let go and retract, and felt the Amelia back gently out of the dock. She swiveled around, put her nose to the sky, and fired her engines.

It didn’t matter that the outside momentum didn’t affect the Amelia’s interior. Raleigh still half-believed that she could feel the speed pressing her sideways into her seat, that she could feel the ship straining forwards and trembling with excitement to be again in the blue sky and the black expanse above, rocketing through the stars trailing blue light and particle residue. Involuntarily she grinned, staring fiercely at her system displays.

“Make sure the atmospheric blocker is functioning on the left side, Raleigh,” came Vari’s voice in her ear. She checked the blocker- it was.

“Blocker’s good.”

“Great.”

The Amelia cut smoothly through the atmosphere and began to pull out of the planet’s gravity well, burning obscene amounts of fuel as she did so. Raleigh wrinkled her nose- that was one thing she didn’t like about the Amelia. The ship was gorgeous and capable, but she was a passenger transport, not a fighter, and she burned a lot of fuel trying to achieve the same kinds of speeds that fighters could hit with almost no effort at all.

A few minutes passed, and Vari’s voice echoed over the intercoms: “We’re free of Sykra’s gravity well and on our way to Rigel. Thirty minutes until we’re clear to engage FTL drives.”

Raleigh rearranged her HUD for no reason. The commander hurried by behind the navigators’ seats.

A few minutes later, someone else went by. Then three more people, all heading for the cockpit. Raleigh began to feel slightly nervous.

She tuned in on her personal comm, trying to figure out what was going on. She wasn’t supposed to, but curiosity got the better of her.

“…at do you mean, you can’t identify it?” Charis. Raleigh winced- the commander did not sound pleased.

“I mean it doesn’t match any known signature in my database.” Vari.

“So what is it? Some species we’re unaware of?”

“No. The signature is similar to our ship’s… and by that, I mean human ships. I think it’s a modified human ship. But there’s something wrong with its drive… it’s been altered somehow.”

“What modifications have been made?” That voice was Elliot, their chief engineer.

“I can’t tell exactly. Some cloaking, that’s for sure. There’s a lot of residue collection so it’s actually really hard to detect.” Vari sounded frustrated, but also admiring. “That’s some useful tech right there.”

“I don’t care. Why are they following us?” Commander Charis again.

“Commander, with all due respect, how the hell should I know?” Vari was definitely annoyed. “I can jump us halfway across the galaxy and keep us from blowing up the whole time but I can’t read the minds of whoever’s piloting that monstrosity.”

Raleigh shut down her eavesdropper before it was detected. It sounded like they were being shadowed by something… another ship of some kind. She wondered what could possibly have any reason for shadowing them. Some kind of smuggling ship hoping to get to Iridere and hide its emissions in the Amelia’s trail?

That made sense. But where would a smuggling ship get emission cloaking devices? Raleigh didn’t know much about the black market but she was pretty sure that even there you couldn’t get technology that hadn’t been developed.

Charis stalked by again, in the opposite direction of the cockpit. She looked really annoyed now, and Raleigh tried to make herself small enough to not be noticed.

It didn’t work. The commander’s head snapped around like a predatory animal’s and she honed in on Raleigh. “Navigator.”

“Ulp,” Raleigh responded, looking up. “Yes?”

“You control the aft emissions scanners and long-range rear scanners, yes?”

“Errrrr, yes…”

“Scan behind us.”

Raleigh complied. Vari could already do this- he and the commander had ultimate control over the ship’s systems- but she also had the ability to use these specific scanners, if needed. It was to prevent Vari from having to do too much if they were caught in a difficult situation.

“We’re alr… oh, that’s odd,” Raleigh murmured, peering at the screen. There were faint, occasional puffs of emissions that the Amelia definitely wasn’t putting out, and she could read echo signals from something that was staying a good quarter AU behind them. “I don’t know what that is… I don’t recognize that emission signal.” Although she knew that this was the ghost ship Vari had detected, she brought up the comparison database and recorded a few seconds of emissions to see if they matched anything in the base. Of course they didn’t. She didn’t expect them to, but she also had to pretend like she hadn’t been listening in on Charis’s conversation with Vari.

“Damn it,” Charis growled, swinging her head around again to look back towards the cockpit. “Alright. Well… don’t do anything, Raleigh. But keep tabs on the emissions’ source for me.”

Raleigh nodded meekly. “Will do, Commander.”

The commander nodded and left, heading back for the navigation center and star map. Raleigh let out a dramatic breath and turned back to her display. The ghost ship behind the Amelia continued to let out little puffs of radioactivity into space at irregular intervals. Raleigh closed out the window, but left the scanners running.

It seemed like only a few minutes until Vari called over the intercoms again. “Engaging FTL drives in two minutes.”

Raleigh readied the ship, tightening the kinetic barriers and minimizing their mass if possible.

“Transferring to FTL core… now.”

The Amelia shuddered. Every crew member felt it as she detached her engines from their normal power core and slowed for a few seconds. Raleigh swallowed. This bit was always dangerous- she was always frightened that there would be some catastrophic issue and the Amelia wouldn’t connect to her FTL core.

But she did. The ship shuddered again, gently this time, as the engines locked into place and hooked themselves up to the FTL core. The Amelia drifted for a few seconds, and then there was a whining sound that quickly scaled up out of Raleigh’s hearing range.

“Engaging.”

The Amelia leaped forwards, jostling everyone, and rippled a hole in the continuum as she slid into faster-than-light travel. Raleigh wondered if the ghost ship would follow them, and if it even could while they were jumping.

She wished the Amelia had some kind of port viewer or window. In FTL, she’d be able to look out and actually see things like black holes and quasars because the wavelengths they’d be emitting, normally invisible to humans, would be shifted against the ship and actually visible to her.

“Approximate time in FTL transit is sixty-four hours,” Vari informed them over the intercom. “And… we’re set. The captain has turned the seat belt sign off. Feel free to move about the cabin.” He sounded quite satisfied with himself.

Raleigh leaned back. Her scanners showed that everything was in perfect shape. Nothing to worry about, no ghost ships to track in FTL, no debris to worry about, nothing to stress over.

The Amelia roared silently onwards, nose blue and tail red, splitting the blackness for seconds as she traveled faster than starlight towards destinations and destiny.