Chapter Two
Chapter Two 3/17/2160- In orbit of planet Fitzgerald Space is big.
Those were Joel's thoughts upon awaking in his annoyingly cramped seat. The fabric of spacetime began to dissolve into a spherical distortion as he could see from the cramped, circular window. A distant pattern of stars and what appeared to be a cerulean gas giant emerged from the rupture in space. Joel, along with the two hundred or so passengers in the spacecraft alongside him, was thrown back in his seat upon entering real-space and accelerating using conventional Newtonian reaction engines. Cheap and inferior to modern gravitophoton-based engines, but they got the job of short-range transportation done relatively smoothly. The engines which allowed faster-than-light travel, of course, operated via a completely different manner. They used a field of dark energy to massively reduce a vehicle's inertial mass by several orders of magnitude consequently shunting it into an alternate spacetime where the speed of light was increased, colloquially termed 'Subspace'. The superconducting coils required to produce such a field, however, could also be used at a lower power setting to easily create powerful gravitational fields at the press of a button. They were prohibitively expensive to manufacture and utilise, which thus led many cheap transportation companies, like the one transporting Joel, to use them exclusively for faster-than-light travel only. Miniaturised coils could also be placed in the floors of spacecraft to create artificial gravity, though Interstellar Expeditions had a propensity to spend the least sum of money on its liners as possible. Joel was strapped in to his seat without any gravity. The transport liner had passed through the Subspace rupture fully, creating a brief flash of Cherenkov radiation which momentarily fizzled out as the rupture collapsed into itself and ceased to exist. The bubbly sensations of the mass-reducing quintessence field had passed from his stomach and the cerulean gas giant was now fully in view, rapidly approaching the shaking spacecraft. The target destination was now easily visible: A slowly rotating torus interlaced with eight major support struts, glowing metallically with the reflection of the yellow star Amscom. A scarlet light on the end of each of the support struts blinked brightly against the relative blackness of space. The thing was quite large for a station, perhaps eight kilometres in diameter. The transport closed the distance to the station within ten minutes. The reaction control system activated with an audible whoosh and decelerated the spacecraft, now throwing Joel into the seat ahead of him. He cursed quietly, returning a brief, "I'm sorry," to the elderly man ahead of him who had turned about face and given him an accusatory glare. Apparently his curse was louder than he initially thought. The spacecraft docked with the station with a sudden jolt of deceleration. After thirty seconds the atmosphere pressure of the craft was equalised barometrically with the pressure of the station's atmosphere and the airlock slowly became ajar. The stale atmosphere of the spacecraft leaked out and was supplanted by blissfully fresh air. The captain's voice came over the speakers and gave the passengers permission to exit the craft. Joel unbuckled his seatbelt and hurriedly waddled through the curved surface and into the hallway of the station. "Gravity," he sighed in a thankful tone. "What a lovely sensation." He stood proudly, letting his muscles and 185 centimetre frame become accustomed to the lost sensations of the gravitational interaction. He had been in that damned cigar tube for over three days- evidently Interstellar Expeditions couldn't afford fast Subspace drives either. Joel's black suit blended nicely with his ebony skin. He had a professional cut of straight black hair- a trait inherited from his combined African American and Swedish heritage- which he kept neatly combed. A black suitcase lay at his side while he stretched his arms. "Lishenshe pleashe." That drawled, slobbery request interrupted his train of thought. He turned to face the voice. It was a heavy Paxir man dressed in a blue attendant uniform, at least half a metre taller than he was. "Pardon me?" Joel asked the man. "Lishen- Lish-," the alien groaned in combined embarrassment and frustration with the complexities of the human lingua franca. He was massively tall, at least 230 centimetres, with grey reptilian skin and four muscular mandibles that supplanted where a pair of lips would normally be expected on a humanoid. A thick otter-like tail, lacking in fur of course and resembling that of a lizard, extended from the back of his flight uniform. Thick, dreadlock-like tentacles of cartilage extended from the alien's scalp, the Paxir equivalent of hair. The mandibles were essentially the equivalent of the reptilian species' lips and could communicate English sounds, if crudely; sibilant sounds in particular were difficult to pronounce due to the lack of a tongue. The alien stumbled a few more times before it finally clicked to Joel as to what the man wanted. He produced a plastic card from his pocket- his traveller's license, which gave him clearance to be aboard the station. He