Chapter 1.4: On the Hyperlane
Author's Notes: The Partogan language and culture is based on that of the real-world Maori people from New Zealand. Whenever you see a character with the letters "wh" in their name, such as "Whetu Karawana" remember that their names are pronounced in the Maori way with the "vuh" sound.
So Whetu is pronounced "Veh-too."
[Personal log: Mission Specialist Mira Mihaka, HMS Midak, Inner Vinjim Star System, 4 Hui-tanguru, 685]
Mira Mihaka: It’s been just over a month now since we left home, everyone has settled into the routine of life on a spaceship for the most part. The crew is broken up into three groups, and we all work in ten-hour shifts. I’m on duty with Kaia in the Engineering Lab from midnight until ten-hundred hours. Then we get the next ten hours off. We usually spend the time doing general maintenance and housekeeping around the Midak, keeping everything shipshape and operational.
Once we run out of stuff to do, we just relax in the crew lounge. Fleet Command knew this mission was going to take over half a decade, so they went all out with the lounge. It’s like a mix of the most luxurious café you can imagine, and a small amphitheater with a huge glass window that backlights the stage with a star field. Big squishy couches all around the walls, and on the other side of the room from the amphitheater is a walled off area with only one door that faces into the lounge. Though that door is a gymnasium we can use to keep our bones and muscles in good shape over the next six years. The gym’s walls are even soundproofed so the people working out don’t disturb anyone in the rest of the lounge.
At the end of our ten hour maintenance shift, Kaia and I head up to Crew Bay Three. There are four crew bays total, and each one can hold fifteen people; but you’ll never find all sixty bunks being used. At a bare minimum, twenty crew members are always awake and working. There are forty if the previous shift is doing maintenance work. The other twenty are sleeping.
Food around here is treated with nervous apprehension. When we left Daxia, there was enough food on board for exactly nine years, four months, and fifteen days. Most of it is pre-prepared meals in vacuum-sealed packages. It should be more that we need, if all goes well. We still have a plan for the day we run out, though:
See, the Midak has a Phased Disassembler Array on board. The tech was pilfered from an alien empire that fell to the Invaders early in the Second Hyperspace War. I forgot what they were called, High-kirians? Higgy-arians? Something like that. The Phased Disassembler Array takes solid matter (preferably in the form of a small asteroid) and breaks it down into its composite particles. Basically, we can grind an asteroid down into a fine powder and then sort that dust by what it’s made of. Once the Midak runs out of food, we’ll turn the PDA on any organic matter we come across. The ship’s computer has a recipe for a life-sustaining nutrient paste that’ll keep us alive past the nine-year mark. If the PDA breaks… well… we won’t let that happen.
In the meantime, Kaia and I have started our first scientific investigation of the mission:
Last night, Hinauri Keiha and Hapaikiterangi Herekotutuku barged into a command staff meeting, yelling that the Hyperspace Module was on fire. Turns out they were kind of right. Random points of the device itself were spontaneously combusting. The fire itself was harmless, and we put it out quickly. The Hyperspace Module’s inner shell is made of a material that isn’t known for being flammable, so the Captain ordered me to “wake up the science team.” I was so excited to be useful that I woke up the people on Third Shift, even though they went to bed about 45 minutes before.
And just to be clear, no. Hyperspace Modules do not spontaneously catch fire. Something had to interact with the shell to cause a spark. All fires need fuel, oxygen, and heat. The Module generates its own heat, and we breathe a mixture of Oxygen and Nitrogen, but where’s the fuel? And what’s starting the chain reaction in the first place?
My shift is almost done, but I’m going to stay on for a few hours and help out the next shift. Maybe together we can figure something out.
[Personal log closed]
[Personal log addendum: 5 Hui-tanguru, 685, Inner Vinjim Star System]
Mira Mihaka: I just had a really, really boring afternoon followed by five seconds of pure terror.
Remember yesterday, when the Hyperspace Module decided it would look better if it was on fire? My team and I spent about twenty-six hours in the labs trying to figure out why that was happening. We tested the material the casing was made out of, took samples of the air and analyzed everything about it, we even took skin samples of the men and women who worked in the module to see if there was a reaction between skin and the module.
