It's 2219. Just 20 years ago, humanity unlocked the secrets to faster than light travel, and a...
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It's 2219. Just 20 years ago, humanity unlocked the secrets to faster than light travel, and a new rush to the stars began. As the human race takes its first tentative steps in interstellar exploration, an ancient galaxy-spanning conflict threatens to swallow up the young species.
Mission Commander Ivy Czininski has stumbled into first contact with intelligent alien life just 12 light years from Earth, and this shocking discovery will send ripples throughout Sol, and beyond. As the full implications of this meeting are felt, nations will rise and fall, and the future course of humanity will be altered forever.
Mining Foreman Owen McGregor just wants to keep his somewhat estranged family safe from the deadly harms of deep space, a prospect that becomes much harder when enormous alien mining ships begin taking their world apart at the seams.
This is the story of humanity's first steps onto the galactic stage.
Sideways in Hyperspace is a science fiction serial by Sagebrysh, read it here or on the story's website at sidewaysfiction.wordpress.com
If you're enjoying Sideways in Hyperspace, please consider voting for the story once per day on topwebfiction.com, or supporting us on Patreon.
Index:
Arc I: First Contact
Chapter 1: Kicking Starward
Chapter 2: Spacetime
Chapter 3: The Ones Who Came Before
Chapter 4: A Moth in a Hurricane
Chapter 5: Ripples on a Cosmic See
Chapter 6: Hyperbolic
Chapter 7: Radioactive
Chapter 8: Wanderlust
Chapter 9: Drive
Chapter 10: Arrivals
Chapter 11: Dark Harvest
Chapter 12: A Prayer for Brighter Days
Interlude α: Martians
Arc II: Conflux Problems
Chapter 13: Humans in Funny Suits
Chapter 14: The Devils of our Better Natures
Chapter 15: Poor Coordination Polka
Chapter 16: That Other, Slightly Better World
Chapter 17: Stranger in a Strange Land
Chapter 18: Wreckage on the Sea of Time
Chapter 19: Correspondence Bias
Chapter 20: Clockwork Physics
Chapter 21: Butterfly Effects
Chapter 22: The Lightspeed Generation
Chapter 23: Very Much Like Us
Chapter 24: On the Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
Interlude β: Immortals
Arc III: Drake Equations
Chapter 25: Zugzwang
Chapter 26: Posthuman
Chapter 27: Availability Heuristics
Chapter 28: Depth of Field
Chapter 29: Pity for the Devil
Chapter 30: Missed Connections
Mission Commander Ivy Czininski has stumbled into first contact with intelligent alien life just 12 light years from Earth, and this shocking discovery will send ripples throughout Sol, and beyond. As the full implications of this meeting are felt, nations will rise and fall, and the future course of humanity will be altered forever.
Mining Foreman Owen McGregor just wants to keep his somewhat estranged family safe from the deadly harms of deep space, a prospect that becomes much harder when enormous alien mining ships begin taking their world apart at the seams.
This is the story of humanity's first steps onto the galactic stage.
Sideways in Hyperspace is a science fiction serial by Sagebrysh, read it here or on the story's website at sidewaysfiction.wordpress.com
If you're enjoying Sideways in Hyperspace, please consider voting for the story once per day on topwebfiction.com, or supporting us on Patreon.
Index:
Arc I: First Contact
Chapter 1: Kicking Starward
Chapter 2: Spacetime
Chapter 3: The Ones Who Came Before
Chapter 4: A Moth in a Hurricane
Chapter 5: Ripples on a Cosmic See
Chapter 6: Hyperbolic
Chapter 7: Radioactive
Chapter 8: Wanderlust
Chapter 9: Drive
Chapter 10: Arrivals
Chapter 11: Dark Harvest
Chapter 12: A Prayer for Brighter Days
Interlude α: Martians
Arc II: Conflux Problems
Chapter 13: Humans in Funny Suits
Chapter 14: The Devils of our Better Natures
Chapter 15: Poor Coordination Polka
Chapter 16: That Other, Slightly Better World
Chapter 17: Stranger in a Strange Land
Chapter 18: Wreckage on the Sea of Time
Chapter 19: Correspondence Bias
Chapter 20: Clockwork Physics
Chapter 21: Butterfly Effects
Chapter 22: The Lightspeed Generation
Chapter 23: Very Much Like Us
Chapter 24: On the Shores of the Cosmic Ocean
Interlude β: Immortals
Arc III: Drake Equations
Chapter 25: Zugzwang
Chapter 26: Posthuman
Chapter 27: Availability Heuristics
Chapter 28: Depth of Field
Chapter 29: Pity for the Devil
Chapter 30: Missed Connections
Last edited:
Chapter 1: Kicking Starward
- Location
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Chapter: 1 Kicking Starward
Newton class starship
MSCV Empiricist
Circular Orbit
15 AU from Luyten's Star
January 2219
For whatever reason, wake-up alarms had always been designed by sadists. That was, at least, the only plausible explanation that came to the mind of Mission Commander Ivy Czininski as a horrible spike of sound drilled down into a rather pleasant dream about her vacation on Earth, and ripped her back into reality. A reality where, when she examined the time, she found to her disgust that she had slept for only three hours.
She blinked twice to bring up the head's up display on the screens that had been baked into her retinas. When the cursor appeared, she swiped at the call accept icon and put an arm over her eyes to spare them the worst as the shipboard AI helpfully threw the cabin lights up to full brightness "...Yes."
"Um… Commander, it's Paolini here…"
Ivy suppressed a snort. She knew full well who was calling her, her painfully nervous Martian-Italian XO's name was written in bright blue letters right there in her field of view… but there was no force in any physical model that might keep Paolini from fretting. She'd been dumped on the MSCV Empiricist at Acidalia Orbital and while she clearly knew her business inside and out when it came to the paperwork-and-payroll side of management, she seemed pathologically incapable of making independent command decisions.
"Yes, Jean. What do you need?" Ivy asked, pushing herself up onto her elbows and rubbing at the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.
"Um… the, um, the warp drive isn't working, commander."
That woke Ivy up. "Define 'not working'!" she snapped, lurching out of bed and ripping aside the curtain on her wardrobe. She grimaced as her head bounced off her over-bed locker again, but she really had more important things to worry about right now than her cabin's too-low ceiling.
"Um, Chief Corbin insists that there's nothing mechanically wrong with it…" Paolini hazarded.
Well, that at least meant the news wasn't so catastrophically terrible as it might have been. It still demanded her immediate attention but they weren't on the verge of being ripped apart by their own tidal forces or some other calamity, which meant that Ivy had time to grab a coffee. Anything short of imminent obliteration could wait for coffee, even if it wouldn't help the minor headache she could feel coming on...
"Okay. I'm on my way up. Czininski out."
"Emmy turn those damn lights down." She shouted into the empty room after the call ended.
The AI spoke back to her, using the calm if somewhat chiding female voice she always used when talking to Ivy. "I'm sorry Commander, but bright blue tinted lights will encourage wakefulness. You'll thank me for this later."
"Yeah I doubt that." Ivy muttered bitterly as she shrugged into a jumpsuit, but her heart wasn't in it---Emmy was almost invariably right about such things.
The AI's function, for which she was exceptionally well-designed, was to anticipate and provide for the needs of the crew. This included making subtle adjustments that even the beneficiaries of her attention may not always detect. She had, for instance, an unnervingly accurate ability to decide when to brew the standard ship's coffee, and when to tap into Ivy's precious personal supply of the good stuff, which she now did. Ivy sometimes found it a little galling to be so calculable, but this time she sipped at the fresh brew, nodded appreciatively, and made her way to the hatch without further complaint.
Getting from the crew ring to the command ring required a trip in freefall via the central spinal shaft, with the half-litre of her precious Jamaican Blue Mountain safe inside a valved sip-cup. From the outside, she knew the Empiricist might have seemed fragile but in fact the evidence of just how sturdy her ship really was could be seen everywhere in the central axis. That spine had to be strong enough to survive having tonnes of titanium and aluminium anchored to it under a constant steady spin to provide spin gravity. More, it had to be strong enough to survive the strain that the mounted toroids imposed on it whenever the ship accelerated, and to have enough redundant strength to hold together even if damaged. Slender though she was, Empiricist had the same kind of deceptive invisible strength as a ballerina.
The spin bridge was crowded for this early in the morning. The petite and brown-haired Jean Paolini had called in almost everybody except Ivy first, which went some way to mollifying her. The fact that the other three members of the bridge crew hadn't been able to help the XO solve the problem made her feel less like her time was being intruded upon.
Still. It would have been nice if Paolini could just calm down and give a straightforward summary of the facts. The normal shift crew on the bridge took turns between staring at their consoles and glancing worriedly at Ivy, while Jean paced before her nervously.
She was rambling at length, but Ivy had tuned her out entirely when it was apparent the younger woman couldn't decide if it was more appropriate to self flagellate about how sorry she was this had happened on her watch, or just panic about the possibility of the drive being broken.
The ship had only been out of Acidalia Orbital for three weeks and the list of breakdowns and errors in their systems were rapidly approaching a kilometer long. At this rate, their ship would be entirely composed of spare parts by the time they returned to Mars.
Ivy let her XO continue in the background while she focused on consuming her coffee as quickly as she could without burning her throat.
"I swear I had Mathias check everything, but there could have been some sort of short in the control boards so I went up and tried again from the thrust bridge and it still didn't work. If the drive really is broken though, then we should send out an emergency respo-"
"Would you stop pacing!" Ivy suddenly barked, causing Jean to freeze in her tracks and the rest of the shift crew to jump slightly in their seats. Ivy drained the last of her coffee. "You're making me nervous."
"Sorry." She squeaked out.
Ivy just sighed. "Go get me a fresh cup of coffee and find Mathias," she said, holding her mug out for the other woman. Jean took the mug with a slightly ridiculous amount of fanfare and then practically fled the spin bridge.
By the time she had returned with a fresh cup of coffee and Mathias Corbin in tow, Ivy had taken the opportunity to investigate undisturbed and start forming her own hypotheses about their situation. She accepted the drink with genuine pleasure---Jean really did make excellent coffee, Ivy could at least give her that.
"What's wrong with it?" She asked the elderly Chinese-Martian chief engineer without preamble as he migrated to a place in front of her chair. She trusted that Jean had reported his opinion accurately, but it was always good to double-check just in case something new had come up.
"Nothing." He said grumpily, having been woken up several hours before Ivy and being a habitual tea-drinker, the poor fool. Ivy liked him, even if there was something vaguely heretical about an engineer who eschewed coffee. "There's nothing wrong with the drive. I looked over everything myself. The exotic matter is cracking properly, the ring is charging, the warp fields are even being generated properly... But for some reason, when we perform the kick the ship just doesn't move."
Ivy nodded, going over the problem once more in her head as she sipped her coffee. The good news was, lack of mechanical failures narrowed the problem space down into the range of not entirely catastrophic potentials. The problem was almost certainly to do with the so-called 'step', which was an unfortunately non-optional part of operating the warp drive.
Also known as the Alcubierre drive or even the Roddenberry drive depending on which side you wanted to be on in a bitter and long-standing argument, the warp field was quite capable of breaking planets if used improperly---bending spacetime around a starship and turning here into something more closely resembling there was no small task after all.
The 'step' (or 'kick' - another argument), solved the planet-smashing problem by moving the vessel along an axis of movement normally imperceptible to humans, pushing off the higher dimensional surface of spacetime before falling back down into three-dimensional space again. The distortion wavefront was thus allowed to relax without releasing its energy, pulling the ship to its destination in the process.
"You checked the boot I assume?" Ivy asked, referring to the exotic matter fueled device buried deep in the hull that generated the kick.
"First thing I checked when I heard about the problem, it's not the boot, it's not the field generators, the damn ship just isn't moving when we kick it."
"I'm really sorry to wake you over this, I know I did just the other night when the transformer blew in the third ring but I really just didn't want to risk some sort of acci--" Ivy held up her hand, cutting off the Italian before she went off on another tirade.
"Jean, in the future, wake up Cale, not me, this is more of his thing." Cale Rouschev was the ship's Pragmacist, the problem solver. Nevertheless, Ivy was already awake and the coffee was already running through her brain. "Have you always been kicking in the same direction?"
"What do you mean?" The other woman asked, in weird realisation in her tone. She had been, it was obvious.
"Where exactly have you been trying to take us for the last few hours Jean?" Ivy asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Just 10 AUs closer to Luyten's Star, standard flight plan, the one you approved last night." The XO seemed to shrink a bit with each word.
Ivy just sighed and took a sip of her coffee. "Jimmy." She said, turning to James Alderson, the navigator, "set in a new course, five AUs out from our current position with respect to Luyten's Star, Charge up the ring and perform the kick whenever ready."
She turned back to Jean even as Jimmy was telling her it would be 30 seconds to charge the ring. "In the future, you need to remember to expand your variable set when you've exhausted all the options within a current set. Mathias told you it wasn't the drive, I'm sure, before you woke me up. The next step to take, is to see if maybe it's the star."
"I don't follow your reasoning." She said with a frown. "Luyten's Star doesn't have the mass to produce that sort of effect this far out."
Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose. Mass deformed the geometry of spacetime, and thus made it difficult to perform a kick into a gravity well: due to how gravity interacted with the ship during the kick, it was like trying to roll a ball up a hill. Jean was correct of course, Luyten' Star, being far smaller than Sol, shouldn't produce that sort of spacetime geometry unless they were trying to kick the ship into the coronasphere. Still, it was worth testing if for no other reason than to rule out a variable.
"True of course." She answered the Italian woman, "But this is space, and who know's what else might be out there distorting spacetime." Once she actually said that aloud, it sounded a lot more ominous, and the sharp bang that reverberated throughout the entire ship as if a taut cable had snapped under tension didn't help matters. Ivy gripped her coffee tightly as the liquid splashed within its sealed mug. The wallscreens before them changed scenes abruptly, and Jimmy announced the kick was successful even as Luyten's Star seemed to grow dimmer and rush away at impossible speeds. Despite the relief upon knowing it wasn't a problem with the ship that would leave them stranded in deep space, the strangeness of the event settled into Ivy's stomach like a frozen comet core.
When Cale woke for his shift at 1000 and discovered the strange situation with the local gravity well, he was absolutely fascinated. The young Martian-Russian paced back and forth the length of the conference room, where he and Ivy were meeting. He was consuming donuts at a breakneck pace as he walked, while Ivy was working through her fifth cup of coffee that morning.
"It can't be a regular black hole, it's not massive enough for that, whatever is generating the distortion. It's more massive than the red dwarf though, and once I got a good look at its track through space up close, it's pretty clear that whatever it is, Luyten's Star is actually orbiting it. That has implications for its interaction with Procyon back during the age of sail. But more importantly, the spot Luyten's Star is orbiting has nothing in it, there's no visible source of mass." That was often how Cale communicated, in a strange stream of consciousness composed of hypotheses, facts, and oftentimes pointless diversions.
"Is it a threat to this ship?" Ivy asked over the rim of her mug.
"I have no idea." Cale answered honestly. "I do think we should investigate though. We should be able to warp to within 8 AUs of the object, and we can cross the rest of the distance using sublights."
"That would take a frankly irresponsible amount of fuel. And several months of travel at 1 G burn. It would eat into our other survey time. We're only supposed to spend a week on this star, then we move on to Capella."
"Not if it's aliens, if it's aliens, then it's worth the time and fuel spent getting there." Cale said this in the same perpetually energized tone he used for everyone, and it was impossible to pick out sarcasm from the mix.
"Aliens." Ivy deadpanned.
"Even if it isn't literally aliens, this is an alien event. An honest to Banks OCP. We're sitting on the edge of a very novel and never before seen astrophysical object. It doesn't even fall into a class of object we theorized the existence of. From this distance, we'd be able to see even a totally inert object via the reflected heat from the red dwarf, it's a gravity field without a celestial body generating it. That's not something we've ever seen before Ivy. Lets go poke the new thing." He said the last part with an almost childlike glee.
"That's just it though isn't it Cale. There's no object. Our telescopes don't see anything in any spectrum, the interferometers are registering the gravity field, but there's nothing else there. You want me to spent a month and a half, burning fuel and time slogging it through this boring solar system so that we can look at a particularly interesting part of empty space. " Ivy sipped her coffee again, her stomach gurgled as if the hot liquid was interacting with the metaphorical comet core in her gut. The more she thought about it, the more the cold knot seemed to accrete.
"There might be an object, just one too small to detect. It could be a primordial black hole, or a neutron core or a chunk of XM that formed in real space and stabilized somehow."
"All those things emit some form of energy in some wavelength, we're not seeing any of that, but that's sort of the point and I do see that. This could be something totally new, and that makes me inclined to spend a bit of extra time investigating it. We can back the schedule up a week, skip say, Capella H, get in as close as our warp drive allows, and spend two weeks or so looking around, but we can't hang out here for a month and a half." Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.
"Unless it does turn out to be aliens." Cale said with a smirk.
"Just go find me an object." She said and shooed him out the door.
She sighed as she stepped back into the room alone. She sent a mental command through her implants, telling the wallscreens to stop showing the smooth wood paneling it had previously, and instead turned transparent, making it seem as if the table as floating on a platform through empty space. The dull red eye of Luyten's Star shone dimly in the distance. It was nearly matched in brilliance by Procyon, off in another direction, and a practical stone's throw away in warp drive terms.
Procyon had been surveyed six months ago by the MSCV Valley Forge who had found the system devastated by the recent passage of the red dwarf. Planets were cooked red hot and massive arcs of debris twinkled in stellar orbits. Two gas giants were in a tight unstable orbit with each other that would see them collide sometime in the next thousand years, and the ship had even witnessed two of the moons of those worlds slam headlong into each other, sending continent sized shards of rock tumbling in all directions.
Luyten's Star, the nomad that had inflicted the devastation, was comparatively tranquil. It had one dead rocky world in its orbit, which bore a ring system and deep cratering on its surface, hinting at the violence it too had experienced in the recent stellar past. The existence of the new, invisible body within the system, did resolve a lot of questions about how something as small as Luyten's star could have had the effect that it did. The conference table shuddered and the view shifted, the red dwarf growing rapidly brighter. Cale had authorized a kick to take them as close to the distortion as the warp drive would allow. Now it was just a matter of collecting the data. Ivy took another sip of coffee and continued in vain to try and melt the lump in her stomach.
"We should have seen it." That was how Cal opened the senior staff meeting the next day. Before everyone present for the meeting had even finished sitting down, much less collected themselves and their notes, Cale was already throwing elaborate light cone diagrams up on the wallscreens.
Ivy ignored Cale and started the meeting in the usual manner. She flipped a toggle on her HUD, and a message told her that the AI was now monitoring the room to a high degree of precision. "Okay, it is January 17th 2219, Meeting 31 Mission 11 on the MSCV Empiricist, the topic of the day is Luyten's star and its mysterious companion. Attending the meeting today are Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, First Officer Jean Paoloni, Pragmacist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, and Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia." Ivy went quiet but didn't sit down or cede the floor to Cale. Instead, she just calmly took a sip of her coffee and watched as he danced in place like he had an urgent need to urinate. He gave her a pleading look, and she finally sat down and motioned for him to begin.
"Luyten's star is only 12 light years from Sol, and astronomers have been watching it for centuries. They would have noticed if it was orbiting some sort of black body. Ergo, the light emitted when this object arrived cannot have reached our Sol observatories yet"
"So, wait, what are you suggesting then?" Kestral asked, standing slowly and cutting Cale off mid-stream. "You think this object just popped into existence in the last 12 years?" The white haired androgyne had spent the last day looking at the same data as Cale, but ey had, unlike Cale, refrained from proposing any hypothesis for the anomaly.
"That's exactly what I'm saying. This object is new, within the last twelve years new. I want to say it's impossible without intelligent intervention, but we can't entirely rule out some sort of natural phenomenon. Regardless, I have a plan to get a better look at it." Cale changed slides and Ivy massaged the bridge of her nose as she tried to think of what they could possibly be looking at.
"How much of an effect has it had on the trajectory of Luyten's star?" Ivy asked before Cale could start talking again. "Could we have overlooked it from Earth in the past? Could we run back the deformation in its trajectory to estimate an arrival time?"
"Massive, no, and I'm way ahead of you." Cale said without skipping a beat. He flipped through several slides, and paused on a series of paths through space. The information on it was striking, Luyten's Star appeared to begin veering sharply off in one direction about four and and a half years ago.
"Anyway," Cale said, carrying on before Ivy had finished processing the disturbing illustration. "If we move the ship so the object is directly between us and the star, it will drastically increase our odds of seeing something. Even if it's a perfect black body, we'll at the very least see the resulting drop in luminosity where it blocks the sunlight."
"What do you actually expect to see?" Jean asked, tapping her pen against the table absentmindedly.
"Aliens." Cale deadpanned.
"Aliens?" Jean said suspiciously. "Like, little green men in flying saucers? You realize how statistically unlikely it is for us to find--"
"This whole thing defies statistical probability. Look, I didn't immediately settle on aliens as a hypothesis. My initial best guess was a primordial black hole, but it just doesn't match the data. The gravitational gradient around a small mass black hole is severe enough that our telescopes would easily be able to see the lensing effects from this distance. At this point the only thing I haven't ruled out is a perfect black body, one small enough that our telescopes haven't caught it occluding a star yet." Cale looked only minorly apologetic at cutting off Jean mid-stream, but he kept going anyway to avoid breaking his stride. "This thing just showed up in the neighborhood four years ago, matched velocities with the star and started deforming its orbit. It's not natural. That doesn't just naturally happen."
That managed to shut everyone at the table up for a moment. Ivy felt the pit settling into her stomach again.
"Are we actually equipped to deal with this?" Evangeline asked, drawing the rest of the eyes at the table to her. The small nordic woman pursed her lips, she rarely spoke at these meetings. "There are protocols regarding first contact scenarios. If that's what this really is, then we should consult them. Whatever this is clocks in at nearly a solar mass, that's very concerning."
"I don't think anyone here is actually suggesting we try to talk to whatever is doing this." Ivy replied to the Conscience.
"That might not be enough," the small woman persisted. "If it is aliens, then they're capable of deforming spacetime at scale we've never come close to matching. They could already see us, just being here could represent a potential existential threat to humankind. They're clearly much more advanced than us."
"So we're all just jumping on the aliens bandwagon?" Jean asked skeptically. "Really guys, aliens? Is that the most scientific consensus we can come to?"
"Do you have a better hypothesis Jean?" Cale asked lightly, remaining unperturbed by her disbelief. "Because just about the only other one I have at this point is some sort of secret weapons test by another human ship."
Jean shrunk back from the attention and shrugged her shoulders. "I don't." She admitted.
"Don't be afraid to challenge Cale, Jean," Ivy advised. "He's not always right, you know…"
Cale nodded self-effacingly and gave the XO an apologetic smile, which seemed to sooth Paolini's nerves a bit. "It's an extraordinary claim I'm making," he agreed. "Extraordinary evidence will hopefully follow, but…"
Kestral nodded solemnly. "It's exciting enough to be in a scenario where aliens are even a plausible hypothesis," ey agreed. "We don't want to get carried away."
From a distance, MSCV Empiricist would have appeared frail: a filigree agglomeration of modules, struts, tanks, and toruses, all dizzily spinning around each other with gyroscopic precision in the vast emptiness of space. Despite this apparent fragility, she thrummed with barely contained power. Heat exchangers glowed dull red as they vented the heat of the fusion reaction into space, the warp drive ring flickered with electromagnetic current, and her AI hummed along at billions of operations per second, digital thoughts sifting through millions of lines of code at a time.
A query from the bridge generated something analogous to a thought, and dozens of branching decision trees sprung into existence and collapsed as the AI considered and discarded possibilities. In the time a human took to blink, the thought had completed and signals flooded out into ancillary systems as commands.
From a god's eye view, its white matte surface would seem to twinkle in the dull red light. The vessel rotated herself in space, and then lept away in an instant, vanishing into a ripple in the starlight. Intra-system warps were, from the perspective of the crew, instantaneous, the ship simply didn't linger in the warp tunnel long enough to perceive.
As the ship snapped out of warp and back into normal spacetime, her telescopes were already panning towards the star, and almost instantly noticed a 3% drop in the luminosity.
Far away, across space, something else stirred, noticing a new star, twinkling in their own telescopes.
Newton class starship
MSCV Empiricist
Circular Orbit
15 AU from Luyten's Star
January 2219
For whatever reason, wake-up alarms had always been designed by sadists. That was, at least, the only plausible explanation that came to the mind of Mission Commander Ivy Czininski as a horrible spike of sound drilled down into a rather pleasant dream about her vacation on Earth, and ripped her back into reality. A reality where, when she examined the time, she found to her disgust that she had slept for only three hours.
She blinked twice to bring up the head's up display on the screens that had been baked into her retinas. When the cursor appeared, she swiped at the call accept icon and put an arm over her eyes to spare them the worst as the shipboard AI helpfully threw the cabin lights up to full brightness "...Yes."
"Um… Commander, it's Paolini here…"
Ivy suppressed a snort. She knew full well who was calling her, her painfully nervous Martian-Italian XO's name was written in bright blue letters right there in her field of view… but there was no force in any physical model that might keep Paolini from fretting. She'd been dumped on the MSCV Empiricist at Acidalia Orbital and while she clearly knew her business inside and out when it came to the paperwork-and-payroll side of management, she seemed pathologically incapable of making independent command decisions.
"Yes, Jean. What do you need?" Ivy asked, pushing herself up onto her elbows and rubbing at the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger.
"Um… the, um, the warp drive isn't working, commander."
That woke Ivy up. "Define 'not working'!" she snapped, lurching out of bed and ripping aside the curtain on her wardrobe. She grimaced as her head bounced off her over-bed locker again, but she really had more important things to worry about right now than her cabin's too-low ceiling.
"Um, Chief Corbin insists that there's nothing mechanically wrong with it…" Paolini hazarded.
Well, that at least meant the news wasn't so catastrophically terrible as it might have been. It still demanded her immediate attention but they weren't on the verge of being ripped apart by their own tidal forces or some other calamity, which meant that Ivy had time to grab a coffee. Anything short of imminent obliteration could wait for coffee, even if it wouldn't help the minor headache she could feel coming on...
"Okay. I'm on my way up. Czininski out."
"Emmy turn those damn lights down." She shouted into the empty room after the call ended.
The AI spoke back to her, using the calm if somewhat chiding female voice she always used when talking to Ivy. "I'm sorry Commander, but bright blue tinted lights will encourage wakefulness. You'll thank me for this later."
"Yeah I doubt that." Ivy muttered bitterly as she shrugged into a jumpsuit, but her heart wasn't in it---Emmy was almost invariably right about such things.
The AI's function, for which she was exceptionally well-designed, was to anticipate and provide for the needs of the crew. This included making subtle adjustments that even the beneficiaries of her attention may not always detect. She had, for instance, an unnervingly accurate ability to decide when to brew the standard ship's coffee, and when to tap into Ivy's precious personal supply of the good stuff, which she now did. Ivy sometimes found it a little galling to be so calculable, but this time she sipped at the fresh brew, nodded appreciatively, and made her way to the hatch without further complaint.
Getting from the crew ring to the command ring required a trip in freefall via the central spinal shaft, with the half-litre of her precious Jamaican Blue Mountain safe inside a valved sip-cup. From the outside, she knew the Empiricist might have seemed fragile but in fact the evidence of just how sturdy her ship really was could be seen everywhere in the central axis. That spine had to be strong enough to survive having tonnes of titanium and aluminium anchored to it under a constant steady spin to provide spin gravity. More, it had to be strong enough to survive the strain that the mounted toroids imposed on it whenever the ship accelerated, and to have enough redundant strength to hold together even if damaged. Slender though she was, Empiricist had the same kind of deceptive invisible strength as a ballerina.
The spin bridge was crowded for this early in the morning. The petite and brown-haired Jean Paolini had called in almost everybody except Ivy first, which went some way to mollifying her. The fact that the other three members of the bridge crew hadn't been able to help the XO solve the problem made her feel less like her time was being intruded upon.
Still. It would have been nice if Paolini could just calm down and give a straightforward summary of the facts. The normal shift crew on the bridge took turns between staring at their consoles and glancing worriedly at Ivy, while Jean paced before her nervously.
She was rambling at length, but Ivy had tuned her out entirely when it was apparent the younger woman couldn't decide if it was more appropriate to self flagellate about how sorry she was this had happened on her watch, or just panic about the possibility of the drive being broken.
The ship had only been out of Acidalia Orbital for three weeks and the list of breakdowns and errors in their systems were rapidly approaching a kilometer long. At this rate, their ship would be entirely composed of spare parts by the time they returned to Mars.
Ivy let her XO continue in the background while she focused on consuming her coffee as quickly as she could without burning her throat.
"I swear I had Mathias check everything, but there could have been some sort of short in the control boards so I went up and tried again from the thrust bridge and it still didn't work. If the drive really is broken though, then we should send out an emergency respo-"
"Would you stop pacing!" Ivy suddenly barked, causing Jean to freeze in her tracks and the rest of the shift crew to jump slightly in their seats. Ivy drained the last of her coffee. "You're making me nervous."
"Sorry." She squeaked out.
Ivy just sighed. "Go get me a fresh cup of coffee and find Mathias," she said, holding her mug out for the other woman. Jean took the mug with a slightly ridiculous amount of fanfare and then practically fled the spin bridge.
By the time she had returned with a fresh cup of coffee and Mathias Corbin in tow, Ivy had taken the opportunity to investigate undisturbed and start forming her own hypotheses about their situation. She accepted the drink with genuine pleasure---Jean really did make excellent coffee, Ivy could at least give her that.
"What's wrong with it?" She asked the elderly Chinese-Martian chief engineer without preamble as he migrated to a place in front of her chair. She trusted that Jean had reported his opinion accurately, but it was always good to double-check just in case something new had come up.
"Nothing." He said grumpily, having been woken up several hours before Ivy and being a habitual tea-drinker, the poor fool. Ivy liked him, even if there was something vaguely heretical about an engineer who eschewed coffee. "There's nothing wrong with the drive. I looked over everything myself. The exotic matter is cracking properly, the ring is charging, the warp fields are even being generated properly... But for some reason, when we perform the kick the ship just doesn't move."
Ivy nodded, going over the problem once more in her head as she sipped her coffee. The good news was, lack of mechanical failures narrowed the problem space down into the range of not entirely catastrophic potentials. The problem was almost certainly to do with the so-called 'step', which was an unfortunately non-optional part of operating the warp drive.
Also known as the Alcubierre drive or even the Roddenberry drive depending on which side you wanted to be on in a bitter and long-standing argument, the warp field was quite capable of breaking planets if used improperly---bending spacetime around a starship and turning here into something more closely resembling there was no small task after all.
The 'step' (or 'kick' - another argument), solved the planet-smashing problem by moving the vessel along an axis of movement normally imperceptible to humans, pushing off the higher dimensional surface of spacetime before falling back down into three-dimensional space again. The distortion wavefront was thus allowed to relax without releasing its energy, pulling the ship to its destination in the process.
"You checked the boot I assume?" Ivy asked, referring to the exotic matter fueled device buried deep in the hull that generated the kick.
"First thing I checked when I heard about the problem, it's not the boot, it's not the field generators, the damn ship just isn't moving when we kick it."
"I'm really sorry to wake you over this, I know I did just the other night when the transformer blew in the third ring but I really just didn't want to risk some sort of acci--" Ivy held up her hand, cutting off the Italian before she went off on another tirade.
"Jean, in the future, wake up Cale, not me, this is more of his thing." Cale Rouschev was the ship's Pragmacist, the problem solver. Nevertheless, Ivy was already awake and the coffee was already running through her brain. "Have you always been kicking in the same direction?"
"What do you mean?" The other woman asked, in weird realisation in her tone. She had been, it was obvious.
"Where exactly have you been trying to take us for the last few hours Jean?" Ivy asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Just 10 AUs closer to Luyten's Star, standard flight plan, the one you approved last night." The XO seemed to shrink a bit with each word.
Ivy just sighed and took a sip of her coffee. "Jimmy." She said, turning to James Alderson, the navigator, "set in a new course, five AUs out from our current position with respect to Luyten's Star, Charge up the ring and perform the kick whenever ready."
She turned back to Jean even as Jimmy was telling her it would be 30 seconds to charge the ring. "In the future, you need to remember to expand your variable set when you've exhausted all the options within a current set. Mathias told you it wasn't the drive, I'm sure, before you woke me up. The next step to take, is to see if maybe it's the star."
"I don't follow your reasoning." She said with a frown. "Luyten's Star doesn't have the mass to produce that sort of effect this far out."
Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose. Mass deformed the geometry of spacetime, and thus made it difficult to perform a kick into a gravity well: due to how gravity interacted with the ship during the kick, it was like trying to roll a ball up a hill. Jean was correct of course, Luyten' Star, being far smaller than Sol, shouldn't produce that sort of spacetime geometry unless they were trying to kick the ship into the coronasphere. Still, it was worth testing if for no other reason than to rule out a variable.
"True of course." She answered the Italian woman, "But this is space, and who know's what else might be out there distorting spacetime." Once she actually said that aloud, it sounded a lot more ominous, and the sharp bang that reverberated throughout the entire ship as if a taut cable had snapped under tension didn't help matters. Ivy gripped her coffee tightly as the liquid splashed within its sealed mug. The wallscreens before them changed scenes abruptly, and Jimmy announced the kick was successful even as Luyten's Star seemed to grow dimmer and rush away at impossible speeds. Despite the relief upon knowing it wasn't a problem with the ship that would leave them stranded in deep space, the strangeness of the event settled into Ivy's stomach like a frozen comet core.
Δ
When Cale woke for his shift at 1000 and discovered the strange situation with the local gravity well, he was absolutely fascinated. The young Martian-Russian paced back and forth the length of the conference room, where he and Ivy were meeting. He was consuming donuts at a breakneck pace as he walked, while Ivy was working through her fifth cup of coffee that morning.
"It can't be a regular black hole, it's not massive enough for that, whatever is generating the distortion. It's more massive than the red dwarf though, and once I got a good look at its track through space up close, it's pretty clear that whatever it is, Luyten's Star is actually orbiting it. That has implications for its interaction with Procyon back during the age of sail. But more importantly, the spot Luyten's Star is orbiting has nothing in it, there's no visible source of mass." That was often how Cale communicated, in a strange stream of consciousness composed of hypotheses, facts, and oftentimes pointless diversions.
"Is it a threat to this ship?" Ivy asked over the rim of her mug.
"I have no idea." Cale answered honestly. "I do think we should investigate though. We should be able to warp to within 8 AUs of the object, and we can cross the rest of the distance using sublights."
"That would take a frankly irresponsible amount of fuel. And several months of travel at 1 G burn. It would eat into our other survey time. We're only supposed to spend a week on this star, then we move on to Capella."
"Not if it's aliens, if it's aliens, then it's worth the time and fuel spent getting there." Cale said this in the same perpetually energized tone he used for everyone, and it was impossible to pick out sarcasm from the mix.
"Aliens." Ivy deadpanned.
"Even if it isn't literally aliens, this is an alien event. An honest to Banks OCP. We're sitting on the edge of a very novel and never before seen astrophysical object. It doesn't even fall into a class of object we theorized the existence of. From this distance, we'd be able to see even a totally inert object via the reflected heat from the red dwarf, it's a gravity field without a celestial body generating it. That's not something we've ever seen before Ivy. Lets go poke the new thing." He said the last part with an almost childlike glee.
"That's just it though isn't it Cale. There's no object. Our telescopes don't see anything in any spectrum, the interferometers are registering the gravity field, but there's nothing else there. You want me to spent a month and a half, burning fuel and time slogging it through this boring solar system so that we can look at a particularly interesting part of empty space. " Ivy sipped her coffee again, her stomach gurgled as if the hot liquid was interacting with the metaphorical comet core in her gut. The more she thought about it, the more the cold knot seemed to accrete.
"There might be an object, just one too small to detect. It could be a primordial black hole, or a neutron core or a chunk of XM that formed in real space and stabilized somehow."
"All those things emit some form of energy in some wavelength, we're not seeing any of that, but that's sort of the point and I do see that. This could be something totally new, and that makes me inclined to spend a bit of extra time investigating it. We can back the schedule up a week, skip say, Capella H, get in as close as our warp drive allows, and spend two weeks or so looking around, but we can't hang out here for a month and a half." Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger.
"Unless it does turn out to be aliens." Cale said with a smirk.
"Just go find me an object." She said and shooed him out the door.
She sighed as she stepped back into the room alone. She sent a mental command through her implants, telling the wallscreens to stop showing the smooth wood paneling it had previously, and instead turned transparent, making it seem as if the table as floating on a platform through empty space. The dull red eye of Luyten's Star shone dimly in the distance. It was nearly matched in brilliance by Procyon, off in another direction, and a practical stone's throw away in warp drive terms.
Procyon had been surveyed six months ago by the MSCV Valley Forge who had found the system devastated by the recent passage of the red dwarf. Planets were cooked red hot and massive arcs of debris twinkled in stellar orbits. Two gas giants were in a tight unstable orbit with each other that would see them collide sometime in the next thousand years, and the ship had even witnessed two of the moons of those worlds slam headlong into each other, sending continent sized shards of rock tumbling in all directions.
Luyten's Star, the nomad that had inflicted the devastation, was comparatively tranquil. It had one dead rocky world in its orbit, which bore a ring system and deep cratering on its surface, hinting at the violence it too had experienced in the recent stellar past. The existence of the new, invisible body within the system, did resolve a lot of questions about how something as small as Luyten's star could have had the effect that it did. The conference table shuddered and the view shifted, the red dwarf growing rapidly brighter. Cale had authorized a kick to take them as close to the distortion as the warp drive would allow. Now it was just a matter of collecting the data. Ivy took another sip of coffee and continued in vain to try and melt the lump in her stomach.
Δ
"We should have seen it." That was how Cal opened the senior staff meeting the next day. Before everyone present for the meeting had even finished sitting down, much less collected themselves and their notes, Cale was already throwing elaborate light cone diagrams up on the wallscreens.
Ivy ignored Cale and started the meeting in the usual manner. She flipped a toggle on her HUD, and a message told her that the AI was now monitoring the room to a high degree of precision. "Okay, it is January 17th 2219, Meeting 31 Mission 11 on the MSCV Empiricist, the topic of the day is Luyten's star and its mysterious companion. Attending the meeting today are Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, First Officer Jean Paoloni, Pragmacist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, and Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia." Ivy went quiet but didn't sit down or cede the floor to Cale. Instead, she just calmly took a sip of her coffee and watched as he danced in place like he had an urgent need to urinate. He gave her a pleading look, and she finally sat down and motioned for him to begin.
"Luyten's star is only 12 light years from Sol, and astronomers have been watching it for centuries. They would have noticed if it was orbiting some sort of black body. Ergo, the light emitted when this object arrived cannot have reached our Sol observatories yet"
"So, wait, what are you suggesting then?" Kestral asked, standing slowly and cutting Cale off mid-stream. "You think this object just popped into existence in the last 12 years?" The white haired androgyne had spent the last day looking at the same data as Cale, but ey had, unlike Cale, refrained from proposing any hypothesis for the anomaly.
"That's exactly what I'm saying. This object is new, within the last twelve years new. I want to say it's impossible without intelligent intervention, but we can't entirely rule out some sort of natural phenomenon. Regardless, I have a plan to get a better look at it." Cale changed slides and Ivy massaged the bridge of her nose as she tried to think of what they could possibly be looking at.
"How much of an effect has it had on the trajectory of Luyten's star?" Ivy asked before Cale could start talking again. "Could we have overlooked it from Earth in the past? Could we run back the deformation in its trajectory to estimate an arrival time?"
"Massive, no, and I'm way ahead of you." Cale said without skipping a beat. He flipped through several slides, and paused on a series of paths through space. The information on it was striking, Luyten's Star appeared to begin veering sharply off in one direction about four and and a half years ago.
"Anyway," Cale said, carrying on before Ivy had finished processing the disturbing illustration. "If we move the ship so the object is directly between us and the star, it will drastically increase our odds of seeing something. Even if it's a perfect black body, we'll at the very least see the resulting drop in luminosity where it blocks the sunlight."
"What do you actually expect to see?" Jean asked, tapping her pen against the table absentmindedly.
"Aliens." Cale deadpanned.
"Aliens?" Jean said suspiciously. "Like, little green men in flying saucers? You realize how statistically unlikely it is for us to find--"
"This whole thing defies statistical probability. Look, I didn't immediately settle on aliens as a hypothesis. My initial best guess was a primordial black hole, but it just doesn't match the data. The gravitational gradient around a small mass black hole is severe enough that our telescopes would easily be able to see the lensing effects from this distance. At this point the only thing I haven't ruled out is a perfect black body, one small enough that our telescopes haven't caught it occluding a star yet." Cale looked only minorly apologetic at cutting off Jean mid-stream, but he kept going anyway to avoid breaking his stride. "This thing just showed up in the neighborhood four years ago, matched velocities with the star and started deforming its orbit. It's not natural. That doesn't just naturally happen."
That managed to shut everyone at the table up for a moment. Ivy felt the pit settling into her stomach again.
"Are we actually equipped to deal with this?" Evangeline asked, drawing the rest of the eyes at the table to her. The small nordic woman pursed her lips, she rarely spoke at these meetings. "There are protocols regarding first contact scenarios. If that's what this really is, then we should consult them. Whatever this is clocks in at nearly a solar mass, that's very concerning."
"I don't think anyone here is actually suggesting we try to talk to whatever is doing this." Ivy replied to the Conscience.
"That might not be enough," the small woman persisted. "If it is aliens, then they're capable of deforming spacetime at scale we've never come close to matching. They could already see us, just being here could represent a potential existential threat to humankind. They're clearly much more advanced than us."
"So we're all just jumping on the aliens bandwagon?" Jean asked skeptically. "Really guys, aliens? Is that the most scientific consensus we can come to?"
"Do you have a better hypothesis Jean?" Cale asked lightly, remaining unperturbed by her disbelief. "Because just about the only other one I have at this point is some sort of secret weapons test by another human ship."
Jean shrunk back from the attention and shrugged her shoulders. "I don't." She admitted.
"Don't be afraid to challenge Cale, Jean," Ivy advised. "He's not always right, you know…"
Cale nodded self-effacingly and gave the XO an apologetic smile, which seemed to sooth Paolini's nerves a bit. "It's an extraordinary claim I'm making," he agreed. "Extraordinary evidence will hopefully follow, but…"
Kestral nodded solemnly. "It's exciting enough to be in a scenario where aliens are even a plausible hypothesis," ey agreed. "We don't want to get carried away."
Δ
From a distance, MSCV Empiricist would have appeared frail: a filigree agglomeration of modules, struts, tanks, and toruses, all dizzily spinning around each other with gyroscopic precision in the vast emptiness of space. Despite this apparent fragility, she thrummed with barely contained power. Heat exchangers glowed dull red as they vented the heat of the fusion reaction into space, the warp drive ring flickered with electromagnetic current, and her AI hummed along at billions of operations per second, digital thoughts sifting through millions of lines of code at a time.
A query from the bridge generated something analogous to a thought, and dozens of branching decision trees sprung into existence and collapsed as the AI considered and discarded possibilities. In the time a human took to blink, the thought had completed and signals flooded out into ancillary systems as commands.
From a god's eye view, its white matte surface would seem to twinkle in the dull red light. The vessel rotated herself in space, and then lept away in an instant, vanishing into a ripple in the starlight. Intra-system warps were, from the perspective of the crew, instantaneous, the ship simply didn't linger in the warp tunnel long enough to perceive.
As the ship snapped out of warp and back into normal spacetime, her telescopes were already panning towards the star, and almost instantly noticed a 3% drop in the luminosity.
Far away, across space, something else stirred, noticing a new star, twinkling in their own telescopes.
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Chapter 2: Spacetime
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 2: Spacetime
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 KM from Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
Alice Pendragon drummed her fingers on her workstation in the EMV Stoneburner's Mining Information Center. In her head, she was mentally ticking off the seconds until their next automated resupply shipment arrived from the Pioneer Station orbiting Aldebaran.
"You think they'll finally send a new foreman to replace Higgs?" Her husband Kaito's voice asked from over her shoulder.
"They'll have to if they want us to keep working. Company policy says we need an approved foreman on duty to send anyone outside," Alice answered him with a shrug. She pulled her hair from its bun and put it back up again, collecting all the stray red strands that had started drifting into her eyes in the process.
"They could always just promote someone here, phone in the training, and say they did their due diligence." Kaito replied. Kaito was, in addition to her husband, also the ship's captain. The Sino-Europan had captained the Stoneburner since before it had been purchased by Fabrique Intersolar, retrofitted with a temporary warp drive, and launched 155 light years out to the giant world of boiling gas they now leisurely orbited. Along with two other EMVs and Pioneer Station, the Hyades mining operations were some of the largest and most distant harvesting expeditions ever conducted. And yet despite helping mastermind the whole operation, despite holding enough shares to sit in on board meetings, and despite profiting handsomely from it, Kaito still held a rather dim view of the company overall. He usually expected the worst from them in terms of performance, and was always on the lookout for ways the company would try to screw him over.
Alice knew better than to indulge in his paranoia though, Fabrique wasn't evil or anything, and in her opinion the company was one of the better mining outfits to work for. The CEO, Zephyr Athabasca, was a competent and driven woman, one with a vision for the future of humanity that Alice very much wanted to be a part of. It was a future of enormous gleaming cities in space, wondrous megastructures, and limitless potential.
"Five seconds." She said to Kaito as she continued her mental countdown.
"Okay, final check on consoles people, look alive!" Kaito said loudly to the rest of the MIC personnel, clapping his hands together as he pushed off Alice's chair and floated down the length of the room.
The Lighthorse appeared out of a ripple in the starlight, exactly on course and on time. It rotated out of the warp and immediately fired its engines in a bone crushing four gee suicide burn. Velocity was conserved through the warp, and while the vector could be rotated, it couldn't have its value altered while within the warp tunnel. Thus when the Lighthorse ended its 90 lightyear and 164 day journey, it was traveling at tens of kilometers a second relative to Amateru, and it had to burn that speed off in order to rendezvous with Stoneburner.
A manned vessel would need to exit warp near the edge of the system, match velocities out there, warp closer, and repeat in a series of step downs that would be easier on the human crew. But the Lighthorse was automated, it had no crew, no internal hallways, it was basically just a warp drive, fusion motors, fuel cells, and attachment points for cargo pods. Any people it was carrying would be stored in hibernation tanks, stacked in like the rest of the cargo.
"We've got the signal from Lighthorse FI-2238, coming in strong, all its vectors look good." Alice announced to the room, a tone of excitement creeping into her voice at the thought of new supplies from home.
She then frowned suddenly as a second Lighthorse dropped out seconds behind the first and replicated the burn. "Uh, Kaito…" She said, a sinking settled into her stomach despite the freefall, "A second ship just dropped out, squawking as Lighthorse FI-2453, also perfectly matching vectors for rendezvous."
"Two of them?" Kaito asked her, leaning over her console. "Why would they send two of them?"
"The second ship is nothing but cases of hibernation pods." He said finally as he stopped studying the manifests. "And only about ten of them have people in them now."
"They expecting a fight? Planning for us to have to ditch the Stoneburner?" Alice asked him, still following the unloading with her eyes. "That's enough pods for the entire crew. And if the second Lighthorse stays here, it could function as a deep space lifeboat."
"The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg went dark. Total loss of contact, no one's sure what happened. There's a ship headed out that way now, but it'll be a while before it reports back. They want us to be ready to jump ship if something happens." Kaito rotated and pushed off the wall again.
"My father was on that ship." Alice said tightly.
"Actually, your father is one of the ten people packed into that Lighthorse, he was on sabbatical aboard Pioneer Station and they pulled him as our new mining foreman." Kaito said matter of factly.
Alice experienced a momentary flood of emotions. First, fear and loss at the idea that her father might be dead, followed by relief that he wasn't accompanied by dismay that he was in fact about to join them and anger that he was once more intruding into her life, followed by guilt at feeling that way after just moments ago facing the idea that he might have been gone.
This all conspired to turn her next sentence into nothing but a string of unintelligible syllables and half starts.
"You think he still hates me?" Kaito asked lightly.
Alice groaned. "We're about to find out."
Owen McGregor's fist connected solidly with Kaito's face, the two of them rebounding off one another in the microgravity. "That's for marrying my daughter without permission!" He said grumpily, still somewhat hungover from the suspension fluid.
Kaito pushed off the wall he was drifting towards and threw himself at Owen, clocking him upside the jaw and sending them flying apart again. "That's for not giving me permission!"
The two growled at one another for a moment and then both broke into a fit of chuckles. In freefall, most of the force of their punches had been expended pushing them away from each other, resulting in, while not quite love taps, certainly not the wrecking blows that the two men had intended to impart on one another.
"I spose I've had that one comin' fer a while now." Owen said finally, shaking his head.
"I see you haven't changed a bit." Alice said sternly, breaking any sense of the moment between them. "You barge into my life again, punch my husband, and I notice you're still referring to me as your property as well."
Owen sighed, dipping his head and attempting to look forlorn, an effect somewhat spoiled by the lack of gravity. "Oh Alice, I know. I'm trying to change, I came out here to try and make amends. Do right by you and your man."
"Well you're off to a terrific start Owen, don't stop on my account." And with that she turned and floated stormily off.
"You really want to show her you're sorry, pack yourself back into that hibernation pod and take the next Lighthorse out of here." Kaito said finally, after watching his wife's exit.
"We wouldn't get much mining done if I did that now would we?" Owen said with a small chuckle. "Look Kaito, I didn't ask to come here, scout's honor, the company decided I was coming here after we lost the Golden Goose. I'll stay in my quarters or my operator's crane, I won't cause any trouble, just treat me like you'd treat a totally unknown foreman and give me a chance to prove to you and Alice that I'm a good person."
"That little speech would have been a lot better received if you hadn't sucker punched me first." Kaito said with a roll of his eyes. "But we need you, we're behind schedule and that ring isn't going to mine itself. But if you slip up, if you hurt Alice again, I will not pull my next punch."
With that, Kaito turned and drifted away down the corridor, leaving Owen alone outside the medical bay.
Newton class starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AU from Luyten's Star
January 2219
Ivy's generation was the last to be born before the discovery of faster than light travel. She had begun her career as a military woman aboard the older generation of slower than light warships. In those days, it took the fastest ship several weeks to travel from Earth to Mars, and the outer solar system could be many months of travel away.
The distances had generated tension. The vastness of space had induced a new form of scarcity. Space was full of valuable resources, but they were distant beyond the ability of the human mind to easily grasp. Piracy and brushfire border skirmishes were on the rise, and the threat of a full scale war between Earth and Mars had loomed for two generations. That all changed seemingly overnight, with the development of the warp drive. Earth, Mars, colonies in the asteroid belt, even the gas giant worlds and their systems of moons were suddenly only seconds apart.
After the brief inevitable rise in tensions that this produced, the flood of new resources onto the markets began to settle humanity into a new equilibrium. The outer colonies began to actually prosper, the generation ships were contacted in deep space and became new centers of commerce for a growing fleet of superluminals, and a sort of new cosmopolitanism was rapidly becoming the dominant cultural force.
This left people like Ivy, who still considered herself a Martian before all else, feeling isolated and somewhat left behind in the brave new world that was developing. It was a nice place to live, but it had left her anxiously prowling the stars, waiting for something to finally snap, as if it was all some drug induced fantasy that they'd suddenly awaken from.
This feeling of nervous tension, like a lightning storm about to break but which never did, was the result of an epigenetic quirk from the ancestral environment. It was a particular twist in her genes that had activated as a result of her combat experience. It was something that Jean, who Ivy was convinced was going to break one day, either didn't have the genetics for, or hadn't the life experience to have activated.
And that was the difference when the two of them stared at the signature their telescopes had filtered out of the sunlight. When Jean Paoloni saw the strange, fractal silhouette, she was merely confused. For Ivy though, there was another response. Fear. Something deep and primal activated in the back of her mind, and she gasped aloud.
The entire bridge though, was silent, as the image fully resolved itself on the telescope. Even Cale was momentarily taken aback by the sight.
"Can it see us?" Ivy said finally breaking the moment of tension that had persisted since they'd left warp. Kestral was perched at the back of the room, and said nothing, Cale continued to gape at the strangeness of the object they were being presented with. "Can it see us? Anyone, do we have any fucking idea if that-" She pointed at the object on the monitors, "Is looking at us right now?!"
"Its uh, it's a perfect black body." Kestral finally managed to stammer out.
Cale turned towards Kestral, then back towards it, his words were subdued for him, dulled, "It absorbs all wavelengths of energy that enter it, it isn't just casting a shadow, it's also not reflective, it doesn't radiate heat, we're looking at the hole it generates in our visual field. If it's able to get information from all of that light…"
"We're leaving." Ivy decided without preamble. "Jimmy start charging the ring, I want us at least a light year out from here, now. Jean, copy all of the data we have on this thing into the emergency courier drone and launch it."
"It's 8 AUs away, it will take 66 minutes for the light of our arrival to to reach it." Cale said in the same calm tone.
Jean and Jimmy had already both launched into motion, Kestral was furiously collecting data, and Cale was alternating between staring at Ivy and staring at the wallscreens.
"We're not going to stick around for an hour to see how it reacts to us showing up. We need to report back on the existence of this thing before we decide how or if we're going to contact them. Jimmy, as soon as we complete the first warp, I want you to have a second already plotted up that takes us into the middle of nowhere, collaborate with Jean and see to it that that location is included into the emergency courier."
"It's already reacting." Kestral said suddenly.
All eyes whirled back to the wallscreens as the rods comprising the object all began to extend themselves at high speed. Ivy tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the warp tunnel to form.
"Emmy, can you calculate the extrusion speed?" Cale asked.
"Extrusion rate is calculated to be 18% of field propagation speed." The AI helpfully reported without comment. Capacitors continued to dump energy and exotic matter into the alcubierre ring, bending deep space closer to them and wrinkling the fabric space between. Ivy was already mentally counting down the seconds in her head until the violent jolt of the kick hurled them into the warp tunnel.
"This began an hour ago, we're 8 AUs away, it's going at 20% of c, they would reach us in five hours," Cale said breathlessly.
"So they already saw us. They decided to do this around the same time you were proposing we move the ship to get a better look at them." Ivy's voice had become just as hollow sounding. The image of the object vanished, its transit in front of the star at an end. "Jimmy, time to ring charge?"
"Seven seconds, command-"He was interrupted by the piercing shrill of a system failure alarm. The lights on the bridge blinked red and Emmy silenced him with a proclamation. "Warning, instability detected in warp conduit, disruptive standing wave forming in pathway, local gravity wave activity detected. Kick sequence aborted." The lights returned to normal as the error message ended. The swearing started in earnest, with Ivy cursing out every computer ever built right the way back to the first abacus while Jimmy's hands flew over his console as if he could somehow suck all the dumped XM back into the ring. Bedlam descended.
It was Jean's voice, quiet and eerily level, that somehow cut through the hubbub. "Emergency courier launching," She said softly. The ship thudded as the axial railgun discharged the probe at 1% the speed of light. The courier would let itself be flung into deep space before activating its small warp drive and heading for Sol. It would be over two weeks before it reached the nearest human and anything could be done about it, but at least somebody would know what had happened here.
Ivy turned to stare at her, then recovered her poise. "Thank you Jean," she said, glad but a little chagrined that it was their flighty XO of all people who'd kept her head. "We, uh... should burn away from it, make sure none of those rods actually hit the ship."
"We'd never outrun them…" Cale warned. "And we'd be smears on the bulkheads if we tried."
"Oblique, then. It'll buy us some time at least," Ivy replied, already rising. "Everyone preset your consoles and begin making your way to the thrust bridge. Jimmy, spin down the torus."
She turned and had already begun making her way to the ladder when Cale called out.
"Wait, something is happening." The star was no longer occluded by the central mass of the object, so all that could be seen were the faint lines that the rods drew across the sun. Something had appeared in the object's center though, a vast and diffuse blue glow came first, it rapidly grew brighter, more violet, and more opaque, wrought through by titanic electrical discharges.
The spectacle brought them all to a halt. The huge storm boiled up out of nowhere in space, sloughing off vast arms of ionizing gas and crackling silently with electromagnetic energy. It vanished nearly as quickly as it had appeared, fading to reveal a gargantuan starship, for that was all that it could possibly be.
"...Emmy. How big is that thing?" Jean asked. She seemed to have gone to an utterly calm and inquisitive place somewhere on the far side of panic.
"The emerging object appears to have an approximate radius of four million meters," the AI announced, hedging the assessment. Ivy could hardly blame her: She was reporting that it was rather larger than Mars.
Somehow, the neutral and uninflected voice that Emmy used for conveying measurements contrived to make her sound awed. At least she'd helpfully rounded off---Ivy doubted if her nerves could have withstood a measurement accurate down to the centimeter, even though Emmy and her instruments could certainly have delivered an answer so precise.
The new object---the *ship*, she reminded herself---resembled nothing so much as an immense coral reef. It was a riot of color and organic shapes all splaying out in seemingly random fashion and was only roughly spherical at best. It disdained to have anything resembling a "front" nor any visible propulsion, a thrust axis, any apparent means of generating gravity… and if it did ever turn or spin then it must do so with diurnal slowness otherwise the centripetal effect at its outermost margin would have liquified the crew. Assuming it had crew, which was a big assumption to make about an object the size of a planet.
Kestral was muttering the skeptic's mantra to eirself while picking over everything that was simply not possible about the new arrival. "If X is true I want to believe X is true. If X is not true I want to believe X is not true, if X is true, I… Cuss it!" Ey gave up and stammered out some frustrated gibberish for a second. "The-uh-tha-bu-it… Th-that… thing should collapse under its own mass!" ey accused. "The tensile forces are just… unless they're propping it up with some kind of generated field, that whole object is made out of unobtanium."
Before Ivy could reply to that, Emmy spoke up again. "The gravity wave distortions appear to be dissipating," she reported. "We are also receiving structured signals along a number of varying electromagnetic frequencies."
"Sweet baby Newton and all his apples... " Cale muttered, running a hand over his scalp as he tried to collect his jaw from the floor. "...They're talking to us."
"Ivy," Jean asked unhelpfully. "What do we do?"
Ivy licked her lips, straightened her jumpsuit, and sat down in her chair, scarcely able to believe the words she was about to say.
"...We initiate first contact protocols," she said.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 KM from Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
Alice Pendragon drummed her fingers on her workstation in the EMV Stoneburner's Mining Information Center. In her head, she was mentally ticking off the seconds until their next automated resupply shipment arrived from the Pioneer Station orbiting Aldebaran.
"You think they'll finally send a new foreman to replace Higgs?" Her husband Kaito's voice asked from over her shoulder.
"They'll have to if they want us to keep working. Company policy says we need an approved foreman on duty to send anyone outside," Alice answered him with a shrug. She pulled her hair from its bun and put it back up again, collecting all the stray red strands that had started drifting into her eyes in the process.
"They could always just promote someone here, phone in the training, and say they did their due diligence." Kaito replied. Kaito was, in addition to her husband, also the ship's captain. The Sino-Europan had captained the Stoneburner since before it had been purchased by Fabrique Intersolar, retrofitted with a temporary warp drive, and launched 155 light years out to the giant world of boiling gas they now leisurely orbited. Along with two other EMVs and Pioneer Station, the Hyades mining operations were some of the largest and most distant harvesting expeditions ever conducted. And yet despite helping mastermind the whole operation, despite holding enough shares to sit in on board meetings, and despite profiting handsomely from it, Kaito still held a rather dim view of the company overall. He usually expected the worst from them in terms of performance, and was always on the lookout for ways the company would try to screw him over.
Alice knew better than to indulge in his paranoia though, Fabrique wasn't evil or anything, and in her opinion the company was one of the better mining outfits to work for. The CEO, Zephyr Athabasca, was a competent and driven woman, one with a vision for the future of humanity that Alice very much wanted to be a part of. It was a future of enormous gleaming cities in space, wondrous megastructures, and limitless potential.
"Five seconds." She said to Kaito as she continued her mental countdown.
"Okay, final check on consoles people, look alive!" Kaito said loudly to the rest of the MIC personnel, clapping his hands together as he pushed off Alice's chair and floated down the length of the room.
The Lighthorse appeared out of a ripple in the starlight, exactly on course and on time. It rotated out of the warp and immediately fired its engines in a bone crushing four gee suicide burn. Velocity was conserved through the warp, and while the vector could be rotated, it couldn't have its value altered while within the warp tunnel. Thus when the Lighthorse ended its 90 lightyear and 164 day journey, it was traveling at tens of kilometers a second relative to Amateru, and it had to burn that speed off in order to rendezvous with Stoneburner.
A manned vessel would need to exit warp near the edge of the system, match velocities out there, warp closer, and repeat in a series of step downs that would be easier on the human crew. But the Lighthorse was automated, it had no crew, no internal hallways, it was basically just a warp drive, fusion motors, fuel cells, and attachment points for cargo pods. Any people it was carrying would be stored in hibernation tanks, stacked in like the rest of the cargo.
"We've got the signal from Lighthorse FI-2238, coming in strong, all its vectors look good." Alice announced to the room, a tone of excitement creeping into her voice at the thought of new supplies from home.
She then frowned suddenly as a second Lighthorse dropped out seconds behind the first and replicated the burn. "Uh, Kaito…" She said, a sinking settled into her stomach despite the freefall, "A second ship just dropped out, squawking as Lighthorse FI-2453, also perfectly matching vectors for rendezvous."
"Two of them?" Kaito asked her, leaning over her console. "Why would they send two of them?"
Δ
When fully loaded with cargo, the Lighthorses were roughly the size of eight city buses stacked together. However, compared to the massive internal bay on the Stoneburner the drone ships seemed relatively puny, dwarfed by the massive chunk of relatively pure platinum that had been found and strapped into the hold until it could be entirely smelted and offloaded, not to mention the Stoneburner herself. Pressurizing the bay would have consumed far too much air, so it was kept in vacuum and unloaded by EVA workers assisted by robotic limbs. Alice watched all this rather pensively from the observation windows on one wall of the bay. Somewhere behind her, Kaito was drifting about as he read the reports the Lighthorses had brought with them. Unable to pace in freefall, Kaito had taken to gently pushing himself from one wall to the other, then back again, his forehead was creased into a deep frown as he studied the reports on a small tablet."The second ship is nothing but cases of hibernation pods." He said finally as he stopped studying the manifests. "And only about ten of them have people in them now."
"They expecting a fight? Planning for us to have to ditch the Stoneburner?" Alice asked him, still following the unloading with her eyes. "That's enough pods for the entire crew. And if the second Lighthorse stays here, it could function as a deep space lifeboat."
"The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg went dark. Total loss of contact, no one's sure what happened. There's a ship headed out that way now, but it'll be a while before it reports back. They want us to be ready to jump ship if something happens." Kaito rotated and pushed off the wall again.
"My father was on that ship." Alice said tightly.
"Actually, your father is one of the ten people packed into that Lighthorse, he was on sabbatical aboard Pioneer Station and they pulled him as our new mining foreman." Kaito said matter of factly.
Alice experienced a momentary flood of emotions. First, fear and loss at the idea that her father might be dead, followed by relief that he wasn't accompanied by dismay that he was in fact about to join them and anger that he was once more intruding into her life, followed by guilt at feeling that way after just moments ago facing the idea that he might have been gone.
This all conspired to turn her next sentence into nothing but a string of unintelligible syllables and half starts.
"You think he still hates me?" Kaito asked lightly.
Alice groaned. "We're about to find out."
Δ
Owen McGregor's fist connected solidly with Kaito's face, the two of them rebounding off one another in the microgravity. "That's for marrying my daughter without permission!" He said grumpily, still somewhat hungover from the suspension fluid.
Kaito pushed off the wall he was drifting towards and threw himself at Owen, clocking him upside the jaw and sending them flying apart again. "That's for not giving me permission!"
The two growled at one another for a moment and then both broke into a fit of chuckles. In freefall, most of the force of their punches had been expended pushing them away from each other, resulting in, while not quite love taps, certainly not the wrecking blows that the two men had intended to impart on one another.
"I spose I've had that one comin' fer a while now." Owen said finally, shaking his head.
"I see you haven't changed a bit." Alice said sternly, breaking any sense of the moment between them. "You barge into my life again, punch my husband, and I notice you're still referring to me as your property as well."
Owen sighed, dipping his head and attempting to look forlorn, an effect somewhat spoiled by the lack of gravity. "Oh Alice, I know. I'm trying to change, I came out here to try and make amends. Do right by you and your man."
"Well you're off to a terrific start Owen, don't stop on my account." And with that she turned and floated stormily off.
"You really want to show her you're sorry, pack yourself back into that hibernation pod and take the next Lighthorse out of here." Kaito said finally, after watching his wife's exit.
"We wouldn't get much mining done if I did that now would we?" Owen said with a small chuckle. "Look Kaito, I didn't ask to come here, scout's honor, the company decided I was coming here after we lost the Golden Goose. I'll stay in my quarters or my operator's crane, I won't cause any trouble, just treat me like you'd treat a totally unknown foreman and give me a chance to prove to you and Alice that I'm a good person."
"That little speech would have been a lot better received if you hadn't sucker punched me first." Kaito said with a roll of his eyes. "But we need you, we're behind schedule and that ring isn't going to mine itself. But if you slip up, if you hurt Alice again, I will not pull my next punch."
With that, Kaito turned and drifted away down the corridor, leaving Owen alone outside the medical bay.
Newton class starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AU from Luyten's Star
January 2219
Ivy's generation was the last to be born before the discovery of faster than light travel. She had begun her career as a military woman aboard the older generation of slower than light warships. In those days, it took the fastest ship several weeks to travel from Earth to Mars, and the outer solar system could be many months of travel away.
The distances had generated tension. The vastness of space had induced a new form of scarcity. Space was full of valuable resources, but they were distant beyond the ability of the human mind to easily grasp. Piracy and brushfire border skirmishes were on the rise, and the threat of a full scale war between Earth and Mars had loomed for two generations. That all changed seemingly overnight, with the development of the warp drive. Earth, Mars, colonies in the asteroid belt, even the gas giant worlds and their systems of moons were suddenly only seconds apart.
After the brief inevitable rise in tensions that this produced, the flood of new resources onto the markets began to settle humanity into a new equilibrium. The outer colonies began to actually prosper, the generation ships were contacted in deep space and became new centers of commerce for a growing fleet of superluminals, and a sort of new cosmopolitanism was rapidly becoming the dominant cultural force.
This left people like Ivy, who still considered herself a Martian before all else, feeling isolated and somewhat left behind in the brave new world that was developing. It was a nice place to live, but it had left her anxiously prowling the stars, waiting for something to finally snap, as if it was all some drug induced fantasy that they'd suddenly awaken from.
This feeling of nervous tension, like a lightning storm about to break but which never did, was the result of an epigenetic quirk from the ancestral environment. It was a particular twist in her genes that had activated as a result of her combat experience. It was something that Jean, who Ivy was convinced was going to break one day, either didn't have the genetics for, or hadn't the life experience to have activated.
And that was the difference when the two of them stared at the signature their telescopes had filtered out of the sunlight. When Jean Paoloni saw the strange, fractal silhouette, she was merely confused. For Ivy though, there was another response. Fear. Something deep and primal activated in the back of her mind, and she gasped aloud.
The entire bridge though, was silent, as the image fully resolved itself on the telescope. Even Cale was momentarily taken aback by the sight.
"Can it see us?" Ivy said finally breaking the moment of tension that had persisted since they'd left warp. Kestral was perched at the back of the room, and said nothing, Cale continued to gape at the strangeness of the object they were being presented with. "Can it see us? Anyone, do we have any fucking idea if that-" She pointed at the object on the monitors, "Is looking at us right now?!"
"Its uh, it's a perfect black body." Kestral finally managed to stammer out.
Cale turned towards Kestral, then back towards it, his words were subdued for him, dulled, "It absorbs all wavelengths of energy that enter it, it isn't just casting a shadow, it's also not reflective, it doesn't radiate heat, we're looking at the hole it generates in our visual field. If it's able to get information from all of that light…"
"We're leaving." Ivy decided without preamble. "Jimmy start charging the ring, I want us at least a light year out from here, now. Jean, copy all of the data we have on this thing into the emergency courier drone and launch it."
"It's 8 AUs away, it will take 66 minutes for the light of our arrival to to reach it." Cale said in the same calm tone.
Jean and Jimmy had already both launched into motion, Kestral was furiously collecting data, and Cale was alternating between staring at Ivy and staring at the wallscreens.
"We're not going to stick around for an hour to see how it reacts to us showing up. We need to report back on the existence of this thing before we decide how or if we're going to contact them. Jimmy, as soon as we complete the first warp, I want you to have a second already plotted up that takes us into the middle of nowhere, collaborate with Jean and see to it that that location is included into the emergency courier."
"It's already reacting." Kestral said suddenly.
All eyes whirled back to the wallscreens as the rods comprising the object all began to extend themselves at high speed. Ivy tapped her foot impatiently as she waited for the warp tunnel to form.
"Emmy, can you calculate the extrusion speed?" Cale asked.
"Extrusion rate is calculated to be 18% of field propagation speed." The AI helpfully reported without comment. Capacitors continued to dump energy and exotic matter into the alcubierre ring, bending deep space closer to them and wrinkling the fabric space between. Ivy was already mentally counting down the seconds in her head until the violent jolt of the kick hurled them into the warp tunnel.
"This began an hour ago, we're 8 AUs away, it's going at 20% of c, they would reach us in five hours," Cale said breathlessly.
"So they already saw us. They decided to do this around the same time you were proposing we move the ship to get a better look at them." Ivy's voice had become just as hollow sounding. The image of the object vanished, its transit in front of the star at an end. "Jimmy, time to ring charge?"
"Seven seconds, command-"He was interrupted by the piercing shrill of a system failure alarm. The lights on the bridge blinked red and Emmy silenced him with a proclamation. "Warning, instability detected in warp conduit, disruptive standing wave forming in pathway, local gravity wave activity detected. Kick sequence aborted." The lights returned to normal as the error message ended. The swearing started in earnest, with Ivy cursing out every computer ever built right the way back to the first abacus while Jimmy's hands flew over his console as if he could somehow suck all the dumped XM back into the ring. Bedlam descended.
It was Jean's voice, quiet and eerily level, that somehow cut through the hubbub. "Emergency courier launching," She said softly. The ship thudded as the axial railgun discharged the probe at 1% the speed of light. The courier would let itself be flung into deep space before activating its small warp drive and heading for Sol. It would be over two weeks before it reached the nearest human and anything could be done about it, but at least somebody would know what had happened here.
Ivy turned to stare at her, then recovered her poise. "Thank you Jean," she said, glad but a little chagrined that it was their flighty XO of all people who'd kept her head. "We, uh... should burn away from it, make sure none of those rods actually hit the ship."
"We'd never outrun them…" Cale warned. "And we'd be smears on the bulkheads if we tried."
"Oblique, then. It'll buy us some time at least," Ivy replied, already rising. "Everyone preset your consoles and begin making your way to the thrust bridge. Jimmy, spin down the torus."
She turned and had already begun making her way to the ladder when Cale called out.
"Wait, something is happening." The star was no longer occluded by the central mass of the object, so all that could be seen were the faint lines that the rods drew across the sun. Something had appeared in the object's center though, a vast and diffuse blue glow came first, it rapidly grew brighter, more violet, and more opaque, wrought through by titanic electrical discharges.
The spectacle brought them all to a halt. The huge storm boiled up out of nowhere in space, sloughing off vast arms of ionizing gas and crackling silently with electromagnetic energy. It vanished nearly as quickly as it had appeared, fading to reveal a gargantuan starship, for that was all that it could possibly be.
"...Emmy. How big is that thing?" Jean asked. She seemed to have gone to an utterly calm and inquisitive place somewhere on the far side of panic.
"The emerging object appears to have an approximate radius of four million meters," the AI announced, hedging the assessment. Ivy could hardly blame her: She was reporting that it was rather larger than Mars.
Somehow, the neutral and uninflected voice that Emmy used for conveying measurements contrived to make her sound awed. At least she'd helpfully rounded off---Ivy doubted if her nerves could have withstood a measurement accurate down to the centimeter, even though Emmy and her instruments could certainly have delivered an answer so precise.
The new object---the *ship*, she reminded herself---resembled nothing so much as an immense coral reef. It was a riot of color and organic shapes all splaying out in seemingly random fashion and was only roughly spherical at best. It disdained to have anything resembling a "front" nor any visible propulsion, a thrust axis, any apparent means of generating gravity… and if it did ever turn or spin then it must do so with diurnal slowness otherwise the centripetal effect at its outermost margin would have liquified the crew. Assuming it had crew, which was a big assumption to make about an object the size of a planet.
Kestral was muttering the skeptic's mantra to eirself while picking over everything that was simply not possible about the new arrival. "If X is true I want to believe X is true. If X is not true I want to believe X is not true, if X is true, I… Cuss it!" Ey gave up and stammered out some frustrated gibberish for a second. "The-uh-tha-bu-it… Th-that… thing should collapse under its own mass!" ey accused. "The tensile forces are just… unless they're propping it up with some kind of generated field, that whole object is made out of unobtanium."
Before Ivy could reply to that, Emmy spoke up again. "The gravity wave distortions appear to be dissipating," she reported. "We are also receiving structured signals along a number of varying electromagnetic frequencies."
"Sweet baby Newton and all his apples... " Cale muttered, running a hand over his scalp as he tried to collect his jaw from the floor. "...They're talking to us."
"Ivy," Jean asked unhelpfully. "What do we do?"
Ivy licked her lips, straightened her jumpsuit, and sat down in her chair, scarcely able to believe the words she was about to say.
"...We initiate first contact protocols," she said.
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Chapter 3: The Ones Who Came Before
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 3: The Ones Who Came Before
Newton class starship
MSCV Empiricist
8 AU from Luyten's Star
January 2219
First contact protocols for organisations and governmental entities were first created following the discovery of a garden world orbiting Proxima Centauri in 2204, and amended every few years after. However, the more years that went by without a contact, the less they seemed to matter.
The Martian first contact protocols had been derived from military operating principles. As a result, the protocol was, of course, an acronym. The Contact Operating Procedures Manual, or COPMAN, laid out an elaborate decision tree designed to accommodate dozens of potential moves by hundreds of different hypothetical aliens. Every officer cadet was put through a first contact simulator based on a randomized COPMAN scenario during their senior year.
The possibility of a starship two-thirds the radius of the Earth hadn't been included, but Ivy was prepared to forgive that particular oversight. Nobody could reasonably be expected to prepare for the physically impossible.
Fortunately, the opening steps in the tree that began with an attempt by the nonhumans to initiate contact were straightforward---establish a common computing language. This boiled down to bombarding one another with prime number sequences in binary, building up to a primitive program in a low-level digital language, and then letting the computer rapidly bootstrap up from that humble beginning to progressively more and more complicated programs in a potted history of human software and communication protocols from first principles.
The next step was harder, and ended up stretching onwards for the next week. It involved establishing a conceptual language onto which an understanding of the actual alien linguistics could be built. Dictionaries, labelled image databases, and children's textbooks flooded out of their x-band antennas, while they received back collections of the alien equivalents.
There had still been no actual communication, it was only yesterday that Emmy and their sociologist (moonlighting as a linguist) had actually managed to figure out which of the images sent back was supposed to be their selfie.
The creatures were eight limbed and radially symmetrical, four lower limbs were offset 45 degrees from four slightly longer upper limbs. Their limbs were feathered and seemed to come in a variety of colors, each one terminating in a set of clawed, four fingered digits. They wore something akin to clothing over their central torsos, with something akin to a hood pulled up over half of the creature's head. It had eight eyes, two on each side, set one above the other. Between the hood and the feathers, Ivy thought they had a vaguely wise appearance, like alien bird priests.
That image was projected onto the wallscreen of the conference room alongside several other different although apparently also clothed creatures for the 41st senior staff meeting.
"Good thing we didn't send them a copy of the Voyager plaque," Jean joked a little desperately. "They'd have thought they'd made contact with a species of naturists."
"They did send us full 3d anatomical renderings, so they're not total prudes" Cale answered lightly. There was a mood of almost forced joviality in the meeting, everyone was excited by the discovery, and yet it was by its nature profoundly uneasy.
"I notice I'm confused here." Ivy said reclining in her chair and steepling her fingers, "I'm looking at nine different types of aliens. Or is this some very elaborate life cycle?"
"Oh," Kestral spoke up to correct her, "No, they're different species. There's a bunch of distinct alien biospheres on that ship. You can see the differences between atmospheres in different sections on the spectrographics."
"We think the bird-spiders are in charge." Cale said. "They put themselves and one other species, that's the furry octopuses with hats, into a category that translates to 'the ones that came before', the rest of this lot are all called 'the ones who followed after'."
Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose, "Do we know anything about their culture? Do they love their children, pray to gods, what?"
"The answers to those questions are probably in the data they sent us, but we haven't built up enough of a knowledge base to generate meaningful answers. It's a lot to sift through, even with Emmy helping," Kestral answered with an unhelpful shrug.
"How close are we to actually talking to them?" Ivy persisted. "These guys are practically in our backyard as far as interstellar distances are concerned, I definitely have some questions to ask them."
"We're pretty close. We could probably do it now honestly, but you'd be getting a lot of 'untranslatable' dumped into the string." Cale answered.
"You can't talk to them." Evangeline spoke suddenly from the back of the room, tucking her pale blonde hair behind her ears. "The Contact Operating Procedures Handbook clearly states that an initial line of communications requires a senior diplomat be sent from Sol."
"Unless." Cale responded from his position in front of the wallscreens. "Continued silence on the part of the human vessel would represent an unconscionable danger to said vessel's wellbeing."
"Cale just because every line in COPMAN is appended with that doesn't mean you can use me as your personal override because you're too impatient to wait for a diplomat." The Conscience snorted and crossed her arms. The Pragmatist shrugged at her and proceeded with his presentation.
"It is however, the case I will be making in this instance." He changed slides. The next slide was of text, it read.
HUMANS?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? HOW DID YOU COME TO THIS PLACE? WE MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] WE HAVE MANY [UNTRANSLATABLE] TO DISCUSS. WE HAVE LITTLE TIME BEFORE [UNTRANSLATABLE]. IF YOUR VESSELS HAVE REACHED THIS DISTANCE FROM SOL, THEN THEY WILL ENCOUNTER [UNTRANSLATABLE] VERY SOON. THERE IS LITTLE TIME. YOU MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] AT ONCE.
Cale was silent while the rest of them digested the text. "When they first started talking, it was in their signal codes, in their language. First they sent a series of numbers which I can only assume must be some sort of squawk code along with what we believe to be the ship's name--Lament for Lost Worlds--followed by that string of words, both in audio and text. They mix in that string every twelve hours within their data dumps."
"I'm going to ask the stupid and obvious question." Jean stated, "But what do those untranslatables mean?"
"I find I'm rather concerned with the content we already have translated." Ivy said softly. "I don't want to anthropomorphize them, but they seem worried about something, agitated even. That seriously frightens me. These guys rolled up in a ship bigger than our planet, what sort of thing worries them?"
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
IF-EMV Stoneburner
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 KM from Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
The mining vessel was a gargantuan, ungainly thing. It was as if someone had frankensteined together all the equipment one might find in a pit mine, a deep sea drilling rig, a good portion of a smeltery, and of course, a spaceship. It had a sort of anti-grace that many of the inhabitants drew comfort from. They said it made the huge vessel feel 'real' and 'solid' something frequently lacking in the depths of space. From his position high above the ore intake bays, it seemed as it the ship was some giant beast, toothed with all manner of rock chewing equipment.
First conceived of to mine ice from the rings of Saturn, Stoneburner had been hastily repurposed following the invention of warp drive, and now stripped precious metals from the rings of a giant boiling world, orbiting a giant incinerating sun. At 155 light years from Sol, the now five year old Stoneburner expedition still retained the title as second furthest a human had gotten from Earth. She hung on the world's dark side, flitting between the orbits of moons and spending as little time as possible in the exposed glare of the red giant while conducting EVA assisted harvesting operations.
The entire vessel shuddered as a small metallic asteroid slammed into its collection bay and was shredded apart by the internal machinery. The jolt threw Owen's work console into an error state, its screens all flashing red suddenly. Owen smacked the side of the console and the alert message vanished, however, the music flooding his crane cabin cut out then as well.
"Damnit." He grumbled, twisting in his seat to figure out what he'd just done, when his daughter's voice broke over the radio, sounding as curt and frosty as all their communications had been over the week since Owen's arrival.
"Warning, incoming bolide swarm. All exterior work crews please return to the ship immediately. That means you too Owen."
Owen grumbled and scratched at his scruffy red beard. His eyes went out past the various spacewalkers now making their way back inside to the cloudtops of Amateru, lit in dull crimson by the world's intense heat. Streaks of white light were already sliding across the sky as bolides slammed into the atmosphere and exploded with the force of a nuclear blast. There was something else though: the cloudtops of Amateru were boiling with a previously unseen vigor, and enormous storms flickered up from the depths. The sight managed to actually get him moving.
He unstrapped from his operator's seat and started climbing down the long pressurized hamster tube that connected the crane cabin to an airlock. He thumbed his earpiece in as he coasted down the tube and listened to Alice issue another round of withdrawal requests. Once she finished, he tapped the communicator and asked her, "It's rock soup down here, what's going on up there baby girl?"
"Some sort of explosion on the sunward side of Amateru." his daughter answered, "There's a lot of debris getting kicked up. And don't call me that Owen I'm a grown woman."
Owen cycled the airlock mechanism and made a beeline for the Mining Information Center, the closest thing to a bridge on the hulk. "How big are we talking here?" He asked calmly as he floated along the corridor. 36 years in space mining had taught him the value of calm in the face of emergencies. Alice hadn't told him to shut up, which meant he wasn't pushing her buttons either, that was especially good, given the potential circumstances.
"Hard to say, it was down in the atmosphere, but it's blown gas and ring fragments up to 200,000 kilometers and still rising." Alice's voice shifted in tone, "Which is why the rest of you need to hurry your asses up and get in the fucking boat!"
He whistled appreciatively without keying up. That was big, almost unimaginably so. He struggled with that visualisation as Alice made another shipwide announcement. "Thrust warning, one minute, strap yourself into something, this is gonna be a bit bumpy."
Owen double timed it to the MIC and strapped into an unused chair as dust particles started falling out of the air. He felt the ship's thrust pressing him down into his feet, and overall it felt more stable than freefall. This was a lie though, they weren't just under thrust, they were actively maneuvering, twisting and turning the ship with cold gas thrusters and gimbling their exhaust nozzles as they maneuvered around city sized chunks of rock and metal.
The MIC was awash with activity: Alice was still shouting orders into the radio, her husband Kaito, eschewing reason and chairs, paced the unsteady floor agitatedly, his dark eyes tracking between cameras mounted to satellites around the world. Operators for various stages of the refining process hastily punched commands into their consoles, shutting down equipment before the jostling they were giving the gear caused it to rip it from its mounts or gut itself.
An exceptionally loud bang reverberated through the decks and new sets of error messages blossomed red across the screens. Kaito snapped up his radio from its holster and shouted into it. "What's going on up there Murphy, are you breaking my boat?"
"We're in the thick of it now Cap'n, whole ring's comin' apart at the seams," came the voice of Eleanor Murphy, the ship's pilot and navigator, from her position up in the nav bridge.
"You get us out of this rock soup and into a higher orbit pronto, you hear?" Kaito replied into the microphone, using Owen's earlier term for the deteriorating conditions.
"We're going to have to completely clear the orbit to fully get out of this." Alice said behind him, her lips creased into a tight frown while her green eyes went between Kaito and Owen. "It's like the planet is gutting itself. The gas plume is rising past 300,000 kilometers. The ring is going full kessler and one of the inner moons broke up when it passed through the plume, there's a lot of new rocks flying around out there."
"Can Murphy avoid the plume, or is it just too big?"
"Too big." Alice said tightly. "It spans the entire daylight side of the planet up into high orbits. We're going to hit it at least once."
"Better batten down then." Owen said, speaking up for the first time.
"The old girl can handle it." Kaito said confidently to his father in law. He was slightly undercut in his confidence as he stumbled under the shifting deck.
"Get ready for main engine cut out." Murphy said over the grainy speakers. Kaito quickly grabbed a support pole as the thrust ended, sending the ship back into freefall. "I matched velocities with one of the moons, we're going to ride it's L4 through the plume, and hopefully the bulk will shield us from the worst of it."
"How long until we hit the edge of the gas?" Kaito asked quickly into the microphone.
"About an hour, and it will take three hours to cross. Once we're through, we'll pass through our periapsis in two hours, and we can make an ejection burn." Murphy responded.
"She'll hold together." Kaito said to no one but himself.
"You so sure about that Captain?" Owen asked him sincerely as he unstrapped and launched himself towards the hatch. "You sure this isn't the same thing that took out the Goose that laid the Golden Egg?"
There was a moment of intense silence as Kaito thought about the other, now vanished EMV. "There's no way of knowing what happened to them at this point. They could all be fine." He paused. "This does seem like the sort of situation they sent that second Lighthorse for though, doesn't it?"
"Not really." Alice said said without looking up. "It would take at least two hours to get everyone in the tanks and loaded into the ship. We'll be in the plume by then, and the Lighthorse is much less of a brick than Stoneburner. If there was a rock strike or something before it completed its auto-warp procedure, that'd be it for us.
"So we ride it out." Kaito said firmly. "She can take it."
"I'm going up to the navigation bridge with a spare suit just in case." Owen announced.. "We've got Murphy up in the most exposed room on this barge. Alice, make sure bulkheads are actually getting sealed throughout the ship, I know Anders and Carlton like to prop the hatches open to their sections."
"I think you're worrying a bit much dad." Alice said kindly. "It's just a rough patch of space weather."
Owen just pointed at one of the screens, a satellite image of the daylight side. The giant world had detonated in a gassy starburst that spanned most of the world's daylight side and rose now hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space. "You ever seen anything like that before Alice? Or you Kaito? Cause to me, that shit there looks downright biblical, and I really don't reckon this boat will fare too well in that rough of weather."
Kaito lifted one eyebrow, crossing his arms. "Are you insulting my boat?" It was an attempt at a witty quip, something to lighten the mood, but it came off hollow and overly harsh, and he quickly silenced himself afterwards. When no one spoke, Owen took it as his cue to gently push off the deck and drift over to the hatch.
"Make sure those bulkheads stay sealed." Owen said before removing himself from the room, closing the hatch behind him as per his own instructions.
Owen floated up the central spinal column around which the rest of the ship was built. The central axis was nearly two kilometers long, but he didn't need to go all the way to the top, fortunately.
The massive ship groaned around him, the metal protesting and shifting as Murphy tweaked their course with the cold gas thrusters. He gently pushed off the walls as they came too close to him, but was otherwise free to drift unimpeded, drawing along a pair of spacesuits in his wake.
Three quarters of the way up the stack, he swung through a bulkhead. Beyond it another long corridor took him outward towards the skin of the ship, where the navigation bridge was mounted on an exposed flank, designed to give the navigator a wide field a view.
He entered the cabin and was immediately assaulted by Murphy's voice as the young mulatto skinned woman shouted at Kaito into a headset.
"I'm doing my best okay? There's too many rocks up here to avoid all of them, we're going to take some damage no matter what I do and you need to get over that!"
"Just keep us out of the worst of it, it's your ass on the line in this too Murphy." Kaito's voice came out of the speakers.
"I'm doing my best, just shut up and let me fly. What do you want Owen?" The two statements were strung together to the point that it took Owen a moment to realise she had started speaking to him.
"It's not safe up here, put this on." He pushed a suit towards her. She minutely adjusted course such that it stopped drifting towards her and began floating back towards Owen.
"Suits make me claustrophobic, I need the freedom of motion to fly the ship." She whined. Owen ignored her and began putting on his own suit. Her suit continued to hang in space between them.
"We're floating in a glass tank in the middle of an asteroid storm, put on the damn suit Murphy." He said brusquely.
"Its reinforced." She argued. She wasn't even looking at him, he followed her eyes out the windows towards the otherworldly scene around them. The blue, water covered moon of Susanoo hung ahead of the Stoneburner a great blue sphere, light pouring over one crescent and leaving the other shrouded in darkness. Amateru boiled and burned beneath them, and behind the moon, the cloud deck rose upwards to reach towards the sun. The metal rich ring they had been orbiting within had completely disintegrated, and chain reaction impacts continued to throw rocks around at an ever increasing rate. There was something in her tone of voice as she stared out into the scene of silent, slow motion destruction, a sad resignation of their fate.
"Hey, we are not going to die here, put on the suit, we need you in one piece to get us through this, and we will get through this."
Murphy grumbled but climbed out of the pilot's cradle and began clambering into the bulky exosuit. Outside, Susanoo was beginning to encounter the edge of the gas plume. Her atmosphere burned and her oceans seethed as the storm of particles tore off her cloud layers. As the moon's electromagnetic field lines began pushing through the cloud, the gas lit up in brilliant auroras that arced across the void, enfolding the blue moon like enormous angel wings.
"It's kind of beautiful."Owen said as he floated in the compartment.
"If you like watching living worlds be boiled sterile." Murphy retorted frostily as she finished clambering into her suit.
"Point taken." He said with a chuckle. The scene unfolding around them was a spectacle in the same way an asteroid impact on an populated station was. Dark, violent, and tugging at the deepest parts of the human psyche. Still, it possessed an otherworldly beauty to which few eyes would ever bear witness.
They watched together in silence as the blue world died. It turned red hot, it's oceans boiling and steaming away into space as the now exposed rocky core continued to be bombarded by the high velocity plasma in the rising gas plume. Those oceans had been alive. Swimming creatures of every size and description, floating reefs that matted together into a thick layer of life, vast leviathans that roamed down into the depths, now all dead in a matter of minutes. It was a humbling and disheartening sight, awesome in power and terrifying in scope.
As the dying moon slid deeper into the burning gas, its formerly invisible tectonic plates began to glow along their margins as the world was deformed by the titanic forces engulfing it. The world was also slowing down as the gas created drag, causing the Stoneburner to begin overtaking it.
"Aren't we getting a bit close?" Owen said, leaning forward over Murphy's shoulder.
"Close is relative in space, and the last thing we want to do right now is slow down." Murphy said as she shifted their course to avoid a tumbling rock coming up from behind them. The hull was beginning to groan and rattle around them as the gas impacted the hull at high velocities. Murphy kept them in the moon's slipstream, letting the moon shield them from the thickest of the streaming particles, but the slightly sick pallor to the young woman's face made it clear she wasn't confident it would be enough.
"She'll hold together." Owen said reassuringly. "If she can handle aerobreaking, she can handle this."
Murphy said nothing in response, merely maintaining a tight grip on the steering handles and grinding her teeth. The clang of an impact echoed out of the metal as a rock impacted some distant part of the hull, and Owen's eyes were drawn back out the windows as they sailed into the storm of swirling, rising particles.
Alarms began going off all around them. Pressure sensors were now reading the outside atmosphere as being thicker than the vessel's interior, and temperature sensors indicated exterior heat was rising rapidly as friction against the hull increased. Owen was about to say something else reassuring, when Susanoo exploded. The world seemed to flatten, the side facing Amateru was compressed by the intense pressure exerted upon it, and finally the forces became too great, the margins of the equator were ripped away and the world cracked down to its roots. A lot of things began happening very quickly then, as the wind began blasting upwards against the hull through cracks in the moon's rubble, continent sized boulders began tumblings towards them.
"Shit!" Murphy exclaimed, keying up her microphone. "Susanoo just bit it, we're about to be dodging rocks the size of Olympus Mons, everyone brace yourselves."
"Turn us into the wind and go for a hard burn, right now." Owen said quickly.
"What? Shut up Owen, that sort of radial burn is incredibly inefficient."
"Stop thinking of it like orbital mechanics, we're not orbiting, we're plowing into the front of an airmass. If we keep going at this speed we'll cook ourselves just like that moon got cooked. We need to turn into the wind and accelerate to keep pace with it so the pressure and friction lessens."
"If we turn our engines into the wind and there's a blowback, we're dead, that's it." Murphy shot back.
Another gust of wind slammed into their ship and rattled everything that wasn't secured. Murphy tapped the forward facing thrusters to slow them down enough that a chunk of burning stone the size of africa could slide silently in front of them.
"Our vector is already drifting upwards, look at the trajectory calculator." Owen pointed out.
"There's a rock coming up from below us, and I can't dodge it so you're about to get what you want." Murphy spat acidly. She keyed up the mic, "Everyone get in a crash couch, we're about to pull three gees to try and avoid turning into roadkill." She gave Owen a hard look and pointed towards a chair. The room was already shifting around him as she pivoted the ship so her engines pointed away from the exploding moon.
Owen had just finished clambering into the crash couch and strapped himself in when he was suddenly pressed into it by three gravities of force. He could feel his skin being drawn downwards, cheeks pressing against his teeth, muscles hanging heavily from his bones. The worst pressure was where his flesh was pinched between the formerly soft plastic of the couch and his bones. His eyeballs were pressed against the backs of their sockets, causing his vision to go slightly blurry. The ship rattled and shook around them, components broke loose and fell backwards towards the engines as they forced the ungainly vessel upwards on a fusion fist.
He wasn't sure if the city sized boulders flying past them were real or phantoms created before his eyes by the intense acceleration, and the world seemed to constrict down towards a point. He heard Murphy saying something to him, but it was far away and out of focus. Darkness overtook him, and he dreamed of fire.
Newton class starship
MSCV Empiricist
8 AU from Luyten's Star
January 2219
First contact protocols for organisations and governmental entities were first created following the discovery of a garden world orbiting Proxima Centauri in 2204, and amended every few years after. However, the more years that went by without a contact, the less they seemed to matter.
The Martian first contact protocols had been derived from military operating principles. As a result, the protocol was, of course, an acronym. The Contact Operating Procedures Manual, or COPMAN, laid out an elaborate decision tree designed to accommodate dozens of potential moves by hundreds of different hypothetical aliens. Every officer cadet was put through a first contact simulator based on a randomized COPMAN scenario during their senior year.
The possibility of a starship two-thirds the radius of the Earth hadn't been included, but Ivy was prepared to forgive that particular oversight. Nobody could reasonably be expected to prepare for the physically impossible.
Fortunately, the opening steps in the tree that began with an attempt by the nonhumans to initiate contact were straightforward---establish a common computing language. This boiled down to bombarding one another with prime number sequences in binary, building up to a primitive program in a low-level digital language, and then letting the computer rapidly bootstrap up from that humble beginning to progressively more and more complicated programs in a potted history of human software and communication protocols from first principles.
The next step was harder, and ended up stretching onwards for the next week. It involved establishing a conceptual language onto which an understanding of the actual alien linguistics could be built. Dictionaries, labelled image databases, and children's textbooks flooded out of their x-band antennas, while they received back collections of the alien equivalents.
There had still been no actual communication, it was only yesterday that Emmy and their sociologist (moonlighting as a linguist) had actually managed to figure out which of the images sent back was supposed to be their selfie.
The creatures were eight limbed and radially symmetrical, four lower limbs were offset 45 degrees from four slightly longer upper limbs. Their limbs were feathered and seemed to come in a variety of colors, each one terminating in a set of clawed, four fingered digits. They wore something akin to clothing over their central torsos, with something akin to a hood pulled up over half of the creature's head. It had eight eyes, two on each side, set one above the other. Between the hood and the feathers, Ivy thought they had a vaguely wise appearance, like alien bird priests.
That image was projected onto the wallscreen of the conference room alongside several other different although apparently also clothed creatures for the 41st senior staff meeting.
"Good thing we didn't send them a copy of the Voyager plaque," Jean joked a little desperately. "They'd have thought they'd made contact with a species of naturists."
"They did send us full 3d anatomical renderings, so they're not total prudes" Cale answered lightly. There was a mood of almost forced joviality in the meeting, everyone was excited by the discovery, and yet it was by its nature profoundly uneasy.
"I notice I'm confused here." Ivy said reclining in her chair and steepling her fingers, "I'm looking at nine different types of aliens. Or is this some very elaborate life cycle?"
"Oh," Kestral spoke up to correct her, "No, they're different species. There's a bunch of distinct alien biospheres on that ship. You can see the differences between atmospheres in different sections on the spectrographics."
"We think the bird-spiders are in charge." Cale said. "They put themselves and one other species, that's the furry octopuses with hats, into a category that translates to 'the ones that came before', the rest of this lot are all called 'the ones who followed after'."
Ivy rubbed the bridge of her nose, "Do we know anything about their culture? Do they love their children, pray to gods, what?"
"The answers to those questions are probably in the data they sent us, but we haven't built up enough of a knowledge base to generate meaningful answers. It's a lot to sift through, even with Emmy helping," Kestral answered with an unhelpful shrug.
"How close are we to actually talking to them?" Ivy persisted. "These guys are practically in our backyard as far as interstellar distances are concerned, I definitely have some questions to ask them."
"We're pretty close. We could probably do it now honestly, but you'd be getting a lot of 'untranslatable' dumped into the string." Cale answered.
"You can't talk to them." Evangeline spoke suddenly from the back of the room, tucking her pale blonde hair behind her ears. "The Contact Operating Procedures Handbook clearly states that an initial line of communications requires a senior diplomat be sent from Sol."
"Unless." Cale responded from his position in front of the wallscreens. "Continued silence on the part of the human vessel would represent an unconscionable danger to said vessel's wellbeing."
"Cale just because every line in COPMAN is appended with that doesn't mean you can use me as your personal override because you're too impatient to wait for a diplomat." The Conscience snorted and crossed her arms. The Pragmatist shrugged at her and proceeded with his presentation.
"It is however, the case I will be making in this instance." He changed slides. The next slide was of text, it read.
HUMANS?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? HOW DID YOU COME TO THIS PLACE? WE MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] WE HAVE MANY [UNTRANSLATABLE] TO DISCUSS. WE HAVE LITTLE TIME BEFORE [UNTRANSLATABLE]. IF YOUR VESSELS HAVE REACHED THIS DISTANCE FROM SOL, THEN THEY WILL ENCOUNTER [UNTRANSLATABLE] VERY SOON. THERE IS LITTLE TIME. YOU MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] AT ONCE.
Cale was silent while the rest of them digested the text. "When they first started talking, it was in their signal codes, in their language. First they sent a series of numbers which I can only assume must be some sort of squawk code along with what we believe to be the ship's name--Lament for Lost Worlds--followed by that string of words, both in audio and text. They mix in that string every twelve hours within their data dumps."
"I'm going to ask the stupid and obvious question." Jean stated, "But what do those untranslatables mean?"
"I find I'm rather concerned with the content we already have translated." Ivy said softly. "I don't want to anthropomorphize them, but they seem worried about something, agitated even. That seriously frightens me. These guys rolled up in a ship bigger than our planet, what sort of thing worries them?"
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
IF-EMV Stoneburner
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 KM from Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
The mining vessel was a gargantuan, ungainly thing. It was as if someone had frankensteined together all the equipment one might find in a pit mine, a deep sea drilling rig, a good portion of a smeltery, and of course, a spaceship. It had a sort of anti-grace that many of the inhabitants drew comfort from. They said it made the huge vessel feel 'real' and 'solid' something frequently lacking in the depths of space. From his position high above the ore intake bays, it seemed as it the ship was some giant beast, toothed with all manner of rock chewing equipment.
First conceived of to mine ice from the rings of Saturn, Stoneburner had been hastily repurposed following the invention of warp drive, and now stripped precious metals from the rings of a giant boiling world, orbiting a giant incinerating sun. At 155 light years from Sol, the now five year old Stoneburner expedition still retained the title as second furthest a human had gotten from Earth. She hung on the world's dark side, flitting between the orbits of moons and spending as little time as possible in the exposed glare of the red giant while conducting EVA assisted harvesting operations.
The entire vessel shuddered as a small metallic asteroid slammed into its collection bay and was shredded apart by the internal machinery. The jolt threw Owen's work console into an error state, its screens all flashing red suddenly. Owen smacked the side of the console and the alert message vanished, however, the music flooding his crane cabin cut out then as well.
"Damnit." He grumbled, twisting in his seat to figure out what he'd just done, when his daughter's voice broke over the radio, sounding as curt and frosty as all their communications had been over the week since Owen's arrival.
"Warning, incoming bolide swarm. All exterior work crews please return to the ship immediately. That means you too Owen."
Owen grumbled and scratched at his scruffy red beard. His eyes went out past the various spacewalkers now making their way back inside to the cloudtops of Amateru, lit in dull crimson by the world's intense heat. Streaks of white light were already sliding across the sky as bolides slammed into the atmosphere and exploded with the force of a nuclear blast. There was something else though: the cloudtops of Amateru were boiling with a previously unseen vigor, and enormous storms flickered up from the depths. The sight managed to actually get him moving.
He unstrapped from his operator's seat and started climbing down the long pressurized hamster tube that connected the crane cabin to an airlock. He thumbed his earpiece in as he coasted down the tube and listened to Alice issue another round of withdrawal requests. Once she finished, he tapped the communicator and asked her, "It's rock soup down here, what's going on up there baby girl?"
"Some sort of explosion on the sunward side of Amateru." his daughter answered, "There's a lot of debris getting kicked up. And don't call me that Owen I'm a grown woman."
Owen cycled the airlock mechanism and made a beeline for the Mining Information Center, the closest thing to a bridge on the hulk. "How big are we talking here?" He asked calmly as he floated along the corridor. 36 years in space mining had taught him the value of calm in the face of emergencies. Alice hadn't told him to shut up, which meant he wasn't pushing her buttons either, that was especially good, given the potential circumstances.
"Hard to say, it was down in the atmosphere, but it's blown gas and ring fragments up to 200,000 kilometers and still rising." Alice's voice shifted in tone, "Which is why the rest of you need to hurry your asses up and get in the fucking boat!"
He whistled appreciatively without keying up. That was big, almost unimaginably so. He struggled with that visualisation as Alice made another shipwide announcement. "Thrust warning, one minute, strap yourself into something, this is gonna be a bit bumpy."
Owen double timed it to the MIC and strapped into an unused chair as dust particles started falling out of the air. He felt the ship's thrust pressing him down into his feet, and overall it felt more stable than freefall. This was a lie though, they weren't just under thrust, they were actively maneuvering, twisting and turning the ship with cold gas thrusters and gimbling their exhaust nozzles as they maneuvered around city sized chunks of rock and metal.
The MIC was awash with activity: Alice was still shouting orders into the radio, her husband Kaito, eschewing reason and chairs, paced the unsteady floor agitatedly, his dark eyes tracking between cameras mounted to satellites around the world. Operators for various stages of the refining process hastily punched commands into their consoles, shutting down equipment before the jostling they were giving the gear caused it to rip it from its mounts or gut itself.
An exceptionally loud bang reverberated through the decks and new sets of error messages blossomed red across the screens. Kaito snapped up his radio from its holster and shouted into it. "What's going on up there Murphy, are you breaking my boat?"
"We're in the thick of it now Cap'n, whole ring's comin' apart at the seams," came the voice of Eleanor Murphy, the ship's pilot and navigator, from her position up in the nav bridge.
"You get us out of this rock soup and into a higher orbit pronto, you hear?" Kaito replied into the microphone, using Owen's earlier term for the deteriorating conditions.
"We're going to have to completely clear the orbit to fully get out of this." Alice said behind him, her lips creased into a tight frown while her green eyes went between Kaito and Owen. "It's like the planet is gutting itself. The gas plume is rising past 300,000 kilometers. The ring is going full kessler and one of the inner moons broke up when it passed through the plume, there's a lot of new rocks flying around out there."
"Can Murphy avoid the plume, or is it just too big?"
"Too big." Alice said tightly. "It spans the entire daylight side of the planet up into high orbits. We're going to hit it at least once."
"Better batten down then." Owen said, speaking up for the first time.
"The old girl can handle it." Kaito said confidently to his father in law. He was slightly undercut in his confidence as he stumbled under the shifting deck.
"Get ready for main engine cut out." Murphy said over the grainy speakers. Kaito quickly grabbed a support pole as the thrust ended, sending the ship back into freefall. "I matched velocities with one of the moons, we're going to ride it's L4 through the plume, and hopefully the bulk will shield us from the worst of it."
"How long until we hit the edge of the gas?" Kaito asked quickly into the microphone.
"About an hour, and it will take three hours to cross. Once we're through, we'll pass through our periapsis in two hours, and we can make an ejection burn." Murphy responded.
"She'll hold together." Kaito said to no one but himself.
"You so sure about that Captain?" Owen asked him sincerely as he unstrapped and launched himself towards the hatch. "You sure this isn't the same thing that took out the Goose that laid the Golden Egg?"
There was a moment of intense silence as Kaito thought about the other, now vanished EMV. "There's no way of knowing what happened to them at this point. They could all be fine." He paused. "This does seem like the sort of situation they sent that second Lighthorse for though, doesn't it?"
"Not really." Alice said said without looking up. "It would take at least two hours to get everyone in the tanks and loaded into the ship. We'll be in the plume by then, and the Lighthorse is much less of a brick than Stoneburner. If there was a rock strike or something before it completed its auto-warp procedure, that'd be it for us.
"So we ride it out." Kaito said firmly. "She can take it."
"I'm going up to the navigation bridge with a spare suit just in case." Owen announced.. "We've got Murphy up in the most exposed room on this barge. Alice, make sure bulkheads are actually getting sealed throughout the ship, I know Anders and Carlton like to prop the hatches open to their sections."
