Be Careful What You Wish For (Tall Tales)

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=By JA Baker=
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There are certain rules that don't need to be be written down. Or, at least, shouldn't need to be.
Never eat yellow snow. Don't piss into the wind. Never shoot pool at a place called Pop's. Never eat anything with more eyes than legs.
And, perhaps most importantly of all...never claim to be something you're not, unless you can convincingly fake it.
So, true story: I knew this guy called Jake. JumpShip navigator, and a pretty decent one at that. Knew his job inside and out, and made a good living out of it. But Jake had a chip on his shoulder, because he was turned down by the Spacer's Guild. Never said why, exactly, but every time he applied, they politely rejected him. Only problem was, Jake had a bit of an ego, and he couldn't handle rejection well. But the Guild is, well, it's the Guild, so there's not much he could do about it. I mean, even the Successor Lord's are ComStar leave them alone for the most part.
The Guild is everywhere, overseeing pretty much every aspect of interstellar travel and trade, and nobody wants to risk pissing them off.
Nobody, that is, except Jake, who was obsessed with finding a way to make them pay for rejecting him. All he'd ever wanted to be was a Guild Master Navigator, mostly for the prestige it gives you. I mean, hell, he was already Guild Certified, which is pretty much a free ride in his line of work, as there are plenty of places that won't higher Guild members, but Certification... Look, I'm only an Environmental Tech, but I get paid more than twice as much as my supervisor simply because I'm Guild Certified in my field. Most navigators would be more than happy to just take their Certification, but not Jake.
He wouldn't let it go, couldn't let it go, and it started to eat away at him. Got so bad his husband up and left him, and he was in danger of losing his billet.
Then, one day, out of the blue... he's all smiles again. Not just back the way he'd been before, but actually happier, and I got a real nasty feeling that he was up to something, and that I was danger-close for any splash damage. Was a couple of weeks before I found out exactly what he had up his sleeve, but I found out the next time we stopped off at a recharge station. Group of us went over in a shuttle for some R&R, and Jake was front and center. As I climbed into the seat next to him, I noticed a lapel pin attached to his tunic, and I felt all the hairs on my body standing on end.
For those of you who haven't seen one, it's a little metal depiction of a capital missile, onto which is engraved the all-seeing-eye. I'd only heard them described before, but I recognized it immediately as the mark of a very select band of spacers, membership of which is by invitation only. They're known as the Steely-Eyed Missile Men, or Women, depending, and they're made up of people who not only kept their shit together in the midst of an emergency, but actively saved the day. Big Damn Heroes, every last one of them. The pins are handed out by the Guild, at the discretion of... it isn't quite clear exactly who, but someone senior. There's no rank or authority or anything that goes with it, beyond the simple recognition that you're someone who knows their job and can perform it under the kinds of pressure that would break meer mortals.
Problem was, I knew damn well that Jake hadn't done anything to earn such an accolade, and I also knew that the Guild does not consider imitation the sincerest form of flattery. No, they take impersonation very, very seriously, and tend to come down on people behind such games with the wrath of a particularly angry god. Hell, I don't even know where he found someone willing to make a duplicate pin, because that's exactly the sort of act that would bring someone to the Guilds attention, and not in a good way. Jake was very much tagging on the tigers tail, and that's another of those 'so obvious that they shouldn't have to be written down' rules.
But it was far too late to do anything to try and change his mind, so all I could do was tag along and try and stop him from getting into too much trouble.
Couple of people at the bar recognized the pin, and suddenly Jake doesn't need to buy how own drinks that night. Before long, he had a crowd of people surrounding him as he told some ******-and-bull story he'd obviously spent time putting together from elements of other people's misadventures, but the bar was eating it all up and asking for more.
All but one young woman, that was, who was sitting in the back, the patch of a Guild Senior Navigator, only one step down from Master Navigator, on her arm, and a genuine pin on her lapel.
It felt like my stomach had suddenly gained its own gravity well as I watched her listen to Jake's story, obviously paying far more attention to the details, and how they didn't quite match up. I wanted to warn him, to drag him out of there and run for the shuttle, but I knew damn well that it was far, far too late. The Guild had rejected Jake, and he'd fired a shot across their bow in response. The only question was, how would they respond.
As it turns out, by getting me drunk, taking me back to her room and then giving me arguably the best night of my life, which was more than a bit unexpected.
"I know you're friend's a fake." she commented as she dressed afterwards, "I don't have to tell you just how poorly the Guild takes that sort of thing."
"He's..." I started, then stopped, "I had no part in it."
