Episode I -- Of Continents and Insects
Like your own existence, this story starts in deep space.
Talasea closed her eyes. She could feel the Gondwana live and breathe all around her. The light rumbles running through the vessel as it fired its RCS thrusters to perform slight course corrections. The whispers of the crew, muffled by walls of carbon and metal. The permanent whirr of ventilation equipment and the distant, distorted bubbling noises coming from the life support systems in the habitation ring. The sounds, whispers, cries, echoes of a ship and its fragile cargo of six human beings — and also, well beyond the rear cargo racks and the radiator array, the vast magnetic wires that harvested the solar wind’s momentum, feeding it to the ship’s sublight q-drive. There were sixteen of them, extending away from the ship like a flower’s petals, and Talasea pictured them as elongated bubbles of white noise, thrown in the void by interstellar fishermen.
A serene voice ran through the ship — Leaves, the Gondwana’s on-board AI and what probably counted as the ship’s quartermaster.
“We have reached optimal translation velocity. Disengaging magnetic sail and reeling wires in. We will be entering a zero-thrust state in five seconds.”
Talasea buttoned up her pale blue flight suit, and opened her eyes.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Zero thrust. Zero gravity.
She blinked and as her feet left the ground, her perspective changed. The long horizontal hallway had suddenly become a vertical tunnel, a pin running through space, holding the engine and the command sections of the Gondwana together.
Talasea leaned against the nearest wall, then pushed, imparting enough momentum to her body to glide effortlessly through the maintenance tunnel. She gave a smile to Serena, the ship’s shuttle pilot, who passed right above her as she slipped towards the starboard docking bay, a small laser stylus in hand — she was probably going to perform a few routine checks on her shuttle, the Open Source Orbiter Nightingale, before the ship’s faster-than-light translation. A few meters ahead, Talasea had to perform an emergency manoeuver — one hand on the nearest railing to slow down, then a small kick against the wall to pick up speed again — to avoid one of the ship’s djinni drones that had seemingly forgotten to watch for incoming crewmembers. The little devils were efficient but easily distracted, hyper-focused as they were on a single task.
“Bridge to the crew, we are five minutes away from translation. Please remember to put all electronics on standby and save your ongoing work. All workstations will be put on sleep mode at T minus two minutes.” A different voice, this time. Valys, the Gondwana’s pilot, one of the ship’s latest recruits, and a newcomer in the Starmoth Initiative. Talasea kept going, then entered the ship’s bridge.
To a non-spacer, the Gondwana’s bridge was rather hard to understand as a coherent place. It was a large, spherical room installed at the exact center of the vessel, with five seats (two for the passengers, one for the commander, one for the pilot, one for the navigator) connected to circular railings not unlike armillary spheres. Control panels, touchscreens and haptic systems had been installed on railings, creating a bubble of information and interaction around the crewmembers. Most bridges were designed to be used under thrust, and as such had a simple layout, not unlike that of an ocean-going vessel, except of course for the fact that a spaceship was closer to a skyscraper in terms of layout, with the “floors” installed in a perpendicular manner relative to the axis of thrust. The Gondwana, however, in the image of its various brethren of the Inyanga class, was also designed to be used as an orbital outpost and thus spend non-negligible amounts of time in zero gravity. The somewhat arcane configuration of the bridge had everything to do with this double purpose, and in general with the ethos of the Starmoth Initiative — its ships were conceived as both vehicles and temporary outposts.
“Arriving on the bridge three minutes before a translation, is that really befitting of a future navigator, Talasea?” smiled Parvati, the ship’s captain. She wore an inrticate outfit beneath her flight suit — a long-sleeved shirt made of lace and an Earth-designed, embroidered jacket, inherited from her second father. It could have been out-of-place, but Talasea found it absolutely charming.
“I already told you that it is absolutely out of the question that I…”
“In due time, you’ll realize that a ship like this needs a commander to spare, and I am sure you will reconsider your opinion. Anyway, Valys, are we ready?” Parvati extended a tattooed arm towards Valys, who was focused on the Gondwana’s haptic controls, and the flurry of information they fed to their five senses. At this moment, thought Talasea, Valys could really feel the ship, directly through their skin, eyes and ears. For all intents and purposes, they were the vessel, much like Leaves themselves.
The AI chimed in, pictured as a blue point on the edge of Talasea’s contact lenses.
“Our dear Valys tells me that everything is in order. We have just received the translation data from the nearest navigation station. I have run them through the algorithms, we are clear. Velocity and course locked.”
“Personal computers?”
“All on standby, on-board data saved. The fission drive is off the grid.” Lights flickered for a second as the ship’s batteries came online. Talasea had always found Parvati’s precautions a bit too extensive — long gone were the first years of the interstellar age, when geometry translations routinely fried mainframes and electrical facilities.
“Serena, how’s the shuttle doing?”
“I’ve double-checked the clamps. Clear.”
“Airlocks secured.”
Talasea took a seat and fastened her seatbelt. A delicious surge of adrenaline went up her spine — she always felt it right before a translation, even though it was one of the most mundane operations in space. How many times had she translated through three dimensional space, again? Five hundred? One thousand?
One thousand and fifty-two translations, for a total of one hundred thousand lightyears covered. Time flew as fast as space.
Parvati lowered her computerized glasses and waved them in Talasea’s general direction, which was her way to delicately indicate that an order was to come.
“Talasea, I would like you to command the translation.”
“No way, commander, I am not the acting…”
“My dear soon-to-be navigator, that is, for once, a direct order. I guess you could discuss whether or not I am legally capable of giving orders to anyone, given that we are aboard a civilian vessel, but frankly, that would be inelegant.”
Talasea sighed. It was a beautiful trap — she was gently, slowly nudging her towards the idea that she would, one day, command the Gondwana. Of course, that was what Parvati thought she was doing, because in Talasea’s mind, she was dragging her, kicking and screaming, towards the commander’s seat.
Talasea flicked a switch to open the main intercom.
“This is acting navigator Talasea. We are clear for translation.” She cut the intercom, then put her hand on Valys’ shoulder. “You may go ahead.”
“Translation in five.”
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
One.
Engage.
A hum emerged in Talasea’s heart, coming from the bowels of the ship. Geometry ping successful. Target is clear and free of solid matter. Then, she felt her heart skipping a beat, followed by the eerily familiar feeling of losing her grasp on reality for the split-second during which the vessel’s geometry drive activated, folding three-dimensional time upon itself.
