Halo Above Gehenna: A hard sci-fi space opera

[VagueZ]

You sip a little bad, lukewarm coffee from a bulb as you watch Lily Station grow on the display in front of you. It is, after all, one of the last times anyone is going to be able to see the station before its imminent destruction.

Lily Station is a classic design. There's scores of very similar structures all around the Halo. It's a rock a hundred or so meters across from most angles, with a pair of rotating hab rings sticking off one side, each of them with a diameter of a few hundred meters and a sedate spin rate. Most people spend most of their time on the rings, to be sure, but certain things make more sense in zero-gee, including the docking equipment.

It looks relatively unprepossessing from the outside, but if the Eternal Immortal has declared it to be involved in forbidden research and due to be punished by Nightfall, then it must be more dangerous than it appears.

At this magnification, and with your angle of approach, you can see Gehenna behind Lily Station, large and clear. It's as ugly a place as ever: a hideous mottled mess of grey, brown, blue, and white all mixed together with chaotic abandon and absolutely no planning. Most of it is in direct sunlight, too, which certainly doesn't help. The only saving grace is that this magnification is too low to see the threads that grow through the Halo and terminate on Gehenna's surface. It's terrible to think of such a thing at the center of the Halo's civilization.

Finally overcome, you waggle your fingertips gently, and the display obligingly reverses, showing your liner approaching from a camera on Lily Station's surface. The first thing you look for is the silvery glow of Bright Heaven, but it's not in the default view and this time of the month would be a very poor one for viewing it, anyway. You turn attention back to the liner. It's an old design, but a sturdy one, which is why it's been plying these same sorts of routes for longer than you've been alive. You see the engines flare on the display about the same time that you feel the very slight deceleration starting to take hold of yourself.

Kids that had been quite literally bouncing off the walls reluctantly have to give in to the directions of their parents and the harried liner workers. Without asking, one of them comes up and gestures at the display you'd been using, tuning it to some insipid children's program, all bright colors and flash.

You let yourself watch it as the liner docks, telling yourself you're not enjoying it.

The so-called 'main lounge' (basically just the majority of the liner's available space turned into seats for a hundred or so passengers and a few little money-making ventures on the side like food and trinkets) starts to empty even before the access tubes are attached. It's easy enough to tell who's who just by watching how they move in the lack of gravity now that the engines are off. Some are here for business, and they move with practiced, simple actions, minimizing the energy they're spending. Some are the idle rich: not Immortals or other super-rich, but rich enough to not have to worry about much in their lives. They move with confident familiarity, but without the sense of purpose that those here for business bring. The last ones are those here for novelty: a vacation, a move, or something else where they just weren't used to moving across the Halo like this. They have all the kids.

None of them know that Nightfall is coming, of course. No one does save the Eternal Immortal, the five Immortal Heirs, and, thanks to your Master, you. It hasn't been officially announced, yet, so everything is done with cheerful good nature and with an eye to the future.

You leave your coffee bulb, still half-filled, on the tiny little platform that counted as your 'desk' at your seat. The ship will want to reuse it. Possibly including the coffee. You join the mass of people as they stream through the access tubes into the rocky, zero-gee section of Lily Station, working their way through the customs station here, carefully putting yourself near, but not at, the tail end, after a family carrying a baby that is rather exhaustingly crying to no end about space travel. You have a perfectly good identity, of course. It's completely legitimate, even if the information is fake, but habits about such things are hard to break. Besides, it's good practice.

Eventually, it's your turn to go through the guard post, where a harried-looking armed security guard and an even more frazzled officer greet you. You pull up your passport and immunization records on your phone, letting their reader scan it.

You like this identity. Your Master did well in getting you it, as it completely conceals who you actually are while hinting a lot at what you can do, just in case you need an even more bulletproof cover than is probably called for on this mission.

