This post was inspired by a writing prompt in the Worldbuilding Community - Worldbuilding Prompt #432 - Challenge Prompt: Space station
All images generated by AI in Wombo.art.
"Easy on the jets, youngster".
Captain Greville's voice was a calming influence. Dannak was the newest member of the crew, barely out of his teens and still very much in training. It was the first time he'd been sat at the controls of the Tarnished Phoenix on the run into Debris.
She was a lovely ship, a demilitarised Imperial Type 23 Long Range Strike Cruiser. Nice big weapons bays converted to cargo holds, huge fuel generators for her O-Drives giving her a massive range, blisteringly fast and a joy to pilot. She was equipped with planar and dimensional drives as well as her FTL O-Drives, but not the Chronos engines that would let them bend time. Those things were rare even on line ships, and were never left onboard demilitarised ones.
The Phoenix was also deceptively tatty on the outside, but that was deliberate. Greville sometimes took her on cargo runs to places where being recognised as an Imperial ship would be a distinct problem.
Checking the instruments, Dannak backed the thruster control off slightly. He knew what was coming up, but had never piloted a ship through it.
They were traversing vast expanses of wreckage, heading for the centre, to a place called Debris. The wreckage was the aftermath of the Battle of Damnation Gulf, where the Imperial Fleets had broken a determined Confed offensive some five hundred years past. Broken ships... and worse things.... clumped and drifted everywhere, filling a fifty light year radius and extending into a dozen or more dimensions either side of the Home Dimension.
Edging past the shattered remains of a squadron of Slaver cruisers, Dannak saw The Wall come into sight on his scopes.
It was a daunting sight, a solid mass of gigantic Imperial Type 19 battleships, tens of thousands of them fused into a solid mass, a plane of ships a thousand kilometres wide and just as high.
They'd done it to themselves, deliberately, knowing the consequences. But it had enabled them to link firing computers and focus their fire. They'd destroyed many times their own number of Slaver vessels and Rim mercenaries before an Einheriar flank attack had used time-skipping Tachyon Bombs to irradiate them, killing the crews and wrecking every onboard system.
"You've been trained by the best, Danna. Just do what you did in the simulator, ignore any ghosts you see, and you'll be fine. Remember; it's one plane forward and two dimensions down, hold for ten seconds and reverse it."
Dannak pictured it in his mind. He found it best to think of the whole universe as a single sheet of paper. It was in the middle of a giant stack of other sheets. Each was another dimension, where the stars and galaxies were in the same places, but where the timelines had thrown up changes to history. Higher up the stack were up-dimensions, below the paper that was this Home universe were down-dimensions. The further you went, the more differently history had turned out.
But there were other whole stacks of paper was well. They were other planes of existence, referred to as forward-planes and back-planes depending on where they were in relation to the Home Stack. They had different rules. The ones nearby were pretty similar, but he'd heard that if you went too far, the laws of physics themselves became totally weird.
Setting a marker on his plotter screen, Dannak started a timer and prepared himself for the shift, left hand on the plane and dimension control stick, right hand on the throttle and directional collective stick.
The ship's indicator moved onto the marker on screen, and Dannak toggled the P-D controller. Gingerly, he pushed it forward until he felt it click, then pressed down until he felt it click once, then twice. He was through. He'd felt nothing change, but somehow his body instinctively knew it was in a different universe, and looking at the forward viewscreen there was no sign of The Wall, just a slowly spinning cluster of individual smashed Slaver ships.
Edging the T-D collective stick forward, Dannak watched the speed indicator climb as he counted slowly to ten. This bit had to be done manually, he knew. Automated clocks and even metronomes malfunctioned in this plane.
He reached ten, and flicked the P-D controller back and up. With a non-existent lurch, the ship was back in it's Home plane. The Wall was behind them, and they were in a kind of clearing. The Phoenix's instruments showed derelict Confed ships densely clustered on all sides except for The Wall. The few spaces between them were so flooded with lingering radiation as to be impassable, which was why the only entrance was through plane and dimension hopping shenanigans.
They could see their goal at last; the place called Debris. You could call it a space station, of sorts. It was made up of salvaged pieces of the warships of both sides, all welded together into a single object. At it's centre, although almost entirely obscured by the accretion of wreckage, was a massive launch bay from an Imperial Star Fortress; the last remnant of the Empress Aralia, a once proud command vessel many tens of kilometres long.
"Nicely done, Danna," said Captain Greville. "You have the makings of a fine pilot. Which is why I want you to stick like glue to Gatta and Yafmi once we go ashore. You got that, girls ?"
The two girls looked over from their grav-chairs. Short, stocky Gatta came from some world with ridiculously high gravity that she wouldn't even name, let alone talk about. There was a shadow in her past, she was stoic and pleasant right up to the point where someone asked about her origin. Willowy slim, pale blue Yafmi was her opposite, her antennae constantly waving as if in a breeze, from one of the worlds of what had once been the Mufl Empire before it was absorbed into the Imperium thousands of years before. But the two made a great team, one on fire control, the other as cargo-master, and both deadly working as a pair in a barroom brawl.
"Yes Boss !" they chorused together. It was as if they'd been practicing.
Debris was going to be an interesting mix of business and pleasure. Officially, the place didn't exist. Officially, the Allied Imperiae and Confederacy were implacably at war with each other until one side or the other was wiped from existence. Officially there were no diplomatic relations and civilians didn't mix.
But Debris had been assembled by civilian scavengers from both sides. They had far more profitable things to do than try to kill each other. It didn't take long for them to assemble the core of Debris as a convenient base for all of them. And it didn't take long before salvagers started doing what salvagers do on their time off. Drinking, gaming and gambling, and more. No-one really cared what species they were gaming with as long as they played fair and honoured their debts.
While that was all going on, the station rapidly developed into an incredibly unofficial trading post where civilians, salvagers, government agents and spies from both sides mingled, buying and selling salvage, contraband and information. As time passed, more pieces of wreckage were added to the growing mass of tangled metal in a haphazard fashion; Debris grew and grew, acquiring a semi-permanent population of pushers, shopkeepers, traders and owners of dens of depravity of all kinds. Not all the trade was in degenerate products or services; a vigorous exchange grew up of Imperials buying Confed luxury items, and vice versa.
Greville had a cargo of Imperial entertainment implant chips, much sought after in Rim space, and had set up a deal with a contact for some exotic living fabric. Yafmi would do the exchange, with Gatta going along to make sure nothing untoward happened. Dannak was being allowed out just so he could experience the place, with all it's eccentricity and liveliness.
As they readied themselves to step ashore, Greville grinned at Dannak.
"Enjoy yourself, Danna. But remember there are still rules here. Always negotiate a price up front, and always be honest about paying it. Have fun, guys !"
