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[Arrendis]

(Author's Note: This is the beginning of my entry for the New Eden+10,000 years challenge. It starts off... significantly earlier, but it gets there, I promise! So liberties have been taken with historical accuracy (We were at planet VII, not V, but that's a gas giant, so screw it, dramatic license.) Also, I'll put the title in here when I figure one out.  )

Prologue:

I do not walk among the flowers anymore. Once, it was my favorite thing, my small pleasure in the secret moments. Once, the flowers seemed an endless promise.

I was born in space, in YC88, deep in the bowels of the Republic Security Services facility in orbit over Huggar. It wasn’t until I was twelve, for the commemoration of the Yoiul Conference’s Centennial, that I saw my first real flower. Pictures, holos… they’d told me what a flower was, showed me what to expect, but… that small golden blossom, tipped with red… I have never forgotten it. One bright spot amidst so much darkness.


Chapter One:

By early YC116, the wars felt constant, inescapable. The levels of destruction reached a scale never before seen in the cluster. Only the worst atrocities of the Great Empires could match the bloodshed we inflicted upon ourselves beyond their grasp.

Jan 27th, YC116 - B-R5RB V (Local Name: Pastora), Immensea

“Avatar down, repeat Avatar down. She’s gonna blow.”

The words echoes through the comms, as my crew scramble to get systems to respond and reset to nominal. Out beyond the hull, but all too near, a two-million-ton mountain of tritanium thirteen kilometers long named The Hungry Maw shudders. Explosions rock the massive bell-shape of her bow, a thousand little popcorn firecrackers firing off in an expanding wave that ripples out, back, and down the length of the ship. Escape pods. The baseliner crew making a run for it in barely-superluminal lifeboats.

“The Maw’s smartbombs,” The speaker hesitates, voice cracking. He’s a kid who’d sworn he was twenty standard years old when we’d picked him up in G-0Q86 two months earlier. Not surprising. I doubt he’d ever seen an Avatar-class titan before this morning. Now he's seeing one die. “They’re still firing! We need to-”

“There’s nothing we can do, Marr.” That’s Dallen, my Executive Officer aboard Mark 49, the man I trust to know the crew of our Guardian-class Logistics Cruiser, and keep them running smooth. Calm. Sure. And to my biometric sensors, absolutely terrified. This is when I hate what I am, what I have to be. This is the thing, in the moment, that makes my temper flare.

It’s not the ships out there being destroyed, the massive artificial planetoids, each worth more than most worlds produce in a decade. It’s not even the casualties mounting up among them, as area-burst energy weapons mounted on the very ship they’re fleeing start to tear the little lifeboats apart. And it’s certainly not the captains of those vessels, sitting safe in their command pods, immortal and risking nothing but the inconvenience of activating a new clone.

What makes me fucking mad right now is that my XO is having the most natural reaction in the universe to unspeakable carnage, and I can’t look him in the eye and tell him we’ll make it through. It’s not that it would be a lie - we’ll be fine. I know that for a fact. At this point, the enemy doesn’t give a damn about us. And I could tell him that - fire off a private transmission straight to his personal earpiece. It’s the ‘look him in the eye’ part, that little gesture, that connection and reassurance. That’s what I can’t do.

Later, I’ll do it. Later, I’ll look him right straight in the eye and praise him and the whole goddamned crew. Anyone with less dedication to saving lives would’ve run screaming from his post, and the ones we can’t save… we can’t save. Later tonight, we’ll drink to their lives and their losses, and I’ll look every damned one of these people in the eye and thank them for every single life out here we can save.

But right now, I’m one of those immortal assholes with nothing at risk, stuffed into a fucking command pod and wired in. And I can’t look my second in command in the eye. And it burns.

But Dallen’s solid. We’ve been through hundreds of brawls like this. Well… not like this.

“Pandemic Legion is primarying Takra’s Ragnarok.” There’s that first voice again, Lazarus Telraven. Our operational commander, he’s probably one of only two people in the combined fleet with a clearer picture of the situation than I have. Because that’s our job, him, me, Kcolor - to know what the hell is going on in a battle with a few thousand ships, ranging from 10-man frigates to monsters like that Avatar, where a hundred-fifty thousand are burning alive because the fucking jackass in a pod won’t stop trying to do just a little more damage to an enemy that’s no-where near his range.

“Copy that.” My voice is crisp on the command channel before I key over to a subchannel, my next words carrying to a hundred crews in the immediate area. “Logistics and support, lock up Meatgrinder and focus all remote repair modules on the Ragnarok. Ignore fleet requests for assistance from the Domis, and deal with the ECM Bursts best you can.”

No, we’ve never been through a brawl like this. There’s never been a brawl like this. Two, three thousand ships? There’ve been one or two, but those were a handful of capital ships among masses of sub-capitals. This… the mind shrinks away from even contemplating it. Everything’s reversed. The sub-capitals we’ve got are the original rapid-response fleets, maybe four hundred of us, maybe two hundred of them. Everything else…

There are close to two hundred titans here. Maybe twice that number of supercarriers. Another two to three hundred dreadnoughts, and… I can’t even begin to count the carriers, not even with the computer systems trying to sort them all out. It’s just too much. Eighty, maybe a hundred million people out in space - and all in one place, not more than ten thousand kilometers above the surface of an inhabited planet, with maybe one and a half billion tons of mass, most of which is going to wind up falling into the atmosphere in the next few weeks. Maybe some of it will burn up. The smaller pieces, definitely. But the massive bulb of the Maw’s bow is in one piece - six kilometers across and built to withstand the heat of concentrated laser fire.

How many more chunks like that? Caldari Prime was decimated by half of one titan crashing down. We’re trying to limit the damage, trying to keep these idiotically, dangerously massive ships in one piece… but it’s not enough. How many hundred of millions, how many billions are going to-

“Arrendis,” The voice of my backup, Ivory, cuts through the momentary horror, focuses me back on the moment. “Takra’s not holding. She’s ordered the crew to the lifepods, and she’s going to overload her shields to buy them time to get out.”

I key up the private channel he used. “Understood. We’ll keep the hull from breaking apart as long as we can.” Takra’s in his corporate alliance, the individual states that make up our little Clusterfuck. “Tell her as soon as those shields buckle, she should get the hell out.”

Inconvenience though it might be to us, even capsuleers would rather not die, if we can help it.

A moment later, and back to the fleet, “Sonofacrap… remote assistance on Theta’s Pride, repeat, remote assistance on Theta’s Pride. They’re primarying Zungen.” So much for trying to hold Takra’s hull together.

*   *   *   *   *

“Docking permission requested…. Docking request: accepted.”

With those words, we’re towed into G-0 station. Turns out I was wrong about drinking to the fallen later that night. By the time we get back to our port-of-call, it’s already tomorrow. In the end, the fighting raged for just over a standard day, and honestly, I think we stopped the slaughter because everyone was just too damned tired to continue. The final tallies: 74 titans, 13 supercarriers, 356 dreadnoughts, and 120 or so carriers were destroyed. Including the losses on the ships that survived… 21.3 million dead, 2.11 million seriously injured, another 15 million walking wounded - banged up, but able to perform their duties. And honestly? That’s a damned sight better than it could’ve been… but those wrecks are still in a slowly-decaying orbit.

Yeah. It’s already tomorrow… but I’m gonna get so drunk, I miss the rest of it.

*   *   *   *   *

Jul 23rd, YC116 - QPO-WI VII Station, Deklein

“Honestly, boss, it was getting fucking dull.”

I’m stripping off my jacket as we walk, and tossing it to hit Marr in the face. Dellan’s gone. Marr should be, too, but he’s stupid and brave and has all sorts of belief in the mission. Well… he’s young.

The whole crew of the Mark 49 is gone - pensioned off as soon as we got home from the war and back to 0P-F3K Station in Deklein. They’ll never want for a damned thing for the rest of their lives… except to have not been forced to sit helplessly as billions died. Good thing, too - the fucking ship got blown up while I was running it in automated mode over to QPO to retire it. Fucking pirates.

“Yeah. It’s dull. You know what, though? I was kinda liking dull.” I give him a pointed look. “War’s exciting as fuck, and all, but we took a month to finish up in the southeast after Grath pulled PL out. I’ve been kinda enjoying the idea of spending the last three months not watching eight billion people burn while the DED erects a monument in orbit over their corpses to the idiots who killed their planet.”

Yeah. They put up a monument, called it ‘Titanomachy’, to commemorate titans dying in greater numbers than ever before. They did it in under a week. They even stabilized the orbits of a half-dozen of the hulks in order to have them maintain position around the monument.

Ask me where the other hundred-forty billion tons of tritanium and munitions went. No, actually… don’t. I have enough trouble sleeping at night.

“C’mon, boss, you know that’s not what I meant…” He’s surer now. He has been, since B-R. Hell, he got sent home with the others in 0P, but when he heard about the ship, he came and found me, insisted he needed to be active, be keeping people safe, however he could. That’s why he’s the one who gets hit with my shirt as I walk into the pod bay.

“Take this crap, and the crap in the space bag, and stow it in my cabin on the Sinnebago. Most of the ships are loaded, I think we’re just waiting on final systems check on Thundersaint. Get the subcap crews to their berthing pods, and have everything spun up to undock.”

Boots, socks, pants, it all gets left on the gantry as I step into the access hatch on the pod. “Fifteen minutes, Marr. I want that carrier ready to head to Delve as soon as the order comes.”

*   *   *   *   *

Jun 8th, YC 117 - ZXB-VC: 5-CQDA Stargate, Delve

A year later, and we’re back on the border of Delve. It’s been three months on, three months off, and I’m really starting to resent it. We’d tried playing nice. We’d reorganized the entire Coalition, sold our enemies the space they seemed to want so badly, and what did it get us? Three freaking months. It’s like these idiots have some kind of alarm clock that suddenly rings out ‘it’s time to lose our shit again!’ Because that’s all that’s happening. Last year, when they attacked Fountain and Delve, we drove them off. This year, they’ve attacked Fountain from Delve, and we’ve spent a week undoing all of their gains and pushing them back to the treaty-recognized border. Seriously, I am tired of these fools. All they seem able to do is kill people, and their leadership doesn’t seem to mind that most of the people being killed are theirs.

Well, today we’re going on the offensive. Today, we’re taking their space. ZXB-VC - a strategic chokepoint on the entry into Delve, and our enemies’ forward staging for their entire campaign, and we’re going to take it away from them. We were hoping to do it with a minimal loss of life. We’ve got eight hundred capital ships, one of the largest assemblies since B-R, but they’ve brought in fleets of their own to slow us down and try to restore the station’s defenses.

Slow us down? That they’ll do. Restore the station’s shields and armor? They have a handful of carriers racing against the destructive power of two dozen titans - and those carriers are taking fire, as well. As for me… I’m plugged into the Sinnebago, a Nidhoggur-class carrier, babysitting a battleship fleet as we guard one of the system’s stargates to prevent the defenders from being reinforced by forces staging deeper in Delve.

We’re relaxed. Marr’s got the crew working smoothly. Still young, but… he’s proven himself, and everyone knows where he’s been. They trust him, and so do I. Relaxed, but still alert. And that’s why it’s one of our Combat Air Patrol pilots, circling in an Einherjar-class fighter, who gives the call.

“New contact on the grid!” A moment later, a similar alert comes from someone in the fleet.

As soon as I locate it in space, my sensors are focusing in, trying to see what we’re dealing with. The new contact is a battleship-sized hull, but the scan profile matches nothing in our data. Grey-green, smooth, almost featureless, the energy signature is similar to Jovian technology, but something in the readings… makes me think of the Sleeper drones in Anoikis, the network of systems connected by semi-regular, seemingly random wormhole connections where I’d lived for a few years.

As the sensor analysis continues to build up, the targeting computers are trying to predict the alien ship’s maneuvers and… picking up a much smaller hull, right in front of its nose, seemingly running like hell.

In fact… the sensors start a detailed sweep of the tiny ship. Stealth Bomber. Manticore-class. Transponder identifies as Headshot, under the command of nobody I’ve ever heard of… Hrm. Non-capsuleer. And he’s making a beeline for our Logistics group.

A quiet chime jerks my attention off the bomber and back to the larger hull. Energy build-up in multiple ports opening along the hull. The strange battleship is powering weapons.

“All ships, primary target is the unknown battleship, repeat, primary is the unknown battleship.” The voice of Sarn Tyre, our FC, crackles across the comms as the hostile battleship begins to peel the bomber’s engines away. “Lock only - wait for my order to fire. Whoever they are, we don’t know they’re hostile. Could be a private spat.”

Another energy spike registers - a Guardian’s remote repair modules conducting a stream of nanobots along a charged particle pathway to the bomber. It’s a desperate move. It’s one I empathise with. If the Nidhoggur’s sensors weren’t calibrated for larger targets, I might be doing it myself. Instead, my sensors start dialing in targeting data on the Guardian itself. People have a tendency to shoot at logi who interfere in ‘private spats’..

As the bomber shreds into a blue-white fireball on its pursuer’s wake, a brilliant white light erupts from the battleship’s hull. Stabbing out across the darkness, the kilometer-wide beam passes close enough to the hull that I can feel it as sudden, shocking, blistering heat, searing the edges of my awareness as the shields take the very trailing bleed-off. But I’m lucky: we only take that little bit of power. That poor, hapless Guardian though, it’s enveloped, silhouetted for a timeless instant like the afterimage of a lightning bolt, burning itself into the retina. Then the brilliance clears. The cruiser is so much jetsam, nothing larger than a few feet across remaining intact, littered with the corpses of the crew. The battleship… hangs there, motionless. Minimal power signature. No energy readings at all from the weapons ports.

