Chapter Text
1
Everything was a red stained blur, sight and sound fading in and out. Red light and soft voices rising and falling.
“...We can’t just… He almost cracked his skull…” one voice spoke, a woman with an accent they couldn’t place. Mercian maybe? Their head hurt too much to think and their stomach felt like it’s half empty contents were trying to crawl out.
“...Know the risks…” said another voice, a man… Teldrani accent? “Can’t risk bringing them over…”
“...Ould go alone…” said the first voice “You stay here, I go over and help the other sh…”
“We can’t risk it.” said the second voice “The Avalon Expedition, the entire Cluster, need us and every ship to succeed.”
Something clicked in the listener’s head… they were… doing something important. Something really important…
“Their stirring… Meds must be wearing off.” said the second voice, moving to where the listener could see them. The blur briefly focussed into a face, on the older side, stern with a neatly trimmed goatee and kind eyes. “Ilyukhina, grab the medkit.”
“It’s going to be alright, doctor.” said the man… Yao. His name was Yao. The listener couldn’t remember their own name with all the pain and ringing in their head but they could still more or less read the name, printed in Centrum Standard and Teldrani letters on their uniform.
“Just rest, Grace.” said Yao “We’ll try to be here back when your awake.”
___
Grace didn’t tumble out of bed. You needed gravity for that, instead he sort of floated out of it, flailing, panicking and generally being exponentially more undignified than he would be if he simply fallen.
For one, he wouldn’t have managed to hit his already injured head on both the panel above his bed and the side of it as he got out.
“Patient Conscious.” stated an automated voice “Please state name and rank for cognitive test.”
“Wha…?” muttered Grace.
“Name not found in ship’s registry.” stated the automated voice “Please try again.”
“Grace, my name is Grace.” said Grace, trying to push himself towards the floor “Why is there no gravity?”
“Captain Yao has placed the vessel in low power mode.” stated the Automated voice. Which didn’t make much sense to Grace. Why would they need to save power? And couldn’t they spin up the centrifuge and just have momentum keep generating gravity?
God he hoped he was on a spaceship big enough to have a proper centrifugal grav deck, not stuck in some tiny little boat that relied on thrust gravity and constant movement to keep things from floating. His head was full of fog and pain and his memories were barely there at best but he knew that he really didn’t like the idea of being in space and absolutely hated the idea of being in space on a tiny ship.
“Please state name and rank for cognitive test.” repeated the ship’s computer.
“Uhh… Grace… R… Ryland!” said Grace grasping onto that scrap of memory with both hands “My name is Ryland Grace. Mister Ryla…”
Grace paused his first reach for a title was mister. Why that? Was he in the navy? They called people mister sometimes didn’t they? He wasn’t dressed like he was in a navy and he was pretty sure they didn’t let you in the CDF if you flailed around and screamed in zero gravity.
The title of doctor was also in his mind. Not doctor like broken bones but the kind that did science.
So why did Mr Grace sound so right?
___
He was in a classroom, it’s walls decorated with diagrams of the cell, periodic table, a heavily simplified blueprint of a Drift gate while above was a model of the entire Tantalus Cluster, from their home system of Firewatch to humanity’s origin of Centrum to the far flung worlds of the Frontier Union and Mercian Freehold.
“Now can anyone tell me the speed of light?” called out Grace to his class, his students showing a fair amount of attention and enthusiasm despite the dulling light of Firewatch’s setting red sun.
One kid, one Grace knew had a bit of trouble remembering long numbers raised their hand not quite first but still pretty enthusiastically. So Grace tossed the little knitted Firewatch coloured ball towards them which they caught.
“C” said the kid, grinning with all the enthusiasm and intelligence of someone who had figured out loop hole to cover something they had trouble with and make themselves look smart in the process.
“Correct.” said Grace, sneaking a glance at his own long number cheat sheet “C is what we write down when doing calculations about the speed of light. Because let’s all be honest, nobody wants to write 299,792,458 metres a second all the time.”
