[X] Stay here, to examine and feel this memorial more deeply.
:I think we found another strand of hope,: you said first. :Younger Shiplords, they felt a little like teenagers. I think humanity could learn to coexist with them, assuming their elders stop trying to kill us all.:
:Really?: The surge of interest across the link was palpable, and not just from Lea.
:Yes,: you replied. Though how to describe the group you'd met? How they'd acted, answered your questions, and the glimpses of their true society beneath it. It was difficult without just showing it, but you tried. :None of them seemed to really believe in the worst of what we've seen of the Shiplords, not in the ways that matter. If that's enough, well, that shouldn't be my decision to make.:
It was oddly freeing to say that. To admit that for all the power and skill you'd wielded in executing this mission, the results of it all wouldn't, and shouldn't, be yours to use. But you weren't there yet. There was more to do here at this Sorrow, and then would be the Consolat homeworld, a place with so many question marks hanging over it that it might as well be shaped like one.
Most importantly, would the codes Kicha had given you be enough to let you enter that most sacred – the only term that felt to fit – of Shiplord systems? And if they did, what would you find there? What would the Nexus that you'd seen referenced look like? What would it do?
One thing was certain, though. Given the location of the system, now core Shiplord territory, anything but a successful infiltration would be annihilated by internal response fleets. Not that attacking the place would end well for anyone, in your view. If there was anything that could set off a frenzy among the Shiplords like the one which had taken them into the madness of their war against the Gysian race, attacking that star system would be it.
You jolted out of those thoughts to find the feeling of those around you smiling. It wasn't the human expression, but it was quite clear regardless. Opening your mind again, you brushed out a wistful sigh.
:I think I'd like to stay here for a little while,: you said. You ignored the quiet amusement of your fellows with the dignity it only deserved. Looking around the vaulting gallery felt strange, like the summit of a great mountain raised high above the currents of history. :I feel like I can almost feel what was when it was created. The reality we lost, could have had, before the Peoples were forced to accept defeat.:
:Do you think it will help?: Mary asked.
:I don't know,: you admitted. You reached out towards the place around you, the feeling of a mighty peak, searching for what was beyond it. :But I think I should try. You can stay if you'd like, but there's an exhibi-:
You cut off abruptly as a priority signal flared in your expanded perceptions. It slashed away the light focus you'd been bending upon the place around you, thrusting you abruptly back into the wholeness of your physical existence. What on earth?
:It's Jane, on the Adamant,: Sidra said. They slipped the words into a sudden moment of acceleration, all feelings of wonder banished. :I'm not tracking any suspicious movements around us or in orbit, but I doubt the sensors I can access from here could pierce Shiplord stealth systems even if they couldn't be ordered to ignore stealth craft.:
:Understood.: You spared a moment to look at the others, noting the beginnings of reactions from the other Unisonbound. Mary was still catching up. You hoped that would be okay. At least there weren't many Shiplords in this section of the Forum. And only then, perhaps a fraction of a second in elapsed time later, did you accept the call.
"We need you up here." It was an audio-only transmission, to take into account potential interception. "We have a critical message from our friend at the Third. You need to see it. In person." The last two words came after a precise pause, just enough to let you start formulating the reply they overrode. Jane had been getting used to you, hadn't she.
Which meant this really was important, but the priority call had told you that. Jane hadn't gained her rank and clearance by coasting. Risking a direct communication from orbit like this wouldn't have been done for anything less than a critical event.
Which informed your next question rather handily. "Timescale?"
"Immediate." A reply which raised another question. Or…no, it didn't. The Adamant had received a critical message from Kicha which you needed to see immediately. Jane was all but screaming that she wanted everyone back on the Adamant an hour ago. You couldn't afford to be blind to that.
You consulted positions, orbital corridors and your shuttle's power curves for a moment, Sidra helping with the exact mathematics. "Twenty."
"Try for fifteen." Jane didn't sound happy telling you to do that, but telling you unhappy things was part of her job. "We'll be bright."
And with that final message, telling you she'd be bringing the Adamant to full readiness in preparation for unknown action, she cut the link. You looked around at your friends, in many ways the core of a second family, and blew out a helpless breath.
"We're leaving. Kalilah, Lea, get Mary back to the shuttle. I'll get Iris." At the same time, you reached across the links of your Heartcircle. :Vega-:
:I know,: the Harmonial replied. You supposed it was good for the soul to be humbled sometimes, given how often you did it to others. :Making our goodbyes. We won't be late.:
"But Ama-" Mary began to protest. She stopped a moment later, her entirely brilliant mind connecting the dots. She couldn't think as fast as any of you, but there was only one person on the entire crew who you thought could really match her intelligence. And Iris cheated to get there.