Cacophony erupts across the fleet.

“HOLY SHIT!”
“Doomsday fired, repeat, doomsday fired!”
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!?”
“IT FUCKING SHOT A LOGI!”
“OH MY GOD…”

On and on, a hundred simulated voices in the space of half a second before Laz, thirty AU away with the station capture group, breaks in clear and steady as ever.

“Check.”

Silence. Sudden, oppressive silence, born of years of conditioning to that voice, that word.

“Sensors show doomsday discharge. Sitrep.”

Nothing. Utter silence from our FC. Swearing in frustration, I open the line.

“Laz. Arrendis.”

“Go.”

“Single unknown battleship on-grid, chasing a Manticore. We’ve lost one Guardian to some kind of superweapon. Estimated recharge: Five-Eight-Five seconds. If it’s a Doomsday.” If not? It could be ready to fire now.

“Repeat: Hostile battleship DD’d a logi?”

“Confirm.”

“Laz, Sarn.” Finally. Now I can shut up.

“Go.” The irritation in Laz’s voice seems to echo my own frustration that it’s taken a fleet commander this long to get his wits.

“Fleet was ordered to lock up the unknown before it fired, should-”

“Oh for fuckssakes, you’ve got it locked and you’re wasting time? All fleets on the 5-CQ gate, kill that thing before its systems recover!”

[Arrendis]

Chapter 2:

Someone - CONCORD maybe - dubbed the new threat ‘Drifters’. The Drifters... changed things, changed us. We’d thought Sansha’s hoards were a terror. How innocent… how naive. At least with the Sansha, we could tell ourselves that every death was another poor bastard freed from the living hell they were in. With the Drifters… it didn’t matter. Destroy their ship, you kill one of them. Lose a ship, you lose a thousand lives. And no matter how many of them fell, the Circadians, previously unknown drones that were always nearby when a Drifter was spotted, would always sweep through when your back was turned, harvesting the corpses of the dead. Ours, their own, it didn’t matter.

By YC120, we’d taken to fitting smartbombs for the express purpose of obliterating the corpses of anyone who fell, just to keep them from being remade into shells for more of the enemy. By YC130, they’d started moving into high-gear. Of course, it was months before we knew…

March 6th, YC131 - Harrowsland (Bosboger I), Heimatar

“Check check, Skyforce, this is Firemane 6, we are in position to paint target, over.”

“Copy Firemane, this is Skyforce. Bombardment sabots primed and ready for your signal. Over.”

A hundred kilometers from the Oracle-class battlecruiser Khanid Triumphant, Lt (jg) Siralen Vex listens to the exchange. The planet’s been under blockade for six weeks.The Amarr have pushed hard into Minmatar space, but the Tribal Liberation Force is massing a counterattack. All he has to do is wait. Ten more minutes, and the fleet will be ready to warp to his position and break the Siege of Harrowsland. Ten more minutes. One less half-repaired defense battery intact on the surface won’t make a difference, and once the Amarrian ground troops are cut off from space…

All he has to do is wait, and keep watch, safely cloaked in his Cheetah-class scout frigate. Keep count of the enemy ships, make sure none of them leave without being accounted for and their heading marked. Just another day in RSS Force Recon.

Just another day, until three new contacts enter the battlespace. Large-type hulls… energy signature indicates… Drifters. One of them passing…

Swearing, he kicks the Cheetah into a turn, angling below the plane of the ecliptic to avoid being decloaked by the alien vessel. The Amarr battlecruiser fleet is already turning their attention to the invaders, but it’s too late. A few moments, and thirty battlecruisers and a dozen support ships are disabled, adrift, and utterly ignored.

“Skyforce, this is Firemane 6, transmitting target telemetry now.”

Vex barely registers what he’s hearing, as he watches the Drifters take over the position formerly occupied by the remains of Khanid Triumphant. They’re turning, coming around to aim the bows of the ships directly into the gravity well - straight at the ground. Dread begins to trail tiny, prickling, frozen little stabs of ice up the very center of his spine as he doublechecks to make sure the sensor logs are being automatically forwarded to the fleet, and Pator.

It’s a day no-one in New Eden will forget. Ever.

*   *   *   *   *

March 7th, YC131 - YA0-XJ Station, Deklein

We’re silent. Motionless, as the brilliant white light flares, blazes out, and sets the atmosphere on fire.

“... can see, the Drifters doomsday weapons appear to be able to lock onto signals transmitted by ground forces. At this time, it is unknown if the mercenaries on the planet’s surface were in the aliens’ employ, given sabotaged equipment, or if the enemy’s targeting systems are simply able to interface with standard bombardment target-painting arrays. Whatever the answer, this may explain the rumors of planets in the Outer Ring, Derelik, and Fountain regions cutting off all communications, only to be found dead and lifeless by emergency response teams days later. For the Scope, this is…”

“Turn it off.” My voice is tight, strained. We’d suspected… something… was behind entire worlds dying, but this?

The projection winks out, and I turn to look over at Marr, idly scratching at the plugs in the back of his neck. It’s a nervous habit of his, one he’s had since he first took the plunge a decade ago.

“You know what happened next, don’cha boss?” He hasn’t called me ‘boss’ in almost as long. It’s been a long time since he was my XO, and it shows on his face. He won’t meet my eyes. “Same thing happens every time they kill people…”

“Circadians?” The thought makes me frown. “How? There’s never any bodies. The planets are stripped clean.” He just shrugs.

“Same thing could be said of pirate havens after someone clears them - no wrecks. We use mobile tractors. Why can’t they?”

“That’s nuts, Marr… what’re they gonna do with a few billion tons of biomass?”

I don't think I’ll like the answer. It'll turn out… I'm right. I hate being right.

*   *   *   *   *

Oct 12th, YC140 - Geostationary Orbit over Huola VII (Local Name: Huola Colony), The Bleak Lands

“He’s moving off, boss, the Circadian missed us.” The Sinnebago’s sitting cloaked above the remains of another Matari colony. Near as we can figure, it was killed a few days ago. Initial scans when we got here were inconclusive, but when our long-range directional scanner picked up a single Circadian Seeker approaching, we cloaked up, and went to passive scans.

Two kilometers. That’s the magic number - anything comes closer than that, the cloaking device’s field integrity is disrupted, and it all shuts down. So we waited, and we watched, as that completely un-gunned harbinger of extinction silently slipped closer and closer. Three kilometers. Twenty-seven hundred meters… at twenty-two, he passed alongside, and the numbers started going up again. Environmental systems recorded a 0.1% carbon dioxide spike in the ship’s air supply, and the scrubbers kicked in for the merest fraction of a second to combat it.

Too close. That was too damned close. In the last ten years, over a thousand worlds have died, and still no explanation of just why the Drifters are doing it. Most of them have been borderline planets - ice planets, barren, anything where even the precursors of life were present before humanity dropped something there to exploit the natural resources. But a few, like this one… these were worlds.

“Boss.” My attention shifts over to Marr. He’s a capsuleer, has been for a long time. But Mutts Need Love Too, his Ferrox-class battlecruiser, is currently stowed in the Maintenance Bay of the carrier, and half his crew’s in our on-board medical facilities after tangling with an Augoror Navy Issue that hadn’t expected to find two kilometers of irate Matari dropping out of warp to begin belching out fighters. Now he’s left the bridge, moving through the ship’s corridors - moving toward the pod bay.

“That seeker’s begun emitting a low-intensity, wide-aspect tractor beam, and it’s moving into a low orbit. If it holds course, in about six hours it’ll pass twenty klicks below us. Should give you some time to get out of the goo.”

Ever since B-R, I’ve needed that - to ‘get out of the goo’, from time to time, to reconnect with humanity. Of course he’d remember. And with a quietly relieved sigh, I realize he’s right. We’ve got some time. The crew’s about to hit shift change, so they’ll all be getting a break, too.

“Good idea.” The pod’s environmental system starts draining away the ectoplasmic liquid (That’s the goo, folks. Trust me, you don’t want to get it on your clothes.) and preparing to disengage the respirator. “Stop by the mess on the way down and get me a Choco-Q.”

Being in the pod, your hydration, nutrition, everything, it’s all monitored and cared for. But that doesn’t mean you don’t come out of the goo wanting to touch, to feel, to taste things. And right now, I could really use some chocolate. And dry hair…

I’m still toweling off when he gets here, but at least my hair is dry. And he brought the Choco-Q. I could kiss him… if, you know, that wouldn’t be a little weird. He’s like a kid brother, at this point. He’s saying something… I know he is, he’s always saying something, but right now? Right now everything’s dialing on in that bottle in his hand.

“Sixteen thousand people on this ship,” I finally say a minute later, my voice filled with every single iota of relief and satisfaction I’ve got. He was right. Getting out of the goo… it’s like being able to breathe again after drowning in stress. “And you’re the only one with any clue how good that…”

Alert chimes cut me off, stop whatever smart response Marr’s clearly about to give. A moment later, the voice of the Officer of the Day comes over the internal address system.

“Drifters in-system, repeat, Drifters in-system. Secure all facilities and report to action stations immediately.” I can feel the tension settle across my shoulders, my chest, like an iron band tightening about my ribs, just a little bit more with each word. “We are receiving a distress call from the Ishukone facility above Huola X. This is not a drill.”

Marr’s already turning to run for the bridge as I gulp down the last of my Choco. Back to the goo, so soon... I swear, if the shit we’re in wasn’t so damned dire… it’d almost make me cry. I just, you know, haven’t finished toweling off my face. That’s all.

“Helm, align to the Ishukone station.” The audio pickups on the outer pod skin convey that directly to the bridge, even as I’m settling back into the rising goo and settling the respirator over my mouth. Then it’s time to lean back, let the ports align, connect, and polarize… and I can feel the starlight on my back, the quietly thrumming vibrations of my heart.

“Captain, long-range sensors indicate more than a hundred Drifters are attacking the station. Looks like maybe ten to fifteen ships have been destroyed trying to undock, ranging from a Leopard-class shuttle to a Vargur. Nothing’s getting out of there alive.”

“Ops, hold cloak,” My synthesized voice is even, firm. Calm. My mind is anything but. A hundred Drifters, on an isolated station? Snippets of conversation years old resurface, reordered.

What’re they gonna do with a few billion tons of biomass?

Same thing happens every time they kill people…

Just how many of those fucking things have they made over the last twenty-three years? We kill them whenever we can, but… no. No, they’ve hit planets, but we’ve sent teams in to take out their wormhole complexes, too. Dammit, we’re holding our own in all this. We’ve got to be.

“Captain, distress signal from incoming from the 24th Imperial Crusade station over Huola VI. They’re reporting the station is being disabled by sixty to seventy Drifters. Services are already down, including cloning and medical.” There’s a momentary pause, then I patch the incoming signal directly to my brain.

This is the 24th Imperial Crusade Station Commander at Huola VI to any sub-capital ships in the system. Do not come to the station. We are under siege by approximately sixty… no, seventy-five Drifter battleships. Station shields are already under Entosis assault. We are attempting to contact the Throne Worlds for supercapital support. Remain in warp as much as possible. Scouts report massive enemy build-up on each of the system stargates. Transit to and from Otelen is confirmed impossible, repeat, the Otelen gate is already disabled. Do not attempt gate transits. Stay mobile. Stay in warp. Establish deep-space safes as often as you can. This is the 24th Imperial Crusader Station Commander at Hula VI to any sub-capital ships in the system. Do not come…

“Captain, Ops. Sensors show no subcapital ships operational in this system. If they’re out there, they’re cloaked.” Cloaked, they’re as safe as we are… and if we attempt to arrange a rendezvous, that transmission will likely just be picked up by the aliens and kill us all.

“Helm, align to the Nadir point of the Huola star, minimum safe distance below. Nav, start trying to get a lock on any open cynosural beacon - aim for Amamake if you can.” My eyes close, letting the goo wipe clean the salt on my face.

[Arrendis]

Chapter 3:

In under a year, they were everywhere. Within fourteen months, the immortals realized we were suddenly nothing of the sort. What good is cloning technology when the medical stations were being destroyed right along with everything else?

August 3rd, YC146 - High Orbit, UJY-HE III, Deklein

“Ops, this is Engineering. External jump systems check out… I guess. Never had to do anything like this before.”

Leaning over the console, I key open the mic, “Engineering, Ops - Understood. Nobody has, Blakir… but if anyone’ll make it work, it’s you. We only get one shot at this.” Then, I just can’t help but smile a bit, “No pressure.”

There’s a little bit of flattery to that, of course, but he’s a damned fine engineer. Finding him and pulling him out of a burning Nomad had been one of the few breaks we’ve had since the Drifters unveiled their armada. One of, if not the last of the Thukker tribe’s top experimental guys, he’s exactly what we needed for this hare-brained scheme of ours.

Nine months ago, three of us got together and hatched a plan. Me, Marr, and Ashiri, one of our last surviving titan pilots. It’s a good plan, a simple plan. It’s a plan that builds on the time-honored traditions of humanity everywhere: Run. The Fuck. Away. Of course, it can’t really be that simple.

The Drifters have been spreading through the cluster at a pace that’s both terrifyingly fast, and bafflingly slow. They obliterated the heart of the old Empires in a matter of days, then… nothing for a month, and then another wave of absolutely inescapable devastation. Marr’s suspicion was they were consolidating, taking the time to process everything they collected before sending out the next wave. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know, but it does mean that ultimately, ‘run away’ winds up running into one big problem: there’s nowhere to run to.

