Sliding Void by Stephen Hunt

between a warship and a freighter like the Rose was largely one of intent. Flying the Gravity Rose into a world’s surface at just under the speed of light would result in one hell of an insurance loss for the inhabitants. The ship’s monorail emerged from the long armoured tunnel into a large chamber, the central floor of which was filled with a series of lozenges, each a steel and crystal construction the size of an apartment block, the crystalline portion of their surfaces gently pulsing with blue light. After six simulated months sharing the sensibilities of an ensign in Hell Fleet , this hyperspace translation matrix was still black magic to Calder – largely because it might as well have been sorcery to his fleet avatar. For all the analogies heaped upon the understanding of such devices – think of it as knife to slice into the deeper realities of the universe – think of it as a translation device to convert the mathematical language of one reality into another – think of it as a piano’s tuning fork to… no, think of it as a big steaming shit-pile of the wrath of the gods, able to mangle the stuff of creation, mould it into spears and hurl it like one of Vega’s thunderbolts across the creators’ phantasmal realm. Calder’s barbarian explanation made as much sense as any the sims had provided with their talk of advanced Brane theory, affine-parameters and T-duality. His capsule pulled in behind a pod already docked at a halt and the robot driver at the front stomped around, tweeting static in-between its follow follow . A door on the left of the capsule rolled into the roof, allowing man and machine to step onto a viewing gantry overlooking the jump matrix. There was a second Sony unit waiting for them, the two robots sharing a burst of communication before forming up behind each other and waddling off. Unlike the robot from the pod, this new boy had its front panel painted white with black characters scrawled across it. The language virus which had burnt the alliance lingua franca, Lingual, into Calder’s skull, provided no comprehension of the writing; but part of his sim learning dimly signalled that these were Sino characters or similar. Lots of Chinese racial worlds inside the Triple Alliance – Calder’s partner in the Hard TAP sim had been one Fu-han Meng. A racist cop voice rose with him, sighing: With a surname like Paopao, you think the chief of the drive rooms is going to be Färsk Nordic rather than a chink ?
    With each other for company, the robots seemed to have forgotten about their human charge, and Calder groaned and followed after the duo as they marched beside the glass of the viewing gallery, little flashes of cerulean light flashing off their metalwork. Catching up, Calder stepped into a lift with the maintenance units. Then he was sinking through the decks, an archaeologist’s excavation of layered shielding – geological layers of concrete sandwiched between layers of alloy steel, diamond composite, sand, water, air, self-healing fibre-reinforced ceramics, until he reached the Engineering Command Housing core, or ECHO core, in fleet parlance. For most starships, the ECHO core was the most important part of the vessel – all that was separating a functional space vessel from being a couple of million tonnes of metal coffin stranded parsecs from civilisation at worse, or a large satellite trapped in a world’s gravity well at best. The Gravity Rose ’s was a four storey chamber, a large central atrium surrounded by rises of railinged decks connected by a nest of walkways, gantries and lifts – some designed for human crew, more arranged for the hundreds of mechanicals moving around the space. The robots were rolling between consoles and the banks of instruments, tending them with all the care farmers showed growing their crops in the greenhouses of Hesperus. There was none of the information overload of the bridge here that Calder could see. No storm of flashy icons and