Translation. The world collapses and swirls around the geometry drive. We are not really moving, at least not in a way that can be grasped by a human mind. We are...well, translating. Displaced through billions of billions of kilometers by a cube made of four-dimensional crystals grown on blue flowers. How and why this is possible — I do not know. No one knows. We are but mere passengers, here. Along for the ride. Here I am, at the helm of a spaceship capable of crossing a solar system in weeks on its own, magnetic sails at my fingertips, and for half a second I am not in control of anything.
It is very soothing.
The Gondwana came back to reality with a very slight rumble and a short flash of light, the last dying remnant of the fold it had briefly created in the world. Parvati seemed happy. Perhaps. Her smiles were always hard to read. She put her glasses back on.
“Status report?”
Leaves’ icon blinked twice.
“All systems are clear. Fission drive back online. I’ve got a few minor glitches in the djinni controllers, I’m resetting them. Our margin of error, compared to the ideal exit target, is about 0.98%. For a fifty lightyears translation, that is more than acceptable. Good job, Valys.”
The pilot gave Leaves a thumbs up, then came back to their controls. Talasea glanced at the cartography display on her side of the panels. The planet in front of her was more than average, it was just...incredibly mundane, but in an offensively boring way. Its red, iron-rich surface reflected the distant light of a class G star, powerful beams gnawing at what little magnetic field the world still had, circling from its cold, dead heart. Thin clouds of water vapour swirled from the equator and towards the poles, suspended in the middle of an unbreathable atmosphere. The Starmoth Initiative called these planets Mars baseline worlds and, much like their original inspiration in the solar system, they had almost nothing going for themselves. They were dime a dozen in charted space — there were at least fifty of them within a forty lightyears radius around the Earth, and some automated survey vessels had even stopped reporting them altogether. They were tragic, in a way. Many of them sat right at the outer edge of their system’s habitable zone and could have — or had, for a few precious million years — harbored life. The fact that they had failed to become Earth-like worlds often owed to a few million kilometers and a slightly more dynamic tectonic history. In other words, nothing.
“Sensors?” asked Parvati.
Leaves replied, sounding thoroughly bored. Talasea wondered how many thousand similar planets they had in their databases.
“IR reports five satellites in orbit. They all appear off-line, there are no radio or laser exchanges between them and the surface. I have a sixth object in polar orbit, I am having trouble pinging it, it looks like some kind of ship debris, perhaps? I don’t think it is very relevant to us. No emissions from Baal station on the ground either. The planet itself is...well, it is as it has always been, I guess. Cold and dead. All in all, the site is exactly as we expected.”
Talasea crossed her arms. The Gondwana had fired its maneuvering thrusters to position itself on an orbital insertion trajectory, following the same path other exploration vessels had used to settle and resupply Baal station, fifteen years ago. In a corner of her screens she had opened a window displaying a satellite picture of the station itself. It was not very impressive — two landing pads, half a dozen laboratories and bunkers spread across ten kilometers square, all centered across a large mohole, an access shaft that dived right towards the cold heart of the planet. It was the most visible part of the station: a gap in the otherwise undisturbed coating of red dust, a deep eye turned towards the stars above.
Turned towards them.
“Must have taken some dedication to set this all up…” commented Valys while keeping a close eye on their velocity and heading. “Especially without long-range logistical support. Indies were quite resourceful, back in the day.”
Back in the day. Talasea found the expression quite charming, and yet it rang true. Fifteen years before, the Starmoth Initiative had barely started its endeavours in this sector of human space, and independent explorers still reigned supreme, for better and worse, setting up a variety of barely organized expeditions to and from the dark strings of the local nebula. They were enthusiastic but didn’t have the means of their ambitions...most of the time. Baal station was one of the exceptions. A true, bonafide deep space outpost, tasked with digging through the many secrets of an otherwise unremarkable planet.
And now it was dead.
“So we’re space janitors, now. Checking out other people’s garbage and making sure it doesn’t explode in someone’s face.” commented Leaves. “I like the idea, to be fair. We’ll be entering low planetary orbit in seven hours, Parvati. I’ll start providing you with landing vectors in about two hours.”
“Perfect. Talasea, a word in private ?”
For a while, for a few months, perhaps for a few years, Talasea had loved Parvati. In many ways, she had been her first — first lover to be twenty years older than her, first night of love in zero-g, first kiss under the purple-tinted skies of an ancient gas giant, perched above a pulsating black hole. Their love had died a kind, subtle death, vanquished by routine and boredom — a mundane story. Spacers weren’t that different from ground-huggers, in the end. What remained between them was not exactly friendship, but it was very far from indifference. A way to understand each other, perhaps.
“What do you think we’re going to find, down there?”
Parvati chugged a bit of tea from her insulated bottle. Sweet, cinnamon-perfumed tea from the blue stars of Phi Clio. One of Tali’s first gifts.
“I do not know.” the commander admitted. “Baal station is a very peculiar installation, straddling the line between indie outpost and full-on unaligned settlement. We have never really encountered this situation before, which is the very reason why the Gondwana is here. As far as I can tell, the outpost has been evacuated in order, but indie records are always unreliable — nothing would have prevented them from fudging entries here and there. Intelligence is precarious when it comes to Baal station. That is a fancy way of saying we have no idea what to expect.”
Every single time she left the comfort of the Gondwana to find her seat aboard the Nightingale, Talasea entertained the exact same thought — the Open Source Orbiter was a tin can. Fifty meters of steel, carbon and aluminium attached to rocket engines, coated in ceramic tiles. A coffin capable of atmospheric re-entry. A strange echo of the first space age, an image from the world before the collapse, before the Low Age. Preparing to land on a planet one thousand and a half lightyears away from the Earth. In the archaic cockpit floated a mixture of dry tea leaves, spent thermal canisters and hot plastic. A few dashboard sections were held together by duct tape — Talasea often wondered if this was a Parvati-approved technical solution, a clandestine repair operation carried out by Serena, or just aesthetics.
The Nightingale rumbled as Serena fired the RCS thrusters, directing the belly of the ship towards the planet. Talasea fastened her seatbelt and closed the helmet of her exosuit. Two of the Gondwana’s crew sat behind her — Vangelis, the away team specialist, and Anna, the exobiologist. Five six-wheeled djinni were stored in the cargo bay, ready to be deployed upon touchdown. A good ground team, for sure, but Talasea was not certain it was ready for…
Well, for what? Good question. Serena chimed in. Her q-augs gleamed in yellow in the darkness of the cockpit, reflected against the stars on the windshield.
