Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

How soon?!? How soon, dammit!

No matter how much I inwardly screamed at the Celestial Forge or tried every query I could think of to shake loose or trick even a hint from the quest system prompts, it remained stubbornly silent. The Forge was clearly telling me things only when it felt like talking, and carefully curating anything that it said so that even trying to datamine it for hints was basically useless. All I was getting was just enough to prod me in a certain direction, and then nothing. Particularly nothing that even began to gave me a clue as to what kind of deadline I was working under here!

Yeah, the 'I'm a pawn' theory is definitely starting to edge ahead of the 'lab rat' theory right now.

The sole bit of foreknowledge that I had been gifted with was that the hope that the Vilani would finally stop trying to conquer us was in vain, and that at some point a Fourth Interstellar War would happen. And that if I didn't do something about it, Terra was going to lose.

No pressure, right?!?

After I stopped hyperventilating and started seriously trying to figure out what the heck I could do about this, I felt that Well-Researched thing I'd bought earlier today doing exactly what its description promised it would do - let me quickly scan across my entire collected body of knowledge looking for things that could help solve the problem I was concentrating on. Which honestly wasn't much right now, given how thoroughly in the dark I was working on. But now that I was actually thinking, I did remember the most important thing of all.

So, I screwed my courage to the sticking-place and went to wake up my parents.

Proving to Mom and Dad that I hadn't lost my mind was as simple as revealing some of my newly-acquired technical knowledge and abilities. Because while I was a straight-A student and one of my school's most infamous study hounds, they knew full well that I did not have a PhD in physics or total recall. Or at least, I hadn't had them yesterday. But while neither of my parents had PhDs Dad had been a sensor tech in the Navy, which meant he had a very good technical education narrowly focused in the specific field of long-range electromagnetic scan equipment. Hyperspectral cameras, passive arrays, microwave-laser scanning radar, he'd operated and done maintenance on them all. So he had just enough of an optics and physics background to know that I wasn't bullshitting him when I suddenly started laying out the kind of waveform analysis calculus that even the engineering officers would have used a computer for. And being able to demonstrate that I now had an eidetic memory was as simple as letting Mom go fetch one of the antique paper books Dad had salvaged from the Warsaw ruins that she knew I hadn't read in years, if ever, and having me recite back any randomly selected page letter-perfect after I'd just skimmed it once.

Which left me with the hard part of the conversation.

"A Fourth Interstellar War." Dad said, his face a mask of shock.

"That's what it said. And sure, it's some mysterious vast unknowable that blatantly has its own agenda in playing enigmatic oracle, but..." I sighed.

"But it's undeniable that something extraordinary is happening, and that it would be arbitrary skepticism to only believe the parts we liked to hear and ignore the rest of it. Until it bit us on the behind." Mom finished.

"Yeah." I agreed. "If we swallow any piece of this, then we have to swallow the worst part along with the best part. Or else we're like the proverbial idiots who think that if they turn off the fire alarm, there won't be any fire."

"Unfortunately, I'm not sure if I can back out of the contract negotiations for Nusku now." Mom said pensively. "I'd even already given my notice at my old job. It was all over but the final signing."

"I'm not sure if you should back out." Dad surprised me.

"Dad, your whole reasoning about Mom taking the job on Nusku was based on the evaluation that the Vilani wouldn't attack again." I said. "And now you know that you'd be living right on the invasion route!"

"No, it was based on the evaluation that the Vilani wouldn't attack again soon." Dad corrected me gently. "And-"

"And we have no idea when that attack will be coming!" I continued.

"Exactly. We have no idea." he finished firmly, and I saw Mom pick up on whatever the heck Dad was trying to say and nod along with him.

I blinked incredulously. "Wait, you're literally volunteering to be mine canaries?"

"Wherever the Confederation stations you, you'll have access to mail and official news services." Dad analyzed. "And you might even have access to internal government sources of information, depending on your job. But unless you volunteer for a frontier posting, and actually get it, you won't have a chance to talk to people who have actually been in the Imperium recently. No opportunity to receive the earliest possible warning of any major shift in Vilani attitudes by talking to people who've been beyond the border. Or to people who live on the border, and who like any frontier colonists anywhere have every motivation to pay the most careful attention possible to what's going on around them."

"Without us needing at least one at-home parent for you any longer your father could start full-time work again, as well." Mom thought out loud. "On one of the Naval bases, as a civilian contract technician for the sensor systems. Which would give you opportunities to pick up all the info you could at the workplace."

"You two are being depressingly and unfairly logical again." I groused, momentarily comforted by the familiar rhythms of a Nowak family discussion. "Okay, okay, I get what you're saying. And... it makes as much sense as anything else. But please don't sign any long-term contracts. And as soon as you two mine canaries start smelling the gas, you get out of the mine."

"You've got that right." Dad nodded emphatically.

"So, next problem. What the heck am I going to do?" I said. "I mean, before the whole 'Fourth Interstellar War' spoiler dropped I was just going to serve my time and then go on to a brilliant career of some kind in academia and R&D, but..."

"But you're going to be expected to finish four years of Public Service before you even see a college, and National Honors or not you'll be an entry-level person expected to go where she's told and do what she's told." Dad said. "And you can't even try going to college first and deferring Public Servuce until afterwards, because they closed that option out years ago."

