All is forgotten.

An empty mind is better

Than no mind at all.

- Anonymous, Poems of the Long Fall

Lady Elinor North, House Montclair

Aboard the Arctic Wind, Dotalian Sovereignty

Elinor had barely stepped out of the airlock of her cutter, the Arctic Wind, when she was subjected to another ambush. This time, her new Dragoon bodyguards were of no help. It was her cousin Alice.

“Oh Great Stars, you’re not going to believe this report!” said Lady Alice Porter as soon as Elinor made it onto her cutter. Despite her obvious excitement, the young woman did an excellent job of keeping a proper demeanor. She wore the standard white space suit, but instead of the North uniform jacket on top, Lady Alice wore a proper velvet vest with a stylish, patterned cravat around her neck.

Alice was her actual cousin, her father’s niece, and was considered part of the North branch of the Montclairs. She was also new to the family business, learning from Lady Dorcas how to manage the operations for an interstellar mining and trade outfit. Much like Elinor’s youngest brother, Miles, Alice was a late-in-life surprise for Elinor’s aunt and uncle. While Miles had opted to go the military route and join the Dragoons, Alice had opted to join up with the business end. She had been taken under the wing of Dorcas, who was Elinor’s de facto right hand and most trusted confidante.

“Please tell me your husband has already left with the cargo cog,” said Elinor, trying to tamp down Alice’s enthusiasm.

“Jeremy left days ago,” said Alice. “He’s running dark, and I filed his official flight plan with Sovereignty Defenses twenty minutes ago, along with ours. We should be hitting the manifold waypoint within a few hours of each other.”

“Good,” said Elinor. “Is everyone onboard and ready to leave?”

“They are,” confirmed Alice. “Lady Dorcas is on the bridge handling astrogration. Why don’t we have a pilot on this run?”

“We’re trying to keep the exact translation coordinates a secret for as long as possible. We need to consolidate our claim against claim jumpers. That’s why we only used our most trusted scouts for the exploration team. Once we’ve established a defensible claim, we can start shipping goods to market and it doesn’t need to stay secret any longer.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” said Alice. She held up the thick folder stuffed with sheets of vellum. “So did you read this?”

“No, not yet,” said Elinor, holding out her hand. Alice handed it over. “Did we receive the latest numbers from the orbital mines?”

“Yeah,” Alice made a sour face. “They aren’t pretty. Rare earth metals are down this quarter and platinum group metals are sinking. Transuranics are steady, thankfully. No super-periodic materials, as expected.”

“Yeah, they’re keeping the doors open,” said Elinor. Transuranics had immense value, but were the hardest and most expensive to mine.

“We’re doing well in volatiles and base metals, but…” Alice didn’t need to finish that statement. Volatiles and base metals were commoditized. They were cheap to mine, but they sold cheap, too. No fortunes could be made there. They were mostly useful as a way to pay the Tithe, since the Formicans cared mostly about contribution, not quality.

“We really need this exploration investment to really pan out,” Elinor said, and began to read the report. She had invested heavily in expedition after expedition, and her parents had finally cut off the money tap. Elinor had argued tirelessly that the expeditions had to continue, but her father had simply pointed at their dwindling funds in their Exchequer accounts, and falling revenues from mining and trade operations.

A new manifold waypoint had been calculated on one of the earliest expeditions, but the scouts had not found the first Way through the waypoint, and come up empty handed. Expedition after expedition failed in their exploration of the manifold. But they had struck gold on the last scouting trip. The scout had found the exit point to another star system, and the Way was clear. The first of six theoretically possible destinations had been uncovered.

Now, Elinor was reading the top-secret scout report of the star system itself. Once in the other star system, the scout had been able to cross-reference its galactic location against old Imperium star charts, and determine that it was the Emanyo System, eighty-nine light years from Dotalian space. But this was all learned from early reports. The scout had gone back for a more thorough examination.

“We’re ready to leave,” came the tinny sound of Dorcas’ voice over the analog, mechanical speaker system.

Elinor sighed in frustration. She put the report in a drawer in the tiny cubicle that was her stateroom, and secured the chair and desk. Then she went up the cramped hallway, ducking under pipes and careful to avoid hitting any of the large busses and relays on the walls. She passed the ready room where her Dragoons had already secured themselves into launch seats. The blast door that was a last resort against explosive decompression from a hull breach was closed, per safety protocols. She entered the bridge and took the seat behind Dorcas and Alice. The last Dragoon that had been guarding her secured the bridge door, spinning the massive wheel to drive steel pins into all four sides of the bulkhead, before taking the last seat in the room.

Despite all the precautions, the exit from the station was very routine. Dorcas expertly manipulated the pilot controls, which were not unlike an atmospheric flyer’s controls. Pushing or pulling against the control wheel controlled pitch and yaw, a separate lever handled throttle, and a panel full of mechanical navigation controls, gauges, and systems information readouts provided a world of information only a trained pilot could understand. Despite all the wealth of information and technology that even an advanced society such as the Dotalian Sovereignty had on hand, there was not a single piece of semiconductor technology onboard. Computers and delicate electronics simply could not survive manifold translation.

After radioing for and receiving clearance to leave the Montclair station, Dorcas carefully navigated the small cutter around dozens of massive cargo cogs that were either waiting to dock or just leaving as well. The cutter’s engine to cargo ratio was far more favorable, so it could dart in and out far faster than the behemoth cogs. Added to that was the need to navigate the Rings of Nulma themselves.

