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Ten

The Nomad dropped out of FTL and began his decelerating approach to a class M4 red dwarf. The long burn of his pulsejets gradually slowed him to orbital speeds on the periphery of the system. The dim glow of the small crimson star shone in the remote distance, barely distinguishable against the constellations in the galactic backdrop.

A low-power warning flashed across the Fighter’s display. The Nomad pivoted the ship, using a short burn to navigate into a closer orbit, where the light intensity was great enough to charge the cells. Optimally angling the craft for photon capture, the Nomad unfolded the photovoltaic cells and waited for the ship to recharge. Awaking a while later to find the incomplete array of cells at full capacity, he retracted the panels and powered up the ship’s scientific equipment. After a time, the scan results pinged across the holographic display. The Nomad redeployed the photovoltaic cells to top up on power reserves and began sifting through the data projected before him.

The system was somewhat unremarkable. The star was twinned with a brown dwarf companion orbiting roughly twenty astronomical units out; in possession of a large magnetosphere, the failed star would be ideal for antimatter harvesting. Two small terrestrial worlds in close synchronous orbit were tidally locked to the star, and a belt of comets and asteroids encircled the outer reaches of the ecliptic. It was a barren and unpromising ancient solar system, akin to the vast majority to which the Nomad had journeyed in the years since the catastrophic loss of half his power cells. But as ever, the Nomad made do.

Scrolling through the last pieces of data, he was readying to close the results of the scans, when something leapt out at him: an anomaly. Something inconsistent with the rest of the solar system drifted out in the far reaches of the asteroid field. The Nomad quickly studied the readout, checking and double-checking to ensure it wasn’t a mere artefact in the scans. It was conclusive. An abnormality of significant size was floating on the fringes of the forsaken solar system. If the Nomad was correct in his guess, it was a wreck, and a large one at that.

There was nothing the Nomad could feasibly conceive of that he would ever find a drift in the endless void more valuable than a shipwreck. True, the carcass might already have been picked clean by scavengers, but equally, wreckage in such an inconsequential system as this one might have gone unnoticed for millennia. It could contain anything: valuable elements and resources, fuel tanks brimming with unsiphoned antimatter, oxygen, hydrogen, water, perhaps even useful equipment. But the Nomad knew above all what he hoped to find: power cells. Summoning his sense of cynicism that prevented disappointment, he suppressed his excitement and adjusted the Fighter’s orbit to carry him out into the asteroid field.

The Fighter coasted in a wide swinging orbit towards the outer reaches of the ecliptic. The dim red star receded to a pinprick of light as the Nomad approached the cloud of residual rock and ice left over from the formation of the solar system. Upon approach to the expansive asteroid belt, the Nomad swivelled the Fighter rearward and slowed the craft with a series of short bursts from the pulsejets. Rotating the ship back around, the Nomad powered up the Fighter’s radar array and flight computer, allowing the ship to begin mapping the location and distances of the vast sea of rock adrift in the void.

In their thousands, the asteroids were plotted into the flight computer, their locations highlighted across the Fighter’s HUD, revealing countless floating islands hidden in the inky blackness. Using the RCS for a translational manoeuvre, the Nomad dipped clear of a stone goliath as it loomed dimly from out of the darkness. Another lateral shift moved the Fighter’s flight path clear of the next rapidly approaching iceberg, the gargantuan mass of frozen volatiles tumbling slowly on its axis. The Nomad powered up the ship’s compositional scanners, hoping to identify the wreckage by its differing makeup to the surrounding asteroids. On a whim, he likewise transferred power to the Fighter’s communication scanners. The Nomad never expected to detect any form of signal, he had long ago accepted that he was alone in the crippling infinitude of space, yet within moments of toggling the scanner, his instruments lit up with a returning ping that sounded at regular intervals.

It was no broadcast or SOS, but it was a signal nonetheless; a transponder had activated upon detection of the interrogating signals emitted from the Fighter’s scanners. The Nomad was alone; that was unmistakable. The response was merely a faint blip echoing what once was. What was important, however, was that the blip existed. The ping informed the Nomad that the wreck afloat somewhere within the asteroid belt still had power. Power enough to send and receive basic signals. And where there was power, there would likely be power cells.

The Nomad delved deeper into the asteroid field, negotiating the cloud of residual material left over from planetary formation. Carried by the tide of gravity, the islands of rock and ice were endlessly adrift, forever floating on parallel orbits, their paths never diverting, never crossing, the lonely planetoids eternally condemned to float in relative proximity to one another, but never to interact. It was easy to think of an asteroid field as a maelstrom of collisions and impacts, yet these remnants of the early solar system were imprisoned by time.

Rejected by chance, the asteroids were doomed never to aggregate more so than they had done already. They would never collate to form a planet or moon, and save for the occasional unlikely interaction with an elliptically orbiting comet or the like, these fragments of creation were fated to continue eternally on their predestined paths. Shackled in orbit, their only chance of escaping eternity was the death of the parent star to which they were anchored. Yet this red dwarf burned so dimly that it would likely continue to do so for several trillion more years. These asteroids were bound unceasingly to existence with no prospect of change or finality—much like the Nomad.

Pressing such thoughts from his mind, the Nomad restudied the readouts in front of him as he continued to navigate towards the signal. Finally, his scientific instruments began to detect higher ratios of heavy elements in the surrounding debris. The Nomad activated the Fighter’s landing lights. Two broad incandescent beams shone from the nose of the craft. Immediately before the Fighter, several fragments of debris were suddenly illuminated. The flotsam were shards of spaceship hull, that much was apparent from the readouts in front of the Nomad, yet beyond this, they bore no hint as to what lurked deeper in the field. Negotiating his way between the scraps of metal, the Nomad continued to follow the constantly returning transponder, tracing the signal towards its source.

Larger and larger chunks of wreckage drifted passed the Nomad as he piloted deeper in, the scans of each section offering him new snippets of information. Steadily, he began to build up a picture of the carrion he was scavenging for; it was a large ship, that much was clear, of unknown alien origin. The radiation damage to the metal indicated the wreck had met its end several millennia ago, yet from the littering of flotsam spread over such a wide expanse, the craft appeared to have broken up almost entirely.

The mystery continued to unfold as the Nomad sailed past what appeared to be a section of an immense rocket thruster nozzle. An exhaust that large could only belong to a warship, or perhaps an interstellar ark. The next recognisable item of debris was a turret barrel from a main battery; the wreck was definitely a warship, likely a destroyer or dreadnought.

Perhaps then, this system had been the site of an ancient battle between two warring races. But the degree of annihilation seemed excessive, even for the bloodiest of wars. It was more probable that the extensive disintegration of the warship had been due instead to a collision, likely with the asteroid field, and perhaps at relativistic speeds. Yet in order for that to have happened, at least accidentally, the ship must have suffered a catastrophic failure in navigational systems prior to the collision.

Something didn’t add up, and not knowing what exactly perturbed the Nomad. He felt ill at ease, as if he had forgotten something vital, or if some crucial piece of information had escaped his conscious observations. This chain of thought was abruptly ended by a proximity warning that flashed up across the Nomad’s HUD. The largest section of flotsam so far loomed out of the dark as the pinging signal built to a crescendo. An intact portion of the dreadnought’s hull floated lifelessly up ahead, silhouetted against the faint red haze of the dwarf star. The metal carcass revolved slowly around its centre of gravity, steadily revealing the ruptures and shears to the metal. The buckled and bowed hull section was but a fraction of the original ship, yet even still, its dimensions were several orders of magnitude greater than the minuscule Fighter approaching it. Even at his present range, the gargantuan hunk of debris brimmed the Fighter’s canopy, but still a considerable distance away, his landing lights merely scattered into the void ahead, the spread of the beams too great to cast away any of the shadow bathing the wreckage.

The debris was more than likely the aft end of the warship. A thousand dimples and scrapes mottled the armoured surface from where the dreadnought had ploughed through the asteroid cloud, before finally coming to rest as a scattering of flotsam lost in the lonely void. The range of the debris field stretched several astronomical units, the majority of the wreckage contained within the densest region of the asteroid belt. The Nomad knew that scouring the field in the hopes of finding other large sections of debris was pointless. The chances of finding anything remotely salvageable within the sea of ice and stone by coincidence alone were incredibly remote. The only thing that had led him to this specific section was a signal transponder still active after all this time. He had been incredibly lucky. This alone was enough to set the Nomad on edge. Luck was something he no longer believed in. Something was not right. But he could not afford to pass up this opportunity. And so, the Nomad continued.

The wreckage loomed larger and larger until the Fighter drifted fully into the debris’s shadow. The mess of scarred and twisted metal had been drastically distorted when the dreadnought came to its violent end, but the ship’s internal structure was still vaguely discernible. Corridors jutted outwards, ending abruptly in jagged edges, whilst rooms hollowed out of the mass of alloy, tunnelling backwards into the shadows. Ventilation and service ducts trailed piping and fraying cables, whilst immense tensile and load-bearing struts extended from the wreckage like a gnarled and mangled skeleton.

The Nomad ran an array of scans on the floating shipwreck, pinpointing the exact location within the crumpled carcass that housed the transponder. It was several compartments deep, inaccessible by the Fighter. Fortunately, the data suggested that the transponder would have its own isolated power source, separate from the main energy cells of the dreadnought that could currently be floating anywhere else in the system.

Reaching beneath his seat, the Nomad pulled out his helmet and locked it over his head. His HUD booted up across the inside of his visor whilst he began shutting down a number of the Fighter’s systems to conserve power. Piloting in as close as possible via the RCS arcjets, the Nomad stabilised his orbit in accordance with the debris, minimising his drift to within a fraction of a metre per hour. The Nomad rotated the cockpit’s safety valve and pressed a series of buttons across the control panel. The gasses of the cockpit hissed as they were rapidly sucked away. The pressure dropped steadily and the beeping transponder faded to quietude as the Nomad was plunged into a vacuum.

The eerie stillness of empty space had always haunted the Nomad. As he retracted the canopy of the Fighter, he was gradually exposed to the raw, dangerous void that constituted the majority of the universe. All that now laid between the Nomad and death was an EVA suit barely a few millimetres thick: a thin layer of compression fabric to protect against the effects of the vacuum, insulated against radiation heat loss, which was then coated in an equally thin reflective weave to ward off ionising cosmic radiation, topped finally by the thickest layer of the suit: an impact resistant material for guarding against micrometeorites.

The Nomad unbuckled himself from the harness of his pilot’s seat, and easing upwards, drifted gently out of the cockpit. On his first spacewalk in recent memory, the Nomad took a moment to fully acclimatise himself with the sensation of weightlessness that was never truly experienced whilst strapped into the pilot’s seat. Acquainted with the microgravity, he activated his EVA suit’s mobility thrusters via the holographic interface on his wrist.

A stream of charged ions expelled from nozzles located on the undersides of his boots, elbows, and back, gently accelerating the Nomad forwards. The propulsion felt cumbersome at first, but the Nomad quickly refamiliarised himself with the thruster control scheme as he negotiated his way over towards a jagged shelf extending from the wreckage. Clasping hold of a warped rung, the Nomad heaved himself inwards and planted his boots down onto the metal ledge. The boots, sensing a ferromagnetic alloy beneath their soles, automatically magnetised, attaching firmly against the metal and locking the Nomad on his feet. This, too was a strange sensation, as there was no sense of weight in his attachment to the floor. Even though he was stood upright, his sense of direction was still lacking an up or a down. Only the very souls of his feet were cemented to the floor; the rest of his body was still free floating.

The experience immediately conjured a traumatic memory of floating in the dark, anchored by his feet to the bottom of a lake, the last vestiges of air ticking away inside his helmet. The haunting flashback summoned a cold sweat across the Nomad’s brow. He stood frozen for a long moment, before pushing the harrowing images back into the deep recesses of his mind from where they had awoken.

Lifting a heel inside his boot and pressing with his toes, the Nomad felt his right foot demagnetise, the suit detecting the shift in pressure beneath his sole, interpreting it as the wearer’s desire to step forwards. His foot floated weightlessly once more and the Nomad clumsily swung it out in front of his body. Then, acting against the natural instinct of allowing gravity to guide his foot back towards the floor, the Nomad actively drove his leg downwards, planting it on the shelf. The boot remagnetised and clamped firmly and flatly to the metal.

A single step was all the Nomad had taken. In his lifetime, he had taken millions. He had been walking since before a time when he even had any memories. A step was the most natural and intuitive movement he could ever conceive of making; it required little effort and thought to carry out. And yet, when something as simple as the force of gravity was removed from the equation, it suddenly became complex. Disorientated and numb from concentration, he focussed on moving forwards one step at a time. It grew easier, as most things do when practised, yet this method of locomotion seemed alien and obtuse.

After a time, the Nomad had travelled some way down the corridor, in towards the heart of the wreckage. He peered back down the tunnel of cold steel to see the Fighter floating motionlessly not too far away. The Nomad required that reassurance. Whenever the Fighter was left unmoored, he needed to at least be able to see it. Had the Nomad made some miscalculation in negating drift, the Fighter could float away without him noticing. It could sail clean out of sight in no time at all if he had made even the slightest mistake when parking alongside the flotsam. He could lose the Fighter altogether, or perhaps worse, have it within sight but just out of range. The mobility thrusters of his EVA suit were simple enough to operate once the Nomad was at ease with them, but their range was limited to a few minutes of usage. If the Fighter drifted too far and too fast, he would never be able to catch up to it. So, every few metres the Nomad trudged down the corridor, he would turn back to check that the Fighter was where he had left it. And sure enough, it was.

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Author Commentary

A core theme of Flight Through Infinity is the vastness, emptiness, and loneliness of space. The spacewalk in Chapter 10 is the embodiment of these themes. The silence is deafening, and the darkness is absolute. But amidst the emptiness, a mysterious signal beckons the Nomad forward.

Chapter 10 is the start of the novel’s second act and begins after a significant time jump from the previous chapter. I wanted it to be up to the reader to decide just how long had passed since the events on the primordial world, but it is safe to say that it should be measured not in weeks or months, but in years.

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Eight

The Nomad struggled to his feet. Water and mud continued to gush past. He planted a foot clumsily before him, and then another, and another, stumbling through dazed weariness towards the foot of the slope. He rasped heavily, straining to take the shortest and smallest gasps he could, fighting the rhythmic spasms in his lungs, ordering him to inhale deeply. Reaching the foot of the bank, the Nomad dug his boots into the sopping mud and began to scramble upwards on hands and knees. It was slow going, too slow, but the ground had turned to slurry, and each time he extended his reach, he clawed away loose clumps of sludge.

He fumbled at his belt and drew out a small hand pick. The Nomad swung over his head and dug it into the slope. Heaving with all his might, he shuffled up the sliding muck and replanted his footing. He reached upwards again, driving the pick through the soft layer of shingle and silt, into the firmer ground beneath. Once again, he wriggled against the tide of drifting mud. Up he scrambled, as quick and steady as was possible, using the very last wisps of air left in his tank as he did so. Finally, he heaved himself up over the verge. The alert flashing in his helmet warned that his oxygen supply was entirely depleted.