"I think you're worrying a bit much dad." Alice said kindly. "It's just a rough patch of space weather."
Owen just pointed at one of the screens, a satellite image of the daylight side. The giant world had detonated in a gassy starburst that spanned most of the world's daylight side and rose now hundreds of thousands of kilometers into space. "You ever seen anything like that before Alice? Or you Kaito? Cause to me, that shit there looks downright biblical, and I really don't reckon this boat will fare too well in that rough of weather."
Kaito lifted one eyebrow, crossing his arms. "Are you insulting my boat?" It was an attempt at a witty quip, something to lighten the mood, but it came off hollow and overly harsh, and he quickly silenced himself afterwards. When no one spoke, Owen took it as his cue to gently push off the deck and drift over to the hatch.
"Make sure those bulkheads stay sealed." Owen said before removing himself from the room, closing the hatch behind him as per his own instructions.
Δ
Owen floated up the central spinal column around which the rest of the ship was built. The central axis was nearly two kilometers long, but he didn't need to go all the way to the top, fortunately.
The massive ship groaned around him, the metal protesting and shifting as Murphy tweaked their course with the cold gas thrusters. He gently pushed off the walls as they came too close to him, but was otherwise free to drift unimpeded, drawing along a pair of spacesuits in his wake.
Three quarters of the way up the stack, he swung through a bulkhead. Beyond it another long corridor took him outward towards the skin of the ship, where the navigation bridge was mounted on an exposed flank, designed to give the navigator a wide field a view.
He entered the cabin and was immediately assaulted by Murphy's voice as the young mulatto skinned woman shouted at Kaito into a headset.
"I'm doing my best okay? There's too many rocks up here to avoid all of them, we're going to take some damage no matter what I do and you need to get over that!"
"Just keep us out of the worst of it, it's your ass on the line in this too Murphy." Kaito's voice came out of the speakers.
"I'm doing my best, just shut up and let me fly. What do you want Owen?" The two statements were strung together to the point that it took Owen a moment to realise she had started speaking to him.
"It's not safe up here, put this on." He pushed a suit towards her. She minutely adjusted course such that it stopped drifting towards her and began floating back towards Owen.
"Suits make me claustrophobic, I need the freedom of motion to fly the ship." She whined. Owen ignored her and began putting on his own suit. Her suit continued to hang in space between them.
"We're floating in a glass tank in the middle of an asteroid storm, put on the damn suit Murphy." He said brusquely.
"Its reinforced." She argued. She wasn't even looking at him, he followed her eyes out the windows towards the otherworldly scene around them. The blue, water covered moon of Susanoo hung ahead of the Stoneburner a great blue sphere, light pouring over one crescent and leaving the other shrouded in darkness. Amateru boiled and burned beneath them, and behind the moon, the cloud deck rose upwards to reach towards the sun. The metal rich ring they had been orbiting within had completely disintegrated, and chain reaction impacts continued to throw rocks around at an ever increasing rate. There was something in her tone of voice as she stared out into the scene of silent, slow motion destruction, a sad resignation of their fate.
"Hey, we are not going to die here, put on the suit, we need you in one piece to get us through this, and we will get through this."
Murphy grumbled but climbed out of the pilot's cradle and began clambering into the bulky exosuit. Outside, Susanoo was beginning to encounter the edge of the gas plume. Her atmosphere burned and her oceans seethed as the storm of particles tore off her cloud layers. As the moon's electromagnetic field lines began pushing through the cloud, the gas lit up in brilliant auroras that arced across the void, enfolding the blue moon like enormous angel wings.
"It's kind of beautiful."Owen said as he floated in the compartment.
"If you like watching living worlds be boiled sterile." Murphy retorted frostily as she finished clambering into her suit.
"Point taken." He said with a chuckle. The scene unfolding around them was a spectacle in the same way an asteroid impact on an populated station was. Dark, violent, and tugging at the deepest parts of the human psyche. Still, it possessed an otherworldly beauty to which few eyes would ever bear witness.
They watched together in silence as the blue world died. It turned red hot, it's oceans boiling and steaming away into space as the now exposed rocky core continued to be bombarded by the high velocity plasma in the rising gas plume. Those oceans had been alive. Swimming creatures of every size and description, floating reefs that matted together into a thick layer of life, vast leviathans that roamed down into the depths, now all dead in a matter of minutes. It was a humbling and disheartening sight, awesome in power and terrifying in scope.
As the dying moon slid deeper into the burning gas, its formerly invisible tectonic plates began to glow along their margins as the world was deformed by the titanic forces engulfing it. The world was also slowing down as the gas created drag, causing the Stoneburner to begin overtaking it.
"Aren't we getting a bit close?" Owen said, leaning forward over Murphy's shoulder.
"Close is relative in space, and the last thing we want to do right now is slow down." Murphy said as she shifted their course to avoid a tumbling rock coming up from behind them. The hull was beginning to groan and rattle around them as the gas impacted the hull at high velocities. Murphy kept them in the moon's slipstream, letting the moon shield them from the thickest of the streaming particles, but the slightly sick pallor to the young woman's face made it clear she wasn't confident it would be enough.
"She'll hold together." Owen said reassuringly. "If she can handle aerobreaking, she can handle this."
Murphy said nothing in response, merely maintaining a tight grip on the steering handles and grinding her teeth. The clang of an impact echoed out of the metal as a rock impacted some distant part of the hull, and Owen's eyes were drawn back out the windows as they sailed into the storm of swirling, rising particles.
Alarms began going off all around them. Pressure sensors were now reading the outside atmosphere as being thicker than the vessel's interior, and temperature sensors indicated exterior heat was rising rapidly as friction against the hull increased. Owen was about to say something else reassuring, when Susanoo exploded. The world seemed to flatten, the side facing Amateru was compressed by the intense pressure exerted upon it, and finally the forces became too great, the margins of the equator were ripped away and the world cracked down to its roots. A lot of things began happening very quickly then, as the wind began blasting upwards against the hull through cracks in the moon's rubble, continent sized boulders began tumblings towards them.
"Shit!" Murphy exclaimed, keying up her microphone. "Susanoo just bit it, we're about to be dodging rocks the size of Olympus Mons, everyone brace yourselves."
"Turn us into the wind and go for a hard burn, right now." Owen said quickly.
"What? Shut up Owen, that sort of radial burn is incredibly inefficient."
"Stop thinking of it like orbital mechanics, we're not orbiting, we're plowing into the front of an airmass. If we keep going at this speed we'll cook ourselves just like that moon got cooked. We need to turn into the wind and accelerate to keep pace with it so the pressure and friction lessens."
"If we turn our engines into the wind and there's a blowback, we're dead, that's it." Murphy shot back.
Another gust of wind slammed into their ship and rattled everything that wasn't secured. Murphy tapped the forward facing thrusters to slow them down enough that a chunk of burning stone the size of africa could slide silently in front of them.
"Our vector is already drifting upwards, look at the trajectory calculator." Owen pointed out.
"There's a rock coming up from below us, and I can't dodge it so you're about to get what you want." Murphy spat acidly. She keyed up the mic, "Everyone get in a crash couch, we're about to pull three gees to try and avoid turning into roadkill." She gave Owen a hard look and pointed towards a chair. The room was already shifting around him as she pivoted the ship so her engines pointed away from the exploding moon.
Owen had just finished clambering into the crash couch and strapped himself in when he was suddenly pressed into it by three gravities of force. He could feel his skin being drawn downwards, cheeks pressing against his teeth, muscles hanging heavily from his bones. The worst pressure was where his flesh was pinched between the formerly soft plastic of the couch and his bones. His eyeballs were pressed against the backs of their sockets, causing his vision to go slightly blurry. The ship rattled and shook around them, components broke loose and fell backwards towards the engines as they forced the ungainly vessel upwards on a fusion fist.
He wasn't sure if the city sized boulders flying past them were real or phantoms created before his eyes by the intense acceleration, and the world seemed to constrict down towards a point. He heard Murphy saying something to him, but it was far away and out of focus. Darkness overtook him, and he dreamed of fire.
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Chapter 4: A Moth in a Hurricane
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 4: A Moth in a Hurricane
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
IF-EMV Stoneburner
Hyperbolic Planetary Escape Trajectory
82,000 KM over Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
High velocity gas and microscopic rock fragments pelted the thick metal hull, echoing around inside like rain on a tin roofed house. Eleanor Murphy was born in space though; she had never felt the rain on her skin, laid in a field on a sunny day, or swam in the deep blue waters of an ocean. To her, the sound was unnatural, unnerving, it spoke to her of the incredibly hostile environment all around them, one which would not hesitate to kill her and everyone else in an instant. A wave of goosebumps rose up her back and she felt a chill despite the exosuit she was wearing.
The Stoneburner had completed its burn, they were coasting in a hyperbolic trajectory that would take them across the center of the gas plume before ejecting themselves from the planet's sphere of influence entirely. They were still accelerating slightly from the pressure of the gas on their hull, but they had nearly matched velocities with it so the thrust it imparted on them was minimal, just enough to make loose items slowly drift to one side of a room, but otherwise impossible to detect.
Murphy ground her teeth together as she struggled to see past the clouds they were soaring through. Even with the radars, they were getting enough bounceback that it was impossible to see more than a few kilometers in any direction. She adjusted course slightly as yet another continent sized chunk of dead moon loomed up out of the gloom and slowly tumbled by them. Owen was still unconscious from the brutal acceleration, and Murphy let him rest, the old foreman would work himself into an early grave if he had his way. She filled the emptiness as she usually did, talking to the ship.
"That's it girl, just ease right on around," she mumbled as she tapped the thrusters. The gas was beginning to thin as the ship neared the center of the plume, and visibility slowly began to climb. Alarms began going off then though, trajectory calculators began throwing up impact alarms, alerting Murphy that their course had them on an imminent collision with an object still lost ahead of them in the gas clouds.
"What're you seeing…?" She asked the equipment, tapping her finger against one of the screens. She strained her eyes out the windows but could not see anything beyond the orange and yellow clouds of hydrogen. The collision sensors were telling her there was something huge in there, but there was nothing that big anywhere in the world's orbit.
"Hmm." She hummed to herself. "Dense cloud of gas maybe?" She twisted a dial that adjusted for atmospheric density, but the dedicated screens interpreting that data continued stubbornly insisting there was a solid structure hundreds of kilometers across that was blocking their passage.
She gave Owen a shove, "Hey," She said as she shook him lightly, "Wake up, I need you to take a look at the radar data.
Owen groaned and squeezed his eyes, trying to block out the light of the cabin. He was aware first of pain: the stiffness of his joints, the tender aches in his muscles and bone, the deeply seated fatigue that penetrated his organs and bones.
"Owen!" Murphy said insistently, jabbing him again.
"What?" He asked gruffy, flipping up his visor and rubbing his forehead. Not willing to take chances, Murphy had already began slightly deforming their trajectory, attempting to curve around whatever the sensors thought that obstruction was. She pointed at the radar screen, where a thick line curved away from them, as if delineating an impossibly large cylinder somewhere ahead in the gloom.
"Have you ever seen something like that before? Could it be some sort of sensor echo off the clouds? Cause I don't have unlimited fuel to work with, and I'd really like to save it for real things if I can help it." She explained as he looked confusedly at the monitor.
"I can't say I've seen something like this before." He said after a moment, "could it be another moon somewhere in there?"
"It's wider than any of the moons were, going off the measured curvature, its like, 3,000 klicks across. Amateru doesn't have any moons that big." She tapped the glass screen. "And it seems to be in the center of the gas plume."
Owen pursed his lips but shrugged. "I can't say I like it, but I also can't say I know what it is. I've never seen anything like any of this."
"Well whatever it is, it's so big I can't do a very good job of steering clear, we're going to pass within a few klicks of it in a bit." Murphy said as she tapped the thrusters again.
That drew Owen's eyes out the glass windows. Something huge was looming ahead in the gas, but it was impossible to discern at this stage, it existed merely as an area of darker gradient than its surroundings.
"Should we tell Kaito? He might want to turn the mining LIDAR on it at th--" Murphy's words were cut off as one of the windows suddenly exploded, ripping all the air from the room in a terrific lung collapsing gust of force. There was a moment of great sound as the wind whistled past his ears and the alarms roared in anger before everything fell silent in the absence of a medium to conduct the vibrations.
His visor had been up, and so had Murphy's. He blinked back freezing and boiling tears and looked to his left. Murphy was flailing in her seat, panicking as she gasped and found only emptiness.
Owen could hear the blood pounding through his veins, the liquid gurgling and trying to boil in his guts; in the absence of other noise, his body was obscenely loud. He tried to draw a breath, and his circumstances and observations finally caught up with his thinking.
He calmly reached over and closed Murphy's visor before doing likewise with his own. There was a suddenly loud hiss as the suit repressurized, and he gasped in a breath despite himself. He shook Murphy to make sure she was still breathing, and sighed when she made a thumb's up gesture through the suit. He activated the internal radio and keyed it to the command frequency.
"Kaito the nav bridge just lost pressure, I haven't looked into the cause yet, but if I were a betting man, I'd say it was a rock strike. Murphy and I are alright, we're both in suits up here, but these computers were designed with air in mind. Half the screens are dead already and the other half are quickly dying. You're going to have to take over navigation down there."
There was a few moments of intense silence as Owen assumed Kaito digested the news. Then his voice came back over the headset. "Copy that. Get Murphy and get out of there for now. Do we need to make any immediate course changes?"
"No, not at all, don't do that." Murphy suddenly broke in, having connected to the line while Kaito was speaking. "I just put us onto a course to avoid a very large unknown object at the center of the plume, if you adjust course, we might hit it. Maintain our trajectory exactly if possible, I'll take back over steering when I get down there."
Owen turned to exit the room, but he froze in the middle of unbuckling himself when his eyes went out the now destroyed front window. Something impossible was emerging from the clouds ahead of them. In the center of the gas plume, a huge hollow far larger than a world had been created. The hollow reached down into the deep roots of Amateru's core, which shone with a brilliant yellow light. In the center of this cavity though, was the impossibility. A rude spike of dark metal, point facing towards the shining core, hung in space before them. It had to be hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall, with thin wire-like protrusions reaching out from the point and impaling the shining nugget of the planet's hot center. Green, purple, and orange lights danced across the object's surface in inexplicable patterns and it hung there motionless, like the barycenter around which all of reality might pivot. Murphy poked him when he didn't move for a moment, so taken aback by the sight that he hadn't heard her speaking to him. He pointed out the shattered window and finished unstrapping himself. When he looked up again, Murphy was now also frozen in transfixed awe.
"Are the rest of you seeing this?" Owen said finally into the radio.
"We see it Owen." Alice's voice came back. "We see it."
Newton Class Exploration Ship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUs from Luyten's Star
January 2219
HUMANS?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? HOW DID YOU COME TO THIS PLACE? WE MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] WE HAVE MANY [UNTRANSLATABLE] TO DISCUSS. WE HAVE LITTLE TIME BEFORE [UNTRANSLATABLE]. IF YOUR VESSELS HAVE REACHED THIS DISTANCE FROM SOL, THEN THEY WILL ENCOUNTER [UNTRANSLATABLE] VERY SOON. THERE IS LITTLE TIME. YOU MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] AT ONCE.
The translated alien message hung on the wallscreen, as if silently passing judgement upon all of them. The staff meeting had stretched into overtime as the decision to begin communicating was argued back and forth.
"Let's just go over the content of the message again, and see if we can't draw any further conclusions from it before deciding what to do, okay?" Kestral held up eir hands in a placating gesture, using a soft tone to make up for cutting Evangeline off before she could begin shouting at Cale yet again.
Jean held up a hand, and when the room went quiet, she asked, "Cale, can you replace the untranslatables in the message with the…" she fumbled for the proper terms, "The untranslated alien script, the thing that's untranslatable."
"I can." He said, raising an eyebrow and taking on a vacant expression as he started manipulating the document from his implants. "Why though? It's just scribbles until Emmy's deep learning algorithms finish pairing symbols with concepts."
"I want to know if they're different words." She answered.
"But, they don't have individual words, their language is more compressed than that, if you could hear them communicate, which you can't because it's outside the human auditory range, it would just sound like music, continuous." Cale replied. He'd replaced the first two untranslatables with strange squiggly lines that curved back and forth over each other.
"No, no, I see what she's getting at." Ivy said, encouraging the younger woman. "Even music has individual notes, at some level there need to be individual bits of information."
Jean nodded, pointing at the message as Cale finished swapping the untranslatables with the raw alien script. "See, they're all different, except for the first and last, which are the same. Its like mad libs."
"Mad libs? Really?" Evangeline snorted. "None of you are linguists. This is all conjecture and I still think the most conscionable course of action is to hold position and continue with our information exchange until another vessel arrives with more equipment."
"It's useful conjecture, we can narrow down the problem space and at least eliminate some possibilities." Cale retorted.
"So to break it down," Kestral began, holding up eir hands again to prevent another round of bickering. "Here's what we know, based on the message."
Ey went up to the wallscreen and interfaced with it through eir implants, ey made a gap between the lines of the message and began writing in between the margins, like a teacher making edits to a student's paper. Ey circled the word humans in the message.
"First thing, they identify us as The Ones Who Will Become, it's a set classification for a hierarchy of species based on technology level. However, they append that phrase with the exact location of Sol with respect to the center of the galaxy. That's how they identify us as humans in their message. That means they know about our species, and they must have encountered us at least once before, but despite that, they're surprised to see us here. The set we fall into is basically 'pre-spaceflight industrial' so the last time they visited us was probably a while ago. "
"Are they capable of being surprised?" Ivy asked. "They're not human, their emotions might not neatly translate into ours."
"Based on their line of questioning, they weren't expecting us here, and yet here we are. Even if they don't interpret that sequence of events emotionally the way we do, we still violated their expectations, that's basically equivalent to the idea of surprise." Ey answered with a shrug. When Ivy didn't raise any further objections, ey continued.
"So anyway, we must something. This one is probably related to communication and our two methods of talking are different enough that the translation algorithms are stumbling over it, it's also the same as the last something in the message."
"Makes sense to me." Cale said.
"Which brings us to the main body of the message. We have a lot of X to talk about. We only have a little while before Y happens. Then a logically ordered if then statement. If our ships are here, then we will encounter Z soon. They don't give time intervals, or if they do then our algorithms haven't figured them out yet. Then they say again that we're short on time." Kestral went quiet and pursed eir lips, ending the set of edits made to the message.
"But they don't give time intervals." Evangeline said from the end of the room, folding her arms in front of her chest.
"Evangeline, what exactly are we allowed to do under COPMAN as far as the information exchange goes?" Jean asked. "Are we allowed to ask for elaboration on specific concepts, or does that go past information gathering and into the realm of diplomacy?"
"We can request elaboration. That doesn't exceed the bounds of our role." the Conscience responded.
"I think we should ask them specifically about that fourth untranslatable." The XO said. "Whatever it is they are...concerned...about, seems to center around that term. It's the thing they say we will encounter soon if we're at least this far from Sol."
"That's actually a really good idea Jean." Ivy had to fight to keep the disbelief out of her tone, she almost couldn't believe that once again, the flighty, panic prone XO was proving to be the voice of reason. Ivy felt as if she'd fallen into wonderland or something.
"Let's just ask about all three terms." Cale offered. "Request specifics on all those untranslatables. We've already been doing that to a degree, but we've hesitated to ask for more before now, since they're already flooding us with more than we can realistically sift through, even with Emmy's help."
Ivy clapped her hands. "Yeah, let's do it. Any objections?"
The staff members looked between one another, but no one raised any new concerns.
"It works for me." Evangeline said finally, peeling herself out of her chair. Cale nodded in assent and Ivy let out a sigh.
"Alright then, meeting adjourned, go do your jobs everyone." Ivy said as she quickly shooed them all out of the room before they could start arguing again. She grabbed Jean as the XO was preparing to leave and held her back, waiting for the last of the other senior staff members to leave before closing the door.
Ivy collapsed back into her seat, rubbing her face with her hands. Jean hugged her arms to herself, her expression pensive as she studied Ivy's face.
"Are you alright Commander?" Jean asked finally when Ivy failed to speak up.
"This whole thing makes me nervous." She answered, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "How's it all sitting with you?"
"Well, it's kind of one of one of the greatest discoveries of all time. We're probably going to show up in history books alongside Armstrong and Thellis." Despite her claim of optimism, Jean's voice was drained; the week and a half since they found the Lament for Lost Worlds had been hard on all of them.
"I sense a but in there." Ivy responded with a small smile.
Well yeah." Jean admitted. "It's all incredible and fantastic right now, but sooner or later the other shoe is gonna drop. This is an inflection point, it's going to change everything."
"For the better?" Ivy asked.
"We should hope to be so lucky."
The color had drained from all of their faces. Even Orion, whose skin was normally the color of dark chocolate, had taken on a sick, greenish pallor. The dark rings hanging from all their eyes attested to the turmoil of the prior day. All around the members of the senior staff meeting, the wallscreens displayed images of carnage at an unimaginable scale.
On one wall, a ship the size of Neptune's orbit was slowly swallowing a red giant sun. Across the table from it, a life bearing world was being rapidly strip mined from orbit by a huge many-legged alien machine. There were images of desperate space battles fought as last stands, war fleets of a dozen species obliterated in an instant before their homeworlds were dismantled and images of hopeless evacuations as refugees fled the wave of destruction; the screens scrolled through what seemed like an endless parade of misery and death.
Ivy tried to push the fear and anxiety from her voice, leaving her sounding dull and drained. "Today is January 27th 2219, Meeting 42 Mission 11 on the MSCV Empiricist, the topic of the day is…" She stumbled, her eyes drawn to the wallscreens. She shook her head and looked away before the scenes of destruction could completely distract her. "We all know what this meeting needs to be about. Attending today, Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, First Officer Jean Paoloni, Pragmacist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, and Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia. Does anyone have any opening remarks?"
Evangeline looked like she had spent the last several hours being violently ill, Kestral's hands were visibly shaking, even Cale had nothing to say. The images of celestial destruction continued to dance on the screens behind them as the room fell into an uncomfortable silence.
"It's almost too big to swallow." Cale said, rising shakily, he leaned on the table for support while waiting for the blood to finish swirling around his head. "I don't want to believe it, and I would be extremely relieved it turns out this is some sort of elaborate lie to steal our technology." He chuckled nervously and rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. "But it's also too big to ignore. We have to act, for now, as if the information they gave us is valid. If it is, then based on what we've translated so far, then there's another alien race out there, somewhere in the galaxy, that represents an imminent existential threat to humanity."
Evangeline answered hollowly from the end of the table. "I agree with the Pragmatist's assessment. It would be unconscionable to ignore the potential risk represented before us."
Jean cleared her throat, and asked, "So I've been looking at these very pretty pictures of shit getting wrecked all day, but no one's bothered to tell me anything about what exactly is doing the wrecking. Who are the bad guys here?"
Cale and Kestral looked between themselves and Kestral answered, "The Ones Who Came Before call them the Reshapers, though that might not be what they call themselves." Kestral stared into eir hands as ey spoke.
"Yeah, and according to the Spider-Birds, they've been systematically dismantling the galaxy for the last 10,000 years, sweeping up and destroying anything in their path." Cale said, continuing for eir when ey went silent.
"If they're so bad, why haven't we seen them before?" Jean persisted. "How have we just not noticed something this huge going on?"
"Well, the Spider-Birds said the Reshapers originated near the center of the galaxy, which is 26,000 light years from Sol. They've been expanding for the last 10,000 years and they're already almost to us. That means the wavefront of their expansion is outrunning its own light cone." Cale's voice was laced with an undercurrent of awe that he couldn't quite keep out of his tone.
"So what do we do than?" Jean asked, leaning her elbows against the table. "Go back to Sol and warn everyone?"
"That's one option." Cale said, "But I don't think that's the one we should take."
"The Contact Operating Procedures Manual gives us a wide degree of latitude in how to respond to an X-risk." Evangeline explained from the end of the room. "Most of the regular contact procedures can be discarded in this event. Our primary purpose is now to learn as much about the X-risk as possible, and neutralize or delay it as a threat to humanity if we are able."
"I doubt we'll be doing much neutralizing today unfortunately." Ivy added on.
"Which leaves us with information gathering." Cale said. "And we definitely need more information. I think it's time we start actually talking to them."
All eyes in the room went to Evangeline, remembering the argument from yesterday. She sighed, trying to prevent the formation of an awkward silence. "I agree with the Pragmatist. It would be an unconscionable risk to humanity not to use all avenues available to us in order to investigate this new threat."
The room fell silent as they all digested this information. Behind them, the crawling scenes of destruction played silently across the wallscreens, still showing world after world snuffed out and harvested for material.
"So," asked Jean lightly, "Who wants to be the spokesperson for humanity?"
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
IF-EMV Stoneburner
Hyperbolic Planetary Escape Trajectory
82,000 KM over Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
High velocity gas and microscopic rock fragments pelted the thick metal hull, echoing around inside like rain on a tin roofed house. Eleanor Murphy was born in space though; she had never felt the rain on her skin, laid in a field on a sunny day, or swam in the deep blue waters of an ocean. To her, the sound was unnatural, unnerving, it spoke to her of the incredibly hostile environment all around them, one which would not hesitate to kill her and everyone else in an instant. A wave of goosebumps rose up her back and she felt a chill despite the exosuit she was wearing.
The Stoneburner had completed its burn, they were coasting in a hyperbolic trajectory that would take them across the center of the gas plume before ejecting themselves from the planet's sphere of influence entirely. They were still accelerating slightly from the pressure of the gas on their hull, but they had nearly matched velocities with it so the thrust it imparted on them was minimal, just enough to make loose items slowly drift to one side of a room, but otherwise impossible to detect.
Murphy ground her teeth together as she struggled to see past the clouds they were soaring through. Even with the radars, they were getting enough bounceback that it was impossible to see more than a few kilometers in any direction. She adjusted course slightly as yet another continent sized chunk of dead moon loomed up out of the gloom and slowly tumbled by them. Owen was still unconscious from the brutal acceleration, and Murphy let him rest, the old foreman would work himself into an early grave if he had his way. She filled the emptiness as she usually did, talking to the ship.
"That's it girl, just ease right on around," she mumbled as she tapped the thrusters. The gas was beginning to thin as the ship neared the center of the plume, and visibility slowly began to climb. Alarms began going off then though, trajectory calculators began throwing up impact alarms, alerting Murphy that their course had them on an imminent collision with an object still lost ahead of them in the gas clouds.
"What're you seeing…?" She asked the equipment, tapping her finger against one of the screens. She strained her eyes out the windows but could not see anything beyond the orange and yellow clouds of hydrogen. The collision sensors were telling her there was something huge in there, but there was nothing that big anywhere in the world's orbit.
"Hmm." She hummed to herself. "Dense cloud of gas maybe?" She twisted a dial that adjusted for atmospheric density, but the dedicated screens interpreting that data continued stubbornly insisting there was a solid structure hundreds of kilometers across that was blocking their passage.
She gave Owen a shove, "Hey," She said as she shook him lightly, "Wake up, I need you to take a look at the radar data.
Owen groaned and squeezed his eyes, trying to block out the light of the cabin. He was aware first of pain: the stiffness of his joints, the tender aches in his muscles and bone, the deeply seated fatigue that penetrated his organs and bones.
"Owen!" Murphy said insistently, jabbing him again.
"What?" He asked gruffy, flipping up his visor and rubbing his forehead. Not willing to take chances, Murphy had already began slightly deforming their trajectory, attempting to curve around whatever the sensors thought that obstruction was. She pointed at the radar screen, where a thick line curved away from them, as if delineating an impossibly large cylinder somewhere ahead in the gloom.
"Have you ever seen something like that before? Could it be some sort of sensor echo off the clouds? Cause I don't have unlimited fuel to work with, and I'd really like to save it for real things if I can help it." She explained as he looked confusedly at the monitor.
"I can't say I've seen something like this before." He said after a moment, "could it be another moon somewhere in there?"
"It's wider than any of the moons were, going off the measured curvature, its like, 3,000 klicks across. Amateru doesn't have any moons that big." She tapped the glass screen. "And it seems to be in the center of the gas plume."
Owen pursed his lips but shrugged. "I can't say I like it, but I also can't say I know what it is. I've never seen anything like any of this."
"Well whatever it is, it's so big I can't do a very good job of steering clear, we're going to pass within a few klicks of it in a bit." Murphy said as she tapped the thrusters again.
That drew Owen's eyes out the glass windows. Something huge was looming ahead in the gas, but it was impossible to discern at this stage, it existed merely as an area of darker gradient than its surroundings.
"Should we tell Kaito? He might want to turn the mining LIDAR on it at th--" Murphy's words were cut off as one of the windows suddenly exploded, ripping all the air from the room in a terrific lung collapsing gust of force. There was a moment of great sound as the wind whistled past his ears and the alarms roared in anger before everything fell silent in the absence of a medium to conduct the vibrations.
His visor had been up, and so had Murphy's. He blinked back freezing and boiling tears and looked to his left. Murphy was flailing in her seat, panicking as she gasped and found only emptiness.
Owen could hear the blood pounding through his veins, the liquid gurgling and trying to boil in his guts; in the absence of other noise, his body was obscenely loud. He tried to draw a breath, and his circumstances and observations finally caught up with his thinking.
He calmly reached over and closed Murphy's visor before doing likewise with his own. There was a suddenly loud hiss as the suit repressurized, and he gasped in a breath despite himself. He shook Murphy to make sure she was still breathing, and sighed when she made a thumb's up gesture through the suit. He activated the internal radio and keyed it to the command frequency.
"Kaito the nav bridge just lost pressure, I haven't looked into the cause yet, but if I were a betting man, I'd say it was a rock strike. Murphy and I are alright, we're both in suits up here, but these computers were designed with air in mind. Half the screens are dead already and the other half are quickly dying. You're going to have to take over navigation down there."
There was a few moments of intense silence as Owen assumed Kaito digested the news. Then his voice came back over the headset. "Copy that. Get Murphy and get out of there for now. Do we need to make any immediate course changes?"
"No, not at all, don't do that." Murphy suddenly broke in, having connected to the line while Kaito was speaking. "I just put us onto a course to avoid a very large unknown object at the center of the plume, if you adjust course, we might hit it. Maintain our trajectory exactly if possible, I'll take back over steering when I get down there."
Owen turned to exit the room, but he froze in the middle of unbuckling himself when his eyes went out the now destroyed front window. Something impossible was emerging from the clouds ahead of them. In the center of the gas plume, a huge hollow far larger than a world had been created. The hollow reached down into the deep roots of Amateru's core, which shone with a brilliant yellow light. In the center of this cavity though, was the impossibility. A rude spike of dark metal, point facing towards the shining core, hung in space before them. It had to be hundreds of thousands of kilometers tall, with thin wire-like protrusions reaching out from the point and impaling the shining nugget of the planet's hot center. Green, purple, and orange lights danced across the object's surface in inexplicable patterns and it hung there motionless, like the barycenter around which all of reality might pivot. Murphy poked him when he didn't move for a moment, so taken aback by the sight that he hadn't heard her speaking to him. He pointed out the shattered window and finished unstrapping himself. When he looked up again, Murphy was now also frozen in transfixed awe.
"Are the rest of you seeing this?" Owen said finally into the radio.
"We see it Owen." Alice's voice came back. "We see it."
Newton Class Exploration Ship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUs from Luyten's Star
January 2219
HUMANS?! WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE? HOW DID YOU COME TO THIS PLACE? WE MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] WE HAVE MANY [UNTRANSLATABLE] TO DISCUSS. WE HAVE LITTLE TIME BEFORE [UNTRANSLATABLE]. IF YOUR VESSELS HAVE REACHED THIS DISTANCE FROM SOL, THEN THEY WILL ENCOUNTER [UNTRANSLATABLE] VERY SOON. THERE IS LITTLE TIME. YOU MUST [UNTRANSLATABLE] AT ONCE.
The translated alien message hung on the wallscreen, as if silently passing judgement upon all of them. The staff meeting had stretched into overtime as the decision to begin communicating was argued back and forth.
"Let's just go over the content of the message again, and see if we can't draw any further conclusions from it before deciding what to do, okay?" Kestral held up eir hands in a placating gesture, using a soft tone to make up for cutting Evangeline off before she could begin shouting at Cale yet again.
Jean held up a hand, and when the room went quiet, she asked, "Cale, can you replace the untranslatables in the message with the…" she fumbled for the proper terms, "The untranslated alien script, the thing that's untranslatable."
"I can." He said, raising an eyebrow and taking on a vacant expression as he started manipulating the document from his implants. "Why though? It's just scribbles until Emmy's deep learning algorithms finish pairing symbols with concepts."
"I want to know if they're different words." She answered.
"But, they don't have individual words, their language is more compressed than that, if you could hear them communicate, which you can't because it's outside the human auditory range, it would just sound like music, continuous." Cale replied. He'd replaced the first two untranslatables with strange squiggly lines that curved back and forth over each other.
"No, no, I see what she's getting at." Ivy said, encouraging the younger woman. "Even music has individual notes, at some level there need to be individual bits of information."
Jean nodded, pointing at the message as Cale finished swapping the untranslatables with the raw alien script. "See, they're all different, except for the first and last, which are the same. Its like mad libs."
"Mad libs? Really?" Evangeline snorted. "None of you are linguists. This is all conjecture and I still think the most conscionable course of action is to hold position and continue with our information exchange until another vessel arrives with more equipment."
"It's useful conjecture, we can narrow down the problem space and at least eliminate some possibilities." Cale retorted.
"So to break it down," Kestral began, holding up eir hands again to prevent another round of bickering. "Here's what we know, based on the message."
Ey went up to the wallscreen and interfaced with it through eir implants, ey made a gap between the lines of the message and began writing in between the margins, like a teacher making edits to a student's paper. Ey circled the word humans in the message.
"First thing, they identify us as The Ones Who Will Become, it's a set classification for a hierarchy of species based on technology level. However, they append that phrase with the exact location of Sol with respect to the center of the galaxy. That's how they identify us as humans in their message. That means they know about our species, and they must have encountered us at least once before, but despite that, they're surprised to see us here. The set we fall into is basically 'pre-spaceflight industrial' so the last time they visited us was probably a while ago. "
"Are they capable of being surprised?" Ivy asked. "They're not human, their emotions might not neatly translate into ours."
"Based on their line of questioning, they weren't expecting us here, and yet here we are. Even if they don't interpret that sequence of events emotionally the way we do, we still violated their expectations, that's basically equivalent to the idea of surprise." Ey answered with a shrug. When Ivy didn't raise any further objections, ey continued.
"So anyway, we must something. This one is probably related to communication and our two methods of talking are different enough that the translation algorithms are stumbling over it, it's also the same as the last something in the message."
"Makes sense to me." Cale said.
"Which brings us to the main body of the message. We have a lot of X to talk about. We only have a little while before Y happens. Then a logically ordered if then statement. If our ships are here, then we will encounter Z soon. They don't give time intervals, or if they do then our algorithms haven't figured them out yet. Then they say again that we're short on time." Kestral went quiet and pursed eir lips, ending the set of edits made to the message.
"But they don't give time intervals." Evangeline said from the end of the room, folding her arms in front of her chest.
"Evangeline, what exactly are we allowed to do under COPMAN as far as the information exchange goes?" Jean asked. "Are we allowed to ask for elaboration on specific concepts, or does that go past information gathering and into the realm of diplomacy?"
"We can request elaboration. That doesn't exceed the bounds of our role." the Conscience responded.
"I think we should ask them specifically about that fourth untranslatable." The XO said. "Whatever it is they are...concerned...about, seems to center around that term. It's the thing they say we will encounter soon if we're at least this far from Sol."
"That's actually a really good idea Jean." Ivy had to fight to keep the disbelief out of her tone, she almost couldn't believe that once again, the flighty, panic prone XO was proving to be the voice of reason. Ivy felt as if she'd fallen into wonderland or something.
"Let's just ask about all three terms." Cale offered. "Request specifics on all those untranslatables. We've already been doing that to a degree, but we've hesitated to ask for more before now, since they're already flooding us with more than we can realistically sift through, even with Emmy's help."
Ivy clapped her hands. "Yeah, let's do it. Any objections?"
The staff members looked between one another, but no one raised any new concerns.
"It works for me." Evangeline said finally, peeling herself out of her chair. Cale nodded in assent and Ivy let out a sigh.
"Alright then, meeting adjourned, go do your jobs everyone." Ivy said as she quickly shooed them all out of the room before they could start arguing again. She grabbed Jean as the XO was preparing to leave and held her back, waiting for the last of the other senior staff members to leave before closing the door.
Ivy collapsed back into her seat, rubbing her face with her hands. Jean hugged her arms to herself, her expression pensive as she studied Ivy's face.
"Are you alright Commander?" Jean asked finally when Ivy failed to speak up.
"This whole thing makes me nervous." She answered, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "How's it all sitting with you?"
"Well, it's kind of one of one of the greatest discoveries of all time. We're probably going to show up in history books alongside Armstrong and Thellis." Despite her claim of optimism, Jean's voice was drained; the week and a half since they found the Lament for Lost Worlds had been hard on all of them.
"I sense a but in there." Ivy responded with a small smile.
Well yeah." Jean admitted. "It's all incredible and fantastic right now, but sooner or later the other shoe is gonna drop. This is an inflection point, it's going to change everything."
"For the better?" Ivy asked.
"We should hope to be so lucky."
Δ
The color had drained from all of their faces. Even Orion, whose skin was normally the color of dark chocolate, had taken on a sick, greenish pallor. The dark rings hanging from all their eyes attested to the turmoil of the prior day. All around the members of the senior staff meeting, the wallscreens displayed images of carnage at an unimaginable scale.
On one wall, a ship the size of Neptune's orbit was slowly swallowing a red giant sun. Across the table from it, a life bearing world was being rapidly strip mined from orbit by a huge many-legged alien machine. There were images of desperate space battles fought as last stands, war fleets of a dozen species obliterated in an instant before their homeworlds were dismantled and images of hopeless evacuations as refugees fled the wave of destruction; the screens scrolled through what seemed like an endless parade of misery and death.
Ivy tried to push the fear and anxiety from her voice, leaving her sounding dull and drained. "Today is January 27th 2219, Meeting 42 Mission 11 on the MSCV Empiricist, the topic of the day is…" She stumbled, her eyes drawn to the wallscreens. She shook her head and looked away before the scenes of destruction could completely distract her. "We all know what this meeting needs to be about. Attending today, Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, First Officer Jean Paoloni, Pragmacist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, and Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia. Does anyone have any opening remarks?"
Evangeline looked like she had spent the last several hours being violently ill, Kestral's hands were visibly shaking, even Cale had nothing to say. The images of celestial destruction continued to dance on the screens behind them as the room fell into an uncomfortable silence.
"It's almost too big to swallow." Cale said, rising shakily, he leaned on the table for support while waiting for the blood to finish swirling around his head. "I don't want to believe it, and I would be extremely relieved it turns out this is some sort of elaborate lie to steal our technology." He chuckled nervously and rapped his knuckles on the tabletop. "But it's also too big to ignore. We have to act, for now, as if the information they gave us is valid. If it is, then based on what we've translated so far, then there's another alien race out there, somewhere in the galaxy, that represents an imminent existential threat to humanity."
Evangeline answered hollowly from the end of the table. "I agree with the Pragmatist's assessment. It would be unconscionable to ignore the potential risk represented before us."
Jean cleared her throat, and asked, "So I've been looking at these very pretty pictures of shit getting wrecked all day, but no one's bothered to tell me anything about what exactly is doing the wrecking. Who are the bad guys here?"
Cale and Kestral looked between themselves and Kestral answered, "The Ones Who Came Before call them the Reshapers, though that might not be what they call themselves." Kestral stared into eir hands as ey spoke.
"Yeah, and according to the Spider-Birds, they've been systematically dismantling the galaxy for the last 10,000 years, sweeping up and destroying anything in their path." Cale said, continuing for eir when ey went silent.
"If they're so bad, why haven't we seen them before?" Jean persisted. "How have we just not noticed something this huge going on?"
"Well, the Spider-Birds said the Reshapers originated near the center of the galaxy, which is 26,000 light years from Sol. They've been expanding for the last 10,000 years and they're already almost to us. That means the wavefront of their expansion is outrunning its own light cone." Cale's voice was laced with an undercurrent of awe that he couldn't quite keep out of his tone.
"So what do we do than?" Jean asked, leaning her elbows against the table. "Go back to Sol and warn everyone?"
"That's one option." Cale said, "But I don't think that's the one we should take."
"The Contact Operating Procedures Manual gives us a wide degree of latitude in how to respond to an X-risk." Evangeline explained from the end of the room. "Most of the regular contact procedures can be discarded in this event. Our primary purpose is now to learn as much about the X-risk as possible, and neutralize or delay it as a threat to humanity if we are able."
"I doubt we'll be doing much neutralizing today unfortunately." Ivy added on.
"Which leaves us with information gathering." Cale said. "And we definitely need more information. I think it's time we start actually talking to them."
All eyes in the room went to Evangeline, remembering the argument from yesterday. She sighed, trying to prevent the formation of an awkward silence. "I agree with the Pragmatist. It would be an unconscionable risk to humanity not to use all avenues available to us in order to investigate this new threat."
The room fell silent as they all digested this information. Behind them, the crawling scenes of destruction played silently across the wallscreens, still showing world after world snuffed out and harvested for material.
"So," asked Jean lightly, "Who wants to be the spokesperson for humanity?"
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Chapter 5: Ripples in a Cosmic See
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 5: Ripples in a Cosmic See
Fabrique Intersolar Deep Space Station
FI-ISCU Pioneer
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 kilometers from Aldebaran b, Aldebaran
February 2219
Zephyr Athabasca never truly stopped moving. The youthful CEO seemed to be perpetually fidgeting some part of her body; if not twitching her knee, then she was drumming her fingers on whatever surface was conviennent, clicking her teeth together, or performing some other semiconscious repetitive body motion.
Her fingers rapidly tapped out a pattern on her glass topped desk as she tried to smother her growing sense of agitation, and her CTO chuckled as he watched her from the other side of said desk.
"You're going to wear a hole in the glass like that." Douglas Farragut said as he reclined in his chair and stroked his salt and pepper beard.
Zephyr ignored him, focusing on the screens embedded in her retinas. A timer was counting down on her implant's HUD, displaying the time remaining until the scheduled arrival of the next Lighthorse from The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
"Maybe this time." Douglas said hopefully. Zephyr was less optimistic, The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg had gone dark over four months ago, and they hadn't gotten a Lighthorse back from them in all that time.
The timer reached zero, and the space around the station remained empty. Zephyr let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding and let her head fall against the glass desk with a soft thud; her short dark hair splayed out like a fan from her head.
Douglas pat her on the head in a paternal gesture that she would have had a problem with if she was in a better state of mind.
"Better Margins should arrive in Theta Tauri in another 29 days." He said softly. "Whatever happened, we'll figure it out."
"Yeah, in another 200 days at minimum." Zephyr snorted, not lifting her face from the desk. "There were over two hundred people on that ship, and we don't even know if they're alive or dead."
"We're doing everything we can for them, don't beat yourself up over this." Douglas sighed. He'd had nearly this exact conversation with Zephyr several times since the Golden Goose had gone dark, and he doubted it would be the last time either.
"Are we doing everything we can? Are we really Doug?" She looked up from the desk and met his eyes. He'd always found the intensity of her gaze to be somewhat unnerving, and in the mood she was in, he could practically see the emotion emanating from her.
Douglas didn't have an easy answer for her. They certainly weren't sparing any obvious effort they could be applying toward the problem, but were they really doing everything in their power? Had they missed something?
Zephyr smiled faintly, having silenced Doug's attempt to ease her anxiety with platitudes. She started going into her clever reasoning for why it was totally rational and logical for her to place the blame for this on herself, when all the lights in the room suddenly flashed red.
The voice of the station's AI erupted from every speaker in audible range. "Alert: Unscheduled Arrival of FI-002 EMV Goose That Laid the Golden Egg."
Zephyr and Doug were both sprinting for the command deck before the message had ended.
Cameras studding the surface of Pioneer Station captured the moment that space seemed to relax itself and eject the 2.8 kilometer long exploratory mining vessel. As the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg shed its spacetime cocoon after the 168 day journey from Theta Tauri, the ship seemed to just fall to pieces. The hulk was dark and cold, it was unevenly venting gases as rooms depressurized and fluid lines ruptured, putting the ship into a slow spin. She made no braking actions, leaving the vessel in the hyperbolic warp exit trajectory that would see her cross the Aldebaran system and eject herself into deep space in a matter of months. Modules broke loose of the hull as it tumbled, and the entire thing gave the impression of a building that was frozen in mid-collapse.
Zephyr's face was a mask of intense worry and unease. Chase shuttles had already launched from the station, performing long 2 gee burns to catch up with the fleeing pile of wreckage. All around her, the command deck was abuzz with activity. The station commander currently on deck was waking up everyone they had on hand for emergencies, monitoring stations were calling out readings and data as they went over the tumbling hulk with the electromagnetic equivalent of a fine toothed comb, and speakers crackled as the pilots of the chase shuttles reported back on their progress.
"This is Grasshopper FI-0819, we are two minutes off matched velocities with a close approach of 500 meters."
The station commander, Gyeong Huygens, snapped his fingers at a tech and pointed at one of the larger monitors, "Get me FI-0819 on that screen, I want close range visual data on the Golden Goose." He pointed to another screen nearby, "And put near infrared to terahertz on that one." He grabbed the radio from its holster in the console. "FI-0819, proceed with rendezvous and turn spotlights onto the hull. Give us some steady visuals."
"Is there any sign of survivors?" Zephyr asked with apprehension.
"We'll know once we get crews over there to take a look at things. It seems like slow going right now, but in the fullness of time, we'll have a complete picture Ms. Athabasca." The commander spoke smoothly. The aging korean sipped at the tea he had perched on the arm of his console, remaining the perfect portrait of discipline and order.
Zephyr on the other hand, started pacing as she resisted the urge to chew on her nails or pull her hair out. Despite being in charge of everything going on around her, Zephyr still felt rather out of control about the entire situation. The inability to do everything herself never sat well with her.
Her eyes snapped to a screen as the spotlights on FI-0819 turned on and lit up the side of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. The command deck was silent as the camera panned along the hull, showing signs of a long and desperate struggle. Holes and craters pockmarked the hulk, struts and cables were snapped, twisted, or fouled together, and the entire ship was slowly turning into a pile of wreckage as modules broke loose and bounced off each other in slow motion. Hasty jury rigging jobs covered some of the damaged sites, but in the end, it appeared as if whatever force that had acted upon the vessel had won out over the efforts of her occupants.
"I'm seeing heat sources around the MIC core decks, as well as from the reactor chamber." One of the techs called out from across the room, breaking the uneasy silence.
Zephyr hustled across the room and leaned against the back of the technician's chair. "Survivors?" She asked him.
"Maybe?" The tech answered hesitantly. Someone of his pay grade rarely interacted with Zephyr, and she knew a surprise encounter with the CEO made some people intensely uneasy.
"Just give me your best guess." She persisted, squeezing his shoulder for encouragement.
"Well it looks like the reactor might still be somewhat hot, there could still be power and pressure in some areas, based on these heat readings."
Zephyr nodded, starting to ask him another question, when a different technician on another sensor system suddenly shouted, "localized Ionizing radiation source detected!" and the deck thundered into motion.
The sudden burst of activity hit Zephyr like a wall. There were instantly way too many conversations going on for her to listen to all of them and the cacophony of voices and equipment nearly overwhelmed her.
She could feel her heart racing and her breathing becoming ragged as she fought down the anxiety attack. She focused in on Huygens voice, filtering it out from the mass of sound assaulting her ears.
"...away from the reactor chamber just to be on the safe side. How much of a radiation hazard are we looking at here?"
She couldn't pick out the voice of the tech he was speaking with, but she could hear his response clearly.
"Alright, thank you." He said. There was something in his tone. She didn't have to hear it, she knew. She knew as soon as he'd spoken. They were dead. They were all dead. She'd killed them all. The world spun as Zephyr began hyperventilating, and then there was darkness.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
Regan McKinley woke up to the sound of dishes and pans crashing downstairs. It sounded like her mother was on another rampage. She groaned and rolled off the bed, peeling herself away from the sheets. She could already feel the summer heat already pooling in the upper areas of her bedroom, and the floor was a blissful few degrees cooler. She had long ago decided that whoever had included seasons in the design of their vessel deserved eternity in a special kind of hell.
Regan had turned 18 a few weeks ago. She could legally buy cigarettes and join the UNDF. She supposed that in the grand scheme of humanity, making it this long was something of an accomplishment.
She tried to hold onto that as she labored through the efforts of dressing herself, shoving her legs into grungy cargo pants and dumping a band t-shirt over her head. It was February according to the UN Coordinated Time Constant, but the colony had kept time differently, anticipating its isolation from the rest of humanity. According to the old pre-FTL colony calendars, it was August.
Regan's mother would be coming upstairs looking for her before too much time passed. She'd pound on the door with a list of demands including chores, job applications, and daily prayer. Regan didn't particularly want to take part in any of that, and so the next step in her routine took her out her bedroom window onto the rooftop.
Despite the lack of air conditioning in her house, the heat still hit her hard as she exited onto the roof. The black tiles shimmered in the morning light; she had a feeling if she stayed up there too long, her sneakers would start sticking to the shingles. She could feel the heat radiating upwards from them as she scampered across the rooftop and gingerly hopped the gap onto the roof of the shed. From there her escape was the simple matter of climbing down the trellis into the neighbor's yard. Regan had turned the avoidance of her parents into something of an artform; the more they tried to reign her in, the more she struggled to break free.
She crossed the rooftops quickly and got down out of sight. The shade was marginally cooler, but the humidity leaked into every crevice and permeated every corner, leaving everything feeling sticky, the air thick and dense.
Once she was on the street behind her house, Regan made a beeline for the local charging station to pick up cigarettes and energy drinks. She thought often in those days about leaving home for good. She was 18, she could move out, join the navy, get an apartment, or get a sleeper pod on a Lighthorse and just run away. She hadn't done any of those things yet, because she had quite a lot of things, and it would be a pain to move any of them. Plus, all those things required an awful expenditure of effort and that was something she'd managed to studiously avoid so far. So she simply basked in her newfound freedom as she drifted into the town.
The blissful cold of the convenience store billowed out of the door as she wandered in. Regan paused, taking a few moments just basking in the glory of the AC.
"Our father, who art in air condititioning, HVAC be thy name…" She mumbled under her breath as she grabbed a drink from the cooler, pausing for a few more moments in the even colder part of the story where the drinks lived.
Eventually her sweat started to cool enough for her to start getting chilled, and she strolled up to the counter and asked for a pack of cigarettes. The cashier gave her matted down blonde hair a look and scanned her identification. She vaguely wondered if the pimply faced twenty-something was working up the courage to talk to her, but he just handed her the cigarettes with a nod and told her to have a nice day.
Going out into the heat a second time was like walking into a brick wall. Warmth radiated up off the pavement in a haze of distortions and humidity, giving the parking lot an oppressive depth. Regan lit her cigarette and hurried across the pavement, hoping her shoes weren't about to start melting into the hot black surface.
The commercial section of town was an oasis of concrete and metal, and was easily five degrees warmer than the surrounding area. She didn't linger there for long, cutting down back alleys and side streets, wandering down the middle of quiet roads. She stayed away from the main streets and invariably ended up on the run down cul-de-sac that Seth Fiegel, her partner in crime, lived on.
The street was named 'Maple' which Regan always thought was funny; all the maple trees that had been planted along the street had died and their withered husks were now all that provided shade on the quiet lane. Seth's house was a beat up ranch style that hadn't been repainted since the turn of the century. The front yard was a jungle of overgrown weeds, dead grass, and discarded and damaged toys owned by Seth's younger brother Caleb.
She pounded on the door, feeling slightly silly having not called in advance before she made her way over, but knowing most of Seth's social life involved her anyway, it wasn't what either of them would consider a big deal.
It was Caleb who answered the door, still wearing his pajamas, wireless game controller in his hand,
"Hey Regan," the twelve year old said, clearly trying to resist the urge to pick his nose in front of her, "Looking for Seth?"
The teenager nodded mutely, taking a drag of her cigarette. Caleb was a cute kid; she liked him, he was smart for his age, but that didn't mean she was very good at talking to him. She followed him inside, not bothering to put her cigarette out. It wasn't like anyone else in the household bothered with that; the top sides of rooms had all acquired a permanent yellow stain from years of smoking, and the place reeked of ash and cat pee.
"I don't think Seth is awake yet." Caleb said. He looked nervously at Regan and glanced at the kitchen table. Despite having been friends with Seth for over a decade, Caleb always seemed somewhat intimidated by the older girl. She peered at the collection of snack food piled up on the kitchen table that appeared to have been opened by twelve year old hands. She snatched a cookie from a half eaten packet of them.
"Go play your game," She said, motioning to the controller still in his hand, "I'll go bug him." Caleb gave her about a third of a second to finish her dismissal before vanishing in the direction of the gaming console. She put out her cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen counter, and descended into Seth's lair.
Seth's father had formerly been a heavy drinker, and had turned the basement into a 'for the guys' chill out space. Then, when he'd remarried, his new wife Helen had forced him to clean up. Regan had been there with Seth for all of that. The end result was that the basement ended up unoccupied, and it didn't take long for Seth to abandon his bedroom and take it over for himself. He said he liked the ambiance, Regan thought it smelled like mildew. That said, if pressed, she was willing to concede that it was the coolest place around that she wouldn't get trouble for loitering around in.
She pounded on the door at the bottom of the stairs, but when Seth didn't answer, She didn't let that stop her. He'd previously given Regan an emergency key to his room ages ago and forgotten about it. She felt around the top of the doorframe until she found it's hiding place in the gap between two pieces of wood. The lock was new, she been there when he switched it out, conquering the basement and shutting his parents out in what Regan had at the time compared to a judo move. With with a rather self satisfied grin, she unlocked the door, strolled inside, and locked the door behind herself.
The windows of the basement were all high up and blocked out with blackout curtains besides, leaving the space in near total darkness. Regan felt her way carefully down the last three steps beyond the door, running her hands along the low ceiling until she found the set of cords that controlled 'red alert,' the system of red Christmas lights that Seth had run throughout the basement. She fumbled the plugs into their sockets and the space was thrown into the dim relief of red light and shadow that characterized the area.
Seth was a lump under a pile of blankets, his mattress sitting on the floor amidst piles of clothes and other more questionable things. It was a pretty large space, he had the whole basement to himself and he'd luxuriously filled up the entire volume of it with trash and dirty laundry, in the true tradition of every seventeen year old boy in human history.
Regan picked her way over to his aging computer, careful to tiptoe around the more suspicious looking articles of clothing, and started up his music app. The Seth-blanket-mattress creature mumbled something unintelligible from the other side of the room as the bass started thumping into the concrete floor. She then picked up a small wooden box from his desk and wandered over to the mattress.
"Seth, it's two in the afternoon." She said flatly.
From within the blankets she heard "It's not morning until I say it is."
Her response was to drop heavily onto the mattress beside him and lounge against the blanket lump. "Well, I'll just be smoking this weed you left on your desk" She opened up the box and took out the small bag of weed and his glass pipe. Regan had brought her own weed with her, she just wanted to irritate him enough that he'd actually emerge from his mattress-cocoon into a beautiful Sethurfly.
He mumbled a string of profanities, but it took until the smoke started to spread out into the air around the mattress that she finally managed to stir him from his blanket nest.
"Regan?" He mumbled, "You know how early it is?"
"It's two in the afternoon Seth." She answered, smoke puffing out with each word.
He groaned and rubbed his eyes, "Damnit, I was supposed to get up at nine to watch Caleb." he swiped the pipe from her and took a long drag from it, sighing out a cloud of smoke.
"Nine has long come and gone I'm afraid. Were you also supposed to make sure he ate? Because it's two hours past lunch and I'm pretty sure he got into the junk food." She let him have the pipe and fished two cigarettes out of her pack, propping them in the crook of her ear.
He handed her back the pipe, rubbing his face. She hit the piece while he answered, "Yeah I was. Did he let you in?"
She nodded silently and passed him back the bowl, smoke curling out of her nose and lips as she studied him in the dimly lit space. Seth was easily her best friend. They had dated for a bit back when they'd turned sixteen, but after a few awkward sexual encounters, had gone back to being friends. He was scruffy, not unattractive but he did the grunge thing more strongly than anyone really needed to. Besides, Regan's sexuality was a terrifying knot of self loathing and repressed desires, and that particular time-bomb was one she was hoping to dodge until at least her twenties.
Seth twisted out of the blanket cocoon he'd slept in and shrugged into a pair of jeans. He fished a t-shirt from what she hoped was a clean clothes pile, before he turned and trudged through the drifts of stuff to his desk.
"I am so done with this town," Regan announced before taking another hit of the bowl. She followed him over to the desk and leaned against his shoulders while he scrolled through his music library.
"I hear that." Seth said, taking the pipe back from her, "Dad's started drinking again. Helen doesn't like it." He rolled his eyes and took a hit of the pipe, then knocked the ash from it out across the back of his hand, "I give the marriage another year or two at most."
Regan took the pipe from him and returned it to its home before lighting up her two cigarettes and handing him one.
"You gonna stick around for the fireworks?" She asked with a bitter chuckle.
He snorted out smoke in response, "Yeah, I doubt it. I'm gonna buy a car and go up the valley at the very least, maybe even cross the glass sea, you up for that?"
"You know it." She answered, dropping into the chair next to his that she always sat in.
"Helen's gonna be home soon, wanna help me hide the evidence of Caleb's rampage?" he asked.
"Not really. He's your brother. I'll lurk around and keep you company though," the teenager answered honestly.
He grunted in affirmation and turned up his music to the earsplitting volume required to shake the floors of the entire house. "Once more unto the breach!" He shouted with a grin, and waded back towards the stairs.
Regan followed him upstairs, traveling through his wake until they'd cleared the sea of stuff that was the basement floor and then charged after him up the stairs.
Seth managed to coerce a bit of aid from Regan at first, but she quickly took to lurking around the kitchen, perched on the edge of the counter smoking with ashtray in hand. Seth meanwhile, convinced Caleb that if the two of them got the house cleaned before Helen got home at four, that he could run around doing whatever he wanted again tomorrow. Regan was fairly certain this was the standard routine. At some point she migrated to the living room and started merging with the sofa as the effects of the weed settled in. Even after the arrival of FTL ships, colony television was lackluster at best, overloaded with locally produced filler, occasionally spiced with something brought in by a Lighthorse. The soap opera Regan found managed to produce boredom of an intensity that seemed potentially lethal to her, and when it suddenly cut out, the transition made her jump.
"This is a Constellation Action News Alert" The screen announced to her, displaying the CAN logo with the words News Alert in bright red across the screen.
Regan perked up in her seat, taking a drag of the cigarette she'd forgotten in her hand, only to realise it'd gone out. The image changed to an anchor woman, standing in front of a wallscreen showing ships in space.
"Shockwaves of a yet to be determined event are being felt across space. Two hours ago, Martian naval forces began a massive and unprecedented deployment. CAN Affiliates captured the images you see behind me of Martian ships preparing to enter warp. Experts are reporting that almost half the fleet has been launched in the direction of Procyon, although their exact destination and the reason for their sudden departure, remain unknown."
Regan was suddenly very interested. Unlike local news, which was inevitably boring, this was something big, something involving the world outside of their habitat.
"UNDF forces have been scrambling to react to this surprise move by the Martians, and as a response have begun deploying their own fleet, which will rendezvous here at Jericho Ridge before continuing onwards to Procyon, residents are advised to expect the first of the UNDF forces within the day, and all intercolonial shipping will be halted for the duration of the operation. Residents of Jericho Ridge are advised that the colony may undergo active maneuvering in order to receive the UNDF fleet.
We'll be here every step of the way to keep you informed as the situation unfolds, for Constellation Action News I'm Hannah Dehamilton: your source for local and interstellar news."
The cut back to the soap opera was so jarring that for a moment, Regan thought she had imagined the entire thing. The scrolling news bar at the bottom was the only thing that confirmed she hadn't hallucinated the incident.
"Hey Seth!" She called out. "Take a look at this."
Fabrique Intersolar Deep Space Station
FI-ISCU Pioneer
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 kilometers from Aldebaran b, Aldebaran
February 2219
Zephyr Athabasca never truly stopped moving. The youthful CEO seemed to be perpetually fidgeting some part of her body; if not twitching her knee, then she was drumming her fingers on whatever surface was conviennent, clicking her teeth together, or performing some other semiconscious repetitive body motion.
Her fingers rapidly tapped out a pattern on her glass topped desk as she tried to smother her growing sense of agitation, and her CTO chuckled as he watched her from the other side of said desk.
"You're going to wear a hole in the glass like that." Douglas Farragut said as he reclined in his chair and stroked his salt and pepper beard.
Zephyr ignored him, focusing on the screens embedded in her retinas. A timer was counting down on her implant's HUD, displaying the time remaining until the scheduled arrival of the next Lighthorse from The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.
"Maybe this time." Douglas said hopefully. Zephyr was less optimistic, The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg had gone dark over four months ago, and they hadn't gotten a Lighthorse back from them in all that time.
The timer reached zero, and the space around the station remained empty. Zephyr let out a breath she hadn't realized she was holding and let her head fall against the glass desk with a soft thud; her short dark hair splayed out like a fan from her head.
Douglas pat her on the head in a paternal gesture that she would have had a problem with if she was in a better state of mind.
"Better Margins should arrive in Theta Tauri in another 29 days." He said softly. "Whatever happened, we'll figure it out."
"Yeah, in another 200 days at minimum." Zephyr snorted, not lifting her face from the desk. "There were over two hundred people on that ship, and we don't even know if they're alive or dead."
"We're doing everything we can for them, don't beat yourself up over this." Douglas sighed. He'd had nearly this exact conversation with Zephyr several times since the Golden Goose had gone dark, and he doubted it would be the last time either.
"Are we doing everything we can? Are we really Doug?" She looked up from the desk and met his eyes. He'd always found the intensity of her gaze to be somewhat unnerving, and in the mood she was in, he could practically see the emotion emanating from her.
Douglas didn't have an easy answer for her. They certainly weren't sparing any obvious effort they could be applying toward the problem, but were they really doing everything in their power? Had they missed something?
Zephyr smiled faintly, having silenced Doug's attempt to ease her anxiety with platitudes. She started going into her clever reasoning for why it was totally rational and logical for her to place the blame for this on herself, when all the lights in the room suddenly flashed red.
The voice of the station's AI erupted from every speaker in audible range. "Alert: Unscheduled Arrival of FI-002 EMV Goose That Laid the Golden Egg."
Zephyr and Doug were both sprinting for the command deck before the message had ended.
Δ
Cameras studding the surface of Pioneer Station captured the moment that space seemed to relax itself and eject the 2.8 kilometer long exploratory mining vessel. As the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg shed its spacetime cocoon after the 168 day journey from Theta Tauri, the ship seemed to just fall to pieces. The hulk was dark and cold, it was unevenly venting gases as rooms depressurized and fluid lines ruptured, putting the ship into a slow spin. She made no braking actions, leaving the vessel in the hyperbolic warp exit trajectory that would see her cross the Aldebaran system and eject herself into deep space in a matter of months. Modules broke loose of the hull as it tumbled, and the entire thing gave the impression of a building that was frozen in mid-collapse.
Zephyr's face was a mask of intense worry and unease. Chase shuttles had already launched from the station, performing long 2 gee burns to catch up with the fleeing pile of wreckage. All around her, the command deck was abuzz with activity. The station commander currently on deck was waking up everyone they had on hand for emergencies, monitoring stations were calling out readings and data as they went over the tumbling hulk with the electromagnetic equivalent of a fine toothed comb, and speakers crackled as the pilots of the chase shuttles reported back on their progress.
"This is Grasshopper FI-0819, we are two minutes off matched velocities with a close approach of 500 meters."
The station commander, Gyeong Huygens, snapped his fingers at a tech and pointed at one of the larger monitors, "Get me FI-0819 on that screen, I want close range visual data on the Golden Goose." He pointed to another screen nearby, "And put near infrared to terahertz on that one." He grabbed the radio from its holster in the console. "FI-0819, proceed with rendezvous and turn spotlights onto the hull. Give us some steady visuals."
"Is there any sign of survivors?" Zephyr asked with apprehension.
"We'll know once we get crews over there to take a look at things. It seems like slow going right now, but in the fullness of time, we'll have a complete picture Ms. Athabasca." The commander spoke smoothly. The aging korean sipped at the tea he had perched on the arm of his console, remaining the perfect portrait of discipline and order.
Zephyr on the other hand, started pacing as she resisted the urge to chew on her nails or pull her hair out. Despite being in charge of everything going on around her, Zephyr still felt rather out of control about the entire situation. The inability to do everything herself never sat well with her.
Her eyes snapped to a screen as the spotlights on FI-0819 turned on and lit up the side of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. The command deck was silent as the camera panned along the hull, showing signs of a long and desperate struggle. Holes and craters pockmarked the hulk, struts and cables were snapped, twisted, or fouled together, and the entire ship was slowly turning into a pile of wreckage as modules broke loose and bounced off each other in slow motion. Hasty jury rigging jobs covered some of the damaged sites, but in the end, it appeared as if whatever force that had acted upon the vessel had won out over the efforts of her occupants.
"I'm seeing heat sources around the MIC core decks, as well as from the reactor chamber." One of the techs called out from across the room, breaking the uneasy silence.
Zephyr hustled across the room and leaned against the back of the technician's chair. "Survivors?" She asked him.
"Maybe?" The tech answered hesitantly. Someone of his pay grade rarely interacted with Zephyr, and she knew a surprise encounter with the CEO made some people intensely uneasy.
"Just give me your best guess." She persisted, squeezing his shoulder for encouragement.
"Well it looks like the reactor might still be somewhat hot, there could still be power and pressure in some areas, based on these heat readings."
Zephyr nodded, starting to ask him another question, when a different technician on another sensor system suddenly shouted, "localized Ionizing radiation source detected!" and the deck thundered into motion.
The sudden burst of activity hit Zephyr like a wall. There were instantly way too many conversations going on for her to listen to all of them and the cacophony of voices and equipment nearly overwhelmed her.
She could feel her heart racing and her breathing becoming ragged as she fought down the anxiety attack. She focused in on Huygens voice, filtering it out from the mass of sound assaulting her ears.
"...away from the reactor chamber just to be on the safe side. How much of a radiation hazard are we looking at here?"
She couldn't pick out the voice of the tech he was speaking with, but she could hear his response clearly.
"Alright, thank you." He said. There was something in his tone. She didn't have to hear it, she knew. She knew as soon as he'd spoken. They were dead. They were all dead. She'd killed them all. The world spun as Zephyr began hyperventilating, and then there was darkness.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
Regan McKinley woke up to the sound of dishes and pans crashing downstairs. It sounded like her mother was on another rampage. She groaned and rolled off the bed, peeling herself away from the sheets. She could already feel the summer heat already pooling in the upper areas of her bedroom, and the floor was a blissful few degrees cooler. She had long ago decided that whoever had included seasons in the design of their vessel deserved eternity in a special kind of hell.
Regan had turned 18 a few weeks ago. She could legally buy cigarettes and join the UNDF. She supposed that in the grand scheme of humanity, making it this long was something of an accomplishment.
She tried to hold onto that as she labored through the efforts of dressing herself, shoving her legs into grungy cargo pants and dumping a band t-shirt over her head. It was February according to the UN Coordinated Time Constant, but the colony had kept time differently, anticipating its isolation from the rest of humanity. According to the old pre-FTL colony calendars, it was August.
Regan's mother would be coming upstairs looking for her before too much time passed. She'd pound on the door with a list of demands including chores, job applications, and daily prayer. Regan didn't particularly want to take part in any of that, and so the next step in her routine took her out her bedroom window onto the rooftop.
Despite the lack of air conditioning in her house, the heat still hit her hard as she exited onto the roof. The black tiles shimmered in the morning light; she had a feeling if she stayed up there too long, her sneakers would start sticking to the shingles. She could feel the heat radiating upwards from them as she scampered across the rooftop and gingerly hopped the gap onto the roof of the shed. From there her escape was the simple matter of climbing down the trellis into the neighbor's yard. Regan had turned the avoidance of her parents into something of an artform; the more they tried to reign her in, the more she struggled to break free.
She crossed the rooftops quickly and got down out of sight. The shade was marginally cooler, but the humidity leaked into every crevice and permeated every corner, leaving everything feeling sticky, the air thick and dense.
Once she was on the street behind her house, Regan made a beeline for the local charging station to pick up cigarettes and energy drinks. She thought often in those days about leaving home for good. She was 18, she could move out, join the navy, get an apartment, or get a sleeper pod on a Lighthorse and just run away. She hadn't done any of those things yet, because she had quite a lot of things, and it would be a pain to move any of them. Plus, all those things required an awful expenditure of effort and that was something she'd managed to studiously avoid so far. So she simply basked in her newfound freedom as she drifted into the town.
Δ
The blissful cold of the convenience store billowed out of the door as she wandered in. Regan paused, taking a few moments just basking in the glory of the AC.
"Our father, who art in air condititioning, HVAC be thy name…" She mumbled under her breath as she grabbed a drink from the cooler, pausing for a few more moments in the even colder part of the story where the drinks lived.
Eventually her sweat started to cool enough for her to start getting chilled, and she strolled up to the counter and asked for a pack of cigarettes. The cashier gave her matted down blonde hair a look and scanned her identification. She vaguely wondered if the pimply faced twenty-something was working up the courage to talk to her, but he just handed her the cigarettes with a nod and told her to have a nice day.
Going out into the heat a second time was like walking into a brick wall. Warmth radiated up off the pavement in a haze of distortions and humidity, giving the parking lot an oppressive depth. Regan lit her cigarette and hurried across the pavement, hoping her shoes weren't about to start melting into the hot black surface.
The commercial section of town was an oasis of concrete and metal, and was easily five degrees warmer than the surrounding area. She didn't linger there for long, cutting down back alleys and side streets, wandering down the middle of quiet roads. She stayed away from the main streets and invariably ended up on the run down cul-de-sac that Seth Fiegel, her partner in crime, lived on.
The street was named 'Maple' which Regan always thought was funny; all the maple trees that had been planted along the street had died and their withered husks were now all that provided shade on the quiet lane. Seth's house was a beat up ranch style that hadn't been repainted since the turn of the century. The front yard was a jungle of overgrown weeds, dead grass, and discarded and damaged toys owned by Seth's younger brother Caleb.
She pounded on the door, feeling slightly silly having not called in advance before she made her way over, but knowing most of Seth's social life involved her anyway, it wasn't what either of them would consider a big deal.
It was Caleb who answered the door, still wearing his pajamas, wireless game controller in his hand,
"Hey Regan," the twelve year old said, clearly trying to resist the urge to pick his nose in front of her, "Looking for Seth?"
The teenager nodded mutely, taking a drag of her cigarette. Caleb was a cute kid; she liked him, he was smart for his age, but that didn't mean she was very good at talking to him. She followed him inside, not bothering to put her cigarette out. It wasn't like anyone else in the household bothered with that; the top sides of rooms had all acquired a permanent yellow stain from years of smoking, and the place reeked of ash and cat pee.
"I don't think Seth is awake yet." Caleb said. He looked nervously at Regan and glanced at the kitchen table. Despite having been friends with Seth for over a decade, Caleb always seemed somewhat intimidated by the older girl. She peered at the collection of snack food piled up on the kitchen table that appeared to have been opened by twelve year old hands. She snatched a cookie from a half eaten packet of them.
"Go play your game," She said, motioning to the controller still in his hand, "I'll go bug him." Caleb gave her about a third of a second to finish her dismissal before vanishing in the direction of the gaming console. She put out her cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen counter, and descended into Seth's lair.
Seth's father had formerly been a heavy drinker, and had turned the basement into a 'for the guys' chill out space. Then, when he'd remarried, his new wife Helen had forced him to clean up. Regan had been there with Seth for all of that. The end result was that the basement ended up unoccupied, and it didn't take long for Seth to abandon his bedroom and take it over for himself. He said he liked the ambiance, Regan thought it smelled like mildew. That said, if pressed, she was willing to concede that it was the coolest place around that she wouldn't get trouble for loitering around in.
She pounded on the door at the bottom of the stairs, but when Seth didn't answer, She didn't let that stop her. He'd previously given Regan an emergency key to his room ages ago and forgotten about it. She felt around the top of the doorframe until she found it's hiding place in the gap between two pieces of wood. The lock was new, she been there when he switched it out, conquering the basement and shutting his parents out in what Regan had at the time compared to a judo move. With with a rather self satisfied grin, she unlocked the door, strolled inside, and locked the door behind herself.
The windows of the basement were all high up and blocked out with blackout curtains besides, leaving the space in near total darkness. Regan felt her way carefully down the last three steps beyond the door, running her hands along the low ceiling until she found the set of cords that controlled 'red alert,' the system of red Christmas lights that Seth had run throughout the basement. She fumbled the plugs into their sockets and the space was thrown into the dim relief of red light and shadow that characterized the area.
Seth was a lump under a pile of blankets, his mattress sitting on the floor amidst piles of clothes and other more questionable things. It was a pretty large space, he had the whole basement to himself and he'd luxuriously filled up the entire volume of it with trash and dirty laundry, in the true tradition of every seventeen year old boy in human history.
Regan picked her way over to his aging computer, careful to tiptoe around the more suspicious looking articles of clothing, and started up his music app. The Seth-blanket-mattress creature mumbled something unintelligible from the other side of the room as the bass started thumping into the concrete floor. She then picked up a small wooden box from his desk and wandered over to the mattress.
"Seth, it's two in the afternoon." She said flatly.
From within the blankets she heard "It's not morning until I say it is."
Her response was to drop heavily onto the mattress beside him and lounge against the blanket lump. "Well, I'll just be smoking this weed you left on your desk" She opened up the box and took out the small bag of weed and his glass pipe. Regan had brought her own weed with her, she just wanted to irritate him enough that he'd actually emerge from his mattress-cocoon into a beautiful Sethurfly.
He mumbled a string of profanities, but it took until the smoke started to spread out into the air around the mattress that she finally managed to stir him from his blanket nest.
"Regan?" He mumbled, "You know how early it is?"
"It's two in the afternoon Seth." She answered, smoke puffing out with each word.
He groaned and rubbed his eyes, "Damnit, I was supposed to get up at nine to watch Caleb." he swiped the pipe from her and took a long drag from it, sighing out a cloud of smoke.
"Nine has long come and gone I'm afraid. Were you also supposed to make sure he ate? Because it's two hours past lunch and I'm pretty sure he got into the junk food." She let him have the pipe and fished two cigarettes out of her pack, propping them in the crook of her ear.
He handed her back the pipe, rubbing his face. She hit the piece while he answered, "Yeah I was. Did he let you in?"
She nodded silently and passed him back the bowl, smoke curling out of her nose and lips as she studied him in the dimly lit space. Seth was easily her best friend. They had dated for a bit back when they'd turned sixteen, but after a few awkward sexual encounters, had gone back to being friends. He was scruffy, not unattractive but he did the grunge thing more strongly than anyone really needed to. Besides, Regan's sexuality was a terrifying knot of self loathing and repressed desires, and that particular time-bomb was one she was hoping to dodge until at least her twenties.
Seth twisted out of the blanket cocoon he'd slept in and shrugged into a pair of jeans. He fished a t-shirt from what she hoped was a clean clothes pile, before he turned and trudged through the drifts of stuff to his desk.
"I am so done with this town," Regan announced before taking another hit of the bowl. She followed him over to the desk and leaned against his shoulders while he scrolled through his music library.
"I hear that." Seth said, taking the pipe back from her, "Dad's started drinking again. Helen doesn't like it." He rolled his eyes and took a hit of the pipe, then knocked the ash from it out across the back of his hand, "I give the marriage another year or two at most."
Regan took the pipe from him and returned it to its home before lighting up her two cigarettes and handing him one.
"You gonna stick around for the fireworks?" She asked with a bitter chuckle.
He snorted out smoke in response, "Yeah, I doubt it. I'm gonna buy a car and go up the valley at the very least, maybe even cross the glass sea, you up for that?"
"You know it." She answered, dropping into the chair next to his that she always sat in.
"Helen's gonna be home soon, wanna help me hide the evidence of Caleb's rampage?" he asked.
"Not really. He's your brother. I'll lurk around and keep you company though," the teenager answered honestly.
He grunted in affirmation and turned up his music to the earsplitting volume required to shake the floors of the entire house. "Once more unto the breach!" He shouted with a grin, and waded back towards the stairs.
Regan followed him upstairs, traveling through his wake until they'd cleared the sea of stuff that was the basement floor and then charged after him up the stairs.
Seth managed to coerce a bit of aid from Regan at first, but she quickly took to lurking around the kitchen, perched on the edge of the counter smoking with ashtray in hand. Seth meanwhile, convinced Caleb that if the two of them got the house cleaned before Helen got home at four, that he could run around doing whatever he wanted again tomorrow. Regan was fairly certain this was the standard routine. At some point she migrated to the living room and started merging with the sofa as the effects of the weed settled in. Even after the arrival of FTL ships, colony television was lackluster at best, overloaded with locally produced filler, occasionally spiced with something brought in by a Lighthorse. The soap opera Regan found managed to produce boredom of an intensity that seemed potentially lethal to her, and when it suddenly cut out, the transition made her jump.
"This is a Constellation Action News Alert" The screen announced to her, displaying the CAN logo with the words News Alert in bright red across the screen.
Regan perked up in her seat, taking a drag of the cigarette she'd forgotten in her hand, only to realise it'd gone out. The image changed to an anchor woman, standing in front of a wallscreen showing ships in space.
"Shockwaves of a yet to be determined event are being felt across space. Two hours ago, Martian naval forces began a massive and unprecedented deployment. CAN Affiliates captured the images you see behind me of Martian ships preparing to enter warp. Experts are reporting that almost half the fleet has been launched in the direction of Procyon, although their exact destination and the reason for their sudden departure, remain unknown."
Regan was suddenly very interested. Unlike local news, which was inevitably boring, this was something big, something involving the world outside of their habitat.
"UNDF forces have been scrambling to react to this surprise move by the Martians, and as a response have begun deploying their own fleet, which will rendezvous here at Jericho Ridge before continuing onwards to Procyon, residents are advised to expect the first of the UNDF forces within the day, and all intercolonial shipping will be halted for the duration of the operation. Residents of Jericho Ridge are advised that the colony may undergo active maneuvering in order to receive the UNDF fleet.
We'll be here every step of the way to keep you informed as the situation unfolds, for Constellation Action News I'm Hannah Dehamilton: your source for local and interstellar news."
The cut back to the soap opera was so jarring that for a moment, Regan thought she had imagined the entire thing. The scrolling news bar at the bottom was the only thing that confirmed she hadn't hallucinated the incident.
"Hey Seth!" She called out. "Take a look at this."
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Chapter 6: Hyperbolic
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 6: Hyperbolic
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hyperbolic Planetary Escape Trajectory
105,000 KM over Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
"Did it do anything as we flew by?" Owen growled into the microphone inside his suit as he and Murphy cannonballed at breakneck speeds up the spine of the ship towards the MIC.
"Nothing." Alice said responded softly from the other end of the radio. "They haven't done anything, they're just sitting there." Her voice was still breathless sounding, awestruck. It was an understandable feeling. Floating outside the Stoneburner, a man could rightly feel humbled next to the enormity of it as a piece of human engineering, with sharply defined metal walls stretching off towards an implied horizon. And yet, compared to the colossal piece of alien machinery that had materialized in space beside them, the Stoneburner was a speck of dust on a mountainside.
The corridor shuddered violently and without warning, sending both Owen and Murphy tumbling as the ship groaned and rumbled all around them.
"That was a big one." Alice said into the radio, "You still there dad?"
"I'm still here." Owen said as he grabbed a handhold and forcefully arrested his momentum, something his shoulder would remind him of later he was sure.
"That thing's arrival created a hollow around itself, and we're about to hit the far edge of it." Murphy said into the comm as she launched herself past Owen, hurrying down the spinal corridor.
"We're getting mighty full of holes as it is." Kaito's voice responded out of the earpiece.
As if the reinforce his point, the ship shuddered again as another rock tore through some distant part of the hull.
"Have there been any casualties?" Owen asked as he launched himself after Murphy.
"Two confirmed, fifteen unaccounted for, thirty eight injured." Alice answered him with clinical detachment.
Owen took a deep breath. Space was hard. Death was a very real possibility, and there was always the chance that the void would see fit to claim one more victim. Even knowing that on an almost instinctive level, it was still an uncomfortably high body count. He sighed and finally answered, "Damn."
"We'll mourn the dead later. We need to focus on making sure the living stay that way." Kaito's voice returned over the suit speakers.
Owen followed Murphy through the hatch into the Mining Information Center, swinging the door shut behind himself.
The room was cast in the dim red glow of emergency lighting. Smoke was venting from a console, filling the compartment with a swirling haze. Murphy left ribbons of smoke flowing in her wake as she coasted smoothly across the room, eyes going between all the screens. She shoved Antonine Kleops, the junior navigator, out of the MIC's pilot cradle and immediately began adjusting course again.
Owen lifted up his facemask and was immediately assaulted by the harsh metallic smell of the void. Under typical operating conditions, the whole ship would smell like the algae used in the air processors, so the sudden scent of burning iron struck Owen particularly hard.
The decks vibrated and rang around them as yet another stone tumbled through their hull at tens of relative kilometers per hour.
"There are a lot of rocks out there ahead of us." Murphy said worriedly from the navigation cradle.
"We can't take this sort of sort of beating for long. We need cover, a big rock, something we can hide behind." Kaito said as he floated towards Murphy, gripping the edge of her chair to arrest his momentum.
"Maybe we should ask the aliens for help." Alice said quietly from her seat. She didn't key up, speaking only to those within earshot.
"No!" Both Kaito and Owen replied instinctively.
"Well okay then." Alice said with a roll of her eyes.
"Its way too dangerous, we have no idea of their intentions, what they would do if they noticed us." Kaito said, keeping his voice level.
"Their intentions are pretty clearly to strip mine this planet, and we flew right fucking by them, they might have already noticed us." She retorted.
"I'm with Kaito on this, they could decide to blow us up on the spot." Owen said firmly.
A series of new alarms began to blare red across the consoles.
"Murphy!" Kaito said, whirling back to the navigation cradle.
"I'm getting us into cover!" Murphy replied indignantly. The navigation computers all began throwing up imminent impact alarms. A huge fragment of moon wreckage was looming larger and larger on the screens.
"We're coming in a little fast don't you think?" Kaito asked frustratedly.
"Not really," Murphy answered then keyed up on the shipwide loudspeakers. "Everyone grab onto something we're coming in hard."
Thrust gravity returned suddenly, but sideways, as Murphy fired the maneuvering thrusters at their maximum rating in an attempt to match velocities with the enormous chunk of rock. Mountains and valleys hewn out of the inside of the collision of some larger boulders began to spread out in a strangely nearby horizon on the video feeds. Owen magnetized his boots and gripped a support column as his body was pulled towards one wall.
Kaito started to say something, but his words were choked off as canyon walls loomed up on either side of the ship.
And then they struck the surface. Despite Murphy's piloting, they didn't come in perfectly. The nose of the ship impacted first, crumpling in the ore intake bays and crushing the cranes and gantry equipment before beginning to bounce. The magnetic grips on Owen's boots failed, and he was hurled towards one corner as the ship began to rebound.
The tail then struck, even as the nose bounced off. Then dense engine block and reactor core slammed into the rock face and rebounded cleanly off, tipping the nose back down and crumpling it further against the asteroid. The main body of the ship finally came to rest against the surface as Murphy finished positioning them with maneuvering thrusters.
"That'll buff right out." Murphy said finally, relaxing in her seat as their relative velocity to the asteroid fell to zero.
Owen groaned from where he'd found himself, tangled up with Kaito in one corner.
"I think we'll be safe for the moment, the asteroid is rotating, and we should rotate away from the worst of the debris cloud as we pass through it. We're also down in a crevasse, so there's not many directions an impactor could come in from." Murphy explained.
"How long can we ride this rock?" Kaito asked as he pushed himself off of Owen and floated back out towards the center of the room.
"It's currently hyperbolic, but it might lose velocity passing through the gas plume." Alice answered for her. "We should make it through though, at worst it'll put us in a long period orbit."
"Alright." Kaito sighed. "That's good to hear. Let's batten down, ride out the worst of it, search for missing personnel, and care for the wounded. We'll get started on repair once we're through the worst of the debris."
"What about the aliens?" Alice asked expectantly.
"We're not talking to the aliens." Kaito insisted.
"Once we're a safe distance away, we should try!" Alice insisted.
"Look what they did to Amateru Alice, what even is a safe distance from that sort of power?" Kaito answered.
"They're miners." Alice pressed. "We're miners too, I think we can find common ground."
"No." Kaito growled. "We are going to repair the ship, unpack and install the warp drive, and leave this star system. I'm not going to risk the ship trying to play explorer. We'll return to Aldebaran and they can launch a proper expedition."
"Alright people." Owen said loudly to the collected population of the MIC, "Lets start coordinating rescue teams, we still have people missing out there."
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hyperbolic Planetary Escape Trajectory
105,000 KM over Amateru, Epsilon Tauri
January 2219
"Did it do anything as we flew by?" Owen growled into the microphone inside his suit as he and Murphy cannonballed at breakneck speeds up the spine of the ship towards the MIC.
"Nothing." Alice said responded softly from the other end of the radio. "They haven't done anything, they're just sitting there." Her voice was still breathless sounding, awestruck. It was an understandable feeling. Floating outside the Stoneburner, a man could rightly feel humbled next to the enormity of it as a piece of human engineering, with sharply defined metal walls stretching off towards an implied horizon. And yet, compared to the colossal piece of alien machinery that had materialized in space beside them, the Stoneburner was a speck of dust on a mountainside.
The corridor shuddered violently and without warning, sending both Owen and Murphy tumbling as the ship groaned and rumbled all around them.
"That was a big one." Alice said into the radio, "You still there dad?"
"I'm still here." Owen said as he grabbed a handhold and forcefully arrested his momentum, something his shoulder would remind him of later he was sure.
"That thing's arrival created a hollow around itself, and we're about to hit the far edge of it." Murphy said into the comm as she launched herself past Owen, hurrying down the spinal corridor.
"We're getting mighty full of holes as it is." Kaito's voice responded out of the earpiece.
As if the reinforce his point, the ship shuddered again as another rock tore through some distant part of the hull.
"Have there been any casualties?" Owen asked as he launched himself after Murphy.
"Two confirmed, fifteen unaccounted for, thirty eight injured." Alice answered him with clinical detachment.
Owen took a deep breath. Space was hard. Death was a very real possibility, and there was always the chance that the void would see fit to claim one more victim. Even knowing that on an almost instinctive level, it was still an uncomfortably high body count. He sighed and finally answered, "Damn."
"We'll mourn the dead later. We need to focus on making sure the living stay that way." Kaito's voice returned over the suit speakers.
Owen followed Murphy through the hatch into the Mining Information Center, swinging the door shut behind himself.
The room was cast in the dim red glow of emergency lighting. Smoke was venting from a console, filling the compartment with a swirling haze. Murphy left ribbons of smoke flowing in her wake as she coasted smoothly across the room, eyes going between all the screens. She shoved Antonine Kleops, the junior navigator, out of the MIC's pilot cradle and immediately began adjusting course again.
Owen lifted up his facemask and was immediately assaulted by the harsh metallic smell of the void. Under typical operating conditions, the whole ship would smell like the algae used in the air processors, so the sudden scent of burning iron struck Owen particularly hard.
The decks vibrated and rang around them as yet another stone tumbled through their hull at tens of relative kilometers per hour.
"There are a lot of rocks out there ahead of us." Murphy said worriedly from the navigation cradle.
"We can't take this sort of sort of beating for long. We need cover, a big rock, something we can hide behind." Kaito said as he floated towards Murphy, gripping the edge of her chair to arrest his momentum.
"Maybe we should ask the aliens for help." Alice said quietly from her seat. She didn't key up, speaking only to those within earshot.
"No!" Both Kaito and Owen replied instinctively.
"Well okay then." Alice said with a roll of her eyes.
"Its way too dangerous, we have no idea of their intentions, what they would do if they noticed us." Kaito said, keeping his voice level.
"Their intentions are pretty clearly to strip mine this planet, and we flew right fucking by them, they might have already noticed us." She retorted.
"I'm with Kaito on this, they could decide to blow us up on the spot." Owen said firmly.
A series of new alarms began to blare red across the consoles.
"Murphy!" Kaito said, whirling back to the navigation cradle.
"I'm getting us into cover!" Murphy replied indignantly. The navigation computers all began throwing up imminent impact alarms. A huge fragment of moon wreckage was looming larger and larger on the screens.
"We're coming in a little fast don't you think?" Kaito asked frustratedly.
"Not really," Murphy answered then keyed up on the shipwide loudspeakers. "Everyone grab onto something we're coming in hard."
Thrust gravity returned suddenly, but sideways, as Murphy fired the maneuvering thrusters at their maximum rating in an attempt to match velocities with the enormous chunk of rock. Mountains and valleys hewn out of the inside of the collision of some larger boulders began to spread out in a strangely nearby horizon on the video feeds. Owen magnetized his boots and gripped a support column as his body was pulled towards one wall.
Kaito started to say something, but his words were choked off as canyon walls loomed up on either side of the ship.
And then they struck the surface. Despite Murphy's piloting, they didn't come in perfectly. The nose of the ship impacted first, crumpling in the ore intake bays and crushing the cranes and gantry equipment before beginning to bounce. The magnetic grips on Owen's boots failed, and he was hurled towards one corner as the ship began to rebound.
The tail then struck, even as the nose bounced off. Then dense engine block and reactor core slammed into the rock face and rebounded cleanly off, tipping the nose back down and crumpling it further against the asteroid. The main body of the ship finally came to rest against the surface as Murphy finished positioning them with maneuvering thrusters.
"That'll buff right out." Murphy said finally, relaxing in her seat as their relative velocity to the asteroid fell to zero.
Owen groaned from where he'd found himself, tangled up with Kaito in one corner.
"I think we'll be safe for the moment, the asteroid is rotating, and we should rotate away from the worst of the debris cloud as we pass through it. We're also down in a crevasse, so there's not many directions an impactor could come in from." Murphy explained.
"How long can we ride this rock?" Kaito asked as he pushed himself off of Owen and floated back out towards the center of the room.
"It's currently hyperbolic, but it might lose velocity passing through the gas plume." Alice answered for her. "We should make it through though, at worst it'll put us in a long period orbit."
"Alright." Kaito sighed. "That's good to hear. Let's batten down, ride out the worst of it, search for missing personnel, and care for the wounded. We'll get started on repair once we're through the worst of the debris."
"What about the aliens?" Alice asked expectantly.
"We're not talking to the aliens." Kaito insisted.
"Once we're a safe distance away, we should try!" Alice insisted.
"Look what they did to Amateru Alice, what even is a safe distance from that sort of power?" Kaito answered.
"They're miners." Alice pressed. "We're miners too, I think we can find common ground."
"No." Kaito growled. "We are going to repair the ship, unpack and install the warp drive, and leave this star system. I'm not going to risk the ship trying to play explorer. We'll return to Aldebaran and they can launch a proper expedition."
"Alright people." Owen said loudly to the collected population of the MIC, "Lets start coordinating rescue teams, we still have people missing out there."
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Chapter 7: Radioactive
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 7: Radioactive
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
"You ready for this Jean?" Ivy asked her subordinate. They were seated in a small communications booth off of the bridge. It had taken nearly another week of semi-automated database queries between the two parties before they felt confident they were ready to start a real conversation.
The small chamber featured a desk, a chair, and wallscreens on four walls. Jean sat nervously in the chair while Ivy leaned against the closed door.
Jean nodded somewhat nervously. "Let's do this."
Ivy took a breath and accessed the room controls through her implant HUD, flipping the recording systems into a high fidelity capture mode. Jean sat up a bit straighter as a red light blinked on in the corner of her own HUD.
"Greetings from Sol. My name is Jean Paolini, I have been selected to represent humanity during this initial dialogue. We have a lot to talk about, and we're still trying to get an understanding of the information you have presented us with. In your initial message to our vessel, you asked what we are doing here. We came to this place in the vessel we now pilot as peaceful explorers. We seek to learn about the wider universe we find ourselves in, and after our encounter with each other, we know we have much to learn. We would be honored to be the recipients of any knowledge you see fit to grace us with."
Jean made a gesture with her hand and then waited patiently for the red light to go off before deflating, her shoulders slumping and head head falling softly against the glass topped desk.
Ivy gently clapped the younger woman on the shoulder. "You did good Jean. Now we just wait two hours for them to respond."
"You know we could cut down on the signal delay by moving closer right Ivy?" Jean asked her. "All this waiting is gonna to make me really anxious."
"Yeah me too." Ivy answered truthfully. "But I don't want to move us closer until we have backup. Just in case."
"How long until that happens?" Jean asked her as she stood up and stretched her arms and legs.
"About 20 days if they left immediately upon receiving the courier drone." Ivy answered her as she opened the door. "Come on, let's go get coffee, sitting in here worrying about what they say next won't change anything."
Jean sighed and slowly pushed herself to her feet. "Alright."
Fabrique Intersolar Deep Space Station
FI-ISCU Pioneer
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 kilometers from Aldebaran b, Aldebaran
February 2219
Zephyr hadn't slept in three days. Her hands shook as she sipped another energy drink. She had swapped her coffee out for them halfway through the second day straight of investigating the loss of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. Of the 208 crew members aboard ship, 193 of them had been neatly tied down beneath sheets in one of the vessel's smaller holds. Their causes of death varied: the majority suffered acute radiation poisoning, while the remainder were a mix of exposure to vacuum, blunt force trauma, or thermal trauma.
The other 15 were in hibernation pods. Also dead, all of radiation exposure, but they were well enough preserved for some edge case options to be on the table. Even if the 15 in the hibernation pods were recovered though, the loss of life was still staggering, unbelievable.
Every time Zephyr contemplated the number of dead, it made her want to vomit. Doug Farragut told her continously that it wasn't her fault. Gyeong Huygens told her to discipline her mind and purge the negative thought patterns from them. Thomas Constantine told her not to think about it.
Zephyr instead starting pulling her hair out. The real problem here, the fundamental reason all of this happened, was that she wasn't yet god, and she really needed to hurry up and fix that so people stopped dying on her.
"Zeph, you still with us?" Zephyr's eyes shifted from the clump of hair still clutched in her fist, to Doug Farragut's kindly expression halfway down the meeting room table.
Zephyr sighed and dragged her mind back into reality, chucking the clump of hair over her shoulder. "I'm sorry Tom, please go over it again."
Doug nodded and she turned her attention back towards Thomas Constantine, the other station commander, who was attempting to brief her and Doug on the status of the investigation.
"Okay so." He started with a clap of his hands. "As you know we have the full sensor and computer logs from the Golden Goose. I've had fifteen people sifting through them, trying to figure out what happened and where everything went wrong."
"And your results?" Zephyr asked, a lump in her throat.
"Their fission reactor chamber was hit by a meteor and ruptured. The damage to the pebble bed was sufficient to start a runaway fission reaction and flood the ship with radiation."
"How'd they manage that?" Doug asked. "The PBR walls are thick enough to survive an impact with a basketball sized meteor going 20 klicks per second relative."
"Well uh, that's where things get weird actually." Tom answered. He fumbled for the small control fob around his neck. Having been born in the generation before implants really became mainstream, Tom thought the idea of having machines in his skull was a bit too weird to accept. He tapped a button on the fob and the wallscreen behind him changed to a wide angle image of Theta Tauri c, with its bands of red, gold, and blue gas swirling through the atmosphere. It's wide ring of mineral wealth twinkled silently in the starlight, still holding the promise of untold riches. The image was frozen at first but Tom tapped the fob again and it began playing. "This is from one of the planetary observation satellites that the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg dropped into a Molniya orbit upon arrival. I'm fast forwarding through two days of recordings before the signal abruptly terminates. Just watch."
On the screen, the planet seemed to zoom away as the satellite's orbit carried it up towards its apoapsis, hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the north pole. Then it slowed to a crawl, passed through the apoapsis and began to fall back towards the world, accelerating as it went. However, about halfway through the descent, something began happening on the planet below. An enormous bulge, like a planet sized zit, expanded on one side of the world. It swelled rapidly then blew apart into an enormous starburst of gas and debris that reached out beyond the orbits of the moons. As the explosion reached upwards, enormous ripples could be seen propagating through the body of the ring, where the Golden Goose had been orbiting. The entire ring unzipped itself and scattered rocks throughout the lower orbits in a matter of hours, condensed into moments by the playback. To the crew of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg those few hours would have seemed nearly apocalyptic.
"Collisional cascading." Zephyr said between pursed lips. "But what makes a gas giant blow up like that in the first place? Did it start fusing or something?"
"Just keep watching please." Tom said tersely. "You won't believe me unless you see it with your own eyes."
Zephyr focused back on the screen. Tiny flashes of light that must have been inter-bolide collisions flickered like distant lightning in the world's lower orbits, while the surface of the world boiled and churned, with storms rising practically out the top of the atmosphere on impossibly strong updrafts. And then the vast and slow motion explosion began to dissipate and fall inwards towards Theta Tauri c. The blast gouged out a hole in the layers of gas that reached all the way down to the liquid metallic hydrogen core of the world. Sitting in the center of this vast cavity was what appeared to be a black spike of enormous proportions. It was larger than most rocky planets in diameter at the top, and the point reached down to the glowing core of the gas giant.
The satellite was still falling, its orbit would bring it swinging in close to the world at high speed, where it would whip through its periapsis before zooming back outwards towards the major leg of its highly elliptical orbit. As it drew closer and closer, rocks could sometimes be seen flashing across the scene in an instant, and then somewhere near the equator, the image finally cut out, and the screen went black with a flash of static.
Zephyr took a long moment to process the video before she spoke. Her hand clenched and unclenched as she worked her way through the implications of what she had just seen and one of her eyes twitched maniacally as her brain tried to process this new information.
"Zephyr?" Doug asked worriedly. She held up a hand to silence him and met eyes with Tom.
"I've seen it with my own eyes and I still don't believe it." She said after another moment of considering. "I assume we have footage like this from all of the satellites?"
"This is the most visually striking to watch, but you can see most of the events in all of them." Tom answered.
Zephyr sighed. Her brow furrowed, her fist slammed into the glass tabletop, and then she was shouting. "Goddamn aliens! We've had our find scooped by fucking aliens!"
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
Sol-Human-Jean-Paoloni, [we/I?] Accept your position as Representative of Humanity. [I/we?] Dreaming-Waking-Transcending Represent <i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds>. You find us under most [distressing/severe/angry/unpleasant?] circumstances. Your species Represent a significant [untranslated]. Never before has any Species besides [untranslated] Created a form of faster than light [engine/thruster/drive?] without first being Gifted the [mathematical equation for a form exotic matter]. We are very [curious/inquisitive/questioning?] of your faster than light [engine/thruster/drive?]. [Untranslated] [we/I?] [fear/know/think/worry] the Reshapers Will soon Arrive at Sol. [Our/my?] Purpose is to Evacuate as many Species as possible from [the galaxy] before the Reshapers fully consume it. [Our/my?] [intent/belief/desire] is to visit Sol in [untranslated time interval] and evacuate as many humans as possible.
The response message was splashed across the wallscreens in the communications room again, and Ivy and Jean once again found themselves there strategizing a response.
"Thanks for not capitalizing everything this time Emmy." Ivy said as she read through the mostly translated response message.
"You should thank Cale for that, he's the one that adjusted my translation algorithms." The computer responded.
"I will. And okay, Jean, we need to tell them not to come to Sol with their big ass spaceship. They'll wreck all of our orbits with their mass."
"If the Reshapers show up not too long after and eat the solar system anyway, than that doesn't really make a difference though, does it?" Jean asked.
"Think about it Jean, do you really think most people are going to take these guys up on their offer to evacuate us? I think when the rest of humanity finds out what's up, they're going to want to fight, and defend Sol from the Reshapers, not just run away with our tails between our legs. That means we're going to need more military ships, more production in general, and all the advanced technology we can get. It also means we need our planets in stable orbits so that we can keep up our industrial production and logistics networks."
Jean nodded. "Should we show them ours if they show us theirs?"
"Show us…?" Ivy stumbled, she knew the phrase Jean had used, but most of the time it was in the context of teenage sexual experimentation.
"FTL Drives I mean." Jean quickly answered. "They said they're curious about our engines. Think they'd trade designs?"
"If these aliens were anywhere near our technology level I would say no, don't give them things that could let them one up us if this is an elaborate lie. But their ship is the size of a planet. They could destroy most of the human race just by camping out somewhere near the sun and destabilizing all of the planetary orbits with their mass. Given that, I think It's worth asking, and I'd feel awfully smug if we did manage to get that out of them before our backup arrives." Ivy admitted.
"Alright well, let's do this than." Jean said with a clap of her hands, sitting down in the room's single chair. She waited for Ivy to activate the recording mode before she began speaking.
"Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, I accept your position as representative of Lament for Lost Worlds. We understand these are difficult times. We have reviewed the information you provided us on the Reshapers, and acknowledge the threat they pose. However it is not in our nature to flee from this threat. We ask that you please do not bring Lament for Lost Worlds into Sol, so as not to disrupt the local planetary orbits with it's mass. We can negotiate a pickup point for those humans who wish to go with you outside of Sol. Also, if you have an interest in our faster than light drive, we will share our designs with you in exchange for your own faster than light drive designs."
The light went out, and Jean once more deflated as she let out a long breath.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Goose that Laid the Golden Egg
Elliptical Orbit
129,000 Kilometers from Theta Tauri c
August 2218
"Well, we've done it." Dianica Botheys said with a tired sigh. She had been junior mining foreman, acting as the lead foreman temporarily while Owen McGregor was on leave at Pioneer Station. The last few weeks though, had seen her world utterly upended.
The planet had exploded around them. They'd tried to escape the blast, but the ring they were inside had ripped itself apart. Asteroid strikes tore dozens of holes in the hull, and nearly half the crew was killed in this opening salvo. Their fission reactor had been ruptured, and they'd failed to fully break orbit, instead merely casting themselves into a many week long suborbital trajectory.
Desperation had ruled the day, as the captain sent out EVA workers to try and repair the damaged reactor and assemble the alcubierre ring so they could warp out before their ship fell back into the soup.
That was four weeks ago. Over those four weeks, hundreds more had died. Radiation poisoning claimed many, micrometeor strikes killed EVA workers, unexpected depressurizations killed more, explosions caused by damaged components killed still more, and by the time the alcubierre ring had been constructed and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg had passed through its apoapsis, she was the most senior surviving member of the crew.
"Almost feels pointless now though, doesn't it?" Sing Easterly, the one surviving engineer, answered forlornly.
"It's absolutely pointless." Esther Volkov, the surviving scientist snorted. "The reactor sort of works sure, but it still leaks like a sieve. If we wrap ourselves up in the warp tunnel in our current state, it'd be like climbing inside a microwave."
"I'm fairly certain we all have a lethal dose of radiation at this point." Dianica answered calmly. "But you know what, it still matters. Someone needs to know what happened here. If they don't get back anything besides our bodies and the ship's data, that alone will be worth it."
"Or, we could try to fire the engines again, push fully out of orbit of the planet, then jettison the reactor and try to survive until help gets here." That suggestion came from Clancy Lehady one of the few EVA workers who hadn't been killed while installing the drive or succumbed to radiation poisoning.
"Did you miss the part where we all already have a lethal dose of radiation?" Dianica insisted.
"There's enough hibernation pods for all of us. If we put ourselves in hibernation and jettison the rector, it might buy us enough time for someone to get here with more anti-rads and anti-cancers." The old EVA worker crossed his arms and evenly met Dianica's gaze.
"We can still use the hibernation pods if we use the drive. A lot of good people died to get that drive installed, I say we make use of it." Sing answered.
"We should vote on it." Clancy insisted.
"No." Dianica said harshly. "This is not a democracy. We have a chain of command, we're going back to Aldebaran, it's been decided."
Clancy harrumphed as Dianica turned back to Sing.
Sing nodded and quickly entered the warp parameters into the drive. The reactor began heating up again as a huge power draw was generated by the systems for the first time in weeks. The young woman's hand hovered over the final execution sequence as the power levels hit 100%.
"Sing," Dianica said softly. "Take us to Aldebaran."
The thai girl smacked the button and the ship lurched violently as they were thrown into the warp tunnel.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
Jean and Ivy had migrated to the conference room for the next round of communication after being chastised by both Cale and Evangeline for not consulting them first before offering the FTL technology as a trade. All four of them though, were equally flabbergasted when the Ones Who Came Before sent them back the exact technical specifications for their drive as well as detailed instructions on how to build it and even how to build the machines that built it.
The translated text sent with the blueprints were displayed once more on the wallscreens.
Sol-Human-Jean-Paoloni, [we/I?] Offer you the Gift of <Hyperspace> that Humanity may take their Place among The Ones Who Followed After. You [cannot/must not/should not?] fight the Reshapers. They will [untranslated] you. Much of your Species may yet survive if we* act quickly. While [we/I?] will respect your desire that [we/I?] not approach your system. [We/I?] [must/should/can?] request you reconsider, for the [untranslated] of Humanity.
"Well uh, they showed us theirs all right." Cale said scratching his head.