So about five hours ago, we got our first lead. Biologist Moe Kaa figured out that the titanium alloy the Hyperspace Module is made from was reacting to cosmic rays. Something coming off the nearby star is reacting with the Hyperspace Module and causing its exterior to combust. I got the whole Engineering Team together and we designed an experiment to test the “cosmic rays” theory. Kaia, Nikau and Tangaroa went to the foundry and built a one-by-two Bio piece of armor plating built from the same alloy as the Hyperspace Module. Then we secured it in the Engineering Lab and began to bombard it with different types of radiation using a particle accelerator I borrowed from the Physics Team.
Before we started, Kaia and I ran up to the bridge to tell Captain Rangi that we were about to start experimenting with radioactivity and open flames. He cleared all of the rooms around the Engineering Lab and gave notice over the loudspeaker that the military crew wasn’t allowed near the lab for the time being. Then we got started. It was tedious work, but we made progress. We tried almost every possible form of radiation a B-class star could put out before we found a really narrow microwave that caused our slab to spontaneously combust. After that, we just had to find a way to stop that from happening naturally.
Tangaroa came up with an idea to remove some atmosphere from the chamber containing the Hyperspace Module. Not enough that the crew would need to wear space suits in the room, but just enough that they might need to carry a bottle of breathing air if they spent a long time inside. Less air, less chance of a fire. So we partially decompressed the Engineering Lab, set up the particle accelerator, and started blasting our test slab again. That’s when Chief Petty Officer Whetu Karawana unsealed the main door and yelled:
“Hey, Mihaka! You in here?”
Karawana didn’t knock. She just opened the door. And I know she didn’t read the sign on the door because I wrote it! The big red letters said: KEEP OUT. SENSITIVE EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS.
But nooo…signs mean nothing to the CPO, apparently. I guess being almost-barely-but-not-quite-an-officer makes you immune to the rules. It also gives you a free pass to cause explosions inside a cramped spaceship, too. When Karawana opened the lab door, she introduced a couple dozen cubic Bios of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and ozone into the room. Our tiny fire exploded like the Unnamed Mountain did six hundred years ago. (Praise the Mountain, lest it happen again) The lab was wrecked. The particle accelerator burnt to a crisp, and all of our testing materiel was turned into charcoal. Tipi from the Physics Team ran over to see what the noise was about, and he threw every curse word in the language at poor Karawana when he saw what the blast had done to his particle accelerator. Karawana looked like she was going to cry. Oh, and you know why she was looking for me in the first place? She wanted to ask why all of the fire alarms in the lab were disabled!
The medics ended up treating five of us (including myself) for ruptured eardrums. Tamaho said it could be a month before my hearing is back to normal levels. My bunkmate Kaia got the worst of it. She’s still in the infirmary now, getting ready for surgery. Second-degree burns on her left arm AND her left eardrum is burst. Damn, she got messed up. So I promised Kaia I’d go see her as soon as my duty shift ended today, which means Tangaroa and Nikau have taken over the investigation for a few hours. Once the shift changes, Eru and Manawa will wake up and take charge. In the meantime, spontaneous fires are still breaking out in the Hyperspace Module every few hours or so. We still have a week and a half before we reach the Hyperlane leading out of the system though, so we need to come up with something before then.
[Personal log closed]
[Personal log addendum: 6 Hui-tanguru 685, Inner Vinjim Star System]
Mira Mihaka: Faster-than-light systems restored! For once, everything went our way today. While I was walking Kaia back to the crew bay, the whole ship went on Hyperspace Alert. I didn’t know what was going on, so I just kinda threw Kaia into the first Radiation Shelter I found and then ran straight to the shelter underneath the Bridge, which is where the Captain goes during Hyperspace Jumps. I hadn’t gone more than two Bios though when the Hyperspace Alert was cancelled.