"Yeah, both the Confederation and private-sector employers love having four years of actual work history and not just test scores to judge people from when making hiring decisions, so now everybody does Public Service before college, no exceptions." I sighed. "Even the scholarship students, because whether or not you can actually do productive work in the field on top of just having good test scores means they pay less scholarships to college goof-offs." Like any good teenager, I sighed heavily at the cosmic unfairness of grown-ups actually being sensible again. "Which means I either spend four years in a holding pattern when we have no clue how much time I even have before I hit the deadline, or I figure out how I can possibly get the time and facilities - and trust! - to start doing advanced defense research when I'm either a junior enlisted tech or an intern."

The room fell silent as we all metaphorically or literally rubbed our chins and put on our thinking caps for a minute, until Mom spoke. "She's just not going to get those kinds of opportunities during Public Service unless her chain of command chooses to give them to her. So, the problem we need to solve is to figure out how we get them to do that."

"Simple. I do something conspicuously brilliant." I replied. "The problem is that so far my only boost is being an encyclopedic synthesist, like out of one of those old Heinlein novels. Which is great for acing the CATs or being a generally knowledgeable person and good thinker in general, but doesn't mean I'm going to invent any new tech miracles right now. And I have no clue how soon the Forge will give me a next boost, or what it will be."

"But that helps." Dad surprised me. "Oh, not in finding an immediate solution, but in clarifying the problem. If you can't invent the needed tech advancements right now, then you don't have to worry about trying to do them right now. What you need to do is work on setting yourself up so that after the next boost finally drops, you can easily capitalize on the opportunity."

"So I... get next to someone who is already involved in that kind of research, do my best to look like the Next Young Prodigy so that I'm taken seriously if and when I get something else to bring to the table, and when the Forge decides to actually give me something then I bring it to the table?" I followed along.

"Well, without more than the most basic security clearance - which is all you're ever going to see when starting out in Public Service at your age - you'll never get alongside anyone involved in actual defense research. But it's not too early to start working on impressing someone reputable in the scientific community, preferably in a related civilian field." Dad corrected me mildly.

"Sounds good to me. So, which positions did Public Service offer you to choose from again?" Mom asked. "Because we'll need to start going through them all very carefully."

"No, what we need to do now is go back to sleep." Dad yawned. "We've still got six weeks to figure it out, and we'll want the clearest possible heads when we do. Fourth Interstellar War or not, the world will still be here in the morning."

* * * * *​

Any attempt on my part to suggest a posting that would mean I could join my folks at Nusku was strenuously argued down. Likewise, any suggestion that I try my 'entry-level access' strategy in the Armed Forces was likewise nixed. If the existence of my brain was really the sole difference between Terra's victory and it's defeat in the next interstellar war, then it was imperative that I not take any unnecessary personal risks. Not even ones like 'living on the border tripwire' or 'hazards of peacetime military service'.

And of course I wasn't blind to the part where my parents were saying this because like all parents everywhere they wanted their child to outlive them by decades, but that didn't change the part where the overprotective nogoodniks were actually right this time.

So, within those limitations the best idea that our collective heads could come up with was the terraforming project on Peraspera. Located approximately two parsecs away from Terra, it could be reached with a single hop by a ship with a jump-2 drive. Even if you were limited to a jump-1 drive, it was still close enough to the Prometheus colony at Alpha Centauri to reach Terra that way. So I wasn't getting too far away from Terra, and even better, I was on the side of Terra away from the Vilani Imperium.

And that was about the only thing Peraspera had to recommend it, because it was otherwise an uninhabitable rock with a total population of approximately 13,000. Peraspera was early enough in its planetary formation that its atmosphere was still an unbreathable mix of nitrogen, nitrogen oxides, CO2, and all sorts of sulfurous gases. Most of its permanent staff was either planetologists or biologists studying the evolution of primitive life in such an environment, or engineers doing advanced field research in life-support systems. Even Vilani tech, with all their thousands of years of incremental improvement and bug-fixing, had never seriously gotten into the problem of setting up a self-sustaining life-support cycle in an unbreathable and corrosive atmosphere without "cheating" and using constant imports of oxygen and biomass. It had been simpler for them to just ignore such inhospitable rocks and concentrate on refining their processes for life-support systems in vacuum environments, seeing as how the universe was 99.99999+% full of that.

But Terrans thought differently, and our approach to an obstacle wasn't so much 'look for an easier way around' as it was 'climb over the wall or bring it down with sapper charges', and so Peraspera had had an experimental outpost there since even before the Third Interstellar War devoted to a long-range study of finding ways to 'speed up' the oxygen formation in its atmosphere and turn a world much like Terra had been a billion years ago into a world much like Terra today. After all, a new Terra-type planet that close to Earth would be invaluable even if our descendants would only see it centuries later.

But its main value to me was the same thing that had sent every other sane applicant running in the other direction. Notably, the part where it was an undermanned and desolate outpost light-years away from Earth that had virtually nothing to recommend it. The Public Service Bureau's reaction to my actually volunteering for one of the PSB slots there was somewhere between "Wait, you're actually interested?" and "Are you sure you've read the entry correctly?" Especially considering that my ridiculously high CAT score meant that I had potential openings ranging as high as being a junior intern at the Secretary-General's office in New York itself. For someone with that kind of opportunity to volunteer for a hardship post that had always been filled at the grunt level via "We need three volunteers - you, you, and you!" was, to put it charitably, considered just a wee bit odd.

We'd seriously considered that Confederation HQ internship, or something comparable to it, before we'd reluctantly come to the conclusion that nobody there was going to do anything with a cute young intern except pat her on the head and send her back out to fetch coffee. For all that they talk about the back-channel corridors of power, those channels only opened to people who had a lot more gray hairs, or prestigious degrees, or longer resumes, or more influential relatives than I had. Especially given that my lack of Top Secret security clearance would also mean I wouldn't be allowed anywhere near any of the meetings where really weighty matters were going on anyway. And as Dad had pointed out I'd certainly never be allowed inside any laboratories doing defense research, not even as a bottle washer, which left that option out too.