Only the fact that you were all talking across links instead of purely verbally let you hear her concerned acceptance of the new reality. You were too busy moving towards your daughter's signal point. She didn't need your help to get out, already signalling that she was disengaging from conversation, though with flags that made it clear how unhappy she was to do so.
But she would need the presence of a Unisonbound to get back to the shuttle in time to meet the frankly absurd deadline you'd set for yourself. It was a risk, but a critical call like this made minor risks like that more acceptable. That was the entire point of the priority, to warn you of something that could break your cover. Which meant you needed to be gone. Now.
You made it out of the Forum, to the spaceport, and then to the Adamant itself in sixteen minutes of chill focus, every action fixed on the goal of reaching the tenuous safety of the ship that could get you out of this system. No traps had waited for you in the atmosphere, or in the void of space as you passed through the tapestry of orbits formed of the small Shiplord fleet around you. Few of them appeared armed, but the Adamant had been built to survive, not fight.
Your first port of call on leaving the shuttle was the small meeting room behind the bridge, where the expected grim-faces of Jane and Lieutenant Gilsan, your Intelligence Officer, were waiting along with an addition you'd not expected – the tall and distinctly harried figure of Lieutenant Roshan, the Adamant's Head of Engineering.
"Which news first?" you asked, barely through the door. The room was rather plain without the holograms that usually illustrated planning above the table.
"The message," Jane stated, gesturing you towards a chair. You caught a flicker of unhappiness from Lieutenant Roshan, but it was squashed quickly. You took your seat, Vega, Mary and Iris finding their own. Given their roles in the Adamant's mission it made sense for them to be here. The rest of your Heartcircle would be briefed in due course.
"What did she have to say?" It was already clear it couldn't be anything good. Best to have the truth of it.
"Better you see for yourself." Jane flicked her fingers towards the centre of the room and the holo-imagers flared to life. The figure that took shape there was the one you'd expected, though how you could tell when Shiplords really did look largely the same to the human eye was a question you'd want to try and answer another day.
The air around Kicha was oddly opaque, perhaps a deliberate attempt at privacy beyond the norm. What you could make out of the room beyond was vague at best, but seemed to speak of a place for living. Long windows let the light of her home's star illuminate the area and there were odd, to you, pieces of furniture scattered along the walls.
Kicha's veil was torn by concern, as deep an emotion as any you'd seen from the ancient Shiplord. But her words, when they came, were calm.
"I hope this finds you, and finds you safe," she began. "No doubt you've seen the broadcast by now. I know it might not be everything you'd hoped, but it's a place to start. It's what came after that's led me to reach out, however. I remember what you said at the Third Sorrow, that you wouldn't enjoy the spotlight of the Authority's focus."
To your left, Vega hissed in a sudden breath. "Oh no."
"I'm afraid that you aren't going to be able to avoid it for very long," the recording continued through your friend's exhalation. "I'll be able to keep them out of my Sorrow's records for perhaps a few days, but for all that this place is mine, my authority over it isn't absolute. If the Authority demands your identities, I'll have to give them up."
"They already know that you're on a pilgrimage, which gives them somewhere to start for now. Ships will be on the way, honour guard, but again, I know your feelings on such things. And if you want to finish your pilgrimage, to honour those final memories I hope you've found your way to understanding, there's little time.
"As a good citizen of the Authority," lines of humour flickered through the concern radiating from Kicha's veil, "I should urge you to make your way to the Authority itself. But as Warden of the Hearthguard, I can only tell you to continue what you've begun. The pilgrimage is a search for answers. If you believe there are more still out there, we may need you to find them.
"Good luck and safe travels." The hologram swam out of focus, then snapped off, leaving your mind racing. In this, though, there was no one faster in the room than Vega. Harmonials made the entire matter of translating doublespeak distinctly unfair.
"Our identities are about to become compromised," the pale blonde said with absolute certainty. "There's more, of course, but I'd prefer not to tread too heavily on the analysis Lieutenant Gilsan has prepared for us."
"Thank you, ma'am." The young intelligence officer gave her a wintry smile. "But you are ultimately quite correct. It's not the sort of immediate compromise that we'd all be afraid of, but it will lead to one. The Adamant's covert systems are excellent, but I cannot imagine we can go to the Authority without being required to let Shiplords onto the Adamant. And at that point, well, we're done.
"There's no way for us to fake the interior of a Shiplord vessel; we don't even know what a civilian model is meant to look like on the inside. And that's before you get into the Adamant Matter that makes up the entire structure. Or our drive." Lieutenant Roshan winced at those words. That was…not a good sign.
"What's wrong with our drive?" It might have been better to leave the question until the end of the report, but you could already tell where this was going. You had to leave, the question was where, and there was a complication with the drive that was going to make that question difficult.
Brevity, in this case, was critical.
"Our diagnostic scans on spinning up the drive on your way up from the surface identified microfractures forming in the structure of the crystal at the centre of the system." Lieutenant Roshan's deep, steady voice was usually a comfort. Today there was a tremor in it.
