Chapter 039: Arrival

Vice Admiral Aran Singh was the only Commonwealth Navy admiral within the Solar System that survived the Day of Sorrows, and even that was just an accident - the shuttle on which he was returning from a holiday on Earth suffered a communication malfunction, which made Vice Admiral Singh unable to participate in the online meeting that ended with a massacre.

With the military and political leadership within the Solar System wiped out, Vice Admiral Singh announced himself a military dictator for the duration of the emergency. While remembered by his colleagues as an unimaginative tactician, his analysis of the weaknesses of the Transhuman Alliance was entirely correct. The result of the strategy chosen by the Vice Admiral on its basis was the collapse of the Transhuman Alliance’ Coreworld Campaign following the Battles of Hope and Vigilance.

Vice Admiral Singh remained the uncontested autocratic ruler of all Mankind until the end of the War of Purity. When the news of the collapse of the Dominion of the Pure in the aftermath of the Battle of Sky-V reached Earth, he stepped down and allowed the first democratic election since the start of the war to occur. The resulting Senate rewarded him with a newly created rank of High Admiral (one of the two in the history of the Solar Commonwealth). He retired soon after, and died of natural causes six years after the end of the War of Purity.

Encyclopedia Galactica

Book 9, Page 891

***

EGS Echo, Command Deck

09:13 04.08.2610 STT

Commander Lena Drathari

The transfer was smooth. The ship passed through the active gate and exited from the other end of it, travelling who knew how many light years in a span of a few milliseconds. To Lena’s massive relief, nobody fired on the cruiser.

The data flooded the cruiser’s display. Nothing in their vicinity, save for some small bits of crushed metal - probably everything that remained of the Seekers’ probes and ships that tried to make the journey. Whatever did them in, didn’t seem to be here.

“Innocent, talk to me.” Keller interrupted the silence.

“Brief Reply: No signs of activity within a light hour.” The robot announced. “Thirteen planets of various sizes. We emerged from one of the outermost moons of a gas giant being the fifth planet. I’m picking up two habitable moons in the vicinity, and the remains of what I presume to be the mysterious Precursor species… pretty much everywhere. Wait a second.”

They did so. It lasted slightly more than a second, to Lena’s small irritation.

“Announcement: I found the Seekers’ forward base, and what remained of their task force.” Innocent said finally. “They are orbiting the fourth planet. The base seems to be mostly dead, though I’m picking some heat from it. The fleet looks like someone ran it through a grinder, but some of the ships are only marginally damaged. No activity.”

If there was someone still alive there and wanted to fight, it would take close to two hours to react, and for the said reaction to become visible to the Echo.

“Correction: It is not a planet.” Innocent announced after a few seconds. “It seems to be a moon orbiting a Hyperspace Planet.”

“Now, that’s quite a find.” Lena commented, ignoring the wave of relief that threatened to overtake her. They were still alive. “Even despite the circumstances.”

“Weird place for a base.” Keller replied. “Then again, it’s the Seekers we are talking about. They are probably confident enough in their technology to not be afraid of the Hyperspace disruption devouring the moon as well.”

Hyperspace planets were planets existing in the Hyperspace rather than the Realspace. Normally they disappeared somewhere outside of their systems, but occasionally they entered a stable equilibrium. Resulting, like in this case, with a moon circling around the planet that simply wasn’t there.

If the scary stories of what happened on Sedna after a hyperspace experiment gone wrong turned it into a hyperspace planetoid were anywhere near correct, Lena would have preferred being in another star system entirely. The Seekers were completely insane to build their base so close to such a space horror.

“They are still very much dead.” She decided to mention it at the end. “You can, if you count things correctly, enter or leave a system without going to the edge of it if you enter Hyperspace right outside of the Hyperspace planet orbit. One hundred CEUs that they wanted to use it as an emergency escape route, only for something to sneak up on them through it.”

Of course, one hundred CEUs was spare money even for her. For him… she still didn’t know how wealthy he was. Trillionaire? Quadrillionaire? Not like it really mattered now that they were stranded who-knows-how-far-away from Human Space.

“I’m not going into that bet, simply because I am something like ninety-five percent sure you are right.” The Captain chuckled, slightly nervously though. “Something obviously mauled them with their fleet on the orbit around their base. If that something approached them from the edge of the system, they would have either run away or fought it back, but almost surely not right above their precious base.” He stared at the display for a few seconds, obviously thinking something over. “Damn, this is going to be a gamble.”

“Gamble?” She asked. Innocent was staring at the Captain, obviously wanting to know more. He didn’t reply, still focused on the image in front of him. “Captain?”