Because the real purpose of Public Service was to ensure that every young adult out there got four years of being forced to work hard for a living, show up on time, etc, etc., and maximizing the odds of their developing suitably responsible citizen habits thereby. As well as maximizing the amount of raw entry-level labor that could be applied to the ceaseless building and infrastructure development projects of the Confederation as a whole, because when your entire culture was only one losing war against a vastly larger opponent away from extinction then you had entire generations spend their lives toiling away as part of a long-range build-up and expansion and you liked it. But that meant that your initial Public Service tour was, 99+% of the time, about proving that you could shut up, do what you were told, and put your shoulder to the wheel. So, not the best environment for trying to stand out as wanting to be an exception to the rules.

But in an isolated research outpost out in the deep black? If there was anywhere that seniority and class lines would break down as far as possible, that would be the place. With only thousands of people total in the entire solar system, then chain of command or official job slots or not the reality of the situation would be that every willing pair of hands that could work would be put to work. And official credentials or not, the more skills they showed on the job then the more they'd be asked to use those skills. Almost any odd knowledge that I showed, if it was at all useful to their mission, would likely be adopted and encouraged. So if I was ever going to have a chance to impress actual scientists with my own genius before I finished spending years and years getting letters after my name, it would be in a place like this. Because if you were going to be the squarest of square pegs then you really had to do your best to find a square hole, no matter how unusual a place it was located in.

In addition, even if the Peraspera idea was a total bust on the 'scientific breakthrough' idea it still had something else to recommend it. Notably, the part where due to it being a major hardship outpost it qualified you for double Public Service credit. The old US military had had a policy where anyone assigned to their Antarctic base back during the Cold War was treated as if they were serving double time - every year you spent there counted as two years towards retirement, complete with being given double pay. Public Service had adopted that idea and adapted it to its own worst and most remote postings. So by volunteering for this duty I'd be finished with my Public Service in two years, not four, meaning that even if all else failed I could still get into college and start blazing my trail from there as quickly as I possibly could.

Given that my parents would be leaving for Nusku about a month after I left for Public Service, we had a lot of things to take care of. Arranging to sell the house and most of the furniture, putting the few antiques and irreplaceables that wouldn't be shipped to Nusku into long-term storage on Terra for me to eventually reclaim, saying goodbye to friends, etc, etc. In my particular case Dad also spent a few weeks cramming every bit of nonclassified knowledge from his old training as a Navy sensor tech into my head, even to the point of tracking down and redownloading all the available e-texts that he could find, if it hadn't already been put there by the Forge. The best strategy we could think of right now for my early breakthrough into defense research was to pass me off as not only a genius but a daddy's girl who'd absorbed her father's tech manuals and everything else all her idiosyncratic self-study could put in there all her life. Not that acting a role as a sort-of obsessive bookworm would be a challenge for me, seeing as how I, uh, kinda had been one for most of my life.

But sensor technology was certainly a field of military R&D, so I could at least enter the picture as already interested in such things and showing myself to be a self-starter in them.
​

* * * * *​

They hadn't told us going in that even the civilian Public Service roles had to go through boot camp. Although in our case it was called 'prep camp', and its ostensible purpose was to ensure that everyone met a minimum physical fitness standard and basic teamwork exercises and preparedness exercises which would be highly useful in any field of endeavor. Oh, it wasn't military at all, oh no! You never even saw, much less touched, a weapon!

Yeah, right. I knew more than enough history, particularly in the focus of 'evil empires that invaded Poland that one time', to remember what most of the people around me had never seen in a textbook. Notably, the little trick the Nazis had played during the era that Germany had still been pretending to obey their forced demilitarization after World War I. Ostensibly a national reconstruction effort, it conscripted large amounts of healthy young men for civilian construction work and rebuilding. So the physical training was clearly to ensure they had the fittest workforce possible, and the teamwork drills were for morale and organization purposes.

And the part where they'd already gotten 75% of military boot camp training and could get the rest in several weeks of dedicated weapons drill and cramming, meaning they could all in theory be mobilized as troops in about a quarter of the time it would normally take? Well, they'd been hoping that the Allies wouldn't notice that part. And largely they hadn't. Heck, our "prep camp" had even giving us all basic vacc suit training. Which at least would be useful to me given where I was going, but when at least 80+% of the initial Public Service postings never got off Terra itself? Yyyyeah.
​

But, I managed to get through the eight weeks without needing to be recycled, and graduated in the best physical shape of my life - not that that was saying much. And so with freshly-acquired novice skills at basic vacuum survival and zero-G maneuvering - not that even spacers used that much nowadays given that artificial gravity generation had been invented in 2052 - I'd gone through a couple more weeks of specialty training for people who were going to be assigned to remote outposts like me, packed my bags up to the maximum weight allowance, and now I was waiting to take the grav shuttle on up to the starship that would take me to where I'd be spending the next two years of my life.

Achievement Unlocked: See Lightning And Hear Thunder
(Successfully Graduate Public Service Preparation Camp)
Reward: 100 CP

Oh, there you are, Forge. Been radio silent on me for weeks and now you speak up? Well, at least now I know something about how I'm going to learn points to buy stuff. Got anything else you want to get off your chest?

