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Date: 1,993,085 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 14,520 (Shango), N.A. 1458 (Qareen)
Location: Oxide system

1

The ship sped past various stars and planets, pausing to note that most of the systems they formed were uninhabited; nothing unusual about that, and there was little else of real interest among them either. None of the hundred-strong crew were going to hang around. They had almost unanimously voted for the ship to be named Seven Seminal Discoveries (92), and they meant it. The ship itself was new enough to have not even made one such discovery, let alone seven, but this crew was confident; as the daring pioneers of a race who were often almost resigned to their second-degree power in the galaxy, they wanted to show their more conservative peers that they were wrong, and that the Cosmic Charter Republic of Stoppan had plenty of prestige to claim. Their time would come, and people like this ship’s crew were convinced that they could make it come sooner.

They had become even more convinced once their journey had taken them outside of the reaches of Stoppan space, several hundred parsecs past Res 116, the last Stoppan-inhabited planet in the direction they were heading in, and the long-range sensors had picked up, beyond the relatively bare region of space, one particularly bright, star-forming region of space, where interstellar gas grew in density and supernovae flung heavier elements into the mix. There was more than mere astronomical curios, however; close analysis, one that involved pushing the sensors to the limit and then teasing out the data, zooming in on specific areas until they underwent the mathematical equivalent of pixellation, revealed that there were odd spikes and jumps in the density that were either unnatural, or an entirely new discovery altogether.

The Shango’s database, which they had syndicated with the Stoppan even since first contact with the Dharans, suggested that they knew nothing about these strange spikes, but then the database was not necessarily a complete one as they received it. Even so, the captain, Zshann of Manres 2, felt that slight tingle of hope as he moved about the bridge. Hope that, eventually, they would find out something that the Shango did not, something genuinely important, rather than the small discoveries of uninhabited star systems that the Federation could not be made to give a damn about.

Zshann had occasionally wondered if this attitude, especially across hundreds of worlds, was exactly healthy, but then again, it was no doubt just competitiveness, the desire of a relatively young, upstart nation.

Still the Seven Seminal Discoveries (92) plunged on, and the captain looked to the main screen at the front, purporting to show some kind of view ahead, as if travelling faster than light could still show a perfectly clear view anyway, and as if having a window on the ship would in any way prove practical. The screen did at least tell the captain, however, that he was less than one Earth day away from reaching the anomalies. And this time, he thought, a sliver of ignorance from the Federation just might out…

2

The Seven Seminal Discoveries (92) was six short of its eponymous promise one Earth day later, when it came across the anomalies. Of course, this was only in one sense; as Zshann suspected, it transpired that the Shango almost certainly knew about this place.

The place itself was around one-tenth of a parsec from a star that the Shango had apparently not named, the database merely granting it an automatic register number. The light from the screen’s “true view” only gave hints and outlines, but the lightened holographic display, with the lights on the bridge dimmed for contrast and the light of the image boosted, revealed the true horror of what they saw; an immense cloud of floating debris. Through the rain of metal, gradually floating in all directions, there slowly emerged vast, charred hulks of recognisable metal, long, aesthetically brutal, box-like hulls mixed with similarly twisted, broken and charred discs.

“Captain?” a minor bridge officer prompted as a holographic wreck headed towards his head.

“A battle. A battle we were never told about,” the captain said.

“Impossible,” replied Piret of Res 19, his second-in-command, moving through a mass of shards in his area, “we had an alliance with the Shango. One of necessity, for sure, but they trusted us. We were updated on everything.”

“Perhaps not this,” the captain said, “and besides, sometimes you can’t trust a member of your own species. Why think that you can always trust another?”

Piret was stumped, and he remained silent. All the captain and most of the bridge crew could do was look at the mass of debris and wonder why they had not been entrusted with what they were seeing.

The pilot, Keyisij of Res 56, had the task of trying to pull the ship through the mess. There were shields, sure, but they were not for situations like this. There was route plotters on the computer screens, too, but they had their limits.

Along with him, three others over the captain’s left shoulder worked quickly to filter and examine the data bursting in from the sensors, but they were perhaps the one real contrast on the bridge to the otherwise universal numb confusion.

Zshann thought as he scanned over the scene, down one avenue of logic, which transpired to be a cul-de-sac, turning back, and repeating the process. A Shango ship, spinning in a strange, widthwise manner, distracted him, but also churned up an idea.

“Can we get any magnification on a Shango ship? Preferably an intact one,” he requested as he stood up and shoved his head through the simulacra of an ideal example and a shower of pieces bouncing off it.

Someone at holographics set to work on it.

“Good plan, captain,” Piret agreed, “although, are you expecting to send a team out?”

“Maybe.”

“They wouldn’t like that back at Res 33,” he said much more quietly.

“They wouldn’t like this back at Res 33,” the captain retorted, “it’s good of you to quote protocol, Piret. I mean that. But we’ve got a political situation here. The truth has to out.”

3

It took several minutes to transmit the data completely from the ship, and it would take quite possibly days, perhaps in Earth terms weeks, in order for it to reach Res 33 and the relevant high offices there. Still, it was all Zshann could do, as well as signal an omnidirectional broadcast at Shango frequencies.

“Either explain,” he had told them, “or we’ll find an explanation.”

Of course, if that was in any way a truthful offer, then it was an invitation for them to lie, so the captain made an each-way bet and sent out a team to find out the unvarnished truth on a relatively intact ship. They found one, albeit one that had no life support systems and most likely, they surmised, no Grab systems at all.

As it transpired, the three-person team that had found their way onto the ship – which was intact enough to be identified as the SFS Surgical Strike – found that the Grab systems fluctuating wildly instead; in one corner of a room, normal, Shango, lighter-than-Stoppan-average artificial gravity ensued; in another, it could be jittery, its hold on the person’s body tenuous, and in another, it could be non-existent, and so the person stood there would float in zero gravity, until they arced downwards into a Grab-affected area again.

After some time of this, they reached the bridge, and from there, they reckoned that the central systems, if they were still there, would yield exactly what happened, at least in part. There was no reason to suggest that they wouldn’t, in the team’s eyes – the ship had taken a few hull breaches, after a complete externally induced shield failure, and the crew no doubt suffered the fate of exposure whilst the ship merely drifted through the carnage, for years bumping into other ships that came off worse in such collisions.

They reached the bridge, the three of them, and spotted the collapsed roof centre. From there they could see into the space beyond, although a dull glint from one piece of debris as it span past, most likely kilometres away, was all they could really see. Holographics had explained what was going on outside so much better than mere sight.

Around the banks, computers lay dormant. Strapping the large crate they had to the floor – the bridge seemed to have no Grab at all – they held onto railings and attempted to figure out the layout of the ship.

“Let’s hope there’s reserve power,” Likea of Banres began. She pointed to the Tracklayer’s booth. “That might be most useful for data. Possibly also First Pivot.”

The other two, Fetric of Res 202 and Miye of Res 97, began to move in those two directions. Likea bumped along to where she hoped some sort of power switch could be found; she found a switch, flicked it in hope, and the bridge lighting flickered into life, although it continued to flicker afterwards.

“No power in the booth,” Fetric explained.

Likea tried another switch.

“First Pivot power,” Miye said.

She tried another next to it.

“Booth online,” Fetric said, and he strapped himself, cumbersome suit and all, into the chair.

4

Zshann,

I am writing to you with the need to press several understandings into the minds of you and your crew. The first of these understandings is that what you have stumbled upon is quite literally secret and restricted information that, across the Shango Federation, is privy to just three individuals at any one time, myself included. It is for these reasons that I have been reluctant to reply to your message, but given that you have no doubt relayed data to Res 33, I will nonetheless give all the details I deem necessary.

What you have come across is the site, broadly speaking, of the Battle of the Oxide System, so named for the oxygen deposits emanating from the nearby star. The battle took place in W.Y. 433, towards the end of the Fifth Intersection War. At the time, Qareen forces had moved deep into our galaxy, and were threatening not only to take the Intersection Zone but a substantial part of what was undeniably our galaxy. The Oxide System was the furthest the Qareen got, as we committed high numbers of ships towards defending it; however, as we did so, similarly high numbers of ships arrived to attack. The fighting was intense, the situation grew desperate and shots were fired at incredibly close quarters, sometimes a mere few kilometres – hence the reason, as you can see, why the debris is still only spread across half a parsec in all directions after thousands of years.

The end result was effectively a draw, a result not good enough for the Qareen, who withdrew from the area and were subsequently pushed back to the Intersection Zone. However, the sheer size of losses on the Federation side were unacceptably high by any military standard – over 5,000 Shango ships were destroyed, and one went missing, never to return – and in the midst of a war effort, to announce the result, even if it was effective victory, would have been highly destructive in terms of propaganda; knowing that the Qareen could come so close to claiming both galaxies would have ruined the Federation. And so, for security reasons, we have suppressed this knowledge ever since.

We imagine at this point that your entire people are now privy to this state secret. We have passed on a form of this message to Res 33. The Federation will come down hard on anyone who disseminates this information in the CCR. We hope you understand and heed this message.

The Office of the President of the Shango Federation.

“Piret, what do you notice about this message?”

The second-in-command studied the text carefully.

“There’s a ship out there and the Shango can’t find it.”

“My thoughts exactly.”

5

On the second through fourth decks of the Seven Seminal Discoveries (92) was a series of large laboratories, and the second one of these was devoted to informational analysis. In a table at the centre of the lab was a small gold cube, and from its contact through the table, computers throughout the lab were able to pick up raw data, and holographic projectors were able to transmit an extrapolation of what the data meant.

“The information is very much incomplete,” one of the lab staff admitted, “the fact that some ships being fired at are damaged by other ships, that they fly in from certain angles – this gives us clues, but we’ll never have the full picture from this one ship.”

Zshann was still prepared to admit that the view ahead of him, which had been playing in real-time, was an impressive one nonetheless. The Surgical Strike had managed to get far enough into the action to come into contact with hundreds of ships, and it was clear to Zshann, who had previously undertaken a brief military career beforehand, that the battle had been strategically disastrous for both sides.

Both sides had, so far as he could tell, undertaken a strategy that almost perfectly anticipated what the other side would do, and the result was a deadlock that forced each side into desperation. With half an hour, he could see signs of tactics being thrown aside utterly, swept under a cosmic carpet as ships simply charged into the fray and opened fire. After a couple of hours, the original plans had fallen apart utterly, and the Surgical Strike and others were simply rushing around at random, firing at anything that was the enemy – he watched in particular as the Strike fired repeatedly at a ship that was already clearly critically damaged, flying as it was on an awkward, linear path and firing at no-one, debris trailing from it as it tumbled through the battle space.

“Well, the President’s story checks out,” the captain said to no-one in particular.

“It’s the folly of war with none of the bravery, virtue or wit,” one of the lab staff said.

The captain couldn’t argue much with that. He continued to watch as the Surgical Strike threaded itself upwards through a ridiculously close bunch of ships, levelled out and then looped round in a sort of half-hearted spiral, apropos of nothing, all the while managing to take out one ship when it should have clocked up at least three. Pure tragedy on so many levels.

6

“Captain, we’ve found that missing ship.”

Zshann could barely believe he was hearing those words, but he heard them, and as he reached the bridge, and witnessed the holographic image himself, he could hardly believe the sight of it, either. There in the centre, a dark, sinister presence, completely black and spherical, simulated jets of radiation streaming out of opposite ends, and an accretion disc in slow orbit around the middle. In among the gathered gas, dust and other assorted pieces was indeed the ship they had been seeking.

The captain moved into the hologram, wading out into the accretion disc and looking at the ship, small in comparison with the event horizon it was so close to, On the side on the artificially brightened ship he could see that it was the SFS Elimination Sought and Achieved.

“The time dilation must be… immense,” he said to no-one.

“They probably still think the war is on, unless they’re aware of it,” Piret agreed.

“Thousands of years and they all flash past like that.”

The captain continued to gaze at the ship and its apparently motionless appearance.

“It’s barely moving,” he observed, “they might well have fallen in already.”

“Routing the ansibles through the sensors suggests otherwise,” Miye said, and she pulled up a screen that demonstrated why. “There’s ample evidence to suggest that the ship is in very close but very fast orbit around the event horizon. Probably mere kilometres away at most and less than a tiny fraction of a per cent below lightspeed velocity. There’s no doubt intense levels of time dilation of both kinds.”

“Fair enough,” the captain said. He wasn’t prepared to argue with better-informed experts, even if he knew something of what he was talking about. “So they can’t get out?”

“Presumably the superlight drive is damaged,” Miye suggested, “or the time dilation is so intense that it’s been mere seconds on there. But I doubt it.”
The captain was still looking at the projection all the while, and noticing that the ship still hadn’t moved, so far as he could see. It moved like a tectonic plate over a planet’s surface; so imperceptibly that he doubted he would even know if it had made significant progress a year later.

“Shouldn’t the accretion disc provide drag? Are you sure they’re not slowly falling in anyway?”

“I can’t see any evidence that such a scenario would happen. The sublight engine would have systems to compensate.”

Of course they would, the captain thought. No Stoppan ship would have such systems, because of the complexity of the calculations, but the Shango would. Even when trapped they showed an edge over his people.

“And there’s no way they could get out? On their own?”

Miye hesitated. “Well…”

“Anything. I’m all ears.”

“It is possible that the black hole will die before they do. But at that point, the Shango, us, the galaxy might have collapsed into subatomic particles. There’d be nothing waiting for them.”

“What can we do?”

Miye seemed uncertain, and the rest of the bridge crew frowned at their screens. Finally, one of them volunteered a solution.

“We could donate our own power to push them into escape velocity. But it would take a lot of power, and we’d have to get it back, probably through stellar capture, which would mean a much longer route home.”

The captain nodded and slowly considered this.

“Fuck it. Gather data, and let’s head back.”

Gathering Apart

Date: 1,994,355 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 18,548 (Shango), N.A. 1863 (Qareen)
Location: planet Trevi, Darkworlds Heath and Franklin

1

“But why here?”

The man who was stood sighed in undisguised aggravation.

“Two reasons, Getriq. One, to show that no-one is safe, which is the key message to send out when fighting a war of resistance. The second is that this is, very relatively speaking, a low-population area. There should be minimal loss of life. Which some of you, for some reason, care about deeply. As if shaving off a few million will make the difference.”

He leaned forward to the table and jabbed the right button for his purpose, which yanked up a holographic projection of the location being talked about. An orb appeared, rotating slowly, revealing its surface to every user: a curiously ordered one, in which a labyrinth of too-straight mountain ranges presented a patchwork pattern of alternating deserts and jungles or, at the poles, tundra and icy wastelands.

“Darkworld Heath,” the man standing explained, “6,000km radius, natural gravity fairly low. 57 Spaces and 115 surfaces. 766 billion inhabitants.”

“I still say this is a bad plan,” the man next to Getriq stated. “It is guaranteed to cause loss of life, which will-”

“It will cause an impact.”

“The wrong impact.”

“You’re too compassionate.”

“It’s not compassion, it’s a matter of damn strategy and you should get your fucking house in order!”