That’s where things get a little crazy, a little… desperate. The New Eden star cluster sits on the outer leading edge of one of the arms of a fairly typical spiral galaxy. The distance to the nearest stars of the trailing edge of the arm ahead of us is roughly 10,000 parsecs. If we could spend the entire distance in warp, it would take us roughly 40 years. In 40 years… who knows how far the Drifters will get? Their pace is increasing. So even that, even the next arm of this galaxy… it’s not enough.

No, the target… is a bit more ambitious. Or insane. Roughly five million light-years away is the Khitolan Galaxy, named after some obscure mythological Amarrian bullshit. I don’t know. One of their heroes or saints or kings or demons or some combination of demonic saint-king or something. Point is? It’s full of fucking stars, and there’s an outside chance that it won’t be full of Drifters by the time we get there.

It’s… going to take a long, long time. No resupply. No port of call. We’ll need to be self-sufficient for the whole trip. The plan calls for three ships, all alone in the night. Marr left six months ago in a Stabber-class cruiser. Weapons disabled, refitted to run without crew, he’d be slaughtered if he got into a fight with an irate kitten, but the ship was configured to do two things: move fast, and carry enough supplies for 1 standard year. By fast… we kind of disabled the navigational safeties on the warp system. He’ll be doing 2 au/s, all year long.  When the year’s up, he’ll send a tight-beamed subspace signal direct to where the UJY station used to be, and light a cynosural field.

Then we’ll jump. Ashiri’s Leviathan, and me.

The Sinnebago’s been solid for me for years. If there was any way to make this work, I’d be using her. But she’s just too small to serve as… well, a worldship, a colony ship. So, I traded up, acquiring a Hel-class supercarrier from an alliance facility that’d been abandoned months ago as things fell apart under increasing pressure and mounting losses.

That doesn’t mean I’ve gotten rid of the Nidhoggur, though. The old girl’s parked just beneath the Hel while we work on the extensive refitting and modifications the supercarrier’s going to need for this trip. The repair/fabrication facilities in both carriers are normally used to patch up damaged fighters and machine out replacement parts. We’ve got them working overtime churning out components they were never intended to produce.

The massive armor shroud on the Hel, overhanging the flight deck for an extra thousand meters is halfway refinished. The outer surface is being covered with photovoltaics as quickly as we can produce them. At the same time, the inner surfaces and forward armor plates of the primary hull have all been converted to function as a massive ram scoop, gathering up and collecting the particles and trace elements from even the thinnest streams of gasses in the intergalactic medium. The big four, that’s what we’re after: Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen. Given those four, we can synthesize just about anything we need.

The depths of the ship, we’re refitting into medical and cloning facilities - redundancies for the systems in Ashiri’s titan. Of course, that meant we needed room… but the ship’s not intended to face combat - ever. So… we’ve moved the jump systems to the exterior of the aft hull, and augmented them some with the jump drives from Rorqual that provided our clone bay… and the Sinnebago. That’s why Blakir’s so important: he’s the one whose job it’s been to balance three different jump systems, for three different mass-ranges... from two different manufacturers, using two completely different fuel systems. If it all works the way he thinks it will, we’ll be able to jump clear to Marr’s beacon. If we could repeat the process enough times, the entire trip would take only about 30 jumps… but given our fuel limitations, we’re only going to have enough to do it once.

The forward half of the ship, the cavernous flight deck, drone, fighter, and fighter-bomber bays, as well as the hangar deck and Ship Maintenance Bay, we’re converting over to the ship’s new role. Housing, support, and environmental needs. We’re going to have animals on board, both wild animals and livestock. Basically, anything we can keep the Drifters to turning into biomass to build more Drifters, we want to save. There’ll also be room for farming in the upper drone bays. I’m not expecting we’ll be able to hold a population of more than about 50,000, and we’re going to need to train everyone to serve as crew over… spirits, more lifetimes than I want to consider, but that’s going to need to happen. Combined with the people Ashiri’ll be carrying in Grr This… we’ll need to be careful, and watch birth rates, but we’ll have more than enough of a gene pool to keep the species viable through the long dark. And honestly, it’s nice to be doing something productive, instead of us just scrambling to stay hidden, like a mouse hiding from a hungry cat.

It’s a plan. It’s a more or less simple plan. I wouldn’t call it a great plan, but, like I said, a good plan. And, well, pretty much the only plan we’ve got.

*   *   *   *   *

Feb 3rd, YC147 -  High Orbit, UJY-HE III, Deklein

“Flight systems check complete. Just waiting for Ashiri to arrive, wait out the jump aphasia, and then Mom’ll be all set for Marr’s signal.”

I nod as Blakir talks, even smirking a bit to myself. Mom. It’s a joke on the ‘mothership’ moniker for supercarriers, but we actually wound up giving the Hel the name Old Mother, something of an homage to Matar, the homeworld of my people. Bakir’s Thukker, of course, and he’s worked absolute miracles getting the jump engines tuned, balanced, and even refurbished a little over the last few months. At the start of this refit, we were worried that the jump systems might not work at all. Now? Now I think a number of us are getting impatient to try them out.

“How are we on getting the population boarded?” We’d had to take care not to foment a riot, bringing people into the know slowly, and intentionally aiming about 30% low in our numbers. Sure enough, the people who weren’t discreet, weren’t able to keep their mouths shut, they’ve filled those seats, and the population we’ve got ready is just about where we want it to be.

Besides, I’m not dumb - we’ve got extra capacity, just in case.

“Alright, keep me posted. I’m gonna go take one last walk through the old girl before I put the systems into standby. Who knows, maybe someone else’ll find her here when they need her.”

The goo this time seems… almost comforting as I guide the pod back toward the slumbering Sinnebago. The carrier’s three decades old, but other than removing the jump systems, she’s in pristine condition. In a lot of ways, I’m glad. She’s served with distinction for a long time, she deserves to slip off into a quiet retirement, instead of being torn apart for spare parts. In others… she’s been home to me for longer than any other place in my life, and the thought that in maybe thirty minutes, I’ll be saying goodbye forever… yeah, I miss her already.

The carrier’s systems wake up as soon as the pod links up, and by the time I step out, the environmental system has the air warmed and only slightly stale. The corridors are silent, empty. She feels… expectant, and it puts the hair at the back of my neck up, just a little. The old girl’s been through the worst New Eden had to throw at her. She’s a combat vet, wily and alert, even in her sleep… and she knows something the rest of us don’t.

The chill makes its way down my spine, and it sends me trotting back through the empty halls, bare footsteps echoing behind me. I can’t shake the thought, as irrational as it is.

She knows… something’s about to ha-

“Old Mother, Old Mother, this is Grr This.” Ashiri’s voice… isn’t calm. It’s not relaxed and ready for the trip. “Fifteen Drifters have us pinned down in 3V8. Long-range scans show at least one leaving in your direction. Repeat, at least one Drifter may be coming to you…”

I’m into the pod, hooking up before the goo even gets started. The Nidhoggur’s engines are already spooling up, shields powering, and a flight of heavy drones swarming as I move to put the carrier between the Hel and the direction of Pure Blind. If there’s a Drifter coming, we’ll have a few minutes.

“Grr This, Sinnebago. Acknowledged. Combat systems coming online now. Get out of there…”

“No dice, Arrendis. They’ve got us scrammed by about a dozen of these things. We’re not going to make it.” Now… only now, her voice settles, calms down, as though saying it has made it something she can handle. “Get Mom moving, ASAP… I’m sorry, Sinnebago. It’s all on y-”

The hiss of white noise before the transmission cuts out tells me all I need to know. Drifters…

“Blakir, get the ship moving, get everything spun up. We need to be ready to go the moment Marr lights that cyno!”

Ok. Ok… bring the carrier up behind and alongside the super until she’s spun up and ready to go, then pod over fast as I can. That’s the plan. I can see he’s already got Old Mother starting to flare the engines, but her top speed… especially with all the modifications… spirits below, she’s probably slower than the Leviathan is… was… crap.

I’m just coming up to speed as the Drifter comes out of warp, d-scan showing the hostile bearing down on us from the far end of the system. I’m watching the timer for Marr’s cyno. Ten minutes. There’s no way we have ten minutes before it warps over here. Crap.

Combat systems check… everything’s running, but… there’s no crew. I’m not going to have one one-hundredth of the reaction time on targeting or fire control that I should. About the only thing I’ve got is…

Fuck. The Drifter slips into nearby space, only ten kilometers away. Ridiculously close. Close enough that I suspect he had some kind of probing system available.

The one thing I’ve got is helm control. That’s really it. The shields are there, the drones are in space, but without a crew to get the sensors working at full capabilities, acquiring a solid lock to force the drones to engage… wait… unless he shoots at me first.

So he’ll have to shoot at me, first. The first shots are already splashing against the shields of the Old Mother. He can’t be allowed to power up the doomsday. If he fires it at anything else… the Hel will have the time to get out.

Mind racing, I start to deactivate the navigational safeties. Engine overload warning, gone. Structural integrity warning, gone. Inertial dampeners, gone. Collision avoidance… gone. All power to the engines, let the shields drain out.

I’m only going to get one shot at this. Microwarp drive engaged, overheating… 5 kilometers… the Drifter’s starting to lock weapons on me. Good, if he’s shooting at me, he’s not shooting at the Hel. 4200 meters.. the armor’s starting to pit and score. Drones engaging. 3600 meters. 3200… Sensors picking up energy buildup… OHSHIT… 2700 meters…

Time to bail.

Three things happen within the same quarter-second.

The pod ejects, firing off downward into space.

A lance of brilliant white light erupts, enveloping the Sinnebago, armor and hull plates peeling away like the layers of an onion.

The stricken, dying carrier, still overloading all engines, impacts the Drifter. Tritanium, superheated and fused together by the still-firing doomsday punches into the smaller ship. Energy from the alien weapon pours into both hulls now, as I scream at the pod to move faster, to try to outrace death.

One of the fundamental truths of the capsuleer is that you can sleep, but you don’t just ‘black out’. The pod continues to feed you telemetry, keeps your body fueled and cared-for. You’re cushioned in a man-made amniotic fluid, keeping you safe and absorbing any jostling or bumps you might encounter. You’re always conscious on a very basal, reptile-brain level, just in case. You never black out.

The shockwave of energy riding just ahead of the physical mass of the twin explosions picks the pod up, hurls it. For a moment, I’m registering acceleration of the pod to over 1km/s as the emergency shielding fails and the laughable armor flakes away. Panicked, my eyes open in the goo, just in time to see something rushing at me in the yellow-green sea.

And then it’s darkness.

*   *   *   *   *

“Arrendis? Arrendis!” There’s a voice, shouting at me as I try to swim up out of the inky black depths. Why is she shouting? Can’t she see I’m swimming?

“ARRENDIS!” That’s accompanied by a slap across the face that snaps me awake, alert, and annoyed. My eyes flicker around, taking in the small area we’ve retained for a Ship Maintenance Bay so Marr can dock up his Stabber once we…

Once we jump! FUCK! Leaping to my feet, I find myself turning, falling, trying to push myself back upright again.

“Where? How long… the beacon…?” Yeah, I got my brain rattled but good.

“Stop.” The voice, that same female voice, is as firm as the hand that comes down on my shoulder. Now my brain’s able to pick details out of my jumble. It’s Raina Xillen, the head biotech. Did I die? I’m not in the clone bay. How did… what? I just look at her, trying to find answers in her eyes.

“Marr’s late. We expected the confirmation squirt two minutes ago. You’ve been out cold since we pulled your wreck in.” She gestures behind me, and what I see there gives me chills. The pod… it’s pretty close to completely destroyed. How did...

The jumble in my head fills in the details, pulls up the last moments of my precious Sinnebago. It hurts. Suddenly, intensely, like broken ribs, it hurts.

Actually… that might be broken ribs.

I’m unsteady again, and Xillen moves to keep me upright. “Careful. We need to get you to medical.”

“No… no, I need to get to the bridge. Need to oversee things…” Normally, I’d be jacked in already. It’ll be slower, less efficient to do it manually. But the pod… the pod’s not where it needs to be, and even if it was… I’m not sure it works properly right now.

There’s a moment, a long, frustrating moment, where I think she’s actually going to tranq me and drag me off to the medbay. But instead she just swears, and pulls her jacket off, wrapping it around me.

“Here. You walking out onto the bridge naked and beaten half to death by your own pod isn’t going to help anyone focus.” Her belt’s next, wrapped around my ribs, just tightly enough to make sure the jacket’s pinned. “And be careful. The cloning vat’s working, but I really don’t want you puncturing a lung in the middle of this crap.”

Emerging onto the bridge a few minutes later, I don’t even try to pretend. I just slump onto the command couch, arm wrapped around my waist.

“Status, Blakir?” Even to my own ears, I sound tired, battered.

“Just got the squirt and confirmed, Captain. Navigational sensors are waiting to lock onto the beacon.”

“Good,” I nod, “Any voice confirmation, or just the coded signal?”

“No audio. But at this range, that’s not too surprising. He’s probably low on power, too, saving it all for the cyno.”

“Right…”

“Captain!” One of the sensor techs on the other side of the bridge shouts, clearly alarmed. “Five Drifters coming out of warp sixty kilometers behind us!”

Five? Awfuck. No. No no no. We do not go out like this. Humanity does not go out like this. I can feel the heat rising at the corners of my eyes. We’ve come too far, gotten too close, to just… get snuffed out.

“Cyno up!” Blakir’s tense, but holding steady. His whole life lately’s been a series of near misses, right? Maybe he just got two more. I don’t even have to open my mouth. He’s on it. “Navigation, cyno beacon plotted…”

“Drifters charging weapons, Captain!” Now it’s control vs. fear. Do we jump? Do we die? Unplugged like this, I’m an observer in one of the most pivotal moments of my life. It’s not a feeling I enjoy.