What is that identity?
[] Fake name (write in)
- [] ...a low-gravity ballet dancer just fresh off a mildly successful tour on Eden, one of the Halo's more famously serene nature spots.
- [] ...a physical security specialist from an enclave in Gehenna, on leave after protecting the enclave from a sabotage attempt.
- [] ...a computer programmer from a team working on a promising new cryptographic code that your team leader will be trying to sell soon.
- [] ...a reactor tech from the high shipyards, stopping over briefly before catching a connecting flight onward to one of the universities in a lower orbit.

Your identity isn't even worth a second glance, of course, not after dealing with the headache in front of you and the last few people between the officer and the chance for a break once she finishes.

The people ahead of you are starting to diffuse. Some of them are pulling themselves along guide ropes, while others are wearing a back-mounted thruster like you, which is gradually putting distance between people even without them heading to different destinations. Some of them have already made it into the hab rings, some are on their way there, and others are spreading into hollowed-out sections of the rock, as there is a zero-gee hotel here among a few other attractions. Not every station has this sort of mixed environment.

You, however, decide you would prefer gravity today, so you don't head that direction.

You pull up a map and sundry similar resources as you let your thruster puff you towards the hab rings.

There's only two levels to the rings on this station, one at Gehenna strength and another at about half that, so still too much compared to the lovely lightness of Bright Heaven. Luckily, there is a hotel of sorts on that level. That becomes your destination. After all, you're here just temporarily before moving on, according to your documentation. This sort of whimsical, last-minute pick is part of your cover.

You know your time limit, though: at noon on the day after tomorrow, Nightfall will strike. At that time, everyone left on Lily Station will die, because nothing can survive Nightfall. The typical pattern is that the Eternal Immortal will announce it properly an hour or so before the strike. It's a concession to allow the innocent a chance to get free, but in the end at least some of them were guilty by association for not revealing the direct villains, so it is truly just the Eternal Immortal's mercy that they get even that much time.

You, of course, have a few things to do before Nightfall. Your Master sent you here with an open-ended mission: to recover anything your Master might find valuable before the station is destroyed. By the time you've reached your chosen hotel, several opportunities have occurred to you.

You're so wrapped up in your solitary browsing that you almost don't notice when you reach your destination. Not until a chipper voice pipes up with "Hi! I just got your reservation. You're here for the hotel?" You look up to find a young woman in a pastel outfit of constantly shifting (if at least muted, thankfully) colors. She's behind a little bar, but she deftly hops to the bar surface, then steps on a barstool as a stepping stone to the floor. "I'm the proprietor. You can call me Leona." The cramped little establishment is clearly not just a hotel, you discover. She serves variously-flavored mushroom risottos over the counter, and that seems to be her primary source of income. The 'hotel' is a series of four flimsy bunks set in a small room just off the restaurant, equipped with just the bare minimum facilities to qualify as acceptable.

Leona, of course, is unwilling to leave you alone, so you end up in one of the seats in the bar before you know it, eating a curry-flavored risotto as she beams from behind short blonde curls and absolutely smothers you with questions. She gets your fake name and backstory out of you, questions why you're here, and otherwise behaves like the long-time friend she definitely isn't. Even eating isn't a help, because she just talks to you instead of letting you eat.

Finally, though, some evening regulars come in, and four other people that she already knows turns out to be enough of a lure to pry her away from you. A dizzying series of names commences, as all of them have a dozen or more mutual contacts with each other and a desire to catch everyone else up on each person's day. Someone saying he's close to figuring out a more optimized layout for the aeroponics gets a wide laughter and some good-natured ribbing on the order of "that's what you've been saying for two months!" as he tries to defend himself. Someone else shares the latest relationship drama, as it seems at least two couples and one trio had some dramatic moments today.

As all that goes on, you turn back to your phone and keep up your research, now that you're on the local net and can actually get information more easily. You're careful to limit your searches to things that won't trip any alarms, but before you can finish picking out your targets, Leona notices what you're looking at, as it turns out she is very good at reading upside down quickly.