handed it to the man, who accepted it with his massive tetradactyl hands. "Joel Olofsson?" he asked upon placing it in the laser scanner. "That's me," he replied with a slight Swedish accent. "Here you are, Mr. Olofsson. Welcome to Fitzgerald Station." He handed Joel his license, curving his mandibles upwards in an attempt to imitate a human smile. He smiled in return and left the spaceport, travelling via the station-wide conveyor belt. The station was crowded with people hustling this way and that. He recognised that the station was an entertainment facility based on the various exhibits and tourist destinations visible along his conveyor travel. Posters of government endorsements were plastered along the walls crookedly. Most of them were copies of a popular military recruitment advertisement featuring an armoured Jaffean woman holding a rifle heroically with alien letters scrawled atop her. Joel mentally translated the letters as best he could. "We can beat the Colonial Revolution," he read to himself. "The UAS is staying right here." He pondered that thought for a time and let out a sarcastic snicker. The United Ascendancy of Stars was the coalition of three interstellar governments which formed the overarching legislative body of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way: Jaffean, Paxir, and human. The first, a feline species of humanoids; the second, a massive reptilian species of humanoids; the latter, a simian species riddled by war since its inception tens thousands of years ago. Humanity, after briefly warring with the former two species over a territorial dispute (and losing miserably), begrudgingly accepted a peace treaty on the condition that they become a member species of the Ascendancy. Not desiring to be driven to extinction at the hands of a significantly more advanced alien empire, the United Nations had little choice but to accept. The real joke, however, wasn't in how the Ascendancy handled other species, but instead how it handled its own colonies. The empire was legislatively divided into two regions: The Core and the Periphery. The Core consisted of a sixty light year region (roughly a day's travel using Subspace propulsion) radiating from Jaffea and encompassing Pax'ilstal- the Jaffean and Paxir homeworlds, respectively- and exhibited economic decadence and an egotistical bourgeoisie populace. The Periphery was everywhere else- mining colonies, agricultural worlds- places where people busted their proverbial asses just to sustain a decent living. The population in the Periphery, as of the 2160 interstellar census, constituted seventy nine percent of the "United" Ascendancy of Stars. In spite of this, their political power and socioeconomic representation was comparable to the power of a worker bee relative to that of the hive queen. Thus the Colonial Revolution. The UAS-UN war was the first war the UAS had fought in nearly a century, and it wasn't cheap. For the past twenty years after the war had ended, the colonies were furious of the rampant increase of quotas and demands due to the costs of the war. A small number of the colonies violently protested, resulting in their deaths. That had the exact opposite effect of quelling the rebellion, however, instead sparking a number of colonial rebellions and violent uprisings. The cancer of rebellion quickly spread across the Periphery, creating a general feeling of angst in the Ascendancy. The military became much more powerful, quickly annihilating any colony daring to rebel. Any mention of political dissent was essentially a free ticket to either prison or execution. That was why Joel popped a snicker. More than three quarters of the empire, of which he was a citizen, was living day-to-day busting their proverbial asses to make a living, while the corpulent bourgeoisie of the Core was gorging themselves on overflows of money and exquisite Jaffean alcohol. Fitzgerald Station was what the UAS termed a "recreation resort," which was a method for the government to entertain its Periphery citizens and quell feelings of dissent. Families who could save up enough duzzels- the standard Ascendancy currency- could usually afford to stay at such a facility for three days of the Earth-standard year. Then it was back to mining and farming for the remaining year. That cold fact reduced his spirits somewhat. Seeing all of the families scuttle about the station, eager to have fun, eager to live, made him slightly depressed knowing that their fun would be dashed by decadence and indifference soon enough to make it all fade from memory. He had forgotten his turn. The thought snapped back to him that he had a destination in mind and he hurriedly held up his arm, tapping his smart watch and projecting a small holographic display of the government pamphlet he received three days prior on Earth. "Gravito-Metrik Office, suite 24E," he read aloud. He looked up hurriedly. The red sign post reading 24E whizzed by as he rode by on the conveyor belt. "Ah, shit," he soliloquised, hurriedly grabbing his suitcase and exiting the belt at an adjacent divergence in the rubber belt. It took him a few minutes to arrive back at 24E, but soon enough he stepped within a metre of the white doors and they parted with a sibilant hiss.
