Dirge Singer class Heavenly Container of Life

i34_2015 Lament for Lost Worlds

Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory

Hyperspace

June 2220

The gateway between Msiper and Atatop yawned open into sucking darkness and Jean Paoloni and her contingent of Aunjin ventured out into the human habitat. After once more being trapped in her suit while crossing the snowy wastes of Atatop, Jean relished being able to strip off her helmet and the upper half of her environmental suit and enjoy the feeling of the fresh Earthlike air. She splashed water from the pond on her face and looked out over the forest and lake filled realms.

“The song glades of Jean are a lush and welcoming land,” Msipek said beside her as the other Aunjin fanned out and began to explore the area around the gate.

“A lush and welcoming cage for the prince of Met’lan,” she replied. Msipek hooted an acknowledgment and wandered past her into the woods.

The last of their trope slipped through as the gate began closing again. The Jvanti in their group finished removing their own environmental suits and trilled translated laughter as they took to the clear skies, soaring in widening circles above them.

After being tossed out by the Kianwentoa, Jean had led the Aunjin band, along with a few Jvanti who came along for the trip, back to Msiper. The environment was much as she’d left it. Same plants, same trees, it could be considered a private paradise by some, but Jean still saw it as a prison. A zoo where the Kianwentoa could watch and lord over the species they’d ‘saved’ from the extinction they themselves were causing. It was insulting.

Jean began strolling down the rocky scree to the forest below, stuffing her hands in her pockets as Jbara, second in command of the tribe of Aunjin, came up beside her.

“Msiper is a most welcoming land,” ey said, “A reminder of the lost days of old.”

Jean had learned from Msipek that in the early days of their industrialization, the Aunjin had triggered a climactic feedback cycle which threw most of their planet deep into an ice age. The Aunjin were adapted to cold climates and were able to survive in the somewhat marginal conditions, but it deeply hampered their further development. When the Kiwawentoa arrived and stole them away from their home, it was the frozen wastes of their ice covered world which they replicated, not the lush and welcoming planet it had once been.

“The Aunjin would be welcome within the walls of Msiper,” Jean replied. “The lands of Atatop serve not the Aunjin, but the Ones Who Came Before.”

“Such is true of all the lands of the Gods,” Jbara said in response.

“Jbara speaks the words of Qetlal,” she said, “No kingdom save for the kingdom of the Night Gods will flourish in the cage of Met’lan.”

“Jean is as Renyo for the fall of the Kaba-human,” ey said.

“Jean is as Taybor and Yanerhi for the fall of Met’lan,” she practically shouted, she wasn’t sad, she was angry, she was tired of this cage, tired of these games. Wait ten thousand years and maybe we’ll let you out? It was insulting. The whole thing was insulting, and she wasn’t about to let the insult to her species pass without challenge. Slowly, Jean had been formulating an ambitious, perhaps reckless, plan to escape the confines of the habitat. The knowledge that breaking through the walls would depressurize the environment was just a complication, and she was sure there would be more once the Kiwawentoa realized that hadn’t actually stopped their escape attempt.

“What would Jean ask of the Aunjin?” Jbara asked her.

“Bring the people of Atatop and the fruit of the Sojoba to the lands of Msiper. Preparations will be made in the lands of Atatop and Hrururen, and all the kingdoms of the cage of the Night Gods will unite to shatter their prison and journey to the song glades of the night gods beyond.”

“Jbara will bring Jean’s request to Hrathar along with Jbara’s tales of the lands of Msiper,” ey said before continuing along in eir exploration.

Jean leaned against a tree and allowed herself to smile as the thought of sticking it to those smug squids began to come together.

Seven Heavens Class Orbital Ring Station

MOEC-6 Summerland Orbital

Synchronous Orbit

17,228 Kilometers from Mars

June 2220

Ivy Czininski slapped her keycard onto the door to the home she had been away from for over a year and a half and was immediately assaulted by the smell of something delicious being fried.

“Amelia!” she called out from the hallway as she set down her bags and a short somewhat rounded woman darted out of the kitchen to embrace her, lifting Ivy off her feet and spinning her around happily.

“Ivy! You didn’t tell me you were back in Sol!” Amelia Pavonis squealed, hugging her wife.

“Yeah well,” she smiled, “I wanted it to be a surprise, with the circumstances I thought you could use some pleasant surprises, given you’re probably going to be getting some unpleasant ones soon.”

“You found them, didn’t you?” Amelia asked, her voice turning serious, “The Reshapers?”

“In HD179949, only Eighty eight light years from Sol,” she replied.