"I can't believe they'd just…" Evangeline short circuited slightly, her arms flailing. "How is it remotely safe from their perspective to go around handing this information out to every alien race who asks them about it?"
"I think we should send them our drive designs." Jean said with a nod. "It's only fair and we don't want to be seen as going back on an agreement."
"You shouldn't have offered them that deal in the first place Jean." Evangeline said icily.
"Then maybe you should have offered to talk to them instead of having a mental breakdown because we found out about some scary aliens!" Jean wasn't quite shouting, but was very near to it.
Ivy held up a hand and Jean quieted down. "I authorized it. Their ship could wreck our civilisation with nothing but its presence in the solar system. I doubt any of our technology just happens to hold the secret to defeating them if we somehow end up at odds."
"I agree." Cale said. "I mean, I don't, it totally might hold the secret, but we also need more information, and the best way to keep them talking and keep them friendly is to keep sharing it. Our FTL drive designs are on the internet. All they'd need to do is tap one of our communications satellites to get it. There's no point in hiding it from them now."
Evangeline in her role as Conscience could override Ivy in a situation like this, but she simply sighed and shook her head. "Alright."
They looked to Jean, and Ivy flipped the system to record once again.
"Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, thank you for sending us your drive design, we will likewise send our own drive designs with this transmission. We have seen the images of the Reshapers you sent us, and understand that they represent a grave threat to our existence. However please be aware that no one aboard our ship at this time has the authority to speak for all of our kind. We will have to wait until more of our kind arrive in order to engage in that sort of diplomacy. In the meantime, we would like to continue exchanging databases and begin a cultural exchange."
Fabrique Intersolar Deep Space Station
FI-ISCU Pioneer
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 kilometers from Aldebaran b, Aldebaran
February 2219
Fractal elves danced through space, twisting and folding in impossible transformations. Spinning many-armed angels of fire collapsed and restructured themselves in a timeless, endless procession of images that seemed to stretch onwards for an eternity. Aliens, faeries, and magical creatures kaleidoscoped into and out of one another, textures emerging and subducting into the larger patterns. The flood of impossible imagery accelerated, shapes blurring past each other, vibrating faster and faster, until the vibrations began to condense into rooms, walls, and people, as Dianica Botheys took her first breath in many weeks.
Zephyr Athabasca's face emerged from the swirling cascade of information as a changed mind and body struggled to understand the world it was seeing. Dianica felt as if she was coming down from a powerful psychoactive experience, the world becoming more and more real by the moment and she realised, slowly, that she she was herself, and she was located inside of her body.
"I thought I was dead." She finally croaked out after what must have been a small eternity of her eyes darting around madly, trying to make sense of the world.
"You were." Zephyr answered her with a grin. "Dead and back again."
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
"You ready for this Jean?" Ivy asked her subordinate. They were seated in a small communications booth off of the bridge. It had taken nearly another week of semi-automated database queries between the two parties before they felt confident they were ready to start a real conversation.
The small chamber featured a desk, a chair, and wallscreens on four walls. Jean sat nervously in the chair while Ivy leaned against the closed door.
Jean nodded somewhat nervously. "Let's do this."
Ivy took a breath and accessed the room controls through her implant HUD, flipping the recording systems into a high fidelity capture mode. Jean sat up a bit straighter as a red light blinked on in the corner of her own HUD.
"Greetings from Sol. My name is Jean Paolini, I have been selected to represent humanity during this initial dialogue. We have a lot to talk about, and we're still trying to get an understanding of the information you have presented us with. In your initial message to our vessel, you asked what we are doing here. We came to this place in the vessel we now pilot as peaceful explorers. We seek to learn about the wider universe we find ourselves in, and after our encounter with each other, we know we have much to learn. We would be honored to be the recipients of any knowledge you see fit to grace us with."
Jean made a gesture with her hand and then waited patiently for the red light to go off before deflating, her shoulders slumping and head head falling softly against the glass topped desk.
Ivy gently clapped the younger woman on the shoulder. "You did good Jean. Now we just wait two hours for them to respond."
"You know we could cut down on the signal delay by moving closer right Ivy?" Jean asked her. "All this waiting is gonna to make me really anxious."
"Yeah me too." Ivy answered truthfully. "But I don't want to move us closer until we have backup. Just in case."
"How long until that happens?" Jean asked her as she stood up and stretched her arms and legs.
"About 20 days if they left immediately upon receiving the courier drone." Ivy answered her as she opened the door. "Come on, let's go get coffee, sitting in here worrying about what they say next won't change anything."
Jean sighed and slowly pushed herself to her feet. "Alright."
Fabrique Intersolar Deep Space Station
FI-ISCU Pioneer
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 kilometers from Aldebaran b, Aldebaran
February 2219
Zephyr hadn't slept in three days. Her hands shook as she sipped another energy drink. She had swapped her coffee out for them halfway through the second day straight of investigating the loss of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg. Of the 208 crew members aboard ship, 193 of them had been neatly tied down beneath sheets in one of the vessel's smaller holds. Their causes of death varied: the majority suffered acute radiation poisoning, while the remainder were a mix of exposure to vacuum, blunt force trauma, or thermal trauma.
The other 15 were in hibernation pods. Also dead, all of radiation exposure, but they were well enough preserved for some edge case options to be on the table. Even if the 15 in the hibernation pods were recovered though, the loss of life was still staggering, unbelievable.
Every time Zephyr contemplated the number of dead, it made her want to vomit. Doug Farragut told her continously that it wasn't her fault. Gyeong Huygens told her to discipline her mind and purge the negative thought patterns from them. Thomas Constantine told her not to think about it.
Zephyr instead starting pulling her hair out. The real problem here, the fundamental reason all of this happened, was that she wasn't yet god, and she really needed to hurry up and fix that so people stopped dying on her.
"Zeph, you still with us?" Zephyr's eyes shifted from the clump of hair still clutched in her fist, to Doug Farragut's kindly expression halfway down the meeting room table.
Zephyr sighed and dragged her mind back into reality, chucking the clump of hair over her shoulder. "I'm sorry Tom, please go over it again."
Doug nodded and she turned her attention back towards Thomas Constantine, the other station commander, who was attempting to brief her and Doug on the status of the investigation.
"Okay so." He started with a clap of his hands. "As you know we have the full sensor and computer logs from the Golden Goose. I've had fifteen people sifting through them, trying to figure out what happened and where everything went wrong."
"And your results?" Zephyr asked, a lump in her throat.
"Their fission reactor chamber was hit by a meteor and ruptured. The damage to the pebble bed was sufficient to start a runaway fission reaction and flood the ship with radiation."
"How'd they manage that?" Doug asked. "The PBR walls are thick enough to survive an impact with a basketball sized meteor going 20 klicks per second relative."
"Well uh, that's where things get weird actually." Tom answered. He fumbled for the small control fob around his neck. Having been born in the generation before implants really became mainstream, Tom thought the idea of having machines in his skull was a bit too weird to accept. He tapped a button on the fob and the wallscreen behind him changed to a wide angle image of Theta Tauri c, with its bands of red, gold, and blue gas swirling through the atmosphere. It's wide ring of mineral wealth twinkled silently in the starlight, still holding the promise of untold riches. The image was frozen at first but Tom tapped the fob again and it began playing. "This is from one of the planetary observation satellites that the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg dropped into a Molniya orbit upon arrival. I'm fast forwarding through two days of recordings before the signal abruptly terminates. Just watch."
On the screen, the planet seemed to zoom away as the satellite's orbit carried it up towards its apoapsis, hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the north pole. Then it slowed to a crawl, passed through the apoapsis and began to fall back towards the world, accelerating as it went. However, about halfway through the descent, something began happening on the planet below. An enormous bulge, like a planet sized zit, expanded on one side of the world. It swelled rapidly then blew apart into an enormous starburst of gas and debris that reached out beyond the orbits of the moons. As the explosion reached upwards, enormous ripples could be seen propagating through the body of the ring, where the Golden Goose had been orbiting. The entire ring unzipped itself and scattered rocks throughout the lower orbits in a matter of hours, condensed into moments by the playback. To the crew of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg those few hours would have seemed nearly apocalyptic.
"Collisional cascading." Zephyr said between pursed lips. "But what makes a gas giant blow up like that in the first place? Did it start fusing or something?"
"Just keep watching please." Tom said tersely. "You won't believe me unless you see it with your own eyes."
Zephyr focused back on the screen. Tiny flashes of light that must have been inter-bolide collisions flickered like distant lightning in the world's lower orbits, while the surface of the world boiled and churned, with storms rising practically out the top of the atmosphere on impossibly strong updrafts. And then the vast and slow motion explosion began to dissipate and fall inwards towards Theta Tauri c. The blast gouged out a hole in the layers of gas that reached all the way down to the liquid metallic hydrogen core of the world. Sitting in the center of this vast cavity was what appeared to be a black spike of enormous proportions. It was larger than most rocky planets in diameter at the top, and the point reached down to the glowing core of the gas giant.
The satellite was still falling, its orbit would bring it swinging in close to the world at high speed, where it would whip through its periapsis before zooming back outwards towards the major leg of its highly elliptical orbit. As it drew closer and closer, rocks could sometimes be seen flashing across the scene in an instant, and then somewhere near the equator, the image finally cut out, and the screen went black with a flash of static.
Zephyr took a long moment to process the video before she spoke. Her hand clenched and unclenched as she worked her way through the implications of what she had just seen and one of her eyes twitched maniacally as her brain tried to process this new information.
"Zephyr?" Doug asked worriedly. She held up a hand to silence him and met eyes with Tom.
"I've seen it with my own eyes and I still don't believe it." She said after another moment of considering. "I assume we have footage like this from all of the satellites?"
"This is the most visually striking to watch, but you can see most of the events in all of them." Tom answered.
Zephyr sighed. Her brow furrowed, her fist slammed into the glass tabletop, and then she was shouting. "Goddamn aliens! We've had our find scooped by fucking aliens!"
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
Sol-Human-Jean-Paoloni, [we/I?] Accept your position as Representative of Humanity. [I/we?] Dreaming-Waking-Transcending Represent <i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds>. You find us under most [distressing/severe/angry/unpleasant?] circumstances. Your species Represent a significant [untranslated]. Never before has any Species besides [untranslated] Created a form of faster than light [engine/thruster/drive?] without first being Gifted the [mathematical equation for a form exotic matter]. We are very [curious/inquisitive/questioning?] of your faster than light [engine/thruster/drive?]. [Untranslated] [we/I?] [fear/know/think/worry] the Reshapers Will soon Arrive at Sol. [Our/my?] Purpose is to Evacuate as many Species as possible from [the galaxy] before the Reshapers fully consume it. [Our/my?] [intent/belief/desire] is to visit Sol in [untranslated time interval] and evacuate as many humans as possible.
The response message was splashed across the wallscreens in the communications room again, and Ivy and Jean once again found themselves there strategizing a response.
"Thanks for not capitalizing everything this time Emmy." Ivy said as she read through the mostly translated response message.
"You should thank Cale for that, he's the one that adjusted my translation algorithms." The computer responded.
"I will. And okay, Jean, we need to tell them not to come to Sol with their big ass spaceship. They'll wreck all of our orbits with their mass."
"If the Reshapers show up not too long after and eat the solar system anyway, than that doesn't really make a difference though, does it?" Jean asked.
"Think about it Jean, do you really think most people are going to take these guys up on their offer to evacuate us? I think when the rest of humanity finds out what's up, they're going to want to fight, and defend Sol from the Reshapers, not just run away with our tails between our legs. That means we're going to need more military ships, more production in general, and all the advanced technology we can get. It also means we need our planets in stable orbits so that we can keep up our industrial production and logistics networks."
Jean nodded. "Should we show them ours if they show us theirs?"
"Show us…?" Ivy stumbled, she knew the phrase Jean had used, but most of the time it was in the context of teenage sexual experimentation.
"FTL Drives I mean." Jean quickly answered. "They said they're curious about our engines. Think they'd trade designs?"
"If these aliens were anywhere near our technology level I would say no, don't give them things that could let them one up us if this is an elaborate lie. But their ship is the size of a planet. They could destroy most of the human race just by camping out somewhere near the sun and destabilizing all of the planetary orbits with their mass. Given that, I think It's worth asking, and I'd feel awfully smug if we did manage to get that out of them before our backup arrives." Ivy admitted.
"Alright well, let's do this than." Jean said with a clap of her hands, sitting down in the room's single chair. She waited for Ivy to activate the recording mode before she began speaking.
"Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, I accept your position as representative of Lament for Lost Worlds. We understand these are difficult times. We have reviewed the information you provided us on the Reshapers, and acknowledge the threat they pose. However it is not in our nature to flee from this threat. We ask that you please do not bring Lament for Lost Worlds into Sol, so as not to disrupt the local planetary orbits with it's mass. We can negotiate a pickup point for those humans who wish to go with you outside of Sol. Also, if you have an interest in our faster than light drive, we will share our designs with you in exchange for your own faster than light drive designs."
The light went out, and Jean once more deflated as she let out a long breath.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Goose that Laid the Golden Egg
Elliptical Orbit
129,000 Kilometers from Theta Tauri c
August 2218
"Well, we've done it." Dianica Botheys said with a tired sigh. She had been junior mining foreman, acting as the lead foreman temporarily while Owen McGregor was on leave at Pioneer Station. The last few weeks though, had seen her world utterly upended.
The planet had exploded around them. They'd tried to escape the blast, but the ring they were inside had ripped itself apart. Asteroid strikes tore dozens of holes in the hull, and nearly half the crew was killed in this opening salvo. Their fission reactor had been ruptured, and they'd failed to fully break orbit, instead merely casting themselves into a many week long suborbital trajectory.
Desperation had ruled the day, as the captain sent out EVA workers to try and repair the damaged reactor and assemble the alcubierre ring so they could warp out before their ship fell back into the soup.
That was four weeks ago. Over those four weeks, hundreds more had died. Radiation poisoning claimed many, micrometeor strikes killed EVA workers, unexpected depressurizations killed more, explosions caused by damaged components killed still more, and by the time the alcubierre ring had been constructed and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg had passed through its apoapsis, she was the most senior surviving member of the crew.
"Almost feels pointless now though, doesn't it?" Sing Easterly, the one surviving engineer, answered forlornly.
"It's absolutely pointless." Esther Volkov, the surviving scientist snorted. "The reactor sort of works sure, but it still leaks like a sieve. If we wrap ourselves up in the warp tunnel in our current state, it'd be like climbing inside a microwave."
"I'm fairly certain we all have a lethal dose of radiation at this point." Dianica answered calmly. "But you know what, it still matters. Someone needs to know what happened here. If they don't get back anything besides our bodies and the ship's data, that alone will be worth it."
"Or, we could try to fire the engines again, push fully out of orbit of the planet, then jettison the reactor and try to survive until help gets here." That suggestion came from Clancy Lehady one of the few EVA workers who hadn't been killed while installing the drive or succumbed to radiation poisoning.
"Did you miss the part where we all already have a lethal dose of radiation?" Dianica insisted.
"There's enough hibernation pods for all of us. If we put ourselves in hibernation and jettison the rector, it might buy us enough time for someone to get here with more anti-rads and anti-cancers." The old EVA worker crossed his arms and evenly met Dianica's gaze.
"We can still use the hibernation pods if we use the drive. A lot of good people died to get that drive installed, I say we make use of it." Sing answered.
"We should vote on it." Clancy insisted.
"No." Dianica said harshly. "This is not a democracy. We have a chain of command, we're going back to Aldebaran, it's been decided."
Clancy harrumphed as Dianica turned back to Sing.
Sing nodded and quickly entered the warp parameters into the drive. The reactor began heating up again as a huge power draw was generated by the systems for the first time in weeks. The young woman's hand hovered over the final execution sequence as the power levels hit 100%.
"Sing," Dianica said softly. "Take us to Aldebaran."
The thai girl smacked the button and the ship lurched violently as they were thrown into the warp tunnel.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
Jean and Ivy had migrated to the conference room for the next round of communication after being chastised by both Cale and Evangeline for not consulting them first before offering the FTL technology as a trade. All four of them though, were equally flabbergasted when the Ones Who Came Before sent them back the exact technical specifications for their drive as well as detailed instructions on how to build it and even how to build the machines that built it.
The translated text sent with the blueprints were displayed once more on the wallscreens.
Sol-Human-Jean-Paoloni, [we/I?] Offer you the Gift of <Hyperspace> that Humanity may take their Place among The Ones Who Followed After. You [cannot/must not/should not?] fight the Reshapers. They will [untranslated] you. Much of your Species may yet survive if we* act quickly. While [we/I?] will respect your desire that [we/I?] not approach your system. [We/I?] [must/should/can?] request you reconsider, for the [untranslated] of Humanity.
"Well uh, they showed us theirs all right." Cale said scratching his head.
"I can't believe they'd just…" Evangeline short circuited slightly, her arms flailing. "How is it remotely safe from their perspective to go around handing this information out to every alien race who asks them about it?"
"I think we should send them our drive designs." Jean said with a nod. "It's only fair and we don't want to be seen as going back on an agreement."
"You shouldn't have offered them that deal in the first place Jean." Evangeline said icily.
"Then maybe you should have offered to talk to them instead of having a mental breakdown because we found out about some scary aliens!" Jean wasn't quite shouting, but was very near to it.
Ivy held up a hand and Jean quieted down. "I authorized it. Their ship could wreck our civilisation with nothing but its presence in the solar system. I doubt any of our technology just happens to hold the secret to defeating them if we somehow end up at odds."
"I agree." Cale said. "I mean, I don't, it totally might hold the secret, but we also need more information, and the best way to keep them talking and keep them friendly is to keep sharing it. Our FTL drive designs are on the internet. All they'd need to do is tap one of our communications satellites to get it. There's no point in hiding it from them now."
Evangeline in her role as Conscience could override Ivy in a situation like this, but she simply sighed and shook her head. "Alright."
They looked to Jean, and Ivy flipped the system to record once again.
"Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, thank you for sending us your drive design, we will likewise send our own drive designs with this transmission. We have seen the images of the Reshapers you sent us, and understand that they represent a grave threat to our existence. However please be aware that no one aboard our ship at this time has the authority to speak for all of our kind. We will have to wait until more of our kind arrive in order to engage in that sort of diplomacy. In the meantime, we would like to continue exchanging databases and begin a cultural exchange."
Fabrique Intersolar Deep Space Station
FI-ISCU Pioneer
Elliptical Orbit
30,000 kilometers from Aldebaran b, Aldebaran
February 2219
Fractal elves danced through space, twisting and folding in impossible transformations. Spinning many-armed angels of fire collapsed and restructured themselves in a timeless, endless procession of images that seemed to stretch onwards for an eternity. Aliens, faeries, and magical creatures kaleidoscoped into and out of one another, textures emerging and subducting into the larger patterns. The flood of impossible imagery accelerated, shapes blurring past each other, vibrating faster and faster, until the vibrations began to condense into rooms, walls, and people, as Dianica Botheys took her first breath in many weeks.
Zephyr Athabasca's face emerged from the swirling cascade of information as a changed mind and body struggled to understand the world it was seeing. Dianica felt as if she was coming down from a powerful psychoactive experience, the world becoming more and more real by the moment and she realised, slowly, that she she was herself, and she was located inside of her body.
"I thought I was dead." She finally croaked out after what must have been a small eternity of her eyes darting around madly, trying to make sense of the world.
"You were." Zephyr answered her with a grin. "Dead and back again."
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- Location
- No
I read the fuck out of this on reddit. Soo good to see you here. Welcome to Sufficient Velocity 
And Have a Happy New Year
And Have a Happy New Year
Chapter 8: Wanderlust
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 8: Wanderlust
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
The central tower's lighting was dimming as day smoothly began to wane into night. Regan McKinley and Seth Fiegal left the downtown heat behind them and climbed the side of a valley that had been sculpted like the rest of the terrain into the colony's floor. As the light of the day faded, they could begin to see the walls of the colony arcing upwards before disappearing into the summer haze. Regan was used to the view and it failed to impress her, she spent most of the trip texting Lily Emerson, only putting her phone away to creep under the overgrown brush and japanese knotweed to get to the hole in the fence of the municipal water tower.
Surrounded by brush, the tower was a hundred meter tall construction of rusted iron and corrugated steel built sometime during the late 2150s. Thick hoses constructed of some flexible nanomaterial connected the top of the metal bulb to the central tower far above, but their exact terminal was lost into the evening haze. Regan had used this place as a hangout for years, and it was pretty much the go-to hideout for her circle of friends. No one had ever bothered them there in all the time they'd gone, and despite the no trespassing signs, they always felt pretty secure.
The metal legs of the tower, the ferrocrete platforms, and the smooth ferrocrete pad beneath the tower were all covered in layers and layers of graffiti that Lily and Regan had applied over the years. Regan perched in her usual spot atop one of the giant raised ferrocrete feet of the tower and lit a cigarette, waiting for Lily Emerson and Harper Jordan to show up. It was summer and the light would stay bright for a long time, even if Regan had planned on trying to make her curfew of sunoff, which she never put any effort into actually doing.
Regan had just finished her first cigarette and realized she was in the process of lighting a second when the silence finally got to her.
"So shit isn't going well with Helen it looks like," she said to Seth.
The boy looked at her but didn't respond, he just took another drag of his own cigarette.
Regan pushed harder, "what are you going to do about it, like, really?"
He shook his head. "I dunno Regan. With custody and everything…" Custody of Caleb was the elephant in the room. Caleb was Helen's, while Seth had been a product of his father's prior marriage. If Helen divorced Seth's dad, chances were that she'd get custody of Caleb.
"You could always go with Helen. She'd probably let you, right?" Regan suggested.
"I'm not sure if I want to go with Helen." He laughed somewhat bitterly, smoke accompanying his exhalation. "You know, the truth is, my dad's an asshole, but at least he's honest about it. Helen's constantly on this high horse where she thinks we're this perfect family. And like, anything that makes us deviate from that must be someone's fault. Someone other than her that is."
"If it makes you feel any better, my parents are kinda the same, except that I'm the hate sponge for all their disappointments." Regan shrugged and took another drag of her smoke.
"Yeah but you're the hate sponge for everyone's disappointments Regan." A voice called from above the pair with a laugh. Harper Jordan was hanging from the ladder leading to the top of the tower, feet planted, leaning against the metal cage that enclosed the ladder at the bottom.
"Very funny, how'd you get up there without us seeing you?" Regan fumed.
"I beat you here and went up top." He shrugged and climbed onto the chain link cage, lifting himself over it and dropping to the ground with a thump.
Regan exchanged a look with Seth, and the boy just pursed his lips in irritation.
"Why didn't you text when you got here?" Harper asked.
"I figured we were the first ones." Regan replied, "is Lily here already too?"
"Nah, I haven't seen her." He pulled a vaporizer out of a pocket on his jacket and blew a huge cloud of faintly sparkling blue smoke at her.
That managed to get a laugh out of Seth.
"So you guys hear the news?" Harper said, blue smoke still escaping with his words.
"That the Martians discovered aliens?" Regan replied. "Yeah, I heard, I assumed that's why you wanted to hang out."
"Wait what, aliens?" Seth blinked rapidly, "Like, actual for real aliens?"
"Yeah, remember like, a week ago, when the Martians suddenly started moving half their fleet without explaining anything?" Regan queried.
Seth nodded.
"They just announced they've met intelligent life and made contact with it." Harper said.
"Well fuck. What does that mean?" Seth blanched.
Regan pursed her lips. "It doesn't mean anything."
"That's great Miss Nihilism, but I mean for us," Seth snorted, "This could change everything. There's already all these new ships docked up on the High Ridge…"
"I don't know Seth!" The girl replied more venomously than she'd intended. "You're right, this could change everything, and everything's already changing really fast. I don't know what's going to happen, and yeah, that's pretty fucking scary."
"Spookyscary. I'm texting Lily and seeing where she's at." Harper's eyes wandered off as he focused on empty space. Regan was rather envious of his implants. She couldn't afford her own, and her parents made a disgusted face when the idea of implants came up, so she was stuck with her phone for the foreseeable future.
Seth sighed. "I'm sorry Regan, it's just kind of a lot, you know?"
"Yeah." Regan exhaled. "You wanna get food or some shit? I don't really wanna go home and deal with my parents for a while."
"Yeah sure, but I don't want to go back downtown, it was already weird with all the soldiers around, everyone's going to be talking about this." Seth said, "I just need some time to update my worldviews."
" Why don't we just meet Lily at that deli up on Meadow Street." Regan offered, "Its out of the way, and I think you can get sandwiches there?"
"Yeah you can." Harper said. "Also Lily is stuck at home. We should probably go bust her out."
"Ugh, is her mom drunk again?" Regan asked, taking a drag of her smoke.
"She hasn't said it, but probably." Harper sighed.
"Well it's gonna be dark soon, so why don't we go rescue Lily, get something to eat, then, what?" Seth asked, "Cause I don't want to go home yet either."
"Lets just wander around in the woods or something." Regan said. The light from the central tower was by now dim enough to begin to make out the tangled mechanical structures lurking beneath the light fixtures. Through the haze of evening air, the lights of Mt. Washington were coming on like distant fireflies across the vast gulf of air above their heads. Seth nodded and the two of them looked at Harper.
The other boy just shrugged, "Meh, it's not like my grandma will actually notice I'm gone." He said, answering their unspoken question.
The trio exchanged no further words, they just quietly collected their things and slipped out of their bolthole the same way they'd slept in.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hohmann Transfer Orbit
3.2 AUs from Epsilon Tauri
February 2219
Owen blinked back the sweat from his eyes, unable to wipe the perspiration away in the cramped confines of his spacesuit. He took a deep breath and blew it out over his face, trying to keep cool. He fumbled through his gloves to attach another bolt into the erector set that was the Stonebreaker's drive ring.
The ship was coasting across the Epsilon Tauri system on a long arcing transfer orbit that would eventually take them out to Tsukuyomi, the other planet in the system. Of course, if their schedules for the repair and refitting of the ship were accurate, they would be leaving long before they ever saw that world.
Which, Owen mused, was probably for the better: planetary satellites had spotted another gigantic alien mining ship there.
They rode the asteroid Murphy crashed them into for for a week, using it as cover from the worst of the debris that had inundated Amateru's orbits. They had then used shaped charges to blow off a roughly plate sized hunk of the stone, and welded onto the still rather mangled bow of the Stoneburner, letting it act like a huge iron umbrella for the ship.
Owen lifted his arm and drew in the impact wrench floating on a strap attached to his wrist. He threaded his gloved fingers into the oversized trigger guard and adjusted his magnetized footing on the hull before quickly tightening the bolts on the joint assembly he was positioned at.
"Alice, pylon ten is fully anchored." He said finally into his microphone as he pushed himself gently off of the hull.
"Good," his daughter's voice answered over the suit speaker. "Davis just finished up eleven, and Anders is half done with twelve. We're almost ready to start anchoring the ring itself to the pylons."
"Should we start moving the ring into position when Anders finishes his section?" Owen asked.
Alice didn't answer him for a moment, when he was about to ask again to make sure he'd actually keyed up, Kaito's voice issued from the speaker. "No. Everyone come inside as you finish your assigned work for now. Owen, please report to my office once you're back inside."
Owen frowned, something about Kaito's tone made him rather uneasy. He changed frequencies and pinged Alice's receiver unit. "Something going on?" He asked her.
"We're not in danger or anything, I just want to sit down and have a serious conversation where we go over all of our potential options at this point." Alice said.
Owen was fairly certain he knew what that conversation would be about. Alice was still advocating that they try and talk to the aliens.
"Alright." He said into his microphone, then sighed and shook his head once he stopped keying up. The old foreman reached the top of the pylon on his slow drift upwards, and he pushed hard off of it, expertly propelling himself back towards the airlock without using any of his thruster fuel. "I'm on my way."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
When the Constellation Project was first conceived of by UN architects and shipbuilders in the latter decades of the twenty first century, the cold war with Mars had been underway for nearly fifty years. The actual construction of the ships and the real pressure to construct them didn't come until later, when the outer planets broke away from Earth and Mars and began threatening the inner worlds with asteroid bombardment if they refused to accept their sovereignty.
The vessel designs predated the conflict in the outer system though. Instead, they were designed in every way to be a final middle finger to the Martian Socialist Republic. Each of the colony landscapes was modelled on a scaled down version of Martian topography; in the case of Regan's colony, the strip of land she lived on was modelled after Valles Marineris.
Lily Emerson lived near the top of that valley, in what had been designed at one time as an area of relative affluence. The houses here were larger, but the sense of decay and neglect that suffused the downtown seeped up valley slopes as well. Lanes were lined with ancient willows, their fronds overgrown and draping into cracked and potholed street. As the artificial sun at the colony's heart dimmed into a dull red glow, the streetlamps along the tree lined streets began coming on, casting areas of shadow and light around the thick branches.
Lily's parents had divorced when she was ten: her father had come out as gay and ran off to join the UNDF and see the galaxy. In his absence, her mother simply collapsed in on herself. She worked from home, drank furiously, and took up religion. Never a good mixture in Regan's opinion. She thought Lily had managed to weather it all like a champion though, and Regan generally considered the other girl to be a more emotionally balanced person then she herself was.
Regan pounded on the door of Lily's two story home, hitting it with her fist, knocking like a police officer would, "Mrs. Emmerson open up!"
Harper and Seth stood a safe distance back from the door, arms crossed.
Regan continued pounding even as the door opened and she nearly fell inside. Lily's mother stood in the threshold, spittle leaking from her lip.
"Regan?" She slurred out, "What do you want?" Her voice turned instantly bitter and accusatory. Despite being almost a head taller than Lily's mother, Regan shrank from the intensity of her tone. She took a breath and tried to keep her voice calm and diplomatic.
"I want to hang out with Lily, can she come with us?" the teenager offered.
Regan thought the older woman might be considering it, but realized just in time how green her face was getting and just about managed to step back far enough to avoid when she puked on the carpet.
The teenager sighed and stepped past the intoxicated woman, shouting up the stairs for Lily, and then started helping her mother over to the couch, where she curled up forlornly, eyes staring into the middle distance.
Lily came downstairs, her green eyes going from Regan and her mother to the puke in the doorway, to the two boys still standing on the front walk. She sighed and went to the kitchen to fetch cleaning supplies. By the time the vomit had been cleaned up, Lily's mother had fallen asleep on the sofa.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hohmann Transfer Orbit
3.2 AUs from Epsilon Tauri
February 2219
Owen drifted hesitantly through the threshold into Kaito's office. Alice and Kaito were both already present, and staring daggers at each other. They were standing, which was to say, floating, while their feet were magnetically secured to the deck.
"Did I come at a bad time?" Owen said lightly, stroking his beard as he floated in.
"I think this is a fine time Owen." Kaito said calmly, his hands clasped at his wrists. "How long until we can return to Aldebaran?"
"We could have had the ring installed by now if you hadn't pulled my crew inside honestly. Maybe seven, eight more hours for the engineering team to go over the junction linkups?" Owen offered. "But I was thinking, we might not want to go straight to Aldebaran."
Kaito seemed to sputter a bit, which was all the encouragement Alice needed to launch into her idea. "Look, I know we can't endanger the ship. All I'm suggesting is that we program a Lighthorse to stay behind after we leave and let it try and signal the aliens itself for a while. Then it can return to Aldebaran and tell us what it learned."
Kaito ground his teeth together and growled out, "And what is your suggestion Owen?"
Owen held up his hands. "I think we should take a detour to Gamma Tauri where the Jabberwocky is mining."
Kaito blinked, and seemed to consider it for a moment. "Why?" He asked.
"Look, we know almost nothing about these aliens, but we know they're at two of the worlds in this system, and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg already went dark. I think there's a good chance that if there's aliens here, than there might be aliens in Gamma Tauri as well. If we go to Aldebaran, that's five months one way in warp, than five months back out to Gamma Tauri to warn to Jabberwocky. But we're only twenty days from Gamma Tauri here, we could pop over there and raise the alarm before heading back towards Aldebaran." Owen explained.
Kaito nodded. "Captain Arrari would probably appreciate the heads up if there's a chance these aliens will show up in Gamma Tauri. But we can just send a Lighthorse there, why take the whole Stoneburner?"
"In case we're too late and the aliens are already there. Our showing up could be the difference between half their crew surviving and having a total loss of life." Owen answered dispassionately.
"You think these aliens are responsible for the loss of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg?" Kaito said.
"I'd be willing to bet money on it." Owen nodded.
"I still think we should try communicating with them." Alice insisted. "This could all be a big misunderstanding and they might be willing to work out shared mining access. We don't know."
"We're not diplomats Alice, we're not even access negotiators. We wouldn't be handling a mining rights dispute between other humans, we'd defer it upwards within the company and I'm perfectly inclined to do that now." Kaito crossed his arms.
"We absolutely would be handling it ourselves if it was other humans and you know it. You hate deferring things to the company." Alice met his gaze with her own.
Kaito sighed and let his body go limp, not that it actually affected his postured since he was still locked to the decking by his magnetic boots. "Alice, this whole thing scares me, I don't trust these aliens one bit, I don't want to do anything that might make things worse."
"You really think just saying 'hey, we exist' is going to make things that much worse?" Alice asked.
"It might!" Kaito insisted. "These are aliens! We don't know how they think, announcing our presence might make them decide to start systematically exterminating our species."
"That's a bit alarmist don't you think?" Alice wrinkled her nose, "I mean how likely is that really to happen?"
"I don't know, and that's what concerns me the most." Kaito answered. "I don't know that the chance of it happening isn't zero, I don't even know what the chance of it happening is, and we don't know enough to even start estimating what the chances of that happening are. But there is a chance it could happen, and as long as that's the case, the safest thing to do is nothing."
Alice looked imploringly at Owen, hoping she could find an ally in him.
"Sorry Alice." He said with a shrug. "I agree with Kaito on this. We're miners not alien diplomats. If you really want to talk to the aliens, I'm sure there'll be a mission going out to do just that once we get to Aldebaran and tell everyone about this."
"They might be gone by then." She whined. "This is the chance of a lifetime. We could go down in history as the first people to make contact with alien life."
"Or," Kaito offered, "We could go down in history as the first people to be killed by alien life. We're not doing it and that's final."
Alice deflated somewhat and grumpily snapped back with "Fine!" She spun and stomped out of the room, her magnetic boots banging on the decking as she stormed off.
Kaito and Owen exchanged a look between them, Owen shook his head and resisted the urge to chuckle.
"She's your daughter, how do you deal with her when she gets like this?" Kaito asked Owen after a moment.
Owen did chuckle then, unable to hold it back any longer. "She's your wife," he laughed, "if you figure it out be sure to let me know."
"Hah, I might keep that as proprietary husband information." Kaito snorted.
"So how do you feel about that detour to Gamma Tauri?" Owen asked.
"I don't really want to do it, but I'd feel awful if something happened to Jabberwocky that we could have prevented or tried to prevent, so yeah we're going." Kaito answered.
"I'd better go see to the warp drive than." Owen nodded, and retreated from the office.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
By the time the teenagers managed to slip out of Lily's house, the night had begun to settle in fully. The sky had darkened to a bruised purple, lit only by the dull red glow of the waste heat radiating off the central tower, and the shape of the cylindrical colony became apparent as the light dimmed. The distant skyscrapers in the city of Mt. Washington created artificial constellations over their heads; the artificial stars twinkled in the twilight, their light distorted by the vast cavern of air.
"So we just gonna stay out all night then?" Lily asked as they wandered down the middle of a deserted suburban street.
"I think that's the plan," Regan answered. "I definitely don't wanna go home," she shrugged, lighting another cigarette from her pack.
"Well, it's kind of perfect out right now." Lily said, stretching her arms. Regan had to agree with her. They could see all the lamps turning on along the distant country roads as the ground curved upwards to arch over their heads. The streetlights an ocean of glass away twinkled far above them, the central tower was a dark smear across the sky, and the temperature had fallen to that perfectly comfortable summer night level.
"I wish it was like this all the time, I might never go home." Seth said with a laugh.
"Yeah, too bad about winter and all that." Harper responded. Despite living in an artificial colony, there were still mechanically generated seasons and weather.
"I wish they could just keep it like this. Dark and warm, but not too warm." Seth continued. "Just leave it on the setting it's on right now."
"All the plants would die." Harper replied automatically. "We have it set up the way it is for a reason."
"Yeah I know." Seth admitted, "I can dream though.
The deli loomed up out of the evening darkness as they approached, its brightly lit interior shining out into the night. Regan snubbed out her half smoked cigarette and they strolled inside.
The teens each took turns ordering food, then sat down in a corner booth to wait for it to be prepared. Besides themselves and the one employee working the counter, the place was empty.
Regan was browsing the social media streams on her phone when her mother started texting her in all capitals, asking where she was and demanding she return home at once. She just sighed and turned off her phone before she started getting calls.
"I'm going to be grounded to hell and back." She grumbled as she shoved her phone back into her pocket.
"I think you actually have to pay attention to your parents for that to actually have an effect. It's not like they'd physically stop you from leaving." Seth said, leaning against the counter as they waited for their food.
"Nah, but they'll take my phone and my computer, make it a pain in the ass to do anything," she shrugged, "it's whatever, I'll just use your computer."
"Your respect for my property is truly astounding." Seth answered with a chuckle.
The deli's solitary employee brought their orders out, and the teens quickly fled the empty store into the night. The street was quiet save for the humming of the street lights and the quiet, ceaseless chirping of a million crickets. Regan relit her cigarette as they strolled off into the darkness.
The group ate their sandwiches and walked in silence, wandering away from downtown Lincolnville and heading along the top of the valley where the land grew wild and sparsely populated.
"You know, I'm really pretty sick of this shitty little town." Regan said after a long period of quiet, taking a drag of her smoke. "It's okay right now, at night, with you guys, but like...I really kinda hate this place."
"I know what you mean." Lily answered. "Nothing ever happens here, it's like this place is in stasis. Its 2050 here, forever."
The designers of the Constellation Project colonies had envisioned each colony as carrying the seed belonging to one of the participating nations. A snapshot of life in 2050 in a particular nation was used as the template for the street layouts, the city buildings, and to some degree the larger landscaping. Colony 15 of Jericho Ridge had dropped American towns, forests, and farmlands onto scaled down Martian regolith, creating the environment Regan and her friends called home.
"This place didn't even exist in 2050." Harper responded with a laugh, "It was just modeled after.." He held up his fingers like quotation marks, "Late modern american living."
"It was built in 2104 right?" Regan asked, she had always only half paid attention in history classes, "because of that war on earth?"
"The Gravity War wasn't fought on Earth." Harper corrected her, "It was the only war fought entirely in space. The colonies at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune signed the Tartarus Accord and declared independence from Earth and Mars. Things got real tense and everyone thought the Earth was for sure going to get slagged, so the colonies were built as lifeboats for all the various UN nations contributing."
"I bet it must really have been something else to see this place in its heyday." Seth admitted. "It used to be better here."
"Dude, this place was born shitty." Regan retorted with a snort, "it was engineered to be shitty from the start."
"You're too cynical Regan. No, back before FTL was invented? People used to care about this place." Seth remarked.
"Yeah, as a time capsule so that in a few hundred more years, someone could start up Planet USA. We're just human seeds, nobody actually gave a fuck about us." Regan unconsciously raised her voice as she started to feel the low, ever present anger at her circumstances.
"I dunno," Lily said with a shrug, "I think it might have actually been pretty nice here back then. There were all sorts of little shops and things. Like that place the McGuires live now? Pretty sure that was a barbershop back in the day."
"If you like living in an amusement park without the rides maybe." Regan insisted.
Regan turned and nearly walked into a chain link gate. The intersection they had just passed through terminated at one point with a gated off section. Signage on the fence and gate proclaimed the area as Constellation Project Engineering property. It was also liberally sprinkled with bright red 'No Trespassing' signs along its periphery.
Despite all the effort that had at one time gone into securing the location, it was now rather inadequately contained. Large sections of the fence had simply fallen inward, and the chain link had completely separated from the metal fence posts in several locations.
"Whoa what is this?" Regan asked, running her hands along the rough metal sign.
"Some sort of old colony project site." Seth offered. He fished out a flashlight from his backpack and shone it into the trees beyond the fence. "It looks abandoned, let's check it out."
Seth and Harper started climbing over a fallen section of the fence, and Regan was quick to follow after them.
"Are you guys sure this is a good idea?" Lily asked. "What if there's something dangerous in there?"
"We'll be careful." Regan said absentmindedly, already turning to follow the two boys as they started down the somewhat overgrown road into the forest.
Lily sighed and hiked up her skirt so she could follow them over the fence and hurried to catch up.
The trees on either side of the path were thick conifers that smelled richly of pine needles. Their dark branches blocked out much of the streetlight above them, giving the narrow lane an ominous, haunted feeling.
A low slung ferrocrete structure emerged ahead of them. The building had no windows, and the rusted doors were all set into the ground, giving the place the impression of being the entrance to some larger subsurface complex.
"What do you suppose this place is?" Regan asked as they crossed the overgrown lot surrounding the outpost.
"It looks like an access point for some sort of underground service, maybe electrical or water reclamation." Harper replied, quick to be the font of information even when he wasn't sure what he was talking about. He hopped down the stairs to the door well and shoulder checked the rusted metal. The hinges on the door shrieked in protest and the entire door deformed inwards on itself, separating the locking mechanism from the doorframe.
"Oi!" Lily shouted, "What have I told you about damaging government property Harper Jordan?!"
He shrugged and gently pushed the door open with his toe. "Its open."
Seth was quick to follow him down and pushed past him inside, nearly falling down the stairs inside the door. "Whoa!" He said quickly as he grabbed onto the handrails to catch himself. "It's like some sort of bunker."
"Okay, this we definitely need to check out." Regan said with a grin. "You have all the stuff right?" She asked Seth.
"Yeah of course," He answered, "when I figured we'd be out all night it seemed prudent to bring the full kit." The kit he referred to contained everything a group of teenagers might need to get into mischief. It contained electronic lockpicks, a crowbar, flashlights, rope, bolt cutters, spray paint, and all sorts of other miscellaneous items, any one of which would earn them more than a frown from the police.
Lily hesitated at the threshold to the room, "Something about this place feels weird, I don't know if this is a good idea."
"You think it might be haunted or something?" Seth asked her. Both Seth and Lily were avid believers in the supernatural.
"I'm not sure." She said, running her fingers along the doorframe and slipping inside, feeling the ferrocrete surface. "I sense something though."
"Spookyscary." Harper said as he shut the door behind him, the last one inside.
Regan charged ahead down the stairs, which descended a surprising depth into the soil before terminating in another door, one locked by a working electronic security system. She tried to open the door anyway, in case it had simply been left unlocked, but it was secured.
"This one's locked," she said, examining the locking mechanism with her flashlight. The other teens started to crowd around the door as they descended the stairs but Seth pushed past them and crouched down beside Regan.
"Oh wow, this is like, original design, unaltered since the colony was built." Seth said with some excitement. "I can't believe there are any of these still in use."
"So you can bypass it then right?" Harper asked him.
"Oh yeah," He grinned, "I can absolutely bypass it." He fished around in his backpack and extracted a small computing device. The electronic lockpick worked by assaulting the electronic lock system with requests for access at such a speed that it would either randomly guess the correct answer in short order or cause the computer in the lock to have a seizure and die. Newer systems were networked against that sort of intrusion, but older systems could still be accessed that way. Seth pressed the lockpick to the place a keycard would normally be placed, and activated it. There was a moment of collectively held breaths as they watched the duel between the lockpick computer and the lock's computer, before the locking mechanisms gave way with a surprisingly heavy series of clanks and bangs.
"After you?" Seth said somewhat nervously.
Regan shrugged and twisted the handle on the door. As soon as she pulled the handle's internal mechanism from the doorframe, the door flew inwards, ripped out of her hands by a sudden movement of air. The door at the top of the stairs banged open and a great gust of wind howled down the stairs, threatening to suck them into the darkness beyond. Dust and debris from the forest outside came spiralling down the stairs after them, giving the air a gritty taste and stinging their eyes. The temperature fell rapidly as the air settled again, depositing a thin layer of hoarfrost on everything around them.
"What the actual fuck?" Seth said, laughing nervously as he shined his flashlight into the room beyond the hatch. A breeze continued to blow in from outside, drawing air deeper underground.
"Okay, that's actually pretty creepy." Regan said anxiously as she crossed the threshold into the room beyond the stairwell. The room she found herself in was some sort of preparation atrium, not quite a waiting room, but something close to it. Lockers and clothing racks were mounted to the walls, along with rather utilitarian looking benches and changing cubicles.
"There's something really weird going on here," she announced finally.
"I thought you didn't believe in ghosts Regan?" Seth teased.
"No I think Regan's right." Harper said quietly. "Something does seem weird about this place. Does it feel colder to anyone?"
Lily pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the thermostat. "Weird." she said simply, eyeing the results on her phone suspiciously. "You know when spirits manifest, they consume energy out of the air to do it, which causes the temperature to drop. If there's a spirit here, then they just drew a lot of power out of the air."
"Lily, that's completely ridiculous." Harper said calmly, walking past Regan and into the next room. "It's even colder in here," he said.
"Have you ever seen anything like this?" Lily asked, snapping pictures of the frosted corridor on her phone.
"Only in ghost stories." Seth answered. They walked down the short hallway where they found the first fork in their path. The hallway continued straight, but a stairwell forked off it at a right angle, descending further into the skin of the colony.
Regan didn't believe in ghosts, but the place was measurably colder than the outside. It was like a freezer in there, despite there being no obvious equipment at work to cool the air. The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she could feel the goosebumps slowly spreading down her back. The breeze continued down the stairs, whistling along the corridors, and it drew them onwards.
The door at the bottom of the stairs had been left open, but it was the room beyond it that caught all their attention. A huge row of tall windows dominated the space, looking out into an even more cavernous chamber beyond. The floor of that huge chamber had partly yawned open, stuck in a frozen grin, with only darkness and stars visible beyond it. A series of heavy duty hatches covered in warnings were placed on either side of the room. Their labels were obvious. 'Airlock.' 'Pressure Warning' 'Vacuum Suit Required.'
Regan's eyes darted around the room, before finally settling on the thing that bothered her the most about this entire arrangement: one panel of the windows were missing, in their place was a tarp of some sort, one that was now continuously flapping in the rather strong winds at the bottom of the building.
"Where does it go down there?" Lily called from the top of the stairs.
Regan looked back to the windows. "It goes," she fumbled for words as her mind tripped over the implications. "It goes outside. It leads to space."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
The central tower's lighting was dimming as day smoothly began to wane into night. Regan McKinley and Seth Fiegal left the downtown heat behind them and climbed the side of a valley that had been sculpted like the rest of the terrain into the colony's floor. As the light of the day faded, they could begin to see the walls of the colony arcing upwards before disappearing into the summer haze. Regan was used to the view and it failed to impress her, she spent most of the trip texting Lily Emerson, only putting her phone away to creep under the overgrown brush and japanese knotweed to get to the hole in the fence of the municipal water tower.
Surrounded by brush, the tower was a hundred meter tall construction of rusted iron and corrugated steel built sometime during the late 2150s. Thick hoses constructed of some flexible nanomaterial connected the top of the metal bulb to the central tower far above, but their exact terminal was lost into the evening haze. Regan had used this place as a hangout for years, and it was pretty much the go-to hideout for her circle of friends. No one had ever bothered them there in all the time they'd gone, and despite the no trespassing signs, they always felt pretty secure.
The metal legs of the tower, the ferrocrete platforms, and the smooth ferrocrete pad beneath the tower were all covered in layers and layers of graffiti that Lily and Regan had applied over the years. Regan perched in her usual spot atop one of the giant raised ferrocrete feet of the tower and lit a cigarette, waiting for Lily Emerson and Harper Jordan to show up. It was summer and the light would stay bright for a long time, even if Regan had planned on trying to make her curfew of sunoff, which she never put any effort into actually doing.
Regan had just finished her first cigarette and realized she was in the process of lighting a second when the silence finally got to her.
"So shit isn't going well with Helen it looks like," she said to Seth.
The boy looked at her but didn't respond, he just took another drag of his own cigarette.
Regan pushed harder, "what are you going to do about it, like, really?"
He shook his head. "I dunno Regan. With custody and everything…" Custody of Caleb was the elephant in the room. Caleb was Helen's, while Seth had been a product of his father's prior marriage. If Helen divorced Seth's dad, chances were that she'd get custody of Caleb.
"You could always go with Helen. She'd probably let you, right?" Regan suggested.
"I'm not sure if I want to go with Helen." He laughed somewhat bitterly, smoke accompanying his exhalation. "You know, the truth is, my dad's an asshole, but at least he's honest about it. Helen's constantly on this high horse where she thinks we're this perfect family. And like, anything that makes us deviate from that must be someone's fault. Someone other than her that is."
"If it makes you feel any better, my parents are kinda the same, except that I'm the hate sponge for all their disappointments." Regan shrugged and took another drag of her smoke.
"Yeah but you're the hate sponge for everyone's disappointments Regan." A voice called from above the pair with a laugh. Harper Jordan was hanging from the ladder leading to the top of the tower, feet planted, leaning against the metal cage that enclosed the ladder at the bottom.
"Very funny, how'd you get up there without us seeing you?" Regan fumed.
"I beat you here and went up top." He shrugged and climbed onto the chain link cage, lifting himself over it and dropping to the ground with a thump.
Regan exchanged a look with Seth, and the boy just pursed his lips in irritation.
"Why didn't you text when you got here?" Harper asked.
"I figured we were the first ones." Regan replied, "is Lily here already too?"
"Nah, I haven't seen her." He pulled a vaporizer out of a pocket on his jacket and blew a huge cloud of faintly sparkling blue smoke at her.
That managed to get a laugh out of Seth.
"So you guys hear the news?" Harper said, blue smoke still escaping with his words.
"That the Martians discovered aliens?" Regan replied. "Yeah, I heard, I assumed that's why you wanted to hang out."
"Wait what, aliens?" Seth blinked rapidly, "Like, actual for real aliens?"
"Yeah, remember like, a week ago, when the Martians suddenly started moving half their fleet without explaining anything?" Regan queried.
Seth nodded.
"They just announced they've met intelligent life and made contact with it." Harper said.
"Well fuck. What does that mean?" Seth blanched.
Regan pursed her lips. "It doesn't mean anything."
"That's great Miss Nihilism, but I mean for us," Seth snorted, "This could change everything. There's already all these new ships docked up on the High Ridge…"
"I don't know Seth!" The girl replied more venomously than she'd intended. "You're right, this could change everything, and everything's already changing really fast. I don't know what's going to happen, and yeah, that's pretty fucking scary."
"Spookyscary. I'm texting Lily and seeing where she's at." Harper's eyes wandered off as he focused on empty space. Regan was rather envious of his implants. She couldn't afford her own, and her parents made a disgusted face when the idea of implants came up, so she was stuck with her phone for the foreseeable future.
Seth sighed. "I'm sorry Regan, it's just kind of a lot, you know?"
"Yeah." Regan exhaled. "You wanna get food or some shit? I don't really wanna go home and deal with my parents for a while."
"Yeah sure, but I don't want to go back downtown, it was already weird with all the soldiers around, everyone's going to be talking about this." Seth said, "I just need some time to update my worldviews."
" Why don't we just meet Lily at that deli up on Meadow Street." Regan offered, "Its out of the way, and I think you can get sandwiches there?"
"Yeah you can." Harper said. "Also Lily is stuck at home. We should probably go bust her out."
"Ugh, is her mom drunk again?" Regan asked, taking a drag of her smoke.
"She hasn't said it, but probably." Harper sighed.
"Well it's gonna be dark soon, so why don't we go rescue Lily, get something to eat, then, what?" Seth asked, "Cause I don't want to go home yet either."
"Lets just wander around in the woods or something." Regan said. The light from the central tower was by now dim enough to begin to make out the tangled mechanical structures lurking beneath the light fixtures. Through the haze of evening air, the lights of Mt. Washington were coming on like distant fireflies across the vast gulf of air above their heads. Seth nodded and the two of them looked at Harper.
The other boy just shrugged, "Meh, it's not like my grandma will actually notice I'm gone." He said, answering their unspoken question.
The trio exchanged no further words, they just quietly collected their things and slipped out of their bolthole the same way they'd slept in.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hohmann Transfer Orbit
3.2 AUs from Epsilon Tauri
February 2219
Owen blinked back the sweat from his eyes, unable to wipe the perspiration away in the cramped confines of his spacesuit. He took a deep breath and blew it out over his face, trying to keep cool. He fumbled through his gloves to attach another bolt into the erector set that was the Stonebreaker's drive ring.
The ship was coasting across the Epsilon Tauri system on a long arcing transfer orbit that would eventually take them out to Tsukuyomi, the other planet in the system. Of course, if their schedules for the repair and refitting of the ship were accurate, they would be leaving long before they ever saw that world.
Which, Owen mused, was probably for the better: planetary satellites had spotted another gigantic alien mining ship there.
They rode the asteroid Murphy crashed them into for for a week, using it as cover from the worst of the debris that had inundated Amateru's orbits. They had then used shaped charges to blow off a roughly plate sized hunk of the stone, and welded onto the still rather mangled bow of the Stoneburner, letting it act like a huge iron umbrella for the ship.
Owen lifted his arm and drew in the impact wrench floating on a strap attached to his wrist. He threaded his gloved fingers into the oversized trigger guard and adjusted his magnetized footing on the hull before quickly tightening the bolts on the joint assembly he was positioned at.
"Alice, pylon ten is fully anchored." He said finally into his microphone as he pushed himself gently off of the hull.
"Good," his daughter's voice answered over the suit speaker. "Davis just finished up eleven, and Anders is half done with twelve. We're almost ready to start anchoring the ring itself to the pylons."
"Should we start moving the ring into position when Anders finishes his section?" Owen asked.
Alice didn't answer him for a moment, when he was about to ask again to make sure he'd actually keyed up, Kaito's voice issued from the speaker. "No. Everyone come inside as you finish your assigned work for now. Owen, please report to my office once you're back inside."
Owen frowned, something about Kaito's tone made him rather uneasy. He changed frequencies and pinged Alice's receiver unit. "Something going on?" He asked her.
"We're not in danger or anything, I just want to sit down and have a serious conversation where we go over all of our potential options at this point." Alice said.
Owen was fairly certain he knew what that conversation would be about. Alice was still advocating that they try and talk to the aliens.
"Alright." He said into his microphone, then sighed and shook his head once he stopped keying up. The old foreman reached the top of the pylon on his slow drift upwards, and he pushed hard off of it, expertly propelling himself back towards the airlock without using any of his thruster fuel. "I'm on my way."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
When the Constellation Project was first conceived of by UN architects and shipbuilders in the latter decades of the twenty first century, the cold war with Mars had been underway for nearly fifty years. The actual construction of the ships and the real pressure to construct them didn't come until later, when the outer planets broke away from Earth and Mars and began threatening the inner worlds with asteroid bombardment if they refused to accept their sovereignty.
The vessel designs predated the conflict in the outer system though. Instead, they were designed in every way to be a final middle finger to the Martian Socialist Republic. Each of the colony landscapes was modelled on a scaled down version of Martian topography; in the case of Regan's colony, the strip of land she lived on was modelled after Valles Marineris.
Lily Emerson lived near the top of that valley, in what had been designed at one time as an area of relative affluence. The houses here were larger, but the sense of decay and neglect that suffused the downtown seeped up valley slopes as well. Lanes were lined with ancient willows, their fronds overgrown and draping into cracked and potholed street. As the artificial sun at the colony's heart dimmed into a dull red glow, the streetlamps along the tree lined streets began coming on, casting areas of shadow and light around the thick branches.
Lily's parents had divorced when she was ten: her father had come out as gay and ran off to join the UNDF and see the galaxy. In his absence, her mother simply collapsed in on herself. She worked from home, drank furiously, and took up religion. Never a good mixture in Regan's opinion. She thought Lily had managed to weather it all like a champion though, and Regan generally considered the other girl to be a more emotionally balanced person then she herself was.
Regan pounded on the door of Lily's two story home, hitting it with her fist, knocking like a police officer would, "Mrs. Emmerson open up!"
Harper and Seth stood a safe distance back from the door, arms crossed.
Regan continued pounding even as the door opened and she nearly fell inside. Lily's mother stood in the threshold, spittle leaking from her lip.
"Regan?" She slurred out, "What do you want?" Her voice turned instantly bitter and accusatory. Despite being almost a head taller than Lily's mother, Regan shrank from the intensity of her tone. She took a breath and tried to keep her voice calm and diplomatic.
"I want to hang out with Lily, can she come with us?" the teenager offered.
Regan thought the older woman might be considering it, but realized just in time how green her face was getting and just about managed to step back far enough to avoid when she puked on the carpet.
The teenager sighed and stepped past the intoxicated woman, shouting up the stairs for Lily, and then started helping her mother over to the couch, where she curled up forlornly, eyes staring into the middle distance.
Lily came downstairs, her green eyes going from Regan and her mother to the puke in the doorway, to the two boys still standing on the front walk. She sighed and went to the kitchen to fetch cleaning supplies. By the time the vomit had been cleaned up, Lily's mother had fallen asleep on the sofa.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hohmann Transfer Orbit
3.2 AUs from Epsilon Tauri
February 2219
Owen drifted hesitantly through the threshold into Kaito's office. Alice and Kaito were both already present, and staring daggers at each other. They were standing, which was to say, floating, while their feet were magnetically secured to the deck.
"Did I come at a bad time?" Owen said lightly, stroking his beard as he floated in.
"I think this is a fine time Owen." Kaito said calmly, his hands clasped at his wrists. "How long until we can return to Aldebaran?"
"We could have had the ring installed by now if you hadn't pulled my crew inside honestly. Maybe seven, eight more hours for the engineering team to go over the junction linkups?" Owen offered. "But I was thinking, we might not want to go straight to Aldebaran."
Kaito seemed to sputter a bit, which was all the encouragement Alice needed to launch into her idea. "Look, I know we can't endanger the ship. All I'm suggesting is that we program a Lighthorse to stay behind after we leave and let it try and signal the aliens itself for a while. Then it can return to Aldebaran and tell us what it learned."
Kaito ground his teeth together and growled out, "And what is your suggestion Owen?"
Owen held up his hands. "I think we should take a detour to Gamma Tauri where the Jabberwocky is mining."
Kaito blinked, and seemed to consider it for a moment. "Why?" He asked.
"Look, we know almost nothing about these aliens, but we know they're at two of the worlds in this system, and the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg already went dark. I think there's a good chance that if there's aliens here, than there might be aliens in Gamma Tauri as well. If we go to Aldebaran, that's five months one way in warp, than five months back out to Gamma Tauri to warn to Jabberwocky. But we're only twenty days from Gamma Tauri here, we could pop over there and raise the alarm before heading back towards Aldebaran." Owen explained.
Kaito nodded. "Captain Arrari would probably appreciate the heads up if there's a chance these aliens will show up in Gamma Tauri. But we can just send a Lighthorse there, why take the whole Stoneburner?"
"In case we're too late and the aliens are already there. Our showing up could be the difference between half their crew surviving and having a total loss of life." Owen answered dispassionately.
"You think these aliens are responsible for the loss of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg?" Kaito said.
"I'd be willing to bet money on it." Owen nodded.
"I still think we should try communicating with them." Alice insisted. "This could all be a big misunderstanding and they might be willing to work out shared mining access. We don't know."
"We're not diplomats Alice, we're not even access negotiators. We wouldn't be handling a mining rights dispute between other humans, we'd defer it upwards within the company and I'm perfectly inclined to do that now." Kaito crossed his arms.
"We absolutely would be handling it ourselves if it was other humans and you know it. You hate deferring things to the company." Alice met his gaze with her own.
Kaito sighed and let his body go limp, not that it actually affected his postured since he was still locked to the decking by his magnetic boots. "Alice, this whole thing scares me, I don't trust these aliens one bit, I don't want to do anything that might make things worse."
"You really think just saying 'hey, we exist' is going to make things that much worse?" Alice asked.
"It might!" Kaito insisted. "These are aliens! We don't know how they think, announcing our presence might make them decide to start systematically exterminating our species."
"That's a bit alarmist don't you think?" Alice wrinkled her nose, "I mean how likely is that really to happen?"
"I don't know, and that's what concerns me the most." Kaito answered. "I don't know that the chance of it happening isn't zero, I don't even know what the chance of it happening is, and we don't know enough to even start estimating what the chances of that happening are. But there is a chance it could happen, and as long as that's the case, the safest thing to do is nothing."
Alice looked imploringly at Owen, hoping she could find an ally in him.
"Sorry Alice." He said with a shrug. "I agree with Kaito on this. We're miners not alien diplomats. If you really want to talk to the aliens, I'm sure there'll be a mission going out to do just that once we get to Aldebaran and tell everyone about this."
"They might be gone by then." She whined. "This is the chance of a lifetime. We could go down in history as the first people to make contact with alien life."
"Or," Kaito offered, "We could go down in history as the first people to be killed by alien life. We're not doing it and that's final."
Alice deflated somewhat and grumpily snapped back with "Fine!" She spun and stomped out of the room, her magnetic boots banging on the decking as she stormed off.
Kaito and Owen exchanged a look between them, Owen shook his head and resisted the urge to chuckle.
"She's your daughter, how do you deal with her when she gets like this?" Kaito asked Owen after a moment.
Owen did chuckle then, unable to hold it back any longer. "She's your wife," he laughed, "if you figure it out be sure to let me know."
"Hah, I might keep that as proprietary husband information." Kaito snorted.
"So how do you feel about that detour to Gamma Tauri?" Owen asked.
"I don't really want to do it, but I'd feel awful if something happened to Jabberwocky that we could have prevented or tried to prevent, so yeah we're going." Kaito answered.
"I'd better go see to the warp drive than." Owen nodded, and retreated from the office.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
By the time the teenagers managed to slip out of Lily's house, the night had begun to settle in fully. The sky had darkened to a bruised purple, lit only by the dull red glow of the waste heat radiating off the central tower, and the shape of the cylindrical colony became apparent as the light dimmed. The distant skyscrapers in the city of Mt. Washington created artificial constellations over their heads; the artificial stars twinkled in the twilight, their light distorted by the vast cavern of air.
"So we just gonna stay out all night then?" Lily asked as they wandered down the middle of a deserted suburban street.
"I think that's the plan," Regan answered. "I definitely don't wanna go home," she shrugged, lighting another cigarette from her pack.
"Well, it's kind of perfect out right now." Lily said, stretching her arms. Regan had to agree with her. They could see all the lamps turning on along the distant country roads as the ground curved upwards to arch over their heads. The streetlights an ocean of glass away twinkled far above them, the central tower was a dark smear across the sky, and the temperature had fallen to that perfectly comfortable summer night level.
"I wish it was like this all the time, I might never go home." Seth said with a laugh.
"Yeah, too bad about winter and all that." Harper responded. Despite living in an artificial colony, there were still mechanically generated seasons and weather.
"I wish they could just keep it like this. Dark and warm, but not too warm." Seth continued. "Just leave it on the setting it's on right now."
"All the plants would die." Harper replied automatically. "We have it set up the way it is for a reason."
"Yeah I know." Seth admitted, "I can dream though.
The deli loomed up out of the evening darkness as they approached, its brightly lit interior shining out into the night. Regan snubbed out her half smoked cigarette and they strolled inside.
The teens each took turns ordering food, then sat down in a corner booth to wait for it to be prepared. Besides themselves and the one employee working the counter, the place was empty.
Regan was browsing the social media streams on her phone when her mother started texting her in all capitals, asking where she was and demanding she return home at once. She just sighed and turned off her phone before she started getting calls.
"I'm going to be grounded to hell and back." She grumbled as she shoved her phone back into her pocket.
"I think you actually have to pay attention to your parents for that to actually have an effect. It's not like they'd physically stop you from leaving." Seth said, leaning against the counter as they waited for their food.
"Nah, but they'll take my phone and my computer, make it a pain in the ass to do anything," she shrugged, "it's whatever, I'll just use your computer."
"Your respect for my property is truly astounding." Seth answered with a chuckle.
The deli's solitary employee brought their orders out, and the teens quickly fled the empty store into the night. The street was quiet save for the humming of the street lights and the quiet, ceaseless chirping of a million crickets. Regan relit her cigarette as they strolled off into the darkness.
The group ate their sandwiches and walked in silence, wandering away from downtown Lincolnville and heading along the top of the valley where the land grew wild and sparsely populated.
"You know, I'm really pretty sick of this shitty little town." Regan said after a long period of quiet, taking a drag of her smoke. "It's okay right now, at night, with you guys, but like...I really kinda hate this place."
"I know what you mean." Lily answered. "Nothing ever happens here, it's like this place is in stasis. Its 2050 here, forever."
The designers of the Constellation Project colonies had envisioned each colony as carrying the seed belonging to one of the participating nations. A snapshot of life in 2050 in a particular nation was used as the template for the street layouts, the city buildings, and to some degree the larger landscaping. Colony 15 of Jericho Ridge had dropped American towns, forests, and farmlands onto scaled down Martian regolith, creating the environment Regan and her friends called home.
"This place didn't even exist in 2050." Harper responded with a laugh, "It was just modeled after.." He held up his fingers like quotation marks, "Late modern american living."
"It was built in 2104 right?" Regan asked, she had always only half paid attention in history classes, "because of that war on earth?"
"The Gravity War wasn't fought on Earth." Harper corrected her, "It was the only war fought entirely in space. The colonies at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune signed the Tartarus Accord and declared independence from Earth and Mars. Things got real tense and everyone thought the Earth was for sure going to get slagged, so the colonies were built as lifeboats for all the various UN nations contributing."
"I bet it must really have been something else to see this place in its heyday." Seth admitted. "It used to be better here."
"Dude, this place was born shitty." Regan retorted with a snort, "it was engineered to be shitty from the start."
"You're too cynical Regan. No, back before FTL was invented? People used to care about this place." Seth remarked.
"Yeah, as a time capsule so that in a few hundred more years, someone could start up Planet USA. We're just human seeds, nobody actually gave a fuck about us." Regan unconsciously raised her voice as she started to feel the low, ever present anger at her circumstances.
"I dunno," Lily said with a shrug, "I think it might have actually been pretty nice here back then. There were all sorts of little shops and things. Like that place the McGuires live now? Pretty sure that was a barbershop back in the day."
"If you like living in an amusement park without the rides maybe." Regan insisted.
Regan turned and nearly walked into a chain link gate. The intersection they had just passed through terminated at one point with a gated off section. Signage on the fence and gate proclaimed the area as Constellation Project Engineering property. It was also liberally sprinkled with bright red 'No Trespassing' signs along its periphery.
Despite all the effort that had at one time gone into securing the location, it was now rather inadequately contained. Large sections of the fence had simply fallen inward, and the chain link had completely separated from the metal fence posts in several locations.
"Whoa what is this?" Regan asked, running her hands along the rough metal sign.
"Some sort of old colony project site." Seth offered. He fished out a flashlight from his backpack and shone it into the trees beyond the fence. "It looks abandoned, let's check it out."
Seth and Harper started climbing over a fallen section of the fence, and Regan was quick to follow after them.
"Are you guys sure this is a good idea?" Lily asked. "What if there's something dangerous in there?"
"We'll be careful." Regan said absentmindedly, already turning to follow the two boys as they started down the somewhat overgrown road into the forest.
Lily sighed and hiked up her skirt so she could follow them over the fence and hurried to catch up.
The trees on either side of the path were thick conifers that smelled richly of pine needles. Their dark branches blocked out much of the streetlight above them, giving the narrow lane an ominous, haunted feeling.
A low slung ferrocrete structure emerged ahead of them. The building had no windows, and the rusted doors were all set into the ground, giving the place the impression of being the entrance to some larger subsurface complex.
"What do you suppose this place is?" Regan asked as they crossed the overgrown lot surrounding the outpost.
"It looks like an access point for some sort of underground service, maybe electrical or water reclamation." Harper replied, quick to be the font of information even when he wasn't sure what he was talking about. He hopped down the stairs to the door well and shoulder checked the rusted metal. The hinges on the door shrieked in protest and the entire door deformed inwards on itself, separating the locking mechanism from the doorframe.
"Oi!" Lily shouted, "What have I told you about damaging government property Harper Jordan?!"
He shrugged and gently pushed the door open with his toe. "Its open."
Seth was quick to follow him down and pushed past him inside, nearly falling down the stairs inside the door. "Whoa!" He said quickly as he grabbed onto the handrails to catch himself. "It's like some sort of bunker."
"Okay, this we definitely need to check out." Regan said with a grin. "You have all the stuff right?" She asked Seth.
"Yeah of course," He answered, "when I figured we'd be out all night it seemed prudent to bring the full kit." The kit he referred to contained everything a group of teenagers might need to get into mischief. It contained electronic lockpicks, a crowbar, flashlights, rope, bolt cutters, spray paint, and all sorts of other miscellaneous items, any one of which would earn them more than a frown from the police.
Lily hesitated at the threshold to the room, "Something about this place feels weird, I don't know if this is a good idea."
"You think it might be haunted or something?" Seth asked her. Both Seth and Lily were avid believers in the supernatural.
"I'm not sure." She said, running her fingers along the doorframe and slipping inside, feeling the ferrocrete surface. "I sense something though."
"Spookyscary." Harper said as he shut the door behind him, the last one inside.
Regan charged ahead down the stairs, which descended a surprising depth into the soil before terminating in another door, one locked by a working electronic security system. She tried to open the door anyway, in case it had simply been left unlocked, but it was secured.
"This one's locked," she said, examining the locking mechanism with her flashlight. The other teens started to crowd around the door as they descended the stairs but Seth pushed past them and crouched down beside Regan.
"Oh wow, this is like, original design, unaltered since the colony was built." Seth said with some excitement. "I can't believe there are any of these still in use."
"So you can bypass it then right?" Harper asked him.
"Oh yeah," He grinned, "I can absolutely bypass it." He fished around in his backpack and extracted a small computing device. The electronic lockpick worked by assaulting the electronic lock system with requests for access at such a speed that it would either randomly guess the correct answer in short order or cause the computer in the lock to have a seizure and die. Newer systems were networked against that sort of intrusion, but older systems could still be accessed that way. Seth pressed the lockpick to the place a keycard would normally be placed, and activated it. There was a moment of collectively held breaths as they watched the duel between the lockpick computer and the lock's computer, before the locking mechanisms gave way with a surprisingly heavy series of clanks and bangs.
"After you?" Seth said somewhat nervously.
Regan shrugged and twisted the handle on the door. As soon as she pulled the handle's internal mechanism from the doorframe, the door flew inwards, ripped out of her hands by a sudden movement of air. The door at the top of the stairs banged open and a great gust of wind howled down the stairs, threatening to suck them into the darkness beyond. Dust and debris from the forest outside came spiralling down the stairs after them, giving the air a gritty taste and stinging their eyes. The temperature fell rapidly as the air settled again, depositing a thin layer of hoarfrost on everything around them.
"What the actual fuck?" Seth said, laughing nervously as he shined his flashlight into the room beyond the hatch. A breeze continued to blow in from outside, drawing air deeper underground.
"Okay, that's actually pretty creepy." Regan said anxiously as she crossed the threshold into the room beyond the stairwell. The room she found herself in was some sort of preparation atrium, not quite a waiting room, but something close to it. Lockers and clothing racks were mounted to the walls, along with rather utilitarian looking benches and changing cubicles.
"There's something really weird going on here," she announced finally.
"I thought you didn't believe in ghosts Regan?" Seth teased.
"No I think Regan's right." Harper said quietly. "Something does seem weird about this place. Does it feel colder to anyone?"
Lily pulled her phone from her pocket and checked the thermostat. "Weird." she said simply, eyeing the results on her phone suspiciously. "You know when spirits manifest, they consume energy out of the air to do it, which causes the temperature to drop. If there's a spirit here, then they just drew a lot of power out of the air."
"Lily, that's completely ridiculous." Harper said calmly, walking past Regan and into the next room. "It's even colder in here," he said.
"Have you ever seen anything like this?" Lily asked, snapping pictures of the frosted corridor on her phone.
"Only in ghost stories." Seth answered. They walked down the short hallway where they found the first fork in their path. The hallway continued straight, but a stairwell forked off it at a right angle, descending further into the skin of the colony.
Regan didn't believe in ghosts, but the place was measurably colder than the outside. It was like a freezer in there, despite there being no obvious equipment at work to cool the air. The hairs on the back of her neck rose, and she could feel the goosebumps slowly spreading down her back. The breeze continued down the stairs, whistling along the corridors, and it drew them onwards.
The door at the bottom of the stairs had been left open, but it was the room beyond it that caught all their attention. A huge row of tall windows dominated the space, looking out into an even more cavernous chamber beyond. The floor of that huge chamber had partly yawned open, stuck in a frozen grin, with only darkness and stars visible beyond it. A series of heavy duty hatches covered in warnings were placed on either side of the room. Their labels were obvious. 'Airlock.' 'Pressure Warning' 'Vacuum Suit Required.'
Regan's eyes darted around the room, before finally settling on the thing that bothered her the most about this entire arrangement: one panel of the windows were missing, in their place was a tarp of some sort, one that was now continuously flapping in the rather strong winds at the bottom of the building.
"Where does it go down there?" Lily called from the top of the stairs.
Regan looked back to the windows. "It goes," she fumbled for words as her mind tripped over the implications. "It goes outside. It leads to space."
Chapter 9: Drive
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 9: Drive
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
"Go over it again please." Jean Paoloni asked a very frustrated Kestral Schiaparelli at the 55th senior staff meeting.
The science officer groaned and rubbed the bridge of eir nose with eir fingertips.
"Okay," Kestral said taking a deep breath. "Let's try this with analogies."
"You were using analogies last time." Jean groaned.
Kestral went still for a moment, grinding eir teeth together. "Last time I was using higher order analogies in an attempt to be more accurate, but cuss it, I'm using the simple, wrong analogies everyone knows as truthisms."
Ey projected a 3d image of a sheet of flat spacetime above the surface of the table. "Okay, so this is that really simplified view of flat spacetime that I'm sure everyone here learned in grade school. It's wrong, our universe is an N-dimensional spacetime where N is... never mind. The rubber sheet is a poor analogy but it'll do for now."
Jean nodded along, still trying to grasp all the implications of the information they were going over.
"Now, in that model, we often use a colloquialism to describe the movement of our ships when we activate our Lederman Isolator, we say that we're 'kicking off' of the surface of spacetime." Kestral continued.
"I'm familiar with the term I use all the time," Jean said trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. "I also know that's technically an incorrect way of thinking about it."
"Right." Ey went on, "but it's not entirely wrong or we wouldn't use it. We can think of the way our drive works in this analogy as moving our ship upwards away from the 'surface' of spacetime."
"Okay…" Jean left the phrase unfinished, resisting the impulse to roll her eyes.
"The alien's drive doesn't do that. They punch a hole in the fabric of spacetime and their ship goes down into this space underneath it, what they call hyperspace. I mean, technically we should be calling it hypospace because according to the Jacksonian model it's nested inside our- ...never mind." Kestral deflated slightly as ey realized ey had managed to complete the point.
"Okay, that I kind of understand." Jean said scratching her nose, "But it's also all wrong I assume? It's not really down at all."
"No, it seems to be another region of navigable 3-dimensional spacetime, just completely cut off from our own and with its own rules and stuff filling it." Cale offered.
"Like another dimension?" Jean asked.
"No!" Kestral balked, "That's a colloquialism too far, if you need to use something like that, at least say 'another universe' another dimension implies another axis of motion, all the equations break down, you can't do that."
"I suppose if it makes you feel any better, they think our warp drive is impossible." Jean snarked.
"How do they think we got here then?" Cale asked her.
"I'm not sure," Jean shrugged, "But they seem pretty convinced that their FTL is the only way to go about it."
"Well, Kestral and I have been picking apart the blueprints they sent us, and if I hadn't gotten the designs from aliens in a giant spaceship, I would be inclined to call them impossible, so the feeling is somewhat mutual." Cale shrugged.
"Moving on from FTL drives," Ivy began, clearing her throat, and the rest of the table went quiet. Ivy banished the hologram with a wave of her hand. "We've been talking to the aliens for a while now. We need to start building up a basic psychological profile on them for when support arrives. As the one who's been talking to them, what can you tell me Jean?"
"They're aliens Ivy, I really don't even know where I would start," Jean said with a shrug. "I mean, Dreaming-Waking-Transcending seems nice enough? I'm still not sure if I'm talking to an individual or some sort of hivemind. We can't seem to distinguish between their plural and singular pronouns, if there is a difference."
"Their language is really dense." Kestral further elaborated, "They have four independent gas circulation systems, so the range of sounds they can make is enormous, and they've encoded complex ideas down into syllables, it makes it hard to pick apart sometimes."
"We can still make some extrapolations from that. If not an actual hivemind, the lack of a distinction between singular and plural pronouns might indicate a collectivist attitude within their culture." Cale suggested.
"Or it could be a linguistic relic from an earlier period in the development of their present language." Kestral countered with. "It's almost too early to say anything definitive."
"Here's the issue." Evangeline opened up with, after remaining silent for a long time. "We still don't know for sure that they themselves aren't the aliens that are doing all this damage. We need to know whether or not they can lie, and if we're being lied too."
"You've been in their database." Kestral said to Evangeline, "You know they create works of fiction. That means they can conceptualize lying."
"Which makes the second question all the more important." Evangeline responded.
"They already know where Sol is" Cale threw in, "and they knew it before meeting us."
"How did they know that? They looked through whatever equivalents they have to a telescope, and saw a ship, and knew we were human, how?" The Conscience persisted.
"They could have made out our body plans through the ship's hull with infrared telescopes of sufficient resolution." Mathias added quietly. "The hull isn't that thick." The chief engineer spoke rarely enough in a staff meeting that for a moment all eyes were drawn to him, as if expecting some further input.
"They also know where Sol is." the Pragmatist reminded them.
"Which is bad if it turns out they've been stringing us along and are planning on destroying the Sol anyway." Jean said before Evangeline had a chance to, before adding, "But, they've also not done anything outwardly threatening yet, and have been at the very least pleasant during my interactions."
"I really don't want to bet the fate of humanity on them seeming nice." The Conscience said with a sigh. "Isn't there something more concrete we can do as a way to test their morality?"
"Oh, there's any number of ethics questions you could pose to them, I'm just not sure how meaningful they'd be. While ethics are thought to be somewhat universal, the lens you're looking through is completely different." Cale said.
"I think it'd be worth doing anyway, if the aliens are amenable to it, if nothing else then for the data it would generate." Ivy said.
"Asking those sorts of questions could also be seen as overly invasive." Evangeline argued. "Isn't there anything we can determine from within the existing set of data we have?"
"Having a lot of data is only so valid when you only have a few people capable of making heads or tails of it, even with Emmy's help." Kestral replied.
"I think we should keep hacking at that before we start trying to give them personality tests." Evangeline suggested. "We'll have backup along before too much more time passes, let's not do anything that causes too much of a stir before than."
"We don't know if the ethics questions will actually cause any problems," Jean countered, "And we can ask them if it's okay to ask those questions."
"I don't think we have the data yet to properly phrase either of those questions." Kestral admitted. "Ethics is a tricky subject, taking it across species lines doesn't make it any easier."
"That's why we need to be cautious. At the very least, waiting another week won't hurt anything." The Conscience insisted.
Ivy nodded. "Let's table the ethics questions for a week and see where we can get on the translations in that time. In the meantime, I want the rest of you to work out some testable hypotheses we can use to determine the morality of the aliens."
"They're aliens Cale, tell me why that's actually interesting." Ivy said absentmindedly, without focusing her attention away from the report she was writing on her retinal screens.
Cale had prepared a somewhat grand speech explaining how he had divined that information by taking apart the alien's word for eating and realized it had three of the same base roots as the word for learning and then had gone back into their biological data to determine that they stored knowledge on a level equivalent to genetics and that they could learn by eating the genetic memories of their predecessors, but Ivy had thrown a wrench into that by failing to be impressed by his discovery.
"It's part of their learning cycle. They store information in something akin to our DNA, at the chemical level. When one of them dies, they eat them to gain their memories." He still delivered the revelation with unnecessary gusto.
"Cale, Kestral was in here two hours ago to tell me how ey'd figured out that the alien language is polysynthetic. And two hours before that, Evangeline was telling me about their mating habits, which are horrifying by the way. It's just random noise at this point, you're the Pragmacist, you're supposed to interpret all this stuff and paint me a coherent picture, because right now, I don't have one." Ivy kept her tone even, resisting the urge to grow frustrated or raise her voice."
Cale was silent for a moment before speaking, "I've let myself get a bit caught up in the excitement of it all haven't I?" He said softly.
"You have," Ivy answered him honestly. "And while I've mostly allowed it, I really need you in your best condition, this is all really happening, and as exciting as it is, we need to be prepared for what happens next."
"What happens next Ivy?" Cale asked.
"That's what you're supposed to be telling me," Ivy replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"I don't know what happens next either," Cale admitted with a shrug. "Aliens are real isn't a problem I can solve. And the fact that there might be galaxy eating aliens out there slowly working their way towards us is definitely not something I have a solution to."
"I know Cale," Ivy sighed, "and I'm not asking you to solve that. That's just going to have to be something we take up the chain of command. I would however, really like to be able to tell command whether or not I thought these aliens were lying and stringing us along, or if they're actually acting out of altruism."
"I did have something in mind for that actually," Cale said, "have you heard of a honeypot trap?"
"Not since command school," Ivy answered him. "But I know what it is. What exactly did you have in mind?"
"You think they'll buy it?" Ivy asked Cale, drawing Jean's attention back to the other occupants of the room.
"Well, there's two lies baked into the honeypot." Cale answered, "One is stated, the other is unstated. They might realize that exceeding that bandwidth won't actually harm us, and keep within the restrictions to play along, but there's also other less obvious backdoors in the subsystems they could attempt to exploit, and we can watch for that as well."
"Like Kestral said, they know how to lie," Jean said softly from behind her hair. "They have works of fiction, that means they understand lying."
"That doesn't necessarily mean they won't still take the bait, humans fall for this trick, and we obviously understand lying," Cale argued.
"It's not usually presented in quite so obvious a way with humans though," Jean responded as she pushed her hair out of her eyes.
"There's not much we can do about that," Ivy replied. "Now it's just a matter of seeing what they do."
"If they realize we tricked them in some way, they could react with hostility." Jean said.
"We should probably be ready to bolt if they start doing anything." Cale answered.
"I've had the warp coils spooled up since the moment they showed up." Ivy responded calmly. "We'll get through this, just a couple more weeks and we should hopefully be getting some backup."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
The arc welder flickered brilliantly in the dimly lit underground chamber, throwing the room into stark monochrome every time it activated.
"Almost finished," Seth Fiegel said from behind the heavy welding mask he wore.
"Good." Regan said, rubbing her legs together, "It makes me nervous being down here with the air leaking out, and it's cold."
"Well, hopefully it should start warming up soon. I'm telling you Regan, this place is going to be so dank once we get it all set up." Seth grinned behind the welding mask and went back to sealing the big chunk of sheet metal they'd stolen into the broken window.
"Yeah, until someone comes down here and finds us. Someone will eventually be interested in this place." Regan retorted as she fidgeted in an attempt to keep warm while she poked at the ancient interface terminal through woolen mittens.
"You worry too much, they stuck that tarp over the hole and forgot this place existed."
"That's exactly what I mean," Regan insisted, "There's no way they'd just leave this hole in the colony leaking air, people could die, the colony could depressurize."
"That was never going to happen," Seth assured her. "For one, the entire colony has some huge backup tanks, enough to last like, a thousand years at least. But more importantly really, even just our own cylinder is massive. There's so much air inside it that it would take decades for it all to get sucked out through a hole this size."
"So you really think they were just going to leave it like this?" Regan asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, they can't just leave it, leave it," Seth answered. "But they could put it off, throw a tarp over it and seal the outside hatch, ignore it as long as it doesn't seem to cause any immediate issues, pass it off to the next administration after an election, its politics Regan. How long does it take them to fix the roads when they get damaged?"
"Yeah, that's true." The other teenager answered. "We've probably got a while in that case."
"Yeah, maybe someone else will find it in like fifty more years, but I really don't think anyone's gonna care that we're down here." Seth said before once more firing up the arc welder.
"So what, you're going to just move in then?" Regan practically had to shout over the roar of the welder.
"More like a home away from home, a place we can chill and hang out away from our parents. Somewhere to escape to when they're being shitty." Seth replied in a muffled shout from behind the welding mask.
"Seems like a weird place to hang out." Regan admitted when Seth deactivated the arc welder, "It's not super cozy, and we already have the water tower for that sort of thing." She shivered involuntarily, despite the sweater she had carried out to the bunker and put on once they'd gone inside.
"The water tower's less fun to hang out at in the winter, If it doesn't start warming up once the pressure leak is fixed, we'll just bring some heaters down and plug them in." Seth activated the welder once more in another series of short pulses.
"Still," Regan said once he stopped welding, "It's just a sort of dreary place. All metal and industrial."
"Oh, just wait, Harper should be here soon with pizza and beer, we'll get some decorations and christmas lights strung up, get some chairs down here, figure out how to open that big door all the way so we have a few out into space, it'll be great." Seth fired up the arc welder in one last burst, then lifted the mask from his face and set the welder down.
"You finished with it?" Regan asked him, looking up from the old terminal.
"I think so, I'm just checking it now," Seth replied, withdrawing a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lighting it. He took a drag of the cigarette and then began waving it around the sheeting he'd sealed the hole with, as if conducting some complex ritual blessing on the metal.
"What're you doing?" Regan asked after watching him at this for a moment.
"Seeing where the smoke goes." The boy answered without breaking his focus. He took another drag of the cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke at the metal.
"Anything?" She asked.
Seth didn't respond for a moment, still seemingly caught in the trance of his impromptu ritual. Then he stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and hopped back with a clap of his hands. "I think we're good!" He grinned and shoved the welding gear into an out of the way corner. "How's it going with that console? Could you get into the system?"
Regan looked back down at the fossil of a computer interface. "Oh yeah I can control everything in here, there's no connection to the main colony networks to mess with things."
"Wow, nice." He said, clearly impressed.
"Yeah but you might be out of luck on the opening that big door, I think the actuators are rusted in place." She continued, "Along with all of the air cyclers and atmosphere pumps for that big room."
"Well the actuators are an easy enough fix at least," Seth said as he took a drag of his cigarette.
"It's in space!" Regan practically shouted. "There's no air there!"
"There's an old spacesuit in Lily's basement, I saw it when we grabbed the arc welder," Seth answered calmly. "I can fix it."
"Why do you care?" Regan looked up from the terminal, raising an eyebrow. "It's just a big empty room."
"If we fix the door, we can use the space in there," Seth responded with a glint in his eye.
"For what?" Regan asked.
"For building a spaceship," Seth said smoothly.
Regan sputtered, "I was sure you were going to suggest we grow weed in there, that's uh, well it's different for sure."
"I measured the space with the rangefinder on my phone, it's two hundred meters long, we could build a full size ship in there, than just open the door and drop out the bottom into space." Seth explained.
"You can't just…" Regan stumbled on the words, "That's…Do you have any idea how to actually do that?"
"It'll be a learning experience." Seth grinned.
"Yeah sure, that'll be what they say when they're picking our charred bones out of the wreckage when it all blows up in our faces." Regan snarked.
"We'll be careful, but it'll take a while to even be ready to do anything dangerous, we have to find enough scrap metal to build a hull." Seth admitted, "It's a long-term project, something that might take a few years and might never come to anything, but if it does, think of the payoff. Total freedom, we can go literally anywhere."
"When you put it that way…" Regan said.
"Oi! Somebody order pizza!?" Harper's voice echoed down the stairs.
"We're down here!" Seth shouted back up the stairwell.
Harper practically flew down the stairs, sliding down the railing on his butt, boxes of pizza balanced atop one another in his hands. Lily followed more sedately in his wake.
"Nice!" Harper exclaimed upon catching his balance, "You got the sheet installed." He set the pizza down and started spreading the boxes out on the floor. Regan quickly found herself gravitating towards the aroma as Lily set down a case of beer and a bag of random decorative materials.
"Yeah, it seems airtight," Seth said as he grabbed a pizza slice. "The breeze seems to be gone at least."
"If there are any microscopic leaks left, it's not a big deal," Harper said through a mouthful of food. "There's so much air in the colony it'd take millions of years to all leak out."
"We shouldn't close that outer hatch until we're sure," Regan said before taking a bite of the pizza. "Otherwise if we're asleep here and there's a slow leak, the bunker could depressurize."
"Yeah, it's probably safest to just keep that one propped open," Harper said with the half of his mouth he wasn't using to chew. "Especially if we plan on going outside at any point."
"Are we planning that?" Lily asked, "I missed that part of the plan, and if I recall I'm the only one with access to a spacesuit."
Harper and Seth exchanged a meaningful look and Seth answered. "I'd like to."
"It's really dangerous," Lily said solemnly, meeting his gaze evenly. "Space isn't a game."
"I know," Seth said without flinching away. "We'll be careful."
"If one of you ends up dead because I let you borrow that spacesuit, I'd never forgive myself," Lily explained, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"This is something I need to do Lily, please let me do this." Seth pleaded.
"I'll think about." She answered finally, before sinking onto her knees and grabbing a slice of pizza. Outside, the stars whirled endlessly beneath their feet.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
February 2219
"Go over it again please." Jean Paoloni asked a very frustrated Kestral Schiaparelli at the 55th senior staff meeting.
The science officer groaned and rubbed the bridge of eir nose with eir fingertips.
"Okay," Kestral said taking a deep breath. "Let's try this with analogies."
"You were using analogies last time." Jean groaned.
Kestral went still for a moment, grinding eir teeth together. "Last time I was using higher order analogies in an attempt to be more accurate, but cuss it, I'm using the simple, wrong analogies everyone knows as truthisms."
Ey projected a 3d image of a sheet of flat spacetime above the surface of the table. "Okay, so this is that really simplified view of flat spacetime that I'm sure everyone here learned in grade school. It's wrong, our universe is an N-dimensional spacetime where N is... never mind. The rubber sheet is a poor analogy but it'll do for now."
Jean nodded along, still trying to grasp all the implications of the information they were going over.
"Now, in that model, we often use a colloquialism to describe the movement of our ships when we activate our Lederman Isolator, we say that we're 'kicking off' of the surface of spacetime." Kestral continued.
"I'm familiar with the term I use all the time," Jean said trying to keep the frustration out of her voice. "I also know that's technically an incorrect way of thinking about it."
"Right." Ey went on, "but it's not entirely wrong or we wouldn't use it. We can think of the way our drive works in this analogy as moving our ship upwards away from the 'surface' of spacetime."
"Okay…" Jean left the phrase unfinished, resisting the impulse to roll her eyes.
"The alien's drive doesn't do that. They punch a hole in the fabric of spacetime and their ship goes down into this space underneath it, what they call hyperspace. I mean, technically we should be calling it hypospace because according to the Jacksonian model it's nested inside our- ...never mind." Kestral deflated slightly as ey realized ey had managed to complete the point.
"Okay, that I kind of understand." Jean said scratching her nose, "But it's also all wrong I assume? It's not really down at all."
"No, it seems to be another region of navigable 3-dimensional spacetime, just completely cut off from our own and with its own rules and stuff filling it." Cale offered.
"Like another dimension?" Jean asked.
"No!" Kestral balked, "That's a colloquialism too far, if you need to use something like that, at least say 'another universe' another dimension implies another axis of motion, all the equations break down, you can't do that."
"I suppose if it makes you feel any better, they think our warp drive is impossible." Jean snarked.
"How do they think we got here then?" Cale asked her.
"I'm not sure," Jean shrugged, "But they seem pretty convinced that their FTL is the only way to go about it."
"Well, Kestral and I have been picking apart the blueprints they sent us, and if I hadn't gotten the designs from aliens in a giant spaceship, I would be inclined to call them impossible, so the feeling is somewhat mutual." Cale shrugged.
"Moving on from FTL drives," Ivy began, clearing her throat, and the rest of the table went quiet. Ivy banished the hologram with a wave of her hand. "We've been talking to the aliens for a while now. We need to start building up a basic psychological profile on them for when support arrives. As the one who's been talking to them, what can you tell me Jean?"
"They're aliens Ivy, I really don't even know where I would start," Jean said with a shrug. "I mean, Dreaming-Waking-Transcending seems nice enough? I'm still not sure if I'm talking to an individual or some sort of hivemind. We can't seem to distinguish between their plural and singular pronouns, if there is a difference."
"Their language is really dense." Kestral further elaborated, "They have four independent gas circulation systems, so the range of sounds they can make is enormous, and they've encoded complex ideas down into syllables, it makes it hard to pick apart sometimes."
"We can still make some extrapolations from that. If not an actual hivemind, the lack of a distinction between singular and plural pronouns might indicate a collectivist attitude within their culture." Cale suggested.
"Or it could be a linguistic relic from an earlier period in the development of their present language." Kestral countered with. "It's almost too early to say anything definitive."
"Here's the issue." Evangeline opened up with, after remaining silent for a long time. "We still don't know for sure that they themselves aren't the aliens that are doing all this damage. We need to know whether or not they can lie, and if we're being lied too."
"You've been in their database." Kestral said to Evangeline, "You know they create works of fiction. That means they can conceptualize lying."
"Which makes the second question all the more important." Evangeline responded.
"They already know where Sol is" Cale threw in, "and they knew it before meeting us."
"How did they know that? They looked through whatever equivalents they have to a telescope, and saw a ship, and knew we were human, how?" The Conscience persisted.
"They could have made out our body plans through the ship's hull with infrared telescopes of sufficient resolution." Mathias added quietly. "The hull isn't that thick." The chief engineer spoke rarely enough in a staff meeting that for a moment all eyes were drawn to him, as if expecting some further input.
"They also know where Sol is." the Pragmatist reminded them.
"Which is bad if it turns out they've been stringing us along and are planning on destroying the Sol anyway." Jean said before Evangeline had a chance to, before adding, "But, they've also not done anything outwardly threatening yet, and have been at the very least pleasant during my interactions."
"I really don't want to bet the fate of humanity on them seeming nice." The Conscience said with a sigh. "Isn't there something more concrete we can do as a way to test their morality?"
"Oh, there's any number of ethics questions you could pose to them, I'm just not sure how meaningful they'd be. While ethics are thought to be somewhat universal, the lens you're looking through is completely different." Cale said.
"I think it'd be worth doing anyway, if the aliens are amenable to it, if nothing else then for the data it would generate." Ivy said.
"Asking those sorts of questions could also be seen as overly invasive." Evangeline argued. "Isn't there anything we can determine from within the existing set of data we have?"
"Having a lot of data is only so valid when you only have a few people capable of making heads or tails of it, even with Emmy's help." Kestral replied.
"I think we should keep hacking at that before we start trying to give them personality tests." Evangeline suggested. "We'll have backup along before too much more time passes, let's not do anything that causes too much of a stir before than."
"We don't know if the ethics questions will actually cause any problems," Jean countered, "And we can ask them if it's okay to ask those questions."
"I don't think we have the data yet to properly phrase either of those questions." Kestral admitted. "Ethics is a tricky subject, taking it across species lines doesn't make it any easier."
"That's why we need to be cautious. At the very least, waiting another week won't hurt anything." The Conscience insisted.
Ivy nodded. "Let's table the ethics questions for a week and see where we can get on the translations in that time. In the meantime, I want the rest of you to work out some testable hypotheses we can use to determine the morality of the aliens."
Δ
"They eat their dead." It was a strange way to open a conversation, but that was the first thing Cale said as he entered Ivy's office, sliding the door shut behind him.
"They're aliens Cale, tell me why that's actually interesting." Ivy said absentmindedly, without focusing her attention away from the report she was writing on her retinal screens.
Cale had prepared a somewhat grand speech explaining how he had divined that information by taking apart the alien's word for eating and realized it had three of the same base roots as the word for learning and then had gone back into their biological data to determine that they stored knowledge on a level equivalent to genetics and that they could learn by eating the genetic memories of their predecessors, but Ivy had thrown a wrench into that by failing to be impressed by his discovery.
"It's part of their learning cycle. They store information in something akin to our DNA, at the chemical level. When one of them dies, they eat them to gain their memories." He still delivered the revelation with unnecessary gusto.
"Cale, Kestral was in here two hours ago to tell me how ey'd figured out that the alien language is polysynthetic. And two hours before that, Evangeline was telling me about their mating habits, which are horrifying by the way. It's just random noise at this point, you're the Pragmacist, you're supposed to interpret all this stuff and paint me a coherent picture, because right now, I don't have one." Ivy kept her tone even, resisting the urge to grow frustrated or raise her voice."
Cale was silent for a moment before speaking, "I've let myself get a bit caught up in the excitement of it all haven't I?" He said softly.
"You have," Ivy answered him honestly. "And while I've mostly allowed it, I really need you in your best condition, this is all really happening, and as exciting as it is, we need to be prepared for what happens next."
"What happens next Ivy?" Cale asked.
"That's what you're supposed to be telling me," Ivy replied, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"I don't know what happens next either," Cale admitted with a shrug. "Aliens are real isn't a problem I can solve. And the fact that there might be galaxy eating aliens out there slowly working their way towards us is definitely not something I have a solution to."
"I know Cale," Ivy sighed, "and I'm not asking you to solve that. That's just going to have to be something we take up the chain of command. I would however, really like to be able to tell command whether or not I thought these aliens were lying and stringing us along, or if they're actually acting out of altruism."
"I did have something in mind for that actually," Cale said, "have you heard of a honeypot trap?"
"Not since command school," Ivy answered him. "But I know what it is. What exactly did you have in mind?"
Δ
"Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, we would like to offer access to a deeper level of network connectivity." Jean said smoothly into the microphone, "We believe this will aid our efforts to translate and understand one another's languages. However, we have reason to believe that taxing this conduit could overload our computer systems and render our ship inoperable, so we request that you do not exceed channel throughput of 200 tb/s." The recording light on the edge of her visual field blinked off and Jean sighed, dropping her head and letting her curly brown hair fall in front of her face.
"You think they'll buy it?" Ivy asked Cale, drawing Jean's attention back to the other occupants of the room.
"Well, there's two lies baked into the honeypot." Cale answered, "One is stated, the other is unstated. They might realize that exceeding that bandwidth won't actually harm us, and keep within the restrictions to play along, but there's also other less obvious backdoors in the subsystems they could attempt to exploit, and we can watch for that as well."
"Like Kestral said, they know how to lie," Jean said softly from behind her hair. "They have works of fiction, that means they understand lying."
"That doesn't necessarily mean they won't still take the bait, humans fall for this trick, and we obviously understand lying," Cale argued.
"It's not usually presented in quite so obvious a way with humans though," Jean responded as she pushed her hair out of her eyes.
"There's not much we can do about that," Ivy replied. "Now it's just a matter of seeing what they do."
"If they realize we tricked them in some way, they could react with hostility." Jean said.
"We should probably be ready to bolt if they start doing anything." Cale answered.
"I've had the warp coils spooled up since the moment they showed up." Ivy responded calmly. "We'll get through this, just a couple more weeks and we should hopefully be getting some backup."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
February 2219
The arc welder flickered brilliantly in the dimly lit underground chamber, throwing the room into stark monochrome every time it activated.
"Almost finished," Seth Fiegel said from behind the heavy welding mask he wore.
"Good." Regan said, rubbing her legs together, "It makes me nervous being down here with the air leaking out, and it's cold."
"Well, hopefully it should start warming up soon. I'm telling you Regan, this place is going to be so dank once we get it all set up." Seth grinned behind the welding mask and went back to sealing the big chunk of sheet metal they'd stolen into the broken window.
"Yeah, until someone comes down here and finds us. Someone will eventually be interested in this place." Regan retorted as she fidgeted in an attempt to keep warm while she poked at the ancient interface terminal through woolen mittens.
"You worry too much, they stuck that tarp over the hole and forgot this place existed."
"That's exactly what I mean," Regan insisted, "There's no way they'd just leave this hole in the colony leaking air, people could die, the colony could depressurize."
"That was never going to happen," Seth assured her. "For one, the entire colony has some huge backup tanks, enough to last like, a thousand years at least. But more importantly really, even just our own cylinder is massive. There's so much air inside it that it would take decades for it all to get sucked out through a hole this size."
"So you really think they were just going to leave it like this?" Regan asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, they can't just leave it, leave it," Seth answered. "But they could put it off, throw a tarp over it and seal the outside hatch, ignore it as long as it doesn't seem to cause any immediate issues, pass it off to the next administration after an election, its politics Regan. How long does it take them to fix the roads when they get damaged?"
"Yeah, that's true." The other teenager answered. "We've probably got a while in that case."
"Yeah, maybe someone else will find it in like fifty more years, but I really don't think anyone's gonna care that we're down here." Seth said before once more firing up the arc welder.
"So what, you're going to just move in then?" Regan practically had to shout over the roar of the welder.
"More like a home away from home, a place we can chill and hang out away from our parents. Somewhere to escape to when they're being shitty." Seth replied in a muffled shout from behind the welding mask.
"Seems like a weird place to hang out." Regan admitted when Seth deactivated the arc welder, "It's not super cozy, and we already have the water tower for that sort of thing." She shivered involuntarily, despite the sweater she had carried out to the bunker and put on once they'd gone inside.
"The water tower's less fun to hang out at in the winter, If it doesn't start warming up once the pressure leak is fixed, we'll just bring some heaters down and plug them in." Seth activated the welder once more in another series of short pulses.
"Still," Regan said once he stopped welding, "It's just a sort of dreary place. All metal and industrial."
"Oh, just wait, Harper should be here soon with pizza and beer, we'll get some decorations and christmas lights strung up, get some chairs down here, figure out how to open that big door all the way so we have a few out into space, it'll be great." Seth fired up the arc welder in one last burst, then lifted the mask from his face and set the welder down.
"You finished with it?" Regan asked him, looking up from the old terminal.
"I think so, I'm just checking it now," Seth replied, withdrawing a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and lighting it. He took a drag of the cigarette and then began waving it around the sheeting he'd sealed the hole with, as if conducting some complex ritual blessing on the metal.
"What're you doing?" Regan asked after watching him at this for a moment.
"Seeing where the smoke goes." The boy answered without breaking his focus. He took another drag of the cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke at the metal.
"Anything?" She asked.
Seth didn't respond for a moment, still seemingly caught in the trance of his impromptu ritual. Then he stuck the cigarette in the corner of his mouth and hopped back with a clap of his hands. "I think we're good!" He grinned and shoved the welding gear into an out of the way corner. "How's it going with that console? Could you get into the system?"
Regan looked back down at the fossil of a computer interface. "Oh yeah I can control everything in here, there's no connection to the main colony networks to mess with things."
"Wow, nice." He said, clearly impressed.
"Yeah but you might be out of luck on the opening that big door, I think the actuators are rusted in place." She continued, "Along with all of the air cyclers and atmosphere pumps for that big room."
"Well the actuators are an easy enough fix at least," Seth said as he took a drag of his cigarette.
"It's in space!" Regan practically shouted. "There's no air there!"
"There's an old spacesuit in Lily's basement, I saw it when we grabbed the arc welder," Seth answered calmly. "I can fix it."
"Why do you care?" Regan looked up from the terminal, raising an eyebrow. "It's just a big empty room."
"If we fix the door, we can use the space in there," Seth responded with a glint in his eye.
"For what?" Regan asked.
"For building a spaceship," Seth said smoothly.
Regan sputtered, "I was sure you were going to suggest we grow weed in there, that's uh, well it's different for sure."
"I measured the space with the rangefinder on my phone, it's two hundred meters long, we could build a full size ship in there, than just open the door and drop out the bottom into space." Seth explained.
"You can't just…" Regan stumbled on the words, "That's…Do you have any idea how to actually do that?"
"It'll be a learning experience." Seth grinned.
"Yeah sure, that'll be what they say when they're picking our charred bones out of the wreckage when it all blows up in our faces." Regan snarked.
"We'll be careful, but it'll take a while to even be ready to do anything dangerous, we have to find enough scrap metal to build a hull." Seth admitted, "It's a long-term project, something that might take a few years and might never come to anything, but if it does, think of the payoff. Total freedom, we can go literally anywhere."
"When you put it that way…" Regan said.
"Oi! Somebody order pizza!?" Harper's voice echoed down the stairs.
"We're down here!" Seth shouted back up the stairwell.
Harper practically flew down the stairs, sliding down the railing on his butt, boxes of pizza balanced atop one another in his hands. Lily followed more sedately in his wake.
"Nice!" Harper exclaimed upon catching his balance, "You got the sheet installed." He set the pizza down and started spreading the boxes out on the floor. Regan quickly found herself gravitating towards the aroma as Lily set down a case of beer and a bag of random decorative materials.
"Yeah, it seems airtight," Seth said as he grabbed a pizza slice. "The breeze seems to be gone at least."
"If there are any microscopic leaks left, it's not a big deal," Harper said through a mouthful of food. "There's so much air in the colony it'd take millions of years to all leak out."
"We shouldn't close that outer hatch until we're sure," Regan said before taking a bite of the pizza. "Otherwise if we're asleep here and there's a slow leak, the bunker could depressurize."
"Yeah, it's probably safest to just keep that one propped open," Harper said with the half of his mouth he wasn't using to chew. "Especially if we plan on going outside at any point."
"Are we planning that?" Lily asked, "I missed that part of the plan, and if I recall I'm the only one with access to a spacesuit."
Harper and Seth exchanged a meaningful look and Seth answered. "I'd like to."
"It's really dangerous," Lily said solemnly, meeting his gaze evenly. "Space isn't a game."
