The Secrets' Crusade

The Adamant flickered into reality at the edge of the Stellar Exclusion Zone, all stealth systems fully active, and all eyes watching the outputs of your ship's sensors for any sign that something might have noticed the jump. Even the most advanced implementations of a system like Sol's Lux Sagum should be spoofed by the perfect stealth of your enhanced camouflage, but there was no sense in being complacent.

"Jump complete," Lieutenant Aster reported from the helm. "Sensors are looking clear."

"Shape our course for Origin Four, Mister Aster," Jane told him. "But keep your hands light on the controls, just in case something goes wrong."

It had been tempting to head straight for the Consolat homeworld, very tempting in fact. The Adamant could hide in the shadow of a Trojan cluster asteroid, with your ground team transiting by shuttle or establishing a base on the planet. The Trailblazer gear had, after all, been designed to establish outposts like that. Given the expected state of the planet's infonet after so long, it seemed likely that there'd be plenty of places to hide.

But in the end, you'd decided against it. There was, in some ways, too much on the Consolat homeworld. It would be terribly easy to lose track of your actual objective when torn between four different points of focus. Better to start slow, with a location that restricted you to only one. And somewhere much closer to the edge of the SEZ, just in case something did go wrong.

"Yes ma'am," Aster replied. There was a gentle hum of power, and the Adamant's drive lifted you all forward, into the shadow of the Consolat's home star. From here on out, escaping would require an element of travel through realspace. No pressure.

You'd left things long enough for Vega and Elil to get a proper rest ahead of their first major test since the Third Sorrow. That had only been a few months ago, but a lot had happened since then. And you'd all had just enough time to grow used to the safety of well-forged Shiplord identities. Losing those hadn't been enjoyable, especially when you'd not made any mistakes in using them. But they'd also served their purpose. They'd gotten you here.

"My goodness," you murmured, switching to the Adamant's visual feeds. You'd known, intellectually, that Origin Four – the gas giant of the system – was many times larger than Jupiter. In truth, the hands of fate for celestial objects had only just denied its place as a true star, and you'd never actually visited a gas giant in person before. You'd seen holo, of course, but that was just recordings. There was something very different in seeing it directly, and you had to wonder how different it would be again once you could look with your own eyes.

"Yup," Jane agreed, her lips curved in a small smile. "They're impressive, aren't they."

"I'll say."

It was simply enormous, easily distinct amidst the starfield most of fifteen light-minutes out. It would take you more than an hour to get there, what with you taking your time to limit the strain on the stealth systems and your thankfully rested Potentials who were connected to them. You wondered if you could get away with just staring at the planet all the way in.

Probably not, you concluded sadly.

The immense planet was awash with colour, hues of ethereal sapphire and deep, deep azure swirled together as if by some vast painter's brush. A dazzling ring system surrounded it, ice and stardust reflecting the light of the stars in gleaming bands of opalescent silver and diamond-white. And that was just the planet. The cosmic giant was attended to by dozens of moons, many of that retinue distinct in their character.

The largest was almost the size of Earth, its surface marbled by bands of rusted red and emerald green within a turbulent atmosphere. Another, smaller moon was overtaken by swirling clouds, and a likely biological source of light made the enormous storm systems glow with a gentle lavender light. Your target was neither of them.

"No figures this time?" Mary asked over a private channel, checking just as you'd asked.

"None," you replied. "But this place, Mary." Words couldn't do it justice. You could really feel it, now that you were in-system. The echoes of an act of not-quite-Practice so vast that it had left a permanent mark on reality. Before this mission you'd always thought that Practice was part of the Secrets, simply one of an enormously higher order, granted to your people by the Dragons' sacrifice.

But looking at this system, actually feeling the power still there rippling through your bones, it made you wonder. Had you been wrong all along?

You shook your head, returning to the question Mary had asked you. Trying to explain. "I'm not sure if that's good or bad, to be honest. I've only properly seen them once, in our jump to the Fourth, but I can't help but think it means something."

The memory from that jump still haunted you, a spectre in the back of your mind that you'd had no opportunity to exorcise.

"Well," Mary said, her tone encouraging, "Maybe we can look into it here. I can't imagine we'll be able to spend all of our time on our target. Though it is rather strange."

"Still can't make sense of the atmosphere?" You asked, only half-teasing.

She blew a raspberry at you over the link. Without opening her mouth.

