On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

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Here's story 198, of 240 so far.

Structures

It’s always so quiet up here. I think the lack of noise makes it worse.

Oh, there are the machines humming away everywhere. The thousands of crisp little noises from the computer and all the panels. But you learn to filter those out so quickly that, pretty soon, all you notice is what’s behind them.

We’re about 17,000 lights from Earth right now, coming back in, making some stops, but this is the longest stretch. Two hundred crewmembers on board, and I’m sitting here alone, strapped to my chair at the helm, watching the ship fly itself.

Our mission was to drop a satellite for q-comm, as always. We fly an entangled array out to somewhere remote, and from then on we can communicate in real time, no matter how far away. Sometimes I feel like we’re telecoms engineers more than anything else. But we don’t actually do much engineering, because the technologies are as near to perfect as anything can be.

There’s a lot about deep space missions that’s contrary to what you’d expect, and most of it is a consequence of how we travel. I say travel rather than move, because we don’t really move at all, as everyone knows. We have fusion-powered thrusters for in-system manoeuvres, but it’s been a long time since anyone went any distance with those, except in emergencies. We’ve grown so good at folding space that there’s no need for anything slower and more volatile.

You’d expect that we’d need sophisticated deflection, for example, but we don’t, because bending spacetime around you takes all the debris and everything else along with it. Once you form the static pocket around the ship, that’s it. As it turned out, deflection is a useful side-effect we didn’t need to plan for.

Another thing you’d expect is that folding would be a major event on board. All hands to stations, constant checks and re-checks, stress and drama. But that hasn’t been true for ages. For one thing, unless there’s a very compelling reason otherwise, we tend to fold at night — the ship’s local night, that is.

You learn why when you experience folding: if you’re awake, you tend to get sick the first few times. Something about it messes up human equilibrium. It doesn’t happen if you’re asleep or otherwise unconscious, hence it’s much easier to do it when the balance of the crew are in their racks. You also get used to it quickly, and after a few folds you just feel it as a mild sensation of pressure around the back of your head, readily ignored.

The other thing that surprises most people is that we switch off gravity during a fold transit. It mediates the nausea a little, but it also reduces the energy drain per unit of curvature by about fifteen percent, which is well worth the inconvenience of floating around and using hand-holds. That’s why I’m strapped to my chair.

I’ve talked to children about the experience of a fold transit, and they’re mostly excited and amazed by it. I always emphasise that the ship stays still, in a kind of bubble, which seems to reassure them — and adults too. I’ve never really understood that reaction. I’m happier with the idea of acceleration and propulsion than with bending the fabric of the universe. But each to his own.

Then there’s the other part of it, which is mostly glossed over. I don’t discuss that part with children. Even the crew doesn’t talk about it much. It’s the reason I’m here alone at the helm, and why it’s almost always an available duty shift. I volunteer, because few others do, and in return they’re grateful, so they do me the occasional favour. It’s unspoken, because the reason for it is unspoken. It’s also why the helm is in a different area from the command bridge, immediately in front of it, and normally separated by a retractable partition.

They keep the partition closed, and all the view panels on the bridge — and everywhere else — show computer-generated distortions of the real space that’s being folded around us. It’s a beautiful show, but it’s not real, which is why it’s informally referred to by crew members as fake-space instead of fold-space. That’s not what you really see out there. Physics prevents it from being what you see.

I know, because I do see. I have actual windows, and I have the option to deploy the shutters, but there would be no point. I already know what lies beyond.

When you fold space, you aren’t bending your origin and destination closer to each other, like the old pencil through paper demonstration. You’re also not pulling space past you at a high rate, like whipping off a tablecloth. Physics doesn’t permit either of those things. Instead, it’s more like applying gravitational pressure to a membrane until it splits, then falling into the rupture. When you do, you’re somewhere else.

That’s the true transit. People call it a lot of things, but the people who have seen it — virtually all in the service, either military or scientists — only talk about it with each other, and then only rarely. Amongst that group, there’s one term that crops up more than any other.

Hell-space.

Not a tunnel of streaming, elongated stars; there are no stars in here. There are light sources, though, and no-one knows what they are. There’s also sound, or the suggestion of it, which shouldn’t be possible unless it’s not entirely a vacuum. Sensors indicate it is, but their readings aren’t consistent from one moment to the next.

Then there are the structures.

I can see one now, off to the far starboard side. But the scale is uncertain, because there’s no backdrop that my mind can understand. They have the suggestion of intelligent design in places, but there’s not enough visual information to decide. And they’re everywhere. Imagine an infinitely tall tower, irregular in construction, as black as space but still visible, at a distance your mind can’t process. Now imagine that it remains stationary, but also seems to change position from one moment to the next. And there are millions of them, sometimes closer and sometimes farther, and you don’t ever seem to be moving in a stable direction.

The overall impression is of suddenly becoming a microscopic insect, buzzing briefly across the consciousness of a deity, crushed by your own insignificance and vulnerability and lack of understanding. To see it is to be marked by it; traumatised, even. Impressionable people have lost their minds just by looking for too long. So far, I haven’t.

As I look now, there are multiple towers, or mountains, or edges of the cosmos, whatever they are. Looming a billion light years away, or only a thousand kilometres. Falling away, or falling towards me; it changes all the time. You can get seasick if you try to focus on any one part of it, and in truth, it’s horrifying. You can learn to tolerate it, though. Almost all of it, except for one thing.

I suppose it’s the quality that pushes people over the edge, and makes even the toughest amongst us shy away from real windows on our spacecraft and instead lie down to try and sleep the time away. I can feel that urge myself as I look out now, right at the back of my mind as a certainty.

It’s watching us.

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

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