"I know," Seth said without flinching away. "We'll be careful."
"If one of you ends up dead because I let you borrow that spacesuit, I'd never forgive myself," Lily explained, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"This is something I need to do Lily, please let me do this." Seth pleaded.
"I'll think about." She answered finally, before sinking onto her knees and grabbing a slice of pizza. Outside, the stars whirled endlessly beneath their feet.
Chapter 10: Arrivals
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 10: Arrivals
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hyperbolic Stellar Warp Trajectory
240 AUs from Gamma Tauri
March 2219
The Stoneburner fell through the warp tunnel towards Gamma Tauri, dragged along inside a wave of spacetime at two hundred times the speed of light.
"Ten minutes until warp tunnel collapse." Alice Pendragon said from her console in the Mining Information center. The tension in the MIC was thick enough to cut with a knife. Alice drummed her fingers on the console and Kaito Pendragon had started using a nicotine vaporizer again. Owen McGregor took a deep breath, but despite his attempts to keep calm, his heart was racing.
They had gamed out every possible scenario they could encounter during their time in the warp tunnel. Their ship would exit warp on the edge of the system and train their telescopes down on Gamma Tauri b. Due to the similar relative motion of all the Hyades Cluster stars, they wouldn't even need to perform a deceleration burn upon exiting warp. If the aliens were there, they would launch a Lighthorse with emergency personnel riding strapped to the outside, which would perform a short warp into the system and attempt a rescue. The Stoneburner herself remain at a perch on the edge of the system, overseeing the operation from a safe height.
The hope was that none of that would be required, and the Jabberwocky would be intact, along with Gamma Tauri b. In that case, they'd just have the Jabberwocky boost up out of the planetary orbit and they'd help install the other EMV's warp ring so they could return to Aldebaran together.
The countdown clock until their exit from warp ticked down ominously as the ship hurtled closer to its sister. The distorted space visible through the camera feeds resembled a rainbow kaleidoscope of swirling colors; the intense distortion of the warp tunnel blue shifted the cosmic microwave background into the visible spectrum, turning the view ahead into a whirl of light.
"Five minutes." Alice said again, breaking the heavily settling silence.
"I can read the clock Alice." Kaito said irritably, taking another drag of his vaporizer.
Alice sighed and resisted the urge to chide him for falling back on his nicotine habit, they were all a bit frayed at the seams.
"Get ready with the telescopes. I want lens covers off and instruments pointed." Kaito said to the MIC crew, sending several of the lower ranking system specialists into a last minute frenzy of activity.
The return from the warp tunnel into normal spacetime didn't actually feel like anything. Unlike the jolt associated with the initial kick into the tunnel, the exit just happened. One moment, they were looking at the radial rainbow of the warp fields, and the next, it all vanished like a ripple on still water, and they were back amongst the stars.
"What do we see?" Kaito asked immediately in a tone that didn't entirely hide his frustration at not having the information simply beamed directly into his head.
There was a moment of tense silence as the images resolved themselves, details appearing with every successive increase in resolution.
It was Alice who spoke first, her lips drawn into a tight grimace as her eyes fixated on strangely massive storm, lit by flickering internal lights deep within the atmosphere of the gas giant. "They're already here."
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
"I don't actually think the bird-spiders are all that smart." Cale said before taking a sip of his coffee. He and Ivy were sitting in the small observation lounge, looking out at a telescopic view of the alien ship, during a brief respite from the seemingly endless flurry of activity they had been inundated with since the aliens first made themselves known.
"Supporting evidence?" Ivy asked, raising an eyebrow from behind her own coffee cup.
"Just a hunch really. Something about the way they've interacted with us so far." Cale shrugged and took another sip of his coffee.
"They did build that spaceship that's bigger than our planet." Ivy pointed out.
"Which just makes me wonder if they're trying to compensate for something." Cale smirked.
Ivy rolled her eyes. "Its impressive though, you've got to admit."
"Oh yeah." Cale said, "I mean, those rods of theirs apparently row through spacetime like oars somehow? Crazy stuff, but I stand by my thesi–"
The lights in the observation room all flashed to red, and the images on the wallscreens suddenly changed as Emmy stepped in and highlighted the flare of a distant fusion drive; a new ship had appeared in the system.
Jean's voice entered Ivy's ears through the room's speakers only a moment later. "Ivy, Cale, we just detected the MNCV Netwon's Prism drop out of warp 2 AUs from us, they're requesting immediate status updates via tight beam."
"Report shipboard situation nominal and send them all the regular reports." Ivy spoke back to the disembodied voice. "We're on our way to the bridge."
Ivy swallowed the last swirl of her coffee and pushed herself out of the chair, gesturing for Cale to follow her as she slipped out into the main corridor in the aft spin gravity ring.
"They didn't waste much time did they?" Cale asked rhetorically as they made their way to the bridge.
"Arriving now?" Ivy mentally tallied the days and distances and flight times, "They must have launched within a couple hours of getting our drone."
As they entered the bridge, Jean jumped up from her seat, "I sent the reply to them, at their current range, we should have a response within a half hour."
"Good good, is it just the one ship?" Ivy asked.
"So far yeah, but here, let me just play the message." Jean answered. Her eyes went blank for a moment as she brought up the signal log on her implants and ordered it to play back over the speakers.
"MSCV FSF8 Empiricist, this is MNCV LAF12 Newton's Prism acting as vanguard to MNCV CV4 Light of Ages and escorts, we require all relevant status updates and tactical data via tight beam. Failure to reply within 20 minutes of field propagation lag will be taken as a sign you have been compromised in some way. Repeat, MSCV FSF8 Empiricist, this is MNCV LAF12 Newton's Prism–" Jean cut the audio before it'd had a chance to fully loop.
"Light of Ages huh?" Cale asked. "That means they're sending the entire Third Fleet."
"I guess we're not the only ones spooked by all this." Ivy acknowledged.
"You think Admiral Wallace still hates me?" Cale asked bemusedly.
"Well, you are still just a senior Pragmatist on scout frigate." Ivy teased. "I'm five years your junior but I already outrank you, I suspect he still remembers."
"Command track is different and I like this posting, I didn't fight it." Cale replied.
"That doesn't mean you weren't still stuck out here to have an example made of." Ivy couldn't quite keep the amusement out of her tone. "You've been at this long enough, if I were to compare you to other Pragmatists with your time in the service, I'd expect you to be the senior Pragmatist to one of the command battle groups by now."
"That whole cake incident was ten years ago, I'm sure he doesn't remember." Cale insisted.
"He has a pretty long memory." Ivy said skeptically.
Cale shrugged, "I guess we'll find out."
Autonomous Cargo Drone
Lighthorse FI-2453
Parabolic Capture Orbit
53,000 kilometers from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
Owen felt his body relax as the Lighthorse's engines cut out at the conclusion of the insertion burn, his mass no longer pressed into the back of his spacesuit by the two gees of acceleration. Gamma Tauri b loomed large through his helmet, it's pale bands of teal and orange concussing with waves of storms as a shining and bulging conflagration expanded on the horizon like a massive wart on the gaseous world.
Sensors Alice had rigged up fed into his helmet's heads up display: the bulge in the world had already risen 5,000 klicks out of the atmosphere, and though the blast was in the middle latitudes, at its present rate of expansion, its margins would soon begin interacting with the inner edge of the ring system.
He watched a timer counting down on his HUD: the time remaining until their hastily improvised radio system reached communications range with the big dish on the Jabberwocky. They had outrun the light of the Stoneburner's arrival on the edge of the system by several hours. Those hours were crucial though; The Jabberwocky still might not actually realize the ring was about to come apart, and while the Stoneburner's telescopes were still looking at the beginning phases of the alien's arrival, that was because the light they were seeing through their telescopes was already several hours into the past. In the intervening time, the storm they had seen on their telescopes had deformed upwards beyond the atmosphere, as if it was being lifted from beneath by the maker's hand.
The Lighthorse was now entirely ballistic, coasting above the planet's vast ring system as the world's intense gravity captured the tiny drone ship into its orbital influence. Owen and nineteen other veteran EVA specialists were riding the Lighthorse, strapped to the outside in their suits by something akin to stirrups. The rings below remained placid, their vast rippling clouds of dust and ice interspaced with the ever-shifting glint of metallic asteroids seemed somehow lost in time, as if their destruction had already been witnessed, and he was just watching a rerun.
Timing, it all came down to timing; even after performing an expertly placed warp, dropping the Lighthorse directly into a parabolic capture orbit, they still had to swing a third of the way around the gas giant before the Jabberwocky would rise above the horizon enough for their radio to be in range.
He took a breath and turned back on the inter-suit channel.
"I don't care who you think you are, I will turn this ship around right no-"
"Murphy!" He barked, silencing the voice of the young woman.
"Boss, tell her to lay off," came next the voice of Maxwell Anders, "I was just making a joke."
"You can stick your joke right u–" Eleanor Murphy started, but Owen accessed the administrative settings and simply muted them both at the server level.
"Enough of that, we are now twenty minutes out from contact. If the events at Amateru were anything to go by, we're going to have another hour and a half at most before everything goes to hell. We are on the clock people!"
"Did you just mute Anders?" Jeffrey Carlton asked.
"Can I as mining foreman, not request twenty minutes to enjoy this ride with a little bit of quiet?"
"That's a definite negative boss." Isaac Banks replied, "See I ate this bean burrito before I got in the suit, and the gas just somehow keeps getting keyed up."
Owen decided it was time for drastic action. He accessed his suit's music library and started uploading it to the Lighthorse's communications server.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"Mike have you ever seen anything like this?" Alicia Arrari asked her senior mining foreman with a frown as she watched the growing disruption on the far side of the world.
"I thought it was a storm at first." Michael Tellerman answered her, "But it isn't like any storm I've ever seen anymore."
"Is it dangerous?" She asked, narrowing her eyes as she watched the lightning storms flickering at the margins of the blast.
"Most things in space tend to be." He snorted, "But then, just about everything that can happen in the atmosphere of a gas giant will already kill you four or five times over, what's one more?"
"The center of it is already 7,000 kilometers up from the usual top of the atmosphere." The captain persisted as she tapped on the screen in irritation.
"It's a big planet," Mike reassured her.
"Alright, how's the breakdown going on that chunk of xenotime?" She asked, turning away from the telescope inputs and floating the length of the ship's Mining Information Center.
"We're about seventy percent done with it. I've got twelve guys out there hacking at it now, so we should have it completely broken down within a few hours." Mike replied as he followed along in her wake.
"Good, once we finish that I wanna climb up to 45,000 klicks, just to be on the safe side," she said as she arrested her momentum on the back of an empty console chair.
"You sure about that? This ring has been pretty good to us, lots of valuable rocks here," Mike asked as he floated past her.
"I don't wanna risk it," she flipped herself over the arm of the captain's chair with the needless acrobatics of zero gee, "there's an entire planet's worth of minerals out there. Go find me Tom and Laura, we'll move the ship once your guys finish with that xenotime rock."
There were no sensors calibrated to measure the health of the ring system, no robotic eyes watching as the innermost margins of the ring began encountering the rapidly expanding deformation in the atmosphere.
As the faint inner edges of the orbiting ring were struck by the rising gases, they began to slow down and experience drag, pulling them into suborbital trajectories. The disturbance in the ring began to build as a standing wave, with higher velocity material slamming into the slowing flow, sending a cascade of impacts rippling outwards into the larger structure of the ring.
Mike slipped out the entrance to the bridge to fetch the navigator and XO, while Alicia strapped into her seat to avoid floating off and watched the growing storm on the satellite feeds.
The chunk of equal parts silicon and water ices had been orbiting placidly for several million years, tumbling around its siblings in a perfect balance of gravity and motion. At nearly five hundred feet long, its mass dominated its region of the ring, and it cast long eddies and gravitational ripples in its wake.
The initial collisional ripples were almost impossible to see as they propagated through the ring at several times the orbital velocity of the material inside of it, a wave not of fluid in any traditional sense, but an endless procession of successive impacts each leading to further impacts as it flowed silently across the ring structure.
The micro meteors struck the boulder first, peppering its surface like high speed birdshot but otherwise failing to harm the enormous stone. But, on the tail of the micro meteors was a two hundred-foot-long piece of irregular ferrite, which slammed into the rock of silicon and ice with the force of a moderately powerful nuclear weapon. The boulder was shattered into several pieces each with some of the ferrite asteroid's momentum transferred to them, sending the wave rippling onward. Though the water component of the asteroid was instantly vaporized in the energy of the collision, the remaining, sharp-edged, silicon pieces remained mostly intact, their spinning velocities putting them directly on course for the exploratory mining vessel.
Impact alarms began going off suddenly in the Jabberwocky's MIC, dozens of them began blaring at once as the cascading impacts sent more and more rocks careening in their direction.
In the time it took for Alicia Arrari to gasp in surprise at the alarms the micrometeor swarm had crossed the distance between the silicon rock and their ship and instantly reduced seven of the EVA miners to shredded meat.
Alicia fumbled for the comms switch and slammed down the shipwide, "Get everyone back inside now! We have an emergency situation!"
"We've lost lifesigns on Kellogg, Anderson, Franks, Henderson, Di'Mallio, Xi Tan and Kosca. Giovanni and Mitchell are still alive but injured and losing suit pressure!" Felicia Downing, the communications specialist, relayed to her.
"Get them inside now!" She shouted at the other girl.
The ship had already begun shuddering with impacts as Mike along with, Thomas Engel and Laura Wolf launched themselves through the hatch into the MIC.
"What's going on?" Laura, her XO asked.
"I have no idea, all the collision alarms started going off at once, we've already had seven casualties to micrometeorites, something is disrupting the ring." The captain explained.
"Do you want me to change our inclination and pull up out of the ring?" Thomas Laurent, the navigator, asked her.
"As soon as-" Her words were interrupted by a fifty-foot chunk of silicon scything through the primary centrifugal smelter. The spinning rock impacted the spinning smelter and both instantly disintegrated in a starburst of liquefied metal, shrapnel, and debris. Chain decompressions tore through bulkhead after bulkhead as the kinetic force spent itself in the hull of the ship. Alicia's neck was yanked hard enough to give her whiplash as Mike, Tom and Laura were slammed into the far wall of the MIC. The command deck began filling with shouts and screams and cries of dismay, accompanied by a growing chorus of damage alarms and error messages, and something else.
It started faint and crackling but was growing stronger as time went on: the two hundred-year-old sound of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire was coming in on their wideband antenna.
Alicia cocked an eyebrow, trying to hear over the MIC's din, she wasn't sure if she was imagining it or not. "Is that…music?"
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Stoneburner
Hyperbolic Stellar Warp Trajectory
240 AUs from Gamma Tauri
March 2219
The Stoneburner fell through the warp tunnel towards Gamma Tauri, dragged along inside a wave of spacetime at two hundred times the speed of light.
"Ten minutes until warp tunnel collapse." Alice Pendragon said from her console in the Mining Information center. The tension in the MIC was thick enough to cut with a knife. Alice drummed her fingers on the console and Kaito Pendragon had started using a nicotine vaporizer again. Owen McGregor took a deep breath, but despite his attempts to keep calm, his heart was racing.
They had gamed out every possible scenario they could encounter during their time in the warp tunnel. Their ship would exit warp on the edge of the system and train their telescopes down on Gamma Tauri b. Due to the similar relative motion of all the Hyades Cluster stars, they wouldn't even need to perform a deceleration burn upon exiting warp. If the aliens were there, they would launch a Lighthorse with emergency personnel riding strapped to the outside, which would perform a short warp into the system and attempt a rescue. The Stoneburner herself remain at a perch on the edge of the system, overseeing the operation from a safe height.
The hope was that none of that would be required, and the Jabberwocky would be intact, along with Gamma Tauri b. In that case, they'd just have the Jabberwocky boost up out of the planetary orbit and they'd help install the other EMV's warp ring so they could return to Aldebaran together.
The countdown clock until their exit from warp ticked down ominously as the ship hurtled closer to its sister. The distorted space visible through the camera feeds resembled a rainbow kaleidoscope of swirling colors; the intense distortion of the warp tunnel blue shifted the cosmic microwave background into the visible spectrum, turning the view ahead into a whirl of light.
"Five minutes." Alice said again, breaking the heavily settling silence.
"I can read the clock Alice." Kaito said irritably, taking another drag of his vaporizer.
Alice sighed and resisted the urge to chide him for falling back on his nicotine habit, they were all a bit frayed at the seams.
"Get ready with the telescopes. I want lens covers off and instruments pointed." Kaito said to the MIC crew, sending several of the lower ranking system specialists into a last minute frenzy of activity.
The return from the warp tunnel into normal spacetime didn't actually feel like anything. Unlike the jolt associated with the initial kick into the tunnel, the exit just happened. One moment, they were looking at the radial rainbow of the warp fields, and the next, it all vanished like a ripple on still water, and they were back amongst the stars.
"What do we see?" Kaito asked immediately in a tone that didn't entirely hide his frustration at not having the information simply beamed directly into his head.
There was a moment of tense silence as the images resolved themselves, details appearing with every successive increase in resolution.
It was Alice who spoke first, her lips drawn into a tight grimace as her eyes fixated on strangely massive storm, lit by flickering internal lights deep within the atmosphere of the gas giant. "They're already here."
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
"I don't actually think the bird-spiders are all that smart." Cale said before taking a sip of his coffee. He and Ivy were sitting in the small observation lounge, looking out at a telescopic view of the alien ship, during a brief respite from the seemingly endless flurry of activity they had been inundated with since the aliens first made themselves known.
"Supporting evidence?" Ivy asked, raising an eyebrow from behind her own coffee cup.
"Just a hunch really. Something about the way they've interacted with us so far." Cale shrugged and took another sip of his coffee.
"They did build that spaceship that's bigger than our planet." Ivy pointed out.
"Which just makes me wonder if they're trying to compensate for something." Cale smirked.
Ivy rolled her eyes. "Its impressive though, you've got to admit."
"Oh yeah." Cale said, "I mean, those rods of theirs apparently row through spacetime like oars somehow? Crazy stuff, but I stand by my thesi–"
The lights in the observation room all flashed to red, and the images on the wallscreens suddenly changed as Emmy stepped in and highlighted the flare of a distant fusion drive; a new ship had appeared in the system.
Jean's voice entered Ivy's ears through the room's speakers only a moment later. "Ivy, Cale, we just detected the MNCV Netwon's Prism drop out of warp 2 AUs from us, they're requesting immediate status updates via tight beam."
"Report shipboard situation nominal and send them all the regular reports." Ivy spoke back to the disembodied voice. "We're on our way to the bridge."
Ivy swallowed the last swirl of her coffee and pushed herself out of the chair, gesturing for Cale to follow her as she slipped out into the main corridor in the aft spin gravity ring.
"They didn't waste much time did they?" Cale asked rhetorically as they made their way to the bridge.
"Arriving now?" Ivy mentally tallied the days and distances and flight times, "They must have launched within a couple hours of getting our drone."
As they entered the bridge, Jean jumped up from her seat, "I sent the reply to them, at their current range, we should have a response within a half hour."
"Good good, is it just the one ship?" Ivy asked.
"So far yeah, but here, let me just play the message." Jean answered. Her eyes went blank for a moment as she brought up the signal log on her implants and ordered it to play back over the speakers.
"MSCV FSF8 Empiricist, this is MNCV LAF12 Newton's Prism acting as vanguard to MNCV CV4 Light of Ages and escorts, we require all relevant status updates and tactical data via tight beam. Failure to reply within 20 minutes of field propagation lag will be taken as a sign you have been compromised in some way. Repeat, MSCV FSF8 Empiricist, this is MNCV LAF12 Newton's Prism–" Jean cut the audio before it'd had a chance to fully loop.
"Light of Ages huh?" Cale asked. "That means they're sending the entire Third Fleet."
"I guess we're not the only ones spooked by all this." Ivy acknowledged.
"You think Admiral Wallace still hates me?" Cale asked bemusedly.
"Well, you are still just a senior Pragmatist on scout frigate." Ivy teased. "I'm five years your junior but I already outrank you, I suspect he still remembers."
"Command track is different and I like this posting, I didn't fight it." Cale replied.
"That doesn't mean you weren't still stuck out here to have an example made of." Ivy couldn't quite keep the amusement out of her tone. "You've been at this long enough, if I were to compare you to other Pragmatists with your time in the service, I'd expect you to be the senior Pragmatist to one of the command battle groups by now."
"That whole cake incident was ten years ago, I'm sure he doesn't remember." Cale insisted.
"He has a pretty long memory." Ivy said skeptically.
Cale shrugged, "I guess we'll find out."
Autonomous Cargo Drone
Lighthorse FI-2453
Parabolic Capture Orbit
53,000 kilometers from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
Owen felt his body relax as the Lighthorse's engines cut out at the conclusion of the insertion burn, his mass no longer pressed into the back of his spacesuit by the two gees of acceleration. Gamma Tauri b loomed large through his helmet, it's pale bands of teal and orange concussing with waves of storms as a shining and bulging conflagration expanded on the horizon like a massive wart on the gaseous world.
Sensors Alice had rigged up fed into his helmet's heads up display: the bulge in the world had already risen 5,000 klicks out of the atmosphere, and though the blast was in the middle latitudes, at its present rate of expansion, its margins would soon begin interacting with the inner edge of the ring system.
He watched a timer counting down on his HUD: the time remaining until their hastily improvised radio system reached communications range with the big dish on the Jabberwocky. They had outrun the light of the Stoneburner's arrival on the edge of the system by several hours. Those hours were crucial though; The Jabberwocky still might not actually realize the ring was about to come apart, and while the Stoneburner's telescopes were still looking at the beginning phases of the alien's arrival, that was because the light they were seeing through their telescopes was already several hours into the past. In the intervening time, the storm they had seen on their telescopes had deformed upwards beyond the atmosphere, as if it was being lifted from beneath by the maker's hand.
The Lighthorse was now entirely ballistic, coasting above the planet's vast ring system as the world's intense gravity captured the tiny drone ship into its orbital influence. Owen and nineteen other veteran EVA specialists were riding the Lighthorse, strapped to the outside in their suits by something akin to stirrups. The rings below remained placid, their vast rippling clouds of dust and ice interspaced with the ever-shifting glint of metallic asteroids seemed somehow lost in time, as if their destruction had already been witnessed, and he was just watching a rerun.
Timing, it all came down to timing; even after performing an expertly placed warp, dropping the Lighthorse directly into a parabolic capture orbit, they still had to swing a third of the way around the gas giant before the Jabberwocky would rise above the horizon enough for their radio to be in range.
He took a breath and turned back on the inter-suit channel.
"I don't care who you think you are, I will turn this ship around right no-"
"Murphy!" He barked, silencing the voice of the young woman.
"Boss, tell her to lay off," came next the voice of Maxwell Anders, "I was just making a joke."
"You can stick your joke right u–" Eleanor Murphy started, but Owen accessed the administrative settings and simply muted them both at the server level.
"Enough of that, we are now twenty minutes out from contact. If the events at Amateru were anything to go by, we're going to have another hour and a half at most before everything goes to hell. We are on the clock people!"
"Did you just mute Anders?" Jeffrey Carlton asked.
"Can I as mining foreman, not request twenty minutes to enjoy this ride with a little bit of quiet?"
"That's a definite negative boss." Isaac Banks replied, "See I ate this bean burrito before I got in the suit, and the gas just somehow keeps getting keyed up."
Owen decided it was time for drastic action. He accessed his suit's music library and started uploading it to the Lighthorse's communications server.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"Mike have you ever seen anything like this?" Alicia Arrari asked her senior mining foreman with a frown as she watched the growing disruption on the far side of the world.
"I thought it was a storm at first." Michael Tellerman answered her, "But it isn't like any storm I've ever seen anymore."
"Is it dangerous?" She asked, narrowing her eyes as she watched the lightning storms flickering at the margins of the blast.
"Most things in space tend to be." He snorted, "But then, just about everything that can happen in the atmosphere of a gas giant will already kill you four or five times over, what's one more?"
"The center of it is already 7,000 kilometers up from the usual top of the atmosphere." The captain persisted as she tapped on the screen in irritation.
"It's a big planet," Mike reassured her.
"Alright, how's the breakdown going on that chunk of xenotime?" She asked, turning away from the telescope inputs and floating the length of the ship's Mining Information Center.
"We're about seventy percent done with it. I've got twelve guys out there hacking at it now, so we should have it completely broken down within a few hours." Mike replied as he followed along in her wake.
"Good, once we finish that I wanna climb up to 45,000 klicks, just to be on the safe side," she said as she arrested her momentum on the back of an empty console chair.
"You sure about that? This ring has been pretty good to us, lots of valuable rocks here," Mike asked as he floated past her.
"I don't wanna risk it," she flipped herself over the arm of the captain's chair with the needless acrobatics of zero gee, "there's an entire planet's worth of minerals out there. Go find me Tom and Laura, we'll move the ship once your guys finish with that xenotime rock."
There were no sensors calibrated to measure the health of the ring system, no robotic eyes watching as the innermost margins of the ring began encountering the rapidly expanding deformation in the atmosphere.
As the faint inner edges of the orbiting ring were struck by the rising gases, they began to slow down and experience drag, pulling them into suborbital trajectories. The disturbance in the ring began to build as a standing wave, with higher velocity material slamming into the slowing flow, sending a cascade of impacts rippling outwards into the larger structure of the ring.
Mike slipped out the entrance to the bridge to fetch the navigator and XO, while Alicia strapped into her seat to avoid floating off and watched the growing storm on the satellite feeds.
The chunk of equal parts silicon and water ices had been orbiting placidly for several million years, tumbling around its siblings in a perfect balance of gravity and motion. At nearly five hundred feet long, its mass dominated its region of the ring, and it cast long eddies and gravitational ripples in its wake.
The initial collisional ripples were almost impossible to see as they propagated through the ring at several times the orbital velocity of the material inside of it, a wave not of fluid in any traditional sense, but an endless procession of successive impacts each leading to further impacts as it flowed silently across the ring structure.
The micro meteors struck the boulder first, peppering its surface like high speed birdshot but otherwise failing to harm the enormous stone. But, on the tail of the micro meteors was a two hundred-foot-long piece of irregular ferrite, which slammed into the rock of silicon and ice with the force of a moderately powerful nuclear weapon. The boulder was shattered into several pieces each with some of the ferrite asteroid's momentum transferred to them, sending the wave rippling onward. Though the water component of the asteroid was instantly vaporized in the energy of the collision, the remaining, sharp-edged, silicon pieces remained mostly intact, their spinning velocities putting them directly on course for the exploratory mining vessel.
Impact alarms began going off suddenly in the Jabberwocky's MIC, dozens of them began blaring at once as the cascading impacts sent more and more rocks careening in their direction.
In the time it took for Alicia Arrari to gasp in surprise at the alarms the micrometeor swarm had crossed the distance between the silicon rock and their ship and instantly reduced seven of the EVA miners to shredded meat.
Alicia fumbled for the comms switch and slammed down the shipwide, "Get everyone back inside now! We have an emergency situation!"
"We've lost lifesigns on Kellogg, Anderson, Franks, Henderson, Di'Mallio, Xi Tan and Kosca. Giovanni and Mitchell are still alive but injured and losing suit pressure!" Felicia Downing, the communications specialist, relayed to her.
"Get them inside now!" She shouted at the other girl.
The ship had already begun shuddering with impacts as Mike along with, Thomas Engel and Laura Wolf launched themselves through the hatch into the MIC.
"What's going on?" Laura, her XO asked.
"I have no idea, all the collision alarms started going off at once, we've already had seven casualties to micrometeorites, something is disrupting the ring." The captain explained.
"Do you want me to change our inclination and pull up out of the ring?" Thomas Laurent, the navigator, asked her.
"As soon as-" Her words were interrupted by a fifty-foot chunk of silicon scything through the primary centrifugal smelter. The spinning rock impacted the spinning smelter and both instantly disintegrated in a starburst of liquefied metal, shrapnel, and debris. Chain decompressions tore through bulkhead after bulkhead as the kinetic force spent itself in the hull of the ship. Alicia's neck was yanked hard enough to give her whiplash as Mike, Tom and Laura were slammed into the far wall of the MIC. The command deck began filling with shouts and screams and cries of dismay, accompanied by a growing chorus of damage alarms and error messages, and something else.
It started faint and crackling but was growing stronger as time went on: the two hundred-year-old sound of Johnny Cash's Ring of Fire was coming in on their wideband antenna.
Alicia cocked an eyebrow, trying to hear over the MIC's din, she wasn't sure if she was imagining it or not. "Is that…music?"
Chapter 11: Dark Harvest
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 11: Dark Harvest
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
Two hours after its arrival, the MNCV Newton's Prism was joined by dozens of ships dropping out of warp all around the light attack frigate. Space rippled and distorted as frigates, cruisers, and destroyers fell out of their warp tunnels seconds apart from one another. Unlike the Empiricist, which was built from the ground up as a long-term survey vessel, the military ships appeared like blocky stacks of modules and weapons wrapped in thick ablative plating, with none of the grace or fragility implied in the design of the science vessel. The massive command battleship Light of Ages was the last to drop out, appearing in a hollow amidst the other twenty-four vessels of the Martian Socialist Republic's Third Fleet.
Ivy Czininski drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair on the bridge while Emmy flagged and identified each new ship dropping out of warp by its squawk code and placing a dot onto the telescopic image.
"Keep in mind this is sixteen minutes old already," Cale said as he materialized behind her on the bridge.
"I'm aware." The captain said with a twinge of annoyance in her voice.
"Any response from the bird-spiders to our fleet showing up?" Cale asked.
"None yet, Jean did tell them a few times we had more ships on the way, so it shouldn't catch them too much off guard," Ivy answered.
The system beeped and Ivy looked up as Emmy started flagging another new set of contacts coming out of warp all around them. There was a moment of panic before she realized that the ships exiting warp were still the Third Fleet, now appearing as doubles on the sensor system since the light of their fleet entering warp had yet to reach the Empiricist.
She sat up straighter in her chair as a request for live video feed from the Light of Ages came through on the tight beam and unconsciously fixed the collar of her shirt.
"You sure you want to be here for this?" She asked Cale wryly.
"Yeah, why not?" Cale said, standing up a bit straighter, "Let's see if he remembers me."
"Alright then Emmy, put him on," Ivy said after taking a deep breath.
The distinguished, salt and pepper haired face of Admiral Adam Wallace appeared larger than life on the main monitor, eyes seeming to peer out of the screen at them.
"Mission Commander Czininski, I'm glad to see you're well." He said levelly. "You seem to have stumbled into quite the interesting situation here."
"Admiral Wallace. You've viewed the drone logs we've sent I assume, sir?" Ivy asked him.
"I've reviewed your drone logs personally," he replied, "and I've got fifty people aboard the Light climbing up my shirt to get access to any additional data you've acquired since then."
"We've acquired enough data to clog up the tightbeam for days sir, which is why I thought we should have this conversation before dumping everything on you." She answered him smoothly.
"Very well, what do you have for me?" He asked her.
"To make a long story short, we've communicated a small amount and opened a line of direct dialog, these aliens claim to be refugees from a galactic scale conflict that is making its way toward us, and has the potential to represent an imminent existential threat to humanity."
He pursed his lips, seeming to digest the information, eyes darting from Ivy to Cale. "Send us everything," He said somewhat gruffly and cut the connection.
Cale waited to speak until the admiral's face had been replaced with the starfield once more, "I think that went well."
Autonomous Cargo Drone
Lighthorse FI-2453
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 kilometers from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"I fell into, a burnin' ring of fire, I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher.." The low, gravelly voice of Johnny Cash resounded through the communications server of the Lighthorse as it fell towards the Jabberwocky on its ballistic trajectory.
From his vantage point above the ring system, Owen watched the first waves of the collisional cascade ripple through the ring structure. In its wake, the ring seemed to boil and churn, rocks that had sedately orbited were now being hurled up into their path. He felt the Lighthorse buck and jink beneath him as they swerved around a large boulder that was climbing into their path.
"You got this Murphy?" Owen asked after lifting the young woman's administrative mute.
"I got this," she said in a detached voice, her mind entirely focused on piloting.
"And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire, the ring of fire…" Sang Johnny Cash as they made their way closer to the Jabberwocky. Owen continued watching the countdown clock on his suit, impatiently drumming his fingers on the inside of his gloves as the seconds ticked down until the planet was no longer in their way.
The timer his zero and Owen instantly began broadcasting. "Come in Jabberwocky this is Owen McGregor broadcasting from Lighthorse FI-2453, Come in Jabberwocky."
There was a tense moment as he waited for a response, and finally, Alicia Arrari's voice came back in over his suit speakers. "You picked a hell of a time to show up."
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
Mike Tellerman had been wearing his magnetic boots when the asteroid slammed into the ship. The force of that impact was enough to break the magnetic locks on the boots, but not quickly enough to prevent the sharp lateral motion from breaking his ankles before the magnetic locks could give way and send him tumbling into a wall.
"Somebody get me a damage report!" Laura Wolf shouted as she extracted herself from Tom Engel and pushed off the wall where she'd been flung into by the impact.
"Take a look for yourself!" Alicia Arrari shouted back from the command chair, "Everything's going to hell, we've lost pressure in fifteen compartments and the entire smelting and processing system is gutting itself." Alicia barely took a breath before turning to one of the system specialists and continuing in the same tone, "Do we still have working engines?"
"I'm getting a damage report and an error state from the primary fuel lines and the maneuvering thruster system is reporting a loss of pressure though it doesn't know where in the system it's leaking." The specialist responded as quickly as he could spit the words out.
"Damnit! Laura, I need you to lead the damage control parties and prioritize repairs to the engines, Mike, get in a suit and take point with the repair teams. And somebody tell me where that damn music is coming from!"
Laura nodded quickly and pushed off Alicia's chair as she made her way to one of the system interface consoles, the ship shuddered again as another rock smashed into the already cratered hull, and Johnny Cash's voice continued unabated.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to help with that." Mike groaned from where he found himself relatively at rest with respect to the wall.
"It's not coming from the ship, we're getting it over the wideband." Felicia Downing, the communications specialist answered nervously. Alicia raised and eyebrow and looked from her to the sensor systems specialist, who just shrugged. And then the Lighthorse blinked into the sensor system's registry at the same time as a voice appeared over the radio.
"Come in Jabberwocky this is Owen McGregor broadcasting from Lighthorse FI-2453, Come in Jabberwocky."
"McGregor?" Mike asked as he gently pushed himself towards Alicia. "Last I heard he was on the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, what's he doing here?"
"We're about to find out," Alicia growled as she keyed up on the radio. "You picked a hell of a time to show up."
"I thought you'd say that," he answered, "The planet's exploding right? You need to get out of there as quickly as possible. Hard burn off the planetary ecliptic and keep burning until you're hyperbolic, then let up to one gee, but keep burning until you're at least an AU from here."
"That would have been great advice about twenty minutes ago, but we've suffered major damage and our engines are down." She replied irritably. Mike gripped the back of Alicia's chair and held to it for support, his ankles still threatening to blind him with pain.
"I also thought you might say that," Owen continued, "which is why I have twenty EVA specialists with me, who are going to get your ship working in the next hour and a half, which is incidentally about how long we have before the lower orbits go full kessler on us." Alicia could hear the tension in his voice. She thought he was trying to come off as confident, but she wasn't sure if he actually believed it.
"What are you doing here, how did you know this was coming?" She asked him.
"It's a long story, but this happened to us too. We don't have time for it now though, this whole orbit is going to hell in a handbasket. It's aliens by the way, you're about to be sitting in the middle of an alien mining operation."
Alicia glanced back at Mike, continuing her conversation with Owen, "I expect to hear the full story as soon as we're safe. How far out are you?" She unkeyed and asked Mike, "What happened?"
"I think I broke my ankles." He answered palely.
"We're 10,000 klicks out and closing rapidly, we'll be performing our hoverslam in the next minute," Owen replied.
"Tell me what it looks like out there, most of the external cameras are in various stages of death at the moment." Alicia unkeyed again, "Go to medical." She hissed at Mike.
"Along with half the crew?" He answered, "I'll stay here and make myself useful."
"I can do that." Owen's voice said at the same time.
"Laura, what's the status on the engines?" Alicia turned to her XO
"I've got a team tracing the leak in the maneuvering thrusters, and another repairing breaks in the primary fuel line, but the main fusion bottle is throwing error states, I'm pretty sure it took a hit, but we've not been able to get anyone down there to check it yet." Laura answered without looking up from her console.
"Alright keep me updated on it," Alicia said.
"Lighthorse FI-2453 just began its rendezvous burn." The sensor system specialist reported from her console.
"We just lost pressure in the main axial corridor between blocks six and thirteen!" One of the other specialists shouted over the din. "Cascade failures continuing in the atmospheric control system!"
Alicia keyed up on the shipwide again, "If you're alive and aren't already in a spacesuit you should probably be getting into a spacesuit right about now." She lifted her flicked the switch back off and said to the room, "That applies here too, let's get the emergency suits out of the locker and distributed."
"I've got that," Mike said, pushing off Alicia's chair with his hands in the direction of the emergency locker. He kept his legs behind him to avoid hitting them against anything and injuring them further. He arrested his momentum with his hands and started throwing emergency spacesuits at people. Unlike the semi-hard bodied EVA suits, theses were essentially large bags with something roughly approximating arms, legs, fingers, and head. They wouldn't protect from impacts, but they would keep them alive if the room depressurized. Alicia unstrapped from her chair and began clambering into one when Owen's voice returned on the speakers.
"Jabberwocky, you do not look to be in good shape. The entire centrifugal smelting assembly is just..wrecked, and you've got liquid metal still flowing out of the induction furnace into the hole where the centrifuge used to be."
"What do the areas behind the assembly look like? The engines and reactor, is the ship still in one piece?" Alicia asked in increasingly desperate sounding tone. Mike winced as he shoved his injured feet into the oversized leg of the emergency spacesuit, partly from his own pain, and partly out of sympathy for Alicia, the pain in her voice was obvious.
"She's holding together." Owen's voice came back, causing Alicia to let out a quiet sigh, "The main axial column still looks to be intact. Some of your magnetic nozzles are damaged, but that's a relatively quick fix."
"We're getting error states from the engine's primary fusion bottle, make checking that your priority." She told him.
"Will do," He responded, "I'll bring the Lighthorse into the rearmost bay, we can check most of that from out here."
"Be careful out there, we just lost seven people to micrometeor impacts." Alicia pursed her lips.
"Caution is my middle name." Owen answered her.
"For both our sakes I hope so Owen," she said.
"Me too," he replied.
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
50 AUs from Theta Tauri
March 2219
After over six months of travel, the starship Better Margins fell out of a ripple in spacetime and into the Theta Tauri system. Her computer systems attempted to contact the system of satellites and relays that the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and spread across the system, only to come up blank.
Theta Tauri b was no more. Theta Tauri c was gone as well. In the seven months since the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg had gone dark, the planets had completely vanished. In their place a series of giant alien machines now swept around the star like giant propeller blades, moving at several times higher than orbital velocity and scooping up every rock, asteroid, comet, and chunk of debris in the system. Captain Benjamin Nesco was utterly flabbergasted. There was no sign of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and not even a sign she had ever been there. He feared the worst for them but was utterly at a loss to understand how entire worlds could simply disappear. The alien machines, while incriminating, were almost an afterthought, just one more mystery for the pile.
The captain of the Better Margins, along with the rest of his bridge crew, were in something of a state of shock. They had expected to find death, they had expected the ship to potentially be a complete write off, but it was just gone. Everything was just gone. Entire gas giant worlds and their collections of moons, asteroid belts, comets, everything was either gone already or quickly being swept up by the impossibly massive alien equipment now present in the system.
After a long period of silence, while the bridge crew witnessed the spectacle unfolding before them, the XO, Melissa Stevenson, gently nudged Ben, "Captain, we do we do now?"
He pursed his lips, mind racing but coming up blank. "We'll observe the system for two weeks, if nothing happens, we'll return to Aldebaran and report on what we've seen."
She took a breath and tucked her auburn hair behind her ears, "Aliens, we finally meet alien life, and it's probably already killed over two hundred people."
"These things...have a way of happening." Ben replied after a measured moment, "When two civilizations of vast technological differences come into contact, it's rarely peaceful, even if the aliens are well intentioned."
"What do you think these ones intend?" She asked him.
"I think these ones intend to finish strip mining this solar system. With regards to us in general, your guess is as good as mine." He answered her.
"You don't want to make contact do you?" She queried.
"No way, that's quite a bit above my paygrade." He chuckled nervously, "We're just going to lurk here at the edge of the system and see what they do. I assume they mined the planets out first, and that's what happened to the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, but I want to see if they start building anything here afterward."
"I'll see about getting some satellites launched." She said softly and pushed past him. Ben continued to watch somewhat transfixed as the 12 AU long blades swept through the system.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
The grey, somewhat cratered deck plating of the Jabberwocky rushed past Owen in a blur of motion as his suited form skimmed the hull at a speed far greater than would typically be considered safe. That said, his situation was far from typical, and the looming threat of micrometeors and the entire ring tearing itself apart encouraged him to make haste.
Anders, Cartlon, Ferguson, and Wells were with him, their suited forms lost somewhere in his blind spot. They were racing down the outside of the ship to the magnetic nozzles. They could go in through the main nozzle into the bottle chamber and check for damage, which was much quicker than trying to reach the same location from inside the ship, especially with the still cascading damage occurring onboard as the mining equipment finished dying.
"Get ready to arrest momentum," Owen said to his companions as they neared the tail of the ship. Owen rotated his suit so the back thrusters were now pointed in the direction he was flying. "Now on my mark hit the thrusters so you don't hit me or each other. Three." He said, making eye contact with Anders through the thick suit glass. "Two." The other man gave him a thumbs-up gesture. "One."
Owen engaged the thrusters on his suit and killed off all his velocity relative to the ship. The other suited figures did the same, and they were soon floating before the massive engine bell at the Jabberwocky's stern.
He keyed up on his private channel to the Jabberwocky's MIC, "Alicia, I'm now looking at the main drive exhaust, the primary nozzle took a lateral hit clean through both sides, we should be able to route power around it and reconfigure the field distribution to account for the damage."
"Alright, please check on the main fusion bottle before you get to work on that, we're not going anywhere without the ability to fuse propellant." The captain's voice came back through his suit speaker.
Owen took a breath and changed channels again, going into foreman mode. "Alright, Carlton and Ferguson, I want you two to start going over the damage to the nozzle and tallying up repair priorities for it, Anders, and Wells, you're with me, we're going to go through the nozzle into the primary fusion bottle, and we're doing the same thing as them. Focus on quick fixes, we can do a more thorough job once we're out of this turkey shoot."
He received back a chorus of acknowledgments and tapped his thruster to start forward into the nozzle bell. He proceeded more cautiously, not wanting to bounce off the nozzle and hurt it or himself.
Anders keyed up and snickered over the comms as Owen began to pull himself up through the pinch point into the fusion bottle, and Owen keyed up on the foreman authority level, cutting him off, "If I hear one sexual innuendo about penetrating starships, I will globally mute you again Anders."
"I didn't say anything," Anders replied defensively, "I would never dream of implying-"
"Shit," Owen said on the foreman level. The fusion bottle was completely gutted. A rock had torn through the outer bottle wall, crossed the chamber, and bounced off the far wall of the bottle, rebounding around inside as it spent all of its kinetic energy and leaving it floating slowly through the center of the chamber. "We're gonna need a new plan."
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
50 AUs from Theta Tauri
March 2219
Two dozen robotic satellite eyes captured the moment that the massive fans sweeping through the system vanished in a short-lived blast of radiation.
"What just happened?" Benjamin Nesco blinked in surprise, snapping out of his thoughts.
"I'm not sure." Zhao Biyu, the sensor system specialist answered confusedly. "All that alien equipment just vanished, there was a radiation surge in...everything, EM, A and B, neutrinos, I have no idea what they just did."
Ben narrowed his eyes, "So are they gone then?"
"There doesn't seem to be anythi...wait" The specialist interrupted herself, "There's another surge in radiation emissions." They all watched as a glowing disc AUs across appeared beneath the ecliptic of the system. Electricity jumped from point to point on the glowing roiling surface in arcs longer than planets as a strange flat storm appeared in spacetime.
"We're recording this right?" Melissa Stevenson asked Biyu softly.
"Of course." The specialist answered.
Three impossibly vast prongs began to emerge from the storm. Dark spires of alien metal sparkling with strange lights rose up around the star, like the claw of some enormous monster. The spires began to curl, folding in on themselves to embrace the star in their grasp. Solar storms erupted from the star's surface, sloughing off massive sheets of high energy plasma as magnetic fields larger than worlds slammed together.
Ben felt his hands starting to sweat as he gripped the armrests of his chair. The bridge crew was silent, held in transfixed awe at the scale of engineering they beheld. The metallic fingers came together at a point above the star and began the descend back into the plane of storms and radiation, dragging the star with them. The claw and star both vanished into the disc of radiation, which then faded away as quickly as it appeared, leaving the Better Margins drifting alone through deep space.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
Ivy closed the door on her office and activated the privacy screens through her implants as she sat down. She brought up the video conferencing screen and accepted the private tight beam connection with her neural interface.
Admiral Wallace's face appeared on the screen and Ivy unconsciously sat more upright in her chair.
"I've reviewed as much of the information as I could without taking a few years and earning a science degree." He began without preamble. He pursed his lips, and then offered a rare smile, "You've done well here Ivy. The actions of you and your crew have been exemplary through and through."
"Thank you, sir." Ivy smiled.
"I have a large team of experts who are now somewhat up to speed on what your people have done, and it's time we put them in touch." He continued. "On that note, I'll be sending over a 10th Rank Pragmatist, a linguist, and a xenobiologist by shuttle. Your ship is going to serve as our physical platform for first contact, congratulations commander, you're going to be in the history books."
Ivy took a moment to process all of what he'd just said, all the while a smile had begun growing across her lips. "Thank you, sir," she managed to finally say, "does that mean you'll want us to move our ship closer to the alien vessel?"
"Yes." He replied. "Once our people have transferred aboard, you'll move in closer, to one light second out from those 'oars' of theirs and initiate real-time communication."
"Understood sir. Will that be all?" She asked.
"That will be all Commander," he answered before cutting the connection. Ivy chuckled to herself for a moment then accessed the intercom system with her implants and contacted Cale.
"He remembers. You're being replaced."
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
Two hours after its arrival, the MNCV Newton's Prism was joined by dozens of ships dropping out of warp all around the light attack frigate. Space rippled and distorted as frigates, cruisers, and destroyers fell out of their warp tunnels seconds apart from one another. Unlike the Empiricist, which was built from the ground up as a long-term survey vessel, the military ships appeared like blocky stacks of modules and weapons wrapped in thick ablative plating, with none of the grace or fragility implied in the design of the science vessel. The massive command battleship Light of Ages was the last to drop out, appearing in a hollow amidst the other twenty-four vessels of the Martian Socialist Republic's Third Fleet.
Ivy Czininski drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair on the bridge while Emmy flagged and identified each new ship dropping out of warp by its squawk code and placing a dot onto the telescopic image.
"Keep in mind this is sixteen minutes old already," Cale said as he materialized behind her on the bridge.
"I'm aware." The captain said with a twinge of annoyance in her voice.
"Any response from the bird-spiders to our fleet showing up?" Cale asked.
"None yet, Jean did tell them a few times we had more ships on the way, so it shouldn't catch them too much off guard," Ivy answered.
The system beeped and Ivy looked up as Emmy started flagging another new set of contacts coming out of warp all around them. There was a moment of panic before she realized that the ships exiting warp were still the Third Fleet, now appearing as doubles on the sensor system since the light of their fleet entering warp had yet to reach the Empiricist.
She sat up straighter in her chair as a request for live video feed from the Light of Ages came through on the tight beam and unconsciously fixed the collar of her shirt.
"You sure you want to be here for this?" She asked Cale wryly.
"Yeah, why not?" Cale said, standing up a bit straighter, "Let's see if he remembers me."
"Alright then Emmy, put him on," Ivy said after taking a deep breath.
The distinguished, salt and pepper haired face of Admiral Adam Wallace appeared larger than life on the main monitor, eyes seeming to peer out of the screen at them.
"Mission Commander Czininski, I'm glad to see you're well." He said levelly. "You seem to have stumbled into quite the interesting situation here."
"Admiral Wallace. You've viewed the drone logs we've sent I assume, sir?" Ivy asked him.
"I've reviewed your drone logs personally," he replied, "and I've got fifty people aboard the Light climbing up my shirt to get access to any additional data you've acquired since then."
"We've acquired enough data to clog up the tightbeam for days sir, which is why I thought we should have this conversation before dumping everything on you." She answered him smoothly.
"Very well, what do you have for me?" He asked her.
"To make a long story short, we've communicated a small amount and opened a line of direct dialog, these aliens claim to be refugees from a galactic scale conflict that is making its way toward us, and has the potential to represent an imminent existential threat to humanity."
He pursed his lips, seeming to digest the information, eyes darting from Ivy to Cale. "Send us everything," He said somewhat gruffly and cut the connection.
Cale waited to speak until the admiral's face had been replaced with the starfield once more, "I think that went well."
Autonomous Cargo Drone
Lighthorse FI-2453
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 kilometers from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"I fell into, a burnin' ring of fire, I went down, down, down, and the flames went higher.." The low, gravelly voice of Johnny Cash resounded through the communications server of the Lighthorse as it fell towards the Jabberwocky on its ballistic trajectory.
From his vantage point above the ring system, Owen watched the first waves of the collisional cascade ripple through the ring structure. In its wake, the ring seemed to boil and churn, rocks that had sedately orbited were now being hurled up into their path. He felt the Lighthorse buck and jink beneath him as they swerved around a large boulder that was climbing into their path.
"You got this Murphy?" Owen asked after lifting the young woman's administrative mute.
"I got this," she said in a detached voice, her mind entirely focused on piloting.
"And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire, the ring of fire…" Sang Johnny Cash as they made their way closer to the Jabberwocky. Owen continued watching the countdown clock on his suit, impatiently drumming his fingers on the inside of his gloves as the seconds ticked down until the planet was no longer in their way.
The timer his zero and Owen instantly began broadcasting. "Come in Jabberwocky this is Owen McGregor broadcasting from Lighthorse FI-2453, Come in Jabberwocky."
There was a tense moment as he waited for a response, and finally, Alicia Arrari's voice came back in over his suit speakers. "You picked a hell of a time to show up."
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
Mike Tellerman had been wearing his magnetic boots when the asteroid slammed into the ship. The force of that impact was enough to break the magnetic locks on the boots, but not quickly enough to prevent the sharp lateral motion from breaking his ankles before the magnetic locks could give way and send him tumbling into a wall.
"Somebody get me a damage report!" Laura Wolf shouted as she extracted herself from Tom Engel and pushed off the wall where she'd been flung into by the impact.
"Take a look for yourself!" Alicia Arrari shouted back from the command chair, "Everything's going to hell, we've lost pressure in fifteen compartments and the entire smelting and processing system is gutting itself." Alicia barely took a breath before turning to one of the system specialists and continuing in the same tone, "Do we still have working engines?"
"I'm getting a damage report and an error state from the primary fuel lines and the maneuvering thruster system is reporting a loss of pressure though it doesn't know where in the system it's leaking." The specialist responded as quickly as he could spit the words out.
"Damnit! Laura, I need you to lead the damage control parties and prioritize repairs to the engines, Mike, get in a suit and take point with the repair teams. And somebody tell me where that damn music is coming from!"
Laura nodded quickly and pushed off Alicia's chair as she made her way to one of the system interface consoles, the ship shuddered again as another rock smashed into the already cratered hull, and Johnny Cash's voice continued unabated.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to help with that." Mike groaned from where he found himself relatively at rest with respect to the wall.
"It's not coming from the ship, we're getting it over the wideband." Felicia Downing, the communications specialist answered nervously. Alicia raised and eyebrow and looked from her to the sensor systems specialist, who just shrugged. And then the Lighthorse blinked into the sensor system's registry at the same time as a voice appeared over the radio.
"Come in Jabberwocky this is Owen McGregor broadcasting from Lighthorse FI-2453, Come in Jabberwocky."
"McGregor?" Mike asked as he gently pushed himself towards Alicia. "Last I heard he was on the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, what's he doing here?"
"We're about to find out," Alicia growled as she keyed up on the radio. "You picked a hell of a time to show up."
"I thought you'd say that," he answered, "The planet's exploding right? You need to get out of there as quickly as possible. Hard burn off the planetary ecliptic and keep burning until you're hyperbolic, then let up to one gee, but keep burning until you're at least an AU from here."
"That would have been great advice about twenty minutes ago, but we've suffered major damage and our engines are down." She replied irritably. Mike gripped the back of Alicia's chair and held to it for support, his ankles still threatening to blind him with pain.
"I also thought you might say that," Owen continued, "which is why I have twenty EVA specialists with me, who are going to get your ship working in the next hour and a half, which is incidentally about how long we have before the lower orbits go full kessler on us." Alicia could hear the tension in his voice. She thought he was trying to come off as confident, but she wasn't sure if he actually believed it.
"What are you doing here, how did you know this was coming?" She asked him.
"It's a long story, but this happened to us too. We don't have time for it now though, this whole orbit is going to hell in a handbasket. It's aliens by the way, you're about to be sitting in the middle of an alien mining operation."
Alicia glanced back at Mike, continuing her conversation with Owen, "I expect to hear the full story as soon as we're safe. How far out are you?" She unkeyed and asked Mike, "What happened?"
"I think I broke my ankles." He answered palely.
"We're 10,000 klicks out and closing rapidly, we'll be performing our hoverslam in the next minute," Owen replied.
"Tell me what it looks like out there, most of the external cameras are in various stages of death at the moment." Alicia unkeyed again, "Go to medical." She hissed at Mike.
"Along with half the crew?" He answered, "I'll stay here and make myself useful."
"I can do that." Owen's voice said at the same time.
"Laura, what's the status on the engines?" Alicia turned to her XO
"I've got a team tracing the leak in the maneuvering thrusters, and another repairing breaks in the primary fuel line, but the main fusion bottle is throwing error states, I'm pretty sure it took a hit, but we've not been able to get anyone down there to check it yet." Laura answered without looking up from her console.
"Alright keep me updated on it," Alicia said.
"Lighthorse FI-2453 just began its rendezvous burn." The sensor system specialist reported from her console.
"We just lost pressure in the main axial corridor between blocks six and thirteen!" One of the other specialists shouted over the din. "Cascade failures continuing in the atmospheric control system!"
Alicia keyed up on the shipwide again, "If you're alive and aren't already in a spacesuit you should probably be getting into a spacesuit right about now." She lifted her flicked the switch back off and said to the room, "That applies here too, let's get the emergency suits out of the locker and distributed."
"I've got that," Mike said, pushing off Alicia's chair with his hands in the direction of the emergency locker. He kept his legs behind him to avoid hitting them against anything and injuring them further. He arrested his momentum with his hands and started throwing emergency spacesuits at people. Unlike the semi-hard bodied EVA suits, theses were essentially large bags with something roughly approximating arms, legs, fingers, and head. They wouldn't protect from impacts, but they would keep them alive if the room depressurized. Alicia unstrapped from her chair and began clambering into one when Owen's voice returned on the speakers.
"Jabberwocky, you do not look to be in good shape. The entire centrifugal smelting assembly is just..wrecked, and you've got liquid metal still flowing out of the induction furnace into the hole where the centrifuge used to be."
"What do the areas behind the assembly look like? The engines and reactor, is the ship still in one piece?" Alicia asked in increasingly desperate sounding tone. Mike winced as he shoved his injured feet into the oversized leg of the emergency spacesuit, partly from his own pain, and partly out of sympathy for Alicia, the pain in her voice was obvious.
"She's holding together." Owen's voice came back, causing Alicia to let out a quiet sigh, "The main axial column still looks to be intact. Some of your magnetic nozzles are damaged, but that's a relatively quick fix."
"We're getting error states from the engine's primary fusion bottle, make checking that your priority." She told him.
"Will do," He responded, "I'll bring the Lighthorse into the rearmost bay, we can check most of that from out here."
"Be careful out there, we just lost seven people to micrometeor impacts." Alicia pursed her lips.
"Caution is my middle name." Owen answered her.
"For both our sakes I hope so Owen," she said.
"Me too," he replied.
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
50 AUs from Theta Tauri
March 2219
After over six months of travel, the starship Better Margins fell out of a ripple in spacetime and into the Theta Tauri system. Her computer systems attempted to contact the system of satellites and relays that the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and spread across the system, only to come up blank.
Theta Tauri b was no more. Theta Tauri c was gone as well. In the seven months since the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg had gone dark, the planets had completely vanished. In their place a series of giant alien machines now swept around the star like giant propeller blades, moving at several times higher than orbital velocity and scooping up every rock, asteroid, comet, and chunk of debris in the system. Captain Benjamin Nesco was utterly flabbergasted. There was no sign of the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg and not even a sign she had ever been there. He feared the worst for them but was utterly at a loss to understand how entire worlds could simply disappear. The alien machines, while incriminating, were almost an afterthought, just one more mystery for the pile.
The captain of the Better Margins, along with the rest of his bridge crew, were in something of a state of shock. They had expected to find death, they had expected the ship to potentially be a complete write off, but it was just gone. Everything was just gone. Entire gas giant worlds and their collections of moons, asteroid belts, comets, everything was either gone already or quickly being swept up by the impossibly massive alien equipment now present in the system.
After a long period of silence, while the bridge crew witnessed the spectacle unfolding before them, the XO, Melissa Stevenson, gently nudged Ben, "Captain, we do we do now?"
He pursed his lips, mind racing but coming up blank. "We'll observe the system for two weeks, if nothing happens, we'll return to Aldebaran and report on what we've seen."
She took a breath and tucked her auburn hair behind her ears, "Aliens, we finally meet alien life, and it's probably already killed over two hundred people."
"These things...have a way of happening." Ben replied after a measured moment, "When two civilizations of vast technological differences come into contact, it's rarely peaceful, even if the aliens are well intentioned."
"What do you think these ones intend?" She asked him.
"I think these ones intend to finish strip mining this solar system. With regards to us in general, your guess is as good as mine." He answered her.
"You don't want to make contact do you?" She queried.
"No way, that's quite a bit above my paygrade." He chuckled nervously, "We're just going to lurk here at the edge of the system and see what they do. I assume they mined the planets out first, and that's what happened to the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg, but I want to see if they start building anything here afterward."
"I'll see about getting some satellites launched." She said softly and pushed past him. Ben continued to watch somewhat transfixed as the 12 AU long blades swept through the system.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
The grey, somewhat cratered deck plating of the Jabberwocky rushed past Owen in a blur of motion as his suited form skimmed the hull at a speed far greater than would typically be considered safe. That said, his situation was far from typical, and the looming threat of micrometeors and the entire ring tearing itself apart encouraged him to make haste.
Anders, Cartlon, Ferguson, and Wells were with him, their suited forms lost somewhere in his blind spot. They were racing down the outside of the ship to the magnetic nozzles. They could go in through the main nozzle into the bottle chamber and check for damage, which was much quicker than trying to reach the same location from inside the ship, especially with the still cascading damage occurring onboard as the mining equipment finished dying.
"Get ready to arrest momentum," Owen said to his companions as they neared the tail of the ship. Owen rotated his suit so the back thrusters were now pointed in the direction he was flying. "Now on my mark hit the thrusters so you don't hit me or each other. Three." He said, making eye contact with Anders through the thick suit glass. "Two." The other man gave him a thumbs-up gesture. "One."
Owen engaged the thrusters on his suit and killed off all his velocity relative to the ship. The other suited figures did the same, and they were soon floating before the massive engine bell at the Jabberwocky's stern.
He keyed up on his private channel to the Jabberwocky's MIC, "Alicia, I'm now looking at the main drive exhaust, the primary nozzle took a lateral hit clean through both sides, we should be able to route power around it and reconfigure the field distribution to account for the damage."
"Alright, please check on the main fusion bottle before you get to work on that, we're not going anywhere without the ability to fuse propellant." The captain's voice came back through his suit speaker.
Owen took a breath and changed channels again, going into foreman mode. "Alright, Carlton and Ferguson, I want you two to start going over the damage to the nozzle and tallying up repair priorities for it, Anders, and Wells, you're with me, we're going to go through the nozzle into the primary fusion bottle, and we're doing the same thing as them. Focus on quick fixes, we can do a more thorough job once we're out of this turkey shoot."
He received back a chorus of acknowledgments and tapped his thruster to start forward into the nozzle bell. He proceeded more cautiously, not wanting to bounce off the nozzle and hurt it or himself.
Anders keyed up and snickered over the comms as Owen began to pull himself up through the pinch point into the fusion bottle, and Owen keyed up on the foreman authority level, cutting him off, "If I hear one sexual innuendo about penetrating starships, I will globally mute you again Anders."
"I didn't say anything," Anders replied defensively, "I would never dream of implying-"
"Shit," Owen said on the foreman level. The fusion bottle was completely gutted. A rock had torn through the outer bottle wall, crossed the chamber, and bounced off the far wall of the bottle, rebounding around inside as it spent all of its kinetic energy and leaving it floating slowly through the center of the chamber. "We're gonna need a new plan."
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
50 AUs from Theta Tauri
March 2219
Two dozen robotic satellite eyes captured the moment that the massive fans sweeping through the system vanished in a short-lived blast of radiation.
"What just happened?" Benjamin Nesco blinked in surprise, snapping out of his thoughts.
"I'm not sure." Zhao Biyu, the sensor system specialist answered confusedly. "All that alien equipment just vanished, there was a radiation surge in...everything, EM, A and B, neutrinos, I have no idea what they just did."
Ben narrowed his eyes, "So are they gone then?"
"There doesn't seem to be anythi...wait" The specialist interrupted herself, "There's another surge in radiation emissions." They all watched as a glowing disc AUs across appeared beneath the ecliptic of the system. Electricity jumped from point to point on the glowing roiling surface in arcs longer than planets as a strange flat storm appeared in spacetime.
"We're recording this right?" Melissa Stevenson asked Biyu softly.
"Of course." The specialist answered.
Three impossibly vast prongs began to emerge from the storm. Dark spires of alien metal sparkling with strange lights rose up around the star, like the claw of some enormous monster. The spires began to curl, folding in on themselves to embrace the star in their grasp. Solar storms erupted from the star's surface, sloughing off massive sheets of high energy plasma as magnetic fields larger than worlds slammed together.
Ben felt his hands starting to sweat as he gripped the armrests of his chair. The bridge crew was silent, held in transfixed awe at the scale of engineering they beheld. The metallic fingers came together at a point above the star and began the descend back into the plane of storms and radiation, dragging the star with them. The claw and star both vanished into the disc of radiation, which then faded away as quickly as it appeared, leaving the Better Margins drifting alone through deep space.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
Ivy closed the door on her office and activated the privacy screens through her implants as she sat down. She brought up the video conferencing screen and accepted the private tight beam connection with her neural interface.
Admiral Wallace's face appeared on the screen and Ivy unconsciously sat more upright in her chair.
"I've reviewed as much of the information as I could without taking a few years and earning a science degree." He began without preamble. He pursed his lips, and then offered a rare smile, "You've done well here Ivy. The actions of you and your crew have been exemplary through and through."
"Thank you, sir." Ivy smiled.
"I have a large team of experts who are now somewhat up to speed on what your people have done, and it's time we put them in touch." He continued. "On that note, I'll be sending over a 10th Rank Pragmatist, a linguist, and a xenobiologist by shuttle. Your ship is going to serve as our physical platform for first contact, congratulations commander, you're going to be in the history books."
Ivy took a moment to process all of what he'd just said, all the while a smile had begun growing across her lips. "Thank you, sir," she managed to finally say, "does that mean you'll want us to move our ship closer to the alien vessel?"
"Yes." He replied. "Once our people have transferred aboard, you'll move in closer, to one light second out from those 'oars' of theirs and initiate real-time communication."
"Understood sir. Will that be all?" She asked.
"That will be all Commander," he answered before cutting the connection. Ivy chuckled to herself for a moment then accessed the intercom system with her implants and contacted Cale.
"He remembers. You're being replaced."
Chapter 12: A Prayer for Brighter Days
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 12: A Prayer for Brighter Days
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
Seth Fiegel took a deep breath, trying to calm his fluttering heart as he stood in an aging spacesuit in a cramped airlock deep inside the skin of Colony 15. This is it, he thought to himself; as soon as he gave the word, Regan McKinley, sitting at the ancient computer terminal behind the thick airlock door, would vent the atmosphere from the room.
"It all looks good out here." Regan's voice spoke to him through the suit's speaker. She had networked the suit's computer to her laptop and was monitoring it remotely. If something went wrong though, there wasn't all that much she'd be able to do.
He took another breath, and gave the order, "Alright, depressurize the airlock."
There was a pause, a note of hesitation in Regan's voice before she activated the controls, "depressurizing," she finally said.
The turbofans roared and sound drained away from the room as the air left it, condensation began to settle onto every surface, freezing into a thin hoarfrost as the residual atmosphere settled out in the reduced pressure. The lighting in the room flipped, the light above the door Seth had entered through, which had been green, turned red. The light above the far door, which had been red, turned green.
Regan's voice seemed to come from a very far away place, despite the speaker only being inches from Seth's ear. "Everything looks good, suit pressure is steady, temperatures are pleasant, your heart rate is kind of high, are you okay Seth?"
The teenager took another deep breath and keyed up, "Yeah, I'm good."
He double checked the chain that was anchored to both the floor of the airlock and the center of his chest, then turned to the far door, "Opening up."
There was another small hiss of air as the airlock settled to true vacuum, and sound seemed to grow even more muffled and far away. A wide and brightly lit cavern opened up before him, with a giant mouth yawning open in the floor, gaping open into the void. He turned and looked back into the windows. Lily Emerson stood in the middle, adjacent to the frame they had replaced, arms crossed and lips narrowed, watching him. Behind her, Regan was seated at the ancient computer terminal, her own computer in her lap, wired into the ancient interface, chewing her lip with worry. Harper Jordan stood at the far left pane, hands pressed up against the glass, eyes alight with excitement.
Seth turned away from his friends and returned to the task he had set before himself. He strode across the hangar floor towards the opening in the hull of the colony. The chain rattled on the decking behind him, he could feel it through the suit, and through the floor, but he couldn't exactly hear it, the eerie silence of the void had descended over him.
He had enough slack on the chain to lower himself a few feet down into the opening, hanging from the colony as it spun to produce gravity, but he wanted to be extremely careful about this, not wanting to be flung off into deep space.
He lowered himself onto his knees beside the opening and pulled the chain taut, letting the slack down into the opening. He gripped the taut chain through his suit and began to climb over the lip. He put most of his weight on the chain and hung over the gap with his feet planted to the edge of the vast door. Slowly, carefully, he walked his hands down the chain, letting out slack, and gently, he pushed off with his feet.
He fell roughly half a meter before the chain regained tension and he swung back out over the opening from under the door. He released a breath he hadn't been aware he was holding, and then took another as he realized how his heart was racing. He waited until the swinging had stopped before he dared open his eyes.
The starfield whirled beneath his feet, yawning open like a bottomless pit. As Colony 15 spun, the view rotated away from the stars to the massive, also spinning cylinders of colonies 16, 17, and 18, connected together at their nose by the huge deflection disc that was the High Ridge. All around the Ridge, the lights of shuttles and transport ships flickered among the superstructure. The matte white hulls of the UN military fleet stood out even from tens of kilometers away, owing to the station lights reflecting off their white skins. The scale of human engineering on display was humbling and awe-inspiring, and Seth strained his eyes to take in the grandeur of the vista.
And then the colony kept rotating, and the stars returned, whirling, whirling endlessly in the distance.
Seth keyed up, and said breathlessly, "It's beautiful out here."
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"What do you mean you can't fix it?" Alicia Arrari practically shouted. "We have the parts aboard to replace everything why can't you fix it?" The MIC was finally beginning the settle down, and the impacts had stopped for the moment. Damage reports and error states were being tallied one by one, and it was beginning to look like the worst might be over.
Owen's voice came back worried, irritable, "There's no time to fix it. The damage is severe, by the time we get it working this altitude will be unsurvivable."
"We'll start pushing with the maneuvering thrusters, but you still need to be working on fixing them." She replied angrily.
"That's too slow, we're going to have to resort to plan b, how many Lighthorses do you have onboard?" There was something in his tone of voice, but Alicia couldn't put her finger on what.
"What's plan b?" She asked him.
"It depends on how many Lighthorses you have." He responded cryptically.
"We have three, counting yours, Owen, what's plan b?"
"We put everyone on your ship in a suit, strap them to one of your Lighthorses, and fly out of here just like we flew in. If we're quick about it, we can get out while it's still safe to do so. The Stoneburner is on the edge of the system, we'll come out of warp there and rendezvous for the trip back to Aldebaran." It was kind of a mad answer, a Lighthorse had no seats, no compartments to put people in, it wasn't meant to be used to carry passengers, and with the amount of debris already kicked up, potentially very dangerous.
"That's completely crazy, you want us to abandon the Jabberwocky?" She told him.
"Yes, right now, the more time we take doing so, the more dangerous it will be to do. If the ring comes apart the rest of the way while we're still here we'll have to switch to plan c, which you're going to like even less than this one." He insisted.
Alicia looked around the MIC, the Jabberwocky was her ship, her home. Her heart and soul had gone into this place, and it meant the world to her. Without it, she was nothing, she had nothing.
However, if what Owen said was true, then remaining aboard would be a death sentence. Alicia would rather die than abandon her ship, but she would not make her crew do the same. She couldn't, she cared for them too much.
"Plan b it is," she responded finally, and changed over to the shipwide frequency. "Attention all hands, due to forces outside of our control, we are forced to abandon the Jabberwocky, all crewmembers should congregate at either Bay 3, Bay 4, or Bay 9, whichever they are closer to. We will use the three Lighthorses in our possession to evacuate in a quick and orderly manner, and we will all live through this." She quickly keyed back over to Owen, "I want you and your people distributed between the three Lighthorses we have helping strap people in."
"We're on it." Owen's voice came back over the system.
"Alright," Alicia said without keying up, "Mike, Laura, get everyone in here down to Bay 3, I'll be along behind you."
"You better not try any heroic bullshit and get yourself killed." Laura replied as she pushed off her console towards the door.
"No one dies here today," she said, "now get going."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
Seth finished lowering himself down the chain, so that he was hanging by his chest, with his hands free. He withdrew a set of binoculars from the satchel he had strapped over his suit, and held them up outside the glass. It was difficult to get a good view, he had to press his face as close as possible to the front of the helmet, and the spinning of the station made it difficult to keep objects in focus for long, but he was still able to see the distant military vessels in fantastic detail during his brief glimpses.
"I'm going to have to come out here again with a video camera so guys can see this, the view is fantastic." Seth said into the microphone on his suit.
"I hope you're being careful." Lily's voice came back through the suit speaker, grating and irritable.
"I am," he replied smoothly, the view was absolutely worth the effort and the risks.
A distant shining star caught his eye as the colony kept rotating, and he put his binoculars to it, resolving it into the drive plume of a ship decelerating towards them.
"There's a new ship coming," he said over the microphone.
"Who is it?" Regan's voice asked him from the speaker system. He strained his eyes trying to make out the tiny details on the distant metallic hull.
"I'm not sure, I thought it was military at first from the drive plume, but the hull looks civilian," he responded as he watched the ship until the colony turned to hide him from it.
"It seems like a lot of people are suddenly interested in us." Regan's voice said softly, "And I'm not sure I care for it."
"I feel you," he answered, face still pressed to the front of the suit in an attempt to see through the binoculars, "It makes me nervous, being so interesting."
The new vessel was much closer as the colony rotated towards it again, affording Seth a much better look at the design. It was covered in antennas and dishes, and bright series of blue stripes ran down one side of the hull. The ship's name was the real giveaway though, plastered all across the side in letters that took up most of the available space were the words Live from Space.
"It's a news ship," Seth said into the suit mic. "Like, big time interstellar news."
"What are they doing here?" Regan's voice asked him. "There's nothing to report on here, right?"
"I kind of hope not." Seth answered her, "The sort of thing that makes interstellar news tends to leave a lot of dead people in its wake." The colony kept rotating, but the vessel sailed by relatively close to the rotating colony as it made for to dock at the High Ridge, allowing Seth a long uninterrupted view of the blue and metallic ship.
"What're you here for?" He asked the ship without cuing up his microphone. The giant hull continued its journey in utter silence, failing to give up its secrets.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"Laura, Owen, Mike, status updates," Alicia asked over the command frequency from the now otherwise empty MIC.
"We're 80% loaded up down here." Owen McGregor reported from FI-2453 in bay 9.
"Approaching 70% now." Mike Tellerman answered from FI-2291 in bay 4.
"We're only half done here, it's taking awhile to get some of the injured crewmembers strapped in." Laura Wolf said from FI-2144 in bay 3.
"Well, we're running out of time. I'm watching the ring come apart on what's left of the satellites." Alicia said to them. "We're losing our window, if we can't launch in the next half hour, the conditions will be too poor for the Lighthorses to survive until their warp jumps."
"I'm not sure if we can make that window," Laura said resignedly. "Owen and Mike should launch as soon as they're fully loaded."
"We're not leaving anyone behind to die," Owen responded. "We always have plan c."
"You still haven't explained what plan c is yet," Alicia answered impatiently. "Other than to tell me I won't like it."
"Plan c is we override the safeties on the Lighthorses and activate their warp drives from inside the Jabberwocky." He answered. "And yes it's possible, the people on board the Lighthorses will be safe, but it will very thoroughly destroy the Jabberwocky."
"You gamed this entire thing out ahead of time didn't you?" She asked him, "What's plan d?"
"Start improvising," Owen answered. "Nobody else dies today. Let's take our time, focus on getting the Lighthorses fully loaded. Until the ship starts breaking apart, we're in good shape."
Alicia's eyes went back to the external monitors, where the ring continued to peel itself apart, scattering rocks everywhere, while the conflagration in the atmosphere rose through the remains of the ring to greater and greater heights, blasting the world's constituent atmospheric gases into space. "Just be quick about it," she said over the line, "We might not have much longer before the ship does start going to pieces."
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Docked at UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
The Leyte Gulf was the pride of the post-FTL UN fleet. Despite being smaller than the Sun Tzu Class battleships, the command cruisers packed a sophisticated electronic warfare and Aegis platform, giving them far greater battlefield control, with finely tuned sensors extending electronic eyes for millions of kilometers in every direction. It gave Commodore Maeve O'Donnell a great deal of comfort to know that nothing went on anywhere near her vessel, without her ship's electronic eyes taking notice. She floated the length of the electronic warfare cruiser's combat Information center, looking over shoulders and studying screen readouts.
"Two new contacts on long range passive," Katie Hawthorne, her chief sensor system specialist reported, drawing Maeve towards the row of sensor specialists at their stations. "Both vessels squawking friendly, dropped out of warp a few seconds apart. The first is UNDF CEW-21 Waterloo, the second is independent news vessel ORR-CS3 Live from Space."
"What's that news ship doing here?" Her second in command, and captain of the ship, Henry Osborne asked her.
"At a guess?" Maeve offered, "the same thing we are, looking for those aliens the Martians ran into."
"I'm assuming they have docking clearance?" Maeve asked Katie.
"Yeah, they're broadcasting docking codes now. Jericho Ridge reports they were given priority clearance," the sensor specialist reported confusedly.
"By whom?" Maeve asked the other girl.
"Their codes were stamped by UNIBRA," Katie answered.
"International Business Relations?" Henry raised an eyebrow, looking at her.
Maeve shrugged, "I don't decide how the world is arranged, I just live in it. Monitor them on their way in as per normal."
"We're also receiving a tightbeam from the captain of the Waterloo, he's requesting to speak with you in private," Katie told her.
"I'll take it in my office." She said lightly, pushing off the back of Katie's chair to propel herself towards her office door, "Henry you have the deck."
"Aye Commodore," he said sharply. Saluting was an odd looking gesture while on the float, but Henry did it anyway. Maeve admired him for it, he was a good soldier.
The commodore slid the hatch to her office closed and activated the room's privacy settings, banishing the ever present ears of the advanced AI systems. She floated over her desk and pulled herself down into the chair, not really sitting in it, but floating in a roughly sitting position. She waved a hand across the glass desktop to bring up the haptic interface, keyed into the transmission logs for the pending message for her and accepted the transmission.
Captain Gunnir Coulson's aging face appeared embedded in the transparent glass screen, lips creased into a scowl.
"Captain Coulson, it's a surprise to see you out here," she started, tucking strands of errant grey hair behind her ears.
"Commodore O'Donnell, I bring news regarding the aliens and new orders from Earth," he replied to her.
"Oh?" She asked him.
"We've received word from one of our sources on Mars that the Martian fleet made their contact with those aliens in the vicinity of Luyten's Star. Your fleet, which will include my vessel as well, is to warp to Luyten's Star and make our own contact with these aliens." The other captain didn't seem particularly taken in with the instructions.
"Do we have a particular strategy for dealing with the Martians in system?" She asked, raising an eyebrow.
"It's to your prerogative, but priority is to make contact and prevent Mars from gaining a technological advantage over Earth," he offered, shrugging helplessly.
"And I'm of course left holding the hot potato on the potential international incident this represents," she offered him an apologetic smile.
He smiled back to her, "I'm afraid so ma'am, but we're all holding it a bit today."
"Ain't that the truth," she snorted.
"Also, our docking clearance is being held up for some civilian vessel, can you override their clearance so we can refuel as quickly as possible?" He asked her.
"I can't actually, which is annoying, they have top priority clearance from UNIBRA, and no, I don't know who gave it to them or why." She told him.
He sighed and shook his head, "Madness, I don't know how you handle the bureaucrats, ma'am."
"One day at a time, one day at a time," she answered.
"Well, we're in a holding pattern until they finish docking," the other captain said.
"Understood," Maeve told him, "Just make best speed, we'll talk again once you're docked."
"Aye," he answered, saluting her before cutting the connection. Maeve sighed and relaxed her neck, a motion which would have under gravity caused her head to lull back but did no such thing in freefall. How she hated politics.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"We're just about finished down here." Laura's voice came through the speaker system on the MIC as yet another rock reverberated through the hull somewhere. Alicia felt as if every impact was striking her personally, slowly dismantling her soul along with her ship.
"Good," she said softly, trying to keep her voice from cracking, "good."
"Is everyone aboard and ready to go than? We have to kick all three Lighthorses within a few microseconds of each other so they don't damage each other with their Isolator fields." Owen's still energetic voice came in over the speakers, breaking the quiet reverie in the MIC.
"Everything's ready." Alicia said from her position, still strapped into the command chair in the Jabberwocky's MIC. Tears began pooling in her eyes, held to them by surface tension in zero gravity and clouding over her vision. "Go, hit it."
"Wait," Laura said, "Alicia, where are you?"
"I'm right where I'm supposed to be." The captain said from the closest thing left to a bridge on her dying ship.
"And where is that?" Laura insisted, the accusatory tone in her voice apparent even over the speakers.
"Just go, we're out of time, the ship's going to come apart on its own if you wait much longer." Alicia argued in favor of her death.
"Oh, I know this game, captain goes down with her ship, I call bullshit." Owen's voice came out of the speaker system. "You said nobody dies today, that includes you. If you don't get onto one of these Lighthorses I swear to whatever alien gods might exist there I will drag you there myself."
"Owen…" Alicia sighed, another impact shuddered through the hull somewhere. "This is my home, this is all I have."
His sigh was audible over the speakers, but he didn't say anything in response.
"We're not leaving without you Alicia. This is our home being abandoned too, don't be selfish." Laura's voice taunted her.
"You can't hold up the evacuation for me Laura, this is how I want it to be," she shook her head and scattered the teardrops away from her eyes.
"I told you Alicia we're not leaving without you." Laura insisted. Alicia sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. In some distant part of the ship, another rock rebounded off the abused armor plating and sent another tremor through the hull. Alicia couldn't help herself, she broke down and started sobbing.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
"Your air supply is half empty, you should probably start heading back in." Regan's voice broke Seth out of his reverie, drawing his attention from the endlessly whirling starfield back to the chain he was hanging from.
"Yeah, I'm on my way back," the teenager said into the speaker before reaching out and grasping the chain with his gloves. Almost immediately, he knew there was a problem. The suit was heavy, really heavy. Hoisting himself up the chain in the suit was much more of a task then he'd previously assumed. His arms strained from the effort to pull himself upwards, legs windmilling uselessly below him as he hung above the endless abyss. His heart started racing, and he felt the panic begin to settle in his gut. He fought to keep his heartbeat steady, even as he felt his breathing coming in shorter and shorter gasps.
"Seth?" Regan's voice came through the speaker, a million miles away. "Seth are you okay?"
He felt his vision narrowing as his attempts to climb the chain grew more and more frantic and tears began running down his cheeks. The animalistic parts of his mind rebelled against the entire situation and he started to hyperventilate. Regan was forced to watch helplessly as his heart continued to race dangerously fast, his mind lost to some faraway place.
"Seth? Seth what's happening out there?" Her voice came through the speaker, increasingly upset as he failed to answer. "Seth! Seth!"
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
Owen slid open the hatch to the MIC and clanked in, his magnetic boots holding his suit to the floor. Alicia was in her suit, curled up in the command chair in a fetal position. He sighed and deactivated his the magnetic grips in his boots, pushing off gently in her direction.
"Alicia…" he said, reaching out for her. The only response from the captain was a choked sob as she stirred in the chair.
He gently gripped the back of her suit and pulled her away from the chair. "Alicia, you're going to come with me okay, nobody dies today, alright?"
Her eyes were fogged with tears and she shakily nodded her head. Owen reattached the magnetic grips on his boots and walked across the room, pulling Alicia along behind him as he went. The ship rattled and reverberated around them as Owen pulled Alicia along, rocks of every size and shape impacting the hull like rain on a tin roof.
"Owen, we just had a rock come through the corner of this bay, we're starting to cut things close." Laura's voice said into Owen's suit speaker.
"Understood," he responded, and deactivated his magnetic boots again. Pushing off while dragging Alicia with him was hard, but having her added mass also meant that he had to expend more energy each time adjusting course, and each impact was that much harder on his knees. He didn't care, the strain would catch up to him in a few hours, and his body would be punishing him for months, but for these few moments the surge of adrenaline in his system kept him moving, pushing off of each brace and doorway in the required sequence to pull himself and Alicia to bay 3.
His muscles waited to start aching until the moment he'd handed the still sobbing captain off to Laura Wolf, forcing him to go through the process of of strapping himself onto the Lighthorse while they screamed in protest at him.
"That had better be everyone now." Owen said over the command channel.
"It is, we've got everyone aboard and accounted for." Laura said to him.
"Alright, I'm pulling Murphy into the command channel." He accessed the administrative settings through his suit's HUD and dragged Murphy from private pilot's channel he had made her into the command channel. "Murphy, you all set up for plan c?"
"Everything's good to go," she answered, a small amount of pleasure creeping into her voice, "I've always wanted to do this."
"Alright then, let's get out of here," he told her.
Eleanor Murphy activated the preprogrammed command sequence she had embedded into the computer systems of the three Lighthorses. Their AI systems attempted to orient the vessels in space in order to exit warp facing the right direction, but Murphy's patch overrode that check, along with the proximity check and the local area safety checks. The systems thus gave the thumb's up less than a millisecond later, and the three Lighthorses leapt away down their warp tunnels. In the moment when the Lederman Isolator activated and the space on the boundary decided which side of the field it wanted to be on, an enormous amount of stress energy was generated on the fabric of nearby spacetime, bunching it up around the bubble of displacement the drone ships had generated. As the Lighthorses vanished, the stress energy released inwards and outwards, instantly turning the Jabberwocky into an incandescent cloud of expanding shrapnel and radiation.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
Seth Fiegel took a deep breath, trying to calm his fluttering heart as he stood in an aging spacesuit in a cramped airlock deep inside the skin of Colony 15. This is it, he thought to himself; as soon as he gave the word, Regan McKinley, sitting at the ancient computer terminal behind the thick airlock door, would vent the atmosphere from the room.
"It all looks good out here." Regan's voice spoke to him through the suit's speaker. She had networked the suit's computer to her laptop and was monitoring it remotely. If something went wrong though, there wasn't all that much she'd be able to do.
He took another breath, and gave the order, "Alright, depressurize the airlock."
There was a pause, a note of hesitation in Regan's voice before she activated the controls, "depressurizing," she finally said.
The turbofans roared and sound drained away from the room as the air left it, condensation began to settle onto every surface, freezing into a thin hoarfrost as the residual atmosphere settled out in the reduced pressure. The lighting in the room flipped, the light above the door Seth had entered through, which had been green, turned red. The light above the far door, which had been red, turned green.
Regan's voice seemed to come from a very far away place, despite the speaker only being inches from Seth's ear. "Everything looks good, suit pressure is steady, temperatures are pleasant, your heart rate is kind of high, are you okay Seth?"
The teenager took another deep breath and keyed up, "Yeah, I'm good."
He double checked the chain that was anchored to both the floor of the airlock and the center of his chest, then turned to the far door, "Opening up."
There was another small hiss of air as the airlock settled to true vacuum, and sound seemed to grow even more muffled and far away. A wide and brightly lit cavern opened up before him, with a giant mouth yawning open in the floor, gaping open into the void. He turned and looked back into the windows. Lily Emerson stood in the middle, adjacent to the frame they had replaced, arms crossed and lips narrowed, watching him. Behind her, Regan was seated at the ancient computer terminal, her own computer in her lap, wired into the ancient interface, chewing her lip with worry. Harper Jordan stood at the far left pane, hands pressed up against the glass, eyes alight with excitement.
Seth turned away from his friends and returned to the task he had set before himself. He strode across the hangar floor towards the opening in the hull of the colony. The chain rattled on the decking behind him, he could feel it through the suit, and through the floor, but he couldn't exactly hear it, the eerie silence of the void had descended over him.
He had enough slack on the chain to lower himself a few feet down into the opening, hanging from the colony as it spun to produce gravity, but he wanted to be extremely careful about this, not wanting to be flung off into deep space.
He lowered himself onto his knees beside the opening and pulled the chain taut, letting the slack down into the opening. He gripped the taut chain through his suit and began to climb over the lip. He put most of his weight on the chain and hung over the gap with his feet planted to the edge of the vast door. Slowly, carefully, he walked his hands down the chain, letting out slack, and gently, he pushed off with his feet.
He fell roughly half a meter before the chain regained tension and he swung back out over the opening from under the door. He released a breath he hadn't been aware he was holding, and then took another as he realized how his heart was racing. He waited until the swinging had stopped before he dared open his eyes.
The starfield whirled beneath his feet, yawning open like a bottomless pit. As Colony 15 spun, the view rotated away from the stars to the massive, also spinning cylinders of colonies 16, 17, and 18, connected together at their nose by the huge deflection disc that was the High Ridge. All around the Ridge, the lights of shuttles and transport ships flickered among the superstructure. The matte white hulls of the UN military fleet stood out even from tens of kilometers away, owing to the station lights reflecting off their white skins. The scale of human engineering on display was humbling and awe-inspiring, and Seth strained his eyes to take in the grandeur of the vista.
And then the colony kept rotating, and the stars returned, whirling, whirling endlessly in the distance.
Seth keyed up, and said breathlessly, "It's beautiful out here."
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"What do you mean you can't fix it?" Alicia Arrari practically shouted. "We have the parts aboard to replace everything why can't you fix it?" The MIC was finally beginning the settle down, and the impacts had stopped for the moment. Damage reports and error states were being tallied one by one, and it was beginning to look like the worst might be over.
Owen's voice came back worried, irritable, "There's no time to fix it. The damage is severe, by the time we get it working this altitude will be unsurvivable."
"We'll start pushing with the maneuvering thrusters, but you still need to be working on fixing them." She replied angrily.
"That's too slow, we're going to have to resort to plan b, how many Lighthorses do you have onboard?" There was something in his tone of voice, but Alicia couldn't put her finger on what.
"What's plan b?" She asked him.
"It depends on how many Lighthorses you have." He responded cryptically.
"We have three, counting yours, Owen, what's plan b?"
"We put everyone on your ship in a suit, strap them to one of your Lighthorses, and fly out of here just like we flew in. If we're quick about it, we can get out while it's still safe to do so. The Stoneburner is on the edge of the system, we'll come out of warp there and rendezvous for the trip back to Aldebaran." It was kind of a mad answer, a Lighthorse had no seats, no compartments to put people in, it wasn't meant to be used to carry passengers, and with the amount of debris already kicked up, potentially very dangerous.
"That's completely crazy, you want us to abandon the Jabberwocky?" She told him.
"Yes, right now, the more time we take doing so, the more dangerous it will be to do. If the ring comes apart the rest of the way while we're still here we'll have to switch to plan c, which you're going to like even less than this one." He insisted.
Alicia looked around the MIC, the Jabberwocky was her ship, her home. Her heart and soul had gone into this place, and it meant the world to her. Without it, she was nothing, she had nothing.
However, if what Owen said was true, then remaining aboard would be a death sentence. Alicia would rather die than abandon her ship, but she would not make her crew do the same. She couldn't, she cared for them too much.
"Plan b it is," she responded finally, and changed over to the shipwide frequency. "Attention all hands, due to forces outside of our control, we are forced to abandon the Jabberwocky, all crewmembers should congregate at either Bay 3, Bay 4, or Bay 9, whichever they are closer to. We will use the three Lighthorses in our possession to evacuate in a quick and orderly manner, and we will all live through this." She quickly keyed back over to Owen, "I want you and your people distributed between the three Lighthorses we have helping strap people in."
"We're on it." Owen's voice came back over the system.
"Alright," Alicia said without keying up, "Mike, Laura, get everyone in here down to Bay 3, I'll be along behind you."
"You better not try any heroic bullshit and get yourself killed." Laura replied as she pushed off her console towards the door.
"No one dies here today," she said, "now get going."
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
Seth finished lowering himself down the chain, so that he was hanging by his chest, with his hands free. He withdrew a set of binoculars from the satchel he had strapped over his suit, and held them up outside the glass. It was difficult to get a good view, he had to press his face as close as possible to the front of the helmet, and the spinning of the station made it difficult to keep objects in focus for long, but he was still able to see the distant military vessels in fantastic detail during his brief glimpses.
"I'm going to have to come out here again with a video camera so guys can see this, the view is fantastic." Seth said into the microphone on his suit.
"I hope you're being careful." Lily's voice came back through the suit speaker, grating and irritable.
"I am," he replied smoothly, the view was absolutely worth the effort and the risks.
A distant shining star caught his eye as the colony kept rotating, and he put his binoculars to it, resolving it into the drive plume of a ship decelerating towards them.
"There's a new ship coming," he said over the microphone.
"Who is it?" Regan's voice asked him from the speaker system. He strained his eyes trying to make out the tiny details on the distant metallic hull.
"I'm not sure, I thought it was military at first from the drive plume, but the hull looks civilian," he responded as he watched the ship until the colony turned to hide him from it.
"It seems like a lot of people are suddenly interested in us." Regan's voice said softly, "And I'm not sure I care for it."
"I feel you," he answered, face still pressed to the front of the suit in an attempt to see through the binoculars, "It makes me nervous, being so interesting."
The new vessel was much closer as the colony rotated towards it again, affording Seth a much better look at the design. It was covered in antennas and dishes, and bright series of blue stripes ran down one side of the hull. The ship's name was the real giveaway though, plastered all across the side in letters that took up most of the available space were the words Live from Space.
"It's a news ship," Seth said into the suit mic. "Like, big time interstellar news."
"What are they doing here?" Regan's voice asked him. "There's nothing to report on here, right?"
"I kind of hope not." Seth answered her, "The sort of thing that makes interstellar news tends to leave a lot of dead people in its wake." The colony kept rotating, but the vessel sailed by relatively close to the rotating colony as it made for to dock at the High Ridge, allowing Seth a long uninterrupted view of the blue and metallic ship.
"What're you here for?" He asked the ship without cuing up his microphone. The giant hull continued its journey in utter silence, failing to give up its secrets.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"Laura, Owen, Mike, status updates," Alicia asked over the command frequency from the now otherwise empty MIC.
"We're 80% loaded up down here." Owen McGregor reported from FI-2453 in bay 9.
"Approaching 70% now." Mike Tellerman answered from FI-2291 in bay 4.
"We're only half done here, it's taking awhile to get some of the injured crewmembers strapped in." Laura Wolf said from FI-2144 in bay 3.
"Well, we're running out of time. I'm watching the ring come apart on what's left of the satellites." Alicia said to them. "We're losing our window, if we can't launch in the next half hour, the conditions will be too poor for the Lighthorses to survive until their warp jumps."
"I'm not sure if we can make that window," Laura said resignedly. "Owen and Mike should launch as soon as they're fully loaded."
"We're not leaving anyone behind to die," Owen responded. "We always have plan c."
"You still haven't explained what plan c is yet," Alicia answered impatiently. "Other than to tell me I won't like it."
"Plan c is we override the safeties on the Lighthorses and activate their warp drives from inside the Jabberwocky." He answered. "And yes it's possible, the people on board the Lighthorses will be safe, but it will very thoroughly destroy the Jabberwocky."
"You gamed this entire thing out ahead of time didn't you?" She asked him, "What's plan d?"
"Start improvising," Owen answered. "Nobody else dies today. Let's take our time, focus on getting the Lighthorses fully loaded. Until the ship starts breaking apart, we're in good shape."
Alicia's eyes went back to the external monitors, where the ring continued to peel itself apart, scattering rocks everywhere, while the conflagration in the atmosphere rose through the remains of the ring to greater and greater heights, blasting the world's constituent atmospheric gases into space. "Just be quick about it," she said over the line, "We might not have much longer before the ship does start going to pieces."
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Docked at UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
The Leyte Gulf was the pride of the post-FTL UN fleet. Despite being smaller than the Sun Tzu Class battleships, the command cruisers packed a sophisticated electronic warfare and Aegis platform, giving them far greater battlefield control, with finely tuned sensors extending electronic eyes for millions of kilometers in every direction. It gave Commodore Maeve O'Donnell a great deal of comfort to know that nothing went on anywhere near her vessel, without her ship's electronic eyes taking notice. She floated the length of the electronic warfare cruiser's combat Information center, looking over shoulders and studying screen readouts.
"Two new contacts on long range passive," Katie Hawthorne, her chief sensor system specialist reported, drawing Maeve towards the row of sensor specialists at their stations. "Both vessels squawking friendly, dropped out of warp a few seconds apart. The first is UNDF CEW-21 Waterloo, the second is independent news vessel ORR-CS3 Live from Space."
"What's that news ship doing here?" Her second in command, and captain of the ship, Henry Osborne asked her.
"At a guess?" Maeve offered, "the same thing we are, looking for those aliens the Martians ran into."
"I'm assuming they have docking clearance?" Maeve asked Katie.
"Yeah, they're broadcasting docking codes now. Jericho Ridge reports they were given priority clearance," the sensor specialist reported confusedly.
"By whom?" Maeve asked the other girl.
"Their codes were stamped by UNIBRA," Katie answered.
"International Business Relations?" Henry raised an eyebrow, looking at her.
Maeve shrugged, "I don't decide how the world is arranged, I just live in it. Monitor them on their way in as per normal."
"We're also receiving a tightbeam from the captain of the Waterloo, he's requesting to speak with you in private," Katie told her.
"I'll take it in my office." She said lightly, pushing off the back of Katie's chair to propel herself towards her office door, "Henry you have the deck."
"Aye Commodore," he said sharply. Saluting was an odd looking gesture while on the float, but Henry did it anyway. Maeve admired him for it, he was a good soldier.
The commodore slid the hatch to her office closed and activated the room's privacy settings, banishing the ever present ears of the advanced AI systems. She floated over her desk and pulled herself down into the chair, not really sitting in it, but floating in a roughly sitting position. She waved a hand across the glass desktop to bring up the haptic interface, keyed into the transmission logs for the pending message for her and accepted the transmission.
Captain Gunnir Coulson's aging face appeared embedded in the transparent glass screen, lips creased into a scowl.
"Captain Coulson, it's a surprise to see you out here," she started, tucking strands of errant grey hair behind her ears.
"Commodore O'Donnell, I bring news regarding the aliens and new orders from Earth," he replied to her.
"Oh?" She asked him.
"We've received word from one of our sources on Mars that the Martian fleet made their contact with those aliens in the vicinity of Luyten's Star. Your fleet, which will include my vessel as well, is to warp to Luyten's Star and make our own contact with these aliens." The other captain didn't seem particularly taken in with the instructions.
"Do we have a particular strategy for dealing with the Martians in system?" She asked, raising an eyebrow.
"It's to your prerogative, but priority is to make contact and prevent Mars from gaining a technological advantage over Earth," he offered, shrugging helplessly.
"And I'm of course left holding the hot potato on the potential international incident this represents," she offered him an apologetic smile.
He smiled back to her, "I'm afraid so ma'am, but we're all holding it a bit today."
"Ain't that the truth," she snorted.
"Also, our docking clearance is being held up for some civilian vessel, can you override their clearance so we can refuel as quickly as possible?" He asked her.
"I can't actually, which is annoying, they have top priority clearance from UNIBRA, and no, I don't know who gave it to them or why." She told him.
He sighed and shook his head, "Madness, I don't know how you handle the bureaucrats, ma'am."
"One day at a time, one day at a time," she answered.
"Well, we're in a holding pattern until they finish docking," the other captain said.
"Understood," Maeve told him, "Just make best speed, we'll talk again once you're docked."
"Aye," he answered, saluting her before cutting the connection. Maeve sighed and relaxed her neck, a motion which would have under gravity caused her head to lull back but did no such thing in freefall. How she hated politics.
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
"We're just about finished down here." Laura's voice came through the speaker system on the MIC as yet another rock reverberated through the hull somewhere. Alicia felt as if every impact was striking her personally, slowly dismantling her soul along with her ship.
"Good," she said softly, trying to keep her voice from cracking, "good."
"Is everyone aboard and ready to go than? We have to kick all three Lighthorses within a few microseconds of each other so they don't damage each other with their Isolator fields." Owen's still energetic voice came in over the speakers, breaking the quiet reverie in the MIC.
"Everything's ready." Alicia said from her position, still strapped into the command chair in the Jabberwocky's MIC. Tears began pooling in her eyes, held to them by surface tension in zero gravity and clouding over her vision. "Go, hit it."
"Wait," Laura said, "Alicia, where are you?"
"I'm right where I'm supposed to be." The captain said from the closest thing left to a bridge on her dying ship.
"And where is that?" Laura insisted, the accusatory tone in her voice apparent even over the speakers.
"Just go, we're out of time, the ship's going to come apart on its own if you wait much longer." Alicia argued in favor of her death.
"Oh, I know this game, captain goes down with her ship, I call bullshit." Owen's voice came out of the speaker system. "You said nobody dies today, that includes you. If you don't get onto one of these Lighthorses I swear to whatever alien gods might exist there I will drag you there myself."
"Owen…" Alicia sighed, another impact shuddered through the hull somewhere. "This is my home, this is all I have."
His sigh was audible over the speakers, but he didn't say anything in response.
"We're not leaving without you Alicia. This is our home being abandoned too, don't be selfish." Laura's voice taunted her.
"You can't hold up the evacuation for me Laura, this is how I want it to be," she shook her head and scattered the teardrops away from her eyes.
"I told you Alicia we're not leaving without you." Laura insisted. Alicia sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. In some distant part of the ship, another rock rebounded off the abused armor plating and sent another tremor through the hull. Alicia couldn't help herself, she broke down and started sobbing.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
"Your air supply is half empty, you should probably start heading back in." Regan's voice broke Seth out of his reverie, drawing his attention from the endlessly whirling starfield back to the chain he was hanging from.
"Yeah, I'm on my way back," the teenager said into the speaker before reaching out and grasping the chain with his gloves. Almost immediately, he knew there was a problem. The suit was heavy, really heavy. Hoisting himself up the chain in the suit was much more of a task then he'd previously assumed. His arms strained from the effort to pull himself upwards, legs windmilling uselessly below him as he hung above the endless abyss. His heart started racing, and he felt the panic begin to settle in his gut. He fought to keep his heartbeat steady, even as he felt his breathing coming in shorter and shorter gasps.
"Seth?" Regan's voice came through the speaker, a million miles away. "Seth are you okay?"
He felt his vision narrowing as his attempts to climb the chain grew more and more frantic and tears began running down his cheeks. The animalistic parts of his mind rebelled against the entire situation and he started to hyperventilate. Regan was forced to watch helplessly as his heart continued to race dangerously fast, his mind lost to some faraway place.
"Seth? Seth what's happening out there?" Her voice came through the speaker, increasingly upset as he failed to answer. "Seth! Seth!"
Horizon Breaker Class Exploratory Mining Vessel
FI-EMV Jabberwocky
Elliptical Orbit
18,000 KM from Gamma Tauri b
March 2219
Owen slid open the hatch to the MIC and clanked in, his magnetic boots holding his suit to the floor. Alicia was in her suit, curled up in the command chair in a fetal position. He sighed and deactivated his the magnetic grips in his boots, pushing off gently in her direction.
"Alicia…" he said, reaching out for her. The only response from the captain was a choked sob as she stirred in the chair.
He gently gripped the back of her suit and pulled her away from the chair. "Alicia, you're going to come with me okay, nobody dies today, alright?"
Her eyes were fogged with tears and she shakily nodded her head. Owen reattached the magnetic grips on his boots and walked across the room, pulling Alicia along behind him as he went. The ship rattled and reverberated around them as Owen pulled Alicia along, rocks of every size and shape impacting the hull like rain on a tin roof.
"Owen, we just had a rock come through the corner of this bay, we're starting to cut things close." Laura's voice said into Owen's suit speaker.
"Understood," he responded, and deactivated his magnetic boots again. Pushing off while dragging Alicia with him was hard, but having her added mass also meant that he had to expend more energy each time adjusting course, and each impact was that much harder on his knees. He didn't care, the strain would catch up to him in a few hours, and his body would be punishing him for months, but for these few moments the surge of adrenaline in his system kept him moving, pushing off of each brace and doorway in the required sequence to pull himself and Alicia to bay 3.
His muscles waited to start aching until the moment he'd handed the still sobbing captain off to Laura Wolf, forcing him to go through the process of of strapping himself onto the Lighthorse while they screamed in protest at him.
"That had better be everyone now." Owen said over the command channel.
"It is, we've got everyone aboard and accounted for." Laura said to him.
"Alright, I'm pulling Murphy into the command channel." He accessed the administrative settings through his suit's HUD and dragged Murphy from private pilot's channel he had made her into the command channel. "Murphy, you all set up for plan c?"
"Everything's good to go," she answered, a small amount of pleasure creeping into her voice, "I've always wanted to do this."
"Alright then, let's get out of here," he told her.
Eleanor Murphy activated the preprogrammed command sequence she had embedded into the computer systems of the three Lighthorses. Their AI systems attempted to orient the vessels in space in order to exit warp facing the right direction, but Murphy's patch overrode that check, along with the proximity check and the local area safety checks. The systems thus gave the thumb's up less than a millisecond later, and the three Lighthorses leapt away down their warp tunnels. In the moment when the Lederman Isolator activated and the space on the boundary decided which side of the field it wanted to be on, an enormous amount of stress energy was generated on the fabric of nearby spacetime, bunching it up around the bubble of displacement the drone ships had generated. As the Lighthorses vanished, the stress energy released inwards and outwards, instantly turning the Jabberwocky into an incandescent cloud of expanding shrapnel and radiation.
Interlude α: Martians
- Location
- Seattle
Interlude α: Martians
The ship was massive compared to anything that had come before it, and it was truly that, a ship. It wasn't a spacecraft as had ever been seen in prior eras of space exploration. It had multiple decks, private cabins, and a massive open area at the prow with a screen posing as a window. It carried a crew of dozens on a journey that lasted months. It was an oceangoing freighter to the coastal bound yachts of earlier days, built to ply the deeper waters of interplanetary space. Its name was the Heart of Gold, and it carried the first 46 humans to set foot on the surface of Mars.
The huge vessel landed on a sunny afternoon in June of 2025, to the breathless anticipation of nearly a billion TV viewers around the world. The Heart of Gold touched down on the broad mesa of Sacra Mensa, in the Lunae Pallus quadrangle, a few hundred meters from a near clone of itself, an unmanned twin that bore the name Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The. The drone ship had come down two years earlier, during the last Earth/Mars optimal launch window. In its time on the red planet, it had been sucking up fuel, deploying solar panels, and inflating prefabricated structures. By the time the Heart of Gold touched down, there was already the beginnings of a first base on Mars.
The base grew rapidly in both size and population, with more and more new Martians arriving every two years. Many of those early visitors to Mars, despite having intended to return home, never quite got around to leaving. Before they knew it, they were starting new lives on the red planet.
It only took eleven years from touchdown on Mars to the birth of Ginevra Arcadia: the first human to be born on another planet. Humans, in whatever environment they're placed in, can never quite seem to help themselves. By that time, Sacra Mensa had nearly 50,000 people in it, a small city in its own right, and hundreds of ships were coming and going at each launch window. Economies of scale had begun scaling, and once the ball was rolling it just kept building speed. A year later, SpaceX moved their headquarters to Sacra Mensa, with a dozen other companies quickly following in their wake. As the population bloomed, talks began about forming a Martian government.
But it was not the governments of Earth that had colonized Mars in the first place, it was the corporations. Following hot on the heels of the trail blazed by the likes of SpaceX followed a growing list of massive multinationals, buying infrastructure, housing, laboratories, employing personnel, and shipping them all to Mars on the still expanding transportation pipeline.
