Exams have taken chunks out of my schedule, so my writing has slowed down, somewhat. Luckily I'm going to be going on an ~exotic~ Carribean cruise (details later) soon, leaving plenty of time to put words on figurative paper.
For now, here's an excerpt.
It's a part of Untitled that didn't make the cut, unfortunately. It takes place in episode 6, an already lengthy chapter, and really doesn't add much to the story that can't be summarized much for succinctly. It was difficult deciding to cut it out, especially after having written it in the first place, but hey, it's all part of the process.
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Getting there had not been easy. She had been jettisoned out into space inside what was essentially a metal coffin with a rocket and a few magnets strapped to it. In cosmic terms, the escape pod was nothing: a dust mite in a universe of metal giants. No sensors could be tuned enough to detect such a small object floating in space, which made it the perfect tool for infiltration.
The escape pod had a viewscreen through which Cass could see her surroundings. The fleets of all three factions were immobile at the time being, daring each other to make the first move. She grabbed the Escape Pod’s simple throttle, and pointed it Confederate-wards. She was looking for the Pretoria. It was a very considerate practice, she thought, to give names to ships. Of course, at her distance, she could not read anything, but it wouldn’t be too hard to get close enough. She was tiny, after all.
By the time she had manoeuvred the pod close enough to see the printed “PRETORIA” on the side of a Confederate Battlecruiser, the Independents had begun their descent. This proved fortunate. The Confederates had spaced their ships out, preparing for a possible battle, giving her extra angles of approach; although sensors could not spot her, someone absent-mindedly looking out of a viewscreen could. Moments after the pod’s magnetic clips latched onto the hull of the Battlecruiser, the vessel’s engines engaged, presumably to attack. The burning question should have been who the target of the assault was; however, this didn’t matter to Cass. The easiest part of her mission was complete.
The Confederates fought their battle. Given her limited viewpoint, Cass was not really in a position to comment on the issue in greater depth- the Pretoria had not fallen apart, which she supposed counted as a victory for the DSC. The difficulties began now. Cass unbuckled her harness.
She had time to think. Reaching into her jeans’ pocket, she pulled out a wallet Landover had handed her as he was explaining her mission earlier. In it were several travel documents and a reasonable amount of Confederate currency. She wasn’t too fond of her fake identity. Landover had picked the name himself, and it was somewhat strange. The mission in general was very haphazard. She supposed it made sense, though. Her lord wasn’t in a rush. She had been told “kill them.” That was what she would do. Landover had made the assumption that following battle, the Pretoria would need to dock somewhere, and had provided Cass with the civilian clothes and Confederate identification. She would find some way to infiltrate the ship, and then she would kill them.
In the midst of her reflections, the pod had begun to rumble. Cass turned over so that she was now floating with her back to the viewscreen and her face buried in the pod’s rather rough cushion. She wasn’t sure, but it was better to be safe than sorry. She closed her eyes. The rumbling intensified, the Pretoria’s engines firing up to their full potential. The vibrations travelled through the Battlecruiser and into Cass’s pod, bumping her un-harnessed self around in the gravity-less pod. She closed her eyes tighter.
Minutes later, the Battlecruiser Pretoria and its hidden hitchhiker were travelling through the fourth dimension.
Unlike many others, Cass did not mind 4-D travel. The worst part of it, she thought, was the nausea one could get if unaccustomed to such a method of travel. Moving in 4-D space felt “weird”, and was often accompanied by a feeling of vertigo. The closest she could describe the feelings was moving “through” space, rather than “in space”.
Other people she had spoken to attributed the worst part of 4-D travel to the fear of instant insanity. Cass did not mind much; these days, viewscreens closed at least an hour in advance, and could not be opened, even under emergency conditions, until the vessel returned to the third dimension. The commonly accepted explanation was that humans, existing in the three dimensional realm, could not understand the fourth dimension if they were to gaze on it. The Wheel had conducted experiments, forcing subjects to observe the fourth-dimension for varying intervals of time. Not one; even those who observed it for fractions of seconds, returned with sound mind. There was a physiological mismatch ; the brains of humans were not wired correctly. She was unsure of the situation in the Confederacy, but the Wheel was constantly experimenting, trying to find a way for humans to understand the mysterious realm. So far they had not succeeded, and that was why Cass currently had her face in the cushion with her eyes shut. She hoped the journey would be over soon.
Eventually, the intense shaking began again; and soon after, Cass felt as though a knot in her stomach was instantly untied. She waited for a half hour more before daring to turn over and open her eyes. Through her vantage point she saw a green and blue planet, white clouds hanging over parts of its continents. By a series of blinking red lights floating in nearby space, she could tell the Pretoria was heading towards a dock. She buckled her harness, preparing for the dock’s artificial gravity. Where Cass came from, docks were called “spaceports” but they were essentially the same thing. Some of them were purely for manufacturing, since all large spacefaring vessels had to be assembled in space and never entered the atmosphere under normal conditions. Most docks were mostly for civilian use, for travel or hauling cargo. Those in strategically or economically important locations were often connected directly to the surface of the planet by a space elevator.
A short while later, the Pretoria had docked. The artificial gravity dropped Cass back down onto the pod’s cushion. From her limited vantage point, she saw a series of lights on a ceiling close by. She would remain unseen up here on top of the Pretoria; getting down would be more difficult. She pressed a series of buttons on the pod’s control panel, opening it. She pushed herself out of it, rolling onto the Pretoria’s smooth metallic surface. She stood up, stretching ever extremity she could. Travel in jeans was simply not meant to be.
“Hmph.”
Cass opened a compartment on the exterior of the pod, where she earlier placed a small backpack. She took it, closed the compartment, and cautiously moved over to the battlecruiser’s edge. Confederate Battlecruisers had a peculiar design; the top three decks were gently sloped, probably for aesthetic appeal. The Wheel didn’t care much for that, and the vast majority of their vessels were thick and boxy; aerodynamics did not matter in space, after all. She peeked over the side. To her far left, a force field separated vacuum from air. To her right, a catwalk extended to administrative areas of the dock. Below her, series of catwalks extended from the ship to what she supposed could be called “dry land”. Examining the series of viewscreens up the Pretoria’s side, she counted that the Pretoria had fourteen decks, with the catwalk down on the seventh. She had walked down from the “roof” of the fourteenth to that of the eleventh. She put herself at a drop of ten meters. She chucked the bag and it thudded on the metal catwalk below. The echo reverberated through the dock.
Cass turned around and knelt, sitting with her back to the edge. She let her hands rest on the ship’s edge, and slowly slid her legs down. She let them rest against a viewscreen, leaving her half-hanging. She looked down and back behind her, checking the distance to the ground. Cass kicked off the Pretoria, twisting around as she fell. She bent her knees and tilted his body slightly forward. She rolled forward as hit the ground, the impact generating a loud, hollow noise. She knew somebody would hear her; that was part of the plan. It would be impossible to get out of the dock without encountering opposition
“Ouch.” She muttered, standing up and picking up her bag. Security would be coming soon. Cass quickly and silently moved away from the entrance to the Pretoria and onto the longer catwalk. She found a good spot, untied her bun, and slid down against the wall, closing her eyes. The echoes of footsteps grew louder by the second.
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After this, Cass would have been accosted by a security guard, lied her way through, and made her way down to the planet where she'd start beating up thugs until somebody noticed. Parts of this excerpt will make it into the final work, just not all of it. Who really cares about jumping off a spaceship??? Nobody, that's who.
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