Chapter 3a: Dangerous Discovery (2220 - 2230)
On 5.18.2220, while scanning the Ucrichi system, Pell Impos and the Rinyhai found that they had a once in a thousand lifetimes opportunity - one of the many moons of Ucrichi III was on a terminal orbit, and had been for thousands of years, but was now, finally about to crash into the gas giant. This was a golden opportunity that could not be missed, for the next six months, details observations were made of the process, until it finally reached the end of its collapse and hit the gas giant around which it had orbited its entire existence.
Useful data regarding gravity and orbits was collected in the process and transmitted back to scientists on Vanerra.
Was the Nerdyn scanned relatively uninteresting systems on a path south, Pell took a gamble on the planet Ucrichi IV, which had massively unstable plate tectonics - but, with the proper application of energy, he thought it might be possible to stabilize the planet's surface.
Unfortunately, despite the expenditure, he was not successful. This failure left Pell quite depressed for several months.
Meanwhile, on 12.28.2221, as the year drew to a close, the Nerdyn entered the Rossier system and made a very interesting discovery.
"Detecting a station in the outer edges of the system, free-standing in space," the sensor officer reported. "And I'm picking up lifeforms. Holy Hock that's a lot of life forms."
"How many are we talking?"
"Five million or so. That's a really big station, but they've got to be crammed in there like Guoplar Fish."
"Put it on display," Ezo ordered, watching the holo display show a large station, covered in paint and festooned with what could be generously called artistic displays. They didn't look like much to him, but they seemed to be sculptures of various kinds, banners, careful arranged debris floating around the station in constructed patterns... fascinating stuff, really.
"I think that's an Artisan Troupe station," Terra mused, tapping her chin lightly. "What kind of life forms are you picking up on the planet?" That name sounded familiar to Ezo, but he couldn't place it offhand.
"Uhm... I'm picking up humans, elvhen... and something the computer is recognizing as Tagchunese?" the comms officer stumbled over the unfamiliar war.
"Tagchungese," Terra corrected lightly. "A nomadic people - their lost their homeworld to climatic shift some 10,000 years ago, and set out in space, traveling across the stars, studying the art of a thousand thousand worlds and cultures and peoples. During the First Empire, Emperor Victor III granted them formal status as a member of the Empire and paid for a series of stations across the galaxy for them to use as bases as they spread their art across the galaxy. Even the Second Empire left them alone, largely. The Artisan Troupe became multispecies in the First Empire, and has stayed that way ever since. Anyone who loves art and wants to spread it across the stars could join."
Terra furrowed her brow, "The Lay of the Dying Rose is An Artisan Troupe production from the middle years of the Second empire." Ezo was not a fan of the opera, but even he recognized that seminal work, detailing the last days of Black Rose before it was destroyed by a Colossus weapon. A dramatic tragedy, it had been made into a film twenty five years ago and had been quite a hit.
"Sounds like exactly the sort of people the God-Empress wants in the Empire. Get the Ambassador up here, and hail them."
Contact with the Artisan Troupe was indeed peaceful, and quite joyous. After requesting copies of the most important cultural works the people of Vanerra had produced in their isolation, the Artisan troupe did the same, but with vastly more, offering many lost cultural treasures, including the almost legendary film
The Princess Bride, a First Empire production based on some much earlier work. This copy was missing a five-minute portion from near the end, but it was still more complete than the thirty-four seconds left intact on Vanerra.
Regularized relations between the Troup and the Empire began shortly thereafter, and within a few years, famous writers, artists and musicians from across the empire were visiting the Artisan's station in the Rossier system, as Artisans of all races began to visit Vanerran space. Making the humans in the troupe the first humans to arrive on Vanerra since the Dark Years began.
The Nerdyn moved south into the Shurkal system from there, making contact with the Gaian Concordant on 8.10.2222, while in the Ardencil system, the Rinyhai found a habitable ocean world that could be settled for the Empire.
"The Gaian Concordant? So... you found Gaia?" Terrra laughed in utter joy. "Amazing. I would love to see it, even just from orbit. The historical value of your discovery..." She shook her head.