Additional colonies owned by various corporate and government interests began popping up all over the Martian surface, spreading out from the initial base like a fungus spreading over a piece of fruit. In 2039, the Martian internet came online, in 2041, the first Martian film reached worldwide theaters on Earth, by 2042, the nearly a thousand vessels were plying the space lanes between Earth and Mars, and the population of Mars had boomed to nearly 500,000.
Those early years were not without hardship though. Many of the corporate interests had jumped onto the Martian bandwagon without fully understanding the implications of colonizing another planet. They saw the opportunity for profit, and they took it. It didn't take long for poor working conditions, minimalist safety standards, and absolute corporate control, to start costing lives and setting the political situation to a low subsurface boil.
The distances and signal delays exacerbated the situation. The corporations technically owned everything on Mars. They owned the houses, the shops, the spacesuits, all the production and distribution, even water and air were owned resources under the heel of corporate power. The ruling corporations, aside from the few that had formed on Mars or rebased their HQs to the red planet, were cast as distant and sinister oligarchs and plutocrats, out to extract the wealth of Mars for themselves at all costs, while sitting safe and cozy back in their nice homes on Earth, where air wasn't a commodity.
In 2048, the Martian population reached one million people, and it only took three years more for the frustration to boil over. A crowdsourced constitution was circulated through the Martian internet, propped up by the leaders of newly formed unions and activist groups. Petitions began circulating among the Martian population, and in 2051 the Mars Socialist Republic came into existence, declaring authority over all of Mars. The MSR was constructed with incredible care and thought towards future proofing, and was seen by many of its drafters as a way to escape the entrapments and pitfalls that had befallen earlier Earth nations. It thus heavily curtailed corporate power, instituted operating taxes and employee living standards, and seized vast amounts of corporately owned Martian infrastructure in the name of the new state government.
The Earth corporations had invested trillions into Mars, and expected a return on that investment, a return that was made impossible by the widescale seizure of their assets and the sudden new standards regarding business regulations and working conditions on Mars. Their attempts to extract financial value from the lack of a Martian regulatory environment catastrophically backfired with the imposition of the Martian government. The futures of their companies were at risk, and they refused to go down without a fight.
In the decades since the colonization of Mars had begun, corporate power on Earth had continued to steadily trickle upwards. As the economy continued to globalise, the combination of new international unions forming and the balkanization of older power structures led to a gradual smoothing of the political environs on Earth. The UN's political power had been rising, propped up by corporate interests in maintaining peace and free trade amongst member states. Continuing advances in automation technology leached more and more power into the hands of the corporate elite, bypassing problematic state governments with international law. Thus the sudden rejection of corporate authority on Mars was seen not just as a financial blow, but as a blow to the institutions themselves, a threat to their way of life.
It only took a year for the various lobbyists to ram through a new international law. The Treaty of Man declared that UN jurisdiction and law applied to all human nationstates, regardless of political affiliation or location. Such a law had been sitting on the fence for years, waiting to be instituted to deal with certain holdouts in the wave of corporate control, such as North Korea and Sweden, but the political will had never quite been there before the formation of the Martian Socialist Republic. The MSR threw all the old political calculations out the window, and the Treaty of Man was rammed through the various UN subcommittees and passed the general vote in record time.
The law essentially informed the Martians that the previous set of laws, those governing international corporate property rights and ownership, still applied to them, and thus all the property that had been taken from the controlling corporations on Mars had been illegally seized. The dozens of corporations piled on lawsuits in the International Court of Justice, lining up to sue the Martian government for property theft.
The distance worked in the favor of the Martians. With a government approval rating of nearly 85%, there was little the corporations could do to directly enforce their edicts. The Martian digital democracy ground into gear, and furious discussions filled AI moderated chatrooms and algorithmically sorted message boards. After weeks of discussion the top voted comment that had emerged out of all the various layers of discourse, stated:
"Dear United Nations,
We did not ask to join your clubhouse of countries, we did not ask to be subject to your rules. In fact, we formed our government specifically to get out from under a bunch of your rules. We're not going to follow them, regardless of whatever edicts or decrees you pass saying we have to. You have no authority on our planet. Your corporate lapdogs have no authority on our planet, and we reject your claims of jurisdiction over us. We are refugees of the tyranny of Earth, and we refuse to let you drag us kicking and screaming back into the dark ages of oligarchs and tyrants. This is a new age, one of automation, knowledge, free thought, and openness. You are not taking our planet from us, kindly go fuck yourselves, and have a lovely rest of your lives.
Love,
Mars"
The post received over 800,000 upvotes, representing nearly the total adult voting population of Mars, and was read by the Martian Ambassador to the UN general assembly aloud to the room in its entirety. The governments of Earth and the corporations they represented, reeled from the slap to the face, and immediately declared the Martian government a rogue state in defiance of International law. The reaction of the Martians was mocking, asking what the governments of Earth thought they were going to do about it. The UN arrested the Martian ambassador for collusion with a rogue state, and the Martians declared war in response.
It was initially a baseless threat. The Martians had no military to speak of, it was merely a way for them to reflect their frustrations with the breakdown of negotiations, few thought it would ever result in actual military action. Regular trade between the two worlds continued seemingly unabated, with over a thousand ships launched between the two worlds during the 2052 window. Their perspective on waging war changed rapidly when a fleet of ships from Earth arrived in 2053, having launched in secret, hidden amongst the commercial vessels. The fleet was composed of armed corporate paramilitaries, mercenaries and private operators, all armed with the latest and greatest of Earth military technology, modified specifically for operations on the red planet.
The fleet landed outside major population centers and stormed in to seize control. Many of the smaller installations and colonies gave in without struggle when rushed by the armored suit wearing paramilitaries, but in more populous areas, the colonists dug in hard. The Martian War of Independence had begun.
Sacra Mensa was seen as the priority target for the invading corporate forces, being the seat of the Martian government as well as the largest single colony on the surface. However, its high bluffs protected it from approach, and the colonists shot down the three ships that attempted to land directly on the Mesa with improvised rockets.
Death tolls on both sides began rising, but the colonists had a major numbers advantage on their invaders. As the Martians realized they were actually fighting a war, more and more Martian military production began to come online, and Martian militias rapidly formed to defend their colonies and homesteads.
The corporate invasion began to falter as Martian tanks started rolling off fabrication lines, and the power imbalance began to tilt. It took nearly a year to retake control of the Martian surface in its entirety, but by that point the Martians had started amassing the first generation of interplanetary warships in orbit of their world. The shallower gravity well of Mars made it easier to put bigger ships into orbit in greater numbers, and the wartime economy of Mars was almost entirely directed towards survival or military output in an unprecedented feat of economic unity.
By the time the next launch window approached, nearly two hundred brand new Martian warships crowded the red planet's equatorial orbital plane. Following the footage of the invasion of Mars, the governments of Earth had grown reticent to engage with the Martians following the public backlash from the corporate backed invasions. The corporations themselves however, were still not ready to give up yet, and threw dozens more vessels filled with paramilitaries at Mars.
The Martians watched, waited, and when they finally witnessed the distant deployment of forces against them, held another vote and decided enough was enough. 62% of the population voted to attack earth in response, and demand a cessation of hostilities toward Mars in exchange for a cessation of hostilities toward Earth.
A third of the Martian fleet launched toward Earth, third launched toward the incoming corporate military vessels, and a third remained in orbit of Mars as a defensive screen. The Martians demanded the corporate ships stand down and turn back or face the consequences, and gave the UN until their ships arrived to figure out what to do.
The various conflicting corporate and governmental forces comprising the United Nations argued back and forth over what to do about the Mars Situation. Many of the more powerful nations and corporate factions didn't consider the new Martian military a real threat, and remained confident they could be forced back into the fold at gunpoint. In order to prove their point, all they had to do was stall peace talks and keep the argument going until their fleet arrived at Mars.
The second corporate invasion force was twice the size of the first, armed with weapons designed to be fired down from orbit as artillery support, as well as aerial drones designed to work in the thin Martian atmosphere and power armor for use in house to house fighting.
Their fleet was not however, designed to fight a battle with another fleet of ships in space. The Martian fleet was cobbled together in appearance and largely assumed to be no more than ferries for ground troops, not a threat that had to be warded off; desperate boarding actions were the most that was expected.
It thus came as a major shock when the Martian fleet engaged the UN forces in interplanetary space three months later, firing guided missiles from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, and destroying the corporate invasion force in its entirety. Earth went into an uproar at the sudden turning of the tables, and the discussion regarding Mars grew more angry and muddied as a result.
In February of 2055, the two Martian fleets converged on Earth's sphere of influence, settling into an orbit of the moon. Over one hundred warships formed a belt around the moon, their running lights glittering in the moon's shadow. The small UN outpost on the moon was boarded and the crew were captured as prisoners of war.
Again, the Martians sued for recognition of their independence, broadcasting a plea for peace. The UN again argued over how to respond, and after another month of debate, declared that they did not negotiate with terrorists.
The direct electronic democracy on Mars churned, peace seeking factions formed and debated with factions that wanted to invade and topple the government of Earth to liberate it, suggestions for response ranged anywhere between 'render the planet uninhabitable' and 'immediately sue for peace while we clearly have the upper hand.' The fact that the UN continued to declare the Martian Socialist Republic illegitimate unless they submitted to corporate authority was lobbed back and forth like a beach ball as automated democratic systems tried to zero in on the solution space. In March of that year, a 600,000 upvote answer came to dominate the discourse, and after another week of talking, was transmitted down to the Earth.
"Dear United Nations,
We will keep destroying your fleets as you send them. Stop sending them. We want peace you dolts, stop forcing our hands. We will force yours harder.
Love,
Mars"
The UN response was swift and brutal, the governments of Earth fired hundreds of nuclear missiles at the Martian fleet in orbit of the moon. The Martian forces scattered, trying to outrun the missiles as they climbed out of Earth's gravity well, but the much greater acceleration tolerance afforded by the nonliving missiles ensured they caught up to the ships hauling the fragile humans. After a week's pursuit, the missiles finally caught up with their quarry as they attempted to loop back around and land on the Earth. Escape shuttles scattered by the hundred like seeds in the upper atmosphere, before the Martian warships vanished from orbit in nuclear starbursts.
The Martians that survived the destruction of their fleet went to ground on Earth, and began a protracted guerrilla campaign against corporate shipyards and infrastructure. Earth and Mars swung apart once more on their orbits, and another two year buildup of arms began.
Second generation Martian warships began to crowd the red planet's orbit once more, with the UN mirroring the Martian tactical doctrines and launching their own warships. The Martians were fed up with fighting though, and they were fed up with Earth. They decided it was time to send a message, and began changing the orbit of a 500 meter long nickel iron asteroid. Powerful thrusters shifted the trajectory of the rock, swinging it around Mars and launching it back out of the sphere of influence on a retrograde heliocentric orbit that would send it looping around towards the Earth.
Mars transmitted a daily demand for peace, for the corporate military forces to stand down and cease their aggression against Mars, and still the buildup in Earth orbit continued. The Martians knew they had to force the issue, they couldn't win a protracted struggle, Earth could in the end, simply outproduce them. Already three hundred corporate warships floated in a parking orbit around the Earth.
In October of 2056, the launch window opened from Earth once more and, the fleet of paramilitary warships launched themselves towards Mars. Mars issued their ultimatum: turn the fleet back now, or we start destroying your cities. The fleet continued onward towards Mars, and the Martian fleet launched towards it.
A few days later, the 500 meter long asteroid made a final course adjustment and came screaming at the Earth from interplanetary space. It slammed into the planet at 60 kilometers per second, perfectly striking the International Court of Justice in The Hague and carving out a ten kilometer wide crater where the Dutch city had once stood.
Earth accepted the peace offer the following day. Tensions and hostility from the two worlds as a result of the conflict would persist for over a century.
The ship was massive compared to anything that had come before it, and it was truly that, a ship. It wasn't a spacecraft as had ever been seen in prior eras of space exploration. It had multiple decks, private cabins, and a massive open area at the prow with a screen posing as a window. It carried a crew of dozens on a journey that lasted months. It was an oceangoing freighter to the coastal bound yachts of earlier days, built to ply the deeper waters of interplanetary space. Its name was the Heart of Gold, and it carried the first 46 humans to set foot on the surface of Mars.
The huge vessel landed on a sunny afternoon in June of 2025, to the breathless anticipation of nearly a billion TV viewers around the world. The Heart of Gold touched down on the broad mesa of Sacra Mensa, in the Lunae Pallus quadrangle, a few hundred meters from a near clone of itself, an unmanned twin that bore the name Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The. The drone ship had come down two years earlier, during the last Earth/Mars optimal launch window. In its time on the red planet, it had been sucking up fuel, deploying solar panels, and inflating prefabricated structures. By the time the Heart of Gold touched down, there was already the beginnings of a first base on Mars.
The base grew rapidly in both size and population, with more and more new Martians arriving every two years. Many of those early visitors to Mars, despite having intended to return home, never quite got around to leaving. Before they knew it, they were starting new lives on the red planet.
It only took eleven years from touchdown on Mars to the birth of Ginevra Arcadia: the first human to be born on another planet. Humans, in whatever environment they're placed in, can never quite seem to help themselves. By that time, Sacra Mensa had nearly 50,000 people in it, a small city in its own right, and hundreds of ships were coming and going at each launch window. Economies of scale had begun scaling, and once the ball was rolling it just kept building speed. A year later, SpaceX moved their headquarters to Sacra Mensa, with a dozen other companies quickly following in their wake. As the population bloomed, talks began about forming a Martian government.
But it was not the governments of Earth that had colonized Mars in the first place, it was the corporations. Following hot on the heels of the trail blazed by the likes of SpaceX followed a growing list of massive multinationals, buying infrastructure, housing, laboratories, employing personnel, and shipping them all to Mars on the still expanding transportation pipeline.
Additional colonies owned by various corporate and government interests began popping up all over the Martian surface, spreading out from the initial base like a fungus spreading over a piece of fruit. In 2039, the Martian internet came online, in 2041, the first Martian film reached worldwide theaters on Earth, by 2042, the nearly a thousand vessels were plying the space lanes between Earth and Mars, and the population of Mars had boomed to nearly 500,000.
Those early years were not without hardship though. Many of the corporate interests had jumped onto the Martian bandwagon without fully understanding the implications of colonizing another planet. They saw the opportunity for profit, and they took it. It didn't take long for poor working conditions, minimalist safety standards, and absolute corporate control, to start costing lives and setting the political situation to a low subsurface boil.
The distances and signal delays exacerbated the situation. The corporations technically owned everything on Mars. They owned the houses, the shops, the spacesuits, all the production and distribution, even water and air were owned resources under the heel of corporate power. The ruling corporations, aside from the few that had formed on Mars or rebased their HQs to the red planet, were cast as distant and sinister oligarchs and plutocrats, out to extract the wealth of Mars for themselves at all costs, while sitting safe and cozy back in their nice homes on Earth, where air wasn't a commodity.
In 2048, the Martian population reached one million people, and it only took three years more for the frustration to boil over. A crowdsourced constitution was circulated through the Martian internet, propped up by the leaders of newly formed unions and activist groups. Petitions began circulating among the Martian population, and in 2051 the Mars Socialist Republic came into existence, declaring authority over all of Mars. The MSR was constructed with incredible care and thought towards future proofing, and was seen by many of its drafters as a way to escape the entrapments and pitfalls that had befallen earlier Earth nations. It thus heavily curtailed corporate power, instituted operating taxes and employee living standards, and seized vast amounts of corporately owned Martian infrastructure in the name of the new state government.
The Earth corporations had invested trillions into Mars, and expected a return on that investment, a return that was made impossible by the widescale seizure of their assets and the sudden new standards regarding business regulations and working conditions on Mars. Their attempts to extract financial value from the lack of a Martian regulatory environment catastrophically backfired with the imposition of the Martian government. The futures of their companies were at risk, and they refused to go down without a fight.
In the decades since the colonization of Mars had begun, corporate power on Earth had continued to steadily trickle upwards. As the economy continued to globalise, the combination of new international unions forming and the balkanization of older power structures led to a gradual smoothing of the political environs on Earth. The UN's political power had been rising, propped up by corporate interests in maintaining peace and free trade amongst member states. Continuing advances in automation technology leached more and more power into the hands of the corporate elite, bypassing problematic state governments with international law. Thus the sudden rejection of corporate authority on Mars was seen not just as a financial blow, but as a blow to the institutions themselves, a threat to their way of life.
It only took a year for the various lobbyists to ram through a new international law. The Treaty of Man declared that UN jurisdiction and law applied to all human nationstates, regardless of political affiliation or location. Such a law had been sitting on the fence for years, waiting to be instituted to deal with certain holdouts in the wave of corporate control, such as North Korea and Sweden, but the political will had never quite been there before the formation of the Martian Socialist Republic. The MSR threw all the old political calculations out the window, and the Treaty of Man was rammed through the various UN subcommittees and passed the general vote in record time.
The law essentially informed the Martians that the previous set of laws, those governing international corporate property rights and ownership, still applied to them, and thus all the property that had been taken from the controlling corporations on Mars had been illegally seized. The dozens of corporations piled on lawsuits in the International Court of Justice, lining up to sue the Martian government for property theft.
The distance worked in the favor of the Martians. With a government approval rating of nearly 85%, there was little the corporations could do to directly enforce their edicts. The Martian digital democracy ground into gear, and furious discussions filled AI moderated chatrooms and algorithmically sorted message boards. After weeks of discussion the top voted comment that had emerged out of all the various layers of discourse, stated:
"Dear United Nations,
We did not ask to join your clubhouse of countries, we did not ask to be subject to your rules. In fact, we formed our government specifically to get out from under a bunch of your rules. We're not going to follow them, regardless of whatever edicts or decrees you pass saying we have to. You have no authority on our planet. Your corporate lapdogs have no authority on our planet, and we reject your claims of jurisdiction over us. We are refugees of the tyranny of Earth, and we refuse to let you drag us kicking and screaming back into the dark ages of oligarchs and tyrants. This is a new age, one of automation, knowledge, free thought, and openness. You are not taking our planet from us, kindly go fuck yourselves, and have a lovely rest of your lives.
Love,
Mars"
The post received over 800,000 upvotes, representing nearly the total adult voting population of Mars, and was read by the Martian Ambassador to the UN general assembly aloud to the room in its entirety. The governments of Earth and the corporations they represented, reeled from the slap to the face, and immediately declared the Martian government a rogue state in defiance of International law. The reaction of the Martians was mocking, asking what the governments of Earth thought they were going to do about it. The UN arrested the Martian ambassador for collusion with a rogue state, and the Martians declared war in response.
It was initially a baseless threat. The Martians had no military to speak of, it was merely a way for them to reflect their frustrations with the breakdown of negotiations, few thought it would ever result in actual military action. Regular trade between the two worlds continued seemingly unabated, with over a thousand ships launched between the two worlds during the 2052 window. Their perspective on waging war changed rapidly when a fleet of ships from Earth arrived in 2053, having launched in secret, hidden amongst the commercial vessels. The fleet was composed of armed corporate paramilitaries, mercenaries and private operators, all armed with the latest and greatest of Earth military technology, modified specifically for operations on the red planet.
The fleet landed outside major population centers and stormed in to seize control. Many of the smaller installations and colonies gave in without struggle when rushed by the armored suit wearing paramilitaries, but in more populous areas, the colonists dug in hard. The Martian War of Independence had begun.
Sacra Mensa was seen as the priority target for the invading corporate forces, being the seat of the Martian government as well as the largest single colony on the surface. However, its high bluffs protected it from approach, and the colonists shot down the three ships that attempted to land directly on the Mesa with improvised rockets.
Death tolls on both sides began rising, but the colonists had a major numbers advantage on their invaders. As the Martians realized they were actually fighting a war, more and more Martian military production began to come online, and Martian militias rapidly formed to defend their colonies and homesteads.
The corporate invasion began to falter as Martian tanks started rolling off fabrication lines, and the power imbalance began to tilt. It took nearly a year to retake control of the Martian surface in its entirety, but by that point the Martians had started amassing the first generation of interplanetary warships in orbit of their world. The shallower gravity well of Mars made it easier to put bigger ships into orbit in greater numbers, and the wartime economy of Mars was almost entirely directed towards survival or military output in an unprecedented feat of economic unity.
By the time the next launch window approached, nearly two hundred brand new Martian warships crowded the red planet's equatorial orbital plane. Following the footage of the invasion of Mars, the governments of Earth had grown reticent to engage with the Martians following the public backlash from the corporate backed invasions. The corporations themselves however, were still not ready to give up yet, and threw dozens more vessels filled with paramilitaries at Mars.
The Martians watched, waited, and when they finally witnessed the distant deployment of forces against them, held another vote and decided enough was enough. 62% of the population voted to attack earth in response, and demand a cessation of hostilities toward Mars in exchange for a cessation of hostilities toward Earth.
A third of the Martian fleet launched toward Earth, third launched toward the incoming corporate military vessels, and a third remained in orbit of Mars as a defensive screen. The Martians demanded the corporate ships stand down and turn back or face the consequences, and gave the UN until their ships arrived to figure out what to do.
The various conflicting corporate and governmental forces comprising the United Nations argued back and forth over what to do about the Mars Situation. Many of the more powerful nations and corporate factions didn't consider the new Martian military a real threat, and remained confident they could be forced back into the fold at gunpoint. In order to prove their point, all they had to do was stall peace talks and keep the argument going until their fleet arrived at Mars.
The second corporate invasion force was twice the size of the first, armed with weapons designed to be fired down from orbit as artillery support, as well as aerial drones designed to work in the thin Martian atmosphere and power armor for use in house to house fighting.
Their fleet was not however, designed to fight a battle with another fleet of ships in space. The Martian fleet was cobbled together in appearance and largely assumed to be no more than ferries for ground troops, not a threat that had to be warded off; desperate boarding actions were the most that was expected.
It thus came as a major shock when the Martian fleet engaged the UN forces in interplanetary space three months later, firing guided missiles from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, and destroying the corporate invasion force in its entirety. Earth went into an uproar at the sudden turning of the tables, and the discussion regarding Mars grew more angry and muddied as a result.
In February of 2055, the two Martian fleets converged on Earth's sphere of influence, settling into an orbit of the moon. Over one hundred warships formed a belt around the moon, their running lights glittering in the moon's shadow. The small UN outpost on the moon was boarded and the crew were captured as prisoners of war.
Again, the Martians sued for recognition of their independence, broadcasting a plea for peace. The UN again argued over how to respond, and after another month of debate, declared that they did not negotiate with terrorists.
The direct electronic democracy on Mars churned, peace seeking factions formed and debated with factions that wanted to invade and topple the government of Earth to liberate it, suggestions for response ranged anywhere between 'render the planet uninhabitable' and 'immediately sue for peace while we clearly have the upper hand.' The fact that the UN continued to declare the Martian Socialist Republic illegitimate unless they submitted to corporate authority was lobbed back and forth like a beach ball as automated democratic systems tried to zero in on the solution space. In March of that year, a 600,000 upvote answer came to dominate the discourse, and after another week of talking, was transmitted down to the Earth.
"Dear United Nations,
We will keep destroying your fleets as you send them. Stop sending them. We want peace you dolts, stop forcing our hands. We will force yours harder.
Love,
Mars"
The UN response was swift and brutal, the governments of Earth fired hundreds of nuclear missiles at the Martian fleet in orbit of the moon. The Martian forces scattered, trying to outrun the missiles as they climbed out of Earth's gravity well, but the much greater acceleration tolerance afforded by the nonliving missiles ensured they caught up to the ships hauling the fragile humans. After a week's pursuit, the missiles finally caught up with their quarry as they attempted to loop back around and land on the Earth. Escape shuttles scattered by the hundred like seeds in the upper atmosphere, before the Martian warships vanished from orbit in nuclear starbursts.
The Martians that survived the destruction of their fleet went to ground on Earth, and began a protracted guerrilla campaign against corporate shipyards and infrastructure. Earth and Mars swung apart once more on their orbits, and another two year buildup of arms began.
Second generation Martian warships began to crowd the red planet's orbit once more, with the UN mirroring the Martian tactical doctrines and launching their own warships. The Martians were fed up with fighting though, and they were fed up with Earth. They decided it was time to send a message, and began changing the orbit of a 500 meter long nickel iron asteroid. Powerful thrusters shifted the trajectory of the rock, swinging it around Mars and launching it back out of the sphere of influence on a retrograde heliocentric orbit that would send it looping around towards the Earth.
Mars transmitted a daily demand for peace, for the corporate military forces to stand down and cease their aggression against Mars, and still the buildup in Earth orbit continued. The Martians knew they had to force the issue, they couldn't win a protracted struggle, Earth could in the end, simply outproduce them. Already three hundred corporate warships floated in a parking orbit around the Earth.
In October of 2056, the launch window opened from Earth once more and, the fleet of paramilitary warships launched themselves towards Mars. Mars issued their ultimatum: turn the fleet back now, or we start destroying your cities. The fleet continued onward towards Mars, and the Martian fleet launched towards it.
A few days later, the 500 meter long asteroid made a final course adjustment and came screaming at the Earth from interplanetary space. It slammed into the planet at 60 kilometers per second, perfectly striking the International Court of Justice in The Hague and carving out a ten kilometer wide crater where the Dutch city had once stood.
Earth accepted the peace offer the following day. Tensions and hostility from the two worlds as a result of the conflict would persist for over a century.
Chapter 13: Humans in Funny Suits
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 13: Humans in Funny Suits
Draco Class Shuttle
[CV4]AIS-8
Ballistic Transfer Trajectory
8 AUs from Luyten's Star
March 2219
The armored insertion shuttle was designed to drop marines through any number of atmospheres directly into a combat zone, land, and then make it back to orbit in one piece. Comfort was never included as a needed design specification. The seats were rough and hard on Margaret Armstrong's back, legs, and ass. She felt every time the pilot tapped a thruster directly through her spine. And yet, she was excited. Margaret was one hundred and thirty-eight years old, she had rewound her age twice, and in that time had learned every living human language and quite a few dead ones. Her body was young now, in her mid-thirties by her own estimate. She wasn't a bundle of hormones liable to screw up an important decision anymore, that was important. The laugh lines had started coming back to her face, and she had noticed grey hairs mixed in with her natural blonde, but it didn't bother her, she always aged gracefully. She was on her way to meet aliens and learn their language too; it felt like her entire life had been leading up to this moment.
Across the aisle from her, Senior Pragmatist Vedika Srivastava sat stoically, her artificially bright orange eyes contrasted sharply against her mahogany skin, giving her an unsettling, slightly alien appearance. Her eyes stared vacantly into space, gaze focused on her optical displays as she idly pondered the nature of the aliens they would soon be meeting. Margaret couldn't help but find the dead gaze unsettling, despite knowing rationally it was only because the Pragmatist was reviewing information on her optical implants, streaming data directly into the visual centers of her brain. That knowledge did nothing to make her blank stare less unsettling, and Margaret resolved to look elsewhere.
To her left, Morgan Sabaea, the youngest of them at ninety six and in eir second life, drummed eir fingers on the armrest of eir chair impatiently. The small, mousy androgyne with a short, military buzzcut served as their xenobiologist. Morgan was an odd one, not the top of eir field, working through the Martian Survey Corps like Margaret and Vedika, but with deep and murky ties to an alphabet soup of organisational acronyms. Martian Naval and Recon Corps, InOps, StratNet, MDRPA the military weapons research division, and MIS the Martian Intelligence service. While Margaret and Vedika were effectively outside the Martian naval command structure, Major Morgan Sabaea was military through and through.
"Nervous?" Margaret tentatively asked Morgan as the relatively younger androgyne continued to drum eir fingers on the armrest.
"The nerves come first," Morgan answered with a smile, ceasing eir drumming and gripping the armrest. "It's the anticipation of the experience, getting the nerves out of the way. Once we're into the thick of things, the calm returns."
"You make it sound like we're going to war." Margaret chuckled nervously, glancing back at Vedika, who was still lost in her datastreams.
"This is the most important event in human history Maggie, from the perspective of psychology, we might as well be flying into battle." Morgan laughed, it was a nice sound, like the tinkling of wind chimes in a breeze.
"Have you been in battle?" Margaret asked the military androgyne.
"I have," ey answered, taking on a faraway look as ey reminisced, "I fought in the Lightspeed Conflict against the warlords of Alpha Centauri. There's a lot of conflict in the universe."
"Only what we take with us." Margaret retorted sagely.
"I'm not so sure about that anymore, you've read the reports, seen the data the Empiricist pulled in. We might be walking into an interstellar war zone," the Major said.
Margaret took a deep breath, her own nerves were worn, but she felt a deep stillness and clarity in her course of action, and she wasn't afraid,"We're at an inflection point, all the math changes, the future of humanity could end up riding on what we do here in the next few months."
"Sort of justifies the anxiety at least, doesn't it?" Morgan smiled.
"If you say so," Margaret said with a sigh, looking back at their Pragmatist, her orange eyes still looking blankly into space, unmoving beyond the occasional blink.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
I am going to die hanging here. The thought pounded through the animalistic parts of Seth Fiegel's brain in a flood of useless survival instincts. The stars wheeled coldly and uncaringly beneath him, offering no solace.
"I am not going to die here," he said to himself, drawing his mind out of the panic driven fog. "I am not going to die here," he repeated it like a mantra as his breathing slowly came under control, and his heart rate slowed down to normal. He continued to ignore Regan McKinley's worried voice in his ear, he wasn't ready to deal with her yet
His plan of climbing the chain was clearly not going to work, he was too heavy in the suit to haul himself up in it. He went through his other options. If he detached himself from the colony and let himself be flung off, there was a remote chance the station's sensors would detect him and they'd come rescue him. But they could just as easily miss his tiny suit in the vast darkness of space, it was a gamble. If he could swing up he could try to grab the lip of the door and haul himself inside. Oh, he realized, this suit has magnetic boots.
He took a breath, getting one last look at the stars, yet another ship slipping across them, then turned and started to carefully rock himself back and forth, as if swinging on a swing.
The Pendulum motion in the chain started out frustratingly small, and it took an annoyingly long time to get a good swing going in the bulky suit, but each swing his feet got a little bit closer to the decking until finally connecting with a knee jarring yank as the magnets in the boots reached out and gripped the hull plating.
Seth stood up on the deck, staring off the colony's vast horizon to the endless expanse of space beyond, spinning, always spinning, overhead now from his new perspective.
"Seth!" Regan's voice insisted angrily through the speakers.
"I'm fine Regan, I just spooked myself a bit is all, I'm coming back in now, don't worry," he tried to make his voice sound calm, confident, he hoped his still shaking nerves didn't make it into the mic.
"You better not die out there Seth Fiegel, or I will capture your spirit in a jar and taunt you about this forever." Lily's voice came out of the speaker system.
Seth ignored her and carefully walked to the edge of the decking. The spinning of the colony still wanted to fling him off into space, and it created the odd feeling of being suspended from his boots. Climbing up over the lip of the door, even with the magnetic boots, was an awkward operation that required kneeling and shimmying and no doubt looked somewhat silly for those watching from the viewing panels.
"How was it out there?" Harper Jordan asked him through the comms system as he strode triumphantly back across the hangar deck.
"It's awesome," he replied, "I'm going to have to do that again."
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
The conference table was more crowded than usual for the Empiricist's 87th senior staff meeting. All the usual senior staff were present, as well as the new personnel sent over by the Light of Ages. Ivy studied the faces arranged around the conference table, Cale Rouschev and Vedika Srivastava were staring daggers at each other across the table, Orion Warrego was quietly talking with Morgan Sabaea, and Kestral was pacing nervously at the head of the room. Ivy felt the androgyne's nervousness mirrored in herself, this was it. In a few hours, they would move closer to the Lament for Lost Worlds and begin real time communication with the Ones Who Came Before.
Or at least, as close to real time as their translation software would allow. Ivy cleared her throat and brought the idle chatter to an end. She flipped the switches on her implants to turn on the room's recording software.
"Today is March 15th, 2219," Ivy began, "This is the 87th senior staff meeting, on the 11th mission of the Martian Survey Corps Vessel Empiricist. Topic of the day is The Ones Who Came Before. In attendance today, Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, First Officer Lieutenant Commander Jean Paoloni, Senior Pragmatist Vedika Srivastava, Pragmatist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, Chief Linguist Margaret Armstrong, Chief Xenobiologist Major Morgan Sabaea, and Senior Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia. Kestral, I open the floor to you." Ivy gestured to the white haired androgyne, who was leaning against the back of eir chair.
Ey snapped upright and clapped eir hands together, smothering eir nervousness in enthusiasm. "Right, so, The Ones Who Came Before, what do we know, what do we suspect, and what do we still need to learn? Those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves."
The science officer began throwing up images onto the wallscreens ey had stored on eir implants.
"Let's start with what we know. The Ones Who Came Before are an octopedal race that evolved on a 0.6 G world. Four of their limbs are differentiated into legs, and four are differentiated into arms. They are radially symmetrical with a dorsal mouth and a ventral waste chute, they have eight, light sensitive organs located around the perimeter of their mouth. Their bodies are covered with feathers, making them capable of gliding and powered flight on their homeworld. They wear clothing that doesn't interfere with this flight, and communicate by vibrating parts of their breathing apparatus to create atmospheric pressure waves. They reproduce sexually with k-pattern selection, have three sexes of very limited sexual dimorphism, and seemed to have evolved subsisting on a diet similar to that of early humans. However, the similarities with them and earth life end there. They have no centralized nervous system, however, they do seem to have a decentralized nervous system that runs in parallel to a chemically based information storage system that encodes directly into their DNA variants. They practice a ritualised form of cannibalism that seems to let them inherit the genetic memories of their predecessors."
"How large are they?" Morgan asked.
"Roughly one meter tall, though it various between individuals," Kestral explained.
"Oh, they're that small?" Margaret asked, "I was imagining them somewhat larger."
Kestral waved eir hands and modified the image, "Here's a human and a banana for scale. More significantly, they didn't develop their own technology, they were technologically uplifted to their current level roughly two million years ago by a race they also call The Ones Who Came Before, seen here."
Kestral changed the image to a different species of octopods, furred instead of feathered, and all wearing individualized and towering headdresses. "We don't know very much about this race, and they don't appear to be one of the races presently represented on the Lament for Lost Worlds, but they do seem to be the original source of all the technology used by the, well, Cale and I have been calling them the Bird-Spiders."
"Their word for themselves is Ki-wa-wen-toa, except they speak all four syllables at once, something we humans can't replicate," Margaret spoke up, adding in her input as linguist. "That translates to The Ones Who Came Before, but their word for the ah…"
"Octopuses in funny hats." Kestral finished the sentence for her.
"Right," Margaret continued, "them, their word for that race is Ki-an-wen-toa, which is slightly different and translates to The Ones Who Came First. Keep in mind that it's effectively a single word in their language, it's densely encoded."
"Is that actually relevant?" Ivy asked the linguist.
"It's a more respectful label then calling them bird-spiders," Margaret answered, "and The Ones Who Came Before is a bit of a mouthful, but if you take the syllables of their word, and say them one at a time instead of all together, it could be pronounced as Kiwawentoa for the 'bird-spiders,' and Kianwentoa, for the 'octopuses in funny hats.'"
"Aw, you don't like our cutsy colloquialisms? I was hoping they'd catch on," Cale laughed.
"These are sentient creatures who deserve respect and dignity," Vedika interjected, "And referring to them as 'bird-spiders' implies they are animals, something beneath us. It sets a poor precedent for future cultural exchange, and breeds negative memes within our own culture regarding their natures."
"I concur with the Senior Pragmatist," Evangeline added in smugly, "The long-term potential for abuse from the memeplex that develops out of that phrase is dangerously high."
"Fine, fine," Ivy imposed, "We call them the Kiwawentoa, can we move along? Kestral, proceed."
"Alright," Kestral began, "So what do we suspect about the bi…the Kiwawentoa, that we can't yet prove?"
"I forward the hypothesis that their development has been largely static since their uplifting," Cale said.
"Is that testable?" Vedika asked him from across the table.
"Sure, if they start using our warp drive, or experimenting with it, it'll overturn my theory," Cale admitted.
"You think they have some sort of learning disability?" Margaret asked, "Something to stop them from developing new technology that differs from what they already know?"
"Something like that," Cale said, "I'm fuzzy on the details, but they seem to add information to their genetic and chemical memory system by consuming other organisms with similar information storage techniques. It's probably a hunting strategy, it would have given them a lot of knowledge about the habits of their usual prey animals, and they eat their dead to retain some of those learned experiences, but that strategy isn't amenable to the development of tool use."
"And we know they were uplifted by the…what was the other one Margaret?" Kestral asked.
"The Kianwentoa," Margaret answered.
"Right, so this all points to the theory that they were uplifted, told to go do a certain set of actions, and then set on their way," Cale elaborated.
"That makes them what, biological robots?" Evangeline asked.
"Engineered servants, manufactured slaves, biological automatons, the point is, these guys are just doing as they're programmed to do, what we need to do, is talk to the fuzzy squids in charge," Cale said.
Vedika cleared her throat loudly at the colloquialism, and Cale held up his hands apologetically.
"Due to the potential seriousness of the threat they pose, we are required to strongly suspect the Reshapers are not a fabrication, that said, we do not yet actually have evidence for their existence, only the word of the Kiwawentoa." Evangeline listed.
"We should have other survey ships warping coreward right now to test those claims," Cale said, "That should be a priority."
"It's already being seen to," Vedika answered calmly, "Remember, MNCV Watt's Engine departed for Sol last week with all the data your ship recovered. When they relay all this to Mars, included will be a recommendation by myself and Admiral Wallace to dispatch the MSCV Bacon's Legacy, and the MSCV Destiny of Light towards Sagittarius looking for these Reshapers."
Cale nodded his head, feeling slightly humbled, by the Senior Pragmatist's foresight, "good, good."
"That's still something we should talk to them about," Jean said, speaking up for the first time in the meeting, "it's pretty obvious they care a lot about all this. They basically forced the information on the Reshapers down our throats when we first met them. They considered it the most important thing to send, and spammed it to us until we were able to translate it."
"They're basically a shipful of refugees, that's what we're getting at, right?" Margaret said. "They're running away from the conflict zone, picking up sentient species along the way."
"To play devil's advocate for a moment," Ivy said, "What if they're lying about the Reshapers and using it as an excuse to harvest sentient species as slave labor?"
"Highly unlikely," Vedika replied, "For a huge host of reasons. It's just not practical."
"How does this potential war play into your theory of them being preprogrammed automatons?" Evangeline asked Cale.
"Difficult to say," Cale admitted, "We'd need to know more about their biology, their chemistry. We know they have a distributed nervous system that is partially electrical like our own, but how much thinking that system does compared to how much is epigenetic decision trees in their chemical memory?" He shrugged.
"They're incredibly alien, we don't really understand their minds at all," Jean said. "I've talked to them, and compared to them, everything we've tried to imagine when we say aliens is just…"
"Humans in funny suits," Morgan interjected, Jean nodded.
"So how exactly is this all going to go down?" Evangeline asked.
"A good question, shall we move on to operations planning?" Ivy asked the table, receiving a dull chorus of nods in assent. "Vedika, if you would then?"
The senior pragmatist nodded and stood, without actually looking at the screens, she threw images from her implants onto the wallscreens, displaying dozens of intersecting and passing orbital arcs through local space. "We will move the Empiricist in, warping to within 250,000 kilometers of the rods the Lament for Lost Worlds uses as propulsion. Thanks to the continued services of First Officer Paoloni as Speaker for Mankind, we have pre-cleared this action with the Kiwawentoa. When we arrive, we will launch a shuttle to a small vessel they will bring out alongside us. That vessel will serve as the first contact platform."
"I thought we couldn't warp any closer to it than this?" Matthias asked, speaking up for the first time "If I recall, we stumbled onto them because Commander Paoloni couldn't get the ship to warp one night."
"That's because the computer systems in the warp drive weren't accounting for the mass of the Lament for Lost Worlds in their tunneling calculations," Vedika explained, "This meant not enough energy was being fed into the warp field generators and the warp tunnel was coming up short of the ship. Now that that mass is accounted for, we should be able to warp closer without any issue."
"Provided they hold still," Cale added, "Those oars of theirs produce pretty serious gravitational waves when they move, which would make warping pretty much impossible."
"Can we moor the Empiricist directly to their contact ship instead of using a shuttle?" Jean asked.
"Maybe, we might be able to print out a custom airlock, but it'll depend on a lot of factors, we'll be able to decide that once we see their ship," Vedika replied.
"Who makes up the initial contact team?" Cale asked.
"Myself, Major Sabaea, Dr. Armstrong, Dr. Schiaparelli, and Lieutenant Commander Paoloni will form the initial team," Vedika answered, "And we'll be warping in five hours."
"Any further questions?" Ivy asked.
The room fell into a somewhat sullen silence, the meeting had already begun to run long.
"Okay," Ivy said, "let's get to work then."
Draco Class Shuttle
[FSF8] AIS-2
Ballistic Transfer Trajectory
2 AUs from Luyten's Star
March 2219
Jean struggled to keep her breathing in check as the shuttle vectored towards their fate. The Kiwawentoa vessel that had flown out from the Lament for Lost Worlds to meet them resembled a cross between a jellyfish and a coral reef: a bulbous head of matte, peach colored material trailed away into strange reedy strands and clusters of nodules. Like the larger vessel, it lacked an apparent source of propulsion, appearing to adjust its course by pulsing its trailing strands in a manner not unlike an aquatic organism.
A large maw irised open at the head of the vessel, and their shuttle was quickly swallowed up. The shuttle flew into a large hanger, brightly lit in blue and green lights. Various semi-organic looking nodules of equipment blinked and twinkled in stacks and rows at the periphery of the space. The entrance irised closed again in that same faintly organic way as everything else.
"This is it, everyone please don your helmets and prepare to exit the vehicle," Vedika spoke from the back of the craft. Jean unstrapped herself from her seat beside the pilot and pushed off it, drifting slowly down the middle of the shuttle. She strapped her helmet on and registered a hard seal on her EVA suit. The Kiwawentoa breathed in oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide like earth life did, but their atmosphere contained a much larger proportion of oxygen and carbon dioxide, enough to render a human unconscious in under a minute.
Jean looked around the cramped shuttle compartment, multiple sets of eyes met her own through the curved glass of the faceplates, faces set in grim determination.
"Let's open it up," Vedika's voice came through the speakers in her suit, though she could also hear the Senior Pragmatist's muffled voice directly through the suits, there weren't actually in a vacuum after all.
The hatch at the rear of the shuttle folded outwards, opening a view up into the alien hangar beyond. Despite her best efforts to remain calm, Jean felt as her heart began racing; it threatened to pound through her chest and escape the confines of her suit.
"Fall out into the hanger," Vedika instructed, "hold position by the far wall."
One by one, the suited figures moved to the edge of the shuttle and pushed off into the alien cavity beyond. Jean's turn in line came speeding at her, and she almost backpedaled into Margaret as the vast and strange landscape caught her off guard. The sheer weirdness of everything was striking: the visual centers of her brain kept trying to draw associations between some strange object and a familiar human one, but there was no frame of reference, nothing made sense, it was like looking at an abstract painting of a spaceship hangar.
But there was no going back now, and with a sharp intake of breath, she pushed off into the void. Alien shapes swirled all around her in the distance, denying her eyes an easy frame of reference. She felt as if she was falling into an irregular blob of color, before the wall came rushing up at her surprisingly fast and she quickly threw her hands up before she rebounded off the rough peach colored surface. The impact sent her slowly spinning away from the wall until Vedika deftly reached out and grabbed a handle on her suit to arrest her motion.
"Sorry," Jean said sheepishly into her microphone, Vedika said nothing in response.
"I feel like I could spend a few lifetimes just studying this room and still barely scratch the surface," Margaret's voice came in through Jean's speakers.
"We have a meeting to attend though," Vedika said, "And our hosts are waiting for us," she pointed down the wall to their left. "The door should be over there," she said, "they've got a meeting room set up for us."
Cold gas thrusters worked poorly in atmosphere, and inefficiently at that, so instead of thruster packs, the contact team's EVA suits had small ducted fans mounted where thrusters would normally be found, powered by a battery housed in the compartment that would typically contain fuel. Vedika tapped her thrusters and Jean could hear the fans whining through her suit as the orange eyed Senior Pragmatist floated along the wall, one hand gently pressed against the rough surface for stability. She seemed completely unflappable, Jean suspected she might be an android.
A slightly more organic looking surface dilated open into a long corridor lit in blue lights further along the wall from the group, and Vedika pointed towards it, "That will be our destination, stay together."
The group of suited humans continued along the wall, then turned and made their way along the corridor. The walls were narrow, slightly too close for comfort to an adult human, it was as if everything had been designed at a child scale. The far end of the corridor dilated open into another larger space beyond. The group pushed themselves out of the tube and into a large roughly spherical room, one which had been divided in two by a smooth plane of transparent material.
Beyond the glass though, two of the Kiwawentoa watched the group of humans, their strange trilling communications somewhat audible through the thick transparent sheet.
The two groups studied each other in silence for a few moments, each seemingly taken aback by the other. When no one else moved or spoke, Jean pushed to the front of the group, and approached the glasslike sheet that separated the two races.
"Hello," she said aloud through her external suit speakers, pressing a gloved hand against the hard transparent surface, "We come in peace."
There was a beat, a moment as the two creatures studied the larger human, then one of the pair moved close to the wall, and pressed a clawed hand to the glass opposite Jean's.
"Humans," A voice spoke in english, translated by a hidden computer system somewhere, "We wish you peace and prosperity." Jeans' eyes locked with those of the strange being in the room beyond, and an understanding passed between them. For the first time, two unique intelligences looked into the eyes of the other and saw themselves reflected there. There could no longer be any doubt, humanity was not alone in the universe.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
Regan's breath caught in her throat as the chain went taut and she felt herself swinging out over the nothingness that was space. Once Seth had confirmed it was safe and explained how to swing back inside afterward, Harper had taken a turn out on the hull. Well, Regan wasn't about to be shown up by the boys, and once the suit had recharged, she declared that she wanted a go at it as well
"Holy shit!" She said into the microphone, instinctively keying up as the stars spun dizzily past beneath her. "Okay, okay this is pretty intense here."
"You doing alright out there Regan?" Seth's voice came back calm and self-assured, and it helped calm her down.
"Yeah, I'm good it's just, wow," she said as she looked around. The colony continued rotating, turning inwards to face its neighboring colonies and providing a view up the long corridor to the High Ridge. The vastness of the expanse around her filled her with a sense of awe, feeling her own tininess against the wide landscape of human mega-engineering.
A parade of military ships was undocking from the High Ridge, cutting free of their moorings and following one another nose to tail, up and out of the vast structure of Jericho Ridge.
"Hey Seth," Regan asked, "all those UN ships are leaving, have you heard anything about that?"
"Nothing on the news or over the colony's localnet. You sure it's the UNDF ships?" He asked her.
"The rotation of the colony is sending me right past them," Regan replied, "I can read the words on the hulls, it's definitely those military ships, and they seem to be in an awful hurry to get somewhere."
"That's kind of relieving, it'd be real bad if a battle broke out here," Seth answered.
"It's probably to do with those aliens," Regan replied, "That news ship is leaving too. I doubt there'll be an actual battle though, everyone is just kinda spooked by this alien stuff."
"Yeah, but when you've got access to nuclear weapons and railguns and combat drones, getting spooked can give someone a real bad day, real easily," Seth said.
"I think people are better than that," Regan retorted, "I don't think this will start a war or anything."
"I hope you're right Regan," Seth's voice came quietly out of the speakers, "The alternative is pretty bleak."
"I hope so too," The teenager said into her microphone. Outside her suit, the station kept spinning, panning into view and out again as the UN fleet left the superstructure and fired up their engines, points of light growing more distant as they accelerated away. And beyond them all, the stars wheeled endlessly onward.
Loving Extension of Wisdom class Lifeseeker
i34_2015/76
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
March 2219
Jean closed her eyes, letting the bizarreness of the situation around her vanish away for a moment. She focused her attention on her breathing, mentally silencing everything beyond herself. She heard the sound of her heart beating, the blood pumping through her veins, and the even movement of her breath.
She floated there, in her self imposed meditative trance, for a few moments, letting her thoughts recollect and her emotions flow away. One by one, she came back to her senses, starting with hearing.
An air pump cycled noisily as it worked to adjust the composition of the atmosphere in the Meetingspace, the name the kiwawentoa gave to the split room. The Lifeseeker, the alien's name for the small ship they now occupied, was designed explicitly for first contact missions, hence the large space and giant glass wall. After the Kiwawentoa had explained to them that they were meant to bring in equipment as they willed and adjust the atmosphere on their own side of the wall to their liking, Vedika began having supplies hauled in. The sound of the other explorers in her party as they set up camp provided another source of noise. But the dominant sound in the chamber was the kiwawentoa themselves. Their language sounded to Jean nearly identical to terrestrial birdsong, and she smiled as she listened to them sing. She took one final breath and opened her eyes.
Morgan and Kestral continued to wrestle a large collapsible tent structure into place, struggling to control the long fiberglass component rods onto which the fabric wall structure was hung; Vedika was overseeing the construction with vague disinterest.
A pair of kiwawentoa diplomats watched the construction with far greater interest than the Pragmatist, chirping and trilling away in their language as they discussed the humans amongst themselves. Occasionally, one of the aliens would field them a question that was translated by the various computer systems interposed between them and issued forth through her earpiece in Martian.
The senior of the two aliens in the still poorly understood hierarchal structure was Dreaming-Waking-Transcending. The creature they had communicated with previously seemed to be in charge, and held the rank of 'Singer of Sad Truths.' Jean learned that he was a male of their species, or at least, that was how Margaret and Morgan had agreed it should be translated. It seemed sort of arbitrary to Jean, they had three sexes, and they didn't neatly map to human sexes. Referring to them as male, female, and ximale, were necessarily inaccurate human conventions.
The Dreaming-Waking-Transcending's feathers bore a mottled pattern in black, white, and grey, and he practically exuded authority. He was the only one of numerous aliens coming and going to wear orange. All the rest of their contingent wore various shades of brown or blue.
His companion was a slightly smaller creature named Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, who had feather patterns that made Jean think of a calico kitten. She wore navy blue robes with orange trim of the same shade as Dreaming-Waking-Transcending's robes, and bore the rank 'Interpreter of Wisdom.'
Margaret floated in a lotus position in the center of the room, holding an actual notebook and pen, most likely exported from Earth at an exorbitant markup. Positioned only a meter from the glass wall, she sat and watched the two kiwawentoa, occasionally writing something in her notes.
Jean's suit began to beep and she focused her eyes inward onto the suit HUD. The exterior atmosphere sensors were flashing green, the air was safe to breathe in the Meetingspace. She quickly shed her helmet and breathed a sigh of relief to be free of the cramped confines of the suit. She let her neck and back go limp and took a deep breath of the much cooler outside air. It had an odd fragrance, a strange cross between musk, rain, and flowers.
"Sol-human-Jean-Paoloni," asked Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, the AI systems giving the smaller alien a slightly different voice to differentiate them, "Does your breathsuit cause you discomfort?"
Jean looked at her helmet floating slowly away, then to the calico creature, "It gets a bit cramped after a while," she replied, surprised to be addressed by the alien.
"We too dislike wearing the breathsuit," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning admitted, curling her legs under her, "It confines the legbreath and produces much discomfort."
"What do you mean by legbreath?" Margaret asked her, looking up from her notes.
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning flexed and curled her legs again, unlike Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, who watched them still and stoically, the female creature seemed completely unable to stop fidgeting.
"Legbreath is," she fumbled for something translatable and decided it would just be easier to demonstrate. She rippled her feathers while also closing all her legs to one another and the motions combined to propel the small creature through the air. Studying-Hoping-Envisioning continued to fly around her side of the meetingspace, making a sound that the earpiece interpreted as laughter.
"Ah," Margaret replied, smiling and scribbling another note in her book, "That makes sense."
"We understand that humans are an aquatic species, is that a correct interpretation?" Studying-Hoping-Envisioning asked as she floated up in front of Margaret.
"No?" Margaret replied, tilting her head in confusion. "We spend very little time in water compared to many other species on our world, so we don't consider ourselves particularly aquatic in comparison."
"But you are unharmed by it," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning responded, "To many species, water is highly corrosive and toxic."
"Including your own?" Margaret asked.
"No," she answered, "Our species drinks water like your own, but we do not immerse ourselves in it, to do so would likely be fatal. Its high specific temperature would leach away the heat from our bodies."
Margaret nodded in understanding, scribbling down another note.
"Does the repeated vertical realignment of your chin and neck bear particular meaning?" She asked Margaret.
"It's a nod, it represents agreement or understanding, a nonverbal yes." She shook her head from side to side, "Conversely this represents a nonverbal no or disagreement."
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning flexed her legs again excitedly, communicating with Dreaming-Waking-Transcending in untranslated birdsong.
"Does that motion where you curl and flex your limbs have a meaning?" Margaret asked.
"Our body language is less discreet than you describe yours as, it means different things relating to the context," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning explained, "Though it often is used to indicate talkthinking or confusion or unknowing, we believe it is similar to your shrug."
Margaret quickly wrote down the alien's response, nodding as she listened.
Jean activated her suit fans and slowly pushed herself across the room towards where her helmet had drifted. She collected it and began moving towards the now completed modular tent structure.
"What is your exact definition of aquatic?" Vedika asked the aliens as she floated past Jean, going the other direction.
"An aquatic species is defined as one capable of surviving immersion in water," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning answered.
"By that definition," Vedika began, "We are indeed an aquatic species. However, we don't actually spend that much time submerged in water. There are species on our world that live their entire lives submerged thusly. Have you never encountered an intelligent species that lives its entire life in water?"
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning curled her legs in confusion, "We have never encountered an intelligent oceanic species. We do not believe such a species is possible. The environment is too hostile, thus species evolved within it must become too well adapted to that environment to ever require the creation of tools."
"Interesting," Vedika responded, crossing her arms as she studied the two aliens. Jean climbed into the tent and began peeling out of the suit. After wearing it for hours and hours, her perspiration threatened to glue it to her skin. The cool air felt fantastic after being trapped inside the suit, and the pants and shirt she pulled on barely felt like anything in comparison to the heavy suit that gripped her body tightly.
Without the suit fans to act as thrusters, Jean stood a real chance of being stranded somewhere in the middle of the room with no way to reach a wall and push off of it. To avoid this, she attached pair of large collapsible nylon wings to her arms in the form of bracers. If she activated a switch on them, the wings would extend, giving her leverage on the air. Another press, and the wings retracted back down into the bracers.
"Are there any other aquatic species on your vessel, or are we the first to be encountered?" Vedika asked.
Jean flapped her arms and pushed away from the tent, air swirling in her wake as she propelled herself back towards the center of the room. She collapsed her wings and used the glass to arrest her momentum, lightly bouncing off it with all fours before extending her wing again to come to a complete stop beside Margaret and Vedika, both of whom still wore their suits.
Jean looked over Studying-Hoping-Envisioning. The eyes of the alien were somewhat disconcerting. They bore an odd resemblance to one of those hypnosis spirals, only colored bright blue in the case of Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, and violet for Dreaming-Waking-Transcending. The little alien had her navy blue hood pulled up over her head, which seemed strange considering the radial symmetry of the aliens, it blocked two sets of their eyes. Jean pulled the hood on her shirt up over her head.
She mirrored Jean by reaching up with two of her limbs and pulling down her hood. Jean laughed and pulled her own hood down. Studying-Hoping-Envisioning pulled her hood back up in response. This game continued between the two of them for several minutes until Vedika and Dreaming-Waking-Transcending began giving them disapproving looks.
Draco Class Shuttle
[CV4]AIS-8
Ballistic Transfer Trajectory
8 AUs from Luyten's Star
March 2219
The armored insertion shuttle was designed to drop marines through any number of atmospheres directly into a combat zone, land, and then make it back to orbit in one piece. Comfort was never included as a needed design specification. The seats were rough and hard on Margaret Armstrong's back, legs, and ass. She felt every time the pilot tapped a thruster directly through her spine. And yet, she was excited. Margaret was one hundred and thirty-eight years old, she had rewound her age twice, and in that time had learned every living human language and quite a few dead ones. Her body was young now, in her mid-thirties by her own estimate. She wasn't a bundle of hormones liable to screw up an important decision anymore, that was important. The laugh lines had started coming back to her face, and she had noticed grey hairs mixed in with her natural blonde, but it didn't bother her, she always aged gracefully. She was on her way to meet aliens and learn their language too; it felt like her entire life had been leading up to this moment.
Across the aisle from her, Senior Pragmatist Vedika Srivastava sat stoically, her artificially bright orange eyes contrasted sharply against her mahogany skin, giving her an unsettling, slightly alien appearance. Her eyes stared vacantly into space, gaze focused on her optical displays as she idly pondered the nature of the aliens they would soon be meeting. Margaret couldn't help but find the dead gaze unsettling, despite knowing rationally it was only because the Pragmatist was reviewing information on her optical implants, streaming data directly into the visual centers of her brain. That knowledge did nothing to make her blank stare less unsettling, and Margaret resolved to look elsewhere.
To her left, Morgan Sabaea, the youngest of them at ninety six and in eir second life, drummed eir fingers on the armrest of eir chair impatiently. The small, mousy androgyne with a short, military buzzcut served as their xenobiologist. Morgan was an odd one, not the top of eir field, working through the Martian Survey Corps like Margaret and Vedika, but with deep and murky ties to an alphabet soup of organisational acronyms. Martian Naval and Recon Corps, InOps, StratNet, MDRPA the military weapons research division, and MIS the Martian Intelligence service. While Margaret and Vedika were effectively outside the Martian naval command structure, Major Morgan Sabaea was military through and through.
"Nervous?" Margaret tentatively asked Morgan as the relatively younger androgyne continued to drum eir fingers on the armrest.
"The nerves come first," Morgan answered with a smile, ceasing eir drumming and gripping the armrest. "It's the anticipation of the experience, getting the nerves out of the way. Once we're into the thick of things, the calm returns."
"You make it sound like we're going to war." Margaret chuckled nervously, glancing back at Vedika, who was still lost in her datastreams.
"This is the most important event in human history Maggie, from the perspective of psychology, we might as well be flying into battle." Morgan laughed, it was a nice sound, like the tinkling of wind chimes in a breeze.
"Have you been in battle?" Margaret asked the military androgyne.
"I have," ey answered, taking on a faraway look as ey reminisced, "I fought in the Lightspeed Conflict against the warlords of Alpha Centauri. There's a lot of conflict in the universe."
"Only what we take with us." Margaret retorted sagely.
"I'm not so sure about that anymore, you've read the reports, seen the data the Empiricist pulled in. We might be walking into an interstellar war zone," the Major said.
Margaret took a deep breath, her own nerves were worn, but she felt a deep stillness and clarity in her course of action, and she wasn't afraid,"We're at an inflection point, all the math changes, the future of humanity could end up riding on what we do here in the next few months."
"Sort of justifies the anxiety at least, doesn't it?" Morgan smiled.
"If you say so," Margaret said with a sigh, looking back at their Pragmatist, her orange eyes still looking blankly into space, unmoving beyond the occasional blink.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
I am going to die hanging here. The thought pounded through the animalistic parts of Seth Fiegel's brain in a flood of useless survival instincts. The stars wheeled coldly and uncaringly beneath him, offering no solace.
"I am not going to die here," he said to himself, drawing his mind out of the panic driven fog. "I am not going to die here," he repeated it like a mantra as his breathing slowly came under control, and his heart rate slowed down to normal. He continued to ignore Regan McKinley's worried voice in his ear, he wasn't ready to deal with her yet
His plan of climbing the chain was clearly not going to work, he was too heavy in the suit to haul himself up in it. He went through his other options. If he detached himself from the colony and let himself be flung off, there was a remote chance the station's sensors would detect him and they'd come rescue him. But they could just as easily miss his tiny suit in the vast darkness of space, it was a gamble. If he could swing up he could try to grab the lip of the door and haul himself inside. Oh, he realized, this suit has magnetic boots.
He took a breath, getting one last look at the stars, yet another ship slipping across them, then turned and started to carefully rock himself back and forth, as if swinging on a swing.
The Pendulum motion in the chain started out frustratingly small, and it took an annoyingly long time to get a good swing going in the bulky suit, but each swing his feet got a little bit closer to the decking until finally connecting with a knee jarring yank as the magnets in the boots reached out and gripped the hull plating.
Seth stood up on the deck, staring off the colony's vast horizon to the endless expanse of space beyond, spinning, always spinning, overhead now from his new perspective.
"Seth!" Regan's voice insisted angrily through the speakers.
"I'm fine Regan, I just spooked myself a bit is all, I'm coming back in now, don't worry," he tried to make his voice sound calm, confident, he hoped his still shaking nerves didn't make it into the mic.
"You better not die out there Seth Fiegel, or I will capture your spirit in a jar and taunt you about this forever." Lily's voice came out of the speaker system.
Seth ignored her and carefully walked to the edge of the decking. The spinning of the colony still wanted to fling him off into space, and it created the odd feeling of being suspended from his boots. Climbing up over the lip of the door, even with the magnetic boots, was an awkward operation that required kneeling and shimmying and no doubt looked somewhat silly for those watching from the viewing panels.
"How was it out there?" Harper Jordan asked him through the comms system as he strode triumphantly back across the hangar deck.
"It's awesome," he replied, "I'm going to have to do that again."
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
8 AUS from Luyten's Star
March 2219
The conference table was more crowded than usual for the Empiricist's 87th senior staff meeting. All the usual senior staff were present, as well as the new personnel sent over by the Light of Ages. Ivy studied the faces arranged around the conference table, Cale Rouschev and Vedika Srivastava were staring daggers at each other across the table, Orion Warrego was quietly talking with Morgan Sabaea, and Kestral was pacing nervously at the head of the room. Ivy felt the androgyne's nervousness mirrored in herself, this was it. In a few hours, they would move closer to the Lament for Lost Worlds and begin real time communication with the Ones Who Came Before.
Or at least, as close to real time as their translation software would allow. Ivy cleared her throat and brought the idle chatter to an end. She flipped the switches on her implants to turn on the room's recording software.
"Today is March 15th, 2219," Ivy began, "This is the 87th senior staff meeting, on the 11th mission of the Martian Survey Corps Vessel Empiricist. Topic of the day is The Ones Who Came Before. In attendance today, Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, First Officer Lieutenant Commander Jean Paoloni, Senior Pragmatist Vedika Srivastava, Pragmatist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, Chief Linguist Margaret Armstrong, Chief Xenobiologist Major Morgan Sabaea, and Senior Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia. Kestral, I open the floor to you." Ivy gestured to the white haired androgyne, who was leaning against the back of eir chair.
Ey snapped upright and clapped eir hands together, smothering eir nervousness in enthusiasm. "Right, so, The Ones Who Came Before, what do we know, what do we suspect, and what do we still need to learn? Those are the questions we need to be asking ourselves."
The science officer began throwing up images onto the wallscreens ey had stored on eir implants.
"Let's start with what we know. The Ones Who Came Before are an octopedal race that evolved on a 0.6 G world. Four of their limbs are differentiated into legs, and four are differentiated into arms. They are radially symmetrical with a dorsal mouth and a ventral waste chute, they have eight, light sensitive organs located around the perimeter of their mouth. Their bodies are covered with feathers, making them capable of gliding and powered flight on their homeworld. They wear clothing that doesn't interfere with this flight, and communicate by vibrating parts of their breathing apparatus to create atmospheric pressure waves. They reproduce sexually with k-pattern selection, have three sexes of very limited sexual dimorphism, and seemed to have evolved subsisting on a diet similar to that of early humans. However, the similarities with them and earth life end there. They have no centralized nervous system, however, they do seem to have a decentralized nervous system that runs in parallel to a chemically based information storage system that encodes directly into their DNA variants. They practice a ritualised form of cannibalism that seems to let them inherit the genetic memories of their predecessors."
"How large are they?" Morgan asked.
"Roughly one meter tall, though it various between individuals," Kestral explained.
"Oh, they're that small?" Margaret asked, "I was imagining them somewhat larger."
Kestral waved eir hands and modified the image, "Here's a human and a banana for scale. More significantly, they didn't develop their own technology, they were technologically uplifted to their current level roughly two million years ago by a race they also call The Ones Who Came Before, seen here."
Kestral changed the image to a different species of octopods, furred instead of feathered, and all wearing individualized and towering headdresses. "We don't know very much about this race, and they don't appear to be one of the races presently represented on the Lament for Lost Worlds, but they do seem to be the original source of all the technology used by the, well, Cale and I have been calling them the Bird-Spiders."
"Their word for themselves is Ki-wa-wen-toa, except they speak all four syllables at once, something we humans can't replicate," Margaret spoke up, adding in her input as linguist. "That translates to The Ones Who Came Before, but their word for the ah…"
"Octopuses in funny hats." Kestral finished the sentence for her.
"Right," Margaret continued, "them, their word for that race is Ki-an-wen-toa, which is slightly different and translates to The Ones Who Came First. Keep in mind that it's effectively a single word in their language, it's densely encoded."
"Is that actually relevant?" Ivy asked the linguist.
"It's a more respectful label then calling them bird-spiders," Margaret answered, "and The Ones Who Came Before is a bit of a mouthful, but if you take the syllables of their word, and say them one at a time instead of all together, it could be pronounced as Kiwawentoa for the 'bird-spiders,' and Kianwentoa, for the 'octopuses in funny hats.'"
"Aw, you don't like our cutsy colloquialisms? I was hoping they'd catch on," Cale laughed.
"These are sentient creatures who deserve respect and dignity," Vedika interjected, "And referring to them as 'bird-spiders' implies they are animals, something beneath us. It sets a poor precedent for future cultural exchange, and breeds negative memes within our own culture regarding their natures."
"I concur with the Senior Pragmatist," Evangeline added in smugly, "The long-term potential for abuse from the memeplex that develops out of that phrase is dangerously high."
"Fine, fine," Ivy imposed, "We call them the Kiwawentoa, can we move along? Kestral, proceed."
"Alright," Kestral began, "So what do we suspect about the bi…the Kiwawentoa, that we can't yet prove?"
"I forward the hypothesis that their development has been largely static since their uplifting," Cale said.
"Is that testable?" Vedika asked him from across the table.
"Sure, if they start using our warp drive, or experimenting with it, it'll overturn my theory," Cale admitted.
"You think they have some sort of learning disability?" Margaret asked, "Something to stop them from developing new technology that differs from what they already know?"
"Something like that," Cale said, "I'm fuzzy on the details, but they seem to add information to their genetic and chemical memory system by consuming other organisms with similar information storage techniques. It's probably a hunting strategy, it would have given them a lot of knowledge about the habits of their usual prey animals, and they eat their dead to retain some of those learned experiences, but that strategy isn't amenable to the development of tool use."
"And we know they were uplifted by the…what was the other one Margaret?" Kestral asked.
"The Kianwentoa," Margaret answered.
"Right, so this all points to the theory that they were uplifted, told to go do a certain set of actions, and then set on their way," Cale elaborated.
"That makes them what, biological robots?" Evangeline asked.
"Engineered servants, manufactured slaves, biological automatons, the point is, these guys are just doing as they're programmed to do, what we need to do, is talk to the fuzzy squids in charge," Cale said.
Vedika cleared her throat loudly at the colloquialism, and Cale held up his hands apologetically.
"Due to the potential seriousness of the threat they pose, we are required to strongly suspect the Reshapers are not a fabrication, that said, we do not yet actually have evidence for their existence, only the word of the Kiwawentoa." Evangeline listed.
"We should have other survey ships warping coreward right now to test those claims," Cale said, "That should be a priority."
"It's already being seen to," Vedika answered calmly, "Remember, MNCV Watt's Engine departed for Sol last week with all the data your ship recovered. When they relay all this to Mars, included will be a recommendation by myself and Admiral Wallace to dispatch the MSCV Bacon's Legacy, and the MSCV Destiny of Light towards Sagittarius looking for these Reshapers."
Cale nodded his head, feeling slightly humbled, by the Senior Pragmatist's foresight, "good, good."
"That's still something we should talk to them about," Jean said, speaking up for the first time in the meeting, "it's pretty obvious they care a lot about all this. They basically forced the information on the Reshapers down our throats when we first met them. They considered it the most important thing to send, and spammed it to us until we were able to translate it."
"They're basically a shipful of refugees, that's what we're getting at, right?" Margaret said. "They're running away from the conflict zone, picking up sentient species along the way."
"To play devil's advocate for a moment," Ivy said, "What if they're lying about the Reshapers and using it as an excuse to harvest sentient species as slave labor?"
"Highly unlikely," Vedika replied, "For a huge host of reasons. It's just not practical."
"How does this potential war play into your theory of them being preprogrammed automatons?" Evangeline asked Cale.
"Difficult to say," Cale admitted, "We'd need to know more about their biology, their chemistry. We know they have a distributed nervous system that is partially electrical like our own, but how much thinking that system does compared to how much is epigenetic decision trees in their chemical memory?" He shrugged.
"They're incredibly alien, we don't really understand their minds at all," Jean said. "I've talked to them, and compared to them, everything we've tried to imagine when we say aliens is just…"
"Humans in funny suits," Morgan interjected, Jean nodded.
"So how exactly is this all going to go down?" Evangeline asked.
"A good question, shall we move on to operations planning?" Ivy asked the table, receiving a dull chorus of nods in assent. "Vedika, if you would then?"
The senior pragmatist nodded and stood, without actually looking at the screens, she threw images from her implants onto the wallscreens, displaying dozens of intersecting and passing orbital arcs through local space. "We will move the Empiricist in, warping to within 250,000 kilometers of the rods the Lament for Lost Worlds uses as propulsion. Thanks to the continued services of First Officer Paoloni as Speaker for Mankind, we have pre-cleared this action with the Kiwawentoa. When we arrive, we will launch a shuttle to a small vessel they will bring out alongside us. That vessel will serve as the first contact platform."
"I thought we couldn't warp any closer to it than this?" Matthias asked, speaking up for the first time "If I recall, we stumbled onto them because Commander Paoloni couldn't get the ship to warp one night."
"That's because the computer systems in the warp drive weren't accounting for the mass of the Lament for Lost Worlds in their tunneling calculations," Vedika explained, "This meant not enough energy was being fed into the warp field generators and the warp tunnel was coming up short of the ship. Now that that mass is accounted for, we should be able to warp closer without any issue."
"Provided they hold still," Cale added, "Those oars of theirs produce pretty serious gravitational waves when they move, which would make warping pretty much impossible."
"Can we moor the Empiricist directly to their contact ship instead of using a shuttle?" Jean asked.
"Maybe, we might be able to print out a custom airlock, but it'll depend on a lot of factors, we'll be able to decide that once we see their ship," Vedika replied.
"Who makes up the initial contact team?" Cale asked.
"Myself, Major Sabaea, Dr. Armstrong, Dr. Schiaparelli, and Lieutenant Commander Paoloni will form the initial team," Vedika answered, "And we'll be warping in five hours."
"Any further questions?" Ivy asked.
The room fell into a somewhat sullen silence, the meeting had already begun to run long.
"Okay," Ivy said, "let's get to work then."
Draco Class Shuttle
[FSF8] AIS-2
Ballistic Transfer Trajectory
2 AUs from Luyten's Star
March 2219
Jean struggled to keep her breathing in check as the shuttle vectored towards their fate. The Kiwawentoa vessel that had flown out from the Lament for Lost Worlds to meet them resembled a cross between a jellyfish and a coral reef: a bulbous head of matte, peach colored material trailed away into strange reedy strands and clusters of nodules. Like the larger vessel, it lacked an apparent source of propulsion, appearing to adjust its course by pulsing its trailing strands in a manner not unlike an aquatic organism.
A large maw irised open at the head of the vessel, and their shuttle was quickly swallowed up. The shuttle flew into a large hanger, brightly lit in blue and green lights. Various semi-organic looking nodules of equipment blinked and twinkled in stacks and rows at the periphery of the space. The entrance irised closed again in that same faintly organic way as everything else.
"This is it, everyone please don your helmets and prepare to exit the vehicle," Vedika spoke from the back of the craft. Jean unstrapped herself from her seat beside the pilot and pushed off it, drifting slowly down the middle of the shuttle. She strapped her helmet on and registered a hard seal on her EVA suit. The Kiwawentoa breathed in oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide like earth life did, but their atmosphere contained a much larger proportion of oxygen and carbon dioxide, enough to render a human unconscious in under a minute.
Jean looked around the cramped shuttle compartment, multiple sets of eyes met her own through the curved glass of the faceplates, faces set in grim determination.
"Let's open it up," Vedika's voice came through the speakers in her suit, though she could also hear the Senior Pragmatist's muffled voice directly through the suits, there weren't actually in a vacuum after all.
The hatch at the rear of the shuttle folded outwards, opening a view up into the alien hangar beyond. Despite her best efforts to remain calm, Jean felt as her heart began racing; it threatened to pound through her chest and escape the confines of her suit.
"Fall out into the hanger," Vedika instructed, "hold position by the far wall."
One by one, the suited figures moved to the edge of the shuttle and pushed off into the alien cavity beyond. Jean's turn in line came speeding at her, and she almost backpedaled into Margaret as the vast and strange landscape caught her off guard. The sheer weirdness of everything was striking: the visual centers of her brain kept trying to draw associations between some strange object and a familiar human one, but there was no frame of reference, nothing made sense, it was like looking at an abstract painting of a spaceship hangar.
But there was no going back now, and with a sharp intake of breath, she pushed off into the void. Alien shapes swirled all around her in the distance, denying her eyes an easy frame of reference. She felt as if she was falling into an irregular blob of color, before the wall came rushing up at her surprisingly fast and she quickly threw her hands up before she rebounded off the rough peach colored surface. The impact sent her slowly spinning away from the wall until Vedika deftly reached out and grabbed a handle on her suit to arrest her motion.
"Sorry," Jean said sheepishly into her microphone, Vedika said nothing in response.
"I feel like I could spend a few lifetimes just studying this room and still barely scratch the surface," Margaret's voice came in through Jean's speakers.
"We have a meeting to attend though," Vedika said, "And our hosts are waiting for us," she pointed down the wall to their left. "The door should be over there," she said, "they've got a meeting room set up for us."
Cold gas thrusters worked poorly in atmosphere, and inefficiently at that, so instead of thruster packs, the contact team's EVA suits had small ducted fans mounted where thrusters would normally be found, powered by a battery housed in the compartment that would typically contain fuel. Vedika tapped her thrusters and Jean could hear the fans whining through her suit as the orange eyed Senior Pragmatist floated along the wall, one hand gently pressed against the rough surface for stability. She seemed completely unflappable, Jean suspected she might be an android.
A slightly more organic looking surface dilated open into a long corridor lit in blue lights further along the wall from the group, and Vedika pointed towards it, "That will be our destination, stay together."
The group of suited humans continued along the wall, then turned and made their way along the corridor. The walls were narrow, slightly too close for comfort to an adult human, it was as if everything had been designed at a child scale. The far end of the corridor dilated open into another larger space beyond. The group pushed themselves out of the tube and into a large roughly spherical room, one which had been divided in two by a smooth plane of transparent material.
Beyond the glass though, two of the Kiwawentoa watched the group of humans, their strange trilling communications somewhat audible through the thick transparent sheet.
The two groups studied each other in silence for a few moments, each seemingly taken aback by the other. When no one else moved or spoke, Jean pushed to the front of the group, and approached the glasslike sheet that separated the two races.
"Hello," she said aloud through her external suit speakers, pressing a gloved hand against the hard transparent surface, "We come in peace."
There was a beat, a moment as the two creatures studied the larger human, then one of the pair moved close to the wall, and pressed a clawed hand to the glass opposite Jean's.
"Humans," A voice spoke in english, translated by a hidden computer system somewhere, "We wish you peace and prosperity." Jeans' eyes locked with those of the strange being in the room beyond, and an understanding passed between them. For the first time, two unique intelligences looked into the eyes of the other and saw themselves reflected there. There could no longer be any doubt, humanity was not alone in the universe.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
March 2219
Regan's breath caught in her throat as the chain went taut and she felt herself swinging out over the nothingness that was space. Once Seth had confirmed it was safe and explained how to swing back inside afterward, Harper had taken a turn out on the hull. Well, Regan wasn't about to be shown up by the boys, and once the suit had recharged, she declared that she wanted a go at it as well
"Holy shit!" She said into the microphone, instinctively keying up as the stars spun dizzily past beneath her. "Okay, okay this is pretty intense here."
"You doing alright out there Regan?" Seth's voice came back calm and self-assured, and it helped calm her down.
"Yeah, I'm good it's just, wow," she said as she looked around. The colony continued rotating, turning inwards to face its neighboring colonies and providing a view up the long corridor to the High Ridge. The vastness of the expanse around her filled her with a sense of awe, feeling her own tininess against the wide landscape of human mega-engineering.
A parade of military ships was undocking from the High Ridge, cutting free of their moorings and following one another nose to tail, up and out of the vast structure of Jericho Ridge.
"Hey Seth," Regan asked, "all those UN ships are leaving, have you heard anything about that?"
"Nothing on the news or over the colony's localnet. You sure it's the UNDF ships?" He asked her.
"The rotation of the colony is sending me right past them," Regan replied, "I can read the words on the hulls, it's definitely those military ships, and they seem to be in an awful hurry to get somewhere."
"That's kind of relieving, it'd be real bad if a battle broke out here," Seth answered.
"It's probably to do with those aliens," Regan replied, "That news ship is leaving too. I doubt there'll be an actual battle though, everyone is just kinda spooked by this alien stuff."
"Yeah, but when you've got access to nuclear weapons and railguns and combat drones, getting spooked can give someone a real bad day, real easily," Seth said.
"I think people are better than that," Regan retorted, "I don't think this will start a war or anything."
"I hope you're right Regan," Seth's voice came quietly out of the speakers, "The alternative is pretty bleak."
"I hope so too," The teenager said into her microphone. Outside her suit, the station kept spinning, panning into view and out again as the UN fleet left the superstructure and fired up their engines, points of light growing more distant as they accelerated away. And beyond them all, the stars wheeled endlessly onward.
Loving Extension of Wisdom class Lifeseeker
i34_2015/76
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
March 2219
Jean closed her eyes, letting the bizarreness of the situation around her vanish away for a moment. She focused her attention on her breathing, mentally silencing everything beyond herself. She heard the sound of her heart beating, the blood pumping through her veins, and the even movement of her breath.
She floated there, in her self imposed meditative trance, for a few moments, letting her thoughts recollect and her emotions flow away. One by one, she came back to her senses, starting with hearing.
An air pump cycled noisily as it worked to adjust the composition of the atmosphere in the Meetingspace, the name the kiwawentoa gave to the split room. The Lifeseeker, the alien's name for the small ship they now occupied, was designed explicitly for first contact missions, hence the large space and giant glass wall. After the Kiwawentoa had explained to them that they were meant to bring in equipment as they willed and adjust the atmosphere on their own side of the wall to their liking, Vedika began having supplies hauled in. The sound of the other explorers in her party as they set up camp provided another source of noise. But the dominant sound in the chamber was the kiwawentoa themselves. Their language sounded to Jean nearly identical to terrestrial birdsong, and she smiled as she listened to them sing. She took one final breath and opened her eyes.
Morgan and Kestral continued to wrestle a large collapsible tent structure into place, struggling to control the long fiberglass component rods onto which the fabric wall structure was hung; Vedika was overseeing the construction with vague disinterest.
A pair of kiwawentoa diplomats watched the construction with far greater interest than the Pragmatist, chirping and trilling away in their language as they discussed the humans amongst themselves. Occasionally, one of the aliens would field them a question that was translated by the various computer systems interposed between them and issued forth through her earpiece in Martian.
The senior of the two aliens in the still poorly understood hierarchal structure was Dreaming-Waking-Transcending. The creature they had communicated with previously seemed to be in charge, and held the rank of 'Singer of Sad Truths.' Jean learned that he was a male of their species, or at least, that was how Margaret and Morgan had agreed it should be translated. It seemed sort of arbitrary to Jean, they had three sexes, and they didn't neatly map to human sexes. Referring to them as male, female, and ximale, were necessarily inaccurate human conventions.
The Dreaming-Waking-Transcending's feathers bore a mottled pattern in black, white, and grey, and he practically exuded authority. He was the only one of numerous aliens coming and going to wear orange. All the rest of their contingent wore various shades of brown or blue.
His companion was a slightly smaller creature named Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, who had feather patterns that made Jean think of a calico kitten. She wore navy blue robes with orange trim of the same shade as Dreaming-Waking-Transcending's robes, and bore the rank 'Interpreter of Wisdom.'
Margaret floated in a lotus position in the center of the room, holding an actual notebook and pen, most likely exported from Earth at an exorbitant markup. Positioned only a meter from the glass wall, she sat and watched the two kiwawentoa, occasionally writing something in her notes.
Jean's suit began to beep and she focused her eyes inward onto the suit HUD. The exterior atmosphere sensors were flashing green, the air was safe to breathe in the Meetingspace. She quickly shed her helmet and breathed a sigh of relief to be free of the cramped confines of the suit. She let her neck and back go limp and took a deep breath of the much cooler outside air. It had an odd fragrance, a strange cross between musk, rain, and flowers.
"Sol-human-Jean-Paoloni," asked Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, the AI systems giving the smaller alien a slightly different voice to differentiate them, "Does your breathsuit cause you discomfort?"
Jean looked at her helmet floating slowly away, then to the calico creature, "It gets a bit cramped after a while," she replied, surprised to be addressed by the alien.
"We too dislike wearing the breathsuit," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning admitted, curling her legs under her, "It confines the legbreath and produces much discomfort."
"What do you mean by legbreath?" Margaret asked her, looking up from her notes.
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning flexed and curled her legs again, unlike Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, who watched them still and stoically, the female creature seemed completely unable to stop fidgeting.
"Legbreath is," she fumbled for something translatable and decided it would just be easier to demonstrate. She rippled her feathers while also closing all her legs to one another and the motions combined to propel the small creature through the air. Studying-Hoping-Envisioning continued to fly around her side of the meetingspace, making a sound that the earpiece interpreted as laughter.
"Ah," Margaret replied, smiling and scribbling another note in her book, "That makes sense."
"We understand that humans are an aquatic species, is that a correct interpretation?" Studying-Hoping-Envisioning asked as she floated up in front of Margaret.
"No?" Margaret replied, tilting her head in confusion. "We spend very little time in water compared to many other species on our world, so we don't consider ourselves particularly aquatic in comparison."
"But you are unharmed by it," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning responded, "To many species, water is highly corrosive and toxic."
"Including your own?" Margaret asked.
"No," she answered, "Our species drinks water like your own, but we do not immerse ourselves in it, to do so would likely be fatal. Its high specific temperature would leach away the heat from our bodies."
Margaret nodded in understanding, scribbling down another note.
"Does the repeated vertical realignment of your chin and neck bear particular meaning?" She asked Margaret.
"It's a nod, it represents agreement or understanding, a nonverbal yes." She shook her head from side to side, "Conversely this represents a nonverbal no or disagreement."
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning flexed her legs again excitedly, communicating with Dreaming-Waking-Transcending in untranslated birdsong.
"Does that motion where you curl and flex your limbs have a meaning?" Margaret asked.
"Our body language is less discreet than you describe yours as, it means different things relating to the context," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning explained, "Though it often is used to indicate talkthinking or confusion or unknowing, we believe it is similar to your shrug."
Margaret quickly wrote down the alien's response, nodding as she listened.
Jean activated her suit fans and slowly pushed herself across the room towards where her helmet had drifted. She collected it and began moving towards the now completed modular tent structure.
"What is your exact definition of aquatic?" Vedika asked the aliens as she floated past Jean, going the other direction.
"An aquatic species is defined as one capable of surviving immersion in water," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning answered.
"By that definition," Vedika began, "We are indeed an aquatic species. However, we don't actually spend that much time submerged in water. There are species on our world that live their entire lives submerged thusly. Have you never encountered an intelligent species that lives its entire life in water?"
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning curled her legs in confusion, "We have never encountered an intelligent oceanic species. We do not believe such a species is possible. The environment is too hostile, thus species evolved within it must become too well adapted to that environment to ever require the creation of tools."
"Interesting," Vedika responded, crossing her arms as she studied the two aliens. Jean climbed into the tent and began peeling out of the suit. After wearing it for hours and hours, her perspiration threatened to glue it to her skin. The cool air felt fantastic after being trapped inside the suit, and the pants and shirt she pulled on barely felt like anything in comparison to the heavy suit that gripped her body tightly.
Without the suit fans to act as thrusters, Jean stood a real chance of being stranded somewhere in the middle of the room with no way to reach a wall and push off of it. To avoid this, she attached pair of large collapsible nylon wings to her arms in the form of bracers. If she activated a switch on them, the wings would extend, giving her leverage on the air. Another press, and the wings retracted back down into the bracers.
"Are there any other aquatic species on your vessel, or are we the first to be encountered?" Vedika asked.
Jean flapped her arms and pushed away from the tent, air swirling in her wake as she propelled herself back towards the center of the room. She collapsed her wings and used the glass to arrest her momentum, lightly bouncing off it with all fours before extending her wing again to come to a complete stop beside Margaret and Vedika, both of whom still wore their suits.
Jean looked over Studying-Hoping-Envisioning. The eyes of the alien were somewhat disconcerting. They bore an odd resemblance to one of those hypnosis spirals, only colored bright blue in the case of Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, and violet for Dreaming-Waking-Transcending. The little alien had her navy blue hood pulled up over her head, which seemed strange considering the radial symmetry of the aliens, it blocked two sets of their eyes. Jean pulled the hood on her shirt up over her head.
She mirrored Jean by reaching up with two of her limbs and pulling down her hood. Jean laughed and pulled her own hood down. Studying-Hoping-Envisioning pulled her hood back up in response. This game continued between the two of them for several minutes until Vedika and Dreaming-Waking-Transcending began giving them disapproving looks.
Chapter 14: The Devils of Our Better Natures
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 14: The Devils of our Better Natures
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
Galactic Orbit
24,970 Light Years from Sagittarius A*
April 2219
No matter how many times he watched it, no matter the angle or the speed he was watching it at, Benjamin Nesco felt the same horrible sinking feeling in his gut every time. It felt as if a great black abyss had yawned open beneath his feet, and it was only by the narrowest margins that he had thus far avoided falling into it. He should have been sleeping, it was 0245 in the morning and he'd had maybe five hours of good sleep in the last week. Instead, he took another sip of his coffee and hit play again.
Three hours and forty-seven minutes: the time it took for that impossibly large hand to reach up out of a strange radioactive glowing disc and drag the star back into it. The images gripped at his mind, as if threatening to drag him down into the darkness like the K-type star had been. The playthrough ended its accelerated run and sent a shiver up his spine.
He banished the cold feeling with another swig of coffee, turned the speed up by another factor of ten to 10000x and hit play again. Once again, a disk with a radius of five AUs opened up beneath the system's ecliptic. The disk was centered on the star, with the mid point only 100,000 kilometers from the star's south pole. Emissions from the disk were all over the place, with an alphabet soup of high energy particles as well as electromagnetic emissions along every spectrum. And then those impossibly large fingers rose up around the star, moving at relativistic speeds as they slide up around it and curled to meet above the sun's north pole. When the fingers began sinking back into the energy disk, the star visibly pulsed and surged, sloughing off chunks of corona that went silently screaming into the system. Auroras millions of kilometers long danced around the descending claws as the electromagnetic fields within them were used to shove the star through space.
And then the star was sucked out of sight, and the storm of radiation dissipated in less than a minute. Ben pursed his lips and sucked in a breath through his teeth, his heart was racing again, this was a situation without precedent.
The comparison that jumped to his mind was the arrival of the Europeans in Central America, and what happened to the Aztecs as a result, but compared to the aliens he had beheld, that technological disparity had been positively tiny. He went for another swig of coffee and realized the cup was empty.
A phrase danced around the corners of his mind, taunting him to invoke it, and yet knowing that doing so would be the equivalent of casting a curse on Fabrique Intersolar. Words had power, and those words would invoke a series of actions that could not be easily undone. It would certainly be the end of Fabrique's interstellar ambitions and could change the nature of space exploration for everyone. And yet, he couldn't ignore the possibility that this was an outside context problem. From where he was floating, it looked pretty far outside of context. Dismantling planets? That was something humanity had ambitions to do and had made moderate progress on in the case of Mercury, it was within Ben's scope of understanding, it fit into his worldview. But just taking an entire star? It wasn't something he could convince his brain to grok.
He went to start the video again and then stopped himself. This is pointless, he thought. He wasn't going to gain some new insight that would allow him to divine meaning from the events they had witnessed by reviewing them for the two-hundredth time, and nothing new had happened in the former location of the Theta Tauri system for the past week. It was time to move on.
He unstrapped from the chair at his desk and gently pushed off of it, flipping over with the unnecessary acrobatics of zero gee to vault above his desk and reach the door to his personal quarters.
Making his way down the axial corridor to the bridge, Ben started to feel better than he had during the previous week, it was time to stop staring slack-jawed and get to work.
The door to the bridge hissed open and admitted him as he floated along, his XO made eye contact as he entered and the bridge crew roused themselves to something approximating attention.
"Captain," Melissa Stevenson nodded to him, pushing out of the captain's chair, "I'm surprised you're awake."
"Couldn't sleep," He explained, "No change?"
"No changes, we're still all alone out here," Melissa answered him.
"All right then, new plan," Ben announced, "we're going to quickly hit Epsilon Tauri and Gamma Tauri and assess the situation in both of those systems. And honestly, even if everything is fine there, I'm probably going to advise the respective ship captains to pull out of the Hyades with us until we can get a handle on what these aliens are doing."
Melissa nodded, "Gamma then Epsilon?"
"Gamma is technically closer," Ben shrugged, pushing past the captain's chair towards the front of the ship, "So sure, we can do Gamma first," he grabbed the navigator's seat to arrest his momentum and woke the navigator, who was asleep in her chair with headphones on, "Alex, power up the warp drive, we're getting out of here."
"Wha.." she mumbled and then snapped fully awake, "Sorry, what, where are we going?"
"Gamma Tauri," Ben explained calmly, "and take us out at 50 AUs again."
Alex Uplands nodded and stretched her arms out over the controls, inputting commands into the computer system to begin the complex process of flinging the ship multiple light years through space. Most of the process was automated, it all happened at microsecond intervals, impossible for a human to time correctly, but all the vectors, the locations involved, the relative velocities, all that data had to be fed into the warp calculator in order to generate the precisely shaped spacetime tunnel to deliver their ship to the exact point specified.
"Warp calculations completed," Alex reported, "304 hours uptime, twelve days travel."
"Sounds good to me," Melissa replied.
Ben nodded and pushed back off Alex's chair, landing neatly in his own chair further back on the bridge. "Hit it."
Alex executed the warp order. Hundreds of downstream AI processes began going off in parallel as the warp began. The automated kick warnings sounded throughout the vessel, and the ship lighting flashed red for thirty seconds, giving the crew warning that they should strap in for the incoming kick. While this was occurring, Better Margins was rotating herself in space, pointing her bow at the distant star, and channeling massive quantities of power into the capacitor banks that would all discharge at once to power the warp field generators. Exotic matter was being precycled through the system and placed to generate the needed spacetime geometries, while on the bridge an automated countdown calmly ran down the seconds.
The timer ran out and the Better Margins vanished into a ripple of light.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
April 2219
Regan McKinley sighed and stretched, sprawled out atop the Lincolnville water tower, Seth Fiegel beside her. Low grey clouds scudded overhead, providing a patchwork view across the drum and mostly hiding Mt. Washington from view. The colony was moving towards autumn on its internal calendar, the days growing shorter and cooler, rain coming more and more frequently. In a few more months, it'd start snowing.
"So she really did it?" Regan asked after a long silence, her eyes watching the clouds slip by in the autumn breeze.
"Yeah," Seth answered bitterly, "Cornered my dad with the divorce lawyer when he got home from work and dumped the proceedings on him."
"Shit Seth," Regan replied sympathetically, "I'm sorry man."
"Yeah, it's a shitshow all around," Seth said as he sat up on the warm curving metal and started lighting a cigarette. The breeze on top of the tower kept blowing out his lighter flame, forcing him to cup his hands close to his face to get the cherry lit, "She took Caleb with her and left, Dad's probably having a meltdown right now, it's just…" he sighed, unable to properly finish the sentence, overwhelmed by the various conflicting emotions.
Regan gently squeezed his shoulder and pat him on the back, "We'll figure this out."
"I am not moving in with Helen, it's not worth it," he said through clenched teeth, "I just don't want to lose my brother over this."
"You won't," Regan assured him, "Helen might be a stuck up narcissist, but she's not a monster, I'm sure she'd let you visit him."
"I wish I was that sure, she doesn't hate me or anything, but I'm not her kid and she knows it. If she thinks I'm a bad influence on him…" He studied his hands, unwilling to let himself show emotion, even with Regan, he refused to break down into the crying mess he wanted to become.
"Just take her side in the divorce, but don't move in with her," Regan suggested, "try and stay on her good side, and if your dad kicks you out for it, you can just live in the bunker, then you're still not like, literally under her thumb, but she'll still like you."
"I don't know if I can do that though," Seth said, "she holds everyone to these hypocritically high standards, and is super judgemental."
Regan sighed and lit her own cigarette, replicating Seth's action of cupping her hands to block the wind. "What a shitshow," she said finally, "I wish there was something I could do."
"Just like, give me a distraction," he answered, staring up at the clouds while taking another drag of his smoke.
"I wish we'd get some more news about those aliens," Regan answered, "There hasn't been anything new on them since the fleet left."
"Maybe they made contact, and they're keeping it hush-hush because the aliens have been living among us for a while or something," Seth chuckled.
"Oh, yeah, I'm an alien, I forgot to tell you," Regan snarked, taking a drag of her smoke.
"But what do you think's really gonna happen?" He asked her.
"Nothing," she answered cynically, watching the dark grey clouds scuttling overhead.
"Oh come on Regan, this is like, the biggest discovery in human history, this'll change everything, there's no way around that," Seth said.
"Are you sure?" The last biggest discovery in human history was FTL getting invented, that happened like, right before we were born, and that didn't change anything here."
"It did change stuff though, if it was never invented, Lily's dad might not have run off," Seth said as an example.
"Yeah but that's just the exception that proves the rule. The more things change, the more they stay the same." Regan shook her head and sighed out another cloud of smoke.
"From the desk of Regan McKinley," Seth chuckled again, rolling his eyes. Regan sat up as a fat drop of water landed on her forehead, eyes going skyward.
"Rain's coming," she said, taking another drag of her smoke as she stood up. "We should head down before we get soaked."
"Yeah, yeah," Seth answered, clambering to his feet, "Only a few more months and it'll be too cold to hang out up here."
"Well, we have the bunker now, so it's all good," Regan answered, "Even if I prefer this view to the one out the hangar doors."
"Really?" Seth asked as he climbed onto the ladder and started descending the side of the water tower. "I thought the view out there was way more impressive."
"It's all sterile space, emptiness, and giant machinery," She replied, following him down the ladder as raindrops started falling around them, "I like nature, green spaces, and clouds and stuff. Space is just dead, cold and dead and sterile."
"All of that stuff you listed is technically in space," Seth retorted, "Everything is in space."
"Yeah but most of space is empty and boring. I mean like, the view out there is impressive, I'm glad I had the opportunity to do that, but watching the stars spin past is only interesting for so long."
"If you say so..." Seth answered, not willing to actually concede the point but being unwilling to argue about it further. The pair quickly scaled the chainlink at the bottom of the ladder and took shelter from the rain beneath the metallic bulk of the water tower.
Regan curled up on one of the raised ferrocrete feet of the tower, continuing to nurse her now damp cigarette. Seth started pacing in the empty area beneath the tower, his head still buzzing with too much anxiety to sit still.
Regan sighed, practically able to see the nervousness bubbling off of him. She spent a few moments trying to work out something to distract him with again, and when her mind threw up an answer she then spent the next few minutes arguing with herself that it wasn't something she wanted to talk about or admit to herself yet. Seth continued pacing, grinding his teeth together as he did so.
"You know," Regan said finally, "I think I might be gay."
Well, it did elicit the reaction of stopping Seth in his tracks. The two of them met eyes for a moment and Seth cocked his head slightly, then he started laughing.
"What?" Regan practically shouted, her face turning beat red.
"You're just now realizing this?" he laughed, "Regan, I've known you were gay since that really awkward time we tried to have sex. You're about the most blatantly gay person I've ever met. You might as well have a rainbow tattooed on your forehead."
"Really?" Regan asked, hiding her still burning face in her knees.
"Yeah, like, duh. Did you actually just figure it out or are you still trying to distract me from the divorce?"
The answer to the question was yes on both counts, she always sort of knew it but was never willing to admit it, and she had definitely thrown it out to try and derail Seth's anxiety train, but admitting that to him would just make him double down on the anxiety, so she punted on the question, "I think I have a crush on Lily," she said, face red with embarrassment.
Seth wandered over and sat next to her on the ferrocrete footing.
"So you gonna lay the moves on her then?" He asked with a chuckle that caused Regan to bury her face deeper into her knees.
"No, I'm going to do no such thing," She said, "She's one of my best friends and I don't want to make things awkward between us."
"Oh, but you'll never know if she feels the same way or not if you don't say anything," Seth teased. He knew she was trying to distract him, but the distraction she'd thrown up was so deeply personal that it worked damnit.
"That's fine," Regan said from behind her knees, "Because the alternative is that it drives a huge wedge between our friendship."
"Or," Seth offered, "She secretly feels the same way and when you admit it to her you two will realize you're deeply in love and run off to have sexytimes."
Regan groaned, "I don't think it's physically possible to feel more embarrassed than I do right now."
"You're the one who brought it up Regan," Seth teased, giving her a slightly shove.
"Yeah, Yeah," she replied. "Do not say anything about this to Lily."
"You sure? I could like, come at it sideways," Seth offered, "tell her I suspect you have a crush on her and gauge her reaction so you can decide if you want to say something or not."
"No, no way, don't say anything," Regan insisted.
"Fine, fine," He answered with a sigh, "My lips are sealed."
"Thanks," Regan answered, leaning against him slightly. The conversation fell away and the two of them sat in silence while the rain continued to fall around them.
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Hyperbolic Stellar Warp Trajectory
13 AUs From Luyten's Star
April 2219
The command electronic warfare cruiser thundered silently down the warp tunnel, her siblings in the Eighth Expeditionary Fleet raced alongside her, invisible in their own isolated warp tunnels.
"Five seconds," Katie Hawthorne said as she counted down towards their exit from the warp tunnel, "Four," Maeve O'Donnell drew in a breath, drumming her fingers on the command console, "three," Sensor system specialists completed final checks, "two" Katie counted onward, "one."
The kaleidoscoping warp tunnel vanished ahead of them and the Leyte Gulf fell back into space; a ripple propagated across the wallscreens around the room as the warp tunnel was replaced with starfield. The smart systems asserted their position and verified locations via galactic coordinate systems, triangulating off distant stars in milliseconds. Luyten's Star was a baleful red eye directly ahead on the forward wallscreens, while the other ten vessels of the Eighth Expeditionary Fleet dropped out of warp all around them, bracketed in green and labeled with callouts by the smart systems. But those weren't the only points of interest displayed on the screens; there were also additional callouts and red bracket boxes being generated every few seconds as the two dozen vessels of the Martian Socialist Republic's Third Fleet was detected 2 AUs inward from their position. A yellow callout appeared as the massive alien vessel near the star was picked up, followed by a blue callout behind them as that damn news ship dropped out of warp a million kilometers astern.
Maeve's eyes darted around the room, reading ship names and classes on the various callouts floating next to their colored brackets. The presence of the news ship was troubling. Someone must have leaked the information, that was a bad sign.
"Warp completed successfully by all ships," Katie reported, "Systems measure us at 10 AUs from Luyten's star. Absolute radial velocity 18 kilometers per second outward, transversal velocity negligible. Nearest Martian vessel is 2.4 AUs away."
Maeve's mind immediately began running in overdrive as she studied the tactical situation as quickly as possible: twenty-six Martian vessels in system, twenty-five of which were located in a tight bubble cluster along a direct vector between Sol and Luyten's Star, 8 AUs from the red dwarf. The last Martian ship was 2 AUs out from the star and less than a million kilometers from an alien ship of truly gigantic proportions. Maeve was momentarily taken aback by the sheer scale of the vessel. It wasn't quite as large as Earth, but it came close, and it was definitely larger than Mars.
Some quick mental math told Maeve they had 20 minutes until the light of their arrival reached the Martians, and this small window of opportunity was one she intended to take advantage of. She grabbed the headset sitting on her armrest and put it over her ears, keying up on the command channel she had with all the captains.
"Plot a new networked fleet warp vector," she announced, "Take us 4.8 AUs closer to the stellar primary, that should bring us out at an equal distance to the Martians from our current one, but on their far side. Execute when all vessels are ready."
She listened to a chorus of acknowledgments, and drummed her fingers on the console once more as the faint vibration of the warp coils spooling up reverberated through the decking. A tone chimed over the ship's intercom, announcing the incoming kick. Maeve took a breath in anticipation for the punch to the gut feeling the kick induced. And then the tone changed to an error alarm, and the kick sequence self-aborted.
"What just happened?" Maeve asked into the microphone, then again to the room at large, "What the hell just happened?"
"Engineering reports green across the board, all systems are nominal," the engineering systems specialist, Andrew Michael, reported, "The drive cycled and the warp field generators activated, but the kick failed." At the same time the specialist was speaking, Maeve was hearing a similar story from all the captains in the fleet.
"Why?" Maeve asked him, keying up at the same time to repeat the question over the command channel.
"I have no idea," he admitted. None of the captains under her knew either, know one seemed to know what had just happened to their drives.
"You have to be fucking kidding me," Maeve swore. Their window to act was closing rapidly, every second that went by, the light of their arrival crossed another three hundred thousand kilometers of empty space, and was that much closer to the Martians.
Precious moments ticked by as the engineering crews went line by line through the warp drive event viewer, peering through hundreds operations that took microseconds to complete for the conflux of factors that had foiled their warp attempt.
"I bet it's that alien ship," Captain Gunnir Coulson's voice said to her through the headset. "Check your interferometers, that thing's weighing in at half a solar mass."
"Katie, what do the interferometers say about that alien ship's mass?" Maeve asked off comms.
"That much of a mass shadow could be throwing off the warp calculations." Captain Allison Strange said into Maeve's ear from the bridge of the Stalingrad.
"Interferometers put the mass of the alien ship at zero point four eight solar masses," Katie reported.
"Can we compensate for that?" Maeve asked Katie while keying up.
"Quick and dirty, I can get us as close as eight," Henry Osborne said from the bridge of the Leyte Gulf. "Half a solar mass isn't much in the grand scheme, but it'd take a while to adjust all the calculations and get in as close as they have that survey ship."
"Okay, new plan," Maeve said, keying up, "we warp 15 AUs, perpendicular to the ecliptic, then come back down on the other side of the alien ship from the Martians. That'll put us sixteen AUs from their fleet, and potentially buy us as much as two hours. Networked warp, execute as soon as all vessels report ready state."
The collection of smooth, matte white UN vessels began pivoting in space, firing cold gas thrusters as they rotated their bows toward Ursa Minor, then, as one, they leapt down their warp tunnels, vanishing in a ripple of light.
It took a bit more than half a minute for the fleet ships to reach their perch 15 AUs above the ecliptic, and after a moment to cycle the drives and reorient themselves, dove back into the warp tunnel.
The ships of the UN Eighth Expeditionary Fleet slammed back into space on the far side of Luyten's star, slipping into existence while the light of their original warp exit was still five minutes out from Martian sensors. Maeve kept count of those seconds carefully, it was a potentially dangerous game to play with warships in deep space.
She was frustrated. While they had potentially gained two hours, it still wasn't enough time to fully reconfigure the warp computers, and at 8 AUs out from the alien ship, they still weren't close enough to talk.
"I say we just transmit the Hello package to the aliens and bug out,"Gunnir's voice said in her ear, "It's not worth getting into a confrontation with the Martians over."
"You and I both know we're under orders to force contact past the Martians," Maeve answered, "If we don't make contact, Earth will be left at a disadvantage."
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes," Allison's voice said, "When this goes wrong they're going to pin its failure on you, Commodore."
"Don't remind me, Allison," Maeve told the other captain.
"Transmit the package, we potentially take the ball from the Martians court and put it in the aliens, it's a start at least," Gunnir said.
"Transmit the Hello package," Maeve said with a sigh, "and begin our orbital capture burns, let's wait and see who makes the next move."
When the light of the UN Fleet's arrival finally reached the Martians, they launched into activity with extreme haste, scattering ships every fifteen degrees along the circumference of an 8 AU circle centered on the Lament for Lost Worlds and landing the MNCV Newcomb's Problem only 0.8 AUs from the the UN Fleet. The Fast Attack Frigate swept the Eighth expeditionary fleet with active sensors and lept back down a warp tunnel. It Immediately returned to the Light of Ages. Five minutes after that, the Martian Third Fleet recongregated and warped directly to the UN fleet, coming out of warp fifty thousand kilometers directly off their bows.
Tactical alarms began going off on the bridge of the Leyte Gulf as the Martian forces exited warp practically on top of them.
"Wideband from the Martian battleship," Katie reported.
"Put it on," Maeve said with a sigh.
