Chapter I
STITCH3D
A set of blue, mottled hands, doubled thumbs, gripped engine components like vice grips. Nia groaned. Her lean, muscular arms tensed as she wrenched the cabling into place. She flipped a large switch next to the paneling, and multiple lights illuminated in sequence: all signs green. Nia let out a sigh of relief and wiped the coolant on her overall’s utility pants and her white tee before slamming the panel shut. Nia threw her worn navy-blue jacket around her hips and took the ladder out of the engine room of the DEEP REACH.
“Is it fixed?” a deep, modulated voice rumbled over Nia as she reached the top of the engineering room’s second-level walkway, a grated floor that overlooked the main engineering room controls. The voice belonged to Greck, a Cartolangious ‘shark’ and the crew’s mechanic.
Nia nodded and tightened the loosened sleeves of the jacket looped around her burnt orange overalls.
“No thanks to you,” Nia joked, as she put up a foot on the railing overlook. Her milky white eyes turned to Greck, and she pulled the laces on her work boot tight, then switched feet and tightened the other.
Greck grumbled, and Nia pushed her way past his hulking frame. Greck fixed just about everything aboard the DEEP REACH, but the wiring on the old vessel required a more finessed touch that his wider-set fingers just couldn’t provide. That, and many of the DEEP REACH’s systems were patched together over decades of improvising to keep the old girl afloat, and Nia had grown accustomed to patching it herself.
“I could help if you’d show me,” Greck’s low voice vacillated through the digital haze from his translator.
“I told you to stop using that thing and just talk to me,” Nia complained, “...I also told you stop moving my sticky stack,” she continued, holding out the roll of adhesive paste patches in her thumbed hand. She waved the roll behind her as she led Greck back down the walkway and then shoved the ‘stack’ back into her junk drawer in one exaggerated movement. She gave the drawer a hearty shove, and then another until it slammed shut… barely. The wall of compartments shifted, and a few more drawers popped out in response.
Greck pulled the translator from his mouth and started barking at Nia in Nothonian.
“Wa-Wa-Wait, I said talk to me, but you need to slow down,” Nia shouted as a nearby steam duct vented its excess haze out into the engineering room.
Greck slowed down his speech, a string of rolling sounds and aquatic bubbling prose. Nia understood about half the dialect, and the other half was intuited from her cranial lattice, as most Declanians did when crossing language barriers across species. Nia nodded and patted Greck on his navy blue coveralls’ fibrous shoulder.
“If I had the time, I’d show you, Greck. Bolt barely has this scrap heap in the yard long enough to get a proper look at the repair logs.”
“Time is money,” Bolt answered from the engineer bay doorway. He ran a hand through his thick Pantheran mane, fairly well kept for a Longshot Captain. Bolt smiled, his gleaming, pearly white fangs piercing the dimly lit walkway, and his deep, burnt orange hair. “Or have you forgotten, we owe her?”
Bolt pressed a furry hand against the metallic doorframe, a sharp nail lightly scratching at the dark metal. Greck nodded.
“Not all of us are ship-bonded,” Nia reminded him. Bolt was about to comment, but Nia interrupted the thought. “But I see your point. Do we have our next station?”
“Carter just got back from Junction. We have a contract. I’ll let him share the finers on the bridge.”
Bolt waved his arm through the doorway, motioning for Nia to join, while Greck stayed behind to finish his never-ending list of repairs.
“Reach’s looking good, Greck. Makes me almost forget about the bog water smell in the galley.”
Greck grunted half-heartedly. He waited for them to walk out, then grabbed Nia’s sticky stack from the junk drawer, pocketed the roll inside his coveralls, and then half-shut the drawer back.
Bolt and Nia made their way across the grated walkway that connected engineering to the operations multipurpose room.
The multipurpose room was aptly named ‘the HUB’, and it connected to living quarters for the crew, a storage room, and a staging room for the cargo hold on the bottom floor–the hold being a large warehouse store underneath the walkway.
The last connection to the HUB was a set of dual industrial-gated ramps that led up into a hallway that ran the width of the ship, with forward connections to the captain and pilot quarters with the bridge entrance between the two.
Bolt pulled up a metal chair in front of the multipurpose room’s main attraction: a huge data-connected hologram table. It was a few generations old, originally designed by Symphonic Software, and a piece of shit if you asked Nia. No one did, but she told them anyway. Bolt rarely walked all the way down to engineering during the Reach’s voyages, but while they were on ‘holiday’, the handsets that piped into the intercom system worked half the time, and he had the time to stretch his legs. Bolt motioned for Nia to sit, which she did, begrudgingly, on the uncomfortable metal slab seat, a creaking folding chair.
