He paced down the long shaft of structural duralloy that bore the weight of the starboard side of the ship. It shuddered occasionally, as the warp drive compensated for some ripple or wrinkle in spacetime. This corridor was one of the dimly lit service passageways, and he was wearing one of the frameworker's light pressure suits should one of the strained structural projectors give way.

They'd come a long way. Eta Centauri was many months behind them now, and most ships of this class needed drydock and overhaul once every six months. He wasn't sure how they'd kept it running, or how they'd keep it running for the remaining months of the journey.

He'd taken astrogation during pilot's training. He knew the hazards that Schwarzchild discontinuities posed, and he knew that even suns were hard to approach. The charts had shown several systems along the way, with warm main sequence stars shepherding known habitable planets along their narrow little Goldilocks belts. A few even had developed respectable civilizations...he often walked through the ship like this, and wondered if he were wise in putting off planetfall for so so long. It was dark out here. Super-relativistic travel did strange things to one's mind. The world outside raced along, with occasional messages drifting out from either endpoint offering a light at the end of the tunnel. Once in a while both would cease to exist, while other times the airwaves were packed with burst-encoded datagrams (not all of which came in chronological order). He could hardly believe the journey was nearly half way over, yet each second seemed to stretch out into weeks and years.

He'd wondered about the shipping lane he'd chosen. Every ship had a different fundamental phasing frequency, so there'd been many local-space neighbors traveling similar routes for stretches of time. Chat's with their systems engineers had saved him quite a bit of trouble before.

They were coming up on space that hadn't been charted recently. He knew the engine's control foils were growing thin and that the structural fields had to work harder every day, yet some days the velvety black seemed to waft them along of its own accord while the ship relaxed its panicked grasp on structural integrity.

He knew, somehow, that even when the ether seemed most opposed to their passage and the ship shuddered hardest, they could just slip the control rods a little further out and just shoulder through it. The old techneer wondered about that. Increasing the forward gravitic pressure while working through tight knots of entwined tesseracts could be just enough to fully collapse a primary vectoring projector...that wouldn't be good.

He'd ask a neighbor for advice. It always seemed to help.