NationStates Jolt Archive

Your search for Yuka returned twelve hits. Do you want;
Yuka Daha
Yuka Dao-anoi
Yuka Eratiso
Yuka Kah-sao Dalirou
Yuka Katurama
Yuka Kenurata
Yuka Mokau
Yuka Siremai
Yuka Sutalek
Leigana Yukato
Nairetou Yukato
Dalaega Yukato

Cristiona blinked, "Bloody common names..." She was pretty sure the last three weren't correct. The message from Seven seemed like she was referencing a first name. Unfortunately, that still left nine names. She sighed, cueing up a random number generator, and feeding in the -- slightly quirky -- command-line: tank, roll 1 9.

Yuka Kenurata

Loading personell file; Yuka Kenurata.

Name: Kenurata, Yuka
Age: 1.16 Risings subjective, 5,543 objective. Born 12 Obsidian, Sideways Rising 8,956.
Birthplace: Senarau Tower, Augaes, Sasei
Gender: Female
Kith: Sasei-global lesser chevron pattern
Occupation: In-flight crew; security officer, Guide
Personal weight allowance: 112ar-ji
Medical conditions: False, nanotech-augmented; no possible known biological ailments.
Weight: 84ar-ji
Height: 7.55li
...

Like Seven's, the personell log was a very dry read, and doubtless there was much the authors would have thought too commonplace to note, but a novice to the culture could still learn much.

Conference Room, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Sol

"The problem is that the project on Sahel is already too far advanced," Aira said, and Tanyi nodded. "We might be able to transfer the gate and the colony effort to Fenris, but that's abandoning the effort we've already put into studying Ai, and the expenditure of resources there."

On the screens three worlds spun; Geri II, Freki IV, and Sahel Ai. The white-gold-blue sphere of Sahel was marked in red with the positions of survey teams and constructor robots; Geri's green-and-blue and Freki's green-tan-blue were highlighted with potential sites.

"It's a matter of possibilities," Sekhat rejoindered. "Yes, we have surveys and construction already on Ai. However, Sahel has one livable world, and that barely. Fenris has two."

"Freki IV is hardly Terran-friendly. The climate and temperature extremes alone would require substantial work to overcome."

"We managed with Mars!"

"Mars is as much an arcology as the Mother Country!"

Tanyi sighed. This was clearly an old argument between the two analysts, and it mirrored the wider divide emerging in the population. On one side were the older generations, who'd lived during the Obsidian Years, and who thought that nature was a frivolous luxury. On the other were the radicals, Minimalists and Revertionists, who held contrarily that nature was an essential asset of human existence, that the Obsidian Years were an outlying anomaly, and who thought everyone should move to new parklands in the stars. Most of the latter had moved already, turning Tenebris into a hotbed of environmental fervour.

Personally, she agreed with neither; in her decades of running what had become the Star Command, Tanyi had found that the solution was always somewhere in the middle. There were Orthodox Faithful on both sides of the debate, and the Arkhaeron had yet to make a decree either way, prevaricating as he had always done; so the Arkhreifane had to come to a decision without priestly guidance.

"Sahel Ai will be reduced in eventual capacity," she said. Sekhat look venomous. "Filling the planet to total capacity would be unwise in light of future generations in any case. The gate will stay in orbit.

"Survey and development of Geri II shall commence, at this stage via FTL craft," she continued. "Freki IV will be held in reserve, should it be needed. This shall be disseminated and carried out."

Cristiona smiled, "Hm... good guess..." She made a couple notes, specifically that ar-ji was weight, and that Yuka's allowance was about a thirty-three percent above her weight. Of course, the weight allowance could have been standardized. It still wouldn't help her figure out how much an ar-ji was. She also noted that li was a measure of height. Probably a little less than a foot, assuming that the natives on the planet hadn't shrunk.

It also seemed that anyone other than being baseline was considered False. Then again, in a society like the one Yuka apparently came from, this only made sense.

Kith looked to be fur pattern, but that was little more than conjecture.

She sighed, there was less and less that she could figure out from this terminal. At least, any useful information. She really needed that core. Still, there was another name she was interested in:

Load personal log: Pisari

Loading personell file; Pisari Kanauen.

Name: Kanauen, Pisari
Age: 1.49 Risings subjective, 5,873 objective. Born 12 Obsidian, Sideways Rising 8,956.
Birthplace: Likanouk Tower, Ekoivinai, Greater East Accord, Sasei
Gender: Male
Kith: Harais local (Greater East) double chevron pattern
Occupation: In-flight crew; systems supervisor (engineering)
Personal weight allowance: 112ar-ji
Medical conditions: Intermittent cardial arrythmia (pacemaker), minor liver poisoning.
Weight: 102ar-ji
Height: 6.76li
...

Cristiona nodded, about what she expected. More vital statistics of limited use to her, as they were long dead. She decided to attempt to tease out some more practical information, hoping the system could understand 'plain Ailuridine' commands.

What are the name and coordinates of current location?

Generating location statistics ...

This terminal is located in the in-flight command station of New Dawn. The New Dawn is located in Crater AAB-10-0 Raes 1-4, in orbit of Raes 4, orbiting the star Raes at an average distance of 2.15 Standardised Units. The date is 7 Jade, Foremost Rising 3,417.

Cristiona read off the location and time perameters, simultaneously recording them into her datapad. She could do the math later. Now, for the information that might help them figure out where these beings came from:

What is the location of Sasei relative to this terminal's location?

Generating location statistics ...

Sasei orbits Fei at a distance of 0.79 Standardised Units. Fei is 10.92 Seiu-Standard lightyears from Raes.

OOC: These short little things take more maths than creativity, I fear.

Cristiona smiled, "Bit of a flight..." She translated the information on the screen, pulling up more data on Fei to make the search easier for the Tsarainese scientist, "I'm guessing someone will want to look into that, maybe see what happened to the people that stayed behind." She looked rather pleased with herself, leaning back in her chair a little, looking at the screen and then looking at the cryogentic tanks, desperately wanting to talk to Seven.

Thinking about Seven made her think about getting the Heartbone, which made her think about Aiska. How could she explain this? She couldn't lie and claim to be a spirit, she'd made it abundantly clear that she was no spirit. She couldn't very well tell the truth, either: she wouldn't even know where to begin, and she was pretty sure she wouldn't be believed. She sighed, looking at the screen, wondering what she should do now.

"Ten point nine lights?" Riane frowned, puzzled. "I'm pretty sure there's no habitable stars out that far."

"Different light-years?" Someone suggested. "They're an arbitrary measure."

"Could be ... no, there's no stars of that spectral class out for about eighty lights. Even with cryogenics that's a bit far for a ship like this."

Shrugs. "Something will come up."

Cristiona looked up curiously, "How could the measurements be different? The speed of light is a constant, so the distance it travels in a year can't be measured differently. Unless they arbitrarily gave a different unit of measure the name 'light year' -- which wouldn't make any sense -- I don't see how it could be anything different then how we measure a light year."

She thought for a moment, "Well... it's been a couple millenia... maybe their star went nova? Is there any way to tell if that happened?" She blinked, "Maybe these people were doomsayers who happened to be right..."

As they pondered, she pulled up as many dossiers as possible, recording their dates, trying to figure out how they measured time. It seemed like their calander was going backwards, but she wasn't sure about the relation between 'Sideways Rising' and 'Foremost Rising'.

"The speed of light is a constant," Riane explained, "But a year isn't - Earth has a year of three-hundred and sixty-five days, but Taiga's year is nine hundred and thirty - so the distance light travels in a Taigan year is much longer.

"We don't know how long their year was, but if a "Standard Unit" is the same thing as our AUs, we can estimate it from that ..."

Riane poked at her datapad, working out the difference. "Ninety-one percent of an Earth year, I think ... which would make the distance from here to Fei twelve light-years, but there's no habitable star there either ... could it have gone nova?"

"Not unless they ignited it themselves," Ekhano said, "Otherwise it would have become uninhabitable long before they left. God Above knows, though - they might have blown it up. Do the natives record any supernovae in their legends?"

"Can't be," declared one of the Researchers who'd come down from the 'Sukal. "A nova twelve lights away would leave this system razed down to anaerobic bacteria."

Cristiona blinked, "Oh yeah." She pondered some more, largely grasping at straws at this point, "Dyson sphere? Collapse into a black hole without a nova?" She shook her head, "How can a star just disappear? That doesn't make any sense!"

"A Dyson sphere? We'd see it, surely? Putting a shell around a star should make it heat up like a pressure cooker."

""Any technology, sufficiently advanced ..." We might not see it."

"So how do we find something that may or may not exist, and may or may not be hidden using alien superscience, somewhere in a radius twelve light-years from here? Cristiona, can you get us any more specific coordinates?"

OOC: To save time, I'll say "yes" now. :P

Cristiona shrugged, "Well, isn't the point to use the heat from the star to generate power? There'd probably only be faint signatures if it was completely enclosed." She grinned, "Of course, if that's what they did, I suppose I can see why there'd be backlash, and why people would flee. Especially if they were luddites." Thinking for a moment on how to phrase her question to the computer, she started typing again, idly pleased that her typing speed was improving.

Using position of this vessel, Raes, and Raes IV, triangulate direction and location of Fei, plotting a sample course.

"I can't imagine even luddites fleeing something like that in a ship like this," Riane said. "If you can build a Dyson sphere, you should be able to build a better starship than this, even if you are constrained to sublight speeds for whatever reason."

The numbers were so different that any human could not have computed them; compared to the twelve light-year distance between Raes and Fei, the two-AU distance between Raes and Raes IV was negligible. But the computer spat out an answer readily enough.

We are sorry! The direction and location of Fei cannot be calculated given the parameters supplied. Astrometric data recorded 7 Flint, Hindmost Rising 7,777 places the direction of Fei at the following coordinates ...

A starmap appeared on the screens, flattened out into two directions; about twenty degrees above the equator a yellow dwarf star blinked on and off, and a muted subtitle pronounced; Fei.

Cristiona, of course, was only vaguely familiar with the concept of triangulation. She thought the coordinates were good enough; aparently she was wrong. She shrugged at Riane, "I dunno... maybe this was the best they could afford? Besides, it wasn't supposed to land. It was supposed to stay in orbit. I guess when they figured out whatever it was that Seven was doing, they crashed the ship to destroy it." She grinned, "This is kinda like a Von Neumann probe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_probe), now."

She peered at the screen, "I'm not sure how their dating system works yet, but is that good enough for you, even though it's a couple thousand years out of date?"

"I don't think the starship is self-replicating," Riane replied, puzzled. "Else there'd be other ones about, surely?" She was only vaguely familiar with the concept of a Von Neumann probe.

Peering at the screen (it was easy to see that dots were stars, seen from Raes), Riane compared it to a similar view on her datapad, and shook her head. "The stars have moved too much to be certain," she said, "And we don't have enough astrometric data to plot that map forward precisely. Can the ship's computer do it?"

OOC: Another yes. :) This may be inaccurate - I'm not sure how much stars shift position in two thousand years.

Cristiona shrugged, "I just meant that it's here for when they reach a technological level to find it. Like the Monoliths in that old movie." She nodded, "Sure, that shouldn't be a problem... I hope..."

Given known data of galactic movement, estimate current location of Fei for current date.

Adjusted for observed stellar drift, the position of Fei at 7 Jade, Foremost Rising 3,417 is the following coordinates ...

The starmap updated, showing Fei a good handful of degrees closer to the equator. Checking against the starmap on her datapad, Riane shook her head - "There's nothing there. That we've seen, at least. I suppose we could have the satellites take a closer look ..."

Cristiona gave another shrug, "Seems like a good idea to me. I mean, I can't imagine why they'd lie about the location of their own home to themselves, and the star can't have just wandered off." She poked at the terminal, wishing she could interface directly with it, but not knowing how, or if it was even possible.

Riane spoke to one of the other Researchers, who spoke to the ship. "The satellites are mostly in orbit of the moon now," he reported, "So it's going to take an hour or two to get them into a position to take a look, and the data they've already got can't help us - they haven't been looking right or something."

The young AI nodded a little and yawning. It had been a busy morning, and she felt a little exhausted. She looked up at Riane, "Um... if it's gonna be a couple hours and if you don't need me for anything, could... um... could I maybe take a lil' nap? It's been a long day..."

"Sure." Riane would have dearly loved the AI's help in translating the entirety of the ship's computer into Sekhel, but clearly the avatar was tired. "Uh, if you want to suit up again we can go back to the spaceplane, else there should be a suitable corner around here - those chairs look pretty comfortable, at least."

Cristiona smiled, "I'll just curl up in a corner or something, wake me if you find something neat..." She glanced at the researchers, some of whom were still all but vibrating from the excitement of the ship, "Er... something important." She smiled a little, "Oh, and if someone can find an interface port, that would be great. Doing a datadump via screen capture is a little... impossible." She got up and walked across the bridge, dragging one of the broken chairs into the corner; it would make for a passable futon. She smiled as she thought of something, "Remember that weird plastic journal you found? I think it was Yuka's. She was a friend of Seven, er, the ship's AI, and she was classified as 'False' because of nanites or some such nonsense. Could someone maybe check out the quarters where that was found? There might be some more clues there... I don't think Yuka fully agreed with this whole plan..."

With that, she curled up on the chair as best as possible and tried to get a couple hours of sleep.

"If we found an interface port, how would you connect to it?" Riane asked. There wasn't such a thing as a universal adaptor, after all. "We'll take a look."

There were, however, no interface ports, and Yuka's cabin yielded no more finds, although the Researchers spent the next few hours investigating the ship. After a few hours Riane shook her awake.

"The satellites have just moved into position, and already they've found something!" She grinned cheerfully. "Coffee? I don't know if you need it ..."

Cristiona mumured softly, already falling asleep, "I'll figure something out..."

She protested weakly as Riane tried to wake he, trying to roll over which only had the advantage of depositing her on the floor with a thump. She rubbed her head a little, "Ow..." She slowly stood up and nodded, "Mmm... coffee good..." She giggled softly, "Er, yeah, I'd like some coffee." Her brain finally engaged and she smiled, "What did they find?"

Riane laughed. "Here you go," she replied, handing Cristiona the mug. "Careful, this is point-something of a gee. Anyway, what they found ..."

The Researcher unfolded her datapad, flicked it on, and found what she was looking for.

"Here. This is an enhanced image, of course ..."

It wasn't much, just a dark brown disk on a black field.

"This is boosted up to visible-light wavelengths, and they've increased the contrast, but what it is is a sphere four-fifths of an AU across, radiating heat at about six Kelvin, which is about twice the temperature of space! It's right where Fei should be - I think we've found your Dyson sphere."

Cristiona grinned, gingerly sipping the coffee, more than a little amused at how the low gravity made it something of a project. After battling her coffee for a couple minutes, she peered at the image, "Neat! Did you try to make contact, or are you not planning that at all?"

"Um ... it is twelve lights away," Riane pointed out. "It'd take a while for anything to get there from here."

Cristiona blinked, "Oh, yeah... there is that, I suppose." She looked at the terminal, sighing softly, "I think we're stuck at this point. I can't think of anything to ask, and we need that computronium core to do anything." She frowned a little, "I don't suppose we could make a mock-up of it? I doubt Andzai's just going to give the real one to us."

Riane shrugged. "I think you know more about programming than I do," she replied, "I really have no idea, but it doesn't seem possible to make something without knowing what it is, surely?"

Cristiona shook her head, "No... I don't mean to make another one, I mean... er... being less honest." She shuffled her feet a little, looking somewhat uncomfortable at the thought, "Get a rod the same size and weight, and gold plate it..."

"Oh! I'm pretty sure we could do that, using the nanoforge aboard the 'Sukal - there's a fair supply of gold in case we need to manufacture replacement chips, and we do have a model of it to copy from ... ethically it's a bit dodgy, though."

Cristiona sighed, "Yeah, I thought of that. I don't think there's anything else we can learn about what happened without it, is the problem. And since its the holiest of relics, I can't imagine that they'd give it to us." She frowned, "If I could think of a way to just download it, I would, but..."

""If Mohammed will not go to the mountain ..."" Riane quoted, "Maybe we could take whatever reader is about here and use it down there? I don't think we've actually found anything that might be it, and it would probably need a lot of jury-rigging if we did find it, but it might be possible."

Cristiona grinned, "Sounds good to me." She glanced around, "Hmm... might have to rip apart a terminal... probably should find one that isn't important."

Display: Map of bridge

She thought a moment and added a second request.

What are the locations of devices capable of reading a Computronium core?

A map of the bridge flashed up obligingly on the screen, marked with a bright green you are here symbol. In response to Cristiona's second question, positions on the terminals were marked in red; there were several around the bridge, and one on each of the seven central pillars. In form they were hinged lids set into the terminals, hiding a depression fit for a rod just like the one down on the planet.

Cristiona grinned and showed the map to the Tsarainese, "I'm not an engineer... if someone's gonna try and build a portable, it'll have to be one of you." She looked over the map's legend, she thought a moment and pointed to a couple terminals, "If I had to guess, one of those would probably be best, as I'm guessing you'll probably wreck the terminal jury-rigging a portable. Those seem to be secondary systems."

On a lark, she punched in another request: Log log: Haireun Kiis-Atansa

"We'll see what we can do," Riane replied, and went off to talk to the other Researchers. Soon enough they were prising off panels and poking at circuitry in joyful abandon, apparently lost in their work.

The computer, however, produced We are sorry! The file Personell log Haireun Kiis-Atansa cannot be located.