So I doubled back to Kaia and we went up to the Bridge together. I found Tangaroa up there with Captain Rangi, and they explained what had happened:
Tangaroa had told the Captain about our “decompress the Hyperspace Module” theory, and Rangi decided to carry out his own test. Tangaroa tried to tell him to wait until the Engineering Team was finished, but the Captain got impatient. Rangi ordered the Hyperspace technicians to don space suits, depressurize the Hyperspace Module and just fire it up. Just like that. He could have blown up the whole ship! Luckily, that didn’t happen. It turned out that the system works perfectly fine in a low-atmosphere environment. Tangaroa, Kaia and I all gave the Captain an earful for risking all of our lives on an untested hunch. He just shrugged and said we could tinker with the Hyperspace Module whenever we wanted so long as we didn’t turn it off.
By the Mountain, does Rangi treat all civilians like children or something?
But, for the time being, we’re going to keep the Hyperspace Module depressurized until we leave the system. The next star in our path is K-class, so it’ll put out different types of radiation than whatever Vinjim is throwing at us, which means we won’t have to worry about this problem much longer. Hopefully.
[Personal log closed.]
Sys/ Hyperspace jump initiated.
Sys/ Post-Hyperspace system self-check underway.
Sys/ Self-check complete. All systems operational.
[Personal log addendum: 17 Hui-tanguru 685, Outer Nithascal Star System]
Well, we’ve made it. And it was just like we thought. As soon as we jumped out of the Vinjim system, the Hyperspace Module started behaving itself again. No fires to be seen anywhere, and we repressurized the module. In future, whenever the ship gets saturated with that particular microwave, we’ll evacuate the Hyperspace Module and then depressurize it. It’s not the best solution, but it’ll keep us moving until we figure out something better.
In the meantime, we’ve entered the Nithascal Star system. Before the Second Hyperspace War, our people had a colony on the second planet here. Ninety million people used to live there, until the Invaders blasted the whole planet into small pieces.
The Nithascal System marked Partoga’s southern border before the war. Once we jump out of here, we’ll have well and truly left home. Between here and Earth is a large swath of space that once belonged to the Micore Empire, followed by a narrow panhandle of Amadii space, and then a big empty region of space no one owned before the war. On the other side of that empty region should be the place where Sol used to be. Then we can start searching.
The humans never fell to the invaders. Partogans who survived the War in Heaven told us as much. Wherever their star ended up, I hope they’re alive and well. Otherwise, this journey might not be worth it.
[Personal log closed]
So Whetu is pronounced "Veh-too."
Chapter 1.4:
On the Hyperlane
[Personal log: Mission Specialist Mira Mihaka, HMS Midak, Inner Vinjim Star System, 4 Hui-tanguru, 685]
Mira Mihaka: It’s been just over a month now since we left home, everyone has settled into the routine of life on a spaceship for the most part. The crew is broken up into three groups, and we all work in ten-hour shifts. I’m on duty with Kaia in the Engineering Lab from midnight until ten-hundred hours. Then we get the next ten hours off. We usually spend the time doing general maintenance and housekeeping around the Midak, keeping everything shipshape and operational.
Once we run out of stuff to do, we just relax in the crew lounge. Fleet Command knew this mission was going to take over half a decade, so they went all out with the lounge. It’s like a mix of the most luxurious café you can imagine, and a small amphitheater with a huge glass window that backlights the stage with a star field. Big squishy couches all around the walls, and on the other side of the room from the amphitheater is a walled off area with only one door that faces into the lounge. Though that door is a gymnasium we can use to keep our bones and muscles in good shape over the next six years. The gym’s walls are even soundproofed so the people working out don’t disturb anyone in the rest of the lounge.
At the end of our ten hour maintenance shift, Kaia and I head up to Crew Bay Three. There are four crew bays total, and each one can hold fifteen people; but you’ll never find all sixty bunks being used. At a bare minimum, twenty crew members are always awake and working. There are forty if the previous shift is doing maintenance work. The other twenty are sleeping.