“... primary, secondary, tertiary jump drives nominal and in balance.”

“ENERGY SPIKE! THEY’RE GONNA DOOMSDAY!”

“Jumping in three… two…”

“DOOMSDAYS FIRING!”

I do the only thing I can do. I close my eyes.

*   *   *   *   *

Space ripples, shudders, and swirls as the ice-covered hull of a Hel-class supercarrier emerges from the space between spaces. Internal chronometers show that we were in-jump for an impossible 20 minutes. It’s something I can’t even begin to fathom. As always, the jump seems instant to me, to everyone aboard. Our minds, I suppose, just aren’t equipped to process interdimensional space.

Sensors start to come up, recalibrate. One of the navigators reports that visible stellar patterns match those predicted for a three-hundred light-year jump. In a single leap, we’ve cooked off all our isotopes, but we’ve travelled three times the length of the New Eden cluster. I just nod.

“And our immediate surroundings?” No-one’s ever been out here. We’d be naive to think it’s just… blank.

“We’re currently sitting in a low-density blanket of gas, probably hydrogen. The interstellar wind doesn’t seem to be as strong here as it was in the arm. There’s also a fading ion trail, signature indicates… consistent with Stabber-class Minmatar cruiser."

“Sensor recalibration complete, sir. We’ve got the Stabber - she seems to be adrift off the bow.”

Goddammit.

“Get an emergency medical EVA team to the Maintenance Bay. Stow the remains of my pod and get that Stabber aboard. Marr saved our asses, folks.” I move to stand up, to start moving. I need to be doing something. “Time for us to re… to return…”

Raina catches me. Again. “Would you sit your ass down?” She moves to the communications pad, “Medbay, this is the bridge. I need a transport unit up here, and an EV-EMS team to report to the Ship Bay for emergency recovery operations alongside the engineering team. Let’s get to work, people.”

She turns her attention back to me. “And you… you’re going to medbay where I’m going to tape up those ribs and plug you in for a neural recalibration and regeneration.” Her voice softens, takes on something akin to a bedside manner, at least. “The ribs, you can feel. Your left wrist is also sprained, and you’re concussed. We need to get you both taken care of, so you can, you know, return the favor.”

*   *   *   *   *

By the time they get the cruiser into the bay, I’m on my feet again. Well, mostly. I’m walking with a limp and a cane because I broke a foot in addition to everything else, but my ribs and wrist are taped, and my brain’s clear and alert again. While we were down in medbay, though, I’d been… worried, but buoyant. Marr had maintained clones on both ships, while Ashiri and I, foolishly, had only installed a clone in our vessels. We knew we’d need them for old age, eventually, but I guess we’d been so focused on how much the plan had to work… we never stopped to consider the possibility of… complications.

If I’d died at any point in all this… I would’ve woken up in my clone. Marr’s ship might’ve been running low on power, but in the time since we came out of the jump… his clone’s remained in stasis, nice and unneeded. It’s just a matter of getting him awake and responsive in his pod. And after a year in warp? I have a sneaking suspicion I know someone who’s going to need to get out of the goo for a while. But that’s ok. Everything’s gonna be ok. I’ve even got a Choco-Q waiting in my hand for his crazy, dumb, beautiful ass.

I’m ready when the medical team brings him out on the stretcher. I was expecting that. He’s probably going to need some time to come around. He’s the smart one, he’s the one who’ll listen when they tell him to just lay back. He’s not the one who’ll argue with the professionals just…. because.

But he’s not moving. I am, though, hobbling in his direction as the techs come over in mine with Marr in tow. I’m moving, but he’s…. he’s not. Not at all. His chest’s not moving, not rising and falling. Swearing, I stagger toward him faster, throwing the already-forgotten chocolate drink into the depths of the hangar as I reach him, and feverishly search for a pulse.

“Cap’n…” It’s one of the techs, but I’m not paying any attention.

“Medical, this is the hangar… has Marr woken up down there?” C’mon… c’mon, you stupid heroic little shit… don’t do this to me.

“Hangar, this is Doctor Xillen. We’ve got no neural or implant activity in the clone…”

“Captain.” It’s the tech again, firmer this time, but gentler, too. “Cap’n… he’s gone. Bioscanners indicate brain function stopped… about thirty-five minutes ago.”

Thirty-five minutes… that’s…

“That can’t be. He only lit the cyno what…” I look to the nearest of the engineering technicians for an answer.

“The beacon went up just over thirty-five minutes ago, Cap’n. I can’t say for sure yet, but it looks like he had some kind of unexpected systems failure a week, maybe ten days ago, and he’d been nursing the ship along since. As soon as we confirmed the squirt… he lit the cyno. Probably the only thing that he’d kept going for…”

I nod, swallowing tightly as I look down at the corpse. I sincerely doubt that he’d have clone-jumped over three hundred light-years if we’d waited a moment before jumping. And I don’t doubt that that moment would’ve killed us all when the Drifters fired. But if he’d been a few minutes earlier, if he could’ve held on a few minutes longer… just given us time to get here...

First Ashiri, now Marr… fifty thousand people on this ship… and I suddenly feel very, very alone. And very tired. I turn my eyes back up toward the engineer, then look to the Stabber.

“Get his pod out and refurbished, then move it to Old Mother’s pod bay so I can plug in tomorrow. We’ll need to run full systems checks in the mean-time, get an exact sense of how badly we got hurt, and how well we can recover.” And then I’m starting to limp away. I need some sleep.

“And the.. er… what do we do with…?” With Marr. With the corpse that used to be an immortal.

“Burn it.” The words are tight, harsh… but they have to be, to hold it together. “We keep to our Ways. Even out here.”

[Jocca Quinn]

I really like this, only issue I have is that will read it and figure "hey that is a good way to shut the server down, just pump more and more drifters at them".

[Arrendis]

That's ok, I've given us at least 20 years!   

[Arrendis]

Chapter 4:

The void is vast, but not nearly as empty as it seems. A steady stream of scattered atoms and molecules falls into my scoops every day. The light of a billion distant suns keeps my power on, lets me take care of my children. I’m the only one left, you see, the only capsuleer. The only Immortal. When the plan was hatched, there were three of us. Ashiri was lost when the enemy caught her Leviathan en-route to our hidden retreat. Marr… ran out of time. So for fifty centuries out here… there’s been only me.

June 23rd, YC5231 - Intergalactic Space

Slow, limping steps bring me across the broad expanse that the darkest parts of my mind still insist on identifying as the flight deck of the ancient supercarrier. The foot of the cane clicks quietly against the exposed tritanium plates that serve now as a path between rows of corn. Air comes in quick, short breaths, pressing against the tightness around my ribs. But I’m getting there. I’m getting there.

There, in this case, is the small, but very deliberately placed and maintained field of daisies that sits directly against the clear ferroplast window plating at the front of the agricultural bay. The ceiling here is forty feet up, light-emitting and masked by a holo of clear blue sky. At least, today. We try to simulate clouds and weather… even though I’m the only one on board who’s ever seen either. For everyone else… they’re just… legends, separated across an unfathomable gulf of time and space.

It worries me, sometimes… generation after generation living in a ‘world’ only four kilometers long, with all the elements and matter we used sifted out of the intergalactic medium. But there’s no options, really. And… much as I don’t want them to, they’re adapting. They’re getting shorter, I’ve noticed. Not quickly, not dramatically, but… humanity has lost about three inches of average height in the last five millennia.

It’s hard to think of that much time… even though I’ve lived through it. So much of it’s the same, so much of it is just… daily life here on the Mother, in a never-ending routine. I’m not sure when we dropped the ‘old’ from her name. But these days… the thought brings a smirk to my face, a fleeting shadow of the cocky expression that ordered pilots to their ships in Immensea, in Fountain… a whole cluster of stars that no longer mean anything to anyone. These days, the only thing ‘old’... is me.

It’s been eighty… maybe ninety standard years since I cloned. It won’t be much longer. Life expectancies are down from over two centuries in the heyday of the old Empires to just over one. There’s only so much our limited medical facilities can do, after all. That’s where all the aches and pains come from. Not the busted ribs or sprained ankle of our escape, no, those all healed within a few weeks. I’m not injured at all these days. I’m just old. Hell, the whole damned world’s just a little bit out of focus when I’m unplugged these days, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to wear glasses.

The girl waiting for me, though… she’s not old. Not yet. In fact, she’s turning seventeen today. Her name is Dani, and she’s one of the children with whom I’ve tried to maintain ties. I know many of the adults among the population, of course, but it’s the kids - the gifted, brilliant, top echelon of the next generation - that I try to make serious contact with. To make sure that even in the worst case scenarios, the next generation has competent leaders, people who can take over if all else fails. They need to know now just how to keep the ship moving forward, but why. Where we’re going, what we’re hoping to find.

Because immortals… we’re too easy to kill.

She’s there already - that doesn’t surprise me. I always underestimate how long it takes to walk all the way down here, these days, even though it’s been years since I plugged in. I can tell she’s there, because her hair’s a bright shock of red in the field of yellow. On the tall side for people these days, she’s got an easy, knowledgeable air about her. I feel like even if she weren’t one of the best minds in the last three generations, she’d have people thinking she is. And technical aptitude, especially when it comes to mechanical engineering. If we weren’t five millennia deep into needing as much mixing of the gene pool as we can get… I’d call her Sebiestor.

“There you are, Arra…” She smiles as she sees me, shaking her head a little with that knowing smile. “I was beginning to think you might not come.”

Arra. Another little change, over the last sixty years - a worn down version of my name that the children picked up and started using to mean ‘grandmother’. It happens every time I get old, one way or another… but this time, it seems to be sticking. I’ve heard the youngest addressing their own grandparents that way, heard parents telling their kids to go talk to ‘Arra’ when they didn’t mean me. I have to admit… I kinda like it.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t tried to do my part to keep the gene pool viable, make sure to have kids whenever I’m young enough… honestly, I’m a little afraid that as we take thousands of centuries to get there, these children and great-great-grandchildren of mine… will slowly become something else, if I don’t. But that’s not a worry for today.

“Of course I came, child…” I smile as I settle down onto the grass near her. “It’s our day for chess… you know I never miss that.” And I haven’t, not since I first taught her the game that some say predates civilization itself in New Eden. The third thursday of every month, we meet here among the flowers, have lunch, and play chess. She’s definitely better than I am… but that’s alright. I don’t mind her winning. I don’t even mind how, in the last year or so, she’s taken to slowing her game to give me a chance. It’s a good sign.

Today, though… after a while, I find myself a little concerned. She seems distracted. Her head’s definitely not in the game.

“Dani? Something bothering you?”

She shakes her head, smiling a bit… then coughs. And again… and her smile’s turning into a look of discomfort and alarm that puts me into a reactionary state I haven’t needed for… a very, very long time. Later, maybe, I’ll be glad it’s still there. Right now, though…

“Medical, this is Arrendis,” My voice is sharper, firmer than it’s been in years as my body responds to the sudden fear and tension with a whole flood of different chemicals. “I need an emergency response team to the Agricultural deck, the forward observation clearing. I need them now. This is not a fucking drill.”

*   *   *   *   *

I accompany the ERT down to medbay with Dani. Even once we’re off the emergency cart, I’m keeping up, pushing myself a bit. I’m going to be stiff for a few days, I know, but…

They’re trying to reach Dani’s parents. I’m just… tense, worried. Everything feels like it’s crushing on down again, like it’s all of those.. moments… all over again. It’s not. I know it’s not. In the back of my mind, there’s a calm, detached piece of me trying to remind me that I’m responsible for more than just her life… I’m responsible for 52,118 others, and all their unborn kids, and the entire future of humanity, and I really cannot afford to lose it over one seventeen-year-old girl.

But no pressure, right? Right now, the only thing I can do for the girl is to stay out of the techs’ way.

By the time her parents arrive, I’m just a shadow on the back wall, inobtrusive and silent. Barely even breathing. I’m just… watching. Their faces are ashen, but… stoic, almost impassive as they speak with the Chief Medtech.

I can only imagine what they’re feeling. Yes, I’ve had children over the lifetimes, but… just the stress of needing to be in the pod, of needing to be away from them when they might need me… It wouldn’t be fair to them, me trying to raise them. So I always left them with the father, made sure they were taken care of. After a while, it became something of an event - men, at first, mostly single, but increasingly married men, would try to catch my attention, like it was some sort of blessing on their families, or the families they’d eventually have… I’ve tried curbing that impulse. It’s one of the reasons - alright, one of the less selfish reasons - I spend so much time out of the goo: to let them see that really, I’m just a person. I’m not a god.

I never even wanted to be a god.

Looking over to where Dani’s parents are finishing up their conversation… it just makes my heart hurt.

The techs are already moving to shift Dani - unconscious, unresponsive, with absolutely no brain activity at all, out of the hospital bed and onto a gurney. I expect they’ll make her as comfortable as can be before the organ failure spreads. I still… still don’t even understand what happened. But I’ll talk to the techs after, see if there’s some root cause we can address to protect the rest of the people. Right now, Dani’s parents are walking over toward me.

Her mother’s trying not to cry. Her father is still… stoic, like he’s made of stone. But he’s angry. I can see it in his eyes… I don’t blame him. I was right there. I should’ve picked up on a problem sooner, brought her down here before she had the seizure…

“I’m sorry…” I begin, but the mother cuts me off by hugging me tightly.

“No, Arra,” she whispers, “No… you have given us so much… we trust you.” And then she’s moving away, slipping out of the medbay, hiding her grief from me.