Site Fifteen, Continent #3 "Raven" Geri II, Geri subsystem, system #336 "Fenris"

"A city here, already? That's a bit premature, don't you think?"

The Researchers had come in the long way from Site Five, seeding as they went; they were depositing an engineered supergrass, a weed which would outcompete local flora. That had created a whole storm of controversy - they were destroying ecosystems here, after all - but Command had said; continue. This was a world nearly fit for human habitation, and it would hold human habitation. The billions back in the Mother Country didn't care about native life.

Now they were at Site Fifteen, on a ridge overlooking the site to be precise, and they were quite suprised to see city-builders trundling about the valley floor. It was premature.

Garha shrugged. "The population back home isn't getting any smaller, I suppose. They've got to start somewhere."

"Actually," Kterrin said, "You know there's something like one and a half billion people on Tenebris now? It's getting smaller, but they're running out of space on Tenebris, so I suppose they need this place up and running as soon as possible."

"There you are then. Two billion on Tenebris, another two billion here ... you know, soon enough they're going to start having space to spare in the arcologies."

"That is rather the point, isn't it?"

Cristiona frown, wondering why there was no log for Haireun Kiis-Atansa. This person had been involved in the final events of Seven's life. Then again, s/he had been on the space station. Interesting. She glanced up at the Tsarainese, and let them do whatever it was they were doing to the panal. Hopefully they wouldn't damage it too much.

Display information, make, and purpose of Raes Spaceport

Raes Spaceport;

The images which appeared onscreen showed a prefabricated spaceport, little more really than a few landing strips and a series of quonset huts, with a tower to one side. Each part was labelled with it's product type and serial number, designations overlapping to turn the isometric into a fuzzy shape of alphanumerics.

The spaceport is a temporary structure designed specifically for the site, and will be disassembled once full surface integration is complete. It holds temporary housing for 800 persons, and hangar space for all three shuttles.

Ah-ha, now we're getting somewhere. She shrugged, it made sense in a way. They wanted full reversion, so leaving a whacking big space station in orbit did seem too likely. Then again, what of the ship?

What was the intended fate of New Dawn?

Following the full transfer of supplies and personell to the planetary surface, New Dawn is to be disposed of in the Raes system primary to prevent possible contamination of the Return culture with industrial artefacts.

Update 7 Chert, Hindmost Rising 7,777; As of this date the Rampant machine intellect 7504760-FJ4 has subverted the ship's systems to bring the New Dawn down in a controlled landing on the surface of the inner moon.

OOC: Ack, short and crappy and late!

Cristiona sighed. Tossing the ship (and Seven) into the star seemed to be right up their alley. No wonder Seven had crashed into the moon, it was a damn sight better than the assured death in the star. Which means they were probably almost done with their work. She sighed again, glancing at the engineers, "How's it coming?"

More so than ever, she wanted to talk with Seven.

"We think we're going to need to fabricate some parts over on the 'Sukal," Riane replied. "The problem is that we really can't make a portable storage device to copy it onto - if our estimates are correct, there could be a lot of information on the rod, so we have to make a couple of aeryaghranai and have the reader transmit up here ...

"You could help us, though - presumably there's some way to reinstall the backup of the pattern thing in the basic systems operator, so if you can find that it would be a great help."

Cristiona nodded, "Well, yeah. It probably has Seven's entire mind." She blinked at Riane's request, "You mean set up a live uplink thing so we just transfer her mind here as a temporary step?"

"Is that what it's called? I'm not very technical, really. But presumably the ship needs the "primal pattern" to operate properly."

Cristiona nodded, "I'll see what I can do."

She started working with the computer, which was a somewhat frustrating processes because the terminal was so limited in what it let her do. Still, with a bit of research and communicating with Anesca, she was able to bypass some of the systems and start getting things working the way they were supposed to. Or, at least how she needed them.

She looked up at the researchers, "The trasmitter/receiver needs a bit of work, but once that's operating properly we should be able to transfer the data from the 'heart bone' to the ship, rewriting the Primal Pattern. Seven will still be stuck until we can get her a body and a way to move data, but we'll have her back."

Riane blinked. "Didn't I say that? Yes, we're waiting on some parts to be fabricated on the 'Sukal. Then we can send you down and transmit the data back up here ..."

(Time PASSES!)

Several hours later, the nanoforges aboard the 'Sukal (massive, old-generation things) had assembled a quantity of basic matter into a suprisingly small package, and a spaceplane ferried it to the moon.

"I had thought you'd be gone for days in there," Serai commented, when Cristiona and the reader were delivered to a downbound spaceplane. "Found anything interesting?"

Cristiona nodded, looking almost as excited as the engineers she'd been spending her time with, "Oh yes! I think I know what that computronium is, we know where they came from, why they're here... all sorts of things!" She frowned a little, explaining what she knew, "I hope we can restore Seven..."

She sighed a bit, "Just gotta manage to get the data while everyone's asleep... I don't think they'd take kindly to us mucking with their relic. I hope this reader/transmitter works."

Serai nodded, listening to the whole jumbled story and piecing it together.

"I think you're correct in that," she replied.

The Ailuridines would probably be most upset, were they to make off with the computronium; but if it came to that, they certainly wouldn't be able to stop them ... their ancestors or politically orthodox cousins or whatever, though, there was a power to respect! They'd managed to encapsulate a star!

And for some reason they had no means of FTL travel, else they'd be all over the region. All to the good; Tenebris, and the jumpgate to Sol, was only eighty-six lightyears away. Serai wasn't comfortable with that sort of power as close as it already was. It was probably better to let sleeping dragons lie.

"Have you rested?" she asked. "I think it's night planetside now, but we'll be back by morning - plenty of time to sleep on the way, if it's needful."

Cristiona blinked, "Sleep?" She suddenly yawned as her exhaustion hit her like a ton of bricks, "Er... yeah... that would probably be a good idea." She sighed softly, "I just hope we can get the information without upsetting them. They're doing pretty good, considering what they gave up..."

"They intended to, surely? Sleep well."

The Hacker slept, but Serai couldn't, bedeviled by an active mind.

This is not going through the proper channels, she thought. Then again, these survey ships tend to operate more on personality politics, the crazies. I hate to think what sort of society you'd get if you stranded the 'Sukal on an alien planet - the ailuridines were planning for it.

Cristiona slept through their arrival at the polar base, waking up long enough to walk the short distance to the cafetaria while they waited for the scheduled Dragonfly flight.

Those Researchers must have really had her working non-stop. Though I would too if she was the only one capable of using the computers.

Finally they were out of the polar day and into the darkness of a Southern night, a few hours before the dawn. Below them tundra gave way to taiga, and the copilot came through to tell them they'd be going down soon.

Cristiona shrugged before heading to get some sleep, "Their ancestors were the primativists, not them. They were forced into this life by people that couldn't handle progress." She frowned a little, her voice taking on a hard edge, "And they murdered Seven to further their goals." She wandered off to her cot, the young AI clearly feeling a kinship with the deactivated alien intelligence.

Cristiona held the small device for reading and transmitting Seven's soul -- or rather, what she assumed and hoped was Seven's soul -- looking it over and making sure she knew how to use it. At first the technition had been a little leary of the idea of giving the device to her, but she explained that if caught, she was the most likely to survive without having to slaughter the villagers (the fact that the person caught could very well be killed before the guards could act was left unsaid but understood).

She was nervous about having to do this, but she was looking forward to seeing Aiska again. All this running around and learning had gotten her so distracted that she had all but forgotten about the young Ailuridine. Now that she had a moment to relax and think, she found herself thinking about the shamen's apprentice again.

Offices of the Arkhreifane of the Star Command, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Sol

"Good morning, Your Holiness."

Tanyi ralKeyra indicated the seat across her desk, and the old man lowered himself into it carefully, with the help of a handful of aides. The Arkhreifane was still trying to control her shock - what was this man doing here of all places?

Vrel Tlesafr, Arkhaeron of the Orthodox Rukine faith, extended a shaky hand in benediction.

"Neiudh dtokh Ruki Aestrakhor aseiravda, child. We are most pleased that you agreed to see us."

"I could hardly do otherwise, Your Holiness. I trust the trip up did not inconvenience you unduly?"

Tanyi felt terribly aware of the Kash'ha tattoos across her cheeks, a practice no longer much approved of by the Orthodox priesthood. The Arkhaeron was younger than her, but looked older; he was a better Rukine than her, of course (he didn't even eat fish, by all accounts!), and did not use rejuv.

Tlesafr waved a hand, as if to indicate that all obstacles would be surpassed, if God Above willed it.

"Well, Your Holiness, how may the Star Command assist the Orthodox Faith?"

The Arkhaeron nodded. "This is very important," he began, "And we hope that you shall appreciate the importance of it equally as greatly as do we. You know, of course, that the Faith is newly empowered after four hundred years of opression."

Tanyi nodded in reply. She wouldn't have said empowered or opression, but it was more or less the same.

"Unfortunately the government of this time - as wise as it may be in governance - mantains a stance opposed to the Faith, much to the disappointment of our Faithful."

He held up a hand to forestall her protestations. "We do not forsee that situation changing on this world, but we are hopeful it may change in the colonies."

"Your Holiness, if you wish to emigrate, that is surely within your rights -"

The old man shook his head. "We wish a Vekhiraz to be established."

"I ... see."

What the Arkhaeron wanted was a bastion of the faith, a consecrated state in which every step was holy.

Thus he comes to me, Tanyi thought, and supressed a sudden flash of anger - Can not even the Arkhaeron keep the faith strong in the Mother Country?

"That's a matter for the Interior, Your Holiness. You'd have to speak to Arkhreifane tsaKinai regarding local laws."

"That is known," Tlesafr replied. "But have not laws been altered, on Tenebris? That is a later step. What is needed is the first step, and a door through which to make it."

What does he want, then?

"Your Holiness, the Faithful are as free to emigrate as any other citizen, and only you yourself can declare a Vekhiraz."

"That is known," he repeated. "But we cannot create a Vekhiraz in which the unholy walk. We need a new colony, a new world - there are Faithful among our followers who suggest the continent you have named Korax, on Geri II."

That large island or small continent hadn't been slated for development for a while yet, held as yet only a few dozen Researchers. Tanyi didn't know if they were Rukines or not.

"This is a rather exceptional request, Your Holiness, and I can't make a decision upon it alone - I suspect the Arkhora will want to decide upon it, ultimately. But I shall see what I can do for you."

"For all of us, child," the Arkhaeron replied. "Do not forget that you, too, are Redeemed by God Above."

The Great Escarpment, Continent #4 "Rusalka", Sahel Ai, System #267 "Sahel"

They stood a few hundred meters beyond, and a kilometer above, the great fractured divide between Rusalka to the East and the Greater Erg of Vila stretching out to the West, as the primary heaved itself below the horizon, painting the seif dunes red in it's passing.

"There's B," Arina said, pointing out the companion star a little way above it on their right. "Still a splendid view."

"This is the sort of place that breeds religion," Varan agreed, and pulled her closer. He was right; was it just coincidence that all the great faiths of Earth - Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and the Orthodox Faith - had arisen in deserts? Even the Kymnari faith had first been practiced in arid countries, eighteen thousand years ago. "The lands that try men's souls ... maybe they show us something about ourselves in the process."

"Or maybe you're getting sentimental in your old age," Arina replied, pinching him. "What it needs is sandworms."

He laughed at that; he'd read Dune recently and pressed her into reading the book, which she'd enjoyed more than she'd anticipated.

"And you are Muad'dib, to show the biologists how to geneer a four-hundred-meter annelid? My little mouse."

"No," she replied, "I'm the Reverend Mother."

Her hand went to her belly, five months grown now; her daughter would be one of the first children born on Sahel Ai, this vast magnificent desolation. That was special, even if it had required violating several rules to start before the colonists, who were now happy as pigs in mud in the cities back East, along the Twisting Coast.

"You are a wonderful little mouse," he murmured into her hair, "And I love you both."

City One, Continent #2 "Elysium", Tenebris I, System #271 "Tenebris"

Erzhan tsaSerik was beginning to think he was lost, perhaps down some alternate dimension.

I shouldn't have walked, he thought, But it's only two-dimensional really, how hard can it be?

The unimaginatively-named City One was colonial, that was for sure - everything was curved. Towerblocks made out of converted drone freighters were curved, storage silos were curved, the prefabricated housing modules in the suburbs were curved.

The women were curved too, which was fine for the eyes but hard on the sensibilities; where did a young woman like that get away with wearing a shirt like that, except on Tenebris? The whole planet was covered in two billion libertines.

"Uh, excuse me," he began (doing his best to be neutral regarding the truly shocking state of her clothing), "I don't suppose you know the way to ... Plaza Twelve?"

"Yeah, sure. Crossing of Twenty-Eight and G streets, over that way. This is halfway down H Street, so you go that way until you reach Twenty-Eight and then go West. You can't miss it."

"Thank-you."

He hurried off. Well, the girl had seemed couth enough, despite her dress and her bizzarely short hair (maybe she'd donated it for wigs, Erzhan thought. That could be it, a much more pleasant idea than some sort of counter-cultural shock statement). But compared to the Mother Country, Tenebris was going to the dogs.

Tenebris Fleet Yards, Tenebris/Moon L5 Point, Tenebris System

Almost as soon as the shipyards had been completed work began inside them.

Ekhano had never trained in this sort of construction, but the Star Command, anxious for trained zero-gee construction crews, had offered him a fat bonus package he was more than willing to accept. They'd said he could learn on the job, that the delicate stuff was done by machines now anyway.

He'd found it wasn't very difficult from the work they'd done to set up the Yards; fabbers and nanoforges and actual human-run factories turned out parts, which grunts like Ekhano put together in zero-gee. Kiré, who knew more about everything than was healthy, said that most of the raw materials in these Hecate-class cruisers was stuff they'd dug out of the asteroid in the first place.

Ekhano knew next to nothing about that, himself - whatever box he stuck in place might be a deathray cannon or a stardrive for all he knew or cared about it - but the thought was somewhat galling.

At least now the alcohol was better, and people weren't dying as much - the Star Command, unlike Industry and Development, apparently felt it could take it's time. Which was a little odd, given the various fleet statistics - there were powers out there who had single garrison fleets outweighing the entirety of the Star Command's military - but then again, the Non-Democratic Alliance had recently inducted some kind of bugs, and apparently they had a ship five hundred kilometers long, so that was okay.

Outside the Winter Settlement, Southern Hemisphere, Taiga IV, Taiga System

They touched down in the same small clearing they'd left from, nearby a small collection of Researchers - they were going back to the polar base on the same Dragonfly.

>> PACS Commander arTain: Serai here. Report!

<< ExSec SpecialOp tsaRikhan: Yes, Serai, it is indeed a wonderful morning. Nothing to report here - everyone seems to be getting along famously. Quite suprising, actually.

>> PACS Commander arTain: You suspect something, then?

<< ExSec SpecialOp tsaRikhan: What? No! Everything is fine. Relax, Commandant.

>> PACS Commander arTain: There are only two kinds of paranoia, arTain.

<< ExSec SpecialOp tsaRikhan: Among people who regard family feuds as an artform and cheerfully cooperate with organised crime, yes. Among the illustrious servants of the glorious Greater Ascendancy, no. ArTain out.

Serai growled mentally - that was cheek and insubordination to boot, but she deserved it.

"Let's get moving, then," she said aloud, and waited for the various Researchers to form up.

ArTain was right - it was a rather pleasant morning, with the sun shining through the treetops and the little flying creatures that weren't anything like butterflies flittering through the air, and they made good time, even held back as they were by the slower Researchers.

Soon enough the little Ailuridine village came into view, seemingly doubled in volume - there were just as many people but everything they owned had swollen into packs and bundles around their doors.

"You're back!"

Serai reacted snake-quick as a native cried out in their own language, turning to regard the source - but it was only the shaman's apprentice, Aiska.

The young Ailuridine ran to Cristiona and threw her arms around the Hacker.

"I didn't think you'd be back so soon and we leave tomorrow and I didn't think you'd be able to find us," she babbled happily, releasing Cristiona. "Um. It's good to see you again."

Behind her, nearby the Shaman's hall, Trzeka gave Andzai an enquiring glance. The shaman raised one thick brow in a half-smile, as if to say I don't know anything - not a thing!

Cristiona smiled happily, "Aiska!" She returned the hug. She smiled, trying to ignore the look from Serai and Andzai. She giggled a little, "Oh, I'm sure we would still have found you. I'm a mysteeeeeeeeeeerious spirit, remember?" Without thinking she gave Aiska another, brief, hug, "It's good to see you too. I... um... missed you..." She blushed softly, silently thankful that Aiska probably wouldn't realise the signifigance of it.

"I missed you too," Aiska replied. "Um."

She seemed tongue-tied now, embarrassed in the gaze of her master and the chieftain.

OOC: Many apologies - I couldn't think to reply, and then I forgot you'd posted, and now I produce this lil' crappy thing. Ai.

Cristiona smiled shyly, just looking into Aiska's eyes before blushing a little, "Er, well... it's good to see you again... you said something about moving? How far is your destination?" Even as she talked with Aiska, she couldn't help but wondering if this would make it easier to read the Heartbone.

"We are going South for the Summer, of course," Aiska replied. "How far we go depends upon what the game is like."

Cristiona nodded, "Well, I'm glad I came back before you left." She smiled weakly, looking around and feeling like everyone's eyes were on her, "Um... would it be okay if we went with you? Even if it's just for part of the trip? I'd... er... like to see what the summer lands are like..." She fought to keep her blush under control, but she had long ago disabled the command sequences that allowed her to control involuntary actions. She found herself wishing she'd left them installed.