"I don't see any reason why you could not visit Gaia," the Elvhen station commander on the other end of the line said. "We would welcome all visitors, as long as they respect the sanctity of life and the basic laws of peace. Every prime Minister since we returned to the stars has agreed -- we will be friend to all, and enemy to none, as long as they seek to abide by that same principle. The wonderful and glorious diversity of life is there to be enjoyed by all."
"A beautiful sentiment," Terra agreed. "If I may ask, how did you find it? Gaia, I mean."
"It was five hundred and eighty five years ago, and so even Elvhen do not live that long," the commander chuckled. "Offhand, I'm not sure, but I know it required a lot of blind jumps off the hyperlane networks and interpreting obscure scraps of old sensor data. Our people were once refugees, fleeting the chaos that had gripped the galaxy after the fall of the Second Empire, but we found paradise, and we live in happiness. Such that any other world we've found since reconnecting to the hyperlanes has been... disappointing."
"I would imagine being raised on Gaia itself would be like that. We have found a smaller world created by the Gaia Seed Initiative in our own space. It is popularly understood to be that the Goddess Tychea brought it so close to us as a gift."
"That could well be," the commander agreed with a shrug. "I am not an especially religious Elv myself, but our people practice many faiths. Above all, though, we value peace, equality and diversity of life and opinion. Imagine the Prime Minister will have much to speak with to your Empress, but in the meantime, shall we exchange historical and cultural data?"
Terra turned to Ambassador Marto Kross, who nodded. "Go ahead."
Terra queued up the command in the computer system - it would take time to transfer the data, even at modern computer processing speeds.
"While we do that, tell us more about your people, Terra Aque. I admit, I never expected to see a Psilon in my lifetime. Tell me - what is it like to have psionic power, to be able to be so connected to the pulse of all life around you through your mind?" The commander's tone was awed, almost reverent.
Terra chuckled, "It probably isn't as transcendent an experience as you make it sound, but then, I'm used to it. I've had it all my life, after all. It is... a constant hum. More powerful on a planet, of course. Actually, I'll probably get a bit of a headache when I return to Vanerra." She blinked, realizing just now that it had been fourteen years since she'd last been on Vanerra. She'd been on planets, surveying and scanning, yes, but for fourteen years, her only company had been the rest of this crew.
Fourteen years. The time had rather flown, in many ways.
"Just from the adapting to the strength of it all," Terra clarified. "Normally it doesn't cause any pain. But it's very hard for Psilons to lie to eachother, given our connection."
"A valuable trait to have."
"Sometimes it's less appealing - just because we can't lie doesn't mean we don't sometimes. We are still just mortal, after all."
"But we always strive to better ourselves, to get past that. Conflict is in our nature, and yet we must always strive to live in harmony."
"That much is true," Terra agreed noncommittally. Peace was not the means to the end, whatever these Gaians may believe, that much Terra knew. History was paved in war, and so too would Unity require it.
Contact with the Gains would only be peaceful, and lead to some useful domestic developments down the line.
On 3.26.2223, the Rinyhai was sucked into a dimensional pocket, vanishing from all sensors for several days - before returning... twice. In a strange otherspace, filled with alien vessels, countless - none from recognized species - half the crew had vanished from the Rinyhai... only to be on this other ship, that appeared to be a perfect copy of the Rinyhai.
Several months were taken checking over both ships and the crews of both quite carefully to ensure there was nothing wrong with any of them, but finally, the copy of the Rinyhai that did not have Pell on it was dubbed the ISS Doppelganger and Sapen Calto was appointed Expolorator of it.
However, on 5.12.2223, the free-range expansion of the Empire's scientists, and the hopeful future they all saw, was shattered in the Klegisc system: Jumping into a system with a station in it, Ezo ordered it hailed, as had now been done four times before by Vanerran explorers...
And the response was shuddering and terrifying. The hate and rage that radiated off the people on the station at the sight of a newly arriving vessel was so great, so severe, that the more psychically attuned and sensitive Psilons onboard the ISS Nerdyn felt it, even across the vast distance of space.