“Alright, everyone, we are about to enter the atmosphere. We are dealing with one third of a bar of pressure, 70% carbon dioxide, the rest is made of various rare gases. Quite windy, but the low pressure mitigates it somewhat.”
“Don’t mess up the landing” commented Vangelis, imposing shape wrapped in a grey-yellow exosuit. “I don’t really want to take a rowboat back home.”
The Gondwana, much like any self-respecting exploration vessel, was equipped with four self-propelled recovery pods capable of orbit-to-surface travel and vice versa, albeit only once — they were emergency pods for both the ship and the shuttle, should it find itself stranded on a planet. Comfort had never been on the radar for their designers.
Talasea liked Vangelis’ eternally grumpy persona — for it was an act, through and through. He’d been a soldier, a biologically augmented combatant in the paramilitary forces of the meta-queen, far away under the bloody sun of Smyrnia-Silesia. He was the only passenger in this shuttle to have truly killed something, in hand to hand combat, with his bare fists. He had served in untold battles, a violent enforcer of the meta-queen’s barely formed will. Complaining about the fact that rowboat seats were not comfortable was meant to feel out of character. It was a reassuring act.
Probably a good idea when sitting in a tin can, descending at twenty-four times the speed of the sound through swirling clouds over an icy desert.
Leaves had assumed the shape of a small four-winged Smyrnian bird, covered in golden fur. It was one of her favourite avatars — the others were a nonchalant irenian astronaut and a plain triangle. It had suddenly appeared in a corner of Valys’ left eye, dancing up and down above the haptic displays.
“You look annoyed, my dear pilot.”
“This fifth contact is bothering me, yes. It’s clearly not a satellite, and I find its orbit exceedingly strange.”
“How so?”
“Well, all the old indie satellites are positioned on a 600 kilometer, sun-synchronous orbit, they’re very clearly ground observation sats, probably with added communication capabilities. The fifth contact, however, is on a much lower orbit, 300 kilometers or so. It is also way larger than a regular satellite. I’d really want to give it a full sensor sweep.”
“Indulge yourself, then.”
The Nightingale, aptly piloted by Serena, performed a nigh-flawless landing, carried by its vertical thrusters a mere five hundred meters away from Baal station. Open Source Orbiters could land pretty much anywhere, and the sandy surface of the planet was just another day at the office for the Gondwana’s rugged shuttle. As soon as the dust settled, the away team was on the ground — Talasea first, followed by the five djinni, then Vangelis, Anna and Serena.
“Gondwana, coms check.”
“Reading you loud and clear. We’re sending you satellite pictures of the station, I think your maps are quite outdated.”
Talasea downloaded the incoming data and moved on among the dunes and black rocks protruding beneath a transparent sky. Seen from the ground, Baal station was almost invisible, the bunkers barely a bump in the landscape. The mohole was there, about seven hundred meters to the magnetic east, she could feel it — a vaguely dark presence above the ground, an emptiness floating between the dunes.
As soon as the LIDAR signals came back to the Gondwana, Valys started feeling the fifth object at the end of their fingers — at first, it felt like a thousand needles poking at their skin as the ship computed the incoming feedback, then the sea of nails slowly turned into an object Valys could feel and manipulate as if it had been a scale model resting in their palm. Then the infrared feedback came as well — the object was a ring, about fifteen meters in diameter, with a central section that felt slightly hotter at the touch.
The pilot identified it almost immediately.
“That’s the faster-than-light section of an atmosphere-capable spaceship. No micrometeorite impacts on the surface. It’s extremely recent. Someone’s already on this planet.”
The hole was a gaping wound in the planet. Two hundred meters wide and fifty meters large, said Talasea’s helmet sensors, and there was an eerie thought peering behind the raw data — indies did not make this. Not without industrial excavating equipment, and even then.
Anna cracked a fluorescent stick and dropped it in the gaping abyss. The ruby-colored lantern took five long minutes to completely disappear, without any signs that it had hit the bottom. Serena ordered one of the djinni to position itself at the edge of the well and probe it with its multispectral head.
“Well. Radar returns tell me it’s about eight hundred meters deep. Bottom is solid ground, but littered in debris. Some of the returns are strange, however. Like, scattered, if it makes any sense.”
Talasea kneeled next to the drone, then set her laser stylus to scraper mode and tried to get a sample of the strange substance the mohole’s walls were made of. The laser tip failed to even penetrate the outermost layer, resulting in a disappointing beep from the handheld device.
“Definitely not indie” said Serena. “That’s not even steel.”
“Hold on, let me try something…” replied Talasea, setting the stylus to cutting mode. This time, instead of a gentle burst of light, the pen-shaped device emitted a single, focus laser beam, meant to cut through metal or other hard materials. This time the stylus managed to make a dent in the black structure, but it was a short-lived result — it took less than a minute for the onyx-coloured material to grow back to its original state, in the image of a tree’s bark piecing a wound back together.
Vangelis stepped forward.
“Transbiological material. Sequence-made?”
“Correct.”
The shape in Valys’ palm suddenly sprung to life, radiating heat against their skin.
“I’ve got a heat spike. The faster than light ring just activated. Firing RCS, it’s positioning itself to face the planet. One of its antennae is rotating too...it’s communicating with something, but I can’t intercept the coms. Crypted, most likely. Leaves?”
“Eyes on Baal station, Valys.”
The djinni turned its camera-head towards Talasea, then quickly retracted its sensors before retreating back towards the safety of Vangelis’ arms as fast as its small wheels enabled it to go.
Then, the ground started shaking and another djinn fell back, while a third, more courageous one, hung tight to the edge of the wall and risked a sensor sweep. Serena was the first one to receive the data from the drone.
“It looks like something just...emerged from the bottom of the well. Moth, it’s burning on IR. Vangelis, override that djinn and keep it in place! I’m trying to figure out what this object is. It’s moving towards the surface. I’ve got a central heat signature, then six smaller signals, spread all around, like...like thrusters. It’s a ship! It’s a bloody spaceship!”
“It’s fully powered up, now. Captain, do you have any idea what model and make that thing is?”
The commander grabbed a pod of tea before answering, her thoughts absorbed by a control panel showing the feeds from the away team.