Out of the five people gathered in the room – four nominally sat on chairs, backs facing each corner, and the one meant to be a leader stood in the centre at the desk – four tensed at the crescendo of rage from the fifth. He had stood to confront the leader, looking eye to eye. For a long time, no-one spoke.

“Well you can count me out.”

“Out of the movement, or out of the cell?” one of the seated men asked.

“Out of the cell. I’ll go where the movement has brains.”

He slammed the door behind him.

“We carry on,” the leader insisted. “OK. Darkworld Heath has the same kind of security as any other in its infrastructure department.”

The holographic image shifted into a cutaway diagram. A central sphere acquired a highlighting glow.

“The infrastructure department hides its information initially via fractal encryption. Once that is broken, there is then a physical encryption in which the data is part of the simulation.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, we would typically enter a virtual simulation of the whole of Darkworld Heath, and then we would have to search for the data, which might be encrypted as a grain of sand on a beach on one of the surfaces.”

“Shit. Sounds complicated.”

“It is, if you don’t know which grain of sand to look for. Which is why, people, we must know. And once we do know, that is it for Darkworld Heath: the Grab Management Systems will be switched off, we will be out in the time we give ourselves, and then natural gravity will do its work.”

The hologram animated, and slowly, the sphere began to collapse in on itself, crushing itself into a small, rocky sphere as debris shot out into space.
Outside the window, a small but bright dot appeared in the sky, and quickly shifted across it. The leader peered out and looked closely.

“It’s time. The details I can explain along the way.”

2

Inside Central Government, the faux-street layout that attempted to disguise, as much as possible, the obvious fact that the whole giant sphere was simply a maze of offices and corridors. Yet roads and staircases and, if inside one of the “buildings”, lifts and telporters, managed to lead in almost all directions, making access far less complicated than the jagged and jaunty street layout would have implied.

Yet all roads led decidedly away from one place, which was buried, door-less and window-less, between six other buildings on each side. There were no logos for the department, and no clear evidence of who the people in the building worked for.

In an area marked Section J, a tall, suited man charged through the openly corridor-like corridors, arriving at a room dominated by one huge circular desk around which large, radial spines filled with panes of glass displaying animated graphics. There, he made his way through the office to a large alcove at the head of it, passed through the Membrane that invisibly covered the alcove and blocked out sound and unwanted visitors, and placed several sheets of paper on the desk. The woman behind it wordlessly picked them up and began reading.

“Dead drop on Space 31,” he explained, “we might have hours at most, it depends on how they’re organised.”

“Source?”

“One of our assets on Trevi. We can’t vouch for the accuracy of the names, they might be pseudonyms. Certainly the database we have hasn’t turned up anything yet.”

“Yet?”

The man nodded. “We might need the whole Federal register. It’s possible that the cell has been recruited from other planets. Possibly Darkworlds.”

The woman looked puzzled, and re-examined the first page. “Zafz, why would the ADG recruit from the very things they’re protesting against?”

“I know. I suspect it’s all part of the ploy to cover themselves. Thing is, Tyos, I suspect the hypocrisy will not bother them if it contributes to the cause.”

Tyos sighed and slapped the document down onto the desk. “OK, the plan is thus.”

She reached for a graphic on the glass panel in front of her, and almost imperceptibly, the Membrane dissolved. Another graphic tap alerted the whole office; another displayed the case so far, as receptors in the paper beamed it onto a holographic projection.

“First of all, we call for Federal help,” she announced, “they might not arrive or reply in time, but it’s worth doing. Second, we track down those names, however long it takes. Thirdly, we need a plan on defending the encryption. If we can get any upgrade at all, let’s do it.”

“Full section meeting?” Zafz asked.

“Full agency meeting, if Kejaj allows. This one’s slipped through the net and it’ll take us all out.”

At this point, someone came running round the desk, weaving past the spines.

“I’ve got all the details beamed to Franklin,” he announced, “but it will take around 71/100 to get there.”

Tyos had risen from the desk, and she grabbed the document as she began to move across the room.

“Fucking hell, we might as well have dispatched a spaceship. Thanks anyway.”

3

“Got a message from Darkworld Heath, and the LCTA there. They say there may be another incident, category zero, but they suspect the ADG this time.”

Panz Hertriss leaned back on his chair at the news. “Darkworld Heath?” he asked. “Did they state a timeframe.”

“They said a minimum of hours, but no upper limit.”

“You see, Itris, if I remember rightly – actually, I’m not sure if I do.”

He leaned over to the glass panel, worked the graphics on the screen, and a huge, holographic image of the two galaxies  appeared. Two shining purple lights indicated Darkworlds Heath and Franklin.

“If I and my convenient computerised calculations are correct, then it’ll take two-thirds of a day to send a message back. We may have to consider the possibility that the incident has been averted or that it has passed.” He checked the screen again. “766 billion citizens. I would’ve thought even the ADG would have its limits. Apparently not.”

Itris could only nod at this. He was already nervous at having to bring such news, and being relatively new to the job, this was more than he needed to be dealing with.

“Itris, don’t worry about it. I understand you have a smaller case to be dealing with.”

“Sure thing, Panz.”

With that, he left. Panz re-examined the document. He would suggest a number of things; deploying a military force, simply sending over advice. The problem, of course, was that window of uncertainty; he had no idea if the event had already happened or not. The Heath LCTA wouldn’t be able to deliver such news until the day afterwards, at best.

Think, he thought to himself. Think think think.

He tapped the glass screen one more time.

“Go ahead, Panz.”

“Mr. President, we might need your decision on something.”

4

The central office of the President was humming with activity. In the room, a long rectangular one of around three metres wide and twelve metres long, advisors examined screens and passed reports. At one end of the office, a third of the floor was raised by a short staircase, and the table at the top was surrounded by Utren Allix the Shango Chief of Armed Forces; Dekrip Iyet, the Head of the Shango Federal Covert Defence Agency, or FCDA; and most critically of all, the most powerful man across eleven million or so worlds, the President of the Shango Federation.

“Mr. President, a contingency plan might be a waste of time. If the whole Darkworld is going under-”

“Utren, in a situation like this, we are operating under an extremely tight window.”

The President looked around suddenly.

“Is the Membrane switched on?” he asked.

Dekrip nodded. “Right up to visual on all six sides.”

Indeed, the staffers that the three men could see mere metres from them would only see a black haze if they were to look back.

“The fact is,” the President continued, “there are over seven hundred billion people who might be affected by this incident. This incident may or may not have already happened either some time ago, or very recently. It might be imminent. We might just be able to intervene at the right time. But until we do, we have no idea how we can. We’re in a strange scenario here on Franklin, where the action we take won’t be useful unless we know the outcome of the action we take.”

He paused briefly, during that time wondering why he couldn’t switch off from autocue mode.

“And that is why we assume all eventualities, including the possibility that Darkworld Heath is gone.”

The President tapped a screen behind him, and the tabletop shifted into a screen. On it, Darkworld Heath’s image appeared, its synthetic outer patchwork of jungles, mountains and deserts surrounded by various blocks of text and graded colour patterns.

“It may take time to implement them all,” Utren countered.

“Good point,” Dekrip added, “we’ll have to prioritise.”

2/97 later, they had agreed a plan.

5

“It’s out of our hands, now.”
“I suspect it always was, Itris. The case?”
“Averted. Although it was unusual.”
“Go on.”
“Stoppan spies on Franklin, Panz. A rare occurrence, unless I’m mistaken.”
“You are not. We do seem to be entering a troubled and troubling phase around now. Here we are in – what year is it? P.W. 18,548, and still these same issues crop up. Intensify, even. It is worrying, looking to the long term.”

6

The LCTA’s Planning Room was packed but relatively quiet; around the table, with some of them sat at it, were a sizeable proportion of the agency’s workers. At one end of the table, a holographic projection of the whole of Darkworld Heath hung in mid-air. At the other end, Darkworld Franklin hovered, and in the middle, a series of lines and arrows stretched across virtual kiloparsecs, labelled with various graded time estimates.

“The ship from Trevi has doubtless landed,” Zafz announced near the Heath end of the table, “but we still have potentially as much as another 1/39 until they’re working at the system from the optimum place. From there, we reckon the Grab management systems would be reached anywhere between 1/39 and 4/39, depending on their capabilities, and from there, the whole Darkworld is under immediate threat.”

“How long,” Tyos asked, “do we need for a full evacuation?”

“I have contacted every Darkworld and every newsband possible,” Koitra, a woman at the Franklin end, said, “we won’t achieve a full evacuation barring Dharan intervention.”

A buzz erupted around the table. “You can’t consider it, Tyos,” one voice managed to say, cutting through the mass of other voices.

“I can and I will,” Tyos said calmly once quiet had been achieved, which did not take long. “I won’t let billions die because of mere principle. We will beg to the Dharans if need be. It’s rare that I pull rank, people, but on this I will. Contact the Dharans.”

“Moving on,” she added after the pause.

Zafz moved his hands across the table, and the holographics shifted to a three-dimensional sprawl of Darkworlds, all differing slightly, branching out into fractal patterns that disappeared, presumably, through the walls.

“This is the system at present, for those who don’t usually go about tinkering with the Grab” Zafz explained. “As you can see, Darkworld Taal is the default encoding simulation for our Grab management. They have to guess this. If they fail, they will have to search across six Darkworlds for the data, and should they fail there, thirty-six. If they fail at eight guesses, they will be searching across the whole galaxy.”

“What are the odds that they fail?” Koitra asked.

“Ordinarily, the odds of making the guess on the first level are a million to one, and on the second level, one point four times ten to the power of thirty-three to one. That’s the beauty of the system; it’s almost impossibly hard to make the first guess, and after that, you truly have to know. After eight failed guesses, you get to search the whole galaxy’s Darkworlds, and you’re looking across them for ten grains of sand, or ten bits of grit, or ten particles of mixed composition. Even across one Darkworld, it’s immensely difficult, and not even we are privy to the information. But I suspect they would not attempt this if they did not have a way around it.”

“What do you suggest?”

“It’s tough to call. We could wait until they make the first guess, and then follow them in.”

“We don’t know their physical location.”

Tyos waved that away. There were tracker bots, after all; if they could be apprehended in virtual space, they would have all the time they needed.

7

Perceld felt ridiculous, and he wasn’t wrong to do so; the headgear he wore was heavy, cumbersome and large enough to make him look like a possible Qareen underneath. Even so, he would have been prepared to wear it if he hadn’t felt that the project was becoming ever more futile.

The headgear, of course, was important due to the lack of information the team had. They had been given an anonymous tip on the fractal system, which would otherwise have turned into a nightmare scenario of impossibly long odds. It was a risk to rely on such a tip, but it had worked, and all ten of the team recruited – two separate cells – had found themselves on Darkworld Taal, or a virtual version of it, scouring the place visually in an agonisingly long analysis. The headgear, naturally, was the only thing that stopped this from lasting billions of years too; its scanner swept over everything it was pointed at, analysing everything with a (fake) self-contained molecular structure, every small component, and tossing it aside as a negative within picoseconds.

Where he stood, the headgear was especially useful, as millions of items – blades of grass across a vast field – were practically identical in their coding.

He had walked for what had felt like miles across the Protest Fields when he stopped, not because of anything he saw or heard, but what he realised.

He hadn’t heard anything from the team in quite some time now. Not a single word. The comms had been full of chatter initially, people reporting nothing for at least 1/39, but another 1/39 on, only three of the pieces had been found, and the chatter was beginning to thin; to the point where each member of the team was able to use most, if not all, six voices that expanded the Shango language to its full potential, rather than the thin, Qareen-like single voice, unable to carry as much context and detail.

It was another 1/39 on from that scenario when he had stopped and realised that the voices in his ears had diminished to far below six, and right down to zero. Had these others left? Was he being framed? Or were the authorities onto them already?

He got his answer shortly; the lighting above suddenly shifted westwards, and in a matter of moments, he found himself looking at a sunset that was not due for another 4/39, at least. The shadows around the place had lengthened considerably, and the buildings in the distance were shrouded in twilight.
It was getting cold, he realised, and he swore he could see movement. He carried on, through the maze of tents he had reached, but felt that something really wasn’t right.

“Unit 1?” he asked into the comms. One voice, no elaboration. No reply.

“Unit 4? Unit 8? Unit 3?”

No replies from them, either. He would have reached for a weapon, but he had none. The plan had looked flawed before, he know, but it had looked about as sound as it could be made to be; now all its horrifying issues seemed to be laid bare. He knew what was going on, now – the darkness was closing in, literally and metaphorically. Yet it had now, surely, been around 1/780 at least. What were they taking their time over?

“Where are you?” he whispered to no-one in particular.

He carried on, through the maze of tents, and in his peripheral vision spotted a flicker. They were to his right; he turned left, but subtly, hoping he could make it look like a voluntary, free deviation. If he could reach the other side of the tents, he thought, then he could probably find a unit in order to-

He suddenly felt a gun jab into his helmet and an arm seizing him at the neck.

“Good effort. But better luck next time.”

P.L.C.

Date: 1,995,260 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 21,417 (Shango), N.A. 2151 (Qareen)
Location: several

>GCNT
.547/2145
Pretence to Revolution?
As a new political movement arises in the quieter quarters of the galaxy, Peri6/946,788 investigates and gives his opinion on the new movement.

My invitation was a somewhat cryptic one; sent out on uniband, it asked all who could to either tune into or turn up in person to what was being described as “the creation of a new platform and a new politics.” And as it turned out, it was quite exciting: if this movement succeeds, the Qareen Confederacy will bear witness to its first economic reforms in centuries.

As we all know, the Confederacy all agreed to a complete post-scarcity settlement in the Treaty of the Confederacy in DNA 46, around one year before the Intersection Wars. Knowing that the Wars would soon occur, it was a necessary step at the time – the capability was there, and there was no need to mess around when the galaxy’s biggest conflict in thousands of years, and possibly ever, was on the verge of erupting.

Yet now, on p334,102, those measures enacted all that time ago are being questioned. Ios8/p102,355, leader of the Pangalactic Limits Campaign, argues that the time has come for the Confederacy to look backwards in order to advance.

“The problem with all Qareen, right now,” Ios8 argued as I spoke with him, “is that they live too easily. Where’s the struggle, we might ask, where is the aspiration?”

He may well have a point. Technological progress, new political ideas, the vitality of an ever-advancing civilisation, seem stagnant in the Confederacy, which arguably seems content right now to sit in its current, sub-Dharan semi-hegemony over one of this galactic pair we reside in.

Before our brief talk, Ios8’s public meeting to convene the first followers among the P.L.C. – an impressive gathering of some two hundred, more of whom have signed up since – went smoothly. With an impassioned argument, Ios8 did not shy away from criticising the status quo, and calling attention to historical fact. His audience was enthusiastic, and the word is spreading; apparently, within 0.01 of a year, some five hundred followers on p334,102 have signed up to the movement.

Five hundred may seem to be a tiny number amidst a civilisation of millions of trillions across Spaceplanes, planets and ships galore, but it is a start, and the movement already has its first off-planet follower.

The P.L.C. might well be dismissed as a reactionary group bent on taking the Qareen as a whole back into an undesired past, but this seems not to be the case. At the same meeting, Ios8 and his followers debated extensively a Charter of Beliefs, some of which included a desire to wind down the increased centralisation that has indeed been the norm since the Intersection Wars. “We’re pretty much a Federation, if not a completely unified state,” one follower told me, although I suspect this might be going too far.

