Relative Gravity / Chapter 02 (Text)

CASSANDRA

Velocity Junkie | Deep Space

The Velocity Junkie had been burning at six-g for a month. They’d stripped the ship of everything but the necessities and packed it with as much fuel ribbon as the hold would carry, only cutting thrust twice a day for food and trips to the head. 

Now the ship was moving at 140-thousand kilometers per second. Nearly half the speed of light. Racing toward the skip-gate that would drop them into orbit around Tartarus, a 122-solar mass black hole spinning fast enough to drag spacetime in a whirl around it. Unstoppable force and immovable object in one malevolent package, and they were about to snuggle right up close to it. 

Cass and Amari were strapped into their seats, lying perpendicular to the thrust. Even with the pressure suits keeping blood in their brains, the drugs helping their vascular systems weather the strain, and the gravity plating on the command deck reducing the sense of acceleration down to only triple what humans had evolved to survive, the trip had been a long, hard slog.

This was one of the few times Cass envied her brother's mental situation. His thoughts weren't tied to his brain. He'd put his bodies in stasis and was riding out the trip in a virt with Vel, running an action-adventure sim. As horrifying as the thought of abandoning her body for a digital life might have been, she could appreciate its occasional situational benefits. 

Trapped in their flesh, Cass and Amari couldn't do much but endure it. They had spent most of their time on their backs, eyes closed, working in their heads, triple checking the gravity lance, monitoring the ship's systems for any sign of fault, running through their plan until it was drilled into them, and streaming hours and hours of content. 

It hadn't been fun, but they'd made it. They were ready. In a few hours, one way or another, it would all be over. 

Once they hit orbit around Tartarus, they'd be on the clock. They were only after a tiny timespace core, but the Collective wasn't about to just let them fly in and take one. And while two entire battlefleets protected the Tartarus sector, even a battlefleet couldn't fight physics. 

The Velocity Junkie had taken a month to build up enough speed for a parking orbit at ISCO. Any Collective response would be weeks from striking distance. Even torpedoes burning at fifty-g would take three days to reach them. 

She had high confidence in success, but nothing was guaranteed. If they slipped, or something went wrong and they couldn’t collect the core with the containment drive currently docked to the ship—well, they'd used most of their fuel accelerating. They wouldn't have any way to slow down. Ever.

But if they pulled it off, stole a fortune's worth of concentrated energy out from under the Collective's nose—her debt with the Lotus would be cleared. Leaving them with more than enough for Abel’s treatment and to buy out Vel’s contract. Amari had even agreed to stay on. 

They'd grown close, this little team. Built an unlikely new family. Who would have ever guessed she’d find it among an eko flotilla?

Vel was under contract with the Wandering Lotus—a loose group of humans, ekoes, and constructs—who'd gathered a dozen ships into a fleet and taken up the challenge of shepherding the good word of digital transcendence to the poor souls trapped behind Collective ignorance.

Cass’ first few days with the flotilla had been miserable. She’d suddenly become an exile, her future shattered, and unsure of her path for the first time in her life. Without the security of the Collective and her duty to her family, who was she? 

She’d quickly realized wallowing in self-pity and racking up debt wouldn't get them anywhere. She put her emotions to the side and offered her services to the Lotus’ leader, the Revelator Chandice. Vel vouched for her, and with her military expertise and knowledge of the Collective, Cass was soon accepted into the fold.

Vel was the first artificial being Cass had ever met in real life. At first, she'd been horrified at the idea a spaceship could have thoughts of its own. Like it was haunted. But over time, and with Abel having his own problems after translating to digital, she'd developed a frame of reference to accepting it.

After all, she believed Abel was still Abel. Whether his thoughts were ordered photons or a tangle of wet, messy chemical impulses, they were still her brother's. So why couldn't the ship be someone too?

Their friendship had developed slowly. Cass came from a long, virulent line of anti-eko indoctrination. But after she and Vel had run a few jobs together—transported one-way missionaries, ferried supplies, and intercepted bratva shipments—they’d gotten to know each other. Soon, the question of whether someone had programmed Vel to be warm and folksy, with her long vowels and plain talk, didn’t much matter. Cass realized she liked it. Vel was as real and alive as anyone. It was thoughtful. And caring. And funny. That it was a ship didn't enter into it.

It was good to have someone to talk to, especially considering Abel’s dire situation. Cass had bought him a new body on credit and tried to learn to love the stranger's face, but he began showing signs the neural transfer hadn't been clean. His personality was wildly unstable, full of holes where memories used to be. Slowly but surely unraveling. Even a second body hadn’t helped. The mental resets were only prolonging the inevitable. 

If the eko rithmists could have fixed him, they would have by now. They said his mind file—his psychorithm—was corrupted. A cognitive incongruence, they told her. Abel's mind couldn't accept what it was and kept tearing itself apart. They needed a specialist to fix him, completely rewrite his mind from the foundations up. Which meant leaving the flotilla. 

She hated the idea of moving further from Mama and Father, but even now she didn't know what had become of them. She could only hope the repercussions of her actions hadn't been too severe. After eighteen months of messages, trying every trick she and Amari could think of to get through the Collective firewalls, she still hadn't heard a reply. 

