EVE Online is a science-fiction massively-multiplayer game and the largest
shared virtual world in existence. It’s set far in the future, where mankind,
long since cut off from Earth, has evolved into several galactic empires that
maintain an increasingly fragile peace. It is a dark place full of opportunity
and danger, where every day tens of thousands explore new territories, wage
wars, manage businesses and corporations, and pirate their way through their
fellow pilots. The following story, for the holiday season, was written with
permission and the assistance of CCP (EVE’s developer). This is a four-part
story that will run Fridays, concluding on December 21. For other stories from
the EVE universe, visit
Eve Chronicles.
CCP’s Abraxas penned Chapter Two of this four-part tale. For the first chapter,
please see
The Minmatar Encounter
.
Leap of Faith
Chapter Two – The
Caldari Quest
Jaak was flying under the
stars’ unyielding gaze, heading for confrontation, failure and death, when one
of them seemed to flash and blink out of existence. It was only for a moment,
and the camera drones that encircled his ship barely caught the burn on their
lenses, but he chose to believe that it had happened, and that it was an omen.
This, at long last, would be the time when he could debase himself, die and be
reborn – rid of his indelible taint.
It wasn’t long since he’d
last been cloned. He had awoken coughing and spluttering on the cold cloning bay
floor, naked as dawn and soaked with the ectoplasm that had been nourishing this
new body. A new ship awaited him in his hangar, courtesy of blessed forethought
during a much older visit, so it was no time before he made it onboard, hooked
his body up to the sensor lines in his escape pod, and undocked from the station
into space and the blanket of stars.
The ones around him shone
dully, their luminescence entirely failing to light his way, but the one he’d
now glimpsed for an instant was enough to lift his spirits. He tended to
navigate by instinct, taking whatever route that felt like it would get him
further than last time, and not thinking about why he was doing this.
There was a planet in the
same approximate direction as his ghost star had been, and Jaak set his ship to
warp there. He could never get used to warping; the tunnel through which his
ship coursed was beautiful and unreal, but the feeling that he was following a
path from which he couldn’t turn was sometimes almost too much to bear.
His ship came out of warp in
another part of the system, and immediately he was rewarded with an evil prize.
There were pirates here, zooming back and forth through a gas cloud. They were
Sansha, a freakish group of slaves bound by invasive technology to obey and
protect their masters. The sun glinted off the carapaces on their ships, and
made the multitude of spikes that dotted their hulls look even more unpleasant.
They locked him immediately,
but he didn’t worry and put his ship in a lazy orbit around their flight. He let
them take a few potshots before he locked them back and started sending off
missile volleys. It wasn’t so much of a fight as a prelude to loss; already
their shields were gone and their armor rapidly disintegrating.
To Jaak, it was also a
pre-death ritual. These guys couldn’t harm him, but he was planning to find
death in battle later on, and if that death was to have any ritual meaning Jaak
must already have engaged in combat at some point in his life. It was true, of
course, that Caldari noncombatants could find honor through an assortment of
cleansing rituals. But Caldari fighters with no blood to their name weren’t
warriors, merely peasants with aspirations; and their deaths, while tragic, were
empty and devoid of purpose. Since Jaak had theoretically only been alive for an
hour, these Sansha were a lucky break.
The last Sansha fell under
Jaak’s missiles, its ship exploding in the briefest of blazes. Jaak felt
slightly envious. They were gone now, for good; not reawakening in a cloning
vat. No chance of forgiveness, yes, but no presence of memories to weigh them
down, either. Whatever they’d done in their lives had died with them, and since
they were not bound by the same web of codes and rules of honor as he was, they
could go in peace.
He wasn’t sure what part of
his secret offense had finally broken him, or how much it had informed his
behavior since. He had tried seeing himself from the outside, objectively
judging his own actions and weighing them against his idea of normality, but
since he couldn’t be sure that this idea was any more acceptable than what he
was already doing, he always gave up. In the end he did what felt right, even if
it was nothing more than committing the least of the wrongs, and tried to make
amends.
Now, with blood on his
hands, it was time to find other pilots, proper Empire capsuleers, and start the
atonement for good and honest.
Jaak set course for insecure
space, that area of violence and danger. The ghost star hadn’t cropped up again,
but he nonetheless found himself taking a different route than usual, and
decided to interpret it as divine guidance. He drifted to a stargate that would
take him into the unguarded territories, activated it, and was shunted through
in a searing blast of light. When he got to the other side, cloaked and silent,
he found himself surrounded.
These areas were still bound
by laws but not policed in the slightest, which meant that honorless capsuleers
would hang around chokepoint gates and attack anyone who dared venture into
their territory. Jaak winced inside his pod. There was no honor in fighting
these men; they were his equals in name only.
He looked around, spotted a
handy planet to warp to, and got ready. Any movement on his part would drop his
ship’s cloak and open him up for attack. He tensed inside his pod and gave his
systems a final check to make sure everything was working alright. Luck willing,
his microwarp drive would shuttle him out of the attackers’ range, and its
overdrive function would give him that extra boost they weren’t expecting.