“So the funny thing about light, is that we need it to see.” said Grace “Obvious I know but since it takes time for it to move, it means that things far enough away can’t be seen until the light reaches us. So, even if you have the best telescope in the entire Cluster, everything you see when your looking at Rialtis will be what happened there about eight years ago. So no catching the races early with a big enough telescope”
“Like the Nebula.” called out one of their students.
“Exactly, gold star for that one.” said Grace “The Nebula that appeared in the sky a couple months ago actually appeared thousands of years ago, it just the light only reached us and became visible to us recently.”
“My dad says the Nebula’s fake and it’s just the Modernists trying to distract us from the famine.” said one of the other kids. Grace had met their father. Grey hat wearing jerk who acted like rationing was the greatest crime in history and that everything that happened was the fault of either Modernist propaganda speaking teachers, Frontier Union sympathisers or both.
Unfortunately, Grace wasn’t allowed to talk politics or how stupid adults could be in front of the kids.
“Well, I can see why they might think it’s fake, it’s certainly weird that a Nebula would suddenly become visible to us but it’s real.” said Grace “There is even an expedition getting planned to build the biggest Drift Gate in history and go to CDC-41-Gamma and while our telescopes might be showing us what it looked like three thousand years ago but it looks like it’s full of habitable planets.”
“And aliens?” asked one child.
Grace shook his head “Telescopes aren’t quite as good to see things like ships or cities yet, assuming aliens even have or need ships or cities like we know them but I’ve met some of the people their hiring for this expedition and they are, without a doubt the best minds in the Cluster for this.”
Well, he was pretty sure they were anyway. Professor Edric and his daughter both seemed pretty smart when he’d met them once back when he was an academic and from what he’s read of their work in journals he still read, they had only gotten sharper and smarter since he’d gone from Doctor Ryland Grace, Xenobiologist to Mister Grace, Elementary School teacher.
___
“Doctor Ryland Grace.” called out Grace as the pieces fell into place “I am doctor Ryland Grace.”
“Name accepted.” stated the computer.
“Good… good.” said Grace “Can we get some gravity on?”
“Activation of the Hail Mary Centrifugal system requires captain’s authorisation.” stated the Hail Mary.
“Right, well, where’s the captain?” asked Grace raising his arms up in a frustrated gesture and accidentality pushing himself backwards. The joys of zero G.
“Captain Yao and Engineer Ilyukhina are not currently aboard.” said the computer “They have left a message.”
“Play it.” said Grace as he slowly fumbled and stumbled towards some railings on the wall. Whatever he was up in space for better be worth it because he couldn’t imagine leaving his nice, safe, mostly habitable home world of Firewatch to be out here.
“Sorry for leaving you while your asleep but we detected another ship out there.” said the voice of Captain Yao. Grace barely remembered the man but still felt he knew him, still felt like this was someone he could trust as a captain.
“Looks like everyone out here got scrambled by the Gate, we were one of the lucky ones not to hit something.” continued Yao’s recording “There is a Mercian ship out there, slammed right into a chunk of ice. We are heading over there to investigate and offer aid. We’ll be back or in contact within three bells. If we are not, the computer is set to give you control after four bells to flee or come to us. Good luck and Fair winds.”
“Right… right. I get it now.” muttered Grace “I’m on a ship going somewhere… probably for research or a conference or… something they need a failed Xenobiologist for and something went wrong with the Drift Gate. Great, normal, understandable problem. The CDF or Frontier Militia or whoever runs the system will be here soon with more ships and help and everything will be fine.”
“Is there a uhh… window? Or maybe a bunch of screens.” called out Grace, not sure where to look when speaking. Voice controlled systems were rare, usually because they were expensive and stopped working the moment somebody with an accent that wasn’t upper class Centrum or Mercian used them.