"I can't say for certain what this means for the system," he continued, his expression twisting with frustration. "If this was a normal First Secret drive, yes. But all the components I know from those are fine. It's just this crystal at the centre and Miracle that is, well, that's perhaps exactly the right word here."
"I understand," you told him, told the room really. The possibility of being stranded here, after having found so much, it was terrifying. But that wasn't necessarily what Roshan had said. Damage, not collapse.
You turned to look at Mary, who was already poking at her tablet. "Any ideas?"
"A few," she murmured, eyes flicking across the screen. She paused for a moment to look up at Lieutenant Roshan. "Do you have the diagnostic scans?"
"Right here." He flicked two fingers up the screen of his own tablet, passing it across the space. "I was hoping you'd be able to help, Doctor. I'm good at my job, but this is just beyond me."
"It would be beyond almost anyone," Mary acknowledged, fingers still moving. Plugging in data. "I'm going to need to run some simulations, but I'm confident in at least an initial hypothesis now. The important one, really."
"Which would be?" You asked.
Mary smiled wearily. "This isn't a total system failure, at least not yet. But I think it's going to restrict our range, potentially by a great deal."
"Why?" Jane asked. She looked more strained than you'd ever seen her, but then the Adamant was her ship. In her mind, its failings would be hers. You'd have to watch that.
"It's difficult to explain," Mary hummed, tapping a few more commands before setting the tablet down. "But in simple terms, what the Void Crystals do is create a conduit for the Uninvolved to act in conventional reality without being detected by the Shiplord sensor net. If that conduit is damaged, then their ability to act undetected will be damaged with it."
"Why does that matter though?" Vega asked. "Tahkel constructed the drive through the crystal. That's…that should be it, right?"
"It's not that simple," Mary sighed. "Ever since we got this drive, the fact that the Void Crystal is an integral part of it suggested that there was a level of active involvement required to shield us from the effects of circumventing the First Secret's limitations. That energy cost has to be paid somewhere, after all, and I'd be shocked if the scale was linear. Which means that even minor damage could translate to a major effect on how far we can push. And pushing harder will only accelerate the damage."
"But if we treat it as a standard First Secret drive," Lieutenant Roshan said, nodding as he followed your friend's logic. "Then that shouldn't inflict any additional cost, should it?"
"That would be my hope, yes," Mary nodded. "It's just a theory, but I've been studying the drive when I can around, well, everything else. And it's the best conclusion I can draw from available data, at least until my analysis finishes.
"In the meantime, however," she trailed off, looking meaningfully at you. You didn't have to be a genius to see where she was going.
"We need to get out of this system," you said heavily. "And we should be able to, before Kicha's deadline. She said a few days. That's enough time to leave the system shell. The only question is what we do then."
"Home, surely," Jane began, only to stop midway as she saw your expressions change. "I see. What did you find down there?"
"The location of the Consolat homeworld," you said simply. You reached out, calling up a starmap, and Sidra translated the coordinates you'd been given at the Last Memory. It was actually quite close. "The place where, if we're right, the Secrets began. And I'm not sure we can afford to ignore it, despite the damage to our drive."
Gilsan swore, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Once the Shiplords have our IDs they'll be able to track our progress. And if we vanish completely, some of them will start to wonder why."
"And even if they don't." You nodded to him. "They'll be looking for us. They'll know where we've been and what we've done there. We'll have to be prepared for the possibility that they'll station more ships at the Origin in response to that."
"Or to Kicha's message," Vega pointed out quietly. "There was more than one reason that she was speaking roundabout. She knows she won't be able to keep that message hidden forever."
You turned to stare at the Harmonial, blue eyes widening. "You're certain?"
"Entirely." There was no hesitation in the word, and you sucked in an involuntary breath. The risks involved in that- "But she also recognised the need to warn us. Getting caught in-system by a broadcast, or by one of the groups they'll be sending to escort us to the Authority, would be far worse than this."
Jane broke the silence that followed, blowing out a breath, her expression resigned. "So we go to the Consolat homeworld, then?"
"I'm not sure there's another choice," you said with a helpless little shrug. "It's going to depend on the results of Mary's analysis, of course, but if this is going to be done we need to do it now. Will there be enough time for you to finish before we leave the system?"
Mary checked her tablet for a moment, then nodded. "There will be." Her green eyes flicked to Lieutenant Roshan. "I'd like to run some tests on the drive, Lieutenant, if you'll allow it?"
"Of course," the man nodded quickly. "Anything we can do to help, ma'am. I'd rather not find out what happens if we try to jump beyond the safe range."
"Nothing, I'd expect. The First Secret has safety measures," Mary replied instantly. She frowned, bringing a considering hand to her lips. "So long as the Uninvolved don't prevent them from activating, at least."