The moon that Lieutenant Aster had set the Adamant on course for was a barren, grey thing, with none of the vibrant colours found on more hospitable worlds. Yet for all its appearance as a lifeless and desolate place, the little planetoid had a thin but serviceable atmosphere. That and the unending dusty greyness of the world created an odd prismatic effect around the satellite, like some ghost's ethereal veil.

That wasn't everything your sensor techs were examining, however. Now that you were actually in the system, it was possible to run full scans with the Adamant's array, using the stealthed scansats further out to refine your data.

Inner System Scans: 92 (rolled on Discord, end me) + 36 (Mary Learning) + 15 (Trailblazer Scansats) = 143 vs ???

Fragments detected.

The first sign that something wasn't quite as your long range scans had suggested came early on, when something flashed up on the system map for a moment before vanishing.

"Full stop," you snapped. The command was pure instinct, and the reaction to it, immediate. The Adamant came to an instant stop. "Iris, what the heck was that?" Mary would, later, tease you about how you slipped into parental language mode.

Fragment Analysis: 32 + 33 (Iris Learning) + 20 (Lagless Computing Core) + 10 (Tombstone Filters) - 60 (???) = 35 vs 30/???

Highly limited fragment identification. Anomalies.

"Checking," the young AI replied from her station. "The combined sensor coverage picked up something. It's archetypal sensor ghost territory, but we shouldn't be dealing with those. All our diagnostics are solid. The only other option is that there's something stealthed out there, hiding from our scans."

"They must be absurdly good to hide that well," Jane said, pulling up the log and studying the placement of the ghost return. It had been barely a light-second away. She peered closer at the data, then her eyes widened. "Iris, doesn't that look suspiciously similar to-"

"The tombstone stealth coatings, yes," your daughter replied. "It's not the same. I'm applying the filters we developed, but I'm only getting more ghosts, nothing certain. The mass readings are all over the place, and there's just nothing there when we point optical sensors at the area.

"And you aren't seeing it because it would make the system map entirely useless," she added a moment later. "I'm getting thousands of return fragments, and I couldn't tell you how many of them are real."

"What do you think it is?" You asked, looking between Iris and Jane. The FSN officer replied first.

"Iris, do they all seem to be in fixed orbits? From what data we can get, I mean."

Iris hummed for a moment, then nodded. "They do."

"I hate to say it," Jane said carefully, "but that screams defence platforms to me. Any pattern to the returns? Say, concentric spheres working outwards from the system's star?"

"I can't tell. I'm sorry." Iris grimaced, clearly frustrated. A moment later her eyes focused, darting across an image only she could see. "But there's something else, too. Mary, can you check the new figures on the scans I just sent you? Compare them to expected standards."

Mary blinked, then pulled up the scan files with a soft sound of assent. Looking over you saw planetary data, far more detailed than what you'd been able to get from the scansats. Mary ran through a set of comparisons, made a few calculations in her head, and then paled.

"What is it?" You asked the two of them. You weren't annoyed, but you did need to know things, and something that made Mary go that pale probably wasn't good.

"Several," Mary's voice was a little shaky. "Several of the moons in the gas giant system and one of the more sunward worlds have isolated mass anomalies."

"What sort of anomalies?"

"The type that you'd see if you hollowed out sections of a planet and filled it with something else," Iris said bluntly. "As well as building what I can only describe as launch corridors out through the planet's crust."

"Oh." And as words went, it summed up your feelings quite effectively. You wondered, for a moment, if the Shiplords even knew. But no, they had to. They'd had control of this system for aeons, and you knew that their sensor technology was still significantly superior to humanity's unPracticed best. Which meant they'd left this here for a reason. It could just be that it had been a creation of the Consolat, but something tugged your mind towards the other possibility.

That the Shiplords would've only left a defence system like this remain if it was a match to their own. And that was, quite frankly, a little terrifying. The Shiplords were, for all the horrors they'd committed, a fully developed Secrets-based civilization with all the terrible power that implied. If the Consolat had been able to build something that could match them, in so little comparative time, and without the Secrets to fall back on?

One thing was sure, it made the Consolat being truly and deliberately responsible for the existence of the Secrets far more likely. How they'd killed themselves in the process still wasn't clear, but they must have cracked the workings of the soul in ways that humanity was still only beginning to grasp. Had everything else flowed from there? Or had it been the end result of a technological progression hundreds of thousands of years in the making?

You shook your head, trying to clear it. Asking the questions on that topic wouldn't do you any good right now. You needed the answers instead, and for that, you had to keep going.

You wet your lips, suddenly nervous in a way that you hadn't felt in a very long time. Most important question first. "Is there any sign that we've been detected by these systems?"