Even so, their arguments have weight. Critics have been dismissive to the P.L.C., but their arguments have thus far been weak. Pinne7 of the 123,456 Network accuses the movement of “regressive, backward thinking”, which any decent analysis should refute. “An ignorant but thankfully tiny force, thinking back to an imaginary time that doubtless never existed,” argues Alak1 of Network Zenana.

This knee-jerk reaction is common amongst many pundits, but the P.L.C. are unfazed. “We won’t necessarily achieve all we aim to, possibly ever,” Ios8 admitted, “but all we’ve got to do is get enough followers, into the thousands or even the millions. Once we’re big enough, we’ll be sending a message to those at the heart of the Confederacy, that it’s time for change. That this whole galaxy needs to be shaken out of its complacency.”

And with the P.L.C. Charter, a sure method has arrived. With some ninety articles, it’s an extensive piece – this movement has emerged fully-formed. It is, quite simply, disappointing to see a new movement, the most radical in centuries, dismissed by journalists who often themselves pose as outside the establishment or mainstream. The P.L.C. are not yet a revolution, but they could easily become one. The P.L.C. isn’t about ignorance; it’s about rationality and aspiration, about driving not just their society, but all Qareen towards an even better future.

It seems remarkable that, in today’s society, trillions have accepted the by-and-large stasis that occurs on the grounds that things are ‘good enough’.  To which it must be asked: is the Confederacy, across millions of Spaceplanes and planets, merely settling? Isn’t there more, beyond this? Don’t we have a Dharan hegemony to confront, and their technology to emulate?

So, for the P.L.C., I wish them the best of luck. There’s a whole galaxy of inertia to overcome, out there, but if they can, the result will be spectacular.

>123,456 Text and Statics Network
.711/2151
In Defence of Reverse Gear
Karank9/p334,102, the second-in-command of the Pangalactic Limits Campaign, argues his case, on why the P.L.C. represent the future, not the past, and why reports of fascist tendencies have been greatly exaggerated.

“The rise of a New Galactic Order,” trumpeted the GCNT recently, snidely dismissing a movement that they had previously supported. It seems especially odd that they would abandon the movement now, as it stands to gain its billionth member, and now has some 1,000 Spaceplanes and 50,000 planets with openly declared followers. But it should not be a surprise; having, in some quarters, embraced the P.L.C., the mainstream media coalitions have decided, seemingly unanimously, to back down to the face of easy slurs on the Campaign.
It’s not clear when this unjustified backlash started. Certain critics – highly conservative-minded ones at that – have always criticised the movement’s radical nature. And of course, radicalism – however benign – is always the enemy of those too insulated by current society to see its failings.

Certainly, the backlash has emerged in the past couple of years. On .743/2149, the riots on Spaceplane 544 were attributed to the P.L.C.’s demonstration, even though a mere 44 protestors showed up and 51 restraints were imposed. Logically, for at least 7 of the restraints the P.L.C. not to blame, and given that most of them returned from the demo, almost certainly more were the responsibility of local Qareen counter-protests.

The second piece of alleged ‘evidence’ lies in supposed rhetoric spoken during 2150. One thing should be made clear: the P.L.C. is not a racist or xenophobic organisation. What we do oppose, however, is the continued welcoming into our society of members of the Shango Federation. It cannot be stressed enough that the allegedly peaceful Federation were once the organisation that caused unimaginable death and destruction during the Intersection Wars; entire Spaceplanes were destroyed and entire planets, even star systems, were in ruins. Smaller conflicts ever since should have given some clue that the Federation, as a whole, is not interested in truly lasting peace.

No, the P.L.C. is not racist; this is the easy slur thrown at us by pundits pulling dubious quotes from the media networks, as they buzz halfway around the galaxy before the P.L.C. can even respond. What we object to is the degradation of our culture and the abandoning of values that served the Confederacy for thousands of years before the Intersection Wars. We object to the flimsiness of our politicians in acting on this, and their unwillingness to talk, let alone deal, with the problem.

Perhaps the real reason for the fear of a P.L.C. galaxy is that a bold new agenda is being adopted by millions of people each day. Nearly one billion people have listened to and agreed with us over the last six  years, and therefore, come the next election in 2155, we will make an impact. Our voice is growing ever louder, and all across the galaxy, people are realising that what we speak of is not reactionary nonsense but the genuine thoughts and feelings that ordinary people – and most critically for the political class, ordinary voters – are thinking.

It’s a smart, intelligent agenda, and the mainstream media find themselves on the wrong side of the argument. For the likes of the GCNT, perhaps oppositional rhetoric isn’t the key; perhaps mere pity is more appropriate.

>Network Zenana
.713/2151
Knowing No Fear, Knowing No Sanity, and Knowing Nothing
Having argued against the P.L.C. since its inception, Alak1/976,501 argues that the P.L.C. is as misguided and repugnant today as it was six years ago.

Six years ago, I wrote an article that, to be frank, was damning of the P.L.C. and their aims. At the time, they were a miniscule organisation, but I wrote that article in a bid to argue against such ideas and in a bid to warn against the rise of such movements. I stand by that article, even now, and as I look on the last six years, I see no reason to change my mind.

The P.L.C. are a different movement, now, in some ways. Numbering a billion or so members, whose distribution is now measured in parsecs instead of kilometres, and as a result, the nature of such an organisation changes; informal discussions become formal conferences, and home-made mailshots become slick marketing and promotional operations. But just because the money for public relations is there, it does not mean that the politics and policies underneath have changed.

There are very few, if any, individuals in the galaxy nowadays who have lived under the age of scarcity, which means that such a time is now being reduced to a folk memory across large swathes of our civilisation. With this, however, comes a romanticisation of that time, and a deluge of misconceptions, of which there are regrettably also no scarcity of.

“Scarcity”, as we well know, has a mass of negative connotations, and for good reason. Starvation, poverty and a fight for resources will not create a “dynamic society”, and it is insulting and unqareen to suggest as much. Ridiculous notions such as these should be shot down with ease in our society; with the information we have in easily-accessible networks, there should be no excuse for such ignorance. Yet somehow, it persists, it thrives, it grows. It should be worrying, but indeed, plenty of those within our media accuse us, the journalists, politicians and campaigners already in the inner circle, of a sneering superiority, or worse, of outright demeaning ordinary Qareen citizens who have taken to the movement.

Yet it is arguably the P.L.C. itself that demeans. When they claim our society to be “technologically stagnant” – their words, not mine – they implicitly insult billions of scientists who, in dedicated facilities across the galaxy (or even on dedicated planets and Spaceplanes) endeavour to push for ever more understanding, and make those incremental breakthroughs that will one day produce the Dharan level of technological sophistication that the P.L.C. claim to be aiming for. Today’s scientists can devote themselves to nothing but the quest for more knowledge, free from almost all other considerations; apparently, this is not enough.

But this would be nothing if the movement did not engage in some of the lowest rhetoric any party has engaged in for the last two thousand years. The P.L.C. are keen to claim that they are not racist, that no xenophobia is afoot, but it is clear where they stand on the Shango and Bhoot diasporas. “You have to ask if these people are polluting the system with the values of their home society, or diluting our own values by adding theirs”, one member asked recently, and not any standard member of the public, but Ios8 himself, when talking about Bhoot refugees, who number in the hundreds and have worked hard to escape oppression.

Perhaps, in the end, it’s not the time before the Wars that the P.L.C. wish to return to; perhaps it’s the Wars themselves.

So The Gods Must Be X

Date: 1,989,107 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 1909 (Shango), N.A. 192 (Qareen)
Location: Darkworld Jeremiah, Dei system

1

He woke up and looked at the grey stone ceiling. This morning, like any other, he blindly slapped an arm down onto the bedside table, and then remember that the UID would be no help here; it was just a ceiling. The peeling and faded metal door in his peripheral vision was just a door, and the desk to the right was just a desk. The only thing that wasn’t what it claimed to be was an apparent alcove in the wall above the desk, which was a universal assembler. That said, it was the size and approximately shape – albeit more rigidly angular and cuboid – of what a citizen of Earth’s Western society would recognise as an ATM, so Goiqa Federoi would have needed to think creatively in order to conjure up something resembling the screen that the ceiling and walls, in almost any other part of the Federation, would convert to.

This did not happen on Darkworld Jeremiah, and he was starting to regret it. He got up – he didn’t need to for another 11/100, but as he washed, got dressed and ate, he felt good about having the extra 7/100 – and decided to make his way out of his room and away from the complex.

It had been three months since he had decided to join the priesthood, and having decided that he was going to do so at the very top, in the most important place of all, it had been two months since he had arrived at Darkworld Jeremiah. His family had hardly objected strongly, but they had advised against it. It was perhaps no wonder; piety had especially not been considered a virtue in the Federation in the previous years, with numerous incidences of religiously-inspired violence hinting at a troubling tendency within it.

Goiqa would have been the first to admit that his conversion three years ago had initially prompted an arrogance, a superiority, perhaps even something with the potential of hubris. The revelation had been an overwhelming one, one that seemingly had to be spread, but in three years he had travelled a long way, and those initial binary thoughts about errant Shango and godless heathen Qareen and the Need to Spread the Word had blurred significantly. Initially he had wondered if such blurring was a more sophisticated outlook, but the longer he stayed here, the more he suspected a crisis of faith, a stretch of doubt or even just a feeling that he was in too deep.

Darkworld Jeremiah was a strangely homogenised place for a Darkworld. Residential Darkworlds usually broke up their vast smears of cityscapes with jungles, forests, woods, mountain ranges, plains, prairies, steppes and rivers, and sometimes the distinction between artificial and natural was blurred, in urban jungles that befitted the name, cities that bore the tabular, blunt beauty of icebergs as they floated across undersurface seas, and mountain ranges that rose up in surreal, ordered columns like cities built by ghostly alien predecessors. Military Darkworlds had their masses of barracks, for sure, but also their mock-up cities and their range of environments, and whilst they rarely employed the same kind of artistic intent as their civilian counterparts, they made up for it in diversity; deserts, cities, jungles and even tundra were present time and time again in finely graded varieties, the Darkworlds as a whole acting like the geological equivalents of paint colour charts.

He had come from Darkworld Gauss, a place that could implant all manner of inspiration in the mind of someone sufficiently alive and world-embracing. Darkworld Jeremiah, however, had the austerity of a church. Which was fair enough, because it was, but even as he left the village complex, he could not see anything much beyond the same regular paved surface, needless columns that reached down to the Vexers below, and the odd, heavily sculpted garden. It all bothered him, he thought; it did not glory the gods, and passing away the 7/100 walking around the village did not change his thoughts.

2

Goiqa found himself where he was meant to be, at the Academy Section Point nearest the village. Its appearance, a mass of nonlinear form combined with more traditional (to Earth eyes) features comparable, broadly, to flying butresses and gothic arches, was a familiar one on Jeremiah. Inside, through a labyrinth of corridors and chambers, he found Space D-101, where the Holiness of the Lower Third (or H.L.T.) Abrax Pretere waited for his students to arrive. Despite everything, he was the first.

“Goiqa. Always eager, it seems.”

“Indeed, sir. Although I also happen to rise early.”

The H.L.T. nodded from across the table. “Although we don’t exactly punish opulence among our students. We know what lives they’ve come from, and I’ve have thought that 42/85 would be a perfectly reasonable-”

He stopped as three other students came through the door, making his class just two short. Another followed shortly afterwards, muttering a hasty, half-sincere apology as he did so.

“One late,” Pretere persisted.

“Krastep, sir, he says he’s ill.”

“I will grant him the benefit of the doubt, as I suspect I have too many times before. Then again, what is faith, beyond granting the benefit of the doubt to the feelings we have, those feelings that we cannot brush aside? But I imagine this is another debate. What we ask today is not the definition of our faith, but the epistemology of it. What can we know about that which is beyond mere science? Where is the line between knowledge and faith? And what about that which lies in between?”

Goiqa wondered if it was things like that which caused him to doubt. There was too much of an attempt to reason that which he had assumed was beyond reason; how could religion wind up in hard calculus? It unsettled him. He assumed that this, the priesthood on Darkworld Jeremiah, would be primarily about guiding those on pilgrimage, given that the place was, so transgalactic sources alleged, the largest holy site for a hundred million light years in all directions.

3

At 76/100 the interior lightband on Space 33 began its fadeout, slowly sapping the area of its grey and beige duochrome and bathing it instead in a weak orange-and-shadow two-tone. Goiqa found himself some two Earth miles away, across the surface of the sphere at any rate; in truth, he also found himself some ten miles high, too, close to the summit of one of the highest towers in the Space. Isiah Tower was an unusual indulgence for Darkworld Jeremiah, although this simply meant there were hundreds instead of thousands of such projects. From the balcony railing, though, he could see all manner of things; the lights flickering on above and below; the small clouds that occasionally drifted past; the columns that connected Cavers and Vexers in the most superficial way, and – he could just about see this in the dimming light – the way they flexed, bulged and thinned in the middle, ripples of stone mass acting like water and shifted in fickle rotating alleigance to the various, weak and tangential Grab forces on either surface in the absence of any truly effective gravity, adding a touch of surrealism to the solemnity of Jeremiah’s architecture.

He watched for some time, idly wondering how he was going to get back on foot in the darkness, but couldn’t bring himself to feel urgency amidst the stillness. Eventually he had this and many other issues answered.

“Goiqa. Goiqa Federoi.”

He turned around and spotted Ipnar Sewt, a man who he had only met on a few occasions. He, during those times, had only had to remember one name; how Ipnar had managed to recall his among hundreds, he could not work out.

“Yes. How-”

“You should probably be leaving. Don’t worry. We’ve all been in these situations. We find ourselves in an equilibrium with our surroundings, and we just can’t break free, however temporary we know it to be. It becomes the softest obsession.”

Goiqa nodded and tried to lean slightly more softly on the railing, if only in a bid to make the most symbolic move of getting away.

“Like I said, don’t worry. I could beam you back in an instant.”

“There are teleports in this tower?”

“Thousands. You didn’t know?”

In retrospect, it should have been obvious.

“You seem bothered, Goiqa. I would say troubled, but that might be
overreaching. It doesn’t elude my essential point, though – something is wrong, isn’t it?”

Goiqa thought it through. His problem, really, wasn’t one of a straightforward, mundane issue.

“Ipnar, is it just me, or is there something off-key about the Church today?”

“I suppose, Goiqa, that depends on what you want from it.”

“I’ve tried as an apprentice. Tried my hardest. The problem I have, though, is all this endless philosophy, methodology, all this rigid study. Shouldn’t faith transcend reason? Shouldn’t it be… well, maybe this is simplistic, but shouldn’t it be the primacy of feeling over thought, or feeling beyond thought?”

Ipnar gave the smile of a man who knew the exact answer.

“I guess you’ve forgotten the history of the Church. It seems incredible, when you look around you at all of this, an entire artificial planet designated to our cause, but it’s true nonetheless, that for a long time, our Church has been in decline. A long, slow decline too. Millions, possibly billions intone their last prayer every year. In a galaxy of trillions this is not an immense problem, but if ignored, this place becomes not a church, but a museum.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything.”

