I was getting a little bit anxious about what we might find in the Trade Centre. Currently, my interactions have been pleasant or being attacked, but I’m guessing this would get a lot more varied as I continue to meet more aliens.
What was also causing my anxiety to go up is the state of this ship.
I had been a bit too wrung out to truly dive into this, but well—we are quite fucked. The biggest problem is the radiation shield.
Turns out it’s incredibly useful, not just to keep out cosmic radiation when you're outside a solar system—and of course, staying too long inside the solar system would start to affect us as well—but it seems it’s incredibly useful to protect against laser weaponry that's meant to kill anything biological inside a ship.
Without it, we would have certainly died from the laser fire those four pirate ships were attacking us with.
Then of course there was the armor damage. That shouldn’t be hard to fix, but it would take time to manufacture armor, and that would be even worse than I had before. Perhaps the best solution would be to buy armor plating and then just cut it and patch the holes.
Then we come to the engines. The left one is destroyed and would need a full rebuild. The right one is still functioning, but I don’t trust it to last for much longer.
The main engine is in working order, but I’m seeing efficiency loss over time that’s starting to be noticeable. Honestly, I’m surprised it has lasted this long. There was a need to touch it up sooner rather than later.
Another goal is to try to upgrade the ship so it would be more flyable, so I could make a long trip to a place where I could rebuild this ship into something that could fight and survive this galaxy.
Of course, I need to find ways to make money, and I also need to get rid of a lot of my materials and change them for more expensive ones to make room, as I was most likely going to have to buy some more things that were going to take up more space.
I heard the computer beeping, so it was time for another manoeuvre. The thing was that changing your direction was incredibly hard in space. Basically, you needed to burn quite a bit of fuel if you wanted to change direction—you couldn’t just turn left and then be heading toward that location.
There is, however, one exception, and that’s this side dimension.
Here, you could turn more like you were inside water, and then when you reappeared in the normal dimension, you would be moving at the speed you were originally but in a different direction, which was incredibly useful.
So right now, we were basically trying to get to the highway that would allow us to be in the correct heading and location to start the decelerator, as we needed to completely kill our speed to be able to dock at the Trade Centre.
Like this, hours went by until it was finally time. I reduced the thrust, the FTL bubble destabilised, and we were back in real space.
Immediately, the ship started to collect data from outside, and the screens in front of me started to populate. We were in the right location, but this solar system was huge.
The area around me was continually updated, and there were a lot of ships pretty close to us and even further away, as we continued to get a better idea of the situation out there.
The communication computer already had a flight path, which surprised me. They must have dedicated space stations just to handle traffic near this landing zone. Lola highlighted the space station we were currently in communication with. It wasn’t too far away.
Soon we started to get data on the overall system.
We already had what we wanted to communicate on the communication computer, so they knew that I wanted to dock in the Trade Centre, needed to do repairs and that we would be fixing our radiation problem before we reached the Trade Centre.
To comply with the last point, I tasked a lot of nano machines that were in the front airlock to go and start absorbing all the radiation from the ship’s armor so it would be safe for people to be near it.
On the screens in front of me appeared what I would call a runway. It was coloured differently depending on the sections you were on, and there were multiple different coloured one’s side by side. Apparently, depending on how many G's of thrust you were using to decelerate, you needed to use different runways.
There were also acceleration runways for when you were leaving the trade hub. When we got the confirmation, we moved just a little bit to our given path, but it will take some time before we would start to burn. It would take us close to five days to burn off all the speed we currently had, and we would be travelling approximately 5.3 billion kilometres.
This runway was incredibly long, but there were longer ones—and even ones for 2.5G deceleration that were above ten billion kilometres long—and all of them ended near the trade hub.
This solar system had five stars, and I kind of wanted to see them with my own eyes.
“What are you doing?” Lola asked me as I was navigating the controllers to open up the armour shielding off the windows.
