It took years, or maybe hours, the Singer was never sure, but the Library slowly revealed many secrets to her.

She found batteries that could charge themselves from ambient heat energy. Next, she read about Lunar fusion plants which were soon replaced by a swarm of solar collectors, launched into orbit around the sun. Finally, she studied how all that power made it from space to the ground; First with microwave laser arrays, but later through the use of a functional Einstein-Rosen bridge called a Gate.

The invention of Gate technology escalated the pace of expansion and innovation even further. So long as it could withstand the stresses of crossing the gravitation gradient and the massive radiation at the event horizon, anything could travel immense distances instantly. Hohmann transfers were replaced by Brachistochrone transfers; the fuel required moved via Gate directly from the refinery to the ship’s engines. A new information age exploded into existence as the burgeoning colonies on Luna, Mars, and Venus could suddenly communicate via Gate instantly.

The Singer even found articles and studies which described a form of Alcubierre drive: an invention that could shorten an interstellar journey to weeks instead of decades.

The history of Earth’s Golden Age was fascinating but ultimately unfulfilling and entirely exhausting. There was no full-body ache as if she’d worked herself to exhaustion. Instead, her thoughts were sluggish, and she felt pressure in her skull as if her brain endeavored to flee from continued abuse.

She never thought she would miss the General’s confidence. It hadn’t even occurred to her that she would be alone again.

There was so much more that she needed. The perspective was welcome, but it was of little use without clear information on how the Earth had been destroyed. Instead, she feared that her commitment to this search had left the crew and her friends without her aide. She needed something that could help her now. A way to ensure they could reach their destination and ensure their success once they arrived.

But she’d already spent so long in this place. The Library was vast and incomprehensible. It could take her lifetimes to map its corridors and galleries, and some part of her suspected there was far more to the Library than these halls suggested.

Without a proper question to ask, a concrete goal with concrete answers, she might never find what she wanted.

But it was in exploring this history that she felt her attention steered toward something else. There were no documents to describe what she found, but once she was aware of its existence, she became aware of how to use it. As if forgetting what a bicycle was, but still remembering how to ride one.

And finally, she was too exhausted to keep her eyes closed.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(ө_ ө)(Θ_Θ)(◌_◌)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

Karen’teh vividly remembered the first time she’d seen napalm and the things it could do to Viribus and Imperial alike. It was the corpses of children that stuck in her mind’s eye the most. She’d thought she’d been hardened against such things, that seeing them again wouldn’t affect her as much. Mason’s corpse relieved her of that illusion.

When the panic and fear that the Human’s immolated corpse dredged up in her had subsided, she steeled herself enough to gather what was left of the body. It left smears of gristle and blood across her arms.

Karen’teh didn’t know enough scripture to know if a Human soul would miss its chance to cross into heaven like a Viribus could if their body wasn’t correctly dispositioned. But, she’d heard enough stories, whispered in the Night, of what fate awaited those Viribus not prepared to return to Thaleia’teh. Left to become the things that stalked in the dark.

If that was what happened to a Viribus’s soul, what would happen to a soul as powerful and holy as a Human’s?

When Karen’teh finally rejoined Eabha, she presented the Human with the corpse reverently. She braced herself for a rebuke of her failure, or worse, for the Human to wail and scream in grief. But, somehow, the silence and stillness of Eabha’s reaction was worse.

“If we hurry, we can commit his remains to Thaleia’teh before we must seek shelter. I am no Priestess, but I know the rites,” Karen’teh said hesitantly. She couldn’t read the Human’s expression, but Eabha nodded all the same.

Karen’teh settled on burial, though Mason clearly deserved a funeral pyre. But the rains were already here, and lighting a fire would soon be almost impossible – not to mention extremely dangerous.

The Night was a time of rains and storms, particularly around Dusk and Dawn. So graves had to be carefully placed so they would not be washed away by flooding. Thankfully, Karen’teh already knew of the sites around the Temple, consecrated by a Priestess years ago. So she chose the nearest to them, a place with a spiral of cairns – each of them a warrior’s grave. They would watch over Mason until Karen’teh could return and exhume the body for a proper pyre during the Day.