The human saw an office lobby with white walls, indicative of the laboratory setting he was expecting. There was a puzzling lack of people in the open lobby- there was a skylight above the door he had just entered displaying the blackness of space; a coffee machine with no attendees; no people walking the hallways. But there was a calico Jaffean sitting behind the desk in the centre of the room. "Pardon, monsieur?" the alien asked in a definitively male voice. "Are you lost?" "No," Joel returned, walking up to the receptionist. "I accepted a research position. I wasn't told anything other than that, I'm afraid." "Ah!" the alien said with a flash of remembrance. "You must be monsieur Olofsson, non?" He nodded. "Good!" he almost shouted. Joel was taken aback by his twitchy mannerisms. The man's jaw twitched at regular intervals and his feline ears made subtle vibratory stirs every once in a while. Joel recognised these as nervous ticks, but simply dismissed the man as being stressed in an office job. The calico leapt out of his seat and slammed open the desk side door and then stared into the skylight for a moment, as if awaiting approval. Joel backed up; this guy was odd, to say the least. "Is everything alright?" he probed nervously. He briefly rotated around to observe the skylight, seeing if anything unusual or interesting was there in space. Nothing. Just a fourteen billion light year wide splatter of white dots of light against a black background. Stars and utter silence. "Terrific!" was the alien's reply. "Let's go to-" he stared into outer space again, awaiting a go-ahead from the heavens above- "Your office!" The human simply shot him a cautious, mildly threatened gaze. A slight blue glow seemed to emanate from the feline's whiskers, emitting some sort of sparkling ephemeral ectoplasm during his last shout. He had seen the effect before in some of the more poverty-stricken regions of the Periphery: Stardust. The artificial blue powder was a metamaterial capable of entrapping gravitophotons within its crystal lattice, giving its users not only a terrific high (brought on by the actual dust) but also a limited ability to project small gusts of gravitomagnetism from their appendages as though they exhibited telekinesis. The Jaffean sniffed heavily and coughed, his breath expelling a crackle of blue electricity. His straight cerulean hair stood on end. "Come on!" he almost shouted, pointing in the direction of a white-painted corridor on the right side of the large room. "Right this way!" So Joel followed him, albeit reluctantly. There were a few other scientists meandering through the hall, reminiscing about their flow charts and Feynman diagrams and gravitophoton momentum yields. Most of them were either human or Jaffean, he noticed, but there were a few Paxir lumbering about who, at nearly two point five metres tall, had a difficult time squeezing into the short hallway. The Jaffean druggie and Joel arrived at a white door with a black stripe of paint running along the midsection. The name tag on the right side of the door read: J. Olofsson- PhD Theoretical and Applied Physics. He was proud to have a sign displaying his achievements. At twenty seven solar years of age, possessing a PhD was a sign of either kissing the professor's ass to get ahead or busting one's own to yield the same effect. Joel performed the latter extensively, and it propelled him farther and faster than anything he imagined. "Hey," Joel asked, turning about to look towards the Jaffean on his left, "So, is this-" he interrupted himself. The man was gone. He looked about the long and narrow hallway, seeing where he could have disappeared to. There was no door behind him where he could have run off. And the hallway was fairly lengthy, so the alien man being able to run that distance in such a short time, even being intoxicated with Stardust, was unlikely. The aliens were digitigrade, however, meaning that they could be fast, stealthy and sneaky. Their tetradactyl paws made nearly zero noise even when sprinting. "Ah, fuck it," he cursed under his breath, quickly losing interest in the druggie's activities. "I've had a long enough day." He angrily punched the red button under his name tag and the door split apart along the black division with a pneumatic whish. The human did a quick look around and stepped through the threshold of the metal doorway. The room was mostly white, with a singular black stripe running through the cubic walls horizontally. There was a desk opposite the door on the upper left of the room, equipped with a surprisingly fancy-looking computer and office tools, as well as a printer and fax machine resting just under the slick black computer monitor. On the right of the room was a wooden bookshelf laden with tomes of all sorts. An orange holographic clock was placed on the wall a metre above and to the right of the desk; it read 7:12 p.m. in civilian time. Overall, the office looked exquisitely crafted, and must have been the size of a large master bedroom. He noticed a rectangular doorway a few metres away from the desk with a hinged door on the side; it led to an equally well-equipped restroom. Joel was interrupted in his aweing with a rustling sound coming from around the bookshelf, which had a right angle and consequently partially obstructed the view. The first things that came to his mind were schol'ieores. The damn animals were from the Paxir homeworld, Pax'ilstal, and had run amok across the galaxy ever since the species' debut into the galactic arena nearly a millennium ago. They resembled hairless, reptilian gerbils with blood red scaly skin. They very often didn't carry disease, but regardless, the little bastards loved to hide in starships and buildings- and seemed to have a certain affinity for eating electrical wires and paper, making them quite a nuisance. Joel swore and readied his suitcase, prepared to smash the alien rodent's skull in. The rustling ceased almost on cue, as if the little bastard knew he was coming. He rounded the right angle of the bookshelf and looked down. But there wasn't a rodent. A Jaffean stood up, a book still in her hands and a confused look prominent on her muzzle. The alien feline was quite short, standing at a full height of maybe a metre and a half, and resembled a melange between a tabby and leopard cat. Her fur had a base of fawn striated with spotty rosettes of obsidian and smears of light fawn striating her fur. The light fawn of her base coat sparkled beautifully between the rosettes of black striating her fur in discontinued spotty stripes. Her eyes were light green with a vertical slit forming her pupil, and a metre-something long furry tail, splotched with black stripy rosettes and a fawn base, extended from her sacrum. Her hair was an indubitably distinctive component to her appearance, resembling a mid-20th century, shoulder-length pixie cut of wavy zebra-coloured hair, most of it black but striated with vertical white stripes. The realisation and ecstatic surprise registered simultaneously with both of them, but only one of them had the courage to speak. "Floriil?" weakly escaped Joel's lips.