Across the Stars

"The Laboratory" by Nick Stath

Those who do not trust their minds and souls to the inscrutable alien engines that follow the courses of the River; or who will not stoop to travel aboard them in the company of recusants and riffraff; or who simply must travel to destinations where the River does not flow—these must avail themselves of machines that obey the laws of time and space as we know them. Even the finest such vehicles struggle to cross the incomprehensibly vast distances between stars at a rate compatible with the rhythms of human life and society. The nearest stellar neighbors are months or years apart at the speed of light, and longer at the accelerations that manmade machines can accomplish and human bodies can tolerate.

Some cross these distances in enormous generation ships, which may be as large as small moons. Others hope to see other worlds in their own lifetime, and opt for speedier travel. “Slowboats” are so called in relation to their fastest cousins, but solar sailers can reach astronomical velocities, as much as a tenth the speed of light. Even the shortest voyages take decades, of course. Accommodations can be made.

Those with the greatest need to swiftly cross the void, however, and the greatest resources, travel aboard mighty torchships, which blast their way from star to star at constant acceleration, turning a journey of decades into one of mere years. These enormous warships bristle with weapons, sensors, and thrusters, but the vast majority of their bulk is given over to fuel storage and equipment for collecting and refining new fuel at any destination without dedicated support facilities. A torchship often launches with fuel amounting to 90% of its mass, sometimes even more.

PCs, if they are not having picaresque adventures aboard a generation ship that functions as an entire self-enclosed campaign setting (or braving the depths of a baris and experiencing the non-Euclidean weirdness of its interior), likely have a torchship at their disposal. This is how commissars of the Continuum and knights of the Empire speed their way on missions and quests across the Pale. But even a torchship accelerating at 0.3 g must spend long, lonely years in the empty spaces between stars. Much can happen in this time.

* * * 

You always feel unwell, swimming up out of the blank fog of torpor. When you take command of your faculties and clamber out of your cryopod, though, you sometimes find that things have indeed gone wrong:

1. Some part of your body has seriously atrophied or lost function. You will need a prosthetic limb or artificial organ to replace it.
2. Some of your memories are lost or corrupted. You don't remember things quite the same way your companions do.
3. Your personality has changed in some way, subtle or dramatic. Brain scans indicate no physical change, but others are unnerved.
4. They told you that you wouldn't dream during torpor—but surely you did. You are haunted by lingering nightmares, vague but vivid.
5. You have aged abnormally; you emerge from torpor a prematurely elderly person, with unwelcome new aches and pains.
6. The ship hasn't reached its destination yet. Perhaps it's still accelerating; perhaps it's adrift or spinning. You must investigate.

On a 6 above, what has gone wrong that caused the cryopod's systems to rouse you from torpor early?

1. The pod itself is malfunctioning (or perhaps all the pods are). You need to fix the defective equipment before you can reenter torpor.
2. Somebody else in the crew is experiencing a pod malfunction or a medical emergency and needs to be awakened and aided.
3. The ship has gone off course. You need to manually correct it, and may need to tinker with the automated navigation system.
4. Something has collided with the ship, damaging the hull, the thrusters, the sensors, or more than one of these. You'll have to make repairs.
5. Alarms are blaring. Intruders! Saboteurs among the crew? Stowaways? Or have boarders somehow managed to penetrate the hull?
6. Nothing seems to be wrong at all. You double-check and triple-check, but it was just a false alarm…right?

If PCs are awakened from torpor and need to spend more than a few days attending to repairs or other tasks, they might run out of emergency supplies and have to jury-rig some kind of equipment to produce nutriments and drinkable water from the life-support system. Tall tales abound of desperate torchship crews unable to return to their own pods who murdered crewmates for access to theirs—or to cannibalize their bodies.