The Crimm
09-05-2006, 19:54
Alarms started going off as the ship's AI took it out of the hyperspace route and raised all defensive shields.
Captain Amelia Ransom looked up from her report and stared at the viewscreens, while a young science officer yelled about radiation levels too high for the computer to even give an estimate on and the comm officer calmly reported that they were recieving over five thousand automated distress calls.
The thing she saw was something she had thought a story... a legend that the old spacers talked about like it was true. She spoke up. "Contact the Errant. Inform them that the starcharts need to be updated for this sector... we nearly ran headlong into Polo's Bolos." That got stares from the bridge crew. They hadn't thought the stories were true either.
It was named for the ship that discovered it, the CSS Marco Polo. Imagine, if you can, a singularity. A black hole. Then another, nearby. Not close enough to merge, but not far enough away to spin off in it's own direction. Now imagine them rotating like bolos around each other. The bolos aren't balenced though, so the singularities whip towards each other and stretch far away, before careening back again, in a centuries long dance.
Now imagine this bizarre event travelling through space, picking up whatever gets in it's way. Imagine this happening for uncounted milenia. A vast storm of debris made up of solar systems, nebula, space dust, asteroids, starships and anything else that happens to get too close. And all of it emiting enough hard radiation to sear the skin off unprotected bodies at 10 lightyears. The storm itself is only six lightyears at it's longest and four thick. It's moving eight lightyears every decade, but is aimed at uninhabited space.
That doesn't matter though. It's moving in a relativly straight path, while the galaxy is spinning. Which means in another uncounted millions of years, it will suck up what was once the most populace system in the galaxy and Earth, a lifeless barren hunk of minerals, will join in the storm and be drawn slowly towards one of the two black dots in the storm, taking a trillion or so years to reach one of them. A trillion years that will feel like little more than scant seconds, if anyone could experience the ordeal. Time itself was warped inside the storm, between the two singularities.
The ship, RSS Castle was a Vlad Class (http://usera.imagecave.com/Alpha-Zero/renegadevlad.bmp.jpg) heavy battlecruiser. With a depleted uranium and lead battering ram built into the bow. And the radiation levels more then thirty light years away meant the whole ship and crew would have to be decontamiated when they got back to Discord. "Scan the area... And broadcast a sector wide all stop. Hoist the Yellow Jack. In case anyone else is out here and wants to be a daredevil."
The battlecruiser's hull lights started pulsing in a white and yellow configuration. Normally that was reserved for border cutters, as an interstellar equivilent of a modern day police cruiser's light bar flashing. Along with the all stop orders, that meant the Castle was officially taking command of the sector. Or at least attempting to... space captains were notoriously stubborn about such things.
http://usera.imagecave.com/Alpha-Zero/renegadecaptain.JPG
Captain Amelia Ransom
Captain Amelia Ransom looked up from her report and stared at the viewscreens, while a young science officer yelled about radiation levels too high for the computer to even give an estimate on and the comm officer calmly reported that they were recieving over five thousand automated distress calls.
The thing she saw was something she had thought a story... a legend that the old spacers talked about like it was true. She spoke up. "Contact the Errant. Inform them that the starcharts need to be updated for this sector... we nearly ran headlong into Polo's Bolos." That got stares from the bridge crew. They hadn't thought the stories were true either.
It was named for the ship that discovered it, the CSS Marco Polo. Imagine, if you can, a singularity. A black hole. Then another, nearby. Not close enough to merge, but not far enough away to spin off in it's own direction. Now imagine them rotating like bolos around each other. The bolos aren't balenced though, so the singularities whip towards each other and stretch far away, before careening back again, in a centuries long dance.
Now imagine this bizarre event travelling through space, picking up whatever gets in it's way. Imagine this happening for uncounted milenia. A vast storm of debris made up of solar systems, nebula, space dust, asteroids, starships and anything else that happens to get too close. And all of it emiting enough hard radiation to sear the skin off unprotected bodies at 10 lightyears. The storm itself is only six lightyears at it's longest and four thick. It's moving eight lightyears every decade, but is aimed at uninhabited space.
That doesn't matter though. It's moving in a relativly straight path, while the galaxy is spinning. Which means in another uncounted millions of years, it will suck up what was once the most populace system in the galaxy and Earth, a lifeless barren hunk of minerals, will join in the storm and be drawn slowly towards one of the two black dots in the storm, taking a trillion or so years to reach one of them. A trillion years that will feel like little more than scant seconds, if anyone could experience the ordeal. Time itself was warped inside the storm, between the two singularities.
The ship, RSS Castle was a Vlad Class (http://usera.imagecave.com/Alpha-Zero/renegadevlad.bmp.jpg) heavy battlecruiser. With a depleted uranium and lead battering ram built into the bow. And the radiation levels more then thirty light years away meant the whole ship and crew would have to be decontamiated when they got back to Discord. "Scan the area... And broadcast a sector wide all stop. Hoist the Yellow Jack. In case anyone else is out here and wants to be a daredevil."
The battlecruiser's hull lights started pulsing in a white and yellow configuration. Normally that was reserved for border cutters, as an interstellar equivilent of a modern day police cruiser's light bar flashing. Along with the all stop orders, that meant the Castle was officially taking command of the sector. Or at least attempting to... space captains were notoriously stubborn about such things.
http://usera.imagecave.com/Alpha-Zero/renegadecaptain.JPG
Captain Amelia Ransom