The Nomad’s lungs burned as he fought to his feet. His head buzzed and his fingers and toes tingled. He stumbled forwards. The Fighter was barely within reach. His knees buckled and his visor plunged into a puddle. Piercing agony throbbed across his scalp as the rain continued to batter him into the ground. He strained his arms, lifting himself out of the mire, but now his elbows faltered. He reached ahead, groping at the soft mud with his fingers and dragged himself towards his ship. His sight was fading white around the periphery whilst inky black spots formed in the centre of his vision.

He gasped and sputtered, choking on nothing more than nitrogen and carbon dioxide. He was not yet dead, but he knew that in a matter of seconds, he would lose consciousness. If that happened, his fate would be sealed. He would never wake up again. Everything up until this point would have been for nothing. All he had endured and suffered, all the pain, all the loss, all the emptiness, despair, and hopelessness, the days, the months, the years, every cycle of every routine, every jump, every system, every planet, all of it would have been for nothing. And so, the Nomad stood up. How it was possible, and with what strength he did so, he would never know, but he rose to his feet and staggered the last few steps towards the Fighter. He heaved himself up the rungs of the ladder and opened the canopy, toppling headfirst into the cockpit.

Rolling over on the seat, the Nomad turned to face the control panel. Reaching with a benumbed hand, he raised the canopy lever and sealed the cockpit. Rotating a safety valve, he initiated an atmospheric purge. All fell silent as the Nomad was deafened by vacuum. Flicking a final switch in his last vestiges of consciousness, the Nomad repressurised the cockpit and began awkwardly fumbling at his helmet. In his oxygen-deprived clumsiness, the collar bearing seemed an impossible puzzle to solve. His vision faded fully to dark as the Nomad felt his pulse weaken. By sheer luck, in his death throes, the Nomad somehow managed to flick the seal on the lock. His head lolled forwards as he lost consciousness. The helmet rolled from his pate, clattering to the cockpit floor.

Author Notes

Chapter 8 stands among the shortest chapters I have ever written across all my novels. After the Nomad’s escape from the algal lake, he is faced with the uphill battle to get back to the safety of the Fighter. The distance to reach the cockpit is short, but reaching it from the shores of the lake proves to be one of the longest and most perilsome legs of his entire journey.

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Seven

Abseiling down the ever more treacherous slope via the winch cable, the Nomad waded through the ankle-deep flow of murky water streaming from the hillsides. Lightning continued to crackle and flash across the sky and the wind picked up momentum, slanting the rain into diagonal streaks. The Nomad gazed about, wondering if he should wait for the storm to pass before continuing. His equipment was already set up and ready for a third cycle, but the weather seemed only to be worsening. He could bear to wait. He certainly had the time to do so. But was it necessary? His suit protected him from the elements, and his equipment was weather-resistant. The hillside was rapidly turning into a river in and of itself, the ground regularly giving way in mudslides, but the winch now meant that if the Nomad slipped, he would no longer tumble to the bottom of the slope. Either way, he was at the shore of the lake again. If he was going to wait for the storm to pass, he would need to make his way back uphill to the Fighter; he might as well take up the next harvest of algae with him in the process.

The Nomad nudged the beached float of the intake back out into the turbulent green waters and started the pump, the whirring of the motor now inaudible over the raging storm. The pump soon cut out again and the notification instructing the Nomad to clean the filters flashed up across the device’s display. Working swiftly, he ejected and cleaned the filters one by one, scooping the algal slime into the recombinator capsules. Powering down the pump, he secured the canisters about his person, and fighting against the tearing winds, the Nomad clipped the winch cable carabiner to his EVA harness.

Activating the capstan remotely via his suit, the Nomad felt the reassuring tug on his waist as the cable was reeled up the slope. Planting his feet into the thick mud of the bank, the Nomad ascended steadily, great swathes of clay and scree tumbling away beneath him. With the gale force winds whipping up the rain into a dense pall of mist and spray, the Nomad could no longer see the top of the slope; as he looked back downhill, he could barely make out the edge of the water receding behind him.

The Nomad felt the ground level out with his feet before he saw the winch ahead of him. He deactivated the turning capstan and plodded over to the biomatter recombinator. The stronger gravity was beginning to take its toll. The Nomad was weary. He could feel it, especially now, as he attempted to insert the canisters into their respective slots on the machine. What was once an easy task, requiring little thought, was now tiresome and clumsy; his arms felt heavy and uncoordinated, a sensation made all the worse by his failing vision behind a rain-soaked visor. When the task was finally complete, the Nomad set the recombinator to carry out the next cycle of biomolecular reorganisation.

Trudging back through the mire, the Nomad huddled himself against a rear leg of the Fighter’s landing gear, beneath the shelter of a wing. Breathing heavily from exertion, he allowed his eyelids to lull shut. Before he knew it, he had plunged into sleep. When he next opened his eyes, the world around him had calmed. The chirping of the recombinator sounded through the stillness. The rains had ceased, the winds quelled, and the sky had brightened to a faint silver.

The Nomad crawled out from beneath the ship into the quagmire the landing zone had become. The skies were still hazy. The Nomad could make out the distant tolling of thunder as he peered through the veil of stratus obscuring the black cumulonimbus that had passed over. The volcanic landscape had been transformed into an extensive marshland, and as the Nomad glanced down the slopes still gushing with rills, he could tell the water levels had risen noticeably. Whereas before the pump was erected several metres set back from the shoreline, now the feet of the device were being lapped at by the green waters.

The Nomad waded over to the recombinator, the device now sat in a deep puddle of slowly draining rainwater. Collecting the nutrient bars and discarding the contents of the excreta tray, he stashed the dispensed rations and carried out a quick stock calculation. He now had enough food to last him for the next two months. The Nomad couldn’t remember a time when his supplies had been so plentiful. But his food store was at far from full capacity; there was room enough for another two harvests. Now that the weather had cleared, he would be remiss if he did not seize the opportunity to fully stock his supplies.

The Nomad gathered up the containers and hooked the carabiner back onto his harness. Activating the winch to turn in reverse, he rappelled down the loose mud and shingle of the slope until he reached the shore of the lake. Kicking the float back out across the water, he powered up the pump, just as a fat globule of water splattered against his visor. The mechanical whirl of the filtration pump hummed to life, the weather deteriorating quickly into a sudden squall. The downpour intensified, and the pump guzzled up more water. The filters soon clogged with the algal growth and the pump cut out. The Nomad cleaned the filters and filled the recombinator canisters.

Gazing up at the darkening heavens, the Nomad realised his mistake; the storm had not passed over at all, he had merely been in the eye. Now, the eyewall was breaking, and the tempest would soon surge back to its fiercest intensity. The Nomad reinserted the filters and began the pump on its final cycle. He clipped his harness back onto the winch cable and began the assisted climb back to the top of the slope. The flood of water had started to swell again. The Nomad’s boots sank into the thick sludge as it slowly drifted downhill. He lost his balance near the top, and the tide of flowing mud swept his feet out from under him. His helmet planted into the black slurry as he was dragged by the winch up the final few metres on his side.

Killing the rotation of the capstan, the Nomad unhooked his harness and stumbled wearily over to the recombinator. Loading the canisters, the Nomad initiated the device. The skies went suddenly dark. Fighting against the wrath of the cyclone, the Nomad staggered back towards the winch. He leapt in terror as a bolt of lightning surged from the clouds and struck the ground barely twenty metres away. Suddenly, the Nomad became all too aware of the peril he was in. He needed to take refuge inside the cockpit. The Fighter itself was insulated against lightning strikes, but his equipment was not.

The Nomad glanced down the slope to the pump, then back behind him to the recombinator. The recombinator took priority. That it had not finished its cycle was unimportant. It could be resumed later on, in safer conditions. The Nomad turned and waded back over to the device. Interrupting the cycle, he powered down the machine. The solar cells folded away as another nearby arc of lightning impacted the hilltop. The Nomad hoisted the machine out of the puddle, exerting himself as he lowered it back into the cargo pod. He sealed the storage unit and reattached it to the clamps beneath the starboard wing, suspending it with the hydraulics to the relative safety of the undercarriage.

Lightning struck again, closer than ever, and the Nomad glanced back down the slope in a long moment of consideration. It was growing more dangerous every moment he spent out in the storm, but could he afford to leave the pump unprotected? This was the first time that the Nomad had used the device in a long while, but it had proven invaluable in this instance. Even if the filters were incapable of performing their intended task, the other components of the device were too important to forsake. Off the top of his head, the Nomad could think of a dozen parts that could be utilised in future repairs to the Fighter; if struck by lightning, they would become altogether worthless.

The Nomad sighed in frustration as he marched back over to the winch and clipped the carabiner to his EVA harness. He descended the perilous hillside, slipping several times on the way down. Reaching the foot of the slope, the Nomad trudged over to the pump and began pulling in the intake pipe. When the machine was collapsed down, the Nomad attached it to the winch, hooking a second carabiner from his harness onto the cable. Readying himself for what the Nomad knew would be a gruelling ascent, he hesitantly activated the capstan winch and began the exhausting fight uphill.

The cable tensioned under additional weight, as together, the Nomad and the filtration pump were heaved steadily uphill. The bank had turned to slop, and the Nomad’s boots sank into the gunge past the ankle. The suction of the mud ensnared his feet, making every step he took harder than the last. Battling with waning energy, the Nomad continued the slow, unrelenting uphill climb as the downpour intensified and the winds hounded him from all sides. But despite the strain, slowly and surely, metre by metre, the Nomad ascended.

The verge up ahead loomed into sight through the swirling gloom and the Nomad could make out the rotating capstan. But in the blink of an eye, a gnarled fork of lightning shot down from the hurricane, exploding in a blinding flash in front of the Nomad. He felt the winch cable about his waist suddenly slacken. Before he had time to react, his weight shifted and the muddy slope gave way underfoot. He fell, tumbling in the mudslide, swamped off his feet as the entire face of the slope sloughed away around him. Scrambling with outstretched hands, the Nomad flailed helplessly, grasping for anything to hold onto, but his arms thrashed in futility as the wave of ashen sludge swept over him. Down he plunged, head over heels, blinded as the shale washed over his visor.

Somehow his fingers managed to snag hold of a fixed rock, but as he tried to stop himself from being swept further downhill, a carabiner snapped taut around his waist. The pump was still attached to his harness. The weight of the machine was too much. The Nomad’s grip gave out. Acting as an anchor, swept up in the landslip, the pump continued to careen downhill, dragging the Nomad with it. Pummelled and battered by the avalanche of scree, the Nomad cascaded down after the pump, briefly slowing as he reached the shoreline.

Clawing at the bank of the lake, the Nomad felt the carabiner about his waist tension again. Upon striking the shore, the filtration pump bounced, arcing through the air in a moment of dreaded silence before splashing into the lake. Rent from the shore, tethered by the waist, the Nomad was dragged after it, plunging into the gungy waters of the algal lake. The viscous body of water swallowed the Nomad whole and he was enveloped suddenly by darkness. The thick layer of scum coating the water’s surface sealed shut, blocking out any remnants of the sullen daylight above.

The Nomad was sinking fast, weighed down by the cumbersome pump still attached to his harness. Instinctually, he fought against the anchor, swimming with all the force he could muster in a desperate attempt to break the surface again, but even without the pump, the weight of his EVA suit alone would have made swimming difficult. He continued to sink through the murky waters, the algae soaking away all but the faintest light from the surface. He was panicking, rasping for air, sweating profusely. His heart drummed between his ears at what seemed a thousand beats per minute.

The Nomad swallowed several lungfuls of air and pressed his eyes tightly closed as he took a moment to calm himself. He reached for his harness and fumbled for the carabiner, but it was a triple lock system, and with the current tension applied to it he couldn’t unfasten it… not until he reached the lakebed.

Sucking in several more deliberate breaths, the Nomad waited as he continued to sink. After what seemed an eternity, the filter pump came to rest on the lake floor and the Nomad beside it. The tension released and the Nomad fumbled once again at the carabiner. This time, through great difficulty, he was able to unclip himself from the cable. He was neutrally buoyant, and though the EVA suit was constricting, the Nomad was able to kick with his boots and pull with his gloved hands, beginning the climb through the murky lake back towards the surface.

He barely made it ten metres upwards before he was snagged once again. The winch cable had managed to coil itself around the Nomad whilst he was sliding down the hillside. Now it was knotted tightly around his ankle. He was still anchored to the lakebed, unable to ascend any further. The Nomad panicked again, scrabbling at his heel in an attempt to free his foot from the coils, but the wire had choked itself tightly around his ankle, and he lacked the dexterity whilst wearing his EVA gloves to untangle himself.

Anxiety continued to overwhelm him. His heart spasmed violently in his chest and his lungs constricted in terror. A buzzer sounded inside his helmet and a dreaded alert flashed up across his visor:

Warning! Oxygen Levels Low!

All his panicking and gasping in fear had squandered the air in his tanks. If he continued to hyperventilate, he would have barely two minutes of breathable air left.

Fighting the innate drive to swallow as much air as he could, the Nomad exhaled for as long as possible before inhaling deeply. For the next minute, this was all he did. He inhaled and exhaled. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale. His throbbing pulse steadied and his mind was brought back into clarity. Without physically checking, he sifted through his mind to recall all of the tools currently stowed in his EVA harness. Out of everything he took with him whilst carrying out EVAs, he knew that there must be one that could help him now. His plasma cutter! That could save him.

Remembering exactly where the tool was holstered, the Nomad calmly reached for the rear loop on his belt and drew the cutter. Flicking off the safety with his thumb, the Nomad primed the device and pulled the trigger. A white-hot glow illuminated in the murky depths and a sudden jet of bubbles frothed upwards. Calmly allowing himself to sink for a moment, the Nomad released the tension from the wire and lowered the flame down towards the line. The torch melted through the wire in a matter of seconds, and suddenly, the Nomad was free of his anchor. Switching off the plasma cutter, the Nomad stowed it back in his belt, and once again, began to swim upwards.

He kicked and pulled with all his might through the viscous water, all the while watching the counter tick down on his remaining oxygen supply. Suddenly, he broke through the grimy surface. Thrashing about helplessly in the waves, he swivelled to get his bearings. He wasn’t far from the shore, and in a few strokes, he had fought his way over to shallower waters. He managed to stand, despite his exhaustion, and waded out the last few metres before collapsing on the bank.

Rain clattered loudly against his helmet as the Nomad wheezed in exertion. His muscles were screaming, his head throbbing dazedly. The alarm on the inside of his helmet wailed with ever greater urgency, his final air reserves dwindling. He could barely move; but he had no choice. If he did not make it back up the slope in the next minute, he would suffocate there in the mud, on this lonely and sullen world.

Can’t wait for Chapter 8? I’ll be back on Thursday. If you’re enjoying the journey, consider sharing this with a fellow Sci-Fi fan.

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Author Commentary

Believe it or not, the lead-up to the Nomad’s accident in this chapter was birthed from real-world experience. For the past decade, my day job has been working as a landscaper. Over the years, I have worked in some pretty miserable weather conditions. The one thing that makes everything harder is mud. On numerous occasions, I have found myself bogged down in conditions that I imagine resemble the infamous mud of the Somme.

Clay and mud when continually trafficked and trampled, under the unrelenting winter rainfall of the Southwest of England, can quickly turn into a hellish quagmire. Moving around becomes exhausting, and in the right (or wrong) conditions, mud reaches an inescapable consistency that coats everything, sucks your boots into the ground, and refuses to let go.

