The Secrets' Crusade

Humanity had once looked to the dark between the stars as a place of wonder, the emptiness beckoning and calling like the great oceans had in your people's antiquity. The early exploration missions had, in fact, spent a great deal of time there. Part of that had been the result of the incredibly crude stardrives pre-Sorrows humanity had been restricted to, but part had also been that simple curiosity.

Then the Shiplords had come. Humanity had possessed several small extrasolar exploration groups at the time, but not one of them had ever made it home. And in their parting orders, the Shiplords had laid down a fierce warning against entering the space between stars. It had only been in the last few weeks, at the Second Sorrow, that you'd learnt the truth of that warning. Just one more lying chain among the scores the Shiplords used to control the galaxy.

"First-wave results are starting to come through," Mary noted from her station. Her fingers were unusually still, all her focus on the data trickling in from the Trailblazer packages you'd launched over the last day.

With your Shiplord IDs blown at worst and under sudden intense scrutiny at best, it had felt safer to fall back on the methods that the Adamant had first been equipped to support. Which was why the Adamant was ghosting through interstellar space a few short lightyears from the edge of the Consolat home system, hidden in the mass shadow of a roaming comet. You'd had no up-to-date information to work with, and so had erred on the side of caution.

And there, the choices you'd made what felt like half a lifetime ago during the Adamant's fitting-out had come back to grace you.

Long-Range Scans: 44 + 36 (Mary Learning) + 15 (Trailblazer Scansats) = 95 vs 40/60/90. Highest quality survey data obtained.

The expanded nanoforge you'd seen built into the ship had maintained all of its systems, barring the core of the FTL drive, without fail throughout your infiltrations. Now, it was finally able to be turned to one of the purposes for which it had been made. Trailblazer systems had been created to aid humanity's covert return to the stars beyond Sol. Now it helped do so for a star far further from your home than the designers could have imagined.

"What are we looking at?" you asked Mary. It was an act of making conversation, but not a poor one. Anyone could look at a star system. Not everyone would be able to make sense of what they saw.

"Two asteroid belts, six planets, one of them a gas giant with what looks to be a major moon system," Mary rattled off. A projection populated as she spoke, the pale light of the system's yellow star already present at the centre. "Most of them aren't all that important though. The one we're after is planet two."

The system map zoomed down until that world filled it. It was firmly in the goldilocks zone, and the combined imaging capacity of the Trailblazer systems had given more than enough data to confirm the presence of life. It was a remarkably pretty world from this distance - a painted orb of blue, white and green in a way that seemed remarkably similar to Earth. There were just a few notable differences.

This world was, for all its life, devoid of any major population of sentients despite the sprawling city-complexes scattered across its continents. Flora had grown up through the buildings in some places, but the process of swallowing them whole seemed still far from complete.

"They must have some truly impressive maintenance systems," you murmured. You felt the attention of the room flick to you, and shook your head, pulling up a few of the first detailed images of the empty Consolat cities.

"Look," you went on. You made a few adjustments to the image and the outlines of several buildings glowed with gentle blue light. "The plant life's made it all the way up to the buildings, into them in some cases. But most of the structures are still standing, with no sign of major damage. Something has to be restraining the planetary fauna, something that's still active even millions of years later."

"Or the Shiplords have been maintaining the systems," Jane Cyneburg pointed out. "We'll have to wait on the full analysis, or landing parties, to be sure."

You reminded yourself that the Adamant's Captain had been a first-wave Trailblazer officer before being fingered for this mission. As a result, she'd benefited from a far more in-depth education on certain carefully-picked subjects than most FSN officers ever would. One of them had been covert survey operations.

"How likely do you think the second will be?" you asked. It was an important question, though maybe asked a little too early. You felt more than heard the sigh of your Unison.

Jane just shrugged. "It's impossible to say at this point. We'll need the full scan analysis first, and that's going to take time. Even with Iris and the Lagless core. We, well-"

"We only get one shot at this," you finished with a nod. "I know. I understand."

"But you wish we could know right now," Jane replied knowingly. "It's the burden of command. I'm just quite happy that this one's yours, Amanda. Looking after the Adamant, that I'm good at. Making decisions that could directly affect our entire species? That's more your speed, I think."

Her tone was light, but there was a thread of steady calm spun through it. And why would there be? She was right. You could feel it even this far out, a subtle divergence in the shape of reality, centred on the Consolat's once-homeworld. For you to be able to feel even that much, lightyears from the system's heart, spoke of something impossibly vast having happened here. Though if what the Last Memory had told you was true, something impossibly vast had happened here.

Carving loopholes into reality with the death of your entire species didn't strike you as something that could be done quietly. Not to the senses you and the other Potentials aboard the Adamant possessed. And especially when there was no system shell. Yet the odd, soulspace-adjacent nature of those creations had been, you assumed, how the Shiplords had hidden the Sorrows from the Uninvolved. And that raised a question: how had the Uninvolved missed it?

A difficult question, but one you didn't have any good way to answer right now.

System Analysis: 68 + 33 (Iris Learning) + 20 (Lagless Computing Core) + 15 (Trailblazer Survey Protocols) = 136 vs 50/80/120. Flawless analysis of survey data.

Iris wasn't physically on the bridge, but your daughter was certainly present. The Adamant's upgraded computing core had been fully opened to her needs, and the steadily populating imagery all around you was only the most obvious example of her presence. You could feel the weight and complexity of the data pouring across her mind, the full sweep of the recon sat data flowing slowly together into a cohesive whole.

Data management like this had been a core function of the program that had eventually birthed your daughter into the world, and she'd never lost the knack. It flooded in, a sheer depth of the data that the analysis team would have taken days or weeks to parse fully, and now didn't have to. With Iris and the Lagless core, all they had to do was run spot-checks on the results.

Part of you wanted to give Elil and Vega the chance to look at the data, but you weren't sure if the risk was worth it. They were both exceptional in the field of data processing, but they were also key parts of the Adamant's stealth systems. You could pull away one of them with relatively little concern thanks to the small Harmonial working group aboard, which would give them something to do after being largely reduced to shoring up the harmony of the Adamant and her crew.

There shouldn't be any observation platforms this far out, and your stealth systems should be entirely capable of handling any that might be there. The question was, should you risk it? You were sensitive to Practice in ways no other Potential was, but the feather-light presence of that second world didn't feel quite like Practice as you knew it. Similar, yes. The same? No.

Trying to understand it from this distance was something to which Insight or Harmony was far better suited. Though it did raise a concern of what might happen if they looked too deep. Vega was very good at creating Miracles, but that was sometimes a double-edged sword. She couldn't always stop herself.

So.

One of Vega or Elil can be substituted by the Accord of Harmonials to investigate the survey data and try to begin examining the odd presence to the star system. Pulling both off the stealth gear is also acceptable, but could leave you vulnerable to an extended sensor net - assuming one exists.
[] Elil
[] Vega
[] Both
[] No
[] Write-in? You cannot cycle Elil and Vega for the purposes of this decision.