“I just want to see it with my eyes.”
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Slowly, the armour shielding in front of the windows descended, and multiple different sources of light were dominant in the sky. There were supposed to be five stars, all of them making up a huge solar system, but two of them were twin stars. I could kind of distinguish between one of the pairs, but the other one just looked like one star.
When I looked at the solar system display, it seems that currently one of the twin stars was orbiting in a way that one was behind the other from our current vantage point. Once again, we couldn't really use our sensors to their fullest, but visually seeing something—well, no one could detect you doing that.
Unfortunately, we couldn’t enjoy the view for too much longer, as we were soon reaching our point where we needed to turn around and start to burn so we could actually dock with the space station. Lola was doing her best to gather as much visual data as possible so she could process it later.
The Trade Centre seemed to be between all the stars, and from the orbit and the mass of the celestial objects like the stars, it was in the lagrange point between the five stars.
Those were the locations where gravity cancelled out, and anything there would just stay there—like satellites or a huge space station—so they wouldn't have to worry about trying to expand thrust to keep it in the same location.
We now had to flip and start our long burn. But before we did, I saw something strange, like a long laser moving from one point of the solar system to another.
“Lola, did you catch that? Was that some sort of weapon?”
“Unknown. Will take some time to get a better picture of what's happening.”
“Well, it isn’t like we could do anything against that. I bet whatever that was would vaporize us instantly. Can you, however, get a better picture of some of the ships around us? I would like to see what kind of other designs there is out there.”
“Acknowledged.”
Lola started displaying video clips of the ships that were close enough for us to get a good visual. All of them, as I suspected, were at least a little bit aerodynamic, but the designs varied quite a lot. Some were more artistic than others.
Then, Lola displayed a video of a ship that surprised me.
It was one of the ships that was quite close to us, but was accelerating instead of decelerating. The thing was it had some unknown solar sails.
“Lola, is that what I think it is?”
“I do not know what you think it is, although they don't seem to be working the way solar sails are supposed to be working.”
We didn’t have exact measurements of the ship—it was hard to tell that just from visual alone without any reference—but it seemed to be some sort of cargo holder, and it kinda looked big. The solar sails were incredibly long, extending from both sides supported by what I would call masts.
It was like it was capturing starlight, as one side of the sail was a blue color from the sun that was on that side, and the other side more of a yellow color because of the sunlight that was coming off that sun. That was all being channeled toward the ship through the sails, and the main drive engine obviously wasn’t expelling some type of fuel—it was definitely expelling sunlight to get the thrust needed.
“Lola, can you get the speed? How fast are they moving?”
“I can’t get their exact speed, but they’re in the 2.5 G acceleration runway.”
Yeah, I wouldn’t expect that to be a way you could accelerate fast.
“They must have a way to store photons, otherwise they wouldn't be able to enter FTL. There's no sunlight there.”
“I concur. Do I continue showing you different ships?”
“For the moment, no.” I didn’t want to do anything else but look at this ship. It was like something out of fantasy. How did that technology work?
When I looked at the overview screen, there were already 1,000 ships displayed there, and we currently only had that level of sensor data of a small portion of this runway. How big was this Trade Centre?
It took us a long while to decelerate, but basically, all I did was switch between different types of ships Lola had been able to get on video.
We were now getting quite close to the Trade Centre. We were now parallel to some of the runways for ships that were using a lot more G to accelerate or decelerate.
The large majority still used what I would call standard drive engines. They were using energy to accelerate some sort of reaction mass, but there were a few more of the solar sail kind we saw. All of them seemed to be larger ships for cargo transport.
Lola had displayed another ship, and it looked quite ordinary except that there was no drive torch to indicate what drive engines they were using.
“That’s curious.”
Lola started displaying more stats about the ship that we knew. It was in the 40G runway. So how was it accelerating?
We were lucky that it moved past us, and I was able to see the back of it. I was on my feet, pushing forward to stay upright and to get closer to the screen.
