Raine had spent some of her idle time before the journey examining the film map, and had a basic idea of how travel in the spaceship worked.  Unfortunately, she had no good excuse to use the axis corridor.  Too bad, she had always loved zero gravity.<br/><br/>The woman walked briskly around corner, her eyes intent on the holographic textures emanating from the length of the film cylinder.  It was dark grey, with one end flat and the other coming to a rounded point.  An invisibly thin crack stretched from flat end to rounded end.  Whenever someone applied pressure to the flat end, the crack would jump to life, spitting out a "sheet" of holographic film with the cylinder at its base.<br/><br/>Raine "pinched" the hologram, jerking her fingers to the side and scrolling the paper sideways to expose a new area of the map.  After a moment of close examination, she had identified the proper hatchway.  On the other side of the door was another hallway that led directly to the temporary non-military accommodations.<br/><br/>One hand idly brushing through her hair - she needed to shower, and get a haircut.  Some of the hair actually reached below her ears, and there were these obnoxiously long bangs that she kept brushing off her face.  How could women<em>live</em>with this mess on their heads?<br/><br/>The "Civilian accommodations" turned out to be a re-purposed hangar.  The usual transport and fighter craft that cluttered the massive room were gone.  Two acres of deckplate stretched before her: the curve of the hull was clearly evident towards the far end of the room.<br/><br/>As Raine entered the hangar, a tired looking navyman handed her a bundle of cloth wordlessly before grabbing another one from a large bin.  The cloth seemed to be a condensed sleeping bag and pillow rolled into a ball.  The fabric was coarse and primitive.<em>The Company sends us out here to colonize a planet, and they provide us with these.  Figures.</em><br/><br/>A sizable number of people had already staked their claims on the worn and flame-scarred hangar floor.  Still, Raine knew this was only a minor fraction, maybe 10%, of the total civilian population.  While there was easily a thousand people gathered here, an equal amount were still wandering the ship or coming out of cryo.  These were workers deemed vital to have awake and alert by the time the ship touched down on the planet: doctors, pilots, families of crewmen, engineers, and mechanics.  The other 18,000 or so people were still cryogenically suspended, meant to be awakened once the planet was deemed secure.  These thousands represented the bulk population, and were drawn from all corners of Company space.  Every race was represented, every trait, skin color, intelligence, and talent.  It was meant to give the colony a solid gene pool as well as a reliable work force.  It also put them above the die-off number: no matter how many babies were pumped out, a small enough population would be unable to reproduce itself even in ideal conditions.<br/><br/>The somewhat Hispanic looking woman padded her way around the main cluster of sleeping bags, grabbing a spot on the very fringe.  She wouldn't be needed for at least six hours; a good window to catch some real sleep.<br/><br/>Even as Raine dropped the rough bundle of fabric onto the solid, somewhat abrasive deckplate, she felt a sharp pang of homesickness suddenly cut through her.<br/><br/>She was<em>here</em>.  Light from Sol would take dozens of years to reach her eyes, and even then it would be no brighter, no more recognizable than the billions of other stars that crowded the night sky.  They were alone.  There was no going back now.<br/><br/>With a sigh and a swear, Raine began to set up her bed.<br/><br/>*   *   *<br/><br/>Edgar Valifikante was a robust man.  Broad shouldered and barrel chested, his face bearing the rugged and strong features of Scandinavian heritage, he looked more like a clodhopping, mudslogging marine then an engineer.  Despite his size, Edgar had a delicate touch when it came to the fragile and intricate subsystems of military cruisers.  His father had been a navigator for civilian spacecraft, and his son had dutifully followed in his footsteps to the stars.<br/><br/>Although he had no specific job coming out of the freezer, Edgar was one of many people who had been designated "On Alert".  They were not active, but were simply fallbacks in the event of an unpleasant situation.<br/><br/>As his COM crackled on his lapel, Edgar knew something decidedly unpleasant had come up.  Why else would he be ordered to the bridge?<br/><br/>Sighing despite himself, the engineer clumsily clambered up the ladders and hatchways tot he axis corridor, then proceeded to launch himself down the long tunnel.  For some reason, the bridge had been built in the nose of the ship.  Human pride, probably.  The captain - or admiral, as the case may be - needs to lead the charge, even if it means exposing the nerve center of the entire ship to  enemy fire.<br/><br/>Exactly seven minutes and seventeen seconds after being paged, Edgar Valifikante arrived on the bridge.  Making a passing effort to neaten his dirty blonde hair (which had grown out to an uncomfortable four inches during cryo), he stepped passed the armed guard onto the bridge.  Spotting the admiral, he tipped his head respectfully.  "Yo," he introduced himself.  "What's the problem?"<br/><br/>An officer, a pixie-like woman with a youthful face, stepped in front of him, blocking off his view of the admiral.  "I am Second Lieutenant Dion.  Let me explain."<br/><br/>Edgar nodded, looking down at the short woman.  He had her by a third of a meter, easy.<br/><br/>"As you probably know, this cruiser comes equipped with seven neutrino cushioners for landing and docking.  While the first five are just fine, the other two - both doral posterier - are not responding.  It's most likely an error in the bridge display, but we want to make sure."  Dion checked her watch.  "You have five and a half hours.  I strongly recommend going now."<br/><br/>The engineer gave her an odd look.  Was she making fun of him?<br/><br/>Edgar shrugged.  Didn't matter.  If one of the neutrino cushioners had failed, the<em>Traveler</em>would be a mountain of ionized bits smeared across half the planet.  