2953-02-19 – Tales from the Service: The Dreaming Gap
The supply line for Seventh Fleet is dependent on a tenuous link: the relatively small group of haulers that move cargo across the Gap from Maribel to Sagittarius Gate.
Obviously many things are now being made here in Sagittarius Gate from locally sourced materials, but spacers, troops, and well more than half of all military goods still need to be moved here from the Orion arm (and most of that comes from depots in the Core Worlds). As we have discussed here before, the Gap crossing is dangerous; there are no ports of call one can limp to on a faulty drive. Keeping to a directed course when no local stars provide easy fixes for navigation between jumps is incredibly challenging, and a search for a missing ship that did not keep exactly to its directed course is all but impossible.
To date, three large cargo ships have gone missing on the Gap run, and their entire compliment of spacers – 138 – are presumed dead. The causes of these losses remain unknown, but equipment failure the crews could not repair with onboard materials seems the most likely culprit.
Despite the unlikeliness of rescue missions, the Confederated Navy does maintain a search and patrol squadron for the Gap crossing, namely Force 57. Currently commanded by Admiral Erasmus Gray from the old but reliable cruiser Beringean, this squadron is in at least as much danger as the core elements of either of the engaged battle fleets, despite the fact that it has not, at least to my knowledge, ever fired a shot in anger.
Most of the vessels in Force 57 are older vessels with a reputation for reliability and have had some of their armaments removed and replaced with additional redundancy in their life support and drive systems.
A spacer aboard one of these vessels, the frigate Vashti Mandel, sent us this account of the toll this duty takes on spacers. I see no reason to doubt its accuracy.
Jerrard MacNeil slipped out of his bunk and dressed in the darkness, making as little noise as possible. It hardly mattered; the occupant of the top bunk was Dane Caroll, a rather heavy sleeper. Jerrard could have drop-kicked his duty boots across their shared cabin and Caroll would be unaffected.
As soon as he had buckled his duty belt and turned on his datapack, Jerrard slipped out into the corridor and headed aft, not quite sure where he was going. Mandel was not a particularly large ship, so he considered simply climb one of the accessways, walk across an upper deck, and then head back down to the crew quarters. That would give his thoughts time to settle, and maybe when he got back he could sleep.
It being the middle of third shift, the ship’s corridors were almost deserted. Though it was a warship in wartime, Mandel didn’t maintain a full round-the-clock crew compliment; shaving down the number of spacers aboard meant that the ship’s supplies lasted longer. Out in the Gap, range and time between resupplies were far more important than combat readiness time.
The slimmed-down crew was also why Jerrard only had one room-mate. Theoretically, a wartime crew for Mandel would be housed four to a cabin. His cousin was aboard a destroyer attached to one of the Fifth Fleet battlewagons, and probably did have to share a living space with three other spacers. Jerrard shuddered at the idea. Service on such a little ship was claustrophobic enough.
Sleep had all but eluded Jerrard for the past three shipboard days and nights. When he did sleep, his rest was plagued with strange nightmares, visions of sinuous monsters slithering through the void, coiling around the ship, or around him personally, and tightening their grip. Jerrard had heard of spacers letting the all-but-starless void of the Gap get to them, but he’d barely glanced out any of the viewports since they’d left Miskarney three weeks ago. Merely knowing the Gap was out there, that the ship was drifting in the purest void known to human exploration, seemed sufficient to activate his imagination, and his duties aboard ship, apparently, weren’t keeping his mind off it enough.
In one sense, Jerrard knew that the Gap was the most predictable place one could operate a spaceship. There was nothing there to encounter, not even clouds microscopic dust that could etch the hull – as long as Mandel didn’t break down or run out of supplies, the patrol would be as uneventful as the last three.
In another sense, Jerrard also knew that the Gap had an eerie reputation for swallowing ships whole. A third large hauler had disappeared a few weeks back, and the number of smaller vessels lost on the crossing had surpassed one hundred some time the previous year. In his own experience, equipment seemed more likely to break on Gap runs than anywhere else, and when things did break out in the Gap, they tended to break more catastrophically. Jerrard could imagine no rational reason for this to be, but he’d heard other gap crews tell of similar experiences.
Perhaps it was time to go down to the ship’s pharmacy and requisition sleeping pills. Jerrard considered this as he climbed two decks up the aft accessway. He couldn’t simply tough out the insomnia forever, not without it affecting his work. He spent eight hours a day in engineering, and even though the gravitic drive on which he worked was unlikely to see much hard use, he would be punished if he slipped up from fatigue and damaged the system.
On deck two, Jerrard exited the accessway and nearly ran into a pair of technicians who’d who had pulled up one of the deck panels and were tinkering with some system exposed beneath. The pair barely glanced up at him, but that slight glance showed him deeply shadowed, red-rimmed eyes that probably mirrored his own. Jerrard sidled past them as they returned their attention to their work and continued down the corridor, past the gunnery stations, the empty compartments where additional gunnery stations had once been installed, the shear-screen control station, and a few other combat duty compartments. Most of the doors on deck two were kept closed at all times, which was why he’d picked this level for his idle walking, but now he wished they were open, so he could see if everyone on duty in the middle of the shipboard night was as fatigue-bleary as he and those technicians. Idly, he wondered if everyone aboard was suffering from low-level insomnia as he was. Perhaps it was just a consequence of working out in the Gap, that one’s mind became oppressed.
Jerrard shook off this thought as he reached the forward accessway and began to descend. Surely that was nonsense. More likely, to most everyone aboard, the Gap patrols were a safe but dull duty, doing their unglamorous part for the war effort. After all, the oppression was all in his head, wasn’t it? The nightmares were just that. There were no horrors in the Gap, except the ones spacers brought with them.
Jerrard had almost convinced himself of this by the time he returned to his own cabin door. With a sigh, he slipped back inside.