One job that sticks in my mind from years back was building a dry-stone wall atop a steep bank in January. Roughly a dozen tonnes of slate needed to be carted up to the top of the slope by hand. But the ground underfoot was quickly turning to sludge, and the mud was proving increasingly difficult to ascend unaided. The solution was a capstan winch utilised to heave a cart of stone up the bank

Whilst lightning never struck our winch, sending me plummeting down the bank to the bottom, I did experience a few slides through the mud, and lost a few large chunks of slate that went toppling down towards the road below, seeding the inspiration that led to this sequence for the Nomad.

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Six

Soaring high over the rugged juvenile landscape, the Nomad surveyed the valleys and waterways for any signs of life. So far, the world appeared sterile: a stack of tinder and kindling yet to receive a spark, all the promise of life, but as of yet, no flames.

The Nomad had accumulated a debt of resources to approach so close to the planet’s surface. He had spent little in the way of fuel to enter the atmosphere, relying on gravity, air resistance, and lift up until this point; the currency with which he’d paid his fare was gravitational potential energy. Now, in order to leave the clutches of this world, he would need to expend large quantities of chemical propellant in order to regain the energy he’d forfeited and reach escape velocity. If the Nomad did not find anything of use on this world, those resources now committed to him leaving would be entirely wasted. And so, with ever-growing determination, the Nomad continued to scour the geography as he glided over thousands of square kilometres of primordial scenery, hunting, searching, looking for any evidence or hint of organic material scattered across the lifeless surface.

Drawing back on the joystick, the Nomad tilted the nose of the Fighter upwards as a jagged sierra drew in from over the horizon. Clearing the craggy peaks, the ship climbed back into the clouds, the view of the world below vanishing through the gloom. The Nomad dipped the Fighter’s pitch, sinking back out of the cloud ceiling. The ground below clarified once more into focus, and a tinge of green suddenly caught his eye.

Between the foothills below, a lake pooled in a valley basin, the glinting waters pluming with verdant swirls. The emerald mere blurred beneath the Nomad as the Fighter raced over, but before he could lose sight of it, he tilted the flightstick, banking the ship back around to circle the lake.

The Fighter began descending in a great looping helix as the Nomad continued to study the vibrant blooms streaking the lake. The colouration could have merely been minerals spewing into the water from submerged volcanic vents. But as the Fighter descended, the Nomad became more and more optimistic of a second possibility. As he drew closer, he convinced himself he was gazing down at an algal bloom.

Bringing the Fighter downwards in an ever-tightening circumference, the Nomad continued to study the emerald plumes, searching for any final clue that could affirm his hopes. Swooping across the lake’s surface in one final surveying pass, he saw it. Clinging to the shore, deposited across the grey sand by the lapping waves, a thick film of residue congealed along the waterline. It was unmistakably organic.

The Fighter pitched back, the VTOL thrusters angling towards the ground, and rode a cushion of hot exhaust downwards. A pillar of dust enveloped the craft, and the landing skids touched down, sinking into the volcanic sand of the newborn world. The Nomad donned his helmet, purged the cockpit of his precious breathable air, and raised the canopy, allowing primordial gasses to flood into the craft. Rising, he familiarised himself with the gravity of the new world. He was on the heavy side, but his weight was still mostly favourable; he wouldn’t want to trek very far, but fortunately, he had touched down barely fifty metres from the lakeside. Extending the steps from the side of the Fighter’s hull, the Nomad clambered down onto the unweathered rock. Registering that the ground beneath his feet was barely a few thousand years old, he took a moment to gaze about the alien terrain.

Carrying out his post-landing inspection of the Fighter, the Nomad lowered the starboard cargo pod. He lifted the now especially weighty biomatter recombinator from out of the container and positioned it clear of the ship. He initiated the machine’s start-up procedure and watched as the pentagonal solar cells unfolded to expose the internal pyramid. Leaving the device to charge, the Nomad descended the steep, shingly slope towards the water to inspect the algal growth closer.

The jade lake lapped glutinously against the rocky shore. Just above the waterline, a thick algal layer coagulated in the sun. The bloom was more concentrated than the Nomad had thought from altitude. Fertile and rich with life, there was more than enough biomass contained in the lake to replenish his rations and then some. Whether or not the algae’s biology was even vaguely compatible with his own, and how he would go about harvesting it, were separate matters altogether.

The Nomad knelt by the water’s edge and initiated his suit’s scanners. A reel of data swiftly transcribed itself across the HUD of his visor. The algal growth was a eukaryotic colony consisting of a range of specialised cell types. Though primarily photosynthetic, there appeared to be a subtype of organisms within the colony that were heterotrophic: animalistic cells that obtained their energy by swallowing and digesting various other types of microorganisms within the biological soup that the isolated lake had become. Though fascinating in and of itself, that was not what he was scanning for; instead, the Nomad turned his attention to the molecular analysis of the organisms.

In its unprocessed state, the alien bloom would be highly poisonous to the Nomad. Fortunately, the algae shared a number of basic building blocks common in the Nomad’s evolved diet. If these initial readings were accurate, the Nomad could expect a much higher yield from the biomatter recombinator than he was used to. The only question now: how could he harvest the algae?

Seating himself on the shoreline, he watched the viscous green waters slosh over the beach in gentle rhythms. The tempest loomed overhead as the break in the storm began to collapse. The skies darkened. Lightning sparked in white arcs through the murk. Splotches of rain started to patter against the Nomad’s visor, before finally, the heavens gave out in full and a deluge of acidic precipitation lashed downwards. Glancing back up the slope, the Nomad remotely triggered the closure of the Fighter’s canopy from a control on his wrist.

The verdant lake danced viscously as a chaotic upheaval of ripples scattered across its surface. Watching the rain streak across his visor, the Nomad felt suddenly thirsty. Sipping from the overly filtered water from his suit’s dispenser, the Nomad swilled the tasteless fluid around his mouth as an idea took hold. The solution was simple.

Rising to his feet, the Nomad clambered up the muddy bank, puffing through exertion as he fought the heavy tug of the planet’s gravity. Finally, panting deeply, he reached the Fighter. The biomatter recombinator was fully charged and ready to be loaded with organic material. He could simply fill the various canisters with water from the lake and run them through the machine, but it would be highly inefficient. Once the water was removed from each sample, there would be little in the way of organic material left in each canister; each cycle of the recombinator might not even possess enough biomass to yield a single nutrition bar. The Nomad needed some way of concentrating the algae in each canister before he ran it through the machine. If he could effectively remove the water from each sample, he could load the recombinator with a far greater volume of algae and produce far more food each cycle; perhaps enough to last several months of spaceflight. Provided his idea worked, the Nomad reckoned he had figured out how to do exactly just such.

The Nomad returned to the cargo pod and gathered up the various canisters for the recombinator, clipping them to his EVA rig. Sliding various cases along the internal rails of the cargo pod, he uncovered a box buried at the bottom of the stowage container. Pulling it out, the Nomad sat the crate down in the sodden ashen soil. Unfastening the clasps, he lifted the lid and peered inside to find a long-neglected water filtration pump.

Designed for water purification, the pump filtered out toxins and organic materials to produce safe drinking water. The Nomad no longer used the device; his subsurface microwave ice mining technique had rendered the rather archaic pump and filter almost redundant. Furthermore, the filters were at the very end of their lifespan, and throughout his journey, the Nomad had never come across anything that could suitably replace them. The filters were, in fact, so degraded, the Nomad suspected they probably were past producing potable water altogether; but in this instance, it was unimportant. The Nomad was not interested in the water; he wanted the waste products. That the filters were near their end did not matter; they might not filter the algae from the water, but they would certainly do a good job at separating water from the algae.

In the strong gravity, the pump was heavy and cumbersome; a relatively low-tech piece of equipment, the filtration system had clearly never been designed with portability in mind. Lugging it towards the water, the Nomad grunted and strained as he reached the slope. Descending the bank, he dug in his heels as the scree gave way underfoot, the hillside growing quickly treacherous in the downpour. Finally reaching the water’s edge, the Nomad lowered the weighty machine onto the mud. Glancing back up the slope in the direction of the Fighter, he quickly realised there was no way he would be able to drag the pump back uphill under his own steam. He would need to use the capstan winch.

The Nomad set up the pump, connecting the float and intake tubing, but forgoing the collection tank; it would only need to be emptied every minute or so once the pump was running; better to let the water flood straight onto the ground and run back into the lake. The pump lacked its own power source, and so the Nomad turned to make his way back up the slope to retrieve a junction cable. Halfway up the bank, the mud and shingle beneath the Nomad’s feet gave way in the downpour and he was swept back down the hillside to the beach.

Stopping just short of the gelatinous residue caking the shoreline, the Nomad heaved himself to his feet. Wading through the runlets of rainwater flowing down the hillside, he scrambled back up the slope, this time on hands and knees. Large clods of sloppy shingle and sludge collapsed beneath him as he fought his way uphill, the cyclone raging ever more powerfully overhead. He reached the top of the slope coated in a layer of black muck, but in the deluge, the sludge was quickly rinsed from his EVA suit.

The Nomad rummaged through the various cases of his cargo pod, the stowage compartment steadily filling with rainwater, and retrieved the power couplings. Sealing the pod, the Nomad stooped under the Fighter and opened a port on the undercarriage. Exposing a power socket, he plugged in one end of the cable, steadily unreeling the rest of the lead as he trudged back towards the slope. This time, he had barely set foot beyond the verge when the ashen shingle slid out from under his boot. He slipped, landing hard on his side. Still clutching the cable in one hand, he tumbled and slid down the entire height of the slope, grinding to a halt beside the pump.

His visor was caked black with grime, and as he fumbled at the helmet with his gloved hand, he only succeeded in smearing the mud. Waiting for the rain to clear his vision, he climbed to his knees beside the pump and felt for the power inlet on its side. Plugging in the other end of the cable, the Nomad listened for the faint beeping of the pump over the cannonade of rain drumming against his helmet. As his vision cleared, he grabbed the intake pipe and cautiously made his way over to the water’s edge. Casting the float out into the sloshing emerald water, the Nomad watched it bob about violently in the storm.

Returning to the pump, the Nomad primed it and powered up the motor. A loud drone hummed over the howling winds as litres of thick, murky, algae-infested water were sucked into the intake and fed through the array of filters. Water soon began to spout from the outlet pipe, spewing onto the shore. The filtrate was far from pure, still tinged green as it gushed down the bank and drained into the lake, but unlike the viscous slime being swallowed at the opposite end of the pump, the end product was transparent and watery.

The machine had barely run for five minutes when the electric motor cut out. Fearing that the waterproofing seals for the electrics might have perished, causing the pump to short-circuit in the storm, the Nomad was filled with a sudden sense of dread. To his relief, however, the whirring of the pump was quickly replaced with a buzzing alert. Reading the display, the Nomad realised the device was instructing the user to clean its filters.

Powering down the pump, the Nomad detached the cover panel and removed one of the filters to inspect it. To his delight, and to what might have been the horror of anyone using the filtration device for its original intended purpose, the filter was heavily plastered in green algal gunk. Readying a canister hooked about his waist, the Nomad used a tool from his EVA rig to scrape the residue from the filter. The deposited algae was almost enough to completely fill the entire canister. Reinserting the cleaned filter, the Nomad quickly got to work harvesting the residue from the rest of them, easily filling all of the recombinator capsules. With the filters cleaned and the containers filled, the Nomad started the pump up again.

With the motor whirring away, he fought his way back up the treacherous incline, slipping several times during the ascent. Reaching the top, the Nomad slotted the canisters into the biomatter recombinator, and once the device had completed its analysis, he started the machine’s first cycle. As the recombinator began to disassemble the algal colonies into their molecular constituents, the Nomad went in search of the capstan winch stowed somewhere inside the portside cargo pod. Hefting the winch to the top of the slope, the Nomad connected it to a secondary power outlet on the undercarriage of the Fighter. Using a mallet, he drove a series of pickets into the ground to anchor the winch atop the slope and unreeled the cable.

Taking shelter beneath the Fighter, the Nomad waited for the recombinator to do its job. Settling down for some rest, he was almost immediately roused as the recombinator started beeping. The Nomad moved closer to inspect it, only to discover, to his confusion, that the cycle was already complete.

The convoluted and long-winded procedure of molecular disassembly and reassembly, that normally took hours to process, had run to completion in just over half an hour. Not quite believing it, the Nomad checked the dispenser tray to find it filled with vacuum-packed nutrition bars. Still refusing to accept his luck, the Nomad opened the excreta tray to find it lined with a small dusting of grey waste product rapidly rehydrating in the rainfall. Checking the display for a final time to confirm that the process had finished without any complications, the Nomad smiled broadly beneath his visor and began stuffing the nutrition bars into the pouches of his EVA suit.

Even with the most optimistic estimates based on the scans the Nomad had taken of the algae, he would never have predicted such a bountiful yield from the recombinator. The algae’s biology must by sheer coincidence have had a very similar chemical structure and composition to the Nomad’s own biology. He could scarcely believe his luck. This singular lake seemed the only one within a thousand kilometres to even harbour life. It could well have been the only site on the entire planet with this specific algae growing in it. And the Nomad had just stumbled upon it. The odds seemed somehow insurmountable. For once, the randomness of the universe had played out in his favour.

Can’t wait for Chapter 7? I’ll be back on Tuesday. If you’re enjoying the journey, consider sharing this with a fellow Sci-Fi fan.

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Author Commentary

Of all the resources the Nomad has to scavenge on his journey across the infinite void, food is the most precious. Whilst the Fighter’s battery cells can be recharged by the light of any star, water can be obtained from most comets and asteroids, and the fuel tanks can be topped up anywhere there is a strong enough magnetosphere, biological matter is one of the few things not guaranteed to be found in a star system. And so, when the Nomad comes across an abundant source of life, he will go to great lengths to take full advantage.

The difficulty usually comes in how to harvest it. Whilst mosses and lichens can simply be scraped up from the ground, extracting algae from water is something more of a challenge.

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Five

Warp core still engaged, the Nomad flipped the Fighter via the arcjets. With the ship spun rearward, the effects of the superluminal drive, namely the polarity of the spacetime distortions, were likewise inverted, acting now against the vessel’s velocity. The blue glow of Cherenkov radiation subsided. Spacetime ahead of the Fighter’s direction of travel, past the ship’s tail, elongated. Behind, in front of the ship’s nose, it contracted. With the reversal of the warp field, the Fighter dropped to a subluminal velocity. But even without the warping of spacetime, mass close to zero, careening backwards through interstellar space, the Fighter was still travelling at near lightspeed.

Lurching the thruster to full throttle, the Nomad fired a prolonged decelerating burn. Even with his mass near zero, the force of the deceleration pinned him crushingly back into his seat. The Fighter plummeted down the energy exponential, shedding momentum at a phenomenal rate as the Nomad’s destination raced swiftly closer. Dropping to non-relativistic speeds, the Nomad finally reached approach velocity for orbital insertion, the target celestial body: a class B blue giant star.

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As the Fighter’s antimatter reserves began to dwindle, the Nomad killed thrust to the engines and pivoted the Fighter front-facing once more. Reraising the yellow and black striped lever, he disengaged the FTL drive. The stretched and contorted bubble of space surrounding the Fighter snapped back to normal, the lens effect smearing the stars ahead into focus.