“Hmm?” He woke up from the stupor. “Oh, right. We need the Seekers’ data about this place, and their ships and the base are the only sources of it I can think of. To begin with, I don’t see any signs of an ‘indigenous population’ in the system, so where do they found it?” He was right. She didn’t notice it at first, but despite all the ruins visible throughout the system, she saw no signs of actual life. At least not a sapient one.

“Ah.” Lena understood the problem. “But it is close to the Hyperspace planet, and we cannot be sure that what destroyed the Seekers isn’t waiting there, in ambush.” The chances were low for human ships. They could only stay in the Hyperspace for a while, and there were no ways of observing Realspace from Hyperspace. But they had no clue what to expect from the local Precursor species. Or from whatever space monsters inhabited these lands.

“Yep.” Captain nodded. “This is, honestly, quite a pain. We will need to take that gamble, of course. Despite the whole thing screaming TRAP. We are picking up some heat from the Seekers warships. I’m certain that whoever they sent into the system before us also detected that, and went there to investigate.” He didn’t have to add that none of them returned alive. “On the other hand, the disappearances happened in short succession around six months ago. They didn’t send anyone between then and the current moment, so whatever horrible space monster was hiding in that bleeding wound in the fabric of reality might have left already.”

“Sudden Interruption: Let me guess.” Innocent took that moment to interject. “Your idea of a plan right now is to go there with the Echo alone, using Christopher Hall as some sort of talisman with a Protection From Evil spell cast on it.” She didn’t have to be a meta-empath to know that the priest was furious.

“Well, kinda?” Keller confessed his crime immediately, and without resistance. “It’s not like we have an awful lot of other options here. I don’t have the data I need to create something resembling an actual plan, so I’m going to make a leap of faith to gain it. Having someone whose guardian angel seems to have a hands-on approach to things aboard is just a cherry on top.”

Lena sighed internally. It was going to be a long and painful discussion. The work relationship between Innocent and Keller had gone to Hell with Hao’s execution. It had some ups and downs, but it seemed that it was the latter right now.

***

EGS Echo, Crew Deck

12:11 04.08.2610 STT

Ensign Christopher Hall

Catfolks were really flexible. Christopher had known that for a while, yet Nekia still managed to surprise him quite regularly. Their current position was a rather good showcase of that. Christopher half-sat half-lied on his back on the edge of the couch and the wall behind that edge. He used some pillows to cushion his back.

Nekia was lying on top of him, her head resting on his chest. She was soundly asleep, despite her back being arched back quite a bit. Christopher had no idea how the catfolks’ spines were built, but the fact that she managed to pull such a position without keeping some of her muscles tense (which, in itself, made falling asleep much harder) was a small miracle.

They were still in the middle of the film, but it seemed that Nekia felt too comfortable in that position and dozed off, despite being very interested in the plot. Christopher really wasn’t sure what to think about this.

That’s when Tiriel entered the living room, coming from the quarters corridor. She immediately noticed the debauchery happening on the couch, and Christopher braced himself for what was going to happen.

“How cozy.” She subvoiced to him. That fact alone surprised him - why did she make sure to not wake Nekia up?

“Not going to intervene?” He replied to her in the same fashion.

“Why?” She said, while standing behind the couch. She was off duty, so she was wearing her standard dress, cute and modest in equal measures. “She is doing well when it comes to learning when such things are appropriate and when not, so I guess a bit of a reward is in order. Besides, I think you both needed that.” She was completely right in her last sentence.

“Yeah, but it is still rather awkward.” Christopher replied. “I have more physical contact with her than the average man has with his girlfriend. Despite us being only teammates.” Nekia still didn’t try to ask the really important question. Christopher’s projected answer to it didn’t change, regardless of everything that happened.

Sure, she was cute. She was really cute. And her flexibility meant some very interesting things when it came to sex. But she was still rather incredibly immature, and that meant a lot when Christopher was the one saying it. What sort of relationship would it be if Christopher was the one forced to do and think about almost everything on his own, and all that the other side would bring into it would be cuteness and sex?

“Bold words for someone who slept with Nekia.” Tiriel, as always, was incredibly knowledgeable about everything happening aboard the Echo. Christopher never ceased to be amazed by it.

“She is telling you about absolutely everything that happens to her, isn’t she?” Tiriel remained neutral, with just a small flavour of mischievousness. “If she does, then she certainly also mentioned how that was the absolutely non-sexual way of sleeping with someone. And I’m still looking for the accomplice that hacked through my door’s security to let her in.”

He refused to admit that, but he started to understand why Tiaa was such a Grumpy Cat. Absolutely everyone aboard the ship didn’t care about basic matters of security and rules of conduct. Even the dress code was occasionally violated. Being one of the few sane people in the sea of crazy people had to be taxing for one’s sanity.

