Part 4: Sea Changes

Eighth Year of the Splintering, Third Year of the Nomads

Eight Hundred and Thirty Third Year After the Battle of the Sol System

Admiral Supesu looked down at the planet beneath the Solar Wind. It was not a large world, nor a particularly rich world. But its atmosphere was not actively toxic, it flora and fauna not particularly predatory, its temperatures stable and tolerable, and its gravity approached the near-mythic standard of one terran gravity. Its sun was a comforting yellow in an off-blue sky. Already the habitation domes were going up for the vast bulk of the one billion humans who had slept away the three year long FTL flight. They had decided to call it Refuge.

But a not insignificant portion of the original Colonizers wanted something else. Not all of them, not by a long chalk, but enough. They had watched the recordings of the battle of the Sol System and the TRAPPIST-1 system. They were sick and tired onto death of being kicked around, chewed up and spat out. Many, if not most, of them had lost friends and family in TRAPPIST-1. They wanted payback.

Admiral Supesu counted herself among them. Her father may have been a hatred-blinded idiot who had gotten three and a half million people killed for no good reason, but her grandfather had died defending the Sol system. She felt the need to make some lasting mark on the Twisted, to leave a lasting racial memory that humanity was not only hard to kill, but a foe to be wary of.

The Solar Wind was busy chewing on asteroids and raining down habitation domes and the other things the colony needed. But she had also produced some basic scaffolding to build a few smaller ships. It was not as good as a full shipyard, but it was much faster to build.

The new Nomad Fleet was starting to shape up, and Admiral Supesu had already but a great deal of thought into it. Each ship would be able to support itself at a minimum, but would need the other ships in the Nomad Fleet to have an excess of anything. Broadly speaking, the fleet could be broken down into three divisions. Provisioner ships would be focused on food production and population housing. Being population heavy and brimming with hydroponics, they would need the other two divisions to supply fuel, water, and defense. Producer ships, like the Solar Wind, would be centered around resource collection and refining. They would be tasked with harvesting and refining all of the fuel, distilling all of the water, and building the bulk of the replacement parts and ships, when needed. And Protector ships would be the military formation of the Nomad Fleet. Optimised for combat above all else, they would be unable to sustain or replace themselves without the ships that they were tasked with protecting.

The Solar Wind herself was also undergoing refit. The cryosleep array was being removed to make room for more hydroponics bays, more storage spaces, crew accommodations, increased life support equipment, and all of the other odds and ends she would need to support her increased crew size and production activity. It would take a few years, but at the end of it…

Amidral Supesu shook her head. At the end of it was an utter unknown. She knew the Twisted held Alpha Centauri, Sol, and presumably TRAPPIST-1, but she had no idea how many other systems the had or where they might be located. Information was her first need, and would be the lifeblood of her operations.

Polo’Liekki Laiska’Vanha’Verta gazed out across his command area with a mixture of sadness and pride. Pride as his new command and the exemplary work that they were performing. For his efforts in capturing the Kuud’Estoista’Maailma system, he had been appointed to the rank of Polo’Liekki and tasked with commanding the cleanup efforts in the system. The reclamation of his own ships and their dead had been almost enough to break his hearts, but the number of dead locals was truly worthy of despair. He had no clue how they had managed even their crude translation of their language into Empire Common, nor how they had managed to survive on worlds whose air they could not even breathe. The tragic loss of life when one the locals experimental, titan-sized colony ship had suffered a catastrophic reactor failure was both a shock and a warning about the necessity of maintaining proper maintenance procedures and safeguards.

At least, that was the official story. Laiska’Vanha’Verta had never really believed the Fleet Archives as to just how much the Empire’s Bureaucracy had covered over down the Crown World Orbits. This was the second time that the Empire had faced the Fanatical Purifiers of the Toinen’Maailma system. This time they actually had not one, but two Titans, and one had just up and run. Moreover, there was new evidence of a fractured race, splitting into multiple parts. The transmission from the surface of one of the worlds made explicit mention that Titan one had been ‘pirate.’ Laiska’Vanha’Verta was fairly sure that was a translation error, and the intended word had been ‘rouge’ or ‘insane.’ Its decision to conduct a self terminating attack that had essentially killed everything in the Kuud’Estoista’Maailma system was the act of an utterly and totally insane sentient.

An incoming missive broke into his mauldin thoughts.

“Polo’Liekki, Reclamation Command. We have found the Viimein’Laiva’Elossa.”

Disbelief pulled the words from his throat. “Say again Reclamation Command?”

“Polo’Liekki, Reclamation Command. I say again, the wreck of the Viimein’Laiva’Elossa has been located.”

“Polo’Liekki, Reclamation Command. Not Possible Reclamation Command, I am standing on her bridge right now.”