“Hmmm? No. The circular design is extremely common, it could even be some kind of indie model. The geometry drive is in the center, and the circle is used to couple the section to a ship. Alas, I am afraid your question will soon be irrelevant. There’s something coming up from Baal. It’s our vessel.”
“Fall back!” ordered Serena, even if she had no authority down there — or anywhere else, but she was the single most experienced surveyor on the team. “It’s accelerating towards the surface!”
Vangelis grabbed the third djinn and, with a pair of drones on his shoulder, ran to the safety of a large boulder. Anna followed in his wake, then Serena, with Talasea trailing close behind — albeit the irenian did not reach the boulder before the ship emerged from the mohole, VTOL engines rushing and screaming against the wind. It was eighty meters long and shaped more like a plane than a ship, with a wishbone-like mainframe and two sleek wings extending away from, tips curved and folded to fit inside the mohole. The vessel was all white, and did not bear any markings, bar from mundane do not step here inscriptions.
“Holy Miracle, that’s a Caravelle Courier!” exclaimed Anna. Serena took a long, hard look at the two custom hardpoints installed on the ship’s underbelly, supporting the eerie shapes of a pair of multi-stage ship-to-ship missiles. The Caravelle dropped one of them immediately. Its maneuvering thrusters ignited, sending it spiralling into the wind until the tip faced the shuttle parked seven hundred meters away, and then the main engine fired. Serena watched in disbelief as the projectile pulverized the sound barrier just before hitting the landed Nightingale. The fuel reserves were ignited almost immediately, and the shuttle disappeared in a fiery explosion, leaving nothing but a vast plume of flames, smoke and melting hot debris.
There was little doubt as to what the second missile’s target would be.
Then the Caravelle fired its main atmospheric thrusters and Talasea fell in the mohole, swept away by a giant’s hand.
The Caravelle dropped its second missile as soon as it had reached the limit of the clouds, less than half a minute after leaving the ground. It was a five-staged, faster than light capable stalker, a true “tin can of death”, quite of an overkill against a poor Open Source Orbiter, but perfectly apt against the Gondwana.
The projectile accelerated and locked its target.
Talasea’s suit realized what was happening slightly before Talasea herself, and took action to correct what it — aptly — considered to be a dire situation. Starmoth Initiative exosuits were meant to be used on the ground and in EVA indifferently, at least when the radiation environment permitted it. As such, they were equipped with backpack thrusters and, naturally, the suit’s autopilot decided to use them. In ground configuration, however, they barely carried any fuel — just enough to go bunny-hopping on low-g worlds — and the autopilot could only fire them for ten seconds straight. It was enough to slow Talasea down quite a bit, but only a temporary solution, of course.
The autopilot pinged the mohole.
It and Talasea had now five hundred meters to find another option.
Leaves was the first one to realize what was happening, its advanced sensor filters differentiating the missile’s heat signature from the Caravelle’s blazing engines about thirty seconds after its launch. It did not waste time relaying the findings to Parvati and, instead, transmitted it directly to Valys.
The pilot plotted an instant translation. One thousand kilometers, straight up — the furthest possible displacement, considering the ship’s available computing power and the time it had before impact. Much to their horror, the missile didn’t even waste time entering orbit. As soon as it hit the edge of the atmosphere, it activated its own geometry drive, matching the Gondwana’s own jump.
“It’s a hunter-killer.” grimly said Parvati.
It felt strange. Plummeting to one’s death in slow motion, as if a prisoner of transparent jelly. The planet’s medium gravity was the worst — too high to prevent Talasea’s death, too low to allow for a quick and merciful fall.
Trying to reboot thrusters.
Deriving power.
Fuel reserve empty.
Retrying…
Talasea ended up switching the poor autopilot off. There was, realistically, nothing to be done.
And then, something caught her.
The Gondwana jumped again, this time slightly further away, and the missile followed suit again, receiving targeting data from the Caravelle. Valys knew their only potential defense was faster than light mobility — the q-drive was useless for sublight evasion, and the ship’s laser grid wasn’t strong enough to threaten a missile — but the hunter-killer had them locked in a conundrum. The missile forced them to perform increasingly quicker jumps, which meant increasingly shorter ones, trapping the Gondwana in a vicious circle — any attempt at stopping to calculate a long-range jump would mean enough time for the missile to catch up. Waiting for the missile to spend all of its fuel or overheat was an option, but Parvati felt they did not have that luxury. She did not know how much fuel the missile had, but she perfectly knew how long they could hold with a translation calculator on override, and it was a ridiculously short amount of time. They weren’t a military ship.
There was one option left. Perhaps.
“Valys, translate us to the other side of the planet.”
A creature from the depths thought Talasea for a second, before realising that she knew the color and texture of the transbiological tentacle that had gently caught her in flight.
A Sequencer.
Slowly, something rose from the night. A gigantic starfish, a creature from the depths of a billion years old abyss, visibly struggling to move, but with unparalleled grace and splendor in its movements. A cloud of baroque paintings — sprawling, excessive beauty, even in rot.
The Gondanwa reintegrated reality above the carbon snow of the planet’s north pole, about five thousand kilometers away from its origin point — not quite “the other side of the planet”, but far enough along the curve for the missile to lose direct line of sight. Parvati ordered to jump again, to create as much space between the projectile and the ship as possible, but this time, the perfumed hallucinations of a translation did not come.
She did not need words to understand what was going on. The sudden disappearance of an entire section on her side panels was enough.
The Gondwana’s mainframe had crashed. An average hard reboot took five minutes. The missile was in the process of reacquiring the target, based on data from its mothership. Four minutes, probably — that was what they had left.
Parvati only had one reasonable option left.
The Sequencer extended one its tentacles, leaving a few particles behind, that then circled around and slowly formed a glyph in the simplified script some Sequencers used to communicate with lesser life forms — well, lesser...Talasea had always considered this was some pretty big talk for a dying species, but this time, she could let this idea slide.
The creature had, after all, saved her life.
The symbol in front her was contorted, twisted and shaking.
I am dying.
I can see that, thought Talasea. Even for the Starmoth Initiative, knowledge of Sequence biology was parcellar at best, but they knew what a dying Sequencer looked like — at least as far as evolved forms like this one were concerned. Strands of mucus soiled the otherwise immaculate strings of transbiological material, exuded by gleaming gold-silver particles, like electricity running through the body of an ancient painting, cut and scattered in the wind. Infection, assessed Talasea. It’s infected, and its body is unable to fight it off — which, in and of itself, was a terrifying thought. Sequencer biology was the result of several dozen millions of years of evolution, both natural and self-controlled. To know that this specific individual was dying of infection…
But that particular thought did not last long, because the Sequencer spewed out another symbol.