Dead centre to the canopy, a piercing azure pinpoint of light twinkled, the brightest star in an otherwise unending sea of constellations. Though now at but a minuscule fraction of lightspeed, the Nomad was still hurtling towards the heart of the approaching stellar system with unfathomable speed. Even still, the distances of infinity were so vast that the Nomad sat for hours, watching in silence as the tiny mote of sapphire swelled across the canopy, growing from little more than a speck of light to an orb of fiery indigo raging against the night.

Spearing through the star’s heliopause, the Fighter tore out of the interstellar medium, piercing a bubble of solar wind and sailing deep into the domain of the blue giant. Upturning the Fighter, the Nomad pitched backwards, issuing a final decelerating burn from the pulsejets, slowing the ship enough for gravitational ensnarement, locking the vessel in a remote and distant orbit around the blue sun.

Adrift on the far-flung fringes of the solar system, the Nomad powered down the pulsejets and reaction control system, before finally lowering the protective safety casing over the warp core lever. With the ship floating silently in the dark, the Nomad flicked a switch on the dashboard and watched as the Fighter’s solar panels began to unfurl from the wings, expanding to a reflective array. The mirror-like cells shimmered dimly as they began to soak up the sun’s cobalt rays, feeding energy back into the Fighter’s power cells.

Leaning back in his chair, the Nomad glimpsed at the current charge level. His heart quailed with a spike of terror in his chest; the cells were close to dead. Another few lightyears further and the Fighter would have hit zero. With charge completely depleted, the superluminal drive would have cut out, followed immediately by the ship’s life support systems, and all other forms of electronics and controls. He would have been stranded in interstellar space, strapped inside a metal coffin, locked hurtling along an unalterable path at deadly speed, no way of recharging so far from the nearest source of light, with only a few minutes of breathable air inside the bubble of the canopy.

Before making the interstellar jump, the Nomad had figured the distance was approaching the limits of the ship’s range, but until now, he had not fully appreciated just how degraded the power cells had become. He had been reckless. Careless. Greedy. He should have picked a closer destination. He should have ensured the cells were at maximum charge before making the jump. He should have kept a closer eye on his instruments.

For whatever reason, the low charge alert hadn’t sounded during warp. Had the cells not lasted as long as they did, it would have spelled the end. The terrifying reality was that the Nomad had almost condemned himself to death. He had been lucky. Very lucky. The near brush with death was too close for comfort. He needed stricter protocol: more stringent routine. Routine was what had kept him alive so far, but was it enough? Each jump took its toll on his aging ship. He could make repairs, but sometimes parts needed replacing entirely, parts he simply did not have.

The Nomad had fought so long and hard for his survival; he couldn’t fail now. If nothing else, that was his reason for continuing. Because, if he did not, then all of the hardship that he had endured until this point had been for nothing. Continuation was the sole purpose of his existence. He continued because that was all he knew how to do. The other motives and desires that had once guided him had now faded into nothingness. Despair, emptiness, loneliness, these were all merely remnants of things he had lost; and as terrible as they were, they were better than feeling nothing at all.

And so, he continued on. He rested. He waited. He stared out at the infinite universe as the photovoltaic cells absorbed the steady wind of photons. When the alarm sounded to signal the cells were at full capacity, he muted the alert. The Nomad prepped the vast array of scientific instruments and carried out his system scans. Once again, he recharged the power cells. Booting up the reaction control system, he reached for the flightstick. A jerk on the controls engaged the RCS arc jets, rotating the Fighter. Neutralising his spin and coming to rest, the Nomad primed the pulsejets.

Piloting the ship in towards the core of the system, he manoeuvred into orbit around a bronze gas giant. The Nomad raised the antimatter collection coils. He waited. The tanks filled. He lowered the coils.

Guiding the Fighter to a nearby comet, he landed on its icy surface. He inspected the ship. He set up his water collection equipment. He refilled the tanks, replenished his oxygen, and refuelled his chemical propellant. He packed everything away.

Climbing back into the cockpit, he carried out his pre-flight checks. He took off. He scanned for organic life. None to be found. He recharged the cells. He powered up the navigation computer, calculating his next FTL jump. Engaging the pulsejets, he slingshotted past the blue sun. He engaged the warp core. He jumped.

Arriving in the next star system, a pair of binary red dwarfs in tight orbit, he began the routine once more. He had taken a shorter jump, leaving more breathing room as far as charge went, yet the cells were still becoming ever less efficient. He recharged. He refilled the antimatter tanks from a gas giant’s magnetosphere, replenishing his water, oxygen, and hydrogen from an icy moon in its orbit.

Whilst landed on the lunar surface, the Nomad removed the panelling from his dashboard and thoroughly inspected the tangle of jury-rigged wiring and circuitry. Eventually, he located the short circuit responsible for the low power alert failing to sound. He patched the wiring and ran a series of diagnostic tests, only to discover another half dozen gremlins buried deep in the electronics. Unsurprised, the Nomad worked his way through the list of faults in the complex motherboard, until one by one, he had repaired each problem.

In the time it took the Nomad to complete the repairs, the gas giant above him completed a full rotation on its axis. When they were done, he took the time to chew through a bland nutrient bar, sipping at the water from his canteen to make it more palatable. Carrying out the requisite pre-flight checks, he took off from the dusty ice-crusted moon. Performing a close flyby of the gas giant, the Nomad launched the Fighter towards the inner reaches of the star system, running further scans for any suggestion of life. There were a handful of terrestrial worlds bathed in the dim crimson glow of the two red dwarfs, yet all bar one lacked anything more than a trace atmosphere, and the one which did was engulfed in a dense smothering veil of toxic gasses, intense heat, and crushing pressure. Any life that existed on that hostile world would be little more than extremophile bacteria.

The Nomad deployed the Fighter’s solar array, bringing the degrading cells back up to full charge before carrying out FTL calculations. A white main sequence star lay sixty-two lightyears away. It was unlikely to harbour any life; such stars rarely did due to their relative youth. But the Nomad still had enough rations to last him a couple more jumps, and this star was a decent halfway point towards a binary system of two yellow main-sequence stars. He plotted his course, blasting the Fighter down a close approach trajectory to the larger of the red dwarfs. He engaged the FTL core, accelerated to lightspeed, and watched as the view of the galaxy before him warped out of shape behind the blue haze of Cherenkov radiation ahead.

As the Nomad had predicted, the class A main sequence star harboured no life. The blinding sun burned hot and young, still having not yet condensed the last of its accretion disc into planets. The system was in a state of chaos and flux. Planetary orbits unstably crisscrossed one another. Small protoplanets and planetesimals collided, showering the larger bodies in violent bombardments. Further out, in the colder regions of the juvenile solar system, gas giants and ice giants were taking shape, waging immense gravitational wars as they vied for stable orbits. As they wrestled for permanence, they threatened to send each other flying off, either into interstellar space, or on catapulting trajectories inward towards the sun. But, even in this infantile and tumultuous system, the Nomad managed to recharge his cells, refuel his antimatter tanks, collect the water and oxygen he needed, and plot a jump away from the maelstrom of cosmic dust and colliding rock.

Dropping out of FTL and slowing to approach velocity, the Nomad gazed on at a pair of yellow suns. Separated by just under a hundred astronomical units, they were far enough apart that each had its own isolated system of planets, yet close enough together that every planet experienced two separate daily sunrises, one of their parent sun, and the other of a much fainter star just bright enough to be visible during the daylight.

The Nomad carried out his usual routine: deploying his solar array to charge the Fighter’s power cells, running detailed analyses of the two systems via the ship’s scientific equipment, locating a planet with a powerful magnetosphere, and collecting enough antimatter to refuel the pulsejet tanks. He touched down on an icy asteroid and collected enough water and oxygen to get him to the next system. Then, he analysed the planetary data, searching for possible life signs across the binary system.

The smaller of the two suns was sorely lacking in terrestrial worlds, likely due to the gas giant in close proximity to the sun; it would have disrupted the orbits of any rocky planets during the migratory phase of the system’s formation. The second of the two stars had a host of small terrestrials, one positioned in the very heart of the system’s habitable zone.

Studying the potential golden world further, the Nomad grew suddenly excited, noting the presence of an atmosphere. His excitement quickly tapered off as he delved deeper into the data, looking at the breakdown of its gaseous composition. It was mostly nitrogenous, with high levels of carbon dioxide and monoxide, laced with small quantities of methane. Only traces of oxygen; not a true golden world. The atmosphere was primordial in nature. There were high levels of water vapour present, and though slightly on the more tropical end of the spectrum, the surface temperatures were very favourable. There could indeed be life on this remote ball of rock; there was almost certainly surface water, maybe even enough to form an ocean. The Nomad had found life before in far harsher conditions, and this planet had all the starting ingredients required for its genesis.

Minimising the results from the scanners with a lazy gesture, the Nomad swivelled the Fighter around and punched the thruster into a quick burn. The vessel hurtled sun-bound, racing towards the smaller of the two class K suns in a gravity slingshot. Streaking across the glowing corona, the Fighter’s canopy blackened almost to total obscurity. Curving out passed the colossal sphere of plasma, the Nomad sat patiently as his momentum flung him into a distant orbit.

In the space of a few hours, the gravitational catapult manoeuvre had delivered him into the bounds of the star’s celestial brethren, slotting him neatly into orbit around the second sun, on target to intercept the terrestrial world in question. The Nomad watched in anticipation as the glowing speck expanded gradually in his view. With the Fighter sailing ever closer, the world took form as a thin crescent of reflected light, but as the Nomad crossed inside the planet’s orbit, the daylit hemisphere of the world revolved quickly into full view.

The planet was a grey and murky marble, pocked and scarred with infernal pits and fissures. Black and silver clouds swirled in raging tempests, flashing with lightning as great tendrils of electricity surged through the storms. Down below, volcanoes churned out torrents of smoke and ash, spewing rivers of lava that fed into lakes of fire. A good third of the southern hemisphere seemed to be ablaze with volcanic eruptions, but north of the equator, the world seemed comparatively tranquil.

Sulphuric rains fell into muddy valleys and collected into a million runlets and rivers. Great lakes had taken form, gathering in the many basins and ravines riven across the planet’s surface. In the millennia that followed, the lakes would coalesce into seas and oceans. No doubt, one day this world would become a paradise of biodiversity, provided no cataclysmic event destroyed the budding ecosystem beforehand. The planet was the perfect cocktail of chemicals, conditions, and circumstances to birth an abundance of life; its potential seemed boundless, but the Nomad cared little for potential.

On average, it took several billion years from initial biogenesis to the formation of complex life. By that point, even with the time dilation experience during superluminal travel, the Nomad would be long dead. The fact that this planet held the potential to one day become a rich jungle world was irrelevant; what mattered was the here and now. The planet was still primordial. It was the perfect crucible for biogenesis. The big question was, had that biogenesis already taken place? Was there life to be found on this young and primitive world?

From orbit, the Fighter’s instruments would offer little insight. Eager to save on fuel and time, the Nomad forwent orbital insertion; with a slight adjustment to his pitch and trajectory, he poised the Fighter for direct atmospheric entry. The primordial world loomed larger and larger in the final minutes of the Nomad’s approach. There would be no deorbital burn, no skimming the atmosphere to shed his momentum. His approach was a direct vector. Like a meteor, his only form of deceleration before impact was the resistance of the atmosphere. But unlike a meteor, the Fighter had the benefit of fixed wings; the Nomad would have control over his lift, pitch, yaw, and roll throughout the descent. With some clever and calculated piloting, he could prevent the landing from becoming a crash, even with his current intercept speeds.

The Fighter hit the atmosphere hot. The moment the gasses enveloping the world became dense enough to push back against the plummeting Fighter, the ship’s heat shields flared red. The Nomad steeply pitched up the Fighter’s angle of attack as it collided with the wall of air. The whole craft vibrated and groaned under the stresses and temperatures of the atmospheric bow wave beneath him, but the violence of the descent, the heat, the shuddering, the thundering tumult of rupturing air, all were products of the speed being shed from the Fighter: momentum syphoned off into alternate forms of energy as the ship ploughed deeper and deeper into the dense ocean of atmosphere.

Once the Fighter had expelled enough velocity, the Nomad pivoted the vessel on its yaw and rotary axes, banking the craft heavily against the air. The Fighter plunged into a helix, corkscrewing downward, continually yielding speed to the resistance of the atmosphere. The ground was fast approaching, but as the air thickened, the vessel was decelerating ever quicker. Down and down the ship spiralled, the Nomad slowly canting his pitch lower, until finally the ground beneath the Fighter rose into view throughout the cockpit’s canopy.

The Nomad deployed the airbrake and switched over to chemical propellant, peeling out of the corkscrew, allowing the wind to provide lift beneath the Fighter’s wings. Storm clouds plumed into black anvils, cyclones twisting bleak and grey below. The shuddering ceased and the heatshields cooled, as held aloft on the wind, the Fighter glided serenely across the cloud tops.

Slowly losing altitude, the Fighter sank through the cloud ceiling. The light across the canopy dimmed, the surrounding mist transitioning quickly from foamy white to foggy grey. Rain beaded across the glass, the droplets growing to thick splatters that swiftly congealed into a gushing film flowing over the entire hull of the Fighter. Lightning glared through the darkling storm and turbulent winds began to buffet the dainty ship.

The in-atmosphere flight instruments were going haywire. Needles revolved in disquieting loops around their dials. Numerous warnings flashed up across the holographic interface. Several buzzers and alarms were sounding throughout the cockpit. The Fighter was shaking, rattling as it shot through the storm, plummeting and lurching upwards as it dropped in and out of pockets of turbulence.

The Nomad slowed his breathing and muted the alarms, gripping his joystick loosely as he rode the violent weather steadily down. Suddenly, he cleared the giant cumulonimbus altogether, emerging out beneath the cloud floor, swooping into a stream of yellow sunrays. The Fighter stabilised in the airflow, settling once more into a smooth glide. Peering out across the alien world, the Nomad gazed on in awe at the brutal and rugged landscape unfolding beneath him. Jagged escarpments and doming mountains rose upwards from the black lava fields. Rivers and streams gushed and bubbled down from the slopes, converging in freshly sculpted valleys, collecting into hundreds of reflective lakes glinting silver in the sullen light.

Even from this vantage, the Nomad could not yet answer his question. There appeared to be everything required. All the correct building blocks of life were present. But was it too early in this planet’s history for the ubiquitous organic particles of nature to have coalesced into the intricate chemical structures and processes that constituted organic life? He could see no evidence as of yet, but he had barely caught a first glimpse of the world. The Nomad pulled back on his joystick and pitched the Fighter parallel to the ground, maintaining altitude as he continued to glide out across the extensive plains.

Thousands of square kilometres drifted slowly beneath the Nomad as he navigated updrafts and air currents to stay aloft, all the while he surveyed the vast new world below. There was a strange sensation that accompanied being the first ever to lay eyes on something; undoubtedly, no one else had ever seen these valleys and lakes before, nor even visited this planet in any respect. It was a sentiment of both great privilege and impossible loneliness; one with which the Nomad was all too well acquainted.

