The Allbright System - A Sci-Fi Progression LitRPG Story

Every ship of the line has them, yet most of the crew never sees them.

They sit near the vessel's core, behind bulkheads thicker than the ones protecting the bridge, in chambers the deck plans label simply as Astro-Navigation.

The crews call them the "Quiet Rooms."

Inside, hooked into life-assisting machinery that breathes for them and feeds them, are the people who make our interstellar civilization possible.

Almost nobody outside the Navy knows what their work actually costs.

Void travel is conducted through pre-charted Voidlanes or tunnels—stable corridors through a plane of existence that does not want us in it.

What the literature mentions less often is that "stable" is a courtesy term. Tunnels shift. Void Entities move in. Anomalies bloom in corridors that were clean a mere week ago.

So every transit begins with verification—the work of the Thread-Path Psyker, who spends staggering quantities of Psyfocus running their Soul's perception down the corridor's full length.

For a short hop, this is taxing.

For the longest corridors, recovery from a single chart can take months or years.

There are Thread Psykers who have spent most of their careers recovering rather than charting—and the Navy considers this an acceptable ratio, because the alternative is sending tens of thousands of crew into the Voidlanes on faith alone.

And faith, as so many of humanity's past attempted doctrines have shown, offers no protection against the realities—or unrealities—of our existence.

Then the ship enters the Void, and the Echo takes over.

Once transit begins, the Echo Psyker descends into a working trance and does not come out until the journey ends—weeks, months, on the deepest corridors years later.

Their mind works around the clock, reinforcing the tunnel's walls, holding the passage steady against a medium that erodes it by simply existing. Parts of their Soul are cast forward into the Void itself, holding a lonely vigil with no rest, no respite and no allies to reach out to. Even when several Echo Psykers are reinforcing the same tunnel at once, they cannot communicate.

It is inside this arrangement that the true cost of course changes becomes clear.

A ship inside a Void tunnel cannot simply turn—breaching the walls spikes the Repulsor-Field and invites the Entities always waiting outside, and beyond the walls the ship's meager pocket of borrowed Reality guarantees nothing.

Departure from a charted tunnel remains the single leading cause of ships and crew lost irretrievably to the Void.

So a course change means leaving the Void entirely: The ship's systems rip open a portal back into Real-space and force the vessel through.

The Repulsor-Field takes—repairable—damage, yet the Echo Psyker takes the worst of it.

There is no way to warn a mind in working trance that the tunnel it is holding is about to cease to exist. The backlash arrives with the full weight of everything they were holding—Soul Burn is expected, and fleet doctrine requires a Null standing by before the portal opens.

And the ship still is not on its new course.

That requires the Thread Psyker to chart again—this time from Blank-space, with no mapped starting point. In the words of one fleet medical officer: "The single most reliable generator of Soul Burn we have ever documented."

The fleet calls the full sequence a "Burning of the Astros."

It is why modern doctrine mandates shorter transits with more scheduled stops—so a change of destination costs nothing but time, instead of the two most valuable people in the Quiet Rooms.

A retired Echo Psyker I once interviewed had been through a Burning.

I asked what she remembered.

"Nothing," she said. "That's the only mercy I received. I remember holding the tunnel—and then the medical bay, six months later, waking up from the coma."

She was quiet for a moment.

"They gave the Null who stopped my partner a posthumous commendation. For being fast enough. I was made to sign the recommendation myself… once my hands had started working again."

[Shortened Excerpt from "The Quiet Rooms" — UHF Long Watch News, Investigative Features, Issue #2,847, PFC 924]