She killed me.
“She”? Yes, that was correct, more or less. It was the glyph they used for female-presenting humans.
She killed all of us.
A tentacle pointed at something at the bottom of the well. There was a patch of pristine, black ground, where the Caravelle had landed and cauterized everything with its thrusters — and all around, the grey, desiccated lines of transbiological strings, rotten and led bare, covered in thick, half-decomposed mucus. The stench was probably unbearable.
Why? Asked Talasea, using her stylus as a light pen.
I do not remember.
No, correction. The central glyph wasn’t for deliberate action, but for capacity.
I cannot remember.
Of course — that was the most cunning part of the plan, right? Sequencers stored their memories in their transbiological cells. To destroy them, like this pathogen was in the process of doing, was to erase the very identity of a Sequencer — memories, feelings, idea, and in the end, individuality.
Talasea felt the tentacles weakening under her. The Sequencer slowly lowered the irenian towards the ground. It was now painfully weak — Talasea knew that adult Sequencers could crush a spaceship in two with a mere pinch, owing to the incredible power of transbiological muscles. Despite the grim nature of the Sequence as a whole, and the mixed feelings she could harbor towards a failed space empire, Talasea could not help but feel sorry for that specific individual. Its slow, painful moves were the Sequence equivalent of a dying man’s last breath.
Another glyph emerged in darkness.
She has not destroyed all.
Then, with a single, powerful blow of its tentacles, the Sequencer pulverized a section of the wall, revealing a service tunnel diving deep under Baal station.
Save yourselves.
And then the Sequencer collapsed, with the grace of a dying castle of sand.
The missile translated five kilometers away from the Gondwana and immediately ignited its final stage, relying on LIDAR guidance for its terminal approach. It wasn’t aiming for the engines, nor the radiators, as it would have been wise to do against a military ship — instead, it sought the cockpit. It wasn’t here to disable the ship.
It was here to kill.
The warhead penetrated the ship’s outer armour like butter, barely slowed down by the ablative dust shield that all Starmoth Initiative vessels were equipped with. It had correctly estimated the internal volume of the cockpit and exploded five centimeters away from the geometric center of the spherical bridge. Plasma and shrapnel immediately formed an expanding bubble of cauterizing death inside the command center of the Gondwana, which then expanded to create a hail of high-velocity projectiles, quickly devouring the ship’s frame in front of it. Leaves was entirely destroyed a mere millisecond after the impact.
Paradoxically, the missile’s quest for anti-personnel efficiency is what saved both Parvati and Valys. Had the missile exploded outside the Gondwana, the shower of debris would have doomed the escape capsule to a quick and fiery death. Instead, the insides of the surveyor ship acted as an improvised ablative shield — a short-lived one, for sure, but enough to spare the rowboat as it hurled towards the planet, engines screaming behind.
Above, the Gondwana was contorting and shaking like a dying whale, insides ripped apart by the missile.
INTERMISSION
Do you know that a rowboat in emergency extraction mode can submit its passengers to more than 5 gees of thrust?
INTERMISSION
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Helmet flashlights pierced the darkness with the clarity of anti-air searchlights. The seven crew members of the Gondwana had instinctively assembled themselves as a scouting party in hostile environments — Talasea and Serena led the group, laser styli in hand, set to illumination, but only a finger away from cutting mode. Parvati and Valys found themselves at the center — both the pilot and the commander had been roughed up by the rowdy atmospheric re-entry of their rowboat, and had trouble keeping up with the rest of the crew. Anna was with them, tending to two of the djinni, while the rest of the drones swarmed around Vangelis, at the rear. Both him and Serena had grabbed industrial cutting lances from the rowboat and held them like weapons — which they were, to a certain extent, even though they wouldn’t have even scratched a Sequence shambler, let alone a more evolved life form. They were only good against whatever lesser scavengers could live in these tunnels and, thankfully, there didn’t seem to be any. Some of the walls bore transparent windows and from them, the crew could see sacks of pus, mucus and rotting transbiological material, stacked in immense, half-collapsed pillars going deep inside the planet’s crust. They weren’t, in fact, walking in a tunnel, but rather alongside a long, enclosed bridge suspended over a sea of decaying biological matter.
“This is criminal.” Anna’s voice was smooth and gentle, almost soothing. “This place is...was a concentration of Sequence remnants like no other in this region of the Milky Way. And you’ve seen it for yourself, Talasea, they weren’t even hostile to us!”
“Don’t get your hopes — or regrets — too high, this was a single individual and it was dying.”
“Another reason why this place is incredible. Something that can kill Sequence transbiological materials...whatever that ship brought here, it is not something I have ever seen, anywhere.”
“Algorab has biological weapons that can paralyse a Sequencer…”
“For a short amount of time, and only for simple lifeforms. This is operating on a much larger scale. Like a WMD of some sort.”
Serena pointed her cutter at a rectangular shape attached to the tunnel wall.
“Heads up. We’ve got another mining charge. Recent, like the others. Whoever planted it didn’t get the time to arm it.”
“You know” commented Vangelis while patting one of its djinni “I am increasingly getting the feeling that we just disrupted something very important. Something that wasn’t carried out by the original owners of Baal station, nor any indie commune.”
“No kidding.” Parvati’s calmness was almost eerie. “I think Valys and I realized that very well when we saw a missile heading for the Gondwana. Fuck. I had grown to like that ship. And Leaves too. I’ll miss it.” There we go for the eulogy, thought Talasea. Two sentences. Don’t dwell on our failures, eh? Keep going. Press on through that tunnel. Descend into the darknesst, then press on. Who knows, maybe you’ll find something other than death at the end. Supplies. An FTL probe. Answers.
“Any idea how old that tunnel can be?” wondered Anna, breaking the nightly silence after a few, long, minutes. Parvati shrugged.
“Who knows? Baal station was officially registered twenty years ago, but all of that obviously isn’t on any plan, official or otherwise. I’m more interested in that Sequence remnant, all around us. Tali?”
“I don’t quite know what to say. It appears the planet was once tectonically active before it slowly lost its internal energy, so maybe this entire space is some kind of ancient caldeira that has been colonized by a sort of Sequence mega-organism...we have found several planets with similar structures, either in artificial or natural cavities, but that is the first time I see a live one. Well, live...you get what I mean.”
