Excerpt

Drift-Flux

Wole Talabi

In space, no one can hear your ship explode.

But they can watch.

Orshio Akume, priest-pilot of the Igodo, sat silently in the pilot module of the control deck, watching a mining ship cleave in two. A sudden release of energy violently ate its way out of the ship. A burst of azure light popped into the space ahead of the Igodo, despite the distance. It receded, quickly shifted to aquamarine, then turquoise, and then to nothing.

A bomb. It had to have been a bomb.

The furrows between Orshio's eyes deepened as his brows drew down and his eyes narrowed, compressing the vertical tribal marking keloid that ran from his hairline to his nose.

The ship was an old one, at least ten times the size of the Igodo, with the unmistakable bright red and blue insignia of the Confederacy emblazoned across it from end to end. There were only a few giant mining ships left operating in the Belt. The last remnants of the first Martian development schemes by the Confederacy and the only ones still in service that were not built by Transhuman Federation Engineers.

The clumsy old giants needed the size primarily to store large quantities of fuel and propellant, still completely enslaved to Newton's third law and Tsiolkovsky's equation. Cargo was attached and hauled using spars and rigging, enwombed in lightweight programmable material mesh and insulation to protect fragile items and ward off hot backlighting from the fusion drive. Modern Transhuman Federation mining ships like the Igodo used the Adadevoh drive to couple to the zero-point and draw vacuum energy so they didn't have any of those problems. They still hauled their cargo using rigging though. Not that the Igodo presently carried any cargo.

"What the hell just happened out there?"