Quoted By:
“There is a deceptive slowness to interplanetary travel. Distances are long. Fixed reference points are rare. A single gee of constant acceleration provides the body with no sense of relative motion.
As a result, I have found it easy to fall into a routine in the days following our departure from MIZAR-IX – lulled by the whirring of air purifiers and the humming of the NOVEMBER RAIN’s beam-drive array. In the daytime, I reviewed system reports, plotted attack vectors, and assisted MERRYGATE as she wrangled with the rules governing the Mizarian language system. But at night, I would spend hours behind the missile bay, staring out from the ship’s only true observation blister. On older ships, this would be pointless: the fierce light of fusion burn would wash out the brightest of stars. But the RAIN’s drive was different. The primary drive manifold was built to exploit a peculiar property of the electroweak force, transmuting particles ejected from the torch drive into a tightly collimated beam of heavy neutrinos. Cold, lightless, and invisible to anyone lacking a scintillator detector shielded under kilometers of rock.
I know that the beam-drive was installed to obfuscate maneuvers and confound pursuers. To push the RAIN’s retaliatory strike from a mitigatable risk to a near certainty. But I rarely dwell on these morbid thoughts. There is a certain beauty to seeing the stars with my own eyes. A sense of nostalgic permanence that memory or history or kin can no longer offer me.”
- [UNSIGNED], EXECUTIVE AUDITOR, TRS NOVEMBER RAIN, AD. 2242, FEB 7, PERSONAL JOURNAL
