DN - Top Speed

I really don’t know how fast my top speed is. I’ve never gotten there. What I do know is that within about fifteen thousand feet of sea level, I can only get up to Mach 3 or so. Past that, the wind resistance is too much, and I’m simply not strong enough to batter my way through. If I want to go faster I need to get higher. The thinner the air, the faster I go. And to go really fast, I need to get up to where there is no air at all.

The pressure on my arms and face seems to drop gradually, and then all of a sudden I’m up in sub-orbit. The silence is perfect. The world vast below me, stretching out almost unimaginably far all around me. It’s fuzzy blue at the edges, and way off near the horizon, the sun is distant and searingly bright. Below me, the world curves away.

Earth is almost heartbreakingly beautiful from up here. It’s home. It’s everything. I wish everyone had a chance to see it like this.

I give myself a few moments to enjoy the view, and then I put on a fresh burst of speed and pass through ten thousand miles per hour like it was nothing at all.

I bring the gate diagram up again to make sure I’m on course. The trouble with orbital jumps is that they’re not nearly as simple as they seem. It isn’t just go up and come down. The Coriolis effect means coming down where I want to isn’t as trivial as pointing myself in the right direction. I could just try to follow the coastline up South America, past Mexico and into the United States, but it would be tricky, and if I made a mistake it would cost so much time to correct it that it might almost defeat the point of coming up here in the first place. I don’t know how the other Dreadnoughts got along without orbital calculators and satellite navigation.

For a good fifteen minutes I glide silently over Earth, splitting my time between checking my telemetry and scanning ahead in the lattice. In the past nine months I’ve gotten a lot better at reading the lattice, the tangled net of light that hangs behind reality. I’m better at seeing through walls now, and I can scan almost fifty miles ahead of me if there’s no atmosphere in the way to clutter up the view. That’s important, because even for me it would be a little uncomfortable to slam into a low-flying satellite at twenty-six thousand miles an hour.

- Sovereign, Chapter 5