Nova Wars

Since its creation, Hellspace has been what everyone was afraid of. It ripped ships apart just with a graze, drove beings mad just seeing the portals, and could wipe out entire planets with just a tendril of energy.

A former hyper-atomic plane, it touched everywhere at once. Distance within the hyper-atomic plane was determined differently, a trip of scores of light years could take place in mere minutes. The speed of light was nearly three hundred times that in our reality.

There was, of course, rumors that there were being who lived there.

Not that it stopped the Lanaktallan from burning it. Turning it into Hellspace, in a last ditch Hail Mary Full of Grace effort to stop the Atrekna during the First Precursor War.

Everyone but the Precursor Autonomous War Machines avoided Hellspace. The PAWM were corrupted by it, but it was the sole way they could move around until later, when they adapted Jumpspace to their drives.

Everyone living avoided it.

Except the Terrans.

When Hellspace reached out and brushed the humans, the humans reached out and touched it back. - From On the Hyper-planes and their relationship to known species, New Tnvaru University.

Wrexit hated Hellspace.

Well, for the obvious reasons mainly.

Food that suddenly turned to rotted sludge filled with maggot analogues. The way corridors seemed to warp and twist and change. The way light sources dimmed, turned off, flickered, and warped the shadows. The shimmering at the edge of the vision. The sudden awareness that the shadow at the edge of awareness was actually sneaking up with a knife. The way that it was impossible to be fully rested and that time seemed warped and twisted.

The way it altered the robots. Turned them from strange but oddly familiar robots with a T-shaped head and bright endochrome chassis to glossy black chassis with a Terran skull. The combat robots, the "Marines" had a red T across their faces. The 'shipboard crew' had a white T.

No, it was the nightmares.

Combined with the fact he always felt as if he had not gotten enough sleep.

The vessel, the Nell of Night, was the flagship for a small seven ship task force of Terran make. Old tech, from forty-thousand years prior.

Captained by a Terran who had been born before even the Glassing of Terra around fifty-thousand years before.

Sure, it had Hellspace shielding, and the Captain and the First Mate, which was someone, Wrexit always had a hard time remembering who, seemed unaffected by the travel through Hellspace.

But to Wrexit, it went on and on and had begun to feel as if it would never end.

Which was why he was changing out of his sleep clothing and into exercise clothing at 0100 Approximate, glancing up at the clock that read "ERROR" above the six lockers. There were signs reminding him to take turns on the equipment and that standard exercise periods were only thirty to sixty minutes.

Wrexit was heavy for a Telkan. Wide shouldered, heavily muscled, but his fox-like face narrow from deprivations early in his life. His fur was streaked here and there by the white of fur that had regrown over scar tissue, a silent catalogue of his life on the streets.

Now, he was a conscripted soldier in a war he didn't understand.

A war that had already cost him his best friend in his whole entire life.

True, Naxen was still alive.

Kind of.

He was now known as N44, a massive armored warbound. A half-dead half-alive corpse held on the edge of death and encased in a heavy armored chassis. Heavily armored and armed, Naxen was primarily concerned with learning how to operate his massive war machine of a body.

Wrexit had tried talking to him a few times, but sometimes it took hours for Wrexit to get a reply.

Naxen was gone and N44 is all that remained.

Wrexit closed his eyes and sighed, leaning forward and pressing his face against the cool bulkhead.

Then, of course, was what Captain Decken called "Burning in the reflexes" for both Wrexit and the only other Telkan onboard, W44 AKA Imna AKA Drali'imna.

Like Wrexit, she had memory implants of attending the Telkan Marine basic training and basic rifleman's course.

Neither had attended either school.

But Captain Decken had insisted on training them as if they had.

And, damn him, he was right.

Wrexit had learned how to use armor, weapons, how to move, how to operate vehicles.

While it had passed the time, Wrexit felt, sometimes, like part of himself was being pared away so something else, someone else, could be layered on top.

Wrexit banged the front of his face on the wall a couple of times then stepped back.

Exercise helped.

