‘You have to get on the couch now!’ The countdown until acceleration was displayed, flashing on all the panels in front of him. Twenty seconds left. There was no going back now. Aborting meant waiting another 6 hours for the drives to be ready again.

‘You won’t survive it. Get on the fucking couch now!’ Captain Shrill Mayor was already secured in the cushion chute. It stretched back twenty metres, padded all the way by a pink fibre-glass composite. Magnetically aided cushions weren’t feasible in the cockpit due to major interference potential. The guys here had it the worst.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ His female co-pilot, Captain Zen Willard was still scrambling around frantically.

‘Just some last minute checks.’

‘If something’s wrong now, we’re screwed anyway. Get your arse in the chute.’ Ten seconds were left until bone-crushing time. She darted into the parallel couch along side her partner’s.

Willard was experienced. She’d made hundreds of jumps before and could harness herself in under a couple of seconds, this time was no exception. Her experience just made it all the more confusing for Shrill why she was fumbling around, taking risks in the final seconds. Or perhaps it made more sense? He wasn’t sure.

Forty gees for a solid ten minutes of endurance wouldn’t even bring them to a tenth of a percent of light. On the other hand it was the break even point. It was nearing on the limit for what humans could live through with current technology. And for regular propulsion ships as opposed to space splitters, it was pretty damn quick.

The force hit real hard; harder than ever before it seemed. They both excused it in their heads for physical shortcomings; neither was in particularly great shape. The sedatives they deployed minutes earlier were beginning to take effect, relaxation oozing through their bodies. The drugs were in reasonably low dosages, but every microgram made the agonizing minutes pass easier.

Their tongues were glued to the floors of their mouths, rendering any communication impossible. Their eyelids were just about the only things they could move, meaning all that was left to do was watch and wait.

The ship updated them with regular intervals of velocity gains. One hundred and fifty thousand metres per second and they were experiencing mild respiratory issues, even with the drugs along with the hundreds of cubic metres of padding. The visual aids just in front of their eyes were frantic, flashing statistics such as fuel usage and predictions, time projections as well as mass detection readings and stray meteorite trajectories; which fortunately there were none of.

Two hundred kilometres per second and they were eighty-five percent there. Air began getting heavier nearer the back of the control room, making breathing even more difficult in the gee cushions.

At two thirty-five kilometres per second their bonding to the fibre glass became slack and aural communication was once again possible. Weightlessness overwhelmed the contents of the ship, while they waited for earth gravity to recover. Both Captains headed straight for the panels at the nose, to check if everything was as calculated.

‘Two thirty-five two hundred exactly. Path correct to the kilometre. If our decell goes as smoothly as the jump, we’ll be there in six days seven minutes. Congratulations Captain Mayor.’

This is the beginning of one of my chapters of something I've been working on. I would rather not have ended it there, but it had to end somewhere.

This is about as best as I could format it. Did you like it? Would you read on?