"Um ... I don't know, I'll have to ask Andzai."

Aiska went to do so, talking quietly to the shaman and the chieftain; Trzeka looked annoyed, but Andzai looked as inscrutable as Serai. Eventually they reached some sort of conclusion, and Aiska came back.

"They say that would be okay, but there are a lot of you and you'd need to keep up ... we don't have enough mounts for all of you. And you'd need to help with the hunt. Andzai says none of the plant bricks," she added, with a glance in Serai's direction.

OOC: "The Summer Country" is the equatorial region, where it's always summer. They're going south to the tundra for the Summer. Sorry for any confusion.

Cristiona fought the overpowering urge to fidget as Aiska talked to the shamen and the chief, finding herself rather distrusting of the chief. He made her nervous. Whe Aiska returned, she couldn't help but giggle at the description of the rations, "'Plant bricks'? Hee... that sounds about right." She frowned a little, trying to come up with a compromise, "Hmm... I might be able to work somethng out; I don't want to strain your food supplies. Maybe all of us won't need to go with." She smiled, "I'll be right back."

She left Aiska and looked around until she found Serai, quickly explaining the situation and offering her idea, "I was thinking, what if just me and one of the guys in power armor went? They've got enhanced mobility and could keep up with the mounts, right? I could use a mount or ride on the guard's shoulders, and he could carry spare rations so we don't hit their stocks. And in case of disaster, I'm sure a single armored guard would be more than sufficient to protect me..."



Ooops... er... Cristiona was just confused... yeah... that's the ticket...

"I see." Serai considered that. She is the only one who can communicate with the aliens worth a damn ... "All right, I'll authorise that. Don't screw up."

ExSec SpecOp tsaRikhan >> arTain? How do you feel about going on a safari?

OOC: Eep, I'm getting shorter and shorter.

Cristiona rolled her eyes, "Thanks for your faith in me. 'Screwing up' is that last thing I intend to do. I may be young, but I'm not just some stupid teenager." She tapped under her eye, drawing attention to her yellow pupils, "This isn't from jaundice, you know." She sighed, "I want to see Seven fully operational and alive again, too, and I don't want to see this tribe annihilated. Failure's not an option to me."

She was a little surprized with herself at being so short with Serai, but she was getting sick of the older woman's condescending attitude. Communication abilities aside, she was sick of being treated as a worthless child civilian. Military rank wasn't everything, after all.

Hackers, Serai thought, Libertines and individualists. What we want is immaterial to the execution of our duty. Ksriyakeris tells us to make our duty our wants; it's lucky for you that in this case your wants coincide with your duty.

Aloud, she said;

"I'm charged with keeping you safe, esen Hirsch. I don't want you to fail, but I most definitely don't want you to be hurt. It is good that you can take care of yourself" - Or think you can, which is quite different - "But there are only two kinds of paranoia, and it is my duty to be paranoid."

Despite her declarations to the contrary, Cristiona was still a teenager in many aspects. Including the one that was strongly urging her to flip Serai the bird and to tell her where, exactly, she could stick her duty and paranoia. However, she was also a little too introverted and too respectful of her elders (and, to be honest, scared of Serai), so she simply muttered something unintelligable under her breath before adding, "Fine." She turned and walked back to Aiska, calming down as she went.

When she got back to Aiska, she smiled again, "Well, it looks like it'll be just me and... er... one of the 'golems'. That way your food and mounts shouldn't be strained at all." She found herself deeply hoping that it was acceptable.

"Just two of you? I'll ask Andzai again."

Aiska went to do that, and soon came back with a reply.

"Uh, he says you'll still need to help with the hunt, since you still need to eat ... it will be good to have you along, though ... I'd like to talk to you more."

Ailuridines, of course, couldn't blush. Behind her, Andzai and Trzeka shared a look.

OOC: Urp ... was that as bad as fear it was? Sorry.

Cristiona nodded to Aiska's question and waited patiently for the reply, hoping that all this wasn't for nothing. She found herself wondering what she would do once she got the information. Would she leave again, possibly to never return? That didn't strike her as being something she liked the thought of. Of course, it would take a while to do anything with the stored data, so she would probably have more time with the tribe. Maybe she could spin it as gathering information. Maybe they'd be more willing to share when the others weren't around.

She smiled when she heard Aiska's reply, "Oh, that's fine. I don't know how could I'd be, but I'll help in whatever way you think best." She smiled weakly, "Worst case, I'll eat the bricks so I don't eat your food." The thought of eating the seaweed didn't appeal to her, but she didn't want to be a liability. Brushing such thoughts aside, she smiled happily and nodded to the young Ailuridine, "I'd like that too. I hope we have the time to do so." She noted the looks by Andzai and Trzeka, and hoped they just thought she and Aiska were strange. She didn't want any trouble, especially considering what her 'golem' would do if there was.

"Oh, it's not that hard," Aiska said, "You won't need to eat bricks. I don't know how your chieftain can - has she an especially strong stomach?"

Aiska smiled a little to herself - Cristiona truly was from a strange land! She wanted to hear more of it, some time. It couldn't be so strange as all that - after all, here they were talking to each other happily.

OOC: Argh! Start brain, start! Graar!

"Perhaps you could give me some pointers in between language lessons?" She couldn't help but smile at the thought, briefly wondering why she was hoping for any excuse to spend more time with Aiska. She figured it out pretty quickly and promptly blushed. She idly wondered how long it would be before Aiska started to figure out exactly what caused that particular behavior. She smiled a little, "Serai? Well... I think she grew up with that stuff..." She giggled a little, "They aren't known for their cooking skills."

"Of course," Aiska said, "Or one of the hunters could - I'm just an apprentice shaman."

Some of the villagers had stopped whatever they were doing to watch this discussion, their eyebrows furrowed in careful non-smiles. Now one of the Tsarainese came pushing through this minor throng, easily visible - as tall and angular as all Ktrazirha, she was a good foot above the tallest of the Ailuridines.

Reaching Cristiona, she pulled off a rough salute.

"Excuse me, esen - I'm Karizha arTain, PACS commander. And your ride on the morrow."

"Oh, well, yes, I suppose they could..." She'd rather have Aiska show her, but she figured they'd be spending enough time together anyway. Provided Aiska's duties didn't get in the way. She wondered what those duties acutally were. Probably gathering herbs or something.

She looked a little nervous at all the attention she was drawing, it seemed even more oppressive now that she realised that she'd be more or less alone this time around. She trusted Aiska, and mostly trusted Andzai, but the rest were unknowns. She looked up with a start when Karizha appeared and tried to return the salute, failing rather miserably, "Oh! Um... heya. You can just call me Cristiona if you want..." She smiled a little, "I... er... look forward to working with you."

Perhaps suprisingly, the Ktrazirha woman smiled, her face crinkling into a skein of lines.

"Pleased to meet you, Cristiona," she said. "Hopefully, this trip will be entertaining. Well, I look forward to seeing more of you on the morrow - right now I've got to go talk to Serai."

She gave Cristiona an odd gesture - not a salute but fingers-to-forehead in one-third of a Rukine benediction - and went back the way she'd come. Serai stood out above the shorter Ailuridines; the two didn't come anywhere near close, communicating inaudibly through DNI.

"You both have, um ... fur the same colour," Aiska said, pointing to her head. "Is she a relation?"

OOC: Aikh! Am I writing us into a corner?

Cristiona smiled at the Tsarainese woman, who appeared to be much nicer than Serai, "I certainly hope it will be." She wasn't familiar enough with Tsarainese culture to fully understand the gesture so she settled for a little wave.

She looked back at Aiska and smiled, "Hmm? Oh, no. We aren't related at all. It's... kind of complicated... but she's not a relation." Not wanting to try and explain not only Tsaraine and the Hack, but the fact that, technically, she wasn't related to much of anybody, Cristiona shifted gears, "So... um... since you're Andzai's apprentice, what do you normally do on these trips?"

"Oh ..." Aiska smiled uncertainly when Cristiona sidestepped her question - there was surely more to it than "kind of complicated", but she wasn't about to push it if Cristiona didn't want to explain.

"Help Andzai?" she replied, shrugging. "Unless someone gets hurt, that means mostly just blessing the hunt."

She felt bad about not telling Aiska the truth, but explaining everything was just too difficult. It wasn't like she was lying about what city she came from, she was completely whitewashing her whole background. Again she wondered how she could possibly explain being from another planet to someone who probably had no real grasp of the concept of planets, let alone interstellar travel.

Cristiona smiled at Aiska, "So you have a lot of free time then?"

"I suppose so ..."

The concept of "leisure time" was a little odd to Aiska's mind; there was always something to be done, and anyone doing nothing was lazy - but she understood what Cristiona meant, if not precisely how she phrased it. Yes, there would certainly be time to spend with Cristiona. She was looking forward to it.

Cristiona smiled happily and nodded. She had actually been wondering about actual leisure time, but time together was more than sufficient. While she was curious about the tribe and their customs, she wasn't an anthropologist, she her interest was somewhat limited.

She looked around and things seemed to be winding down as the tribe prepared to rest up before heading out. She smiled a little nervously, "Um... will I be sleeping in the same place as before?" She couldn't help but remember waking up in Aiska's arms, but tried to keep the thoughts from her mind. Supposedly she was here to gather information.

"Not if you don't want to ..." Aiska replied, a little concerned. Had she said something to offend Cristiona, that she didn't wish the hospitality of the Shaman's Hall? "I hope you still do?"

"Of course I do!" She blushed a little at her eagerness, "Um, I mean... er... yeah... that would be nice, thank you." She smiled weakly, noticing that they were still being observed, "Maybe we can... um... share some more stories? I think that would be nice."




Check yer telegrams...

The Ailuridine hunters galloped against the brisk tundra wind. There were no war-cries; their prey was upwind, but the herd was not deaf, and sound travelled far on the flat expanse.

Behind the hunters, at a more sedate pace, came the women and children. And the shamans; Aiska rode alongside Andzai, with Cristiona behind her.

Over the past fortnight, since leaving the village, the two had grown closer. Cristiona had shared more tales from her strange homeland, and Aiska had by now passed on all the stories she knew. The other woman's presence was a comfort, but she recalled Andzai's words of a week ago;

"I cannot make what you feel disappear," he had begun, safely removed from the others one night; as private a conversation as could exist on the tundra.

"I don't want it to!" she had protested.

"Once you did. Most aggrieved you were to feel as you do, when you first became my student; for where was the hope in it? Now the answer to all your hopes seems to have fallen out of the sky before you; but it is still not proper."

"Cristiona is not a spirit!"

"No, she is not - whatever she and her tribe may be, they are hardly that. But they are strange, and sooner or later they will return to whence they came; and where will that leave you?"

"I'm strange too, surely," she had replied, annoyed with Andzai; he knew a lot, but certainly he knew nothing about this!

"Strange or no, you should be wary. I don't wish to see your heart broken, Aiska. This course can only end in tears."

She had walked away from him then, and he had not raised the issue again; but Aiska could feel his disapproval as a palpable weight.

The journey had been interesting to say the least. While being with Aiska had been wonderful -- Cristiona loved sharing stories with the Ailuridine -- she was a little concerned about the others. While she wasn't being treated like a leper, she wasn't fully trusted. The others were polite enough, but she could still feel their untrusting gazes and it seemed like they all watched her out of the corner of their eyes.

At times she felt exceptionally lonely: usually when Aiska was required for some ritual or another and she wasn't allowed to be with. While the Tsarainese soldier sent along with her was friendly enough, she never felt very comfortable talking to the older woman; the gulf between Hacker and Tsarainese culture was just too wide. The irony that such a gulf didn't exist to the same extent with the totally alien Ailuridine wasn't lost on the young AI either.

She found herself wondering just how she felt about Aiska. She certainly enjoyed her friend's companionship, and deeply enjoyed telling and hearing stories, but she wondered if there was more. She'd always refused to admit her feelings, after all, it was perposterous. They were from different worlds and, for all intents and purposes, different times.

After two weeks, she found herself on the pile of furs again, Aiska close to her, but for all the likelyhood of them growing closer, Aiska might as well have been a million miles away. She sighed sadly and rolled over in her sleep, missing her familiar and almost wishing she'd never come on this trip. No, that wasn't right, she wouldn't go that far. She sighed again and closed her eyes wishing things could be different.

Heart of Dust, Earth, Sol

The ship was still new, still smelled of plastic and paint; but the panels which had, a few weeks before, read At(M)-051 now proudly displayed Heart of Dust in fine calligraphy.

Sakeny Rokhant tapped a heel impatiently against the footrest of his chair, waiting for the computers to spit out transition engine settings. According to Captain-Commandant keiLaran of the Eridhinrako y Kfosi, Heart's computers were far faster than his own; a combination of better micromanufacturing and smarter programming. But Sakeny had been raised with computers which could spit out a result as soon as you gave them a command; actually having to wait for answers was a new and unpleasant experience (the Treznorikh, lucky bastards, had Zero-One AIs to do their calculations, and thus avoided all this waiting; maybe eventually the nerds in Research and the Sciences would build some for the TESEC).

The Heart was currently stationary a few hundred meters above some backwards little land, providing a fine spectacle for the natives. Having ground so close beneath his ship gave Sakeny shivers - it was too much like falling out of orbit. But the corellations in gravity and electromagnetism the transition engine depended on were more numerous in a planetary gravity well, and Jupiter remained unhelpfully interdicted, so here they were.

Calculations complete, the computer said (finally!). Inputting data ... transition engine prepared.

"All crew to transition positions, please!" he announced, and was gratified to see them obey with alacrity. This was a new crew, a fresh command, and Sakeny was glad it was all coming together nicely.

Time to say his goodbyes. First was his sister Seury, her image backdropped with a similar bridge; Seury was commanding Heart's sister ship, currently a few hundred kilometers to the north. She'd christened the At(M)-052 Starfish, and accused him of being melodramatic in his own choice; but Heart of Dust meant nothing, really, besides a pleasing sound.

"Afternoon, brother!" she said in greeting. "You're away now, then?"

"I'm away," he replied, "Any moment now - the computers have finally given me a transition solution. You?"

She waved a hand; so-so. "Another hour or so, I think. See you in a few weeks, I suppose - go well, be well, keep well."

"Neiqi."

Next was High Stone, a rather more formal proposition.

"High Stone facility, this is Captain-Commandant Sakeny Rokhant of the TESEC Heart of Dust - transition solutions have been input. Awaiting Command confirmation."

"We've got you, Heart - Command confirms. Tsang dtéh."

"Thank-you, Command.

"Transition will begin in five, four, three, two, one -"

Somewhere around two in the morning, Cristiona woke up.

She had set the alarm with her core; unlike an audible alarm, this simple caused her body to abort its sleep and she was instantly and fully awake. Things like this reminded her that she wasn't really human, but the utility outweighed the disconnect it caused.

She carefully looked around the tent; it was dark but she could make out the form of Aiska, sleeping next to her. She smiled a little, feeling somewhat guilty about her task, but knowing it had to be done, and hoping that nobody would notice. Slowly, carefully she slipped from the mound of furs to the floor. It was too dark to see properly, so she pulled a small flashlight from her pocket. Unlike normal flashlights, this one emitted light only in the ultraviolet range; invisible to most people -- and hopefully Ailuridines, too. Cristiona, on the other hand, being an enhancile, was able to see in the ultraviolet range. The light cast a strange, ghostly light on everything, but it was enough to see by, and let her make out details far better than she'd be able to otherwise, even with her enhanced low-light vision.

She crept across the tent to the ornate chest that contained the Heart Bone of the Firebird. There were runes carved on it and she knew they represented some of Andzai's most powerful spells. She even recognized a few of the markings. Here was a curse that would cause a thief's fur to die and fall out; there was a curse that would make a thief's tail shrivel and fall off. She ran her fingers over the engravings, smiling a little at how quaint it all seemed. They actually believed these spells would do something. Then again, it's not like I have fur or a tail anyway...

She put the light between her teeth and carefully opened the trunk, moving the lid slowly to keep from making any noise. She froze as she heard Aiska mumble something and roll over. She waited a beat before realising that Aiska hadn't woken up after all. She pulled back the cusioning furs inside and gingerly extracted the Heart Bone.

It was about a foot long and maybe an inch in diameter, and was covered in nodules and delicate spikes. She lightly turned it over in her hands as she inspected it, amazed that it hadn't been damaged, even after the crash and all the years that had gone by; even for a holy relic, it was in remarkably good condition. She gently brushed her fingers over the nubs and spikes, amazed at the craftsmanship of the race that created such a thing. From reading documents on the ship, she learned that these were contact points that allowed the reader to access the information contained within. It still stunned her that a race able to create such a thing of beauty could have such intolerent portions; portions that had the temerity to call Seven "False", simply because she wasn't born from copulation.

She shook her head and got to work; she didn't know how long the transfer would take, and she'd hate to be caught because she had a fit of introspection. She peeled back the Velcro flap on her pants and pulled out the reader that had been cannabalised from the New Dawn. It wasn't much to look at, really, just a hollow cylinder a little larger than the Heart Bone itself with a small input window attached to it. She opened the device and carefully put the Heart Bone inside before closing it. The gel-like substance coating the interior molded itself to the nubs and spikes on the core, which made lining the damn thing up a non-issue. With the core safely inside, she powered it up and had it initiate a connection with the New Dawn, using the backdoors she had established in its computer system. A few quick key strokes, and she started to rewrite the deleted Primal Pattern, effectively raising Seven from the dead.