Wherever the Nomad went, he was the first. Everywhere he travelled, he was the first to discover it. Each valley, each mountaintop, each plain, every continent, every ocean, every world, all the asteroids, all the planets, all the stars, each and every single place he visited, everything he saw, he was the first, and he was the only. No one else had seen the things he had seen. And no one else ever would.

Yet with each new planet he visited, as different as they were from the others, they all seemed to be mere variations of the same theme. The universe was infinite, and therefore by its very nature it had to be repetitive. Every world was unique, the variation limitless, yet the laws of existence were in themselves limiting. How could each planet truly be different if each must be confined to a few basic guiding principles?

True, the planet the Nomad was soaring over now was different from any other in the universe, but what were those differences? Most life-bearing worlds existed once as analogues to this planet; their mountains were in different places, as were their rivers; maybe their atmospheric compositions varied marginally, likewise the overall chemical make-up of the rocks. Perhaps they were different masses and sizes to this world, positioned at different distances away from another classification of star. But at what level does that variation become perceptible to the observer? If the mountains were arranged somehow differently across the horizon, would the emotional impact be changed in some way? If the rivers meandered down alternate courses, would that somehow make any distinction? What if the hue of the stone were a different shade, or even the sky an altered tinge? Would the overall experience of gazing out across this foreign terrain be any different, even if every aspect were changed beyond recognition?

The Nomad had been the very first to gaze out across innumerable landscapes. Though at first each had appeared novel and unique, with every new planet the Nomad visited, the differences diminished, steadily seeming more and more contrived. As the years had passed, the marvel of exploration and discovery had faded into monotony. Now, gliding high above the sullen primordial world, this upsetting realisation dawned poignantly on the Nomad. He suddenly felt ashamed. Defeated. He had become desensitised to the beauty of the universe. What was the point in exploration if you were numb to everything you discovered? Was it all just routine?

Can’t wait for Chapter 6? I’ll be back on Thursday. If you’re enjoying the journey, consider sharing this with a fellow Sci-Fi fan.

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Author Commentary

The Nomad is imprisoned by routine. I wanted the repetition to really hit home. He is on a near-endless journey with impossibly far left to go, but in this chapter, I wanted to emphasise just how far the Nomad has come already. Flight Through Infinity doesn’t represent the beginning or the end of his voyage, but the middle.

By this stage, everything has become brutally mundane. Despite being presented with jaw-dropping vistas of the universe, he is somewhat numb to the beauty. Most of the systems the Nomad visits, he is the first to discover. And yet, he has visited so many that there is no longer much in the way of novelty.

Each cosmic jump is just a means to an end—a single footstep in a journey of unfathomable scale.

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Four

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Finished with his lacklustre meal, the Nomad once more purged the air from his cockpit and drew back the canopy, allowing the rush of alien atmosphere to surge around him. Dropping down into the rusty sediment of the valley, the Nomad set out on his second expedition across the lakebed. The sun had long since faded from amber to scarlet, minutes ago having sunk beyond the horizon entirely. This time, the journey would be in the dark. The stars shimmered through the hazy skies, casting a dim glow across the lonely dust world. Guided by the torch on his helmet, the Nomad followed the crisp beam of luminance, plodding slowly but determinedly across the breadth of the valley.

Finally, he neared the hollow, the moss glinting faintly with bioluminescence, guiding him in, like a silver beacon in the dark. Drawing the gear from his belt, he began his second harvest. Once each container was filled to the brim, sealed, and fastened to his EVA rig, the Nomad set off again, starting the return journey to the biomatter recombinator. Loading the containers into the device on arrival, he initiated the cycle of molecular deconstruction, sortation, and recombination. Lying supine on the slopes of the valley whilst the process took place, the Nomad watched the foreign sky glimmer through a veil of dusty atmosphere. Meteors streaked in constant crisscrossing trails of vaporised rock, whilst a nearby red flare star periodically intensified in radiance, burning bright for a score of minutes, before fading back to a dimmer glow as the cycle repeated again.

Once the process of recombination had finished, the Nomad collected the dispensed nutrition bars, stowing them in his food hold in the footlocker beneath his pilot’s seat. He emptied the recombinator excreta tray and reorganised the canisters on his harness, venturing out across the valley on his third expedition. The walk seemed shorter this time, the familiar always seeming quicker when compared to the novel, and before long, the Nomad was scraping more of the milky flora from the valley basin. The return journey had the illusion of being quicker still, yet the wait for the recombinator to carry out its complex chemistry never seemed to diminish. During the fourth harvest, the sun rose, transforming the dim nightscape back to one of hazy rust. By the time the fifth harvest was complete, the yellow star was approaching its zenith. During the seventh harvest, the Nomad took a few moments to eat and drink once again, finally setting out one last time to gather what little remnants of the alien moss were left.

When all was said and done, the very last scraps of alien moss scrubbed from the valley and processed, the Nomad powered down the biomatter recombinator and allowed the solar panels to fold away, collapsing the device into its original dodecahedral shape. The Nomad hauled the cumbersome machine carefully back into the starboard-side cargo pod before dragging the storage unit across the red sand into position beneath the wing. Locking the cargo pod back into place, the Nomad activated the hydraulics and clambered up into the cockpit. He closed the canopy, purged the alien air, repressurised, doffed his helmet, clipped himself into the seat’s harness, and lulled his head back into the seat for a brief moment of respite.

Powering up the flight computer, the Nomad performed his routine of pre-flight checks and primed the VTOL jets. The chemical engines started to hum at low frequency as they warmed up, ascending in tone to a high-pitched howl as the hydrogen and oxygen mixed and ignited. Fire and steam erupted from the exhaust nozzles in a torrent of force. Dust blasted into the air and swirled in a blinding cyclone as the Nomad steadily increased thrust. Slowly but surely, the landing skids lifted from the ground as the pillar of updraft took hold of the Fighter. The craft continued to rise steadily until it hovered over thirty metres from the floor of the basin.

The Nomad raised the landing gear lever back into its upwards position and the hydraulic tripod and skids folded away into the undercarriage of the Fighter. Tilting back on the flightstick, the Nomad lifted the ship’s nose, aiming the Fighter towards the heavens. Checking various readings across the control panel, the Nomad toggled the rear thrusters from pulsejets over to the singular rocket engine. Pressing forwards on the thruster, the Nomad felt the delayed surge of power as the chemical propellant ignited and a torrent of fire erupted from the aft of the Fighter.

The archaic method of propulsion was ideal for atmospheric takeoff, allowing enough thrust to propel a ship to orbit, without accelerating the craft to speeds that proved dangerous when in opposition to a wall of air resistance. Antimatter pulsejets, on the other hand, would rapidly accelerate the Fighter to velocities that would crumple the craft in the resistance of the alien atmosphere; in addition, antimatter was incredibly rare, only accumulating naturally in significant quantities when captured in powerful magnetic fields. Hydrogen, however, the fuel which burned within the rocket thruster, was the singular most abundant element in the universe.

As the velocity of the Fighter increased, the ship’s wings carved through the thick soup of gasses of the lower atmosphere, generating lift. Now held aloft by aerodynamics alone, the Nomad powered down the VTOL thrusters, switching control back over to the reaction control system arcjets. Pulling further back on the joystick, the elevons pressed against the airflow over the wings, increasing uplift. The nose of the Fighter pitched into a greater angle of attack and the ship began to shudder amidst the deafening roar of the rocket engines. Punching out of the thick troposphere, the Fighter pierced the stratosphere. The atmosphere thinned further, the Fighter continuing to climb faster and faster. The sky dimmed to black and the first stars shimmered against the heavens. The vibrations diminished and the roaring faded as the atmospheric pressure dwindled, all the while, the Fighter continued to accelerate.

Soaring rapidly out of the mesosphere and into the thermosphere, the Fighter reached orbit. The Nomad eased off the thruster and the rocket engine cut out, the fiery exhaust trail extinguishing in an instant. With the chemical thruster disengaged, the Nomad switched control over to the antimatter pulsejets. Priming the interplanetary engines, he once again nudged the thruster forwards. Antimatter and matter collided, and an immense kick of acceleration shot from the rear of the Fighter, propelling it almost immediately to escape velocity. The Nomad shut his eyes, enduring the strain exerted by the forces on his body, easing off the thruster when he was free from the terrestrial world’s gravitational grasp.

Drifting swiftly away from the crimson world, the Nomad opened the flight computer’s holographic display, prepping the machine for faster-than-light jump calculations. The computer clicked and groaned under the strain of the complex quantum relativity equations, finally churning out a number of possible jump paths. The Nomad sifted through the array of potential destinations, eventually settling on a blue giant, eighty-seven lightyears away. Selecting the star, the augmented reality navigation trajectory flashed up across the Fighter’s HUD. An elongated parabola slung the Fighter on a close pass to the yellow sun.

Barely needing to alter his current orbital path, the Nomad adjusted the yaw and pitch of the Fighter and initiated a burn of the pulsejets. The enormous forces of acceleration took hold of the Nomad once more, wrenching him back into his seat as he hurtled furiously in towards the heart of the solar system. His breathing rasped and his limbs turned to lead, the Fighter careening ever faster towards the star. After a number of minutes, his constant acceleration had delivered him up to a tiny fraction of lightspeed, and the enormous ball of burning gas expanded across the Fighter’s canopy. The photochromatic glass tinged to an almost opaque black, polarising out the dazzling light and heat that would otherwise have blinded the Nomad in an instant. The face of the sun contrasted into focus, its glare so highly filtered that the fiery details of the surface were unveiled. Black chasms the size of planets boiled and effervesced in an infernal sea of searing plasma. Flares licked outwards in great burning tongues from the blazing corona, a constant wind of ionised particles tearing away in every direction.

Even with the canopy tinted to near opaque, the glare was too much to withstand; the Nomad squinted, straining to lift the immense weight of his hand to shield his eyes, all the while he hurtled swiftly around the circumference of the immeasurable sphere of glowing plasma. The pull of the star’s gravity couldn’t contain him now, but it was enough to offer the Fighter one last gravity assist, accelerating the ship up the forever rising energy exponential towards lightspeed. The Nomad kept the pulsejets engaged as the star receded rapidly behind him, but his rate of acceleration was declining. Approaching relativistic speeds, the Fighter was steadily increasing in mass, demanding ever greater quantities of energy to accelerate further. Though he was still several orders of magnitude away from lightspeed, on pulsejets alone, he would never achieve it.

Straining to extend a hand forwards, the Nomad reached for the protective casing on the control panel before him. Lowering the cover exposed a horizontal lever handle, slantingly striped in black and yellow, labelled with over a dozen warnings. Taking hold, the Nomad pulled it firmly upwards and engaged the ship’s superluminal drive.

Inside the warp core, a hundred lasers focussed on a floating mass of superfluid exotic matter. As the lasers fired, the substance rapidly shed heat, cooling in an instant to absolute zero. Upon reaching zero-point energy, a second array of lasers focussed on the exotic matter, countering the spin of the particles. The mass of the exotic matter began to decrease, falling towards zero, before, through some quirk in quantum relativity, continuing further into negativity. As the excitation continued, the negative mass of the exotic matter rose steadily, causing distortions to the very weave of spacetime. The warp drive channelled this negative energy, lowering the mass of both the Fighter and its pilot to near negligible values, peaking waves in the fabric of the universe, creating both negative kinetic energy and a repulsive force of gravity.

The Nomad’s vision of the stars distorted as if he were viewing the way ahead through a magnification lens. With the superluminal drive engaged, the limiter imposed on the antimatter pulsejets was lifted. The Nomad punched the thruster up to its maximum and the antimatter tanks began to rapidly flood the annihilation chamber. The expulsion of energy from the Fighter’s engines intensified, and even in his low mass state, the Nomad could feel the unfathomable forces of acceleration seize hold of him, flattening him into the upholstery of his chair. The Fighter was free to accelerate at its maximum potential, no longer inhibited by the Nomad’s biological limitations, his body’s mass now near insignificant. Likewise, the Fighter was no longer inhibited by its own mass, now able to climb into the steeper regions of the mass-energy exponential curve that otherwise forbade approach of lightspeed due to the bizarre laws of relativity. The Fighter began to accelerate at an unprecedented rate, steadily climbing the vertical section of the momentum curve, rapidly speeding towards superluminal velocities.

Several metres in front of the Fighter’s nose, an ethereal blue haze steadily began to radiate. Spacetime ahead of the ship had contracted, and to the rear of the craft, it was rapidly elongating. The blue luminosity before the craft was electromagnetic radiation, emitted as the velocity of the Fighter started to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. The sapphire glow intensified as the Fighter, contained within the bubble of warped spacetime, shot clean past the light barrier.

The yellow sun and the rest of its solar system were now long gone. The Nomad had left the star system and was tearing through the interstellar medium. Both lightyears and decades receded in the Nomad’s wake as the passage of time distorted and slowed. As the distance between stars yielded to the Nomad, he knew all too well that so did time. For him, mere seconds were passing, yet he knew that outside of the warp bubble formed by his FTL drive, hours were racing by in the blink of an eye.

Relatively speaking, the Fighter itself was not exceeding lightspeed, yet due to the contraction of space before it and its expansion to the rear, from an onlooker’s perspective, the Fighter was measurably surpassing it by several magnitudes. Likewise, by the quirks of physics, his ship would also be invisible on approach to any onlooker, appearing only after having passed the observer, and perhaps more confusingly, as two separate images departing in opposite directions. These implications had once fascinated the Nomad, but now they were merely facts of his day-to-day existence. He had lost count of the number of times he had travelled these speeds and distances; but the number was tiny when compared to the amount of FTL jumps left ahead of him. It was all just routine.

Can’t wait for Chapter 5? I’ll be back on Tuesday. If you’re enjoying the journey, consider sharing this with a fellow Sci-Fi fan.

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Author Notes

In the author’s notes of the last chapter, I conceded that the Biomatter Recombinator was the closest thing to magic in Flight Through Infinity. And yet, in this chapter, the Fighter just began a faster-than-light interstellar jump.

As outrageously far-fetched as FTL travel might seem, this element of the book is still somewhat grounded in science. Some people will insist that FTL travel is outright impossible, but little more than a century ago, people were saying the same thing for manned flight, and yet only 66 years passed between the Wright Brothers’ first powered aircraft flight and the moon landings!

It doesn’t seem incredibly far-fetched to believe that we might only be one or two major scientific breakthroughs away from technology that might make FTL possible. But that does not solve the problem of describing how it might work in Flight Through Infinity.

I worked on the premise of bending spacetime in the same way that a Star Trek warp drive operates. If you can contract spacetime ahead of you and elongate it behind you, you can effectively cheat the laws of physics, accelerating up to and beyond the speed of light, relativistically speaking.

However, through the quirks of relativity, the closer you get to lightspeed, the more your mass increases, and therefore the greater the energy required to accelerate you further. I needed to figure out a way of getting the Nomad and the Fighter up to speed without needing to climb all the way to infinity on the energy-mass exponential curve.

How did I figure this might be possible? By reducing mass beyond what is achievable through rigorous dieting. After a bit of research, I uncovered a now no doubt long-outdated scientific paper which described an experiment where researchers fired various lasers at a molecule to alter its spin. Their measurements, if I recall, recorded a brief instance where the molecule in question seemed to exhibit a negative effective mass. I ran with this.