"Attention UN Expeditionary Fleet," a male voice began, "Martian naval forces are presently conducting a highly sensitive first contact mission in this region, and we cannot allow you to interfere, please exit the area."
Maeve snorted and rolled her eyes, "Get me a tight beam to that battleship, I want to speak to the man in charge over there."
"Aye, transmitting tightbeam request," Katie reported, "And they've accepted it."
"Put it up on the big screen in here," Maeve said, tucking a few stray hairs from in front of her eyes and crossing her arms. Adam Wallace's face appeared larger than life on the forward tactical screen.
"Admiral Wallace I believe?" Maeve asked him, folding one of her legs atop the other.
"And who are you supposed to be?" He asked her gruffly.
"Commodore Maeve O'Donnell, the officially UN sanctioned pain in your ass," she dared to crack a grin, "We're here to talk to the aliens on behalf of Earth."
"I can't allow that," He replied with a frown, "we're in too delicate a phase of the contact diplomacy right now, introducing a third party could throw everything off."
"You can't actually prevent us from making contact," Maeve retorted blithely, "we already sent our Hello package, so if you were hoping to keep the fact we have internal factions from them, the damage is already done."
"That sort of thing is the exact reason I can't let you interfere further," the admiral growled, "We can and will prevent you from interfering with this contact, do not force my hand."
"Admiral," Maeve said with a smile, "I am literally under orders to force your hand. I'm assuming neither of us is willing to let this escalate into an international incident, so really it'd be better if you just let us talk to them."
The connection cut out in a wash of static.
"Their fleet just went fields active, and they've started jamming us." Katie informed her.
Maeve sighed and keyed up on her command channel. "Go fields up, power up active sensors and ECCM, you have activation clearance all all electronic warfare modules, they want to jam us, we'll jam them too."
The smart systems plugged into her command channel automatically worked to reroute around the jamming via encrypted tightbeam and frequency rotation, and even so, the chorus of acknowledgments that came back to her were distorted and filled with static. If this Admiral Wallace wanted to have an electronic warfare battle, then she'd show him what five Command Electronic Warfare cruisers could do. The EM bands around the two fleets became horribly clogged as the advanced jamming and counterjamming systems did battle with one another and the fleets vanished into a storm of white noise.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
April 2219
Ivy Czininski frowned, raising an eyebrow as she watched the events occurring in the outer system play out with a two hour light lag. Interpreting events occurring at FTL speeds by observing light was a difficult endeavor, the action moved more quickly than the light, causing numerous ghosts of ships to appear and vanish on the long range sensors. When the UN fleet first arrived, they brought with them the start of a glorious headache that Ivy was already nursing as she tried to understand the data. She sent Kestral to fetch coffee and Cale as the Martian fleet began cloning itself all over the system on her sensors.
Kestral returned without Cale around the time the edge of the white noise bubble created by the electronic warfare duel reached the ship and fuzzed out all their long range sensors into useless digital snow.
"I gave you a simple mission Schiaparelli," Ivy whined, "I see neither Cale nor coffee with you."
"Cale's making it now," ey answered, "he wanted a cup too so he told me to go ahead, what's happening?"
"I'm not sure," Ivy admitted, "They started jamming each other and all the sensors went to shit."
"What a mess," Kestral said, crossing eir arms and looking out the primary wallscreen, "Think we should pull back the rest of the contact team?"
Ivy sighed and shrugged, "I'll defer that to Srivastava, the contact operation is hers."
"We can still communicate with the Lifeseeker right?" Kestral asked, referring to the roughly squid shaped spacecraft that had pulled up alongside them.
"Yeah," Ivy confirmed, "it's right next to us and the jamming is all AUs out and not being directed this way, though I'm concerned about the political implications of this with our new friends."
"We're definitely not the first species they've encountered with differing political factions," Kestral assured her, "They have all the words and concepts to discuss intraspecies conflict."
"I know, I was in that meeting as well Kestral," a note of annoyance crept into Ivy's voice, "I just worry it will reflect poorly on us. Just because they know what something is, doesn't mean they hold it in high regard."
The door hissed open and Cale walked in holding two sealed coffee cups, he handed her one and perched on the back of her chair.
"I think they sort of just look down all all other races as more primitive, and have this patronizing attitude about everything," Kestral suggested, "I mean, they're still accusing us of lying about our FTL."
"My hypothesis is still holding then?" Cale asked.
"I don't know," ey shrugged, "They say our physics is wrong, and since our physics is wrong, our warp drive can't work as we're describing it, thus the accusation of lying."
"They've seen us warping all around the system though, they know it's mechanically different from their FTL method," Ivy added.
"I know, which is why it's so confusing," Kestral admitted.
"It's not confusing if they weren't programmed with the ability to grok our warp drive for some reason," Cale responded.
Ivy took a sip of her coffee and nearly gagged at how sweet it was, however, her need for caffeine won out and she forced it down, "Gah, Cale you wanna put a bit more coffee in this sugar next time?"
Cale took a sip of his own coffee, frowned, and quickly grabbed Ivy's cup and swapped for his own, "Whoops, that one's yours."
"I can't believe you can stand it that sweet," Ivy said, taking a sip of her own coffee, black and sighing in relief.
"It's an acquired taste," he shrugged, "And the nanobots like it."
Ivy brought her eyes back to the main wallscreen, where a massive, many AU wide orb of static dominated the view, fading away into a semi-coherent view of the remainder of the system. She sighed and took another sip of her coffee while she watched the unfolding human folly, "I hope Jean's doing alright with our friends."
Loving Extension of Wisdom class Lifeseeker
i34_2015/76
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
April 2219
Jean sighed as she stared down the somewhat smaller creature on the far side of the alien glass. She was growing frustrated with Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, and trying not to let it show. She missed Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, and didn't take it as a good sign that the hyperactive little creature appeared to have been sent away.
In her place was an intimidating black feathered ximale named Interpreting-Sorting-Correcting, who wore black clothing to go with xer black feathers.
"We have received a message from another Human Tribe Group, we know about your tribe groups, stop lying Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," Dreaming-Waking-Transcending's translated voice said into her earpiece.
Jean felt a chill run down her back, it was the first time the creature had referred to her as a Martian instead of just as a human.
She changed channels on the server, keyed up on the microphone and subvocalized to Vedika, "They know we're not unified."
Vedika herself, along with Morgan Sabaea and a sleeping Margaret Armstrong, were ensconced in the small prefabricated structure they had erected inside the Meetingspace.
Vedika's voice came back through her earpiece, "They were going to find that out eventually, just keep them calm, we're not at war or anything, so the fact that we have various governments shouldn't matter."
Jean took a breath and flipped back to the channel that would translate her speech for the feathered creature before her, "Okay, yes, fine," Jean admitted, "Our solar system is broken up into several political blocs, but we've been at peace for over a century now."
"We know, this is also what the information provided by the United Nations human tribal group states. However, your tribal group and this United Nations tribal group are now engaging in some manner of electronic conflict with one another, which contradicts this statement." Interpreting-Sorting-Correcting said angrily, xer feathers bristling, "Are you all just liars? What is the true nature of your species?"
"Our species is a big fan of competition without violence," Jean tried to explain, "We may compete for dominance, do battle with electronics, or even robotic proxies, but we rarely extend that out to outright warfare and would prefer to be at peace with our fellow humans."
"If this is a lie we will soon determine it Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," Dreaming-Waking-Transcending threatened, "And such a lie will affect the manner in which we treat your species when we evacuate you in advance of the Reshaper arrival in your system."
Jean sighed, "It isn't a lie," she said. I hope, she thought to herself.
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
Galactic Orbit
24,970 Light Years from Sagittarius A*
April 2219
No matter how many times he watched it, no matter the angle or the speed he was watching it at, Benjamin Nesco felt the same horrible sinking feeling in his gut every time. It felt as if a great black abyss had yawned open beneath his feet, and it was only by the narrowest margins that he had thus far avoided falling into it. He should have been sleeping, it was 0245 in the morning and he'd had maybe five hours of good sleep in the last week. Instead, he took another sip of his coffee and hit play again.
Three hours and forty-seven minutes: the time it took for that impossibly large hand to reach up out of a strange radioactive glowing disc and drag the star back into it. The images gripped at his mind, as if threatening to drag him down into the darkness like the K-type star had been. The playthrough ended its accelerated run and sent a shiver up his spine.
He banished the cold feeling with another swig of coffee, turned the speed up by another factor of ten to 10000x and hit play again. Once again, a disk with a radius of five AUs opened up beneath the system's ecliptic. The disk was centered on the star, with the mid point only 100,000 kilometers from the star's south pole. Emissions from the disk were all over the place, with an alphabet soup of high energy particles as well as electromagnetic emissions along every spectrum. And then those impossibly large fingers rose up around the star, moving at relativistic speeds as they slide up around it and curled to meet above the sun's north pole. When the fingers began sinking back into the energy disk, the star visibly pulsed and surged, sloughing off chunks of corona that went silently screaming into the system. Auroras millions of kilometers long danced around the descending claws as the electromagnetic fields within them were used to shove the star through space.
And then the star was sucked out of sight, and the storm of radiation dissipated in less than a minute. Ben pursed his lips and sucked in a breath through his teeth, his heart was racing again, this was a situation without precedent.
The comparison that jumped to his mind was the arrival of the Europeans in Central America, and what happened to the Aztecs as a result, but compared to the aliens he had beheld, that technological disparity had been positively tiny. He went for another swig of coffee and realized the cup was empty.
A phrase danced around the corners of his mind, taunting him to invoke it, and yet knowing that doing so would be the equivalent of casting a curse on Fabrique Intersolar. Words had power, and those words would invoke a series of actions that could not be easily undone. It would certainly be the end of Fabrique's interstellar ambitions and could change the nature of space exploration for everyone. And yet, he couldn't ignore the possibility that this was an outside context problem. From where he was floating, it looked pretty far outside of context. Dismantling planets? That was something humanity had ambitions to do and had made moderate progress on in the case of Mercury, it was within Ben's scope of understanding, it fit into his worldview. But just taking an entire star? It wasn't something he could convince his brain to grok.
He went to start the video again and then stopped himself. This is pointless, he thought. He wasn't going to gain some new insight that would allow him to divine meaning from the events they had witnessed by reviewing them for the two-hundredth time, and nothing new had happened in the former location of the Theta Tauri system for the past week. It was time to move on.
He unstrapped from the chair at his desk and gently pushed off of it, flipping over with the unnecessary acrobatics of zero gee to vault above his desk and reach the door to his personal quarters.
Making his way down the axial corridor to the bridge, Ben started to feel better than he had during the previous week, it was time to stop staring slack-jawed and get to work.
The door to the bridge hissed open and admitted him as he floated along, his XO made eye contact as he entered and the bridge crew roused themselves to something approximating attention.
"Captain," Melissa Stevenson nodded to him, pushing out of the captain's chair, "I'm surprised you're awake."
"Couldn't sleep," He explained, "No change?"
"No changes, we're still all alone out here," Melissa answered him.
"All right then, new plan," Ben announced, "we're going to quickly hit Epsilon Tauri and Gamma Tauri and assess the situation in both of those systems. And honestly, even if everything is fine there, I'm probably going to advise the respective ship captains to pull out of the Hyades with us until we can get a handle on what these aliens are doing."
Melissa nodded, "Gamma then Epsilon?"
"Gamma is technically closer," Ben shrugged, pushing past the captain's chair towards the front of the ship, "So sure, we can do Gamma first," he grabbed the navigator's seat to arrest his momentum and woke the navigator, who was asleep in her chair with headphones on, "Alex, power up the warp drive, we're getting out of here."
"Wha.." she mumbled and then snapped fully awake, "Sorry, what, where are we going?"
"Gamma Tauri," Ben explained calmly, "and take us out at 50 AUs again."
Alex Uplands nodded and stretched her arms out over the controls, inputting commands into the computer system to begin the complex process of flinging the ship multiple light years through space. Most of the process was automated, it all happened at microsecond intervals, impossible for a human to time correctly, but all the vectors, the locations involved, the relative velocities, all that data had to be fed into the warp calculator in order to generate the precisely shaped spacetime tunnel to deliver their ship to the exact point specified.
"Warp calculations completed," Alex reported, "304 hours uptime, twelve days travel."
"Sounds good to me," Melissa replied.
Ben nodded and pushed back off Alex's chair, landing neatly in his own chair further back on the bridge. "Hit it."
Alex executed the warp order. Hundreds of downstream AI processes began going off in parallel as the warp began. The automated kick warnings sounded throughout the vessel, and the ship lighting flashed red for thirty seconds, giving the crew warning that they should strap in for the incoming kick. While this was occurring, Better Margins was rotating herself in space, pointing her bow at the distant star, and channeling massive quantities of power into the capacitor banks that would all discharge at once to power the warp field generators. Exotic matter was being precycled through the system and placed to generate the needed spacetime geometries, while on the bridge an automated countdown calmly ran down the seconds.
The timer ran out and the Better Margins vanished into a ripple of light.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
April 2219
Regan McKinley sighed and stretched, sprawled out atop the Lincolnville water tower, Seth Fiegel beside her. Low grey clouds scudded overhead, providing a patchwork view across the drum and mostly hiding Mt. Washington from view. The colony was moving towards autumn on its internal calendar, the days growing shorter and cooler, rain coming more and more frequently. In a few more months, it'd start snowing.
"So she really did it?" Regan asked after a long silence, her eyes watching the clouds slip by in the autumn breeze.
"Yeah," Seth answered bitterly, "Cornered my dad with the divorce lawyer when he got home from work and dumped the proceedings on him."
"Shit Seth," Regan replied sympathetically, "I'm sorry man."
"Yeah, it's a shitshow all around," Seth said as he sat up on the warm curving metal and started lighting a cigarette. The breeze on top of the tower kept blowing out his lighter flame, forcing him to cup his hands close to his face to get the cherry lit, "She took Caleb with her and left, Dad's probably having a meltdown right now, it's just…" he sighed, unable to properly finish the sentence, overwhelmed by the various conflicting emotions.
Regan gently squeezed his shoulder and pat him on the back, "We'll figure this out."
"I am not moving in with Helen, it's not worth it," he said through clenched teeth, "I just don't want to lose my brother over this."
"You won't," Regan assured him, "Helen might be a stuck up narcissist, but she's not a monster, I'm sure she'd let you visit him."
"I wish I was that sure, she doesn't hate me or anything, but I'm not her kid and she knows it. If she thinks I'm a bad influence on him…" He studied his hands, unwilling to let himself show emotion, even with Regan, he refused to break down into the crying mess he wanted to become.
"Just take her side in the divorce, but don't move in with her," Regan suggested, "try and stay on her good side, and if your dad kicks you out for it, you can just live in the bunker, then you're still not like, literally under her thumb, but she'll still like you."
"I don't know if I can do that though," Seth said, "she holds everyone to these hypocritically high standards, and is super judgemental."
Regan sighed and lit her own cigarette, replicating Seth's action of cupping her hands to block the wind. "What a shitshow," she said finally, "I wish there was something I could do."
"Just like, give me a distraction," he answered, staring up at the clouds while taking another drag of his smoke.
"I wish we'd get some more news about those aliens," Regan answered, "There hasn't been anything new on them since the fleet left."
"Maybe they made contact, and they're keeping it hush-hush because the aliens have been living among us for a while or something," Seth chuckled.
"Oh, yeah, I'm an alien, I forgot to tell you," Regan snarked, taking a drag of her smoke.
"But what do you think's really gonna happen?" He asked her.
"Nothing," she answered cynically, watching the dark grey clouds scuttling overhead.
"Oh come on Regan, this is like, the biggest discovery in human history, this'll change everything, there's no way around that," Seth said.
"Are you sure?" The last biggest discovery in human history was FTL getting invented, that happened like, right before we were born, and that didn't change anything here."
"It did change stuff though, if it was never invented, Lily's dad might not have run off," Seth said as an example.
"Yeah but that's just the exception that proves the rule. The more things change, the more they stay the same." Regan shook her head and sighed out another cloud of smoke.
"From the desk of Regan McKinley," Seth chuckled again, rolling his eyes. Regan sat up as a fat drop of water landed on her forehead, eyes going skyward.
"Rain's coming," she said, taking another drag of her smoke as she stood up. "We should head down before we get soaked."
"Yeah, yeah," Seth answered, clambering to his feet, "Only a few more months and it'll be too cold to hang out up here."
"Well, we have the bunker now, so it's all good," Regan answered, "Even if I prefer this view to the one out the hangar doors."
"Really?" Seth asked as he climbed onto the ladder and started descending the side of the water tower. "I thought the view out there was way more impressive."
"It's all sterile space, emptiness, and giant machinery," She replied, following him down the ladder as raindrops started falling around them, "I like nature, green spaces, and clouds and stuff. Space is just dead, cold and dead and sterile."
"All of that stuff you listed is technically in space," Seth retorted, "Everything is in space."
"Yeah but most of space is empty and boring. I mean like, the view out there is impressive, I'm glad I had the opportunity to do that, but watching the stars spin past is only interesting for so long."
"If you say so..." Seth answered, not willing to actually concede the point but being unwilling to argue about it further. The pair quickly scaled the chainlink at the bottom of the ladder and took shelter from the rain beneath the metallic bulk of the water tower.
Regan curled up on one of the raised ferrocrete feet of the tower, continuing to nurse her now damp cigarette. Seth started pacing in the empty area beneath the tower, his head still buzzing with too much anxiety to sit still.
Regan sighed, practically able to see the nervousness bubbling off of him. She spent a few moments trying to work out something to distract him with again, and when her mind threw up an answer she then spent the next few minutes arguing with herself that it wasn't something she wanted to talk about or admit to herself yet. Seth continued pacing, grinding his teeth together as he did so.
"You know," Regan said finally, "I think I might be gay."
Well, it did elicit the reaction of stopping Seth in his tracks. The two of them met eyes for a moment and Seth cocked his head slightly, then he started laughing.
"What?" Regan practically shouted, her face turning beat red.
"You're just now realizing this?" he laughed, "Regan, I've known you were gay since that really awkward time we tried to have sex. You're about the most blatantly gay person I've ever met. You might as well have a rainbow tattooed on your forehead."
"Really?" Regan asked, hiding her still burning face in her knees.
"Yeah, like, duh. Did you actually just figure it out or are you still trying to distract me from the divorce?"
The answer to the question was yes on both counts, she always sort of knew it but was never willing to admit it, and she had definitely thrown it out to try and derail Seth's anxiety train, but admitting that to him would just make him double down on the anxiety, so she punted on the question, "I think I have a crush on Lily," she said, face red with embarrassment.
Seth wandered over and sat next to her on the ferrocrete footing.
"So you gonna lay the moves on her then?" He asked with a chuckle that caused Regan to bury her face deeper into her knees.
"No, I'm going to do no such thing," She said, "She's one of my best friends and I don't want to make things awkward between us."
"Oh, but you'll never know if she feels the same way or not if you don't say anything," Seth teased. He knew she was trying to distract him, but the distraction she'd thrown up was so deeply personal that it worked damnit.
"That's fine," Regan said from behind her knees, "Because the alternative is that it drives a huge wedge between our friendship."
"Or," Seth offered, "She secretly feels the same way and when you admit it to her you two will realize you're deeply in love and run off to have sexytimes."
Regan groaned, "I don't think it's physically possible to feel more embarrassed than I do right now."
"You're the one who brought it up Regan," Seth teased, giving her a slightly shove.
"Yeah, Yeah," she replied. "Do not say anything about this to Lily."
"You sure? I could like, come at it sideways," Seth offered, "tell her I suspect you have a crush on her and gauge her reaction so you can decide if you want to say something or not."
"No, no way, don't say anything," Regan insisted.
"Fine, fine," He answered with a sigh, "My lips are sealed."
"Thanks," Regan answered, leaning against him slightly. The conversation fell away and the two of them sat in silence while the rain continued to fall around them.
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Hyperbolic Stellar Warp Trajectory
13 AUs From Luyten's Star
April 2219
The command electronic warfare cruiser thundered silently down the warp tunnel, her siblings in the Eighth Expeditionary Fleet raced alongside her, invisible in their own isolated warp tunnels.
"Five seconds," Katie Hawthorne said as she counted down towards their exit from the warp tunnel, "Four," Maeve O'Donnell drew in a breath, drumming her fingers on the command console, "three," Sensor system specialists completed final checks, "two" Katie counted onward, "one."
The kaleidoscoping warp tunnel vanished ahead of them and the Leyte Gulf fell back into space; a ripple propagated across the wallscreens around the room as the warp tunnel was replaced with starfield. The smart systems asserted their position and verified locations via galactic coordinate systems, triangulating off distant stars in milliseconds. Luyten's Star was a baleful red eye directly ahead on the forward wallscreens, while the other ten vessels of the Eighth Expeditionary Fleet dropped out of warp all around them, bracketed in green and labeled with callouts by the smart systems. But those weren't the only points of interest displayed on the screens; there were also additional callouts and red bracket boxes being generated every few seconds as the two dozen vessels of the Martian Socialist Republic's Third Fleet was detected 2 AUs inward from their position. A yellow callout appeared as the massive alien vessel near the star was picked up, followed by a blue callout behind them as that damn news ship dropped out of warp a million kilometers astern.
Maeve's eyes darted around the room, reading ship names and classes on the various callouts floating next to their colored brackets. The presence of the news ship was troubling. Someone must have leaked the information, that was a bad sign.
"Warp completed successfully by all ships," Katie reported, "Systems measure us at 10 AUs from Luyten's star. Absolute radial velocity 18 kilometers per second outward, transversal velocity negligible. Nearest Martian vessel is 2.4 AUs away."
Maeve's mind immediately began running in overdrive as she studied the tactical situation as quickly as possible: twenty-six Martian vessels in system, twenty-five of which were located in a tight bubble cluster along a direct vector between Sol and Luyten's Star, 8 AUs from the red dwarf. The last Martian ship was 2 AUs out from the star and less than a million kilometers from an alien ship of truly gigantic proportions. Maeve was momentarily taken aback by the sheer scale of the vessel. It wasn't quite as large as Earth, but it came close, and it was definitely larger than Mars.
Some quick mental math told Maeve they had 20 minutes until the light of their arrival reached the Martians, and this small window of opportunity was one she intended to take advantage of. She grabbed the headset sitting on her armrest and put it over her ears, keying up on the command channel she had with all the captains.
"Plot a new networked fleet warp vector," she announced, "Take us 4.8 AUs closer to the stellar primary, that should bring us out at an equal distance to the Martians from our current one, but on their far side. Execute when all vessels are ready."
She listened to a chorus of acknowledgments, and drummed her fingers on the console once more as the faint vibration of the warp coils spooling up reverberated through the decking. A tone chimed over the ship's intercom, announcing the incoming kick. Maeve took a breath in anticipation for the punch to the gut feeling the kick induced. And then the tone changed to an error alarm, and the kick sequence self-aborted.
"What just happened?" Maeve asked into the microphone, then again to the room at large, "What the hell just happened?"
"Engineering reports green across the board, all systems are nominal," the engineering systems specialist, Andrew Michael, reported, "The drive cycled and the warp field generators activated, but the kick failed." At the same time the specialist was speaking, Maeve was hearing a similar story from all the captains in the fleet.
"Why?" Maeve asked him, keying up at the same time to repeat the question over the command channel.
"I have no idea," he admitted. None of the captains under her knew either, know one seemed to know what had just happened to their drives.
"You have to be fucking kidding me," Maeve swore. Their window to act was closing rapidly, every second that went by, the light of their arrival crossed another three hundred thousand kilometers of empty space, and was that much closer to the Martians.
Precious moments ticked by as the engineering crews went line by line through the warp drive event viewer, peering through hundreds operations that took microseconds to complete for the conflux of factors that had foiled their warp attempt.
"I bet it's that alien ship," Captain Gunnir Coulson's voice said to her through the headset. "Check your interferometers, that thing's weighing in at half a solar mass."
"Katie, what do the interferometers say about that alien ship's mass?" Maeve asked off comms.
"That much of a mass shadow could be throwing off the warp calculations." Captain Allison Strange said into Maeve's ear from the bridge of the Stalingrad.
"Interferometers put the mass of the alien ship at zero point four eight solar masses," Katie reported.
"Can we compensate for that?" Maeve asked Katie while keying up.
"Quick and dirty, I can get us as close as eight," Henry Osborne said from the bridge of the Leyte Gulf. "Half a solar mass isn't much in the grand scheme, but it'd take a while to adjust all the calculations and get in as close as they have that survey ship."
"Okay, new plan," Maeve said, keying up, "we warp 15 AUs, perpendicular to the ecliptic, then come back down on the other side of the alien ship from the Martians. That'll put us sixteen AUs from their fleet, and potentially buy us as much as two hours. Networked warp, execute as soon as all vessels report ready state."
The collection of smooth, matte white UN vessels began pivoting in space, firing cold gas thrusters as they rotated their bows toward Ursa Minor, then, as one, they leapt down their warp tunnels, vanishing in a ripple of light.
It took a bit more than half a minute for the fleet ships to reach their perch 15 AUs above the ecliptic, and after a moment to cycle the drives and reorient themselves, dove back into the warp tunnel.
The ships of the UN Eighth Expeditionary Fleet slammed back into space on the far side of Luyten's star, slipping into existence while the light of their original warp exit was still five minutes out from Martian sensors. Maeve kept count of those seconds carefully, it was a potentially dangerous game to play with warships in deep space.
She was frustrated. While they had potentially gained two hours, it still wasn't enough time to fully reconfigure the warp computers, and at 8 AUs out from the alien ship, they still weren't close enough to talk.
"I say we just transmit the Hello package to the aliens and bug out,"Gunnir's voice said in her ear, "It's not worth getting into a confrontation with the Martians over."
"You and I both know we're under orders to force contact past the Martians," Maeve answered, "If we don't make contact, Earth will be left at a disadvantage."
"Play stupid games, win stupid prizes," Allison's voice said, "When this goes wrong they're going to pin its failure on you, Commodore."
"Don't remind me, Allison," Maeve told the other captain.
"Transmit the package, we potentially take the ball from the Martians court and put it in the aliens, it's a start at least," Gunnir said.
"Transmit the Hello package," Maeve said with a sigh, "and begin our orbital capture burns, let's wait and see who makes the next move."
Δ
When the light of the UN Fleet's arrival finally reached the Martians, they launched into activity with extreme haste, scattering ships every fifteen degrees along the circumference of an 8 AU circle centered on the Lament for Lost Worlds and landing the MNCV Newcomb's Problem only 0.8 AUs from the the UN Fleet. The Fast Attack Frigate swept the Eighth expeditionary fleet with active sensors and lept back down a warp tunnel. It Immediately returned to the Light of Ages. Five minutes after that, the Martian Third Fleet recongregated and warped directly to the UN fleet, coming out of warp fifty thousand kilometers directly off their bows.
Tactical alarms began going off on the bridge of the Leyte Gulf as the Martian forces exited warp practically on top of them.
"Wideband from the Martian battleship," Katie reported.
"Put it on," Maeve said with a sigh.
"Attention UN Expeditionary Fleet," a male voice began, "Martian naval forces are presently conducting a highly sensitive first contact mission in this region, and we cannot allow you to interfere, please exit the area."
Maeve snorted and rolled her eyes, "Get me a tight beam to that battleship, I want to speak to the man in charge over there."
"Aye, transmitting tightbeam request," Katie reported, "And they've accepted it."
"Put it up on the big screen in here," Maeve said, tucking a few stray hairs from in front of her eyes and crossing her arms. Adam Wallace's face appeared larger than life on the forward tactical screen.
"Admiral Wallace I believe?" Maeve asked him, folding one of her legs atop the other.
"And who are you supposed to be?" He asked her gruffly.
"Commodore Maeve O'Donnell, the officially UN sanctioned pain in your ass," she dared to crack a grin, "We're here to talk to the aliens on behalf of Earth."
"I can't allow that," He replied with a frown, "we're in too delicate a phase of the contact diplomacy right now, introducing a third party could throw everything off."
"You can't actually prevent us from making contact," Maeve retorted blithely, "we already sent our Hello package, so if you were hoping to keep the fact we have internal factions from them, the damage is already done."
"That sort of thing is the exact reason I can't let you interfere further," the admiral growled, "We can and will prevent you from interfering with this contact, do not force my hand."
"Admiral," Maeve said with a smile, "I am literally under orders to force your hand. I'm assuming neither of us is willing to let this escalate into an international incident, so really it'd be better if you just let us talk to them."
The connection cut out in a wash of static.
"Their fleet just went fields active, and they've started jamming us." Katie informed her.
Maeve sighed and keyed up on her command channel. "Go fields up, power up active sensors and ECCM, you have activation clearance all all electronic warfare modules, they want to jam us, we'll jam them too."
The smart systems plugged into her command channel automatically worked to reroute around the jamming via encrypted tightbeam and frequency rotation, and even so, the chorus of acknowledgments that came back to her were distorted and filled with static. If this Admiral Wallace wanted to have an electronic warfare battle, then she'd show him what five Command Electronic Warfare cruisers could do. The EM bands around the two fleets became horribly clogged as the advanced jamming and counterjamming systems did battle with one another and the fleets vanished into a storm of white noise.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
April 2219
Ivy Czininski frowned, raising an eyebrow as she watched the events occurring in the outer system play out with a two hour light lag. Interpreting events occurring at FTL speeds by observing light was a difficult endeavor, the action moved more quickly than the light, causing numerous ghosts of ships to appear and vanish on the long range sensors. When the UN fleet first arrived, they brought with them the start of a glorious headache that Ivy was already nursing as she tried to understand the data. She sent Kestral to fetch coffee and Cale as the Martian fleet began cloning itself all over the system on her sensors.
Kestral returned without Cale around the time the edge of the white noise bubble created by the electronic warfare duel reached the ship and fuzzed out all their long range sensors into useless digital snow.
"I gave you a simple mission Schiaparelli," Ivy whined, "I see neither Cale nor coffee with you."
"Cale's making it now," ey answered, "he wanted a cup too so he told me to go ahead, what's happening?"
"I'm not sure," Ivy admitted, "They started jamming each other and all the sensors went to shit."
"What a mess," Kestral said, crossing eir arms and looking out the primary wallscreen, "Think we should pull back the rest of the contact team?"
Ivy sighed and shrugged, "I'll defer that to Srivastava, the contact operation is hers."
"We can still communicate with the Lifeseeker right?" Kestral asked, referring to the roughly squid shaped spacecraft that had pulled up alongside them.
"Yeah," Ivy confirmed, "it's right next to us and the jamming is all AUs out and not being directed this way, though I'm concerned about the political implications of this with our new friends."
"We're definitely not the first species they've encountered with differing political factions," Kestral assured her, "They have all the words and concepts to discuss intraspecies conflict."
"I know, I was in that meeting as well Kestral," a note of annoyance crept into Ivy's voice, "I just worry it will reflect poorly on us. Just because they know what something is, doesn't mean they hold it in high regard."
The door hissed open and Cale walked in holding two sealed coffee cups, he handed her one and perched on the back of her chair.
"I think they sort of just look down all all other races as more primitive, and have this patronizing attitude about everything," Kestral suggested, "I mean, they're still accusing us of lying about our FTL."
"My hypothesis is still holding then?" Cale asked.
"I don't know," ey shrugged, "They say our physics is wrong, and since our physics is wrong, our warp drive can't work as we're describing it, thus the accusation of lying."
"They've seen us warping all around the system though, they know it's mechanically different from their FTL method," Ivy added.
"I know, which is why it's so confusing," Kestral admitted.
"It's not confusing if they weren't programmed with the ability to grok our warp drive for some reason," Cale responded.
Ivy took a sip of her coffee and nearly gagged at how sweet it was, however, her need for caffeine won out and she forced it down, "Gah, Cale you wanna put a bit more coffee in this sugar next time?"
Cale took a sip of his own coffee, frowned, and quickly grabbed Ivy's cup and swapped for his own, "Whoops, that one's yours."
"I can't believe you can stand it that sweet," Ivy said, taking a sip of her own coffee, black and sighing in relief.
"It's an acquired taste," he shrugged, "And the nanobots like it."
Ivy brought her eyes back to the main wallscreen, where a massive, many AU wide orb of static dominated the view, fading away into a semi-coherent view of the remainder of the system. She sighed and took another sip of her coffee while she watched the unfolding human folly, "I hope Jean's doing alright with our friends."
Loving Extension of Wisdom class Lifeseeker
i34_2015/76
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
April 2219
Jean sighed as she stared down the somewhat smaller creature on the far side of the alien glass. She was growing frustrated with Dreaming-Waking-Transcending, and trying not to let it show. She missed Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, and didn't take it as a good sign that the hyperactive little creature appeared to have been sent away.
In her place was an intimidating black feathered ximale named Interpreting-Sorting-Correcting, who wore black clothing to go with xer black feathers.
"We have received a message from another Human Tribe Group, we know about your tribe groups, stop lying Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," Dreaming-Waking-Transcending's translated voice said into her earpiece.
Jean felt a chill run down her back, it was the first time the creature had referred to her as a Martian instead of just as a human.
She changed channels on the server, keyed up on the microphone and subvocalized to Vedika, "They know we're not unified."
Vedika herself, along with Morgan Sabaea and a sleeping Margaret Armstrong, were ensconced in the small prefabricated structure they had erected inside the Meetingspace.
Vedika's voice came back through her earpiece, "They were going to find that out eventually, just keep them calm, we're not at war or anything, so the fact that we have various governments shouldn't matter."
Jean took a breath and flipped back to the channel that would translate her speech for the feathered creature before her, "Okay, yes, fine," Jean admitted, "Our solar system is broken up into several political blocs, but we've been at peace for over a century now."
"We know, this is also what the information provided by the United Nations human tribal group states. However, your tribal group and this United Nations tribal group are now engaging in some manner of electronic conflict with one another, which contradicts this statement." Interpreting-Sorting-Correcting said angrily, xer feathers bristling, "Are you all just liars? What is the true nature of your species?"
"Our species is a big fan of competition without violence," Jean tried to explain, "We may compete for dominance, do battle with electronics, or even robotic proxies, but we rarely extend that out to outright warfare and would prefer to be at peace with our fellow humans."
"If this is a lie we will soon determine it Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," Dreaming-Waking-Transcending threatened, "And such a lie will affect the manner in which we treat your species when we evacuate you in advance of the Reshaper arrival in your system."
Jean sighed, "It isn't a lie," she said. I hope, she thought to herself.
Chapter 15: Poor Coordination Polka
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 15: Poor Coordination Polka
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Elliptical Orbit
9 AUs From Luyten's Star
April 2219
Commodore Maeve O'Donnell sipped her third cup of coffee, watching ships dance amidst one another on callouts that were constantly vanishing and reforming as electronic jamming washed over the Leyte Gulf with waves of multispectral noise. ECCM systems struggled to compensate for the interference, sometimes successfully sometimes not. Ships appeared and vanished, doubled and tripled, swapped locations with each other, and seemed to skip chaotically like a broken video reel.
The standoff had been twelve hours in the making, the two fleets darted through one another, ships passing within a few hundred meters of each other as their fleets braided together then separated out as far as 100,000 kilometers before pulling back together again.
"How long are we going to play this game with them?" Henry Osbourne, the captain of the Leyte Gulf, asked her, rubbing his eyes.
"Until they let us talk to the aliens or another UN ship arrives with orders for us to lay off," she replied, "Best grab a cuppa, it's going to be a long few days."
The bald headed captain took a breath, sucking in air past his teeth, they were playing a very dangerous game, and it had all their nerves frayed, "I don't much care for this. Think we could convince the Martians to stop jamming us if we stopped jamming them?"
"I doubt it," Maeve answered, "They're under orders to stop us from talking to the aliens, we're under orders to talk to the aliens, so until some politician somewhere comes to an agreement, this is the game we play."
"We did get the Hello package out before the jamming started, maybe we can scatter our fleet in all directions, split them up to weaken their jamming and establish contact that way?" Katie Hawthorne suggested, "If we can force the contact past them, maybe we can get the aliens to talk them into standing down."
Maeve pursed her lips, "bring up the system board," she motioned to Katie with her coffee mug. The sensor systems specialist rotated her chair towards Maeve, nursing her own coffee cup as she activated the large table in the center of the CIC. A three dimensional model of the system appeared with the positions of all the ships in theory marked on it. The interference was sending the ships skipping and teleporting and doubling and vanishing, as on the main screen, but the fleets as a whole were still discernable as blobs of constantly shifting vessels.
Henry leaned against the table, dancing his fingers across the surface, he rewound the system timer to just after their exit from warp, after the entirety of the Martian fleet had been registered in the battle computer, identified from the databases of Martian ships, and labelled with a callout. "I don't think that will work. Their fleet composition is dominated by electronic warfare vessels, the same as ours. And they significantly outnumber us, so even if every ship went in a different direction, they could still have two to three vessels for every one of ours.
"What about drones?" Maeve suggested.
"If we string out drones in the direction of the alien ship every 15,000 klicks," Katie suggested, "it might let us push a signal through the jamming."
"The Martians won't like that at all," Henry shook his head.
"Think they'll fire on our drones?" Maeve asked him, raising an eyebrow.
"In this case,?" Henry answered her, "Probably. They consider themselves legally allowed to do it under certain sets of circumstances as per the 2176 Treaty."
"Yeah," Maeve said, her voice trailing off as she tried to see the tactical board as a puzzle to be solved. She pursed her lips, "Three chains of drones from every ship in the fleet, on equiangular trajectories, we launch them all at once at the extreme inward curve of our engagement braid, when the separation between our fleets is the maximum, let's see if we can't catch them off guard."
Maeve pursed her lips, taking another sip of her coffee as drones died by the hundred. Despite the heavy losses, her plan appeared to be working, the signals on the wallscreens and the system board were starting to clear of static.
The fleets closed to within hundreds of meters of one another again, the vessels of the two fleets darted past each other, and all hell broke loose.
"Fast movers!" Katie Hawthorne suddenly shouted in alarm as the entirety of the Martian fleet began hemorrhaging small rapidly accelerating objects.
"Drones? Missiles?" Henry asked quickly.
"PDLs are authorized to free fire on all fast movers," Maeve ordered quickly, transmitting through her headset to all the ship captains and command crews. The space around both fleets erupted in violence as drones exploded and died, lasers flickered invisibly through space, and point defense rounds detonated in starbursts of flak. The trajectories of the fleets shifted, holding within 15,000 kilometers of one, the braid tightening as their fast movers danced around each other. The now escalated conflict held in its expanded steady state like a growing standing wave, another vector of conflict in addition to the electronic warfare systems. The not quite yet a battlefield was growing in complexity as each side escalated in a bid for the upper hand. For two hours, the dual of drones continued with constant violence and fervor, leaving Maeve sucking down cup after cup of coffee in an attempt to stay awake and keep her nerves from fraying too terribly.
And then the MNCV Chapel Hill slammed into the UNDF Normandy at the close approach in their combat braid. The two military vessels struck one another with enough force to level a city; despite being glancing blows, the Martian frigate's relative motion smashed it through the armored skin of the cruiser like it was paper, while friction ground the frigate into the cruiser like cheese on a grindstone.
The two vessels slid against each other with an utterly silent shriek of protesting metal, snapping structural struts, popping pressure vessels, and fracturing bulkheads; hundreds died in seconds as their ships hulls unzipped themselves and vented to space. Volatiles cooked off and chain reactions tore through the vessels as their fuel supplies and weapons magazines detonated, before both ships were momentarily swallowed up in the twin starbursts of their rupturing fusion reactors.
Maeve watched in horror as the wreckage of the two vessels went screaming into the darkness, wreathed in a plasma halo and glowing with residual heat.
"Pull away from the Martians," Maeve barked into the command channel, "All vessels pull away from the Martian fleet right now, cut electronic warfare and recall drones, begin backing off to 250,000 kilometers."
"This just got a whole lot messier," Henry said into the command channel with a sigh.
"Yeah, I was afraid of something like this happening," Gunnir Coulson of the Waterloo replied into her earpiece.
"Like I said Maeve," Allison Strange said from the bridge of the Stalingrad, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
The Commodore sighed and studied the system board. The two ships had collided in the middle of the combat weave, and as the seconds since the impact ticked by, the fleets pulled apart from one another once more. As the UN fleet pulled range, the Martians began turning and vectoring back towards them to keep their forces inside the effective e-war envelope. They were however also beginning to recall drones when it became apparent the UN was recalling theirs.
She took another sip of her coffee and tried to push down the horrible guilt at the deaths that had just occurred under her command.
Maeve moved out of the command channel and started a recording, "Admiral Wallace," she began, "My condolences on the loss of life that just occurred. I would be lying if I said it couldn't have been avoided. Our fleet will assume a parking orbit and cease attempts to force contact with the aliens for the time being, we would appreciate if your fleet maintained at least 50,000 kilometers of separation in order to assure a repeat incident doesn't occur."
She stopped recording, saved the file, and sent it to Katie Hawthorne, "Katie, I want you to push this at the Martian fleet, ultrawideband, see if you can't force it through their jamming."
The system specialist nodded and began instructing her subordinates to push the signal through the jamming systems, temporarily replacing the storm of white noise with signal across a huge swath of bandwidths.
She relaxed her neck and closed her eyes, waiting for the Martians to reply. It took a few moments, then the Martian battleship repeated their trick with the electronic warfare systems, the static haze around the fleet rippling momentarily as the response signal was propagated through the storm of interference.
"Commodore O'Donnell," the Martian admiral said, "I likewise extend condolences on this avoidable loss of life. I understand the political situation you are operating inside of, but I still request in strong terms that you withdraw immediately from this system. We will maintain distance and jamming on your fleet until you comply or our orders change."
The Commodore pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes, taking a slow breath. Her emotions were starting to get the best of her as she tried to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. It came back to her at the end of the day, she was responsible, and that weighed heavily on her conscience.
"Commodore? Your orders?" One of the other captains asked her over the command channel.
"Maintain course and orbital vector, cease all active thrusting," she mumbled out, taking another sip of coffee and trying to burn away the spreading numbness in her heart.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
April 2219
"Shuttle Number four is docked," The Empiricist's AI announced to Ivy Czininski on the bridge.
"Thank you Emmy," Ivy said as she took a sip of her coffee and turned to Cale Rouschev, "Ready for a close encounter of the third kind?" She asked him. He and Kestral were scheduled to journey back to the Lifeseeker on its next trip.
"I would have been on the first shuttle over if Vedika hadn't bumped me," he complained.
"Well, maybe you should have thought about that before that whole cake incident," Ivy smiled good-naturedly, her eyes going back to the ongoing conflict between the UN and Martian forces. It was sort of beautiful, when the visible sensors weren't being blinded by laser light they captured images of ships wreathed in halos of tiny detonations as PDC shells exploded and drones were blown apart.
"I should get down to the shuttle bay," Cale said mostly to himself.
Ivy nodded in acknowledgment as he slipped out the door, leaving just her and Jimmy on the bridge.
She took another sip of coffee and then inadvertently sprayed it across the bridge as the MNCV Chapel Hill and UNDF Normandy collided with one another.
"Sweet baby newton…" She stammered, watching with disbelief as the fleets began to separate from each other and transmit frantic apologies and calls to stand down. It was all hours out of date, but the suddenly massive death toll left Ivy reeling.
"Commander, we are receiving a communication from the Lifeseeker." Emmy announced to her.
"Let's hear it," Ivy told the AI. The translation systems had progressed to a sufficient degree that instead of visually displaying words, the AI simply translated the message and stated it over the speakers.
"Lying militaristic humans, your kind have been determined to be violent liars. All evacuations of humans will be conducted via standard methods for use on violent warlike savages. This diplomatic sequence is terminated," Emmy intoned to her. The Lifeseeker was already turning back towards the Lament for Lost Worlds.
"Send them back this," Ivy started, "Please, this is all a misunderstanding, we don't yet have the details on the events that took place moments ago but it was pretty clearly an accident not an intentional escalation of force, we wish to peacefully communicate with one another and learn to coexist in this universe together without violence."
"You lying humans have thus far told only stories and fabrications, we have no reason to trust your words and trusting your words risks the lives of many species under our charge. We will rescue you from the Reshapers as is our mission, but we will not allow human liars to endanger this mission either," the kiwawentoa, via Emmy, retorted.
Ivy ground her teeth as Vedika Srivastava and Cale Rouschev ran into the bridge, with Margaret Armstrong, Kestral Schiaparelli, and Morgan Sabaea hot on their heels.
"What's going on?" The senior pragmatist barked at her.
"I'm not sure," Ivy admitted, "There was a collision, one of our frigates ran into a UN cruiser, and now the Kiwawentoa are calling us liars and calling off the contact," Ivy said angrily, "They're withdrawing the Lifeseeker."
"Shit," Vedika swore. On the wallscreens, the nearly invisible propulsive rods of the Lament for Lost Worlds began to flicker and spark with energy. A storm of radiation was building around the enormous ark ship, wrapping it in a cocoon of light and energy.
"Well, we've fucked up," Morgan announced, crossing eir arms. The storm of radiation became opaque, and then faded away into nothingness. The rods began to rapidly contract down towards a center point, racing inwards at relativistic speeds as they folded up on themselves and vanished with a burst of light. It took less than a minute for the Mars-sized ship to disappear, leaving the Empiricist floating alone.
"I have some bad news for you," Vedika said softly after the tension broke nearly a moment after the ship vanished.
Ivy whirled on the Senior Pragmatist, temper flaring, "Worse than this?" She asked grumpily.
"Well," Vedika winced, "It did also just cost you your XO."
Ivy frowned, "Where's Jean?"
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
April 2219
The powerful ringing in Jean Paoloni's ears faded away, and she slowly felt herself drift back into reality. It was a painful settling process, her ego forming back together out of mental noise, realizing that she was a human named Jean Paoloni, and finally realizing that she was floating naked in some sort of holding chamber. The last thing she remembered, she had been arguing with the Kiwawentoa about whether or not humans were liars, and then that overpowering, crushing ringing sound had turned her mind into pudding and left her dissociated and inert as her mind raced uselessly in a million directions at once.
Her eyes darted around the small spherical space she found herself in. The rough coral-like walls were the same as in the Meetingspace, but the room she found herself in was much smaller. If she stretched her body out all the way, her fingertips and toes brushed against the walls of the chamber. The space had no discernable features, no doors, windows, or seams visible in the peach colored material. The lighting seemed to come from a series of tiny recessed light emitters scattered around the perimeter of the room, invisible without getting right up to the surface. This created an unsettling lack of shadows and gave the place an odd flatness.
Jean tapped her knuckles against the walls, but they felt solid all around, it was as if she was somehow embedded in a bubble in solid stone. She pounded harder, but the walls seemed entirely solid.
"Hello?" She asked finally. There was no answer from any sort of system or from one of the aliens. "Hey!" She shouted, "Hey I know you're out there somewhere, what is this? Dreaming-Waking-Transcending you better explain yourself!"
The walls of the chamber remained silent, her captors failed to answer her. "Fuck!" She shouted in frustration, banging her fists on one wall and pushing off towards the other as a result.
Jean let herself drift slowly across the spherical space until her back gently bumped against the far wall. Silence still reigned, the Kiwawentoa either weren't listening, or didn't care what she had to say. She curled up into a ball, resting her chin against her knees. Something had to happen eventually, she prayed they wouldn't abandon her in there to slowly starve to death, but there was nothing she could do.
The fear and sadness came suddenly, one moment she was somewhat irritated, mostly calm, and then all the dread and anxiety finally caught up with her, slamming into her mind like an out of control transport shuttle. She pinched her eyes shut and hugged herself close as she was wracked by quiet sobs, hugging herself tightly. Nothing changed, the Kiwawentoa remained silent, and slowly the wave of emotions passed and Jean fell into a troubled sleep.
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Elliptical Orbit
9 AUs From Luyten's Star
April 2219
Commodore Maeve O'Donnell sipped her third cup of coffee, watching ships dance amidst one another on callouts that were constantly vanishing and reforming as electronic jamming washed over the Leyte Gulf with waves of multispectral noise. ECCM systems struggled to compensate for the interference, sometimes successfully sometimes not. Ships appeared and vanished, doubled and tripled, swapped locations with each other, and seemed to skip chaotically like a broken video reel.
The standoff had been twelve hours in the making, the two fleets darted through one another, ships passing within a few hundred meters of each other as their fleets braided together then separated out as far as 100,000 kilometers before pulling back together again.
"How long are we going to play this game with them?" Henry Osbourne, the captain of the Leyte Gulf, asked her, rubbing his eyes.
"Until they let us talk to the aliens or another UN ship arrives with orders for us to lay off," she replied, "Best grab a cuppa, it's going to be a long few days."
The bald headed captain took a breath, sucking in air past his teeth, they were playing a very dangerous game, and it had all their nerves frayed, "I don't much care for this. Think we could convince the Martians to stop jamming us if we stopped jamming them?"
"I doubt it," Maeve answered, "They're under orders to stop us from talking to the aliens, we're under orders to talk to the aliens, so until some politician somewhere comes to an agreement, this is the game we play."
"We did get the Hello package out before the jamming started, maybe we can scatter our fleet in all directions, split them up to weaken their jamming and establish contact that way?" Katie Hawthorne suggested, "If we can force the contact past them, maybe we can get the aliens to talk them into standing down."
Maeve pursed her lips, "bring up the system board," she motioned to Katie with her coffee mug. The sensor systems specialist rotated her chair towards Maeve, nursing her own coffee cup as she activated the large table in the center of the CIC. A three dimensional model of the system appeared with the positions of all the ships in theory marked on it. The interference was sending the ships skipping and teleporting and doubling and vanishing, as on the main screen, but the fleets as a whole were still discernable as blobs of constantly shifting vessels.
Henry leaned against the table, dancing his fingers across the surface, he rewound the system timer to just after their exit from warp, after the entirety of the Martian fleet had been registered in the battle computer, identified from the databases of Martian ships, and labelled with a callout. "I don't think that will work. Their fleet composition is dominated by electronic warfare vessels, the same as ours. And they significantly outnumber us, so even if every ship went in a different direction, they could still have two to three vessels for every one of ours.
"What about drones?" Maeve suggested.
"If we string out drones in the direction of the alien ship every 15,000 klicks," Katie suggested, "it might let us push a signal through the jamming."
"The Martians won't like that at all," Henry shook his head.
"Think they'll fire on our drones?" Maeve asked him, raising an eyebrow.
"In this case,?" Henry answered her, "Probably. They consider themselves legally allowed to do it under certain sets of circumstances as per the 2176 Treaty."
"Yeah," Maeve said, her voice trailing off as she tried to see the tactical board as a puzzle to be solved. She pursed her lips, "Three chains of drones from every ship in the fleet, on equiangular trajectories, we launch them all at once at the extreme inward curve of our engagement braid, when the separation between our fleets is the maximum, let's see if we can't catch them off guard."
Δ
At the moment of most extreme separation between the UN and Martian fleets, the smaller force of UN vessels made their move, launching hundreds of drones into space, angling away from each other in every direction as they attempted to assemble themselves into a vast antenna array. The Martian fleet responded quickly, turning sharply in a four-gee swerve that had crewmembers pressed into acceleration chairs as they closed the gap once more to the UN vessels. Point defense cannons on the Martian ships opened up on the swarming drones, blowing dozens of them away and sending the remainder scattering.
Maeve pursed her lips, taking another sip of her coffee as drones died by the hundred. Despite the heavy losses, her plan appeared to be working, the signals on the wallscreens and the system board were starting to clear of static.
The fleets closed to within hundreds of meters of one another again, the vessels of the two fleets darted past each other, and all hell broke loose.
"Fast movers!" Katie Hawthorne suddenly shouted in alarm as the entirety of the Martian fleet began hemorrhaging small rapidly accelerating objects.
"Drones? Missiles?" Henry asked quickly.
"PDLs are authorized to free fire on all fast movers," Maeve ordered quickly, transmitting through her headset to all the ship captains and command crews. The space around both fleets erupted in violence as drones exploded and died, lasers flickered invisibly through space, and point defense rounds detonated in starbursts of flak. The trajectories of the fleets shifted, holding within 15,000 kilometers of one, the braid tightening as their fast movers danced around each other. The now escalated conflict held in its expanded steady state like a growing standing wave, another vector of conflict in addition to the electronic warfare systems. The not quite yet a battlefield was growing in complexity as each side escalated in a bid for the upper hand. For two hours, the dual of drones continued with constant violence and fervor, leaving Maeve sucking down cup after cup of coffee in an attempt to stay awake and keep her nerves from fraying too terribly.
And then the MNCV Chapel Hill slammed into the UNDF Normandy at the close approach in their combat braid. The two military vessels struck one another with enough force to level a city; despite being glancing blows, the Martian frigate's relative motion smashed it through the armored skin of the cruiser like it was paper, while friction ground the frigate into the cruiser like cheese on a grindstone.
The two vessels slid against each other with an utterly silent shriek of protesting metal, snapping structural struts, popping pressure vessels, and fracturing bulkheads; hundreds died in seconds as their ships hulls unzipped themselves and vented to space. Volatiles cooked off and chain reactions tore through the vessels as their fuel supplies and weapons magazines detonated, before both ships were momentarily swallowed up in the twin starbursts of their rupturing fusion reactors.
Maeve watched in horror as the wreckage of the two vessels went screaming into the darkness, wreathed in a plasma halo and glowing with residual heat.
"Pull away from the Martians," Maeve barked into the command channel, "All vessels pull away from the Martian fleet right now, cut electronic warfare and recall drones, begin backing off to 250,000 kilometers."
"This just got a whole lot messier," Henry said into the command channel with a sigh.
"Yeah, I was afraid of something like this happening," Gunnir Coulson of the Waterloo replied into her earpiece.
"Like I said Maeve," Allison Strange said from the bridge of the Stalingrad, "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
The Commodore sighed and studied the system board. The two ships had collided in the middle of the combat weave, and as the seconds since the impact ticked by, the fleets pulled apart from one another once more. As the UN fleet pulled range, the Martians began turning and vectoring back towards them to keep their forces inside the effective e-war envelope. They were however also beginning to recall drones when it became apparent the UN was recalling theirs.
She took another sip of her coffee and tried to push down the horrible guilt at the deaths that had just occurred under her command.
Maeve moved out of the command channel and started a recording, "Admiral Wallace," she began, "My condolences on the loss of life that just occurred. I would be lying if I said it couldn't have been avoided. Our fleet will assume a parking orbit and cease attempts to force contact with the aliens for the time being, we would appreciate if your fleet maintained at least 50,000 kilometers of separation in order to assure a repeat incident doesn't occur."
She stopped recording, saved the file, and sent it to Katie Hawthorne, "Katie, I want you to push this at the Martian fleet, ultrawideband, see if you can't force it through their jamming."
The system specialist nodded and began instructing her subordinates to push the signal through the jamming systems, temporarily replacing the storm of white noise with signal across a huge swath of bandwidths.
She relaxed her neck and closed her eyes, waiting for the Martians to reply. It took a few moments, then the Martian battleship repeated their trick with the electronic warfare systems, the static haze around the fleet rippling momentarily as the response signal was propagated through the storm of interference.
"Commodore O'Donnell," the Martian admiral said, "I likewise extend condolences on this avoidable loss of life. I understand the political situation you are operating inside of, but I still request in strong terms that you withdraw immediately from this system. We will maintain distance and jamming on your fleet until you comply or our orders change."
The Commodore pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes, taking a slow breath. Her emotions were starting to get the best of her as she tried to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. It came back to her at the end of the day, she was responsible, and that weighed heavily on her conscience.
"Commodore? Your orders?" One of the other captains asked her over the command channel.
"Maintain course and orbital vector, cease all active thrusting," she mumbled out, taking another sip of coffee and trying to burn away the spreading numbness in her heart.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Circular Orbit
250,000 Kilometers from Lament for Lost Worlds
April 2219
"Shuttle Number four is docked," The Empiricist's AI announced to Ivy Czininski on the bridge.
"Thank you Emmy," Ivy said as she took a sip of her coffee and turned to Cale Rouschev, "Ready for a close encounter of the third kind?" She asked him. He and Kestral were scheduled to journey back to the Lifeseeker on its next trip.
"I would have been on the first shuttle over if Vedika hadn't bumped me," he complained.
"Well, maybe you should have thought about that before that whole cake incident," Ivy smiled good-naturedly, her eyes going back to the ongoing conflict between the UN and Martian forces. It was sort of beautiful, when the visible sensors weren't being blinded by laser light they captured images of ships wreathed in halos of tiny detonations as PDC shells exploded and drones were blown apart.
"I should get down to the shuttle bay," Cale said mostly to himself.
Ivy nodded in acknowledgment as he slipped out the door, leaving just her and Jimmy on the bridge.
She took another sip of coffee and then inadvertently sprayed it across the bridge as the MNCV Chapel Hill and UNDF Normandy collided with one another.
"Sweet baby newton…" She stammered, watching with disbelief as the fleets began to separate from each other and transmit frantic apologies and calls to stand down. It was all hours out of date, but the suddenly massive death toll left Ivy reeling.
"Commander, we are receiving a communication from the Lifeseeker." Emmy announced to her.
"Let's hear it," Ivy told the AI. The translation systems had progressed to a sufficient degree that instead of visually displaying words, the AI simply translated the message and stated it over the speakers.
"Lying militaristic humans, your kind have been determined to be violent liars. All evacuations of humans will be conducted via standard methods for use on violent warlike savages. This diplomatic sequence is terminated," Emmy intoned to her. The Lifeseeker was already turning back towards the Lament for Lost Worlds.
"Send them back this," Ivy started, "Please, this is all a misunderstanding, we don't yet have the details on the events that took place moments ago but it was pretty clearly an accident not an intentional escalation of force, we wish to peacefully communicate with one another and learn to coexist in this universe together without violence."
"You lying humans have thus far told only stories and fabrications, we have no reason to trust your words and trusting your words risks the lives of many species under our charge. We will rescue you from the Reshapers as is our mission, but we will not allow human liars to endanger this mission either," the kiwawentoa, via Emmy, retorted.
Ivy ground her teeth as Vedika Srivastava and Cale Rouschev ran into the bridge, with Margaret Armstrong, Kestral Schiaparelli, and Morgan Sabaea hot on their heels.
"What's going on?" The senior pragmatist barked at her.
"I'm not sure," Ivy admitted, "There was a collision, one of our frigates ran into a UN cruiser, and now the Kiwawentoa are calling us liars and calling off the contact," Ivy said angrily, "They're withdrawing the Lifeseeker."
"Shit," Vedika swore. On the wallscreens, the nearly invisible propulsive rods of the Lament for Lost Worlds began to flicker and spark with energy. A storm of radiation was building around the enormous ark ship, wrapping it in a cocoon of light and energy.
"Well, we've fucked up," Morgan announced, crossing eir arms. The storm of radiation became opaque, and then faded away into nothingness. The rods began to rapidly contract down towards a center point, racing inwards at relativistic speeds as they folded up on themselves and vanished with a burst of light. It took less than a minute for the Mars-sized ship to disappear, leaving the Empiricist floating alone.
"I have some bad news for you," Vedika said softly after the tension broke nearly a moment after the ship vanished.
Ivy whirled on the Senior Pragmatist, temper flaring, "Worse than this?" She asked grumpily.
"Well," Vedika winced, "It did also just cost you your XO."
Ivy frowned, "Where's Jean?"
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
April 2219
The powerful ringing in Jean Paoloni's ears faded away, and she slowly felt herself drift back into reality. It was a painful settling process, her ego forming back together out of mental noise, realizing that she was a human named Jean Paoloni, and finally realizing that she was floating naked in some sort of holding chamber. The last thing she remembered, she had been arguing with the Kiwawentoa about whether or not humans were liars, and then that overpowering, crushing ringing sound had turned her mind into pudding and left her dissociated and inert as her mind raced uselessly in a million directions at once.
Her eyes darted around the small spherical space she found herself in. The rough coral-like walls were the same as in the Meetingspace, but the room she found herself in was much smaller. If she stretched her body out all the way, her fingertips and toes brushed against the walls of the chamber. The space had no discernable features, no doors, windows, or seams visible in the peach colored material. The lighting seemed to come from a series of tiny recessed light emitters scattered around the perimeter of the room, invisible without getting right up to the surface. This created an unsettling lack of shadows and gave the place an odd flatness.
Jean tapped her knuckles against the walls, but they felt solid all around, it was as if she was somehow embedded in a bubble in solid stone. She pounded harder, but the walls seemed entirely solid.
"Hello?" She asked finally. There was no answer from any sort of system or from one of the aliens. "Hey!" She shouted, "Hey I know you're out there somewhere, what is this? Dreaming-Waking-Transcending you better explain yourself!"
The walls of the chamber remained silent, her captors failed to answer her. "Fuck!" She shouted in frustration, banging her fists on one wall and pushing off towards the other as a result.
Jean let herself drift slowly across the spherical space until her back gently bumped against the far wall. Silence still reigned, the Kiwawentoa either weren't listening, or didn't care what she had to say. She curled up into a ball, resting her chin against her knees. Something had to happen eventually, she prayed they wouldn't abandon her in there to slowly starve to death, but there was nothing she could do.
The fear and sadness came suddenly, one moment she was somewhat irritated, mostly calm, and then all the dread and anxiety finally caught up with her, slamming into her mind like an out of control transport shuttle. She pinched her eyes shut and hugged herself close as she was wracked by quiet sobs, hugging herself tightly. Nothing changed, the Kiwawentoa remained silent, and slowly the wave of emotions passed and Jean fell into a troubled sleep.
Good characterisation and excellent world building. I like that, warp drive aside, the story trends towards hard science fiction. Here are some of the thoughts I had during read through:
Chapter 1: Kicking Starward
"while she clearly knew her business inside and out when it came to the paperwork-and-payroll side of management"
-> They have AI. Paperwork-and-payroll would not be a human endeavor. More esoteric jobs like Pragmacist & Conscience sound far more plausible in a future that has AI.
"The ship had only been out of Acidalia Orbital for three weeks and the list of breakdowns and errors in their systems were rapidly approaching a kilometer long"
-> Newly launched ships undergo extensive trials (months in case of military ships) and shake down cruises, before being declared ready for deployment. For example, the USS Zumwalt started sea trials in December 2015 and was commissioned in October 2016. Perhaps something like: The ship had a lot of problems that were fixed during shake down, but apparently the engineers had not gotten all of them.
"Heat exchangers glowed dull red as they vented the heat of the fusion reaction into the void"
-> Heat exchangers, or better radiators, would radiate, not vent. Venting implies a loss of material that is ejected overboard.
Also, the crew have decided that aliens are a possibility. Would it not be sensible to call home to give an update, in case the ship is destroyed?
Chapter 2: Spacetime
"launched 155 light years out to the giant world of boiling gas they now leisurely orbited."
-> why would they go 155 light years to mine a gas giant - is Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt not enough? An explanation would be some sort of "unobtanium" that is rare and not found everywhere.
"The ship thudded as the axial railgun discharged the probe at 1% the speed of light. The courier would let itself be flung into deep space before activating its small warp drive and heading for Sol. "
-> Why not launch the probe before approaching the Alien object? They would be able to update the probe with new info during its cruise to deep space. Also it makes sense for the drone to jump somewhere other than Sol if warp transit can be followed.
Overall very nice - first contact is appropriately mysterious.
Chapter 3 The Ones Who Came Before:
"tweaked their course with the cold gas thrusters"
-> cold gas thrusters have a low Isp. If you have space to spare, such as a large ship, you would use something better. In case of the mining ship, chemical thrusters / rocket engines would be running on what they mine, such as oxygen and hydrogen.
Note, that such thrusters would be used to translate the ship's position as well as its orientation. If you just want to point the ship somewhere else i.e. change its orientation, you could also use gyroscopes, without expending reaction mass. For example, the ISS has four gyroscopes, with a 100kg steel disk each, to adjust its orientation.
Although during combat or any fast maneuver a ship would be able to speed up an orientation change using thrusters.
I liked the fantastical descriptions of the mining ship's flight.
Chapter 4: A Moth in a Hurricane
"So anyway, we must something. " -> "So anyway, we must DO something. "
""Go back to Sol and warn everyone?"" -> Can't they update the drone with new information?
Chapter 5 Ripples in a Cosmic See:
Good world building with the point of view of a standard citizen. Also the fact that events happen outside a character's immediate surroundings gives the story a good sense of scale.
Chapter 6 Hyperbolic:
Nice characterisation of the different people on the mining ship.
Chapter 7 Radioactive:
"the loss of life was still staggering, unbelievable"
-> seems that Humanity has continued on a peaceful path.
""They said they're curious about our engines. Think they'd trade designs?""
-> The humans may be giving away the only advantage they have. Perhaps trying to gain alien tech without sharing your own would be appropriate for a first try. If it doesn't work sharing is always an option.
Chapter 8 Wanderlust:
The exploration of the colony feels like it was not humans who built it. If you build something, you have the plans and would secure dangerous places / educate children what they are and why they should not go there.
Chapter 9 Drive:
The unattended hole in the colony seems like incompetence. You do not let an iron bridge slowly rust away (even if it can take considerable time to compromise it). You repaint it regularly.
I really like the way the crew methodically tries to understand the aliens. Also the time it takes to progress seems realistic - no magical instant solutions.
Chapter 10 Arrivals:
""MSCV FSF8 Empiricist, this is MNCV LAF12 Newton's Prism acting as vanguard to MNCV CV4 Light of Ages and escorts, we require all relevant status updates and tactical data via tight beam. Failure to reply within 20 minutes of field propagation lag will be taken as a sign you have been compromised in some way."
-> On the one hand the navy is worried that the Empiricist is compromised, on the other they are announcing details about their fleet and number of ships? They should simply have demanded an update and given a warning of what would happen should the Empiricist not comply.
Chapter 11 Dark Harvest:
The building tension with the mining ship is well done. Also the aliens actually seem alien and not just humans with bumpy heads.
Chapter 12 A Prayer for Brighter Days:
"Nobody else dies today."
-> Would be ironic if that attitude would get more people killed.
"Alicia we're not leaving without you."
-> And that one even more.
Chapter 13 Martians:
Love the SpaceX reference. Hopefully the developments will be as quick in reality.
"sinister oligarchs and plutocrats, out to extract the wealth of Mars for themselves at all costs"
-> This does not make sense. Mars would be a net drain on resources until the local economy is self sufficient. Once it is, it will boil in its own juices, because Mars has nothing that the Earth doesn't have. The only unique Martian selling point I see, is its lower gravity well, which would be advantageous in space ship construction and launch. Otherwise it may become a centre for technological development and export patents.
Regarding the redirected asteroid. There is no way that Earth would not detect a redirection and do something about it. If redirected asteroids were hard to detect, Earth could redirect asteroids to Mars as well. So this would then result in a MAD doctrine (similar to nuclear weapons) and a cold war would be plausible.
Chapter 14 Humans in Funny Suits:
"eir" -> that is interesting, a third gender (or non gender).
What happened to the honey trap mentioned in one of the previous chapters?
Chapter 15 The Devils of Our Better Natures:
"Absolute radial velocity 18 kilometers per second outward, transversal velocity negligible. "
-> Yay! No "full stop". Also great that the speed of light and the associated propagation of information is taken into account.
Given that humanity faces an existential threat, it does not make sense that the Martians refuse to share information on the first contact. This conflict between the two human fleets feels contrived.
Also, the orientation change using thrusters: They could use gyroscopes as base line and thrusters if high speed orientation changes are necessary, as mentioned previously.
Chapter 16 Poor Coordination Polka:
Same this chapter. The conflict feels contrived. There could be other reasons why the aliens decided that the humans are savage e.g. that they have military ships in the first place.
For example, the arrival of the Martian fleet would make the aliens nervous. The arrival of the second, distinct fleet (with slightly different ship designs), would imply that humans have factions and conflict between those. On the basis of this, they could decide that humans are savage. As such there would be no need for an, in this case, illogical conflict between the human factions. Simply their arrival would be sufficient.
Overall, I like the story very much. The thing that I found weak was the backstory of the Earth/Mars conflict, which seemed a bit too contrived. The same goes for Earth/Mars military interactions.
I look forward to future chapters.
Chapter 1: Kicking Starward
"while she clearly knew her business inside and out when it came to the paperwork-and-payroll side of management"
-> They have AI. Paperwork-and-payroll would not be a human endeavor. More esoteric jobs like Pragmacist & Conscience sound far more plausible in a future that has AI.
"The ship had only been out of Acidalia Orbital for three weeks and the list of breakdowns and errors in their systems were rapidly approaching a kilometer long"
-> Newly launched ships undergo extensive trials (months in case of military ships) and shake down cruises, before being declared ready for deployment. For example, the USS Zumwalt started sea trials in December 2015 and was commissioned in October 2016. Perhaps something like: The ship had a lot of problems that were fixed during shake down, but apparently the engineers had not gotten all of them.
"Heat exchangers glowed dull red as they vented the heat of the fusion reaction into the void"
-> Heat exchangers, or better radiators, would radiate, not vent. Venting implies a loss of material that is ejected overboard.
Also, the crew have decided that aliens are a possibility. Would it not be sensible to call home to give an update, in case the ship is destroyed?
Chapter 2: Spacetime
"launched 155 light years out to the giant world of boiling gas they now leisurely orbited."
-> why would they go 155 light years to mine a gas giant - is Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt not enough? An explanation would be some sort of "unobtanium" that is rare and not found everywhere.
"The ship thudded as the axial railgun discharged the probe at 1% the speed of light. The courier would let itself be flung into deep space before activating its small warp drive and heading for Sol. "
-> Why not launch the probe before approaching the Alien object? They would be able to update the probe with new info during its cruise to deep space. Also it makes sense for the drone to jump somewhere other than Sol if warp transit can be followed.
Overall very nice - first contact is appropriately mysterious.
Chapter 3 The Ones Who Came Before:
"tweaked their course with the cold gas thrusters"
-> cold gas thrusters have a low Isp. If you have space to spare, such as a large ship, you would use something better. In case of the mining ship, chemical thrusters / rocket engines would be running on what they mine, such as oxygen and hydrogen.
Note, that such thrusters would be used to translate the ship's position as well as its orientation. If you just want to point the ship somewhere else i.e. change its orientation, you could also use gyroscopes, without expending reaction mass. For example, the ISS has four gyroscopes, with a 100kg steel disk each, to adjust its orientation.
Although during combat or any fast maneuver a ship would be able to speed up an orientation change using thrusters.
I liked the fantastical descriptions of the mining ship's flight.
Chapter 4: A Moth in a Hurricane
"So anyway, we must something. " -> "So anyway, we must DO something. "
""Go back to Sol and warn everyone?"" -> Can't they update the drone with new information?
Chapter 5 Ripples in a Cosmic See:
Good world building with the point of view of a standard citizen. Also the fact that events happen outside a character's immediate surroundings gives the story a good sense of scale.
Chapter 6 Hyperbolic:
Nice characterisation of the different people on the mining ship.
Chapter 7 Radioactive:
"the loss of life was still staggering, unbelievable"
-> seems that Humanity has continued on a peaceful path.
""They said they're curious about our engines. Think they'd trade designs?""
-> The humans may be giving away the only advantage they have. Perhaps trying to gain alien tech without sharing your own would be appropriate for a first try. If it doesn't work sharing is always an option.
Chapter 8 Wanderlust:
The exploration of the colony feels like it was not humans who built it. If you build something, you have the plans and would secure dangerous places / educate children what they are and why they should not go there.
Chapter 9 Drive:
The unattended hole in the colony seems like incompetence. You do not let an iron bridge slowly rust away (even if it can take considerable time to compromise it). You repaint it regularly.
I really like the way the crew methodically tries to understand the aliens. Also the time it takes to progress seems realistic - no magical instant solutions.
Chapter 10 Arrivals:
""MSCV FSF8 Empiricist, this is MNCV LAF12 Newton's Prism acting as vanguard to MNCV CV4 Light of Ages and escorts, we require all relevant status updates and tactical data via tight beam. Failure to reply within 20 minutes of field propagation lag will be taken as a sign you have been compromised in some way."
-> On the one hand the navy is worried that the Empiricist is compromised, on the other they are announcing details about their fleet and number of ships? They should simply have demanded an update and given a warning of what would happen should the Empiricist not comply.
Chapter 11 Dark Harvest:
The building tension with the mining ship is well done. Also the aliens actually seem alien and not just humans with bumpy heads.
Chapter 12 A Prayer for Brighter Days:
"Nobody else dies today."
-> Would be ironic if that attitude would get more people killed.
"Alicia we're not leaving without you."
-> And that one even more.
Chapter 13 Martians:
Love the SpaceX reference. Hopefully the developments will be as quick in reality.
"sinister oligarchs and plutocrats, out to extract the wealth of Mars for themselves at all costs"
-> This does not make sense. Mars would be a net drain on resources until the local economy is self sufficient. Once it is, it will boil in its own juices, because Mars has nothing that the Earth doesn't have. The only unique Martian selling point I see, is its lower gravity well, which would be advantageous in space ship construction and launch. Otherwise it may become a centre for technological development and export patents.
Regarding the redirected asteroid. There is no way that Earth would not detect a redirection and do something about it. If redirected asteroids were hard to detect, Earth could redirect asteroids to Mars as well. So this would then result in a MAD doctrine (similar to nuclear weapons) and a cold war would be plausible.
Chapter 14 Humans in Funny Suits:
"eir" -> that is interesting, a third gender (or non gender).
What happened to the honey trap mentioned in one of the previous chapters?
Chapter 15 The Devils of Our Better Natures:
"Absolute radial velocity 18 kilometers per second outward, transversal velocity negligible. "
-> Yay! No "full stop". Also great that the speed of light and the associated propagation of information is taken into account.
Given that humanity faces an existential threat, it does not make sense that the Martians refuse to share information on the first contact. This conflict between the two human fleets feels contrived.
Also, the orientation change using thrusters: They could use gyroscopes as base line and thrusters if high speed orientation changes are necessary, as mentioned previously.
Chapter 16 Poor Coordination Polka:
Same this chapter. The conflict feels contrived. There could be other reasons why the aliens decided that the humans are savage e.g. that they have military ships in the first place.
For example, the arrival of the Martian fleet would make the aliens nervous. The arrival of the second, distinct fleet (with slightly different ship designs), would imply that humans have factions and conflict between those. On the basis of this, they could decide that humans are savage. As such there would be no need for an, in this case, illogical conflict between the human factions. Simply their arrival would be sufficient.
Overall, I like the story very much. The thing that I found weak was the backstory of the Earth/Mars conflict, which seemed a bit too contrived. The same goes for Earth/Mars military interactions.
I look forward to future chapters.
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Chapter 16: That Other, Slightly Better World
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 16: That Other, Slightly Better World
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Elliptical Orbit
9 AUs From Luyten's Star
April 2219
"Ma'am?" Katie Hawthorne asked nervously, nudging Maeve O'Donnell awake. "The Martians have stopped jamming us, the alien ship is gone.
The Commodore sat up in her chair and habitually tucked her hair behind her ears, "Order our e-war to stand down as well."
Katie nodded and began issuing commands into the headset. Maeve's own headset was floating on the end of its cord nearby. She reeled it in and shoved it over her ears, as she did this, she swung her chair around and made eye contact with an idle specialist, "Go get me some coffee," she instructed, "Katie how long was I out for?"
"About four hours ma'am," Katie replied, "After what happened with the Normandy, we thought we should let you rest. The jamming just let up a moment ago."
"And the aliens are gone?" Maeve asked, accepting a cup of coffee as it was handed to her.
"We lost them on sensors as soon as the electronic warfare started up," Katie answered with a shrug, "But they seem to be gone now, yes."
"Well damn," Maeve mused, taking a sip of her coffee.
"We're getting a tightbeam from the Light of Ages, would you like me to put it through?" Katie asked.
"Yeah, go ahead, let's see what the Admiral has to say about this," Maeve replied.
Katie established the connection and Admiral Wallace was immediately shouting at them.
"Do you fools have any idea what you've cost us here today?" He roared at them.
"Well, since you've had us jammed and incommunicado this entire time, no, we don't," Maeve replied sternly.
"Our survey vessel reports that the aliens have classified our species as warlike and cut all diplomatic contact," His voice was a low, dangerous growl, "we were doing just fine here for a month before you lot showed up, and in less than a day you have potentially screwed the pooch on our future relations with these creatures."
"Maybe if you hadn't decided to initiate hostilities with a peaceful contact expedition, they wouldn't think we're warlike," she smiled sweetly at him in a way that made her look very much like someone's grandmother.
"Maeve," he said seriously, "We were doing good, important work here, the things we've learned affect the future of the human race, and your actions here may have dangerously altered that future trajectory."
"It's politics Adam," she retorted, "The politicians make dancing monkeys of us all."
"This should be beyond politics!" He roared, "When the Reshapers reach Sol, you think they're going to care what planet you're from when they take you apart for raw materials?"
Maeve raised an eyebrow, confused, "The Reshapers?"
Admiral Wallace studied Commodore O'Donnell through the cameras for a moment and slowly smiled, "I am about to take a huge shit on all of your politicians."
The connection cut out abruptly, and Maeve's eyes automatically went from the screen to Katie, "He broke the connection on their end, but they're sending us something," the system specialist reported.
"What is it?" Maeve asked the other girl.
"It's a compressed video archive labeled Reshapers," Katie answered.
"Play it," Maeve said.
Katie nodded and directed the first video in the sequence at the main screen.
Maeve watched the alien video with wide eyes. She and saw, and she saw, and she saw.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Parking Orbit
9 AUs from Luyten's Star
April 2219
The two fleets both orbited Luyten's star at 9 AUs, maintaining a steady 50,000 kilometers of distance between them. The electronic warfare had fallen away when it was realized there was nothing to fight over anymore, and the opposing forces had taken to glaring at each other across the intervening distance. After Admiral Wallace had shared the Reshaper data with the UN commodore, communications had fallen completely silent.
It wasn't a formal staff meeting: Matthias Corbin, Orion Warrego, and of course Jean, were absent. Ivy had also broken out a bottle of scotch, which was technically against regulation but seemed called for. Cale, Kestral, Vedika, and Margaret had migrated into the conference room one by one, their faces etched with the same weariness as Ivy's own.
Cale had been the first. He sat studying old slides he and Kestral had made over the past few months, staring at the images with a glazed look. When Ivy offered to join and brought liquor to sweeten the deal, he didn't say no. They sat in silence drinking as Kestral and Margaret wandered in to join their silent vigil, but when Vedika entered and slumped into a chair, it didn't take long for Ivy to let her emotions get the better of her.
"You know this is your fault," Ivy accused, gesturing at Vedika with the scotch bottle in her hand, "It was your decision to always keep someone on the Lifeseeker during the diplomacy."
Vedika swiped the bottle of scotch from Ivy's outstretched hand and took her own swig of it, "Don't remind me," she said looking down at the table.
"They kidnapped my XO and could be dissecting her right now, so you don't get the luxury of not being reminded," Ivy berated the senior pragmatist.
"Look, I ran the probabilities, and determined there'd be a lower chance of them leaving in the middle of the talks if we kept someone on their ship," Vedika answered, taking another swig of the bottle.
Cale took the bottle of scotch from Vedika and took a swig from it himself, "Maybe your math was wrong," he said, "because it sure looks to me like they left in the middle of their talks anyway."
Vedika resisted the urge to growl at the other Pragmatist, "My math was fine, the aliens just failed to behave within the most likely confines of the statistical model."
"Must not have been a very good model then," Cale persisted, handing the bottle of scotch back to Ivy.
Vedika's face clouded over with an unreadable emotion, and she let her head fall against the conference table with a thump.
"Give me that," Kestral said, swiping the bottle away from Ivy, and taking a cautious sip of it, "This whole thing is a mess, and you know who always managed to have the clearest head about it? Jean." Ey raised the bottle in salute, took a swig of it, and handed it back to Ivy.
"You know I hated her guts when she first came aboard," Ivy said wistfully, taking a swig of the scotch, "She was uptight, a stickler for the rules, and she constantly needed her hand held, but she really came through in the end."
"I don't think the Kiwawentoa will kill her," Margaret offered, "It doesn't seem like their style."
"And you know that from spending a couple weeks talking to them?" Cale asked her, narrowing his eyes.
"Yeah," Margaret said, crossing her arms, "I do think that. I think they'll probably dump her in some specialized human habitat they build for her, as a test case for the larger human habitat they're going to try and cram people into when they show up to evacuate Sol eventually."
"That's not an unreasonable supposition," Vedika said, lifting her head enough to see, "But Cale's correct, we don't have enough data to say for sure how they're going to act. We already made a mistake in regards to their behavior once," she pursed her lips in worry.
Cale continued scrolling through the records of old slides he and Kestral had made for the staff meetings over the past few months, and came to the repetitive, partially translated warning about the Reshapers that the Kiwawentoa had been sending them before the communications protocols were fully established. He snorted, swiping the bottle of scotch back from Ivy.
"Something funny?" The commander asked him with a raised eyebrow.
He chuckled and shook his head, and gave the holographic image a shove, sliding it down the table to Margaret, "What is that untranslated time internal? It's the time frame the Kiwawentoa gave us for the Reshapers to arrive at Sol."
The linguist studied the curly text for a moment, consulted her notebook, and frowned, "It translates to The Greater Rotation, it was a year on their homeworld, it's about three of our years," she said finally, pushing the holographic screen back over to Cale.
Cale started cackling maniacally at that, unable to contain the flood of emotions, "Three years," he hissed, his eye twitching, "We have three years before they show up."
"We'll figure something out," Vedika insisted, "The human race is tough, we won't go down without a fight."
"Then we'll go down with a fight," Cale insisted back, "The Reshapers are an outside context problem, we aren't more than a speed bump to them."
"That sounds awfully nihilistic," Vedika warned, her orange eyes narrowing threateningly, "You haven't abandoned your Compact have you?"
Cale slammed his hand against the table and shouted, "Accuse me of that again I dare you! We'll see how far it gets you."
The two stared daggers at each other and Vedika sighed, breaking the contact first. She started to say something in response, but the speakers around the room cut her off.
"Commander," The AI's voice intruded on them, "The UN fleet is departing the system, they have all warped out towards Sol."
Ivy sighed, "Things are only going to snowball from here. The Reshapers drastically change the galactic political landscape, there's going to be a lot of upheaval in Sol as the news gets around."
"Speaking of news commander," The AI continued in her artificially chipper tone, "The independent news vessel Live From Space is requesting interviews with you and our science team."
Ivy groaned and rubbed her face with her hands, "Pass them off to Admiral Wallace, let him deal with them."
"I'm sorry ma'am," Emmy retorted, "but they are specifically presenting the contact in terms of a freedom of information request directed at Survey and the Pragmatists Guild, the two senior members of which in the system right now are…"
"Vedika and I," the commander groaned and took a deep breath.
"Just deny their request," Vedika said nonchalantly, stealing back the bottle of scotch.
"How does that help?" Ivy asked, "if we deny it, they'll just get in injunction."
"If we deny their request, the denial can be used to file a formal injunction against the Pragmatist's Guild and Survey," Vedika agreed with Ivy, gesturing with the bottle, "however, they have to file that injunction with the council of Consciences, which is all the way back in Sol. By the time an injunction could go through, this will all be out in the open one way or the other."
"You heard her Emmy, deny their request," Ivy instructed the AI.
Vedika staggered to her feet, the alcohol suddenly hitting her as the blood rushed from her head, forcing her to grip her chair for balance as her vision swam. She started to leave as her balance came back to her, then hesitated near the doorway.
"Their captain has declared her intent to file an injunction and cut the connection," Emmy reported. Ivy grunted in response and the AI fell silent.
Cale kept scrolling through the slides as the room fell into another sullen silence. Kestral stole back the bottle of scotch and took another swig before handing it off to Margaret. Cale came to a slide where Jean and Kestral had drawn smiley faces onto all of the alien creatures and angrily dismissed the screen and stormed from the room before he could start crying or screaming.
Vedika pursed her lips and gave chase.
"Should I do something about that?" Ivy asked the remaining population of the room. Margaret shrugged and Kestral shook eir head.
"They're the Pragmatists, let them figure it out," the science officer declared.
"Do you have a problem?" He asked her angrily as he floated in the central axle.
"Do you?" She asked back, crossing her arms.
"Yes, a good friend of mine might be getting dissected right now, oh yeah, and it's your fault," he gave her an accusatory prod with his finger, sending her floating gently away from him. He pushed himself off the floor and floated off towards the prow of the ship, forcing Vedika to catch up.
"Look," she said crossly as she finally caught up again, "I had to make a call, I weighed the odds, and I made it. It's my job to make those hard calls, and it's also your job, you should know why I made it. I don't care if you don't like me, it's not my job for you to like me, but if you're going to call yourself a Pragmatist you should understand why I did it."
"I know why you did it!" He shouted as she backed him into the end of the hall at the entrance to the freefall bridge. He whirled on her, accusatory finger waving, "I am a Pragmatist, I know how the math works out, I know why you did it, I know it's your fault, and I know I would have done the exact same thing in your place."
She started to say something in response but he cut he off, his eyes blurred with moisture as he forced his voice to remain under control, "No, I know exactly how all the calculations went in your head, I took the same classes you did, you put yourself at risk there too, they could have flown away while you were on board, it wasn't a risk you weren't willing to take yourself. It would have seemed like an easy enough way to tilt the odds slightly in your favor. I would have done it too, I would have killed Jean just as readily as you did."
He shoved her away from him and bounced off the door to the bridge, she caught herself on the wall and kicked off hard, catching and shoving into him before they both slammed back into the door. And then, she was kissing him, and he was kissing her, and their clothes were coming off even as they slipped into the secondary bridge and locked the door behind themselves.
Ivy completed the introductions for the recording systems, but didn't sit afterward, "We are now, all of us, at a crossroads. In roughly a week and a half, the MNCV Watt's Engine will reach Sol with all of the data we collected. That was going to happen regardless of how things played out with the Kiwawentoa, and it's still scheduled to happen. When they get back, the data will be presented to various committees and think tanks within Survey, the Navy, the Intelligence services, the Pragmatist's Guild, and the Council of Consciences. Those groups will all pull their various levers operating the machinery of government, and some sort of conclusion is going to be reached regarding whether or not to reveal the Reshapers to the public."
"They can't hope to sit on this," Evangeline interrupted, "It's way too big to keep a secret, and Admiral Wallace already gave the Reshaper data to that UN Commodore, the UN are going to be acting on the information in a little under three weeks."
"I agree," Ivy held up a hand in a placating gesture, "And so does Admiral Wallace. He's confident the decision will be made to go public with the information."
"As a counterpoint," Kestral said, "A lot of people are still going to freak out and act like it's the end of the world."
"You have to admit, we're sort of edging into 'end of the world' territory in conceptual space," Cale added in.
"Yeah…" Kestral said sadly, eir voice trailing off.
"What happens regarding the Reshapers is out of our hands at this point," Ivy said, "Themis will reach its conclusion and Mars will act, we all did our parts by raising the alarm. Whatever action Themis gravitates to, the majority of this fleet will be returning to Sol to see that it is carried out. This ship however, has been authorized by Admiral Wallace to join the Destiny of Light and Bacon's Legacy in sweeping Sagittarius for signs of the Reshapers or the Kiwawentoa. When the rest of the fleet departs for Sol, we'll be departing for the outpost at Ross 154."
That successfully generated a murmur among the occupants of the room. Ivy held her hands up to continue before the dialogue began again, "Major Sabaea, you'll be returning to the Light of Ages for your next assignment, Dr. Armstrong and Pragmatist Srivastava, you're both members of Survey and thus eligible for this next part. The Empiricist goes out on one-year long survey missions, and we've only been out of dock for six months so far. That mission has just been given a six-month extension, meaning we have another year out from Sol at minimum. Any member of Survey who wishes to return to Sol now however, will be able to return aboard the Light of Ages."
With that, Ivy clasped her hands together and took her seat, watching things play out.
"We figured out the interval on the Kiwawentoa warning message last night, and it's three years," Kestral said for the benefit of anyone who missed their informal drinking session, "A whole year out of that time, possibly the last…" ey tripped over eir words, not wanting to come off as despairing.
"I became a Pragmatist to deal with the hardest problems facing the human race, and I joined Survey to see the universe and poke it with a stick, I'm perfectly content to stay aboard," Cale said, seeming much more chipper than he had last night.
A serious look passed between the two Pragmatists and Vedika turned to Ivy, "I'd like to stay on as well. Cale's right, we're out here on the edge to keep these from being humanity's last few years."
Kestral sighed, "I'm in, for science and such."
Ivy patted the androgyne on eir back, "Does anyone actually want to leave?"
Mathias stood up, pursing his lips, "I'm an old man, I'm overdue for anti-senesic therapy, and I'd like to see Mars again before everything starts going to hell."
"Margaret?" Ivy singled out the linguist, but the blonde haired woman simply shrugged.
"I'm not overdue for my anti-senesics, and I can't very well talk to aliens on Mars now can I?" she asked, smiling.
"No," Ivy met her smile, "I suppose you can't."
"What about you Ivy, you're part of Survey, don't you have a wife?" Cale asked her.
"She knows the work we're doing is important," Ivy shrugged, "It's like you said Vedika, we're out here on the edge, to make sure the humanity we return to has a future."
"I just hope we succeed," Kestral said softly.
"Yeah," Ivy replied, "Me too."
Jean's replacement would meet up with them at Ross 154, and Vedika was temporarily bumped to Acting XO. Because she was acting as the XO, she was not allowed to also act as the senior pragmatist and Cale had his position back for the moment. In the long term, who knew? Despite their roll in the seat cushions, Cale's emotions still fluctuated wildly when it came to the orange eyed woman. He wasn't sure whether he hated her or was deeply attracted to her or some incredibly unhealthy combination of the two. There was just too much happening too quickly to get a good emotional read on things; before his mind could fully process one event, two more crazy things had already happened and it left Cale's analytical parts screaming incoherently.
After the Third Fleet departed for Sol, and the Empiricist for Ross 154, Cale shut himself into the ship's machine shop. He began laying out tools and equipment on the wide metal work table. There was a trancelike mantra to the way he performed this process, a deep-seated part of his Pragmatist training with the Inventariat Faction of the Pragmatist's Guild. Each tool he removed and placed in its specific location triggered the next step in the mnemonic, unspooling the memory from his head and instilling its powerful sense of calm along with it.
Once his head was clear, he brought up the incredibly complex diagrams and blueprints the Kiwawentoa had provided on their hyperdrive, sprawling them across the table on dozens of holographic displays.
The design itself was fairly simple, with a central portal generator and a sort of spooling strung out to define the perimeter of a three-dimensional gateway into hyperspace. The math for it all seemed to work out, it would just take an obscene amount of exotic matter to make a portal of an appreciable diameter. In terms of exotic matter usage, the Hyperdrive was far less efficient than the warp drive. Not only that but since hyperspace was a place itself, traversing it required expending fuel, whereas there was no fuel cost associated with warping beyond what it took to match orbital velocities upon exiting the warp tunnel.
It was a wildly inefficient process that only seemed reasonable from the alien's perspective. Hyperspace was apparently full of exotic matter, to the point where using up enormous quantities of it was not considered a big deal. Add in the Kiwawentoa's apparently reactionless drives, and it started to make some sense.
There was definitely a lot that could be learned by coming to an understanding of Kiwawentoa technology, possibly even marrying together the technologies of the two races to make some sort of hyper-warp-drive.
Cale cut the instructions for the hyperdrive into sections that the machine shop printer could replicate. There didn't seem to be any particular scaling limits on the technology beyond what was required to move larger objects, and Cale's plan involved creating a portal with a diameter of less than a meter, just large enough to stick some cameras and sensors through. Doing so would still take what he was sure Ivy would term an unreasonable amount of exotic matter, but it was For Science after all.
He closed his eyes, took a breath, and emptied his mind, silencing the storm of emotions as his heartbeat slowed to a crawl. He opened his eyes slowly, and nearly jumped out of his shoes when he saw that Vedika had materialized across the table from him.
"Do you mind?" he asked irritably, gesturing her towards the door with a wrench.
She leaned on the table and summoned the holographic screens toward herself with her implants, turning them around to look through the various blueprints and diagrams, "Garage project?" She asked him.
"Yeah, something like that," Cale said, stealing the screens back with hand gestures, "but I'm just doing it to clear my head, so if you don't mind, can you please leave me be?"
"I'd like to help," she said softly.
"You're Improvisariat," he scoffed, "I don't really want your help right now."
"I won't talk or distract you," she offered.
"Alright," he relented with a sigh and shoved a set of diagrams at her, "Print those out and figure out how to connect them together."
Vedika nodded and quietly went to work on assembling the components. She wordlessly handed him his printer jobs as they completed, and averted her eyes whenever he noticed her studying him. Together, the pair slowly began assembling the beginnings of the first human hyperspace window generator.
Marathon Class Starship
UNDF Leyte Gulf
Elliptical Orbit
9 AUs From Luyten's Star
April 2219
"Ma'am?" Katie Hawthorne asked nervously, nudging Maeve O'Donnell awake. "The Martians have stopped jamming us, the alien ship is gone.
The Commodore sat up in her chair and habitually tucked her hair behind her ears, "Order our e-war to stand down as well."
Katie nodded and began issuing commands into the headset. Maeve's own headset was floating on the end of its cord nearby. She reeled it in and shoved it over her ears, as she did this, she swung her chair around and made eye contact with an idle specialist, "Go get me some coffee," she instructed, "Katie how long was I out for?"
"About four hours ma'am," Katie replied, "After what happened with the Normandy, we thought we should let you rest. The jamming just let up a moment ago."
"And the aliens are gone?" Maeve asked, accepting a cup of coffee as it was handed to her.
"We lost them on sensors as soon as the electronic warfare started up," Katie answered with a shrug, "But they seem to be gone now, yes."
"Well damn," Maeve mused, taking a sip of her coffee.
"We're getting a tightbeam from the Light of Ages, would you like me to put it through?" Katie asked.
"Yeah, go ahead, let's see what the Admiral has to say about this," Maeve replied.
Katie established the connection and Admiral Wallace was immediately shouting at them.
"Do you fools have any idea what you've cost us here today?" He roared at them.
"Well, since you've had us jammed and incommunicado this entire time, no, we don't," Maeve replied sternly.
"Our survey vessel reports that the aliens have classified our species as warlike and cut all diplomatic contact," His voice was a low, dangerous growl, "we were doing just fine here for a month before you lot showed up, and in less than a day you have potentially screwed the pooch on our future relations with these creatures."
"Maybe if you hadn't decided to initiate hostilities with a peaceful contact expedition, they wouldn't think we're warlike," she smiled sweetly at him in a way that made her look very much like someone's grandmother.
"Maeve," he said seriously, "We were doing good, important work here, the things we've learned affect the future of the human race, and your actions here may have dangerously altered that future trajectory."
"It's politics Adam," she retorted, "The politicians make dancing monkeys of us all."
"This should be beyond politics!" He roared, "When the Reshapers reach Sol, you think they're going to care what planet you're from when they take you apart for raw materials?"
Maeve raised an eyebrow, confused, "The Reshapers?"
Admiral Wallace studied Commodore O'Donnell through the cameras for a moment and slowly smiled, "I am about to take a huge shit on all of your politicians."
The connection cut out abruptly, and Maeve's eyes automatically went from the screen to Katie, "He broke the connection on their end, but they're sending us something," the system specialist reported.
"What is it?" Maeve asked the other girl.
"It's a compressed video archive labeled Reshapers," Katie answered.
"Play it," Maeve said.
Katie nodded and directed the first video in the sequence at the main screen.
Maeve watched the alien video with wide eyes. She and saw, and she saw, and she saw.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Parking Orbit
9 AUs from Luyten's Star
April 2219
The two fleets both orbited Luyten's star at 9 AUs, maintaining a steady 50,000 kilometers of distance between them. The electronic warfare had fallen away when it was realized there was nothing to fight over anymore, and the opposing forces had taken to glaring at each other across the intervening distance. After Admiral Wallace had shared the Reshaper data with the UN commodore, communications had fallen completely silent.
It wasn't a formal staff meeting: Matthias Corbin, Orion Warrego, and of course Jean, were absent. Ivy had also broken out a bottle of scotch, which was technically against regulation but seemed called for. Cale, Kestral, Vedika, and Margaret had migrated into the conference room one by one, their faces etched with the same weariness as Ivy's own.
Cale had been the first. He sat studying old slides he and Kestral had made over the past few months, staring at the images with a glazed look. When Ivy offered to join and brought liquor to sweeten the deal, he didn't say no. They sat in silence drinking as Kestral and Margaret wandered in to join their silent vigil, but when Vedika entered and slumped into a chair, it didn't take long for Ivy to let her emotions get the better of her.
"You know this is your fault," Ivy accused, gesturing at Vedika with the scotch bottle in her hand, "It was your decision to always keep someone on the Lifeseeker during the diplomacy."
Vedika swiped the bottle of scotch from Ivy's outstretched hand and took her own swig of it, "Don't remind me," she said looking down at the table.
"They kidnapped my XO and could be dissecting her right now, so you don't get the luxury of not being reminded," Ivy berated the senior pragmatist.
"Look, I ran the probabilities, and determined there'd be a lower chance of them leaving in the middle of the talks if we kept someone on their ship," Vedika answered, taking another swig of the bottle.
Cale took the bottle of scotch from Vedika and took a swig from it himself, "Maybe your math was wrong," he said, "because it sure looks to me like they left in the middle of their talks anyway."
Vedika resisted the urge to growl at the other Pragmatist, "My math was fine, the aliens just failed to behave within the most likely confines of the statistical model."
"Must not have been a very good model then," Cale persisted, handing the bottle of scotch back to Ivy.
Vedika's face clouded over with an unreadable emotion, and she let her head fall against the conference table with a thump.
"Give me that," Kestral said, swiping the bottle away from Ivy, and taking a cautious sip of it, "This whole thing is a mess, and you know who always managed to have the clearest head about it? Jean." Ey raised the bottle in salute, took a swig of it, and handed it back to Ivy.
"You know I hated her guts when she first came aboard," Ivy said wistfully, taking a swig of the scotch, "She was uptight, a stickler for the rules, and she constantly needed her hand held, but she really came through in the end."
"I don't think the Kiwawentoa will kill her," Margaret offered, "It doesn't seem like their style."
"And you know that from spending a couple weeks talking to them?" Cale asked her, narrowing his eyes.
"Yeah," Margaret said, crossing her arms, "I do think that. I think they'll probably dump her in some specialized human habitat they build for her, as a test case for the larger human habitat they're going to try and cram people into when they show up to evacuate Sol eventually."
"That's not an unreasonable supposition," Vedika said, lifting her head enough to see, "But Cale's correct, we don't have enough data to say for sure how they're going to act. We already made a mistake in regards to their behavior once," she pursed her lips in worry.
Cale continued scrolling through the records of old slides he and Kestral had made for the staff meetings over the past few months, and came to the repetitive, partially translated warning about the Reshapers that the Kiwawentoa had been sending them before the communications protocols were fully established. He snorted, swiping the bottle of scotch back from Ivy.
"Something funny?" The commander asked him with a raised eyebrow.
He chuckled and shook his head, and gave the holographic image a shove, sliding it down the table to Margaret, "What is that untranslated time internal? It's the time frame the Kiwawentoa gave us for the Reshapers to arrive at Sol."
The linguist studied the curly text for a moment, consulted her notebook, and frowned, "It translates to The Greater Rotation, it was a year on their homeworld, it's about three of our years," she said finally, pushing the holographic screen back over to Cale.
Cale started cackling maniacally at that, unable to contain the flood of emotions, "Three years," he hissed, his eye twitching, "We have three years before they show up."
"We'll figure something out," Vedika insisted, "The human race is tough, we won't go down without a fight."
"Then we'll go down with a fight," Cale insisted back, "The Reshapers are an outside context problem, we aren't more than a speed bump to them."
"That sounds awfully nihilistic," Vedika warned, her orange eyes narrowing threateningly, "You haven't abandoned your Compact have you?"
Cale slammed his hand against the table and shouted, "Accuse me of that again I dare you! We'll see how far it gets you."
The two stared daggers at each other and Vedika sighed, breaking the contact first. She started to say something in response, but the speakers around the room cut her off.
"Commander," The AI's voice intruded on them, "The UN fleet is departing the system, they have all warped out towards Sol."
Ivy sighed, "Things are only going to snowball from here. The Reshapers drastically change the galactic political landscape, there's going to be a lot of upheaval in Sol as the news gets around."
"Speaking of news commander," The AI continued in her artificially chipper tone, "The independent news vessel Live From Space is requesting interviews with you and our science team."
Ivy groaned and rubbed her face with her hands, "Pass them off to Admiral Wallace, let him deal with them."
"I'm sorry ma'am," Emmy retorted, "but they are specifically presenting the contact in terms of a freedom of information request directed at Survey and the Pragmatists Guild, the two senior members of which in the system right now are…"
"Vedika and I," the commander groaned and took a deep breath.
"Just deny their request," Vedika said nonchalantly, stealing back the bottle of scotch.
"How does that help?" Ivy asked, "if we deny it, they'll just get in injunction."
"If we deny their request, the denial can be used to file a formal injunction against the Pragmatist's Guild and Survey," Vedika agreed with Ivy, gesturing with the bottle, "however, they have to file that injunction with the council of Consciences, which is all the way back in Sol. By the time an injunction could go through, this will all be out in the open one way or the other."
"You heard her Emmy, deny their request," Ivy instructed the AI.
Vedika staggered to her feet, the alcohol suddenly hitting her as the blood rushed from her head, forcing her to grip her chair for balance as her vision swam. She started to leave as her balance came back to her, then hesitated near the doorway.
"Their captain has declared her intent to file an injunction and cut the connection," Emmy reported. Ivy grunted in response and the AI fell silent.
Cale kept scrolling through the slides as the room fell into another sullen silence. Kestral stole back the bottle of scotch and took another swig before handing it off to Margaret. Cale came to a slide where Jean and Kestral had drawn smiley faces onto all of the alien creatures and angrily dismissed the screen and stormed from the room before he could start crying or screaming.
Vedika pursed her lips and gave chase.
"Should I do something about that?" Ivy asked the remaining population of the room. Margaret shrugged and Kestral shook eir head.
"They're the Pragmatists, let them figure it out," the science officer declared.
Δ
Cale didn't have a particular destination in mind as he fled the conference room, he just wanted to get away from everything and everyone. He made his way up a travel spoke from the ring towards the zero gravity modules at the heart of the ship, reasoning that there would be fewer people to bother him in freefall. Vedika paced him a few meters back, and it took him until very near the top of the shaft to realize she was following him.
"Do you have a problem?" He asked her angrily as he floated in the central axle.
"Do you?" She asked back, crossing her arms.
"Yes, a good friend of mine might be getting dissected right now, oh yeah, and it's your fault," he gave her an accusatory prod with his finger, sending her floating gently away from him. He pushed himself off the floor and floated off towards the prow of the ship, forcing Vedika to catch up.
"Look," she said crossly as she finally caught up again, "I had to make a call, I weighed the odds, and I made it. It's my job to make those hard calls, and it's also your job, you should know why I made it. I don't care if you don't like me, it's not my job for you to like me, but if you're going to call yourself a Pragmatist you should understand why I did it."
"I know why you did it!" He shouted as she backed him into the end of the hall at the entrance to the freefall bridge. He whirled on her, accusatory finger waving, "I am a Pragmatist, I know how the math works out, I know why you did it, I know it's your fault, and I know I would have done the exact same thing in your place."
She started to say something in response but he cut he off, his eyes blurred with moisture as he forced his voice to remain under control, "No, I know exactly how all the calculations went in your head, I took the same classes you did, you put yourself at risk there too, they could have flown away while you were on board, it wasn't a risk you weren't willing to take yourself. It would have seemed like an easy enough way to tilt the odds slightly in your favor. I would have done it too, I would have killed Jean just as readily as you did."
He shoved her away from him and bounced off the door to the bridge, she caught herself on the wall and kicked off hard, catching and shoving into him before they both slammed back into the door. And then, she was kissing him, and he was kissing her, and their clothes were coming off even as they slipped into the secondary bridge and locked the door behind themselves.
Δ
"Today is April 15th 2219," Ivy intoned to the room, "This is the 118th senior staff meeting of the 11th mission of the MSCV Empiricist, In attendance today, Mission Commander Ivy Czininski, Senior Pragmatist Vedika Srivastava, Pragmacist Cale Rouschev, Chief Science Officer Kestral Schiaparelli, Chief Medical Officer Orion Warrego, Chief Engineer Mathias Corbin, Chief Linguist Margaret Armstrong, Chief Xenobiologist Major Morgan Sabaea, and Senior Conscience Evangeline Daedaelia."
Ivy completed the introductions for the recording systems, but didn't sit afterward, "We are now, all of us, at a crossroads. In roughly a week and a half, the MNCV Watt's Engine will reach Sol with all of the data we collected. That was going to happen regardless of how things played out with the Kiwawentoa, and it's still scheduled to happen. When they get back, the data will be presented to various committees and think tanks within Survey, the Navy, the Intelligence services, the Pragmatist's Guild, and the Council of Consciences. Those groups will all pull their various levers operating the machinery of government, and some sort of conclusion is going to be reached regarding whether or not to reveal the Reshapers to the public."
"They can't hope to sit on this," Evangeline interrupted, "It's way too big to keep a secret, and Admiral Wallace already gave the Reshaper data to that UN Commodore, the UN are going to be acting on the information in a little under three weeks."
"I agree," Ivy held up a hand in a placating gesture, "And so does Admiral Wallace. He's confident the decision will be made to go public with the information."
"As a counterpoint," Kestral said, "A lot of people are still going to freak out and act like it's the end of the world."
