Silence between the stars
Preface
Silence between the stars is a piece of player-created fiction written by Casiella Truza. Originally published on the blog Ecliptic Rift.
Silence between the stars
Casi drifted through a forgotten corner of low-sec, her Buzzard-class covert operations frigate cloaked and scanning. She’d gotten a weak sensor hit indicating some sort of data repository in the system, probably belonging to the Angel Cartel given her location in Heimatar.
She’d just finished deploying out her quest probes when some of the feeds started displaying some oddities. First it started with market and transaction data updating only partially. This concerned her greatly due to the plays she had going.
Even more than that, though, her navigational data started losing all coherence. Nothing reconciled, and so her thrusters started sputtering as the automatic systems tried to find reference points and failed miserably. The loud banging that started emanating from the correlation processor registered only slightly lower on the scale.
She started to ask her corp-mates for assistance, but even that started to build up with static and she just managed a hasty “going offline” (and not even the full words) before everything shut down entirely.
The Buzzard went dark, somewhere in the depths of Heimatar low-sec. Casi could hear nothing in the ship, not even the silent thrum of the pod fluid pumps. And given how she was wired up at the moment, that meant she had something approaching zero sensory input of any sort. Long moments stretched into what felt like infinity as she contemplated a podder death, one that could override all the safeties that promised her near-immortality. No sudden pod destruction and no way to trigger one, just a slow suffocation somewhere between the stars.
A blinding flash announced the return of all systems. The amount of returning data flooding back through her implant threatened to completely overwhelm her. Safeties kicked in and queued up the data, triaging what she needed most so she could regain control.
Less than ten minutes had transpired in what she now thought of as her “near-death experience”.