He briefly wondered what would've caused a failure in one of the cushioner, and realized virtually nothing could.  The neutrino cushioners were large blocks of ultradense matter interlocked with long nanofibers.  Although solid to the touch, a microscope would make the material look like millions of suspended platforms, all interconnected and spaced apart.  The matter was extremely heavy - thus the spacing out to limit weight - and was dense enough to catch a couple hundred neutrinos (extremely small and elusive particles emitted from the nuclear reactions in the core of a star) every second or so.  Add an electric current and the material stops a full 50% of neutrinos that impact it, something previously thought to be impossible.  To put it in a perspective, a light-year long column of lead would only stop a little below a half of the neutrinos that pass through its entire length.  So, a cushioner essentially packed the density of a light-year long piece of lead into a block of metal ten meters thick.  The trillions of neutrinos it blocks every second slow the ship down, each impact shaving off a minute slice of the ship's forward velocity, thus allowing the spacecraft to brake while expending little fuel.<br/><br/>Despite its awesome ability, the cushioner was a relatively simple machine.  The tough part was building it.  Maintenance was unnecessary, and operation consisted solely of running electricity through it.<br/><br/>So, Edgar concluded, there must be something wrong with the wiring.  That, or maybe the cushioner was simply torn off the hull?  With the bridge currently unable to communicate with the neutrino cushioner, a manual examination was required, and he had been chosen.<br/><br/>He wasn't worried; no way!  Edgar had been in space countless times, mostly repairing ship hulls.  It was a simple, overrated operation.<br/><br/>The large man turned to exit the bridge, nodding his understanding to Dion.  As he walked through the air lock, a pale, wiry man appeared.  The two collided.<br/><br/>Edgar tumbled to the hard deckplate, spouting expletives all the way.  The tall man lost his balance and fell against the wall, grunting as his shoulder banged on the bulkhead.  Quickly, he uttered a quiet apology, extending his hand down for Edgar to grab onto.<br/><br/>The large man looked at him, then grabbed the offered hand.  For such a light man, his grip was vice-like.  He pulled, jerking the heavy man to his feet with a surprising amount of strength.  Then, clapping the engineer apologetically on the shoulder, "You OK?"<br/><br/>Edgar shrugged his hand off.  "Ya, fine.  Watch where you're going," he growled, stalking off.<br/><br/>First Lieutenant Jonn Ah'Lerno smiled at Edgar's back as the broad shouldered man walked away.<br/><br/>*   *    *<br/><br/><em>"What was the mans name again?"</em><br/><br/>"Valifikante, Sir," Jonn said, walking onto the bridge after the collision with Edgar.  He looked around the wide, faintly cavernous, room, taking in the dozens of consoles lining the walls.  The front was taken up by an immense window looking out into space: a seamless fabric of starlight stretched from top to bottom.  In front of the window was a sheet of clear plastic glass standing up on the deckplate: the main viewscreen.  Any feed could be displayed there, as well as graphics, maps, communications; virtually anything, really.  Right now, the transparent glass showed a navigational plot of the immediate space about the cruiser.  It was empty, as they were still hundreds of thousands of kilometers from the planet and its moons.  A wire-frame diagram of the ship was in the bottom right corner, two dots toward the bow blinking red: the out-of-touch neutrino cushioners.<br/><br/>The officer quickly walked to his station, a broad console designed specifically for navigations.  He went through the login and verification procedures, then decided to review the cruiser's current course as it rocketed towards Novus.<br/><br/>First it would use the gravity of the twin moons - a binary pair, circling each other as they orbited the planet - to slow down before activating the neutrino cushioners.  As they neared the upper atmosphere, they would fire off bursts from the engines to bleed off any excess velocity before settling into a low orbit.  He would lead the survey teams to find potential colonization sites.  Once the Admiral had decided, the cruiser would enter the atmosphere, using air friction and the neutrino cushioners to keep their speed nominal.<br/><br/>Jonn had started double checking the mathematics when a video popped up on the main viewscreen.  It was Edgar Valifikante, specifically the camera attached to his helmet.  The view was shaky as it stared listlessly into space, and the engineer's rough voice provided commentary.  "Bridge, I'm nearly at the first cushioner.  The external hull shows signs of wear and tear, nothing unusual.  Background radiation minimal.  Uh..."<br/><br/>The camera panned over the hull, showing acres of blackened Comp-A steel.  Gouges in the alloy showed the impact sites of various micrometeors that had struck it over the decades.  Then the view returned to space, and stars jigged crazily across the screen for a few seconds.  The camera steadied itself, staring at an apparently random patch of space.  Jonn watched attentively, his fingers resting atop his console's keyboard.<br/><br/>"Check this out," Edgar said, his voice punctuated with bursts of static.  As he spoke, the camera zoomed in.  It quickly became apparent that this was no ordinary patch of space.<br/><br/>Within seconds, Novus, still hours distant, loomed on the screen.  It was a healthy planet, its surface a patchwork of blue and green and yellow and white.  A single continent stretched from north pole to equator on the hemisphere facing them.  It may have extended all the way to the southern pole, but any landmass in the southern hemisphere was blocked by a massive cloud formation.<br/><br/>It vaguely resembled a hurricane, but with thicker arms a wider look.  That, and it was easily four times larger than the hurricanes seen on Earth.<br/><br/>"Heh heh, I hope you like rain."<br/><br/>Jonn let his eyes widen.  It<em>was</em>an impressive sight.