"Oh!" She says in a high-pitched tone, and suddenly you're the center of attention: the out-of-towner looking at some of the local highlights. Amid the general overly friendly atmosphere, Leona definitely manages to offer to show you around tomorrow morning.

Unfortunately, you seem to have made a friend.

The upside is that this may be the best chance you have to do a little reconnaissance before things start happening very quickly.

What was it you were looking at?
[] An art collection full of ancient paintings, far more ancient than any history you know
[] An observatory processing room, full of data from a variety of telescopes
[] A zoo and genetic database for some of the creatures from wild and jungle habs.

~ ~​

Author Note
It's the far future. You are an agent serving as an agent for a mysterious Master. The world is intentionally not completely laid out for you; if you make a few logical jumps you can probably determine many things before they get properly revealed, because the setting is... well, it's reasonably hard science fiction, slightly on the darker side. Exactly what is going on I'm sure you'll get as we go along.

This is a completely narrative quest; there's no explicit mechanics, just trade-offs as far as what you're going to see. Expect a certain level of intrigue and some action within a largely realistic framework... which doesn't mean you won't get a chance to be a badass or a hero within that, just that this is going to stay firmly within the realm of things that I can feel comfortable justifying.

Most of the time, you're going to see simply plurality-takes-all votes, and if there's multiple votes in the same update (like this), they will be unlinked and counted separately unless otherwise noted.

Anything that I missed or if you have any questions, let me know and I'll see what I can do. There will be no reserved posts.

 

[VagueZ]

[X] Blaise Hardline
- - [X] ...a reactor tech from the high shipyards, stopping over briefly before catching a connecting flight onward to one of the universities in a lower orbit.
[x] An observatory processing room, full of data from a variety of telescopes


You rise early. It's not a particularly long sleep, but you have a certain time limit on your actions here. You can always blame it on clock cycle discrepancies, too. You are the only one in the hotel, so it's relatively simple to perform your morning ablutions and go in search of food. As is common with a lot of these sorts of small businesses, Leona sleeps in the store; it's her home as much as her workplace. You hear thunderous snoring from behind the counter, and don't wake her immediately.

You go out into the main corridor, instead, and find some potato-based breakfast out of a vending machine. It's actually a reasonable quality; it's even appropriately hot. A pleasant, if surprising, find. You walk the corridors in a good imitation of someone just stretching his legs as you commit to memory hiding places, escape routes, and automatic airlocks.

In the corridor, as is fairly typical, there's lots of greenery and enough insect life to support it. Even at this early an hour, there's a few people up to look through them, ensuring things are going as they should for the closed ecological loops. The workers here are shabbily-dressed young people. You put them out of your mind. You finish off your breakfast by eating the bowl. The crispy bread (rice-based, you think) is not the tastiest part of the meal, but it is still a bedrock part of Halo culture: don't waste things.

You meander back towards Leona's establishment, already starting to feel a little time pressure and hoping she'll be up. Luckily, she is. The disheveled woman is going about her morning routine with the blank-eyed, zombie-like motions of someone who isn't a morning person. She's eating whatever was leftover from yesterday's work as a cold breakfast as she putters around behind her bar. "Sorry, clo--oh, Blaise!" She forces herself to perk up a bit. "I didn't hear you go out."

"I didn't want to wake you." This is something of a lie. You doubted that waking her up would actually get her out the door any faster than doing it herself, and you walk quietly by instinct.

"Thank you," she says, filling a collapsible cup with water and gulping it down to finish off her own breakfast. "Let me just get changed and I can see if my friend Ji-ho at the observatory is up."

You give her a smile. "Of course. I do have a day or so before my connecting flight comes in." Showing you around is a chance for her to liven up her life a bit, dealing with a semi-exotic off-stationer, and maybe get some money from you. There's always the remote possibility that she's genuinely trying to be friendly because she's a friendly person, of course.