Goiqa realised that it was getting dark, now; a breeze picked up, and the last of the sunset could barely show the horizon.

“But I am stating,” Ipnar continued, “that the establishment here want to, I paraphrase, modernise. Demonstrate their relevance. Move with the times. The unchanging faith is not always all that unchanging. When public opinion, on hundreds of tiny issues, starts to shift, the effects are seismic. And so the Church shifts to justify its presence.”

Goiqa frowned. “So what you’re saying is, it’s all a lie.”

“Well, that’s highly reductive.”

He supposed so.

“What I’m saying is, you don’t have to turn your back on it. There’s always an alternative. Reconsider, not the destination, but the path to it.”

It was now completely dark on the balcony, barring a small spotlight whose edge of influence just touched the railings.

“You see, the Church doesn’t approve, for example, of us in the Plasma Community. We’re not heretics to them, but… something about us doesn’t sit right with them. But aren’t we disrespecting the gods if we blithely – indeed, blindly – accept assumptions about their nature, about their whims and requirements, from a group of demonstrably flawed mortal beings?

“I won’t pressure you, Goiqa. It is always your choice, but the important thing is that you have a choice. You can leave, become a lay follower. You can push yourself to the fringes, become a missionary. You can weave in and out of official doctrine and dogma, become part of the Plasma Community. It’s all there for you.”

Ipnar began to back away, off the balcony and into the room inside.

“The only thing you must do,” he called from the shadows, “is beam yourself back.” He flicked a light on. “Over here.”

With that, Goiqa did so, and having stepped into the unit, he found with a brief flash of light that he was back in his sparse room, ten miles down and two miles away.

4

“Ipnar. I imagine you would have nothing to do with Federoi’s disappearance?”

“Disappearance?”

“Yes. He has not been seen by anyone at the complex for the last five days.”

“Well, that is somewhat odd. I would have hoped that he would have informed his superiors and gone through the proper procedure before vanishing. Do you suspect a more tragic occurrence?”

“On Jeremiah? People come here to be buried, Ipnar, but they don’t die here.”

“True enough.”

“He was a gifted student, the likes of whom we can’t afford to lose.”

“Correction – you can’t afford to lose. The likes of me will survive just fine.”

The Sport of Presidents

Date:1,995,266 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 21,436 (Shango), N.A. 2153 (Qareen)
Location:Spaceplane 554,091

Putting on a Storm: The Recent NKLPC Controversy
Whilst still relatively obscure here in the Intersection Zone, the sport of Kaizener has never been more popular in the centre of the Confederacy. But there is troubling brewing in the wake of recent events; Reto6/877,091 reports on the controversial game that started it all.

Sections: Sport/Kaizener, Society
74th New Kaizener League Pangalactic Cup
Coalition Reason Season from 1,909 (Winner) v. Coalition Workable Alchemy 554,091
Final Score: 1,426 – 1,425

Unlike the Fauxwar matches common in the Intersection Zone, where strategy is merely as complex as the contestants choose it to be, and even then ultimately break down at some point, the sport of Kaizener always demands tactics at every opportunity. Soft flooring and a soft ball conspire to produce slow serves, and whilst this can be compensated for with technique, it ultimately results in long and tense games.

No game in this recent NKLPC, however, has been as tense as this, the Last 256 match between Coalition Reason Season, from Spaceplane 1,909, and young upstarts Coalition Workable Alchemy, from Spaceplane 554,091, who were notable for knocking out the last planet-based team in the previous and 12th round. Reason Season risked this match by field just three players, arguing that such a move would result in a tactically tighter unit. It didn’t, or if it did, it didn’t significantly, and it was a decision they almost regretted. Workable Alchemy, however, were fielding the full four players as regulations permitted, and cycled them very effectively between main play roles, catching and resting. They also took a relative risk by introducing the android Drummer Girl into proceedings; unused throughout the actual matches, they argue that she is in fact capable of playing equally well to the rest of the team. The match itself seemed to support this, although the announcement of the team for their next match in the QKL suggests otherwise.

In the end, though, a close match resulted: one that was too close, in fact, and has resulted in many questioning the nature of the game. Some argue that the game should not have been as close as it was, and they are currently calling for a re-think of the rules. Others argue that the eventual winners were effectively given a reprieve, and argue likewise for that different reason.

Day One

Reason Season began by fielding Ranyt7, and Workable Alchemy fielded Tor9 as their initial player. Both were fairly representative of the styles of their respective coalitions; Ranyt7 favouring the “prizefighter” method of play, an attacking form that involves (relatively) fast play, low, high or otherwise extreme serves, and a willingness to move forward towards the wall. Tor9, on the other hand, was a “politician”, preferring a slower method that emphasised subtle moves and the application of topspin. Such a method resulted in a number of individually interesting moves – one shot achieved so much spin and turn that Ranyt found himself staggering into the right-hand side wall to compensate for it, losing a point and looking somewhat foolish at the same time – but overall, it only worked on these sporadic occasions and proved largely ineffective.

These competing methods with a new ball soon saw their effectiveness demonstrated, albeit highly unscientifically. Ranyt’s ability for precision jump serves – those which hit the point between floor and wall, causing the ball to leap back strangely at the opponent – caused issues, although Tor managed occasional flashes of brilliance, often forcing Ranyt to initiate and concede serves in subgames that would rack up later on.

After the midday break, the RS coalition switched Ranyt for Kalo1, but the WA team persisted with Tor. Although Tor made initial gains, Kalo1 taking some time to ease into his game, the gamble did not ultimately pay off. By the end of the day, Workable Alchemy found themselves over a hundred points down. Even the team themselves could not disguise the fact that they were now outsiders after just one day’s play, although they insisted that this now freed them from the pressure of needing to win, instead of ramping it up.

Curiously enough, the team defended Tor9’s performance, and argued that they, collectively, had made a strategic error, rather than witnessed bad play. This might well have been true, but Tor9’s rate of service faults – something not dependent on the condition of the ball – was noticeably down compared to both of the rivals he played against. Many of the pundits and commentators gathered were not slow to noticing this.

Day Two

The second day of play began with Reason Season bringing out their third player, Sarp2, and most notably, Workable Alchemy playing Drummer Girl. Whilst not a first for a Kaizener game, this was perhaps the most important match that an android had ever played in. Adopting a “philosopher” style, one that emphasised long rallies and various shots that suggested a labyrinth of directions, it proved reasonably effective, and at the very least, it stopped the increasingly embarrassing slide that occurred towards the end of the first day. Sarp2 found herself matched all too easily, and her jump serves were countered far more often than not.

What Drummer Girl had in tactical ability and stamina, however, she lost in terms of accuracy, notable by the fact that just one point was added to Workable Alchemy’s Fazi Score all day. The FAvoured Zone Impact Score calls for ten hits for every point scored on the coalition’s Favoured Zone, a small area of the wall chosen by them. Reason Season had judged this to be a distraction, and placed the zone near the top right corner; Workable Alchemy, on the other hand, placed it relatively centrally, sometimes scoring hits apparently by accident.

Incidentally, two points were added to Reason Season’s Fazi Score, and this proved to be all they would score for the whole game.

In the afternoon, the game started to shift, albeit at the rate usually associated with planet-based geology. Dragging the game closer by two dozen points, Drummer Girl managed to demonstrate an increased understanding of the game, playing with greater nuance; at 67.89.33, local time, there came a brilliant shot which presented the first genuine catch opportunity – a slicing shot in which the spin just beat a newly-rejoined Ranyt, clipping the racquet-bat and providing exactly enough of a deflection to land in then-catcher Tor9’s hands.

That, right there and then, could have been the end of the match, but with a ninety-seven point deficit and a mere sixty-four subgames under their serve, it unfortunately made no sense for the catch to be made. The graceful, brilliant move had to be squandered with a vague fumble and drop. The disappointment from the crowd, who were sensing an interesting but ultimately one-side game, was palpable, but there was far more to come.

At 71.04.11 another opportunity arose, this time the ball simply beating a fast-charging Ranyt, but he reached the wall, and hence safety, long before the thrown ball could run him out. As it was, another alert piece of play was let down by perverse incentives. Still, the game was about to ramp up severely in the next two days.

Of course, it didn’t look that way. Workable Alchemy had made progress, but an eighty-eight point gap still looked insurmountable. Workable Alchemy continued to insist at the end of the day that they were the outsiders, and that the pressure to win was purely on Reason Season.

Day Three

Workable Alchemy surprised many a punter in what had already been a match of some surprises, by announcing their desire to play one subgame – served by Reason Season – before the main game resumed. More surprisingly, Reason Season agreed, clearly seeing that retaining serve would potentially give them momentum and push the game beyond doubt. Such a gambit seemed bizarre for both teams – arbitrary for WA, and unnecessary for RS, but the logic paid off for WA when Perj3 (WA still operating on a player-per-day approach) grasped a tensely-fought 3-2 victory over Sarp2 and dropped the gap down to eighty-seven points. It proved to be a crucial moment, and the morning of day three saw a steady slide in one direction, as the gap fell from the opening eighty-eight points down to fifty-seven. As the prospect of actual competition arose, it was reported that audience figures for this previously insignificant match doubled.

All of this suggested that Sarp2 was incapable of brilliant moments, which was untrue, and every statistic, indicated that she had actually improved over her second stint compared to the first. Her serves showed astonishing accuracy, and the rates of jump serves and, especially, rolling serves were more than doubled. These serves proved tricky for Perj3, but they could only slow down his seemingly relentless march onwards. Sarp2 played excellently;  the problem for her was that she was facing an opponent even more on top of their game.

In the afternoon, Kalo1 managed to slow down the advance, although this was arguably due to Perj3’s fatigue than anything else; close analysis of the game reveals that the closest it got – thirty-six points – occurred some 10 MaU before the end of the day, and after that, some three points were dropped. Furthermore, serve percentages on the Workable Alchemy side steadily reduced throughout the afternoon.

Post-session, WA were undeniably still behind, and perhaps still not truly competitve, although neither Style Points nor Fazi Scores were released at the time. It was Reason Season, however, who found themselves on the back foot, having to justify how they had not finished the game once and for all. All the team could do was selectively pick at the facts, citing percentages and the late run of form.

They also cited their first major catching opportunity. With subgames still mounting, and the gap closing, it was becoming ever more realistically possible for Workable Alchemy to win – something that was a mere mathematic possibility at the end of day one. A catch then, ending the main game and forcing a run through all the subgames, would have been critical; unfortunately, as Perj3’s outside edge deflected sharply to catcher Sarp2’s right, and the ball further deflected off the tips of her fingers as she dived for it, sending both herself and the ball crashing into the side wall. Whilst a spectacular moment for spectators, it confirmed a fourth day of play.

Day Four

The audience figure for the fourth day were confirmed early on as being the third highest peak audience for any last 256 game in the history of the NKLPC, but this impressive achievement was about to rise even higher. As Lod9, Workable Alchemy’s final, ‘unused’ player, took up his racquet-bat and readied himself for the first serve, there was in the arena a distinct feeling of tension, of feeling that this extraordinary comeback could just occur, and that an otherwise routine tournament could yet throw up a truly classic match, or at least a classic ending to one.

So Lod9 went to work, and found himself continuing the work of the previous two days, and sure enough, after ten MaU in the morning, around 45.32.09, the lead started to come down. By midday, in fact, it was just twenty points. With each of Reason Season’s change of players, and with each change of strategy, however, that cutting of the lead slowed drastically.

Even so, Reason Season needed a breakthrough, and through the afternoon, it kept threatening to happen. At 66.44.98, Lod9’s flailing attempt at a return provided an opportunity; his similarly poor attempt to reach the Safe Zone offered a second chance. Incredibly, both of them were missed by catcher Ranyt, whose ridiculous throw missed the Safe Zone by a metre.

At 75.43.89, though, the breakthrough for RS came. Once again, Lod9 missed a return, the ball passing more than a racquet-bat’s length to his left, and Ranyt did not waste a second chance, the ball landing square in the middle of the Safe Zone before Lod could begin to respond, proving the advantage of a prizefighter’s fast play. With that, the main game was over, and the game would now shift to the 228 subgames that needed to be decided. With only 101 of those with RS’s serve, however, the game was suddenly against them: the main game had ended 1,302 to 1,291.

Another shock was to come, when the Judging Panel decided to release the Fazi Scores for both sides. With a mere two points to Workable Alchemy’s seventeen, Reason Season found the score to suddenly be, including the subgame played earlier, 1,304 to 1,309 against them. Having had a first-day lead of one hundred and twelve points, Reason Season now found themselves behind after just three days of play, with the subgame serves against them and the main game over.

Fans on one side of the contest expressed outrage, arguing that the team would not have made the catch if they knew they were behind; some pundits, however, argued that Reason Season had actually made four key mistakes: firstly, that they had squandered a sizeable lead; secondly, that they had made the catch whilst complacently assuming they were ahead, even whilst knowing some scores were off the table; thirdly, that they had actually ignored the Fazi Scores as part of their strategy; finally, that even now, the number of Style Points both sides had scored had not been released, and that fact was being ignored.

But the score stood, and it was under a storm of controversy that day four ended and day five began.

Day Five

The final day’s events were inevitably clouded by the revelations of the previous night, but Reason Season themselves, in either the conference the previous evening or in the morning pre-match, had not complained. With 228 subgames ahead of them, they were perhaps more focused on the increasingly uphill task of winning, and with the game’s audience figures now the highest any last 256 game had ever seen, and the eleventh highest for any NKLPC match in history, the eyes of the Confederacy – or at least, a large swathe of it – were watching. As the ones in the lead, Workable Alchemy had the advantage of choosing which subgames to play, and promptly decided to repeat their strategy from day three on a larger scale, allowing Reason Season to serve all of their 101 subgames first.

This was a risky gambit, and whilst RS faltered on occasion, most notably at the start of each of the three players’ stints, they nonetheless took most of those subgames, dropping a mere twelve, to give them a lead of eighty-four points. Whilst Workable Alchemy found themselves with a useful advantage – they would now never lose serve for the rest of the game – they were nonetheless otherwise in a similar scenario to the one they had been in at the close of day two.

After the break, 127 subgames lay ahead. The players in the court, now without catchers, and with the alleyways blocked off with sidewall extensions, looked very alone as they battled for a victory that, in the end, would not even necessarily put them in the top 100 coalitions in the galaxy. It was now that Workable Alchemy changed their strategy; having deployed Tor9 – much improved from her first stint on the first day – for many of the subgames earlier on, they now switched regularly between themselves. Perhaps it was this that overcomplicated their strategy; perhaps it was instead RS’s sense of momentum, but either way, the lead extended, topping out at a hundred points precisely, before shakily reducing. Even as WA gathered an unstoppable momentum, it became clear that, at best, they would win narrowly, even as their rolling serves scurried across the court floor and eluded RS’s players with increasing frequency, and almost perfectly timed drop shots hit the wall just inches above the floor.

That afternoon saw what was perhaps Workable Alchemy’s best collective performance in the tournament so far, but it was proving to be only just enough, and in a penultimate twist to the game, the scores were nominally level for the final subgame, at 1,420 apiece.