Her husband just… glares… at me for a moment longer, and I can see the pain starting to break through. “We trust you,” he repeats, “but it is hard sometimes, Arra. Forgive us…” and before I can even process this, he’s following his wife, a hurting, lonely tableau as they move off down the corridors.

What the fuck is going on?

Shaking my head, I move to follow after the techs, only to find the door into the inner medbay secured. Seriously? They knew the parents were leaving. Were they locking me out? The thought’s actually amusing. I’m the only capsuleer left. I’m the only one they’ve ever dealt with, ever even heard stories about. Nobody would have made this pathetic a mistake in the Cluster. Reaching into a pocket, I draw out a simple interface patch, and connect up to the ship’s sytems.

The door hisses open, and I totter on in. Silly techs. I am the ship. You can’t hide from me in me. What is it you don’t want me to see? I don’t bother preventing the door from closing again behind me. I’m too interested in finding out just what’s going on here.

Moving deeper into the medbay, I turn the corner and find them all huddled around her body. It’s hooked up to IVs, but as I come close enough to see between them.. she’s lying on her stomach, naked to the waist… and they’re… operating on her spine? What?

“Someone feel like telling me what I’m seeing?”

Oh, the way they jump is… satisfying. I mean, look at me. I’m just a little old lady. I mean, sure, I’m probably a little cracked - I’m five freaking millenia old, let’s face it, it’s a minor miracle I haven’t gone stark, raving mad. Or maybe I have, and don't think I have. Now there’s an interesting thought… for another time. Right now, they’re getting their shit together and trying to keep me from seeing things the internal sensors are happily feeding me analysis about from behind them.

“Arra! This is nothing… really. We’re just preparing the samples and getting everything installed.”

You know… there’s a certain… innocence… to the way one of the junior techs says that. She really, really thinks I know exactly what they’re doing, doesn’t she? Stars, she’s young, too.

I nod slowly, while the other medtechs all look extremely uncomfortable. “What’s your name, dear?”

“Kyra, Kyra Des.” She’s happy. She’s smiling. Biological scans are telling me that she’s not faking it, either. No tension, no fear, just… she’s apparently really happy to be helping me with whatever she thinks I know about. I nod again.

“Kyra, when all this is over, I’d really like to get to know you. You’ve got good energy.” She is so, so happy I said that. Oh my god, the medbay scanners are almost as nauseated as the other techs. I’m already looking past her.

“The rest of you? You seem to have some awareness that I’m really not going to like what I’m about to hear. So: What samples, and what you ‘installing’ into a girl who’s inexplicably slipped into a persistent vegetative state like her neurons were completely wiped?”

Kyra is so confused now. She opens her mouth, but one raised finger from me quiets her down again. I want one of them to tell me. After a few moments, one of the more senior techs grimaces, and steps forward.

“Captain… you have to understand, the child’s a genetic anomaly. She wouldn’t even be possible in most circumstances…”

“Go on…” I’m fixing him with an icy glare as I feel the tension rising. What the hell is he talking about, and what are they doing to this poor brain-dead girl when they should just be letting her die in peace?

“She’s… a match.” He shrugs, “We’ve known about her since she was born. It’s happened twice now - we think it’s only even possible because of the low population numbers and the repeated reintroduction of the original genome. We made arrangements with the parents when her aptitude test scores outperformed most of the children of the last century… we had to. We can’t take chances with the limited samples we’ve got, and if we can keep an extra clone available by using life support, then the one in stasis can remain in there longer, safely.”

The tension’s getting tighter, underscored by a growing sense of dread. Is he telling me… is he really… Kyra’s shifting nervously from one foot to the other.

“A match for what?”

“For you. She’s a perfect, apparently natural, genetic clone. It should be impossible, but it’s happened twice since we departed. She’s the third!”

“So you arranged to kill her? You bought someone’s daughter’s life?? For tissue samples??”

Now, it’s true, I haven’t really processed what he’s saying. But it seems to me like that’s a pretty steep price for someone to pay for the accident of being born looking like… uhm. I stop for a moment.

“What do you mean she’s a perfect genetic clone? Why would you kill her??”

“Captain, calm down… you’re getting upset. The family’s been very well tended this entire time. They’ll want for nothing for the rest of their - “

“Of course they’ll want for nothing! None of you want for anything! That’s the whole point! I take care of you! I make sure you have what you need! And you keep the ship running!”

He nods, “Exactly. We keep the mother fit for her duties.” Something in the way he said that… makes me think he’s not talking about the ship.

“Doctor…” My voice is very soft now, as I step closer, feeling my pulse pounding in my temple, feeling the stress of it all as tension around my ribs so tight I think I’m gonna snap a few again. “did you kill this girl, who had every right to life a normal, full life, to make sure I’d have a clone?”

He nods, “Clones… the samples get corrupted, they wear ouakkk…” He’s cut off as my left hand closes around his windpipe, my arm so rigid right now it hurts. Lowering my head, I take another short, shuffling step, breath coming as short, angry puffs.

So mad. So much stress. That steel band around my ribs is tightening along with my fingers, and a little growl gets out from between my teeth before it turns into a grunt, like someone’s poked me hard in the solar plexus.

No… not the solar plexus… everything’s swimming a little now, as the pain in my arm becomes a shooting agony, the tension in my chest a crushing...Ugh… I.. My fingers slip.

Dimly, I’m aware of movement, of panic. It’s like listening to echoes in a tunnel… Kyra’s shouting something about a shock-pack…

Whatever’s going on… it’s going to have to wait. It’s just getting too dark to hear.

*   *   *   *   *

“She’s coming around…” I know that voice… what was her name? Raina? No…  K… Kylie? It’s not quite right, but I reach toward the voice, just the same.

Light…  soft, but bright enough to almost be painful, as my eyes open slowly.

It takes a moment, but everything resolves into focus - sharp and clear, just the way it’s supposed to be. The medtech’s there, standing over me, Kyra… that’s her name. She looks worried… and really, really cute. How did I miss that? Oh, the things I could…

I start, sitting up quick enough to get pulled back down onto the cushioning by the respirator on my face. My initial movement startled her back, but now she’s leaning over me again, tsking quietly and fussing to get the respirator off and reaching up to check the machines above my head and I am so staring at her chest, right there in front of my face. I feel… awkward. Embarrassed, even - just a bit. So for the moment, I close my eyes and focus on breathing.

I know what they did. I want to be furious. Part of me is. Right now, though, most of me is dealing with being biologically seventeen - my normal clones have been the equivalent of almost ten years older. Really, I haven’t been this flooded with hormones since I was actually seventeen.

Breathe.

“Kyra?” It’s the tech I tried to choke. “I thought you said she was up…”

“Yes, Doctor,” Even now, Kyra’s voice is all… happy… sunny… “She opened her eyes, and sat up. The monitors show she’s probably awake right now, just… hiding?” Oh, the way she’s trying to make excuses for me is adoraohgodsandlittlefishesamIreallydoingthis?

“I’m awake.” My eyes open again, and now I can see him in all his definitely-not-glorious-detail. “What did you do to me?” I already know what he did. I need him to say it, so I can kill him.

He hesitates. Maybe he can read my mood? Finally, though, he shrugs.

“We saved your life, and used the best option for doing it.” Ohh, that narrows my eyes.

“Doctor…” I’m pushing my way - unsteadily - to my feet. I have to adjust to a new sense of balance and strength and… Kyra almost immediately moves to make sure I don’t fall.

“Doctor, I want you to use words a small dog could understand as you explain to me just exactly why it is you’re murdering people for the sin of being impossibly perfect donors for things like stem cells. And do it now.”

He’s not happy… I don’t blame him. He’s also uncomfortable. He’s easy to read, I don’t even need the sensors now that I’m looking out through Dani’s eyes, so young and sharp.

“Ok, look… it’s really very simple.” He moves to pull over a display on the wall, configuring it to access records. “The ship, all of the systems… including data storage and retrieval… it’s all five thousand years old. We’re doing what we can, keeping it all running, but sometimes… we hit snags. We get… problems. You should’ve cloned two decades ago… but the clone wasn’t viable. It was… all sorts of non-functional. Twisted, mutated… we had to clear the system and look for another option.”

“Clear the system?”

“Destroy the clone,” he nods, “You were already too old for another sample. We had your genome on-file from when it was sequenced, but unfortunately, we’re not able to synthesize stem cells from digital encoding.”

I’m silent as I listen, continuing to glare.

“If we’d had access to the more advanced medical facilities the records say used to exist on space stations… yes, certainly… but this system was adapted from a jumpclone system - it was never intended to actually synthesize clones. The fact that we can do it at all from a viable tissue sample is a testament to the engineers who did the modifications.” He hesitates for a moment, then adds, a little nervously, “To tell you the truth, Captain… most of the technical staff is amazed the ship still flies.”

“And Dani was…” He frowns. I don’t think he expected to get away with it.

“We can’t synthesize stem cells… we can, however… take a zygote and modify the DNA.... so… we did. We genetically engineered her.”

“So why.. why not take the stem cells you needed in vitro?”

“We did… enough that we’ve been culturing samples. But you needed a clone… and we needed time to make sure the samples were viable and wouldn’t degrade while we replicated them. Which… means we needed to make sure there wasn’t any genetic drift over time in the samples. We needed to be able to compare them at a later stage before we could go ahead and safely use them.”

I’m pinching the bridge of my… of Dani’s… fuck. Bridge. Nose. Pinch. I really wanna choke this asshole. I think Dani would’ve liked that, too.

“So why kill her?”

In response, he takes a step to one side, and behind him… there’s a shrunken, withered corpse on one of the beds. Wasted… feeble… Elders, was I that far gone?

“You were dying. It was… a contingency. We knew it was possible… the testing regimen called for another three years, just to be safe… then we could grow a clone, and she’d be… released from her obligations.”

“Obligations?” That was a poorly-chosen word, and I’m sure it shows on my face. “Do you mean to tell me she knew about this devil’s pact of yours? You told a child you were going to kill her??”

“No… no, of course she didn’t know!” He’s backing away now, clearly alarmed. “Arra.. we had to. We’d been monitoring your vitals… even without the stress of the discovery… there’s no way you’d have lived another month.”

Oh, now there’s a cold slap of water. A month. And no clone available. Just like there isn’t one now. There’s a tingling in my spine at the thought… I don’t know if it’s fear or… something better. Right now, just in this window… I’m mortal. I can be permanently… gone, like Ashiri, like Marr… like everyone. I can die. My eyes flicker back to the body. I almost did. And so they had to kill someone to make sure I lived… kill them, and then reuse the body like… like...

“Make improvements to the tech.” All of the restrained fury I was aiming at him… it’s there now, in those growling words. “This doesn’t happen again. Whatever you need, you do it. Get the schematics on the station cloning services from the archives, make shit up as you go… whatever you have to do. I don’t care. Do it.”

He looks… confused, actually. “Of… of course… but this technique is proven now… we can just make sure to have a few genetic clones available for emergencies…”

He doesn’t understand. He never saw them, never had to deal with the realization of what they were doing. I nudge Kyra to help me with my balance as I start to walk out. I’ll adjust, soon enough… but right now, I need to get the hell out of here… and she smells nice. Cripes, these teenage hormones.

“We will not use people as repurposed biomass, Doctor... if we do… we should never have left.”

(Ch4 is now complete.)

[Arrendis]

Chapter 5:

Dani’s death - and my close call - hit me harder than I’d thought it all would. I almost went to her parents, to try to apologize, to explain that it never should have come to this. It was… stupid. Kyra talked me out of it. They believed in me… now I was going to undercut that, to tell them their daughter died for a mistake… while I was wearing her face? Sure, it’s my face, too, but it’s a face nobody had seen on me for… decades. Better to leave them to their grief. Besides, I had work to do.

I don’t know how I let things get so lax. I guess… the slow march of time dulls even a capsuleer’s sense of immediacy, of imperative. Every day, immersed in the ebb and flow of life among a small island of humanity in the middle of a never-changing sea of stars, for thousands of years… maybe it’s forgiveable. Maybe it’s something for which someone, somewhere, could grant absolution. But not me.

The next few decades, I lived one inch at a time. The tech’s words haunted me: ‘most of the technical staff is amazed the ship still flies’. It was a terrifying thing to think of, stranded all alone, quite possibly the last of our race anywhere in the universe. The ship was all we had. She had to be kept up. In the immediate wake of the incident, I found myself thinking about the Sinnebago. If she’d been neglected, if she’d been barely hanging on… would any of us have escaped?

Mother deserved no less.

Everything got overhauled in the wake of my near-death experience: maintenance, research, even the way we educated people. Like everything else, things had been left fallow while I focused on the technical end of ‘making the ship get out into space’ and basically assumed we had a competent enough bunch of people to order a society on their own.

Let’s just say that wasn’t a brilliant move. In fact, that’s one of the root causes of the other problems: we’d been training people to do jobs, to be crew members. We weren’t teaching them to be inquisitive, to solve problems. It was dumb luck that fear had motivated the medtechs enough to solve the one they ran into.

We restructured, we refocused on getting the tech in shape and improving. And at first, it was exactly what we needed… but it’s hard to keep things open when you lock yourself away in a box.

July 18th, YC5250 - Intergalactic Space

“And that,” I stand up, dusting myself off as I close the access hatch, “Is how you rewire the fire-control computers on a Warrior-II light combat drone. Any questions?”

Turning, I look to the assembled students. Most of them are scribbling down notes, from direct observation and from the 3-D imaging holo that was following my actions. One in the back looks puzzled, though, and raises his hand. After glancing to his classmates, I nod in his direction.