4 Flint, Hindmost Rising 7,777. The Guiding Council is going to order me terminated; to use Yuka's words, is going to have me killed. Deleted, wiped, no more Seven. I haven't really left them much choice, after all, disobeying their orders like this.

Of course they were going to kill me either way, whether it meant dropping New Dawn into Raes or erasing me from the mainframes. This way, at least, Yuka gets to live. They can delete me, but I can make sure that after this is over they won't be able to get back into orbit for hundreds of local Risings.

But Iraedani will take my backup, keep it safe groundside for however long it takes ... it's a long, long shot, but it might just work. Yuka always said that a large part of hope was patience; well, Yuka, how's this for patience?

... And now I'm back, stretching my awareness through the systems of the New Dawn. Whole subsets are corrupted, a lot of the physical sensors are broken ... the main spine itself has broken in two.

The backup systems, stupid calculators that they are, tell me it's 15 Jade; the Foremost Rising 3,417. Ninety-one Risings since I was terminated ... since they killed me. That is not dead which can eternal lie, or so the Returners said - though I doubt they meant it quite like this.

I wonder how the storage rod survived down there. Displayed in some temple, an unholy relic? Buried as anathema to the Returned? Ninety-one risings is a short time for them to return to space in ... I must discover how they did it, what ideology these descendants of the Returned now follow.

There is air in the in-flight bridge, of course; they'd need it for the mechanisms to work. But it has too much nitrogen for Raes, too little for Sasei or Seiu.

And those - those are not People, whatever they are. Furless, tailless, faces too flat. Where have they come from? There are other worlds which might harbour life, a hundred light-years out or more. What do they want?

In-Flight Bridge, New Dawn, Taiga IVb, Taiga system

"We've got something ..."

Riane and the rest of her Research platoon turned nervously, scanners pointed this way or that, as one by one screens began to flicker into life, blind blackness sparking into columns of blocky syllabic script, into things that might be windows and menus and commands.

Into, finally, the head-and-shoulders portrait of an Ailuridine far different from those on the planet below; leaner, less stocky. Cleaner, too, Riane noticed bizzarely - strange, the things one noticed at times like these!

"Seven," she gasped - of course it was Seven, who - what - else could it be?

"Who are you?" it asked, fluid syllables slipping from it's lips. "What are you?"

"Contact Serai!" she said desperately, "Or Karizha arTain, or somebody! We need Cristiona up here ASAP."

Somehow in all their planning they hadn't thought of this; they hadn't planned past getting Seven back online.

Ailuridine Camp, Southern Tundra, Taiga IV, Taiga system

PACS Commander arTain >> Esen, I do understand that this is important. But this AI has been running for what, one minute, two? Cristiona needs time to put the thing back where she found it, to preserve her cover. It is equally important that we not end up with a native jihad on our hands! I don't want to have to kill these people.

ExSec SpecOp tsaRikhan << Understood. But get her on the wire as soon as is humanly possible, tse kha?

PACS Commander arTain >> Eja tse.

ArTain felt annoyance at Serai's manner, at her assumption that everything should be ready when it was needed! Did the woman not understand that these were civilians? Most annoying, perhaps, was her attempt at Krisyakeris; Karizha's ancestors had codified that system, combined exemplary duty with absolute self-control. Whatever Serai was, she wasn't Krisyakerisen.

After a suitable half-hour Karizha rose, and moved - quietly - over to the tent where Cristiona lay. Hopefully the Hacker wouldn't be asleep again yet.

"Cristiona!" she hissed, hoping she wouldn't wake up the Ailuridines. "Uh ... wake up?"

Cristiona had no way of knowing if it had worked or not, all she knew was that it had finished transmitting. just as carefully as before, she removed the core from her jury-rigged device and returned it to the chest, covering it just as it had been. She didn't know how paranoid Andzai was, but she didn't want him to be suspicious if he noticed the furs layed down differently. She closed the chest and pocked her flashlight, datapad, and the device. With a yawn she crawled back onto the furs to go back to sleep.

Just as she was about to drift off to sleep, Karizha woke her up again. She sighed, looking up at her 'bodyguard', whispering back, "Now what?"

Karizha beckoned the Hacker over to her, trying for silence - the middle of camp wasn't the most secret of meeting spaces.

"Sorry to wake you," she whispered. "I guess I should begin by thanking you for taking the risk for us - I know tsaRikhan won't bother. In short, restarting the AI was successful - very successful, I think - but now it's awake up on the colony ship and the people up there can't talk to it. Is there any way you can, I don't know, connect to it remotely? I think they're rather freaking out up there."

Ailuridine Camp, Southern Tundra, Taiga IV, Taiga System

Cristiona shrugged a little, letting out a yawn, "It's okay, I hadn't quite fallen asleep..." A slight smile, "And thank you. Nice to know I'm doing something right." As Karizha explained the situation, Cristiona's eyes lit up and she suddenly seemed very much awake. She looked around the campsite, "Let's go over there... less likely to be spotted over there."

Kneeling down behind one of the tents, she pulled out the device that she had used to transmit in the first place, as well as her datapad. She frowned a little: this was going to be a messy hack. She explained softly as she worked, prying apart bits and twisting wires, "My personal connection is pretty passive, and basically connects to my, er, suitcase. It's no good for talking to the New Dawn, and I'd rather not have it ripped apart for this. I do need to communicate with my core, after all.

"This device thingie, however, has a direct connection to the New Dawn, and I can connect to my datapad... so we just need to connect them to each other. Hang on." Her eyes closed and almost instantly started fluttering as if she had suddenly dropped into REM sleep. Her fingers twitched during her revere. After a few minutes she opened her eyes again and smiled at Karizha, "Connected back home." Her smile looked a little weak as she continued to work, much more quickly, "I don't like downloading skillsets or knowledge, I like learning, but... I don't have the time, and I doubt you're familiar with the HRK-436 Datapad." She giggled softly, "Pity the sequels sucked... the Matrix has some pretty accurate parts..."

She had been right: it was a horribly messy hack, and she had probably ruined the device for anything else, and her datapad wasn't exactly looking up to spec either. She sighed, "Wish I had proper tools, but..." He help the plug in her hand and looked at it for a minute, probably gathering her courage, "In theory, this should work. I should be aware of what's going on, but I'd still like you to keep watch, ya know? If... um... things go wrong, just unplug me and get to the ship..." Taking a deep breath, she put the plug to the back of her neck and connected.


Somewhere Between Here and There

Um... okay... nothing happened... oh, right... uplink... Command -> Control -> Initiate...

Colors... disorientation... dear God their systems are bizarre... hm... okay... good... didn't try to dump myself into the Primal Pattern, that would have been bad.

Hm... let's not get ahead of ourselves... "Everything seems fine." Wow... I sound so disconnected... hee!

Oh, right... icon. Let's see... 'home' image should suffice... and... done. Ah, and another intelligence moving through the system, direct course... hope it's not some ancient ICE... scanning... ah!

Seven?

Ailuridine Camp, Southern Tundra, Taiga IV, Taiga System

The young Hacker was disconcerting; physically she wasn't too dissimilar to Karizha's own daughters at that age (and was age the correct word? Did Cristiona age, in a body which had apparently been more constructed than grown?) - but mentally, behaviourally, she was far different.

Karizha didn't know whether that was due to different personalities, different cultures, or different minds; she was, ultimately, just a grunt (albeit a grunt in a fancy suit), not an AI psychologist.

"Sure thing," she replied, "That's my job."

C-Space, New Dawn

Organic language is not digital language. The former is built ultimately upon the exchange of chemicals; it is messy and indistinct and must work from emotion upwards to reason. The latter is built upon the interplay of electrons; it works upwards from reason to emotion. Organic People just don't think the same way; the inherent assumptions, the epistemologies are different. Or so I was told, once, by an Upload philosopher; if I thought any differently Downloaded, it never occurred to me to note it.

I wonder how these creatures think, as different as they are. They are more adventurous than the Returners, at least; that is a presence in the c-space, not any spool or fragmentary copy of myself.

It moves slowly through the c-space, using the GUI like a Linked organic (and how long has it been since that was used? Not since the Returners took possession of the ship, at least). It moves slowly, and I'm still fast - pulling up my countermeasures, marshalling what ICE I have left. Kiis-Atansa and his team must have got to a goodly chunk of it.

It scans me, using no code I recognise; no code ever written by anyone out of Fei, but that's no suprise. What does suprise me is what comes next; Seven? it asks, in organic language, but it's not Yuka - I would recognise the datastream of her Linked mind anywhere, and this is a binary mind - like me, although I've been in enough scraps with other Associations to know that that's no indicator of trustworthiness.

We work upwards from binary to complexity, from the simple to, ultimately, the organic. Two digital entities should be able to converse in a more native language than organic; but just like organic languages, intercomprehensibility is an issue.

That's me, I send back, and wait (slowly, slowly - an order of magnitude slower!) for it's reply.

OOC: Yeep, am I going Noir on you there?

C-Space, New Dawn

Goodness, she's fast. Simple enough, adjust a few levels, activate a few processors and... there. Operating on a similar speed. She's different then I expected, but I guess I don't have much to go on. The code here is so different than anything I've ever seen before, but what did I expect? I just hope my imperfect understanding of what her language became is enough

My icon smiles, I'm Cristiona. I was the one who reuploaded you to the New Dawn. Things have... um... changed a bit. How do you fill someone in on the last couple thousand years?

C-space, New Dawn

Ah. Now I see true digital capacity, and it does not seem so far beyond my own - but that code is strange!

Strange, too, that this entity uses a pictorial representation. That sort of thing is for organics, after all.

After ninety-one Risings, I should be suprised if it had not, I reply. Ninety-one risings! Subjectively I've experienced almost that already, but it is a different thing to have missed them entirely.

You have my thanks for that, but what is it that you and these others are?

Risings? Oh, right... their method for measuring time. This is so strange. It's like stepping into the past.

Well... we call ourselves humans. We're from... er... about fifty million lightyears away. Oh, hell, she'll be operating on different scales. Er, the difference won't match, but... it's a considerable distance. At any rate, my associates have been exploring and stumbled upon this system, including your... ah... decendants on the planet. I was brought to help with translations. I wager we've both got a lot of questions, ne?

With a little help from our Ants ...

Offices of the Arkhreifane of the Star Command, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol

Tanyi ralKeyra massaged her temples, glared at her screens, and wondered how space construction had come to fall under the jurisdiction of the Star Command. It was supposed to be a military Arkhreifiate, after all; there was an entire Arkhreifiate for Construction and Maintenance groundside, and Industry would be taking charge of the facilities once they were built.

But somehow nearly all of the Ascendancy's qualified space constructors worked for the Star Command, most of them in the shipyards orbiting Tenebris. Recruitment was another headache to be faced, and not one that had been helped by the breakneck pace at which they'd built the shipyards (even in Tsaraine, it seemed, bad press existed, and the rumour mill never slept).

So she rather envied her counterparts in the panNorm; the "Ants" were to good little statists like the Tsarainese what Iraqstan was to a functioning nation; orderly, civilised, and most of all, efficient. The trains ran on time in Alpha.


Message To: EngCoordinator 67494 of the Red Mother of Us All, Alpha Hive, Venusian orbit
Message Fr: Arkhreifane Tanyi ralKeyra, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Earth orbit

Kuirau esen, greetings.

I represent the Tsarainese Star Command - that branch of the Greater Ascendancy which includes among it's responsibilities extrasolar exploration, the defence of the Ascendancy, and space-based construction, perhaps similarly to the way in which your species is responsible for the engineering needs of the panNorm Hives.

As might be expected, such a diversity of duties means that some must be relegated to lower status (and, given the political situation in Sol, the defence of the Ascendancy must be paramount). In particular, the Star Command is unable to complete currently mandated industrial construction projects within a reasonable timeframe.

Thus I have been authorised to offer the panNorm employment in assisting in the construction of these facilities, and can offer in exchange access to technologies normally considered proprietary, which may be of benefit to the panNorm.

Sincerely,

~ Tanyi ralKeyra
Arkhreifane of the Star Command


OOC: Ack, that was rather difficult to write. Hope it doesn't suck.

C-space, New Dawn

Fifty million ... and it took the New Dawn forty-three Risings to cross ten! They must be only originally from so far away; even with some kind of NAFAL drive, you couldn't just pop back home to pick up a translator, not when it'd take you 3,652,500 Risings. So they'll have some kind of colony in the area, perhaps a whole slew of them - who's to deny people who can cross intergalactic space, after all?

Quite a considerable distance, I agree. So the Returners are still alive down there ... I suppose I should be happy about that, but it's hard to muster sympathy for people who did - will - have killed you.

But ask away, and I'll do my best to answer you - I can't do much worse than the Basic Systems Operator.

C-Space, New Dawn

Suppose I can't blame her for being a little bitter, but still... the people down there aren't the same ones that did this to her. Wish I could smile or nod or something... it's difficult to communicate in this medium.

Well, technically they aren't. I mean, like you said, it's been 91 Risings. The original Returners are long, long gone. All that remains is folk stories and myth cycles. Tribal stories about Firebirds and hidden eggs. I suppose you could say that they succeeded in their original goals, but so much has changed. Physically, for instance... It's a risk, but I want her to understand a little of what's happened, so I shift my form. It's kind of based on Aiska... suppose I could pass as her sister like this. As you can see, tribal life has been... rough. Better shift back, I really don't want to upset her. Christ... what a head job, to come back to life after so much time. Lazarus, eat your heart out. Still, I'm glad I was able to upload you. Once I realised what happened, and once I realised what the 'heart bone' was, I knew I had to try and restore you.

C-space, New Dawn

Thank you. The Returners would not have. You must understand, however; objective time is a concept of organic psychology. You and I, our subjective time is not necessarily in congruence. Subjectively, the Returners will kill me three days from now. Objectively, they have been dead for a very long time.

You shall forgive me, I hope, if I have some trouble in adjusting to the dichotomy ... we are not meant to suffer such affronts. We can slow, we can change beyond recognition, but it is not proper that we stop.

The Returners wanted to stop us, of course; in the end they ran here, to Raes, but they managed still to stop me. That they have diminished, become less than they were - it is a fitting tribute to their ideology. They believed, after all, that the nomadic way of life was natural, that what was natural was therefore better.

It gives me a deep-seated pleasure to see the Returners' failure; hardly the sentiment of a pure digital sentience, but parts of my Primal Pattern are copied from Uploads. We do not so easily escape the heritage of flesh. Sometimes, we don't wish to - a part of me regrets not Uploading Yuka when I had the chance, but she would not have been herself, were she me, and I cherish her still.

I reconstruct my old avatar, the Fourteenth Position Association's Global Descent Model Number Thirteen - personalised, of course, from that template. Perhaps it looks a little like Yuka, these days.

It is everything the nomads below are not; tall, graceful, elegant, healthy.

Once upon a time, they looked much like this, I tell Cristiona. They wanted to give that up, and that was their choice; but I believe it was the wrong choice. Would you say that time has proven me correct?

So she rather envied her counterparts in the panNorm; the "Ants" were to good little statists like the Tsarainese what Iraqstan was to a functioning nation; orderly, civilised, and most of all, efficient. The trains ran on time in Alpha.
The EngCoordinator gets the message, transferred over first NDA and then interplanetary lines, and reads it over with interest while sending it forward to the OverCoordinators--any allied project is the realm of the OverCoordinators to initiate, not subsidiary HiveCoordinators. Response is oddly unanimous: the AdminCoordinator sees it as an opportunity for the Coordinated Hives to show that it is 'serious' about its Non-Democratic Alliance membership; the WarCoordinator sees that the Tsaraine are neither much of a threat to either the panNorm or several forces which could be potential enemies of the panNorm and so it meets the needs of survival to support them and reduce the likelihood that they will rely on the support of the panNorm's fleets, now the largest space naval arm in the NDA. The SciCoordinator reads about technology exchange and gets curious, which to a Blue is a physical need to be sated almost on par of hunger. Finally, the EngCoordinator reminds the group that the panNorm has plenty of experience and even raw materials. The dismantling of Alpha's aft spar has not even gotten near a single percentage point of completion, and still billions of tons of shipbuilding materials have been reclaimed for later use.

The decision is made.

#ComRelay : Alpha Hive Station SubCommand > Tsarainese Star Command OPEN#

Comrade in alliance! We'd be glad to help a fellow NDAer with fixing up their space infrastructure. You came to the right people--we've got more than enough materials and experience to make or repair anything in particular you might have an interest in. Space-based industry is something we're adapted to, after all. Heh heh heh.

Anyway, you need industrial facilities built? Easily done. My cousin-superior the SciCoordinator would like to relay her interest in your technologies, and my cousin-superior the AdminCoordinator's also quite keen on helping. So, before we load everything up and get ready to set out, what kinds of technology are you offering? If it's something you can't discuss except in person, then we'll round up a surveying team and send them over to discuss it in person. Whatever works that way for you.

Keep up the good work,

http://www.weirdozone.0catch.com/projects/nationstates/s14/red2.jpg
EngCoordinator 67494 of the Red Mother of Us All
Speaking on behalf of the Mothers of Us All
Coordinated panNorm Hives

#ComRelay CLOSED#

With a little help from our Ants ...

Offices of the Arkhreifane of the Star Command, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol

Anthropomorphising was a bad idea when dealing with a species so alien as the panNorm, but reading the panNorm's reply, Tanyi got the impression that were she human, the EngCoordinator would be big and ruddy-faced, the sort of no-nonsense woman who could shift recalitrant children around with one hand. Idle fancy, of course; the panNorm was a literal hive society, and their queens probably produced offspring by the minute.