"You have to admit, we're sort of edging into 'end of the world' territory in conceptual space," Cale added in.
"Yeah…" Kestral said sadly, eir voice trailing off.
"What happens regarding the Reshapers is out of our hands at this point," Ivy said, "Themis will reach its conclusion and Mars will act, we all did our parts by raising the alarm. Whatever action Themis gravitates to, the majority of this fleet will be returning to Sol to see that it is carried out. This ship however, has been authorized by Admiral Wallace to join the Destiny of Light and Bacon's Legacy in sweeping Sagittarius for signs of the Reshapers or the Kiwawentoa. When the rest of the fleet departs for Sol, we'll be departing for the outpost at Ross 154."
That successfully generated a murmur among the occupants of the room. Ivy held her hands up to continue before the dialogue began again, "Major Sabaea, you'll be returning to the Light of Ages for your next assignment, Dr. Armstrong and Pragmatist Srivastava, you're both members of Survey and thus eligible for this next part. The Empiricist goes out on one-year long survey missions, and we've only been out of dock for six months so far. That mission has just been given a six-month extension, meaning we have another year out from Sol at minimum. Any member of Survey who wishes to return to Sol now however, will be able to return aboard the Light of Ages."
With that, Ivy clasped her hands together and took her seat, watching things play out.
"We figured out the interval on the Kiwawentoa warning message last night, and it's three years," Kestral said for the benefit of anyone who missed their informal drinking session, "A whole year out of that time, possibly the last…" ey tripped over eir words, not wanting to come off as despairing.
"I became a Pragmatist to deal with the hardest problems facing the human race, and I joined Survey to see the universe and poke it with a stick, I'm perfectly content to stay aboard," Cale said, seeming much more chipper than he had last night.
A serious look passed between the two Pragmatists and Vedika turned to Ivy, "I'd like to stay on as well. Cale's right, we're out here on the edge to keep these from being humanity's last few years."
Kestral sighed, "I'm in, for science and such."
Ivy patted the androgyne on eir back, "Does anyone actually want to leave?"
Mathias stood up, pursing his lips, "I'm an old man, I'm overdue for anti-senesic therapy, and I'd like to see Mars again before everything starts going to hell."
"Margaret?" Ivy singled out the linguist, but the blonde haired woman simply shrugged.
"I'm not overdue for my anti-senesics, and I can't very well talk to aliens on Mars now can I?" she asked, smiling.
"No," Ivy met her smile, "I suppose you can't."
"What about you Ivy, you're part of Survey, don't you have a wife?" Cale asked her.
"She knows the work we're doing is important," Ivy shrugged, "It's like you said Vedika, we're out here on the edge, to make sure the humanity we return to has a future."
"I just hope we succeed," Kestral said softly.
"Yeah," Ivy replied, "Me too."
Δ
In the end, twelve members of the original crew on the Empiricist decided to return to Mars with the fleet instead of journeying onward with them to Ross 154. Mathias was the only member of the senior staff to go, and was replaced by a thin lanky androgyne named Orel Shaw. Ey seemed like a good human to Cale, if not a bit rough around the edges. Something about engineers just made them seem more abrasive than was strictly speaking required.
Jean's replacement would meet up with them at Ross 154, and Vedika was temporarily bumped to Acting XO. Because she was acting as the XO, she was not allowed to also act as the senior pragmatist and Cale had his position back for the moment. In the long term, who knew? Despite their roll in the seat cushions, Cale's emotions still fluctuated wildly when it came to the orange eyed woman. He wasn't sure whether he hated her or was deeply attracted to her or some incredibly unhealthy combination of the two. There was just too much happening too quickly to get a good emotional read on things; before his mind could fully process one event, two more crazy things had already happened and it left Cale's analytical parts screaming incoherently.
After the Third Fleet departed for Sol, and the Empiricist for Ross 154, Cale shut himself into the ship's machine shop. He began laying out tools and equipment on the wide metal work table. There was a trancelike mantra to the way he performed this process, a deep-seated part of his Pragmatist training with the Inventariat Faction of the Pragmatist's Guild. Each tool he removed and placed in its specific location triggered the next step in the mnemonic, unspooling the memory from his head and instilling its powerful sense of calm along with it.
Once his head was clear, he brought up the incredibly complex diagrams and blueprints the Kiwawentoa had provided on their hyperdrive, sprawling them across the table on dozens of holographic displays.
The design itself was fairly simple, with a central portal generator and a sort of spooling strung out to define the perimeter of a three-dimensional gateway into hyperspace. The math for it all seemed to work out, it would just take an obscene amount of exotic matter to make a portal of an appreciable diameter. In terms of exotic matter usage, the Hyperdrive was far less efficient than the warp drive. Not only that but since hyperspace was a place itself, traversing it required expending fuel, whereas there was no fuel cost associated with warping beyond what it took to match orbital velocities upon exiting the warp tunnel.
It was a wildly inefficient process that only seemed reasonable from the alien's perspective. Hyperspace was apparently full of exotic matter, to the point where using up enormous quantities of it was not considered a big deal. Add in the Kiwawentoa's apparently reactionless drives, and it started to make some sense.
There was definitely a lot that could be learned by coming to an understanding of Kiwawentoa technology, possibly even marrying together the technologies of the two races to make some sort of hyper-warp-drive.
Cale cut the instructions for the hyperdrive into sections that the machine shop printer could replicate. There didn't seem to be any particular scaling limits on the technology beyond what was required to move larger objects, and Cale's plan involved creating a portal with a diameter of less than a meter, just large enough to stick some cameras and sensors through. Doing so would still take what he was sure Ivy would term an unreasonable amount of exotic matter, but it was For Science after all.
He closed his eyes, took a breath, and emptied his mind, silencing the storm of emotions as his heartbeat slowed to a crawl. He opened his eyes slowly, and nearly jumped out of his shoes when he saw that Vedika had materialized across the table from him.
"Do you mind?" he asked irritably, gesturing her towards the door with a wrench.
She leaned on the table and summoned the holographic screens toward herself with her implants, turning them around to look through the various blueprints and diagrams, "Garage project?" She asked him.
"Yeah, something like that," Cale said, stealing the screens back with hand gestures, "but I'm just doing it to clear my head, so if you don't mind, can you please leave me be?"
"I'd like to help," she said softly.
"You're Improvisariat," he scoffed, "I don't really want your help right now."
"I won't talk or distract you," she offered.
"Alright," he relented with a sigh and shoved a set of diagrams at her, "Print those out and figure out how to connect them together."
Vedika nodded and quietly went to work on assembling the components. She wordlessly handed him his printer jobs as they completed, and averted her eyes whenever he noticed her studying him. Together, the pair slowly began assembling the beginnings of the first human hyperspace window generator.
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Chapter 17: Stranger in a Strange Land
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 17: Stranger in a Strange Land
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
April 2219
Jean Paoloni's awareness returned suddenly, her semi-conscious mind suddenly acutely aware of the brightness behind her eyelids and her urgent need to urinate. She opened her eyes to discover she was sitting on the bottom of her little bubble of air. At some point while she'd rested, she ship had gradually begun accelerating, gently pressing her into the floor.
She stood and found her joints painfully stiff, the gravity was slightly higher than a gee, and it felt excruciatingly heavy after days in freefall aboard the Lifeseeker. Her bladder clenched painfully as she stood and reminded her of her need to pee. There was nowhere to go, of course, nothing that resembled a bathroom or even a vent, and she desperately did not want to share the small space with her bodily excretions. In the end, she couldn't hold it in any longer and found to her amazement that the stream completely vanished upon hitting the pale orange surface of her cell, absorbed instantly and completely.
Jean pawed the spot on the floor with her foot in confusion, it was completely dry. She shrugged and sat down to meditate. On the bright side, she was alive, she could breathe the air, she hadn't been subjected to unsurvivable accelerations, and she wasn't sitting in a puddle of her own urine. On the less bright side, she'd had nothing to eat or drink in over a day, and thus far been kept in total isolation. Even if they didn't let her die, it wasn't a pleasant environment.
She sat down with a sigh and tried to meditate, focusing her mind only on her breathing. The clouds in her head slowly began to clear as she accepted the reality of the situation. Whatever it was the kiwawentoa were doing with her, it was clear they were taking their time about it. She closed her eyes and steadied her heart.
Jean opened a door in her mind and began constructing a new world for herself behind her eyes: a place her mind could escape to. She envisioned a long transparent spaceship corridors, laced through with metal conduits and support struts stretching out from behind a red painted wooden door in the darkness. She stepped through the door into her mental palace and began assembling a private new home for herself in the back of her mind. She clicked each segment of the station together like lego pieces, taking pains to carefully visualize the details of each one and commit them to memory before attaching it to the larger structure. All the segments were mostly glass, filled with plants and sunlight, and looking down on a blue world.
She was shocked suddenly from her meditative trance as water flowed into the cell around her. The walls of the chamber had taken on a soft spongy texture and water was running out of them, pooling and swirling at her feet.
"What the hell?" She said to the room's silent controllers, the water level in the chamber continued to grow, rising slowly past her ankles. It wasn't cold or warm, it felt rather close to body temperature. Jean groaned and sat back down in the slowly flooding cell. She drank some of the water and found it had little taste. Her dry lips greedily swallowed it down and she breathed a sigh of relief. At least she wouldn't be dying of dehydration.
Water continued to flow into the room until the spherical space had half filled itself, leaving Jean floating in the center. She sighed and laid floating on her back, stretching her arms and legs out as much as she could and closed her eyes once more, resuming the slow process of detailing out her mindscape.
Jean knew that she couldn't forever outrun the forces of madness brought on by prolonged social isolation, but she'd make those monsters work if they wanted to claim her. She knew she wasn't immune to them, no one was, if the kiwawentoa never released her, she would slowly go insane in her spherical little prison, even if they did feed and water her appropriately.
The hours continued to tick by slowly. With no way to measure time beyond her own circadian rhythms, Jean was left guessing as to how long she'd been confined. She didn't think it had been more than two days at that point, so she remained hopeful she wouldn't be confined for that long. But each hour of her confinement that nothing happened, a little bit of that hope was eroded away. She was fine now, she'd be fine in the cell for possibly months if that was how long it took for the aliens to decide what to do with her, but she had no idea as to the duration of her incarceration and thus took every precaution she could where her mental health was concerned. Better to do it now and not need it, then wait until she was already starting to go crazy.
After what Jean estimated to be around four hours, the water in her chamber began draining away, and she was deposited onto the floor. The walls had regained their hardness and water absorption properties and the space was quickly dry once again. After the water drained out, Jean didn't even bother to move from the position she'd been floating in, she just sighed and went back to her meditation.
She fell asleep eventually, awoke, and went through another cycle of her pod flooding and emptying out again several hours later. Jean was never quite sure of the time durations involved since the lighting in the cell never varied, and she had no way to measure or denote the passage of time. One day seemed to crawl slowly and inexorably into the next with no delineations between them beyond when Jean slept. Her stomach was getting awfully empty though. The pains associated with hunger had since departed, leaving behind a low-level ache that probably signified the deaths of millions of bacteria in her gut as their food supplies ran out.
Having water helped, and after the first day, Jean always made sure to fill her stomach up on water at the very least, to keep hydrated and reduce that dull ache to a manageable level. She would need food eventually, but she could last another few days.
Jean counted five days, by the flooding of her chamber, before something happened. She was floating on the surface of the water, arms and legs spread, staring up at the dripping coral colored ceiling overhead. Then, suddenly and without warning, she was falling. The bottom of her room seemed to give out, and she and all the water were falling into a deep though still well-lit shaft the width of her room. Coral colored walls blurred past as the pool of water turned into millions of little freefalling blobs and droplets all around her.
The end of the tunnel came rushing up at her, and she came to a stop relative to the floor as a huge gust of wind caught and held her aloft. The chamber she had fallen into was larger and had some interesting looking devices involved in pushing air around, but before she had the chance to examine them closely, the entire chamber contracted in size and she was shot horizontally down another tunnel like she had been fired from a cannon. The airflow sucked her down the length of the tube, keeping her clear of the walls as she was raced along somewhere. The tube curved and went through several more 'junctions' as Jean saw them, before ejecting her out the side of a fake mountain and sending her cartwheeling into a small lake.
"You've got to be kidding me," she groaned. The creatures had dumped her into the equivalent of a nature preserve. More startlingly, it appeared the plants filling the environment were all Earthlife. The kiwawentoa had claimed to have visited the Earth before, but the fact they had such a large space already prepared was impressive. Just doing some quick mental math, Jean figured close to a billion people could potentially fit into a city built on the valley floor.
She trudged off down the rocky incline, following the path of a small stream as it flowed out of the lake and meandered down the valley wall. The rocky slope gave way to a thick pine forest, and the ravine carved by the stream grew steep-sided as it cut through the soft earth.
As the pine forest gave way to deciduous trees further down the slope, Jean was coming to appreciate the scope of the engineering she was witnessing all around her. She was on a ship that experienced periods of acceleration and freefall. Either the kiwawentoa were operating with some form of artificial gravity and internal dampening, not altogether unreasonable to suppose given the scope of some of their other technology, or the entire chamber she was in was carefully spun up and spun down via some enormous gearbox and balancing systems. Zero gravity would wreak havoc on a delicate ecosystem, and if it was just spinning, then the acceleration would have thrown everything off, so some sort of mechanism to mitigate that had to be at work, though it was difficult to fathom how such a thing might operate.
Jean's feet sank into the soft loam of the forest and small insects buzzed around her head. She saw squirrels darting up and down trees, and signs of other creatures like deer and rabbit tracks. The environment she'd been placed into was filled with earthlife, both flora and fauna, which was a fairly impressive feat, the kiwawentoa had clearly been planning the evacuation of Earth for a long time.
The deciduous forest opened up into a low basin filled with another lake. Trees edged right up to the shore, their branches dipping into the water's edge. There was no sign of any structures, buildings, or people of the human or alien variety. She seemed to be alone in a vast wilderness. Jean was a native Martian. She'd grown up aboard the Alamanth Orbital and the closest she'd ever come to the wild was her military surface survival training from her years in the Martian Navy before switching over to Survey. All of that training had taken place aboard the Caligula Orbital, which contained all the sprawling military compounds required for the various branches boot camps, as well as a vast wilderness area for training in Earthlike conditions.
She had gear with her in those situations though, full military packs and equipment, she was never literally dropped naked into the woods, and that did not sit well with her. She wasn't sure what the kiwawentoa expected her to do trapped in there beyond try to survive, but maybe that was the point.
She continued her exploration of the environment, wandering down the shore of the lake, watching as fish jumped in the glinting fake sunlight. The environment infuriated her on some deep level, she hated the idea of being a lab rat, which is what the aliens were essentially doing with her.
Unfortunately, she had to play along for a time, the sun was starting to set, and Jean was still alone and naked in the wilderness, and the fact that the wilderness happened to be inside a massive alien spaceship didn't change the fact that she had to focus on surviving that environment.
And so, she kept walking, pacing out the perimeter of the lake, until she stumbled into a thorny bush covered in berries. She gasped in pain and stumbled backwards onto her butt as the thorns dug into her skin, but her eyes immediately went to the berries. She had no idea if they were poisonous or not, but her stomach was rumbling threateningly and she wasn't up to attempting to hunt anything yet. She supposed she'd need to do that eventually, but if she could stave off starvation for a for more days, it'd give her time to prepare herself at least.
She plucked one berry off the bush, popped it into her mouth, and chewed it slowly, tasting for bitterness that might indicate toxicity. When she found none, she swallowed it down and settled on the shore of the lake to wait. She gave the lone berry a few hours to pass through her empty stomach, waiting to see if it gave her some sort of painful cramps or digestive trouble, and when that didn't happen, she returned to the bush and carefully extracted and ate each and every ripe or even mostly ripe fruit from the bush. By the end of the process, she was cut up to the point where it looked as if she'd gotten into a fight with a bundle of razor wire, but her stomach was a little less empty and she felt a little more hopeful.
The sun fell behind the mountaintops and the sky began shifting through all the various colors of the sunset, darkness spread across the sky like a deep purple bruise, encircling the retreating sunlight and driving it back. Stars began to twinkle in the night sky as darkness set in fully. The night brought freezing temperatures that left Jean huddled in a miserable ball, clinging to her arms and legs for warmth. She had no material with her to start a fire, but shelter and fire were definitely going to be immediate priorities.
At some point in the night, she dozed off, passing into a fitful and restless sleep.
The image of her trying to hunt something with a spear while buck naked crawled through her mind and had her cracking up laughing.
"I am so screwed," she said aloud with a laugh. Her voice sounded strange in the wilds, she hadn't used it since she first arrived. She sighed and silently continued exploring the area around where she'd slept. She drank from a small rocky stream that flowed down towards the water through a deep ravine and searched the riverbed until she found a handful of relatively sharp stones to work with. She wasn't sure what exactly she was going to do with them. Try to chop down a tree? Sharpen sticks?
Nevertheless, she gathered as many as she could carry and walked back towards the place she slept her first night. She figured she should probably search around for a potentially better spot to camp out and found a place where three trees had fallen against each other, overlooking another small stream. It seemed like a natural place to try and construct a shelter. After depositing her handfuls of potential knife blades, she wandered around the forest breaking branches off of pine trees. She thought the fanlike branches would work well as the underlying structure for a roof.
After gathering an armful of branches, she draped them over the fallen logs and each other to make a low covered area. She cleared all the debris off the forest floor beneath the branches, and moved her rocks there as well. It wasn't much, but it was a start.
She next piled dry leaves and more pine branches onto the roof structure, layering them together in a way that she hoped would be waterproof, as she had a sneaking suspicion that the kiwawentoa had built weather into the environment. She didn't want to get caught in a rainstorm in the night and die of hypothermia or something like that.
Once she had sufficiently built up her hut, draping branches over it to her satisfaction, she sat down in her hut and started trying to sharpen one end of a pine bough. It was easy enough to break all the branches away until she was left with a relatively straight piece of wood, but her attempts to sharpen the end of it were not going well. The stones she had were just not sharp enough themselves, to bite into the wood. She kept at it and managed to somewhat sharpen one branch, though it was a far cry from a usable spear.
She finally gave up for the moment in frustration and wandered off to look for more berry bushes. She hugged the lake shore, using it as a landmark to avoid getting lost, which meant threading up and down every ravine and gully along the shoreline, backtracking and retracing her steps to avoid hidden obstacles in the terrain.
She found a bush containing berries of the same type she'd eaten before, and stripped it clean. It was either good luck on her part or good planning on the kiwawentoa's part that the berries were in season when they'd dropped her in there. That left her to wonder if it was intentional, how many chambers like this one were contained within the alien ship?
She speculated on the nature of her captors as she wandered back towards her campsite. They said they were collecting refugees, and if they knew about humanity before, then it stood to reason they had a good heads up on any species they'd be collecting. The piece of machinery Jean was trapped inside of could have been built hundreds of years ago.
Jean collected reeds and tall grasses from along the shore of the lake as she went, formulating a plan to braid them together into some sort of twine.
She drank water from the stream, and reentered her campsite. The sun was beginning to dip low in the sky again, and she set out on the ground before her hut, intent on starting a fire. She had found likely candidates for firewood while she was building her hut, and stacked them nearby for use later. She understood how to start a fire without a fuel source, and had even done it herself during survival training, but she still wasn't particularly optimistic about her chances.
To start, she carved a divot into a large dry piece of wood with one of her stones, and filled the area around it with fine wood shavings. She piled various sizes of kindling within easy reach and set herself to the task ahead. She took a large dry branch and broke off a piece roughly twice the size of a pencil. She set the piece into the groove and began furiously rubbing her hands together, pressing the wood down in an attempt to build up friction between the two pieces.
The process seemed to take hours, but after what felt to Jean like an inordinate amount of effort, a faint wisp of smoke began curling out from between the two pieces of wood. Jean kept working at it, and finally, a small flame began spreading through the wood shavings. She carefully began to add kindling, stocking the fire gently and carefully urging it into existence. She piled on more wood as it grew, and before long the campfire was merrily snapping and popping away in the fading light.
Jean sighed, collapsing back into her butt and wiping the sweat from her forehead. The process was effortful, but the effect was worth it. The radiant heat from the fire felt good on her skin in the cooling air, and the light seemed to drive back the darkness plaguing the back of Jean's head. The fire was a sign of light, progress, civilization. It defiantly cast back the gloom of night, sending long flickering rays of light across the lake and into the depths of the forest.
Content in her accomplishments for the day, Jean curled up in her shelter beneath a pile of leaves and slept.
The birds were new, she realized. Not being from Earth, the absence of birds within the environment hadn't been something she'd remarked on, but now that she thought about it, there hadn't been any birds at all up to this point. The sudden presence of bird noises in the environment jogged Jean the rest of the way awake and she jumped out of her hut, eyes darting to and fro. Either the Kiwawentoa had just released birds into the environment, which Jean found unlikely, or they had entered themselves, and she was hearing them talk to each other.
She wandered toward the source of the sound, stretching her muscles as she walked through the cool morning air. She crept slowly up on the source of the noise. It wasn't hard to pinpoint where the birdsong was coming from, which Jean took as further evidence that it was, in fact, the Kiwawentoa and not actual birds.
The two creatures were not particularly subtle in their dark blue robes, they stood out in the forest environment like a sore thumb. Jean realized with a start that one of the creatures was Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, the hyperactive creature she had met in the Meetingspace.
Her partner was not a creature Jean recognized, its feathers were a mottled mixture of blue and white, and wore navy colored robes like Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, but with white trim instead of orange. She was puzzled by the fact they didn't seem to need air masks or helmets to breathe her air, yet she needed one to breathe their air. If it was just a quirk of biology then it seemed like a rather unfair one to her.
Jean nervously stepped out from behind a tree and presented herself to the two aliens. They trilled excitedly to one another and Studying-Hoping-Envisioning waved her forearms excitedly, bouncing on her lower legs. She reached under herself where she had a pack of some sort hanging from her legs, and held it out eagerly to Jean.
Jean looked warily at the two aliens, then took the strange bag from them. Inside it were her clothes, her spacesuit, and a good deal of her equipment. She smiled appreciatively at the little creature. Studying-Hoping-Envisioning continued to gesture somewhat urgently at the bag, so Jean began going through the items in it until she found the earpiece that translated their speech, and held it up before her. The calico alien did a fairly decent approximation of a human nod, and Jean strapped the device to her ear with a shrug. She didn't expect it to work without the larger computers backended into it.
"Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni!" A translated female voice said through the earpiece excitedly, Jean looked at the creature and smiled again, evidently, they had created their own translation backend to talk to Jean with.
"Hello Studying-Hoping-Envisioning," Jean said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"We are so glad to have found you Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," she chirped back excitedly, "We have much to discuss, and little time."
"How about we start with why you've imprisoned me and brought me to this place," she gestured to the wilderness around her, "against my will."
"We did not wish to see this happen," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning replied sadly, "It was a decision of the High Singer of Fates, Xi has classified your species as violent and warlike, which requires containing you in an isolated environment where you cannot harm the other species in our charge."
"Are you breaking the rules to give me back my things then?" Jean asked.
"It's complicated," she replied, "The ancestors don't like it, but we continue without being stopped so far."
Jean nodded and picked up the bag, "So you're just going to leave me in here to fend for myself?" she asked seriously.
"We're leaving you in here with the tools to leave this place," the little alien said cryptically pointing a limb at the bag again.
"Is this some sort of test?" Jean asked.
The other creature, who had been silent thus far, spoke, finally spoke up, "Yes," she said, "It is a test."
"We will speak again soon, Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning said, "Until then, keep your things safe, and look for the hidden doorways."
Before Jean had a chance to ask for elaboration on their thoroughly cryptic statements, the two creatures had pushed hard off the ground and went soaring into the air, leaving Jean alone in the forest once more.
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
Circular Orbit
50 AUs from Gamma Tauri
May 2219
Better Margins was not much to look at. It was a blunt-nosed, four hundred meter long sausage wrapped in coils of fuel tanks and warp rings, itself nestled in an elaborate truss structure that gave the overall vessel a distinctly skeletal look.
At the end of her twenty-day journey, the exploration vessel fell back into spacetime at the edge of Gamma Tauri. Her thrusters fired as she rotated herself in space, spinning and flipping her orientation towards the core of the system.
"I've connected with the Jabberwocky's satellite network," Zhao Biyu announced to the rest of the bridge crew.
"What's the story, aliens? No aliens?" Benjamin Nesco asked impatiently from the captain's chair. He'd been waiting nervously for their warp exit for days, fretting over the fates of the other mining ships.
"I'm checking the logs on the closest satellite," Biyu reported back calmly, "the most recent file is labeled viewme," She paused, "that's weird, it's registered as having come from the Stoneburner."
"Put it put on the main screen and play it," the captain instructed.
She nodded and hit play on the file, captain Kaito Pendragon's serious face appeared on the screen, lips pursed into a frown.
"If you are receiving this, it means our satellites have survived for some time," he reported first, "If you've come looking for us or the Jabberwocky, you won't find her, we've already left to return to Aldebaran. The full logs of our encounter with the aliens, and yes, I said aliens, have been uploaded to the satellite network. They were all instructed to accelerate out of system until their fuel supplies ran out. We have no idea what the ultimate extent of the alien mining operations in this system are, but we detected activity at every planet in the system prior to our departure for Aldebaran."
"You have no idea Kaito," Ben murmured in a pause between the other captain's sentences.
"The satellites are all set to record, so there should be a complete record of everything the aliens do, provided they don't destroy the satellites," Kaito continued, "pick up those logs before you leave."
The message ended, and the screen automatically reset to its display of the starfield.
"Biyu, what are the aliens doing right now?" Ben asked the Ganymedean woman.
She flipped through tabs on her display, and focused the ship's telescopes inward. The view on the big monitor began zooming in and in and in, stars falling away out of focus as Gamma Tauri bloomed brighter and brighter. The actions of the alien miners were immediately apparent by the astronomically large blades sweeping through the system, scooping up asteroids, comets and planetoids.
"It's a good thing they ordered their satellites to burn out of the system, or we wouldn't have a surviving record," Melissa said softly.
"Download it all," Benjamin ordered her, "Pull everything from the satellites, we'll take over the monitoring of the rest of their mining operations, see if they take this star too."
Benjamin unbuckled from his chair, letting himself drift upwards as he straightened his body out, "Melissa, come with me, let's check out their logs." He pushed off his chair, drifting gently across the bridge toward the conference room, beckoning for his XO to follow. She nodded, unbuckling from her chair and slipping into his wake as he passed through the doorway. She shut the door and strapped herself into one of the conference room chairs to keep from floating off.
Benjamin scrolled through the list of automatically generated log folders where each day's instrument recordings and logs for each satellite were recorded, found one dated three months ago, and hit play. The system at that time was calm, there was yet to be a sign of the coming aliens. He closed it and skipped forward a month, using a binary search to narrow down the timeframe for the alien's arrival, and quickly found it. He moved it from the holoscreen in front of him to the main monitor, stretched out his legs, and hit play.
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
April 2219
Jean Paoloni's awareness returned suddenly, her semi-conscious mind suddenly acutely aware of the brightness behind her eyelids and her urgent need to urinate. She opened her eyes to discover she was sitting on the bottom of her little bubble of air. At some point while she'd rested, she ship had gradually begun accelerating, gently pressing her into the floor.
She stood and found her joints painfully stiff, the gravity was slightly higher than a gee, and it felt excruciatingly heavy after days in freefall aboard the Lifeseeker. Her bladder clenched painfully as she stood and reminded her of her need to pee. There was nowhere to go, of course, nothing that resembled a bathroom or even a vent, and she desperately did not want to share the small space with her bodily excretions. In the end, she couldn't hold it in any longer and found to her amazement that the stream completely vanished upon hitting the pale orange surface of her cell, absorbed instantly and completely.
Jean pawed the spot on the floor with her foot in confusion, it was completely dry. She shrugged and sat down to meditate. On the bright side, she was alive, she could breathe the air, she hadn't been subjected to unsurvivable accelerations, and she wasn't sitting in a puddle of her own urine. On the less bright side, she'd had nothing to eat or drink in over a day, and thus far been kept in total isolation. Even if they didn't let her die, it wasn't a pleasant environment.
She sat down with a sigh and tried to meditate, focusing her mind only on her breathing. The clouds in her head slowly began to clear as she accepted the reality of the situation. Whatever it was the kiwawentoa were doing with her, it was clear they were taking their time about it. She closed her eyes and steadied her heart.
Jean opened a door in her mind and began constructing a new world for herself behind her eyes: a place her mind could escape to. She envisioned a long transparent spaceship corridors, laced through with metal conduits and support struts stretching out from behind a red painted wooden door in the darkness. She stepped through the door into her mental palace and began assembling a private new home for herself in the back of her mind. She clicked each segment of the station together like lego pieces, taking pains to carefully visualize the details of each one and commit them to memory before attaching it to the larger structure. All the segments were mostly glass, filled with plants and sunlight, and looking down on a blue world.
She was shocked suddenly from her meditative trance as water flowed into the cell around her. The walls of the chamber had taken on a soft spongy texture and water was running out of them, pooling and swirling at her feet.
"What the hell?" She said to the room's silent controllers, the water level in the chamber continued to grow, rising slowly past her ankles. It wasn't cold or warm, it felt rather close to body temperature. Jean groaned and sat back down in the slowly flooding cell. She drank some of the water and found it had little taste. Her dry lips greedily swallowed it down and she breathed a sigh of relief. At least she wouldn't be dying of dehydration.
Water continued to flow into the room until the spherical space had half filled itself, leaving Jean floating in the center. She sighed and laid floating on her back, stretching her arms and legs out as much as she could and closed her eyes once more, resuming the slow process of detailing out her mindscape.
Jean knew that she couldn't forever outrun the forces of madness brought on by prolonged social isolation, but she'd make those monsters work if they wanted to claim her. She knew she wasn't immune to them, no one was, if the kiwawentoa never released her, she would slowly go insane in her spherical little prison, even if they did feed and water her appropriately.
The hours continued to tick by slowly. With no way to measure time beyond her own circadian rhythms, Jean was left guessing as to how long she'd been confined. She didn't think it had been more than two days at that point, so she remained hopeful she wouldn't be confined for that long. But each hour of her confinement that nothing happened, a little bit of that hope was eroded away. She was fine now, she'd be fine in the cell for possibly months if that was how long it took for the aliens to decide what to do with her, but she had no idea as to the duration of her incarceration and thus took every precaution she could where her mental health was concerned. Better to do it now and not need it, then wait until she was already starting to go crazy.
After what Jean estimated to be around four hours, the water in her chamber began draining away, and she was deposited onto the floor. The walls had regained their hardness and water absorption properties and the space was quickly dry once again. After the water drained out, Jean didn't even bother to move from the position she'd been floating in, she just sighed and went back to her meditation.
She fell asleep eventually, awoke, and went through another cycle of her pod flooding and emptying out again several hours later. Jean was never quite sure of the time durations involved since the lighting in the cell never varied, and she had no way to measure or denote the passage of time. One day seemed to crawl slowly and inexorably into the next with no delineations between them beyond when Jean slept. Her stomach was getting awfully empty though. The pains associated with hunger had since departed, leaving behind a low-level ache that probably signified the deaths of millions of bacteria in her gut as their food supplies ran out.
Having water helped, and after the first day, Jean always made sure to fill her stomach up on water at the very least, to keep hydrated and reduce that dull ache to a manageable level. She would need food eventually, but she could last another few days.
Jean counted five days, by the flooding of her chamber, before something happened. She was floating on the surface of the water, arms and legs spread, staring up at the dripping coral colored ceiling overhead. Then, suddenly and without warning, she was falling. The bottom of her room seemed to give out, and she and all the water were falling into a deep though still well-lit shaft the width of her room. Coral colored walls blurred past as the pool of water turned into millions of little freefalling blobs and droplets all around her.
The end of the tunnel came rushing up at her, and she came to a stop relative to the floor as a huge gust of wind caught and held her aloft. The chamber she had fallen into was larger and had some interesting looking devices involved in pushing air around, but before she had the chance to examine them closely, the entire chamber contracted in size and she was shot horizontally down another tunnel like she had been fired from a cannon. The airflow sucked her down the length of the tube, keeping her clear of the walls as she was raced along somewhere. The tube curved and went through several more 'junctions' as Jean saw them, before ejecting her out the side of a fake mountain and sending her cartwheeling into a small lake.
Δ
Jean rose to the surface sputtering and coughing up water as she crawled onto a rocky boulder strewn shore. Looking out from the lake, a vast bowl-shaped valley spread out beneath her, dotted with lakes and forests, ringed by impassable mountains that flowed upward into what appeared to be blue skies.
"You've got to be kidding me," she groaned. The creatures had dumped her into the equivalent of a nature preserve. More startlingly, it appeared the plants filling the environment were all Earthlife. The kiwawentoa had claimed to have visited the Earth before, but the fact they had such a large space already prepared was impressive. Just doing some quick mental math, Jean figured close to a billion people could potentially fit into a city built on the valley floor.
She trudged off down the rocky incline, following the path of a small stream as it flowed out of the lake and meandered down the valley wall. The rocky slope gave way to a thick pine forest, and the ravine carved by the stream grew steep-sided as it cut through the soft earth.
As the pine forest gave way to deciduous trees further down the slope, Jean was coming to appreciate the scope of the engineering she was witnessing all around her. She was on a ship that experienced periods of acceleration and freefall. Either the kiwawentoa were operating with some form of artificial gravity and internal dampening, not altogether unreasonable to suppose given the scope of some of their other technology, or the entire chamber she was in was carefully spun up and spun down via some enormous gearbox and balancing systems. Zero gravity would wreak havoc on a delicate ecosystem, and if it was just spinning, then the acceleration would have thrown everything off, so some sort of mechanism to mitigate that had to be at work, though it was difficult to fathom how such a thing might operate.
Jean's feet sank into the soft loam of the forest and small insects buzzed around her head. She saw squirrels darting up and down trees, and signs of other creatures like deer and rabbit tracks. The environment she'd been placed into was filled with earthlife, both flora and fauna, which was a fairly impressive feat, the kiwawentoa had clearly been planning the evacuation of Earth for a long time.
The deciduous forest opened up into a low basin filled with another lake. Trees edged right up to the shore, their branches dipping into the water's edge. There was no sign of any structures, buildings, or people of the human or alien variety. She seemed to be alone in a vast wilderness. Jean was a native Martian. She'd grown up aboard the Alamanth Orbital and the closest she'd ever come to the wild was her military surface survival training from her years in the Martian Navy before switching over to Survey. All of that training had taken place aboard the Caligula Orbital, which contained all the sprawling military compounds required for the various branches boot camps, as well as a vast wilderness area for training in Earthlike conditions.
She had gear with her in those situations though, full military packs and equipment, she was never literally dropped naked into the woods, and that did not sit well with her. She wasn't sure what the kiwawentoa expected her to do trapped in there beyond try to survive, but maybe that was the point.
She continued her exploration of the environment, wandering down the shore of the lake, watching as fish jumped in the glinting fake sunlight. The environment infuriated her on some deep level, she hated the idea of being a lab rat, which is what the aliens were essentially doing with her.
Unfortunately, she had to play along for a time, the sun was starting to set, and Jean was still alone and naked in the wilderness, and the fact that the wilderness happened to be inside a massive alien spaceship didn't change the fact that she had to focus on surviving that environment.
And so, she kept walking, pacing out the perimeter of the lake, until she stumbled into a thorny bush covered in berries. She gasped in pain and stumbled backwards onto her butt as the thorns dug into her skin, but her eyes immediately went to the berries. She had no idea if they were poisonous or not, but her stomach was rumbling threateningly and she wasn't up to attempting to hunt anything yet. She supposed she'd need to do that eventually, but if she could stave off starvation for a for more days, it'd give her time to prepare herself at least.
She plucked one berry off the bush, popped it into her mouth, and chewed it slowly, tasting for bitterness that might indicate toxicity. When she found none, she swallowed it down and settled on the shore of the lake to wait. She gave the lone berry a few hours to pass through her empty stomach, waiting to see if it gave her some sort of painful cramps or digestive trouble, and when that didn't happen, she returned to the bush and carefully extracted and ate each and every ripe or even mostly ripe fruit from the bush. By the end of the process, she was cut up to the point where it looked as if she'd gotten into a fight with a bundle of razor wire, but her stomach was a little less empty and she felt a little more hopeful.
The sun fell behind the mountaintops and the sky began shifting through all the various colors of the sunset, darkness spread across the sky like a deep purple bruise, encircling the retreating sunlight and driving it back. Stars began to twinkle in the night sky as darkness set in fully. The night brought freezing temperatures that left Jean huddled in a miserable ball, clinging to her arms and legs for warmth. She had no material with her to start a fire, but shelter and fire were definitely going to be immediate priorities.
At some point in the night, she dozed off, passing into a fitful and restless sleep.
Δ
Jean awoke stiff and lethargic. Her joints and muscles ached from a night on the cold ground, and her fingers and toes felt dangerously numb. She rubbed her hands together and rubbed her hands against her feet, working up some friction and trying to get her blood flowing. The air was still chill in the gathering morning light, and Jean set off into the woods at a light jog, trying to work up enough body heat to be comfortable in the cool weather. She really needed clothes, but she really needed a lot of things. She needed to be able to hunt and trap things, which meant she needed to somehow fashion to tools to make those things. Principally that meant knives, axes, and string. If she could create a sharp enough edge, she could use that to sharpen sticks into spears.
The image of her trying to hunt something with a spear while buck naked crawled through her mind and had her cracking up laughing.
"I am so screwed," she said aloud with a laugh. Her voice sounded strange in the wilds, she hadn't used it since she first arrived. She sighed and silently continued exploring the area around where she'd slept. She drank from a small rocky stream that flowed down towards the water through a deep ravine and searched the riverbed until she found a handful of relatively sharp stones to work with. She wasn't sure what exactly she was going to do with them. Try to chop down a tree? Sharpen sticks?
Nevertheless, she gathered as many as she could carry and walked back towards the place she slept her first night. She figured she should probably search around for a potentially better spot to camp out and found a place where three trees had fallen against each other, overlooking another small stream. It seemed like a natural place to try and construct a shelter. After depositing her handfuls of potential knife blades, she wandered around the forest breaking branches off of pine trees. She thought the fanlike branches would work well as the underlying structure for a roof.
After gathering an armful of branches, she draped them over the fallen logs and each other to make a low covered area. She cleared all the debris off the forest floor beneath the branches, and moved her rocks there as well. It wasn't much, but it was a start.
She next piled dry leaves and more pine branches onto the roof structure, layering them together in a way that she hoped would be waterproof, as she had a sneaking suspicion that the kiwawentoa had built weather into the environment. She didn't want to get caught in a rainstorm in the night and die of hypothermia or something like that.
Once she had sufficiently built up her hut, draping branches over it to her satisfaction, she sat down in her hut and started trying to sharpen one end of a pine bough. It was easy enough to break all the branches away until she was left with a relatively straight piece of wood, but her attempts to sharpen the end of it were not going well. The stones she had were just not sharp enough themselves, to bite into the wood. She kept at it and managed to somewhat sharpen one branch, though it was a far cry from a usable spear.
She finally gave up for the moment in frustration and wandered off to look for more berry bushes. She hugged the lake shore, using it as a landmark to avoid getting lost, which meant threading up and down every ravine and gully along the shoreline, backtracking and retracing her steps to avoid hidden obstacles in the terrain.
She found a bush containing berries of the same type she'd eaten before, and stripped it clean. It was either good luck on her part or good planning on the kiwawentoa's part that the berries were in season when they'd dropped her in there. That left her to wonder if it was intentional, how many chambers like this one were contained within the alien ship?
She speculated on the nature of her captors as she wandered back towards her campsite. They said they were collecting refugees, and if they knew about humanity before, then it stood to reason they had a good heads up on any species they'd be collecting. The piece of machinery Jean was trapped inside of could have been built hundreds of years ago.
Jean collected reeds and tall grasses from along the shore of the lake as she went, formulating a plan to braid them together into some sort of twine.
She drank water from the stream, and reentered her campsite. The sun was beginning to dip low in the sky again, and she set out on the ground before her hut, intent on starting a fire. She had found likely candidates for firewood while she was building her hut, and stacked them nearby for use later. She understood how to start a fire without a fuel source, and had even done it herself during survival training, but she still wasn't particularly optimistic about her chances.
To start, she carved a divot into a large dry piece of wood with one of her stones, and filled the area around it with fine wood shavings. She piled various sizes of kindling within easy reach and set herself to the task ahead. She took a large dry branch and broke off a piece roughly twice the size of a pencil. She set the piece into the groove and began furiously rubbing her hands together, pressing the wood down in an attempt to build up friction between the two pieces.
The process seemed to take hours, but after what felt to Jean like an inordinate amount of effort, a faint wisp of smoke began curling out from between the two pieces of wood. Jean kept working at it, and finally, a small flame began spreading through the wood shavings. She carefully began to add kindling, stocking the fire gently and carefully urging it into existence. She piled on more wood as it grew, and before long the campfire was merrily snapping and popping away in the fading light.
Jean sighed, collapsing back into her butt and wiping the sweat from her forehead. The process was effortful, but the effect was worth it. The radiant heat from the fire felt good on her skin in the cooling air, and the light seemed to drive back the darkness plaguing the back of Jean's head. The fire was a sign of light, progress, civilization. It defiantly cast back the gloom of night, sending long flickering rays of light across the lake and into the depths of the forest.
Content in her accomplishments for the day, Jean curled up in her shelter beneath a pile of leaves and slept.
Δ
Jean woke to the sound of birdsong. Her sleep addled mind found this significant but struggled to understand why as she slowly pushed back her drowsiness and brushed bits of leaf and debris off her skin.
The birds were new, she realized. Not being from Earth, the absence of birds within the environment hadn't been something she'd remarked on, but now that she thought about it, there hadn't been any birds at all up to this point. The sudden presence of bird noises in the environment jogged Jean the rest of the way awake and she jumped out of her hut, eyes darting to and fro. Either the Kiwawentoa had just released birds into the environment, which Jean found unlikely, or they had entered themselves, and she was hearing them talk to each other.
She wandered toward the source of the sound, stretching her muscles as she walked through the cool morning air. She crept slowly up on the source of the noise. It wasn't hard to pinpoint where the birdsong was coming from, which Jean took as further evidence that it was, in fact, the Kiwawentoa and not actual birds.
The two creatures were not particularly subtle in their dark blue robes, they stood out in the forest environment like a sore thumb. Jean realized with a start that one of the creatures was Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, the hyperactive creature she had met in the Meetingspace.
Her partner was not a creature Jean recognized, its feathers were a mottled mixture of blue and white, and wore navy colored robes like Studying-Hoping-Envisioning, but with white trim instead of orange. She was puzzled by the fact they didn't seem to need air masks or helmets to breathe her air, yet she needed one to breathe their air. If it was just a quirk of biology then it seemed like a rather unfair one to her.
Jean nervously stepped out from behind a tree and presented herself to the two aliens. They trilled excitedly to one another and Studying-Hoping-Envisioning waved her forearms excitedly, bouncing on her lower legs. She reached under herself where she had a pack of some sort hanging from her legs, and held it out eagerly to Jean.
Jean looked warily at the two aliens, then took the strange bag from them. Inside it were her clothes, her spacesuit, and a good deal of her equipment. She smiled appreciatively at the little creature. Studying-Hoping-Envisioning continued to gesture somewhat urgently at the bag, so Jean began going through the items in it until she found the earpiece that translated their speech, and held it up before her. The calico alien did a fairly decent approximation of a human nod, and Jean strapped the device to her ear with a shrug. She didn't expect it to work without the larger computers backended into it.
"Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni!" A translated female voice said through the earpiece excitedly, Jean looked at the creature and smiled again, evidently, they had created their own translation backend to talk to Jean with.
"Hello Studying-Hoping-Envisioning," Jean said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"We are so glad to have found you Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," she chirped back excitedly, "We have much to discuss, and little time."
"How about we start with why you've imprisoned me and brought me to this place," she gestured to the wilderness around her, "against my will."
"We did not wish to see this happen," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning replied sadly, "It was a decision of the High Singer of Fates, Xi has classified your species as violent and warlike, which requires containing you in an isolated environment where you cannot harm the other species in our charge."
"Are you breaking the rules to give me back my things then?" Jean asked.
"It's complicated," she replied, "The ancestors don't like it, but we continue without being stopped so far."
Jean nodded and picked up the bag, "So you're just going to leave me in here to fend for myself?" she asked seriously.
"We're leaving you in here with the tools to leave this place," the little alien said cryptically pointing a limb at the bag again.
"Is this some sort of test?" Jean asked.
The other creature, who had been silent thus far, spoke, finally spoke up, "Yes," she said, "It is a test."
"We will speak again soon, Sol-Martian-Jean-Paoloni," Studying-Hoping-Envisioning said, "Until then, keep your things safe, and look for the hidden doorways."
Before Jean had a chance to ask for elaboration on their thoroughly cryptic statements, the two creatures had pushed hard off the ground and went soaring into the air, leaving Jean alone in the forest once more.
Discovery Class Starship
FI-ESV Better Margins
Circular Orbit
50 AUs from Gamma Tauri
May 2219
Better Margins was not much to look at. It was a blunt-nosed, four hundred meter long sausage wrapped in coils of fuel tanks and warp rings, itself nestled in an elaborate truss structure that gave the overall vessel a distinctly skeletal look.
At the end of her twenty-day journey, the exploration vessel fell back into spacetime at the edge of Gamma Tauri. Her thrusters fired as she rotated herself in space, spinning and flipping her orientation towards the core of the system.
"I've connected with the Jabberwocky's satellite network," Zhao Biyu announced to the rest of the bridge crew.
"What's the story, aliens? No aliens?" Benjamin Nesco asked impatiently from the captain's chair. He'd been waiting nervously for their warp exit for days, fretting over the fates of the other mining ships.
"I'm checking the logs on the closest satellite," Biyu reported back calmly, "the most recent file is labeled viewme," She paused, "that's weird, it's registered as having come from the Stoneburner."
"Put it put on the main screen and play it," the captain instructed.
She nodded and hit play on the file, captain Kaito Pendragon's serious face appeared on the screen, lips pursed into a frown.
"If you are receiving this, it means our satellites have survived for some time," he reported first, "If you've come looking for us or the Jabberwocky, you won't find her, we've already left to return to Aldebaran. The full logs of our encounter with the aliens, and yes, I said aliens, have been uploaded to the satellite network. They were all instructed to accelerate out of system until their fuel supplies ran out. We have no idea what the ultimate extent of the alien mining operations in this system are, but we detected activity at every planet in the system prior to our departure for Aldebaran."
"You have no idea Kaito," Ben murmured in a pause between the other captain's sentences.
"The satellites are all set to record, so there should be a complete record of everything the aliens do, provided they don't destroy the satellites," Kaito continued, "pick up those logs before you leave."
The message ended, and the screen automatically reset to its display of the starfield.
"Biyu, what are the aliens doing right now?" Ben asked the Ganymedean woman.
She flipped through tabs on her display, and focused the ship's telescopes inward. The view on the big monitor began zooming in and in and in, stars falling away out of focus as Gamma Tauri bloomed brighter and brighter. The actions of the alien miners were immediately apparent by the astronomically large blades sweeping through the system, scooping up asteroids, comets and planetoids.
"It's a good thing they ordered their satellites to burn out of the system, or we wouldn't have a surviving record," Melissa said softly.
"Download it all," Benjamin ordered her, "Pull everything from the satellites, we'll take over the monitoring of the rest of their mining operations, see if they take this star too."
Benjamin unbuckled from his chair, letting himself drift upwards as he straightened his body out, "Melissa, come with me, let's check out their logs." He pushed off his chair, drifting gently across the bridge toward the conference room, beckoning for his XO to follow. She nodded, unbuckling from her chair and slipping into his wake as he passed through the doorway. She shut the door and strapped herself into one of the conference room chairs to keep from floating off.
Benjamin scrolled through the list of automatically generated log folders where each day's instrument recordings and logs for each satellite were recorded, found one dated three months ago, and hit play. The system at that time was calm, there was yet to be a sign of the coming aliens. He closed it and skipped forward a month, using a binary search to narrow down the timeframe for the alien's arrival, and quickly found it. He moved it from the holoscreen in front of him to the main monitor, stretched out his legs, and hit play.
- Location
- UK
Well I just finished reading everything so far and have to say that this is a fantastic sci-fi story, worthy of being in print even. Keep up the great work
Chapter 18: Wreckage on the Sea of Time
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 18: Wreckage on the Sea of Time
United Nations Embassy Project Mars Dome
Central Administration Building
Sacra Mensa, Martian Socialist Republic
Mars, Sol
April 2219
Jacob Chryse paced the lobby of the Central Administration Building in the UN Embassy Project on Mars, riding on a mountain of anxiety instilled in him by the bleating alert from his house systems and the level ten alert mission that Themis had thrown onto every screen in his home, including the ones inside his eyelids.
Jacob was a rank ten Datamancer in the Martian digital government, a position which blended that of a programmer, lawyer, and occasionally a detective or journalist. Datamancers were largely free agents working directly for Themis, the direct output stream for Mars' government. They existed outside the military, the traditional police, the councils and guilds, intelligence services, and the corporations, they took assignments for whoever offered them the energy credits and answered only to Themis.
The systems had woke him in the middle of his sleep cycle, blasting him into consciousness with blaring alarms and bright lights, generating the image for the level ten time limited mission alert on a holoscreen floating less than a meter from his head. At the time, he'd growled at the system and ignored its message, stepping through the screen and wandering into the kitchen, dazed by his sudden jerk into wakefulness.
He autonomically went through the motions involved with making coffee and stared at a blank corner of the wall where the house systems hadn't thrown a blindingly bright alert message. Once some caffeine was in his bloodstream and his mind had come the rest of the way awake, Jacob quickly realized he was going to take the mission. More, he realized Themis knew he'd take the mission, she always knew. She had all his data, after all, he mused, she knew him better than any human alive.
He dumped his coffee into a thermos and stumbled into the sharp black clothing that was the staple of his subculture, affixing his cloak around his shoulders as he practically ran from his housing block.
He gulped coffee and absorbed as much of the mission information as he could as Themis led him through the underground city to the UN Embassy Dome.
There was always a risk of a datamancer accepting a mission and then failing to complete or even actively subverting the mission, but Themis had all the data. In his ninety-eight years as a datamancer, Jacob had never accepted a mission and then failed to complete it. He was very proud of his one hundred percent completion rate and thus was quite selective about what assignments he accepted.
He could tell how important his mission was by the way Themis naturally parted the seas to speed his passage through the city. Traffic signals and train transfers lined up perfectly and people flowed out of his way as he hurried past.
The young Junior Undersecretary to the Senior Embassy Project Director failed to understand his urgency, however, and met him with a flat, vaguely hostile look as he paced the reception areas in agitation. She was recent transfer from Earth, and seeing Jacob in the office looking like someone had introduced goth fashion to a member of the fellowship of the ring made her rather uneasy.
"Please sit down Mr. Chryse," she asked in desperation after it looked to her like he might kick the coffee table in frustration.
Jacob strolled over to the woman. He'd undergone anti-senesenic treatment once, but that was decades ago now, and his hair was once more going grey, retreating from the top of his head. His severe, stern appearance contrasted with his postmodern gondorian cosplay, and the junior undersecretary felt a chill go up her spine as she realized that he took himself completely seriously. He placed his black gloved hands on the glass topped surface of her desk, and she couldn't help but notice the sword strapped to his hip.
He studied her with his optical implants, feeding Themis what he saw and receiving back the girl's life story. Through Themis, he had access to everything from the junior undersecretary's birth certificate, to her graduating college, to her credit score with the Earth corporations. Her name was Annetta West, she had grown up on a floating arcology in the South Florida Sea. She had gone to school at Oxford where she majored in international political science, eventually going on to law school and passing the BAR exam. She joined the UN and worked her way through the ranks to her current position across the desk from him. It was the most prestigious position she had ever occupied and she was a glorified receptionist.
"Look," he said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture, "I don't think you understand who I am, or how important it is that I speak to the Project Director right now. You got here six months ago, and know nothing about our society yet. You see the people, but you don't see Mars, you don't see the connections between things that bind our people together."
"So who are you then? I don't see any sort of official council documents from you, you show up in here looking like some sort of hobbit and expect me to bring you directly to our most senior diplomat? " She quipped, crossing her arms as she considered calling for security to escort him from the building.
Jacob calmly reached a hand into a side pocket and withdrew a small holoscreen projector. He slapped the device onto Annetta's desk as Themis generated a rather large list of legal documents to accompany Jacob's visit, he saw the secretary's eyes go wide as the digital paperwork scrolled past her.
"I am Jacob Chryse, rank ten datamancer and Lord General of the Order of Hermes, here on a level ten alert mission from Themis, and I need to speak to Senior Embassy Project Director Hamilton, now. Not in three hours, not next week, right now," he said authoritatively, hands settling back onto Annetta's desk. "Message your director, message her right now, tell her those exact words."
He could practically see the gears turning in Annetta's head as the logical parts of her mind teased apart the meaning of his words, realizing that rank ten was the highest grade in the Martian government, and she was looking at a rank ten person on a rank ten mission. He smiled slightly as he watched her go pale. She fumbled for her secure phone and contacted the director.
"Director Hamilton?" She said nervously into the phone, "There's a man here who needs to see you." She paused as she listened to the director say something then responded, "He says his name is Jacob Chryse, he says he's a rank ten datamancer on a level ten alert mission for Themis. He said to tell you that."
Jacob's smile grew as the girl lost yet another shade of pigmentation, "Yes," she said softly, "Yes I understand." She ended the call and met Jacob's gaze, "She'll be right out."
"She had better be," he said dangerously, turning his back on her and returning to his pacing.
It took another ten minutes, time during which the junior undersecretary looked like she might faint with fear any moment. Jacob idly considered calling in drone backup on the off chance the girl decided he was a security threat and tried to detain him, but before he came to a decision the inner door to the office slid open and a short, round, and harried looking woman burst through.
"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" Senior UN Embassy Project Director of Mars, Rose Hamilton, asked him, meeting his gaze with her own visual daggers as he crossed the room towards her.
"We should speak in private," he said calmly, "This is a matter of grave importance, with implications for the future of the human race."
Rose looked from him to Annetta, who shrugged, "he wouldn't tell me what it was about," she said helplessly as the Senior Director's gaze bored into her, "He said he'd only speak to you."
"This had better be good, warlock," she said, pointing an accusatory finger at Jacob. "Come on then," she turned and beckoned him back towards her office.
He followed her through the brightly lit corridors of the central administration building, walking between portraits of various UN Secretary Generals, each of them seeming to judge him in their own way. He rebuked their judgments, he was the Lord General of Hermes, citizen of Mars. He strolled after the brown skinned director and entered her office behind her.
She sunk into her chair and met his gaze once more, "Start talking warlock," she said, once again using the disparaging slang term for datamancers.
He said nothing and set a small device on the edge of her desk. The computer inside it interfaced with the room's network and Themis forced her way into the office past layers of electronic security.
"That device is currently downloading all of the data Mars has on an alien threat called the Reshapers into your mainframe," he said, "In twenty-six hours, Themis will go public with the information, releasing it to the Martian internet and media outlets. We're giving you a day's advance warning so your government can get on top of this. I've seen some of it, and it's big. There will be a panic among some members of the public."
"When you say alien threat, what is it you mean," she asked him, "Does it relate to the aliens your government has been in communication with?"
"Those aliens gave us the warning regarding the Reshapers, and enough hard data to ensure we at the very least seriously investigate their claims," he replied as Themis fed him information on his optical implants, telling him what to say to the director.
"Well, what are they claiming, what are these Reshapers then?" she grilled him.
"They're an outside context problem, they're a civilization near rank three on the Kardashev scale and are in the process of dismantling the entire galaxy for resources regardless of who gets in their way. Is that succinct enough for you?" He said calmly, studying her reaction. She seemed not to entirely believe him but set her jaw in a way that made him think she at least took his claim seriously. She might not believe everything regarding these aliens, but she believed him when he said that Mars would go public with it in a day and that it would indeed cause a stir among the population. She took a long breath and sighed out through gritted teeth.
"You just had to go and complicate my morning, didn't you?" she accused him as she brought up her screens and started attaching the files he'd dropped onto her desktop into email attachments to the senior undersecretary of the executive administration. Jacob merely smiled back at her as Themis awarded him with a massive amount of energy credits for successfully completing his mission.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
May 2219
Regan McKinley had to admit, the bunker was turning into a pretty nice looking clubhouse as more and more stuff was added to it. The main room looking out into the hangar had been filled with old furniture the teens had salvaged, and the plain metal walls were slowly becoming covered over with a combination of posters and graffiti. Rainbow colored christmas lights were strung through all the rooms and hallways in the bunker, and Regan had hacked into the bunker's network so the intercom played music from an internet radio station over the loudspeakers.
Regan reclined in the hangar operator's chair, watching Seth Fiegel through the glass windows. The boy was dedicated to his goals, she had to give him that, when he'd said he'd wanted to get the main hangar doors fixed, she'd figured it would end up like a lot of his other projects, where he talked endlessly about what he was going to do without actually making any progress towards doing whatever thing it was he was talking about. But he seemed to take this idea seriously. Another shower of sparks was thrown across the empty hangar floor as Seth touched his angle grinder to some internal component in the door mechanism.
Lily Emerson yawned as she wandered out of the side hallway they had converted into a dorm. She leaned against Regan's shoulders, resting her chin on the top of Regan's head as she looked out into the hangar. "He's still at it huh?" She asked. Seth had been in the suit out in the hangar banging away at the door mechanisms since before she fell asleep.
"Yeah," Regan answered quietly, eyes glancing up to look at Seth for a moment before returning to her game. "He spent the entire air supply of the suit out there, came in, recharged, and went right back out."
"Jeez," Lily said, sounding vaguely impressed.
"Did you finish that mural on the far wall of the locker room?" Regan asked her.
"Not yet," she yawned, "Do we still have energy drinks left?"
"No, Seth drank them all," Regan pouted, "Harper went out to get more."
Lily sighed and draped her arms over Regan, making her intensely aware of the other girl's presence. She gritted her teeth and returned to her game. After a moment of watching her play, Lily detangled herself from Regan and wandered over to the glass wall separating them from the airless hangar bay.
"Try it now," Seth's voice entered the room through the overhead speakers. He was standing back from the door mechanism and observing the exposed panel with a critical eye. Regan sighed, paused her game, and keyed in the sequence on the ancient terminal that would once again try to finish closing the hangar door. The past three times he'd asked her to try activating the doors, the shrieks of the actuators could be could be heard echoing through the metal hull. This time it remained quiet, but for Seth's whoop of success through the speaker system. Regan craned her neck and realized Seth was slowly moving across the hangar as the floor shifted and the view into the void winked shut with a dull thump.
"Pressurize the hangar," Seth instructed excitedly through the speakers. It took Regan a moment of searching through the fossil interface to find the air controls on the huge room and start up the century-old pumps.
There was a distant roar somewhere in the ductwork as the air pumps went to work, valves and seals opened, and air roared into the hangar, blowing up a billowing cloud of long settled rust flakes and space dust, obscuring the two girl's view of the bay.
Regan shoved her headset over her ears and keyed up on the channel she had open with Seth, "Keep your helmet on, I don't think it'd be a good idea to breathe that shit in."
"Yeah," Seth's voice replied through the speaker system, "It'll probably take a few hours to settle down or be filtered out of the air."
"Dust yourself off before you come in, don't track it into the bunker," she told him.
"Yes mom," he teased. She could see his distant suited form strolling across the vast hangar bay, pacing out the confines of the room.
Harper chose that moment to come flying down the stairs with a large crate of energy drinks balanced on his shoulder. "Turn on the news!" He shouted as he raced into the room. When both Lily and Regan stared at him with bewilderment, he set down the crate of drinks and raced to the far wall of the room to activate the holoscreen he had mounted there.
"...Come together in the face of this threat," A brown skinned woman in a business suit was saying, The ticker at the bottom of the screen identified her as United Nations Secretary General Kelsang Choenyi and Regan felt her eyebrows start crawling towards the top of her head.
"For all of its history, humanity has defied the odds, come together, and lived to survive and thrive another day," the woman continued.
"The Martians just announced the existence of a second race of aliens," Harper explained to them as the woman paused to take a sip of her water.
"I know many of you are afraid for your families, for your futures, and for your world, but we will not let ourselves be defined by our fear. We will not let ourselves be defined by our uncertainty. We will survive and thrive, we will come together, and when the Reshapers come upon our system we will make them think twice before messing with Earth." The woman went silent and the view cut out to a talking head discussing the politics between Earth and Mars following the announcement. Images flashed on the screen of Martian warships repositioning themselves and UN ships responding in kind. Harper turned the screen back off.
"The Reshapers are like, god level in terms of technology, and they're strip mining the whole galaxy. Apparently, they're on their way towards Sol," Harper said, "There's demonstrations in New York, Paris, Moscow, Sacra Mensa, San Francisco, Seattle, and on a whole bunch of Martian orbitals. There're riots in like, every second city on Earth and a bunch of the colonies, and the internet boards are blowing up all over."
"So the Evil Aliens finally reveal themselves to us," Regan replied, crossing her arms.
"Looks like it," Harper said, "and people are freaking the fuck out over it."
"Are we safe here? Is the colony safe?" Regan asked him.
"No one has any idea," he answered honestly, "But they seem pretty scary to me, maybe Seth's plan to build a ship and get out of here isn't totally crazy."
Their eyes all went to the fourth teen in their group, who was still excitedly stomping around the hangar bay, drawing lines on the dust and grit with his feet.
"Maybe," Regan admitted.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
United Nations Defense Fleet Headquarters Building
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
The Defense fleet headquarters was a frenzy of barely controlled chaos. Lower ranking officers darted between offices balancing stacks of tablets and shouting updates to their various teams on their various tasks. The Eighth Expeditionary Fleet slid out of warp over the Earth a week into Martians going public with the information on the Reshapers. Protests and demonstrations were rampant, instability on various colonies was at an all time high system-wide, and fleets of the three great powers were racing from hotspot to hotspot, trying to keep ahead of the spreading unrest.
Maeve O'Donnell understood it somewhat. It was an expression of frustration. People had no outlet for their emotions and so they took it out on society. Everyone was shouting 'do something!' at the top of their lungs, but no one was quite sure what to do. Having the news of the Reshapers already circulating when they arrived had thrown Maeve for a loop until she understood that the Martians had sent a ship back towards Sol a week before her fleet arrived at Luyten's Star.
It meant she had little to offer to Admiral Eastlake to explain the loss of one of her ships, and added yet another level of apprehension towards her upcoming debrief. She had already submitted her written reports, but she still had to actually talk to the Admiral.
As her scheduled debrief loomed closer, Maeve found herself in one of the officer's lounges, looking out over the Earth. From her height, the Earth was a sphere of blue and green, a gem in the vast wilderness of deep space. The strife that beset the surface was invisible from her altitude, the world seemed tranquil and idyllic.
She sipped a coffee she'd purchased from the bar and settled to stare out at the Earth and wait out her last few hours. Those hours seemed to race by as the Earth below her rotated out of night and into the daylight. Tiny island chains glinted in the morning sunlight, and wispy clouds cast shifting fractals across the surface.
When the appointed hour of her figurative execution approached, she stiffly rose from her seat and made her way through the ring to the Defense Fleet Headquarters building, a towering spire in shiny reflective white pointing inwards on the ring and up towards the central elevator station. She felt herself drawn slightly to the side as she rode the building's elevator upwards towards the ring's center of spin, but not enough to give her nausea.
The Admiral's receptionist was a young chinese woman who smiled and offered Maeve coffee, which she shrugged off. She thought it would likely only make her nerves worse than they already were. After what had seemed like an intolerable amount of waiting, the receptionist announced that the Admiral would see her and opened the door to her office.
As Senior Defense Secretary to the Executive Administration of Secretary General Kelsang Choenyi, Admiral Angela Eastlake was one of the most powerful women in the solar system and overseer of all UN military forces. She had over a century of military service on her record and had been through two rounds of anti-senescenic treatments. She wore a young angular face with blonde hair pulled back into a severe bun, and smiled wanly at Maeve as she entered.
"Maeve, have a seat," she said, gesturing to the chair across from her desk. The Commodore dutifully sank into her chair and reluctantly met the Admiral's eyes.
"So a bit of a mess then?" The Admiral asked her.
"A bit," She admitted before launching into her defense of her actions, "we followed orders and attempted to initiate contact. As expected, the Martians blocked us and there was an accident when two of our ships collided. The aliens left while our ships were blinded by Martian jamming. I'm not sure what else we were expected to do. You sent us in there looking to start a fight, and we started one, and as happens with these sorts of things, people died."
"I sent you in there to figure out how to talk to the aliens and gave you discretion on how to deal with the Martians--" Angela started to say when Maeve cut her off.
"They started jamming us--" Maeve said before Angela cut her off back.
"And you jammed them back," the Admiral asserted, "You gave into the conflux trap. You let the situation escalate until you couldn't possibly hope to escape something going wrong. You let that duel with them continue for twelve hours, you could have stood down at any time and worked out a stable fleet position, then kept pestering them into letting you communicate. Instead, it took a hundred and forty-eight people dying before you de-escalated. Tell me I'm wrong."
"You aren't wrong," Maeve said ashamedly, staring at her feet, "So what happens next?"
"Next I strip you of your command and bump you down to captain and tell the talking heads I dealt with the problem, while I'm internally faced the reality that every one of your peers would have done the same thing in your place," the Admiral admitted frankly, "I don't hold you personally responsible for the screwups that took place, but I have to play to the politicians. You're being given command of the UNDF BCS3 Mercy Given, your one year mission is to find us some aliens and make contact with them. Now leave your Commodore's bars on my desk and get out of my office."
Maeve shamefully obliged her request and fled the room as quickly as possible. She felt ashamed of herself and felt every bit of valid criticism against her like a raw wound that had just been opened up.
The secretary started to say something to her, but she took one look at Maeve's expression and simply smiled conciliatorily. Maeve gave the other woman a stiff nod and made her way for the door.
She held the door open for a young man in a captain's uniform as she slipped out of the reception area and made her way back to the elevators, continuing to tell herself she wasn't going to start crying. She was over a century old, she was a dignified woman, and she wasn't going to cry like a teenager because something hadn't gone her way. She hadn't cried for the loss of life on the Normandy and her own personal career loss paled in comparison to that by every metric. She deserved her demotion, and she should be happy she came out of it with a command and a ship, no she definitely wasn't going to cry.
There was no one else in the elevator when she entered and she mashed the button for the base of the ring. The elevator had descended a third of the way down the shaft when her tears finally managed to silently escape her eyes. The lift was halfway down when a tremor ran through the car and her phone started throwing up urgent security alerts for the floor she had just departed. Maeve's moment of weakness quickly passed and she blinked back the tears as she stared at her phone screen in growing horror.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
May 2219
All their faces were obscured by various sorts of breathing masks. Regan wore an old surplus gas mask from the colony police that she had wrote 'fuck the police' and a combination of other colorful slogans onto. Lily was wearing the old spacesuit, which seemed to Regan to be a bit of overkill, but she wasn't one to judge. Harper was wearing ski goggles and a baklava, with a surgical mask tucked underneath. Seth had a bandana tied around his mouth like an outlaw in the ancient west, and had the welding mask propped open on top of his head.
The group of teens were attempting to clean up the massive amount of rust and grit that had accumulated in the hangar bay over the years, and it was proving to be a daunting undertaking. The hangar was two hundred meters in length and a hundred in width, it would be possible to comfortably host two games of football at once on the massive open floor.
The pile of loose powdery debris they had swept up was already half Regan's height in the center and a meter in diameter, and they'd only swept up a quarter of the floor.
"It's going to take a dump truck to clear all this shit out," Regan declared, her voice muffled behind the breathing mask.
"Yeah, I didn't realize there was going to be quite so much of it," Seth paused, leaning against his push broom and eyeing the mound of dust and debris with a critical eye.
"We could always just override the door safeties so the big door starts opening while there's still air in the room and suck everything out into space," Harper suggested. Their eyes went to Regan, she had more knowledge of how the colony computer systems worked than any of them. She thought about it for a moment and then shook her head.
"How many cubic meters is this room? How tall is it Seth? I know you took a bunch of rangefinding data," Regan asked him.
"It's seventy-five meters high," he supplied, frowning as he realized where Regan's train of thought was going.
"So one hundred times two hundred times seventy-five," she pulled out her phone and quickly did the math using a calculator app, holding the result out in front of her, "Is one point five million cubic meters of air."
"And someone might notice that much air going missing at once," Seth completed her thought for her.
"That's a lot of air, someone would definitely notice that and come to investigate," she confirmed, "We don't want that."
"Well, what are we going to do with this stuff then?" Harper complained, "Wheelbarrow it out and dump it in the woods outside?"
"We could sweep it up into piles along the crease in the door," Regan thought aloud, "then pull the air out of the room, open the door a bit, and sweep stuff out into space through the open door."
"We only have the one spacesuit though," Lily reminded her.
"I'll do it," Seth offered, "Help me get it swept into the middle of the room first, I'll take care of getting it out the door afterward."
"Alright, but I'm going to go eat something first, we've been at this all morning," Harper announced, strolling off the hangar deck towards the airlock chamber. Lily followed after him in the spacesuit, and Regan started to follow but stopped when she realized Seth was still working away.
She paused, letting the other two drift ahead of her and said quietly, "Are you alright Seth?"
Ever since finding the bunker, something seemed different about Seth. He wasn't as aimless, instead, he seemed to have gained a laser focus on his personal starship project, and it was a little frightening seeing how dedicated he was.
"Yeah, I'm good," he said without looking up from the deck.
"I'm serious," Regan insisted, crossing her arms in front of her chest, "It's like you've turned into a different person, I've never seen you this...driven."
He paused and leaned against the broom handle, "I'm really serious about this Regan, and I know what you're going to say," He cut her off as she started to speak, "You're going to say that all this stuff with the divorce is messing with my head, and you're probably right, but that doesn't really change my perspective on it. At least I'm doing something productive," and with that, he resumed his sweeping.
"I just worry this productive thing of yours is going to kill you. Can't you just paint or learn to play the guitar or something like a normal person?" Regan asked him.
"If it kills me, then it kills me," the teenager answered her with a shrug, "I'd rather have a short and interesting life then a long boring and typical one."
"I don't want it to kill you, Seth." She protested, "I want you to still be around for the reunion in a few centuries. Not only that but what you're talking about could also kill other people."
"Then don't help me," he said simply. Regan's eye twitched as her mind short-circuited slightly.
"You…" her struggled to find the words, then lanced into him once she did, "This is stupid, you're being stupid and stubborn, and it's going to get you killed."
"So noted," He said.
"And you don't fucking care, you don't care if you live or die, whatever."
Regan sighed and stomped off across the hangar plain, wandering back to the airlock and brushing herself down thoroughly before stripping off her gas mask and stepping through into the observation room.
Images of starships fighting played across the holoscreen with a news ticker at the bottom, and Harper and Lily were both watching it with rapt attention as they ate leftover pizza.
"What's this crap?" Regan asked, gesturing to the screen and shoving her hands in her pockets, "More drama in space?"
"Yeah," Harper responded, "Those ships we saw a few weeks back got into a fight with the Martians, and it spooked the aliens they were talking to. It's all over the headlines. They also got some good pictures of the alien spaceship, it's huge and crazy looking." His voice gradually became more excited as he explained everything that was being announced.
"What a mess," Regan said with a sigh as information scrolled endlessly beneath the silent images of drones exploding in space.
"...finally ended when the United Nations cruiser Normandy, and the Martian frigate Chapel Hill collided in space during close maneuvers, resulting in over two hundred fatalities between the two ships." The new anchor continued as the images of the colliding vessels flashed across the screen.
Regan hugged her arms to her chest, strangely captivated by the conflict, drawn toward the images of destruction by some some dark part tugging at her psyche. The image jumped again as the anchor switched topics.
"In other news," the anchor continued, "Admiral Angela Eastlake, the Senior Defense Secretary to the Executive Administration of Kelsang Choenyi was killed in a bomb blast in her office yesterday evening. Three members of her immediate staff were also killed, their names are being withheld at this time. The terrorist organisation calling itself the Free Sky Tribe has claimed responsibility for the attack. Shortly following the bomb blast, their founder Anton Hellas released a video online in multiple languages, admitting responsibility and declaring that the stars are the birthright of all of humanity. Hellas' Free Sky Tribe is a militant branch of the Open Sky Movement. Founders of the movement in the Open Sky Tribe on Triton have denounced the bombing and called for an end to the violence..."
"The Open Sky Movement are a bunch of dumb hippies," Regan rebutted the news anchor, "You can't just declare yourself an ethnic group, by their logic, we're spacers, and we're oh so oppressed right?"
"Oh it's more complicated than that back in Sol and you know it, Regan," Lily scolded her, "We are spacers, we've lived our whole lives in space, we were born in space, I don't know about you, but I've never been to a planet, I'm pretty sure that makes us spacers by their definition."
Regan's attraction to Lily and her attraction to misanthropy did battle for a moment before her hormones won out and silenced her desire to keep arguing.
"Fine, whatever," she mumbled halfheartedly.
"Something bothering you?" Lily asked her.
Regan made a face and tried to find words to express her feelings, "That guy, the one who just blew up that Admiral, he says the stars are our birthright. But I don't think we deserve the stars. You ever think maybe, it'd be better for the entire universe if humanity just all went extinct?"
"Not really," Harper answered her absentmindedly, "I mean, we do a lot of bad stuff," he said, gesturing to the holoscreen and turning the volume down with his implants, "But I think at the end of the day, we're still a net positive. The Reshapers seem way worse than us."
"You think we're a net positive with all of this shit?" She quipped, gesturing at the screen.
"People are capable of all sorts of things Regan," Lily told her soothingly, "All you can do is try and put out as much good as you can, and hope it outways the bad."
"I guess," she replied sullenly, eyes still on the screen, vaguely disgusted at the typical human folly on display. She shook her head as the newscast jumped topics again, showing riots on the Sessrumnir Orbital, and turned away from the other teens and the holoscreen. She needed some time to think.
She slipped out of the observation room and climbed the bunker stairs back towards the surface.
The air had grown bitter and chill as winter closed in on the colony, giving the breeze a painful bite. Regan wandered away from the bunker entrance, lighting a cigarette as she walked off into the fading twilight.
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
May 2219
Jean thought she was doing reasonably well for herself, but the isolation was slowly starting to get to her. It had been two weeks since the Kiwawentoa had delivered her the small collection of gear they'd taken from her, and she'd not seen or heard another sentient since then.
She found herself retreating more and more into her still growing mindscape as the toll of the social isolation began to set in. She found herself thinking aloud, just to hear another voice.
The gear the Kiwawentoa returned to her had been a godsend. There was a small knife in her suit for cutting patches into shape, and from that, she was able to produce a large number of spears and other useful objects. Her diet consisted of berries, nuts, and seeds mashed together into a sort of stiff bar for easy carrying and strips of deer meat she was hastily trying to dry in order to preserve it.
The deer hunt had presented itself to Jean like a monumental undertaking, the Martian had never killed anything in her life, and the horns on the deer were more than a little intimidating. She'd crouched along a trail for hours, keeping as silent as possible, grasping her homemade spear tightly as she waited for the creature to make its appearance.
When the battle at long last came, it ended up being somewhat anticlimactic. The creature had ambled along the path, and when Jean finally jumped out and spooked it, it dropped its antlers and charged her. She ducked to her right at the last moment, grabbing the deer's left antler with her left hand and used it as a lever to push herself out of the path of the horns. At the same time, her right hand, the one holding the spear, came around swinging and drove the spear into the creature's neck.
It made a horribly pained noise as blood spurted from the wound, and it collapsed on the forest floor and died. It had taken less than a minute to take down the creature. The process of hauling it back to her camp and butchering it had turned out to be backbreaking and disgusting work. It had taken her hours to haul the carcass back, and she'd nearly puked several times while emptying out the creature's guts, but in the end, she had meat cooking over a fire, and pelts drying out to make into clothes.
In the intervening days, she'd made crude clothing, fashioned herself better tools, and successfully cured the meat into tough but edible strips she hoped would not quickly go bad.
Her mind kept returning to the calico colored alien's words, her instructions to look for the hidden doorways, and the knowledge that they were testing her in some manner. It peeved her to be their lab rat, but she still did her best to set a good example for other humans.
Jean didn't know exactly what Studying-Hoping-Envisioning was referring to, but after days of wandering the bottom of the valley, she was coming to the conclusion that the hidden doorways, whatever they were, were probably up higher on the valley wall, where the cliff could conceivably open up into a space behind the mountains.
Thus she had begun condensing her things down as much as possible into portable forms she could carry up hills. Most of her stuff fit into the bags the Kiwawentoa had put it inside of, but those bags were strange and clearly designed for alien anatomy. She had carefully braided grasses together into rough shoulder straps and ties, allowing her to carry everything, even so, the rough unbalanced bundle was a pain to lug up the forested slope.
Going downhill, the valley hadn't seemed all that steep, but going back up it while carrying around fifty pounds of stuff in a homemade rucksack was an entirely different experience. Jean found herself panting and wheezing from the exertion before even reaching an altitude where the deciduous forest gave way to conifers.
The valley floor spread out below her in a verdant patchwork of blues and greens. Jean carefully slide her pack off her shoulders and leaned against a boulder, munching on a piece of leathery deer jerky. The sun was still high in the sky, despite the energy she'd exerted, not that much time had actually elapsed since she'd departed the lake shore, she probably hadn't come all that far yet.
She groaned, then paused, chuckling at how strange her voice had started to sound to her, "I better get out of here soon, or I'm going to actually go crazy," she said aloud cheerfully, and shrugged the pack back over her shoulders.
The thick leafy deciduous trees gave way to arrow straight conifers as she reached higher elevations, which made the going somewhat easier. The lower forests had been thick with bushes and undergrowth, but up amongst the conifers, the undergrowth was mostly clear, save for a thick layer of fallen needle-like leaves.
The slope of the land grew slowly as she climbed up towards the walls of the bowl-shaped valley. Large rocks and boulders began to emerge from the thick loam in places, jutting up like submerged icebergs showing their faces to the sun. The slope of the walls had been almost imperceptible down on the lake shore, but as she climbed through the pine forest, the slope just seemed to increase without end.
The trees were becoming more straggly and sparsely spread out on the hillside, and the soil had grown more poor and rocky. Tall wispy grasses and brightly colored wildflowers dominated the areas between the trees, and Jean could see that further up the slope, even those failed to grow as the soil gave way to a rocky scree. At the top of a long sloping mound of loose rock and rubble, was the cliff face and the true perimeter to the environment. That was Jean's objective.
The increasingly sharp slope of increasingly loose scree made this a difficult and treacherous undertaking. The few remaining plants gave way to bare stone as she continued her arduous ascent of the valley wall. Her climb sent avalanches of stone tumbling down the hillside in her wake, raising a cloud of dust into the setting sun.
Jean had hoped to make the cliff face by nightfall and find some sort of shelter in the base of the cliffs, but from up close, the cliff face looked profoundly uninviting. The slope of loose scree clung to the hillsides as much as gravity would allow, leaving no flat places to make camp.
Defeated, she half walked and half rode the wave of debris down the hill to the treeline. When she reached the first of the trees, she fell heavily against it and slung off her pack to set up camp for the night.
The stiffness in her joints and muscles made her severely regret that decision almost immediately after waking, nevertheless, she ignored her protesting body and shouldered her pack once more.
She set out along the curve of the valley wall, staying just above the treeline where the ground was fairly easy to traverse despite the incline. By midmorning, it felt like she had come a long way from her initial campsite. Her angle on the lakes at the valley's floor had noticeably shifted, and a different patch of cliff face stared down at her from high on the ridge.
Jean continued in this manner for some time, picking her way around scraggly bushes that grew in clusters amongst the tall grasses and scrambling over boulders that had slid down the cliff face. It wasn't particularly easy progress, but it felt more productive than climbing the valley initially had and far more than mucking around in the scree slopes further up the valley walls.
She was munching on one of her fruit bars when she stumbled onto the stream. A shallow bed of water cascaded through a worn divot in the slope, carving a steeper angle into the hillside with its passage. Wildflowers grew all along its shore, hiding the steep-sided ravine it lay within, and Jean nearly tumbled into it before she caught herself.
The stream was a good thing though, Jean remembered the pond she had been thrown into upon her arrival in the valley, and it seemed like as good a place as any to start looking for hidden doors. She spent the afternoon hiking up the hillside once again, following the course of the stream up the side of the valley.
The ravine opened up into a wide bowl at the base of the cliffs and water bubbled and gurgled over the lip as it began its long descent to the lakes below. On the far side of the pond though, was something that brought a smile to Jean's lips for the first time in days. Looking like something out of a fantasy novel, the outline of a door was set into the base of the cliff.
United Nations Embassy Project Mars Dome
Central Administration Building
Sacra Mensa, Martian Socialist Republic
Mars, Sol
April 2219
Jacob Chryse paced the lobby of the Central Administration Building in the UN Embassy Project on Mars, riding on a mountain of anxiety instilled in him by the bleating alert from his house systems and the level ten alert mission that Themis had thrown onto every screen in his home, including the ones inside his eyelids.
Jacob was a rank ten Datamancer in the Martian digital government, a position which blended that of a programmer, lawyer, and occasionally a detective or journalist. Datamancers were largely free agents working directly for Themis, the direct output stream for Mars' government. They existed outside the military, the traditional police, the councils and guilds, intelligence services, and the corporations, they took assignments for whoever offered them the energy credits and answered only to Themis.
The systems had woke him in the middle of his sleep cycle, blasting him into consciousness with blaring alarms and bright lights, generating the image for the level ten time limited mission alert on a holoscreen floating less than a meter from his head. At the time, he'd growled at the system and ignored its message, stepping through the screen and wandering into the kitchen, dazed by his sudden jerk into wakefulness.
He autonomically went through the motions involved with making coffee and stared at a blank corner of the wall where the house systems hadn't thrown a blindingly bright alert message. Once some caffeine was in his bloodstream and his mind had come the rest of the way awake, Jacob quickly realized he was going to take the mission. More, he realized Themis knew he'd take the mission, she always knew. She had all his data, after all, he mused, she knew him better than any human alive.
He dumped his coffee into a thermos and stumbled into the sharp black clothing that was the staple of his subculture, affixing his cloak around his shoulders as he practically ran from his housing block.
He gulped coffee and absorbed as much of the mission information as he could as Themis led him through the underground city to the UN Embassy Dome.
There was always a risk of a datamancer accepting a mission and then failing to complete or even actively subverting the mission, but Themis had all the data. In his ninety-eight years as a datamancer, Jacob had never accepted a mission and then failed to complete it. He was very proud of his one hundred percent completion rate and thus was quite selective about what assignments he accepted.
He could tell how important his mission was by the way Themis naturally parted the seas to speed his passage through the city. Traffic signals and train transfers lined up perfectly and people flowed out of his way as he hurried past.
The young Junior Undersecretary to the Senior Embassy Project Director failed to understand his urgency, however, and met him with a flat, vaguely hostile look as he paced the reception areas in agitation. She was recent transfer from Earth, and seeing Jacob in the office looking like someone had introduced goth fashion to a member of the fellowship of the ring made her rather uneasy.
"Please sit down Mr. Chryse," she asked in desperation after it looked to her like he might kick the coffee table in frustration.
Jacob strolled over to the woman. He'd undergone anti-senesenic treatment once, but that was decades ago now, and his hair was once more going grey, retreating from the top of his head. His severe, stern appearance contrasted with his postmodern gondorian cosplay, and the junior undersecretary felt a chill go up her spine as she realized that he took himself completely seriously. He placed his black gloved hands on the glass topped surface of her desk, and she couldn't help but notice the sword strapped to his hip.
He studied her with his optical implants, feeding Themis what he saw and receiving back the girl's life story. Through Themis, he had access to everything from the junior undersecretary's birth certificate, to her graduating college, to her credit score with the Earth corporations. Her name was Annetta West, she had grown up on a floating arcology in the South Florida Sea. She had gone to school at Oxford where she majored in international political science, eventually going on to law school and passing the BAR exam. She joined the UN and worked her way through the ranks to her current position across the desk from him. It was the most prestigious position she had ever occupied and she was a glorified receptionist.
"Look," he said, holding his hands up in a placating gesture, "I don't think you understand who I am, or how important it is that I speak to the Project Director right now. You got here six months ago, and know nothing about our society yet. You see the people, but you don't see Mars, you don't see the connections between things that bind our people together."
"So who are you then? I don't see any sort of official council documents from you, you show up in here looking like some sort of hobbit and expect me to bring you directly to our most senior diplomat? " She quipped, crossing her arms as she considered calling for security to escort him from the building.
Jacob calmly reached a hand into a side pocket and withdrew a small holoscreen projector. He slapped the device onto Annetta's desk as Themis generated a rather large list of legal documents to accompany Jacob's visit, he saw the secretary's eyes go wide as the digital paperwork scrolled past her.
"I am Jacob Chryse, rank ten datamancer and Lord General of the Order of Hermes, here on a level ten alert mission from Themis, and I need to speak to Senior Embassy Project Director Hamilton, now. Not in three hours, not next week, right now," he said authoritatively, hands settling back onto Annetta's desk. "Message your director, message her right now, tell her those exact words."
He could practically see the gears turning in Annetta's head as the logical parts of her mind teased apart the meaning of his words, realizing that rank ten was the highest grade in the Martian government, and she was looking at a rank ten person on a rank ten mission. He smiled slightly as he watched her go pale. She fumbled for her secure phone and contacted the director.
"Director Hamilton?" She said nervously into the phone, "There's a man here who needs to see you." She paused as she listened to the director say something then responded, "He says his name is Jacob Chryse, he says he's a rank ten datamancer on a level ten alert mission for Themis. He said to tell you that."
Jacob's smile grew as the girl lost yet another shade of pigmentation, "Yes," she said softly, "Yes I understand." She ended the call and met Jacob's gaze, "She'll be right out."
"She had better be," he said dangerously, turning his back on her and returning to his pacing.
It took another ten minutes, time during which the junior undersecretary looked like she might faint with fear any moment. Jacob idly considered calling in drone backup on the off chance the girl decided he was a security threat and tried to detain him, but before he came to a decision the inner door to the office slid open and a short, round, and harried looking woman burst through.
"Well, what do you have to say for yourself?" Senior UN Embassy Project Director of Mars, Rose Hamilton, asked him, meeting his gaze with her own visual daggers as he crossed the room towards her.
"We should speak in private," he said calmly, "This is a matter of grave importance, with implications for the future of the human race."
Rose looked from him to Annetta, who shrugged, "he wouldn't tell me what it was about," she said helplessly as the Senior Director's gaze bored into her, "He said he'd only speak to you."
"This had better be good, warlock," she said, pointing an accusatory finger at Jacob. "Come on then," she turned and beckoned him back towards her office.
He followed her through the brightly lit corridors of the central administration building, walking between portraits of various UN Secretary Generals, each of them seeming to judge him in their own way. He rebuked their judgments, he was the Lord General of Hermes, citizen of Mars. He strolled after the brown skinned director and entered her office behind her.
She sunk into her chair and met his gaze once more, "Start talking warlock," she said, once again using the disparaging slang term for datamancers.
He said nothing and set a small device on the edge of her desk. The computer inside it interfaced with the room's network and Themis forced her way into the office past layers of electronic security.
"That device is currently downloading all of the data Mars has on an alien threat called the Reshapers into your mainframe," he said, "In twenty-six hours, Themis will go public with the information, releasing it to the Martian internet and media outlets. We're giving you a day's advance warning so your government can get on top of this. I've seen some of it, and it's big. There will be a panic among some members of the public."
"When you say alien threat, what is it you mean," she asked him, "Does it relate to the aliens your government has been in communication with?"
"Those aliens gave us the warning regarding the Reshapers, and enough hard data to ensure we at the very least seriously investigate their claims," he replied as Themis fed him information on his optical implants, telling him what to say to the director.
"Well, what are they claiming, what are these Reshapers then?" she grilled him.
"They're an outside context problem, they're a civilization near rank three on the Kardashev scale and are in the process of dismantling the entire galaxy for resources regardless of who gets in their way. Is that succinct enough for you?" He said calmly, studying her reaction. She seemed not to entirely believe him but set her jaw in a way that made him think she at least took his claim seriously. She might not believe everything regarding these aliens, but she believed him when he said that Mars would go public with it in a day and that it would indeed cause a stir among the population. She took a long breath and sighed out through gritted teeth.
"You just had to go and complicate my morning, didn't you?" she accused him as she brought up her screens and started attaching the files he'd dropped onto her desktop into email attachments to the senior undersecretary of the executive administration. Jacob merely smiled back at her as Themis awarded him with a massive amount of energy credits for successfully completing his mission.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
May 2219
Regan McKinley had to admit, the bunker was turning into a pretty nice looking clubhouse as more and more stuff was added to it. The main room looking out into the hangar had been filled with old furniture the teens had salvaged, and the plain metal walls were slowly becoming covered over with a combination of posters and graffiti. Rainbow colored christmas lights were strung through all the rooms and hallways in the bunker, and Regan had hacked into the bunker's network so the intercom played music from an internet radio station over the loudspeakers.
Regan reclined in the hangar operator's chair, watching Seth Fiegel through the glass windows. The boy was dedicated to his goals, she had to give him that, when he'd said he'd wanted to get the main hangar doors fixed, she'd figured it would end up like a lot of his other projects, where he talked endlessly about what he was going to do without actually making any progress towards doing whatever thing it was he was talking about. But he seemed to take this idea seriously. Another shower of sparks was thrown across the empty hangar floor as Seth touched his angle grinder to some internal component in the door mechanism.
Lily Emerson yawned as she wandered out of the side hallway they had converted into a dorm. She leaned against Regan's shoulders, resting her chin on the top of Regan's head as she looked out into the hangar. "He's still at it huh?" She asked. Seth had been in the suit out in the hangar banging away at the door mechanisms since before she fell asleep.
"Yeah," Regan answered quietly, eyes glancing up to look at Seth for a moment before returning to her game. "He spent the entire air supply of the suit out there, came in, recharged, and went right back out."
"Jeez," Lily said, sounding vaguely impressed.
"Did you finish that mural on the far wall of the locker room?" Regan asked her.
"Not yet," she yawned, "Do we still have energy drinks left?"
"No, Seth drank them all," Regan pouted, "Harper went out to get more."
Lily sighed and draped her arms over Regan, making her intensely aware of the other girl's presence. She gritted her teeth and returned to her game. After a moment of watching her play, Lily detangled herself from Regan and wandered over to the glass wall separating them from the airless hangar bay.
"Try it now," Seth's voice entered the room through the overhead speakers. He was standing back from the door mechanism and observing the exposed panel with a critical eye. Regan sighed, paused her game, and keyed in the sequence on the ancient terminal that would once again try to finish closing the hangar door. The past three times he'd asked her to try activating the doors, the shrieks of the actuators could be could be heard echoing through the metal hull. This time it remained quiet, but for Seth's whoop of success through the speaker system. Regan craned her neck and realized Seth was slowly moving across the hangar as the floor shifted and the view into the void winked shut with a dull thump.
"Pressurize the hangar," Seth instructed excitedly through the speakers. It took Regan a moment of searching through the fossil interface to find the air controls on the huge room and start up the century-old pumps.
There was a distant roar somewhere in the ductwork as the air pumps went to work, valves and seals opened, and air roared into the hangar, blowing up a billowing cloud of long settled rust flakes and space dust, obscuring the two girl's view of the bay.
Regan shoved her headset over her ears and keyed up on the channel she had open with Seth, "Keep your helmet on, I don't think it'd be a good idea to breathe that shit in."
"Yeah," Seth's voice replied through the speaker system, "It'll probably take a few hours to settle down or be filtered out of the air."
"Dust yourself off before you come in, don't track it into the bunker," she told him.
"Yes mom," he teased. She could see his distant suited form strolling across the vast hangar bay, pacing out the confines of the room.
Harper chose that moment to come flying down the stairs with a large crate of energy drinks balanced on his shoulder. "Turn on the news!" He shouted as he raced into the room. When both Lily and Regan stared at him with bewilderment, he set down the crate of drinks and raced to the far wall of the room to activate the holoscreen he had mounted there.
"...Come together in the face of this threat," A brown skinned woman in a business suit was saying, The ticker at the bottom of the screen identified her as United Nations Secretary General Kelsang Choenyi and Regan felt her eyebrows start crawling towards the top of her head.
"For all of its history, humanity has defied the odds, come together, and lived to survive and thrive another day," the woman continued.
"The Martians just announced the existence of a second race of aliens," Harper explained to them as the woman paused to take a sip of her water.
"I know many of you are afraid for your families, for your futures, and for your world, but we will not let ourselves be defined by our fear. We will not let ourselves be defined by our uncertainty. We will survive and thrive, we will come together, and when the Reshapers come upon our system we will make them think twice before messing with Earth." The woman went silent and the view cut out to a talking head discussing the politics between Earth and Mars following the announcement. Images flashed on the screen of Martian warships repositioning themselves and UN ships responding in kind. Harper turned the screen back off.
"The Reshapers are like, god level in terms of technology, and they're strip mining the whole galaxy. Apparently, they're on their way towards Sol," Harper said, "There's demonstrations in New York, Paris, Moscow, Sacra Mensa, San Francisco, Seattle, and on a whole bunch of Martian orbitals. There're riots in like, every second city on Earth and a bunch of the colonies, and the internet boards are blowing up all over."
"So the Evil Aliens finally reveal themselves to us," Regan replied, crossing her arms.
"Looks like it," Harper said, "and people are freaking the fuck out over it."
"Are we safe here? Is the colony safe?" Regan asked him.
"No one has any idea," he answered honestly, "But they seem pretty scary to me, maybe Seth's plan to build a ship and get out of here isn't totally crazy."
Their eyes all went to the fourth teen in their group, who was still excitedly stomping around the hangar bay, drawing lines on the dust and grit with his feet.
"Maybe," Regan admitted.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
United Nations Defense Fleet Headquarters Building
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
The Defense fleet headquarters was a frenzy of barely controlled chaos. Lower ranking officers darted between offices balancing stacks of tablets and shouting updates to their various teams on their various tasks. The Eighth Expeditionary Fleet slid out of warp over the Earth a week into Martians going public with the information on the Reshapers. Protests and demonstrations were rampant, instability on various colonies was at an all time high system-wide, and fleets of the three great powers were racing from hotspot to hotspot, trying to keep ahead of the spreading unrest.
Maeve O'Donnell understood it somewhat. It was an expression of frustration. People had no outlet for their emotions and so they took it out on society. Everyone was shouting 'do something!' at the top of their lungs, but no one was quite sure what to do. Having the news of the Reshapers already circulating when they arrived had thrown Maeve for a loop until she understood that the Martians had sent a ship back towards Sol a week before her fleet arrived at Luyten's Star.
It meant she had little to offer to Admiral Eastlake to explain the loss of one of her ships, and added yet another level of apprehension towards her upcoming debrief. She had already submitted her written reports, but she still had to actually talk to the Admiral.
As her scheduled debrief loomed closer, Maeve found herself in one of the officer's lounges, looking out over the Earth. From her height, the Earth was a sphere of blue and green, a gem in the vast wilderness of deep space. The strife that beset the surface was invisible from her altitude, the world seemed tranquil and idyllic.
She sipped a coffee she'd purchased from the bar and settled to stare out at the Earth and wait out her last few hours. Those hours seemed to race by as the Earth below her rotated out of night and into the daylight. Tiny island chains glinted in the morning sunlight, and wispy clouds cast shifting fractals across the surface.
When the appointed hour of her figurative execution approached, she stiffly rose from her seat and made her way through the ring to the Defense Fleet Headquarters building, a towering spire in shiny reflective white pointing inwards on the ring and up towards the central elevator station. She felt herself drawn slightly to the side as she rode the building's elevator upwards towards the ring's center of spin, but not enough to give her nausea.
The Admiral's receptionist was a young chinese woman who smiled and offered Maeve coffee, which she shrugged off. She thought it would likely only make her nerves worse than they already were. After what had seemed like an intolerable amount of waiting, the receptionist announced that the Admiral would see her and opened the door to her office.
As Senior Defense Secretary to the Executive Administration of Secretary General Kelsang Choenyi, Admiral Angela Eastlake was one of the most powerful women in the solar system and overseer of all UN military forces. She had over a century of military service on her record and had been through two rounds of anti-senescenic treatments. She wore a young angular face with blonde hair pulled back into a severe bun, and smiled wanly at Maeve as she entered.
"Maeve, have a seat," she said, gesturing to the chair across from her desk. The Commodore dutifully sank into her chair and reluctantly met the Admiral's eyes.
"So a bit of a mess then?" The Admiral asked her.
"A bit," She admitted before launching into her defense of her actions, "we followed orders and attempted to initiate contact. As expected, the Martians blocked us and there was an accident when two of our ships collided. The aliens left while our ships were blinded by Martian jamming. I'm not sure what else we were expected to do. You sent us in there looking to start a fight, and we started one, and as happens with these sorts of things, people died."
"I sent you in there to figure out how to talk to the aliens and gave you discretion on how to deal with the Martians--" Angela started to say when Maeve cut her off.
"They started jamming us--" Maeve said before Angela cut her off back.
"And you jammed them back," the Admiral asserted, "You gave into the conflux trap. You let the situation escalate until you couldn't possibly hope to escape something going wrong. You let that duel with them continue for twelve hours, you could have stood down at any time and worked out a stable fleet position, then kept pestering them into letting you communicate. Instead, it took a hundred and forty-eight people dying before you de-escalated. Tell me I'm wrong."
"You aren't wrong," Maeve said ashamedly, staring at her feet, "So what happens next?"
"Next I strip you of your command and bump you down to captain and tell the talking heads I dealt with the problem, while I'm internally faced the reality that every one of your peers would have done the same thing in your place," the Admiral admitted frankly, "I don't hold you personally responsible for the screwups that took place, but I have to play to the politicians. You're being given command of the UNDF BCS3 Mercy Given, your one year mission is to find us some aliens and make contact with them. Now leave your Commodore's bars on my desk and get out of my office."
Maeve shamefully obliged her request and fled the room as quickly as possible. She felt ashamed of herself and felt every bit of valid criticism against her like a raw wound that had just been opened up.
The secretary started to say something to her, but she took one look at Maeve's expression and simply smiled conciliatorily. Maeve gave the other woman a stiff nod and made her way for the door.
She held the door open for a young man in a captain's uniform as she slipped out of the reception area and made her way back to the elevators, continuing to tell herself she wasn't going to start crying. She was over a century old, she was a dignified woman, and she wasn't going to cry like a teenager because something hadn't gone her way. She hadn't cried for the loss of life on the Normandy and her own personal career loss paled in comparison to that by every metric. She deserved her demotion, and she should be happy she came out of it with a command and a ship, no she definitely wasn't going to cry.
There was no one else in the elevator when she entered and she mashed the button for the base of the ring. The elevator had descended a third of the way down the shaft when her tears finally managed to silently escape her eyes. The lift was halfway down when a tremor ran through the car and her phone started throwing up urgent security alerts for the floor she had just departed. Maeve's moment of weakness quickly passed and she blinked back the tears as she stared at her phone screen in growing horror.
Constellation Project Colony
UNDSV 15-18 Jericho Ridge
Hyperbolic Stellar Escape Trajectory
1.95 Light Years from Sol
May 2219
All their faces were obscured by various sorts of breathing masks. Regan wore an old surplus gas mask from the colony police that she had wrote 'fuck the police' and a combination of other colorful slogans onto. Lily was wearing the old spacesuit, which seemed to Regan to be a bit of overkill, but she wasn't one to judge. Harper was wearing ski goggles and a baklava, with a surgical mask tucked underneath. Seth had a bandana tied around his mouth like an outlaw in the ancient west, and had the welding mask propped open on top of his head.
The group of teens were attempting to clean up the massive amount of rust and grit that had accumulated in the hangar bay over the years, and it was proving to be a daunting undertaking. The hangar was two hundred meters in length and a hundred in width, it would be possible to comfortably host two games of football at once on the massive open floor.
The pile of loose powdery debris they had swept up was already half Regan's height in the center and a meter in diameter, and they'd only swept up a quarter of the floor.
"It's going to take a dump truck to clear all this shit out," Regan declared, her voice muffled behind the breathing mask.
"Yeah, I didn't realize there was going to be quite so much of it," Seth paused, leaning against his push broom and eyeing the mound of dust and debris with a critical eye.
"We could always just override the door safeties so the big door starts opening while there's still air in the room and suck everything out into space," Harper suggested. Their eyes went to Regan, she had more knowledge of how the colony computer systems worked than any of them. She thought about it for a moment and then shook her head.
"How many cubic meters is this room? How tall is it Seth? I know you took a bunch of rangefinding data," Regan asked him.
"It's seventy-five meters high," he supplied, frowning as he realized where Regan's train of thought was going.
"So one hundred times two hundred times seventy-five," she pulled out her phone and quickly did the math using a calculator app, holding the result out in front of her, "Is one point five million cubic meters of air."
"And someone might notice that much air going missing at once," Seth completed her thought for her.
"That's a lot of air, someone would definitely notice that and come to investigate," she confirmed, "We don't want that."
"Well, what are we going to do with this stuff then?" Harper complained, "Wheelbarrow it out and dump it in the woods outside?"
"We could sweep it up into piles along the crease in the door," Regan thought aloud, "then pull the air out of the room, open the door a bit, and sweep stuff out into space through the open door."
"We only have the one spacesuit though," Lily reminded her.
"I'll do it," Seth offered, "Help me get it swept into the middle of the room first, I'll take care of getting it out the door afterward."
"Alright, but I'm going to go eat something first, we've been at this all morning," Harper announced, strolling off the hangar deck towards the airlock chamber. Lily followed after him in the spacesuit, and Regan started to follow but stopped when she realized Seth was still working away.
She paused, letting the other two drift ahead of her and said quietly, "Are you alright Seth?"
Ever since finding the bunker, something seemed different about Seth. He wasn't as aimless, instead, he seemed to have gained a laser focus on his personal starship project, and it was a little frightening seeing how dedicated he was.
"Yeah, I'm good," he said without looking up from the deck.
"I'm serious," Regan insisted, crossing her arms in front of her chest, "It's like you've turned into a different person, I've never seen you this...driven."
He paused and leaned against the broom handle, "I'm really serious about this Regan, and I know what you're going to say," He cut her off as she started to speak, "You're going to say that all this stuff with the divorce is messing with my head, and you're probably right, but that doesn't really change my perspective on it. At least I'm doing something productive," and with that, he resumed his sweeping.
"I just worry this productive thing of yours is going to kill you. Can't you just paint or learn to play the guitar or something like a normal person?" Regan asked him.
"If it kills me, then it kills me," the teenager answered her with a shrug, "I'd rather have a short and interesting life then a long boring and typical one."
"I don't want it to kill you, Seth." She protested, "I want you to still be around for the reunion in a few centuries. Not only that but what you're talking about could also kill other people."
"Then don't help me," he said simply. Regan's eye twitched as her mind short-circuited slightly.
"You…" her struggled to find the words, then lanced into him once she did, "This is stupid, you're being stupid and stubborn, and it's going to get you killed."
"So noted," He said.
"And you don't fucking care, you don't care if you live or die, whatever."
Regan sighed and stomped off across the hangar plain, wandering back to the airlock and brushing herself down thoroughly before stripping off her gas mask and stepping through into the observation room.
Images of starships fighting played across the holoscreen with a news ticker at the bottom, and Harper and Lily were both watching it with rapt attention as they ate leftover pizza.
"What's this crap?" Regan asked, gesturing to the screen and shoving her hands in her pockets, "More drama in space?"
"Yeah," Harper responded, "Those ships we saw a few weeks back got into a fight with the Martians, and it spooked the aliens they were talking to. It's all over the headlines. They also got some good pictures of the alien spaceship, it's huge and crazy looking." His voice gradually became more excited as he explained everything that was being announced.
"What a mess," Regan said with a sigh as information scrolled endlessly beneath the silent images of drones exploding in space.
"...finally ended when the United Nations cruiser Normandy, and the Martian frigate Chapel Hill collided in space during close maneuvers, resulting in over two hundred fatalities between the two ships." The new anchor continued as the images of the colliding vessels flashed across the screen.
Regan hugged her arms to her chest, strangely captivated by the conflict, drawn toward the images of destruction by some some dark part tugging at her psyche. The image jumped again as the anchor switched topics.
"In other news," the anchor continued, "Admiral Angela Eastlake, the Senior Defense Secretary to the Executive Administration of Kelsang Choenyi was killed in a bomb blast in her office yesterday evening. Three members of her immediate staff were also killed, their names are being withheld at this time. The terrorist organisation calling itself the Free Sky Tribe has claimed responsibility for the attack. Shortly following the bomb blast, their founder Anton Hellas released a video online in multiple languages, admitting responsibility and declaring that the stars are the birthright of all of humanity. Hellas' Free Sky Tribe is a militant branch of the Open Sky Movement. Founders of the movement in the Open Sky Tribe on Triton have denounced the bombing and called for an end to the violence..."
"The Open Sky Movement are a bunch of dumb hippies," Regan rebutted the news anchor, "You can't just declare yourself an ethnic group, by their logic, we're spacers, and we're oh so oppressed right?"