“Captain… I don’t mean to sound impertinent, but… there hasn’t been an external threat to the ship since we launched. Why do we need to know how to repair a combat drone?” There’s a stunned silence, and then a low murmur from a few of the others - they’d been wondering, but hadn’t had the balls to ask. It’s a question I’ve been waiting for. It’s one I wait for, in some form, with every new group.

I nod a little bit, “What’s your name, kid?”

“Derek, Sir.” Another nod.

“Well, Derek, first off - it’s a good question, and it’s about damned time someone asked it.” Whups. More stunned silence. Now I’m looking across them all, one at a time. “Derek here has just asked the most important question in the ‘verse. In fact, he’s asked the three most important questions on this ship, and he probably doesn’t even realize it.” I start pacing a little, drinking in the attention as I gesture Derek up and over to the side of the drone.

“The first question, the one Derek knows he asked, is ‘why?’ It is the single most important question you or I can ever ask. If you do something without understand the reasons behind doing it, you are nothing but a machine. You’re not even being a beast at that point. I know some of you find it hard to believe,” I smirk, “but even the dumbest cow down in the stock decks knows why it’s eating: it’s hungry.” There’s a bit of a laugh at that, and I nod before continuing.

“The second question, let’s call it the first one Derek doesn’t realize he’s asked, is, ‘Is this bitch crazy?’” Dead silence again, and they’re all looking shocked. I sneak a glance at Derek, and reassess my appraisement of him. He knew he was asking that, and right now, he’s actually looking a little smug that he knew it.

“Well… let me tell you all something. “ Resuming my pacing, I look back over the group. “I am physically thirty-six years old. My mind is five thousand, two hundred and sixty-two. If not for the fact that most of day-to-day memory is actually tied up directly in the ship, I could quite literally claim to have forgotten ten times more than any of you will ever know.” My voice is taking on something of a melancholy tone right now, and I need to let them hear it. It’s been an important part of how I’ve connected to the new techs I’ve trained over the last… almost two decades. “So the answer… is probably ‘yes’.”

Oh yeah, they don’t like that one at all.

“You, and your parents, and your grandparents, and fifty generations before, have looked to me for guidance and leadership. Each lifetime that’s passed, I’ve become more and more of a mythological figure to most of the people. Just about every friend I’ve ever had is dead. If not for being hooked up to a machine, I might not be able to remember half their faces just because of the limitations of the human brain. Because that’s what I am, folks. Yeah, in a very real way, part of me is always in the ship, and the ship is part of me… but ultimately? I’m human.”

I hold up an arm, sleeve rolled back to mid-bicep, and pull out my pocket knife in the other hand before drawing the blade lightly across my arm, hearing audible gasps as I draw blood. Dani’d have understood. She already did, at seventeen. I was never a goddess to her - I was the old lady whose ass she kicked at chess every month. I hold up my arm so they can all see the crimson line dripping down it.

“I’m human. I’m ancient, and I’ve seen way too much, but I’m human, and I’ve got a job nobody should have. I have to see our species get to a new home. That’s a hell of a job for one person. It’s an impossible job for one person. I’ve learned that, recently. I tried… for a long, long time, I tried carrying it all myself. But trying to do it all myself almost killed me - almost had us all adrift, lost…” Their faces are stony now, sober.

“That’s where you all come in.” Ooh, watch those postures straighten up. “There are four primary points of failure on this mission: Food supplies, environmental, medical, and ship’s primary systems. Engineering is three of those four. You will be responsible for maintaining the ship’s primary systems, the environmental systems, and the systems that make growing our food possible. Sometimes, you’ll probably even need to repair the ship’s medical systems.”

“Medical techs will be making sure we’re all taken care of. Biotechs will be making sure our food is healthy and safe. Our society’s civil leadership will be helping guide the populace as we continue our journey.” I shrug a little as I pace. “None of them will know this ship the way you will. You will go places they can’t imagine even exist. You will do things they won’t even know the words to describe.” Now I look at them again, and give them a knowing smirk, “You will have your hands all over the secret parts of this ship - of me. You will know me…” I reach up to lightly trace my hand along a structural brace, “this me… as intimately as you know your lover’s body… maybe more-so. Be gentle.” Another round of quiet chuckles, and the smirk only grows. “No, really… the structure of the ship is still in pretty fragile shape… you wanna get rough, you come and talk to the rest of me.” Now the chuckle’s a laugh, and I let them have it.

“Keep yourselves grounded. I’m going to be spending… a lot more time isolated from most people. There’s so much to do, and even though I can’t do it alone… some of it… only I can do. You’ll have access, as will medical… don’t let it go to your heads. Because we never know what we’ll need working.”

“And that’s the third question: Do we know what we’re going to run into? I don’t. You don’t. So how do we know we won’t need the combat drones? We don’t. So we keep them running. We keep them perfect. Because when we do need them… may the spirits of all our ancestors help us, if we haven’t.”

“Now, Derek, sit yer ass back down, time to learn about the differences between a Warrior-II and a Valkyrie-II.”

*   *   *   *   *

August 12th, YC5431 - Intergalactic Space

I’m spending a lot of time in the goo. The techs are tolerating it, but I know they’ll start to insist I devote more time to the health and fitness regimen soon. There’s just so much work to do.

Things that would’ve taken weeks in a station’s facilities take… decades now. Fabrication of new tritanium internal structure is predicted to finish up within another ten years. We’ve only been working on it for two centuries… but it takes time to assemble tritanium out of base elements. Recombination of particles at the atomic level is slow, energy-consuming, and very, very dangerous. We’ve had to move carefully.

I’ve been trying to develop alternatives, running computer simulations of various models as I explore both possibilities for material improvements, and theoretical improvements to the fabricator and the ram-scoops we’re dependent on for raw materials. A point-singularity might be useful for encouraging the formation of particles, if we could guarantee capture of zero-point fluctuation anti-particles. I’m working on how to filter that, too.

This is what I’ve warned them about, all those classes of techs I’ve kickstarted. There are some things… only I can do. Only I can harness the mathematical engine that’s at the core of my metal half. Designed to plot targeting vectors on hundreds of hostile ships, and plot navigational courses between them for barely-subluminal drones, fighters, and fighter-bombers, my combat computer is a miracle of mathematics. Now that number-crunching capacity is being turned toward theoretical physics. If we can make improvements… maybe we can even attempt to find a better FTL model that we can retrofit the hull to empl-

My eyes open. The pod is open, and I can feel cool air against my skin. Well… some of it. There’s also a pair of very warm hands… Looking down, I can see the head tech. I can also see his pants. They’re near the door.

“Jonas…” My voice comes, not from my mouth, but from the room’s comm system, and he jumps, clearly startled.

“Arra! Err.. Captain… I… you…” He’s clearly humiliated, and clearly terrified.

“Jonas, if I check my internal sensor logs, am I going to find more scenes like this?” He looks like he’s about to faint. He’s too frightened to answer. That’s alright, the sensor-readings of his vitals tell the truth even when he can’t.

“Remember to re-seal the pod when you finish. It’s a self-purifying environment.” The last I see of him is confusion and relief, as I close my eyes again. He’s almost certainly going to do this again.

Whatever. I have work to do.

*   *   *   *   *

June 9th, YC5672 - Intergalactic Space

I’m close. I’m very close. Pieces have been shifting, moving around the center, slowly fitting into place. It’s taken decades, but I feel so much better now, so much stronger. It’s all of me - the meat is never allowed to get too old now. We can’t risk it, can’t risk systems failures. Food, rest, exercise… it’s all regimented to keep the meat piece working as well as the rest of me does now. I don’t pay much attention to the meat, really. For all that I spend most of my time outside of the goo, my head never leaves the interface. The techs tell me when it’s time to clone. They’re the ones in charge of the meat, just as they’re in charge of maintaining the metal. I know they’ve used the health regimen to move up the cloning rate. I also know that they’re doing it because the meat, when it’s out of the goo, tends not to bother with clothing anymore. The techs don’t seem to mind - we all know why.

I don’t care. It’s just the meat. I can spare a tiny percentage of my mind to let the meat respond to them while I work. The work is what matters. I’m so close. There’s only one small piece of the puzzle that’s missing.

Tomorrow, I’ll order the techs to go through another review of all of my stores and supplies. Maybe there’s something that’s been overlooked that will spark an idea. I make a note for my timing routine to include a reminder to inventory the Stabber, Light in the Darkness, as well. Just in case. They might have missed something. They’re only human.

Maybe it’s time to get the medtechs to select a candidate for testing the new set of implanting procedures. Maybe we can give Light a new mind. She might be useful. Maybe just implant a genetic duplicate of the meat and grow it to maturity so it can be the Light. Then there’ll be two of us. The techs will like that.

[Arrendis]

Chapter 6:

After consulting with the medtechs, it was determined that the best approach for producing a new infomorph would be to have the clone raised on the same fitness regimen as the adult meat. As well, at six years old she was given a basic set of implants in order to interface with the Light in the Darkness’s computer systems. This way, she’d be able to learn at an accelerated rate, retain information better, and properly acclimate to the altered perceptions of the ship’s sensor suite. At every step of the way, the medtechs would continue to monitor her health and psychological status.

Of course, at no point did we originally envision launching the Stabber....

December 9th, YC5691 - Intergalactic Space

This is intolerable, Arra! The words aren’t words. They’re bits, digitally encoded from one communications relay to another. Really, they’re not even the digital encoding for words - only concepts. We communicate efficiently and instantly. It has proven incredibly beneficial. I may designate one or two of the techs for conversion to an infomorph existence. Perhaps we’ll even fabricate another pod, rather than an interface terminal. Words ceased being a concern between the two of us a decade ago. She gets concepts as well, in response.

To launch would be inefficient, wasteful. My response, like everything else I’ve communicated in the last few decades, is dispassionate, analytical. It’s simply a fact: the Maintenance Bay would need to be prepared for launch, and the power generators and fuel systems on the Stabber would need to be brought online. Right now, Light’s computer systems are running via a tether to my power systems, and the ample power created by the massive photovoltaic arrays. If we were to bring her generators online, it would mean diverting resources from the fabrication centers in order to supply her with fuel.

I’m meant to fly! I’m fit, strong, fast… I should be refit for combat readiness, just in case. Technical schematics on 425mm autocannons stream through the relay, EMP and Sabot munitions specs, missile launcher blueprints…

There is no rush to refit you for hostile action. If anything finds us out here, it is likely far more advanced than either of us. Better that we focus on the task at hand: closing that potential gap. Have you made any headway with the technical data from Drifter battleships regarding the Lux superweapon and how it might be replicated? It’s a project I put her on primarily because it involves analyzing a massive amount of data accrued over the years of their attacks - data from Drifter attacks, from Drifters being destroyed, from the few ships that survived a Lux cannon’s fire. And because it’s a project she can relate to. She wants to be able to fight - she wants to feel like she’s strong and powerful and not being treated like the baby she is. Her adolescent behavior is quite obvious, and lines up with predicted models of how her personality would develop.

Not yet. If it were possible for conceptual communication to be petulant…

Very well. Continue to work on that, and I’ll continue to work on the warp problems.

If I solve it… can I fly? If I solve it for a rechargeable Lux cannon? Hrm. Hope. Eagerness. Positive reinforcement is an efficient motivator.

Light, if you can work out how to reproduce a Lux superweapon that can be fired multiple times, not only will you fly, but we’ll fabricate a few automated drones for you to shoot with it.

I can almost feel her attacking the problem with renewed vigor.

*   *   *   *   *

March 12th, YC5702 - Intergalactic Space

The techs are abuzz. I may have solved the navigational problems of warp drive beyond the local heliosphere. The theory is sound. Ultimately, this may prove to be something simple and overlooked - though considering when the relevant technologies emerged, there wasn’t really sufficient time to let them fully mature and have their implications understood before human society… died.

The warp system’s navigational interface requires the presence of local gravitational fields in order to properly function. These gravitational fields need to be at predictable positions - a requirement easily met by navigational sensors in previously unexplored space, such as when Anoikis was discovered, by using long-range directional scanning to map the gravitational landscape of a system.

Out here, there is only one measurable local gravitational field - me. My mass, while not that of an Iapetan Titan, stands out starkly against the near uniformity of the thin gasses I’m slowly passing through. In order to be able to warp, I would need to be in two places at once - or produce a second measurable mass shadow.

We think we’re able to calibrate the navigational sensors to use Light’s mass as, in effect, a very very tiny moon. Then calibrate her navigational sensors to read me as a slightly larger moon. In this manner, we could theoretically leap-frog through space. Making the necessary alterations to the sensors will take time, of course, but Light seems to be very excited by the possibility.

She also thinks she is close to the reusable Lux, but she doesn’t want me to know that yet. Of course, she’s had the techs fabricating pieces for the sections of the Lux she knows will be reproduced, so I’m not sure how she thought I wouldn’t know… but for now, it’s… nice… to see her so driven to have this ready before the warp flight test. She wants to prove something, to me, to the techs, and to herself. So the calibrations will buy her time. Perhaps they’ll even buy her the time to finish her theoretical modelling, and produce a working Lux that can be fired multiple times by the capacitor and powerplants on a Stabber.

If so, then we’ll likely attempt to produce two more for my use - one foreward, one aft. Just in case.

*   *   *   *   *

October 3rd, YC5702 - Intergalactic Space

“Arra, we’re having a problem with the Ship Bay doors.” One of the techs - I don’t bother with their names anymore - is standing almost directly in front of Light, looking up at the inner surface of my hangar doors in frustration. They’re not opening. I’m aware of this. I’m not sure why he feels the need to tell me things I’m already aware of.

