Swimming around the reef was the best!

Tunie loved to be out here swimming, climbing, pulling herself along.

There was so many swooping particles to dodge that it made her feel alive. So many fine little adjustments to make with every feather and every barb along each feather.

Grasping the weft and wane of the Aether to shove minutely or drag slightly.

Individually every action was barely a breath of acceleration.

But between the feathery forms of her exterior, and the even finer and more extreme precision of the filaments and branches that spiraled through her drive.

Tunie swam and climbed and pulled and pushed herself through the void.

She spun gently in the dark and drank in with her eyes everything around her.

Every speck of dust, every drifting cloud of gas, every sailing bloom of plankton.

She watched bursts of light ahead and felt her thoughts churning and burning behind each of her eyes.

Singing and speaking and weighing every trajectory within herself and outside herself.

When Tunie was at cruising velocity she felt vast and outside herself.

The world was only in the future many-many-many of body lengths ahead and out. She swam in the future and the possibilities and dodged collisions and drag and ablations before they were even vaguely possible.

There was a cloud of iron rich star-spew. She would never be near it. Over there was a flickering humming song of relaying resonance mirrors, sweetly singing out echoes of her and other ship songs.

There fore and aft and all around going in every direction was the twinkling hints of other vessels. Some burned with brightness in long-light, others sparkled in short-light using the brightness of torches and gases spewing out. Some had crew, some were beasts, and some might be more frightful things. Some extended thin silky sheets to catch star-light and rode the winds. Some tugged and slid by on the very dust clouds that Tunie and others avoided, using their songs to traverse where no other could. And of course there were vessels that were like Tunie as they feathered and fluffed and dragged and swam on aether.

There was constructs of Gardener and Canner, There was the natural borne shapes of wild bodies and the mysterious and wondrous shapes that came from the great city shipyards.

Even with being so far from the main trade-currents it was bustling on the scale and speed that concerned a Traveler of the reef.

It made the sharp sudden realities and course changes of INSIDE her body much harder to focus on.

She needed every moment and mote of thought and light to traverse the courses ahead and anticipate far future paths.

There was no time to worry about what was in her hull, on her feathers or even many many many body lengths ahead.

No maneuver she could make without snapping her own spine would prevent a collision that was arriving that late.

Which Tunie would hate to do, snapped spines in transit lead to Ships smashing into the reef without being able to decelerate from cruising speed.

That was the thing nightmares were made of.

Very horrible nightmares.

Tunie sometimes woke up when they were at port for a long rest of maintenance and repair.

The nightmares jolting her up crying and needing brushies from her crew.

The vision of sleep that of drifting without the strength to change course. Trapped at speed and starving. Unable to move, unable to shift, her feathers brittle and stiff.

And then slamming into a mass of the coral, in the dream she knew the heat and light would be blinding, that her corpse would burn and sear and shatter deep into the reef.

Whole ports and worlds and ecocosms unknown to ships gone in blinding hateful tragedy and light.

The nightmare of crashing at cruise velocity haunted every ship when they rested in berth.

Young ships grew up in their creche ports on stories and velocity rhymes of the the horror that was crashing at speed.

So tunie lived in the future, smeared out across vast expanses of space. Feeling with her eyes, tasting with her vision. Knowing by course and impulse and acceleration.

This is why every ship needed a crew to help think the quicktime inside themselves.

To see to the things that could not be trusted to autonomous motiles pulsing and crawling around inside.

The ship had to look and see and fly and swim and grasp so much at once in transit every single moment there was no attention to spare for the interior, hold, cargo and passenger.

Tunie loved and trusted her crew.

And her crew was very skilled at speaking and talking and handling the needs to crew things. Tunie was good at ship things. At course things and fuel things and trajectory things.

Her crew could speak to any port things, Tunie loved preening and showing off the vast logs of rapid trades and exchanges and deals she and her crew made to the other ships.

Tunie knew some of the older ships and crews thought she was a little silly. And sometimes they said mean things about how small and singular her crew was.

But how long did their crew have to work to be understood during outreach or uplift exchanges?

How much extra mass and time sink did they suffer to have translation machines to get ports to understand and speak deals?

How lean could they run with the added maintenance and cost of those translator machines?

How much trade profit did they lose because they did not have a Crew that could speak and be understood and understand in every single port in the reef (or close enough to it that Tunie and the ships agreed arguing this point was semantics).

How many ships had a SIREN on their crew?

Tunie had not heard many objections or counters that mattered in those exchanges.

At worst many older ships were annoyed with Tunie for acting too smug about it.

But Tunie’s crew was the best and she trusted that whatever the special-care-instruction cargo now-passengers required would be conveyed and the contract fulfilled properly because her crew was the best port-trade-talker Tunie had ever heard of in the reef.

There were dozens of uplift mission that Tunie and her crew had successfully returned to and gotten delicious trade deals for the trouble.

No one was going to convince Tunie that her crew was not the best.

Although it sounded like something might be lowering the morale of the special-care-instruction-cargo-now-passengers.