SAGITTARIUS
Adapted from a short story I wrote, but never published, back in 2018. It's set in the universe of Elite: Dangerous, but I've taken broad artistic liberties with the game's canon to make the story more interesting.
2025-08-27
This story contains some descriptions of gore.
Alek Resed-Liu woke to the noisy jingle of his morning alarm at the foot of his sleeping pod. Yawning and stretching, he drifted out of bed and hit the silence button. April 13th, 3303—11:30AM. Location: Galactic core.
“Morning, Verity!” he shouted out.
“Good morning, Alek.” The ship’s computer greeted him in turn.
“Engage forced gravity, I need a shower. Oh, and put on some music.”
“Got it. FSD charging, hold onto something for a minute. What sort of music?”
A low mounting hum began from the rear of the ship as the engines fired up. Alek locked his arms around a handrail. “Something with energy. Today’s the day, Verity!”
The ship jolted as the engines suddenly boosted into full power, sending tremors through Alek’s arms. A guitar riff came on over the intercom system—the intro to Zero Point by Sunspiller. Alek let out a laugh—of course, the ninety-minute Lavian melometal album about a pirate gang who steal a black hole. “Nice choice.” He wouldn’t be stealing any black holes today but he would certainly be getting up close and personal with one.
“Glad you approve,” came the computer’s reply.
Verity may have shared a name and voice with the Pilots Federation’s standard-issue Cockpit Voice Assistant, but Alek had vastly expanded her interaction capacity and systems access, making her far more capable. He was pretty sure he was in breach of international AI law, but he was well outside of the bubble anyway, so there was nobody around to stop him.
Another jolt, and the rattling of the ship’s main engines suddenly stopped. The familiar purr of the frameshift drive picked up with the music, and Alek slowly felt himself pulled toward the floor as the ship got up to speed.
Alek showered, broke his fast, and then made his way to the cockpit, singing along with the music. His ship—The Crumb Truck, a Lakon Diamondback Explorer that he’d saved from a scrapdrift and modded to the teeth—hung in rapid supercruise orbit around the local system’s main star, drawing its power directly from the astral body and simulating gravity with the orbital force.
“Alright!” he exclaimed as he buckled himself into the pilot’s seat and took manual control of the ship’s movement. “Time to get up close and personal with Sagittarius A-Star.”
“Brilliant!” said Verity. “Setting your destination now.”
Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, was so massive it had been showing up as an anomaly in Alek’s local system scanner for the past three days, even from hundreds of lightyears away. Now that he was within just six, the scanner had been completely overpowered and was as good as useless. Being without system sensors was a slight problem, but Verity could navigate short distances without them if needed.
Alek pulled away from the nearby star, pointing the ship towards his destination. “Initiate jump.”
“Frameshift drive charging,” confirmed Verity.
The Crumb Truck’s FSD had, of course, been modified too. It was a delicate piece of machinery and Alek could only do basic tuning, but his friend El knew them like the back of her hand. Together they had boosted its jump range up to just shy of forty lightyears, and installed an experimental subspace bubble refractor that let it simulate gravity while in supercruise. El had since opened up a workshop, a pretty exclusive operation for competent Pilots Federation spacers. Apparently she had a lot of clients. Alek grinned—she’d never visited Sag A* in her time as an explorer. She was gonna be so jealous of the pictures he was about to get.
“Charge complete, ready to engage,” announced Verity.
“Let’s do this,” said Alek with a grin. He throttled the ship up to full power and the jump countdown began.
Four. Three. Two. One. Engage.
With a bang, the star Alek had been orbiting vanished from the ship’s scanner. The speedometer went off the scale and Verity went into hibernation. That was normal—he was in witchspace now, the space between spaces, and the laws of physics were slightly different. Precision electronics needed to be shut off to avoid damage. Alek reclined in his seat and gazed out at the gentle glow of the shifting abyss he was passing through, nodding his head to the music as it reached its climax.
After fifteen minutes or so, just as the final song played its closing chords, there was a groan and then another loud bang. The Crumb Truck dropped out of hyperspace in front of the most massive object in the galaxy. Alek throttled down, then leaned forward in his seat and stared, agape.
He’d seen black holes before but this one was just immense. It took up his whole field of view. He unbuckled from the pilot’s seat and pushed himself, now weightless, forward to the cockpit glass. He took out his filex and snapped a few photos. Woah.
It was bright, too. He’d come in near one of the poles to avoid hitting the accretion disk—the warped band of light and superheated plasma that stretched out for millions of kilometres around its equator, like a planet’s rings made out of liquid glass—but even here, far away from it and still in supercruise, he found himself squinting slightly through the canopy glass.