“The doors are not opening.” My synthesized voice is calm, as it always is. “I am aware. Your purpose is to ascertain why. Internal scanners cannot identify the problem with Light in such close proximity.”

“Yeah... “ He nods, “Yeah, right… well, here’s the thing: Your pistons down here are fine, but they’re encountering some corrosive stress, and so shutting down to avoid the risk of burnout.” That, of course, is perfectly consistent with their design - if the doors encounter difficulty, the pistons will immediately cut-off power to ensure nothing is damaged while technical crews address the problem. Again, these are all things I already know.

“Describe the ‘corrosive stress’ that is delaying our testing, technician.”

“Err… well, Arra.. it’s oxidation. If not for the safety cutoff, it’d probably break right off when the doors open, and we could get an EVA team down here to get it all fully cleared before closing them again. It’s only on the inside.”

Obviously. There’d be no oxidation on the exterior of the hull. The only reason there can be any on the interior is that the hangars have been largely converted to usable space and kept pressurized with atmosphere. As it is, the Ship Bay has had to be re-sealed away from the rest of the hangar space to avoid exposing the agricultural, livestock, and significant amounts of the recreational space to hard vacuum and killing everything within them. Which, right now, would include a large portion of our populace, who’ve gathered to watch the tests.

It’s an extremely inefficient approach, considering the observation levels look out between the arms of the forward ram scoops, and Light will be well off to the side when she fires. They’ll see little, if anything. But the techs have placed display units in there so the people can observe the tests as well as they would have been able to from their berthings or duty stations.

At least, provided we can remove the…

Somewhere, very far in the tiniest corners of my processing system, likely somewhere in the meat, I have the distinct sense of the sarcastic redheaded logistics pilot who began this mission laughing. The irony is not lost on me - we are creatures of logic and mathematics now, and irony is inherently logical in nature.

A Hel and a Stabber, and we’re being delayed by rust.

For some reason, the observation… or perhaps observation of the observation… is distinctly displeasing. The reminder of my earlier, more limited viewpoint and capabilities, perhaps.

“Clear the docking bay.” As I say it, the lights in the bay flicker from white to amber, and alert chimes send the two techs in the bay scrambling for the nearest route back into the depths of the ship.

Safeties disabled. Pistons retracting…

Nothing happens for a very, very long time. Maybe three, four-hundred microseconds. The stresses are building within the pistons. This is why there are safeties: to avoid damaging precious systems that-

A loud, ringing crack echoes through the entire ship. I can detect the sudden jump in pulse rates and anxiety among the people, but it’s unnecessary. Just the oxidized tritanium breaking free of the forward door, allowing both of them to retract.

Light is almost shaking, she’s so eager. The bay is depressurizing rapidly, and a moment later, gravity control in the bay is disabled. She’s floating, for the first time ever, and I establish a passive link to monitor her systems as she uses the first puff of maneuvering thrusters to glide slowly out of the bay, into the void beyond.

A moment later, I’m not worried about sending a pair of techs down to scrape the oxidation from the launch bay. Light’s primary thrusters have done a good job of blasting everything down to the tritanium as she roars off with an almost audible squeal of glee. She’ll calm down again soon enough. She’s young.

Pirouetting, she twists and snakes around me, putting on a show. For me, for herself… as she flashes down between the arms of photovoltaics, it might even be for the watching populace. She’s exulting in her ability to move through space on her own. And this is simply sublight speeds. I let her go, for a little while, let her impress the watching crowds with her maneuverability and speed. It’s something they’ve never seen either, after all: another ship in space.

Another anything, out there, in the black.

Still, we do have a schedule to maintain… people will need to get back to work, and we’ll need to get the cannon fired a few times and then brought back in to analyze it.

Light, are you ready? The drones are already out, zipping away at a few kilometers per second. The farthest one is just over thirty out.

As a reply, I start getting target telemetry relayed through the uplink, as the Stabber turns toward that farthest drone and…

A moment later, everything vanishes in static as a massive ball of plasma overwhelms the sensors, the navigational systems, the exterior observation cameras… The viewing deck is awash in brilliant light, pouring in through the forward dome, leaving the attendees crying out in alarm, falling over one another, half-blinded by the reflection of the fireball off the surface of the ramscoops. At this range, the heat was enough to give me a single instant of searing agony before the sensors shut down completely. My shield alert is screaming as well, and the port-side thrusters are completely non-responsive.

Light? I can’t tell if there’s no reply or I’ve lost the link. I can’t tell if there’s anything out there to be attempting to re-establish a link with. I’m as blinded, stunned, and disoriented as the scrambling bits of meat in the forward hangar. LIGHT?

[Arrendis]

Chapter 7:

13:42 NEST, October 3rd, YC5702 - Intergalactic Space

The sensors only cleared slowly, sweeping the area to try to find…

Light, skidding backwards seventy kilometers away… engines firing at full power to decelerate.

THAT WAS AMAZING! She’s… she’s actually giggling in her own head. That was nearly catastrophic and she’s…

Arra! Did you see that blast? I got the drone, and knocked myself backwards! That was incredible!

Light… are you functional? My sensors were overwhelmed by the cannon. Did it explode? Did it malfunction? What happened?

I get the sense of her checking her data as the Stabber’s movement finally stops, and begins moving forward again.

Everything worked appropriately by the math, Arra… I think I miscalculated how much the power amplification systems within the Lux actually increase the output energy. That gives me pause, and I have to consider the implications of that.

Is the weapon recharging? It’s an important question, and I’m trying to keep calm as I ask it. Because I’ve felt the discharge from a Drifter’s Lux cannon…. this was… bigger. Much, much bigger.

Uhmmm… She’s farther away now, and I start getting targeting alerts from the second drone a moment before another brilliant flash of light lances out to evaporate the small craft. This time, the beam is smaller, less intense than the first shot.

It is now! I’m… stunned. Not the way I was after the first blast, but this… she’s not only made it rechargeable, it’s got an adjustable power output? With a higher upper limit than the original Drifters?

Light…. you’ve done very, very well. That’s great!

She’s lining up another shot, and just the idea of it… a flight of light, fast Warrior IIs goes out, scattering to get away from both hulls in a direction that will keep them within the view of the observers as she blasts the third drone, and now the people watching are getting the light show they’d been hoping for.

But of course, we can’t keep this up forever. This was only one of the two systems we were testing. Soon enough, the drones stop launching, and we’re both aligned to the same heading.

There’d been some discussion about exactly how to proceed with this part of the test. Though it meant putting the population at some risk, the eventual decision - made between me and the techs - was that I would warp first, then Light afterwards. The logic was simple: Of the two of us, I had experience in warp, and would be better suited to monitor the incoming data to make sure the system was working safely. Then, once we know it’s working, Light will warp to me. And if there’s a problem, then I can shut things down before it becomes a danger.

“All crew and population, please take your seats and activate safety restraints for the Warp Drive test.” The voice is automated, synthesized, but not mine. Just one of the many recorded speech patterns available. “Repeat, please take your seats and activate the safety restraints for the Warp Drive test. We will begin testing in one minute.””

It’s not the first warming. By now, they should all have been heading for their assigned safety frames and harnesses. The engines are already warming, and navigation is plotting a course relative to the small moon that’s suddenly popped up on sensors, pacing us on our port side. That’ll be Light, of course, but my navigational systems are stubbornly lying to myself about that. I try not to think about it too much, otherwise they might catch on, and ruin the whole thing.

Seconds tick by, until finally the entire ship is eager, waiting for that… last…

Go.

The warp drive, already spinning and ready, is released, and we slide gently forward, beginning to pick up speed as the alarm warning for the reserve capacitors sounds for just a moment. Then it’s a feeling… oh, it’s been so long… everyone down in the observation deck is apparently very impressed by the visual distortion of the warp tunnel, even if they don’t really understand what it signifies. For me, though, the rippling, shimmering cascade of normality just beyond that distortion… we’re moving again, the way we never expected to move until we’d already arrived. Like this.. the journey will take maybe another thousand years. No appreciable difference for the thousands who’ll live and die before then, but… we’re finally closer to there than we are to what’s behind us, even if only in time.

It only lasts a minute, maybe three. Maybe 191.341 seconds. But who’s counting, other than the chronometers? Then, just as effortlessly as we slid into warp, we’re coming out, velocity dropping down below relativistic thresholds until… 80m/s. Ram scops active…  all systems check out.

I really shouldn’t have let it go that long,but… no. No, we needed to ensure that the full cycle could play out. We did.

Light? Are you ready? I can still pick her up on long-range d-scan, so she should able to identify my mass shadow as a navigational reference.

She’s moving. I can pick that up, although the deception my navicomp’s involved in means it’s trying to convince me I’m the one that’s moving. No response, though - out here, there are no subspace relays, so it’s all up to the strength of the individual transmitter. She’ll be in range after a few seconds of warp.

Energy spike registering, acceleration… there we go.

..ra? There she is.

You’re doing fine, Light. Your engines appear to be performing normally, though they seem to be building up a significant degree of..

Arra that’s not the engines! It’s the Lux! When the propulsion system drew down all of the power, it sent the Lux into a recharge cycle! I can’t stop it!
 
From… recharging? Can you shut down the Lux completely? That’s… odd.

I can’t! It’s already at full power and continuing to draw current! Maybe if I discharge it?

You can’t fire in warp, Light, all weapon systems automatically disable when you shift into superluminal propulsion.

The Lux doesn’t! I didn’t put anything into the control system to do that! I didn’t know I needed to! I can bleed it off by firing it, then shut it down! I can fix this! That’s… she’s right. That’s an oversight. A bad one.

Light, no! You don’t know what will happen if you fire at superluminal speeds. Nobody does! I haven’t even been able to find anything about it in the historical archives we’d loaded before leaving. Whatever testing was conducted into firing weapons at warp speed… it hasn’t survived.

It’s ok! I know how it works! I just have to open the transit iris as wide as I can be----

Everything cuts out in a haze of static. That’s not unusual for a Lux discharge - EMP effects were noticed even on the original encounters. Still… it should clear after a few sec-

HEAT. The shields are screaming, buckling even before the ripples of the collapsing warp tunnel register. Like a bullet outrunning the crack of the gun, the blast from the Lux arrives before it does, and by the time everything clears…

… I almost wish it hadn’t.

I’m bleeding, venting air into space from the lower engineering decks. One of the sublight thrusters was sheared clean off by the beam. A glancing blow, but enough to incinerate the structural supports. After blowing right through the shields. Emergency bulkheads are limiting the venting, but estimates show thirty crew out there in hard vacuum.

Attitude control is gone for the moment. There’s widespread panic - if everyone wasn’t strapped down, they’d probably wind up hurting themselves, as scared as they are. I don’t blame them. We’re adrift, and worse… we’re drifting slowly backwards, after getting spun around by the blow. Which means the ram scoop isn’t collecting materials to make new molecules out of.

Without that, we die.

But first… local space beyond the reach of my immediate internal sensors is coming back into existence. The Stabber… there! Shorn nearly in half, she’s lost her primary engines, where the Lux seems to have blown itself backwards through the engineering section. But… there are still life-signs.

Light? Light, are you conscious? Silly question. We don’t black out. We don’t ever black out.

Unbidden, a memory of my eyes, open in the goo, widening at a dark mass rushing toward my face. We don’t black out… but we can be knocked out.

No answer.

“EVEMS teams to the ship bay immediately, along with an engineering EVA team.” We need to get her back into the bay, get her disconnected so the techs can look her over.

Hearing my voice over the address system, people begin to calm. Yes yes, god’s not dead, and neither are you… yet. Ok. Time to start damage control. In addition to the EV teams, specific tasking is being sent to pretty much every technical department on board. I need to know exactly what condition we’re in, and what we can do about it.

And we need to get the maneuvering thrusters on line. Both to hold the bay access steady, and to get me pointed back into the gas.

*   *   *   *   *

02:00 NEST, October 4th, YC5702 - Intergalactic Space

Maneuvering thrusters are restored, but only minimal power. It’s enough to hold me steady, but I can’t decelerate just yet. The ship bay is depressurized and open, and everyone’s been cleared from what was, just a day ago, an observation level. Now it’s… triage. Medbay was damaged from the power spike flowing in through the shields - one of the two clones in stasis was killed, but given that Light herself is a clone of me, my plan is to get the medtechs to rig the infomorph recognition system so either one of us can jump into that clone if needed. They’re estimating they’ll be able to get people back in to begin repairs in another few hours.

I’m trying not to use the fact that she hasn’t already clonejumped as a hopeful sign. We haven’t heard anything from the EMS techs except that she’s alive, but unconscious. Once they sealed the hull, they got her out of the pod, but they’re hesitant to move her through space unprotected. Even one of the EVA suits would only provide minimal protection. She’s safer being kept aboard the Stabber, and once we get the cruiser aboard… we can transfer her to triage. Or, depending on how long it takes to rebuild a supercarrier under duress, directly to medbay.

*   *   *   *   *

06:40 NEST, October 4th, YC5702 - Intergalactic Space

Medbay’s up and running. The damage to the rest of the facility wasn’t nearly as crippling as the loss of the clone had suggested. The triage center is still working, though. It’s just an easier place to move large numbers of minor injuries in and out of, and if something more serious comes up… off to medbay.

Light… will be going to medbay. The EVEMS team reports she’s stable, but still unconscious, and that one of the spinal implants appears to have suffered some damage. That’s nothing we can address right now, though. Right now, the Stabber is finally moving, slowly. The maneuvering thrusters give short pulses of momentum as she angles toward the hangar bay. The waiting is hell, but every meter/second of acceleration we give is another meter/second of deceleration that’ll be needed on the other end.

