Chapter 3, The Sink Hole
The Pious Lament exists in real space where a moment earlier it hadn’t. To an outside observer it is a very unremarkable thing, one extra tiny dot amongst millions of others, all of which count as nothing beside the grandeur of the sink hole. On board the transition is marked by a sudden release of the tension that had been building slowly, and mostly unnoticed over almost a month of warp travel. Across the ship a hundred thousand pairs of shoulders drop and relax as their owner’s sigh and smile.
On the bridge the huge, circular display viewer hangs before the command station as the armoured panels still cover the windows, on it the presence of the Sink Hole dominates everything, only part of the arc can be seen from this angle, and that covers more than half of the screen even though the phenomena is several hundred light years away. It appears as if blue and purple gasses are condensing out of space and moving slowly towards the hole in the centre, getting denser, brighter and faster as they seem to roll through to the space beyond. One of the odder things about the Sink Hole is that it always appears as a circle, no matter what direction it is viewed from. Another oddity is that the stars seen through it do not match the stars seen by looking around it, several ships have been through to explore these stars but none had ever returned.
Dominating the floor of the bridge is the great hemisphere of the three-dimensional tactical display, currently showing things at a much-reduced scale. The Sink Hole is still the most prominent thing there, though the mechanisms are having difficulty displaying it’s unique qualities and it appears there to be the size and shape of a donut, made of bruises, near the edge off the port side. The Pious Lament is usually represented in the centre of this display, a tiny dot of light at this scale, identified by it’s floating label. As more data comes in other objects begin to appear, the star ahead, labelled simply as GIL 17/4, this is the destination and as it appears on the screen the nixie display above the mechanicus balcony lights up with it’s red neon glow, four days, seven hours, twenty two minuets and sixteen . . . fifteen . . . fourteen seconds. Next to it are a series of planets and satellites, most identified by serial numbers but one as 'Gelron?'. The Empire’s Glory comes into view, several hours off the starboard bow, and off the beam on the same side, two more contacts pop into existence, these closer, perhaps two hours away and marked as ‘unidentified’, all of these three contacts immediately start closing in on the Pious Lament.
Feel free to choose your own location and activity when coming out of warp, you may post about it here, or in the PMs as you see fit.
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