Bolt pulled up the user interface of the hologram table, and a wave of blue lines rolled over the top of the device, broken up by periodic glitches in the dotted matrix. Nia cleared her throat and folded her arms over her chest, waiting for Bolt to get to the meat of their obligatory pre-flight checklist.
A rough, incomplete model of the DEEP REACH rezzed shakily atop the field of neon blue grid lines, with the ship’s systems overlaying the layout with a hazy, neon orange glow. A table of nearly imperceptible gauges and semi-filled bars populated next to the bridge, engineering, and cargo store rooms. Most of the bars were filling in at green or yellow-caution levels, but a few were red, and a few triggered small emergency flags.
“The hull sensors are still not responding on several of the external hull doors,” Nia motioned an index finger at the external section. Bolt sniffed loudly and pulled up engineering diagnostics.
“These keep failing,” Bolt waved at a series of five data columns marked as long-term deficiencies.
“I already told you those ‘new’ interpolators aren’t compatible with the subspace telemetry system. It doesn’t matter if the engines can talk to the interpolator framework if the telemetry calculations refuse to translate into this old Rhynese shit,” Nia complained. “We’re still having to approximate and run calculations manually to give us a chance at turning the nav into subspace throttle.”
Bolt tapped the solar-shaders off the top of his brow and over his eyes. “Well, until we discover a fresh batch of ancient Rhyno calculators, we’re going to have to get the interpolators to work, no?”
Nia sighed and waved two of the columns away, marking them for follow-up in the engineering bay computer system. Bolt didn’t know shit about the engineering systems, and the little bit she taught him just made him think he knew what would fix things. She knew this because she could feel the residual buzz of ego coming off Bolt’s brainwaves. Nia could correct him, explaining that the NAV system was an old Rhyno Commonwealth design, and that was being fed spatial data through Dahl sensor arrays and interpreted into actionable directions by a stolen Rogers Republic Navigation Sorter (NS)–which in turn was routed down to engineering’s Main Processing Unit (MPU), which had been scavenged from a Astex Mining Transport and that processor was feeding translated calculations to the engines. And all of these systems needed to talk to each other in real time to monitor conditions and ensure that the DEEP REACH did not, in fact, explode into a million tiny pieces.
Bolt was bored, nearly snoring at the thought of another lecture from his blue-skinned engineer. He was rescued when a communications alert froze up the holo-table interface. Neon-blue type glowed over the locked display in Nothonian glyphs, while the audio played in a Rogers-Regulation Rhyneese
INCOMING ALERT:
[PILOT DUNNY]… [INBOUND]… [FROM]… [JUNCTION].
“Greck!” Bolt roared. “Your fishspeak is system-wide again!”
“Sorry,” Greck muttered over the comm speaker.
Bolt punched the table, and the console shuddered into a hard reset, projecting a Symphonic Systems logo that floated over the table. Bolt looked over at Nia, pulling his solar-shades down over his snout so his eyes glared darkly at her.
“We’ll finish the checklist after Dunny shows us her haul.”
###
The bridge of the DEEP REACH was a patchwork of repurposed old tech from former empires, pirate cabals, and once-cutting-edge Longshot experimental modules. Like the rest of the ship, nothing ‘talked’ directly to each other. The NAV computer and its IO ports barely communicated with the Navigation Sorter, which Nia reminded everyone was scavenged from a merchant trade ship that had drifted too far out of the shipping subspace lanes, so its capacity to actually navigate was suspect at best. The engineering MPU was incompatible with the ship’s power supply, and on and on it went.
Thus, Nia found herself constantly scavenging for passthroughs, interpolators, and transfer patches, trading part of their bounties or boons to keep the REACH… reaching.
Nia rolled out from under the NAV computer panel as Dunny, the DEEP REACH’s pilot - a female Eukary with a worn, leather three-pointed hat - strode in from her Junction supply run. Nia sighed as she picked up on Dunny’s mental waveform and knew she barely had anything to share. A small paperboard box slammed down onto the common table, and Dunny started pulling small bits and bobbles out, haphazardly dropping them into small piles.
“No parsers?” Nia groaned. They had to route signals multiple times through data hubs to get information back from engineering, when they should have been able to parse the signals directly. It was an easy enough part to acquire if you weren’t living in Longshot pirate space…
Dunny shook her head, her eyes covered by her hat. She adjusted the brim and looked from under it at Nia. “Hardly a wire between the lot in the markets. Found this though…”
Dunny flipped her thumb and a little piece of wrapped candy shot into Nia’s hands. She rolled the wrapper over in her hands and saw the label.
“A Popworks Starflare–Nice!” Nia said with a smile. She hadn’t tasted one since she was a kid.
“Sorry ‘bout the other doodads. You’ll have to keep working your magic.”