“I just woke up to feel someone intruding under my quilt.” He continued. “Despite the strength of character she showed up a while ago, she was still hit pretty badly. She seemed to have really bad dreams, and honestly, I didn’t feel like pushing her away in that state. It was still slightly awkward.” Not exactly in the bad way, unless you take into account how close to breaking the rules it was. And he was totally terrified of Tiaa catching wind of what happened.

“That is just the catfolk for you.” Tiriel replied, while brazenly stealing a few chips from their snacks plate. “Really clingy, even without any romantic feeling behind it. They cling to their family, they cling to their friends, they cling to their romantic interests…” Christopher did his best to imagine the Chief Petty Officer ‘cling’ to anyone in the same way as her daughter did. His imagination failed him. “Can easily be misunderstood, which is why you can find a lot of people out there thinking that catfolks as a race are just a bunch of sluts of both genders.”

“One more case of ‘the people behind the program thought it's a nice idea but they didn’t think through the consequences’?” He asked. She nodded in answer. “Wonderful. Future Mankind is an absolute mess.” And that was in the field of biology. The fields of politics, philosophies and religions were objectively speaking ten thousand times worse.

Although a lot of that was derived from biology. Some of the weirdest and worst countries out there were created by someone taking a notably divergent biology and constructing their countries around it.

“Well, I think it is just that the genetic diversity was low on the Solar Commonwealth’s priority.” Tiriel replied. “The whole ‘standardized genetic templates’ idea was made to avoid the wealthy designing their babies and becoming a closed caste of genetic superhumans. So the Commonwealth went the ‘genesculpt an entire planetary population in the same way or get lost’ route. Unfortunately, some of these ‘ways’ turned out to be stupid, but genesculpting everyone out of a subspecies and thus driving it to extinction had a really bad PR. So they are still around.”

It made perfect sense. He could imagine how the public would react to the government trying to genetically unmake one of the new ‘races’ of Mankind. The accusations of racism was the weakest of epithets that came to his mind. If one of these races failed to the point of everyone wanting their children to be normal humans - yes, it could work, though with some people still getting talkative. But Christopher was certain that no Variant was ‘messed up’ to the point of not even a single one of its members wanting to remain part of it.

On the other hand, it was suspicious. Not what she said - it made sense. But the fact that she was parasitizing on his snacks instead of preparing for the big day. And wasted time on talking about old times.

“Okay, what’s going on?” He decided to play the cards openly. “We are getting a new member in a little while, and you are standing here, talking about history, instead of preparing a welcome meal? How come?” The only ‘new arrival’ he saw thus far was when he and Ryan joined. But he did remember Tiriel being saddened back then that she was surprised with their arrival, and didn’t have time for a proper welcome.

“One of the newcomers does not eat food.” Tiriel replied with a neutral face. Too neutral, in fact. “And I do not exactly like the other one.” Christopher stared at Tiriel for a while. Nekia was still sleeping soundly, her cat ears close enough for him to be tempted to pet them.

In moments like this he felt like he was her parent. Tiriel was something like an older sister, or even a mother (he didn’t see Nekia and Tiaa spending time together, so he had no idea how motherly the Scary Cat herself was in private).

“You KNOW who is coming to join us?!” He finally said, still staring at her. She stared back, but after a few seconds she nodded. “How?! I’m an Ensign in charge of this team, yet I wasn’t told a thing!” It was probably one more weird joke of the ship’s officers at their expense. He already expected it was going to be someone strange. The part about ‘not eating food’ confirmed that.

He didn’t even know that there were going to be two new members, instead of one.

“Women’s intuition.” She said and winked at him. He understood immediately. Secret gossip channel on the shipnet’s social media. “It is one of those powers that God gave us, women, so that we can guide the men. Who only got muscles, so they need someone to think for them.” He rolled his eyes. Her rare feminist mode was just her making fun of him, as he never saw her act like that with anyone else in the vicinity. At least anyone conscious.

Ryan and Tendrik entered the room from the outside. They were in their work clothes, so as Chistopher expected they received a temporary leave from work to meet their new teammate. Tendrik immediately waved towards them.

“Hey there!” Of course, he didn't subvoice. Probably because he couldn’t see Nekia from his position. It woke her up, and she raised up, still slightly unconscious. That’s when he noticed her. “Oops… wait, are we interrupting something?” Ryan leaned towards his ear.

“I think it’s called a threesome.” The engineer whispered. Theatrically, so it was audible to everyone within a kilometer or so. His combat training brought some achievements, so he managed to avoid the now empty plate of snacks. “Hey!”