A conspicuous silence in my mind greeted me, without even its snarky 'Further information not available at this time' macro.

Yeah, figured.​

The shuttle called for us to board, and I managed to snag a window seat. I could have easily connected my datapad to the shuttle's public datanet hotspot and pulled a superior view from its external cameras, but like every other human ever I ignored that in favor of jamming my nose up against the transparisteel to look out an actual live window at actual live... space.

I blinked away a tear as the shuttle boosted straight through the atmospheric interface and the sky faded from blue to black, and the shiny blue curvature of the Earth became visible below me. I'd never been up before, but now I had officially graduated from groundhog to vacuum worm. Like tens of millions people before me, I'd left Mother Earth behind - for all that I planned to return someday - and reached out to touch the stars.

The High Frontier. The millions upon millions of uncharted stars that comprised our galaxy, one of only God knew how many galaxies in the universe. Once, mankind had looked up at that star-studded infinity and dreamed that an endless adventure waited for us. The ancient 20th-century flatvid Star Trek was still a classic that all sci-fi fans knew of, a classic milestone of Terran culture that enscapsulated the innocent dreams and wonder that our ancestors had dreamed of as they took their tentative first steps into space.

Achievement Unlocked: One Small Step For Sophia
(Begin Your First Voyage Into Space)
Reward: 100 CP

But that had been an innocent dream, of a prior century. Because when our first FTL expedition had met the Vilani at Barnard's Star, we'd learned that the skies were not free. That our elder cousins had already reached the stars over two thousand years before the Chinese had even founded the first dynasty, and that their empire of hundreds of stars stood between us and that entire branch of the spiral arm. And that they saw us in the same light as those same ancient Chinese would see some small, insignificant tribe of border barbarians - to be ignored as non-persons existing beyond the outbounds, or to be crushed by their army and assimilated into their empire as peons who would no longer have any of their own language, culture, or history.

And the last time the Vilani had tried, they'd come so very close to succeeding.

Never again.

I took a deep breath and turned away from the window, pulling my thoughts back to focusing on the task ahead. I'd just found out about at least one method of earning more CP, so I concentrated on mentally opening the Celestial Forge menu to see what my options now were. I read through the list - or at least the limited selection that the Forge wanted to show me this time, since I really doubted that its entire list had only a dozen choices on it total - and then closed the menu without spending anything. It would be better to get to Peraspera and see what my opportunities there actually were first.

Although we called them 'starports', a place like the one my mother had worked at was properly called a downport. The larger worlds, whenver possible, would separate their starports into an orbital facility - the highport - and the groundside facility, the downport. This is because gravity wells were the deepest things in space, and over time the fuel expense saved by not having to take an entire large starship all the way down the well and back up again was more than worth the cost of constructing an orbital station. Many types of ships couldn't even land on planets at all, and the smaller vessels that could were only built that way because of the need to service planets and outposts too small to have to highports.

So my first venture into space was on a mere orbital shuttle and didn't go any further than Armstrong Highport, one of the several large orbital docking stations around Earth. I checked in there and was directed to meet the ship that would take me on my first-ever interstellar journey.

The Beowulf, despite its mythologically glorious name, was about as humble as an interstellar spacecraft could get. A Hero-class merchant ship, she was effectively 200 displacement tons of interstellar cargo truck. Indeed, the Hero-class freighters were a Vilani design - and one so common and unremarkable that the Vilani didn't even give them names, just registry numbers. The 'Type A' freighter, as the Vilani had designated it - it's designation as the Hero-class by Terrans was an example of how early translator software occasionally threw up the most entertaining glitches - was a simple design they'd used for centuries for cargo runs to minor or backwater worlds that didn't have a major enough trade route going to them to justify sending one of the big bulk freighters. It's only saving grace was that as it was intended for frontier and off-route service, it had a fully capable Jump-2 drive instead of a short-legged Jump-1. Entirely unarmed and too slow in realspace to run away from anything substantially faster than a slow walk, they were considered so unremarkable by the Vilani that they hadn't even asked for them back as a condition of the negotiations at the end of the Third Interstellar War.

And with our Navy not having much use for them either, the Confederation had basically dumped them all onto the used starship market cheap and in like-new condition (say what what you would about Vilani, they didn't cut corners on maintenance). And being actually very well-designed and cost-effective in their particular niche, the design had caught on with both the large corporations and smaller and independent operators to the point that the Vilani were bemused that us barbarian Terrans were not only building our own Hero-class ships in our yards but were ordering as many from Vilani space as they'd sell to us.

So, in hindsight it wasn't surprising that the regular supply run out to an outpost like Peraspera would be on one of these ships. I mean, what I was I expecting, a Chicago-class patrol cruiser?

"Sophia Nowak, passenger, reporting as ordered ma'am!" I said to the middle-aged woman in a ship's jumpsuit with a sleeve patch reading CMS Beowulf who was watching the longshoremen load cargo modules.

"At ease, kid." she said amusedly. "Public Service, huh?"

"First day out." I agreed sheepishly.

"Well, you're not in prep camp anymore and you're not in the military, so you don't have to snap to. Alice Wilkins, ship's purser. Give me your datawork and I'll check you in."

I handed her the datachip they'd given me with my prepaid passage and travel docs, and she slotted it into her own datapad, looked at the results, had me confirm my ID with my thumbprint, and nodded. "OK, you're logged in. Departure is tonight at 1930, everybody is to be aboard and with hatches tight by 1900. Until then, feel free to run amok on the station with your last day of freedom... but don't get tossed in the drunk tank or you'll miss your ride, and then your Public Service supervisor gets to find somewhere even worse than where you're going to send you. I see you already got your basic vacc suit and spacer orientation so we don't have to do that, and the rest of your passenger orientation we'll take care of after we lift. Sound good?"