* * *​

Leona takes you a good quarter of the way along the habitation ring, then you take an elevator down to the full-Gehenna gravity ring. She chatters with you the whole time, intermixing very thoroughly pointless local gossip with questions about your own life. You try to minimize how much you share, just to avoid any possibility of accidental contradictions, but that still entails spinning a few stories about working as a reactor tech. The high shipyards are where captured asteroids are first brought, and you adapt a report your Master shared with you about one of the more dramatic capture burns where the asteroid nearly was lost.

The punchline, of course, was that the asteroid was relatively useless: a loose collection of low-value rocks without a solid core or any economically useful ores. It had quickly been sold at auction for a pittance and shifted to an orbit much lower in the Halo. "Last I heard," you explain to Leona, "It was bought out by a Neo-Prim consortium and they were still trying to figure out anything to do with it."

"And you didn't follow up?" Leona studies you intently.

You shrug. "It wasn't my job," you say, completely truthfully for once.

"But surely you were curious?"

"I had other work." Leona looks at you expectantly. You dredge up the next reasonable thing: your Master had ordered a personal armed spaceship be constructed. "One of the Immortals from Bright Heaven wanted a fast yacht, something that could get out to Rustball in only a couple of weeks when the conjunction is right." Rustball, of course, is the outer settled world of humanity. It's a mixed place, with pleasant gravity only a little more than twice that of Bright Heaven, but on the other hand it's also much further out, so it's harder to take in light from your sun or grow crops there.

"Yeah, those sorts of trips are very useful to people like Ji-ho," Leona says. "The more camera data and similar he gets, the more he can find more resources."

"That makes sense," you say with a nod, framing it as some new revelation, instead of the whole reason you were looking there to begin with. "More angles like that, more ability to find valuable asteroids."

"Exactly!" Leona grins at you. She probably doesn't fully understand the economics of it. Few people truly do. There's no shortage of available rocks with any sort of useful materials out beyond Rustball, but moving them to the Halo, where they can be useful, is a deeply expensive maneuver that involves two quite powerful burns and years of waiting. The better option is to find something that can be nudged into a useful capture with a minimal expense, preferably also quickly. Hence the constant peering around for such data.

"I've always just liked the look of it, though," you say, musingly. "A chance to stare into deep space... the bustle of the Halo doesn't really allow us to properly consider the rest of the cosmos."

"Oh, you definitely will like Ji-ho, then," Leona says with a smile that says she has a good surprise in store for you.

* * *​

Ji-ho turns out to be a dark-haired man with a nervous energy about him, always twitching even when sitting still. Leona introduces you to him and he practically falls all over himself to make you feel at home. He's delighted to have a visitor: his type of work is usually just not very interesting to people unless he has a new discovery to sell to them.

The observatory processing office is just a tiny little room that's definitely going to get too hot with three people crammed into it. Ji-ho sits in the lone chair. He offered it to you, but you told him you prefer to stand. Leona is perched on the one corner of the desk that doesn't have computer displays blocking it off, and you're leaning against the wall in the only remaining space that still lets the door open. Ji-ho shows you a lot of pictures of deep space. You act appropriately impressed. Some of them are just starfields, but he has some nebulae and similar dramatic things to reveal, as well.

He chats a bit about his actual work, too, where he purchases as much data as he can from all sorts of sources and then plugs it into computer programs of his own design, looking for moving objects or unexpected parallax that can reveal something worthwhile. This part is rather dull, but you keep up the facade of interest until he finally feels comfortable enough to drop the bombshell.

Ji-ho has to pause for a moment to let a nearby pipe thump away. That's the station's balancing system in action, pumping fluid around to keep the hab ring from wobbling. As it fades away, Ji-ho leans forward. "Do you know what I found, though?"

"What?" You obligingly get off the wall, not out of genuine interest, but just to play along. You've already scoped out the office well enough and looked over his shoulder enough to see enough of his access codes. You can steal the data here later, get off Lily Station, and your Master will have a head start in claiming some new asteroids to grow new financial markets.

