Chapter Intermission SongChapter I: Part IYaris-Lo
Rob Majunder jumps into the cockpit and everybody else straps in. Rob runs the typical
flight checks, warms up the engine, calls in on Hangar Command to open the sky roof and tentatively hovers a couple of meters from the ground.
It swings slight to the left and again to the right as Rob gets used to the controls, and as the roof opens up, the Midnight Sun shoots upwards.
"Calm it, Rob!" shouts Saxson, gripping to the chair for dear life.
"You're going to kill us!" agrees Dante,
gulping a phlegm of blood from a bitten tongue - meanwhile, Rob's letting out a wild
Yeeaah-heahhhh!! as the horizon fades to star-dotted blackness.
The Midnight Sun lifts away and all are silent in wonder as they look upon a world they have known for so long, some for the first time, from space.
"It's beautiful..." somebody whispers, the other's lack of disagreement acknowledgement enough.
Rob flicks toggles and hits open the FTL Drive Button casing;
"Here we go...!"The Midnight Sun's FTL hums beautifully as it charges up, the speckled starfield stretching and blurring
into a watercolour piece of art as the fabric of space is meddled with in only a way that humanity might do.
A sound, crossed between a thick piece of solid paper ripping in a large hall and a sonic boom, echoes throughout the ship and the starfield is gone.
The crew can feel that they are travelling fast - incredibly fast, in fact, as they are travelling faster than light.
But the view in front of them looks as if they are moving in slow motion, as if you could reach out and
pluck an elongated star from the sky. The confusion and disbalance sends the weak uneasy and green of face.
Some time later the sound from when they begun the journey seems to be played in reverse - a piece of thick
paper being ripped back into a whole piece and the sonic boom event being undone - and the artist paints the
watercolour artpiece in reverse, back to it's original canvas... a speckled starfield. Anybody listening to somebody
who may have been mid-sentence, might have heard their last few words in reverse.
And in that starfield danced in morbid calm two suns of Blue and Red. In the near distance, a silver-black space station
hovered, a single member of audience to the colossal ballet.
"Mise de Feu, welcome to Yaris-Lo. Approach and dock in Bay 12, we have a loading team nearly ready for you," a voice
crackles over the comms.
Soon after, the ship docks comfortably and you power down the engines.