Perj3 was the man who found himself serving to win or lose the match, against Sarp2. Said subgame, far from being a complex, epic showdown, proved to be a simple matter for Perj3; a rolling serve hit with maximum force ripped across the floor, straight past Sarp2 – 2-0. A follow-up serve simply spun away, misleading Sarp right as it jinked left on the bounce – 3-0. The score was now 1,421 for Workable Alchemy to Reason Season’s 1,420.

There was, however, one final set of statistics to be released by the Style Board, and if the controversy on the fourth day was a fierce one, then the maelstrom unleashed by this was something of a supernova of contention. As the Style Board released the points allocated – four for Workable Alchemy, six for Reason Season, making the final score 1,425 to 1,426 respectively, the anger throughout the galaxy became immediately obvious through the various networked ansible forums.

Aftermath

How, various fans asked – even those supporting Reason Season – could such a match, a tournament match – be decided by style? Whilst style points had always been an intrinsic part of Kaizener, this was the first time that they had ever actually affected the result of match. The New Kaizener League suddenly found itself having to defend rules it had not seen challenged in centuries, and both coalitions that had played could only meekly state that they accepted the result, even if it was not ideal.

The resulting debate spread far and wide, consuming almost every feed in the local news coalitions in the galactic centre, although naturally, the interest has only, thus far, leaked mildly into our region, were it was met more with disdain and contempt by pundits rather than analysis.

Put simply, those of us in the Intersection Zone have perhaps wondered quite what the fuss was about; with recent rises in terrorism, an increasingly loud campaign for “scarcity politics” and Qareen-Shango tensions on the rise, along with increasingly disturbing revelations from the Bhoot regime, did this represent a dire lack of priorities among some in the Confederacy?

Perhaps, I would like to suggest, it represents the excess passions of, for one, a sport with massive interests across thousands of Spaceplanes and planets across the galaxy, and two, the simple tendency towards soft vacuousness that can occur in what is, let us be honest, a highly advanced civilisation that rarely encounters truly serious threats.

In truth, however, I find it odd that pundits have chosen to focus on this. If nothing else – and I suspect it did indeed offer nothing else – the game did offer a strong degree of spectacle, and several days of entertainment. The highly technical nature of the game meant that it was not intellectually lacking, either; the same, however, cannot be said for the rise in scarcity politics.

And with this, the article you currently read manages to finally wheel itself round to the point: perhaps it has been a struggle to convey both the excitement and complexity of Kaizener to an audience I know to be unfamiliar with it, but as a sport, it has come under attack recently from many quarters – politicians, the media, its own fans – and I feel it is a sport, and a piece of our culture, that is worth defending. Those who attack it pay no heed to the aforementioned campaign for scarcity which, though sporadic and disorganised though it is, continues to growth in strength and threatens, unlike Kaizener, to undermine all that the Confederacy has aimed for. Its quasi-religious implications are, or should be, insulting to any Qareen, although thousands continue to join the movement each day. Kaizener continues to embellish and embolden Qareen values: expertise, perfectionism, rational and strategic thought, and an unwillingness to flinch from the complex or the difficult. The NKL’s thorough and borderline unbeatable testing and scanning for drug use or extraordinary genetic or biological enhancement is rooted in a Qareen sense of fairness and justice.

These are the values that built a galaxy-spanning civilisation; the values that Ios8/p102,355 and his Pangalactic Limits Campaign espouse are the inverse, dragging us backwards, not to a simpler time, but to a worse one. The appalling conditions of the Bhoot people under their RPDSR should be not a model, but a warning to us all of the atrocities that can occur when power concentrated in the hands of elites destroys opportunities and priveliges for all but the few.

So if we’re to come together, let it be for vacuous purpose if need be, if only so we avoid overthinking ourselves into needless – and cruel – revolution. Let’s do it for friendly, honest competition, instead of brutal domination. Yes, we in the Intersection Zone could perhaps learn plenty from Kaizener.

Up

Date: 1,995,187 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 21,186 (Shango), N.A. 2128 (Qareen)
Location: RPDSR of the Bhoot People.

1

The scene on the bridge had been a tense one, but he nonetheless allowed it to slide from lingering mindset to sepia-toned memory. It was OK. She was safe now, and the Walk-In Contradiction/Lemonless/Spaceship Plus was charging away from the whole region of space at speeds they could never hope to catch.
Crossing the bridge had been the first bit of hope in years – but Weczer7/11,191 knew even then that she was in a tentative state, one where the information she had gathered had to balance the trouble she had potentially caused, something that was not easy to judge, even as she was lying on the floor of her quarters in the Walk-In. That had been made clear on the bridge, back on the planet; across the canyon, she could see a mass of hovering gunships, ranged battalions of android troops, all ready to act if the people releasing her attempted one last gambit, and to underline that they were dealing with the Qareen Confederacy, that civilisation that had some kind of presence in – be it a full occupation, a colony, or even just regular visitors and immigrants to – almost all of the galaxy.

Naturally, they backed down.

She had kept that information, though. It had meant a complex procedure in her cell, but she had done it, and the act of doing it had made her glad to be Qareen, the bio- and genetic-engineered origins of her race before it spread across the galaxy proving a saviour. Unlike the Shango, eschewing all ideas of technology beyond that of it being a medium for otherwise impossible occurrences, the Qareen had for thousands of years felt that the personal experience as enhanced by technology and the technology itself could be, and perhaps should be, inseparable. It was the guiding philosophy of mighty intellects, the guiding philosophy of an immense civilisation, the guiding philosophy that spread across thousands of parsecs.

Not to mention the guiding philosophy that had saved her ass.

#You were heading into the unknown. You could not have known or have reasonably expected how events would unfold a priori#, she was reassured by Galan6, the other female on board.

#Well, I’m not sure. Here is what I know – unless – you have clearance, yes?#

#Sure. {clearance qpa l7} is the highest I have.#

#OK. {cognitive: qpa l5 required}, so it should be fine. {info sending} …it’ll take
a while.#

It took three minutes, which felt like a long time to be engaging one’s superconcious, especially across most of the quartersphere concerned.

#Sent. Disseminate at will amongst those permitted to view.#

She shot up from the floor to her feet and decided she would do something useful, but as her brain dipped power usage to prevent dizziness, she realised that she didn’t really have a plan. Not in the short term, anyway – long term, well, she’d return to monitoring the usual threats, bouncing from planet to planet. If the information dropped to level zero clearance, she thought, she could write some sort of piece about the whole thing. There’d be no end of public demand for that.

#This is pretty crude#, Galan6 admitted, #but my simulation says that you couldn’t have had significantly less than a 76% chance of capture, give or take five per cent either way.#

She was not surprised, but she reckoned she should have been. Logically, she assumed that Qareen technology and capabilities were responsible, because amongst the civilian population, she had never seen less than 100% rates. That was, of course, a mere shuttle-craft in the cargo bay of pain that was the life of an Bhoot citizen.

2

It had been half a Qareen year that she had been in there.

Of course, there was no risk of disease, either physically or, for that matter, mentally – a Qareen could always turn ostensibly insane, but there would always be one part of the brain that could lock itself off and perform functions separately, acting calmly underneath the storm of struggles in the conscious or superconcious.

Not that it was ever likely, but if it was to happen, it would happen here. The cell – a grey, cube-shaped space about two metres in all dimensions, was but a small component in the panopticon, yet its walls were soundproof, impregnable, and in any event, anything – and they thought of everything – that could potentially dig was taken away. Every possession she had was machine-assessed for it, which meant that anything she had in the cell was 100% likely to grind away before it made any impact on the walls.

The door was an old-style barred one, of the type she had only heard about in history classes, and of the type far easier to break out of than any potential Qareen facility. The Bhoot had countered this by making a breakout undesirable, to the tune of a sheer drop that Weczer guessed at being at least a kilometre, maybe two.

Despite the whole thing being very crude, all of it, except perhaps the Monitoring Station in the centre, the kind of thing no Qareen or Shango planet, Spaceplane or Darkworld would have utilised in thousands of years. It was, however, effectively – brutally so, although she had long since discovered that the Bhoot knew about brutality, and towards their own people, they had raised it to an artform. There was no getting out, barring the lone signal she had hoped would cut through the cell walls, or at least through the bars, and out into the reaches of Qareen space. Swallowing the amplifier would have distorted the signal, however, and not done much for her physiology either.

She reckoned that the only two actions to commit to were to protect and survive. Protect the information, which she had managed to smuggle the equipment for into the cell, and survive, which involved sitting out the sentence.
In the corner of the cell, where the setting sun struggled to reach its light into, she pulled the slim device from where it had been attached to the inside of her pocket, apparently made of fabric itself. Applying it to her head, she waited, then felt the mild jab of tiny needles engaging with the nerves in her head. Despite all the technology, there was no such thing as perfect machine-human interfacing.

In the top right corner of her vision, it flashed up: data download in progress – size 5.5 basics [unit-10]. She watched it tick slowly upwards from zero per cent. At sundown, which she made to be 65.74.09 locally and 12.07.96 in the agreed temporal measurement, the Monitoring Station began to sweep a flashlight over the cells. The thing no doubt had night vision anyway, along with thermal imaging and the like, but it naturally had to give the impression of activity.

Coming from a world filled with innovation, she tensed at the sight of the beam, assuming it was capable of all manner of scanning, analysing and other similar functions, that it would expose her plans, even as limited as they were, and instantly act in retribution.

It swept over, and her cell sunk into twilight again, the drop visible when stood close to the barred boor now in complete darkness.

100% complete, the interface told her as the beam was almost 180 degrees from her, and she felt the reverse of the jabbing from earlier, a feeling of tiny needles pulling out. She shook and bobbed her head, trying to make it look like a natural act, and the data logger flapped onto the floor. She scooped it up, shoved it into her pocket, and felt it sticking to the inside of it once again, as anonymous as it had been throughout; now, though, the disguise was unnecessary – she had all she needed, locked up within her own mental library.

The following morning, at 25.50.50 – they kept strict timetables around there – she was teleported out the same way she was teleported in, and found herself in the familiar environs of a similarly bleak-looking office, located, she had deduced during incarceration, in the tower propping up the Monitoring Station.

Uniformed, helmeted guards lined the room, all very blatantly carrying large guns in one hand and hefty spears in the other, and at last an open sign of the government’s hypocrisy. Quite what they expected from an unarmed woman, Weczer could not fathom. Even so, a vague clue was offered by the guard stood in front of her.

“We have received news from your people,” he said, “I do not know how they have discovered your presence as we did, but they are threatening war if we do not release you. Our glorious nation has decided it does not require such a conflict over one mere individual; it is not for the good of the people. Your release is therefore due at midday (she presumed 50.50.50), and you will remain here until then.”

She nodded, feigning fear and deference but secretly relieved. That message she had sent had got through, despite everything.

3

The bare, unpainted walls of the room were crumbling, but even so, the place was typical of what she had seen in her time here. Furnishing the space around her was a table and a trio of chairs, all metal, all rusting at their unrefined edges. A bare light, crude in its square glass casing, blasted light inefficiently into the area.

The two people in the room with Weczer had that same, haunted look that every Bhoot citizen had on their face; a look that suggested that had seen terrible things, that they had no words for, and that if they had the words, they would not dare speak of anyhow.

“It was too much of a risk to come here,” one of them said. He had introduced himself as Fighting Shadows At Sundown For Victory. The woman, who claimed to be named River to Glorious Destiny, did not reply, but looked as if she concurred.

“Well,” Weczer said, looking out of the murky window to see a dark country lane leading away towards the city lights, “it is done, now. We might as well do what we came here to do.”

“You’re right,” River said, and sat down on one of the chairs, which creaked. Fighting Shadows followed her, and his chair scraped a painful noise across the floor.

“Normally my job is to go somewhere, find any information I can, analyse it, draw conclusions about future events, and then leave,” Weczer explained. The two members of her audience nodded. “This time,” she continued, “it’s different. There’s nothing developing here. It’s an equilibrium, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing’s going to change.”

“I want nothing to do with this,” Fighting Shadows said, getting up (creak) and heading towards the door, “our glorious society-”

“Glorious? Have you seen it?”

He said nothing, but gave a defiant look in response to the implied attack, and left. Outside, she heard a small car engine wheeze into life, and saw a flicker of shadow as it passed the window. One follower down. This awkward attempt at a resistance movement would not, she thought, impress anyone in the Confederacy. Perhaps, though, it was here motive that was lacking; it wasn’t that she was necessarily a citizen, on the inside, who wanted to change things; no, she was a relatively priveliged outsider, who had found her visit to this place intolerable, and felt that sure the citizens would agree. The problem was that she could find few who openly would.

“Are you still in, River?”

River nodded, but very hesitantly.

“The key thing here is that the people outnumber the government significantly. What they lack are the resources, which the political elite have seized with impressive totality.”

“But the government works for the people,” River argued.

“Of course they don’t, River. Why do you think that? Because they claim they do?”

Weczer knew, however, that it was only partly that. What it really was, truthfully, was that the government stated it, repeatedly, loudly proclaiming it across every medium available, and the result was bludgeoning rhetoric that worked to crush every other possible argument; not with quality of reason, but with quantity of claims. To even ask River the question she just had was to rip away reality and force her to view an utterly bizarre universe, whose principles were entirely upside-down from the assumptions she had always held.

It transpired to be irrelevant anyhow. Before she could say anything else, the door slammed open, thudding dust off the adjacent wall and rattling on its hinges, and a squad of uniformed, anonymous government operatives swept in, shoving the pair of them to the floor. Inside the hour, she was inside her cramped cell within the vastness of the panopticon.

4

The QPA could be bureaucratic, but usually for a reason – every precaution had to be taken, so precise, exact and highly detailed assessments couldn’t really be protested in such circumstances. Weczer7, though, had never seen anything like what she had attempted recently, however. She had requested a transfer from the third designated Bhoot planet (“Glory”) to the first (“Power”). The resulting paperwork – and yes, it was indeed overwhelmingly manually-inputted dead-tree format – could have filled a warehouse, she thought, and on reconsideration found it to be only a small exaggeration.

Said paperwork was nonetheless done quickly, however; a mere tenth of a Qareen year later, she found herself boarding the ship, the Revolution for Prosperity, and heading for Planet Power, which was a mere five light years distant, but even so, it would take five Earth weeks to do what it would take Qareen vessel ten Earth minutes to achieve. Still, she had got her wish, and once inside the vessel, pleasantly surprised. Spacious and relatively luxurious, certainly more so than, say, a warship, she found herself in the one area of the Bhoot civilisation that had so far even remotely suggested opulence. There were, apparently, no protocols, either; she could wake at any hour, and often did, and used the facilities at will, although she did not dare ask if there were any sports facilities she would recognise; she was already under the impression that there was some kind of catch, that a trap would be revealed. They were suspicious enough when she had initially merely asked to be there.

Five weeks later, though, the ship landed on Power – they actually landed, she realised, and did not choose or offer to beam her down. That, of course, would have meant the surrender of a level of control, and the regime would not allow it, especially to what their records marked as a recent and rare immigrant.