"Oh it's more complicated than that back in Sol and you know it, Regan," Lily scolded her, "We are spacers, we've lived our whole lives in space, we were born in space, I don't know about you, but I've never been to a planet, I'm pretty sure that makes us spacers by their definition."
Regan's attraction to Lily and her attraction to misanthropy did battle for a moment before her hormones won out and silenced her desire to keep arguing.
"Fine, whatever," she mumbled halfheartedly.
"Something bothering you?" Lily asked her.
Regan made a face and tried to find words to express her feelings, "That guy, the one who just blew up that Admiral, he says the stars are our birthright. But I don't think we deserve the stars. You ever think maybe, it'd be better for the entire universe if humanity just all went extinct?"
"Not really," Harper answered her absentmindedly, "I mean, we do a lot of bad stuff," he said, gesturing to the holoscreen and turning the volume down with his implants, "But I think at the end of the day, we're still a net positive. The Reshapers seem way worse than us."
"You think we're a net positive with all of this shit?" She quipped, gesturing at the screen.
"People are capable of all sorts of things Regan," Lily told her soothingly, "All you can do is try and put out as much good as you can, and hope it outways the bad."
"I guess," she replied sullenly, eyes still on the screen, vaguely disgusted at the typical human folly on display. She shook her head as the newscast jumped topics again, showing riots on the Sessrumnir Orbital, and turned away from the other teens and the holoscreen. She needed some time to think.
She slipped out of the observation room and climbed the bunker stairs back towards the surface.
The air had grown bitter and chill as winter closed in on the colony, giving the breeze a painful bite. Regan wandered away from the bunker entrance, lighting a cigarette as she walked off into the fading twilight.
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
May 2219
Jean thought she was doing reasonably well for herself, but the isolation was slowly starting to get to her. It had been two weeks since the Kiwawentoa had delivered her the small collection of gear they'd taken from her, and she'd not seen or heard another sentient since then.
She found herself retreating more and more into her still growing mindscape as the toll of the social isolation began to set in. She found herself thinking aloud, just to hear another voice.
The gear the Kiwawentoa returned to her had been a godsend. There was a small knife in her suit for cutting patches into shape, and from that, she was able to produce a large number of spears and other useful objects. Her diet consisted of berries, nuts, and seeds mashed together into a sort of stiff bar for easy carrying and strips of deer meat she was hastily trying to dry in order to preserve it.
The deer hunt had presented itself to Jean like a monumental undertaking, the Martian had never killed anything in her life, and the horns on the deer were more than a little intimidating. She'd crouched along a trail for hours, keeping as silent as possible, grasping her homemade spear tightly as she waited for the creature to make its appearance.
When the battle at long last came, it ended up being somewhat anticlimactic. The creature had ambled along the path, and when Jean finally jumped out and spooked it, it dropped its antlers and charged her. She ducked to her right at the last moment, grabbing the deer's left antler with her left hand and used it as a lever to push herself out of the path of the horns. At the same time, her right hand, the one holding the spear, came around swinging and drove the spear into the creature's neck.
It made a horribly pained noise as blood spurted from the wound, and it collapsed on the forest floor and died. It had taken less than a minute to take down the creature. The process of hauling it back to her camp and butchering it had turned out to be backbreaking and disgusting work. It had taken her hours to haul the carcass back, and she'd nearly puked several times while emptying out the creature's guts, but in the end, she had meat cooking over a fire, and pelts drying out to make into clothes.
In the intervening days, she'd made crude clothing, fashioned herself better tools, and successfully cured the meat into tough but edible strips she hoped would not quickly go bad.
Her mind kept returning to the calico colored alien's words, her instructions to look for the hidden doorways, and the knowledge that they were testing her in some manner. It peeved her to be their lab rat, but she still did her best to set a good example for other humans.
Jean didn't know exactly what Studying-Hoping-Envisioning was referring to, but after days of wandering the bottom of the valley, she was coming to the conclusion that the hidden doorways, whatever they were, were probably up higher on the valley wall, where the cliff could conceivably open up into a space behind the mountains.
Thus she had begun condensing her things down as much as possible into portable forms she could carry up hills. Most of her stuff fit into the bags the Kiwawentoa had put it inside of, but those bags were strange and clearly designed for alien anatomy. She had carefully braided grasses together into rough shoulder straps and ties, allowing her to carry everything, even so, the rough unbalanced bundle was a pain to lug up the forested slope.
Going downhill, the valley hadn't seemed all that steep, but going back up it while carrying around fifty pounds of stuff in a homemade rucksack was an entirely different experience. Jean found herself panting and wheezing from the exertion before even reaching an altitude where the deciduous forest gave way to conifers.
The valley floor spread out below her in a verdant patchwork of blues and greens. Jean carefully slide her pack off her shoulders and leaned against a boulder, munching on a piece of leathery deer jerky. The sun was still high in the sky, despite the energy she'd exerted, not that much time had actually elapsed since she'd departed the lake shore, she probably hadn't come all that far yet.
She groaned, then paused, chuckling at how strange her voice had started to sound to her, "I better get out of here soon, or I'm going to actually go crazy," she said aloud cheerfully, and shrugged the pack back over her shoulders.
The thick leafy deciduous trees gave way to arrow straight conifers as she reached higher elevations, which made the going somewhat easier. The lower forests had been thick with bushes and undergrowth, but up amongst the conifers, the undergrowth was mostly clear, save for a thick layer of fallen needle-like leaves.
The slope of the land grew slowly as she climbed up towards the walls of the bowl-shaped valley. Large rocks and boulders began to emerge from the thick loam in places, jutting up like submerged icebergs showing their faces to the sun. The slope of the walls had been almost imperceptible down on the lake shore, but as she climbed through the pine forest, the slope just seemed to increase without end.
The trees were becoming more straggly and sparsely spread out on the hillside, and the soil had grown more poor and rocky. Tall wispy grasses and brightly colored wildflowers dominated the areas between the trees, and Jean could see that further up the slope, even those failed to grow as the soil gave way to a rocky scree. At the top of a long sloping mound of loose rock and rubble, was the cliff face and the true perimeter to the environment. That was Jean's objective.
The increasingly sharp slope of increasingly loose scree made this a difficult and treacherous undertaking. The few remaining plants gave way to bare stone as she continued her arduous ascent of the valley wall. Her climb sent avalanches of stone tumbling down the hillside in her wake, raising a cloud of dust into the setting sun.
Jean had hoped to make the cliff face by nightfall and find some sort of shelter in the base of the cliffs, but from up close, the cliff face looked profoundly uninviting. The slope of loose scree clung to the hillsides as much as gravity would allow, leaving no flat places to make camp.
Defeated, she half walked and half rode the wave of debris down the hill to the treeline. When she reached the first of the trees, she fell heavily against it and slung off her pack to set up camp for the night.
Δ
Jean woke stiff and in pain as the first cold light of morning began to creep into the valley, driving away the artificial starlight with cheerfully blue skies. She groaned and rubbed her face, brushing away the debris that had accumulated in the night. She hadn't bothered to make a fire, she'd merely wrapped up in all the layers she had and fallen asleep nearly immediately from exhaustion, slumped against a tree trunk.
The stiffness in her joints and muscles made her severely regret that decision almost immediately after waking, nevertheless, she ignored her protesting body and shouldered her pack once more.
She set out along the curve of the valley wall, staying just above the treeline where the ground was fairly easy to traverse despite the incline. By midmorning, it felt like she had come a long way from her initial campsite. Her angle on the lakes at the valley's floor had noticeably shifted, and a different patch of cliff face stared down at her from high on the ridge.
Jean continued in this manner for some time, picking her way around scraggly bushes that grew in clusters amongst the tall grasses and scrambling over boulders that had slid down the cliff face. It wasn't particularly easy progress, but it felt more productive than climbing the valley initially had and far more than mucking around in the scree slopes further up the valley walls.
She was munching on one of her fruit bars when she stumbled onto the stream. A shallow bed of water cascaded through a worn divot in the slope, carving a steeper angle into the hillside with its passage. Wildflowers grew all along its shore, hiding the steep-sided ravine it lay within, and Jean nearly tumbled into it before she caught herself.
The stream was a good thing though, Jean remembered the pond she had been thrown into upon her arrival in the valley, and it seemed like as good a place as any to start looking for hidden doors. She spent the afternoon hiking up the hillside once again, following the course of the stream up the side of the valley.
The ravine opened up into a wide bowl at the base of the cliffs and water bubbled and gurgled over the lip as it began its long descent to the lakes below. On the far side of the pond though, was something that brought a smile to Jean's lips for the first time in days. Looking like something out of a fantasy novel, the outline of a door was set into the base of the cliff.
Chapter 19: Correspondence Bias
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 19: Correspondence Bias
Styx Class Orbital Scow
LDS-OS Bob Dylan
15,944 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
Angela Eastlake awoke with a groan. Her entire body ached, her skin throbbing as if it were a muscle. Every nerve in her body was firing off at full tilt, and she saw stars dancing behind her eyelids. She tried to roll over and rub her face, but found she was restrained. As wakefulness continued returning to her and she realized she was being held down, her eyes darted open and came face to face with the third most wanted man in the Solar system.
"Admiral! You're awake," Anton Hellas smiled down at Angela, "Our last conversation was interrupted before it could reach its culmination, I'd ever so like to continue it."
Her mind skipped as her memories caught up with her. She remembered the young captain entering her office with some ridiculous story of how the system had become corrupted, then pulling a gun on her when the conversation started to go sour. Angela had tried to call security on her implants, then there was a blinding brilliance and her mind had gone dark.
Anton grinned peevishly at her, "So as I was saying before we were interrupted, the Great Powers may have kept the peace for the last century, but they did so by ruthlessly exploiting their workers and creating a dispossessed underclass on every major planet and colony."
There were radicals whose actions were paid for by the opposing governments, there were radicals motivated by religious extremism, and then there was the group that truly believed they were acting in humanity's best interests. That last group was the one that Anton fell into, he legitimately believed he was doing the right thing, and that made him incredibly dangerous.
"Aren't you going to say anything?" he demanded, "You've been defending their interests with bullets for over a century, you forget how to do it with words?"
"I have nothing to say to the likes of you," she declared, "You're a murderer and criminal."
"I could say the same about you," he snorted, "I could, but then, our conversation would go nowhere, would it?" he pat her on the cheek condescendingly and then started pacing. He started to speak, but the Admiral cut him off.
"I'm nothing like you," she insisted.
He laughed, "You say that, but I think we're not so different you and I."
"I worked to bring peace, and order, and justice to the system, all you've done is sow chaos and destruction," she spoke with a conviction borne of years of service.
"You defend and uphold a system where air and water are tradable commodities, where children are left to suffocate because they can't afford to breathe. Where's the justice in that?" His tone was earnest, almost melancholic, "Where's the justice, when corporations strip asteroids barren of resources and then leave the people in them to die when they stop being useful? Where's the justice, when the companies that mine the iron in your space stations hire death squads to torture and kill union leaders who are trying to organize for better conditions?"
He shook his head and answered his own question, "There is no justice in it at all."
"So you'd make things worse?" She argued, "Create violence and instability?"
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable," he insisted, "A great man once said that. And, thanks to the actions of people like you, the plutocrats who rule over the system have successfully managed to suppress peaceful revolution for over a century. But the people cry out to be heard, and I hear their pleas."
"You're a power hungry maniac," she snarled.
"Is that what you really believe about me? You know in the Tribe, there are many who think you're a lizard person. They think your blood runs green if you're cut, but I know you still bleed red," he smiled ominously at that. "You believe in what you're doing, that's admirable, Admiral. But you've been doing it a long time, and the power has corrupted you. You're blind to the suffering you inflict upon others."
"And you're not?" she snorted derisively.
"On the contrary, my eyes are wide open," he replied, "I am keenly aware of the scales weighed against each action I perform, the hurt I cause and the suffering I inflict, weighed against the lives saved with those harms, no I must act."
He turned away from her again, pacing the room, "So see, It's happened time and again, first on the nations of Earth, then Mars, then in the Tartarus Accords. I was born on Mars you know? And not on some prissy orbital, I grew up on the frontier. And you know, there was so much hope on Mars, so much idealism, and compassion, and yet they still managed to fall prey to their greed, small mindedness, and baser urges. They called themselves socialists, but they paid no heed to the universal plight of workers everywhere. They justify their brutality in space by saying it is for the good of Mars, while their corporations just take, and take, and take," he spat, "Mars is also guilty, and will also face justice in due time."
"If this is your idea of justice: kidnapping, and torture? It's sick." The admiral sneered.
"Oh, no, I'm still establishing my case, as it were, you see?" He said. "The UN Is no different, it was originally created as a peacekeeping organization, and it has managed to do that on Earth for over two centuries, albeit at nuclear gunpoint, but still an impressive accomplishment. It's too bad you sold out your ideals in favor of realpolitik, maybe the corporations wouldn't have walked all over you so much."
"We still have ideals," Angela said defensively, "But in the real world, sometimes you have to do unpleasant things in order to uphold those ideals and the systems that allow them."
"I believe that was true once, but no longer. Another great man anticipated it when he said, the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Nations start out with their ideals intact, created in the fires of revolution, and then over time, corruption seeps in, power accumulates at the top, in people like you, and the oppressed become the oppressors."
"So now that you have the power, you're going to oppress those who you feel wronged you, is that how this works?" Andrea growled.
Anton chuckled, "Yeah, thanks to you, I'm about to oppress the shit out of your friends."
"I won't help you," she said forcefully, gritting her teeth. "I won't let you torture information out of me."
"You're already helping me," Anton said nonchalantly, turning back towards her with a scalpel in hand, "I just need to borrow your face."
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
United Nations Executive Security Operations Building
Geosynchronous Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
Admiral Marion Blake absentmindedly fiddled with the medals pinned to her dress uniform. The attack that had killed the senior defense secretary left all of them reeling and on edge. The Free Sky Tribe weren't even considered the most dangerous terrorist group in the system, the idea that they had managed to infiltrate one of the most secure military installations in the UN and kill their most senior military officer didn't sit well with any of them.
The fleet around Earth had been put on high alert and dozens of ships swarmed the local space around the station. They were visible as moving white blurs as they passed cameras which fed imagery into the faux windows lining the perimeter of the operations room. Despite all the effort being thrown at the problem, the UN Special Investigators assigned to the incident were unable to pick up the trail of the terrorists responsible. They had vanished into the buzz of traffic around Earth without a trace. She dragged her eyes away from the wallscreens and focused back on the matter she had at hand.
Images paraded across the holographic screens at the center of the room, videos given to the Martians by the aliens they were calling the Kiwawentoa depicted planetary-scale destruction and even stars being dismantled for resources. It showed massive alien war fleets casually swatted aside, entire solar systems reduced to rubble and then vacuumed up afterward.
"We should consider the possibility that we will not be able to defend Sol against the Reshapers," General Arthur Alexander, Secretary of the Marines said sullenly as the images scrolled past.
"The Security Council will never agree to abandoning the defense of the Earth," Kai Ming Song, Senior Administrative Representative to the UN security council declared.
"You've seen the video Song," Gideon Churchill, Senior Undersecretary to the executive administration said calmly to the korean woman, "Tell me how to defend Earth against that."
"You have nuclear warheads, relativistic kinetic kill weapons, a fleet of over a thousand ships, it's your job to figure out how to defend Earth from this sort of threat," she insisted, "Figure out how to kill them, and kill them until they decide to leave our system alone."
"It looks like a lot of species tried that and the Reshapers wiped the floor with them," Marion spoke up, meeting the representative's gaze.
"What's our alternative," Sven Goddardson Junior Undersecretary to the Executive Administration said, steepling his fingers, "Evacuate the planet?"
"You can't be serious," Gideon said turning towards Sven, "There are twenty billion people on the Earth, the logistics of evacuating even a tenth of that population is…" he trailed off as he imagined the costs and the logistical complexities involved. It was the sort of thing that could kill tens of thousands just as a side effect of the mass migrations.
"There's no realistic way we could evacuate everyone," Marion agreed with the senior undersecretary, She swiped her hands through the videos of the Reshapers and shifted the image at the center of the table back to its default setting.
The real-time holographic map of the Sol system rotated lazily around the round table that dominated the room, highlighting the locations of planets, asteroids, and rotating habitats. Color coded trajectories representing the courses of various military vessels crisscrossed the chart in what should have been a confusing tangle, but to Marion, made perfect sense.
"However," she continued, "We could at least get started on the process. We have two hundred and nineteen rotating habitats currently housing fifty-eight million people in the Earth-Luna sphere of influence, if we retrofit those colonies with warp drives and start filling them up to capacity, we could fit upwards of a hundred and fifty million people just with the infrastructure we have in orbit right now."
"One hundred and fifty million out of twenty billion," the senior undersecretary reiterated, "That's zero point seven percent of the Earth's population, it's a drop in the bucket."
"People are going to die in the course of these events regardless of how they play out," Arthur said, "If these aliens come for the Earth, and we can't protect her, then she's like the Titanic, and we don't have enough lifeboats."
"Thus bringing us back to my point," Song argued, "Which is that we need to figure out how to kill these Reshapers and keep them away from our planet."
"We should still have contingency plans," Arthur insisted, "Start evacuating our most important scholars and artists now, so if the worst happens, our civilisation can continue in some fo-" Arthur's words were suddenly ripped from his mouth, along with all the rest of the air in his lungs as the room unexpectedly turned into shrapnel.
Anton Hellas's hijacked kinetic kill vehicle had slammed into the structure at several hundred kilometers per second relative to the station. The hundred ton automated military vehicle was instantly reduced into a slug of hot metal as it tore through layers of armor plating and bulkheads. The room around Marion disintegrated in a roar of light and noise as the shockwave dopplered through the hull, and then suddenly she was tumbling through space, the now ruined ring station receding in the distance as her last breath of air escaped her lungs.
The armored skyscraper and a large chunk of the nearby ring were shredded apart in milliseconds by the shear forces, its wreckage torn from the station and sent tumbling along in the wake of the interplanetary bullet. Thousands perished instantly as their bodies were crushed and torn apart by the exploding structure. Thousands more were cast into the abyss as the rooms and compartments they had inhabited cracked open to the void and dumped their still living occupants into space.
Marion saw the Earth, breathtakingly beautiful as it hung shining in the vast darkness. Her eyes burned, her skin burned, and her head swam, but she held her gaze on that image of the blue world for the few seconds it took for the dark bliss of unconsciousness and death swim up through her body and claim her.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
0.9 AUs from Ross 154
May 2219
Ross 154 was a quiet, foreboding place. The variable dwarf cast a dim and baleful crimson glare over a singular barren worldlet, a tumbling Mercury-sized rock orbiting within a larger rubble belt that never accumulated into a true planet.
It was on this forlorn rock in space that the Martian Survey Corps had built Magellan, their largest interstellar exploration complex. Vast warrens supporting a population of thousands were burrowed into the darkened rock, sprouting transparent domes across the surface like mushroom caps. An orbital elevator descended from a waystation with a rotating habitat ring down to the planetoid's surface, and the dark side of the tidally locked world bore growing clusters of radio telescopes, peering into the darkness of space.
Despite the activity she knew was there, the system felt lonely and desolate to Ivy Czininski as she brought the Empiricist in to dock with the station. The maneuvering thrusters cut out, and the clamps on the rotating habitat grabbed hold of the Empiricist, bringing an abrupt return from weightlessness and shoving Ivy into her seat.
There was only one other vessel docked to the station when they arrived, the MNCV Dawnchaser, which was preparing to depart coreward into Scorpius in the hunt for the Reshapers.
Airlocks clanked into place and electrical and fuel lines from the station hooked up as status lights went green across the board. Ivy sighed and let her head fall back in her chair, then unstrapped and climbed down the axial ladder to the airlock chamber. Vedika followed her silently from the bridge, and together they passed through the airlocks and entered the station.
Station Commander Neal Tekla greeted the pair of them outside the airlock, and they all saluted each other smartly in what was strictly speaking far more military a manner than Survey required.
"Welcome back to Magellan, Commander Czininski," he said enthusiastically shaking her hand, "how's it feel to be the first captain to find intelligent life in space?"
"Rather terrifying to be completely honest with you," Ivy smiled and broke the contact, "But then it is the sort of thing we all signed up to do."
"Don't remind me," the old man grimaced, "I'd be right out there with you if I had a ship of my own and wasn't saddled down running this colony. Did you think you'd ever actually see the day we met aliens?"
"I mean, I'm not planning on dying anytime soon, so eventually I figured we'd run into someone," Ivy explained, "What about you Neal, were you planning on forgoing the anti-senesics this time around?"
"I'm considering it," he admitted, "I've had a long life, I've been rejuvenated twice already, and I don't want to just keep ticking along forever. In my experience, everyone has a limit."
"Well, I hope yours is still a few hundred years out Old Man," she smiled sadly at him, "I've gotten rather used to you being around here."
"Everything passes with time Ivy, even supposed Immortals," he said sagely as they strolled the wide hallway the airlocks were mounted along, "Though, maybe I'd feel different after the physical therapy. It's been a few decades since these old joints were comfortable in a gravity well."
"I'd consider it," Vedika spoke up for the first time, "See if the anti-senesic therapy improves your emotional state."
He grunted in response, and they walked in silence to the elevator.
"So you have an officer for me?" She asked him as they entered the elevator, "I lost one of mine."
"I heard about that," he confirmed, "Nasty situation, I hope she pulls through, she was a good kid from what I hear."
"She is," Ivy insisted, correcting him on the tense, "But I need an XO until we can get her back."
"And I do have one for you," he sent a personnel file from his implants to her own and she opened it, reading the contents.
"Lieutenant Commander Joy Icaria, forty-three, served two tours of duty aboard the Oppenheimer's Lament," Ivy read off the sheet as the lift carried them upwards, deeper into the ring, slight coriolis forces tugging them to the side as they rose through the decks.
"I've met her, she's a good kid," the station commander said.
"She's a bit young for Executive Officer, is she competent?" Ivy asked as they stepped off the lift into the station command layer at the inner surface of the ring.
"She sure seemed it to me," Neal said gruffly, "Tough as nails that one, though, she could do to get the pole out of her ass."
"That's high praise coming from you," she said.
"It is," he admitted, "most of these kids are softer than fresh pastry, a real conflict would chew them up and spit them out faster than you can bat an eye."
"I would have said something about how we were leaving the era where we'd have to fight those sorts of conflicts," Ivy admitted, "but the Reshapers change that equation quite a bit."
"The universe is full of conflict, there's no escaping it," he said.
"I hope you're mistaken about that Old Man," Ivy said seriously.
"So do I Commander, so do I," he replied.
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
May 2219
The outline of the archway was created by a deep seam in the rock face. The door itself seemed to be composed of the same material as the rest of the cliff, and aside from the seam itself, was particularly unremarkable as a patch of the cliff face.
Jean had erected a campsite beside the door at the edge of the pond. She started a fire as the sun began dimming and falling behind the mountains, letting in the night. At the altitude she was at, it didn't take long for the air to acquire a painfully bitter bite that left her huddling up in her clothing and animal skins as close to the fire as she could manage. The chill of night pressed down on her, leaving her questioning the wisdom of making camp right up at the door. However, she knew she had made the right choice as the fake sun fully sank behind the fake mountains and the fake stars started to come out. In the gathering fake twilight, a faint glow emanating from the seam in the cliff face became readily apparent.
It was a soft white light, impossible to see during the day, but becoming visible in the growing dusk. Jean stood up and ran in place for a moment to get her blood flowing again, and made her way up to the cliff face.
She tried to peer into the seam in the rock, but aside from the soft glow, nothing was visible. She felt the rock with her palm and thought she felt a slight rumble pass through the stone, but it faded away as quickly as it came. She rapped her knuckles on the stone face of the door, and pressed against it with all of her body weight, but just like her attempts during the day, these attempts also produced no effect and the door remained stubbornly in place.
She growled in frustration at the stone and kicked it, but this also produced no effect other than to make her toe hurt. Jean sighed and leaned against the door, slumping slowly down the face of it, until she was in a sitting position. She lightly banged her head on the hard stone surface in frustration.
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning had told her to find the hidden doorways, and this seemed like the sort of thing she had been describing. It wasn't that hidden, but from any distance away it was all but invisible against the cliff face. Jean's tiny campfire produced more light than was managing to seep around the cracks in the door, so even at night, it wasn't as if it'd be particularly noticeable without coming right up onto it.
She rested her head against the cool stone and closed her eyes. That was when she heard the faint chirping and trilling sounds emanating from the stone. Her eyes darted open and she leapt back from the rock like it'd bit her. The doorway had fallen silent once more.
She stomped back to her campfire and sat down next to the heat source, glaring at the glowing door. The door, if it had any regard for her actions, continued to ignore her.
Jean dug through her rucksack and found a hunk of deer jerky and sat chewing on it and poking the fire with a stick while considering the problem before her. She wasn't sure what had triggered the sound to begin with, if it had a trigger. That if was the problem, however, as there was also the possibility that it was simply very faint and could be only be heard when Jean pressed her face to the surface.
"Well I guess I'd better test it somehow," she said quietly, her voice dry and hoarse from disuse. She retreated into her mindscape and began listing out all the potential things to test for on a mental whiteboard. Could she hear the sound when she pressed her ear to the stone outside the doorway? What about if she had some sort of intermediary inorganic material like a cup to amplify the sound?
She shouldered her pack and wandered absentmindedly back over to the doorway, continuing to chew on her deer jerky while she examined the stone again. She pressed herself against the face of the door so her ear was up against the stone, and once more, she could hear the faint chirping sound. She slowly began to back off from the door. She started with her head while keeping her knees, arms, and chest touching the stone. She could still hear the chirping. As soon as no part of her body was in physical contact with the surface, it fell silent. She touched a finger to the door and the sound return.
"Huh," she said aloud, letting her arm fall limp against her body.
She repeated the entire test on the blank cliff face next to the door, but she wasn't able to hear anything. It seemed to be reacting to her contact in some way. She leaned in as close to the door as she could without touching it, then slowly extended one finger. It was quiet until her finger made contact with the stone, but as soon as that happened, she could hear the trilling and chirping again.
It was definitely kiwawentoa speech that she was hearing, probably some sort of automated message designed to react to touch. She tried touching the door through a layer of deer skin, but if failed to react to anything but her living skin, not even her hair triggered the response.
She stepped back from the door and sat down on the rocky ground before it. She removed the deerskin wrappings she had tied around her feet as an attempt at shoes and touched the sole of her foot to the door.
She then dug through her rucksack until she found the earpiece that translated the alien's speech. Once it had sat on her ear long enough to build up the electrical charge it needed from her body, the little device immediately began speaking to her.
"...ccess. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access Identif…" she pulled her foot away from the door before the voice gave her a headache and stared at the blank stone in bewilderment.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Docked at Magellan Elevator Station
0.9 AUs from Ross 154
May 2219
Cale and Kestral quietly slipped into the engineering bay at the bottom of the Empiricist. With the ship tethered into the station life support and half the crew aboard the station, the passageways were quiet and empty. The duo tried to look casual, but Kestral was nervous and couldn't stop looking all over the place, as if expecting enemies to jump out at any moment.
"This is a really bad idea," Kestral hissed to Cale as he shut the door to the engineering bay.
"We need exotic matter to test the hyperspace window generator. While we're docked up to the station and getting all our tanks topped off is as good a time as any, the exotic matter we take will just be replenished from the big tanks on the station," he explained to em again.
"You still don't have permission to be doing this," ey insisted as Cale began plugging in a portable containment unit into one of the shunt valves for the main exotic matter tank.
"I notice that you're not stopping me or raising an alarm, but are in fact helping me do this," Cale smiled wryly, "Let me also remind you that for the next several hours, until our next XO shows up, I'm senior pragmatist, which yes, does give me the authority to siphon fuel for science projects."
"And yet, I notice we're still doing this in secret while half the crew is on shore leave," ey smirked, shoving eir hands in eir pockets.
"Yes well," he grimaced as he yanked the plunger out of the containment unit to fill the chamber and locked it into place before beginning to unhook the unit from the valve, "Ivy won't like it, unless she finds out about it after we get it working, in which case she'll just be impressed and mildly annoyed."
"Provided it doesn't blow up in our faces," ey appended.
"It's not going to blow up in our faces," Cale assured em as he unplugged the containment unit and hefted it in the crook of his arm.
"So you say," Kestral teased as ey climbed the stairs to the main corridor and Cale hurried up the stairs after em.
Kestral opened the hatch to the corridor and was confronted by the sour looking face of Orel Shaw staring down at them from above. The tall lanky androgyne looked between the pair and crossed eir arms.
"What are you two doing here?" ey asked the increasingly guilty looking duo.
"Science, clearly," Cale said, shouldering past em, "I have this exotic matter and the chief science officer with me, clearly I'm doing science, now excuse me."
Cale continued onward up the corridor stairs leaving Kestral behind with Orel. Kestral looked somewhat like a kid with eir hand caught in the cookie jar. "He's always like this," Kestral assured the chief engineer as ey tried to squeeze past em.
Orel glared at them as they fled up the corridor staircase toward the machine shop they'd set up in. Cale set the containment unit down inside the door to the machine shop, pulled Kestral inside and pulled the door shut, engaging the locking mechanisms.
"You think ey'll report us to Ivy?" Kestral asked.
"If ey do, we'll still have a few hours before she can get down here to yell at us, she's aboard the station picking up our new XO, and Vedika is with her running interference, we've got everything set up, let's try and open the window," Cale said as he hefted the containment unit once more, carrying it over the cage of equipment that he had constructed with help from Kestral and Vedika.
"You work things out with Vedika?" Kestral asked, "It seemed like there was a lot of hostility between you two when we first left Luyten's Star. But I know she's been helping you with this."
"Yeah, you could say that," Cale admitted, poorly suppressing a smirk.
"Are you two fucking?" ey interrogated.
"I mean it, we worked things out," Cale insisted, "I was just feeling really emotional, but she's been helping build the hyperspace window generator, I think we've come to an understanding of each other."
"You're totally fucking," Kestral snorted with disbelief, "Pragmatists, you lot are unbelievable."
"It's not that big of a deal, it's not like we're in the military," Cale defended himself, "this is Survey, people hook up, Ivy's wife is a Digital Anthropologist and they met on a mission too, it's fine."
Kestral sighed and paced after him, rolling eir eyes as ey began gathering up power cables and connecting them to the ship's energy grid as Cale hooked the containment unit into the larger setup.
"We should have enough exotic matter to sustain the window for about five hours if my math holds," Cale explained to Kestral, "that should be enough time to do some good science."
"All the monitoring equipment is set up," Kestral confirmed, "The antennas are folded and in place, all the sensors are mounted, if it works, then we're good to go with the science part."
"It'll work," Cale assured em. He completed the connection process and started the power up sequence for the hyperspace window generator. The alien machine had to be flushed with exotic matter and fed local gravitational and magnetic field data to generate a safe window, and that process took some time before it could be activated.
"We'll see," Kestral replied, stepping back from the equipment and crossing eir arms as it began to quietly hum with power.
Cale studied the readouts carefully as the machine powered up, pumping exotic matter through all of its specially printed coils of electrically charged materials, "It all looks good here," Cale said quietly, growing more serious as he prepared to activate the device.
"You're sure this isn't going to rip a hole in the ship?" Kestral asked ominously.
"It isn't going to rip a hole in the ship," he confirmed and activated the machine.
The device hummed louder and then the humming stopped as the equipment emitted a loud pop from somewhere inside the cage and all the readouts started going crazy.
"What did you do?" Kestral asked frantically as ey looked at the strange cascade of particle and electromagnetic radiation that the sensors inside the cage were picking up on.
Cale's face was slowly splitting open into a massive grin as he looked over the rapidly scrolling information, "It's working," he said excitedly, "The window is stable, you're seeing the emissions from the transitional zone, extend the antenna."
Kestral's eyes lit up as ey realized what the data ey were looking at meant, it meant they had done it, they had opened a portal into hyperspace. Ey quickly input the control sequence into the antenna system, and a twenty-kilometer long cable topped with a bulb of sensors, cameras, and detectors began unspooling into the hyperspace window.
"Interesting," Kestral murmured as ey studied the screens displaying camera feeds into hyperspace. The background glowed with a dim red light, mottled by inconsistencies and turbulence. Vast clouds of dark gasses enclosed them on all sides, damping down the view to what the sensors told em was only about fifty AUs. There were no stars visible but some of the gas glowed with its own strange inner light.
Cale crowded eir as he watched the screens as well. He opened up a new screen and began flipping between the different sensors, looking at data coming in from various different wavelengths of light. He paused in the middle of the microwave spectrum, jaw dropping as he saw the flood of structured signals the microwave antennas were picking up.
He prodded Kestral away from the visible frequencies and pointed to the flood of signals rippling across his interface.
"What am I looking at?" Ey asked him.
"I think we just discovered the alien internet," he replied.
Styx Class Orbital Scow
LDS-OS Bob Dylan
15,944 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
Angela Eastlake awoke with a groan. Her entire body ached, her skin throbbing as if it were a muscle. Every nerve in her body was firing off at full tilt, and she saw stars dancing behind her eyelids. She tried to roll over and rub her face, but found she was restrained. As wakefulness continued returning to her and she realized she was being held down, her eyes darted open and came face to face with the third most wanted man in the Solar system.
"Admiral! You're awake," Anton Hellas smiled down at Angela, "Our last conversation was interrupted before it could reach its culmination, I'd ever so like to continue it."
Her mind skipped as her memories caught up with her. She remembered the young captain entering her office with some ridiculous story of how the system had become corrupted, then pulling a gun on her when the conversation started to go sour. Angela had tried to call security on her implants, then there was a blinding brilliance and her mind had gone dark.
Anton grinned peevishly at her, "So as I was saying before we were interrupted, the Great Powers may have kept the peace for the last century, but they did so by ruthlessly exploiting their workers and creating a dispossessed underclass on every major planet and colony."
There were radicals whose actions were paid for by the opposing governments, there were radicals motivated by religious extremism, and then there was the group that truly believed they were acting in humanity's best interests. That last group was the one that Anton fell into, he legitimately believed he was doing the right thing, and that made him incredibly dangerous.
"Aren't you going to say anything?" he demanded, "You've been defending their interests with bullets for over a century, you forget how to do it with words?"
"I have nothing to say to the likes of you," she declared, "You're a murderer and criminal."
"I could say the same about you," he snorted, "I could, but then, our conversation would go nowhere, would it?" he pat her on the cheek condescendingly and then started pacing. He started to speak, but the Admiral cut him off.
"I'm nothing like you," she insisted.
He laughed, "You say that, but I think we're not so different you and I."
"I worked to bring peace, and order, and justice to the system, all you've done is sow chaos and destruction," she spoke with a conviction borne of years of service.
"You defend and uphold a system where air and water are tradable commodities, where children are left to suffocate because they can't afford to breathe. Where's the justice in that?" His tone was earnest, almost melancholic, "Where's the justice, when corporations strip asteroids barren of resources and then leave the people in them to die when they stop being useful? Where's the justice, when the companies that mine the iron in your space stations hire death squads to torture and kill union leaders who are trying to organize for better conditions?"
He shook his head and answered his own question, "There is no justice in it at all."
"So you'd make things worse?" She argued, "Create violence and instability?"
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable," he insisted, "A great man once said that. And, thanks to the actions of people like you, the plutocrats who rule over the system have successfully managed to suppress peaceful revolution for over a century. But the people cry out to be heard, and I hear their pleas."
"You're a power hungry maniac," she snarled.
"Is that what you really believe about me? You know in the Tribe, there are many who think you're a lizard person. They think your blood runs green if you're cut, but I know you still bleed red," he smiled ominously at that. "You believe in what you're doing, that's admirable, Admiral. But you've been doing it a long time, and the power has corrupted you. You're blind to the suffering you inflict upon others."
"And you're not?" she snorted derisively.
"On the contrary, my eyes are wide open," he replied, "I am keenly aware of the scales weighed against each action I perform, the hurt I cause and the suffering I inflict, weighed against the lives saved with those harms, no I must act."
He turned away from her again, pacing the room, "So see, It's happened time and again, first on the nations of Earth, then Mars, then in the Tartarus Accords. I was born on Mars you know? And not on some prissy orbital, I grew up on the frontier. And you know, there was so much hope on Mars, so much idealism, and compassion, and yet they still managed to fall prey to their greed, small mindedness, and baser urges. They called themselves socialists, but they paid no heed to the universal plight of workers everywhere. They justify their brutality in space by saying it is for the good of Mars, while their corporations just take, and take, and take," he spat, "Mars is also guilty, and will also face justice in due time."
"If this is your idea of justice: kidnapping, and torture? It's sick." The admiral sneered.
"Oh, no, I'm still establishing my case, as it were, you see?" He said. "The UN Is no different, it was originally created as a peacekeeping organization, and it has managed to do that on Earth for over two centuries, albeit at nuclear gunpoint, but still an impressive accomplishment. It's too bad you sold out your ideals in favor of realpolitik, maybe the corporations wouldn't have walked all over you so much."
"We still have ideals," Angela said defensively, "But in the real world, sometimes you have to do unpleasant things in order to uphold those ideals and the systems that allow them."
"I believe that was true once, but no longer. Another great man anticipated it when he said, the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Nations start out with their ideals intact, created in the fires of revolution, and then over time, corruption seeps in, power accumulates at the top, in people like you, and the oppressed become the oppressors."
"So now that you have the power, you're going to oppress those who you feel wronged you, is that how this works?" Andrea growled.
Anton chuckled, "Yeah, thanks to you, I'm about to oppress the shit out of your friends."
"I won't help you," she said forcefully, gritting her teeth. "I won't let you torture information out of me."
"You're already helping me," Anton said nonchalantly, turning back towards her with a scalpel in hand, "I just need to borrow your face."
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
United Nations Executive Security Operations Building
Geosynchronous Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
Admiral Marion Blake absentmindedly fiddled with the medals pinned to her dress uniform. The attack that had killed the senior defense secretary left all of them reeling and on edge. The Free Sky Tribe weren't even considered the most dangerous terrorist group in the system, the idea that they had managed to infiltrate one of the most secure military installations in the UN and kill their most senior military officer didn't sit well with any of them.
The fleet around Earth had been put on high alert and dozens of ships swarmed the local space around the station. They were visible as moving white blurs as they passed cameras which fed imagery into the faux windows lining the perimeter of the operations room. Despite all the effort being thrown at the problem, the UN Special Investigators assigned to the incident were unable to pick up the trail of the terrorists responsible. They had vanished into the buzz of traffic around Earth without a trace. She dragged her eyes away from the wallscreens and focused back on the matter she had at hand.
Images paraded across the holographic screens at the center of the room, videos given to the Martians by the aliens they were calling the Kiwawentoa depicted planetary-scale destruction and even stars being dismantled for resources. It showed massive alien war fleets casually swatted aside, entire solar systems reduced to rubble and then vacuumed up afterward.
"We should consider the possibility that we will not be able to defend Sol against the Reshapers," General Arthur Alexander, Secretary of the Marines said sullenly as the images scrolled past.
"The Security Council will never agree to abandoning the defense of the Earth," Kai Ming Song, Senior Administrative Representative to the UN security council declared.
"You've seen the video Song," Gideon Churchill, Senior Undersecretary to the executive administration said calmly to the korean woman, "Tell me how to defend Earth against that."
"You have nuclear warheads, relativistic kinetic kill weapons, a fleet of over a thousand ships, it's your job to figure out how to defend Earth from this sort of threat," she insisted, "Figure out how to kill them, and kill them until they decide to leave our system alone."
"It looks like a lot of species tried that and the Reshapers wiped the floor with them," Marion spoke up, meeting the representative's gaze.
"What's our alternative," Sven Goddardson Junior Undersecretary to the Executive Administration said, steepling his fingers, "Evacuate the planet?"
"You can't be serious," Gideon said turning towards Sven, "There are twenty billion people on the Earth, the logistics of evacuating even a tenth of that population is…" he trailed off as he imagined the costs and the logistical complexities involved. It was the sort of thing that could kill tens of thousands just as a side effect of the mass migrations.
"There's no realistic way we could evacuate everyone," Marion agreed with the senior undersecretary, She swiped her hands through the videos of the Reshapers and shifted the image at the center of the table back to its default setting.
The real-time holographic map of the Sol system rotated lazily around the round table that dominated the room, highlighting the locations of planets, asteroids, and rotating habitats. Color coded trajectories representing the courses of various military vessels crisscrossed the chart in what should have been a confusing tangle, but to Marion, made perfect sense.
"However," she continued, "We could at least get started on the process. We have two hundred and nineteen rotating habitats currently housing fifty-eight million people in the Earth-Luna sphere of influence, if we retrofit those colonies with warp drives and start filling them up to capacity, we could fit upwards of a hundred and fifty million people just with the infrastructure we have in orbit right now."
"One hundred and fifty million out of twenty billion," the senior undersecretary reiterated, "That's zero point seven percent of the Earth's population, it's a drop in the bucket."
"People are going to die in the course of these events regardless of how they play out," Arthur said, "If these aliens come for the Earth, and we can't protect her, then she's like the Titanic, and we don't have enough lifeboats."
"Thus bringing us back to my point," Song argued, "Which is that we need to figure out how to kill these Reshapers and keep them away from our planet."
"We should still have contingency plans," Arthur insisted, "Start evacuating our most important scholars and artists now, so if the worst happens, our civilisation can continue in some fo-" Arthur's words were suddenly ripped from his mouth, along with all the rest of the air in his lungs as the room unexpectedly turned into shrapnel.
Anton Hellas's hijacked kinetic kill vehicle had slammed into the structure at several hundred kilometers per second relative to the station. The hundred ton automated military vehicle was instantly reduced into a slug of hot metal as it tore through layers of armor plating and bulkheads. The room around Marion disintegrated in a roar of light and noise as the shockwave dopplered through the hull, and then suddenly she was tumbling through space, the now ruined ring station receding in the distance as her last breath of air escaped her lungs.
The armored skyscraper and a large chunk of the nearby ring were shredded apart in milliseconds by the shear forces, its wreckage torn from the station and sent tumbling along in the wake of the interplanetary bullet. Thousands perished instantly as their bodies were crushed and torn apart by the exploding structure. Thousands more were cast into the abyss as the rooms and compartments they had inhabited cracked open to the void and dumped their still living occupants into space.
Marion saw the Earth, breathtakingly beautiful as it hung shining in the vast darkness. Her eyes burned, her skin burned, and her head swam, but she held her gaze on that image of the blue world for the few seconds it took for the dark bliss of unconsciousness and death swim up through her body and claim her.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Elliptical Orbit
0.9 AUs from Ross 154
May 2219
Ross 154 was a quiet, foreboding place. The variable dwarf cast a dim and baleful crimson glare over a singular barren worldlet, a tumbling Mercury-sized rock orbiting within a larger rubble belt that never accumulated into a true planet.
It was on this forlorn rock in space that the Martian Survey Corps had built Magellan, their largest interstellar exploration complex. Vast warrens supporting a population of thousands were burrowed into the darkened rock, sprouting transparent domes across the surface like mushroom caps. An orbital elevator descended from a waystation with a rotating habitat ring down to the planetoid's surface, and the dark side of the tidally locked world bore growing clusters of radio telescopes, peering into the darkness of space.
Despite the activity she knew was there, the system felt lonely and desolate to Ivy Czininski as she brought the Empiricist in to dock with the station. The maneuvering thrusters cut out, and the clamps on the rotating habitat grabbed hold of the Empiricist, bringing an abrupt return from weightlessness and shoving Ivy into her seat.
There was only one other vessel docked to the station when they arrived, the MNCV Dawnchaser, which was preparing to depart coreward into Scorpius in the hunt for the Reshapers.
Airlocks clanked into place and electrical and fuel lines from the station hooked up as status lights went green across the board. Ivy sighed and let her head fall back in her chair, then unstrapped and climbed down the axial ladder to the airlock chamber. Vedika followed her silently from the bridge, and together they passed through the airlocks and entered the station.
Station Commander Neal Tekla greeted the pair of them outside the airlock, and they all saluted each other smartly in what was strictly speaking far more military a manner than Survey required.
"Welcome back to Magellan, Commander Czininski," he said enthusiastically shaking her hand, "how's it feel to be the first captain to find intelligent life in space?"
"Rather terrifying to be completely honest with you," Ivy smiled and broke the contact, "But then it is the sort of thing we all signed up to do."
"Don't remind me," the old man grimaced, "I'd be right out there with you if I had a ship of my own and wasn't saddled down running this colony. Did you think you'd ever actually see the day we met aliens?"
"I mean, I'm not planning on dying anytime soon, so eventually I figured we'd run into someone," Ivy explained, "What about you Neal, were you planning on forgoing the anti-senesics this time around?"
"I'm considering it," he admitted, "I've had a long life, I've been rejuvenated twice already, and I don't want to just keep ticking along forever. In my experience, everyone has a limit."
"Well, I hope yours is still a few hundred years out Old Man," she smiled sadly at him, "I've gotten rather used to you being around here."
"Everything passes with time Ivy, even supposed Immortals," he said sagely as they strolled the wide hallway the airlocks were mounted along, "Though, maybe I'd feel different after the physical therapy. It's been a few decades since these old joints were comfortable in a gravity well."
"I'd consider it," Vedika spoke up for the first time, "See if the anti-senesic therapy improves your emotional state."
He grunted in response, and they walked in silence to the elevator.
"So you have an officer for me?" She asked him as they entered the elevator, "I lost one of mine."
"I heard about that," he confirmed, "Nasty situation, I hope she pulls through, she was a good kid from what I hear."
"She is," Ivy insisted, correcting him on the tense, "But I need an XO until we can get her back."
"And I do have one for you," he sent a personnel file from his implants to her own and she opened it, reading the contents.
"Lieutenant Commander Joy Icaria, forty-three, served two tours of duty aboard the Oppenheimer's Lament," Ivy read off the sheet as the lift carried them upwards, deeper into the ring, slight coriolis forces tugging them to the side as they rose through the decks.
"I've met her, she's a good kid," the station commander said.
"She's a bit young for Executive Officer, is she competent?" Ivy asked as they stepped off the lift into the station command layer at the inner surface of the ring.
"She sure seemed it to me," Neal said gruffly, "Tough as nails that one, though, she could do to get the pole out of her ass."
"That's high praise coming from you," she said.
"It is," he admitted, "most of these kids are softer than fresh pastry, a real conflict would chew them up and spit them out faster than you can bat an eye."
"I would have said something about how we were leaving the era where we'd have to fight those sorts of conflicts," Ivy admitted, "but the Reshapers change that equation quite a bit."
"The universe is full of conflict, there's no escaping it," he said.
"I hope you're mistaken about that Old Man," Ivy said seriously.
"So do I Commander, so do I," he replied.
Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life
i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds
Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory
Hyperspace
May 2219
The outline of the archway was created by a deep seam in the rock face. The door itself seemed to be composed of the same material as the rest of the cliff, and aside from the seam itself, was particularly unremarkable as a patch of the cliff face.
Jean had erected a campsite beside the door at the edge of the pond. She started a fire as the sun began dimming and falling behind the mountains, letting in the night. At the altitude she was at, it didn't take long for the air to acquire a painfully bitter bite that left her huddling up in her clothing and animal skins as close to the fire as she could manage. The chill of night pressed down on her, leaving her questioning the wisdom of making camp right up at the door. However, she knew she had made the right choice as the fake sun fully sank behind the fake mountains and the fake stars started to come out. In the gathering fake twilight, a faint glow emanating from the seam in the cliff face became readily apparent.
It was a soft white light, impossible to see during the day, but becoming visible in the growing dusk. Jean stood up and ran in place for a moment to get her blood flowing again, and made her way up to the cliff face.
She tried to peer into the seam in the rock, but aside from the soft glow, nothing was visible. She felt the rock with her palm and thought she felt a slight rumble pass through the stone, but it faded away as quickly as it came. She rapped her knuckles on the stone face of the door, and pressed against it with all of her body weight, but just like her attempts during the day, these attempts also produced no effect and the door remained stubbornly in place.
She growled in frustration at the stone and kicked it, but this also produced no effect other than to make her toe hurt. Jean sighed and leaned against the door, slumping slowly down the face of it, until she was in a sitting position. She lightly banged her head on the hard stone surface in frustration.
Studying-Hoping-Envisioning had told her to find the hidden doorways, and this seemed like the sort of thing she had been describing. It wasn't that hidden, but from any distance away it was all but invisible against the cliff face. Jean's tiny campfire produced more light than was managing to seep around the cracks in the door, so even at night, it wasn't as if it'd be particularly noticeable without coming right up onto it.
She rested her head against the cool stone and closed her eyes. That was when she heard the faint chirping and trilling sounds emanating from the stone. Her eyes darted open and she leapt back from the rock like it'd bit her. The doorway had fallen silent once more.
She stomped back to her campfire and sat down next to the heat source, glaring at the glowing door. The door, if it had any regard for her actions, continued to ignore her.
Jean dug through her rucksack and found a hunk of deer jerky and sat chewing on it and poking the fire with a stick while considering the problem before her. She wasn't sure what had triggered the sound to begin with, if it had a trigger. That if was the problem, however, as there was also the possibility that it was simply very faint and could be only be heard when Jean pressed her face to the surface.
"Well I guess I'd better test it somehow," she said quietly, her voice dry and hoarse from disuse. She retreated into her mindscape and began listing out all the potential things to test for on a mental whiteboard. Could she hear the sound when she pressed her ear to the stone outside the doorway? What about if she had some sort of intermediary inorganic material like a cup to amplify the sound?
She shouldered her pack and wandered absentmindedly back over to the doorway, continuing to chew on her deer jerky while she examined the stone again. She pressed herself against the face of the door so her ear was up against the stone, and once more, she could hear the faint chirping sound. She slowly began to back off from the door. She started with her head while keeping her knees, arms, and chest touching the stone. She could still hear the chirping. As soon as no part of her body was in physical contact with the surface, it fell silent. She touched a finger to the door and the sound return.
"Huh," she said aloud, letting her arm fall limp against her body.
She repeated the entire test on the blank cliff face next to the door, but she wasn't able to hear anything. It seemed to be reacting to her contact in some way. She leaned in as close to the door as she could without touching it, then slowly extended one finger. It was quiet until her finger made contact with the stone, but as soon as that happened, she could hear the trilling and chirping again.
It was definitely kiwawentoa speech that she was hearing, probably some sort of automated message designed to react to touch. She tried touching the door through a layer of deer skin, but if failed to react to anything but her living skin, not even her hair triggered the response.
She stepped back from the door and sat down on the rocky ground before it. She removed the deerskin wrappings she had tied around her feet as an attempt at shoes and touched the sole of her foot to the door.
She then dug through her rucksack until she found the earpiece that translated the alien's speech. Once it had sat on her ear long enough to build up the electrical charge it needed from her body, the little device immediately began speaking to her.
"...ccess. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access. Identify. Human. Identify. Waygiver. Passage. Access Identif…" she pulled her foot away from the door before the voice gave her a headache and stared at the blank stone in bewilderment.
Newton Class Starship
MSCV Empiricist
Docked at Magellan Elevator Station
0.9 AUs from Ross 154
May 2219
Cale and Kestral quietly slipped into the engineering bay at the bottom of the Empiricist. With the ship tethered into the station life support and half the crew aboard the station, the passageways were quiet and empty. The duo tried to look casual, but Kestral was nervous and couldn't stop looking all over the place, as if expecting enemies to jump out at any moment.
"This is a really bad idea," Kestral hissed to Cale as he shut the door to the engineering bay.
"We need exotic matter to test the hyperspace window generator. While we're docked up to the station and getting all our tanks topped off is as good a time as any, the exotic matter we take will just be replenished from the big tanks on the station," he explained to em again.
"You still don't have permission to be doing this," ey insisted as Cale began plugging in a portable containment unit into one of the shunt valves for the main exotic matter tank.
"I notice that you're not stopping me or raising an alarm, but are in fact helping me do this," Cale smiled wryly, "Let me also remind you that for the next several hours, until our next XO shows up, I'm senior pragmatist, which yes, does give me the authority to siphon fuel for science projects."
"And yet, I notice we're still doing this in secret while half the crew is on shore leave," ey smirked, shoving eir hands in eir pockets.
"Yes well," he grimaced as he yanked the plunger out of the containment unit to fill the chamber and locked it into place before beginning to unhook the unit from the valve, "Ivy won't like it, unless she finds out about it after we get it working, in which case she'll just be impressed and mildly annoyed."
"Provided it doesn't blow up in our faces," ey appended.
"It's not going to blow up in our faces," Cale assured em as he unplugged the containment unit and hefted it in the crook of his arm.
"So you say," Kestral teased as ey climbed the stairs to the main corridor and Cale hurried up the stairs after em.
Kestral opened the hatch to the corridor and was confronted by the sour looking face of Orel Shaw staring down at them from above. The tall lanky androgyne looked between the pair and crossed eir arms.
"What are you two doing here?" ey asked the increasingly guilty looking duo.
"Science, clearly," Cale said, shouldering past em, "I have this exotic matter and the chief science officer with me, clearly I'm doing science, now excuse me."
Cale continued onward up the corridor stairs leaving Kestral behind with Orel. Kestral looked somewhat like a kid with eir hand caught in the cookie jar. "He's always like this," Kestral assured the chief engineer as ey tried to squeeze past em.
Orel glared at them as they fled up the corridor staircase toward the machine shop they'd set up in. Cale set the containment unit down inside the door to the machine shop, pulled Kestral inside and pulled the door shut, engaging the locking mechanisms.
"You think ey'll report us to Ivy?" Kestral asked.
"If ey do, we'll still have a few hours before she can get down here to yell at us, she's aboard the station picking up our new XO, and Vedika is with her running interference, we've got everything set up, let's try and open the window," Cale said as he hefted the containment unit once more, carrying it over the cage of equipment that he had constructed with help from Kestral and Vedika.
"You work things out with Vedika?" Kestral asked, "It seemed like there was a lot of hostility between you two when we first left Luyten's Star. But I know she's been helping you with this."
"Yeah, you could say that," Cale admitted, poorly suppressing a smirk.
"Are you two fucking?" ey interrogated.
"I mean it, we worked things out," Cale insisted, "I was just feeling really emotional, but she's been helping build the hyperspace window generator, I think we've come to an understanding of each other."
"You're totally fucking," Kestral snorted with disbelief, "Pragmatists, you lot are unbelievable."
"It's not that big of a deal, it's not like we're in the military," Cale defended himself, "this is Survey, people hook up, Ivy's wife is a Digital Anthropologist and they met on a mission too, it's fine."
Kestral sighed and paced after him, rolling eir eyes as ey began gathering up power cables and connecting them to the ship's energy grid as Cale hooked the containment unit into the larger setup.
"We should have enough exotic matter to sustain the window for about five hours if my math holds," Cale explained to Kestral, "that should be enough time to do some good science."
"All the monitoring equipment is set up," Kestral confirmed, "The antennas are folded and in place, all the sensors are mounted, if it works, then we're good to go with the science part."
"It'll work," Cale assured em. He completed the connection process and started the power up sequence for the hyperspace window generator. The alien machine had to be flushed with exotic matter and fed local gravitational and magnetic field data to generate a safe window, and that process took some time before it could be activated.
"We'll see," Kestral replied, stepping back from the equipment and crossing eir arms as it began to quietly hum with power.
Cale studied the readouts carefully as the machine powered up, pumping exotic matter through all of its specially printed coils of electrically charged materials, "It all looks good here," Cale said quietly, growing more serious as he prepared to activate the device.
"You're sure this isn't going to rip a hole in the ship?" Kestral asked ominously.
"It isn't going to rip a hole in the ship," he confirmed and activated the machine.
The device hummed louder and then the humming stopped as the equipment emitted a loud pop from somewhere inside the cage and all the readouts started going crazy.
"What did you do?" Kestral asked frantically as ey looked at the strange cascade of particle and electromagnetic radiation that the sensors inside the cage were picking up on.
Cale's face was slowly splitting open into a massive grin as he looked over the rapidly scrolling information, "It's working," he said excitedly, "The window is stable, you're seeing the emissions from the transitional zone, extend the antenna."
Kestral's eyes lit up as ey realized what the data ey were looking at meant, it meant they had done it, they had opened a portal into hyperspace. Ey quickly input the control sequence into the antenna system, and a twenty-kilometer long cable topped with a bulb of sensors, cameras, and detectors began unspooling into the hyperspace window.
"Interesting," Kestral murmured as ey studied the screens displaying camera feeds into hyperspace. The background glowed with a dim red light, mottled by inconsistencies and turbulence. Vast clouds of dark gasses enclosed them on all sides, damping down the view to what the sensors told em was only about fifty AUs. There were no stars visible but some of the gas glowed with its own strange inner light.
Cale crowded eir as he watched the screens as well. He opened up a new screen and began flipping between the different sensors, looking at data coming in from various different wavelengths of light. He paused in the middle of the microwave spectrum, jaw dropping as he saw the flood of structured signals the microwave antennas were picking up.
He prodded Kestral away from the visible frequencies and pointed to the flood of signals rippling across his interface.
"What am I looking at?" Ey asked him.
"I think we just discovered the alien internet," he replied.
Chapter 20: Clockwork Physics
- Location
- Seattle
Chapter 20: Clockwork Physics
Waif Class Orbital Transfer Shuttle
LDS-OTS15 Jerrie Cobb
Elliptical Orbit
22,214 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
The Waif was nearly a fifty-year-old design, and Jerrie Cobb was rapidly approaching her fiftieth year in space. She was a solid old girl, a compact armored cabin sat above a small fusion motor for short range on-orbit burns, powering the shuttle from station to station in the Earth-Luna sphere of influence. Her current owners, listed in UN databases as the Laughing Dog Shipping Company, had welded bulk cargo containers onto the outside and then strapped yet more containers into the interlocking grips on the container surfaces. This had the effect of nearly burying the hull of the vessel in the mass of metal shipping cans.
Inside one of those containers, inside a spacesuit and clutching a gauss rifle, Margaritifer Ross counted down the final minutes before she and over two thousand of her fellow comrades in arms in the Free Sky Tribe stormed the Malacca Elevator Station for the betterment of workers across the system. Stories would be told for generations about what she and her comrades did today in the universal struggle against capitalism. Margaritifer was a teenager, a scrawny waif of a girl with deeply tanned skin and black hair she kept hacked off above her ears. She would turn twenty if she survived the several months remaining until her next birthday, but, she already considered herself an adult. After her parents were killed in an asteroid mining accident, she had grew up entirely amongst the Tribe, and among the Tribe, she was as grown up as it got.
She navigated the warren of interconnected compartments and hollowed out shipping containers with the ease of a long term spacer, migrating from her tiny closet of a cabin to the egress point she and her people would be using.
Moments ago, Margaritifer had felt her heartbeat jump from calm to racing as the Jerrie Cobb began her final course adjustments, leaving her assigned orbital trajectory in the wake of Anton Hellas' kinetic kill vehicle strike on the Malacca Elevator Station. As the attack occurred and thousands perished in and around the station, the speaker in her suit had begun beeping insistently, informing her that the next phase of the plan was about to begin. On that cue, she and all of her comrades in the boarding parties began making their way to their assigned positions for the operation. The jovial camaraderie and banal treatment of the approaching conflict had vanished into a grim determination. She saw steely eyes, set jaws, and twitching trigger fingers as she climbed through the three-dimensional environment.
With one eye, Margaritifer watched an external video feed on her suit hud as her ship approached the crippled space station. The kinetic weapon had torn a gaping hole in the main ring and scattered a long glittering tail of debris out from the station and reaching downwards towards the planet's surface. Matte white military vessels were moored all around the station, and more ships buzzed around it, shining spotlights on the damaged areas of the ring.
This was the riskiest portion of the operation, if the military vessels realized what was going on too soon, they would surely all be killed. All it would take was one nuclear missile to end all their lives. They had to get in amidst the UN forces, where they would be hesitant to use their heavier weapons to fight back.
To that end, the Jerrie Cobb was broadcasting that it was off course and simulating a thruster malfunction that was bringing it in under the station. Margaritifer slid into place and strapped into her suit harness as the countdown clock continued.
"Ready to send some UN toadies back to Mommy Earth the hard way?" Kaya Twopallas asked with a grin from the harness across from her. The lanky, green-eyed orphan boy ran his fingers suggestively up and down the barrel of his gun.
"You know, some people, like the Open Sky Tribe, they think we should talk to the plutocrats, figure things out peacefully," Milo Smalls said from beside him.
"They do, do they?" Margaritifer asked, "They would, sitting pretty out on Triton, they don't see things like we do. Frankly, on behalf of Ceres, they all deserve to die."
"Amen to that sister," Kaya said, clapping two fingers to his shoulder as the countdown reached ten seconds, "Never forget what they did to us."
"I haven't," Margaritifer replied with a grim smile.
At zero, dozens of tiny shaped explosives hidden in among the shipping containers detonated, simulating a debris strike on the container cluster and scattering the shipping cans in the direction of the station.
Margaritifer's container unfolded itself and dumped her into space with the thruster harness attached to her back. About half the boarding teams were launched across the void in only their suits, while the other half, carrying heavier weapons and equipment, rode the shipping containers in under the guise of debris.
The teenager soared through space, the Earth hanging like a beautiful jewel in the sky, moored in place by the impossibly long elevator cable as the station loomed large in front of her. She took a few moments to admire the view before adjusting her course slightly with the thruster pack.
As she approached the station, she was able to take in the full scope of the damage that it had taken. Buildings had buckled and deformed, venting to space as they lost structural integrity and flooding the area with an enormous halo of detris. The sections of the ring adjacent to the impact had been deformed by the strike, the newly exposed edges of the structure were twisted and stretched out into long accusatory fingers of metal. The ring continued to spin, but it was no longer spinning evenly around the elevator cable, it was off course and crooked, subjecting parts of the structure to shifting gravity fields and tilting corridors.
Margaritifer flipped herself over so her feet were pointing towards the station and adjusted her course again, trying to keep herself lined up with the ghostly path through space that her hud projected in front of her. The entry point she and the fifteen others on her strike team would be using was highlighted with a glowing callout, a large armored glass window into some sort of senior officers lounge.
She couldn't see the rest of her squad, they were all running dark to mask their approach, but she knew they were there. The suit hud told her roughly where each of them should be if they were on course, all vectoring in towards the same point.
The windows began growing large, fast, as the station rushed up towards her, and Margaritifer fired her thrusters hard, arresting the velocity the ejection from the ship had imparted on her. As she braked, she trained her rifle towards what was now down from her perspective, towards the glass ceiling of the officer's lounge, and squeezed the trigger.
The fifty caliber gauss rifle discharged a five round burst, launching the large caliber explosive rounds down ahead of the teenager. She knew her fellow squadmates would be doing likewise.
The armored window was designed to survive micrometeor strikes at up to fifteen kilometers per second, far higher a speed than the rifle was capable of accelerating a round up to, but the explosives in the core of the rounds detonated as they slammed into the reinforced glass, hurling a tiny depleted uranium sabot into the material even as the rest of the round exploded.
The sudden volley pushed the window beyond its structural limits and the glass shattered in a glittering starburst as the air in the room was blown out into space along with several unwitting occupants.
Margaritifer braced herself and continued braking as the floor of the officer's lounge raced up to meet her, and she bounced hard into the deck and was hurled sideways and pressed to her knees as the angular momentum of the station slammed into her. She rolled and came up into a crouch with her weapon ready as the other members of her squad hit the deck around her.
She activated her comms system and went active with her sensors, eyes darting all around the destroyed lounge. Above her head, she could see out into space, the vast arms of the ring sweeping up on either side of her, and the elevator cable and central station seeming to rotate in place like a spinning top as the ring rotated around it.
"Squad check in!" Eli Sixhebe roared as he crashed onto the deck.
"Down safe!" Margaritifer said into her microphone, joining a chorus of similar responses from her squadmates. Eli disseminated the next set of orders to them all through the suit systems, and a new ghostly line appeared on Margaritifer's hud, leading through a sealed door and deeper into the ring station.
"Ivanova, Borealis and West, you have point, get some breaching charges on that door, we'll vent each chamber to space to clear our advance of hostiles. Twopallas, Ross, you're on vanguard, watch our backs. Use explosive or armor piercing rounds in the station, switch to ceramic when we board our target vessel, we don't want to damage the prize. We clear?"
The squad all keyed up in unison and whooped with anticipation. Margaritifer looked at Kaya and nodded to the boy, theatrically cocking her weapon. He pounded his shoulder with his fist and splayed his hands out before him in a spacer's salute.
"Like you say, sister, we kill 'em all," Kaya said through the suit channel.
"Cut the chatter," Eli responded sharply, "We're on battle comms."
The advance team breached the hatch with an explosive charge and pointed their weapons into the airstream as debris and atmosphere came roaring out from the room beyond.
"Move out people! Eyes on a swivel!" Eli shouted through the speaker system, directing the soldiers forward. Margaritifer kept her eyes peeled on the other sealed hatches, watching for signs of a counterattack as the main body of the strike team rushed forward into the adjacent hallway. Emergency pressure doors had slammed down every few meters in the corridor and the advance team was working its way through each one in sequence, venting each segment of the station into space as they went.
Margaritifer followed in their wake, seeing the carnage their passage inflicted each step of the way. Bodies exposed to vacuum littered the corridor, and debris was strewn everywhere by the sudden windstorm as each section was vented.
The chaos of the kinetic weapon strike served as the perfect cover for their attack. The station was already a disaster area with tens of thousands dead, many more wounded and the structural integrity of the ring severely compromised in many places. The station networks had been knocked out and power and life support were on the fritz. Margaritifer doubted the people they'd killed during their boarding even realized what was happening, if they had time to consider it before their sudden deaths, they might simply surmise that their sections of the ring had finally succumbed to damage inflicted by the initial disaster.
She refused to let herself get complacent though, she was still aboard what was once one of the most secure military installations in the system. They would eventually realize what was happening and begin fighting back, and she had to be ready for when that happened.
The squad reached an elevator and forced the shaft open. Inside the shaft, they sabotaged the lift mechanism and sent the elevator car crashing to the bottom of the ring before rappelling down after it. Their target was one of the military vessels moored to the outside edge of the station. Ten squads would converge on the airlocks for each vessel, attempt to force their way inside, and seize control of the ships. If successful, they would disconnect from the station and engage their FTL drives to escape.
Margaritifer remained on alert as the last of the squad began descending the elevator shaft. She peered around the ruined and depressurized corridor with her gauss rifle at the ready as her team breached the door at the bottom of the shaft and sent a gust of air howling up through it.
The girl nodded to Kaya, and the other teen began descending the elevator shaft to join the rest of the strike team. She was about to join him when movement in her peripheral vision brought her whipping her weapon around, every animalistic warning sensor in her body jammed into red as her eyes locked onto the figure staggering out of a side corridor in an emergency spacesuit.
The two figures both froze as they considered one another; the UN woman in the emergency suit began putting her hands up and backing away down the corridor slowly. Margaritifer only had a few seconds to process what was happening before the figure would pass out of sight. She winced as she pulled the trigger on her rifle.
The first two explosive rounds caught the figure in her center of mass, the third had drifted upward from the weapon's slight recoil and struck her square in the face. Her head and chest detonated in a starburst of gore and viscera as the explosive rounds tore the front of her body apart. Margaritifer forced her eyes away from the horrific scene as the urge to vomit nearly overwhelmed her.
"Ross! What's going on up there?" Eli's voice demanded through the suit speaker.
"Sorry, nothing sir," she said glancing up and down the hall again, "There was a survivor in an emergency suit, I took care of her."
"Is the area clear at the moment?" He asked.
Margaritifer forced herself to look up and down the corridor again, trying to gloss over the charnel house she had created in the hall. It was empty.
"It's clear," she breathed into the microphone.
"Then get your ass down here before anyone else shows up," Eli instructed harshly.
Margaritifer gladly turned away from the mess and began descending the elevator shaft. Ten levels below her, the squad was slowly and clearing a path towards their target vessel, continuing to vent the station to space as they went. Margaritifer secured herself to the rappelling line and jumped off into the abyss.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
Boardwalk Level
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
Maeve O'Donnell peeked out into the hallway and found it abandoned aside from the mutilated body of Katie Hawthorne. Maeve's heart was thundering in her chest as she tried to work the communications channels on her emergency suit, but all the station's networks were showing as offline or unavailable and neither the emergency suit, nor the phone in her pocket had the transmission reach to connect all the way down to where the ships were docked.
Maeve and Katie had been in one of the records rooms just before the attack, going over digital files on the crew of her new ship. Maeve had had Katie promoted to Commander and was planning on having her serve as her First Officer on the Mercy Given.
Over the years of working with her, Maeve had grown quite fond of the young woman and had hoped to one day aid in her command aspirations. But now, all of Katie's hopes and dreams had been reduced to scattered bits of brain matter coating the corridor. Maeve had no idea who the invaders were, but their willingness to snuff the life out of a promising young woman made her furious.
She still had no idea what exactly was happening at large. First, there was a huge crash somewhere and all the emergency systems started activating, then the networks had all gone down, and now there seemed to be armed soldiers roaming the halls killing survivors? Maeve had to get to her ship, had to get to a communications relay, had to make contact with someone and figure out the bigger picture if she had any hope of surviving the events underway.
The group of soldiers that had come through and killed Katie had descended an elevator shaft towards the station's hangar deck, where the airlocks and access points for the shuttles and docked ships were located. The way they had entered was obvious from the folded in pressure doors leading back towards one of the lounge areas.
Maeve had no desire to encounter the enemy soldiers until she was properly armed and equipped, so she went the opposite direction, retracing their route of ingress back towards the initial entry point.
There were bodies everywhere of people who hadn't made it to safety before the invaders unceremoniously cracked their rooms open and let the space in. Maeve issued a silent prayer to the lords of war for the lives lost, quietly vowing vengeance on those responsible for the disaster she had become a part of.
She strode out into the destroyed officer's lounge, looking up at the structure of the station. The damage that had been inflicted was just shy of apocalyptic; a huge chunk of the ring was simply missing and the entire structure had been deformed by that event. Vast glittering trails of debris twinkled in the sunlight, and Maeve involuntarily shivered as the scope of the damage and the number of probable casualties penetrated her core like a kinetic impactor.
Distant flickers of light illuminated a battle happening in space around her. Ships were fighting, firing at one another, but Maeve still had no idea who was attacking or why. The scene had an otherworldly brilliance to it: the smooth hulled UN ships darting about like angels, the twinkle of light off the station debris, the high-velocity stillness occasionally punctuated by the occasional brief trail of fire from a PDC, or the blinding sparkle of light as a PDL scattered in all directions, and all of it, in utter silence.
If Katie had been alive, she would have tried to talk Maeve out of what she was about to do. But they'd killed Katie, they'd left her ruined body cooling in the hallway. With no one nearby to present a voice of reason, Maeve decided to act. If it killed her, well she wouldn't be dying alone today.
She began to climb slowly and awkwardly through the shattered windows that had roofed the lounge. She had to stack furniture onto the bar to reach the lip and then actually pulling herself up through the opening left her bones feeling every year of their use.
The emergency spacesuit had no magnetic grips to hold Maeve to the spinning ring, but the outside of the ring structure had maintenance gantries and catwalks strung out all across the surface. It was still risky without magnetic boots or a harness or something, but Maeve wasn't about to just sit around waiting to die, and that seemed to be the other alternative available at the moment.
Maeve finally managed to haul herself out of the breach and lay panting on the inner surface of the ring. The ring's wide horizon swept up and away from her, with the elevator station in the center seeming to wobble and gyrate as it spun in place. Maeve knew the elevator station was stationary, what she was seeing was an imbalance in the spin of the ring. The structure was slowly losing integrity as the centripetal force peeled it apart bit by bit.
The former Commodore took off at a run across the top of the ring. It was several hundred meters to the edge of the structure where the gantries descending the to the bottom of the ring could be accessed.
As she approached the edge and began slowly clambering down the interlocking stairways, ladders, and catwalks that clung to the exterior, a pair of ships began swinging in close to the station, exchanging long trails of point defense with one another as they danced around the ring structure. The first ship was a UN destroyer that had already taken a beating in some fashion, with huge gashes and holes in her matte white armored cladding. The second was some sort of civilian transport ship, which was firing PDCs out of shipping containers at the UN vessel.
The destroyer lashed out with PDL bursts, popping shipping containers like balloons as the laser weapons raked the other vessel's surface. The transport ship pulled away from the ring then began turning back towards it again as it neared the elevator station. Lasers tore through the rusted hull and with a small series of chain reaction explosions the containers broke away from the transport, tumbling away in all directions. The crippled transport ship turned its engines on full burn and accelerated straight into the ring, slamming into a distant section of the surface opposite the breach from where Maeve was standing. A tremor in the station surface built all the way to a minor earthquake as the fusion reactor in the attacking vessel detonated and bathed the station in a blast of light and radiation.
The shaking continued as the light of the blast faded away, and that was when Maeve realized the explosion had compromised the structural integrity of the already damaged ring. The section of the structure she was on was being pulled away from the center station by the force of its rotation.
Maeve swore and tried to connect with any nearby communications networks on her device. She briefly established a connection with the destroyer, but then it sped away towards another part of the conflict, where yet more PDC fire was erupting in the distance.
She grumbled as the signal strength dropped to zero and she sighed and continued frantically climbing down the outside of the ring. The spin gravity was falling away as more and more of the rotational velocity escaped to be converted into inertial velocity, leaving Maeve groping at the support posts and handrails as her feet were held to the catwalk with increasingly little force.
As she reached the bottom of the ring, she saw a ship undock from its moorings and execute an immediate warp jump, tearing another chunk from the station as the shear forces wreaked havoc on the docking bay it had been moored in. Maeve's blood finished running all the way to ice cold as she realized the attackers were stealing their ships, military warships armed with nuclear weapons. It shouldn't have been possible, the ship's AIs should have stopped them, but she watched as another ship undocked and immediately turned its guns on a passing UN cruiser before also vanishing into a ripple in spacetime as their warp drive fired.
She took off at a run, she had to warn the Mercy Given while there was still time. She raced down the hanging catwalks as quickly as she could in the fading gravity, trying to get in communications range with one of the ships. She started to pick up a signal from the UNDF Ticonderoga, but as she frantically tried to connect to their network, the ship engaged its warp drive while still locked to the dock and tore away a huge chunk of the nearby station hull. The catwalks rattled and screeched as the shear point crunched itself together in a blast of light and debris.
Between the proximity to the warp activations and the detonation of the terrorist ship's fusion drive, Maeve knew she had probably already received an extreme dose of radiation and would need extensive anti-cancer and radiation sickness treatments if she survived, but she ignored the tingling in her skin and the uneasiness in her stomach and raced onward down the catwalk.
Finally, the UNDF Mercy Given's network appeared on her hud, and she desperately pressed the connect button. She let out a huge breath as the network connected and immediately she established a line to the bridge.
"Mercy Given, Captain, is that you?" The voice of Lieutenant Commander Pandora Eisley asked through her suit speakers. "There's some sort of attack going on aboard the station, the networks are all locked down and--"
"Yes, undock, undock now, seal all docking ports and airlocks there are intruders aboard the station," she said as quickly as she could get the words out.
"I've sealed the hatches and ordered a security team to the airlocks, but we can't undock," Dora responded, "The networks have us locked out and won't accept our codes to release the docking clamps."
"Then rip the damn clamps out of the station, there are intruders onboard armed with high-powered weapons and breaching charges, I think they're trying to make off with our ships which means you need to undock now. Pass the word down the line to the other vessels."
"Acknowledged," the Lieutenant Commander replied breathlessly.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
Spaceport Level
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
The wide open concourse of the spaceport had turned into a battlefield. Margaritifer's strike team and six other teams had merged on this area of the spaceport and exchanged fire with the surviving UN forces, those who had been in spacesuits on the concourse when they broke the air seals. The fighting was fierce, clawing back bulkheads one at a time, venting a section of hallway, dueling with the survivors, and then repeating the process another ten meters down the corridor.
The deck rumbled and the spin gravity began to slowly fade away as the low-level shaking continued. The battle outside must have been progressing on schedule, which meant Margaritifer's squad was starting to fall behind. Their progress through the station had begun to flag as the defenders started to rally and coordinate with one another. Their networks were still crippled as had been promised, but that didn't stop them from physically talking to each other.
There were far too many Terrans to fight and claim the station, likely there were already dozens more military vessels converging on the elevator from all over Earth's orbit. The Tribe's plan relied on getting in and getting out before enough forces could be mustered in response. If they lagged behind, they would be left behind, encircled, and killed. Victory or death, it was that simple. By virtue of the damage they had inflicted on their foe, they had already won a great victory for the Tribe this day, it was just a matter of surviving to enjoy it now, and Margaritifer very much planned on living.
Her strike team broke through into the chamber containing the airlock access to their target vessel. The advance team went to work breaching the airlock, while the rest of the squad set up a defensive perimeter in that segment of the corridor. The station continued to groan and creak, and then with a sharp bang, the gravity suddenly fell away entirely, leaving everyone momentarily groping for support and locking down magnetic boots. The airlock started to groan and shriek as the vessel beyond fired its thrusters in an attempt to escape the station.
"The clamps will hold them, keep working!" Eli encouraged the soldiers, keeping his weapon trained on the sealed door, waiting for the attack from the far side. The advance team finished wiring up the breaching charges and began backing off as the metal around the airlock emitted another groan of protest at the stress it was being subjected to.
Eli nodded and they blew the hatch, rushing inwards weapons blazing as the defenders were suddenly exposed to vacuum. The strike team raced forward to claim their prize.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
Catwalk Gantry
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth, Sol
May 2219
Maeve kept running, racing down the hanging system of catwalks, trying to get closer to the Mercy Given as the battle surged in local space. Stolen warships ripped into UN loyal forces, joining in battle with the makeshift pirate flotilla that had led the station assault. Another series of tremors vibrated through the metal grating in the catwalk and gravity fell away entirely, the section of station had broken from the ring and its velocity vector sent it drifting away from the station.
"They're about to breach our airlock," Dora reported defeatedly, as Maeve clung to the gantry for dear life, "We can't break out of the dock."
"Use PDLs, cut yourself away, collateral damage to the station is considered acceptable," Maeve ordered. Another vessel was released by the station clamps and engaged its warp drive. Somehow the invaders had taken control of their networks from the governing AIs and smart systems, yet another impossible feat to pile onto their list of accomplishments.
The Mercy Given's point defense lasers twinkled as the destructive energy reflected off the nearby hull. It flash heated the structure and melted deep gashes into it, ripping through clamps and gantries with burning light and leaving the edges molten hot. The ship continued to heave against the ruined clamps, and then finally, the battlecruiser broke away from the docking bay in a shower of debris and molten metal.
"Are you secure?" Maeve asked into the microphone demandingly.
"Standby," Dora replied.
"Fuck," Maeve swore and started trying to climb along a support strut to stay in communications range as the ship slowly drifted clear of the docking gantries. The battle around the station was intensifying with more and more ships joining in. Ships continued to jump out of the fight into warp, but it was impossible to tell if it was invaders escaping with stolen ships, or loyal forces fleeing the battle to escape destruction after taking critical damage. Even as the battle grew in scope, the chunk of ring Maeve was on continued to drift away from the combat zone, giving her a wide vantage point from which to observe the conflict.
"Are you secure?" Maeve asked again with agitation.
"Standby please," the Lieutenant commander repeated.
"Dora what the fuck is going on over there?" Maeve barked into the microphone.
Dora said nothing, she just started keying up and Maeve heard the sound of gunfire through her speakers. "You hold that corridor! You hear me?" Someone was shouting in the background over the roar of small arms fire.
A UN Destroyer tumbled past the ring fragment, drifting dead in the water and venting gasses from dozens of wounds. Maeve thought the total death toll might be approaching fifty thousand, just from her own personal tally. She held her breath as the firefight played out in a staccato of gunfire, punctuated by incoherent orders being shouted over the din and cries of pain as the forces exchanged casualties.
Maeve was so engrossed with the conflict on the Mercy Given, she didn't notice that the ruined destroyer was drifting closer to the ring fragment until it blocked out the sun, looming larger and larger as it tumbled nose to tail towards the wrecked gantries.
Well, I guess this is how I die, Maeve thought to herself as the hulk cartwheeled over her head and slammed tailfirst into the side of a docking bay. The catwalk kicked and buckled, folding and twisting up on itself suddenly and bucking Maeve off in the process. Maeve was slammed against a support pole as it bent itself in half, seeing stars as she rebounded off the collapsing gantry and was sent tumbling into space.
"Secure the ship, Dora, take care of her," Maeve said softly as the blood pooled in her head and feet from the rotation that had been imparted onto her, making her dizzy and lightheaded. She could still hear the ongoing firefight through her suit speakers, but it was gradually growing distant and static filled as Maeve drifted away from the ship.
The sun and the earth and the battle and the ring fragment all spun past one another in an endless and unstoppable precession as Maeve tumbled. She tried to steady her breathing but she was spinning quite rapidly; nausea and lightheadedness continued to build and her vision began to contract down to a point. She resisted the urge to panic and start hyperventilating, which would only accelerate her journey to unconsciousness. Instead, she and slowly and deliberately accessed and activated the emergency transponder on her suit, finishing the activation sequence just before her vision blurred out completely.
Maeve took another slow deliberate breath, watching the blurring fading scenery rotate past her as the unstoppable tendrils of unconsciousness finally claimed her as their own.
Waif Class Orbital Transfer Shuttle
LDS-OTS15 Jerrie Cobb
Elliptical Orbit
22,214 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
The Waif was nearly a fifty-year-old design, and Jerrie Cobb was rapidly approaching her fiftieth year in space. She was a solid old girl, a compact armored cabin sat above a small fusion motor for short range on-orbit burns, powering the shuttle from station to station in the Earth-Luna sphere of influence. Her current owners, listed in UN databases as the Laughing Dog Shipping Company, had welded bulk cargo containers onto the outside and then strapped yet more containers into the interlocking grips on the container surfaces. This had the effect of nearly burying the hull of the vessel in the mass of metal shipping cans.
Inside one of those containers, inside a spacesuit and clutching a gauss rifle, Margaritifer Ross counted down the final minutes before she and over two thousand of her fellow comrades in arms in the Free Sky Tribe stormed the Malacca Elevator Station for the betterment of workers across the system. Stories would be told for generations about what she and her comrades did today in the universal struggle against capitalism. Margaritifer was a teenager, a scrawny waif of a girl with deeply tanned skin and black hair she kept hacked off above her ears. She would turn twenty if she survived the several months remaining until her next birthday, but, she already considered herself an adult. After her parents were killed in an asteroid mining accident, she had grew up entirely amongst the Tribe, and among the Tribe, she was as grown up as it got.
She navigated the warren of interconnected compartments and hollowed out shipping containers with the ease of a long term spacer, migrating from her tiny closet of a cabin to the egress point she and her people would be using.
Moments ago, Margaritifer had felt her heartbeat jump from calm to racing as the Jerrie Cobb began her final course adjustments, leaving her assigned orbital trajectory in the wake of Anton Hellas' kinetic kill vehicle strike on the Malacca Elevator Station. As the attack occurred and thousands perished in and around the station, the speaker in her suit had begun beeping insistently, informing her that the next phase of the plan was about to begin. On that cue, she and all of her comrades in the boarding parties began making their way to their assigned positions for the operation. The jovial camaraderie and banal treatment of the approaching conflict had vanished into a grim determination. She saw steely eyes, set jaws, and twitching trigger fingers as she climbed through the three-dimensional environment.
With one eye, Margaritifer watched an external video feed on her suit hud as her ship approached the crippled space station. The kinetic weapon had torn a gaping hole in the main ring and scattered a long glittering tail of debris out from the station and reaching downwards towards the planet's surface. Matte white military vessels were moored all around the station, and more ships buzzed around it, shining spotlights on the damaged areas of the ring.
This was the riskiest portion of the operation, if the military vessels realized what was going on too soon, they would surely all be killed. All it would take was one nuclear missile to end all their lives. They had to get in amidst the UN forces, where they would be hesitant to use their heavier weapons to fight back.
To that end, the Jerrie Cobb was broadcasting that it was off course and simulating a thruster malfunction that was bringing it in under the station. Margaritifer slid into place and strapped into her suit harness as the countdown clock continued.
"Ready to send some UN toadies back to Mommy Earth the hard way?" Kaya Twopallas asked with a grin from the harness across from her. The lanky, green-eyed orphan boy ran his fingers suggestively up and down the barrel of his gun.
"You know, some people, like the Open Sky Tribe, they think we should talk to the plutocrats, figure things out peacefully," Milo Smalls said from beside him.
"They do, do they?" Margaritifer asked, "They would, sitting pretty out on Triton, they don't see things like we do. Frankly, on behalf of Ceres, they all deserve to die."
"Amen to that sister," Kaya said, clapping two fingers to his shoulder as the countdown reached ten seconds, "Never forget what they did to us."
"I haven't," Margaritifer replied with a grim smile.
At zero, dozens of tiny shaped explosives hidden in among the shipping containers detonated, simulating a debris strike on the container cluster and scattering the shipping cans in the direction of the station.
Margaritifer's container unfolded itself and dumped her into space with the thruster harness attached to her back. About half the boarding teams were launched across the void in only their suits, while the other half, carrying heavier weapons and equipment, rode the shipping containers in under the guise of debris.
The teenager soared through space, the Earth hanging like a beautiful jewel in the sky, moored in place by the impossibly long elevator cable as the station loomed large in front of her. She took a few moments to admire the view before adjusting her course slightly with the thruster pack.
As she approached the station, she was able to take in the full scope of the damage that it had taken. Buildings had buckled and deformed, venting to space as they lost structural integrity and flooding the area with an enormous halo of detris. The sections of the ring adjacent to the impact had been deformed by the strike, the newly exposed edges of the structure were twisted and stretched out into long accusatory fingers of metal. The ring continued to spin, but it was no longer spinning evenly around the elevator cable, it was off course and crooked, subjecting parts of the structure to shifting gravity fields and tilting corridors.
Margaritifer flipped herself over so her feet were pointing towards the station and adjusted her course again, trying to keep herself lined up with the ghostly path through space that her hud projected in front of her. The entry point she and the fifteen others on her strike team would be using was highlighted with a glowing callout, a large armored glass window into some sort of senior officers lounge.
She couldn't see the rest of her squad, they were all running dark to mask their approach, but she knew they were there. The suit hud told her roughly where each of them should be if they were on course, all vectoring in towards the same point.
The windows began growing large, fast, as the station rushed up towards her, and Margaritifer fired her thrusters hard, arresting the velocity the ejection from the ship had imparted on her. As she braked, she trained her rifle towards what was now down from her perspective, towards the glass ceiling of the officer's lounge, and squeezed the trigger.
The fifty caliber gauss rifle discharged a five round burst, launching the large caliber explosive rounds down ahead of the teenager. She knew her fellow squadmates would be doing likewise.
The armored window was designed to survive micrometeor strikes at up to fifteen kilometers per second, far higher a speed than the rifle was capable of accelerating a round up to, but the explosives in the core of the rounds detonated as they slammed into the reinforced glass, hurling a tiny depleted uranium sabot into the material even as the rest of the round exploded.
The sudden volley pushed the window beyond its structural limits and the glass shattered in a glittering starburst as the air in the room was blown out into space along with several unwitting occupants.
Margaritifer braced herself and continued braking as the floor of the officer's lounge raced up to meet her, and she bounced hard into the deck and was hurled sideways and pressed to her knees as the angular momentum of the station slammed into her. She rolled and came up into a crouch with her weapon ready as the other members of her squad hit the deck around her.
She activated her comms system and went active with her sensors, eyes darting all around the destroyed lounge. Above her head, she could see out into space, the vast arms of the ring sweeping up on either side of her, and the elevator cable and central station seeming to rotate in place like a spinning top as the ring rotated around it.
"Squad check in!" Eli Sixhebe roared as he crashed onto the deck.
"Down safe!" Margaritifer said into her microphone, joining a chorus of similar responses from her squadmates. Eli disseminated the next set of orders to them all through the suit systems, and a new ghostly line appeared on Margaritifer's hud, leading through a sealed door and deeper into the ring station.
"Ivanova, Borealis and West, you have point, get some breaching charges on that door, we'll vent each chamber to space to clear our advance of hostiles. Twopallas, Ross, you're on vanguard, watch our backs. Use explosive or armor piercing rounds in the station, switch to ceramic when we board our target vessel, we don't want to damage the prize. We clear?"
The squad all keyed up in unison and whooped with anticipation. Margaritifer looked at Kaya and nodded to the boy, theatrically cocking her weapon. He pounded his shoulder with his fist and splayed his hands out before him in a spacer's salute.
"Like you say, sister, we kill 'em all," Kaya said through the suit channel.
"Cut the chatter," Eli responded sharply, "We're on battle comms."
The advance team breached the hatch with an explosive charge and pointed their weapons into the airstream as debris and atmosphere came roaring out from the room beyond.
"Move out people! Eyes on a swivel!" Eli shouted through the speaker system, directing the soldiers forward. Margaritifer kept her eyes peeled on the other sealed hatches, watching for signs of a counterattack as the main body of the strike team rushed forward into the adjacent hallway. Emergency pressure doors had slammed down every few meters in the corridor and the advance team was working its way through each one in sequence, venting each segment of the station into space as they went.
Margaritifer followed in their wake, seeing the carnage their passage inflicted each step of the way. Bodies exposed to vacuum littered the corridor, and debris was strewn everywhere by the sudden windstorm as each section was vented.
The chaos of the kinetic weapon strike served as the perfect cover for their attack. The station was already a disaster area with tens of thousands dead, many more wounded and the structural integrity of the ring severely compromised in many places. The station networks had been knocked out and power and life support were on the fritz. Margaritifer doubted the people they'd killed during their boarding even realized what was happening, if they had time to consider it before their sudden deaths, they might simply surmise that their sections of the ring had finally succumbed to damage inflicted by the initial disaster.
She refused to let herself get complacent though, she was still aboard what was once one of the most secure military installations in the system. They would eventually realize what was happening and begin fighting back, and she had to be ready for when that happened.
The squad reached an elevator and forced the shaft open. Inside the shaft, they sabotaged the lift mechanism and sent the elevator car crashing to the bottom of the ring before rappelling down after it. Their target was one of the military vessels moored to the outside edge of the station. Ten squads would converge on the airlocks for each vessel, attempt to force their way inside, and seize control of the ships. If successful, they would disconnect from the station and engage their FTL drives to escape.
Margaritifer remained on alert as the last of the squad began descending the elevator shaft. She peered around the ruined and depressurized corridor with her gauss rifle at the ready as her team breached the door at the bottom of the shaft and sent a gust of air howling up through it.
The girl nodded to Kaya, and the other teen began descending the elevator shaft to join the rest of the strike team. She was about to join him when movement in her peripheral vision brought her whipping her weapon around, every animalistic warning sensor in her body jammed into red as her eyes locked onto the figure staggering out of a side corridor in an emergency spacesuit.
The two figures both froze as they considered one another; the UN woman in the emergency suit began putting her hands up and backing away down the corridor slowly. Margaritifer only had a few seconds to process what was happening before the figure would pass out of sight. She winced as she pulled the trigger on her rifle.
The first two explosive rounds caught the figure in her center of mass, the third had drifted upward from the weapon's slight recoil and struck her square in the face. Her head and chest detonated in a starburst of gore and viscera as the explosive rounds tore the front of her body apart. Margaritifer forced her eyes away from the horrific scene as the urge to vomit nearly overwhelmed her.
"Ross! What's going on up there?" Eli's voice demanded through the suit speaker.
"Sorry, nothing sir," she said glancing up and down the hall again, "There was a survivor in an emergency suit, I took care of her."
"Is the area clear at the moment?" He asked.
Margaritifer forced herself to look up and down the corridor again, trying to gloss over the charnel house she had created in the hall. It was empty.
"It's clear," she breathed into the microphone.
"Then get your ass down here before anyone else shows up," Eli instructed harshly.
Margaritifer gladly turned away from the mess and began descending the elevator shaft. Ten levels below her, the squad was slowly and clearing a path towards their target vessel, continuing to vent the station to space as they went. Margaritifer secured herself to the rappelling line and jumped off into the abyss.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
Boardwalk Level
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
Maeve O'Donnell peeked out into the hallway and found it abandoned aside from the mutilated body of Katie Hawthorne. Maeve's heart was thundering in her chest as she tried to work the communications channels on her emergency suit, but all the station's networks were showing as offline or unavailable and neither the emergency suit, nor the phone in her pocket had the transmission reach to connect all the way down to where the ships were docked.
Maeve and Katie had been in one of the records rooms just before the attack, going over digital files on the crew of her new ship. Maeve had had Katie promoted to Commander and was planning on having her serve as her First Officer on the Mercy Given.
Over the years of working with her, Maeve had grown quite fond of the young woman and had hoped to one day aid in her command aspirations. But now, all of Katie's hopes and dreams had been reduced to scattered bits of brain matter coating the corridor. Maeve had no idea who the invaders were, but their willingness to snuff the life out of a promising young woman made her furious.
She still had no idea what exactly was happening at large. First, there was a huge crash somewhere and all the emergency systems started activating, then the networks had all gone down, and now there seemed to be armed soldiers roaming the halls killing survivors? Maeve had to get to her ship, had to get to a communications relay, had to make contact with someone and figure out the bigger picture if she had any hope of surviving the events underway.
The group of soldiers that had come through and killed Katie had descended an elevator shaft towards the station's hangar deck, where the airlocks and access points for the shuttles and docked ships were located. The way they had entered was obvious from the folded in pressure doors leading back towards one of the lounge areas.
Maeve had no desire to encounter the enemy soldiers until she was properly armed and equipped, so she went the opposite direction, retracing their route of ingress back towards the initial entry point.
There were bodies everywhere of people who hadn't made it to safety before the invaders unceremoniously cracked their rooms open and let the space in. Maeve issued a silent prayer to the lords of war for the lives lost, quietly vowing vengeance on those responsible for the disaster she had become a part of.
She strode out into the destroyed officer's lounge, looking up at the structure of the station. The damage that had been inflicted was just shy of apocalyptic; a huge chunk of the ring was simply missing and the entire structure had been deformed by that event. Vast glittering trails of debris twinkled in the sunlight, and Maeve involuntarily shivered as the scope of the damage and the number of probable casualties penetrated her core like a kinetic impactor.
Distant flickers of light illuminated a battle happening in space around her. Ships were fighting, firing at one another, but Maeve still had no idea who was attacking or why. The scene had an otherworldly brilliance to it: the smooth hulled UN ships darting about like angels, the twinkle of light off the station debris, the high-velocity stillness occasionally punctuated by the occasional brief trail of fire from a PDC, or the blinding sparkle of light as a PDL scattered in all directions, and all of it, in utter silence.
If Katie had been alive, she would have tried to talk Maeve out of what she was about to do. But they'd killed Katie, they'd left her ruined body cooling in the hallway. With no one nearby to present a voice of reason, Maeve decided to act. If it killed her, well she wouldn't be dying alone today.
She began to climb slowly and awkwardly through the shattered windows that had roofed the lounge. She had to stack furniture onto the bar to reach the lip and then actually pulling herself up through the opening left her bones feeling every year of their use.
The emergency spacesuit had no magnetic grips to hold Maeve to the spinning ring, but the outside of the ring structure had maintenance gantries and catwalks strung out all across the surface. It was still risky without magnetic boots or a harness or something, but Maeve wasn't about to just sit around waiting to die, and that seemed to be the other alternative available at the moment.
Maeve finally managed to haul herself out of the breach and lay panting on the inner surface of the ring. The ring's wide horizon swept up and away from her, with the elevator station in the center seeming to wobble and gyrate as it spun in place. Maeve knew the elevator station was stationary, what she was seeing was an imbalance in the spin of the ring. The structure was slowly losing integrity as the centripetal force peeled it apart bit by bit.
The former Commodore took off at a run across the top of the ring. It was several hundred meters to the edge of the structure where the gantries descending the to the bottom of the ring could be accessed.
As she approached the edge and began slowly clambering down the interlocking stairways, ladders, and catwalks that clung to the exterior, a pair of ships began swinging in close to the station, exchanging long trails of point defense with one another as they danced around the ring structure. The first ship was a UN destroyer that had already taken a beating in some fashion, with huge gashes and holes in her matte white armored cladding. The second was some sort of civilian transport ship, which was firing PDCs out of shipping containers at the UN vessel.
The destroyer lashed out with PDL bursts, popping shipping containers like balloons as the laser weapons raked the other vessel's surface. The transport ship pulled away from the ring then began turning back towards it again as it neared the elevator station. Lasers tore through the rusted hull and with a small series of chain reaction explosions the containers broke away from the transport, tumbling away in all directions. The crippled transport ship turned its engines on full burn and accelerated straight into the ring, slamming into a distant section of the surface opposite the breach from where Maeve was standing. A tremor in the station surface built all the way to a minor earthquake as the fusion reactor in the attacking vessel detonated and bathed the station in a blast of light and radiation.
The shaking continued as the light of the blast faded away, and that was when Maeve realized the explosion had compromised the structural integrity of the already damaged ring. The section of the structure she was on was being pulled away from the center station by the force of its rotation.
Maeve swore and tried to connect with any nearby communications networks on her device. She briefly established a connection with the destroyer, but then it sped away towards another part of the conflict, where yet more PDC fire was erupting in the distance.
She grumbled as the signal strength dropped to zero and she sighed and continued frantically climbing down the outside of the ring. The spin gravity was falling away as more and more of the rotational velocity escaped to be converted into inertial velocity, leaving Maeve groping at the support posts and handrails as her feet were held to the catwalk with increasingly little force.
As she reached the bottom of the ring, she saw a ship undock from its moorings and execute an immediate warp jump, tearing another chunk from the station as the shear forces wreaked havoc on the docking bay it had been moored in. Maeve's blood finished running all the way to ice cold as she realized the attackers were stealing their ships, military warships armed with nuclear weapons. It shouldn't have been possible, the ship's AIs should have stopped them, but she watched as another ship undocked and immediately turned its guns on a passing UN cruiser before also vanishing into a ripple in spacetime as their warp drive fired.
She took off at a run, she had to warn the Mercy Given while there was still time. She raced down the hanging catwalks as quickly as she could in the fading gravity, trying to get in communications range with one of the ships. She started to pick up a signal from the UNDF Ticonderoga, but as she frantically tried to connect to their network, the ship engaged its warp drive while still locked to the dock and tore away a huge chunk of the nearby station hull. The catwalks rattled and screeched as the shear point crunched itself together in a blast of light and debris.
Between the proximity to the warp activations and the detonation of the terrorist ship's fusion drive, Maeve knew she had probably already received an extreme dose of radiation and would need extensive anti-cancer and radiation sickness treatments if she survived, but she ignored the tingling in her skin and the uneasiness in her stomach and raced onward down the catwalk.
Finally, the UNDF Mercy Given's network appeared on her hud, and she desperately pressed the connect button. She let out a huge breath as the network connected and immediately she established a line to the bridge.
"Mercy Given, Captain, is that you?" The voice of Lieutenant Commander Pandora Eisley asked through her suit speakers. "There's some sort of attack going on aboard the station, the networks are all locked down and--"
"Yes, undock, undock now, seal all docking ports and airlocks there are intruders aboard the station," she said as quickly as she could get the words out.
"I've sealed the hatches and ordered a security team to the airlocks, but we can't undock," Dora responded, "The networks have us locked out and won't accept our codes to release the docking clamps."
"Then rip the damn clamps out of the station, there are intruders onboard armed with high-powered weapons and breaching charges, I think they're trying to make off with our ships which means you need to undock now. Pass the word down the line to the other vessels."
"Acknowledged," the Lieutenant Commander replied breathlessly.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
Spaceport Level
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth
May 2219
The wide open concourse of the spaceport had turned into a battlefield. Margaritifer's strike team and six other teams had merged on this area of the spaceport and exchanged fire with the surviving UN forces, those who had been in spacesuits on the concourse when they broke the air seals. The fighting was fierce, clawing back bulkheads one at a time, venting a section of hallway, dueling with the survivors, and then repeating the process another ten meters down the corridor.
The deck rumbled and the spin gravity began to slowly fade away as the low-level shaking continued. The battle outside must have been progressing on schedule, which meant Margaritifer's squad was starting to fall behind. Their progress through the station had begun to flag as the defenders started to rally and coordinate with one another. Their networks were still crippled as had been promised, but that didn't stop them from physically talking to each other.
There were far too many Terrans to fight and claim the station, likely there were already dozens more military vessels converging on the elevator from all over Earth's orbit. The Tribe's plan relied on getting in and getting out before enough forces could be mustered in response. If they lagged behind, they would be left behind, encircled, and killed. Victory or death, it was that simple. By virtue of the damage they had inflicted on their foe, they had already won a great victory for the Tribe this day, it was just a matter of surviving to enjoy it now, and Margaritifer very much planned on living.
Her strike team broke through into the chamber containing the airlock access to their target vessel. The advance team went to work breaching the airlock, while the rest of the squad set up a defensive perimeter in that segment of the corridor. The station continued to groan and creak, and then with a sharp bang, the gravity suddenly fell away entirely, leaving everyone momentarily groping for support and locking down magnetic boots. The airlock started to groan and shriek as the vessel beyond fired its thrusters in an attempt to escape the station.
"The clamps will hold them, keep working!" Eli encouraged the soldiers, keeping his weapon trained on the sealed door, waiting for the attack from the far side. The advance team finished wiring up the breaching charges and began backing off as the metal around the airlock emitted another groan of protest at the stress it was being subjected to.
Eli nodded and they blew the hatch, rushing inwards weapons blazing as the defenders were suddenly exposed to vacuum. The strike team raced forward to claim their prize.
Malacca Elevator Station, Main Ring
Catwalk Gantry
Geostationary Orbit
22,236 Kilometers from Earth, Sol
May 2219
Maeve kept running, racing down the hanging system of catwalks, trying to get closer to the Mercy Given as the battle surged in local space. Stolen warships ripped into UN loyal forces, joining in battle with the makeshift pirate flotilla that had led the station assault. Another series of tremors vibrated through the metal grating in the catwalk and gravity fell away entirely, the section of station had broken from the ring and its velocity vector sent it drifting away from the station.
"They're about to breach our airlock," Dora reported defeatedly, as Maeve clung to the gantry for dear life, "We can't break out of the dock."
"Use PDLs, cut yourself away, collateral damage to the station is considered acceptable," Maeve ordered. Another vessel was released by the station clamps and engaged its warp drive. Somehow the invaders had taken control of their networks from the governing AIs and smart systems, yet another impossible feat to pile onto their list of accomplishments.
The Mercy Given's point defense lasers twinkled as the destructive energy reflected off the nearby hull. It flash heated the structure and melted deep gashes into it, ripping through clamps and gantries with burning light and leaving the edges molten hot. The ship continued to heave against the ruined clamps, and then finally, the battlecruiser broke away from the docking bay in a shower of debris and molten metal.
"Are you secure?" Maeve asked into the microphone demandingly.
"Standby," Dora replied.
"Fuck," Maeve swore and started trying to climb along a support strut to stay in communications range as the ship slowly drifted clear of the docking gantries. The battle around the station was intensifying with more and more ships joining in. Ships continued to jump out of the fight into warp, but it was impossible to tell if it was invaders escaping with stolen ships, or loyal forces fleeing the battle to escape destruction after taking critical damage. Even as the battle grew in scope, the chunk of ring Maeve was on continued to drift away from the combat zone, giving her a wide vantage point from which to observe the conflict.
"Are you secure?" Maeve asked again with agitation.
"Standby please," the Lieutenant commander repeated.
"Dora what the fuck is going on over there?" Maeve barked into the microphone.
Dora said nothing, she just started keying up and Maeve heard the sound of gunfire through her speakers. "You hold that corridor! You hear me?" Someone was shouting in the background over the roar of small arms fire.
A UN Destroyer tumbled past the ring fragment, drifting dead in the water and venting gasses from dozens of wounds. Maeve thought the total death toll might be approaching fifty thousand, just from her own personal tally. She held her breath as the firefight played out in a staccato of gunfire, punctuated by incoherent orders being shouted over the din and cries of pain as the forces exchanged casualties.
Maeve was so engrossed with the conflict on the Mercy Given, she didn't notice that the ruined destroyer was drifting closer to the ring fragment until it blocked out the sun, looming larger and larger as it tumbled nose to tail towards the wrecked gantries.
Well, I guess this is how I die, Maeve thought to herself as the hulk cartwheeled over her head and slammed tailfirst into the side of a docking bay. The catwalk kicked and buckled, folding and twisting up on itself suddenly and bucking Maeve off in the process. Maeve was slammed against a support pole as it bent itself in half, seeing stars as she rebounded off the collapsing gantry and was sent tumbling into space.
"Secure the ship, Dora, take care of her," Maeve said softly as the blood pooled in her head and feet from the rotation that had been imparted onto her, making her dizzy and lightheaded. She could still hear the ongoing firefight through her suit speakers, but it was gradually growing distant and static filled as Maeve drifted away from the ship.
The sun and the earth and the battle and the ring fragment all spun past one another in an endless and unstoppable precession as Maeve tumbled. She tried to steady her breathing but she was spinning quite rapidly; nausea and lightheadedness continued to build and her vision began to contract down to a point. She resisted the urge to panic and start hyperventilating, which would only accelerate her journey to unconsciousness. Instead, she and slowly and deliberately accessed and activated the emergency transponder on her suit, finishing the activation sequence just before her vision blurred out completely.
Maeve took another slow deliberate breath, watching the blurring fading scenery rotate past her as the unstoppable tendrils of unconsciousness finally claimed her as their own.