Cass glanced across at Amari, reassured by her quiet presence.  

The ship’s mechanic had been crewing with the Weekend Warrior transport frigate when its former captain had decided to convert to digital and swapped his ship for a new body. Recognizing her talents, the Lotus revelator had kept her on, and she'd been assigned to retrofit the Warrior's hauling platform with the engine bank from Vel's previous ship, the Velocity's Shadow, creating the ship they were riding in now.

When they’d first met, Amari was stocky with short spiky hair and vaguely Asian features, but already deep in transition to the buxom, chestnut-skinned woman Cass had grown close to. 

Growing up in the Collective, Cass had heard the stories about transmogs—people who altered their bodies using genetic manipulation and targeted surgery. Sliding from ethnicity to ethnicity as easily as people changed wardrobes. She'd always thought them wild fables meant to scare children. Cautionary tales about the corrupted Free Worlds. 

Amari said she’d been born on Khomsa, to descendants of Persian and Korean heritage. You couldn’t tell by looking at her. Through years of gene-therapy she'd been black and white and brown and even a man for a while. 

She'd shown Cass vids of some of her previous incarnations, each one a stranger with the same person on the inside. Her laugh was the same though, that never seemed to change. That and her eyes. She'd always kept them the same rich brown they'd been since she was a girl.

Amari had barely finished growing into her new look when they'd figured the tail end of the timespace heist would require a month at constant acceleration. 

Spending that long at three-g—which would multiply her one hundred kgs to 300 and put terrible strain on her heart and lungs—was potentially dangerous, even with the protective drugs. Cass had suggested she sit it out, but Amari had shot that idea down and immediately started a new gene infusion. The Velocity Junkie was her home. No one was leaving her behind. She was now in the middle of adapting to a hybrid Polynesian/Celtic ethnicity with a more compact form.   

The burn had been especially difficult on her. Over the past month she'd dropped nearly a third of her weight. Her previously rich brown skin was patched over with yellow-pink blotches of new coloring, and her tight curls had begun to show cinnamon roots. Soon enough, she'd be a completely different person. All over again.

In a way, Cass envied her. Amari shed her self-image as easily as a snake leaving its skin, while Cass couldn't escape being exactly who she was, all the damn time.

Amari had never explained what drove her extreme changes, and Cass had never asked. Everyone was allowed their secrets. If Amari wanted to share, she would when she was ready.

"I am so done with this chair," Amari said, wincing as she struggled to find a comfortable position against the thrust. "And bored off my tits."

She reached into the breast pocket of her overalls and retrieved her mindset, dialed it into whatever mental state she was looking for, then put it to her lips and pulled a long drag. She held it in for a moment then angled her head and blew the vapor into the air filter. Her body relaxed back into her crèche. 

"Enjoy the quiet while it lasts," Cass finally said. "Go" time was approaching, and her anticipation rising to match. "Before you know it, we'll be skimming over a black hole at point-five C."

"And getting younger by the minute," Amari said with a chuckle. 

"You don't get younger, it's that everything else gets older."

"Same difference." Amari scoffed. "The whole thing's a complete mind-strak." 

Cass felt the same way. Black holes were mesmerizing and terrifying all at once. Creation squeezed to the breaking point. The ship would be moving so fast—around the mass of 122 stars packed into the area of a small asteroid—that gravity and speed warped time. For every second that ticked by on the ship, more than a second and a half would pass everywhere else. They weren't just stealing a condensed ball of energy. They were stealing time. 

How cool was that? 

"Vel and I are about to take down the elder dragon," Abel announced over the comms. Cass hadn’t heard from him all day. "Anyone want to come join us?"

They were minutes away from blinking through the skip-gate, and Abel wanted to play games. 

She swallowed her frustration. It wasn't his fault. His brain was malfunctioning. Luckily, he'd agreed to stay virtual for the mission. She couldn't trust him with anything important. He could hardly string two thoughts together anymore. Cass should have left him behind to reknit with his control pattern instead of dragging him out here, but she couldn't help it. She was responsible for his safety and needed to keep watch on him. Which, as ironic as it was, meant bringing him into orbit around a black hole.

"I'd love to, big brother," Cass replied, "but we've got work. Maybe when we're done."

Vel would keep him occupied while the rest of them executed the plan.

"Promise?" he said, his voice rising like it had when he was a kid. She had been the younger sister, but she'd always been the one protecting him. 

"When I get a chance," she said.

"Fine," he said, sulking. "See ya later, I guess." 

She felt bad about it, hearing his little boy frown before he dropped off, but he'd forget about it soon enough. 

They were just under nine-million klicks from the gate when Vel started the sixty-second counter. 

The ship was carving through space. Covering the average distance between Old Earth and Mars every hour. 

The gate opened with a supernova burst, but the glowing ring was far too distant to make out as more than a blue-shifted dot of light even with the ship's most powerful telescope.

The ring came into focus a moment later. Then it was huge. And then they were through, with the warped-nothing sphere of Tartarus looming ahead.