“My hand slipped.” Tiriel announced. Her smile left no doubts as to whether she was even remotely serious about her reply. The plate was unharmed: the local kitchen utensils were tough enough that they could probably stop an M1 Abrams tank round. Despite being light as a feather.

Christopher once got so curious with the incredible resistance of utensils and other tools that he checked what they were made of. Finding out that he ate meals on plates made of a nanocomposite that was initially developed to construct Mankind’s first ringworld (which never happened in the end due to the War of Purity) was one of the weirdest things he ever went through. The word ‘abstract’ didn’t begin to describe that knowledge.

“You. Wait here.” Ryan said sternly to Tiriel, before disappearing in the quarter corridors. He returned a minute later with two pillows. “It’s time to solve our problems. Fight me!” It was rather close to issuing a challenge for a duel, and was said to a noble. Tiriel naturally obliged.

“Did… something happen?” Nekia woke up enough to ask that question to Christopher. She accentuated her sleepiness with a loud yawn. In the background Tiriel scored a critical hit by hitting Ryan’s face with a pillow.

“Absolutely nothing, you can go back to sleep if you manage in this noise.” He replied. She probably stopped listening after ‘you can go back to sleep’, and immediately did just that. She hugged him again - really close - and immediately fell asleep.

Christopher started suspecting that the research team behind the catfolk figured out how to make humans invulnerable to muscle pain after sleeping in awkward positions and for some reason didn’t spread that discovery to two-zeroes. This added one more crime worthy of capital punishment to the list of bad things that Variant creators did.

He was her favourite pillow at this point. His telekinesis allowed him to slightly push her away if any part of his body ended up hurting under the strain. He could slightly reposition her so delicately that she didn’t even feel it.

The whole pillow fight made the situation feel like everyone was past the depression caused by Rukh’s death. The worst seemed over, yes. But mostly because bad thoughts turned from acute to chronic. They couldn’t stay broken, so they did their best to move forward. Even if some people felt like they were overcompensating.

Tendrik did his best to act as a referee. Kivanna entered the room a while later, coming from the quarters. She surveyed the ongoing battle and relocated herself into a safe place.

Christopher used his meta-empathy in reverse - rather than trying to tap into someone’s emotion, he opened himself to the ones surrounding him. Since Nekia was the closest person, the emotions accompanying her safe and relaxed sleep were the strongest he caught. He ended up dozing off rather quickly.

He was woken around twenty minutes later when someone rang the quarter’s doorbell. Nekia awoke, as well. The rest of the team was scattered around the room. Tendrik, Kivanna and Ryan seemed to have been playing a VR game together, while Tiriel retreated to the edge of the room and was reading a paper book. Probably one of Tolkien's works (alternatively something religious, though her approach to Tolkien was almost religious too).

“Does your female intuition expand into knowing who that is?” Christopher asked Tiriel, while Nekia - this time slightly more conscious - was getting off him and the rest of the team were leaving the game.

“Yes. It is the Cycle.” She surprised him again. “Get ready for the shock of a lifetime.” She added while putting away her book. Christopher started considering the idea that she was actually knowledgeable around computers and hacked the security cameras outside of the quarters. Which added her to the list of potential suspects for hacking his quarters’ security.

He wasn’t sure if there was anything that could surprise him at this point. These doubts ended when the doors slid open and a knight entered the living quarters.

It wasn’t a large knight. Tall, yes - something like six feet tall. But built like a rather slender woman. The armor - pristinely white - was a heavy one. It looked so deep - despite the general thinness of the frame - that there was just no way that there was an actual person inside.

The knight carried a tower shield and a short spear, with a sheathed sword on a belt. When it walked inside, it put the spear away - it remained upright, standing on its own next to him - and saluted.

“Private Fervent Dance at The End of the Cycle.” The knight said loudly, though with a weirdly androgynous voice. It took Christopher a short while to figure out that ‘Private’ was a military rank, and the rest was just a really long name. He would have failed to do it if Tiriel hadn’t mentioned the word ‘Cycle’ earlier. “I was transferred to the Recovery Team Eight as a marine-in-training.”

“First Programmer, a Sidhe!” It was rare to hear Tendrik mention the Techtrian Hierocracy’ deistic God-equivalent, much less with such an excited voice. “It’s a Sidhe! I love the Explorers’ Guild so much.” He didn’t seem perturbed by someone just dethroning him from the seat of the bearer of the weirdest name within the team.

Sidhe. Wait, I remember one of them from the Longest War game… wait, aren’t they aliens?! Catgirls, space elves, cyborgs and now aliens. Just wonderful. Is someone up there in the hierarchy using this team to play some sort of human resources bingo?

