339-Valkyrie’s View: A Year Among the Stars
December 4th, 2552 – The art of misdirection
Escape Pilot Kat James Reporting
I’ve been mostly playing catch-up, with Fipps and Cookie. They were more than willing to fill me in as I worked on the Gumbo.
While most of the Gumbo’s equipment was outdated, the void detector our tech team had built was of great interest to Fipps, as were the modification diagrams the Other Me had provided. It did turn out that most of the discoveries were less interesting considering the fact that our ships were now being upgraded by the Parataph and we were working on a hybrid technology that was leaps and bounds better than anything either of us had come up with on our own.
So, everything I’d managed to learn, was now outdated— everything that is except for Jump technology and following paths within the Void and how the paths seemed to be sucking real space into the void.
Tower’s debriefing was a bit more thorough since he had more training when it came to observation, but what he couldn’t explain were the rifts, tunnels, and wells that the Lasatiea and the Void Walkers were using.
That’s when I was summoned from working on the Gumbo to report my observations. While most of the brass didn’t understand, the pilots did and so did a lot of the mechanics and scientists who’d been studying the jump gates.
We realized early on that what we had was a lot of theory without any hard data to support it. That meant we had nothing but speculation to go on. One of the biggest questions we came up with was, ‘what would happen if you opened a well in the middle of one of the Void Walker’s passages?’
Surprisingly the general consensus was ‘we should probably just keep that theoretical.’
It’s good to know that we’ve developed some common sense.
Askir and Almir stayed with us, or more to the point Tower and in the evening we compared notes.
It took me a minute to realize that the fleet was powering up and opening a gateway, but when we exited, we were right back where we started.
Cookie explained that we’ve been doing that for a while now. It seems the well masks our presence because the Lasatiea are looking for an exit signal and since we never really enter the gate they keep looking for us where we aren’t.
The canteen was less crowded than I remember it but Fipps assured me that most of our people are on loan to different ships.
Leave a Reply