Chapter 7

The BCNS Suppository Splinters’ internal hull bulkheads were vibrating and making incessant loud roaring noises, it and the entire sub fleet of Lord Kank had a cascade of gamma rays flashing from impacts to their front armour blocks.

They were not under attack. They were encountering TRAFFIC.

Travelling at slightly above 0.7c (70 percent of light speed) meant that hitting even so much as a proton travelling similarly fast in the opposite direction was a bit of a pants shitting experience radiologically speaking. Having millions of entire atoms hitting you went beyond pants shitting to entirely new metaphors involving fear and bodily leakage.

They currently had an entire mega fleet of huge civilian refined copper freighter junkers travelling past them at a similar velocity IN THE OPPOSITE DIRECTION on the other lane of the laser highway. Even the most spotlessly clean and well maintained ships leaked a little bit of atmosphere and other particles, and these junkers were absolute shitboxes.

At least they had had advanced warning to prepare. The reflective sails of the ship were all stowed away to stop them being ripped to shreds, the front weapons and sensors had been retracted, and 3 layers of ten-metre cubic shipping containers full of inert regolith had been moved to cover the entire front of the ship as expendable armour. Every ship in the fleet had done the same, as had the civilian junkers, they had no acceleration with the light sails stowed and they had to simply coast past each other in microgravity.

The civilian ships going the other way were divided into many small sub fleets with millions of kilometres of distance ahead and behind each other, but at this speed they seemed to shoot past with a panty wetting cadence, showering the fleet with every atom of crap vented out of slight airlock leaks and shoddy pipe joints and hull cracks at relativistic speed.

The shipping containers of regolith at the front of the Suppository Splinters looked like a pyrotechnic display in the gamma ray and X-ray spectrums, the regolith cooked radioactive by a holocaust of particle impacts smashing atoms and sending the rad counters screaming. Exactly what weird and wonderful new atomic isotopes the regolith atoms were being transmuted into as they were smashed apart was anyone’s guess right now.

People unfamiliar with the realities of relativistic travel often questioned why the front 950 metres of the ship was uninhabited storage, fuel, reactors and stuff while only the rear-most 50 meters were inhabited. This relativistic death blizzard right now was the reason, you wanted as much raw mass as possible between this radiation apocalypse and the crew.

These sorts of junker fleets were regrettably common on the laser highways. Copper was the standard unit of currency in the Bo-Cran Empire, workers were literally paid with small ingots of refined copper as their wages. It had so much liquidity everywhere that junker fleets were always ferrying it around by the millions of tons from the (usually metal-rich) stars that star-lifted it to the economic hub systems. With the economic hub system Xantha-9 slightly less than half a light year behind them they would likely be seeing a lot of these sorts of civilian freighter junker fleets intermittently.

The ship AI was right now billing the junkers for damages, calculating the exact probabilistic trajectory of every particle impact back to the ship that most probably leaked it, triple checking every calculation and cost estimate, sending this billing data to the offending ships and back to the Bo-Cran Navy base in Xantha-9 to bill the ships when they arrived.

“Yeah yeah, fuck you.” The offending ships messaged back dismissively to each new damage bill they accrued.

Inside the infirmary Nyxia was terrified as the entire hull of the ship roared with noise, infirmary rad counters crackling softly from the mild muon drizzle that got through the mass of the ship from the prow rad-storm, her 18 eggs floating in a big wobbly ball of water inside their enclosed glass seawater tank in the microgravity.

Nyxia floated next to her tank full of eggs, worried about what would happen when the 1 G acceleration inevitably returned after this chaos passed, her eggs might be smashed against the tank bottom!

Omdo put a ceiling mounted robotic arm hand on her shoulder reassuringly as she floated with the whole world screaming around her, she put a hand over his metal hand and gripped it tightly against her shoulder for comfort.

“The ship was designed to withstand this relativistic particle turbulence, it sounds far worse than it is.” Omdo soothed her with his sophisticated AI voice, the quiet voice of an upper society professor type, dignified and wise.

“Are the rads getting through? Are my eggs safe?”

“A spattering of muons, a gamma ray or two, far below the lethal exposure dose. I will give your eggs a genetic repair nanite treatment after it passes just to be sure.” Omdo promised.

“What about when we accelerate again? My eggs will hit the tank bottom at 1 G!”

“The tank has a soft transparent polymer coating padding every surface of the tank interior, it was designed to mitigate that eventuality.” Omdo reassured.

Nyxia almost sobbed in relief at these wonderful words.

The entire infirmary suddenly boomed with terrible noise!

“WHAT WAS THAT!” Nyxia screamed.