Der Angst
08-02-2007, 18:40
Milkyway; Sagittarius Arm; ~ 30000 LY from Earth; Antispinwards
The Wealth of Nations seemed uncharacteristically small when compared to the planet below, like a grain of sand atop the ocean. And yet, it was working tirelessly, manipulating the (Barely existing) ecosystem of the world below it to fit the specs.
A vast amount of machinery had been deployed, sailing in the dense atmosphere of the planet the ship was orbiting, filtering out excess carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid, breaking up carbonates and nitrates, conducting the excess heat of the planet into themselves (No point in producing power when it's readily available all around oneself) or into space, and a thousand other things, a few even tasked with collecting the handful of bacteria colonies that'd managed to survive on this planet, mocking nature's attempt at annihilating them.
On a larger scale, forces far beyond the sane 'pushed' the planet, quite invisibly so (Having an asteroid impact would've been simpler, but it'd also have caused a mess and screwed up the timetable the Wealth of Nations was operating with), temporarily fucking with its magnetosphere - not necessarily a bad thing, as it allowed for some of the processes that'd eventually manipulate the weather into being less unwelcoming -, adding the momentum necessary to move it into a zone where it wouldn't (Again) experience a greenhouse effect of water-boiling proportions if one, lets say, introduced a few billion tonnes of CO2 and methane-producing biomass to it.
A mirror of some sort would probably have been simpler and, indeed, faster - but the ship was of the opinion that such 'Unnatural' objects would rather ruin the artistic aspect of its work, and went with the somewhat less expected option of adding velocity and thus increasing the distance between planet and sun.
A consciousness controlling a myriad of different machines, thousands of aspects incorporated in the sheer physical presence that was the ship, engaging in hundreds of conversations with its sizeable number of inhabitants, not all of which were (Post)human or machine, and spending whatever resources it'd left on indulging itself. 'Concentrated', it was not.
Still. It looked curiously at the specs it'd received from the Wishmaster, continuing to be surprised by the decidedly non-military purpose of the request (If one disregarded the routine process of securing the system from low-level incursions, which didn't really count). It'd been a long-winded request, going off various tangents about biochemistry, carbon cycles, radiation levels, alien DNA structures, environmental impacts, gravity, literature, the latest episode of Futurama, interstellar warfare, polite phrases and apologies, not to mention a dozen other things, but the essence of the whole, bloated conversation had been 'Need planet. Make planet. Now.'
The Wealth of Nations didn't mind this overly much. Scouring the archives of various IEUs to find a suitable 'Almost-Earth' object had been quick, so had been moving to said object.
Still, it was quite a thing to pull off, and it figured that its inhabitants weren't overly happy about being thirty kilolights off the majority of the society.
Ah well. Come time... For now, it was simply busy, and dealing with the flood of complaints a million people are capable of.
Lesser Magellanic Cloud
The magellanic clouds were, perhaps, not the most likly place to live at, owing to their relatively low content of heavier elements, which - apart from making it difficult from reaching the iron age, yet alone a reasonable state of industrialisation - tended to make the development of life difficult - a lack of trace elements generally isn't very supportive of the same.
Of course, this very traits made them highly endearing to those who wanted to keep their shinies hidden, and the Necrontyr - with their staggering amount of shinies - were no exception.
Hidden behind an absurd number of security measures, paranoia and darkfields causing something that was about as close to invisibility as one could possibly get in space, orbiting a nice little K-class star that'd take another ten billion or so (Give and take a billion) years before expanding and spending its last moments as a red giant, the Eranthus-Rescarii orbital rotated endlessly in the void, a vast bracelet in space, almost six million kilometres in circumfence.
Well. 'Bracelet'. It wasn't exactly... finished, and most of it wasn't even existing, apart from the most flimsy of connections that kept it together.
Still. A handful of plates were already present, some in the process of cooling, consisting of little more than glowing magma, others already 'finished', early rivers, lakes and oceans forming on barely fertile soil, plants and fungi - artificially introduced, as evolution was a tad more time consuming than was desirable - slowly but surely colonising it.
And one of the plates happened to host the handful - a couple ten-thousand - of Kraidens that'd survived the Thrashian extermination campaign, having been extracted by the Astral Romance, the Twink Factor and the Erisavenus - the latter having arranged for the plate to be made available for the Kraidens.
It was still very much patchwork - only so much biomass had been taken from their original homeworld, and growing more wasn't the fastest process in the world -, but it'd worked. To an extend, anyway. Not that the orbital's mind was particularly happy about the additional assignment - having to deal with the rather severe psychological damage caused by being the last fraction of a percent of one's species, and making sure that mass suicides in the barely-developing villages the Kraidens - formerly on a pre-steam age level - were now living in didn't further thin the gene pool didn't exactly cause joyous pleasure to erupt.
But still. It was a start.
