2954-05-06 – Tales from the Inbox: The Arrival of the Zenith Treader
Gareth Glass sighed as Zenith Treader’s Himura drive wound down and the familiar, if harsh, blue glow of Sagittarius Gate slanted in through the viewpanels. It had been nearly three weeks since he or anyone else aboard had seen natural starlight of any kind, and though this was far from the ship’s first Gap passage, it was always a relief to reach the end of the run.
“Gareth, get the controller on comms and get us a berth.” Ellia Kossner, Treader’s skipper, stood up from her station and stretched. “I’ll be in my cabin.”
“Gladly.” On such a small crew, and a civilian-chartered one at that, they didn’t bother much with the formalities of command. Besides the two of them, Treader only had three other spacers on the crew – there was Kim Sung, the engineer, and techs Estrada and Lowell, both just hired on at Maribel at the beginning of the current run. Their old tech, Susan Atwood, had unexpectedly resigned her position and left the ship, and the skipper, not wanting to take a chance on a single new hire for a Gap crossing, had signed on two likely candidates just in time to make their scheduled departure.
Gareth soon found himself alone on the command deck. While routine status and intention reports sped away on tight beams toward port control, he turned on the compartment’s overhead speakers and fed them some of his favorite music. The jangling, melodic, often haunting tones of the Tranquility Wave moved through him. Even though he’d never been to Tranquility or to the lesser worlds in its orbit, Gareth had loved the musical styles born there since he was very young.
Nobody else on the ship shared his enthusiasm, of course, so Gareth had to listen on his own, or in his earpiece. Sung in particular, a Hyadean through and through, despised anything that “had the reek of Ori about it.” Gareth didn’t want her to think him a partisan in the ancient feud between Hyades and Orionis.
Some minutes later, the first signals directed at Zenith Treader from the outlying watch-posts began to trickle in. The computer automatically responded to the various challenges with appropriate responses. Most likely, these were only a formality, since the ship had visited this place half a dozen times in the last two years and its jump signature should have been in the database.
A tap on the bulkhead drew Gareth’s attention to the rear of the compartment. There, he saw Patricia Lowell, one of the new techs, frowning up at the speakers. “Sorry to bother you. I heard we made Sagittarius, and wanted to have a look.”
“Never been across the gap before, eh?” Gareth shrugged and turned down the music. “Have a seat if you’d like, but there’s not much to look at.”
Lowell sat in the auxiliary station ahead of Gareth’s console, closest to the viewpanels. He’d had plenty of time to chat with the two new hires on the crew on the transit, but of course he hadn’t. The only person on the crew who shared his duty spaces was the skipper, and off duty he’d mostly stayed out of the common spaces, preferring the company of his music and a good book in his cabin.
“This is your first Gap transit, eh?”
“Hmm?” Lowell turned around, then shrugged. “Oh, yes. I’ve been on long-haul runs, but the last few weeks have been...”
“The Gap is pretty hard on most spacers.” Gareth shrugged. “It gets a little easier. If you blank your cabin viewpanels and put on a little music, you can forget the dark for a while.”
“Music like...” Here Lowell gestured up at the speakers. “Whatever that was you were playing when I came in?”
Gareth chuckled and turned the music back up a little. “Tranq-Wave can be a bit of an acquired taste. Annoys the Skipper and Sung to no end.”
“Really?” Lowell paused for a long moment, looking back out at the blue-white orb of Sagittarius Gate ahead of the ship. “It isn’t what I’d pick, but I’m not sure I’d call it annoying. It’s sort of like... as if space travel had an official score, like the holo-dramas do.”
Gareth sat up suddenly. “Exactly!” He grinned. “See, I thought it was just me.”
“I think if I listened to that for too long, sitting down on duty, I’d fall asleep.” Lowell shook her head. “Fortunately this ship keeps us busy. There’s about ten things hitting service-by date every shift.”
“Treader is hardly new.” Gareth sighed. “But she’s adaptable, and we keep her up to date with all the new toys we can afford. Makes us more flexible than most of our competitors on the Gap run.”
“It’s certainly one of the nicer hulls I’ve berthed in.”
Gareth nodded his agreement, but Lowell wasn’t looking at him. She was staring out forward again, as if lost in a memory. He shrugged and went back to monitoring comms traffic.
Though the planet itself remains in enemy hands, it seems that Fifth Fleet has won at Håkøya. Enemy garrison strength dirtside remains unknown, but with no fleet to support these troops, the outcome of a ground campaign is hardly in doubt.
There is some concern about a counter-attack in the media, but I find this rather unlikely; the defending force in a system with so many planetary bodies holds numerous advantages. Rather than post stories of the various skirmishes and engagements of the weeks-long naval campaign in Håkøya, we’ve elected to move on to some of the other accounts that have been trickling in. Stories worth telling from the fighting there can always be inserted into this feed later.
