ON RAILS OF GOLDEN FIRE
I am not alone.
Countless lives have I lived and yet I am still young and foolish. There is no end to that which I think I know, but do not. I travel the great vastness as I please, believing myself free, the master of my own destiny. I have roamed far and wide. I have mined ice in the Vale of the Silent, threaded my way through the anarchic madness outside stations in Rens. I am welcomed in a dozen systems and reviled in a dozen more. I’ve died in a blaze of fire, gasped my last into the frozen void. I have been reborn over and over again, coughing pink-fluid from my lungs and burst gasping from the clone vat. I stare now at a wall littered with certificates and commendations, medals and looted trinkets. I feel like tearing it all down and jettisoning it with the rest of my waste. I know nothing. I am not alone.
You remember the names of some, no matter if you have no connection to them. There’s the three that everyone knows: Gagarin, 1961; Armstrong, 1969; Chen, 2044. Space, the moon, Mars. Three men who helped us learn to walk. But then we started to run and after that, the names seemed less important. Many live on: Jean-Baptiste Jeunet, Oshoki Jaratino, VeXx MoHawK. But great achievers though those men were, they weren’t the first three. And they weren’t the other three either. Three more brave men, to whom no statue is erected. Though they were times of great endeavour, there was a great deal of sacrifice. We remember them also. Anthony Chindarkar, 2048, the first man to die in space; Allen Strickland, 2501, the first man to die off-world. And Sato Ichikhan who, in 23255, did not die.
Until today, I alone had not believed my ancestor worthy of inclusion on such a list. I knew the stories of course, we all did. My father still owns the real vid shot, not the copy used on the newsfeeds, of young Sato waving cheerfully as he climbed into the cockpit. He was Duvolle Labs’ best test pilot and our family were immensely proud of him. At the time, he had been working on upgrades to Duvolle’s most recent creation, the Tanaris. The R&D team believed they had come up with a way to coax a little more speed out of their new Interceptor. They fitted the vessel with a pair of experimental MWDs (micro-microwarpdrives, if you will), miniaturised to a level that, if successful, would revolutionise space travel all over again. Sato Ichikhan would pilot the vessel on a short flight around the Caille System, and the white coats at Duvolle would take plenty of readings.
No one knows what really happened. Oh, the plot to sabotage the experiment was uncovered in the end and traced back to an Amarr Corporation. It was their agent, posing as a Duvolle lab technician, who inadvertently caused the feedback loop back at the station. He had hidden his monitoring equipment carefully enough, but the miniscule amount of power he leeched to power the bug was sadly just enough to cause a system failure in the main sensors. Some safeguards kicked in; others did not, and the scientists could only watch in horror as the feedback grew exponentially and caused the MWDs to kick in before the ship was ready.
Sato did not die. Perhaps that is the most tragic thing of all. There is no word for what happened to him. Some say he ‘phased’. Others, that he ‘half-warped’. I have watched the feed many times, several times this very day. Even at the highest resolution, the slowest speed, it is not clear. The Tanaris hangs, engines glowing as they power up. Then there is an explosion. The ship bucks, a shockwave rippling through the vessel’s structure, before being engulfed in bright white light. Then it is away, burning twin trails of argent fire. The camera struggles to follow as the Interceptor streaks like a bolt toward the moon. There is a burst of static, the CEO herself cuts across the mic, asking Sato if he can hear her. There is no reply as the vessel continues to pick up speed. There are no accurate readings any more; Sato has surpassed their sensors’ maximum capacity, his velocity off their scales within fractions of a second. Then he hits the moon. There is a cry of alarm from Duvolle and the world holds its breath, waiting to see the tiny flash of impact. But there is none. The Tanaris passes through. Sensors on the moon’s surface detect no landing. Capsuleers on other side of the system report seeing an unidentifiable ship travelling at impossible speed. There is confusion, the camera spins and zooms, out of focus. The Duvolle scientists scramble to get a fix, but he is too fast for them. Sato is gone.
The first sighting took place twenty years later. A Caldari survey fleet traced the path of what they thought to be a comet before their viewscreens displayed the fuzzy image of an insubstantial Gallentean vessel. People say that they have looked out their windows during a jump to see a ghostly ship flying alongside. The barely distinguishable pilot waves at them in greeting before speeding away. Those that drift about the edges of space see him most regularly. They say he appears to lost ships, who follow the trails of his warp drives to safety. More than once a pilot has attributed a narrow escape from a pirate trap to the sudden appearance of a fast ship nearby. ‘Ghost Rider’, they called him. Of course.
I did not believe this any more than I believed half the nonsense said about my great-uncle. One of the chief reasons I have drifted apart from my family is because their mindless superstition and their deification of Sato’s memory. He’ll appear when you need him, they told me, he comes to us all eventually. What nonsense. I rejected this along with all the other rubbish. I believed that Sato had not passed through the moon. I believed his vessel had burnt up long before it had gotten that far. I believed that my great-uncle had been atomised along with the rest of his vessel moments after the accident. The camera was unable to catch it, and the confusion back at the station rendered all the data unuseable. It was a tragedy, nothing more. The rest was a lie, perpetuated by my parasitic relatives, and for those who had spent too long alone, staring out at the stars. I knew it all and of course, I knew nothing.
I had taken on a contract for the military. A rogue drone installation, nothing serious. I hung in space nearby in my Thorax, bored almost to tears as my drones decimated their infected cousins. Then my console began to chime unexpectedly. I fired the engines and started to lock the target. I had no enemies in this system and the salvage I could hope to expect from this mission was paltry compared to the wealth of loot hidden in the null-sec systems nearby. Still, an opportunistic pirate might make quick work of my Cruiser. The targeting computer was struggling to lock and I cursed its slowness, scrolling around the viewscreen to identify this troublesome intruder. And there he was.
I was not travelling fast. I glanced in disbelief at my readout as I gaped at the screen, and I was pushing 300m/s. The vessel next to me certainly looked as if it was moving faster than I was. The prototype MWDs blazed with fire, spitting sparks and gouting energy as they shook the whole ship. The Interceptor rattled and blurred as if travelling at immense speeds, yet it kept pace with me exactly. Scrambling from my chair, I jumped to the starboard porthole. The Tanaris was there and yet not there. I could see stars through it. And there, hunched in his cockpit, my great-uncle Sato.
He did not wave cheerfully at me like the stories say. He looked just the same as he had in that ancient newsfeed. He wore a frown of concentration. His mouth was curved into a rictus of determination, teeth clamped together, tendons straining in his neck. He turned and shouted something. Of course, I could not hear. I just saw his mouth moving, screaming some desperate message that I could not, would never, hear. I banged my fist against the hull in frustration, calling his name but he did not turn back. The sparks of light around him flared brightly and then he was gone, streaking away on rails of golden fire.
So here I stand, amid the ruins and ashes of everything I thought to be true. What need do we immortals have for gods and destiny? We are gods, the concept of destiny has become irrelevant. And yet I have questions. What fate has befallen my uncle? It seems he is trapped in a moment, out of time, doomed to forever fly the universe, struggling for control. And yet he has appeared to me, just as my family said he would. I believed them liars and charlatans. Is this the hour of my greatest need? I had not thought so. Yet I find myself lost. I find I have a strong need to contact my brothers, my father. And if Sato has come to me to set me on the right path, then what hand guides his path?
It seems I have found something to believe in. Or rather, it has found me. Other than that, I know nothing. But my ignorance has already been well established. But something has changed. I now know that no matter where I hide in this great emptiness, I am not alone.
