NationStates Jolt Archive

At a star designated in astronomy maps as the small and uninteresting LHS 3003, a red dwarf not too many light years distant, a rather large fleet was gathering.

Klick long needles glinted in the sun. These were doing relatively little work - mostly here to watch for interlopers. Nearly the entire Tahar Joblissan fleet was gathered in one place - more of it than had ever been gathered in one place for a long time.

This would not have been possible without widespread cooperation between the "settled" colonies and the nomads. Things were, to say the least, tense. A significant fraction of the civil Tahar Joblissan fleet was engaged in a project that involved hauling roughly a million times its own dry tonnage around, smelting it, processing it, and spreading it back around the system.

Several vast fleets of "new improved haulers," some largely consisting of fusion engines strapped to large rocks, had been minted out in anticipation of this project, decades in the planning. After the unmeasured economic boom - relative economic boom - of the decentralized colonial expansion, they could afford it. A large industrial infrastructure had sprouted up, apparently out of nowhere, from one-way ships built in several nearby systems. The Von Neumanns were proving of great work, as the hundred million workers on the case were finding themselves to be shorthanded.

"Get your ass off the rock! Some of us have work to do!" With great pressure comes great impatience. Bob was particularly unhappy today, being already behind his assigned quota. The last rock had turned out bad - large air pockets had turned out to conceal old stored chemical explosives from who knew when. Well, oxygen tanks and organics, which turned out to be the same thing and turned a significant chunk of it into unusuable debris flying around his orbit.

This particular lump of nickle, iron, carbon, silicon, and ice turned out to have a prior resident. Not, mind you, a permanent resident, but one who was proving rather recalcitrant at the moment.

"I said move it! Come on, work with me here!"

The radio sputtered back at him. "Oh, you just wait a minute there, loud and clonky. I'm not done yet. You can have the damn rock when I'm through with it, and not a minute sooner."

The sparsity of Tahar Joblissan nomads and their oh-so-well-loved methane tankers might, of course, have been noticed by those paying attention to in- and out- system traffic in the Sol and near Sol area. The shift of around a trillion tons of civilian cargo shipping abruptly out of circulation over the course of a half year or so would drive prices up in some areas and shift trade patterns in others. It would produce panic in a few certain paranoid individuals worried about the ultimate ends of the Tahar Joblissans...

"Are you done yet?" Silence. I'm getting way behind schedule here, lady.

Several sectors over and half an orbit inwards, an enormous strand, highlighted by bright warning beacons indicating traffic to steer clear, hung in space. Many thousands of miles in length already and growing on both ends at roughly a hundred miles an hour, it was only one of scores, curved and negotiating to share increasingly crowded space. Bright spiderlike beads moved slowly along, reinforcing the strand segment by segment; the main processors at both ends could not weave it quickly enough to make it thick as well as extending quickly.

Great caution was required; a broken strand here could mean substantial delays, and should two collide, the mess would be horrorifically expensive, wasteful, and take a month to clean up after.

The red star loomed brightly, large and near. Tiny to the outside galaxy though it may be, it still burns a bright fusion flame, a candle that will burn for a hundred billion years or so.

The sheer scale of the project provided enough to dim it slightly already, from some angles of vision... a small percent, but dimmer no less, and in a few years, this dimming would be seen by any in the nearest few stars. Within a few decades, Earth astronomers would be able to tell the difference. By then, of course, this final phase of construction should be complete.

Excerpted from the Index of Known Colonies of Associated Descent From the Tahar Joblissan Exodus, by the Bureau of Internal Foreign Relations Publications for Internal Use:
Local Star Name: N/A
Colony Name: N/A
Colonial Government Type: N/A
Astronomical Designations: LHS 3003/LP 914-54
Absolute Magnitude: 18.02
Mass: 15 million Yg
Position (SSC):
R=+20.86 LY
Ө: 224°9'37.5"
Ф: -28°09'51"
System Description: LHS 3003, although not formally claimed as the system of residence for any particular organized colonial group, is home to a science station operated in joint by several of the colonies. Visitors are not advised, as the system is a potentially hazardous area as well as a sensitive scientific site and unplanned visitors could well interfere with astronomical or local observation as well as meet with an accident as a result of experimentation or natural local conditions.

A ruddy rainbow shimmered on what was now visible as a stack of thin rings with another stack now just beginning to be cross them. The full spectrum of blood filtered between them, the light of the star beginning to shift and dim, partially occluded. Large coarse panels, like the scales of an enormous dragon, hung freely around the rings, and some inside, their shifting shadows causing a slight shimmer as they blotted out the solar wind reaching the rings.

In one of Taharasopolissa's rooftop observatories, a government agent examined the coordinates closely. The dim star was now distinctly gone, faded completely out of the sky. It had been dimming noticably and erratically for months before being snuffed out.

He nodded and noted down the absence. I wonder what this means, he mused to himself. We shall have to keep careful track. Occlusion or extinction of a red dwarf means something