“And what are these structures for, usually?”
“No idea. The main property of transbiological material, as Anna will no doubt confirm, is that it is, by definition, not confined to a single usage. Such a concentration of Sequence technology could be, I don’t know, a factory, a breeding place, a library, who knows what. Right, Anna?”
“Sadly, even with state-of-the-art techniques, we can’t really do anything interesting with dead transbiological cells. We need live samples to understand their usage. This entire place is going to become unusable in a few days, maybe hours. And on that note, we should really hurry up. I don’t quite understand how transbiological cells die, but if they are being targeted by a bacterial or viral pathogen, as the rotting process would indicate, they are probably going to saturate the entire cavity with decomposition byproducts. The exploding kind.”
There was nothing but silence for the following twenty minutes.
Then they found a door. Intentionally made, and human-sized, this time.
Serena’s curse echoed through the radio channel they all shared, like sudden fireworks by a quiet summer afternoon.
“Holy Miracle of Elora.”
The door, its magnetic seals long unlocked, led to a white-walled silo, deep underground, outside of Baal station’s surface perimeter. Inside the silo was a surface-to-orbit shuttle, about thirty meters tall, a vertical lander, wrapped in heat-resistant coating that, stretched all across the ship’s frame, made it look more like a racing vessel than a shuttle. Seen from the side, it was an arrow, pointed at the invisible sky, eight hundred meters above. There were no mining charges around — the demolition team from the Caravelle did not have time to reach this part of the station, or had simply ignored it.
“I gather it’s a nice ship?” asked Anna, who knew next to nothing when it came to space vessels.
“You could say that, yes…” answered Serena, extending one of her artificial arms against the lower coating, the “robe” that covered part of the engine bells and landing clamps. It felt like a shark’s skin — smooth and scratchy at the same time. “What you are looking at is a high-power VTOL shuttle manufactured by Tsuno Industries a decade or two ago, with a twin propulsion, conventional chemical and fission. It’s definitely not indie, if this question is even worth debating anymore.”
“Can we...use it?”
Serena shrugged, reaching for the handle of the emergency access, one meter and a half above ground on the port side of the shuttle.
“Honestly, I think it’s fairly naive to assume that…” the handle gave way as soon as she pushed against it, pivoting downwards and opening the door. “...it’s open.” She took a peek inside the emergency airlock. “I see no obvious evidence that the door has been forced open, but it looks like the safeties have been manually reset from the inside, possibly by a drone or a tentacle, or some good old hacking. Judging from the absence of demolition charges in the silo, I’d say the people from the Caravelle wanted to keep that ship from themselves, but we changed their plans somewhat. Good timing, you could say…”
Parvati entered, following Serena.
“Honestly, I’d have preferred a stolen shuttle and a still intact Gondwana. This is a fine spaceship, but assuming that it still works...it’s not faster-than-light, and the nearest automated relay is on the far side of the system. I hope everyone here enjoys the prospect of a few months in cicada sleep.”
“Well, if there’s a shuttle, there might be a true ship somewhere. Who knows? Baal station is clearly not what it seemed to be, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it had other oddities in store for us.”
“Speaking of which…” intervened a clearly anxious Anna, eyes locked on the blast door they had left behind, and the rotting mass of Sequence flesh that bulged beneath their feet, through the semi-transparent window panels. “I do not want to be here when the main muscle sphincters give way. Hurry up.”
The cockpit of the shuttle was unlike anything Serena had seen before. It was coated in grey-white coral, probably from the Eloran seas, adorned with blackwood — a bioengineered material laced with electronic systems, seamlessly integrated to natural bark. Ten seats (eight passengers and two pilots) filled a spacious cockpit, with a vast curved display above that, in flight, gave the illusion half the shuttle was made of glass. Despite a good decade of dust, they looked entirely functional and even more — they were positively regal. Their leathery surface wasn’t only pleasant to the touch, Serena’s trained eye could perfectly see that they covered top of the line, almost military-like anti-g equipment. They were in vertical configuration, back towards the silo’s walls, seats in a blind stadium.
“Moon Communes.” commented Parvati as she hoisted Valys in the vertical cockpit with Vangelis’ help. “This looks a lot like a lunar vessel, wouldn’t you say? The colors, the scenery…”
“Perhaps.” Serena didn’t sound convinced, and more importantly was absorbed by the control panels on the pilot’s seat. They seemed to be still active, probably running on battery. “Miracle, I don’t even have a proper interface, I just get a default Biblioteca login screen on guest mode. The shuttle’s software is still there however, the basic modules at least. Looks like my hypothesis was right, Parvati, our aggressors wanted to reuse the shuttle, they performed a standard reinitialisation process. The good news is that it probably means the shuttle is usable. The bad news, well...Moth, I hate the default Biblioteca. What version is even this, 2.3? Oh, good, I misclicked, it’s now in Russian. No, I do not want to apply a new language pack, just give me your default Arab back, and in the right reading direction, please. Good. Now, let’s see if I can load the piloting modules…oh dear, that’s the default UI? Green on black? What is this, the Low Age? Oh no, this isn’t going to go well.”
“What’s going on, Serena?”
“I can’t even change the UI myself, I have to choose between presets and they’re all atrocious. Alright. Default orange, maybe?”
She typed a line of code, and the cockpit’s displays came to life — most of them, at least, a few panels were broken — with a crude, low-resolution orange UI.
“Better than nothing.” She checked her seat, struggled a bit to find the safety belt, then her hands instinctively reached for the stick and throttle. “Now, engines. I...Valys, can you come here for a moment? I’m not sure how to interpret those numbers.”
The navigator climbed towards Serena, grunting in pain, helped by Vangelis. They detached the copilot’s display, turning it into a tablet, then retreated to their nest a row below.
“You’re now the proud mother of a perfectly fine solid core nuclear reactor, Serena. The fission core is fine and dandy, and you’ve got fissile material and propellant aplenty. Whoever stored that shuttle here clearly didn’t want to mothball it. We are very low on conventional fuel, however.”
“Yes, I saw that. We have one, maybe two take-offs with the solid fuel canisters. I think the shuttle normally runs on oxygen-hydrogen fuel, according to the displays, but of course you don’t want to store that at ambient temperature for years. Hmmm. We’re lucky gravity isn’t too high.”
A rumble echoed through the silo’s walls, followed by a muffled whisper — several thousand tonnes of air brutally released by decaying transbiological lungs, shaking Baal station’s foundations.