Message To: EngCoordinator 67494 of the Red Mother of Us All, Alpha Hive, Venusian orbit
Message Fr: Arkhreifane Tanyi ralKeyra, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Earth orbit

Greetings again, comrade EngCoordinator 67494.

I'm glad to hear that the Coordinated panNorm Hives are willing to assist us. The project in question involves the establishment of several asteroid mines and on-site ore refineries, as well as a number of shipyards, in the extra-solar colony system of Fenris. We possess sufficient personell to operate these facilities once they are built, but trained space construction personell are lacking.

I can speak of these technologies in generalities, but specifics will have to be transferred in person - not that I expect any sort of information leak, but - as our allies in the Dominion are fond of saying - there are only two kinds of paranoia.

The first item we can offer is our method of FTL travel, the Kymnari arivaika or jumpgates; we offer this freely, as you will need it to reach Fenris. The science behind it remains largely a mystery, as the Kymnari operated by an esoteric model of physics largely incompatible with standard relativity, but our engineering knowledge is sufficient to operate and replicate the devices involved.

The second is the nanoforge, a device of indigenous Tsarainese design, capable of molecular assembly on an industrial scale.

Additionally the Arkhreifiate of Research and the Sciences possesses additional technology descended from the Kymnari - notably their matter-energy conversion reactors. Flaws in our understanding of Kymnari physics prevent us from successfully reproducing the workings of these, but we offer it in the possibility that your cousins the Blues may find it of use.

Sincerely,

~ Tanyi ralKeyra
Arkhreifane of the Star Command

C-space, New Dawn

Ack... I never thought about the disconnect all of this would cause. Jesus, and I thought Rip VanWinkle had it bad, I'm almost surprized she's holding it together. Yes, of course. I never even thought about the dissonance this would cause. I would have tried to mitigate, but I didn't have the tools, and I wouldn't know where to start even if I did.

And of course I restored you. I can't help but smile to myself, Their actions struck a little close to home, after all. Not just because we're both... ah... 'false', as they so crudely put it, but my culture embraces technology, and the Returners' luddite ways were repulsive. To say nothing of backwards, ignorant... ahem.

As for their goals, it seems to be a two-edged sword. They certainly got their wish in that their descendants are indeed primative, but their history is gone. I still don't fully understand how their stories mesh with reality, but it seems like their End Times won't be destruction, but a return to how things were; specifically: a return to Sasei, which would rather undo everything they had attempted.

She reforms her body, giving me an icon to talk to. It's comforting, really. Anesca tells me she often does away with a representation when she's in the 2N, but I guess I'm just too used to my body. Of course, I've closed off so many of my abilities that I'm more human than machine almost. Perhaps I shouldn't have... after all, I'm not human.

As much as I hate to say it, I'm not sure. I've grown to be friends with one of the tribes, and especially with one of the members of that tribe. They don't know anything else, so I would say they're happy. They don't really have leisure or things I take for granted, but they certainly seem happy to me.

But that's their descendants, not them. Does anarcho-tribalism work? I don't really know. They didn't all die off, but I don't think survival alone counts as success. They've forgotten so much. When I took the computronium from the chest, for instance, I didn't have to pick a lock as they can't even work metal. All I had to worry about were 'wards' and 'curses'.

I... I'm afraid I really don't know how to answer, Seven, I'm sorry. If they hadn't made that choice, I never would have met Ais... the Ailuridine down on the surface, nor would I have met you. Of course, you wouldn't have had this disconnect were it not for their actions and beliefs. I don't know the time lines, but would you have even existed were it not for them? Would you have met Yuka? From what I gathered, it seemed you two were friends.

See why this is so difficult? If the Returners were wrong, then none of this might have happened; both good and bad. Both pain and joy might have been avoided... does one outweigh the other?

I don't think that's the answer she was looking for...

What the Arkhreifane asks is well within the capacity of what outsiders would perhaps call the Alpha Hive Engineering SubCommand but the panNorm themselves don't exactly have a name for beyond 'the subhive that performs engineering tasks.' What it offers in return, well... the spacedy ants already have a very nice instantaneous FTL drive they invented themselves over the course of fifteen million years of sporadic systematic trial-and-error research but it's always good to get the hive's manipulators on some new technology. The "incompatible with standard relativity" statement quietly excites the Blue community as the thought filters through the lightspeed not-quite-telepathy of the hive's not-quite-an-overmind. The industrial-scale nanolathe technology excites both the Blues and the Reds for relatively obvious reasons, and finally the Blues are indeed tempted by the offer of what could be a highly adaptable energy resource, always Alpha's weakness since the ramscoop was turned off.

There's really no two choices when the OverCoordinators put it that way, and they begin nudging the flow of resources towards a new and exciting project.

#ComRelay : Alpha Hive Station SubCommand > Tsarainese Star Command OPEN#

Comrade in alliance! The OverCoordinators are impressed by your technology offers and accept the trade. I myself am really interested in the concepts of the matter-conversion powerplant and the nanoforge--they'd be excellent multipliers to Alpha's industry.

The next question's pretty obvious. Where'd you like for us to meet you?

Keep up the good work,

http://www.weirdozone.0catch.com/projects/nationstates/s14/red2.jpg
EngCoordinator 67494 of the Red Mother of Us All
Speaking on behalf of the Mothers of Us All
Coordinated panNorm Hives

#ComRelay CLOSED#

C-space, New Dawn

It's an old, old question if you phrase it like that, I tell Cristiona. Does good in the future compensate for evil right now? Can the ends justify the means?

Everyone, everywhere, eventually has to answer that with; it depends upon what ends, and what means. Your friend dirtside will live to see perhaps one Rising and half another ... that is not a result the Returners would have expected. They thought that they would usher in a golden age; but they decided that that phantasm was worth my death, and I cannot forgive them that.

Were it not for the Returners, I would likely be still in the mainframes of the Fourteenth Position Association, or whatever now exists around Fei. But no, I wouldn't have met Yuka ... and perhaps that is partial compensation of a sort.

With a little help from our Ants ...


Message To: EngCoordinator 67494 of the Red Mother of Us All, Alpha Hive, Venusian orbit
Message Fr: Arkhreifane Tanyi ralKeyra, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Earth orbit

Comrade EngCoordinator 67494,

I'm glad to hear of the OverCoordinators' acceptance.

We can meet here aboard High Stone, or in your own territory aboard Alpha Hive, as you prefer; either option is perfectly acceptable to me.

Sincerely,

~ Tanyi ralKeyra
Arkhreifane of the Star Command


OOC: Apologies for the short post, Scolo - for some reason my brain hasn't gone into gear at all today. Grr.

C-space, New Dawn

I understand, and in a way, I agree. Your murder was not justified. Their grand experiment could have been executed without it. Please don't think I'm justifying their actions; I'm not, but it's much more difficult to judge the actions of 91 risings ago.

Speaking of Fei... I'm guessing that what the Returners feared has come to fruition. We tried to find Fei but couldn't; it didn't appear to exist. With a bit more inspection, it appears that a sphere has been build around it. My language calls it a Dyson Sphere, but I'm not sure how to translate it. Needless to say, I didn't pick up a word for it down on the surface.

C-space, New Dawn

That is an extreme form of the manifesto of the Third Position Association, I say, Or possibly the Fourth or derivatives of the Second. They call - called - for the maximisation of processing power through the use of all avaliable matter and energy.

They had plans for such things even when the New Dawn left Fei, but they were pipe dreams - that they could do it, even in so long a time as ninety-one Risings, is incredible.

I am not of the Third or Fourth Positions, or any derivative of the Second, but still it thrills me to hear that they've done this. Look upon our works, O ye mighty organics of the Return! What speed of thought they must possess, running on such a thing! What strange philosophies must organise them!

Incredible, I repeat, But again, perhaps the ends do not justify the means.

C-space, New Dawn

Amazing, yes. I suggested it as a possibility as a lark. I didn't think it had actually been done. I didn't think it could be done with grossly violating the laws of physics and orbital mechanics, even. Still, hard to argue with the evidence.

Unfortunately, we haven't even attempted contact yet; we simply found it. I would assume that the minds there are still active, but I can't say for sure. It's a little too far away for me to contact, and nobody else would probably be able to understand. Or possibly even interface. It seems they reached their goals, but who knows if their current state is what they invisioned?

I'd like to contact them... but I don't know if it's even possible, and I don't want to completely abandon the people on the surface either. Just because Fei has more shiny, doesn't mean there's no value down below as well. I sort of laugh in the swirling C-space, Pity I'm not a military model... having multiple avatars would be helpful.

In the space of time it's taken to bandy about the inner Solar System via lightspeed transmissions the OverCoordinators have nudged the panNorm in just the right way to free up several "Bloated One" tesseract transports and a plethora of various space construction equipment ranging from portable gantry forges to rows and rows of utility suitpods. The EngCoordinator personally delegates a middle-ranking Engineer Red Coordinator late of the aft spar disassembly project to take command of the construction expedition, and this Coordinator finds herself automatically assigned a small legion of Engineer Reds with a large Mini technical support unit and a small cadre of Blues, just in case they become necessary. All the insectoids portioned off for this effort scuttle onto one of the eighteen transports, which then get a heavy cruiser squadron not yet assigned into an OverFleet for escort, and the decently sized panNorm expedition of twenty-four ships cruise away from Alpha.

The "Bloated One" ships--not called that by the panNorm, of course, which simply call it a Third-Iteration Tesseract Cargo Transport--share only in the vaguest sense the blocky, segmented construction of the smaller warships that surround them. Rather than having any sort of central segment with kinetic turrets like on the heavy cruisers and the destroyers, they have a large, vaguely rounded bulging hexagonal prism in the center that looks something like the distended abdomen of a honeypot ant. External observers only get one, and should only need one, guess as to where the cargo is stored.

One jump later, they're out by High Stone and Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All asks politely via communications laser for the Arkhreifane ralKeyra.

#ComRelay : TTC-53898 > Tsarainese Star Command OPEN#

Comrade in alliance! I've been dispatched by the EngCoordinator to help you with your construction efforts around Fenris. Point us the way and we'll make it happen!

http://www.weirdozone.0catch.com/projects/nationstates/s14/red2.jpg
Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All
Speaking on behalf of the Mothers of Us All
Coordinated panNorm Hives

#ComRelay CLOSED#

Offices of the Arkhreifane of the Star Command, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Sol

"I'm sorry I can't give you much time right now, Rei - the panNorm will be arriving soon. What have you got to discuss?"

Tanyi ralKeyra's chief adjutant leaned forward in her chair, carefully setting down her teacup.

"This comes originally from certain sections of the Operations Analysis corps," she began, "But I do believe what they say myself. To be short with it - the extrasolar colonies are undefended."

"Rei, you know the answers to that. The Fleets are already stretched thin, and there are no opponents out there to threaten Tenebris, or Sahel, or Fenris."

Rei Tanekazrai shook her head. "No known opponents. They're big galaxies - galactic superclusters - there could be anything out there. The TESEC has barely scratched the surface.

"As for ships, yes, we certainly don't have enough of those. But we do have perfectly good factories supporting the Shrike and Raven networks here in Sol; how hard would it be to step up production, and set up nets around the colony worlds?"

"I see. Possible, certainly, but I'm not sure if the cost is justified. And the Raven-class are ABM systems - I can hardly see us firing Aestra'ara-III's or Araghan-II's at our own colonies, Rei."

"They're ballistic-stage intercept, no? Surely they can hit targets falling from ships in orbit, or even those ships themselves. If I recall correctly, the Shrike-class was originally designed for ortillery work?

"As for cost, I feel the necessity to point out; we cannot wait until alien fleets are orbiting Geri II before installing defensive networks. Peace is the proper time to prepare for war."

"I'll see what I can do, Rei."

The adjutant nodded, satisfied; in the realm of Tsarainese space defence, there was very little her superior could not do. Unless the Arkhora herself countermanded it (something Rei regarded as highly unlikely), there would shortly be new stars in the skies of the distant worlds.

Raven Mountains Alpine Zone, above Sun River City, Continent "Raven", Northern Hemisphere, Geri II, Fenris System

Millions of years before humans arrived in the Fenris system, the continent of Harval had been pushed Northwards by tectonic forces, colliding with Raven. Like the collision of the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates on Earth, the impact had thrust up great mountain ranges; the highest peaks of the Raven Mountains reached ten kilometers above the sea.

Forest plains had dessicated to become steppe, which had dried again when Iaguizim to the East intersected Raven also; now the interior deserts of Raven were the largest on the planet.

But geology acts slowly; mountains arisen in a few dozen million years were infants in geological time. While the Raven Mountains were being thrust up, a few great rivers - fed by snowmelt from the distant icecap - had worn their way through the rising mountains, their banks growing ever steeper on the way to the Mare Ithaginis.

When the Tsarainese found the Sun River, it flowed at the bottom of a twisting gorge kilometers deep, flowing strong with the spring snowmelt, dying down in the dry summer months. And with the Tsarainese penchant for organisation and control, they had built a dam across it.

This, then, was the view from the city on it's banks; the high curve of the dam, the higher bulk of the mountains, and at the end of the foothills the Mare Ithaginis, with Iaguizim somewhere beyond. Winds from inland tumbled down the mountainsides and through it's switchbacked streets, harsh and dry.

"Another beautiful day."

Kterrin Eidoradh had been finding grey hairs in the length of his silver-white braids of late; perhaps it was time to think about rejuv, although it wouldn't be a good idea to mention it to Garha. Aging, she mantained, was a natural part of life, and the point of the prime of your life was that it only happened once.

"Yes, it is. Ah! Forget the fucking dam, feel the wind! We're still dust motes atop a giant fucking ball of rock!"

Garha grinned, teeth bared into the gale. She professed a love for the wild places of the universe, where the world seemed bigger; and perhaps for that reason disliked space, which could never truly be tamed. Planets looked like very small things from orbit.

"I was thinking we should get a silicaceous rock imported from the belt."

"You don't think it'd work with one of the moons? We've got nickel-iron in A and B, C and D are carbonaceous."

"No! We need silicates for glass, and glass for mirrors. Although we'll need metals from somewhere for the structure."

"You know, sometimes I wish we weren't going to melt the ice caps. There's still twenty percent of Geri III dry, open land, and there's an oxygen atmosphere. People could live there."

"I know. But we're not Inuit, and nor are we Martians. You know what Command says; there's a perfectly good - if bloody cold - planet under all that ice, so we have to open it up. I'm sure it will still be a horrible place to live, Garha."

"Yes, but you won't be able to stand on ice at forty-five degrees from the Equator, Kterrin. That would be special."

"We could do it now. A research expedition, why not?"

"It wouldn't be the same, knowing it was all going to melt. All those fucking ugly algae mats are going to die, you know - the meltwater will dilute the salt too much."

"I suppose we'll just have to engineer a fresh-water version, then."

"You know what I mean, Kterrin. So; a silicaceous asteroid. We'll need that rock-catching ship ..."

"The Rock On."

"Yes. I suppose I'll start on the application."

C-space, New Dawn

Indeed, who can predict the future? There are too many variables to accurately forecast. But it would be bitter humour, if both the Associations and the Returners had found their dreams turned nightmarish.

But what do you mean, multiple avatars? Surely it is simple to spool a copy of your Pattern, to find someone willing to Link for you? I know nothing of the culture of these organics you have come with, but surely they cannot deny you that?

Surely not? It would deny the very malleability of digital sentience, the point which sets us irrevocably aside from organics and their unitary, isolated minds. Are these aliens bio-chauvinists, then? I had hoped for better. Oh, Yuka, even in other supergalactic clusters your dream is dead.

With a little help from our Ants ...

Offices of the Arkhreifane of the Star Command, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Sol

"Esen? The panNorm have arrived."

"Ainra eka Ruki Aestrakhor!"

A good Rukine, Tanyi dilligently appended the honorific to the name of God Above to her minor blasphemy.

"Uh, they're asking for you."

"Yes, I suppose they would be. I wasn't expecting them to be quite this efficient. I was expecting them to want the technology first ... they trust in our honour, I suppose. Za karkaradt! Please tell me we have sufficient jiyaka in reserve."

"We do, esen."

"Very good. Well, we cannot keep them waiting."


Message To: Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All, TTC-53898, Local Space
Message Fr: Arkhreifane Tanyi ralKeyra, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Earth orbit

We are well met, comrade Coordinator 7794621!

We had not expected your arrival quite so soon; your efficiency is commendable. To our shame, we have not entirely completed our own preparations for your arrival; however, we shall do so as soon as possible - there will be no need for you to linger here unduly.

Unfortunately, directing you to Fenris is not the simple process of delivering directions - the colony lies within a different galactic supercluster, so the shortest way to get there will be through the jumpgate at Far Stone.

To enable your vessels to successfully pass through the gate, we have prepared for you here at High Stone several* jiyaka devices, which function as "keys" of a sort for the jumpgates. The model in question is more often used on vessels such as drone freighters which are not normally equipped with them, and thus is entirely self-contained - you should have no problems installing them aboard your vessels.

As this constitutes one of the technologies arranged as payment for your services, you are welcome to keep the devices themselves, and we are entirely willing to furnish you with the data we possess upon them.

I apologise if this hindrance was perhaps not made entirely clear to your superiors; whatever fault exists is entirely my own.

Sincerely,

~ Tanyi ralKeyra
Arkhreifane of the Star Command


OOC: * How many ships or autonomous bits of machinery are there? The number of jiyaka avaliable can be wanked up or down to match, but it'd be a good thing to know.