Approach; Hyperspatial Travel
The Moondance raced through the oddly (But not really) one-dimensional properties of non-relativistic space, preventing its atoms from collapsing into showers of protons and electrons with what was best described as 'Twinkery', and trying to keep an eye on the radiation echos it used to navigate in this realm - a bit difficult, given that waves (Including electromagnetic ones) spread rather differently in this state, but manageable.
For an explorer, it was oddly unarmed - most usually, their firepower amounted to about half that of an equivalent-volume warship (A necessity, given the level of violence found in the galaxy), but it'd spent the last four days disassembling missiles, deconstructing CREWs, removing particle cannons, getting rid of unguided munitions, and generally pulling down its proverbial pants. Only its field emitters, effectors and displacers had stayed, all of which were effectively multi-purpose tools that, although usable as weapons, could - and most usually were - also used for decidedly more civilian purposes.
It wasn't much of a bother - staying in non-relativistic space, it was perfectly safe (Unless someone else happened to use the same FTL method, anyway), and if its hosts desired such, well... Their territory, their rules.
In any case. By now, it was only about half an hour away from entering HT-patrolled space, its own radiation-echoes doubtlessly triggering a variety of low-level alarms, despite its arrival technically having been announced beforehand - but then, there's only two kinds of paranoia. Particularly in this galaxy.
Time to introduce itself.
FTLCOM@NRS 1e15 & EM 1E-1; SL 0; Beamspread@1000%
From: IEU Moondance
To: Whom it may concern; Hyperspatial Travel (Border Security)
Subject: Arrival; Course Schedule
I figure that I'm just about to set off some alarms, anyway, so I'll make it short - I believe that either the Stargazer or Ms. Mikogami - if not both - have already announced my impending arrival.
As per your wishes, I've degraded my combat capabilities as much as is possible without inflicting functional damage on my less violence-related functions (I figure that you'll want to check this in detail - I'll be ready for such as soon as I shift into reality proper).
A detailed list regarding my remaining functionality in terms of organised violence is attached - as you might already guess, it's rather limited. Nothing easier than popping me from a lightsecond out.
Anyway. Back to business. My course schedule is as follows [Infoburst: Course Schedule Attached]. Point A through G are subcraft-release waypoints, point H is my exit point. All subcraft and of course I myself are there for in-depth analysis of the potential refugee-worlds - at present, only one is necessary, although this number will doubtlessly grow.
The first boatloads of Anamaris' native species are - at present velocities - about three months out, this should give us the time necessary for rudimentary preparations.
And that's about it from my end. Any questions and/ or protocols I'm supposed to answer/ follow up to?
The Wealth of Nations seemed uncharacteristically small when compared to the planet below, like a grain of sand atop the ocean. And yet, it was working tirelessly, manipulating the (Barely existing) ecosystem of the world below it to fit the specs.
A vast amount of machinery had been deployed, sailing in the dense atmosphere of the planet the ship was orbiting, filtering out excess carbon dioxide and sulphuric acid, breaking up carbonates and nitrates, conducting the excess heat of the planet into themselves (No point in producing power when it's readily available all around oneself) or into space, and a thousand other things, a few even tasked with collecting the handful of bacteria colonies that'd managed to survive on this planet, mocking nature's attempt at annihilating them.
On a larger scale, forces far beyond the sane 'pushed' the planet, quite invisibly so (Having an asteroid impact would've been simpler, but it'd also have caused a mess and screwed up the timetable the Wealth of Nations was operating with), temporarily fucking with its magnetosphere - not necessarily a bad thing, as it allowed for some of the processes that'd eventually manipulate the weather into being less unwelcoming -, adding the momentum necessary to move it into a zone where it wouldn't (Again) experience a greenhouse effect of water-boiling proportions if one, lets say, introduced a few billion tonnes of CO2 and methane-producing biomass to it.
A mirror of some sort would probably have been simpler and, indeed, faster - but the ship was of the opinion that such 'Unnatural' objects would rather ruin the artistic aspect of its work, and went with the somewhat less expected option of adding velocity and thus increasing the distance between planet and sun.
A consciousness controlling a myriad of different machines, thousands of aspects incorporated in the sheer physical presence that was the ship, engaging in hundreds of conversations with its sizeable number of inhabitants, not all of which were (Post)human or machine, and spending whatever resources it'd left on indulging itself. 'Concentrated', it was not.
Still. It looked curiously at the specs it'd received from the Wishmaster, continuing to be surprised by the decidedly non-military purpose of the request (If one disregarded the routine process of securing the system from low-level incursions, which didn't really count). It'd been a long-winded request, going off various tangents about biochemistry, carbon cycles, radiation levels, alien DNA structures, environmental impacts, gravity, literature, the latest episode of Futurama, interstellar warfare, polite phrases and apologies, not to mention a dozen other things, but the essence of the whole, bloated conversation had been 'Need planet. Make planet. Now.'
The Wealth of Nations didn't mind this overly much. Scouring the archives of various IEUs to find a suitable 'Almost-Earth' object had been quick, so had been moving to said object.
