a brief and ugly existence. A blinding flash of light. Streaks of molten metal like meteors. An expanding cloud of titanium tinsel. Asteroids crashing and tumbling and knocking into one another, cleaving into smaller hunks of rock. An immense amount of destruction, all without making a sound, a macabre ballet and light show.
A large chunk of the cargo vessel flips end over end, twisted like taffy, great black gouges down the side, and everywhere are the scraps of bright red and blue and gray containers, all their contents spilling into the vacuum of space, much of it pulverized beyond recognition.
It all happens in an instant. None of the destruction is there one moment—just quietude and the mingling of hippo-like rocks—and then chaos and burning and death and space litter. This is what it looks like when a billion-ton spacecraft goes from FTL to slamming into a rock the size of a small county. When the beacon’s GWB went out, it was like the street sign before a sharp curve had been removed, the one that warns of the approaching cliff. I think of the eight crewmembers dead. Eight is the number of men in a special battalions squad. We don’t normally lose them quite this fast. Oftentimes, one will crawl away and die a slow and lonely death on the edge of space. But no one is crawling away from the disaster beyond my porthole. And five thousand more lives are inbound at twenty times the speed of light.
• 4 •
The archives deep in the heart of beacon 23 house practically every novel ever written. A random trip through the database is an exercise in frustration, as for every one novel I would enjoy, there are roughly three billion I can’t get through, and no way of telling the two types apart other than a miserable chapter or two.
Which is why I spend more time reading through the complete Wiki, circa 2245, not updated in several decades, but close enough for solar nukes and frag grenades.
My curiosity over the picture of the lighthouse keeper and the tidal wave led me deep into the Wiki searching for answers, to no avail. But before I reached out to NASA with a research request, I stumbled upon an article that beggared belief. This article comes to mind as I watch the remnants of an interplanetary cargo vessel disperse itself across the cosmos. It comes to mind as I see what looks like two smaller pirate-class cargo vessels moving out there among the lifeless rocks and the tinsel of torn hull. The article was about an old profession long since lost. Or so the Wiki thought.
In the days of sea-bound ships, when hulls were made to keep water rather than vacuum out, and hazards to navigation were submerged rocks, not the floating-in-space kind, there was a dishonest profession of men known as wreckers.
I wouldn’t have believed it, were it not right there in the Wiki, but wreckers did just as described: they wrecked ships for a living. A brutal, murderous living.
I increased the zoom on the porthole and watched the flame of thrusters and the white puff of attitude controllers as the two black-painted cargo ships scooted from cargo container to cargo container. And the extreme coincidence of my GWB failure seemed to slide away. This was a lighthouse I was standing in, and lighthouses were not always appreciated.
Four or five centuries ago, a lighthouse would go up and down long before it went around and around. That is, some of the lighthouse would get built during the day, and then at night, many of those same stones would disappear. This would go on for months, until the builders posted guards and gave out beatings to the saboteurs. Lighthouses, you see, were bad business for the men who relied on wrecks for a living.
Wrecking probably starts with the sudden and unexpected bounty of one big catastrophe at sea. Lucky and enterprising salvagers sell the spoils that wash up beyond the reef. Before too long, clever and desperate men begin wishing for the next great crash. And so they proceed to
A large chunk of the cargo vessel flips end over end, twisted like taffy, great black gouges down the side, and everywhere are the scraps of bright red and blue and gray containers, all their contents spilling into the vacuum of space, much of it pulverized beyond recognition.
It all happens in an instant. None of the destruction is there one moment—just quietude and the mingling of hippo-like rocks—and then chaos and burning and death and space litter. This is what it looks like when a billion-ton spacecraft goes from FTL to slamming into a rock the size of a small county. When the beacon’s GWB went out, it was like the street sign before a sharp curve had been removed, the one that warns of the approaching cliff. I think of the eight crewmembers dead. Eight is the number of men in a special battalions squad. We don’t normally lose them quite this fast. Oftentimes, one will crawl away and die a slow and lonely death on the edge of space. But no one is crawling away from the disaster beyond my porthole. And five thousand more lives are inbound at twenty times the speed of light.
• 4 •
The archives deep in the heart of beacon 23 house practically every novel ever written. A random trip through the database is an exercise in frustration, as for every one novel I would enjoy, there are roughly three billion I can’t get through, and no way of telling the two types apart other than a miserable chapter or two.
Which is why I spend more time reading through the complete Wiki, circa 2245, not updated in several decades, but close enough for solar nukes and frag grenades.
My curiosity over the picture of the lighthouse keeper and the tidal wave led me deep into the Wiki searching for answers, to no avail. But before I reached out to NASA with a research request, I stumbled upon an article that beggared belief. This article comes to mind as I watch the remnants of an interplanetary cargo vessel disperse itself across the cosmos. It comes to mind as I see what looks like two smaller pirate-class cargo vessels moving out there among the lifeless rocks and the tinsel of torn hull. The article was about an old profession long since lost. Or so the Wiki thought.
In the days of sea-bound ships, when hulls were made to keep water rather than vacuum out, and hazards to navigation were submerged rocks, not the floating-in-space kind, there was a dishonest profession of men known as wreckers.
I wouldn’t have believed it, were it not right there in the Wiki, but wreckers did just as described: they wrecked ships for a living. A brutal, murderous living.
I increased the zoom on the porthole and watched the flame of thrusters and the white puff of attitude controllers as the two black-painted cargo ships scooted from cargo container to cargo container. And the extreme coincidence of my GWB failure seemed to slide away. This was a lighthouse I was standing in, and lighthouses were not always appreciated.
Four or five centuries ago, a lighthouse would go up and down long before it went around and around. That is, some of the lighthouse would get built during the day, and then at night, many of those same stones would disappear. This would go on for months, until the builders posted guards and gave out beatings to the saboteurs. Lighthouses, you see, were bad business for the men who relied on wrecks for a living.
Wrecking probably starts with the sudden and unexpected bounty of one big catastrophe at sea. Lucky and enterprising salvagers sell the spoils that wash up beyond the reef. Before too long, clever and desperate men begin wishing for the next great crash. And so they proceed to
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