And the way light bent around it made him dizzy. Looking straight on at the centre felt like looking through an unfocused lens, everything bent and flattened out of shape. The lens seemed to be shifting too, ever so slightly changing over time…
“Alek!”
He snapped out of his daze, turning around to look back at the ship’s control panel behind him. “What is it?”
“You didn’t zero the throttle fully, we’re on a collision course!” exclaimed Verity. “And you’re still in manual control mode, I can’t turn the ship!”
“Shit!” Alek propelled himself back into the pilot’s seat, fumbling with the seat straps until he was secure. He zeroed the throttle and pulled the ship around to face away from the black hole, then gave full power to the FSD.
The drive’s purr turned into a whine as it struggled against the crushing gravity well that Alek had let the ship drift into. Oh no. “FSD is beyond safe limits,” informed Verity. “Wants to emergency drop– I’ve prevented it.” Oh, this was bad.
“How far beyond? What’s the external gravity?”
“Nine hundred and forty percent. External gravity is 217G.”
“Oh, fucking hell.” Alek forced his breathing to remain steady, his heart now racing. He snapped on his flight-suit helmet, then raised his voice. “Power plant capacity to 120%. Deactivate shields, sensors, life support, everything. All power to FSD!”
“Complying.” Verity was short-spoken in dangerous situations. The cockpit display flickered. The ship’s external shields flashed blue, then went out. A timer appeared in the corner of Alek’s vision: 120 minutes of emergency air. The ship’s atmosphere would quickly become unbreathable without life support running. The morning’s soundtrack was a distant memory already.
The Crumb Truck was screaming now. The hull creaked and groaned against the crushing gravity; the FSD was making a sound more like Alek’s old Eagle MkII during a drag race. Alek was pressed against the back of his flight seat, pinning the throttle as high as possible, as if it would stop the moment he let go. “Come on, come on, come on, come on….”
Bang. The ship jerked out of his control; The FSD went silent.
“Fuck!” Alek slammed his fist into his seat handrest. Total supercruise failure—the drive’s subspace bubble had become so distorted by gravity that it had collapsed. He’d only ever experienced this before while test-flying some of El’s old prototypes.
Think fast. You don’t have much time. Alek slowed his breathing—he had started hyperventilating without realising. He needed to stay calm and conserve air. The timer in the corner of his vision continued to count down.
“Verity, how long until we’re torn to shreds?”
“Discounting relativistic effects, about… five hours. But the ship will overheat first. External temperature is six thousand kelvin and rising.”
“…Okay. Okay, I can work with that. Synth some premium heatsinks, they’ll buy us some time. And reactivate the field-maintenance unit, send its drone up to the FSD bay.” Alek gritted his teeth and unbuckled from his seat. Even in the event of supercruise failure, it could still be possible to make a hyperspace jump—but the ship was mass locked by the black hole. He would have to remove some safety measures on the drive before he could attempt it.
Alek made his way down to the FSD housing. The drive was deactivated, as expected. He plugged his filex into an I/O port and opened the drive’s firmware settings. The first thing he would have to do was disable the safety integrity check in firmware. The only reason he even had the option to do this was because he was using an experimental firmware patch that El had been working on when he left. The integrity check was designed to prevent drive spinup if any electrical faults were found—but he was about to deliberately introduce an electrical fault.
“Heat sink deployed.”
The sound of a repair drone moving through the service corridor outside prompted Alek to step away from the drive. The drone was designed to disassemble ship modules and bring faulty parts down to the auto field-maintenance unit for repair or replacement, but it could also do some in-place work.
“Okay. Verity, “ said Alek, “I’m gonna need you to take direct control of the AFMU drone.”
“Control assumed.” The robot made a slow saluting gesture with one arm.
“Right. I’m about to open the FSD casing. I need you to overcharge the drone’s electromagnets to hold the Alc-lens in place. Divert power from weapons, it’ll really want to escape.”
“Got it,” said Verity. The drone positioned itself above the drive and reached out with two arms. A high-pitched whine filled the room, and the ship’s lights dimmed slightly. The FSD’s Alcubierre lens was made of exotic matter—it was repelled by gravity. Hopefully the AFMU drone would be able to hold it in place despite their proximity to the black hole.
“Perfect. I’ll guide the opener arm.” Alek took hold of the robot’s third arm, which was fitted with a torsion wrench. He began to undo the bolts on the FSD casing: one, two, thr– SLAM.