"Yes ma'am."
​

She tapped her datapad. "And, according to my freight-tracking system your belongings are under the weight allowance and, except for your carryall there, have already arrived been boxed in with the rest of our cargo. It's probably in one of those containers right over there." she waved at the loading crew as they were busy wrestling yet another cargo container up the ramp on their grav-pallet. She held up the datapad with one particular section already highlighted. "That everything you checked in?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Right. OK, that's everything I need. See you in a few hours." She turned away to get back to her job of inventorying the stores being loaded aboard, and I pondered what to do with my last afternoon of freedom before I headed out.

Yeah. Definitely not Star Trek.

I spent my last time on Armstrong Station doing a combo of hitting the usual tourist experiences and eating the traditional last hearty meal. No alcohol, though. It was legal now that I was an adult, the Confederation drinking age being 18, but there's a reason Purser Wilkins reminded me not to overindulge - 'graduate Public Service prep camp and take the first opportunity to legally overindulge and end up missing your ship' was such a common thing for newly-minted adults turned loose from 8 weeks' of prep camp that it was one of the most common holovid cliches in sitcoms. No need to be one in real life. Besides, Dad had considered 'know how to handle her liquor' a valuable life skill for a young woman so I'd tasted Polish vodka before I was sixteen and learned how to deal with it before I was seventeen. Space station beer might as well be soda pop as far as I was concerned, so why bother paying extra?

But as routine as the experience was for the crew of the Beowulf it was still my very first interstellar voyage, and as the only passenger they had on this run and a green kid on her first voyage aside the officers were apparently feeling generous about it, so I was surprised to actually be invited to the bridge for the entry into jumpspace. I'd expected to have to watch it from the viewscreen in my cabin.

"Permission to enter the bridge, sir?" I called out, after stopping and knocking quickly three times on the edge of the open hatchway.

"Permission granted." called back an unfamiliar voice in a very familiar accent, and my face locked into an expressionless mask as I fought down an instinctive flinch. Doing my absolute best to pretend that nothing was wrong, I entered to see the tall, narrow-faced man sitting in the captain's chair briefly turn his head to watch me enter, then unconcernedly face away from me after a glance to look back at his workstation.

"How long until jump?" I asked Purser Wilkins, who normally wasn't on the bridge for this evolution but was apparently there to keep an eye on me while the bridge crew was busy working. Not that I didn't already know, because jumps were calculated well in advance whenever possible and for a routine commercial run like this the Beowulf would already have its navigation plot completed before it had even left the dock, but I had to say something. Since a starship couldn't enter jumpspace near any object substantially more massive than a dreadnaught - even a small asteroid or a large space station could do it - the Beowulf's relatively slow 1.5-G maneuver drive had taken us almost four hours to take us far away from Terra to put us beyond its jump limit.

"About ten minutes." she replied softly. "Nervous?"

"Well, there is the statistical one in a million and a half chance of a jumpdrive malfunction." I deliberately leaned into her misapprehension.

"Yeah, but that means people who have been working the spacelanes for a decade haven't even met anyone who's met anyone who actually made the Final Jump that way." she said. "Even a misjump scenario, as rare as they are, means you just come out somewhere else. Sometimes even somewhere farther away than it's possible for your jumpdrive to normally take you." She continued more thoughtfully. "Always wondered if someone would ever figure out how that happens so they can make a longer-range jumpdrive. Even the Vilani haven't gotten past Jump-2, and they've had stardrive for thousands of years."

"They've had Jump-2 for thousands of years." I replied. "If they haven't figured out a method for going further per jump than that in all that time... well, misjumps prove it's physically possible, but... huh, that is weird. Why haven't they?"

"Because the Imperium stopped fundamental research into jump physics when they originally got to Jump-2 and went 'Ehhh, good enough.' And they just stayed there ever since." she replied. "If you're curious as to exactly why then ask the Captain later. He grew up there."

"So, he's not from Nusku?" I asked. Because the thing that had shocked me so much when I'd stepped onto the bridge was that the skipper of the vessel taking me on my first interstellar voyage was, from his accent, features, and dusky coloration, the textbook archetype of a Vilani.

"Nope. Born somewhere about twenty parsecs in from the border." she said unconcernedly. "He was first mate on a ship like this one when the Navy captured it towards the end of the Procyon campaign in the last big one, and after the war was over and he was out of the internment camp he just didn't go home. Said that working for a Terran freight line was just like working for Sharurshid - that's the big Vilani shipping megacorp - except they paid better and micromanaged less. And it's not like he wasn't qualified on this model of ship!"

"There we go." I heard the Captain say. "Final course recheck complete and nominal. Astrogator?" he trailed off inquiringly.

"Looks good to me as well." the officer he addressed replied. "Lock it in?"

"Yes." the Captain replied. "All stations, report final readiness for jump."

"Cargo and passengers, all secure and accounted for." Purser Wilkins said formally.

"Engineering, green board." a voice came from the intercom.

"Life support, green board." another voice came in.

"Sensors and comms, green board." one of the crewmen at another panel replied.

"Astrogation, green board." the astrogator replied.

"All stations report green." the Captain acknowledged. "We are go for jump in two minutes seventeen seconds... mark." he finished, reaching forward to tap a control on his touchsteen and release the ship's computer to execute the jump program.