"There's no reaction that I can see," Iris said cautiously. The silence around her was utterly cavernous, and she tried to reassure them. "Believe me, if these systems were to react, the entire system would know it. But if they're an automated defence matrix for the star system, they might only react if the star system starts to be threatened."

"It could also be why we've not detected any AI presence," Mary added quietly. Her tone was definitely not happy, and she continued as the bridge's focus turned towards her. "If this system was built by the Consolat then any system AI that the Shiplords tried to install might conflict with it, therefore activating the defence system. Which means if we mess around too much in the infospace here, trip enough flags, then it may well be a Consolat AI that we end up facing."

"I'm not really sure that would help, Mary," you replied, though there was a hint of question in the statement. Your friend shrugged.

"It probably wouldn't," she admitted. "But if it's not a Shiplord system, its priorities might be different. There could be an opportunity there, but only if we've absolutely no other option. We've no idea what scale of AI we'd be dealing with. If the Consolat worked out how to create all this without anything like Practice, it could be a true AGI."

Iris made a choking sound. You darted a look at her, making sure she was okay for now. Then returned a questioning gaze to Mary. "What does that mean?"

"Iris has a soul," Mary explained. "And there's a Secret for AI. I'm sure of that, even if Practice made it unnecessary. But once, before we discovered the Second , there were attempts at constructing AI based purely in computers… That development is where systems like the VI your older sister has was built on. It never got further than that before the Second Secret made it irrelevant, but with enough time? Who knows what they may have done."

"Not a risk we'd like to take when those other options remain, then." Jane could've made that sound like a question. She quite pointedly did not. "Do we continue in-system, Mandy?"

"I don't see much choice," you replied, scratching lightly at your hairline. "We have to know what's here. Just, maybe take it a bit slower than we'd planned."

"You heard the lady, Mister Aster." The tone of command in the voice of the Adamant's Captain was undercut only by the tense smile on her face as she gave the order. "Steady as she goes."

"Steady as she goes, yes ma'am," Aster confirmed, bringing up the drive again.

There was more discussion as you closed in on the gas giant, but all of it circled the same points, that you just didn't know enough to say anything but that you didn't know enough. There was one last surprise waiting for you, however. As the Adamant slipped into the orbit of the barren moon of your target, you felt Mir tense in the close-knit web of your Heartcircle's connections.

Ghosts of Peace: 41 + 25 (Mir Practice) - 10 (Focus Incompatibility) = 56 vs 50/???

Success

For a moment, the Practice flooded from the younger man, his Focus of Peace reaching out for something far below. You traced how it moved, spreading out across a vast and rugged plain that on a habitable world probably would have been an ocean. Then it snapped back, like a child pulling their hand back from an open flame.

:Mir?: Yours wasn't the only voice to clamour for your fellow's attention.

:What was that?:

:Are you alright?:

You felt Lea blur out of her quarters towards the Peace Focused's stateroom on the wings of her fully extended Aegis. You were maybe half a second from following your fellow Mender's example when Mir answered you, his mental voice ragged and quiet.

:We're okay.: There were deeper meanings in the phrase, an acceptance of Lea's reaction, but also a request that you not join her given your own responsibilities. :I was watching, taking it all in, and I think I found something.:

:Down on the moon?: Vega asked. Her own tone was that of a person returning to full focus as the Adamant settled into orbit and Lieutenant Aster cut the drive field. :I saw you reaching down there, Elil too.:

:And me,: you sent, weaving the memory-image of what you'd witnessed through the words.

:Yes.: You felt Mir nodding. :I…I'm not sure where it is, not exactly. But it's something that was made to bring this place peace. Not in the way I would, but…it was close enough for my Focus to try to connect, but too different in the end for any success.:

:It narrowed it down, though.: This time it seemed Elil's turn to be supportive. :I only got the moon. You've gotten us further than that.:

You felt Mir attempt a vague protest, one quickly rejected by the support of his peers. One part of your mind stayed there, attentive to your Heartcircle's needs. The rest looked down at the world through visual link and also the more detailed survey data you'd started to receive. You quickly highlighted the area that Mir's Practice had been reaching for.

"Focus initial survey on this area," you ordered. "Mir narrowed it down for us again, something that his Focus could latch onto for a moment. That's all we can do from up here though. Anything more's going to take actually going down there to look."

You looked around the bridge, feeling the steady tension, the concern, and the steady resolution beneath it all. That would be good enough.

"Let's get to it."

Welcome to your first turn at the Origin. Each of these will take place across an unspecified number of days, typically less than a week, allowing you (as Amanda) to take or order the undertaking of action. Not all of these options will directly involve the Origin system.