Still, she landed on Power, near the planet’s capital, a gargantuan sprawl of a city that was, like many Bhoot cities, oddly bare-looking even at the nominally busiest point of the day. She left the ship, accompanied by a lone guard for the length of the way into the city. He then got out of the car, wishing her a “for the glory of the Republic” standard bid of goodbye, and walked back. She examined the pile of documents on the passenger seat as soon as she was in the city and parked; they told her where her designated accomodation was, and suggested jobs she could assign herself to. The employment sheet also stated that there was a “personnel surplus due to the efficiency and effectiveness of the Republic’s economics”, which she understood to mean that she wasn’t really wanted anyway. It was when noticing things like that – which were hardly possible not to notice – that she realised what bothered her about the whole place; if only, if only, she thought, they could be honest about their intentions. But they were not, and so the whole populace was shrouded in this opaque rhetoric, this bullshit she found more crushing than the surveillance and the martial presence about the place.

She wondered whether doing anything about it was within her remit. Then she reasoned that she had an open remit anyhow – and that the billions involved across those four planets could hardly be sorry she tried.

For centuries, political academics across the Qareen Confederacy – and for that matter, across the Shango Federation with which a slow-built and, even now in NA 2128, tentative alliance had been formed – had studied the doings of their elected leaders with few assumptions at the core of their discipline. Yet there were some, and the most wide-reaching one – backed up by almost all the evidence that could be gathered on the subject, as well as more suspect claims by the likes of the Dharans – was this: no interstellar civilisation could reach or maintain such a status whilst acting as a dictatorship.

Of course, the evidence for this was, along with Dharan claims, limited to the aforementioned two civilisations and the Stoppan Republic that the Shango had long been familiar with, who exemplified the assumption perfectly.

The theory, too, was solid enough: as a civilisation prospered and expanded, it provided both a jurisdiction with monolithic gaps – the space between planets, and the thousands of uninhabited worlds within and without the civilisation – and, with spaceships a common asset, the capability for groups, if not individuals, to exploit these gaps was immense. For a civilisation to remain coherent, it had to appease those of such libertarian desires, whilst maintaining the values of the more socially conservative. Either way, the result was democracy and liberal tolerance all round.

The gap, on the other hand, was the Bhoot civilisation, which had been known by the Qareen for two thousand of their years, but had always been shrouded in mystery. Assuming that it was simply a cultural position of isolationism, the Confederacy had stayed clear, respecting such distance even during the Intersection Wars, where the Bhoot signed a formal alliance for the Fourth and Fifth wars, which simply amounted to a few spaceships tossed into the otherwise vast resources utilised.

Eventually, however, the Confederacy needed to know, and so the QPA dispatched an agent. Weczer7 knew she had no idea what to expect, but with few friends and family, she knew she was the closest to the ideal that the QPA could manage. The Walk-In Contradiction/Lemonless/Spaceship Plus beamed her to the surface of what she later learned to be named Glory from 100 local AUs, taking no chances on detection even if it resulted in teleporter failure.
Within hours of reaching the surface, though, Weczer couldn’t help but feel that something was wrong about the place, and that the secrecy existed for the wrong reasons. The place looked impoverished, and finding a local government office, the huge, imposing metallic sign at the front gave away the truth: Representative People’s Democratic Social Republic of the Bhoot People, it read, along with Freedom, Justice, Peace, Order underneath.

Such eagerness to imply freedom did not bode well, but over the days afterwards, she found the propaganda had light foundations in truth. The RPDSR of Bhoot was technically a capitalist and democratic society, and one where criticism of the government was not banned or punished per se, but that only represented a half-truth. Highly corporatist, she found that business, media and government effectively formed a dictatorial elite, a triangle of mutual interest that allowed tyranny to occur, and democracy was rendered moot by the razor-thin difference between parties. Of course, locking out the overwhelming majority of the populace would potential cause rioting, so the government had enabled a smart system of surveillance, enacting laws that were programmed into combat and police drones that hovered over the cities and towns in which the Bhoot lived.

As she first found her apartment, for example, she found no communication devices. This was part of the government’s real control: one facet was communication, of which technological devices to enable it were banned unless approved by the government and commerce committees. Furthermore, and most noticeably, no meeting between more than two people was ever permitted; the streets, even when relatively busy, were full of people whose paths never intersected for fear of it constituting a meeting; most never came within three metres of each other.

The second facet was ownership; this state-military-industrial elite possessed every spaceship she saw, and all transport for long distance, which meant no entering or leaving a local area without their permission.

Weczer7 found herself oddly unmoved by all of this; what dismayed her was that, despite them being free to do so, she heard no resentment, no anger amongst citizens in private. Even when they knew they were not being listened to (even if they were being tracked), many of them spoke of a glorious system, a great nation, and of “traditional Bhoot values.”

Perhaps, she told herself, she was looking at it from an alien perspective. Maybe this suited them. Maybe it truly was their way. But she couldn’t fathom it; there was no understanding that complicity, that rampant desire to support a system that held them back. Many of them told Weczer that they would soon be inside that elite, sharing in the spoils, but when she asked, she could not get anyone to name someone else who had achieved this feat. Their ideas had sprung not from evidence, but from the screen on their bedroom wall, which issued nightly the torrent of assurance that it was possible.

Always she asked herself whether to intervene was to raise the ugly spectre of paternalism that had dogged ancient Qareen empires. The final straw finally occurred one day when, spotting an elusive but foolishly public three-person meeting, she also witnessed its drastic termination. The grey, battered and unpainted AI drone swept down from the sky, weapons blazing, hitting the three of them with brutal accuracy and effectiveness, but of course never killing, for to kill them was to martyr them; instead, the intense maiming would incentivise them towards the truth path, to use the government terminology.

As she saw their clothes singe and their bodies writhe and their voices pierce the air with unnatural shrieks, she made her decision. Condescending, patronising, paternalistic or otherwise, she would defend the values of her culture, initiate an initiative, an uprising, a shaking off, and the first step was to strike at the heart of this alleged Democratic Republic.

5

The Walk-In Contradiction/Lemonless/Spaceship Plus was, thought Weczer7/11,191, a truly magnificent spaceship. Half a kilometre in diameter, and disc-shaped barring its two cylindrical superlight drives on support struts either side – a fairly standard Qareen design – it had a dozen decks, but the ship had everything she could have imagined – Kaizener courts aplenty, programmable matter that the crew were fond of using to the full, shifting walls and staircases so the ship was never the same from day to day, and VR simulations that were practically indistinguishable from reality. Practically, of course, because where it simulated a known environment, there were gaps in the information. Having selected Earth, another place that, like the assignment that was approaching for her, was something of an enigma to the Qareen, she found herself in an area labelled Tajikstan, and this was where the simulation and its database faltered – there was little information, and so the people in the streets were doing very little other than walking or standing.

She called up the settings and changed it again. She found herself on a narrow lane, a pair of bollards in front of her, the foliage and walls either side obscuring a crossroads busy with traffic. It was raining lightly. To her right was a large field surrounded by fencing. As she walked the length of the road, she found a sign, reading “Melbourne Avenue”. Australia, she thought, cannot be right. It was too cold for that, if she remembered rightly. United Kingdom, the ship’s computer prompted.

Well, she thought, it seems like a nice enough place. She hoped the Bhoot planet was as pleasant.

The Malevolent Laughter of Hegemony by Magnitudes

Date: 1,988,612 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 337 (Shango), N.A. 34 (Qareen)
Location: outer edges of NGC4038

1

Skirting around the outer edges of the galaxy, the Stoppan ship Vehicular Array for a Spring Day (39) had a crew who were, collectively, in a buoyant mood. It was only too justifiable, too; this was the furthest in the galaxy that the Stoppan race as a whole had ever reached, and it was the perhaps the most detailed self-survey of the area they had. Of course, the Shango Federation had been most generous with their own data, with all the confidence of a civilisation that knew it wouldn’t be surpassed soon, but the Stoppan were not ones to take such information for granted, however benignly it was offered. As such, the Vehicular Array was one of those particular designated ships dispatched with an almost completely open mission: go forth, and discover whatever needs discovering, and take years to do so if necessary.

The journey had already thrown up plenty. Amongst dozens of planets, they had found the ruins of dead civilisations, and struck a particular hit as they found one that the Shango didn’t know about; on the northern hemisphere of an uninhabited planet five hundred parsecs out and twenty down from the safety zone of Stoppan space. Of course, transgalactic diplomacy was not a competition, but to score a point against the Federation was something to celebrate nonetheless; having met only one alien race in their lifetime, and never fought a war with them, this was the closest to any sort of glorious victory-in-battle that they were going to receive.

Yet the journey took a turn for the stranger five years in. On that day, the ship had already reached one planet, and made another discovery, albeit one the Shango quickly confirmed their awareness of. This always blunted the joy of discovery a little, but it was no matter; the ship left orbit again, and headed along its planned route near the galactic edge, hoping to sweep in increments back into the ‘thick’ of the galaxy, away from the dusty domain they found themselves in. It was then that the ship flashed in with almost cartoon-like speed, slamming to a rapid stop and hanging ominously in their path. It was alien, for sure. It was beyond anything they had seen. Was it Shango? Was it hostile?

2

The captain examined the ship, and its sharp, jagged contours. Certainly it looked hostile, but then again, the Shango’s bluff, brutal designs were similarly aggressive to the uninformed. Aesthetics were no guide to potential action. Still, the colour and that exploded, shattered shape combined to form an uneasy image; the detailing that a zoomed picture revealed suggested a ship designed with immense but casual complexity out of possibility rather than necessity.

Then again, who was he to judge an alien race?

“Working on a message, captain,” the comms and data officer said, “standard greeting?”

“Standard greeting.”

On the ship’s holographic 3D view in the centre of the bridge, itself in the centre of the ship, the mysterious vessel hung motionless in the centre of all centres, poised as if a weapon held in the invisible hand of a cosmic hunter. For several minutes it stayed, and finally, a message returned.

“Congratulations,” the data officer read out, “if we have judged correctly, you must be a Stoppan vessel located outside of normal space. Indeed, if we have judged correctly, you should be able to read this message. You have come into contact with representatives from the Dharan Republic, whose jurisdiction extends across this galaxy and others. We have suspected the existence of the Stoppan people for some time, due to our contact with the Shango Federation, but it is a pleasure to receive potential confirmation, and we are happy to open diplomatic relations, if you care to respond.”

“Captain, your thoughts?”

There was a lengthy pause, during which the captain pushed buttons on a nearby console, relaying the message across the ship. As he did so, he thought carefully. Such a ship could potentially eliminate theirs with ease, Sensor data revealed that the ship had crossed through a distance in space in one second that the Vehicular Array on a Spring Day (39) typically managed in a day and a half. They were like ants bowing down to giants, and he wondered if such a thing could ever amount to diplomacy.

“They would appear to be friendly. Their technology is far more advanced, judging from the ship, and it would be unwise to brush them aside if they ask for an audience. Official diplomacy, though? We cannot take on that capacity. Not for all of Stoppan civilisation. Send a message to state as such.”

The crew murmured their agreement. There was tension on that bridge, but the captain knew what the rest of them surely did: maybe the second biggest ever moment of Stoppan history was approaching.

3

The Dharans beamed onto the Stoppan ship, apparently wishing to maintain secrecy over their technology. It was perhaps understandable; for all their relative primitivism, the Stoppans could almost certainly scan and extract data from much of the ship, although an attempt to do this externally failed. The captain reckoned that no Shango had ever seen the inside of a Dharan ship either.

The Dharans themselves, a relatively tall race of people, at least to Stoppan eyes, twice the height of them, with five fingers to a hand, two eyes to a face. The captain welcomed them warmly, and they were similarly polite, although he inevitably noticed their subconcious expressions of mild shock and distaste. They knew they were in a less advanced environment, and despite everything, struggled to conceal it. As they toured the ship, they feigned interest in technology they doubtless regarded as archaic, and the captain couldn’t help but feel that if only they had, for example, brought some damn musicians or artists on board, they would have something to show.

“We must nonetheless meet some of your leaders. Your higher-ups,” the lead Dharan explained.

The captain explained that the ship had taken years to reach the place it had, and would potentially take months to get back.

“It’s no problem. We can tractor beam it, if you give us the co-ordinates.”

4

“Report.”

“The Shango have finally got back to us, captain, from Darkworld Franklin itself. They seem legit, everything we’ve sent is confirmed and corroborated.”

Of course, the captain had that brief flash of thought in the back of his mind, sensing conspiracy. Even if it was true, though, how was he to know? He reasoned that he could not, and to blame him for unwittingly bringing about a Stoppan downfall, just as the Republic approached greatness, would have been harsh in the extreme.

Still, as he sat at his chair, behind the ring shaped table skirting around the whole bridge, looking to the holographic projection in the centre of the room, he couldn’t help but notice how the dot of the Dharan ship, with the Vehicular Array (39) in tow, was visibly moving across a screen that was showing the whole of the galaxy. Officers around the perimeter could only scan the ship in puzzlement; the spatial-temporal forces on it had to be immense, unbearable, by rights smashing the ship into subatomic splinters with an instantaneous reaction to make the Planck era an apparent eternity.

Whatever was protecting it, however, was nonetheless keeping it completely intact.

There was little to really do now. The mission had started as an open one, and only the vaguest of plans were to be set up, but now that the ship was clearly heading back to Stoppan space, the captain felt a slight sense of hopelessness – or was it just a feeling of restriction? Either way, there was a determinism afoot that he wasn’t sure he liked.

He decided to stop staring at the projection, which stated that the journey would take three more minutes, and head towards the ship’s exit teleporters, positioned towards the rear of the ship. Down the corridors, making his way past scurrying members of his own crew and occasionally around hunched Dharans attempting to cope with the low ceilings, he reached the sparsely-furnished teleporter rooms, with its two crew members on opposite consoles on the other side of the circular room.

“Sir, we’ll be arriving shortly,” the one nearest the door said.

“I know. I’ve informed the government on Res 33 already.”

The thirty-third planet of the Stoppan Republic was the one that nominally controlled the others, although in truth, it only really served as a site for a representative government in times like this; it was also chosen for being the centre, or the closest planet to the centre, of the subsequent Republic that spanned some three hundred planets across two hundred systems.

“Do they know all about the situation we have?”

“They should do, although my message was vague. If nothing else, they will soon. How long until we reach 33?”

“Seconds, sir. We’re practically there.”

The captain nodded. “Beam me directly to Central Government Headquarters. I’ve got important news to deliver.”

Train

Year: 1,988,405 A.D. (Gregorian), W.Y. 127 (Shango), C.E. 13 (Qareen)
Location: nr. Darkworld Franklin

1

The walk to the captain’s office had been one of twisting corridors and low ceilings, of narrow passages surrounded by displays and components, and of glimpses into small rooms where the floorspace could maybe accomodate two standing to work at a machine. After what felt like a kilometre of this, she had finally arrived at the office, which was seemingly the only room on the ship that was of sensible dimensions for a Shango. The captain, naturally, was a large-built and tall man in order to compensate for this.

“Welcome aboard the Shango Federation Ship Total Wipeout,” he said, “Captain Ilrap. You are…”

He said this whilst remaining sat. He invited her, in turn, to sit.

“Kolliq, Kolliq Derro. I’m applying for the-”

“Tracklayer role. Yes indeed. Been a difficult role to fill.”

