:AAO: Curtains Shadow ch.3

Oh, how the tunnels seemed to stretch on long into the night eternal. "Oh" quipped my fractured friend, oblivious to the chill but affected nonetheless. He knelt beside me, one knee supporting a weary arm. Traces of dust, dandruff, and starlight lilted and swayed upon the sails. Speckles of meteoric dust from anywhere glinted as it hit magnetic neutral on the sails shield. Barely registering on the main radars, CS was nonetheless present in the universal crossroads. Sending and receiving bits of light, bits of dust, a pale wake of vacuum space, vortices of subatomic waves. No vessel in the cosmos could be considered truly "stealth." Fools with delusions of grandeur could pull off heists of infamy and bombast, but their traces are never truly erased. Something, somewhere, will know.

I was lost in thought, amid translations of varying technical detail. A swarm of mathematics could be heard in the distance, "Oh" quipped my friend. Ali could be blunt, to a fault.

My heart fluttered a bit at his soft murmurs. My oldest friend, companion when I was but a shadow. He gets seasick, so he is a Dramamine miner. The pharma keeps him in a slow, sometimes breathless state, willing to be more than anyone I ever knew. Willing to survive until the next moment he could speak, could exhale and look me in the eyes. "I always Love you" he said again, and we shared a bashful smile, looking away from each other in fear of losing balance and falling overboard.

The wind was always ready to sway the ship, Curtains Shadow was small and manoeuvrable, but required vigilance. Now and then, the crews of larger self-contained ships would mock our little schooner. But we laughed back in their faces, gleefully playing the clown. We even painted curtains on the sails, because "Your boat looks like a castaway's raft" was the most common joke at the dockside tavern.

"Hold steady! There is another wind tunnel ahead!" I shouted to the crew, grasping the mainmast and shimmying down in one twisting motion. Ali was already adjusting the levers and knobs, glancing this way and that. CS soared gently into a hollow turbulence. The view of the thing was uncanny.

The wind tunnels of this sector were quite pretty from the right angle. The ever turning tornado of planetary debris colliding and separating forever around the void. It was hard to look directly at the black hole, just giving it a glance was a matter of caution. Early explorers had not understood this, staring longingly like sun worshippers. Their eyes, let us not worry about such things. There is a safety glance, and then there is a peripheral awareness, these are invaluable to the explorers of the inner sectors.

We passed into the gaping wormhole mouth, the dark and starlight were smashed into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of haste. Furious shrouds of great clouds, and a whispery trail through the center of it. CS threaded the eye, diving into and through with a whisper of spray from the tail.

"Pass me that canteen, dear." I said after a long moment of silence. He tossed it up to me, and a sip, and a return. He sipped, we waited a moment longer. Heeeyah! We cheered, the crew all at once began to laugh and pull out the tables and bread. We set the balast, homeostatic adjustments to the course. All of our actions gave us balance, to glide through the wind tunnel peacefully.

Ali spoke suddenly: "We had our bit, now for a bite. Let us celebrate the light." I looked long into his eyes, stern then bemused. Nodding, I took his hand and we went down to dine with the rest.