Drain Space

Chapter 3 - Deludo

After the events of the first day of my adventure I was ready to sleep immediately after entering the drain point. I requested one of the top rooms, but Fidelis told me it was customary for the head of an expedition to stay in the room closest to the main room, though a wry smile curled on her mouth as she said it. I didn't want to stay across from the room with a chair in it, as that felt unsafe in the event of some sort of crash, so I chose to stay in the room behind it, which was technically one of the two farthest away from the control room. Since I left my bag behind I did not have any blankets or sheets, leaving me to sleep on the thin bare cot in my cabin. The air conditioning was controllable per room and mine was set too low for my comfort. I searched until I found a small control pad and tried to change it, but it was still in a local language I couldn't read so I gave up and lied down. Still, fatigue took me quickly and I slept through most of the day. When I awoke, I stepped bleary eyed into the bridge. The lights were down low and I found Rust in the top left seat, fiddling with something on the chair's control panel.

"Hey Rust, where's Fidelis?" I asked.

"She went to bed an hour ago. Your species needs a lot of sleep, you were gone for about 10 hours." Rust replied.

"Yesterday was a big day for me," I croaked out, "What are you up to?"

"There were some games on the ship's computer, so I've been playing them before going to bed myself. Nothing fancy, just things like Pygle's Adventure and Smare. Did they let you play games at the monastery?"

"Not really. There were some games at farewell parties, but it was mostly meditating or chores. Any free time I had was either spent cooking food for myself, learning more about the language."

"Oh, you can cook? That's great!" Rust exclaimed, "This flyer needed a cook. I'll make sure we stop somewhere to pick up supplies."

I felt a little disrespected, "Well, I'm the captain, not the ship chef."

Rust turned away from his game to look at me, smiling. But the smile faded when he saw I was serious, "Oh of course, I didn't mean to offend. You'll just be both! A captain cook."

I realized how rude I had acted and felt bad immediately, "Sorry to be defensive. I guess I'm so new to this world, I feel more like a child, a captain kid." I gave a nervous chuckle, "I came here from my world five years ago and landed at the monastery. I've seen things over the past half a decade that were technologically impossible on my planet." I sighed, "I suppose it was a good thing though. The Universe knew what it was doing. But I had no idea things like the ring thingy we flew through existed."

Rust looked confused, then realized what I meant, "What? Oh the drain point. That's old tech to us." He began explaining how it worked, interrupting himself in excitement, "It's pretty simple, it's a four dimensional tunnel connecting two points in space. It takes an exponential amount of energy to bring each side or the tunnel closer, so you usually have to travel some distance inside the tunnel, colloquially called "drain space', in order to save fuel for the rings. There is usually a ring on either side of the tunnel holding it open, but the engines of flyers are now designed to be able to exit the tunnel early if necessary, although there is almost no emergency where it is not a better idea to continue going through. "

My stomach was grumbling mightily, but I was fascinated by the tech, "So what's so special about the drain we took?"

"The drains we're using are old, very old. Like before Laycha fell. In fact it was built while the Laychan Empire was expanding to interstellar conquest. These first drain points, constructed pretty much immediately after the technology was invented, were used to ship people and materials to and from colonized planets." Rust suddenly looked up and stuck his tongue out a little as he tried to remember dates, "That was some thousand years ago or so? Today they don't see much use because there are more efficient trade routes with nicer drain rings but these are kept around for military use in the event of an outage on the main routes, as well as by people just looking to skip planet for a weekend or something."