Blackbird

The Ethereal realm they call it, those minds greater than mine in academia. It seemed to me to be a fitting accolade. There is much work done on its nature within the scientific method, about the matter of fact things, presumptions on its dimensions and how it interacts with the fabric of our world that overlays it.  That cannot detract from its beauty, the vast oceanic motion when you gaze upon it, the crushing squalls that must fall upon cresting waves and rancorous spray. The Ether had depth at least, in that much it was reminiscent of the seas of Earth. Despite it missing other dimensions of normal space, enquiring minds wondered what they at its surface, did the infinity of space make such things impossible? Question hung with no satisfactory answer, and if man is anything, he is a beast of fancy. Prone to the chasing of a thought or question to its eventual conclusion, sometimes without a care to the consequences.

The point being, that in a limitless environment there was statistically, the chance for all things to occur. It was an ethos that was to drive on scientific endeavours in the Ether beyond space. Pictographs could show you the twin suns of Norfolk and Suffolk, men didn’t lack wonders to see, that was not in truth what they craved. Men would instead risk their lives, even their immortal souls according to the Seal of Rome, to unlock the Ether’s secrets. It brought men away from the trade lines of the Royal Navy, from the colonies of her Majesty and out beyond the rim of known space, out into the vast expanse of the Ether. It was an adventure simply put; those pioneers who had sailed into the unknown because it was there to be seen and conquered in the yesterdays of history. That same emboldened spirit burned within the hearts of all men, and it would be heard. It shone brightly in the blood of my family. When Earth had been the only realm of humanity and the fleet of the empire was in its timber and sails, my family had been there in the thick of it, amongst the great churning maelstrom of history. Just as they had sailed the seas of old, I had sailed the celestial seas for some twenty years, my body once youthful and supple had matured becoming strong and hard. In those years through the helm of my Ether suit I had danced on the frozen wastes of Europa; Swam through the great rings of Saturn herself and seen the barren red landscape of Mars. Further, beyond the blue Earth called home, I had witnessed streaking comets and burning worlds of stone, black holes devour helpless stars, feeding their unending appetite. I was a space dog, a star child, unbound from the planet of my birth; a wandering spirit among the stars, a titan aloft, where once only the gods had once gazed from.

Yet for all the great wonders I had seen, for all that the universe had shared, and I was still not ready for it to pass into shadow. I remember distinctly that been my final thought as I reflected on my life. In the middle of that erupting tempest, as I spun without end or rest in sight, racked by confusion and reeling from fractured memories of what had happened, I remembered that, above all other things that rushed through my adrenaline saturated mind.

After a time the Ether grew calmer and shallow, like a sandstorm once vibrant and furious, all grew settled and desiccated, parched of volatility.  In the clearing distance I saw a shape, indistinct at first but none the less present, an impressive icon of my home universe in the alien abstraction, this phantom zone of marginal existence. The Cherie Priest hung in the clear space ahead of me, nothing more now to surveillance than a picked at corpse left for dead, all but bones that not even the carrion would usurp. Around her a haze of shards from the hull danced and played idly in the ambient light. The forward command section of the ship was abstracted, missing, transformed in a second by the explosion that had tossed me into the deep Ether. She was inert, torn asunder in the act that would have almost certainly killed all the crew, all but me who would surely suffered a worse still fate, at the mercy of the remaining reserves of my suit. There really seemed nothing to be done, the cooling emotions and dipping stimulus of the storm dissipated and I grew more level headed. The carcass might yet provide me with a means of prolonging my life, a body without a mind she might well be, never able again to fly and swallow as a bird might, as she once did with such grace. But in nature nothing is wasted and the end of one life is the continuation for others. I risked death by considering going nearer, but it was a merely a postponement of inevitable conclusion, to not attempt so.