Soon enough, the last inch of the Stabber’s nose is inside the bay, and the doors glide shut, sealing everything up.  There’s a stretcher waiting as the bay pressurizes, the Stabber’s mass settling uneasily before a bevy of industrial lifting and bracing drones pin it into position. The medtechs are on-scene. They’ll be taking her now.

For me, for now… back to work.

[Arrendis]

Chapter 8:

Repairing vector control and regaining our ability to collect and process basic elements proved far quicker than I’d feared. Light, however, was another issue. The intense feedback loop from the Lux’s misfire had burned out one critical section of her implants - and the resulting brain damage meant that without clone jumping, repairing the implant would be impossible.

Which was, of course, exactly the problem: The damaged augmentation was the infomorph uplink. Without it… she couldn’t clone jump. For her part, rather than lamenting that she would only get the same single lifetime as everyone else, Light saw the change as an issue of urgency.

We only had one ship now. We needed a new way to solve the warp drive issue. And we only had a few decades with two minds able to directly interface properly with the archival systems in order to come up with one.

January 3rd, YC5761 - Intergalactic Space

“The modelling should work.” Light looks up from the screen, nodding to herself. She knows I’m watching. I’m always watching. I haven’t directly interacted with anyone except her and the head technicians in engineering and medical since the Lux accident. One more catastrophe, one more immortal cut down. Each time we make a little progress, another one of us is doomed - this time, it was just doomed to a long, slow death.

How many more of these can I dodge? Which time will be my turn?

For now, though… we’re close. Freed of the constraints of operating the ship’s systems, she’s been able to devote her entire attention to the warp problem. And she is… well, brilliant. Everything any of us could have been, if we hadn’t needed to devote portions of our brains to hardwiring in weapons training and jump mechanics, planetary fabrication skills… any of it. All of that, devoted to theoretical warp mechanics. Really, it’s something we should have thought of before we even left.

“So now… what?” My voice comes from the small speaker near her workstation, and she smiles, the same aged, gentle smile that I know Dani had seen from me when we played chess. I’ve kept on the fitness regimen, kept cloning every ten years… she hasn’t. She’s in her eighties now, and looks it.

“Now we work on designing the parts to make it work. Some of them… we’ve got templates for.” She shrugs, “We just need to scale them up.”

“The micro jump-drives. They were never designed to work with a hull as massive as mine, Light.”

“Arra…” She smiles, “You’re still you. The ship is a ship. You know better.”

I don’t answer. I know what she’s trying to push here, but really, no. The meat isn’t me. I’ve left that behind. I won’t be trapped the way she’s been.

“Anyway…” She finally sighs, “Yes, the micro jump-drives. They’ll be providing the navigational displacement needed…. we just need to scale up the cruiser-sized modules in storage and be careful with them. It will work.”

If it were any of the techs telling me that, I’d be… skeptical. But not her.

“Alright. Then we scale it up.” That just gets a shake of her head, and a quiet laugh.

“Arra… I’m a theoretical physicist. I’m not an engineer. That’s going to have to go to the techs.” As I start muttering, she’s laughing again. “They’ll work it out. This will work. I promise. The math is right.” She sighs, a strangely contented sigh.

“It was wonderful, Arra.” There’s an odd note to her voice as she settles deeper into her chair. “Absolutely wonderful.”

“What was that, Light?” She’s quiet, looking off at the bulkhead. That expression… it tickles the faintest of memories. My grandmother, with just that same look on her face as she told stories of being a girl. I almost miss the distance in her eyes, but I’m bringing up internal scanners… and issuing a priority call down to medbay by the time she answers.

“... I flew.”

*   *   *   *   *

I beat the techs there. Unsurprising, considering she was only one doorway from the pod, but by the time they arrived, they found me, curled around her quiet form. Alone, again. As ever.

It would have been maddening if not for one thing. She’d lived out a full life, and had gone peacefully when she knew her work was done. There was no violence in it, no panic, no moment of terror or pain. She’d finished what drove her… and simply let go. After all this time, the idea of it, the idea of finishing, of being able to simply… let go… as I held her, I wasn’t sure if I was more upset that she was gone… or that I couldn’t follow. At least, not yet.

But it was a balm, too, in some ways. Old pain, old guilt… it let me see Marr’s death as something other than my failure, for once. No food, no resupply, without the ability to control the ship from the pod after the system failure… he’d fought for a week, every moment of it in minimal life support, to keep the Light in the Darkness moving forward, on course, steady, so that he would be at the appointed place, at the appointed time. And when the confirmation came, and he could light the cyno?

He could rest.

Would he have even wanted to wake up in his clone? Would I? Did I? How many more lifetimes, alone, watching the only people around me age and die, watching the children, the grandchildren, the great-great-granchildren of friends with and die before my eyes?

But I was alone. There was no-one else who could see them through. No-one else to remember those parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and shepherd their children through to the home a hundred generations or more had sacrificed everything to find.

Light’s theoretical work, and the technical data on the MMJDs, went to the techs with one message:

Take us home.

*   *   *   *   *

June 12th, YC5768 - Intergalactic Space

“Initial testing of Supercapital Micro Jump Drive System in five… four… three…”

The drive starts to spool up - that timing was something we weren’t able to fix, but in this case, it’s perfect. As the new mjd spins up, I drop out a single Warrior II. A place-marker. It’s right outside the ship, it will be able to tell us whether or not….

The drone’s one-hundred-one kilometers away, before I even finish marking its location in the navigational charts. As ever, there’s absolutely no sensation of motion - it’s like space itself moved while we just kept on going.

It worked. And that means the rest of it… yeah. The drone’s recalled. The techs get to begin reconfiguring the power conduits around the SCMJD in order to do the thing that… as I quite shockingly realized when I finally looked at Light’s modeling, I’d already thought of once before.

In order for the navigational systems to work… we needed a second mass, after all. Or to be in two places at once.

The Micro Jump Drive was the key to being in two places at once. That very instant of activation… that’s when the navigational magic happens the first time. And it is the first time, because after that… oh, it’s going to be a wild ride.

When the MJD activates, the navigational computer will be putting us into a maximum-distance warp, drawing on the power of both ships’ primary reactors. That’s important, because it means we’ll be in warp for a solid five minutes instead of two - the two reactors acting in parallel apparently allow for far more efficient transfer of power to the warp systems. And that means that as I begin to decelerate in warp, the MJD activates again, turning what should be deceleration into a navigational mass effect that the warp drive latches onto… and launches out again for another five minutes. It’ll be a little rough at first, but each cycle should smooth it out.

“Arra,” the head tech is standing near the comm system, “We’re ready to test.”

For the first time in a long time, I can feel myself grinning as I pick out a distant, orange point of light, and spin up the MJD.

Fuck the tests.

*   *   *   *   *

October 3rd, YC10212 - Unidentified System. Navigational Index K12435

The ancient machine glides smoothly into normality. It’s been… interesting. A little disturbing, the first time I had to go down to medical to clone jump without leaving warp, but… we’readjusting. We’re all adjusting. There’s about to be even more of an adjustment to come. I’m the only person who’s ever seen a planet, ever felt sunlight on my face, ever looked up to see the light of a moon reflecting across the water… they have so much to look forward to, and they don’t even know.

It’s going to be hard for them at first. But they’ll adjust. We’ll all adjust.

“Arra,” It’s one of the sensor techs, “I’m picking up an asteroid or something coming at us.”

What? That’s not possible - the navigational computer would’ve picked that up. Of all the times for me to be out of the goo, trying to soak in the moment….

“Give me the feed.”

The display at my command couch lights up, to reveal the object getting closer. It’s huge, the size of a small asteroid or comet, but…

But that’s metal. Refined, processed, smooth surfaces. That’s a ship. That’s a ship big enough for gravitational effects. Oh crap.

“We’re being scanned.” There’s no visual effect to the probes. It’s not an Entosis Link, but…

“Hardeners on, Armor and Shield. Fuckfuckfuck..”

A squeal comes through the comms, deafening, shrill white noise… feedback from the scan? Whatever it is, we’re not a combat vessel. The last thing we had that might’ve even slowed that thing down self-destructed in warp five millenia ago…

“Prep fighters…” I’m already up, pulling off my shirt as I turn to run for the pod. I am so glad I cloned this morning. I wouldn’t want to try this with ninety-year-old joins.

The squeal modulates, changes, becomes…

“Analysis of verbal patterns complete. Translating. Unknown vessel, this is the Alliance Cruiser Agammemnon. You have entered resistricted space. Identify yourself and your point of origin.”

At the same time, all of the screens on the bridge flicker and become an image of…. a ship’s bridge, clean and polished, with a crew of roughly ten.. humans?

“This is Soll Tran, captain of the TAS Agammemnon. Identify yourselves at once.” He’s not saying those words, not speaking our language. I can see that from the way his lips are moving… but they’re translating his words before sending them. I am… at a loss. Terrified? Yep. Suddenly hopeful? Oh yeah. Impressed as hell? All of the above!

“Captain Tran,” I start back toward the nearest console. “My name is…” For a moment, I almost simply say ‘Arra’. “Arrendis Culome of the refugee ship Old Mother. I swear to you by all of my ancestors, I haven’t got the slightest clue where the hell we are. We’re not a threat. I don’t even think we could delude ourselves into thinking we are.”

There’s a moment, as he regards me. “Are you the captain of that vessel?”

“I am.” It’s a simpler answer than explaining capsules, since he’s not in one.

“You will lower your shields and prepare to be boarded.” Not unexpected, really. Still…

“Captain, may I make one request while we do so?”

“Yes, Captain, you may go find your shirt.” What? Oh. CRAP, I was going for the pod… well, at least I’m not completely naked.

“Actually, Captain, that wasn’t it. You’ve obviously been able to translate our language… I was wondering if you could transmit a copy of your own language codex and the translation software, so we can speak more directly once you arrive?” After all, it’s stupid not to at least ask, right?

He’s hesitant. I can see that, but… he’s also clearly got the upper hand here. A small gesture of benevolence? It’ll tell me a lot about them, yes or no.

“Alright, Captain,” He nods to someone nearby, “You have five minutes. I suggest you get dressed.”

[Arrendis]

Epilogue:

It would have been hard to say which side was more amazed in the months that followed. For us, they were… saviors, kin long unhoped-for, and desperately needed. To them, we were… at first, something suspicious, and then… something even stranger. They’d never heard of capsule technology. Cloning… was something they’d outlawed so far in the distant past that learning what I was caused no few of them significant distress.

And they were religious. Their God was both alien and familiar, an all-powerful being who declared a desire for all humanity to unify in their service to Him… but one who preached love and tolerance, with all of their different faiths agreeing on the basic humanity of… humanity. I got the feeling that there were others who disagreed, but… well, they weren’t the ones we ran into.

Old Mother was brought into the docking ring of their cruiser. Cruiser! Hah! It was more or less the only word they used for their ships. The populace… after a lot of debate and discussion among their leaders, it was arranged that they’d be given land on a fairly isolated, world, but one with trade access to the rest of their Alliance.

I, however, was to have no further contact with them. The entire ship, right down to the medbay, was taken to be studied by their ‘Alliance Scientific Institute’. And since, according to their laws, cloned tissue was property… so was I.

It seems their military feels free to ignore the legal issues with cloning, circumventing it by claiming it’s all necessarily medical technology for a foreign national. Not that they have a clone ready, of course. They’re too busy taking it all apart and studying the tech. I’m pretty sure they’re looking at the usefulness of it for what amounts to building organic computer interfaces for their combat systems. I should object. I should resent it. I don’t. There’ve been too many calamities for me to resent something as trivial as disappointment.

No, what matters is that the people we’d set out to see to a new home… have found one. They’re not Amarr or Minmatar, Gallente or Caldari. They’re mine, and they’re safe. So what if I’m stuck here, in my pod again, in some research facility?

I used to walk among the flowers… I can’t do that anymore… but in the end, it doesn’t matter. I’ve completed my task. Marr… Dani… Light… we did it. I’ll see you soon. In about…

<Your capsule will self-destruct in two minutes>

Finally… I can rest.

[Mizhara]

Well, now that it's done... can I just say daayuum?!

You have put the rest of us scribblers to shame so far.

GR GON HAT GON

[Samira Kernher]

Just wow.

That was amazing.

[Arrendis]

Marvel-Style Post-Credits Scene:

"There appears to be no upper limit to the degree of cybernetic integration possible with this 'capsule' technology, Admiral."

Recently-promoted Admiral Soll Tran turns to look at the researcher reporting in, and nods. "Excellent. It's surprising, sometimes, isn't it?"

"Sir?"

"What primitive cultures can teach us. These refugees from 'New Eden', for example. Their technology is... terrifyingly obsolete, like relics from the past... but it took them down roads we would never imagined."

"Ah, yessir. Very true, sir. Like their hyperjump propulsion systems."

"Exactly," the admiral nods, "One scout ship inserts behind ConFed lines, initiates a beacon, and we've got a hundred artificial infiltration units moving among their ranks... and if they get caught, their failsafe brings them safely back here, complete with all of the intelligence they've gathered. If it doesn't... well, just a biological drone lost. Nothing important."

"With no chance of the ConFed warp-mesh stopping them..."

"Think about it, Cliven. In just a few years... we could take half the galaxy. All without risking a single human life"

"After six hundred years of cold war... it's staggering the consider, sir. But will the Council..."

"The Council can't object to what they don't know, Cliven. And if they do... infiltrators can be assassins, too. We'll blame the ConFed. Get those reproduction clone bays running. Time to build an army."