Soul of a Gambler

Preface I - "The Black Sector"

Life is a series of interconnected events, this we all know. It builds upon itself, and stretches from the beginning of history to the present day with echoes of the distant past still clear within its voice. It's course changes us, and we must change to fit it's course. This is the law of life.

This is what entertained the mind of General Tobias Calhoun as he held the railing that separated the command deck of the Stardust Crusader from the reinforced enameled glass that defended against the vacuum of space.

Warp, Punch, Slip-space, FTL, all names made up by spacefaring civilizations to push away the idea that there might be something in the deep featureless black of the special void one found themselves in when outpacing light. Even making such an awe-inspiring feat as breaking the light barrier seem mundane didn't rid the grizzled veteran of that tickle of childish fear. Fear of what lurked in the darkest dark.

He focused instead on the lines of his face, chiseled and square, well shaped from staying hungry in the face of the physical strain of combat. A freshly stitched scar curled around the low end of his left eye that accented the shimmering depth of the Bourbon color with a rusty darkness, earned in a police action against dissidents on Alamura just three days earlier. He adjusted the brim of his peaked cap, the symbol of the Blackwatch, the symbol of his pride and lifelong service, shone brightly in the reflection of the bridge lights standing out from the red band of the black hat.

The great vessel lurched like a passenger plane in turbulence. A deep sputtering sound resonated through the hull, and Calhoun felt a rattling that accompanied the raucous noise surge through the railing he held. His eyes traced the arrow-shaped bow of the ship, they hadn't been hit, none of the turrets searched for Quarry everything was oddly peaceful despite the shaking of the ship and the overlapping shouts of the men.

"Helmsman! What in God's good name is going on? Observation, status report!" He shouted over his shoulder, using the boom of his voice to lasso his men back into focus.

A woman who stood half obscured by a semicircular control panel on a raised area near the center of the bridge, surrounded by holographic displays of the ship focused on her commander. She cleared her throat and dismissed the screens around her, "General, we're undergoing a massive drop in engine power, the engines are responding like we just slammed into a gravity well."

"A gravity well? Observation, any nearby bodies? I thought this jump course was clear."

The skinny and significantly lower ranking man who represented Observation didn't have a direct line of sight to Calhoun, but by the sound of his boots it sounded like he stood anyway. "Nothing, sir. This course was clear as day."

"So we've hit a gravity well on a clear course. Tell me how that makes sense. Punch it in to the navicomp and tell me it makes sense."

"Sir, we just aren't seeing anything, the system must just be malfunctioning. I'll do a hard reset and recalculate."

There was no need to recalculate. The ship shook again and Calhoun's eyes turned back to the blackness, they were still in warp, no stars to be found. That childlike part of him that sheltered far away inside his mind whispered to the grown man on the surface that some beast of the black was curling unseen tendrils around the small portion of the aft behind the conning tower. As the stars crashed back into view and the proximity alarm whooped to life, the monster was revealed.

A foreign ship, distant but visible. The window highlighted the ship in yellow, the color reserved for unknown contacts, and displayed a distance of seventy thousand kilometers. The ship's designation was presented as VIGILANT SENTINEL, and seeing the familiar text of Intergalactic Basic came as a small relief. Whoever the Sentinel belonged to was civilized.