Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

The Catchfire Queen

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a space-folk horror anthology podcast and thus may include material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Two hulls. One to keep the atmo in, and one to keep the dark out. That's the way. Just like it was when we were diving into the dark depths of the ocean's fastness, our first steps into a hungry dark utterly alien and untrod by our callow human feet. Just like then, the smallest flaw, the tiniest crack will turn the fruit of our engineering genius from tower to tomb in heartbeats. Two hulls. One to fit your world inside, and one to hold the hunger outside. It's a soap-bubble of nanocarbon and alloy between you and a bad death.

Is it any wonder that we have so many little rituals, superstitions, and stories about them? Can't trust anything so implicitly and not get nigh religious with it, can you?

Never name a bird after a battle, because she might get a taste for blood. Always apologize when you run a manual override, else she might think you don't trust her. See that she's fueled up before you sidle off to the bars when you make port, because she's like to get jealous if you see to your own comfort before hers. Never take her name in vain.

She's all that stands between you and vaccuum. She's the way, the truth, and the life. Now tell me, adrift in this wide and hostile sea, that she /ain't/ god. And just you remember that she's listening.

[Introduction: Bad Boy]

Catchfire Queen come off the line about thirty years ago. She wasn't called Catchfire Queen then, of course. Her factory designation was AAF-11D, Alliance Aerospace Freighter Class, 11-Delta. Aphid if you wanted to use the Spacer's handle for her. Named after a sap-sucker bug of copious dispersal, the kind that can tell the shifting of the wind and move from cash crop to woody cover and outlast every attempt to shake her off; cold or predator or chemical pesticide, don't matter. Aphids are tough, and they are everywhere. Her birth wasn't remarkable. There were a thousand Aphids that rolled off the Alliance Aero assembly lines, spot-welded and spaceworthy under the hands of the techs at the Double Alpha yards. But none of them got legends. None of them saw what The Queen saw. None of them were blazoned and annointed like the Queen. None of them burnt and rose again. Not like the Queen.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Ships and ghosts. You gotta pace yourself with ships and ghosts, else you'll find yourself giving away the best parts before you mean to.

But let's start where it really started: by the light of a centerline console, just north of throttle and the g-force that nails your heart to your spine. Aphids are Frieghters, born and blazoned, and bred, but that Delta at the end is for Delta Victor. Two Starliner 99's on outrigger nacelles aft of her centerline, eating reaction mass with butterfly's bites and throwing blue hellfire to the rear, an Aphid was born to run and while she could haul cargo it'd be like lashing a crate to the back of a thoroughbred. Like, it'll carry it, but there's better you could be doing by a natural sprinter. You get an Aphid, can afford an Alliance Aerospace, you take courier jobs. Time sensitive. The kind that pay you a small mint to transport a letter, a briefcase, an unassuming locked crate. And that's what she was doing, that Aphid. She wasn't called Aphid anymore. Under the hand of the gal with her hand on the throttle, Allie Simms, the flight plan of the fast-burn courier was calling her Catchfire Queen. And as she burnt rimward from the shining midst of the core worlds back homeward and out here toward the edge of nothing across a wake of bad blood and festering tension, and she rolled up the throttle and pressed Alliee Simms into the command couch with a full four G's cruising, she looked every bit deserving of her name. She was a regal titan, throwing actinide fire like a dart soaked in kerosene and hurled with steely eyed precision.