"We are the Pureborn, the truest form of Humanity as it stood on Old Earth, before the corruption given to us by the mutated monsters of Black Rose, before the divergence of Humanity into false breeds and tainting by aliens and alien ideas. You are not truly of Earth, but bizzare and monstrous evolutionary dead ends. Your people will be destroyed - starting with your vessel. The Purity Order will cleanse you and your filth from the galaxy."
Missiles were fired from the station, and corvettes flew towards the Nerdyn - and Ezo, terrified out of his skin by the rage he was picking up, the sheer hate, the malice, the monstrous, psychotic xenocidal fury, ordered an emergency hyperjump back to the Forni system, ending the second voyage of the Nerdyn.
The discovery of the hateful, and hostile 'Purity Order' left all expansion closed off without going through the space of another power. Tgo that end, Pell Impos was ordered to pass through Gaian space, to the far side of it, where a nebula known as the Enem Shroud waited to be explored.
Along the way, he did in fact stop at Gaia itself for a few days, his crew taking a much earned vacation on paradise. Finally, however, on 7.9.2226, he reached the Shroud and began to explore the unexplored space, finding a Gaia world in the Ruenthsam system - too far to be something the Empire could hope to colonize, of course. What was interesting about Ruenthsam III was the ruined cities filled with skeletons, rusting structures and the detritus of a race that had once existed, and thousands of still functioning, if primitive, robots. There was no signs of war, conflict or destruction, and the robots seemed engaged in an effort to maintain and clean the world, even growing crops for a dead population.
The skeletons were not Children of Earth, and this Gaia world did not appear to be the product of the Gaia Seed Initiative. After careful examination of the atmosphere, a hallucinogen was discovered that seemed to induce extremely powerful and pleasant dreams. A few intact computer systems were found and copied, but untranslated. Still, with most of the skeletons seeming to be posed in ways that suggested the people had just sat down or laid down, Pell and his team theorized that at some point, a hallucinogen had spread out throughout the world's atmosphere, and the people had just... enjoyed it. Neglecting food, water, and all life necessities - leaving their primitive robots behind to work on the same orders they'd been following, for an unclear amount of time.
The Nerdyn, still under Ezo's command, and now back in the Forni system, decided to emulate the Rinyhai and sailed through Moshtaran space to the far end, though he wouldn't reach unexplored space until near the end of 2230.
Moving deeper into the Enem Shroud, in mid 2228, the Rinyhai found a gateway in orbit around a black hole called the Uzhab Vortex. But it was strange. It was a first Empire Gateway, but it had been changed, altered... unlike the one they'd found in the Urcrichi system, it was still active, but it was locked, needing some sort of code or activation signal.
Scans showed that sometime in the last five hundred years, the Gateway had been modified by swarms of nanites - a few inert ones were found on the gateway itself - of unknown origin, cutting the gate off from any semblance of the original network and instead linking it to somewhere else. Scans trying to identify its destination found a cluster of stars beyond the edges of the galaxy, dubbed the 'L-Cluster' that seemed to be the destination for the locked gate.
The question of what the Hock this gate was, and what had happened to it, was a mystery that Pell and his crew, nor the scientists back on Vanerra, could not answer. The data was stored and put aside - there seemed to be no way to open the gate, and consultation with Gaian and Moshtaran scientists showed they had no idea what the in the name of the Cursed Void this thing was either, or how to open it.
Finally, in 2229, an ancient lifeboat containing a reptillian alien was found and cracked open by the Rinyhai - and after some study, the body contained therein was found to be a member of the Kel-Azan, one of the races that early humanity had been friendly with - they had died out during the Skreeth Wars that occupied the early days of the long fall of the First Empire, fighting alongside the First Empire when the Skreeth, masters of biological warfare as they were, released tailored bioweapons against the Kel-Azan worlds, that even with the help of the First Empire, could not be cured or quarantined fast enoigh to save their people.
There was even a trace of the illness in the lifeboat, which was thankfully harmless to Psilons, though the vessel was subjected to a stringent disinfecting once the samples of the virus were stored for later study.
The last ten years had started with promise, but very little had been discovered, and the Empire was caring less and less about distant discoveries - the Purity Order stood prime as the threat to be concerned about, the thing the Empire had to pour all the resources Tychea could grant Vanerra.
Exploration was just... not of interest. Not really. Not anymore.