The Total Wipeout, it transpired, had gone through three different tracklayers in the previous year.

“The first guy was simply not good enough. Half of his time here was spent off-ship, because of the damage we took. The second guy had some extremely rare condition that caused him to react to flashing lights – can you imagine? Can’t gaze at brief flashes in the midst of a space-based battle? Ridiculous. Why he hid that from us, when it became so obvious…”

He gazed at the desk in silent annoyance for a few seconds, then continued.
“And recently we’ve been using an AI, but they’re just not quite as up to the task as a human. Great defensively, but they can’t position for firing. What I’m saying, Ms. Derro, is that after all of this, this ship is very, very much ready for a highly competent tracklayer. You have to be capable. So are you ready to proceed?”

“Yes.”

The desk shifted in appearance underneath his hands, transferring from its previous wooden look to a display of a timeline, instantly recognisable to Kolliq as her Utilisation Statement. The U.S. contained few gaps, although it did contain a broad theme to it.

“I see you have extensive experience in civilian piloting,” the captain noted, “it is a fairly low-pressure environment, most of the time.”

“It can be. I would also note, though…”

She reached over, highlighted three small bits in orange, and pulled them away from the long timeline bar in the display.

“…I do also have racing experience. Requires some originality and spontaneous thinking to do that, especially in the laned sublight series I’ve competed in.”

The captain nodded, and drew the blocks across the table towards him. A series of statistics unravelled in sprawls of architect lines as he did so, great stacked rivers of information torrenting outwards in the Federal language of Umbekkr.

He gazed over it, taking in statistics and reports and gently bumping away offers to be told more. When he looked up again, he gave a confident smile.

“Well, Ms. Derro, this does seem to qualify you. Of course, we would never let you, or any other candidate, into a battle situation without a thorough assessment. Even if there is an ever-escalating war on.”

Kolliq nodded. The view on the screen behind showed the surrounding space, which, given that it was a mere few parsecs from Darkworld Franklin, was unlikely to face a direct attack – yet. The way the war – the wars, plural, in fact – had gone, it would not be long before even this area of space would be under attack.

2

What surprised Kolliq at first was how they actually gave her the ship for the assessment, with a First Pivot on standby. They had also not limited superlight speeds. They had a lot of confidence in her.

She settled into the booth, where the controls were arrayed in front of her, and the screen in front showed a genuine, front-of-ship view, although the fractal mass of screens around it showed numerous other pieces of data that she was tempted to get distracted by.

The first task was simple enough – fly off from the current, static position near Franklin to the mocked-up battle sight a parsec away. The burst of speed from the ship – it was not a small machine, and it was tempting to think in terms of Darkworld physics, or even planetary terms – was surprising enough, but the middle circle of screens had one indicated an ETA to the site, and listed it in mere Earth minutes, rather than the leisurely courses she had piloted in the past. Even the racing machines couldn’t quite touch this.

As soon as she reached the site, the enemy ships (pure focused AI constructs with membrane-attuned self-preservation protocols) opened fire immediately. Shield energy drained slowly but surely. She looked down at the railed course plotted in front of her, bumped a holographic points symbol onto the track, and from there extended two fingers from it and, with a fluid wrist action, sent those rails curving back on themselves, twisting and turning away evasively. Some damage had been done, but it was easily survivable. She continued, for what felt like several minutes but was probably less, to evade and duck various laser and uvaser fire, and eventually decided that she had to fight back.

The Total Wipeout swung in, and began a corkscrew descent through the mass of ships, beam weapons and assembled ammo flinging outwards in maelstroms towards each ship, and at the end of the volley she suspected a sighting of the white blast of an alkahest ray. She flicked her eyes over the outer screens for confirmation but found none with just a glance; as she looked back, she saw a flash and a partial eclipse of the nearby star, a certain hit.

She curved the rails ahead into a sharp bank to bring the ship about, and just ducked most of a further fusilade; the Total returned fire, and this time she saw it, that milky-white fire that suggested a lack of shield energy. More flashes, more artificial asteroids shot past. As she continued to fire, more flashes; this time, two of them managed to collide, producing another flash and showering the view with debris.

One ship remained, and it continued to fire, hitting more often than not. The shields were running low.

Think, Kolliq thought. There has to be something you can do. She examined one of the other views and found the ship to be behind and above her, swooping in. She figured it out.

She switched the rails off, cutting the ship free from the pair of forcefield shackles it been bound by, threw the engines into dorsal-aft asymmetry, and with the ship powersliding through space on Newtonian physics alone, watched as the last white beam stuttered across the ship’s underbelly, flashes erupted across its hull and a rain of exotic material slammed against the camera view with such force that she instinctively flinched.

3

“Most impressive,” the captain said almost immediately afterwards, after a pause that was just long enough to qualify as dramatic. “That thing you did, at the end?”

“I took it off the rails and used the thrusters naturally.”

“That doesn’t necessarily guarantee directional accuracy, though. A tighter track could’ve turned the ship around faster.”

“Yes, but the unpredictability and impreciseness of the ship’s movement made the enemy’s targeting slightly more difficult.”

The captain nodded. “Well, it worked. I can’t argue with that.”

The main screen in the tracklayer booth flashed up the statistics, like a high scores board from an old arcade game. Six ships were eliminated in 7/492; not a result repeatable in real life, but a strong one nonetheless. Kolliq stared ahead, the concentration she had been under during the assessment proving hard to shake.

“That is definitely the best performance I’ve seen in the last year. You’re hired, if you still want it-”

“Yes, sir. When do I start?”

“We’ll probably get a posting as soon as we return to Franklin. Or to Rama, at least. Straight away, unless you especially need anything to work.”

Sure enough, she looped the ship back at maximum speed. With only a slightly longer journey time than the route out, they were soon back, the main screen showing the Federation capital looming ever larger as they approached. Kolliq actually lived – or perhaps now, used to live – several thousand parsecs from Franklin, on a planet just shy of one of the heavy-stellar-formation or HSF zones on the edge of the galaxy, and she had come there as a refugee from another planet whose star had very rapidly gone supernova; only Shango technology had saved anyone from such an event. But both residences had been backwards, “rural”, as it were, and did not compare to this gargantuan planetary sprawl of three trillion people, served by no less than a quartet of Darkmoons. As she skirted the ship around that artificial planet, towards the night side where city lights represented a mere fraction of the population living there. In the darkness, a mysterious circle of utter black where the stars were blocked out revealed the presence of Darkmoon Rama, and with the circles of screens confirming it, she locked in an orbit.

Once the orbit was set, she, the captain, the second-in-command and the first pivot headed back through the labyrinth of corridors.

“Any questions? You were very eager to take the role. Unquestioningly, in fact. The military does not tend to approve of such behaviour in non-critical situations.”

“Sorry, I-”

“Not a worry. It’s one of the very few mistakes I have seen from you, and it was a minor one. The point is this; that unquestioningness, we have heard it to be a Qareen quality. True or not, I’ll nonetheless make the point – except in an emergency, it is acceptable to use initiative, to question, to ask. You may have heard that the military demands discipline and obedience; that is true to some extent, but not absolutely.”

They rounded another corner in single file, and passed yet another room that barely qualified as a cupboard.

“OK,” she replied, “how about this. When I was a civilian pilot, every room had hectares of space. This ship seems to have tiny rooms. Just wondering, why?”

“Well, it is a ship to fight battles in. When determining the lives and fates of quadrillions, of a whole galaxy, Ms. Derro, you should not be too relaxed about it.”

“I guess not.”

4

The SFS Total Wipeout‘s first mission after that was to head towards Darkworld Taurus, just inside the Intersection Zone, but still thousands of parsecs away; such a journey would take days, and involved Kolliq mostly bumping that small holographic infinity symbol onto the track and letting the sensors scan ahead, finding no fault in continuing onwards in its path for parsec after parsec.
Still, she found Captain Ilrap’s words to be accurate. Taurus, at mimimum, had at least a trillion inhabitants, but if it fell, then the further consequences could have been the half-dozen systems around it. That didn’t relax her, and lying on her bunk as those on the night shift strolled past did indeed add to the unease. There was no privacy on that ship; any mistakes, any embarrassments, were all very much public.

“It takes a few missions, but it’ll be OK,” the woman on the bunk below, Alati, had said. She could only nod and assume that was true. Alati claimed to have lost a friend on another ship, and assured her that it was losing others, rathering than facing actual death, that was the truly distressing thing. That, she doubted.

Still, the ship remained on its double-forcefield track, shooting forwards at the top speed of around 115 kiloparsecs per Shango year, as the dim reach of inertia insisted it should. She assumed it was inertia, anyhow; she had never been too strong on the physics of superlight travel, recalling vaguely from her education that it was some different form of physics. Different how, she didn’t know and didn’t find to be immediately important.

A week passed without relatively incident, and her job was at the point a somewhat narrow, unskilled one, merely scanning for potential obstacles in their path, even though the first pivot and the backup AI systems would doubtless catch them anyhow. For anything less than a planet, tractor beam or teleport would shift them out of the way too. The endless waiting seemed to heighten the potential danger impending, and she wondered whether she regretted her eagerness to take the job, or whether it would simply be easier to fall asleep for the rest of the journey, and to wake up in the chaos, too emotionally senseless to have to fear what was going on.

It was on day eight that the Total Wipeout began to approach the combat zone; having skirted around, above and below others, receiving messages of victory and the odd word of defeat (worryingly, Kolliq thought, the defeats and victories became increasingly even the closer they got to Taurus). This Intersection War – the third, if she remembered correctly – was perhaps going to go the way of the Shango, after two indecisive results that had not truly separated the sides or struck a crippling blow to either one of them. This one, she thought, had to decide it, even if it lasted her whole lifetime, as it had so far, even if they had to throw a trillion ships into the breach; after all, if the Qareen could simply be allowed to invade Shango space, then who else, what other galactic empire would decide to rule over and oppress them? The Dharans, she thought, would gladly enter the galaxy – if they weren’t already here, as rumoured – and seize it, and perhaps the Qareen’s claimed space too, if their rumoured power was to be believed.

The bridge was oddly calm as they got within twenty parsecs, or an Earth hour and a half, from the battle area.

“Preview shot and data from the Tactical Advance,” the data officer announced, and brought it up on the surrounding walls. Kolliq was tempted to gasp, but refrained. There in the picture, no doubt shot from the cameras fed to the tracklayer booth, were at least a dozen Qareen warships, and data indicated that there were hundreds gathered around Taurus. The fighting had begun an hour ago, and had proved relatively even, although Taurus itself had been bombed in parts, and shot with miasma beams in a bid to spread damage further into the Darkworld. This is what they will stoop to, she had been told, by colleagues, by friends, by the media; they were prepared to inflict disease on their enemies.

The Shango at least had the decency to kill as quickly and painlessly as possible.
There was also the suggestion that Shango reinforcements might tip the balance, at least numbers-wise. Still, the ship raced in, and it was not long afterwards that Kolliq, settled into the booth and ready to engage in the most dangerous computer game, saw the message “weapons engaging” flash up on her main screen.

Dead Cities

Year: 1,997,977 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 29,749 (Shango), N.A. 2987 (Qareen)
Location: Spaceplane 217-D

1

The M.E.A.C. QCS Orchestral Sky/Unvector was the sort of ship that gave Seren4/235,677 an odd feeling. It was probably a daft feeling, if he was honest, and certainly an irrational one to still be having several days after boarding, but all the same, it was there: he didn’t feel comfortable riding through Qareen space on a Shango-constructed starship.

Still, he figured that said uncomfortable feelings would be easily displaced later. What mattered was not that he was on the Orchestral Sky, but the fact that it was heading towards, and, as the ship informed him, a mere hundred parsecs from, Spaceplane 217.

Indeed, as he thought about it, and left his cabin to pace through the corridors in contemplation, he realised that it was indeed all wiped away by 217.

217 – soon to be 217-D – was, as the name suggested, one of the earliest Spaceplanes in the Confederacy. It was the 217th, in fact, and it had maintained itself successfully for thousands of years, shifting its way through the galaxy over that time from the outer, brighter regions of the galaxy where rampant star formation abounded and swung upwards towards the top and centre of Qareen space. Over those thousands of years, it had handled war, terrorism and general unrest with ease. Two Confederate years ago, however, it suddenly went silent, and when the first (and pretty much only) wave of refugees landed primarily on planets, wild, bug-eyed narrations of monster attacks and stalking menaces occurred. Very little sense was actually extracted from these stories, and locally in many areas, decisions were made to put up psychiatric hospitals and units, for the first time in millenia, in order to figure out the numerous cases of apparently incurable insanity.

Whatever was really going on, Seren4 thought, it was perhaps too much for one man to deal with. And whilst he technically wasn’t sent to deal with it, he was nonetheless going to end up there, and he was meant to come face-to-face with whatever the issue was. He hadn’t taken this journey without training; plenty of combat experience in the VRooms, a few games of Fauxwar on about a dozen planets in the two intervening years, and some of this even based on the worst happenings of the Intersection Wars; that was, he had assumed, surely enough.

Now he was more uncertain. Still, he would find out soon enough.

He moved down the corridor, which had been decked out in as much luxuriousness as possible; rare metals (but almost certainly assembler-made), strange compounds, and elaborate art lined the walls and (very high) ceilings and floor. Carpets soft enough to sleep on were ubiquitous. The Mjollnir-Expanse Acquisition Coalition were always ones to treat every commission like a PR stunt, relentlessly determined to prove that they, beyond all others, could build a better ship, in whatever way that meant.

“No chandeliers,” he said to no-one in particular, and as he suspected, the ship morphed the dangling lighting into integrated strips of anonymous but equally coloured and effective lighting. He carried on through the almost-empty ship. There were three others on board, and the whole place had 16 decks and a five-hundred metre length, and those three did not necessarily share the same routine. His conversations had been sparse at best. Still, it was all in good preparation.

He found a transporting platform, stepped onto it, and shifted upwards, moving from his current deck, deck 8, up to deck 1 and the observation room. There the M.E.A.C. had found a way of rendering the ship’s material transparent; no loss of structural integrity, but perfectly clear windows all the same. No Qareen ship would ever bother with such excess.

As he reached the observation deck he found signs of other life on board; Elex7/1,899, a woman whose journey was apparently further than this, possibly, she had hinted, with a destination in Shango space.

#Seren?#, she asked.

#Yes. How’d you guess?#

#One in three chance. Plus Alag9 isn’t really likely to be around this hour, so make it fifty-fifty.#

He nodded, and made his way slowly towards the windows, where she was stood about two metres from them, watching the stars crawl across the view.

#217 will be coming up soon#, she explained, #it’s been good meeting you. Best of luck#.

#Thanks. Same to you#, he replied, then opened up to the others on board. Alag was awake; Seran wasn’t, but he had bid him goodbye beforehand anyway.

#Same to you, too, Alag#, he added, patching through the previous conversation.

#Very best of luck. You will definitely need it#.

And with that, just as it had seemingly worn off, he started to get nervous again.

2

From space, 217 looked like all other Spaceplanes, although it was slightly smaller than the average, given how later projects had grown ever larger.