Still, it was quite a thing to pull off, and it figured that its inhabitants weren't overly happy about being thirty kilolights off the majority of the society.
Ah well. Come time... For now, it was simply busy, and dealing with the flood of complaints a million people are capable of.
Lesser Magellanic Cloud
The magellanic clouds were, perhaps, not the most likly place to live at, owing to their relatively low content of heavier elements, which - apart from making it difficult from reaching the iron age, yet alone a reasonable state of industrialisation - tended to make the development of life difficult - a lack of trace elements generally isn't very supportive of the same.
Of course, this very traits made them highly endearing to those who wanted to keep their shinies hidden, and the Necrontyr - with their staggering amount of shinies - were no exception.
Hidden behind an absurd number of security measures, paranoia and darkfields causing something that was about as close to invisibility as one could possibly get in space, orbiting a nice little K-class star that'd take another ten billion or so (Give and take a billion) years before expanding and spending its last moments as a red giant, the Eranthus-Rescarii orbital rotated endlessly in the void, a vast bracelet in space, almost six million kilometres in circumfence.
Well. 'Bracelet'. It wasn't exactly... finished, and most of it wasn't even existing, apart from the most flimsy of connections that kept it together.
Still. A handful of plates were already present, some in the process of cooling, consisting of little more than glowing magma, others already 'finished', early rivers, lakes and oceans forming on barely fertile soil, plants and fungi - artificially introduced, as evolution was a tad more time consuming than was desirable - slowly but surely colonising it.
And one of the plates happened to host the handful - a couple ten-thousand - of Kraidens that'd survived the Thrashian extermination campaign, having been extracted by the Astral Romance, the Twink Factor and the Erisavenus - the latter having arranged for the plate to be made available for the Kraidens.
It was still very much patchwork - only so much biomass had been taken from their original homeworld, and growing more wasn't the fastest process in the world -, but it'd worked. To an extend, anyway. Not that the orbital's mind was particularly happy about the additional assignment - having to deal with the rather severe psychological damage caused by being the last fraction of a percent of one's species, and making sure that mass suicides in the barely-developing villages the Kraidens - formerly on a pre-steam age level - were now living in didn't further thin the gene pool didn't exactly cause joyous pleasure to erupt.
But still. It was a start.
Approach; Hyperspatial Travel
The Moondance raced through the oddly (But not really) one-dimensional properties of non-relativistic space, preventing its atoms from collapsing into showers of protons and electrons with what was best described as 'Twinkery', and trying to keep an eye on the radiation echos it used to navigate in this realm - a bit difficult, given that waves (Including electromagnetic ones) spread rather differently in this state, but manageable.
For an explorer, it was oddly unarmed - most usually, their firepower amounted to about half that of an equivalent-volume warship (A necessity, given the level of violence found in the galaxy), but it'd spent the last four days disassembling missiles, deconstructing CREWs, removing particle cannons, getting rid of unguided munitions, and generally pulling down its proverbial pants. Only its field emitters, effectors and displacers had stayed, all of which were effectively multi-purpose tools that, although usable as weapons, could - and most usually were - also used for decidedly more civilian purposes.
It wasn't much of a bother - staying in non-relativistic space, it was perfectly safe (Unless someone else happened to use the same FTL method, anyway), and if its hosts desired such, well... Their territory, their rules.
In any case. By now, it was only about half an hour away from entering HT-patrolled space, its own radiation-echoes doubtlessly triggering a variety of low-level alarms, despite its arrival technically having been announced beforehand - but then, there's only two kinds of paranoia. Particularly in this galaxy.
Time to introduce itself.
FTLCOM@NRS 1e15 & EM 1E-1; SL 0; Beamspread@1000%
From: IEU Moondance
To: Whom it may concern; Hyperspatial Travel (Border Security)
Subject: Arrival; Course Schedule
I figure that I'm just about to set off some alarms, anyway, so I'll make it short - I believe that either the Stargazer or Ms. Mikogami - if not both - have already announced my impending arrival.
As per your wishes, I've degraded my combat capabilities as much as is possible without inflicting functional damage on my less violence-related functions (I figure that you'll want to check this in detail - I'll be ready for such as soon as I shift into reality proper).
A detailed list regarding my remaining functionality in terms of organised violence is attached - as you might already guess, it's rather limited. Nothing easier than popping me from a lightsecond out.
Anyway. Back to business. My course schedule is as follows [Infoburst: Course Schedule Attached]. Point A through G are subcraft-release waypoints, point H is my exit point. All subcraft and of course I myself are there for in-depth analysis of the potential refugee-worlds - at present, only one is necessary, although this number will doubtlessly grow.
The first boatloads of Anamaris' native species are - at present velocities - about three months out, this should give us the time necessary for rudimentary preparations.
And that's about it from my end. Any questions and/ or protocols I'm supposed to answer/ follow up to?