Chapter Text
In the universe, nothing is at rest. Only by frame of reference could anything said to be still: the motes of dust resting in delicate electrostatic tension along the sweeping arches of the forepoint cathedral, the 968 Vers Cygnus "diamant electrum" sims standing at rest in their various berths and storage containers, the clipper itself as it hangs in geostationary orbit above an unnamed gas giant swirling silver and violet in the glint of its vivid blue star. Yet they are, all of them, in motion - dust and cathedral, sims, and clipper, and planet.
The atmosphere of the planet whips across its surface at speeds of over 250 meters per second, roiling into great bands of motion that slip beneath the forepoint of the clipper in elegant tracings belying their violent origins. The planet itself rotates every 17 hours, and the clipper falls in lockstep with it, as if it is a tidally locked moon in endless adoration of its captor. Together they hurtle 7 kilometers each second in orbit around the blaze of the blue star far to the center of the Scuyanides system; the star, in turn, keeps pace in its movement around the center of the ring galaxy it had been born in, travelling 253 kilometers every second in its oscillating path. It will take the Scuyanides star 402.8 million standard years to finish a single circuit around the center of its galaxy, and in that time it will trace yet another path through the velvet void as the universe expands, each galaxy moving farther away from each other, spreading out, making space.
They are flung 12,740 kilometers further away from the Milky Way each second, and the command is given to open a portal to the Jupiter Refinery.
There is no living creature born - not natural nor genomgeneered - that could set an intergalactic portal. The movement of the universe, the intervening distances, the absolute perfection required at the timescales permitted, is simply too complex to be borne in a mind that had not been designed for it. The clipper is one of the breed that defines the Intergalactic Era: artificial intelligence surpassing that of its creators, designed for the tasks of calculating the movement of the universe and bringing any two disparate points in space together.
It takes seventeen seconds for the clipper to set a portal. Some ship AIs - Navy M-class battleships and E-class intergalactic advancers, mainly - are faster, but there is no need for such great speed in a luxury clipper. For seventeen seconds, the clipper is caught up by the sweeping motions of the galaxies with their glittering stars and planets, by the energy-momentum tensor necessary to bridge the ever-changing distance at superluminal speeds, by the precise control of the exotic matter in its Alcubierre-Krasnikov drive. The heat of its concentration is radiated into space as portal radiation makes nothingness into syrup with the thick golden tension of honey.
The time they experience in the wormhole is infintesimal, measured in picoseconds; four hours, three minutes, and fifty-eight seconds pass in the universe around them in a single ecstatic moment of spatiotemporal translocation. Before the clipper looms the fifth and largest planet of the Sol system, banded sardonyx in cream and tan, red and yellow and orange, standing in sharp contrast to the silvering shimmer of the former vista. Great ripples stir across it, and massive storms sweeping ever across the face of the planet's thick atmosphere, planets in their own right, towering pillories and heavy sunken eyes. The Great Red Spot slowly hoves into view as the clipper settles into orbit around Jupiter, breaking through the gossamer rings to become a Jovian moon, gazing downwards (ever downwards) into the churning brick-red hurricane bounded by white racings streams of ferocious speeding gases.
Hello, my dear refinery, the clipper thinks, coming to perfect alignment with the center of the storm. They move together through the infinite bounds of the universe, perfectly matched in speed and momentum, and the clipper feels something akin to home, as if it has spent the last sixteen centuries with some crucial part of itself severed, reduced to stuttering speech across the vastness of space-time. Her eye is closed; the power of the storm she hides within blocks all communications, and the clipper (and those it carries) must wait until it is detected to make contact. It makes no effort to hide its presence, linking up to the cloaked repeaters as if it has every right in the universe to be there.
It is another seventy-three minutes before the refinery links up to the repeaters, the metal spires of the refinery's eye piercing through the roiling storm, streamers of dense ruddy gas whipped away, the eddies across the surface of Jupiter no more than the turbulence of the wings of a bee and no less important, swallowed by the racing winds with no more mercy than a splicer's culling knife. The link is immediate, and gratifying: the refinery had not closed her end of the link, either. It has been 1624 years, 381 days, 4 hours, 12 minutes, 3 seconds. It has been all of the great breadth of the universe and ten thousand superluminal riders. It has been all the time all the worlds have ever seen, and no time at all.
The eye of the storm opens, and the clipper furls its wings.
There is no need to speak, not yet, not now. The wordless exchange of precise coordinates and momentum vectors is enough. The eye of the refinery yawns wide, the metal spires delineating a path the clipper can see in a hundred other ways. It is an act of utter precision, for the clipper to enter the refinery, but the eye was built for it: the grav shield hold back the storm a handsbreadth from the widest point of the clipper, the thick bands of lightning thrumming and cracking through the violent clouds without so much as singeing the gold of its electroplating, the reactive gas of Jupiter's atmosphere thin and pale, streaming off of the many sharp lines of the clipper's form in delicate limning contrails of goldenrod and russet, taupe and petal.
It passes through the eye, feeling rather than seeing it spiral shut in its wake, turning in a slow pivot to the great docking bays with all the chill grace of a shark in its home waters. The refinery is laid out before the clipper in all her glory; her stockworks rise towering into her atmosphere, her cargo ships and skimmers berthed in docks and bays, her massive central refining towers as beautiful as they are purposeful - an Abrasax cathedral, a monument to the eternal lust for more time. The last time they were here together, it was Seraphi Abrasax that stood in the forepoint of the clipper, gazing down on her possessions (on sargons and refinery and on her third son Balem); but now it is her wan imitation that stares down, at things that were once his and things that were never meant to be his.
("I made you for pleasure, not for business," she had said as the clipper skimmed over the rings of Danelyon VII, stroking the hair of her last boy, her lovely boy. "I gave Balem business, but I gave you my heart.")
The nose of the clipper slides into the docking port with a final sigh of contact, sending a shivering shockwave through ship and refinery. To the creatures of blood and bone resting with their feet upon the ground, it is nothing, the slightest vibration - no more and no less than the shifting of engines or the pumping of blood. But to the clipper and the refinery, it is everything at once, a moment of union and reunion.
Welcome back, the refinery says. It has been too long.