He clocked on the overdrive,
activated the microwarp drive, dropped cloak, and ran. The pirates immediately
started locking him, but he was already headed away, his ship revving up to the
speed it needed for proper warp, and by the time they started firing salvos he
felt the familiar rumbling as the motors started up the warp tunnel. His ship
tore away at immense speed, and within moments the pirates were nothing more
than dwindling specks and dull stars fading to nothing in the background. Jaak
wasn’t happy about having a microwarp drive on his ship – it smacked of
cowardice and flight from combat – but it was a small concession so that he
wouldn’t travel countless jumps into dark territories only to be killed by an
unworthy adversary. The deaths, all his deaths, should mean something.
Once he broke out of warp he
got the strangest feeling of something being off, and immediately started warp
again, going deeper into the system and praying they hadn’t managed to follow
him. After he’d broken warp a second time he finally allowed himself a breather,
and rotated his camera drones to scout his surroundings. There was no one here.
He relaxed, feeling the paranoia and adrenaline backrush wash from his body, and
set his ship to the next stargate. There were no more chokepoints on this path,
and there would be no more stalkers waiting in secret.
He couldn’t plan the
impending confrontation, for that would be murder or intentional suicide; he
must be engaged first, and fight to protect his honor. He would follow his whims
on these travels, but the paths he took had long since become too well known,
and the stars that shone down on him were far too familiar. Everything he did
seemed planned, and it felt as if it had always been that way. He thought of the
offense, and tried not to.
It took him a few more jumps
to reach a system he felt had some promise. Other pilots were registered on the
system-wide communications board, and Jaak had no doubt that some of them would
bring the fire. He was drifting through the system, looking to put himself in
harm’s way, when something caught his eye: A stargate that he didn’t remember
ever being there, and that wasn’t listed in the location selector of his warp
interface. He experienced the same strange feeling as he had when he warped from
the pirates at the gate, and idly realized that in those few panicky seconds
right after the warp, when he’d been panning around before warping again, he
couldn’t actually remember seeing the planet he had warped to.
Jaak shook off the feeling,
suspecting he was becoming so inured to the celestial vistas that he was
starting to subconsciously ignore them, and approached the gate.
As he reached jump range he
suddenly felt unsure about using it, and stopped his ship, letting it sit there
in total stillness as he thought about it. After a while, his thoughts spinning
down in ever darker spirals, he came to the conclusion that try as he might to
break away, he had by now been completely conformed to the patterns of his
Empire, to the point that forging brand-new paths seemed anathema to him. He
thought of the planet he didn’t see, and of the ghost star that had led his way,
and of the terrible offense that had led him to this in the first place, and not
for the first time he wondered if he might possibly be nothing more than a
broken, deluded man.
He shirked off that thought,
and for the first time since he’d been brought back to life he allowed himself
to think in full about the offense he’d committed, the one that had driven him
to this. There was no single event, but a series of them, an endless trail of
unforgivable transgressions that compose living and being human. From first to
last he had failed everyone: His wasted childhood of obedience and
concentration, his exemplary grades, his meteoric rise through the ranks and
instant acceptance into the pilot program, and the ascendancy to the pod and the
stars above, all of which had failed to satisfy not merely his closest and
dearest but this whole closed system in which he’d been formed, this Empire that
had shaped him into what he was and taught him that in a life that had been
imbued with nothing but the purest success, he was still, somehow, a waste and
an utter failure.
And at some point, he had
changed. It might have been when he first undocked his ship and came to the
inexorable realization that even though he had achieved godhood, he was still
not good enough for a Caldari. Every decision he had made, along with all
decisions he continued to make, they only accumulated his transgressions,
watched over by the stars’ invisible eyes, until such point as they became
intolerable, and he could see nothing but his desire for escape, and for
redemption, and for an end.
He trembled in his pod. The
stars, the stars, the stars shone down on him.
He felt like he was part of
his own ship. This was normal; pilots were parts of their ships in the same way
that central nervous systems were parts of the bodies they held up. But they
were not unified parts, Jaak thought, for when a person feels like a part of
something they can also see themselves as individual entities and can imagine
being separated, however painfully. Right now Jaak felt like he and the ship
could not be divided, not even in thought and theory, and it was as if the
ship’s parts were holding him back, like shrinking skin stretched too taut over
a body that wanted to expand and tear itself out. He should have been a god in
the sky, he thought, but right now all he wanted was to break through this metal
shell and be free at last, from the constraints on form and spirit. So that was
what he’d been trying, that and fulfilling his duties to the last as he’d always
done. He’d had missiles and gunfire and lasers tear him to shreds, break open
the shell that encased him, and set him free. But it never worked. He always
woke up again in the pod vats with nothing changed and nothing to do but go out
again and sacrifice himself once more on the altar of invisible penance.
The gate was there in front
of him, silent and strange.
And Jaak realized that if he
was that far gone, this choice couldn’t possibly be worse than any others. It
might, in fact, be the only path he had yet to take; and at that moment the idea
of treading all the others yet again was terrifying and bleak.
He activated the gate, and
disappeared.
Previous
chapters in this tale:
Chapter One – The Minmatar Encounter