“I’m running out,” Nia complained. She pocketed the candy in her overalls and rolled back under the nav computer. She pulled a thick glob of conduction putty from her pocket and pressed a string of it around two fraying wires. An errant spark zapped her thumb, jumping across to the other thumb on the same hand. Nia winced and shoved a protective sleeve around the wires, then shoved them back up. Nia slammed the paneling shut as best she could and rolled back out and away from the NAV.
“Where’s our illustrious navigator?” Dunny grunted.
“Talking with Bolt in his quarters,” Nia rubbed her grimy hands together and turned a spinning chair towards her at the common table, a roughly welded Symphonic communications table affixed to the top of their Navigation Sorter. “The NAV should hold for another run.”
“It better,” Carter’s Nothonian dialect cut through muffled tones as the sound moved around the tentacles on his face. It was a higher variant dialect, but still resembling Greck’s language. The accent always struck the crew as a little much, if not completely ‘put on’ by Carter. They rarely met others from the squid species from Nothonian space, so they didn’t have a reference to know if he was just full of himself, at least more than they already knew he was.
It better, Dunny mouthed with rolled eyes behind the squid’s back. Nia tried to hide a smile.
Carter looked down and pulled a few pieces of loose tech to his face, his tentacles pulling apart a relay switch and reconnecting it. The tentacles dropped the switch back into the box as Carter’s glassy black eyes turned their attention to Dunny. Carter dipped his head down to make up the height difference between him and the diminutive Eukary.
“Is the NAV Link talking to Flight Control?” Carter entoned through vibrating tentacles.
“Issa’ bit garbled, but first checks say so,” Dunny replied, and she put the rest of the tech refuse back in the box and moved the box off the holo table away from Carter. “So where we going?”
“Carter’s been a bit mum on that,” Bolt replied nonchalantly as he entered the bridge with long, confident strides. “But I’m promised it could be quite lucrative. Maybe afford us a few more repairs you all keep complaining ‘bout.”
Carter nodded in Bolt’s direction, then pulled a data chip from his dark jacket pocket. “Coordinates, a contract, and terms for the crew.”
Dunny accepted the chip and put it in a small converter box linked between the NAV and the flight controls pipeline, with another set of mismatched cables running secondary conversions between the mismatched systems.
The common table hummed, and the same blue grid rolled over it in a wave of light, revealing a spatial map of the sectors between the outer reaches of Longshot space and the Nothonian Enclaves. Nia looked up from the map as Dunny scoffed. Dunny pointed to the sector route
“Are you insane?” Dunny chuckled. “There’s nothing out there but a web of rocks.”
“Look, this is where the deep range scanners led me. There’s residual signal noise. Now, it could be an echo or interference… But I’m betting it’s something old; something everybody else has written off.”
“They wrote it off because it’s a desolate asteroid field. You’re making me fly through that on a … bet?” Dunny’s large eyes narrowed, and she wiped her hand across her tattered denim pants.
“Careful, Dunny. You sound scared,” Carter jabbed through his rolling tentacles, his dead black eyes hiding his anger.
Dunny scoffed and grabbed her box of tech junk and hauled it away, eyes still piercing from under her worn brim at Carter as she left.
“Old salvage?” Nia questioned.
“The transmissions were security-coded data dumps - unintelligible, but … still,” Carter explained to Nia in a hushed voice. However, his eyes remained locked on Bolt, who was not shy about his own skepticism in the cap quarters already. “These types of data transmissions are usually relayed long distances, via Ansible or reconnaissance networks… Whatever it is - if it is something - it’s good.”
Nia’s milky white eyes darted to Bolt, who leaned back against the command console with his arms folded. Bolt shrugged and nodded to the exit. “Better finish pre-flight.”
TO BE CONTINUED!
THE CREW OF THE DEEP REACH
I love what you're building here, Rob. You've built a really compelling cast of characters here.
You can tell Nia's been at this a long time. (maybe even longer than the rest of the crew?). She's a little gruff compared to the other Declanian protagonists we've seen, but she still has some hints of that innate empathy.
You can see it in her interaction with Dunny. It seems like Dunny is just sort of...there. Underfoot and hardly noticed. But it's pretty clear that's a character trait and not just "and there's a Eukary." Nia is the only member of the crew who has any real meaningful conversation with her.
Bolt might be my favorite character so far. I feel like he's got the arrogance of Mal Reynolds with the charm and (in)competence of Michael Scott (and the redeeming qualities of neither). I'm pretty sure I'd hate to work for him, but I'm gonna love reading about him. He's the type of character who's going to either get what he deserves of have a killer redemption moment, and I'm here for either one.
Nia is a great protagonist—there’s nothing like a grumpy, brilliant engineer with double thumbs to ground a story. The tension between the mismatched tech and the mystery of the 'residual signal noise' has me hooked. Looking forward to seeing if the DEEP REACH actually holds together through that web of rocks!