“One need not be asleep to dream.”
- Arcadian proverb
Maeve Cavainna stared out at the elongated rainbows of passing stars as the Blue Phoenix soared between them. Superluminal flight scattered the light into a thousand subtle hues, turning starlight into something strange, exotic and unfamiliar. At such speeds, even the brightest suns were only colorful smears against the perfect velvet black of space. A heartbeat of light and then each was gone.
How many millions of lives did the ship pass by, unnoticed by those living on the worlds circling the hazy little stars? But the planets were invisible to Maeve, too small and gone too fast to ever see. The universe was a cold, dark and ignorant place. Uncaring and blind. She pressed her fingertips to the hard glassteel of the viewport, searching. It was as if there was no one else in the entire universe, as though she were alone. But Maeve knew better.
Where are you?
He was out there somewhere. Coldhand, the bounty hunter. Tiberius was certain that they had shaken him from their trail, but Maeve wasn’t so sure. No matter how many worlds she fled to, Coldhand always found her. Whatever stinking alleyway she found to hide in, he would be there. He was the song-silencing hand of the Nameless come for her at last. There, that spark of light! Was it Coldhand’s ship? No, it couldn’t be.
Maeve frowned as the sparkle faded back into nothingness. She struggled to remember what Gripper had told her about SL flight. At superluminal speeds, there was no way she could see any pursuing vessel. The Blue Phoenix was flying faster than light, outrunning sight of anything that might be following them. So excited that he had hopped from one huge foot to the other, Gripper had explained the surprises that had come with interstellar travels.
Everyone expected time dilation and lapses, Gripper had said, grinning like a boy. All of the science supported it! Relativistic travel, they called it. But it never happened. No one stepped off a starship to find themselves years younger than their own children. Time was not the mutable, changeable thing that physicists and temprologists predicted, not stretched and twisted by superluminal travel like cloud-candy. It behaved nothing like anyone expected, but as a strange, steady galactic constant, an unwavering interstellar heartbeat.
Maeve leaned against the window. Her breath clouded the pane. She squinted into the fog, willing herself to see the impossible.
Where are you, Coldhand?
No time dilation? That’s a pretty odd way of establishing that this story doesn’t take place in our universe. Not all readers can be expected to know that time dilation is a experimentally established fact here.
We introduced the idea early not to show where the story takes place, but to implant an idea that will be of importance down the road. Thanks for reading and commenting, Stig!