As Novas
Overview
As Novas was the drive engineer and de facto ship’s philosopher aboard The Adequate Response, a position they held for over three decades. A third-generation spacer raised on a remote refuelling depot, they earned a reputation as one of the finest plasma-drive diagnosticians in known space—and one of the most difficult people to share a long-haul voyage with.
Over their career, Novas developed a body of laconic, fatalistic observations that hardened into legend. Their aphorisms—recorded obsessively by the ship’s AI and passed among spacers across the sector—distilled decades of engineering disasters, near-death events, and cosmic indifference into compact, unforgettable sayings. Their most famous observation, describing a phenomenon where effect precedes cause, entered spacer vocabulary as “a deterministic boot to the head,” a phrase still quoted long after their death.
Background
As Novas was born aboard Tharsis Anchorage, a free-floating refuelling depot on the Rimward Drift so remote it barely registered on official charts. Life there taught them early that every machine fails and the only people who survive are those who stop expecting otherwise. They shipped out as an apprentice drive engineer at sixteen, cycling through salvage tugs and bulk freighters whose captains prized competence highly enough to tolerate the unsolicited pessimism that came with it.
In Stellar Year 12,440, three years after The Adequate Response was commissioned, Captain Rupert “Pappy” Huang recruited Novas from a crumbling ore hauler. Pappy wanted one person aboard who would speak unwelcome truths aloud, and Novas fulfilled that role with relentless dedication. Over the next thirty-one years, their muttered grim observations became part of the ship’s permanent memory, catalogued by the AI REGGIE and later deployed as a teaching tool for subsequent generations. Novas retired at sixty-five to a quiet rim station, where they continued to curate their sayings and greet visitors with the assurance that the universe was winding down—which was, they maintained, perfectly acceptable.
Physical Description
As Novas was tall and rawboned, with a frame burned lean by a career of skipping meals to chase engine faults. They moved with the careful economy of someone who had spent decades in zero-g and never fully trusted the artificial gravity to hold. Their face carried the marks of hard vacuum exposure and difficult choices—deep lines carved by squinting through decompression mists, a nose broken twice and reset with a permanent leftward drift, and skin with the waxy pallor of someone who considered unfiltered sunlight a rumour. A shock of silver-grey hair, cut unevenly with a utility blade, stood in permanent disarray.
Novas wore the same grease-stained black coveralls for three decades, rotated with an identical pair during cleanings. Over this went a battered pre-Expansion leather flight jacket, salvaged from a Roanoke surplus bin and subsequently decorated with patches commemorating seventeen major engine failures and nine near-death events, including one embroidered skull captioned “TOLD YOU SO.” The jacket smelled permanently of ozone, hot metal, and faint herbal smoke. They never went anywhere without a data slate held together by docking tape and stubbornness, containing an expanding file titled Things I Noticed While Everything Exploded, which served as the raw material for their aphorisms over forty-seven years.
Personality
Novas was pragmatic to the point of brutality. They considered optimism a dangerous form of self-delusion and refused to sugar-coat a diagnostic or say “it could be worse” without explaining exactly how it would get worse. This unflinching honesty made them an exceptional engineer and a catastrophically poor source of comfort.
Beneath the fatalism ran an obsessive attention to detail. Novas noticed micro-hesitations in relays, subtle vibration shifts in baffles, and mood changes in crew members before a word was spoken. These observations, catalogued with meticulous precision, were distilled into aphorisms that compressed an entire career’s worth of disaster into single memorable sentences. They were laconic in the extreme, speaking in short declarative bursts punctuated by silences that could convey deep contemplation or absolute contempt depending on context. A streak of dark humour threaded through their pessimism—they could describe a cascading reactor failure with the tone of a mortician complimenting a casket. Despite a genuine conviction that free will was largely an illusion, Novas never stopped fixing things, operating on the principle that while the machine didn’t care about choice, it absolutely cared whether the bolt was tightened.
Relationships
Captain Rupert “Pappy” Huang: The two shared a relationship of mutual respect that bordered on philosophical symbiosis. Pappy tolerated Novas’s relentless grumbling because it grounded the crew; Novas tolerated Pappy’s cheerfulness because it came with a paycheck. Novas was the only crew member permitted to call an order stupid to the captain’s face.
REGGIE, the ship’s AI: REGGIE found Novas’s logic-adjacent fatalism deeply satisfying, and Novas treated the AI as an intellectual equal when few others did. REGGIE’s permanent memory contains 2,187 recorded Novas sayings, tagged and cross-referenced by theme. In the present day, REGGIE deploys these aphorisms with the fondness of a grandchild quoting a departed elder.
Subsequent Huang generations: Novas’s sayings were passed down through the family. The current Cosmic Janitor, Danny Huang, carries a deep if irritated familiarity with them, unable to open a diagnostic panel without hearing REGGIE’s impression of Novas explaining why whatever he finds is his own fault.
Other crew: Novas was tolerated by most, respected by fellow engineers, exhausting to navigators, and once nearly poisoned by the ship’s cook after remarking on the inevitability of universal heat-death. When threatened with rat poison, Novas replied that it would merely accelerate the process.
Speech Pattern
Novas spoke with a gravel-low voice shaped by decades of talking over plasma conduits, each word measured as though syllables came from a limited budget. Their sentences were clipped and aphoristic, stripped of adjectives and subordinate clauses, sounding like they had been rehearsed in an empty engine room for maximum impact. Many pronouncements were preceded by a long, deliberate silence, during which Novas appeared to consult some internal catalogue of cosmic injustices, and followed by a quiet, half-hummed “…yep” that served as both punctuation and shrug. Their vocabulary drew entirely from the world of engineering and physics—levers, gears, thermodynamics, and the unfeeling machinery of the universe—replacing concepts like “fate” with phrases such as “statistically predetermined outcome envelope.”