A panel lit up, showing a map of the ship… one room was listed as the bridge which Grace didn’t want to go anywhere near lest his zero G flailing around accidentality blew the ship apart… but just below it was a spherical room covered in screens. He’d heard about those… maybe taken the kids on a field trip to a place with one once? They had originally been designed as “don’t go crazy” rooms on long haul flights but nowadays had been turned into a sort of, general use, needing to visualise a 3D space thing.
The Ship was… well, it was tiny for a modern ship. Less than a hundred metres long and mostly fuel tanks by volume. Decent sized main drive for it’s size though and it did have a (admittedly quite impressive in it’s space efficiency) centrifuge system for generating gravity. He couldn’t see all the systems on this diagram but it looked like a science ship, capable of either flying around a system fast or staying in place comfortably to scan, launch probes or for the tiny craft the rest of the crew had taken to go out and do it’s thing.
It was a nice ship… Grace just wished it was one that was a bit… safer.
“Alright…” muttered Grace steeling their nerves “Let’s go take a look outside.”
___
“Alright, Mary.” said Grace standing by the control panel for the screen room “Let’s see what’s out there.”
Ice. Ice was out there. A massive field of chunks of it as far as the Hail Mary’s sensors could see (which Grace checked, was pretty far. Far away enough that speed of light made the furthest reaches of it’s range unreliable.) He had seen some ice out while passing the ship’s single small window but he had just assumed they were just pointed at a bunch of it, not completely surrounded by massive chunks of it.
“Okay… see why things went wrong…” said Grace racking his brain for a system that looked like this. Presumably the gate in this system had something wrong with it, since it didn’t catch them and slow them down safely which is why they weren’t near it and all the stations and waiting ships that usually hovered around the big fancy rings that tossed ships between systems at faster than light speeds.
No star… big debris field… Atamara crossroads? But that was a Rogue Planet… no gigantic fields of ice.
All that ice… Grace checked the settings to see what scale they were at and frowned. An ice field this dense with chunks of ice that big… it should pull itself together, form a planet… maybe multiple considering how big it seemed to be. Grace was a biologist not a physicist but he knew enough to know that wasn’t right.
If only he could ask…
“oh… fudge.” muttered Grace, remembering this ship had a computer which unlike him, hadn’t taken several major hits to the head “Mary, what part of the Cluster are we in?”
“We are not currently in the Tantalus Cluster.” stated Mary.
“No, no.” said Grace shaking his head “The Tantalus Cluster is… there’s nothing past it for thousands of light years. Drift Gates don’t have the…”
“Mary, what is this ship’s mission?” asked Grace, dread beginning to grip his heart. Memories of reading papers on the construction of the largest and longest range Drift Gate in human history, of a half mad plan to travel further than any human had ever dreamed and explore strange new worlds in a desperate mission to find something to stop the famine.
“The Hail Mary is part of the civilian component of the multinational Avalon Expedition to the CDC-41-Gamma Nebula. It’s goal is to search for new resources, new life and/or new trading partners in order to alleviate the Great Famine currently gripping the Tantalus Cluster.” stated the Hail Mary.
“Ah…” said Grace, before curling up into a ball, floating in zero gravity and screaming.
___
“Doctor Ryland Grace?” asked a woman, blonde and approaching the latter end of middle age, walking into the school’s bike shelter, walking under the tattered tiny paper flags of the Cluster’s three nations that had been set up for an event a few weeks ago and never taken down.
He didn’t think she was one of the parents of anyone he taught. Hadn’t seen her at any of the PTA meetings at least but who knew what was going on with the kid’s parent’s home lives.
“Right… well, nice to meet you.” said Grace, putting down his bike helmet and extending a hand towards the woman. He kind of hoped this would be a quick chat. Rations for teachers got cut recently so he’d had to skip lunch and really wanted to eat something within the next few bells even if it was just the cardboard tasting ration bars at home.
“Eva Stratt” said the woman, introducing herself as quickly and efficiently as she shook Grace’s hand “Is it true you wrote a paper, “An Analysis of Water Based Assumptions and Recalibrations of Expectations for Evolutionary Models in Non-Tantalus life”.”