Karen’teh moved her camp to the site, the ashes of her fire now damp and cold. Eabha’s apathy made the task take longer than it should have; without constant attention, the Human would stop following Karen’teh and simply stare into the middle distance. But once the tarp was deployed again, Eabha and Karen’teh could both shelter under it while Karen’teh dug the grave.

Water still trickled into the grave, and Karen’teh worked until her arms ached with the effort of moving the wet soil. The grave wasn’t large, though, like a child’s grave. By the time Mason was laid to rest, and the grave filled in, it was cold and getting colder.

Karen’teh washed the mud from her fur in the freezing rain.

Thunder rumbled overhead.

~,~’~{~{@ ((●(●_(ө_ ө)(Θ_Θ)(◌_◌)_●)●)) @}~}~’~,~

It was strange to use nautical terms to describe an interstellar vessel. The Manifest Destiny had a bow and stern, evident by its propulsion bells and conical armor. But its radial symmetry made it difficult to distinguish “port” and “starboard” from “dorsal” and “ventral.” These terms were still used, of course. A crewman needed ways to distinguish directions on a ship and maintain their sense of direction without the aid of gravity.

But that was about where the similarities ended between the starship and its aquatic predecessors.

There was an engine room, but it was divided by a lead-lined dog-leg corridor to shield the engineers from radiation. There were magazines and torpedo tubes and guns, but they were controlled with computers and had long ago done away with chemical propellants.

Not even the canteen was recognizable. The uninitiated might dismiss the cylindrical chamber as a cargo hold – which was only partly correct. There were no tables or recognizable chairs. Instead, the crew simply lashed themselves to a wall and prepared and ate their food in the air around them. Beyond the initial fascination of free fall dining, it was often frustrating and slow to properly feed oneself out of sealed bags. Even then, the air often became fouled with droplets and food particles which required a powerful filtration and air circulation system to clean.

Like most modules in the immense vessel, it served multiple purposes. A dividing wall separated a small area of the canteen for the officers to take meals and hold meetings regarding warship management. The entrance to the cylindrical module was also off-center, which preserved the walls of the pressure vessel and allowed one side of the chamber to act as a thoroughfare to other modules.

However, the thoroughfare was useless if most of the crew had inexplicably decided to crowd into the canteen.

First Officer Achilles expected to find a brawl or perhaps some form of a riot when he arrived. However, he didn’t hear harsh words or angry voices. Instead, he heard singing. He paused as he pushed his way through the stragglers forced to wait in the connection between modules. The smiles on their faces confused him.

Ever since the ship had embarked, morale had been low. The stress of boarding action, no matter how successful, had banished the imagined glory of their efforts. Instead, death loomed in all their minds, and the dishonorable pirate’s execution that waited for them should the Empire catch them.

Achilles had been anticipating having to pacify a stressed and angry crew, not a party.

He didn’t dare to admonish the crew, though his presence was enough to remind the stragglers on the outside of the canteen that they had better things to do. Still, he pushed his way inside, and the crew parted around him.

“… canons roaring, Pistols warring, She ravaged galleons mercilessly!” the crew chorused off-key. “Oh, Anne Bonny!”

Achilles forced his way deeper into the canteen and finally discovered the source of the commotion: the Singer. She had strapped herself to one wall, with all three of the Viribus creating a protective bubble of open-air around her. The trash from several meals floated nearby, and a crew member pushed through the crowd to deliver more to the Human.

He was certainly surprised to find the Singer awake, not to mention so energetically, after several months in some sort of coma. But once the initial surprise had passed, he noticed the bags under her eyes. The closer he looked, the more he could tell; the Human was exhausted.

“That’s enough!” Achilles said, his voice only raised enough to cut through the singing. The crew grew quiet immediately. “This isn’t a cruise. You all have jobs to do,” he said once he only had to speak over the hum of the ship.

The crew quickly dispersed. It pained Achilles to end their joviality, but the ship needed to be ready for action at every checkpoint – and the Singer’s relief was noticeable. The crew, perhaps, was less familiar with Human body language, but Achilles had worked closely with the General long enough to have picked up the subtleties.

He was familiar with exhaustion: a Human could work for hours and hours, far more than most species, but they did have limits. He’d seen the General push himself to – and then past – his limits often enough. Achilles didn’t know how long the Singer had been in the canteen, but she was already well past her limits.