Everyone sat back and watched the big countdown timer on the central display as it ticked off the remaining seconds. At exactly one minute I practically leaped out of my skin when the lighting panels suddenly cut out and the dim emergency lighting flicked on.

I barely bit back a frantic yelp of 'What's wrong?' when my perfect memory reminded me from basic training that I was a passenger and passengers did not speak during an emergency situation on the bridge except to yell a warning or reply to a direct question. Which thought held me long enough to realize that nobody else on the bridge had so much as blinked, much less was showing any signs of alarm.

I was just about ready to blow a fuse at the 'practical joke' they'd just pulled when the Captain broke in on my thoughts. "Oh, the lights? On our early vessels they'd reduce all nonessential systems to minimum power shortly before jump, so as to allow the capacitors a maximum surge capacity for the jumpdrive. It's standard procedure to dim lights before jump on Imperial starships even to this day."

Since he'd spoken to me, ship's etiquette meant I could reply - assuming I did so courteously. So I changed my original 'That wouldn't work!' into the form of a question that a stupid greenie would ask. "How does changing the overall power load by a few dozen watts - it's just the lighting panels, after all - even begin to affect the sort of gigawatt-range capacitor surge that a jump drive requires?"

"It doesn't, not at all." the Captain agreed good-naturedly. "But it's still tradition!"

"Coming up on jump." the astrogator said.

Everybody - including me - turned to face the main display and held our breaths waiting for the big moment. Part of my mind noted that even the veteran spacers around me were not entirely jaded in the moment, let alone the young woman about to make her first leap into another dimension-

The astrogator spoke up again. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Aaand-"

Discontinuity.
​

* * * * *​

At the moment the jumpdrive initiatied, the CSS Beowulf and every soul aboard on her ceased to exist for a moment so fleeting that not even the finest atomic clocks had ever perceived it, before Time's arrow resumed her flow for us. Only now our ship was no longer in the material universe, but held suspended in a temporary 'bubble' of normalspace that we had 'dragged' with us into the barely knowable and quite frankly weird other dimensions that comprised jumpspace. If by some cosmic horridness that bubble ever went away and exposed us to jumpspace directly... well, the theories were many and varied but the punchline was the same in all of them.
​

Fortunately, the collapse of a jumpspace 'bubble' - whether at the scheduled end of the jump or because your astrogator had critically goofed his calcs and plotted you a jumpspace route that crossed the no-jump zone around another astronomical body in between your departure and destination - had only one known result, to kick the ship back into normal space and leave it there. Although one of the many odd facts about jumpdrive is that regardless of how far you jumped - whether it was the full 2 parsecs and change of a jump-2 drive, or an in-system microjump from Terra to Mars orbit - all jumps took 168 Terran hours, or one Terran week, of time (plus or minus a margin of ten percent). So the instant we entered jumpspace a 168-hour "jump clock" timer started counting down, with our exact time of emergence being on a bell curve centered on 168 hours with the maximum divergence of 16+ hours being a literal one-in-a-million case. And even the most widely known divergences, even in the case of a misjump that entirely slagged your drive and left you further off your plotted route than it was normally possible for you to go, were still were consistent with the standard time variance if nothing else. Yes, this all sounded extremely arbitrary and oddly convenient, but the collective body of knowledge about the science of jump physics was built on a few experimentally verified facts, a whole lot of theoretical wild guesses, and an at least equally long list of things we were so in the dark about that we didn't even know what we didn't know.

And no, there hadn't been a 'The Actual Secrets of Jumpdrive Physics, Unabridged Edition' or equivalent anywhere on the perk lists the Forge had been offering me. I'd looked.

But the practical upshot of it was that the most relaxed period of time in a starship crew's life would begin. You had nothing to do in jumpspace except catch up on all the routine chores you were postponing while doing groundside or in-system operations. While you were in jump the rest of the universe couldn't get into annoy you in any way whatsoever, and your ship's systems were presumably more than up to the task of running a week without catastrophic malfunction because only a suicidal idiot didn't check for that before jumping in the first place. Also, even if our power plant spontaneously melted into slag then so long as we had enough battery power to run the life support for a week, we'd still get to our destination alive - the jumpdrive's job ended the instant you actually finished charging up for jump and entered jumpspace, from that point on you were basically operating on inertia. And a good thing too, because otherwise you'd be betting an entire starship and its crew's lives on 1 week of constant system uptime in all the various power and drive subsystems every time they went anywhere, as opposed to just needing that no-fault uptime during the actual run-up to the jump itself, with every opportunity to abort and go back to port if you didn't like what you were seeing.

Or so Captain Urshargii enjoyed explaining to me at length at breakfast the next morning, because as soon you got him going on the topic of Starship Operations 101 then he moved immediately into professor mode and didn't stop. Which... okay, I honestly didn't mind because while I knew a lot of this already from school, textbooks are one thing and talking to somebody who actually did it for a living was something else.

And, of course, I was taking full advantage of my first and perhaps only chance to speak with a real live citizen - or ex-citizen - of the Vilani Imperium. So even though he couldn't give me more than the history they'd taught him in school... well, heck. That's about all I could give any alien that came and asked me to talk about my homeland, and yet it would still be very useful to someone trying to learn about Terran culture from scratch.