Food around here is treated with nervous apprehension. When we left Daxia, there was enough food on board for exactly nine years, four months, and fifteen days. Most of it is pre-prepared meals in vacuum-sealed packages. It should be more that we need, if all goes well. We still have a plan for the day we run out, though:
See, the Midak has a Phased Disassembler Array on board. The tech was pilfered from an alien empire that fell to the Invaders early in the Second Hyperspace War. I forgot what they were called, High-kirians? Higgy-arians? Something like that. The Phased Disassembler Array takes solid matter (preferably in the form of a small asteroid) and breaks it down into its composite particles. Basically, we can grind an asteroid down into a fine powder and then sort that dust by what it’s made of. Once the Midak runs out of food, we’ll turn the PDA on any organic matter we come across. The ship’s computer has a recipe for a life-sustaining nutrient paste that’ll keep us alive past the nine-year mark. If the PDA breaks… well… we won’t let that happen.
In the meantime, Kaia and I have started our first scientific investigation of the mission:
Last night, Hinauri Keiha and Hapaikiterangi Herekotutuku barged into a command staff meeting, yelling that the Hyperspace Module was on fire. Turns out they were kind of right. Random points of the device itself were spontaneously combusting. The fire itself was harmless, and we put it out quickly. The Hyperspace Module’s inner shell is made of a material that isn’t known for being flammable, so the Captain ordered me to “wake up the science team.” I was so excited to be useful that I woke up the people on Third Shift, even though they went to bed about 45 minutes before.
And just to be clear, no. Hyperspace Modules do not spontaneously catch fire. Something had to interact with the shell to cause a spark. All fires need fuel, oxygen, and heat. The Module generates its own heat, and we breathe a mixture of Oxygen and Nitrogen, but where’s the fuel? And what’s starting the chain reaction in the first place?
My shift is almost done, but I’m going to stay on for a few hours and help out the next shift. Maybe together we can figure something out.
[Personal log closed]
[Personal log addendum: 5 Hui-tanguru, 685, Inner Vinjim Star System]
Mira Mihaka: I just had a really, really boring afternoon followed by five seconds of pure terror.
Remember yesterday, when the Hyperspace Module decided it would look better if it was on fire? My team and I spent about twenty-six hours in the labs trying to figure out why that was happening. We tested the material the casing was made out of, took samples of the air and analyzed everything about it, we even took skin samples of the men and women who worked in the module to see if there was a reaction between skin and the module.
So about five hours ago, we got our first lead. Biologist Moe Kaa figured out that the titanium alloy the Hyperspace Module is made from was reacting to cosmic rays. Something coming off the nearby star is reacting with the Hyperspace Module and causing its exterior to combust. I got the whole Engineering Team together and we designed an experiment to test the “cosmic rays” theory. Kaia, Nikau and Tangaroa went to the foundry and built a one-by-two Bio piece of armor plating built from the same alloy as the Hyperspace Module. Then we secured it in the Engineering Lab and began to bombard it with different types of radiation using a particle accelerator I borrowed from the Physics Team.
Before we started, Kaia and I ran up to the bridge to tell Captain Rangi that we were about to start experimenting with radioactivity and open flames. He cleared all of the rooms around the Engineering Lab and gave notice over the loudspeaker that the military crew wasn’t allowed near the lab for the time being. Then we got started. It was tedious work, but we made progress. We tried almost every possible form of radiation a B-class star could put out before we found a really narrow microwave that caused our slab to spontaneously combust. After that, we just had to find a way to stop that from happening naturally.
Tangaroa came up with an idea to remove some atmosphere from the chamber containing the Hyperspace Module. Not enough that the crew would need to wear space suits in the room, but just enough that they might need to carry a bottle of breathing air if they spent a long time inside. Less air, less chance of a fire. So we partially decompressed the Engineering Lab, set up the particle accelerator, and started blasting our test slab again. That’s when Chief Petty Officer Whetu Karawana unsealed the main door and yelled:
“Hey, Mihaka! You in here?”
Karawana didn’t knock. She just opened the door. And I know she didn’t read the sign on the door because I wrote it! The big red letters said: KEEP OUT. SENSITIVE EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS.
But nooo…signs mean nothing to the CPO, apparently. I guess being almost-barely-but-not-quite-an-officer makes you immune to the rules. It also gives you a free pass to cause explosions inside a cramped spaceship, too. When Karawana opened the lab door, she introduced a couple dozen cubic Bios of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and ozone into the room. Our tiny fire exploded like the Unnamed Mountain did six hundred years ago. (Praise the Mountain, lest it happen again) The lab was wrecked. The particle accelerator burnt to a crisp, and all of our testing materiel was turned into charcoal. Tipi from the Physics Team ran over to see what the noise was about, and he threw every curse word in the language at poor Karawana when he saw what the blast had done to his particle accelerator. Karawana looked like she was going to cry. Oh, and you know why she was looking for me in the first place? She wanted to ask why all of the fire alarms in the lab were disabled!