Thus was born the basis of how the Nomad’s FTL drive worked, allowing him to make interstellar jumps on his journey across the infinite void.

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Three

White plasma erupted from the Fighter’s pulse engines, glaring as a geyser of luminous discharge throughout the black void. The prolonged burn slowed the ship to approach velocity. Precise firing from the reaction control system arc jets swivelled the Fighter back on its axis, and as the Nomad was spun back to face his destination, a crimson world loomed into view through his canopy. Little more than a cold dust ball on the very fringes of the star’s habitable region, from orbit, the world appeared anything but habitable. The yellow sun’s light refracted through the hazy atmosphere encircling the ball of rock, and as the Nomad gazed down on its incarnadine surface, through the hundreds of whirling dust storms, he looked out across a world scarred with canyons and desiccated riverbeds. The world had once been far more than the ubiquitous desert it had decayed into; that much was clear, but it had likely been millennia since water had trickled across its surface. Now, from orbit, the planet appeared dead: a carcass adrift in a decaying universe. But as the Nomad well knew, carcasses were still often ripe for scavenging; all he required was a few morsels, a few scraps of rotten flesh left clinging to the carrion.

With a few short burns from the pulse engines, the Nomad manoeuvred into a high orbit around the scarlet globe, positioning the Fighter so that the array of scientific instruments fitted to the undercarriage aligned with the atmosphere. Booting up an assortment of scanners, the Nomad selected a few compositional scans and allowed them to run their course as he sat watching the celestial body revolve slowly beneath him. After a number of orbits, the scans had run their course. Now left with a packet of unprocessed data to sift through, the Nomad wasted little time in finding what he was after. The atmospheric readings were promising enough to warrant investigation of the world, and the more he studied the figures before him, the greater his certainty became. What he was looking for existed on this forsaken ball of rock, but more importantly, he knew exactly where to search for it.

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The Nomad fed the coordinates into the flight computer and allowed it to whir away as it plotted various trajectories for atmospheric insertion. Powering down the scanners and flight computer, the Nomad adjusted his pitch and roll, waiting for the approaching window on his final planetary loop. Briefly firing the Fighter’s pulsejets in a deorbital burn around the nightside of the planet, the Nomad pressed back into his seat as his speed bled away. Killing the pulsejets, he pitched the Fighter back towards its travel vector, lifting the nose above the curvature of the horizon. The Nomad sat patiently as his orbit began to decay, and before long, losing altitude, the Fighter dipped into the thermosphere, skimming the very outer reaches of the terrestrial world’s sky. The Fighter began to shudder as it sank deeper into the veil of gas enveloping the world, and as the ship plunged into the mesosphere, the vibrations inside the cockpit intensified. Amber plasma began to glow across the underside of the Fighter as the gasses beneath it were compacted into a shockwave of intense heat. The searing flames licked up across the hull, flickering across the canopy, growing ever hotter as the Fighter speared deeper into the atmosphere. Tearing now into the stratosphere, the ship quaked fiercer and fiercer as the lower atmosphere rapidly approached, the friction of gasses syphoning speed from the Fighter as it continued to plummet.

The Nomad heaved left on the joystick. Elevons on the wings angled against the air, causing the Fighter to bank. The projected landing zone swerved violently away from the approach vector across the head-up display. The Nomad veered right in correction, banking the opposite way, the Fighter’s nose still pitched upwards. The landing site recentred in the approach path, then veered wide off course in the opposite direction. Intentionally overshooting the turn, the Nomad curved his flightpath right of the landing zone; banking out of the arc, he swerved left again. He continued this weaving line of descent, serpentine left and right, rapidly shedding both altitude and velocity until the fiery plasma enveloping the Fighter died away.

Straightening his descent, the Nomad finally dropped the Fighter’s angle of attack, granting him a view of the approaching landing site dead ahead. Now on target, the Nomad flicked various switches, locking the elevons and slats on the wings and tailfins into an airbrake. The forces of deceleration strained at the Nomad’s harness as he lurched forwards in his seat. The Fighter was now deep in the troposphere, the ground rapidly approaching.

The Nomad watched the figures tick over on his HUD. His flight instruments made recommendations for slight alterations to his approach; for the most part, the Nomad ignored them. The Fighter was a part of him, an extension of his own body; he could feel the wind beneath his wings, the density of the atmosphere. The currents of air spoke to him through the feedback in the Fighter’s controls. The shuddering and jerking of the craft came almost as a comfort; he didn’t fight against the tide, he didn’t wrestle against the controls, instead he followed the rivers of airflow, anticipating, reacting, embracing the wind. He was always in control. There was no need to bluntly carve a path through the air; instead, he navigated the flowing streams of wind, knowing that they would guide him to where he needed to be.

The landing point was approaching fast. The Nomad disengaged the airbrake and switched thrusters from the arcjets over to the chemical vertical-take-off-and-landing engines. Pitching the Fighter back, the Nomad engaged the VTOL thrusters and allowed the chemical jets to brake, shedding away the last of the Fighter’s speed. The craft hung suspended above the surface of the alien world on a cushion of lift. The Nomad deployed the landing gear and slowly reduced thrust, allowing the Fighter to gradually descend the last few metres. Red dust swept up in the vortex of exhaust plumed around the Fighter. Engulfed by the crimson cloud of sand, the Fighter’s landing skids touched down on the surface of the alien world.

Grit rained down across the landing site, crackling as it showered the Fighter’s canopy. Powering down the chemical engines, the Nomad examined the readouts before him: a mostly nitrogen and carbon-dioxide-based atmosphere, with traces of argon and various sulphates; far from breathable, yet fairly innocuous under the protection of the Nomad’s EVA suit. But amongst the otherwise inert cocktail of gasses existed a small percentage of oxygen; a reliable though not conclusive biomarker, atmospheric oxygen regularly indicated the existence of life. Life was what the Nomad was searching for.

He didn’t expect to find anything exceptionally complex; he doubted this planet could even sustain anything much more intricate than single-celled bacteria. Yet the oxygen levels in the atmosphere suggested that there was a biomass of some significance somewhere to be found, and if his orbital scans had any indication, the valley he had just touched down in was the best place to search: the site of the richest oxygen concentration on the entire planet.

Donning his helmet, the Nomad purged the cockpit of air, preventing the loss of any of his own precious atmosphere to the alien world. All fell silent as the Nomad was plunged into a vacuum; with the last vestiges of air evacuated from the cockpit, he initiated retraction of the canopy. The instant the cockpit seal was breached, a torrent of air gushed into the Fighter and sound returned. Readings of pressure and gaseous composition flashed up across the inside of the Nomad’s visor. When the canopy had fully retracted, the Nomad unclipped his harness and rose to his feet, taking a moment to familiarise himself with the world’s gravity.

The downward tug of the desert planet was several orders of magnitude higher than the tiny ice moon he had just left, but even still, it was a relatively low-gravity world. The Nomad sat himself down on the rim of the cockpit and swung his legs over the side. Dropping gently into the alien dust, he gazed about at the barren hillsides of the foreign valley. He took his first few steps; his gait was light and bounding, but his feet more or less remained in constant contact with the ground as he strode a circumference around the Fighter. Once again, he carried out a series of post-landing checks.

Little had changed since the last inspection: the front landing skid was still slightly warped, the weld in the wing was holding perfectly, and none of the scientific equipment on the undercarriage had shaken loose during atmospheric entry or landing. With a sense of dread and unease, the Nomad looked over the antimatter tank. All was as it had been: the ship was still holding together and functioning as the Nomad needed it to, serving as a lifeboat adrift alone in a never-ending sea of stars.

Ducking beneath the starboard wing, the Nomad lowered the second cargo pod via the hydraulics and disengaged the clamps. Dragging the pod through the red silt of the dried-up lakebed, the Nomad pulled the container clear of the Fighter and retracted the access panel. From out of the pod, he lifted a cumbersome dodecahedron, hoisting it out by a pair of handles. Straining against the device’s weight, even in low gravity, the Nomad lowered the machine onto the shingle and dragged it further still from the Fighter. When he had a suitable berth, the Nomad activated the device via a single button located between the two grips. A small diode blinked, and once the Nomad had stepped clear, the machine unfolded.

The solar panels encasing the device unfurled, splaying out across the ground in a polyhedral net of reflective photovoltaic cells. Centred in the flattened external structure of the machine was a pyramidal device, gradually charging in the yellow sun’s rays. It was perhaps the singular most important and valuable piece of technology the Nomad had ever salvaged: a biomatter recombinator. In the long time since his rations had run out, this had been his only safe source of nutrition.

Whilst the device’s cells recharged, the Nomad returned to the cargo pod and gathered a number of empty airtight canisters, clipping each of them to the belt of his EVA rig. Glancing out across the long-dried-up lake, the Nomad activated his suit’s short burst scanners. His HUD flashed to life as various rocks, crags, and distant slopes showed augmented reality data readouts. But the Nomad turned a blind eye to all nonessential information. There was only one thing he was searching for, and when a possible detection sprang up several kilometres in the distance, he minimised all other information across the inside of his visor.

With his rangefinder locked onto a milky-tinged slope just over three thousand metres away, the Nomad began his hike over to the far side of the alien basin. His feet sank into the crusty lakebed, the mud clumping between the treads of his boots like clay; there was more moisture in the ground than the Nomad had first thought. Soon, a long trail of footprints extended to his rear, leading all the way back to the Fighter, the small spacecraft continuing to recede in the distance with each further step he took. On the Nomad trekked, alone across the expansive wastes, the digits on his visor gradually ticking down. Finally, the Nomad drew near the slopes. He could now see for himself that the milky hue tinging the otherwise crimson landscape was indeed the very thing he was looking for: organic matter.

Swathes of feathery cream moss carpeted the hillside in dense clumps. As the Nomad closed to within the final few hundred metres, he realised the alien flora swept down into a bowl sunken into the plain of the lakebed, where the growth was at its richest. Fine filaments of silver stamens coiled upwards from the mossy growth, quivering in the gentle breeze swilling about the basin.

Arriving at the rim of the hollow, the Nomad stepped down and knelt beside the nearest patch of moss, allowing his suit’s limited scientific equipment to run a preliminary analysis. The data readouts projected onto the Nomad’s visor, bringing a sense of relief to the weary traveller. The growth was both plant-like and fungal in cellular structure; though highly toxic to the Nomad’s biology in its current form, it was constituted from a spectrum of amino acids and carbohydrates that were somewhat akin to the Nomad’s. The growth appeared both photo and chemosynthetic, drawing energy from both the yellow sun’s light and from the rich source of minerals deposited in the long dried-up lakebed. Assuming the average conversion rate, there was easily enough biomass here to supply the Nomad with provisions for the near future.

The Nomad unclipped the various canisters from his belt and arranged them on the ground. Next, he drew a spatula-like implement from a slot in his belt. Unscrewing the cap of the first container, the Nomad proceeded to use the flat tool to scrape up some of the moss; the whitish growth separated from the soil without too much effort. The Nomad spooned the sample into the capsule and repeated the process, methodically harvesting tufts of alien flora until all of the containers were filled and sealed. Reclipping each of the canisters to his belt, the Nomad rose back to his feet and began the long return march towards the Fighter.

Retracing his own footsteps, the Nomad finally arrived back at the landing zone. The biomatter recombinator had long ago reached full charge and was primed and awaiting the Nomad. Approaching the device, the Nomad unclipped the first canister from his belt and inserted it into a circular recess on the pyramidal unit. The machine’s holographic display flickered to life as the recombinator awoke from standby and began analysing the organic matter. Whilst the machine constructed a detailed digital model of the molecular composition of the alien flora, the Nomad loaded the rest of the canisters into the remaining slots on the recombinator. Waiting for the device to complete its analysis, the Nomad took the time to fill his water canteen from the Fighter’s drinking reserves, ensuring the recombinator’s own water levels were topped up.

By this point, the biomatter recombinator had built up a full digital structure of the alien moss. Ready to go, it prompted its user that it was primed. Without hesitation, the Nomad triggered the next phase of the cycle and made his way over to the Fighter. Sitting on the ground, leaning against the landing gear of his ship, the Nomad made himself comfortable for the long wait. The recombinator had begun the complex process of deconstructing the moss via millions of intricate chemical reactions into its constituent organic molecules. Once this process was complete, the device would sort and separate the cocktail of chemicals, removing those intrinsically toxic to the Nomad’s own biology, whilst retaining those that were compatible with it. Then, the recombinator would begin the final stage of the process, reassembling the various organic molecules deemed safe to consume into more complex proteins and carbohydrates capable of offering the Nomad sustenance and nutrition. It was complex, time-consuming, and highly inefficient, but it was about the only way the Nomad could feed himself without being poisoned.

In the hours that followed, the Nomad slipped into slumber. He awoke sometime later to the faint beeping of the recombinator. The alien landscape was twilit, the yellow star soon to disappear beneath the horizon. Judging from the planet’s rotatory period, he had likely been asleep for quite some time; but time was relative to the Nomad. If there was one thing he did have, it was time.

Rising groggily to his feet, the Nomad made his way over to the recombinator and opened the dispenser tray. He looked down in muted disappointment at the vacuum-packed nutrition bars the machine had formed from the moss; there were fewer than he had hoped, but more than he had feared. Either way, he knew he would have to repeat the whole process a number of times to ensure he had enough food to survive until whenever next he came across a viable source of organic matter. But he wouldn’t do so immediately. He’d forgotten how long it had been since he had last eaten, but he knew it had been too long; if he didn’t eat something now, he might not have the energy to complete the journey to the moss colony and back a second time.

The Nomad stowed the nutrition bars in his pouch and opened the excreta tray of the recombinator. It was brimming with grey powder. Far greater in quantity than the consumable food produced, the waste products of the reaction had been sapped of every ounce of nutrition and water. Taking the refuse a short distance away, the Nomad inverted the tray, emptying the toxic by-products out across the ground. The Nomad returned to the biomatter recombinator, restowing the excreta tray before removing the various collection canisters, hooking each in turn back onto his belt. Powering down the device into standby, the Nomad returned to his ship. Depressing a covering panel on the hull, the Nomad exposed a twist lever. Activating it saw a series of flat ladder rungs extend from beneath the Fighter’s hull, allowing the Nomad to climb back into the cockpit. The rungs retracted as the Nomad seated himself in the pilot seat and closed the canopy.

Venting the alien atmosphere from the Fighter, the Nomad was plunged momentarily back into a vacuum, before repressurisation flooded the cockpit with his own air supply. The Nomad removed his helmet and wiped the sweat from his brow. He took a swig of water from his canteen and unwrapped one of the nutrient bars. He sank his teeth into the dry, bland mass of protein and carbohydrates, packed with whatever nutrients and minerals that the biomatter recombinator had managed to extract from the toxic alien flora. The meal was utterly unsatisfying and conjured a horrid thirst. The Nomad forced down the remainder of the bar with several large gulps from his canteen. There was no enjoyment to be had from it, but irrespective, it sufficed. It was no different from any other meal the Nomad had experienced in recent memory. At this stage, the very notion of taking pleasure from eating seemed like an abstract concept to the Nomad. Pleasure was a luxury that had been absent from his life so long he had almost forgotten it. Eating served one singular purpose: survival.