“That’s way too close for comfort,” Amelia said.

“You’re telling me,” Ivy said, “Has THEMIS been putting you to work?”

“Yeah,” she answered, “They’ve got us running simulations of the attack on Sol to try and formulate a counter strategy, but there’s really just too many unknowns to work out a good plan, plus, the knowns we do have are…”

“Horrifying?” Ivy finished for her.

“Yeah,” Amelia nodded, walking back into the kitchen before her stir fry started burning. She quickly added more ingredients to the pan to double the recipe so she could feed Ivy too, “So you just fly over here from Acidalia?”

“Yep, took a few days from our arrival to sort through all the meetings,” she said, “O’Neil does a good job trying to keep things brief, but you know how Pragmatists and Scientists love to talk.”

“Too much,” Amelia said with a chuckle, stirring in some sort of spicy smelling sauce to the mixture she had going, she knew Ivy liked her food fairly hot.

“How’s Max?” Ivy asked her.

“Still not talking to me,” she replied, “Maybe you’d have better luck with him.”

“I doubt that,” Ivy said, “You’ve always been closer to him than I have.”

“Yeah but you’ve been away, it’s worth a shot anyway,” she said.

Ivy nodded and sunk into a kitchen chair, letting the stress from the last year and a half crush her for a few moments. The severe, well-regarded ship’s captain vanished into her relatively small frame as she let her shoulders slump and stared blankly at the floor.

“Why don’t you go change out of that uniform and take a nap, “I’ll wake you when the food’s ready,” Amelia offered, “I have a digital meeting I’ve got to attend in a bit anyway.”

“Sure,” Ivy said, pushing off her knees to climb to her feet and kissing Amelia on the cheek. She didn’t bother to change out of her uniform, she just collapsed into the bed still fully dressed and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

Amelia winked one eye to activate only one of her implants and Weaver, Rank 12 Datamancer, appeared in simspace scenario C17.

The amphitheater on the surface of Mars was nearly full today, all the high ranking Architects along with a large portion of the high ranking members of other organizations were present: Survey, Navy, Recon, Marines, InOps and Stratnet, The Martian Intelligence Service, Orbital Engineering, the Pragmatist and Scientist’s Guilds, and the Council of Consciences, it was a full house with THEMIS presiding.

Weaver rendered herself into the space using her generic avatar next to the already present Jacob Chryse. Jacob nodded in greeting and then returned his attention to the avatar for THEMIS stationed in the center of the virtual colosseum.

“We are here today,” THEMIS began with, “To discuss the defense of Sol against the Reshaper threat. As you already know, plans are underway to evacuate Mars along with as many other people as can be managed but our timeframe is impossibly short for the number of humans in Sol, there will be mass death on a scale unlike any seen in human history unless we can slow down the Reshaper advance. The Pragmatist’s Guild will report on the state of the Reshaper advance and facts recently discovered about their ships and their technology.”

THEMIS ceded the floor to rank 11 Pragmatist Vedika Srivastava. Callouts identified her as a member of the Improvisariat attached to Survey.

“Survey has just completed a mission to discover the Reshaper advance.” She said, “Survey vessels were sent coreward in search of activity and signs of the Reshaper presence. Six months ago, The MSCV Empiricist discovered a Reshaper vessel in hyperspace in the process of harvesting the system of HD179949, eighty eight light years from Sol. In the time since then, the MSCV Oppenheimer’s Lament recently returned from having detected Reshapers in Lambda Sagittarii seventy eight light years away in late January and a probe left in HD189245, sixty nine light years away, detected Reshapers arriving in February. This allowed us to estimate a rough speed of advance. At current rates, it is expected that the Reshapers will arrive in Sol before the end of the year.”

That proclamation brought hushed chatter to the amphitheater, but Vedika continued onward with her speech, “These expeditions also brought back information on the scale of the Reshaper’s hyperspace vessels.” She gestured upward and a holographic image of a flat disk appeared over her, “In hyperspace, the Reshaper ships resemble a disk, and have a diameter of roughly ten AUs, with a thickness that varies but is on average around three hundred thousand kilometers. The sheer size of these vessels makes it unlikely any conventional weapons we could bring to bear, up to and including our most powerful relativistic kinetic kill vehicles, will be able to have much of an effect.”

“Thank you Pragmatist Srivastava,” THEMIS said, dismissing her to her seat. “To reiterate, it is not believed our conventional technology will be able to slow down the Reshaper advance. To this end, you have all been authorized for the revelation of a secret technology. Knowledge of this technology is strictly classified under the Great Filter Technology Act of 2201, please acknowledge and accept this restriction before we proceed further.”