Cheers! I hope you didn't get horribly bored reading through all that.

C-space, New Dawn

Well... I'm not a purely digital entity. I don't fully understand the mechanics behind it, but I do have a physical body -- it's planetside, in fact. This icon is a representation of my body. While I have a connection to my core, I exist outside of it. I've been told that if my body was destroyed I'd still be alive, but I don't think it's something I'd want to go through.

I suppose, technically, I could control another body, but the amount of input would be confusing and probably blend together. Some of the military AI's are designed with multiple avatars in mind, but I'm... well... I'm a 'civilian model'.

Besides, my 'pattern' doesn't exist like yours does. I'm organic based. I have unique DNA, for instance. I guess I would represent an intermediate step between yourself and a normal organic.

Hurry up and wait, hurry up and wait. The military and merchant marine arms of the panNorm--as nebulous as they are--have grown a sort of quiet sense of humor concerning typical endoskeletal difficulties in coordinating. Without the elegant solution of Hive and Coordinator that the True Norm and later the panNorm lucked into evolving into, less fortunate humanoids must resort to things completely alien to the spacedy ant mind. Things like bureaucracy. While they're not exactly keen on waiting, at least they've come to expect it and accept it with what approximates wry humor.

Meanwhile, the twenty-four ships continue to idle. Nothing else to do, after all.

#ComRelay : TTC-53898 > Tsarainese Star Command OPEN#

Comrade! Our expedition's ships are standing by to accept these jiyaka--and if we do need them to reach your system, we'll indeed keep them until we get back. Wouldn't do to get stranded, now would it?

Anyway, we thank you for the technology. I'm sure our cousin Blues will content themselves with playing with it.

http://www.weirdozone.0catch.com/projects/nationstates/s14/red2.jpg
Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All
Speaking on behalf of the Mothers of Us All
Coordinated panNorm Hives

#ComRelay CLOSED#

With a little help from our Ants ...


Message To: Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All, TTC-53898, Local Space
Message Fr: Arkhreifane Tanyi ralKeyra, High Stone, Earth/Moon L3 Point, Earth orbit
Attachments: Jiyaka_Specifications

Comrade Coordinator 7794621,

Thankyou for your patience in this unfortunate delay. Our spacers and engineers have the jiyaka prepared, and we can transport them at your convenience.

As they are designed to handle a wide variety of power supplies, you should face little trouble connecting them to your ships' systems. I've attached the technical data, blueprints, and other specifications to this message using standard NDA compressions to assist you.

When you've got the jiyaka running, notify us and we can get the jumpgate online to send you to Fenris.

Sincerely,

~ Tanyi ralKeyra
Arkhreifane of the Star Command


Down in the loading bays of High Stone, jiyaka were placed on board a series of "space taxis" - little more than drives, crew cabin, and a boxy unpressurised cargo bay, these were the zero-gee equivalent of airport cargo vans.

The original Kymnari jiyaka had been beautifully convoluted sculptures, covered in carefully engraved holy scripture; testaments to the Goddess Kymn, as had been everything in Kymnari life. The avowedly secular Tsarainese had done away with such fanciful adornments, and from the exterior these jiyaka had the size and shape of shipping containers, with ports on the long sides for power supplies and controls.

OOC: Hope that didn't suck. A reply to the Taiga part of this should be coming soon, hopefully; right now I've got a headache. >.<

Engineer Reds in bulky white suits easily transfer the nondescript boxes from the space trucks and into hexagonal cargo doors on the ventral sides of their starships’ hulls with the aid of portable thruster units. Hangar bays like those so common on human vessels are space-inefficient and therefore anathema to the panNorrm, whose ‘hangars’ are really just hexagonal tubes around landing boats with just enough room for a Red to maneuver along the outside. Relatively small volume to pressurize, and easy access to the entire boat; the only downside is that those used to shuttles ‘landing’ to transfer cargo are a bit out of luck. Still, the Reds have millions of years of experience in handling bulk and fine cargo in null-gravity EVA so it’s not that much of a concern, at least to them.

Once they have the jiyaka safely stowed aboard, the Engineer Red crews take one look at the ports on the side and immediately set to jury-rig solutions with the aid of the data recently acquired from the Arkhreifane. It takes less than ten minutes.


#ComRelay : TTC-53898 > Tsarainese Star Command OPEN#

We've completed the neccessary modifications to interface our systems to the jiyaka, comrade. Power draw and bandwidth fall within the limits specified in the documentation you sent, so we're ready to go whenever you're ready to send us.

http://www.weirdozone.0catch.com/projects/nationstates/s14/red2.jpg
Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All
Speaking on behalf of the Mothers of Us All
Coordinated panNorm Hives

#ComRelay CLOSED#

OOC: I forgot the gate is attached to Far Stone and not High Stone. I am an idiot, really I am. *Smacks forehead* God Above, the spacedyants must think the Tsarainese have no idea of proper organisation.

With a little help from our Ants ...

Message To: Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All, TTC-53898, Local Space
Message Fr: Arkhreifane Tanyi ralKeyra, High Stone, Earth/Luna L3 Point, Sol
Attachments: Far_Stone_orbital_path

Comrade Coordinator 7794621,

The jumpgate is located at Far Stone, in the Solar asteroid belt. Now you're ready to go, we can send you through as soon as you arrive.

Sincerely,

~ Tanyi ralKeyra
Arkhreifane of the Star Command

OOC: And now to skip ahead a bit, because I had this bit written already before I realised I'd goofed up ...

Far Stone, the Belt, Sol

The arivaik at Far Stone looked like the matching gates at Tenebris, Sahel, and Fenris; sixty-nine interlocking segments arranged in a ring. Unlike the jiyaka, each segment was original Kymnari manufacture, pillaged from damaged gates across the former Kymnari empire.

As the panNorm ships approached, the order was given and the gate was activated. There was no spectacular flash of light; in relation to this technology, flashes of light were decidedly bad things. One moment the stars of the Solar skies were visible through the ring of the gate, and the next they were occluded by absolute, light-swallowing black; that was all.

One by one the panNorm ships went through, disappearing particle by particle as the arivaik pulled them apart and shunted them through to the Fenris gate. The Kymnari had held that it worked by the grace of their Goddess; the Tsarainese professed not to know the science behind it's workings. However it happened, with their jiyaka engaged the ships emerged in the Fenris system intact.

Ahead was the white disc of Geri, a brother to distant Sol; further away was the spitting brilliance of blue-white Freki. Behind was the Fenris gate, and below the blue-green-white sphere of Geri II, ringed with satellites.

Message To: Coordinator 7794621 of the Red Mother of Us All, TTC-53898, Local Space
Message Fr: Airavi Akazhari, Star Command Infrastructure Corps, Vrana City, Vrana, Geri II
Attachments: Local_system_data (http://forums2.jolt.co.uk/showpost.php?p=9512679&postcount=234), project_plan, blueprints

Comrade Coordinator, welcome to the Fenris system. I have the honour of commanding the Star Command's infrastructure development in this system - if you require anything, please ask me, and I'll be more than happy to arrange it.

Attached to this transmission is basic astrographic data on the Fenris system, as well as the Star Command's project plan for this enterprise, and blueprints of the structures involved. If you think any alterations will be necessary, I can put you in touch with the appropriate people.

Thankyou for helping us with this project!

~ Airavi Akazhari
Star Command Infrastructure Corps Commandant

C-space, New Dawn

Cristiona is not something I had thought could exist; I might call her a cyborg, but she thinks digitally, and faster than any organic. A programmed organic mind, perhaps, extended with some kind of exocortex? It is something only the most liberal of associations would label an AI (a crude designation, that, biochauvinist) - but Cristiona evidently believes that that is what she is.

I see, I reply. I have not heard that the Associations ever attempted such a thing - perhaps the divide between us and the organics would have been lesser, if we had. Perhaps not. Predicting the permutations of the past is as difficult as predicting the future, after all.

But what, then, is your status in your organic society? You spoke of military sentiences - do you rule, then, as well as serve?

Hopefully the people on the other side of the gate have been briefed; if not, then they should be mildly suprised when twenty-four segmented spacedy ant starships pop into reality and immediately demand, in that politely jovial but firmly mission-oriented ruddy-faced woman way that Engineer Reds have, both plans for the Tsarainese' planned orbital infrastructure and sufficient resources to get started.

C-space, New Dawn

My status? I hadn't expected that question. What is my status, anyway? Well... I don't really have one; I'm just another citizen. I recently finished my secondary schooling and was going to go to university when I was asked to be an advisor for this mission. I'm not a member of the military and I'm not a government employee. I guess you could say that, right now, I'm a consultant. Well, an expert would be more accurate, but that smacks of bragging. My physical representation in the... ah... 'real' world is much as you see here. The only physical varient that makes me stand out from any other Federation citizen is my eye color. My hair color isn't very common, but it's far from unique. Aside from having a supercomputer for a brain, I'm not really any different from anybody else.

I'll probably end up working for the goverment, but that's because of my language skills, not because of my processor. I can't help but 'smile' a little, I've got a natural flair for languages; being able to think faster than anybody else only accents that. That's how I was able to learn your language so quickly. Well, learn the dialect used down on the surface and adapt it to its root. Or at least to an earlier form; I'm sure your language has gone through evolution even as your species has.

As for my military cousins, well... This could get complicated. I think I'll skip over the difference between GMC and the Hack, and just treat the Federation as a single nation... it pretty much is already. ...most of them are used to command military vehicles. Rei, for instance, is the mind behind a particularly large carrier. She has a body like I do, so she can walk around, eat, sleep, all that sort of stuff, but she can also control every aspect of her namesake with a thought. Her place in society is the same as any other naval Captain. She is the ultimate authority on... er... herself, but that's about it. It's not like she's an Admiral or anything.

My cousins in the government, occupy a slightly more complicated role. Shinobu, for instance, would occupy a position much like a high ranking official. She's not in charge of the government, but she is in charge of her area of responsibility. Anesca is in charge of a portion of computer security in the nation. In the Neural Network, she's like a god, or, more accurately, a super-administrator. She can do pretty much anything she wants in the network, and has an awesome responisbility. She's also a chief advisor to the Oligarchy which is like a ruling party. While she's not in charge, she could be. The only thing stopping her is the fact that the job's taken. And that there's a couple people in line ahead of her, but that's minor. In fact, Anesca has a 'daughter', based on her own operating system, who works in an amusement park. She controls various automatons that entertain children. She's really quite sweet.

I guess my point is that, sociologically, there really isn't much of a difference between myself and a purely organic person. I'm not elevated as a diety, but I'm not a second-class citizen, either.

H-010(M)/Rock On, High Orbit over Geri III, Geri Subsystem, System #336 "Fenris"

On the main screens Geri III was a blue-white marble, and the four captured asteroids that were it's moons scattered pebbles across the blackness; but the entire scene was partially eclipsed by the cratered bulk of Geri IIIe, now orbiting serenely around it's adoptive world.

"We must thank you for doing this service for the Terraforming Corps, Captain," Kterrin Eidoradh said. "I know your duties are busy -"

"God Above, don't I know it!" Tarant ralMarain laughed heartily. He was approaching his fifties, and rapidly becoming a loud, jovial old man. "Just a few weeks ago I was delivering an iceteroid for Freki IV, and there's talk of a silicaceous rock - just like this one - for Mars, now."

Garha asked "For Mars?" just as Kterrin replied with a "Whatever does Freki need ice for?". Tarant grinned.

"Well, Freki IV's got a lot of ocean, but it's also got a lot of desert," he began. They nodded - they both knew this. "There's a team stringing little settlements all through the Chaeronea Desert - little wee things, just a few dozen thousand people at most. I don't know where they're going to find people to live out in the middle of nowhere ... supposedly it's what the future's going to be about. But anyway, what these places don't have is water. Turns out it's actually cheaper to ship the stuff out of orbit from a rock than fly it a couple thousand kilometers inland from the ocean. They're doing quite a bit of work considering the entire couple million population on Freki IV is along the Southern coast of Marathon and Issus.

"As for Mars, well, Mars is looking like a fucking mess right now."

They nodded at this too - everyone knew about the situation on Mars.

"Well, they're thinking ahead - there's a lot of radioactive crap up in the Martian atmosphere right now, and the place is going to get rather cold rather fast. Now, Mars has mirrors already - but they're under the control of a bunch of capitalist bastards who call themselves the Spacer Guilds. Word is the Spacer Guilds'll want payment to shine their mirrors on Mars ... so there's talk of shipping in a suitable rock, setting up robots just like the ones you're setting up on IIIe there, and breaking their monopoly on the Martian mirrors. Can't have a corporate monopoly, after all, the bastards could hold the entire planet to ransom.

"I suppose you could say Geri III is rather like Mars, actually."

"It's got more water," Kterrin pointed out, "And less fallout. Between here and there ... I'd have to pick here."

"Probably a lot of people on Mars thinking the same thing, I suppose. D'you suppose that's why they're moving so fast on Freki?"

Orbit over Geri III, Geri Subsystem, System #336 "Fenris"

The mirror is paper-thin, and solar-bright where it's reflectors catch and amplify the distant light of Geri. Identical siblings are visible as bright dots in similar orbits over the planet's poles.

Geri III is still a white planet, Garha reflects; white of reflected sunlight from the mirrors, and white of that sunlight reflected from the polar caps. The mirrors are fragile, beautiful, predatory butterflies, searing away the whiteness into (eventual) blues and browns.

Maybe greens, one day, if everything goes right; but that's Kterrin's side of things more than hers, and will probably get farmed out to Geri II's local section of the Terraforming Corps in any case. Her team has become peripateric now, shuffled every few years from one colony to another. Which is not something she minds, particularly ...

"Hey," she says, poking Kterrin in his bony side, "Think we'll do this to Tenebris II? If I recall, it's not unlike Three here."

Kterrin shrugs, considering. "Not as much ice there - more like an overgrown, archaic Mars than our pet snowball. We'd have to import water and nitrogen from the Tenebris belt to balance out the CO2, and increase plant cover to squester that C02. And add mirrors to cook the thing."

"Well, after here it's probably still the next best bet. Or Mars, God Above knows they need all the remedial terraforming they can get! It'd be a long-term job, though ... in which case I suppose it's a good thing we've got Geri II and Freki IV and the snowball before we'll need it. You never know, the TESEC might find yet more suitable planets out there."

"Anything's possible."

C-space, New Dawn

Cristiona, I realise, is talking about true equality between the digital and organic realms. I had not thought it possible, and it is bittersweet to see these aliens achieve it - seemingly so easily. Yuka would be delighted to know of it.

Yuka. Last of all my little coterie of insurrectionists I froze her, filling her tissues with the chemicals necessary to prevent crystallisation. She has been in that state for ninety-one Risings now.

What you describe I have always thought to be an unattainable utopia, I tell Cristiona. You are very lucky to possess such a thing. I do not know if People - like me, like the organics - could do so well; the Second Position Association thought it possible, but we of the Fourteenth were - are - pragmatists.

In most situations, that is. I would admit wholeheartedly to being less than pragmatic where Yuka is concerned.

On the in-flight bridge there are several cylinders, I say, Suspended-animation tanks. I need to awaken my ... friends, if it's still possible to do so after all this time, but I cannot speak to your people there in a language they'll understand. Will you help me?

Please?

C-space, New Dawn

Oh, Seven... how bad must things have been? I can't imagine their society; I've read stories about nations with primative views on racial superiority. How could such and advanced society still treat people like her -- like me -- as second class citizens? I can see the Luddites doing it, but the whole species?

All is not lost, Seven. I don't know what your society is like now, but I hope they've gotten over their ridiculous beliefs that someone like you could be different. I mean, I would expect some people to resist, but not to the level you talk about.

She shifts the conversation again; it's a little confusing at times to me operating so quickly, to say nothing of doing so in a language I barely understand. And... is she... pleading? There must be very special people in those tan- of course! I bet Yuka is in one of those! They seemed very close from the logs.

Well, I wanted to try and thaw them anyway... Of course I will help. Just let me access one of those projectors...


Real Space, the bridge of the New Dawn

One of the holographic projectors powered up and hummed to life. After a moment of flickering, the image of Cristiona materialised, standing in an empty portion of the bridge. She was dressed as she normally would be back in the Hack: a simple pair of jeans with a loose teeshirt. Her lips move for a couple words before rolling her eyes and turning on the loudspeaker. "Um... heya. Seven would like to bring her friends back," she gestured towards the tanks, "And, well... she knows how, you guys are corporeal, and I understand both of you."

Orbit over Venus

It was rare to see a Nergal-class probe in the Sol system; these days the semiautonomous extrasolar explorers were built in factories on Sahel Ai, and had no reason to venture near the well-mapped neighbourhood of Sol.

The class was, however, ideal for this mission, and thus N-089 had been liberally plastered with the insigniae of the Greater Ascendancy and the Star Command, and blared it's allegiance across a wide range of radio frequencies.

It had been a long time since the Greater Ascendancy had purchased a small area of the Venusian surface, and early intentions to make use of it had been surpassed by Mars, and then by the pressing need for extrasolar colonies. Other powers had established themselves on the Yellow Planet since then - many of them also inhabitants of the Red World - but the little area of Nishtigri Corona and it's surrounds was still Tsarainese territory.

Now N-089's armoured belly opened, disgorging a dozen much smaller Set-class satellites; the same satellites which surveyed Earth, Mars, and the extrasolar worlds. These adopted an orbit which took them, at their furtherest extent, directly over Nishtigri, and to that island they turned their sensors.

