1. absence of any sound or noise; stillness.
2. the state or fact of being silent; muteness.
3. absence or omission of mention, comment, or expressed concern: the conspicuous silence of our newspapers on local graft.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/silence
It was like a hammer. A large hammer, pounding on the hull over and over. Then the gravelly voice began, accompanied by a siren’s wail. “Bück dich!”… I have no idea what came next because, still in a very fragile state, I clasped my ears to defend what hungover brain matter I had left.
A large groan creaked through the ship. Removing my hands from the flight controls may have been a slight oversight on my part. The Hiraeth clipped the top of the mail slot on her way out, then bouncing off every pole in the affectionately named toast rack, we skated out of Explorer’s Anchorage and into the black.
Before I could silence the self-imposed torture music, more audio pain came at me in the form of warning tones from the proximity sensors. My starboard view was filled with the front end of a Beluga Liner. This was not good. In a vain attempt to launch us out of the way, I hit the booster and made it halfway across the oncoming ship’s nose before it finished the job by ramming us out of the way.
Now entering into an uncontrolled spin, I had to take steps to bring my situation under control. Enduring the angry voice charging out the comms unit, I grabbed the controls and turned the flight assist off and back on again. As the manoeuvring thrusters began to fire and slowly steadied the ship, I silenced the audio system so I could have a moment to compose myself. I would have to re-enter the port and effect some quick repairs.
My communications console then started to blink violently at me. Sigh. I was not having a good day. Two messages were queued up and eagerly waiting for my attention. The first message: a fine for speeding within a restricted area. The second: another fine, this time for causing damage to another craft while speeding in a restricted area.
I weighed my options, either to continue on my merry way or return to Explorer’s Anchorage and have the hull looked at. I opened a docking request with the station, anonymous access of course until I had paid my fines. I gave the ships modules and hull capacity a once over. The hull damage was not too bad- sitting at eighty-nine percent and most modules sitting at ninety-five or above. I had gotten off lucky considering the size of ship that just cast me aside.
Having disregarded the fines and any repairs The Hiraeth may have needed, I forged on with my journey. However, the noise from the engines and the lightshow from my first jump started to pull me back in to the dehydrated nauseous disposition of yesterday. I was going to have to take a walk. I quickly scanned the system, the bodies here had already been catalogued and mapped by another commander so I stopped when I found one with a light atmosphere. A 2 A, Carbon Dioxide rich, rocky body with smattering of metals. Two biological signals, that will give me something to do on my walk I thought.
Touching down on the northern hemisphere, almost at the pole I noticed that the terrain was flat, unusually flat. I was in no state to take the SRV out but I may well have to come back here, I thought to myself. I chuckled, thinking, “Well, I will come back when I come to pay off my fines.”
I exited the Hiraeth on foot, leaving my boot prints in the virgin dirt. I walked and I walked in complete silence and it was golden.
The Javi Times 