…
…what? Where… where was he? His body ached all over. He raised an… arm… what was… where? There were lights flashing. Red lights. And something right in front of his face, getting in the way of his vision.
An alarm was ringing. Several alarms? Not his morning alarm, though. Something else. It was too loud, his head hurt. His head…
“Alek!”
A woman’s voice. She sounded worried. Where?
Okay, Alek. Pull yourself together. Figure out what’s going on.
“…Verity?”
The woman—no, it was just Verity. Verity replied to him. “Good, you’re still alive. Alek, the Alc-lens shattered. FSD casing blew up in your face, it knocked you out.”
The… The Alc-lens? What was…
“Oh, fuck!”
Adrenaline coursed through Alek as his senses began to return to him. The AFMU drone was bent to one side, its arms totally mangled. The FSD casing was nowhere to be seen, but tiny shards of metal littered the air. A ring of cracks splintered out through his visor, from a point just below his eye. It was leaking and overpressurising to compensate - his air timer was now estimating 71 minutes.
Alarms kept ringing. Critical temperature, hull breach, significant internal damage. The lens must have torn through the ship like a frag cannon when it broke.
Alek looked at his right arm again. His hand was about as mangled as the AFMU drone’s. The index and middle fingers were missing entirely; his wrist and thumb were bent at unnatural angles.
Okay. Situation taken stock of. You’ve been through worse than this. Not while alone, but, that’s what you’ve got Verity for.
He fired off a few questions at his ship’s AI. “How long was I out? Trajectory of the lens? What modules are damaged? Is the hyperspace portal still good? How many heatsinks do we have left?”
Verity replied in equally quick succession. “Twelve minutes. Lens trajectory was aftward, away from Sag A*; main thruster and power distributor are damaged. Hyperspace portal should still be operational. One heatsink cooling purge active; we’ll have four left afterwards.”
Alek whistled. “Only four heatsinks… At this rate that’ll give us another twenty minutes. But if we can still jump out of here…” He shook his head and returned his focus to the task at hand. The disfigured AFMU drone had a toolbox grafted onto the side of it, with the phrase “Manual field-maintenance” scribbled on in sharpie. Sometimes it was better not to trust the machines. He opened the box and took out a cleaning rag, binding it around his broken hand like a tourniquet. It was starting to hurt now. He’d do some proper first-aid when he had the time.
“Heat sink deployed.”
After locating his filex from among the debris and pulling up the FSD schematic, Alek opened the toolbox again and took out a length of wire, a tube of solder glue and a box cutter. Then he returned to the FSD and began to work, one-handedly stripping the protective coats from a very specific tiny data cable and a nearby power line, then clumsily grafting between the two with wire. The solder glue took a moment to dry and then his fix was secure.
This short circuit would cause the FSD controller to think it was in free space all the time, effectively bypassing all mass-lock checks. It was an extremely dangerous modification to make: ignoring mass-lock factor had the potential to totally annihilate the ship on jump. It was an absolute last resort, a tradeoff between likely death and certain death.
“Heat sink deployed.”
Alek backed away to admire his work. He was sweating—the outside environment was so hot that even the constant cooling cycle couldn’t keep up. He started up the FSD firmware again. It greeted him with a score of warning messages about the missing Alcubierre lens, but still booted. He didn’t have time to run diagnostics, he would just have to hope his hamfisted mods had been successful. He rushed back towards the cockpit.
“Charge FSD!” Alek shouted as he leapt into his seat, not bothering to fasten himself in. The ship was beginning to creak and turn, buffeted by superheated wind. The console flickered again. There were more alarms blaring in here, mostly relating to ongoing heat damage.
“On it,” said Verity. Alek heard the hum of the frame shift drive charging in the back of the ship. He crossed all the fingers he had left.
“Heat sink deployed, one left. Ready to engage.”
Alek pulled the ship around to face the star Verity had chosen at random to jump to, and throttled up. The ship’s remaining engines obliged with all their might but it wasn’t nearly enough—it kept plummeting towards the ever-looming darkness below. The FSD was not able to engage unless the ship trajectory matched the direction of the destination, and it was dropping away from that destination at over a million metres per second.
Alek sat back in his seat, alarms blaring in his ears. Of course. How hadn’t he thought of that? It was over. There was no way out.
Well, at least he’d die knowing he’d given it everything he could. He was happy with that. He swung the ship around again and admired the black hole. Nobody alive had ever been this close to it…
Ah, what the hell. He took out his filex and snapped another picture, chuckling to himself. “Send this picture out on system comms channels. Caption it something ironic… Got too close. Oops.”