“Well, yes.” said Grace, slightly nervously. Xenobiology was a tough subject in the Tantalus Cluster. They had sixteen inhabited systems, several of which had native life and all of them were not exactly vastly different. A Horse and a Stringwolf had all the same basic components from DNA to being mostly water to a centralised nervous system to oxygen breathing lungs… of course Stringwolves and all life on Seravis Major were also ridiculously toxic in a variety of horrific ways but that was, as far as Xenobiology went, a minor difference and beside the point. Even the weird, ammonia breathing primitive life that had been found in the Maiala’s rest system was mostly water.
It had made the Cluster’s xenobiologists complacent, assuming everything in the universe would follow that pattern.
“In it, you suggested that the similarity between life on planets in the Tantalus Cluster was due to a shared origin in panspermia, microbes carried between worlds on asteroids and that outside the Cluster, we could find vastly divergent forms of life. Particularly outside the goldilocks zone most inhabited worlds occupy.” said Stratt.
“It’s uhh… it’s obvious really. I mean, life is ultimately just a complex chemical reaction that makes more of itself.” said Grace “Our Cluster is small so we don’t have that big of a sample pool but out in the wider universe, in proper galaxies that are thousands if not millions of times bigger than us, there could be all sorts of life out there… of course, my theories weren’t the best received.”
“Yes. You publicly called the head of Xenobiology at the Henshall Institute for Higher Learning a staggering waste of carbon when he questioned your lack of physical evidence.” said Stratt.
Grace short of shrugged with his hands “it was a very heated debate… Is… is there a reason for this conversation?”
“The famine.” said Stratt. As if the thing had had loomed over the cluster for decades, that had already claimed tens of millions of lives, pushed the Assembly into a civil war with the Frontier that almost destroyed both, the thing that had basically defined Grace’s life, explained anything.
“Going to need a little more than that.” said Grace.
“I am with the Avalon Expeditionary Board.” said Stratt “And I am offering you a chance to join us in saving the entire Tantalus Cluster.”
___
Grace eventually stopped screaming. More out of emotional exhaustion rather than actually coming to terms with the fact that,
1) the expedition that everyone back home, tens of billions of people including his kids, was counting on was apparently scattered through an impossible ice field, with both the flagship or the Gate haulers carrying the machinery they needed to build a way back home nowhere in sight.
2) he was not on a nice safe ship like a Wanderer Platform or a Nest ship or a ship of the line, but instead on a very small, very fragile research ship.
3) the only other ship nearby was apparently crippled by an impact and his ship’s entire crew had gone over to help leaving him alone… three thousand light years from any human colony.
4) the only way to get home is if they built a Drift gate… one of the largest and most complex pieces of human engineering ever developed and, to reiterate point one, all the ships carrying the parts seemed to be missing.
Grace bit back the urge to crawl back into a ball and tried to… tried to be whatever sort of person would volunteer to be on a ship like this.
“Uhh… Mary, can you focus scanners on the ship the rest of the crew are going to?” asked Grace.
“Negate. Switching from passive to active sensors requires captain’s authorisation.” said the Hail Mary. Grace… vaguely knew what that meant. He’d seen war movies. Hadn’t really enjoyed them but he knew the whole, passive meant just looking and active meant shining a light into the dark thing which meant people could also see where you were.
“Well… can you zoom in with what you can see of them?” asked Grace.
“Affirmative Doctor Grace.” said Mary, as one of the walls soon became filled with the vaguely hammer shaped design of a Mercian built Freighter. One with a little white and yellow pod docked to the side.
It looked pretty beaten up… but according to the sensors, it didn’t seem to be leaking air or spewing out radiation or… any of the other bad things that happened to ships. Grace really hoped he would start remembering more things about being in space soon or else he was going to start looking really stupid compared to Yao and Ilyukhina.
“Hopefully…” said Grace staring at the ship’s mostly intact antenna and grinning “They will be get things working and hail Mary soon.”