“Polo’Liekki, Reclamation Command. Apologies. Clarification: we have located the wreck of the CAG Viimein’Laiva’Elossa embedded in the surface of the seventh world from this system’s primary star. First impression is that she crashed and was scavenged some time later. There is evidence of excavation efforts.”

“Polo’Liekki, Reclamation Command. Well, at least we know how the locals were able to construct FTL drives. Mark her for recovery and write up your findings.”

“Polo’Liekki, Reclamation Command. By your will.”

Laiska’Vanha’Verta rubbed his one remaining grasper across his two remaining eyes. The CAG Viimein’Laiva’Elossa. Second ship to bear the name, commanded by Ensimmainen’Vanha’Verta. The Vanha’Verta of the Toinen’Maailma system.

The Empire’s Bureaucracy may have hidden his Titan kill, but they could not hide this!

Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku, one of the historians and linguists attached to the Kuud’Estoista’Maailma Reclamation Command, was thanking his lucky stars for his habitual kelptomancy where old and outdated Empire technology was concerned. Recovery Command had pulled him off of his usual boring shift of parsing through wreckage looking for data storage devices with a special assignment: unlock an old storage volume that they had found. Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku had taken one look at the device, recognised a 453 series storage vault, and had gone to his cabin to hunt down the needed connectors. The Empire used the new 16840 series vaults nowadays, dense cubes of minute atomic circuits laced with data-trails and instruction lattices.

But the old 453’s were a printed circuit design, needing actual physical connectors to interface with. It also had actual screws to hold components into place, instead of everything being a single slab of nigh indestructible atoms. Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku had already pulled out the relic tablet from around the same era that he kept running as a hobby, as it was probably the only device he had with a slow enough processing speed and the approximate connectors needed to interface with the 453.

Three satav later and Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku was back at his workbench laying out his parts. Several of the technical types had gathered, both to stare at the 453 data storage vault and to gawk at the ‘nutcase’ historian who just happened to have the knowledge and tech needed to open up said vault. Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku engaged the sterile field generator, the real reason he had requested the bench, and set to work with a screwdriver. The external screws took a bit of persuasion and a few drops of anti-corrosion compounds, but the 453 eventually opened up.

Inside was the expected slabs of printed circuits along with the severed cables of the interface connectors. Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku cautiously disconnected the connectors and examined the sockets. Almost all of them were right out of the old 453 series manual he was using as a reference, but three were not. Two of the three were wide twenty five pin data bus input connectors, the kind that might come from a ship display. The last was a nine pin data input connector, much more common to personal terminals at the time the 453 was in service.

Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku stepped back from the sterile field and grabbed a nearby tech.

“This thing is a proprietary Fleet model, so I’m going to need some old Fleet documentation.”

The tech widened his eyes, wondering what fresh weirdness was going to land in his graspers. “Like what?”

Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku spun his arms, “wiring diagrams for a start. 453s were capital ship exclusives back when they were in service. This one has three extra data inputs, and I need to figure out what they fed from. If one of them was a security terminal, then I’m going to have to request the old Fleet security codes. Probably the old general override code, which is going to be a pain the the grasper to get.”

“I can try, but I don’t have much hope. They pulled this one out of an old CAG, a heavy guided missile cruiser. Does that help any?”

“Some. An early-build CAG would have fewer things to feed into a data vault due to fewer backups and redundant systems. Where was this one found?”

“Flag quarters.”

“That’s strange. Really strange. I would have expected only the standard inputs for a diary or similar unless… Which CAG was this 543 found on?”

“The VLE, if the rumors are true.”

“CAG Viimein’Laiva’Elossa? No way!”

“It’s only a rumor, but if it’s true…”

Kertomus'Kielen’Sanahaku spun his arms and poked three grasper claws at the 453 sitting on the workbench. “I think we can all but confirm it. We won’t know for sure until we crack the data vault, of course, but let us do some thinking. We have a non-standard, but Fleet proprietary, data vault. It was mounted in a CAG known to be commanded by a Vanha’Verta, found inside the command accommodations. The Toinen’Maailma Vanha’Verta, the one responsible for establishing the secret Fleet Archive. Said data vault has three extra inputs, two of which would fit a feed from say the Scopes display or the Battle Information Center display. Either or both could be used for capturing raw data for later analysis. The third input is suitable for a personal terminal, probably used to input copies of reports and the like. Add all that up and what do you get? A secret, personal archive module intended to go into the new secret Fleet Archive.”

“Tulipalo’Ja’Armo!”

“You said it, not me. Forget the wiring diagrams, I need you to get a message to Polo’Liekki Vanha’Verta that I may have a family artifact here. If this is true, It’s going to be locked down tighter than anything in the Fleet. Tighter actually, because the security codes are probably lost too. I’m hoping that the Polo’Liekki may have some sort of family relic key or passphrase or something that may get us in. If not, he may know who to contact, or who I’m going to have to courier this thing to.”