Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

Lockout (Part 2)

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a space-folk horror anthology podcast and as such may not be suited for all audiences. Listener discretion, is advised.

You can't go home again. That's what all the old-hats say when Blues get sick for the feeling of true planetary gravity and a home cooked meal that ain't reconstituted or freeze-dried out of a foil pouch. The worlds are still turning back there somewhere, but your place in them isn't there anymore. Time and astrodynamics aren't like to cease their dance just because you don't like the tune, and life is getting on without you just fine back there. The tears shed for you as you linked with the Railhead and burnt for the rim through the not-universe of Slipspace were dry as dust before you ever surfaced again. Einstein and relativity are a real sumbitch, ain't they? Can't go home again. That's why you don't see many folks who wind up in this life seeming eager to leave it. The life they built out here on the edge is all they've really got left, y'understand. Sure, they could hop the rail again and burn in the opposite direction and hope that the tides were right and that they'd arrive before everything they ever knew or loved had gone the way of everything in its time, but the Slip ain't predictable. What we don't know about it could fill a rack of dataslates.

I've heard stories about spacers who've hit bad space on the inbetween, arrived at their destination as dried up husks and dust as time caught up with them. I've heard about folks who've popped up just in time to see their past selves link with the Railhead.

So no, as a general rule, you can't go home again. But mysterious and weird are the ways of the Slip. Sometimes home comes back for you.

Jesse Ford was having a bad day. It'd looked like a good one when he'd started it. He'd grabbed a bite at his favorite counter on his way out from Reachback station, slung back a powdered egg and corned beef-effect patty sandwich on his way to his Kestrel. He'd spotted a likely prize, a military frigate that was still reading lights on when his broadpass EM sweeper had kissed it. The capture-manuever was textbook, the Belter's prybar-hatch punching in amidships at the thickest part of the bird, the part least likely to have suffered significant structural damage on her way out into the big empty.

It had gotten significantly worse from there. Losing time. Seeing things. Hearing things. Now, as a mech cavalry vet of some of the most brutal fighting of the Consolidation, he was used to sometimes living with ghosts of a war long over. But walking through the corridors of a ship that turned out to not just be the spitting image of his old warbird, but the old graveyard gal herself, the ISS Bannockburn, had done something altogether different to him.

And that was before his Kestrel, the ship that had brought him to this ghost-ship had suffered a catastrophic decoupling and gone spinning off into the void leaving the Bannockburn with a hole in her guts that was spewing O2 at an alarming rate.

Jesse Ford was not easily startled. But the Mech Jock in the armored coverall and the broken Cav helmet, the one who'd warned him that "they were going to take the ship,"the one who was leaking something that looked suspiciously like blood from the pulverized hole in the spiderwebbed faceplate...that pretty damn well startled him.

"How come you never listen, Jesse?" It had asked him over the crackling intercom freq.

He didn't answer. Jesse turned and ran.

Didn't much matter, though. The Mech Jock's voice came over the intercrom freq and no matter how quick Jesse managed to get through the hatch and into the corridor, feet slapping against the marshmallow over drill-bit of the anti-spall, he couldn't get away. "Now where the Hell you think you goin' boy?"