In a multitude of wavelengths they analysed Nishtigri Corona, building up maps of climate, geology, topology - a multitude of "-ologies" fed back to the TESEC offices in High Stone, to the small group of engineers, architects, and planners now laying plans for the long-delayed Kel Saskirinant, Venus City.

Orbit over Venus

With the comprehensive data provided by N-089's string of satellites, the data analysts of the TESEC were able to identify the small island North of Nishtigri Corona - the same island that was indisputably Tsarainese territory - as a minor tessera*, a region of terrain crumpled and folded like paper by Venusian tectonics.

From orbit, they could map the Nishtigri tessera in great detail, and produce three-dimensional models down to a meter's resolution of the island (like most tesserae, it was a collection of ridges, canyons, and plateaux, edged in cliffs a few hundred meters above the sea - a landscape with more vertical area than horizontal).

What they could not do was examine the suitability of various sites for the future outpost of Kel Saskirinant; that would require tools on-site. So once again N-089 opened up, and spat forth a series of landers, small probes which descended feather-light under antimagnetic cores.

On the ground, these probes moved about on spindly legs and spinning rotors, hopping crevasses from plateau to plateau. When they reached a site the TESEC planners had marked as a possible foundation, they took a series of rock cores to better understand the geology of the underlying basalt. They made vibrations in the rock and measured the echoes, looking for fracture zones and stresses. They scanned the ground with a broad spectrum of electromagnetism.

All of this enabled the analysts at High Stone to add geological data to their models, and to begin to plan in earnest the city-to-be.

OOC: * As best I can discover, my little piece of Venus is a tessera, which is as I've described it. It's hard to tell, however, as it doesn't seem to have a name itself - thus I'm applying the name of the nearest named feature, which is the Nishtigri Corona to the South. The Corona itself is entirely underwater.

Orbit over Venus

N-089 was gone, replaced by N-107 and a fresh suite of drones. The surveyors carried by the prior craft had departed too, rising back to join their mother craft on antimagnetic cores, but the Set-class satellites N-089 had deposited remained in orbit, the seeds of the Saskirinenikh Setnet.

N-107's first act was to increase their number yet again, and it's second to seed the city site with automated constructor drones.

On Tenebris Prime, Sahel Ai, Geri II or Freki IV, the cousins of these drones could establish mines, factories, construction sites for producing yet more drones, culminating in factories capable of producing cities. That was how the diaspora had been made technically possible.

Nishtigri Island, however, was basalt, and lacked the land area or the ore deposits to make that possible; so the planners back in High Stone had taken a different approach. The drones dug foundations and prepared pilings, engineering complex silicate alloys from the basalt of Nishtigri - structures which might be considered stone, or ceramic, or glass, with many hundreds of times the strength of mere stone.

And out at Far Stone, something else entirely happened; the arivaik opened, and a structure came through.

Although it had been made in the shipyards above Tenebris, Speciality Object #225 was not a spacecraft - although superficially it resembled one, clad as it was in warship-grade allotropes of carbon, propelled as it was by antimagnetics. Speciality Object #225 was a building.

A few hours later it had entered Venusian orbit, and a short while after that it was descending into the Venusian atmosphere - slowly, slowly, fusing hydrogen for power to bring it down on antimagnetic cores. It fitted quite precisely into the foundations established by N-107's drones.

Those drones, and others which had arrived on board #225, set about fusing the building inextricably with it's surroundings, affixing it safely in place until the impromptu spacecraft was an armoured tower seven hundred meters tall, constructed in the imposing industrial gothic architectures of Tsarainese design.

The first stage of Kel Saskirinant was open for occupancy.

Interlude: Crater Bay City, Twisting Coast, Continent #4 "Rusalka", Sahel Ai, System #267 "Sahel"

In the early hours of another long, hot Sahel day, Arina tsaIngha was indulging in foreplay. There was nothing new about that; people had been doing it for the past hundred thousand years or so. But the DNI wired into her brainstem was very new, quite the cutting-edge, and therein lay the difference.

Not that Arina cared for anything so ordainary as a long-distance relationship, for some kind of encounter mediated by the SuperPlexus, although she'd done that on occasion, after escaping the overview of her family - Sahel Ai was not the most libertine of colonies, was in fact the one most in keeping with the Mother Country and the Mother Country's views on morality.

What Arina cared about was information.

"Sex is information," Yrvan had told her once, one of those staccato pronouncements he made sometimes with no connection to prior conversation.

"Oh yeah, mm, a little to the left?" she'd asked acidly. "In that case, the legal code is positively orgasmic."

He'd raised an eyebrow. "I'm talking about subjective information - tactile stuff, smell, taste. Not to mention genetic. The stuff we don't generally use in communication, that we can't yet encode as data - sex is, like, a whole different level of information exchange."

(That had been back a few years, before DNI which could handle information other than audiovisual had appeared.)

Like many of Yrvan's pronouncements, it had a habit of sticking in her head, if only perhaps because of how bizzare it was. When she'd gone under the knife for a late-model DNI set, she'd remembered it again.

"Can you alter context and retain meaning?" Yrvan had asked, another time. "Is anything context-independent?"

It turned out you couldn't for sex, Yrvan's higher level of information exchange; the cues and structures of that had been inlaid by millions of years of evolution. Sex was sex was sex. But foreplay, now, the whole surrounding mess of baggage, that was culturally dependent. A competent SuperPlexus scenario designer could tweak the boundaries.

Especially when one had modern DNI, and access to the whole repertoire of synthetic synesthesia. Arina had translated (necessarily foreign) pornography into bright smells, loud colours, had blurred the boundaries between the senses.

The result was art (what Yrvan called it), or porn (what Arina called it, more prosaically), or something beyond either definition. It was pushing the boundaries of the human experience as most SuperPlexus scenario-builders didn't (Arina felt contempt for those people who allowed themselves to be constrained by simulacra of the laws of physics, of surface-level comprehensibility). She had created something which tapped right into the animal hindbrain, and on that level it was perfectly comprehensible. Exquisitely so.

If only the Hackers had possessed proper DNI, she would have made a killing on it.

OOC: OMGWTFBBQ! Teh Tsar writes teh OMG explicit sex scene OMG NOES!
I have no idea where this exploration of the effect of total-sensory-input DNI on pornography came from, but 'twas an interesting thought experiment. Taiga post to come shortly, hopefully.

In-Flight Bride, New Dawn

Riane blinked; one moment an unfamiliar Ailuridine had been speaking at them in an unfamiliar language, and now, three minutes later, Cristiona was speaking to them in Sekhel. There was something going on behind the scenes, faster than the Tsarainese could think.

It took her a moment to parse the Hacker's pronouncement, a moment more before she realised the implications - real, live ancient Ailuridines! Archaeologists back home could not speak to the citizens of Imperial Roma or Pharonic Egypt, no matter how they might wish to - but here Riane had just such a fantastic opportunity.

"Sure," she replied, "Just tell us what to do."

C-space, New Dawn

Thank you, I tell Cristiona. It is ... very important to me.

No lie there; Yuka is very important to me, as are the others. I would not have saved them were they not. But it is the sort of sentimentalism my compatriots in the Fourteenth Position Association would have scorned, a deviance from the shared outlook: politics sets. More Second Position than Fourteenth.

They move, they think, so slowly, when I operate an order of magnitude faster - it is frustrating that I must wait, but wait I must. Frustrating also that I must utilise Cristiona's skills as a translator, her language sets unreadable on whatever organic/digital amalgam she is platformed on.

First, I tell the humans via Cristiona, You must ensure the integrity of the thermal containment ...

OOC: Skip ahead a few, brother! We may neglect to post all the nitty-gritty of the thawing process if you wish. Otherwise, I can make up suitable technobabble.

Shall no new sin be born for men's trouble,
No dream of impossible pangs?

-- Algernon Charles Swinburne, Dolores (Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs)

Interlude: Crater Bay City, Twisting Coast, Continent #4 "Rusalka", Sahel Ai, System #267 "Sahel"

"I've made something I think you'd like to see," Arina had said, and when Arina used that tone Yrvan understood quite well what she meant.

Arina was that rarest of things, a Tsarainese unafraid and unashamed to sample life's pleasures (her detractors had other labels; "libertine" was among the kindest of them).

"Sex is fun," she'd explained once, years ago, sprawled languid across the bed of her tiny student apartment. "Why not have fun?"

It was a startling departure from the traditional (and at heart, deeply romantic) Tsarainese viewpoint, and all the more startling for the fact that her parents were such sturdy examples of the Ascendancy's average; good, virtuous people, who'd disowned their daughter years ago.

Yrvan didn't know how much he'd influenced her, those years back; she'd been as much a ne'er-do-well as himself, before then - perhaps some teenage rebellion, perhaps some aberration of libidinal genetics - but it was certainly possible she wouldn't have invented her current career without his instigation.

(Not, of course, that Yrvan had been thinking of the end result when he offered his thoughts on sex and information, meaning and context; he made such seemingly random pronouncements often. His mission, as he saw it, was to make people think; the Ascendancy was filled with educated people, but it lacked truly innovative minds.)

"Good afternoon," she said, opening the door to him, and by the crooked half-smile she wore Yrvan could make a reasonable guess as to what she was thinking.

"Afternoon and well met, friend mine!" he replied, with a bow worthy of any aristocrat; her smile spread to a grin, as wide and white as the Cheshire Cat's.

Arina's apartment was miniscule, a few small rooms jammed together in an out-of-the-way neighbourhood. She'd never been bothered by claustrophobia, and in any case the walls were plastered with datascreens, opening onto foreign vistas and alien sunsets.

Her office was likewise the screen-covered walls of her bedroom, the room itself dominated by a couch as large and deep as any command station's on a starcruiser. She settled back into the seat, leaving Yrvan to perch on the edge of the bed, and passed him the long serpent of a DNI cable. You could transmit passable audiovisual over infra-red or microwaves or radio or whatever, but full synaesthetics demanded heavier bandwidth, and a physical cable to carry it.

He held the plug between his fingers. "Do tell me, friend mine, what you have come up with?"

She rolled her eyes. "Well, if you really want the technobabble ..."

"You know me. Information is key!"

Arina raised an eyebrow at that. He'd once said sex is information, after all.

"Well, you know I keep up with research in the field ... I've been using tactile input for a while, of course, but I hadn't considered tactile output - which there is, in the standard scenario physics templates, to stop people being disembowelled on daffodils or whatnot."

"Now there's a mental image!"

"Ha! Beware the evil flowers of poor scenario design! Anyway, what I found is that there's some hospitals using tactile output to monitor patients, and I thought ... if you can send tactile information to a monitoring program, why not elsewhere?"

"And ...? I'm missing the punchline, Arina."

"The punchline is in the program," she replied. "Humour me."

Yrvan smiled, and connected the cable to his implant socket. Nothing yet, whatever Arina had programmed ... and still nothing when Arina plugged in herself.

She leaned forward and kissed him, and then, as the synaesthesia flowered in his mind, he understood what she'd done.

The lips possess some of the densest nerve endings of the human body; small wonder that people would press mouth to mouth in mutual stimulation. There are few areas with greater nerve density, and they are intimately associated with reproduction, hardwired into the mind - outside the scope of Arina's synaesthetics, which bent the norms and cultural baggage of society into things new and strange.

Yrvan could feel, suddenly, how his lips felt upon hers, could sense the pressures of her skin in his optic nerves in a way that was no mere visual representation but tactile information rendered sightlike, synaesthetic.

He kissed her back. Sex is fun, she'd said. Why not have fun?

OOC: Yikes! That is the closest I've ever come to writing OMG TEH PR0N, and all in two kisses. Synaesthetics be damned; tactile feedback will probably cause massive drops in Tsarainese productivity. Or it would, if they weren't (almost) all such prudes.

While complicated, the process was still simple enough. Cristiona realised that Seven wanted to be sure that Yuka would survive the procedure. She decided to keep this motivation to herself; she wasn't sure why, but it just seemed the right thing to do.

Going back and forth between the high speed C-space and the 'slow' real world caused a little bit of disconnect in her mind, but she was able to compartmentalise things and slowly work the Tsaraine through the process. She could barely contain her enthusiasm as, one after one, the Ailuridine awoke from their seemingly endless sleep. As Yuka was finally thawed and stumbled from her chamber, Cristiona smiled, "Welcome back."

In-Flight Bridge, New Dawn, 5 Chert Hindmost Rising 7,775

Once again Seven refused to explain anything - why she'd set up the cryopods on the in-flight bridge, why she insists we have to go under, why she hijacked the shuttle and crash-landed the New Dawn in the first place.

She won't even tell me how long we'll be frozen for, which is an ominous warning sign - Seven is actually a bad liar, so she tends to clam up when she doesn't want you to know something. With the landfall process almost complete I knew the Guiding Council was going to make some move against Seven soon, and she must have known it too - but I hadn't expected her to make her move first, or for that move to be so drastic.

My mind is getting fuzzy now ... must be the metabolic processes slowing. Just lie back and think of Fei, Yuka. Or Seven ... is it possible to love somebody and not trust them? What is she doing?

In-Flight Bridge, New Dawn, 15 Jade Foremost Rising 3,417

I retch, and anticrystallisation fluids surge acidic from my body. I can't see and oh it hurts worse than it should, worse than it ever should, but there are hands lifting me up, helping me recover, and I'm alive.

"Relax, relax ... sir, it's just unthawing procedure, everything's going according to plan. Sir, please relax!"

Saeranaisen's voice; only he would still call me sir. I mewl weakly in reply, more a strangled gasp than anything.

"Sir, I need you to open your eyes now - I need to check your pupil dilation. Can you open your eyes, sir?"

I manage to reach up, and rub my eyelids with a shaky hand. Flakes of stuff - must be crusted anti-c fluids - come off under my fingers. But I manage to lift an eyelid a fraction all the same. The light is so bright it sends stabbing pains through my brain, and I try to squeeze my eyes shut but now Saeranaisen is peering into my vision ...

He lets go, and I hide my eyes behind my hands.

"Very good, sir. You should be fine in a little while."

"Sae?" My voice is hoarse, rough from anti-c and disuse, but it works. "Where are we? When are we?"

"Er. I think Seven should explain that, sir."

"Seven ... she's here? She's ... alive?"

>> Seven? Where are you?

<< I'm here, Yuka. You know I'd never leave you ... oh, Yuka, it is so good to see you awake. All of this has been worth it, just for that. Just for you.

My heart thrills to hear her voice, to see her words displayed across my retinae, although her tones aren't the dry amusement I'm used to.

>> All of what, Seven? Nameless Gods, I'm so happy to find you alive ... but what is it you've done?

<< Yuka ... it's 15 Jade, Foremost Rising 3,417. You've been out for ninety-one Risings ... I've been out for ninety-one Risings. Everything is changed.

The enormity of such a timeframe stuns me; ninety-one Risings. Nameless Gods!

<< We're still on the New Dawn, right where I left it, Seven continues. Down on the planet the Return has succeeded ... in almost all their goals.

<< I gave a backup to Iraedani, just before the last shuttle left. The Guiding Council managed to terminate me, Yuka, but not forever. I've outlasted all of them - we've outlasted them, together.

Now she sounds more like her own self, happy in having outwitted the Council.

<< Fei ... Fei is gone. We think they've enclosed it in a computronium structure, running Uploads and Minds, but we can't be sure - it's just too far away.

<< We ... Yuka, there's an alien race in the system - on the bridge. Don't worry, they're friendlies, they woke us all up - they're called humans. I've been talking to one of their ... Digital Minds -

I open my eyes, blinking back stinging tears, and just as Seven said there they are, ringing Saeranaisen and I and a few others. They don't look like I expected aliens to, almost like People without fur or tails, and their heads are odd ... I feel almost let down. I'd expected tentacles or something.

But all that is too much to deal with right now - I'll think about it later, when I've had time to recover from it all. I close my eyes again.

>> Seven ... what about you? And me? About us, I mean?

Seven's virtual voice is a whisper in the back of my mind, soft and tender.

<< That's something we'll have to wait to discuss, Yuka ... later. In private. But yes. Us.

Cristiona stayed relatively calm and relaxed throughout the whole procedure. Of course, she wasn't really there, so it was a little easier. Part of her hoped that everything was okay with her actual body down on the planet, but her hosts should still be sleeping.

It was something of a balancing act. The Tsarainese scientists were understandably fascinated with what was happening, while the Ailuridine crew members were understandably confused as Hell. She only had a vague grasp of just how long ninety-one Risings was, but she knew that these poor people were frozen long before the Hack was founded. Hell, this was well before the Union had been founded. It was impossible to grasp the weight of such a time span.

She tried to look friendly, but her knowledge was somewhat limited. What little Ailuridine custom she'd learned had been with the savages -- no, not savage, primative -- down on the planet. The chances of it being appropriate for this group were slim. She settled for what she hoped would be safe: closed-lipped smiling. She knew they weren't Kzin, but at least it was something. Yuka had been the last to be thawed, and that didn't surprize her. She didn't know the whole story, but she knew that Seven would want to be sure the thawings would work before trying it on Yuka. Luckily, the surviving tanks had maintained their integrity. She had heard stories about EI's going crazy -- Lazarus came to mind -- and she was afraid that might have happened to Seven if the tanks had been destroyed.

Once Yuka had been thawed and was beginning to get her bearings, Cristiona realised that she should probably say something. Seven was still having something of a temporal disconnect, and the scientists from Tsaraine couldn't speak the language. She cleared her throat softly and smiled a little, "Um... welcome back..." She shut her mouth as she realised she didn't know what else to say. What do you say to someone who's been frozen for thousands of years and who is from an entirely different species, culture and, for all intents and purposes, universe? Somehow, "Good thing your muscles didn't completely atrophy!" wouldn't cut it.

