The Storm

Pulsar was rattled awake by an explosion.

It'd been a long day, debating the finer details of hauling contracts with the stodgy little Salance at distribution point 17 and loading pallet after pallet of trinkets and flat-pack furniture into his trusty SD-20, and he'd only closed his eyes for a moment - what felt like a moment, anyway. A quick glance at a monitor, still rebooting from the last jump, put him at about three hours' rest.

He cursed under his breath. A distant alarm chimed in the quarters beyond the cockpit door, two hours late. Hunched on the armrest, he wiped the sleep-dust from his clustered eyes with the lazy push of a palm as he readjusted himself in his seat. Where was he - halfway to 49? A third of the way?

The error pulsing on the dot-matrix monitor off his right shoulder finally caught his eyes. "Star nav fault, no QC beacons in range," it read. He squinted. That can't be right. No way the antenna got blown off; the fuses are all set. He re-set its switch just to be sure, and though the alignment coils beat their telltale thrum, the error persisted.

It was only as the flash shutter covering the cockpit's portholes drew upward that he realised the severity of the situation. Beyond, where once was the endless black mottled with distant points of light, were the ghostly embers of star-death, wisps of white-blue curling in incandescent clouds. A moment further, and the weight of the situation sunk him in his seat.

He'd jumped straight into a gods-damned baby nebula.

Pulsar's StarHaul training kicked in, and, taking the communicator from its rack, he tuned his antenna to the emergency frequencies. "Starburst, starburst, starburst," he barked, pulling on his headset as he stared into the fire. "Cluster zero-eight! Position, ah -" The starmap didn't give him much to go on but vague estimates of his position, but he was probably - "Eighteen light-years from beacon zero eight one alpha, bearing unknown!"

Nothing. Nothing but the fuzz of charged particles and the steady bip-bip-bip of the synchronisation signal whispering through the tinny little speakers. He made the call again. Nothing. Yet another call, and still nothing. He gritted his teeth.

He knew the danger. Flying into a nebula is the last thing any StarHaul pilot wants to do. The static charge alone makes communications impossible, but the danger is more subtle. It's getting out. When ships the size Pulsar likes to run jump through dense space, the dust gathers at the front of the bubble, collects, heats up. In the instant between one place and another, enough can be collected that it undergoes fusion and just explodes.

The aethereal filaments beyond his cockpit window might as well have been gunpowder, and he was amongst it all with a lighter. He pulled a little device from his belt and took a long, thoughtful drag.

He did have a shock-cone, of course. He'd probably be space junk without it. A heavy beryllium-tungsten ceramic thing, it sat at the nose of the vessel, looking none the worse for wear upon its throne of hydraulic rams. It occluded much of the view outside, and from his position he could see its inner walls, still glowing a dull red with the heat of what would have been certain disaster.

He held his breath for a time, eventually letting a purple-white haze escape into the cabin, soon to be drawn into the filters. A new focus took him then, and soon he was thumbing buttons, checking cameras, orienting the vehicle away from a distant white dot that seemed to burn a hole in the video feed. Reactor power: at safe maximum. Coolant pumps: all in service. Hypermagnetopulse system: coils cooling, capacitors charging.

Time to ride the storm.