NationStates Jolt Archive

It was quite a system, even though it was not well known.

What had once been known as "the least crowded best vacation site in the sector" until interest had faded posessed three habitable planets, four extremely large and rich uninhabitable ones, seven gas giants with varying atmospheres and densities, and a variety of astronomical wonders, such as micronebulae, shared rings, space life, and the Rings of Manwë, a spectacular cloud surrounding the star.

Piliminius, the middle Earthlike world, had never been explored. A cloud of rubble completely covered it, kept in place by four moons in equidistant orbits.

No efforts had been made to explore Piliminius. No efforts had even been made to decipher its name. It had been submitted to the Star Database by a troubled explorer who had later comitted suicide.

The only trouble is, suicide can be comitted in a variety of ways.

Deliberately flying through a debris field is not a common one...

In between two brilliant green stars appeared a shape. It vaguely resembled an elongated teardrop, with a ring of engines around it. The engines soon detached, and dropped into an orbit that would keep them safe for a while. Hopefully.

"Their orbit should hold them for at least a week, sir," said a scared young diplomat who couldn't have been eighteen. "Do you think we'll take that long.

President Jack Whirle of the United Planetstates of New Jupiter shrugged. "Who knows?"

The conn officer, an actual combat veteran, turned his head from his console. "Uh, sir, we've left the Green Twins' magnetic field, our long-range sensors are on-line, and... um, I think they might know..."

He pointed.

The human population of the ship gasped.

It was Piliminius. That was certain. It was a boring world, and there weren't many of those in the Manwë System. The blank brown had flashed over news networks all over the sector for a week. But...

The moons were gone. The dust field was disentegrating. And six satellites the size of Luna now orbited the world at geostationary distance.

The satellites were designed for defense. Of that there was no doubt. Gunports the size of major cities gaped over the metal plains. No engines were evident.

No signs of construction were, either.

There was silence for a space. The question each crewman was bursting to ask was, How did those get there? But no one asked. They all knew no one knew the answer.

Except the moon-builders...

Finally the conn officer broke the silence. "Sir, I'm not in control anymore."

"What do you mean?" It was the girl. This was probably the farthest from home she had ever been.

"It's on its own now..."

They felt a slight kick as the shuttle accelerated.

"We don't have the power for that..." The conn officer shook his head slowly.

The majesty of the satellites was revealed soon. Much sooner than they had expected...

These would have been marvels of engineering, projects of lifetimes for anyone else in the sector shared by Piliminius, New Jupiter, and Thunderstraat. Maybe even for anyone else in the galaxy.

They hadn't been there a week ago.

Halfway between the satellites and the surface they stopped. Simply stopped, abruptly. The conn officer again gestured amazement. "The power it takes to do that... I don't think physics applies to them."

All at once, hair rose on board the shuttle. Sparks crawled across the metal surface.

And, suddenly, Piliminius disappeared...

For a moment, all light ceased.

Then, as the shuttle's auxiliary power plant came on line, the light to the universe seemed to return as well...

They were orbiting a moon. Except, in most of the more ordinary moons, the surface was pretty much uniform. In this one...

Most of the surface of this moon was, apparently, made up of other people's space.

One portal showed a gray world, with a city on every surface. One showed a dreary red world, which seemed to glow with life all the same. More and more and more appeared as the shuttle orbited this singular moon.

"Conn. Are you in control?"

Whirle's commanding voice cut through the murmur that had taken hold of the ship. The conn officer stopped desperately poking at his controls and turned around.

"No sir. They're prob'ly letting us look at this before they do whatever else they're going to do."

"Hmm."

The officer looked back to a light on his console, then turned again. "Uh, our attitude pulses are firing. We're turning around."

The moon fell down, off the bottom edge of the display, and then they'd seen everything...

It was a world.

It was a battleship.

It was amazing.

Obviously once fully a planet, a ring of uniform mountains crossed the planet diagonally in a perfect circle, thin and tall - so tall that the atmosphere could be seen frozen halfway up them. So tall that they poked past the sky into space. No oceans or lakes were apparent, only...

Miles and miles and

Miles and miles and

Miles and miles of weaponry.

And, in six colossal pits large enough to be small continents,

Engines.

"That's..."

"Amazing?"

"I don't think we have a word..."

The kick again. They were accelerating, past the planet.