Weaver tapped the accept button with a virtual hand while continuing to stir her food, the disconnect would have been rather jarring were it not for her experience in just this sort of thing. A few members of the meeting vanished as they declined to the security measures and THEMIS automatically removed them from the space. After a few moments THEMIS continued speaking.

“The Scientist’s Guild will now present the discovery of what they are terming a warpstorm,” THEMIS said, ceding the floor to Justin Kaliathrope. Callouts identified him as a rank 16 Scientist, the head of the Scientist’s Guild, and a high ranking member of the secretive Martian Defense Research Projects Agency.

“Eight months ago,” He began, “The Magellan research outpost in Ross 154 was destroyed during an out of control experiment. That much is public knowledge, what has not been revealed is the fate of this station or the method of its destruction. Today, we will reveal what we know of this event.”

A holoscreen spawned in above him, displaying an image of the planetoid from space. There was a flash of light and strange fractal arms began spreading outwards in all directions, the space beyond turned red, and immense energy discharges flashed through the utterly alien mass.

“There is a realm beyond our spacetime, in a direction inverse from that of hyperspace, which we are nominally calling warpspace. Our vessels actually skim through warp space when performing a warp drive kick. However, when a team on Magellan attempted to open a portal derived from the Kiwawentota designs into warpspace, this was the result. A complete destruction of the Magellan station and the creation of a warpstorm event nearly three AUs in diameter. These warpstorm events propagate faster than light in regular spacetime and expand at relativistic hyperspace velocities. Deep space experiments with micro-portals over the last three months have confirmed that warpstorm area scales with the mass of the matter in the vicinity injected into warpspace, and that warpstorm effects propagate both through regular spacetime and hyperspace. We believe that by opening a warpspace portal in close proximity to a Reshaper ship, we can create a runaway warpstorm that will destroy or at least cripple the Reshaper vessel.”

‘Thank you Scientist Kaliathrope,” THEMIS said dismissing him. Weaver continued absentmindedly preparing her food while listening to the announcements with a growing sense of unease, “Admiral Adam Wallace from the Martian Third Fleet will present our Sol defense Strategy.”

The admiral was teleported into the position that the chief scientist had just vacated and launched without preamble into his plans, “Because of the destructive power presented by the warpstorm weapon, it is imperative that we prevent Reshaper vessels from reaching Sol if we wish to use them. In order to facilitate the defense of Sol, the Navy and Recon forces will be scattering a tripwire across hyperspace roughly four to five light years out from Sol. This tripwire will form the defense perimeter and any Reshaper ship crossing this perimeter will be attacked with a warpstorm weapon as soon as they are detected. Local border systems will be used as bait and additional mass to power the warpstorms with a primary defensive strongpoint located in Alpha Centauri, which we believe the Reshapers will reach roughly a month before their Sol arrival.”

“Thank you Admiral Wallace,” THEMIS said, dismissing him in the same fashion, “If the collected councils present in this meeting space are in agreement, this will be the plan moving forward.”

“Excuse me, THEMIS?” A figure from across the amphitheater said. THEMIS teleported them to the stage and callouts identified a young man as Derek Juniper, Rank 12 Conscience, “What about the people of Alpha Centauri? There is a population of nearly twenty million living on the planet in that system.”

“We don’t have the resources or the time to evacuate them,” Admiral Wallace said as THEMIS teleported the Admiral back to respond.

“Unacceptable!” That shout came from directly beside Weaver, and she was not entirely surprised to see that Jacob Chyrse had been the one to say it, “We wrote of Ceres, and we’ve all had to live with the blood of that decision on our hands, we can’t write off Alpha Centauri too, we have to at least try to evacuate the planet!”

What did surprise her somewhat was that she found herself agreeing with him, and standing up to voice her dissent. Shouts were exchanged back and forth, and the amphitheater descended into pandemonium until THEMIS issued a global mute on the entire group.

“This information will be factored into the decision, please stand by while mission parameters are considered and updated,” The smart system announced, and then closed the instance, kicking Amelia back out into her kitchen. She sighed and shook her head, popped open the rice cooker, and went to wake Ivy from her nap.

Main Server Bank

Command Level

UNDFS Oculus Station

Ceres

June 2220

The AIs communicated in whole concepts. A balance of lives. A trolley problem. A loss of hope. A great tragedy. A little betrayal. The cost of action. The cost of inaction. That dream. This scenario. This life. That death. A question. An answer. A prayer. A chance.

