The Sun Clouded Over maintained a steady pace as they cruised through the fragment serving as their base of operations throughout their ersatz career as a longhauler. They detected and took note of reliable landmarks, sliding through their waypoint systems. They had plenty of time to reminisce about favorite passengers and the stories they’d told of where they were from and where they were going, recognizing the names of certain stars or worlds as they passed them by. They had a single passenger now, and a single immediate destination, albeit one originally plotted out of spite.
Only one jumpgate had ever been charted in this fragment, and any detailed information about its function had been lost in the generations since it stopped functioning. It was a ruin now, and an obscure one at that.
Sun had now tried several times to educate Indy on the inevitability of what they would find—with little success. They hoped that once they arrived and he saw it for himself, their developing rapport would allow for the two of them to plot a more reasonable course of action to reach the imperial labs. Hopefully.
But like all outlooks founded on faith, Indrani’s expectations didn’t wane. Whether the ruins were as dilapidated as they sounded or not, it didn’t change the fact he believed they needed to go there, that it was a key, if not a door to pass through on their Path.
In his quarters, Indrani listened to the push of water against piping, the hum of electricity and the lulling buzz of Sun’s machinery. He was in mid-stretch, a seated half-twist that he’d been practicing every day to ease the stiffness in his bruised ribs. His arm had recovered for the most part, though the skin still sustained a purple mottling. It had been a week ship-time since he’d finally, properly, met Sun, and now they were quickly coming up on the jump gate. Excitement sizzled beneath his skin. He tried not to think about how from this moment on, his whole life would change, leading him closer to enlightenment on his Path.
“Sun? Are we there yet?” he asked into the air, helplessly chipper. Many of his mentors at the monastery had privately counseled him that he should cultivate a more solemn disposition when it came to holy matters. He often found himself reprimanded for his jovial nature when spurred on by some novel or exciting turn of events. He had tried to temper his mood for Sun, but they didn’t complain, and despite the awareness that he might be maddening the poor Ship, he couldn’t contain himself.
Five hours since the last ask. Sun checked against the unofficial tally they’d started after guessing that Indrani’s interruptions were increasing at an exponential rate. They hadn’t been far off the mark.
For a week, Sun had responded by telling him about their speed and distance covered, then by pointing out their progress on the holographic map in the common room—but really, the scale was hardly adequate. Even as their body propelled themself through the vacuum thoughtlessly, the sheer amount of space they covered in even a second was absurd and difficult to wrap their mind around. The bipedal hominids Sun descended from evolved on a planet with a circumference shorter than the distance their body traversed in the time it took for Indrani to speak his question aloud.
They had about a hundred and ninety-five minutes to change their strategy before he struck again.
“Almost, Indy,” Sun replied, in a tone they hoped was placating but not patronizing. “Actually, I had an idea. Remember the archives room? Why don’t you meet me there? You can get a good view of what we’re coming up on.”
“Yes, coming!” Indrani jumped up from his stretch and pulled on his tunic, splashing his face quickly to clean off the sweat. He jogged down the hall, a smile pinned on his face. They were so close! As he hurried, he took in the expanse of Sun’s hall; now everywhere he went was a new marvel. He was moving inside Sun, running through their halls like a blood cell in their veins. It was endlessly fascinating, and Indrani wondered if he’d be allowed to explore them further soon. He’d seen Sun’s physical form...perhaps he’d be allowed into their more intimate atriums and chambers. Maybe he’d even discover something about Sun they didn’t already know about themselves.
“Here!” Indrani said as he turned the corner into the archives room. “You can see it already?”
Sun’s avatar stood in the middle of a seemingly massive starlit expanse. They had set the walls, floor, and ceiling to project a convincing display of their surroundings in miniature. A few stars slid along the walls like raindrops on a windshield
.
“I thought I’d try porting the visual readings from the sensors all across my exterior hull,” they said, gesturing broadly above and below them. “Better view than your typical window view, huh, Ind— oh. Are you okay?”
Indrani was quiet and slack-jawed as the doors shut behind him, sealing him into the illusion. The blurred starlight streaked past in an expanse of dimensionless ink at all sides, a consuming darkness filled with the diamond glint of distant worlds. He felt impossibly small, and his chest constricted with the wonder of it.
“Wow,” he breathed, head swiveling around to absorb the scene. A blink, and he was looking at Sun, his smile bashful. “Sorry, yes, I’m fine! Better than fine! Do I not look fine? I mean, Sun,” he spun slowly in place, staring up at the ceiling where more stars blinked by, “this is incredible.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Sun smiled, gesturing toward Indrani to join them in the center of the room. “This is what’s all around us, right now, as distantly as I can see. Or y’know, pick up readings from. I have a broader definition of ‘seeing’ than most.”
They glanced at Indy, eyebrows raised in friendly challenge. “How far out do you think I can see things? What’s your guess?”