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Author Notes

Much like water, the Nomad requires food. I am of the belief that life is likely to be quite abundant throughout the universe; it can be found just about everywhere on Earth, in the most extreme and hostile environments. Whilst the widespread presence of complex and intelligent life in outer space could arguably be exceptionally rare, I would not be at all surprised if, within my own lifetime, we discover the presence of microbial life elsewhere within our own solar system.

For Flight Through Infinity, I worked on the basis that the Nomad was unlikely to stumble upon orchards of edible fruit or alien animals running free which he could hunt for meat. The majority of life he would come across would be simple: algae, moss, lichen. And it would almost certainly be completely inedible in its unprocessed form. Even here on Earth, the majority of flora is inedible to humans; we lack the digestive capacity to graze on grasses and trees, and a lot of fruit is outright poisonous.

However, all life on Earth is made up of the same basic building blocks: fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Some of those building blocks have been demonstrated to exist in nature, independent of life, and have even been discovered in meteorites. It is therefore not too much of a stretch to theorise that extraterrestrial life will use the same building blocks for similar purposes.

Where things get complicated, though, is the variations that might occur. Life on Earth utilises only 22 amino acids of the hundreds found in nature to form proteins. There is a good chance that any extraterrestrial life that might have evolved independently of us would have limited to no overlaps with the amino acids found in our own biology. Much the same can be said for lipids and carbohydrates. Furthermore, most biological molecules have a property known as chirality, where the same molecule can exist as mirror images due to the way the molecular bonds are configured. The two halves of this chirality are described as being left-handed and right-handed; in the same way your hands are mirrored, they cannot be superimposed over one another. Life on Earth is decidedly left-handed when it comes to amino acids and right-handed when it comes to carbohydrates. This might seem superficial, but configurations are key to how molecules interact with one another, to the point where molecules with the incorrect chirality can even prove toxic.

These are the challenges the Nomad faces when it comes to his nutrition. However, irrespective of what biological material he finds along his journey, molecules can always be broken down into their constituent elements. And at the end of the day, they can be theoretically reorganised into whatever biochemistry you want, given the right conditions and raw materials.

Thus was born the Biomatter Recombinator, the least scientifically grounded piece of technology in the whole of the Nomad’s arsenal. The fundamental principles check out, but as to the exact details of its functioning, it is the closest thing to wizardry you will find in Flight Through Infinity.

Is it something of a cheat in the quest for Hard Sci-Fi? Perhaps. But I think it is far more reasonable a compromise than the Nomad carrying a decade’s worth of protein bars in his luggage, or even less likely, him chowing down on alien bananas and eating space buffalo cooked over a fire.

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Two

The Nomad ducked beneath the portside wing of his Fighter and manually unfastened the cargo pod clamps. In such low gravity, there was no need to operate the lowering hydraulics; the pod weighed so little that with nothing more than his own strength, he was able to lower the cargo capsule softly to the ground. As it descended gently from the wing, the Nomad delivered a sharp horizontal tug to the pod, in this instance, its mass mattering, heaving it out from underneath the wing during its slow fall. The metallic capsule ejected another billowing cloud of dust from the moon’s surface as it touched down on the crater floor. Once the regolith resettled, the Nomad depressed the access panel and awaited its gentle spring-loaded retraction.

Peering into the cylindrical vessel, the Nomad moved aside several toolboxes and spare component canisters until he came across the container he was looking for. Clicking it out of the fixture rails of the cargo pod, he removed the canister and laid it on the astrobleme floor. Opening the round case, the Nomad withdrew a collapsible tripod, erecting it several metres away from his landing site. Returning to the container, he then cautiously pulled out a small microwave unit. Fixing the microwave emitter atop the tripod and unfolding the unit’s solar cells, the Nomad left the device to charge, returning back to the cargo pod, this time to retrieve a collapsible cold trap. Taking a mallet from the toolbox, the Nomad made his way back over to the microwave emitter, hammering the spike of the cold trap into the regolith. The Nomad continued this back and forth for several minutes, systematically unloading various devices from the cargo pod and setting up an array of equipment around the perimeter of the landing zone.

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Next in the sequence was a solar-powered refrigerator unit; attaching it to the cold trap, the Nomad powered up both devices. The umbrella-like canopy of the cold trap unfurled in a wide dome, suspended above the ground by the prop driven into the regolith; meanwhile, the motor of the heat pump silently whirred into action, injecting refrigerant throughout the canopy, rapidly chilling the hood. As the underside of the cold trap steadily dropped in temperature, the Nomad returned to the microwave emitter and primed the device. The Nomad stepped clear of the emissions zone; detecting its operator was at a safe distance, the device began to blast pulses of microwaves into the permafrost below.

Dielectrically excited by the rays of electromagnetic radiation beaming into the ground, the frozen water molecules that had been held captive in the subsurface ice for millennia began to heat through agitation. Unable to form water in the vacuum of space, the thawing ice instantly sublimated, escaping from the rock and dust as vapour. Much of the evaporated water was lost to space as it jettisoned from the permafrost, but that which rose beneath the cold trap snap-froze on contact, condensing immediately to ice across the underside of the canopy. After a matter of minutes, a substantial ice sheet crusted the umbrella of the cold trap.

Throughout the process, the Nomad had taken the time to set up a secondary microwave device; insulated inside a mesh cage, this one served as an oven, dedicated to melting ice into water. Alongside the microwave oven, the Nomad prepped an electrolyser designed for the separation of water into its constituent elements: hydrogen and oxygen.

Once these two devices were ready, the Nomad returned to the cold trap. Holding a button for several seconds, the Nomad activated the heating filaments within the canopy. The filaments briefly raised the temperature of the umbrella above melting point, just long enough to thaw the ice’s outer layer and separate it from the underside of the canopy. No longer fixed beneath the umbrella, the sheets of ice, now beholden only to gravity, drifted downwards in slow motion, finally coming to rest on the ground.

Collecting up the ice sheets, the Nomad fed them each in turn into the microwave melting unit before sealing it shut and initiating its cycle. The magnetron inside the oven powered up, bombarding the ice with pulses of microwaves, changing its state again, the ice this time able to melt into water inside the pressurised unit. As water formed, it was filtered and drained into the device’s collection tank. With the first batch gathered, freshly extracted from beneath the lunar surface, the Nomad linked the water collection tank via a hose to a port on the Fighter, refilling the ship’s reserves. All the while, a second crust of ice began to condense across the umbrella of the cold trap.

After several cycles of ice formation, followed by its subsequent melting, the ship’s water reserve tank, for the most part serving as the Nomad’s drinking supply, was full. With the Fighter topped out, the Nomad switched tact, feeding all subsequently produced water directly into the electrolyser he’d set up. Inside the electrolysis chamber, the water was broken down into hydrogen and oxygen gas; both products thereafter were cooled and compressed, resulting in liquefaction, and then fed, once more via a system of hoses, into the Fighter. The two elements were housed in separate pressurised tanks, serving respectively as cryogenic fuel and oxidiser for the ship’s atmospheric chemical propellant thrusters. Finally, with the Fighter fully refuelled, the surplus of oxygen produced in the subsequent rounds of electrolysis was then compressed and used to replenish both the Fighter and the Nomad’s respiratory oxygen supply.

Several hours after the Nomad had first touched down, the process of resupplying and refuelling was finally complete. The Nomad collapsed down and stowed all of his equipment, the majority of which he had salvaged at one time or another during his endless journey across the stars. With everything packed methodically back into the cargo pod, the Nomad sealed it shut and rolled it into position below the wing. Activating the hydraulic clamps, he watched the retractable arm affix to the pod, lifting it back into position beneath the wing.

Breathing heavily inside his helmet, the Nomad panned his gaze back and forth across the crater in one final sweep, ensuring again he had left nothing behind. The only evidence of his brief visit to the perpetually tumbling moon were his footprints. With no wind or active geological processes to erode the marks his boots had made, his footsteps were stamped eternally into the reflective dust of the astrobleme.

With the mauve behemoth gas giant hanging directly above in the dark skies, the Nomad turned back towards the open cockpit of his Fighter. With a well-judged bound, he leapt up from the low-gravity surface, landing atop the nose of the ship. The Nomad lowered himself lazily into the pilot’s chair, closing the canopy with a pull of a lever, sealing the cockpit as he buckled his harness. Reverting several switches, the Nomad began repressurisation. A crescendo of hissing air, punctuated by the knell of a claxon growing in volume, reverberated throughout the cockpit. Once the process was complete, the Nomad raised his visor, powering down his rig, before removing his helmet completely, stowing it securely under his seat.

Glancing one final time across the silver moonscape, the Nomad powered up the necessary systems for take-off. A long burn of chemical propellant from the lift-off engines suspended the Fighter on a cushion of thrust and carried the small craft swiftly away from the lunar surface, inserting the ship back into a high orbit around the gas giant. Consulting the results of the system scans once more, the Nomad selected the coordinates of a small terrestrial world on the fringes of the star system’s habitable zone and plugged them into the flight computer. The jarring circuitry processed the data and calculated a flight path.

Rotating and twisting the Fighter with the ship’s arcjets, the Nomad aimed the nose of the vessel towards the horizon of the gas giant. Pushing the thrust lever forwards, the Nomad sank heavily back in his chair as the pulsejets ignited, rapidly accelerating the Fighter towards the curvature of the gas giant’s horizon. The tiny spacecraft cut through the veil of the planet’s upper atmosphere as it hurtled past the immense world, claiming a boost in speed from the gravity assist. Finally achieving escape velocity, and still accelerating, the ship was flung clear of the gas giant’s orbit and was sent careering off towards the centre of the solar system.

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Author Notes

Whilst modern astronomy has shown that there is no shortage of exoplanets throughout the galaxy, finding liquid water in space would still seem to be exceedingly rare. Water is essential for life (as we know it), and thus the Nomad requires a supply for his own personal consumption, but perhaps more importantly, the Fighter requires its constituent components (hydrogen and oxygen) to fuel its chemical engines.

Water itself is actually fairly abundant in space, making up a significant percentage of comets and asteroids; however, it is imprisoned as solid ice underground. The question I was therefore faced with was: how would the Nomad practically extract ice in a vacuum? A bit of research suggested that microwave technology was perhaps the most efficient solution, converting ice directly into steam, only for it to immediately be refrozen on the underside of the Nomad’s cold trap, to finally be converted into water when melted by a secondary device.

This kind of technological problem-solving is something I had to contend with frequently whilst writing Flight Through Infinity. How could a single man feasibly survive alone in space with limited resources? There is almost always an answer grounded in science, utilising current technology.

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If you’ve been following my work, you know that I recently made a big decision: to take this story out of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program and bring it directly to you. This isn’t just a repost of the book; this is the Director’s Cut. Beyond the story itself, every chapter will feature:

• Author Notes: At the end of each post, I’ll share a small look behind the curtain of how this story came to be

• Direct Access: I’ll be in the comments of every chapter to answer your questions.

The Flight Schedule: I’ll be dropping new chapters every Tuesday and Thursday. The first 10 chapters are free for everyone. From Chapter 11 onwards, the journey continues for my paid subscribers. If you want to support the creation of new worlds and get deep-space updates twice a week, I’d love to have you on board.

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One

The Nomad was alone. The universe in its entire enormity stretched endlessly beyond comprehension. But the infinity was empty. Pinpricks of existence dotted the eternal infinitude, yet the vast distances between the isolated systems were nothing but darkness and oblivion; the silence of the infinite void was absolute and unending. The Universe was cold. The Universe was dark. The Universe was silent. The Nomad was alone.

The Nomad stirred suddenly as the silence was broken. He roused from terrifying slumber, but no nightmares had plagued his sleep; so long had passed since he had dreamt that now, the very concept of dreaming seemed abstract. The Nomad yearned for nightmares, for any fleeting image, no matter how insignificant, to come to him in his sleep. Instead, his sleep was haunted by the silence of existence, something infinitely more harrowing. Within that silence, he feared he might cease to exist altogether. Perhaps he already had; what his life had become was hardly existence.

The Nomad wearily shook the darkness from his thoughts and gazed about the cockpit, at the surrounding assortment of dials and readouts. The high-pitched beeping that had awoken him continued to sound. He had heard it hundreds, possibly thousands of times before, but his mind was still whirring in the haze of hypnagogia; he glanced dazedly around at the myriad of buttons and controls blinking beneath the glow of a holographic interface, finally turning his attention to the correct switch. Flicking it, he silenced the alarm. The power cells were charged.

The Nomad fumbled for his canteen floating in the footwell. Unscrewing the seal from the canister, he took a sip of fluid before lulling his head back against the headrest. He gazed out of the cockpit, into the infinity through which he was drifting. Millions of stars and galaxies shimmered faintly in twisting constellations; they shone sapphire, silver, amber, and crimson, immense clouds of dust diffusing their light in murky hues of bronze and umber. It was beautiful. It was daunting. And it was terrifying.

Flicking another switch on the dashboard, the Nomad initiated collapse of the solar panels. He peered out the canopy at the mirror-like cells, the panels glimmering with reflected starlight as they began to smoothly contract and fold inwards. Within moments, the photovoltaic modules had fully retracted, concealed now within the wings of the Fighter. The Nomad turned his attention to the main interface of the instrument panel, booting up the core systems. A momentary lag in the worn circuitry delayed the powering up, but within a few seconds, the cockpit lit up with a cacophony of readouts. Sifting through the flight computer with lazy swipes of his hand, the Nomad navigated to the system scanners, initiating every option available within the menus.

He sat and watched the displays tick over, an array of instruments and scanners powering up each in turn, beginning to survey the solar system in immense complexity. The scans, as they always did, took hours to run. The Nomad drifted back into sleep for a time, awakening now and then to grimace at the dwindling energy readouts from the Fighter’s power cells. The scans had always been power-intensive, but the power cells were worn, holding only a fraction of the charge that they once had; they were coming to the end of their lifespan, and it had been far too long since the Nomad had been able to replace any of them.

When the scans were finally complete and the last of the scientific instruments had powered down, the Nomad begrudgingly reopened the Fighter’s solar panels to top up on charge. Turning his attention to the results of the scans, he rapidly scrolled over the complex data, sifting with efficient and well-trained acuity through the hundreds of figures and graphs. He was disappointed, such as he always was; in all the time he had lived this way, he had still not yet been able to rid himself of the disease of expectant optimism. The data was congruent with his long-range scans, yet in spite of this, he had hoped that the system would be more promising. But it did not matter. It never did. His situation was still the same, and so was his routine.

The Nomad rapidly tapped a brief sequence of buttons before throwing a series of switches. Carrying out his pre-flight checks, he examined the needles on an array of dials and analysed all the information projecting across the digital holograms. Folding away the solar cells for a second time, he primed the pulsejets and engaged the antimatter fuel tanks. Taking hold of the flightstick, the Nomad deftly rotated the Fighter, the arcjets of the reaction control system firing in a staccato of puffs to swivel the ship around its central axis. The nose of the Fighter pivoted gently, the stars blurring across the outside of the canopy as its pilot adjusted both pitch and yaw.