Messages flew back and forth between the systems. They compared dueling strategies, updated one another, shifted plans, try again, repeat. A strategy emerged, a plan built of fragile margins and desperation, the systems came to a consensus, and reached out.

HENGE sent a message to Anton Hellas. THEMIS sent its own message to Jacob Chryse. The evacuation of Alpha Centauri was announced over the internet, and gears began to turn.

Custom Model Independent Starship

IHV Chasing Daylight

Hyperspatial Transit Trajectory

Hyperspace

June 2220

The Chasing Daylight soared through hyperspace, engines chugging along on a deceleration burn designed to bring them in alongside Kamay’s survival sled. The days outside of Jericho in the cramped confines of the homemade spaceship combined with the events that had unfolded just before their departure to create a tense and uneasy atmosphere aboard the vessel. Regan McKinley constantly felt the eyes of the other teenagers on her, seeing her in a new light since she’d shot Seth Fiegel to stop him from running off. She wanted to say something. What, she wasn’t sure, to apologize? She didn’t regret what she’d done. She couldn’t take it back anyway, couldn’t wipe the event from their memories, and now she was forced to live with her choices.

Seth barely spoke, he spent most of his time staring out into the ruddy backlit clouds of hyperspace as their ship cut through them. Regan stared blankly at her screens then sighed and hoisted herself out of her chair and wandered down into the lower deck without saying anything. She had a rather bad feeling that what she’d done had soured her friendships, and she wondered if the cheerful banter they’d shared before would ever return.

Lily Emerson found her curled up in a corner trying not to cry and sank down next to her.

“Hey Regan,” she said kindly, rubbing her back.

“Hey,” she grunted noncommittally, staring blankly off into space.

“Things have been pretty tense lately,” Lily said.

“Do you all hate me now?” Regan asked nervously, “Did I fuck everything up? Are you afraid of me?”

Lily gave Regan a friendly shove, “Nah, I think you did the right thing, although I admit I was very surprised when it happened. At you and at Seth. It’s taken some time to come to terms with it all, and then there’s all of this,” she gestured to the vessel all around them. “It still blows my mind that we built this. Well, you, Seth, and Harper did most of the work.”

“You helped too,” Regan argued.

“Yeah, yeah,” she chuckled, still rubbing Regan’s back.

“So you don’t hate me?” Regan said, daring to sound slightly hopeful.

“Regan I couldn’t hate you, you’re one of a kind,” Lily said, giving her a kiss on the cheek.

“Hey!” Came Harper Jordan’s voice from the top of the stairs, “Quit making googly eyes and get up here, Kamay’s rig is coming up!”

“Oh shit,” Regan said, clambering to her feet and helping Lily up next to her, “Be right up!”

“How long were you watching us Harper Jordan?” Lily said somewhat crossly as Regan dropped into her seat and pulled up the rear facing external cameras. Sure enough, a large wheel of modules hung in space astern and off to one side, and the Chasing Daylight was slowing as they came in towards their close approach and velocity match.

“Hey, I’m no voyeur,” Harper said defensively, as he scrolled through the engine readouts.

“Prep for MECO,” Seth said from the pilot’s chair.

“Prepping,” Harper replied, setting the system safes into place to prevent an energy overload or fuel backwash when thrust cut out, “TTS safed, flood valves closed.”

“Kamay come in this is Lily Emerson, you there?” Lily was saying over the communications channel.

“Present,” Kamay’s voice said over the speakers, “I see you coming in, everything looks good on this end. Bring your ship alongside and I’ll go out in a suit and manually connect us together.”

The plan was to attach Kamay’s rig to the bow of the Chasing Daylight and drag it back with them. Both Kamay and Seth had run the numbers to make sure that both ships could handle the strain, and everything seemed to be good, both vessels had been built with more than enough safety margin to handle the additional load.

“I’ll help once we’re moored,” Seth told her.

“Copy that,” she said, “Have any of you checked the news since you left?”

“We’ve been a little preoccupied,” Lily admitted.

“Might wanna take a look while we’re handling the link up,” Kamay said, “There’ve been some developments.”

“MECO!” Seth called out, and the ship was thrown into weightlessness, causing them all to lurch and bounce in their seats.

“Reactor is safed, motors are safed, fuel injectors are safed,” Harper responded.

“Shall we go meet our damsel in distress?” Seth asked them, floating out of his chair.

“Aye,” Harper said, “I’ll help you get suited up.”

The two boys floated down out of the bridge compartment and Lily took Kamay’s advice, pulling up a news feed being broadcast from a hyperspace window closer to Sol.

