4.1
+++
"We have experienced significant temporal dilation." MUM reports, not too long after we arrive.
"Yeah?" Lucy asks, scrolling through reports sent back by the Stone Ship attendant fleet.
"I have analyzed all visible stars within range. Cross-referencing with pre-existing star maps shows a significant drift. We were inside of the Warp Storm for approximately five thousand years."
Lucy paused. "What."
"As far as I can tell, the current year is approximately in the late stages of the thirtieth millennium, somewhere between the sixth and ninth century."
Mmm. That was... certainly something.
"We lost five thousand years?" Lucy asked, before sighing and shaking her head. "No- doesn't matter. The Empyrean does as the Empyrean does. We're out, and that's that."
Fucking Warp.
"Got any good news for me?" She asked.
"Empyreal sensor arrays indicate that the galaxy has calmed down significantly since the beginning of the Strife." MUM offers. "The number and severity of Warp Storms have depleted significantly compared to what records indicate. However, the core of Aeldari Empire territories appears to have been consumed by a particularly large Warp Storm, spanning over twenty thousand light years."
She blinked. "Huh." She leaned back. "So much for their vaunted superiority, I guess."
"A shame." Singleton said, his voice making it perfectly clear that he didn't think it was a shame at all.
"What about Earth?" Lucy asked.
Over there, judging by that bright ass light shining through the Warp.
"The Sol system is located three thousand and two light years away." MUM reports. "It is free of Warp Storms. Additionally, a Warp Beacon of considerable power has been activated. No further information is available."
"Somebody is there." She smiled. "How quickly could we get there, if we just went straight to it?"
"Boundary Drives would require approximately twenty five years of continuous travel in order to reach Sol. Grav-Tether FTL would require fourteen years. Wormhole travel, circumstances permitting, could require anywhere up to a week."
Probably a lot less than a week. Barring Warp Storms or other similar reality-rending contrivances, there wasn't much that could stop me. Powerful gravitational disturbances could slow me, but not much else.
I was fairly certain it wasn't a good idea, though. Just going straight to Terra, more or less directly into Big E. Not right now.
So I poke Lucy's mind, to get her attention. An idea floats across, and she nods.
She flicks her hands, bring the star map up again. "MUM, cross reference all stars with previous records. Can you identify former and likely colonies?"
MUM's avatar pulsed.
A moment later, several stars were highlighted, in four different colours. Blue, green, yellow, and red.
"Matches to former colonies are marked in blue." MUM stated. "Likely candidates for colonies are marked in green. Yellow indicates resource-rich systems that lack suitable worlds for terraformation, but are potential harvesting zones. Red highlights mark stars that were confirmed to have been swallowed by a Warp Storm at one point, or are marked as containment zones for uncooperative alien species. Given that the Federation no longer appears to exist as a polity, containment has likely been broken."
There was a startling large amount of reds. Blues, too. Greens were the rarest, even yellows vastly more common.
Mostly because Humanity hadn't spared any zone to expand into. Most of that which could have been green was instead blue.
Lucy blew out a breath, looking at them all. "Alright."
She went quiet, for a bit, looking at them all. Then, she sighed. "Call a council. It's time to discuss stage four."
+++
When you get down to it, we did not have a particularly large amount of people available to us. Oh, sure, ten billion people sounds like a lot, but split across forty six main ships and their attendant fleets, it really wasn't.
Not when you compared it to a galaxy of two hundred and fifty billion stars.
Project Moth was ambitious, like that. Sure, Humanity hadn't spread through the entire galaxy, and sure, even with advanced terraforming technologies, not every star held a viable colony, and sure, most colonies probably don't exist anymore thanks to the Men of Iron, Warp Incursions, Alien Assault, or the like, but...
That was still a lot.
Let's be pessimistic.
The Federation had laid claim to something like sixty percent of the galaxy. Let's go down to forty, just to narrow it down to space that was unconditionally theirs, no 'if's, 'and's, 'or's, or 'but's about it. Let's say that, of all that vast space, only about two percent of it has long term colonies that don't need constant maintenance to stay active. We'll simplify, and state that it's just one, per potential site. Let's further say that, between the Men of Iron, the Warp Storms, and Alien invasions, only zero point one percent of those survived.
Where does that leave us?
With about three million surviving colonies.
And that's the pessimistic estimate. In reality, the space claimed was bigger, the number of stars that held colonies that didn't need maintenance was closer to fourteen percent, and the number of colonies per star averaged at two point six.
The number of survivors was harder to guess. But again, let's keep that pessimistic one in a thousand guess.
The number of survivors has just jumped to fifty four million and six hundred thousand colonies.
It would take far, far, far too much time to go check up on all that with only a single fleet. Checking ten stars every day would take nearly eight hundred years.
And that's just checking the stars to see if we can find anything. If we did find things? Then even more time would have to be spent dealing with whatever it was. It could take anywhere from days to years depending on the issue.
And the worse part of it?
We still have it better than literally almost everyone in the galaxy when it comes to travel time. My wormholes were amazing for that. Reliable, effectively instantaneous, interstellar transportation whose only limit was energy availability?
Nobody had that. The Webway and Necron Pharos Devices were reliable and very quick, but both were limited to entrances and exits, not free-range like me. Warp Drives were free-range with limits mostly on safety of entrance and exit points, but it was the Warp and it obviously wasn't stable. Inertialess Drives and Narvhals were stable, but neither were instantaneous.
What did all of this mean?
Well, a few things. First, that we had an advantage that should be exploited as ruthlessly as possible. Second, that one big fleet was not an efficient usage of our manpower. And third, since we had now taken a look around, found no immediate problems, had a full stock of energy and matter, and had our options in front of us, that it was time to get moving.
Thus, Stage Four.