Captain Urshargii, as the first officer of a Vilani merchant vessel, had technically been of the damgarii social class. If the Vilani Imperium had been a strictly feudal system then he'd have ranked as a knight - not a commoner, but not a noble either. The actual literal translation of damgarii was "manager", however, just as the literal translations of the commoner or engarii class was "employee" and the noble or enshii class was "executive". It was both a hereditary and a non-hereditary rank - Vilani children automatically started out at the lower social rank of their two parents (which was one reason why inter-class marriage was rare) and almost always stayed at that status for the rest of their life. You could lose status for ongoing and gross incompetence - even if your parents were two of the highest of the enshii that wouldn't stop a conspicuous moron of an offspring from eventually being quietly demoted and put off to pasture somewhere if they couldn't find a way to get him up to where he could be trusted with responsibility - and likewise you could raise status for merit, although in both cases it took a lot of fuckups or a lot of merit to eventualy line jump. And, of course, regular chains of command like any other military, government, or commercial concern existed in the Imperium just like they did here - the social class thing was more of a broad cultural sorting mechanism on top of all that.

Captain Urshargii had actually been born an engarii and had worked his way up from starship crewman to starship officer over decades, eventually being given damgarii status when he came that close to sitting in the captain's chair. He'd been without close family ties, though - a somewhat unusual thing for a Vilani, I gathered, who apparently tended to gather in extended families and clans for support - so making the decision to stay in Terran space after the Third Interstellar War and continue on in the same career he loved doing for a boss that he felt more comfortable with was a rational decision.

Well, either that or he was a spy. But I had to hope that the Office of Naval Intelligence had at least tried to check out that possibility, or else he'd never have gotten authorized for Terran citizenship. And he was a naturalized citizen, not a resident alien - he'd forfeited his Imperial citizenship and couldn't go home again. No, I certainly didn't try to ask why.

And he certainly hadn't conformed to the stereotype of the sneering, arrogant, supercilious Vilani from the holovids. Well, except in his looks. My clumsy attempt to bring that up only drew a laugh from him, and a confirmation that he actually had known a few people like that among his enshii superiors, although most of them could at least manage a more diplomatic form of considering oneself to be on an entirely different social plane of existence than the common folk they were speaking to.

I admittedly had more to do on the voyage over than just loaf around and trade life stories with the crew. There was a whole file full of training videos and self-quizzes I was supposed to have already finished by the time I made planetfall - I guess they figured that using the week in jumpspace to at least begin to save time on my orientation - but with my new memory I could cram through all stuff pretty fast and still get it all down letter-perfect. So I still had time to draw out my first living source on Vilani culture and society, poke around the ship as much as the crew would indulge my curiosity without getting annoyed, and begin my very first petty social engineering effort towards establishing myself as a breakout prodigy.

Although I'd considered spending some of the 200cp I'd banked so far on something to help me do this, I honestly hadn't seen anything on the list that was directly applicable. Plus, I still hadn't arrived at Peraspera yet and I had no clue how soon I'd get any more CP, so I decided to just make do with what I had.

As a clever social manipulator I was... really not... but the sensor tech of the Beowulf, a Mr. Clarke, was a young man barely off his own initial Public Service tour as a Navy enlisted man. And I was pretty sure that the reason he'd gotten out after his initial four years instead of going career - after all, he was still working in the same job on a starship, and the Navy was far more prestigious than crewing a tramp freighter - is because he either hadn't quite made the grade, or didn't like the work. Not that he was lazy, per se - Captain Urshargii ran a taut ship and didn't tolerate deadweight - but he clearly was not someone with great ambitions.

So when I originally started talking to him with 'Hey, you had the same job my dad did!', and then after a few rounds of back-and-forth I'd mildly bragged about how dad had talked about his job so much that I was pretty sure I could do it myself, he pointed me right at his console and booted up a training sim and told me to put my solarii where my mouth was. I'd probably have tried for a less confrontational way to get him to do this - asked him politely if I could try the console in training mode or something - but some people just rubbed you the wrong way, and he was one of them.

So, I did indeed put my solarii where my mouth was. And then I did the same to next several sims he tried. By this point First Officer Molteno had noticed what was going on, and came over to see me doing quite well on a discrimination-and-tracking exercise pulled from a real-life case study of a Vilani commerce raider versus a 400-dton armed merchant cruiser shortly before the Third Interstellar War.

"Your father couldn't have taken his own training sims home with him when he mustered out." he said. "The Navy sims are restricted material. Did you get a download from the merchant marine academy or something?"

"Something like that." I non-committed. "And, well, I just found it really fascinating." I did my best aw-shucks grin as I continued. "I find a lot of stuff really fascinating. Then again, I've got total recall so..."

"Ah, that explains it." he nodded, as Mr. Clarke grew even grumpier with envy. I actually sympathized with him there - as someone who'd spent years cramming for exams myself, the existence of those lucky people who could just look at the book once and go on to ace any brute-force memorization exercise was annoying. And thanks to the Forge I could now speak from both ends of that equation. "You could probably take the sensor tech certification exam if you tried."

"Well, it's not as if I'm doing my Public Service onboard a starship or anything..." I demurred. Come on, bite the hook, bite the hook...

"To be honest, I'm curious to see how you'd do." Mr. Molteno said. "Want to try it?"

"Heck yeah!" I agreed cheerfully.

So, I sat down at one of the unused bridge terminals as Mr. Molteno set me up with an official Confederation Merchant Marine certification exam for sensor technicians, and I spent the next two hours proving that I could indeed have passed the test if I'd taken it officially. And at dinner that evening I waited until Mr. Molteno had finished entertaining everyone with the tale of the new kid and her unofficially following in her father's footsteps, and I politely asked Captain Urshargii if I could have a copy of the relevant log entries so I could mail them to my father. And he of course agreed... and went further than that, due to a quirk of Vilani culture that I'd known about from something he'd told me several days ago and had shamelessly plotted to take advantage of.