“Oh, I see.” He did his best to appear calm. Tiriel was eyeing him with an ‘I told you’ face. “I’m Ensign Christopher Hall, head of the team.” As the others introduced themselves, he quickly connected to the shipnet and read through the Encyclopedia Galactica’s entry on Sidhe.

Not ‘aliens’ as much as alien Virtuals. Xenophiles supreme. They wandered for tens of thousands of years from one alien civilization to another, using their cybernetic nature to alter themselves (and their minds) to fit their new hosts.

They even modified their own technology - the entry mentioned that when they come to Human Space, they rearranged their entire military to include vehicles such as tanks and so on, brazenly stealing the entire combat doctrine just to better fit in. If that wasn’t enough, their name was obviously local as well - and they immediately began to refer to themselves with it, even in private conversations.

Each time their hosts started being mean to them or something lethally bad was happening to them, the Sidhe just packed their bags, took their new converts (and all of their hosts that wanted to get out of the mess) and fled to find another prospective home.

Also their technology was apparently pretty much on ‘space gods’ level, but somewhere during their history they fell down the Wall of Reason and no longer understood how their own technology worked. But they had enough pretty much indestructible automatic fabricators to construct spare parts for everything, so it wasn’t that much of a problem.

It explained why Tendrik acted like… well, like a complete technological nerd who just saw a marvel of exotechnology. Even Ryan seemed to be in awe, though it could be caused by him slowly turning into a complete engineering nerd.

Everyone finished the introduction. The Sidhe kept standing there. After a few seconds of awkward silence - interrupted only by Tiriel making a pained sigh in the background - Christopher decided to ask.

“Err… are you going to just stand there?” The Sidhe nodded. “Why?”

“I’m standing at attention. In the films I watched it always lasted until the officer said ‘at ease’.” The alien announced. Christopher understood the true terror of what he just heard almost immediately.

“Let me clarify one thing.” He asked, trying not to look at Tiriel’s irritatingly happy face. “Your species is a lot into being like humans, right?” The Sidhe nodded. “And you too, right?” It nodded again. “But all you know about us is knowledge from… uhm… films?”

“And videogames.” Cycle replied, with an enthusiasm in its voice. Ryan hid his face in his hands. He understood the problem the fastest after Christopher. Tiriel, of course, somehow knew before the Sidhe even arrived.

“And how much contact with humans have you had earlier?” Christopher decided to try to save the situation.

“None.” The Sidhe refused to catch the lifebuoy that Christopher threw. “I remained inactive during the entire trip due to my own decision. When I left my world to join the Echo I specified that I want to join a not-very-experienced team that had recently suffered losses. Like in one of the films I watched. I was woken up three hours ago.”

How did Tiriel catch wind of the Cycle joining them despite the Sidhe being ‘woken up’ three hours ago was a mystery that defied human science. The secretive girls’ gossip channel seemed to run on rules of science of another reality.

“That is… I am not sure if it was a good idea to admit that so openly.” Tiriel decided to speak the words instead of him.

“I know. However I was asked about it by my superior officer, and while I stood at attention, so… uhm…” It was hard to read the Sidhe’s emotions, but Christopher was almost sure that it was incredibly puzzled. “Did I do something wrong?”

Christopher sighed. Loudly. This was going to become one more point on his long list of existential pains.

“Nah, don’t worry about that.” Christopher replied. There was no need to get angry over something that was obviously just a serious case of not understanding how humans actually worked. “At ease.“

The Sidhe changed. Its outer shell stopped being an armor and became a skin. The sword, shield and a spear were absorbed too, swallowed like some strange liquid. After something like two seconds the knight was no more, instead there was an androgynous and pristinely white human figure in the middle of the room. It looked like a strangely flexible plastic figurine. No clothes, but also no gender. And no face, save for slightly too large eyes.

“Awesome, awesome!” The strange figure was obviously extremely excited. “What now? What do we do?” Christopher made a grandmother of all sighs.

“You can start by picking your quarters and unpacking your things. If you have anything with you.” It was a Virtual, even if an Alien one. He wasn’t sure if it needed anything physical. “I believe that Tendrik will be overjoyed to guide you.” Calling Tendrik’s current state ‘overjoyed’ was the understatement of a century.

Once the two of them disappeared, the room went silent for a while. Christopher turned to Tiriel.

“That was the one who can’t eat, right?” She nodded. “And now it’s time for the one whom you don’t like?” She nodded again. “Is that person going to be somewhat.. uhm... surprising as well?” Third nod in a row.

Oh God.