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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."
Last edited:
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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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?"