There's an old song, I don't know who by or even what it's about. But the dominating line is, "I'm blue." Blah blah blah, I'm blue, ah-bah-dee, I'm blue blah blah blah.
That's me. I'm blue. I'm so fucking blue.
Don't look back. Look back and there's a red so dim it's beyond black. It's a fuller awareness of nothing, not just the absence of light, but light sucked from your eyes by an enraged continuum.
So look ahead. Squint. Turn the rad shield as high up as it'll go and hope like hell it actually works. It's not though. I can feel it not working.
Breach Lead Specialist. Blue. Hull surface, unmarked stealth ship in a widely acknowledged interdiction zone. Everybody knows you stay the hell out. Hasn't been seriously contested in nearly twenty years.
Except today. This guy - these guys, I guess - sneak in quiet and dark, coasting with engines cold, the radar cross section of a small mote of dust. We might never have spotted him, except our stealth is better. And we can spot us okay, then again we don't use radar. Emitting sensor energies isn't stealthy, so we don't do it. We use other methods.
So we spotted them. And with our better stealth we intercepted, quiet and dark - quieter and darker, with the radar cross section of a we don't have a radar cross section. We're not something you spot.
The intruder's surface is fuzzy. Good stealth usually is, absorbing detection energies with fractally discontinuous contours. The science people have better terminology, that's me remembering it to the best of my ability. You ask them how it works, they'll tell you. You ask me, I tell you it works great. That's all I know.
Boots aren't magnetic because hulls usually aren't steel. They're electronic, glomming themselves into the electron orbits of materials' molecules. Even extremely stable stuff like lead and nitrogen, they stick. So fuzzy polymer hulls aren't a problem, I stay put.
Good thing. Or maybe not, come to think of it.
As soon as I made contact, the target one-eightied and lit up. With me on the hull. I'm still on the hull.
These boots will hold against nearly two gee which is good, because this ship - not as big as a Marine frigate but not a dinky little miner either - whipped right around. I'd call it a full five meters per second rate, nothing to sneeze at. And then she lit up.
A marine frigate under full burn can hit five gees if the pilot hates you. You'll sure as hell hate the pilot by the time a burn like that is over. This? I don't know what this is. After the flip, there was no acceleration. There was a glare from the drive bell and let me just say that was fucking weird. Marine drives are completely invisible from the front. You'll never spot a glimmer from the drive plume. From behind you can see the drive very clearly, bright as hell for sure but the reaction mass is monatomic carbon and the exhaust temperature is dead cold - like I said, our stealth is damn good.
But this ship's drive flared like a goddamn sun, so bright that I could see the glare sparkling on individual grains of dust even from where I stood, on the forward ventral curve of the hull. I wasn't even facing the right way, and I could see it.
And then I couldn't. Because I am blue.
The entire universe comes streaming from directly in front of me, compressed to an infinitesimal point of unbelievable light that contains all the energy radiated by every source everywhere, all pouring in from directly ahead. Imagine that, all that energy cranked up and up by your incident velocity - the light isn't going faster than light, of course not - but I sure as hell am. Shit, some of this energy pouring into me might just be sound, cranked up so high into the EM spectrum by our relative velocity that it shoots into me like a laser through a drop of water. Visible light hits like hard gamma rays,; gamma rays, hell, I don't know. Neutrinos, maybe? I'm getting cooked like a goddamn Hot Pocket out here. Colonial Marine environment battle suit shielding is second to none, but what the hell. Nobody ever expected us to be outside a hull in cee-plus, the energy of all of creation raining down, blasted beyond a blueshifted white hailstorm of chaos.
If I look straight sideways, I can see stars going by. Actually see them. To the rear, what I can see of the rear, a fading surly murk that recedes into oblivion, darkness. Space isn't dark but damn, that is dark. That is Dark.
Look ahead, then. Because Dark is way too much nothing. All the radiation shooting through me is probably going to kill me in a few minutes, might as well wonder at the view. All that energy. Now we know what cee-plus looks like, it's amazing. Mesmerizing. Beautiful, if it wasn't killing me.
How in the hell did these people ever develop cee-plus?
And how did they spot me?
Who are they?
I reckon I might find out if they stop soon.
I am so blue.