"Do you really think we'd have done what we just did if I thought you did?" she asked with a sly smile, "I have to report him. After that... I don't know what they'll do."
I tried warning Jake, but if anything he seemed happy that he'd riled the Guild like that. So kept wearing the damn pin every chance he got.
Well, six months down the line, and we were hauling a trio of Drops hips loaded up with ore, bound for... who gives a damn. We were two jumps into our journey, when all hell broke lose. I was in the hydroponics bay, scrubbing and reassembling air filters, when the general alarm sounded. I stowed the equipment on the double, then but my pressure suit on and rushed to my duty station... only to find it wasn't there.
It's hard to describe what I found, because I don't think we're really built to see and comprehend some things. What it looked like was a pool of shimmering water laying diagonally across the hallway, cutting me off from environmental. I could see the back of someone someone, as if they'd been walking along the corridor when... whatever it was happened. I reached out to touch them, but got the worst static shock of my life for my troubles. Looking closer, I could see that, what I at first thought was water was actually more like the static you get on a screen if the input cable is knocked loose.
Shocked, in more ways than one, and unable to get to my assigned station, I made my way to the bridge to report what I'd found.
Well, as it turned out, they already knew, as the same... I don't know what you'd call it, had bisected the bridge. The Captain was on the other side of... whatever it was. Without her to take command, and no sign of the XO, the crew was kind of loosing it. I mean full-on running around like headless chickens, completely lost their shit, screaming like madmen lost it. All except Jake, who was sat at his station. Oddly calm as he typed away at the keyboard. I decided very quickly that he was my best chance to see what was going on.
"We hit, or were hit by, some...thing." he didn't even look round, and his voice was calm to the point of sounding almost detached, "Readings don't make sense. The gravity field sensor is fluctuating between zero and the mass of a small star. The power readouts for the jump-core imply that we're in the middle of a jump, and we've lost all external communications."
Okay, I'll admit that the last one really worried me, as it meant that we had no way to call for help from any of the other ships recharging at that particular jump-point.
"What about the DropShips?" I asked.
"Whatever happened to us, happened to them as well." Jake shrugged almost nonchalantly, "But, I have an idea. System says we're mid-jump, right? Well, how about we finish the sequence and complete the jump?"
"Mightn't that rip the shop apart?" I asked, hesitantly, "I mean, we could end up with half the ship jumping, and the other half... staying wherever the hell it is?"
"It's a calculated risk." he agreed, "But that maths solid. No way to pull back, so we may as well trying pushing forward."
Well, there wasn't much more I could do but just float there and watch the man work, while chaos reigned all around us. The screen before him was filled with the complex, five dimensional equations needed to make a hyperspace jump. I know most people, myself included, tend to think. It as just a case of entering a set of co-ordinates based upon the targets location in the three dimensions we're used to experiencing, but it is far, far more complex than that. There are simply far too many variables. Such as mass and density of the ship, its crew and cargo, to just type in some numbers and press a button. Hell, some specific cargos require certain modifications, meaning that no two jumps are never the same.
Somehow, Jake was running all the equations in his head, because the computer was locked in an endless loop of trying to reconcile sets of irreconcilable data. I wanted to ask just what the hell he was doing, but the fear that I might distract him, cause him to make a mistake struck my dumb. All I really could do was watch as the equations he was inputting grew more and more complex, with so many variables that I simply lost count.
Eventually, Jake finished typing. Then looked at the screen and nodded.
"Okay," He said to no-one in particular, "Let's go."
He activated the jump initiator... and up became down, left became right, today became yesterday, and everything, and the do mean everything, tasted of purple and regret.
Then we were out the other side, and the captain was demanding two know why two of her officers seemed to be on the verge of trying to kill each other. Everyone else turned to look at her, but I was too busy looking at Jake, whose eyes were locked on the readout from the navigation screen. Some how we'd managed to jump well beyond the long-believed theoretical maximum. Indeed, we seemed to have arrived at our ultimate destination, according to the ships clock, an hour before we left.
Needless to say, a lot of questions were asked, but Jake was oddly noncommittal about the whole thing, claiming not to remember anything. For my part, I kept my damn mouth shut, because I still wasn't sure if what I'd seen really happened, or if I'd had the craziest jump-dream ever.
About a month later, Jake and I are sitting at a bar on some random recharge station, drinking like we didn't want to see the morning, when the same Guild navigator who'd made me see God suddenly appeared at Jake's side and ordered us a round. Picking up her glass, she clinked it against his.
"Now you can wear the pin."
The End
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