It took two hours. The ship couldn't have taken the speed it took to go that far that fast. But they circumnavigated the orbit of an unpleasant blue sun and found themselves looking at a less dangerous but just as spectacular planet.

It was green and blue with life. Life seemed to pour from the seas into the land, and even the clouds seemed to be alive. Mountains that would have been huge on most other worlds were covered with green.

Except for the north...

Where the Arctic Circle should have been were mountains. Big and tall. They too poked into space, and were offset, almost like...

A crown.

It was deep in one of the mountains capping the final planet that the diplomacy team found themselves. The shuttle flew into a nondescript cave and parked itself before turning off.

As the first diplomat stepped out of the shuttle, the cave entry slowly sealed itself behind them. For a brief heartstopping second, total darkness caught the breath of the New Jovians, and then the rock itself glowed, a blue luminescence glowing faintly all around them.

There was only one way out of the cave: a tunnel directly opposite where the entry had been. It appeared to lead to a brighter section of rock around a dead end.

The diplomacy team stood in silence. Finally Whirle broke it, his words echoing in the sealed chamber:

"Let's go."

And he bounded down the short tunnel, bluish light growing brighter and brighter until it seemed to glow from the President himself. As Jack Whirle reached the tunnel end, the light flared, and he disappeared.

Time passed. None of the others wanted to follow, but there was no escape.

They spent three days there, slowly using up supplies. The air seemed to circulate through the rock, but aside from that the Rosies weren't giving any help - if that was who had captured them.

Almost an hour after three days of boredom, the cave opened. Air burst into the vacuum and froze, but it flowed from the rock even faster than it could enter space. MacPeters, the grizzled conn, nodded. "Let's go," he said, echoing the words of Jack Whirle - who was probably now deceased, destroyed in the fantastic energies of the tunnel.

Then - in the only moment of fright the diplomats had had on their journey - a dry voice spoke from the unwatched tunnel.

"Yes," said the President of the United Planetstates of New Jupiter. "Let's go."

~

"They'll take us home. They say that we'll get to New Io two steps ahead of their fleet. They say we can't stop them. They say our universe can't stop them.
"And we can't."
It was three hours later, and the shuttle was in transit to the world the Rosies called Spike. "What happened, while you were gone?" asked the ship's youngest member, an intern from a colony near New Vulcan.
"I'll tell you," said the young President, and now he sounded old.
And he told them.

"When I started walking down that passage, I had the strangest feeling - almost like there should have been tingles running down my spine but there weren't. The closer I got to the end, the more the feeling increased, until I got to the end.

"The light - engulfed me. It covered me and poured through every cell in my body. When it went away, I was in an office.

"It was an ordinary office. The door was behind me, the desk in front, as if I had been called there for an interview. There was a huge overstuffed chair facing the window, which showed the crown planet from an impossibly high distance.

"Slowly, the person in the chair turned around... he was a mutant, or so I thought. He was huge, with muscles still extraordinary underneath flab showing from an old-fashioned business suit. His face was hideous, almost piglike, with tusks from his lower jaw going past his nostrils.

"'Who are you?' I asked.

"'I am called Guoli Greathammer,' he said, his voice deeper than human but somehow high-pitched for him. 'I serve in the senate of the Empire.

"'What Empire?' I asked.

"'THE Empire,' he said, and then...

"He showed me the Empire. It is impossible to describe. Imagine millions of worlds, working together under the guidance of one man. And it holds together. It's amazing - they follow a common cause, but nothing else...

"Their technology is far beyond what we have. They have the power to travel throughout the Multiverse, but not to anywhere we were familiar with...

"Until now.

"The sector that New Sol and Thunderstraat and Pinkett's Star inhabit is riddled with holes that none of our instruments can detect but the Empire can readily use to create their dimensional gateways.

"They intend to take our universe into their empire by force. They intend to place trillions under their grip.

"And they can do it.

"For a month they kept me there, showing me their Empire. They don't expect I can stop them with that. And I can't."

"But sir! You were only down there for three days!"

"Was I only down there for three days? Or were you really up there for a month?"

The room fell silent.

"The Empire sometimes lets nations join it peacefully. It's New Jupiter's only hope.

"We must - absolutely must - get home before the Imperial fleet arrives. If we do not, our worlds will be devastated. There is no other way..."

The diplomatic shuttle, its diplomats unneeded, swung past the world Whirle assured them really was called Spike.