The medics ended up treating five of us (including myself) for ruptured eardrums. Tamaho said it could be a month before my hearing is back to normal levels. My bunkmate Kaia got the worst of it. She’s still in the infirmary now, getting ready for surgery. Second-degree burns on her left arm AND her left eardrum is burst. Damn, she got messed up. So I promised Kaia I’d go see her as soon as my duty shift ended today, which means Tangaroa and Nikau have taken over the investigation for a few hours. Once the shift changes, Eru and Manawa will wake up and take charge. In the meantime, spontaneous fires are still breaking out in the Hyperspace Module every few hours or so. We still have a week and a half before we reach the Hyperlane leading out of the system though, so we need to come up with something before then.
[Personal log closed]
[Personal log addendum: 6 Hui-tanguru 685, Inner Vinjim Star System]
Mira Mihaka: Faster-than-light systems restored! For once, everything went our way today. While I was walking Kaia back to the crew bay, the whole ship went on Hyperspace Alert. I didn’t know what was going on, so I just kinda threw Kaia into the first Radiation Shelter I found and then ran straight to the shelter underneath the Bridge, which is where the Captain goes during Hyperspace Jumps. I hadn’t gone more than two Bios though when the Hyperspace Alert was cancelled.
So I doubled back to Kaia and we went up to the Bridge together. I found Tangaroa up there with Captain Rangi, and they explained what had happened:
Tangaroa had told the Captain about our “decompress the Hyperspace Module” theory, and Rangi decided to carry out his own test. Tangaroa tried to tell him to wait until the Engineering Team was finished, but the Captain got impatient. Rangi ordered the Hyperspace technicians to don space suits, depressurize the Hyperspace Module and just fire it up. Just like that. He could have blown up the whole ship! Luckily, that didn’t happen. It turned out that the system works perfectly fine in a low-atmosphere environment. Tangaroa, Kaia and I all gave the Captain an earful for risking all of our lives on an untested hunch. He just shrugged and said we could tinker with the Hyperspace Module whenever we wanted so long as we didn’t turn it off.
By the Mountain, does Rangi treat all civilians like children or something?
But, for the time being, we’re going to keep the Hyperspace Module depressurized until we leave the system. The next star in our path is K-class, so it’ll put out different types of radiation than whatever Vinjim is throwing at us, which means we won’t have to worry about this problem much longer. Hopefully.
[Personal log closed.]
Sys/ Hyperspace jump initiated.
Sys/ Post-Hyperspace system self-check underway.
Sys/ Self-check complete. All systems operational.
[Personal log addendum: 17 Hui-tanguru 685, Outer Nithascal Star System]
Well, we’ve made it. And it was just like we thought. As soon as we jumped out of the Vinjim system, the Hyperspace Module started behaving itself again. No fires to be seen anywhere, and we repressurized the module. In future, whenever the ship gets saturated with that particular microwave, we’ll evacuate the Hyperspace Module and then depressurize it. It’s not the best solution, but it’ll keep us moving until we figure out something better.
In the meantime, we’ve entered the Nithascal Star system. Before the Second Hyperspace War, our people had a colony on the second planet here. Ninety million people used to live there, until the Invaders blasted the whole planet into small pieces.
The Nithascal System marked Partoga’s southern border before the war. Once we jump out of here, we’ll have well and truly left home. Between here and Earth is a large swath of space that once belonged to the Micore Empire, followed by a narrow panhandle of Amadii space, and then a big empty region of space no one owned before the war. On the other side of that empty region should be the place where Sol used to be. Then we can start searching.
The humans never fell to the invaders. Partogans who survived the War in Heaven told us as much. Wherever their star ended up, I hope they’re alive and well. Otherwise, this journey might not be worth it.
[Personal log closed]
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