That looked like a rotating ribbon propeller.
“What, Lola, what’s that?”
“Unknown.”
“Yeah... that goes into the top of the ‘how does that tech work’ list.”
“Yes, that looks incredibly interesting.”
Wow, Lola was also excited about that. They didn’t seem to be expelling any reaction mass, so what’s that propeller actually pushing them forward with? Somehow it must be, as there didn’t seem to be anything else that would indicate a way to accelerate that ship.
It took about 7 more hours when Lola displayed another ship that once again made me question reality. The ship itself looked like a stingray without the stinger, but the wings of the ship—the edges of them—moved like waves, like some sort of sea creature. Was it called something like undulating fins?
This one did have more traditional drive engines, but they were not active right now.
“That looks so cool!”
“Agreed.”
Time continued to go by, and I was getting more anxious as I now wanted to see what that Trade Centre looked like, but we would need to wait until we could turn around, which wouldn’t take too much longer.
“I think I figured out what those lights that looked like laser attacks are.”
“Nice. Explain it, please?”
“Every sun has some sort of megastructure on top of it. It looks to be collecting energy. That energy is then transferred to relays using lasers. I suspect that relay stores that energy and then produces another laser that transfers the energy further towards the needed location.”
“Wait—are you serious? There is something you would classify as megastructures?”
“Yes. They are incredibly large, and I do not understand how they have got the metal to just build the collectors near the sun, let alone the thousands of relays I have been able to detect.”
“Can you display them?”
Lola then changed the main view screen to show a larger overview of the solar system and then zoomed in on one of the suns that had, on top of it, a huge structure. It must have easily been 100 kilometers tall, and the arms of it extended perhaps 1000 kilometers to form a sort of cup at the top of the sun.
“My God, that’s so big. At least the arms that extend so long seem to be quite tiny in diameter. I guess they’re using those like masts, because I bet you there are solar sails between those arms.”
“Yes, your conclusion is most likely the correct one. They're using that to generate power that they can then send all over the solar system, and from the looks of it, some of it is moved towards the Trade Centre.”
“How long have they been building all of this? But I’m starting to understand why this is called a Trade Centre. There are tens of thousands of ships just on this runway cluster—and this is one of three main runway clusters.”
“I do not know. We do not have access to their version of the World Wide Web—not until we have docked and paid. And even then, I suspect we would have to pay to get any proper information.”
It took a bit longer, but eventually we were able to turn around and stop decelerating. We would need to decelerate one more time, but that was only for a short while.
We could now see the Trade Centre, and I could even make it out with my eyes. Lola started displaying the dimensions, and—oh my God, was it large.
“Yeah, I would classify that as a megastructure.”
“Agreed.”
The station had a round design, with the main structure having a 10-kilometre radius. It was incredibly large. It had arms coming off the main structure that were hundreds of kilometres long and also quite wide to accommodate the different ship sizes. There were also levels to the main station—each one seemed to be 100 metres tall, and there were 104 levels.
To the side of the space station there also seemed to be currently an extension to one of the arms being built, and from the looks of it, over time they had added to the bottom of the space station, adding more levels.
It made sense that a megastructure like this would always be expanded, but how were they getting so much material? All of that looked like it was made out of metal, and there were armor platings protecting the entire thing, with a lot of weaponry.
Then, Lola displayed a ship that was currently offloading and loading cargo. It was wedge-shaped and quite flat, but it was 3 kilometers long and 5 kilometers wide.
“Now that’s a proper freighter. Its size would put it well into the large category.”
It was honestly hard for me to understand what was going on—this was all so overwhelming. Never had I expected something like this.
And then I was almost blinded by a huge laser that hit the large protrusion from the center of the space station, which was at least 50 kilometers above the main station. It seemed to crackle with energy. That was obviously the lasers from the relays powering this monstrosity.
How many people were living there?