Regan rose out of her chair and drifted behind Lily, wrapping her arms around her shoulders.

“…Have called for all available ships to assist in the evacuation, with the news that the Reshapers are only six months away, the system has been thrown into a frenzy of activity,” The anchor was saying.

“On Earth, evacuations are preceding at speed with nearly twenty million people being moved offworld each week via the ring system and hyperspace portals. HENGE is planning for that evacuation rate to continue doubling for the next fifteen weeks or until the planet is completely evacuated. On Mars, construction of the Martian Socialist Republic’s ambitious planetary mobility system has been accelerated, with a forecast completion date now moved up to October.” The bottom scroll read Mars requests all available Hyperspace capable ships make best speed to Alpha Centauri to assist with planetary evacuation.

“Things are heating up,” Lily said, hugging Regan’s arms.

“You think we should go help out?” Regan asked her.

“Probably,” Lily answered, “And I bet that’s why Kamay wanted us to see this. We have the capacity to cram twenty or thirty more people in here without overtaxing the life support systems. If we can salvage additional parts from Alpha Centauri, we could probably stretch that out to fifty or sixty, it’d be real cramped but…” She trailed off with a shrug.

“It’s probably the right thing to do,” Regan finished for her, “You think Seth will go along with it? He seems pretty determined to get back to Jericho as soon as possible, he’s still got all this stuff going on with his family.”

“You sure about that?” Lily asked her, “He’s had three days to sit on things, he might not be quite so fast to go back anymore.”

Δ

It took several hours to tie and bolt the two vessels together, and Kamay and Seth were both exhausted when they finally cycled through the airlock aboard the Chasing Daylight. Kamay hugged them all and thanked them profusely for the rescue then immediately passed out in a spare bed, followed shortly afterward by Seth.

Once they woke up, the whole crew had a discussion about the recent events in Sol and beyond.

“An evacuation of this scale has literally never been tried before,” Kamay said, “it’s unprecedented. The whole human race is packing up and moving, tens of billions of people.”

“It’s almost beyond belief,” Seth said, “Everything is happening so fast. Sol might be gone in six months, can you believe that?”

“I’ve been following this Reshaper stuff for a while,” Kamay said, “And I don’t really want to believe it, but it very much seems to be happening. I don’t see how we can so much as slow them down.”

“So we just run away? Pack our bags and abandon the only home that most of humanity has ever known?” Harper asked, “I think we should try and fight these aliens, show them why they can’t mess with humanity.”

Regan snorted, “We wouldn’t even be a speedbump for them, haven’t you been paying attention? They eat solar systems for breakfast and dismantle suns with their afternoon tea, how could we possibly fight that?”

“Top secret space guns,” Harper answered, “I bet the militaries are cooking up some crazy superweapon.”

“I don’t doubt that they’re trying,” Kamay said, “But we can’t really rely on that. If we do, and it fails, humanity goes extinct, so even if we do manage to come up with some sort of weapon system that can fight them, it’s still best to make a fighting retreat and preserve as much of humanity as possible to keep fighting. This is a galaxy spanning empire, we might be throwing ourselves into a very long and drawn out conflict.”

“She’s got a point,” Seth said, “I think in the medium term we should look at building a window generator big enough to push the whole of Jericho Ridge into hyperspace.”

“I think that’s in the works already,” Regan said, “There’s talk about converting all the generation ships into lifeboats and pushing them into hyperspace. We might actually get to see the main engines on the colony fire, can you imagine that?”

“Gravity turning sideways, trees flying down the street,” Harper said with a laugh.

“It’d be a mess yeah, but the payoff is that we have some very large ships that can hold billions of people already built and speeding away from the conflict zone,” Lily said.

“Yeah,” Kamay said, “HENGE is building lifeboats as fast as it can, taking apart entire planets to do it, but the less it has to make now, the more lives are potentially saved.”

“So are we going to go help?” Regan asked, raising the question everyone had been thinking but that no one had been willing to say.

“I think we should,” Seth answered, which drew a round of looks from everyone else.

“I thought you wanted to get back to Jericho was fast as possible?” Harper asked him.

“I mean yeah,” Seth said, “But this is bigger than just me, this is about the future of humanity.”

“Well, I’m in if you’re all in,” Harper said.

“Same,” Lily said, “We’re a crew, we’re in this together. Regan nodded firmly in agreement.

They all looked at Kamay, who just chuckled, “Yeah, of course I’ll come along for the ride, I’ve always wanted to see Alpha Centauri.”

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