“Serena…”
“I’m working on it. The shuttle is still linked to the silo’s systems, I just need to find the button, goddammit, who the hell puts ground controls in a submenu...and it’s in Russian again...there.” Somewhere, far above the shuttle, a pair of heavy blast doors opened, powered by emergency batteries. Far below, dying Sequencers screamed in echo. “Stand-by for startup sequence. I would like everyone to fasten their seatbelts, please. Vangelis, tell the djinni to anchor themselves to the ground, or to your shoulder, or whatever. This is going to be...relatively brutal. Solid fuel does not allow for a lot of subtlety.”
Understatement of the century thought Talasea as the shuttle started shaking and rushing against the silo’s railings, then her seat went into horizontal mode and the sky pushed against her chest with the strength of an Eloran six-legged buffalo. Above, the clouds were the colors of blood, smeared across the horizon. The last thing she saw before her monad decided to cut her off from the outside world was an unending stream of decayed organic matter, streaming through cracks in the silo like molten ash.
And so here they were, at the tip of a tube of aluminium and carbon stuffed with enough explosives to level a small town, hoping to reach for the deep dark sky unscathed.
One last burn for orbital insertion and then — zero-g. Talasea’s mind came back to life and her eyes instinctively reached for the planet below.
“Orbital sweep?”
“The Caravelle and its FTL module are gone from that hemisphere. If they weren’t, we’d probably already have a missile incoming.”
“Speak of taking risks…”
“Calculated risks. That ship only had two missiles, I saw them. A custom, hasty job.”
“Right. Do we have fission power?”
“Wait a sec. Unfolding radiators…” Serena reached for her panel, that blinked in red before beeping and displaying INVALID COMMAND in Russian. “I hate that UI so much. Touchscreens were a mistake. Give me some buttons, switches and knobs! Well...here we go.” Talasea turned around, seeing a pair of radiators extending from the rear section of the shuttle. “Now, let’s start this little baby. It will take some time, as usual. I found some rations. They’re five years past their expiry date. Any takers?”
The only answer was a vague grunt coming from a half-asleep Parvati. One of the djinni had escaped Vangelis’ watch, and was now drifting towards the front of the cockpit, looking around with great interest through its small camera. Talasea caught it in mid-air, much to the dismay of the drone.
“A more pressing question, now...where do we go next? It is not like this ship is capable of faster-than-light travel. All the money went in the ornaments.”
“Hmmm. Navigation data wasn’t wiped, interestingly enough. I swear this UI is one of the worst I have ever seen…” Serena sighed, battling with a beautiful, but intricate cartographical interface on her panel.
“You already said that.”
“I know, shut up. Let’s look at the bookmarks...Baal station is marked, which isn’t very helpful...the satellites are also marked, one to five, with maintenance notes...there’s a sixth bookmark, which is rather interesting. It says Cicada, and points towards one of the asteroids that periodically intersects the planet’s orbit. I can’t quite figure out the symbol next to it, though. The inverted triangle, here.”
Valys sprung to life between two monad-induced dreams.
“It’s archaic, but I think it means that the Cicada is a ship, a real one, not that shitty atomic bus.”
In her dreams, Talasea saw white angels made of neutrons dance amidst the shuttle’s bell noozles, filtering the faint light of the red dwarf. Then, she woke up, unsure if hours or days had passed. Serena whispered in her ear.
“Hey, bluie…”
“It’s been a while since you called me bluie...what’s up?”
“Look…”
Talasea blinked. A mere ten kilometers in front of the shuttle stood a medium-sized, iron-rich asteroid, covered in ancient craters. One of them was occupied by a small automated factory. A carbon tether extended away from it and pointed towards a peculiar shape stabilized in the vicinity of the asteroid. A spaceship, almost a quarter of a kilometer long, made of two identical cylinders linked together by a central node and protected by two hexagonal dust shields, one of which was a purely aesthetic element as it was positioned at the rear of the vessel. The hexagonal pattern extended to the ship’s pearlescent hull, giving it an almost crystalline, quartz-like appearance, white coating infused with veins of blood by the star. The radiators were folded inside the hull, and there was no visible radiation shield, hinting at a q-drive based propulsion. When Serena pinged it with the shuttle’s laser array, it answered positively and unlocked its starboard docking bay.
On the short-range IFF display, the ship bore the name Cicada.
FIRST INTERLUDE
Far away, at the edge of a not-quite star.
Jyothi glanced at the brown dwarf. Its clay-colored clouds swirled and unfolded, a few million kilometers away. The station was close enough for the celestial object to wash away her skin with a sugary warmth. In the vast bay window, she could see her reflection — a strange creature, she thought. A two hundred and fifty years old human being, a true ship of Theseus with every single organ in her body — even the brain, piece by piece — replaced and recreated by pseudovegetal implants over the many decades of her interstellar life. Her bronze-coloured skin, dark eyes and silver hair made her hard to identify, to put somewhere in space and time. She was hard to link to a specific ethnicity, to a planet, to an age category, to something in general. At the beginning, in the first decades of her new life, Jyothi had felt strange — in limbo, unsure whether or not she even qualified to the title of human being any longer. Now, she had embraced this limbo, this strangeness. She could not deny it. Few people knew of her origins — of Jyothi, sister of the Outer Church, veteran of the last war of the Low Age, witness to the Coronation of the Sky; of Jyothi, missionary in the Giants’ Collective at the dawn of the interstellar age, days before the discovery of the geometry drive; of Jyothi, aimless traveller among unknown stars. Time spiralled behind her. She was a beautiful spectre, an echo of what had once been, of the ancient world left behind by interstellar humanity, of the Low Age and of the ruins from the industrial era. The great limbo, once again.
Perhaps, she was alone, now. The last veteran. The last remnant. Or perhaps not, but in the end it did not matter.
She looked at the glass in her palm. Filled with Eloran whiskey, golden-colored and smooth like honey poured in vinegar — she hated it, but it was now part of her character. She could not even drink it properly, as her half-vegetal body rejected alcohol entirely. It was solely a stage prop. Jyothi, the elegant mastermind, or something to that effect. Childish, in many ways, but then again, she had always seen herself as a character in a very long play.
Jyothi stood up. She was beautiful, too. Not in a conventional way — if the idea had any meaning, muddled in the staggering diversity of human experience — but it was real nonetheless. A presence, a way to be, a way to act, a voice too, calm and serene, Jyothi — writer, character and actor in her own play. One her lovers had once likened her to an old tree in a dark forest. She had battled with this metaphor for a very long time, and she had come to the conclusion that it had been a compliment, albeit one of the most beautifully convoluted ones she had ever received.
