The Travel of the Delta

Vlad woke up in his tank and panicked for a few seconds. The feeling of drowning faded away when he realized where he was. Being in stasis means no dreams. You just remember getting in the tank and the next thing you feel is waking up with liquid in your lungs.

Vlad tried a few meditation practices he picked up over the years to calm his heart beat and let the machines pump the perfluorohexane out of his lungs.

A knock on the glass of his tank ripped him out of his meditation. It was Jane, obviously. Vlad didn't know how Jane always managed to be this quickly out of the tanks. Some genetic alteration probably, but she would never admit to it, coming from the Holy City of the Lord, a highly religious and purist colony around the Gliese 682 star, called Light of the Lord by the locals.

He gave her a short wave and she disappeared to bother the rest of the crew.

Half an hour later, Vlad was out of the tank and out of a shower as well. He noticed some slight lag on his right arm, probably a miscalibration of the servos. The damn liquid never did good with his outdated cybernetics. He would need to ask Wololo to take a look later, once he was done with the post-stasis engine checkups.

Wololo was the unusual name for the even more unusual chief engineer of The Delta, the interstellar spacecraft which Vlad called his home for the past three decades. Wololo joined them two visits ago because the local government decided that after a hundred years of peaceful co-existence it was time for a purge of all diabolical beings like uplifts or bioroids. Wololo is an uplifted octopus, at least that is what Vlad remembers the name of his species to be.

The creature looks like a giant head with eight or so arms, each one holding another type of tool or gadget. Vlad was told that these creatures once lived in the deep oceans of Earth, but he never visited and up until meeting Wololo only heard ever increasingly dramatic stories of them eating entire ships when you least expected it. Wololo is quite large, but definitely not ship-eating large. He is incredibly handy with machines and computers, though, which made the vote to bring him on board very easy.

"We are approaching Vega, all hands in the CC!" announced the voice of their captain through the internal communications system.

Vlad put on his clothes and ran down the hall to the elevator. A few seconds later he was joined by Jane and together they reached the Control Center of The Delta.

"What do we have?", asked Jane while sitting down at her terminal.

"Doesn't look good.", said Boris, the chief gunner, "I see seventeen missiles approaching our vector. Looks like they sent them off two years ago. No idea why the sensors haven't picked them up earlier."

"Why would they do that?", asked Vlad, "Didn't they ask for trade the last time a Spacer crew visited?"

"That was over forty years ago", answered Jane and they all knew what it meant. Spacers brought trade, but Spacers were also strange and literally out of this world. Some people feared or even hated them, even if most Spacers are just traders or explorers meaning no harm to anyone. But if an entire generation can pass without ever seeing one, the fears might become bigger and bigger. Spacers come in giant spacecraft with enough energy to destroy entire planets if they wanted to (not that anybody would want that). Add some superstition into the mix and you got a nice cocktail of bigotry and hate. And a first strike as it seems.

"Can we just accelerate again and shoot past?", asked Boris.

"We barely have enough fuel to decelerate properly, speeding up again just means we won't have enough fuel to stop at all.", said Jane.

"What if we just continue on the current trajectory. Make a few slight adjustments so we just cross the outer system and target the next closest colony and use our current velocity to bring us there?"

"That would mean that we might be stuck for a few decades if not centuries before reaching another system."

For a few moments the only noise was the one from the proximity alert of the incoming missiles. They had always operated on a few year's worth of time jumps, maximum a few decades. But not centuries. Centuries mean being completely disconnected from your past, centuries mean entire civilizations rise and fall while you are in the tank. Centuries mean not seeing anyone that you knew alive anymore.

"We take it to a vote", said the captain, "Who is in favor of continuing on our current velocity and trying our luck? Alternative is to shoot down those missiles, risk a war we don't want or worse. But we could fuel up and accelerate properly if we survive."

It was no easy vote this time. Some people had friends or family they had hoped to see again. But in the end it was unanimous. Everyone knew the risks when they joined the crew. Everyone knew they will be outcasts not only from society but also from time.

Vlad wondered if cybernetics would advance enough to give him a more resistent arm wherever they might end up. He took off his clothes and climbed back into the tank. And while the liquid slowly filled the bottom, he felt the panic rise again in his throat.