The ship didn’t laugh at his pun. He knew that it was just a voice wired into a ship computer and it was stupid to anthropomorphise it, but he was still a little disappointed. Still, gave him time to workshop a better pun when they did call.
Grace frowned as he saw something moving beyond the Mercian ship. Shiny and shimmering gold.
“Mary, what is that, behind the ship?” asked Grace.
“Unknown object. Currently on intercept course with Mercian Contender Class Schooner, Millinery Militia.” stated Hail Mary “Would you like a full display of the craft?”
“Yeah… put it on the screen to my right.” muttered Grace staring at the screen. This mystery ship was pretty far out, should have a few minutes before they were close enough to either the Hail Mary or the Mercian ship to do anything. Even radio calls would have several seconds of delay that would make talking awkward.
It wasn’t a great picture, low resolution and with several bits missing due to the Hail Mary not getting a good look at it but the overall shape… it looked like whatever it was, it had solar sails. Was that another thing Grace had forgotten? Had Solar sails suddenly gone from a long obsolete novelty to something people actually used? Even aside from that it was odd looking, curved like some sort of vast ocean going creature, made out of some sort of orange material that aside from a few scratches, seemed almost featureless.
Grace’s eyes glanced over the measurements, length, heat and radiation emission… bunch of other things but Grace’s attention quickly snapped back to the ship’s size.
It was… big. With all the debris and an odd scattering effect from it’s hull they didn’t have an exact measurement but… that thing must be… kilometres wide. Wider than even the biggest Treasure ships or ships of the line were long…
Humans couldn’t have built something like that. Even without the famine and Edric’s gate taking up so much resources, a ship that big…
It was aliens… actual alien life. Despite his still splitting head ache and zero gravity induced nausea, Grace couldn’t help but smile ear to ear.
Alien life… intelligent alien life! It made him wish he could turn the radio on and try and talk to them even if he had no idea if they used radio or if they even had language like humans did but whatever Yao had done to the ship had shut any communications down and it would need either take his authorisation or Grace to wait a few bells to be able to be able to switch it on.
“Warning. Unknown objects launched.” stated the Hail Mary, highlighting a series of thin, blocks of something shimmering and orange flying out of the sail ship and towards the Mercian ship.
Shuttles maybe? Messages in bottles? They were pretty small… maybe these aliens were just tiny? Grace really hoped that would be the case. It would be funny too. Big ship fully of tiny, friendly aliens.
The objects didn’t slow down at the halfway point and Grace muttered a swear under his breath. A shuttle or a probe would have flipped and burned, slowing itself down with it’s one engine so it came to a relative stop beside it’s destination.
The only reason they wouldn’t is if they weren’t trying to meet them, they were trying to hit them.
The Mercian ship tried to move, it’s main drive briefly flickering to life before failing. Boats and escape pods were launched from the ship, including the Hail Mary’s pod, scattering in all directions… aside from towards the Hail Mary.
It seemed that Yao was trying to keep the… Grace couldn’t believe he was thinking this but the aliens, attention away from the rock the Hail Mary was floating beside, even if that meant he had to hope his little short range pod could avoid the gigantic alien ship out there on it’s own.
The void was lit up with gunfire as the Mercian ship opened up with it’s carronades, swivel guns and torpedoes, interspaced with launching flares and chaff. It was an impressive display of the Tantalus Cluster’s wide variety of ways to stop missiles hitting.
One by one, the missiles were intercepted, the first by Mercian torpedoes, then by canister shot fired from the ship’s guns and the final three that managed to get through were drawn away from the ship itself by it’s countermeasures, exploding more or less harmlessly off their bow.
Grace was impressed… he just wished that the first display of human intelligence and ingenuity hadn’t been weapons and a warship.
The alien ship got closer and closer, the shells the Schooner fired in it’s direction doing little to slow it down. Grace wasn’t a soldier or an engineer or whatever but it seemed all the human ship was doing was scratching the hull plating and occasionally punching a hole in the sails.