Nulma was a light gravity planet, slightly under the Galactic Constant of 1G. It’s sister planet, Klutea, was the home of the Royal House and the King’s Court. Klutea was far harsher compared to Nulma, with a slightly lower oxygen content, higher gravity, and a tidally locked moon. There were theories that the Rings of Nulma had once been a moon that the Imperium Aeternus had broken up for materials, but there was no real evidence. Like many old tales, the Old Imperium made for a convenient boogeyman.

Once past the Rings, Dorcas was able to really accelerate. Elinor could hear the high-pitched whine of the gravitational generators fighting against the inertia to maintain a survivable 2G’s in the living areas, while the rumble of the Huntington-Wesley engines pumped enormous energy through massive nozzles to accelerate the cutter.

For nearly five hours, Elinor sat in the launch seat with her teeth gritted. The constant pressure made her feel nauseous and hot. Sweat dripped off her brow, and her hands clenched the arms of the chair in a white-knuckled death grip. At long last, the rumble of the engines ceased, and the high-pitched whine could be heard winding down. Gravity slowly returned to normal.

“Acceleration burn nominal, no further burns needed at this time. All crew may return to their duties,” said Dorcas over the intercom. Dorcas turned and gave Elinor a wild grin. “That was soooo much fun!! Why did I ever let you talk me into leaving behind piloting?”

“Because you love me,” said Elinor, “and I needed your help.”

“Right, right, save the family business, blah, blah, blah,” said Dorcas with a fake pout. “Deceleration burn will be in two weeks. Plenty of time to figure out our next steps.”

“Great,” muttered Elinor. “Barely enough time to recover from this burn.”

“Hey, a win by only one point is still a win,” smirked Dorcas.

“And an asskicking by any other name still hurts,” countered Elinor.

“You wouldn’t hurt little ole’ me, would you?” Dorcas fluttered her eyes.

“Can and will. I’m going to take a nap, I’m drained. I’ll finish reading the report and we can talk at dinner.”

Alice had been completely right. The report was astounding. The star system had never been settled, and it was easy to understand why. Emanyo had a A-type main sequence star, or dwarf star, that was relatively young. The system itself had formed from the remnants of a supernova, so the system was swimming with gases even now. The blue-white star had only five planets, but boasted a robust asteroid belt with ten proto-planets and nearly fifty notable asteroids. And while it had relatively few planets, the ones they had were notable.

The Old Imperium star charts had indicated names for the planets. While technically, once Elinor claimed the system, she would be able to name them, she doubted she would bother. Everyone used Old Imperium star charts. Because of the density of the star and its high radiation, the habitable zone of the star was fairly far back. The planets were even farther out.

The closest planet to the star was Murkaph, a terrestrial planet with a thin atmosphere and robust magnetic field. This made the planet a candidate for terraforming, theoretically, if Elinor had the money and a few centuries to work. The second planet had extremely high temperatures, making it mostly useless. The greenhouse effect had run amuck, driving daily average temperatures up over 100 degrees centigrade on the cooler days, and above 200 degrees on the hot ones.

The gas giants were what were truly spectacular. Skudim and Tealick were massive specimens for their type. Tealick was twenty times the size of your average single-g of gravity terrestrial planet, while Skudim was far closer to a three hundred times the size. In fact, the size and density of the planet indicated that it was a failed star that had lost the race to gobble up mass to its larger brother, the dwarf star. If the mass had distributed even a little bit more equitably, this would have been a binary system.

Hidden behind Skudim, almost as an afterthought, was Bloodira, a frozen chunk of planet with a misshapen moon and tiny, almost nonexistent ring. It was distant and cold, and its slow orbit meant thousands of years to fully transit around the star.

But as fascinating as the stellar oddities that made up this star system were, what truly drew Elinor’s attention was the spectrographic readings. Optical spectrometry was the most ancient of scouting techniques, and had been refined by countless centuries of mankind’s exploration of space. And these readings were beautiful. There were untouched riches of transuranics and plantinum group metals on three different major asteroids, ripe for the plucking. The smaller gas giant, Tealick, had a wealth of deuterium in its atmosphere. But the most interesting part was the anomalous data from the semi-habitable planet, Murkaph.

Somewhere on the planet, a hint of a reading indicated something rare was there. It could be ventricite crystals, once in high demand by the Imperium Aeternus, now mostly used for scanners and sensors. It could be adamium shards, which was a key ingredient in temperature-controllable smart materials, particularly popular for medical devices for spacefarers, since they remained unaffected by manifold translation. And, if they were particularly lucky, it could be aurum ore.

The gold colored ore was named after its baser cousin, gold, because of its color. But that was truly the only similarity between the two. Aurum, once forged properly, formed one of the strongest materials in the universe. The Old Imperium had used vast amounts of it, and so had the Formican fleets in the Formican Wars that followed the collapse of the Imperium. Ever since, however, this had proven to be the rarest and most valuable resource in the galaxy. Or at least, in human space.

None of these rare materials showed up properly on a spectrograph, so the anomalous readings were a sign that one of them was there - if the equipment was functioning correctly at the time of the scan. Or it could mean that none of them were.

This anomalous reading was what sent the scout rushing back to report to Elinor immediately, before going back for a more thorough report. It had been worth the extra weeks of travel time, to allow Elinor to prepare her trip sooner.

Lady Elinor North had a slim chance to reverse her family’s fortunes, and in a big way. But she had to get there. Now, she could only prepare, and wait, as the manifold waypoint approached.