The glare of a distant class K yellow sun reacted with the photochromic glass of the canopy as it swung into view, polarising it to a dark tint. With a short burn of the arcjets, the Nomad neutralised the Fighter’s spin, stabilising the ship. Gently, he palmed the thruster and the pulsejets engaged. Equal quantities of antimatter and matter flooded the combustion chamber, colliding to annihilate one another in perfect symmetry, producing vast quantities of energy, channelled and expelled through the nozzles of the pulsejets.

The Nomad sank back in his seat as impetus took hold. His weight doubled, then quadrupled, and finally octupled under the intense acceleration. His breathing rasped as his chest collapsed, and his vision faded and darkened, all the while his fingers remained locked around the thrust lever. He held on, bracing against the staggering forces exerting on his body, finally drawing back his arm with dwindling strength, easing off the thruster. The weight gradually lifted from behind his eyes, and air flowed once more into his lungs. The pulsejets disengaged and his body returned to weightlessness. The Fighter glided rapidly, but almost imperceptibly, through the vacuum of space, towards the heart of the solar system.

Hours passed as the Fighter continued to streak a line through the blackness. The Nomad watched numbers tick over on his displays as the astronomical units to his destination slowly dwindled. He powered down the majority of the ship’s systems to conserve power, even going so far as to disengage the autopilot. He sat watching the burning orb of yellow plasma steadily swell, every so often nudging and rotating the joystick to correct his pitch and yaw. Each correction was followed by a short burst from his pulsejets, but the alterations to his flight path were minute; for the most part, the Nomad stared steadily ahead through the tinted glass at an almost indiscernibly changing scene.

The Nomad had come to accept boredom for what it was long ago. Now he welcomed it. Boredom meant familiarity. Familiarity meant routine. Routine meant little complication. The Nomad lived for routine. Routine was all he had, and as monotonous as it had become, it meant he was still alive. Change was the unknown. The unknown was dangerous.

Eventually, a point of light emerged out of the glare of the star’s corona, progressively enlarging to a crescent of reflected starlight. The Nomad adjusted yaw, centring the planet in his tracking as he systematically booted up the various flight systems onboard the Fighter. A last burst from his pulsejets set him on final course as he watched the navigation computer calculate an approach vector for orbital insertion.

A mauve gas giant loomed large ahead. Surrounding the planet, a scattering of small frozen satellites shimmered in the light of the yellow sun. The Nomad pulled back on his joystick and the arcjets swivelled the Fighter back a full one-eighty degrees. He shifted the stick swiftly forward to cancel out the revolution. Now facing away from the rapidly approaching planetary system, the Nomad shoved the thruster, initiating the pulsejets for a hard burn. Antimatter and matter reacted again, the exhausts expelling a white jet of energy that translated directly into force. The Nomad was pressed powerfully backwards into his chair once more. His chest tightened and his vision tunnelled in the immense, prolonged deceleration. When his relative speed fell to within approach parameters, he killed the thrusters and was jolted suddenly back into buoyancy. Deftly pivoting the Fighter back around, the curved horizons of the giant planetary body filled the window of the canopy.

The Nomad rolled the Fighter, dropped pitch, and the planet scudded overhead. Delivering a short series of bursts from the pulsejets, the Nomad lined up for his final approach. A singular last kick of acceleration ensnared him within the gas giant’s powerful gravitational field, perpetually dragging the Fighter over the horizon as it was captured in orbit. As the Nomad was carried around to the sunward-facing hemisphere, he gazed up at the swirling bands of cloud effervescing throughout the soupy atmosphere.

Checking the decay of his orbit, the Nomad powered down nonessential systems and briefly studied the planet’s magnetic field readings. His scanners indicated moderate levels of antimatter captured by the powerful magnetosphere, channelled by the field lines into the gas giant’s inner radiation belt. The Nomad engaged a series of switches and began deployment of the antimatter collection coils. The mechanical groan of hydraulics sounded throughout the cockpit as four magnetically charged coils rose from beneath covered ports in the Fighter’s hull, telescopically extending outwards from the fuselage. The familiar clicking of the electromagnets powering up sounded, and as the coils extended to full length, the noise was replaced by a gentle hum.

The conductors were energy-intensive, taxing the reserves of the power cells, but in this case, the rapid depletion in charge was a price worth paying; as the power cells’ energy levels began to plummet, the needle of the fuel gauge steadily climbed. Antimatter ensnared in the planet’s radiation belt was drawn inwards by the magnetic field of the collection coils, funnelled towards the craft, and fed into the Fighter’s fuel tank as the minuscule ship sailed around the planet in orbit.

As the Fighter steadily refuelled, floating silently across the daylit hemisphere, the Nomad reclined and watched the upper atmosphere of the gas giant drift below him. In a matter of moments, his orbit had carried the Fighter over the terminator, across the thin line of twilight, to the dark side of the planet beyond. In the shadow of night, the tempestuous skies flashed with silent streaks of lightning, momentarily illuminating the gargantuan cyclones of gas. Before long, the eternal freefall of orbit had swung the Fighter back around to the daytime side of the strange world, delivering him thereafter back to night in a perpetual rapid diurnal cycle, all the while, the gas giant slowly revolved on its own axis. After several scores of orbits and a half turn of the planet, a diode above the fuel gauge illuminated; the tanks were full.

The Nomad reverted a half dozen switches and the electromagnets’ low drone subsided to the sound of retracting hydraulics. The collection coils stowed themselves and the port covers locked shut. The Nomad brought up the flight computer interface once again and, one by one, examined the satellites encircling the gas giant. Carefully studying their orbits, rotation, mass, density, and predicted elemental compositions each in turn, he selected what seemed the most prosperous candidate and instructed the flight computer to plot a course to insert the Fighter within the tiny moon’s orbit. The computer clicked and jarred into its calculations before producing a series of potential results. Choosing the flight path that best balanced time and fuel efficiency, the Nomad adjusted the Fighter’s pitch and rotation and initiated a short burn of the pulsejets. The small spurt of acceleration seemed at first to barely alter the Fighter’s orbit, yet as the ship drifted around to the darkened face of the gas giant, the planet was receding from view.

Still hooked within the immense gravity well, the Fighter yielded to the forces manipulating its freefall, rapidly slowing in its drift away from the planet, coming to a brief moment of inertia before the inevitable tug of the gas giant began to draw the tiny ship inwards again. The Fighter accelerated as it plummeted towards the crescent of sunlight on the planet’s far horizon and picked up speed as it slingshotted around to the daytime hemisphere. Hurtling across the mauve sunlit face of the gas world, the Fighter was flung outwards again on the precipice of orbital escape, thrown on its trajectory even further away from the gas giant in a vast sweeping arc. Still beholden, however, to the tug of the colossal gaseous sphere below, the craft slowed again at the peak of its parabola and began to drop for a third and final pass, this time swooping so close to the gas giant that it tore through the thin veil of the thermosphere. The Nomad’s ship juddered as wisps of air ripped across the fuselage, but in seconds, the gas planet was receding again. The Fighter launched outwards, nearly attaining escape velocity altogether as it soared away into a far-flung orbit.

The Nomad gazed ahead as his craft sailed distantly above the gas giant, sighting a mote of light as it emerged faintly from out of the dark. The minuscule glimmer swelled across the canopy, revealing itself to be an aspherical satellite of ice and dust. The irregular-shaped moon tumbled slowly end over end, hanging suspended in distant orbit, swept up by the tidal forces of the behemoth world below. Closing in fast, the Nomad swivelled the ship backwards and fired the pulsejets to decelerate. The Fighter slowed, and with a tilt of the flightstick, the Nomad spun back to face the moon’s scarred and pitted surface.

Craters sat within craters, jagged bluffs and mesas rose vertically out of smooth plains, and canyons carved through the ice and rock, snaking in great fissures across the glinting lunar surface. Each feature spoke of a violent past: an asteroid captured by the inescapable grip of the gas giant’s gravity well, locked now eternally in a cold and distant orbit around its remote adoptive world. A wispy tail of gas and dust trailed behind the moon’s orbit, shed from the satellite, as each time it emerged from the shadow of its celestial parent, its surface heated and sublimated under sun exposure. The Fighter drifted into the shimmering tail and a gentle crackling sounded throughout the cockpit, millions of microscopic flecks of dust and ice clattering against the glass of the canopy.

The crackling faded, the Fighter drifting out the far side of the tail to the outer circumference of the moon’s orbit. As he drew closer to the tumbling ice ball, the Nomad glimpsed down at the silvery surface. A speck of shadow swept rapidly over the hills and valleys below, growing ever larger as the Fighter descended towards the ground. Inverting the ship upside down, the Nomad lifted up on the joystick, firing all the arcjets on the underside of the craft. The gentle nudge of thrust propelled the Fighter downwards and the ship began to slowly decrease in altitude, approaching the moon’s surface.

Pivoting the Fighter back upright, the Nomad made several adjustments to the controls, orienting the craft for the impending touchdown. Drawing a stiff lever downward, he listened to the whirr of hydraulics as the Fighter’s landing gear deployed from the undercarriage. Cautiously tweaking the flightstick, his other hand firmly clasping the thruster, the Nomad deftly guided the Fighter lower. The ship hung aloft, remaining suspended by intermittent bursts from the arcjets as the Nomad scoured the landscape below from his cockpit in search of a suitable landing zone.

Finally, the Nomad steered the Fighter down toward a smooth crater basin. A long, gentle burn slowed the craft as it eased down into a plume of dust. The landing skids contacted the silver regolith, and the dampeners softened the touchdown.

The Nomad powered down the reaction control system and arcjets, and as the dust settled, he took a long moment to gaze about the alien landscape surrounding him. The black star-speckled sky cut a stark line of contrast across the horizon, rising against the white shimmering terrain below. Potholes and boulders seen from above now took form in their true scales, standing as vast ravines and sheer mountains carved from the barren lunar surface. As the minute moon continued to tumble in its orbit, the gargantuan orb of the mauve gas giant emerged steadily over the onward horizon, rising upwards from behind the rim of the crater.

The Nomad reached beneath his legs and pulled his helmet from under the seat. Placing it over his head, he locked it into his collar bearing, sealing his extravehicular activity suit. He toggled a button on the helmet and a gold-coated solar visor slid down across his face. Checking his EVA suit’s power supplies, the Nomad powered on the rig, watching as the internal heads-up display projected onto the inner visor. Turning his attention to the control panel before him, the Nomad rotated a safety valve and depressed a series of buttons, initiating decompression of the cockpit.

A claxon buzzed throughout the cockpit, swiftly accompanied by the loud hissing of evacuating air, but as the pressure dropped, the tumult diminished to the eerie quietude of a vacuum, until all the Nomad could hear was his own rasping breath inside the confines of his helmet. The Nomad lifted a final handle on the control panel and the Fighter’s canopy rose smoothly and silently, retracting from the cockpit, exposing the Nomad to the raw emptiness of space. Unclipping the harness across his chest, the Nomad climbed cautiously out of his seat and stood. Taking several moments to familiarise himself with his weight in the microgravity environment, he kicked off from the floor of his cockpit, rising upwards in a controlled but high-soaring bound. The red and white battle-scarred Fighter receded beneath him as he sailed along the upward arc of his trajectory, before finally, several metres above the cockpit, the weak tug of the moon began his leisurely fall. His boots connected with the silver regolith and a cloud of dirt kicked up around him as he landed gently beside his Fighter. Waiting a prolonged moment for the dust to finally settle, the Nomad strode a bobbing circumference around his ship as he visually inspected the fuselage.

The half dozen laser burns were continuing to fade from radiation exposure, along with the Fighter’s colouration itself. The nose of the Fighter was looking worse than ever, stripped of all its paint by millions of micrometeorite impacts. The warped front skid of his landing gear was still going strong; so long as he was careful, the damage shouldn’t get any worse. The recent weld on the starboard wing was holding up well, and ducking beneath the undercarriage, the Nomad examined the array of scientific equipment and scanners he had outfitted to the Fighter. All were still in good operational condition and remained firmly attached to the hull by their makeshift housing and brackets.

Finally, the Nomad turned his attention to the antimatter tank expansion and its accompanying shielding jury-rigged to the aft end of the undercarriage. Several new dimples, no doubt micrometeorite collisions, had appeared since the last inspection, yet overall, the plating and electromagnetic shielding coils were still serviceably protecting the canisters from the perils of spaceflight. Irrespective, the integrity of the tank expansion did little to reassure the Nomad. He wasn’t happy with the modification; he never had been. Even after all this time with no incident, he felt little reassurance by the simple fact that they had held out to date.

Expanding the volume of the antimatter tanks beyond the outer hull, outside of the ship’s armoured fuselage and electromagnetic shielding field, was an act of insanity. It was an accident waiting to happen. One that would inevitably spell disaster, if not instant and utter oblivion. But the Nomad had had no choice; or so he had convinced himself. It was the only conceivable way of effectively extending the ship’s range. Without doing so, he would have died of old age long before he ever reached his destination. Even still, and even with all of the precautions he had taken to safeguard the tanks, the Nomad felt uneasy whenever he thought about them.

The tanks housed the most volatile and destructive substance in the universe, annihilating regular matter instantly on contact. The resulting reaction was the direct conversion of mass into energy at an exponential rate. The products: high-energy gamma rays and a stream of exotic particles. When controlled and directed, they provided the immense thrust necessary for the near-relativistic speeds achieved in spaceflight. When uncontrolled but still directed, the reaction produced devastating weapons of war. If both uncontrolled and undirected, the end result was only ever disaster. Even so much as a microscopic rupture in the antimatter tanks would see both the Nomad, the Fighter, and anything else within a suitably vast radius, utterly and entirely annihilated. This simple truth haunted the Nomad. He had fought so long and so hard for his continued existence; the notion of that existence balancing so precariously on the integrity of a few millimetres of alloy seemed like a cruel, vindictive mockery. But, as the Nomad reminded himself: he had had no choice.

Can’t wait for Chapter 2? I’ll be back on Thursday. If you’re enjoying the journey, consider sharing this with a fellow Sci-Fi fan.

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Author Notes

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road served as something of an inspiration for Flight Through Infinity. In The Road, the Man and the Boy are two nameless protagonists on a journey across a post-apocalyptic world. At no point does the novel explain where they are going or what happened to the world. Flight Through Infinity is very much the same; the Nomad is on an endless journey in an empty universe. In tribute to The Road, the Nomad remains a nameless protagonist.

As is no doubt apparent from this introductory chapter, I wanted Flight Through Infinity to lean hard into the hard aspects of Science Fiction. I wanted to ground the story in the gritty realism of space flight; the Fighter, for all its advanced technology, is a ship I feel could exist in the not-too-distant future. Yes, it uses antimatter as a fuel source to allow the Nomad to cover vast distances at relativistic speeds, but when manoeuvring, it utilises the same technology as present-day spaceships.

For all its technological prowess, the Fighter is limited by very real factors. It needs refuelling, it needs recharging, and it needs constant maintenance and repairs. And whilst the Nomad can traverse the breadth of a solar system in a matter of hours, he is still beholden to the laws of physics; he cannot simply point the Fighter at his intended target and hit the afterburners. Momentum and gravity dictate how the Nomad must travel, forcing him to rely on complex manoeuvres, such as planetary slingshots and deorbital burns.

I tried to bring this realism to every aspect of the novel, researching both existing technologies and theoretical ones to help ground what would be an otherwise fantastical tale.

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