"Maybe we can try to talk to one of them," you said. "That might have been what they were trying to do in the jump transitions. But for now," you turned your focus to Jane. "Get us moving for the system edge, Commander."
"Yes ma'am."
Mary Analysis: 72 + 36 + 15 = 123/80.
Mary was able to report her results to you on the second day of three as the Adamant churned steadily out towards the system shell. You'd made a brief goodbye to Warden Yarin as you left orbit, and the journey had been quiet since then. Her feelings on the matter were actually rather positive, all things considered.
"It's not as bad as Lieutenant Roshan was worried it might be," she explained at the evening command meeting, over a shared dinner. "We're going to lose a lot of range, and that will continue to drop as we push the drive beyond its limits, but after a jump or two we should be able to model that properly. The only problem is that there's no way we're going to make it back to Earth in those two jumps. We've lost the galactic reach we had before."
Given that you were more than half the galaxy away from Sol, that fit with your expectations, but wasn't exactly pleasant to hear. But it was also better than the earlier fears as Mary had worked to puzzle out the exact nature of the problem.
"Kind of narrows our options down though, doesn't it," Jane sighed, picking at the remains of her food. You were happy to say you'd helped keep her from getting bound up in blaming herself for not noticing the issues with your drive, however impossible that would've been. There was relatively little you could do for a more general melancholy in response to her ship's wings being abruptly clipped.
"It does," you agreed, "but we'd already planned for that. And all the reasons we discussed to visit the Origin first still hold. That hasn't changed."
"No, I guess it hasn't." She shook her head, clearly still frustrated. "It just leaves us much more vulnerable than I'd like, especially if we want to infiltrate one of the most important cultural touchstones of the Shiplords species."
"It's the world that is," Vega said philosophically. "Are you sure you can't Mend the flaws though, Mandy?"
That had taken surprisingly long to come up, but the answer was a frustratingly simple one: you just weren't sure. And it certainly wouldn't be safe to try doing so in the middle of a Sorrow. The only baseline you had to work from was when you'd repaired Artefacts for other Potentials, back when you were just a particularly gifted Mender.
"It never took me less than months to fix Artefacts," you said, again. It could have been annoying, but you could tell what she was actually doing. Using repetition to get your mind away from the particular failure point. "I don't think that's really viable."
"Not right now," the Harmonial agreed. "But it's good to have it there as an option, if we need it to get all the way home in a reasonable timeframe."
And wasn't that the truth.
You'd have vastly preferred to head for Sol now, but there was no certainty you could make it before the drive dropped to standard limits. And even if it didn't…you shook your head. What you'd said to Jane was the truth. All the reasons to go to the Consolat Origin were still there. Another risk, yes, but the entire mission had been one of those. And in a way you felt…like you almost owed the attempt.
Not to the Shiplords, not in their entirety. But Kicha, Entara, the Teel'sanha Peoples, they'd all given you pieces to the map that now pointed onwards to the home of the Consolat. And the home of the Secrets. If you could find a way to understand what the Peoples had missed, to understand the Secrets, wouldn't that be a way to end this war?
You couldn't know without going there.
It had been a lot to think on. But it hadn't been everything you'd done on your way to the system's edge, either.
What does Amanda find to occupy herself on the way to the system's edge? Pick one:
[] Talk with Sidra - your Unison Platform has not been themself since the Third Sorrow, and perhaps before. Something's wrong, and you've been putting off this conversation for weeks. There probably won't be time at the Consolat Origin. See to it now.
[] Talk with Kalilah about recent revelations - this will allow Amanda to level the (frankly impressive to still be functional) emotional state of the most powerful combat asset in the entire mission, the Adamant included.
[] Help Mary - specifically with her investigation into what the Secrets being deliberately created might mean, and how you might be able to leverage this in investigating the Consolat homeworld.
[] Listen to Iris - your daughter spent most of your time at the Forum as part of a group talking to an ex-Tribute Fleet officer. You'll take the time to properly work through that experience after the fact, and see what truths might linger.
[] Write-in?
The next day you passed through the system shell without incident, vanishing away to a randomly plotted point in deep space at the edge of standard jump range. Kicha's warning, it seemed, had proven enough. The Authority transmitted a broadcast to the identity codes Kicha had provided for you bare hours later, an earnest request for you and your fellows to travel to meet with them.
A few hours later, with no reply forthcoming, they broadcast the details of those identities to the general population and detailed several Fleet Survey units to begin a search of Shiplord space for you and your ship.
And that left some people in a very odd situation.
I am open to discussion on if the Adamant should, in fact, head for the Consolat Origin. At the moment I just can't see Amanda not taking this chance, not with the other risks they've taken so far in this mission. But I can also always miss things, and if you feel I have, this would be the time to bring it up.
