Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

Wake Angel

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a space-folk horror anthology podcast and as such may not be suited for all audiences. Listener discretion, is advised.

Let's talk about Slipspace, Belter. When you linked up with the Railhead, settled between the pylons and saw the light turn to water, when the whole of the galaxy seemed to condense to an infinitely dense incandescent bluewhite dot and then unfold like a lotus flower all around you...well, what had you been told to expect? Did you get the lurch, the feeling like your body was moving forward but your consciousness, your point of view, was drifting slowly out through back of your skull so you were looking at your own body standing there gawping at what it was seeing? Did you get the all-overs? The shakes that start at the nape of your neck and march down the line of your central nervous system and outward from sheathed neuron to naked nerve endings, that swarm of ants moving under your skin as your monkey-brain tries to put what it's feeling into something actionable, but can only manage a chihuaha shudder? Did someone tell you what to expect? Could they? How could they ever be right, right? The Slip hits everyone just a little different, and some of us take to it better than others.

But what is the Slip, I mean really? When you get right down to it, what is it that we surrender our squishy little meat-suits to when we link up with the Rail and punch through space and time, catapulting through the light and then the dark and the sound and the fury on our way out beyond the stars that we know? Hell I don't know. No one does. That's for the angels to know and for us to try our absolute damnedest not to think too hard about.

Whatever the Slip may be, it's what gave us the stars. Even at the smallish-type fraction of the speed of light that we've managed, through gross disregard for our own human limitations, to accomplish through terrestrial means, if it weren't for the Railheads we would have been stuck on our unfashionable arm of our backwater spiral galaxy. We'd have never met the Belt, never stared into the gaping maw of SAG-A.

Of all the half-busted junk we've found floating, testament to other thinking, building organisms adrift out here in the vasty unknown and unknowable, The Rails are what made the Belt possible. And of all we know about the Rails--who built them, how they work, what effects they'll have on our human physiology and evolution in the long run--the thing that comforts me least is the existence of angels.

[Intro Bad Boy]

You know, they call 'em Angels. Seems a kindly name to hang on them if you ask me. I expect that it comes from the same place as sailors back on the oceans of Earth looking down at something that...well, maybe if you squinted and were more than a little lonesome for the company of someone other than the unwashed and shifty-eyed brethren that you left port with...something that resembled a human being that had learned to live beneath the waves. Because when you look at a Wake Angel, it might look a little like us. Maybe. If you're a hopeful and optimistic sort.

The wings are right, though. For angels, I mean.

They're broad, diaphanous things, trailing light like a Northern night's sky or faulty reactor containment. They come in all colors...or maybe no one can quite agree on what to call the shade. Maybe we lack the words for the information our eyes are feeding us. That ain't unheard of.

Usually you can see them keeping pace with ships traveling through the slip. They corkscrew back and forth, three four five of them stiching fore and aft, racing our little yeses across an ocean of no. Their light trails behind them like a long-exposure photograph, like fireflies caught in burning honey. You can't watch them without thinking that they're racing you. That they're playful. Friendly even.