He hated to admit it, but he'd gotten a lot stronger under Captain Decken's watchful eyes.

Wrexit left the changing room slash showers slash locker room and stepped into the 'small' gym. By standards that Wrexit would have never been able to achieve in the slums, the fifteen foot by ten foot room was small, but since he'd never seen a gym outside of school, Wrexit considered it more than adequate. There were weight stations, exercise machines, and the gravity could even be adjusted per machine or even on a three by three plate.

He'd slowly turned up the gravity until it was at what the ship listed as .92G.

He was tugging at the waist of his shorts when he walked in and it wasn't until he looked up that he realized he wasn't alone.

On one hand he wanted to bust up laughing.

On the other hand, it was absolutely terrifying.

The "Marines" were in the gym. Glossy black robots with a red-T on their skulls. They were at exercise stations, doing situps at the sides, pushups over by the weight rack. Two were skipping rope, three were doing pullups, and one was lifting kettlebells. They all had on shorts and bare midriff shirts with "Little Nell of Night" on the chest and their designations on the back.

Wrexit just blinked, staring.

The robots were dripping light clear oil as they worked, as if they were perspiring.

Telkan used a mix of water and oil when they sweated to increase the thermal conductivity of their fur, as well as open mouth fast panting, to mitigate heat.

But robots?

One of them, which Wrexit recognized as the robot known as Super Slugger by the partially melted skull face, stood up and snapped its fingers.

The robots all put back their weights, got off the machines, put back their equipment. They wiped down the equipment with red cloth rags, then all filed out.

"Mister Wrexit," Super Slugger said, moving by.

Wrexit just stared as they moved out the door and into the changing room slash locker room.

Oddly enough, right before the door closed, he heard a sharp snap followed by a high pitched outcry, then laughing as the showers turned on.

Wrexit shook his head, turning back to the gym.

Captain Decken was on the far side, if you could call fifteen feet away 'far'. Wrexit found himself staring.

Weirdly, he had just subconsciously pictured the Captain as having fur under his uniform. His face, neck, and hands were furless. Sure, he had hair on his head and fine hairs on the backs of his hands and on his forearms, but for some reason Wrexit's mental picture of the Captain had always assumed he had fur under his uniform.

The Captain was wearing a small pair of exercise shorts and fingerless leather gloves. He was hanging upside down on bar, his knees folded over it, holding one of the 20 kilogram plates against his chest with his arms, and bending/twisting at the waist so his arms touched the opposite leg.

It wasn't just what he was doing, but the fact he was doing them quickly.

Wrexit stared for a long moment. He'd never really considered that a Terran would be hairless. Sure, there was some on the chest and legs, but all of the Captain's musculature was visible.

Wrexit was considered muscular for a Telkan, but the Captain looked freakish to Wrexit. The muscles and muscle groups defined to the point that it looked like eight separate muscles in his abdomen.

The Captain stopped, lowering the plate almost to the floor and letting it go. It clanked against the variable surface deckplate and then the Captain reached up, grabbed the bar, and swung down by unfolding his legs and moving them opposite of the hand.

It was weirdly fluid and almost menacing to Wrexit.

The Captain stood up. "Watch it, I'm running at 4G," the Captain said. He tapped the wristband. "There, back to normal."

Wrexit just nodded as the Captain moved the plate back to the storage rack.

"All yours, Crewman Wrexit," the Captain said, moving away, toward the showers. Instead of going through the doors, he sat down and picked up one of the kettlebell weights.

Wrexit shook his head and moved to the machines.

After a few minutes he was aware the Captain was watching him intently. He tried to ignore it, but the weight of the gaze got heavier and heavier until the fur down his spine was starting to raise.

"Am I doing something wrong, Captain?" Wrexit asked, turning and looking the Captain, who was staring, without blinking, at Wrexit.

"What? Oh, sorry, I was considering our current situation," the Captain said, blinking rapidly.

"I thought you were staring at me," Wrexit said, suddenly feeling foolish.