Essentially, it resembled two huge snowglobes, thousands of kilometres in radii, stuck base-to-base. Halfway up or down both the transparent domes, circling around constructed tracks, would normally have been the artifical sun and moon spotlights, casting light and, well, less intense light on two regions either side of the transparent disc. Around the edge on both sides of the disc, an ice wall marked where there was no further territory.

The Orchestral Sky/Unvector approached the Spaceplane and orbited at a distance of 36,000km. From there, Seren found himself beamed into a public square in 217’s capital, P34, along with what, to human eyes, would appear to be a large tracked vehicle generally resembling a hybrid of an articulated lorry and a battle tank – and indeed, it was armed, albeit not in a manner that could handle a true military onslaught. Twenty metres long by four metres wide by three metres high inside the main area; that was to be home for as long as it took. Stood next to it, he looked around at the utterly still scene in front of him. Dim red lighting provided the bare minimum of visibility to the city streets, as the moon above was turned right down until it appeared as a vague disc-shaped presence in the sky. Beyond that, the stars were visible as if there was no protective dome at all.

After about thirty seconds of such observation, he concluded two certain things: one, that said protective dome was definitely there, and that two, there was no obvious cause; at least, there wasn’t one where he stood. There were, in his mind, two obvious things to do: one was to head to anywhere easily accesible with an AI unit – most likely a hotel – and the second was to head towards the central processor for the whole Spaceplane, but that would take some driving.

He checked the nearest hotel first, which some basic research in the truck-tank revealed to be just beyond the square. Walking in through the automatic doors, taking care not to hurry too quickly – the doors may well have interpreted anyone running towards them as potential attackers – he reached the lobby. A single projected AI zapped into existence in the middle of the mosaic floor.

“First visitor in nearly two years,” it said, “where have you all been?”

“That’s what I’ve been wanting to know,” Seren4 replied, “what about your last visitors?”

The AI nodded his head. “They were behaving… oddly. Like they weren’t quite sane. I shut the doors as soon as I recognised what was going on, and once I did, dozens, maybe hundreds of them, all piled up outside the doors, heaving to get in. Naturally I got the assemblers and beamers working, and reinforced them. If I hadn’t then this place would have been gutted by now. There’s enough damage as it is.”

He pointed upstairs, and zapped out again. Seren headed up there, and instantly the impression from the clean, sparse lobby shifted; walls were splattered with various substances, damage was embedded within them, lighting flickered, floors were filled with trails of mess. Even the worst guests wouldn’t have created such chaos. The PAI zapped back in again.

“Because of the mob outside, I couldn’t get those that slipped in, out. They just ran round the place, ransacked it, as if they were looking for something, and charged around like they had no thoughts of their own.”

Seren could only raise his hand casually in acknowledgement. “So there’s not much to work on, here?”

“My speciality is in running a hotel. I just left this stuff as it is so there’d be evidence. I assumed there would be an investigation.”

“Well, this is the investigation. I guess there just isn’t much here apart from a couple of clues.”

“You’re facing some pretty feral people. But trust me, it’s people who almost certainly caused this. Be careful if you meet any non-projected.”

“Will do.”

He headed out of the hotel again, across the public square to the truck-tank. He wondered if the power grid, having been shut down to emergency reserve, and as a result leaving the whole Spaceplane in a perpetual twilight, should be re-activated. He decided that this was second priority. First priority was the next thing on the checklist: the central processor.

He checked the truck-tank again, just to be sure. Indeed, the central processor was exactly where he suspected; in the dead centre of the Spaceplane, five hundred kilometres to the south-east and some thirty kilometres down into the disc. Choosing not to delay, he slammed the ignition button and started off.

3

Through the forests, a mist had settled and red light, sodium-like, lit the way in stages. The winding roads had enough moisture along their ultra-smooth surfaces to cause the front end of the tank-truck to twitch in search of grip.
Throughout, he saw no-one, but the signs of their possibly present, possibly past presence were ever-present. Burnt-out cars occasionally littered the path, and the houses and local villages Seren passed were often gutted and strewn with debris.

On many levels, it was an astonishing sight, to see such a fallen society. In a civilisation like the Qareen Confederacy, a post-scarcity society in almost all possible respects, Spaceplanes represented the last sign of inequality; like gated communities, they shut off an elite from the normal, planet-dwelling folk. Everyone there usually had to earn their place, be it through military service, technological or scientific accomplishment, artistic achievement, or some other, widely recognised achievement. For those in 217, however, such privelige had suddenly collapsed from under them.

Having driven for three hours, and reasoning that he was nearly at the processor – or at least, that his overland journey was close to complete – he decided to stop, get out and take a break. Having concluded that physical travel, rather than beaming from point to point, would allow him to survey the wider picture of what had happened, he couldn’t help but feel that denying himself the option completely was somewhat unwise. The view in front of him during that break confirmed his point; as he walked around the village, full of trashed, burnt houses and cars, he couldn’t help but feel that it was adding no real extra understanding in concrete terms. All this was, after all, was more devastation, exactly as he had seen for kilometre after kilometre, and just as with the rest of the route, there was no explanation here. He sighed, and as if that long exhalation had deflated him, he slumped onto the bonnet of a particularly blackened vehicle. Doing so made a panel from it clatter loudly to the ground, its sound echoing off the buildings.

And that is when Seren got his explanation.

The first one he just watched until it got within fifty yards of him, at which point he realised that it wasn’t going to stop. When he looked closer, he could see in detail the flailing limbs, the constantly-staring eyes and hear a stuttering growl of the being.

He started to run.

He looked over his shoulder and found there were now three of them. He couldn’t remember where the truck-tank was, only that he was in the right direction.

He continued to run.

There must have been a dozen of them as he reached the main road. The juddering, stuttering noises of their inarticulate throats were blending into a single, continuous groan like a jammed and primitive industrial machine.

The truck-tank was in sight.

Automatically it opened for him, but scanning both him and the chasing pack, it found only Qareen, and hence friendly bodies. He flung himself into the main cab.

“Close the door!”

It did so. As he picked himself up, got behind the wheel, and checked the systems, a series of thuds hit the vehicle. All around the cab, through the various windows and transparent panels, he could see them up close; their eyes intensely bloodshot, their faces coated in blood and grime, their fists slammed in pure aggression.

“Computer, target all weapon systems at-”

“Targets identified as-”

“Do it, do it, do it-”

The weapons opened fire, lasering each of the targets between or in the eyes.
They all dropped to the floor, and Seren suspected the cowardly bastard had probably only targeted them for stun strength or light maiming. The threat, though, was for now gone. The truck-tank autopiloted into reverse, taking care not to crush the bodies that Seren would have gladly splattered just to be rid of whatever they were. Steering around them, it built up speed gradually, and
Seren had a thought.

“Computer?”

“Here.”

“Remind us not to stop at any villages, or settlements of any kind, until we reach the processor. Unless it’s necessary, of course.”

“Noted.”

He sat back and attempted to relax. I preferred this place when nothing stirred, he thought to himself.

4

Ziggurat Fractal Encryption (local version 2987.656 update) in progress.
To: Central Confederate Office for Widescale Emergency
From: Seren4/235,177; Investigating Agent
Subject: Post-Incident Assessment Report for 217-D, Part Four

To all invested,

After three days of investigation I have ultimately located the source and perhaps part of the nature of the incident which has created the disaster that occurred at 217-D. I will hence expound on such issues below.

Cause

After several hours of driving to the central processor, and enduring several attacks (see below) from local citizens, I discovered the ultimate cause of the issue to be biological. The processor’s log, in fact, noted in detail the exact cause before shutdown, which occurred a few hours later. It would appear that the central source of the crisis was an old weapons facility in R88, some two hundred kilometres to the south-east of, and obverse of, P34. Some kind of explosion at the plant appeared to release an experimental biological weapon, a virus designed for anti-terrorist purposes (and hence the native population were not immune) known as PGEN754. Notes from the plant note that the virus is airborn, but survives for only a short time without a host. It is, however, transmissble in relatively close contact (say, within one metre), and it requires some time for the worst symptoms to become obvious to outside observers.

Whilst it would appear that the lack of new hosts in nearly two years has allowed the virus to die out, there are nonetheless still some among the native population who have not died of the disease, which does ultimately appear to be eventually fatal.

Nature

The virus is unlike those generated in other, similar facilities throughout the Confederacy, and indeed without precedent in Qareen history; from there, the confusing narratives generated by eyewitnesses are nonetheless logical. The virus would appear to generate intense amounts of aggression (and, oddly, increased levels of stamina) from the victim, and similarly, it would appear to heavily reduce the victim’s capacity for sentience and concious reason. This includes the capacity for communication; my attempts were often met with relatively feral responses, although some language was used. The victims are often willing to enact such mindless aggression on those suspected of being uninfected, detected seemingly by the victim’s subconcious observation of behaviour and body language.

Whilst there are no precedents to enlighten us from this galaxy regarding the nature of the virus, there is, by an odd coincidence, something to be found in the human database acquired during first contact, as made around three thousand years ago in the agreed Confederate Calendar. In several human cultures, there would appear to be some common folklore that shares some similarity with the incident that has occurred. Whilst we can discard many of the more supernatural aspects of the folklore, and the details are significantly different from many versions of the human stories, we can nonetheless draw much from this legend of what would appear to be termed “the walking dead” in preparation for any further outbreak.

Suggested Course of Action

There would appear to be little to suggest for most other Spaceplanes, as it was 217’s ancient design that predominantly allowed such a facility to be present on it. Almost all such facilities are now properly isolated throughout the Confederacy.

A review on regulating non-Qareen-immune biological weaponry, or at least untargeted weaponry, may well be wise.

My surveying of 217 itself, utilising scans from the central processor, remote surveyance drones and my own observation, would suggest that there are very few survivors, if any, on the Spaceplane at present. Any survivors still present are highly likely to be exposed to the virus, or else in the early stages of contraction. In the long term, it is highly unlikely that there is much in the way of Qareen citizens or material assets that can be extracted from the Spaceplane. Given that the virus has already cost several billion lives, I recommend that it would be unwise to attempt any kind of recovery of the system, and that CCOWE consider the possibility of classifying 217-D as beyond reprieve. [Receiver’s note: CCOWE agreed with this judgement and 217-D was subsequently eliminated, 2987.994].

Starboard

Year: 1,992,209 A.D. (Gregorian), P.W. 11,632 (Shango), N.A. 1168 (Qareen)
Location: Intersection Zone

1

The M.E.A.C. starship SFS Supression Fire had sped three thousand parsecs through the Intersection Zone, heading across and down it towards Darkworld Komodo. It was still some two thousand from its destination when the incident occurred.

On the bridge, the only area of the ship to have any real sense of space and layout, the incident marked a moment of unease. In the middle of the bridge, a round table projected a holographic image of the surrounding space in all directions for some two hundred parsecs; a thin grey line indicated the ship’s intended path through it. Another line, which moved down in another downward arc, came close to intersecting the ship. This in itself was not a problem; the course could always be altered. What was the issue was the nature of the object.

“We suspect it to be a Dharan vessel,” the navigator told the captain.

“The Dharans? Any indication of what they want? Anything out of them at all?”

“None, sir. But then again, we have only sent one message. They might simply be slow in responding.”

The captain moved over to the table from his seat at a raised platform on the left hand side of the bridge, and examined the dot that indicated the Dharan vessel.

“There is only one?”

“There is only one,” another crew member indicated.

“Drop speed,” he ordered no-one in particular, although it was the job of First Pivot to do so, “maintain path. Don’t activate any weapons. We don’t want to seem evasive or hostile. I suspect they are not either of those things, too. Also scan for further Dharan presence at longer range, use network monitoring if you have to.”

The Suppression Fire promptly slowed, and the two dots on the screen continued to merge, albeit more slowly.

“They’re slowing to meet us,” the First Pivot said, eyeing the display over the table, even as he slowed the ship with the console, “I think they are looking to actually meet us.”

“Shit.”

The captain gripped the table and squeezed, as if attempting to crush it. As the equivalent of five Earth minutes passed, he split his gaze between the table and the clock screen, which, by the end, informed him that it was 79/87 in Federal Time. Darkworld Komodo was still a week away, and even if a distress call was sent out, the nearest Darkworld – probably, if he remembered rightly, Darkworld Behemoth – would still probably take at least a day to send a ship. He was truly alone with this Dharan vessel, and would have to do the best he could.

“Sir, we’re entering contact range with the vessel.” The captain nodded in acknowledgement. Of course, contact range differed for Shango and Dharan ships, in any case; Dharan weapons had longer effective ranges, and their ansibles were far less prone to inteference from outside forces. That said, how much so was uncertain, across the whole Federation. The same was probably true of anything Dharan, although it was known that they were a far more advanced civilisation, the kind that could wander into the Intersection Zone and either deal with or outrun any ship with ease. The Federation, the captain knew, could do astonishing things with such technology.

“Display it,” he ordered, and the table shifted to reveal a three-dimensional hologram of ship revealed the scene. The Dharan vessel was a military one, he could tell; the shape of it suggested a sword blade with a mass of bayonets attached, branching out in aggressive fractal patterns. The ship had a very dark green exterior, and was, the captain guessed, about twice as long, wide and high as his own vessel.

“It’s gettting very close,” the First Pivot continued, “they’ll pass within mere kilometres.”

“I’ve sent another message,” the navigator added.

The two vessels continued through space, moving ever closer. The Dharan vessel continued across their path, ever so slowly, slower, in fact, than the rate at which they were travelling, which was already sublight. What were these people doing, he thought, what motive do they have? As far as he was aware, this was the first time in at least a year that the Dharans had shown any kind of presence in the Intersection Zone or the galaxy, although he admitted to himself the possibility of being wrong.

“Still no response.”

The ship was, if anything, slowing, right down, onto the path the Suppression Fire was on.

“I’m slowing it down, captain,” the First Pivot said, “I think these guys are actually stopping.”

“What are they planning?”

“Fuck knows,” the captain said, still gazing at the projection. He paused for a while, then had a thought. “What information do we have about the Dharans?”

A crewman near the front of the bridge brought up the database entry and read it out.

“Dharans. Form of government ultimately unknown, but socially they are relatively unified, suggesting some form of central executive control. Suspected origin in a galaxy around thirteen point eight million parsecs from here. Believed to have some form of inhabitation across the whole supercluster, possibly in every galaxy. Despite a simplistic language compared to us, or even the Qareen, they seem to have faster ships and more advanced technology. Last major involvement known to us in these galaxies was around four hundred years previously, when fifty full-sized Dharan vessels, twenty of them warships, passed directly through Shango space and one landed on Darkworld Franklin, the inhabitants claiming their visit to be diplomatic.”

“Any acts of aggression?”

“There was a misunderstanding during the Intersection Wars, which resulted in damage to a Dharan warship, destruction to thirty-three Shango ships and seventeen Qareen.”

The captain paused to think of another question. As he did so, he noticed that both the Suppression Fire and the Dharan vessel had stopped. A screen wrapping around the bridge showed a heavily zoomed image of it, As he continued to examine it, he spotted a message flashing up on the table console, even though this was not supposed to receive outside communications.

“Bye.”

And with no other explanation, the vessel blasted away at top speed.

Within one Earth hour, it was out of the galaxy.