But there was no response.
“…Verity?”
BANG, SHHHWA-BAM.
What?
SLAM.
For the second time that hour, Alek’s body was thrown against a hard surface. After a moment his eyes snapped open again. He was upside down? No, he was up against the canopy glass. The ship was upside down.
No again. The ship was spinning. Careering, sideways, out of control, through witchspace. He’d made the jump! His safety bypass must have also disabled the ship trajectory check. The Crumb Truck, his thrown-together disaster boat, bodged with ridiculous, dangerous mods, had made the jump! Alek laughed out loud. He still had a chance!
But something was wrong. His trajectory was completely uncontrolled—the ship was flailing through hyperspace, flying straight but not facing where it was going. It was spinning so quickly that the centripetal force was creating an artificial gravity, pushing him towards the nose. And it seemed to be moving far faster than usual…
Could it be? No, surely not.
Had he jumped straight through the black hole?
Nobody had tried that before, at least not that he knew of. Certainly nobody had tried it and survived.
But there was that strange sucking sound that had happened at the start of the jump… And the bizarre sensation that had accompanied it. He must have jumped straight through the black hole.
Alek looked at the air timer inside his helmet. Forty-seven minutes remaining.
So where was he jumping to? He had no way of knowing. He wasn’t pointing towards any specific destination. And the jump had been supercharged, it could go on for a very long time… Possibly days. He wouldn’t last that long on emergency oxygen. He needed to get life support back online. Fuck, his hand hurt.
Alek cursed as he struggled to stand, sandwiched between the console desk and the cockpit glass at an awkward angle. The console was completely lifeless anyway—no display, no system info, no Verity. Certainly no life support. The only light in the whole cockpit was coming from outside, the haunting glow of witchspace spinning around dizzyingly. Even the audio monitor was out. All Alek could hear was his own pulse throbbing through his head.
How was he going to get out of the cockpit? The door into the crew quarters was directly above him. He couldn’t climb, not in this state. He was lightheaded and weak, from a combination of blood loss and the coriolis effect. Maybe he should just pass out and hope.
“Unghhhh….”
When Alek opened his eyes again, the timer was down to nine and a half minutes. The ship was still spinning through witchspace, but much slower—the force wasn’t pressing him down any more. His clothes were soaked in blood.
He hadn’t meant to actually pass out.
Alek slowly tried to move himself. His joints ached but the pain paled in comparison to his arm. Gently, carefully, he rose out of the tip of the cockpit, holding the bad arm close to his body and guiding himself up with the good one.
Life support. Need to get life support back.
Alek pulled himself up onto the back of his seat, then further up through the cockpit door and into the corridor beyond. The life support suite was right here… He closed the door behind him to have something to brace against, then opened the service hatch. It was completely dark—not even an emergency light. His filex was still working, so he turned on its light.
Maybe there was just a loose cable somewhere? He would need a screwdriver to investigate that. He was about to start feeling his way down towards where he had left his toolbox–
A sudden, familiar BANG stopped him in his tracks. He was already up against the cockpit door this time, no additional bruises from being hurled across a room.
Magically, miraculously, the emergency lights flickered on. Indicators started to flash on the life support unit; a tiny display came on, unreadable in the dull red but distinctly active. Fans started whirring; the air purification loop was back online.
A voice rang out over the intercom: “Welcome aboard, Alek.” Verity’s default startup message.
Alek let out a hysterical laugh.
Verity regained her lucidity. “Strange; the system doesn’t usually do a full reboot like that. Did you notice any irregularities during the jump?”
Alek’s laughter continued. He re-opened the cockpit door and was bathed in the gentle yellow glow of a mercifully normal star.
“Based on the local star chart, we seem to be six thousand two hundred lightyears below the galactic plane. We must have flown through hyperspace until the ship hit something big enough to stop us.”
Alek climbed into the pilot’s seat and stared.
“Local system contains… twelve astronomical bodies. You’ll need to conduct a full scan to determine what they are exactly.”
“Oh my God… Verity. We made it.”
“Hull integrity is forty-six percent. Frame shift drive is practically inoperable, catastrophic physical damage to thrusters and power distributor, significant heat damage to all internal modules. And you’re still bleeding out. We’re not out of the woods yet.”
Rolling his eyes, Alek got up and dug a proper first-aid kit out of a storage panel. Verity was right, of course—there was a long road still ahead of him. But he could fix a busted up ship.
He chuckled. El was gonna be so jealous.