Notably, that for all that they were extremely traditionalist and class-conscious in many ways, in many other ways Vilani society was more relentlessly meritocratic than most Terran cultures had ever dreamed of being. To a Vilani, if you'd proven that you were able to do the job then you'd proven that you were able to do the job, period, end of sentence. It didn't matter what your seniority was or how you'd come by to learn it, the only thing that mattered was if you performed satisfactorily both on the standardized tests of ability and in the field.

So, having been assured that I'd shown a suitable grade both in simulation and on the academics, Captain Urshargii - just as I'd expected him to do - readily signed off on legitimately certifying me as having passed the relevant examinations under the supervision of his officers, and signing off on an official notation to the Public Service Bureau - my current employers - that I had done so.

Which of course didn't mean that I was really a starship sensor technician yet... but it did mean that I was now legally eligible to apply, on a no-experience training-only entry-level basis, to any civilian starship as a crew member in that job slot. But of course I had no ambitions to run off and join the Free Traders or anything like that. My real goal was to arrive at my first Public Safety job as somehow standing out, even just a little, from the common run of employee. To present myself as someone who later on could be believed as some kind of uniquely brilliant polymath. Which I'd just made a good start at accomplishing.

Achievement Unlocked: On The Radar
(Make An Initial Impression As Unusually Precocious)
(Bonus: Have Your Achievement Acknowledged On Your Official Permanent Record)
Reward: 200 CP

And it had all relied upon taking advantage of the professional jealousy and territorial nature of a fellow Terran, and the uncompromising professional integrity and attention to details of a Vilani. Which... was leaving me feeling just a little unfocused, given how all my life I'd grown up in an uncompromising atmosphere of how the Vilani were the enemy, who would destroy us if they could.

But never from your father, who'd actually fought them in space, or your mother, whose only son died from Vilani nukes, my conscience prodded me irresistibly.

My Forge-granted library-in-my-head included at least some textbooks on the theory and practice of propaganda just as it did on a wide range of other topics, so I was already academically aware that the first step in indoctrinating soldiers to fire on the enemy without hesitation - a thing normal human minds actually didn't do very well - was to dehumanize the enemy in their eyes. It was a lot easier to strike with lethal force if the target had no face, if it was just an object or a threat and not another person. And yes, I was aware that the Confederation's survival strategy was and had been ever since our first one-world government had formed out of the ashes of the First Interstellar War based on a total mobilization - and in the event of war, near-total militarization - of the Confederation's efforts. That was why we had most of a war economy even in peacetime, why the most rapidly-expanding categories in the labor market were colonial development, space industry, and starship construction, and why Public Service - also created shortly after the First Interstellar War - existed to drill at least the beginnings of military-style thinking and work habits into as many impressionable young minds as possible. Plus, of course, all of the work that primary and secondary education, as well as popular entertainment, did to cast the Vilani as a fearsome, implacable monolith.

But now I'd met one, talked with one, and ate dinner with one for a week, and between that and my Forge-granted inability to make myself forget anything I really needed to remember, that childhood indoctrination of mine no longer looked remotely as simple or clear as it once had.

And yet I was still an only child. And I'd still accompanied my father through the nuclear-ashed ruins of the city our family had lived in for centuries. And the Vilani saarpuhii kushuggi who'd ordered that bombing, along with the officers and crews of his fleet that had executed it, had done so without a moment's hesitation. And all in accordance with official - and openly acknowledged! - Vilani doctrine that in time of war the enemy must be not only defeated but smashed. That the concept of 'collateral damage' or 'noncombatants' did not really exist, and that the only logical way to wage war was that once you had broken through the enemy's defenses to do as much damage as you possibly could to either force their unconditional surrender or leave them so broken that they would be unable to ever defy you again.

I tried to reconcile the fact that kindly, honest hardworking people like Captain Urshargii existed with the equally solid fact that if Vilani internal politics we hadn't had any idea existed at the time hadn't forced Kadur Erasharshi to abandon his campaign against Earth before he could push it through to completion, he might very well have burned all of Terra from pole to pole unless we'd agreed to dissolve the Confederation and become the next Vilani subject race forever. And it... just... wouldn't...

As the featureless grey of jumpspace faded from the viewscreens and we broke back out into realspace, I sighed and abandoned my fruitless ruminating to start cleaning up my cabin and packing my stuff back up in my carryall. In a few hours I'd leave the Beowulf behind and meet the people I'd be spending the next two years of my life with, on a new planet, and I'd almost certainly be working hard enough to not have any time for pondering.

But I definitely had a lot to write about to Mom and Dad in my next letter to them. Because if I'd ever had any delusions that this saving the Confederation stuff was going to be as cut-and-dried as the holovids made it out to be, then I certainly didn't have them now.
​

* * * * *​

Author's Note: I have a lot of setting knowledge and background to get on-stage. Fortunately, one of the benefits of having your MC be a teenager just leaving the nest is that they don't know shit, and the process of maturing means that they will spend a lot of camera time finding out about shit. Which means so will the audience.

And even better, since it's all in-character voice and not third-person omniscient, I can tweak it later if it turns out I need to. After all, perception is a thing.

PS: No, this is not the same Beowulf that every old-school Traveller fan knows of legend. That ship, after all, only existed in the Third Imperium era centuries and centuries from now. But it is a very old class of merchantship, and a very old name, and names do get reused throughout history... and sometimes, you just have to pay due homage to where it all began.

Unspent CP: 400
Purchases: None​