"I found some unexpected success in parallax studies," he says. "Look at these." He brings up a display and starts bouncing between two similar-looking shots. But... they're not quite identical. "These were taken on the same date, one by a public-access scope on Bright Heaven, and the lower-quality one from an automated prospecting craft out beyond Rustball on its way to the giant planets. See that?"

He stabs one greasy finger at the offending stars. "That's stellar parallax, that is! At this much magnification, I can prove that the stars are not a uniform distance from us!"

You can't hide your stare here. Parallax from stars? It can't be. That's not how the universe is laid out. The Immortals have been very clear about it: Gehenna and other planets orbit the Sun, and the Halo and Bright Heaven orbit around Gehenna. Beyond the realm of your Sun's influence, the rest of the universe is a distant illusion. Once you can speak again, you clear your throat and ask, "so how big is it, and how far?"

Ji-ho shrugs. "I'm still working on that. But it's truly distant indeed: no spacecraft created could travel there in even a hundred years, I'm sure, and it's certainly possible that some stars may be some measurable fraction of the Sun's size, given how bright they can be."

"H-have you told anyone about this?" You kick yourself for letting a quaver into your voice.

Ji-ho shrugs, not very concerned. "Beyond you two and my boyfriend? I have some counterparts on other stations, and I had hinted I had some new discoveries to announce. Didn't tell them any details. My boyfriend and I had a conversation about it today, though. He just left Lily Station yesterday as part of his work."

Leona kicks her legs, which are still hanging off Ji-ho's desk. She narrowly misses your nose, and you don't even notice. "I'm sure he was telling you to try to sell it, though," she teases Ji-ho. "Although I don't know who would even care to buy that sort of information!"

The astronomer leans back, a typically jerky motion that he's trying to make look casual. "He did. In fact, when he called this morning, he gave me a list of possibilities. I don't think they're good ones, but... it's worth trying."

You open your mouth to say something else, when suddenly every screen in the room, including the phones in all of your pockets, suddenly click on. You can see it through the fabric of your pants, on Ji-ho's screens, on an info screen in the hallway. It's not just in here. You're sure it's happening to every screen, everywhere in Lily Station. But no... no! You were told you had until noon tomorrow! You should have a solid thirty hours remaining! Your Master wasn't able to give you even that much cover?

The stern, youthful face of the Eternal Immortal is on each and every screen. The Eternal Immortal could pass for a twenty-year-old if you didn't look in the eyes, but when speaking there is an infinitely assured deliberation that no non-Immortal could match. "Attention, inhabitants of Lily Station. You have harbored research into the forbidden. The judgment of the Eternal Immortal is the same as it is for any who delve into such realms: the infection must be sterilized before it can spread. Nightfall will come. The innocent may leave, should they be able to get free within one hour. However, any who harbor any of the following, whether on Lily Station or beyond, shall forever be judged as harboring the guilty."

The Eternal Immortal reads off a list of names. Anyone on that list will find any escape pod, any ship, anything larger than a personal survival suit blocked by those too desperate to touch them and risk their own lives. The last name on the list is somehow no surprise, with how the day is going: "Ji-ho Park." The Eternal Immortal concludes by saying, "It is my hope that the innocent will live, and that those foolish enough to coddle those who research dangerous things will not." There is no signoff. The screens simply revert back to what they were doing.

Ji-ho and Leona stare at each other for a long, frozen moment, just like the rest of the station. In a moment, once people finish processing this death sentence, Lily Station will explode into pandemonium.

You, however, are not so ill-prepared to deal with this.

[] You are here for a reason. Disable both of them, grab the research, take that back to your Master.
[] This will be easier with some cooperation. Convince Ji-ho to give up the research to Leona, then help her get clear.
[] Surely the Eternal Immortal wouldn't begrudge your Master some knowledge. Help escape with both of them.