“And here I was looking for an excuse to get away and look for you,” the Singer said by way of greeting, though the look in her eyes was grateful.

Achilles wasn’t sure how to respond to that. It felt odd to hear her speak so informally as if they were equals, as if she hadn’t communed with something and then fallen into a deep sleep for months. “Perhaps we should speak in private,” he suggested and motioned towards the sliding door that led to the officers’ section of the canteen.

She agreed wordlessly. The joviality melted from her face as she unbuckled herself and floated past Achilles into the private room. He followed her in, and though all three Viribus would have followed, they elected the smallest of them – Turin’eh – to squeeze inside while the other two waited by the door.

“You seem different than when I met you,” Achilles opened bluntly. “What’s changed?”

“Just realizing what exactly’s at stake here,” the Singer said. “And I don’t just mean our people,” she said with a nod to Turin’eh, “or the crew. This could be really big, Empire big.”

“The General has always planned to tear down the Empire. It’s why we’re all here,” Achilles said, his question implied.

“Bigger, then,” the Singer said with a shake of her head. “Galaxy big, probably bigger than that. But that won’t really matter unless we can get boots on Laetus. Where are we? Have we started braking yet?”

Achilles shook his head. “Soon, we’ve almost reached the halfway point. What do you mean by bigger? Is there something else I need to know about?”

“I’m not sure yet,” the Singer admitted. “The General said a lot of stuff over the radio before the end: he was trying to open his Gate. The General adjusted the start-up of the Anti-Euclidean Engine so that when the portal was created, the gravitational waves could induce a dilation in our Gates,” she explained. “I was close enough to be affected as well, but my Gate closed shortly after. Without a power supply, it couldn’t maintain the dilation. The General was able to keep his open by exposing himself to a power supply, to terminal effect.”

“How do you know all this?” Achilles asked incredulously. She sounded like the General, and that wasn’t strange exactly, but it was different.

She shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know. When the Gate opened, we connected back to … I’m not sure what to call it exactly. I want to say ‘Mother,’ but I think the General called it ‘Father.’”

“Thalea’teh spoke through you. I heard it with my own ears, Holy One,” Turin’eh offered.

“I guess so,” the Singer said, and her eyes narrowed as the name triggered a whole new trail of thought. She would need to speak to the Viribus later. “The General and I had a theory that while Thalea’teh might be extremely powerful, Human-level communication could still be beyond its abilities. But it can write information into the Human brain.

“I was only connected for a moment. The General was able to keep his Gate open for minutes,” the Singer explained. “I spent … I don’t even know how long trying to make sense of it. The General’s smarter than me, and he was connected longer. I can’t imagine how much information he would have had access to before he died. But if anyone knows what is going on, it’s him.”

“Well, getting to him won’t be so easy,” Achilles growled. “It’s been hard enough to convince the Terminals that we’re on a secret Imperial mission without official backing. But, once we start braking, the exhaust will be headed towards the Anti-Euclidean Gates in front of us.”

“Why is that a problem?” the Singer asked. “You’ve managed to talk your way into special consideration for passage so far, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Achilles admitted reluctantly. “But the issue is relative velocity. We haven’t begun to reach a noticeable time dilation, but we are well beyond the escape velocity of any star along our route. So they only need to shut down the Anti-Euclidean Engine to launch us into a hyperbolic orbit that we can’t recover from.

“Once we start braking, our thrust exhaust will be accelerated toward the Terminal, creating a cloud of high-speed particles that can punch right through shielding and supercharge the event horizon of the Anti-Euclidean portal. Crossing that charged horizon will cause more stress than any of the other transfers. And Terminal workers and communication equipment would be damaged – it’s more than enough for them to insist on voice-recognized codes,” Achilles explained.

“Did the codebook get destroyed? I know that was a risk,” the Singer asked incredulously.

“We have the codebook,” Achilles assured her, “but that’s not enough. They have computers that can measure inflection and stress in the person giving the code responses. If they detect even the slightest hesitation, they’ll demand we submit to a search. We can’t even trust a recording of the Captain if we could convince him to comply with our demands.”

“I can handle that,” the Singer said. “Just take me to him, and I’ll get us through the next Terminals.”