"Just staring off into space while I consider what might be at the end of this pursuit," the Captain said. "No retinal link data or anything, just my brain and what we know," he set down the kettlebell on the rack. "I'll leave you to it."

Wrexit just nodded, going back to the weights as the Captain left.

He considered it. Just staring off into space was predatory enough to make Wrexit nervous. There was no feeling of disconnect, no vagueness, no ignoring surroundings in that gaze.

Wrexit put it out of his mind and went back to lifting weights.

When he was done he showered, which at first had thrown him off since he was used to badly tuned ultrasonic cleaning systems but now he found himself enjoying the hot water and soap that was specially formulated for his fur. He put on his shipboard off-duty uniform and left the locker room.

He touched his new implant as he moved through the corridor.

"Operations," came the smooth calm voice of the robot everyone called "Mister Manfred."

"Is D44 awake?" Wrexit asked.

"D44 is currently located in the aft chow hall and biometrics show that she is awake and engaged in activity. Is there anything else I can assist you with, W44?" Mister Manfred asked.

"No, thank you. W44 out," Wrexit said.

It took three tries to get to the aft chowhall, one of the corridors warping to loop back onto itself and another ending in a scarred and rune inlaid blast door that was missing when he came back around.

Wrexit found Imna sitting at the table, picking at a piece of pie. He grabbed a tray of food and moved over to sit across from her.

"Can't sleep?" he asked.

"My internal clock tells me its late morning, shipboard clock tells me a lot of other times," Imna said.

Wrexit nodded. "Mine says it's early morning, like three in the morning."

"We've been in Hellspace for two months. I've never heard of anything being in Hellspace for longer than a few moments," Imna said. She laughed as she pushed away her tray that was now full of moldy food, setting down the eating utensil that had gone from durachrome to inlaid and carved tarnished silver.

"So, what's your plans with your... afternoon?" Wrexit asked.

"I just finished at the range and did a practice session with the force lance," Imna said. She tapped one of her vestigial claws on the table. "Going to do more armor work later. How about you?"

Wrexit shrugged. "Maybe more hand to hand. When it comes to the guns..."

"Weapons," Imna corrected with a smile. She reached down and grabbed her crotch under the table. "Like Mister Fumbles says: This is my weapon, this is my gun, this is for killing, this is for fun."

Wrexit chuckled and shook his head. "You're really enjoying yourself, aren't you?"

Imna stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Captain Decken is making sure I can fight and survive. We can't go home, they'll kill us. We have a death sentence, Wrexit," she looked at him, locking eyes with him. "If the Solarian Iron Dominion will have me, then I'll fight for them."

Wrexit blinked. "You think they'll kill us if we go home?"

Imna nodded. "They arrested us in the middle of the night. They messed with our brains. They falsified paperwork that said we were Telkan Marines. If we go back, it'll be a huge scandal that the Telkan government doesn't need."

She shook her head. "Before all of this, I would have naively thought that we could just go home, that it was all just a mistake."

"What changed your mind?" Wrexit asked.

Imna looked at the table, tapping her index claw on the hard surface. "Remembering the Hierophant's War and knowing that we saw the Warbound ourselves," she said softly. "We heard the Terrans scream of rage. We saw the Warbound in the church, one of the few churches remaining after the war."

She shook her head.

"No, Wrexit, we can't ever go home," she said softly. "I just hope that the government thinks I'm dead."

"Why?" Wrexit asked.

"So they don't kill my parents too," she said. She gave a bitter laugh. "Governments always believe that the thing that will cover up a murder they're worried about coming to light is to commit more murders. You don't have to worry about witnesses if you don't leave anyone alive."

She stood up. "I'm a Telkan without a country, without a home, without a people."

Wrexit sat quietly after she left, leaving him alone in the aft mess hall.

He'd never had anyone but Naxen and the rest of the gang.

He hoped that Lawsec hadn't killed his friends.

But part of him knew the truth.

They were all street scum. Just like him.

Nobody would care if Lawsec killed them in the holding cells.

He just hoped his sisters and his mother were still alive.

He got up and left.

Hetmwit just sat at the end of the table and watched him leave.