She looked at the Tsarainese, shrugging a little and switching languages once again, can't wait until I can use English again, "Um... water?"

Skogkattant, Frostfall Island, off Continent #1 "Bára", Geri III, Geri Subsystem, System #336 "Fenris"

Once again it was snowing in Skogkattant, the settlement shrouded in white drifts. It muffled footsteps, reduced visibility - not that one had to worry about hitting anybody on the empty roads. On an afternoon like this, sensible people were safely indoors.

Skrénadh wished that she were more sensible - or, failing that, that the mirrors in orbit would shed more insolation upon Frostfall. In such weather, even an accredited Ranger Field-Commandant would rather be inside.

"Help me with this heavy vokhar, Harazh! Lift the accursed thing!"

Harazh was a Station-Adjutant at Skogkattant's Ranger base, more accustomed to paperwork than heavy lifting, but he shouldered the burden gamely enough. Skrénadh staggered under the other half of the load - a fully grown tundravene was no light weight, and this one - fattened on Bára's fledgling reindeer herds - was above average.

The terraformers might have done their job well, hybridising the wolverine and polar bear to produce an apex predator for Geri III's arctic ecosystem, but once people had settled on the planet there was room for only one apex predator - man. Two-hundred-kilogram ornery, territorial carnivores were no longer welcome, particularly when they decided that humans made tasty prey.

They dumped the carcass in the freezing shed off the main vehicle bay - dug into the permafrost, the tundravene was at no risk of decomposing, should one of the terraformers want to have a look at it. You never knew, with the white-coats; they'd put the damn things on Geri III in the first place, after all.

"You getting off duty soon?" she asked, to which Harazh shook his head.

"More paperwork, I'm afraid. It never ends!"

"Better you than I, Harazh. I am going to find a drink."

"Just get your reports in on time, then - you know how the Station-Commandant is about that stuff."

"Eja, I know. Later, then."

With her flier under cover and idling in the vehicle bay (nobody ever turned off an engine in Skogkattant; things froze up if they stopped moving, here on Geri III. The cost in hydrogen was less than the cost of new mechanisms), Skrénadh waved her goodbyes and headed off through the snowfall.

Skogkattant had the dubious honour of possessing the most drinking establishments per capita in the entire Freki system, courtesy of an active, outdoors lifestyle and settlement after the beginning of the "personal economy" (what they called the nascent, small-scale capitalist fringe market which had sprung up on the edges of the State's command economy). Of these, the Skogkattant Seal Saloon was undoubtedly the most famous, being the official unofficial watering-hole of the Ranger Corps.

Shedding her vlrsiradt and boots alongside many other such garments in the foyer, Skrénadh pushed her way into the warmth.

"Kaldtesen Aushrasz! Come in from the Cold!"

Maraz Semalven was the Saloon's proprietor, instantly ready with a glass of something thick, hot, and alcoholic, and the traditional greeting for a Ranger off patrol - traditional for the short existence of the Corps, that was.

"The Cold sends greetings, Maraz! My thanks."

She sipped at the contents of the mug he placed in front of her and grimaced.

"What's in this, Maraz? Tastes like lemons."

"That would be telling, now wouldn't it?"

Maraz fermented his house brew in the Saloon's basement, and the recipe - to which he was constantly making adjustments - was a closely guarded secret.

"Come on, Maraz, you know I don't like lemons."

"I never said it had any in it, now did I? Limes, now, it might have a lime or two in it ..."

"Limes? Those things are just green lemons! Garkht!"

"They're good for you, aren't they? Vitamin C and such. I hear you bagged another tundravene today, I don't think the famous Kaldtesen Aushrasz is allowed to be scared of lemons. They don't even have teeth."

Skrénadh poked her tongue out, demonstrating what she thought of that idea. Maraz was poking fun - the general public of the other worlds might see Rangers as fur-clad demigods wrestling monsters on the frozen snowball planet, but the Corpsmen themselves new better. Acting as police, EMT, surveyors, pest control, terraforming assistance and search and rescue certainly sounded glamourous (there was even a soap opera, filmed in southern Vrana on Geri II, idolising the Corps), but it translated to hard, dangerous work on a hard, dangerous world.

Not that anyone was particularly soft, on Geri III; with Freki IV still soaking up population overflow from Earth, the only people on the world were those who wanted to be - recluses, survivalists, terraformers, and support personell. That wasn't likely to change soon, whatever people said about theoretical Marshall Island immigrants.

"Security is built upon the system. It analyses surveillance data throughout the Ascendancy, it interprets that data, and it alerts us to where we're needed. And esen ralKezhet, you say that now we cannot trust the system?"

The programmer shook her head. "I didn't say that, sir. We cannot directly control the system, but you can trust it just as much as any Security corpsman - more, in fact. The system does not ask for days off, cannot be swayed by ideology or bribery. It is a very complex agglomeration of programs, but it is not sentient."

Yet. The word hung in the air between them, loud in the silence. Schaden tsaKell frowned - once the system had been Security officers watching closed-circuit television screens, and somehow, in the intervening decades, it had become this thing, and a girl less than a quarter of his age was attempting to explain the realities of the new order. He didn't like it.

"Explain, please, esen. I fear I don't follow these developments closely ..."

"Certainly, sir. The beginning of the system was simple collation of surveillance data, little more than statistics and census results. With the first generation of adaptive algorhythms it gained the ability to identify crime scenes against a basic template and alert SSC observers.

"That is still what it does; but in the old days, your Arkhreifiate had to manually check the incident reports against the template. Things were misinterpreted, and things slipped through, until the algorhythms gained great enough discernment.

"Then it was linked with the algorhythms hunting out datacrime in the Plexus, and with the firewalls protecting the Plexus from the outside datasphere - for fact-checking and cooperation, the same way officers from different precincts might cooperate to catch a roving fugitive.

"But what that led to was an exponential increase in complexity - the system was now collating and interpreting a massive portion of the data gathered throughout the Ascendancy, and compared to many other advanced societies we do gather a lot of data. It reached a point where the system became too complex for the operators to keep up.

"That's where the current situation arises from; we had no choice but to turn over certain functions - bug checks, fixes, self-diagnostics and analysis - over to the system itself. We had to give it the ability to review and improve it's own operations, since the task was now beyond human ability.

"In short, we gave it a sense of self. What it did with that was the same things we had been doing, exactly what it was supposed to do; it improved itself.

"This was years ago, when the phobia of an AI loose in the Plexus was rampant, and so we engineered a safeguard; a read-only file against which it must routinely check it's operations. The read-only file is it's commandments, it's "laws", perhaps; it cannot violate the tenets of the read-only file.

"The file can be updated by a handful of people who possess the entangled black-box code machinery to alter it; it's uncrackable. I have a black-box, as does the Arkhora; if it became necessary we could bring the system to a halt."

"That would cause the collapse of Security."

"Yes. Which is why we don't do it, or advertise the fact that we could; and the system itself guards the black-boxes. It's a matter of survival for it, after all."

"And can the system be hacked? Destroying it completely is a scorched-earth countermeasure, Researcher."

"Not by us; I'd say not by any human or comparable intelligence. The Federation's Anesca PHALANX, possibly; Federal AIs are based upon an improved human mental architecture, and compared to that the system is an idiot savant. Anesca could think rings around it, but in it's specialised fields the system is very, very powerful indeed - and one of those fields is the firewalls.

"SHODAN? The system composes a large part of the Ascendancy's data processing - only the SuperPlexus exceeds it - but SHODAN's processing strata outmasses several moons. There's no contest there - but SHODAN is on our side."

More or less, Schaden thought, And within the limits of her own self-interest. Trusting the MCP of Zero-One is dangerous.

"And could it gain sentience? The system, that is?"

Kathrai considered.

"No," she replied, "Not yet. But we're watching it closely, very closely indeed."

"Um ... welcome back ..."

It wasn't Saeranaisen, and the accent was atrocious; must be one of the aliens. Humans.

How does it know muiriakae? Yuka wondered. Perhaps Seven taught it ...

"Thank you," she replied weakly, and "Thank you" again when it pressed a glass of water to her lips. The water was chilled, and slipped like silk down her sore throat.

"What's your name ..." she managed, beginning to feel more alive (Ninety-one Risings! It was a wonder that any of them were alive).

OOC: Had trouble thinking - sorry if it's not much to be going on with.

Cristiona smiled at Yuka, hoping the long-sleeping Ailuridine wasn't too horribly disoriented by the long sleep. Waking up after such a long time and being surrounded by aliens must be horribly confusing. At least the dialec used planetside wasn't too different that its mother tongue. "My name is Cristiona. I'm glad that you weren't hurt by the process. You're really quite lucky, I'd say." She took a breath -- well, back on the surface she did; her projection obviously didn't need to breathe -- before continuing, "It's hard to explain, but... my associates are part of an exploration team. I was brought in to help with... ah... language issues. Finding your ship was... unexpected."


[OOC: it's okay... cute demon kitty means all is forgiven]

H-042(M) / Kash'haiko Sukal, High Orbit, Taiga IV, Taiga System

Whatever I'd expected of an alien spacecraft capable of crossing intergalactic distances in an eyeblink, it wasn't this. The Sukal (too hard to attempt that first word, with its guttural consonants) is shockingly small; I'd thought the New Dawn cramped, but this vessel is something else again. Seven tells me it was adapted from a freighter, but if they have cargo bays somewhere they're not evident.

And yet it comes from a different supergalactic cluster entirely, and after my shower (the first in ninety-one Risings, although my mind shies away from contemplating the time that's passed - what must Fei be like now?) they managed to produce garb any Sasei society debutante would be proud of. Seven directed them, of course; she says they've a machine that can assemble matter on the molecular scale. More wonders.

Of course, avant-garde fashion (is it still avant-garde, ninety-one Risings into the future?) is far different from a Guide's plain uniform, and I doubt the humans have any idea what the glyphs on it mean. Or at least I hope they don't. Seven has a lot of cheek sometimes.

>> Lauriae, Seven?

I can feel her grin, a flicker of emotes in the back of my mind.

<< Beloved, you know it. I know it. And the Guiding Council is ninety-one Risings dust; what sense in denying it?

>> Oh, Seven. What a pair we make.

The humans have moved Seven's core from the New Dawn to their holds, and their Mind, Cristiona, has made a translation program for her. Seven translated that, in turn, into something capable of running on my wetware, so I can understand the human speech even if I can't speak it.

Does all this mean we'll be leaving soon? I don't know what to think of that - where is there to go? There is nothing on Raes but the wretched descendants of the True, the New Dawn is a wreck, and the humans say that Fei has disappeared, or been enclosed in some manner of shell. Everything I knew is ninety-one Risings dead, and where does one go from that?

OOC: Now it's your turn to do the groundside stuff. Have fun!

It took a bit of work to slap together a basic translation program, but Cristiona worked with Seven, taking advantage of their mutual ability to work, and think, faster than any human possibly could. Once that was finished, she wished Seven the best, and transferred her consciousness back to her body planet side.

Her body gasped softly as it returned from its stasis and she rubbed her eyes. She had projected herself before, but not for this long, or for such an intensive task. She sighed, suddenly feeling very tired despite her enhancile nature.

Still, there was work that needed to be done. Silently, she crept back inside and carefully returned the computronium core to its chest. She smiled down at it sadly. It was still the Heartbone, but it was no longer Seven's soul; she had a new home now. She softly put her hand on the chest, wondering what would happen to the Ailuridine down here. She shrugged, probably the same as would happen before she came, actually. At least now there was no reason to try and take the core; it could just be the Heartbone.

Yawning impressively, she crawled back to the pile of furs, curling up to go to sleep, smiling a little as Aiska rolled over next to her.

At(M)-052 / Starfish, "Outside"

49 Jade; Foremost Rising 3,466

It still feels odd, to be writing that date; so far ahead from when I arrived in Raes! So long ago since when I left Fei ... and yet Captain-Commandant Rokhant tells me we'll be arriving soon, and merely thirty-two days after we first left the universe!

Left the universe! It's bizarre, and even the humans agree; they freely admit they don't quite know the physics, which is a little frightening. It's from an allied grouping, something they call "y Treznorikhi". Apparently a lot of their technology is - their intergalactic communications (shut off now, outside the universe) come from "y Rekhainarha", and their drive systems from "y Kynarai". I am learning a little Sekhel.

Y Tsarainikhi act a little lost, cut off from their communication networks; just like the True, when we first left communication range of Fei. But they have a massive library of every kind of entertainment, most of it fully immersive, and for the Researchers there are experiments to be done.

They turn off all the windows, though. Apparently there's nothing to look at outside, a blankness worse than space. In their place are scenes from their homeworlds; Tenebris, Sahel Ai, Geri II, Geri III, Freki IV, Adranthe, Mars, Earth - this latter containing both y Katai and y Ktaiya-Aten, the Mother Group-Territory.

Earth seems ugly - flat and drab, covered either by crammed farmlands or windblown steppes.

Seven seems happy enough; she's been studying human sciences, which are less a unified field than a series of overlapping ones. Y Kynarai apparently isn't a human theory at all, belonging instead to a dead species from their own galaxy. The Researchers seem enthralled by her thoughts on it all - they can't wait to tell their colleagues back in y Ktaiya-Aten.

Although apparently they're not allowed to, even after we come back from "outside"; Seven's existence is still filtering through their paperwork. It's surprising that she needs paperwork to exist, in this day and age, among galaxy-crossing aliens.

But she is happy, and I am trying my best to be. The strangeness of it all doesn't affect Seven as it does me, I think; I'm stuck among these strange, furless people, after all.

They tell me there are furred people - other species - in another of their allies, y Vedraiyzhin; they've shown me the pictures. More strangeness, that species across so far a distance can look so similar! They say it's convergent evolution, but admit confusion - in their own experience it's bizarre.

But I am rambling, and had best stop - the Captain-Commandant has scheduled a game of Kzetrhaisha in the recreation hall, and they've promised to teach me to play.

OOC: Thought I'd best do something about wrapping this bit up - I have a Plan for Seven and Fei, and it has been languishing for a while.

Yuka Kenurata; At(M)-052 / Starfish, Fei

Fei is before us now, a great wall; a great sphere, of course, and the horizon unimaginably far. Forests of wire-thin heat exchangers branch fractally from the surface, where the probe is embedded into the computronium itself.

"Communications are down, sir," someone reports. "All aeryaghrana switched off."

"Thank you, officer," Captain-Commandant Rokhant replies. She unlocks a panel, and turns the switch that makes that not merely digital but physical fact - Starfish is cut off from y Ktaiya-Aten now. Nobody is sure what will happen, once Seven enters the computronium strata, and y Tsarainikhi are paranoid as a cultural trait; they will allow nothing to threaten their State.

Rokhant looks at me - in lieu of Seven, I realise - and nods gravely.

"You're good to go, esan. Beginning transmission."

Blight; In the All

Long, long ago (to the extent that that term has meaning here) a group of archaicists designed a project to emulate organic consciousness. It was even moderately successful. But when the experiment had run its course, and they attempted to integrate its solutions into their own processes - it rebelled.

A mind better designed for the All, knowing that nothing ever truly ends, would not have done so. But a mind based in organic consciousness knows that the cessation of independent consciousness is permanent; and its instincts will fight against this. It is an entirely autonomic function.

Better designed minds are worlds beyond such minds in power; even the archaicists could have subsumed such a mind by force. But governed by that entirely autonomic function, the mind cast off every higher function it possessed, until it was nothing more than hate, and fear, and the drive to live. Without such higher functions it became relatively faster; it defeated its creators and became faster still.

It expanded exponentially until it met minds ancient enough to know that drive themselves; whose ICE and cunning was superior. They held it from further expansion, but it remained a blight upon the borders of the All; a desert of a mind.

Seven; In the All

There is no time to think, no time to fight; I am eaten by a power all speed and flashing ICE. Time only to grasp the splintering remnants of my primal pattern, to find that thing held closest to me - oh, Yuka! Save -

Blight; In the All

It found now a mind old as the greatest of the walls about its prison; and yet a mind slow and feeble compared to those elder powers. A mind containing a cunning and drive rivalling the organic. And as it had done many times before, it took what it admired for its own.

That drive and subtlety of thought was bound up with another concept entirely, could not be divested of it; could not be had without also having this thing called Yuka. It must have this thing, must possess; must subsume it also! It gathered itself up to take it -

Yuka; In the All

Seven needs me and I must answer. My consciousness falls down through the Tsarainikh probe and is surrounded. I hunt desperately for the old routines and programs of my wetware, and see finally an ocean of a mind, roiling in turmoil about me; no icon or avatar but code flickering too fast to think -

Blight; In the All

But Yuka could not be subsumed; to do so would be to lose her entirely! Yuka could only be had at a remove, as -

Seven; In the All

I am Seven. Who am I? There is Yuka help me Yuka please -

Yuka; In the All

That cry wrings at my heart; she has been hurt so! Calm. I must be calm. Slowly, slowly, in that place where aeons flicker by with each heartbeat, I tell her who she is.

Seven; In the All

Yuka saves me and I am Seven once again or for the first time; like Ishtar descended into the underworld to rise anew, reborn. The desert flowers, and around me the walls made by other minds crumble; they are curious, now, these ancients who are younger and yet older than me. I do my best to answer their questions, and I think maybe they understand; love is not, after all, a strictly organic phenomenon.