Something exploded in the human ship’s stern. Grace didn’t know if it had been hit by something the Hail Mary couldn’t detect or if an attempt to get their main drive working had failed explosively.
The Alien ship sailed into what for spacecraft was practically right next to the Mercian ship. Grace briefly wondered if they were going to board it. If this had all been some… less than friendly but still potentially peaceful first contact, that this could be salvaged before any more people died.
He didn’t see what killed the Millinery Milita, a ship of sixty eight souls. There was a flash from the alien ship followed almost instantly by the brief appearance of a small sun where the Mercian ship was.
Unnaturally bright light and vast amounts of radiation washed over the surrounding space, blinding the Hail Mary.
Grace floated there, surrounded by static and error messages as he tried to process what he had just seen. There was life out there… intelligent life wasn’t just some, quirk of Centrum’s evolutionary pressures…
and that life just murdered a ship full of people.
Almost a full half bell had passed before the Hail Mary’s sensor systems slowly flickered back to life…
To reveal a graveyard of ship wreckage and destroyed escape pods. Like something out of the darkest days of the Frontier War.
“Hail Mary Landing Pod wreckage detected.” stated Mary, it’s automated voice devoid of emotion or care “Transferring command authorisation to Doctor Ryland Grace.”
Grace stared up at the ship’s speaker above him “I’m… I’m not a sailor. I’ve never flown a spaceship, I’ve never space walked, I can’t even moon walk…”
“Irrelevant.” stated Mary “All other crew in unavailable. Command falls to you until additional crew can be transferred from the Avalon Expedition.”
“Additional…” Grace paused. They would send more than just two ships wouldn’t they? They’d send dozens right? Big ships too. Ones that could scare off that… thing that had killed… killed his crew. He vaguely remembered other ships…
He just had to find them. He… had a goal. He had something to do. He had something that could stave off the tidal wave of grief and fear that was welling up inside him. He was pretty sure the only reason he was even vaguely functional at the moment was that the tidal wave of grief inside him was so big he couldn’t quite process it.
He just had to find things to distract him, to keep him from thinking about it.
“Alright…” muttered Grace, rubbing his hand across his face as if that could wipe away his fear “Mary, bring up a map of… whatever this system is called. Let’s look for anything that might be a sign of or a rally point for the expedition.”
___
In the shadows and the dark of the ice field, someone watched. They had seen this play out before. The Lightships were relentless and they had yet to see anything that could face them and survive.
They punched the wall with their third claw as flyers launched out of the lightship and tore apart the tiny escape craft launching from the oddly shaped alien vessel, beams of light and hidden fire tearing apart the flimsy cylinders.
All they could do was watch… all they could ever do was watch.
Eventually the Lightship left, disappearing into the star currents. The watcher recorded the damage it had taken and logged it to be shared if they made contact with more watchers. Lightships were identical and self repairing but by keeping track of the damage done to them, it was roughly possible to identify and keep track of them with some degree of accuracy.
This one had been seen before, both it and the watcher’s own ship still bore the scars of their last encounter even if the lightship’s had almost faded.
The Watcher clicked and whistled a string of profanities and curses at the Lightship as they continued their search. Desperately trying to find anyone, anything that had survived the attack.
Something moved. It was a strange thing, shaped like a claw made of tubes with a pair of radiator fins sticking out the back next to it’s engine. Not quite like the aliens that had been murdered but even further from the enemy’s Lightship designs.
The Watcher stared at the sensor readings for a moment… it didn’t appear armed but then again, neither did the enemy when they first appeared… going towards it, trying to make contact… it would be a risk.
The Watcher flinched as their screen showed the alien ship almost crash into a chunk of ice. Clearly not crewed by someone used to space travel. Maybe one of their first spacecraft at all? Could explain why the Enemy hadn’t driven them into hiding yet.
Steeling their nerves, the Watcher gently took their ship out of it’s hiding place and towards the strange, claw shaped alien craft.