“Oh! Hm…” Indrani scratched thoughtfully at his chin, peering at Sun like he could discern the answer if he looked at them hard enough. “Ten….no, one hundred...par...secs,” he asked hesitantly, an awkward smile crooked on his mouth. The curate was well aware he was scientifically challenged; he much preferred the study of spiritual matters and the human heart and mind over astrophysics and engineering. “Wait, no…a thousand?”
“Well, give yourself some credit first,” Sun said, trying not to make him feel too embarrassed at his effort. “On your own, if you were looking out a window, or maybe outside hanging from my hull—” Sun considered the tiny but significant sensation of Indy tethered to them, gripping their outer plating—“you could already see stars five hundred parsecs away. One thousand six hundred trillion kilometers; think of that.”
A ripple of light washed over them, radiating from where they stood at the center of the room outward in all directions, a modestly sized bubble of light that encased them before fading away. Sun nodded at the room beyond the boundary of the sphere. “My range is a bit broader. Several million parsecs.” Another ripple stretched out, reaching the edge of the room and illuminating every object coming into focus on the wall screens. One point of light hovering within the room twinkled persistently.
“That’s incredible,” Indrani breathed, his awe palpable. To be able to hold that much of the universe in your mind’s eye, brush against the vastness of the galaxy—galaxies!—with a flick of their attention. He couldn’t imagine it, and when confronted with Sun’s grand nature, he felt miniscule. Insectoid. A lucky flea that had somehow hitched a ride on a stellar leviathan, swimming through colossal depths he could never fathom to on his own.
“Ah! Is this it?” The twinkling caught his eye, and he walked to it, flicked his fingers outwards to enlarge the point of light. A brightness blinked the room entirely white for a moment, making the curate shut his eyes from the glare of it. When he opened them, their destination engulfed them, mammoth and glorious.
The jump gate floated in the liquid black of space, a series of six concentric rings staggered outwards like a cross-sectioned horn. The rings glistened, their structure composed of some foreign crystalline substance that caught the drifting starlight in its pale facets. Each delicate ring was a spiderwebbing lattice, branching fractals too numerous and complex for Indrani’s human eye to find a pattern. Some rings had retained their structural integrity, but others were fractured, some sporting full breaks.
“I’ve...I’ve never seen one in person. Just images, descriptions,” Indrani whispered, drawing his index finger along the shape of the largest ring in the air. “Is this your first time seeing a gate? Or have you seen more?”
Sun’s avatar went rigid, taking in the sight.
“It’s the same,” they murmured, voice low. Their eyes unfocused, flicking to and fro as if doing a quick sum in their head, then nodded with new understanding, if not reassurance. “Of course. We’re thirty-three parsecs out. A hundred and seven light years.
Sun met Indrani’s quizzical expression. “We’re travelling faster than light, you know. Still not very fast when it comes to crossing the length of the old empire. But light’s speed is constant, and something I see from far enough away might only appear as it did a long time ago.”
They stepped forward a pace to join Indrani at the projection, framed by the great rings.
“This is how it looked the last time I was here,” they said. “One hundred and ten years ago. Just after Fragmentation.”
“Amazing,” Indrani said, biting his lip thoughtfully. He tried to imagine what it was like for Sun, to see the space outside of their hull blistering by in a liquid rush of light. Light that still held ancient images, imprints of time already dissolved by its passing.
“Do you remember what it was like? The Empire?” he asked, paused, fidgeted with the hem of his tunic. “Do you remember...your family?”
As the distance between them and their destination shrank, the projection did its best to compensate for years’ worth of reflected light streaming from the ruined gate. The rings in the magnified image began to drift, a process of decades happening over mere minutes.
“What kind of family do you mean?” Sun asked. “Parents? Direct ancestors? I didn’t have any. I’m pretty sure I just came out of a special embryo bank, engineered for the chassis they developed for me.” They chuckled hollowly. “Custom made.”
Two rings smacked together, flinging some of the delicate lattice into space at hyperspeed. “The Empire was so big. I really saw very little of it. The training I got since I was a—well, I guess you could call me a child—imprinted on me that it was incredible, and worth fighting for.” They sighed, and it felt less of an affectation than usual. “But I think it was my passengers who convinced me of that more than anything else.”
Indrani nodded stiffly, half-ashamed to have unearthed a topic that seemed bitterly tender. For him, family was also a sour subject; he’d been unceremoniously dropped off on an old star barge, at a traveling orphanage filled with a slew of other orphans. He remembered only vague experiences from that time in space, of the rusty industrial interior, the wan yellow lighting, and the musky smell of over-sanitized metal. A memory pushed front and center from that time: the entering and exiting long stasis sleeps between drop-offs at stationary orphanages, of standing in line to get hosed off by their caretakers and shuffled off into a crowded bunks.
He’d never gotten properly adopted. Two groups of potential parents had declined him from his transcripts alone; another family interviewed him but decided on another younger child. Eventually, the orphanage pawned him off at the monastery, who hadn’t seen a child in decades. He became their ward. Nothing familial about it.
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