She took a deep breath, feeling her four lungs unfold in her chest as they filled themselves with the warm, sterile air of the station. Then, she reached for her watch and pressed the button on the side. The lighting in the observation bay turned to red, signalling that it was now locked and secured. A string of letters appeared on the bay window, filtering the brown dwarf’s light.
Clear for voice commands.
“Jyothi to Rossignol. Begin recording, encoding at level seven, no voice filters. Well. Rossignol, I have just received your report from Baal station. It took me a while to process it, and I have to admit that I still have trouble coming to terms with the idea that you opened fire on a Starmoth Initiative vessel and its shuttle. You told me that you acted under pressure, and had to take a split-second decision. I wasn’t personally there, and as such have to rely on your judgment. Hindsight is always perfect, but I do think you should have either refrained from firing, or made sure the ground team had also been thoroughly eliminated. Especially considering that we are dealing with Iniative operators, not hapless miners. Leaving the system immediately was a good call, especially considering the presence of active satellites in the outskirts of the system, but the survival of this team is a problem. Not only do we have eye witnesses, but we can consider the Cicada compromised. It is a shame. The ship does not contain any valuable intel, but I really wanted to reuse it. Anyway. What’s done is done. I think...pause recording.”
She took another breath, searching for the appropriate words. Rossignol had his...manners. There was no need to force him to dwell on his failures. He didn’t need criticism. He needed orders.
“Resume recording. Alright. We are two missiles short, now. I will arrange a new delivery of weapons, when I can get in touch with our suppliers. Make sure the Caravelle is properly supplied and the crew at full capacity. In the hypothesis the ground crew has survived the collapse of Baal station and escaped aboard the Cicada, which is very likely unless they’re complete amateurs, we’ll have the Starmoth Initiative — and possibly Algorab — on our heels. We need to move fast. Pause recording.”
Her gaze rested on the floor, and the complex labyrinth carved in whitewood, copied from a cathedral on Earth. She was about to set something in motion that...correction. Rossignol and his Caravelle had, but it was her role in the story to catch that falling boulder and give it more momentum before it crushed them all.
“Resume recording. We have four sites left, and only two available Flowers of Silence, which means we’ll have to handle two of them the old-fashioned way. I want you to get to Lich, first. Neutralize it before the Starmoth Initiative understands what happened at Baal station. You do not want to face Algorab strike groups. Use the Flower on this one. The second target is Dogon. Two problems: there is an active research site here and the ruins are not from the Sequence, hence are impervious to the Flower. Solution: insert a strike team. You’re not after the ruin, you’re after the data. Ground personnel should be spared, but are expendable if things go haywire. Third and fourth targets will follow once Dogon has fallen. End of recording. Playback.”
She listened to the recording, found it adequate, if not great. It was enough for Rossignol.
“Copy to messenger probe.”
Copied. Level seven encryption.
“Send to relay station eight, for Rossignol only. When is the next translation window?”
Orbital parameters allow for optimal insertion trajectory in two hours and thirty-seven minutes. Messenger probe is primed and loaded. Do you have any special requests?
She smiled and waved at the brown dwarf.
“You don’t know how lucky you are, little one, not having to deal with the hasty reactions of someone on the other side of human space. Not having to deal with the Sequence, not having to deal with...anything, really.”
Should I add this to the recording? blinked the bay window.
“Hmmm? No. Just send it.”
SECOND INTERLUDE
Late industrial era.
Rain. Rain against the windows, battering the penthouse, high above the city. Far away above the ocean, there was a monster coming — a hurricane, the most powerful one of the year so far, though probably not a record-breaker. We should move, madam. Yes. Yes, she knew. The tower was not made to withstand such a storm. Nothing in the city was. Nothing in the nation. Hurricanes were not supposed to form in that sea. In that climate. In that season. Though, to be fair, the concept of season had lost a lot of its relevance, lately.
The helicopter won’t be able to take off for much longer, madam.
I know, she thought, I goddamn know this — I designed the bloody thing. A while back, a long while back...thirty-five years, to be accurate. Her personal helicopter was an antique. Almost vintage.
Rain. Rain against the windows, heavy and cold. Whispers, somewhere behind her, coming from the virtual conference room.
“So what about the launch?”
“It’s going to be fine. I just had the FAA on the phone, they just confirmed our authorization. We won’t be able to recover the stages, however. Beaumont is trying to force me to postpone the launch, but...I mean, they really want that payload up there. Right now. If we cancel the launch, I am afraid Boeing-SPX is going to grab the HELA contract. If we don’t…”
She answered, absently.
“We lose about fifty million for using the Starlight Heavy in full expendable mode. We win a five billion contract. Why are we even discussing this? Besides...tell Beaumont to prime the barges regardless. Even with that weather, I think we can recover some of the boosters.”
“You think?”
I designed their ancestors, and I oversaw the development of their children. I know. I ran the calculations a thousand times.
Her mind extracted itself from the conversation, and went back towards the coming storm. Rain. Rain rushing towards the distant ground.
At which point did our great industrial machine start devouring its own gears? At which point did the world stop making sense? At which point did we just...give up?
Rain. Rain running against the blades of a helicopter, pouring down her neck, clenching her clothes.
I am the seventh richest person in the world. I control one of the largest aerospace conglomerates on the planet. I am worth close to a hundred billion dollars in assets, in stakes, in investments, in real estate. I head one of the most prestigious humanitarian foundations in the world, and I have been elected “person of the year” by Time last month — I wonder if anyone still reads it. And yet. Against a hurricane, I can but flee. Like a queen leaving the anthill behind.
Rain. Rain against the cockpit, minced by dark blades.
When I was 18, my father offered me a suborbital ride aboard one of his contraptions. It was the fourth commercial flight. I was almost like a test pilot. That’s when I fell in love with the dark sky beyond.
Rain. Rain far below, as the helicopter ascends above the deep grey clouds.
And yet, what did I achieve? Where did the dream go? Where did my dream go? Into the furnace, that’s where it went. Into the endless gears of industry — orbital factories above a dying world, suborbital toys for the ultra-rich, moon resorts and a Mars colony that will die as soon as we miss a single launch window. When I founded Cicada Aerospace, the dream was still alive. Now...hell if I know.