The Captain’s voice came on the speaker in every compartment and assured the passengers that the accident was nothing to worry about.
Then they extended their body to full size, connecting with every instrument on the bridge, and went into crisis mode.
The first problem was that the Captain had no idea how the Ship worked. That was the Ship’s business, and the Captain respected people’s privacy. But the Ship had suddenly and violently taken ill and was, for the moment, unable to inform the Captain of the details. This was fine as far as things go, for the last thing the Captain wished for was to embarrass the Ship with insensitive questions regarding her condition.
However, she did seem to be accelerating towards the atmosphere of the planet and the Captain wasn’t sure that ought to be happening. The Captain called up their script of things they had to say on the bridge throughout the journey. They were supposed to sail gracefully between the two bodies of the Couplet system, slingshot around its host star and then go home. There was nothing about entering any atmospheres at relativistic speed.
The assignment to helm a Solar-class luxury cruise liner had been an auspicious one for the Captain, and they were grateful to the Society for granting the opportunity. Then again, they had been chosen for the role on the strength of their soothing voice and minor celebrity status on the Blitphone circuit. They had not been chosen for their experience in space exploration—of which they had none—or their ability to keep calm under pressure.
In truth, the Captain had never been under pressure at any point in their long life. The feeling of being under pressure was disgusting and degrading. The Captain wanted the feeling to stop right away.
They extended a shoot into the diagnostic chamber and conveyed a fragment of their panicked consciousness onto each of the scouting drones. They scattered, magnifying the Captain’s panic by becoming mirrors of that same panic and scrambled along the arteries of the Ship to explore the vital compartments.
The Captain was very sorry for having told the passengers that there was an accident happening, because now the passengers were sending lots of messages to the bridge, which was very distracting.
It had been unavoidable though, because the gravitational pull of the planet below had disturbed the passenger’s compartments, which were meant to hang in neat rows on the surface of the Guest Bubble. They were supposed to all float in perfect microgravity in a ring on the inside of the Bubble . . . but now the ones on the side of the Bubble furthest away from the approaching planet were being stretched out while the ones on the close side were squashed flat.
Since the space inside the bags was folded up to give the passengers the palatial rooms they deserved, this distortion of the outside material was having dramatic effects on the space inside. The Captain was receiving annoying messages from the passenger compartments about buildings collapsing, rivers flooding, ice sculptures breaking and every kind of bump and bruise.
The Ship’s sensory blisters continued to broadcast to the Captain the images and telemetry of the planet growing closer and the force of its gravitational field growing stronger. They tried again to talk to the Ship by rapping on the interface crystal, but this was met with instant regret as the Ship responded once again by bombarding the Captain’s mind with sensations of horror from a thousand indescribable nightmares.
They retracted from the crystal and waves of shock rustled through their branches. They stayed quite still until the drones returned.
They had bad news.
One drone said that the inertial dampeners had been jettisoned into space. Another said that the plasma lances were merrily misfiring in all directions. Another said that the fabricators were producing piles of random materials in such quantity that the Fabrication Bubble might be about to burst. One offered the Captain a piece of the Navigation Ribbon but neither of them recognised what it was.
The Captain twitched and anxiously popped nitrogen bubbles down their shoots. They asked the drones if they had seen a way that any of that might be fixed by the Ship’s Technicians? One drone had seen them slithering out over the exterior but then another drone cut in to say that it had seen the Technicians tearing each other apart in puzzled agony. The Captain thanked the drones and allowed them to put their minds away and crawl back into their chamber.
Long moments passed. The Ship was decelerating at a frightening rate as it skimmed the upper atmosphere. The Captain knew just enough about space travel to know what that meant.
They activated the speaker system again and did the only thing they could possibly think of—
Keep reading from the script.
“As we sail over the larger of the two partners of the Couplet System, we can see the colourful layers of its nitrogen-rich atmosphere. If we look back towards home, we can see that the Couplet’s lesser partner, the silvery moon, is in full phase—illuminated fully by the strange light of its little star. And at this moment below us, we can see the new mountain range that has been produced by the mysterious tectonic forces of this enigmatic world. This mountain range has cooled the global temperature, creating the characteristic icecaps at the poles, which were such an inspiration to Ship 38.”
The messages from the passengers had reached a fever pitch of panic. The Captain saw some of them had even crawled out of their compartments to scramble about in the lumen of the Guest Bubble. They were all changing shape to try and find the most durable form they had learned.
“And if you’d please form camera eyes and attach the viewing lenses provided, you will see that the solar storm we detected earlier has now reached the planet’s magnetosphere and, yes, our scheduled aurora borealis has begun!”
The Fabrication Bubble detached from the main body of the Ship and burst.
The Fabrication Bubble had been only a few modules distant from the Guest Bubble, and the uptick in screams of terror and rage intruding on the bridge told the Captain that the Guests outside their compartments had definitely seen the Fabrication Bubble go up .
“I must remind our guests that the safest place to be at all times is inside their compartments. Through your viewing lenses, you will see a surprise! The Ship has prearranged a refractory web to spell out a special message in the aurora borealis—on behalf of the Ship and the entire SubSociety that serves her, we wish Guest 4057 a very happy updating of their Change Licence! Everybody raise a toast to Guest 4057 on this wonderful—”
The Guest Bubble detached and burst, scattering the passenger compartments across the sky.
The Captain marched bravely on through the script as, one by one, the lights went out.
When the small number of surviving passengers crept from the few bags that had survived miraculously intact, they found that not much of the Ship had survived the crash.
But the parts that did survive would become forever entwined with their lives and with the history of the beautiful but incomprehensible world they had come so far to see.