Lucky 13 (NaNoWriMo 2017)

Chapter 2: My Name Is...

The Griffon's Shadow is a sleek starship. That doesn't mean much though. If we never accelerate past ten percent the speed of light in real space, our aerodynamics mean squat. The Giffon is around a hundred meters long with warp rings wrapped around the front and rear. It's one of those annoying ships that was built in the early days of FTL travel.

Its since be upgraded since then, but it still bears the marks of the old warp ships. Spindly structure as though built out of spider webs with crew compartments at either end and the reactors situated in the very center of the ship. The clump of hyper Ion engines at one end are a new installment, replacing the ship's older steam engines (even I find that hard to say), and the mysterious device we call a light drive is situated somewhere between us and the reactors, it happens to not be affected by radiation, nor does it produce radiation.

We're currently spinning head over tails above Saul. The planet is right on the edge of the FTL event horizon, a mysterious effect that is only ever discussed by people behind closed doors. Essentially what it is is the idea that the farther you travel from your homeworld the more probable something bad is to happen to you. The event horizon is the border of the survivable portion into the non survivable portion.

The only thing that explains this effect is something known as dark matter storms. To understand how these work requires a dead cat and a box or something. I'm not a navigator or a sub-atomic scientist so I don't know how it works, just that inside of the FTL event horizon we do not have to worry about these, and outside of it a starships will be crushed by Schrodinger radiation.

The names May, first officer Daniel May. It's been a few years since I graduated from the Loony Bin. First I got put on the Cosmo clipper as a third officer. A third officer's entire duties seem to revolve around filling out mundane paperwork and observing the rest of the command staff, essentially I was an over glorified intern.

A year later when the captain of the Oblivious retired, I was transferred in as the second officer. Now second officer is a legitimate job, essentially a second first officer, I performed all the same duties, commanding the ship during the night shift, supervised planetary survey missions, and got to fill out the interesting paper work. Did you know there's a citation form for replacing a commanding officer's epaulets with gallium, not a disorderly conduct citation form, no a citation form specifically for replacing a commanding officer's epaulets with gallium. Learning is fun.

The captain and first officer of the Oblivious where young, seven... maybe eight years older than me, and possessed no intent of retiring any time in the foreseeable future. So when it came time for ground control to give me a promotion I was told to pack my bags and they left me on the nearest habitable planet.

That was on Hekate, a painfully quaint planet with a single settlement of researchers. They had all talked excitedly about the planets unique coral and how it was magic. I'm not sure what drugs they were on, or if they were the sober one's and I was high. When the Griffin's Shadow arrived a month latter I was more than ready to bug out.

We're currently sitting above Saul tumbling pidgeon while getting the landing craft ready for the drop. The planet had been colonized for half a decade and already they wanted independence. I prep for the landing, I finish strapping on the last piece of blast armor onto my right forearm and make sure I have everything I need secured to my belt.

Multi tool, check, comm, check, power cells, check, handcuffs, check, ammunition clips, check. The clock reads twenty minutes till the drop zone so I begin making the climb to the rear habitable unit, the place where we keep the landing craft docked. The Griffin had been refitted with artificial gravity at some point in its life, so whether you're standing at the bottom floor or the top, you'll experience gravity equally. Lucky me they thought better than to equip it in the ladder. The closer I got to the center the easier the climbing got. When I finally reached the center I flip and begin sliding down the ladder to the ship's rear unit.