You have Six (6) AP and One (1) Research (Mary) AP to assign, each representing a dice of effort. Unless otherwise specified, there is no limit to the number of AP you can assign to a given task. Some actions may require specific talents or characters to complete - this will be noted in the action text.

You may not select multiple actions that require the same character in the same turn.

Exploration - Direct exploration of the Origin system, based on The Adamant's location in-system. The Adamant is currently in orbit of the fifteenth moon of Origin Four, the system's singular gas giant.
[] Blazing a Trail - Locate and establish a Trailblazer-package outpost inside the current area of interest (an area roughly the size of a mid-sized ocean) on Origin Four-Fifteen. This will give you a safe location on the moon to shelter, store material or data, or even leave a research team behind when the Adamant moves on to investigate the Consolat homeworld.
[] Insight's Ways - Now that you're present above Four-Fifteen, Elil can try to find his way to the place that he felt on the planet. He doesn't know exactly where it is, but he's more than willing to try and isolate it. [Requires Elil]
[] Path of Peace - Investigate the point of interest Elil said was present on the moon using the connection that Mir almost formed with the place. If he did it once, accidentally, it should be possible to do it again. [Requires Mir]
[] To Harmonize - Mir and Elil work well together, but bringing their Focuses together isn't easy. You or Vega could help them bridge that gap. It comes with the risks of any combination of Practice, but those combinations usually have significant rewards. [Requires Mir, Elil and a Harmonial]
[] Write-in?

Investigation - At-a-distance exploration of the Origin system. Generally not location dependent.
[] Matrix Webs - The system's datasphere appears to be nominally accessible, but any exploration of the systems is judged to have two requirements. First, that Iris is involved at some level. And second, that any exploration is done with extreme care. [Requires Iris]
[] Lethal Ghosts - Active scans on entering the inner system detected sensor ghosts and isolated mass anomalies scattered across the system. At present, your best guess is that this is some sort of ancient Consolat system. You may want to figure out just what that system involves.
[] Fellow Guests - The Shiplord science vessel in orbit of the Origin is clearly here for a reason. It's unlikely that you'll be able to discover it from a distance, but looking at where its investigations are focused could be useful by itself. Making an effort to work out the capabilities of the ship would also make Jane more comfortable.
[] Echoes (Practical) - The Consolat Origin is soaked in the echoes of a massive event of reality manipulation, executed through something very like Practice. Mary can approach this from the perspective of a scientist, but it isn't the only option available to you. [Must have free Potentials. You may select specific ones from those available taking into account other selected options, or leave it to me. I will not screw you on this.]
[] Write in?


Research - Theoretical examination of not just factors present here in the Origin, but far beyond. Your Research AP must be assigned to one of these tasks, but additional AP may also be used.
[] Underpinned - With a solid proof now in hand of who created the Secrets, Mary wants to continue her work on understanding how the Consolat actually did it. This could well prove crucial in the weeks to come.
[] Echoes (Theoretical) - As the practical version of this option, but starting from a theoretical baseline. This will have slower progress, but will also have no possibility of triggering a Miracle that could potentially break your cover.
[] VIsions in the Jump - You saw a glimpse of the place where you met Tahkel when jumping to the Fourth Sorrow, and it had two figures there, one of them who looked human. Try to work out how that happened, and how to reach back to that place without requiring another jump. [Requires Amanda]
[] Practised Restraint - Vega was able to find a way to an understanding of Practiced Miracles that allowed her to trigger them with a level of regularity that was a little intimidating. She's offered to try and see if she can reverse the process. Not something you ever thought you'd need before now, but it should be possible. [Requires Vega]
[] Write in?

You may also pick Two (2) Personal Actions. These will have limited mechanical effect on their own, but can synergise with AP actions.
[] Talk with Kalilah about recent revelations, to help steady her soul.
[] Spend some time with your family. This will be a balm to you all.
[] Sharing a meal with the Adamant's command staff would let you listen to their concerns, and maybe learn from them too.
[] Relax and train with your Heartcircle. Keeping your edge in combat sharp is more important now than it ever was. And it's good to share time together.
[] Write in?

As you can see, we're swapping mechanics. I hope that'll work for folks, especially as it's going to mandate a shift to plan voting to let me cover more at once. On reflection, not doing this on the other Sorrows is probably a big part of why so much of it dragged. I wish I'd realised that sooner.

If you have any ideas for write-ins, ping me before voting for them.

Plan voting, please.