A Not So Brief Visit to the Edge - Part 2 of 2

Chronicles of Expansion: Humanity’s (Accidental) Journey to the Edge of Space

Chapter 6 – With Friends Like That, Who Needs Anomalies?

Down into Zulu-9

What are the chances of two crews finding each other in the farthest reaches of space? Considering zero seems too high a number, it was to be expected that Filippa took her sweet time before answering a mayday call. Could it be a trap? If so, who would have set it up, and how the fuck?

The man on the other end, Major Adeus Mezcal, was clear regarding his intentions. Their ship had been destroyed. His ship. He called it Exodus, confirming Filippa’s earlier suspicions. An uncharted high-gravity anomaly had pulled them off course, and he wasn’t sure what happened afterwards. Those who managed to reach the emergency pods in time had survived, shielded by an exterior panel now spearheading the debris field. That’s when space got weird. Asked where he and his crew came from, Mezcal answered honestly with an “I don’t know.”

One second, we were about to crash-land on a protoplanet orbiting anomaly x-2210, an uncharted quasar, and the next… well, the next we are here.

Nearly thirty of us were lost on the first orbit. I don’t know how… not yet… but we will not survive another trip around your world. Are you able to take us in?

Her world? Far from it! Zulu-9 was a near-edge orphan planet with shallow, worldwide oceans, and periodic tsunamis. It had taken her nearly two hundred years to reach the edge, plus another twenty spent finetuning the orbiter’s instruments to work at the limits of spacetime. Edge-space. What a fucking concept! Nobody aboard her orbiter was ready for what the planet threw at them. Or could it be the quasar that sprouted an anomaly, dooming both crews one orbit at a time? Not that it mattered anymore. Her own ship could not survive another pass through the debris field. She had to get down there, and for that she needed Mezcal’s EPEs. Sure, Zulu-9 may not have been her world, but it was now if everything went according to plan. She issued a quick, stark, and thorough reply.

This is not my world. Not yet at least.

My ship is compromised as well. We have twenty-eight hours. Either we pair and descend before then, or we’re both goners.  

You and any wounded have permission to board the Z-Orbiter. Then we can figure out how to get the rest of your crew in here.

One capsule at a time, starting with yours. I will catch you and bring your pod into the secondary bay. There, you will dislodge any EPEs manually and place them by door number nine, then walk to the infirmary for a med check.

Do I need to warn you of what happens if you deviate from these instructions?

Bluffing. It was the language of her trade, and she had to assume Mezcal spoke it fluently. Besides, Philippa had no cards left to play. She could always depressurize the bay and let space do the dirty work for her, but then what? The EPEs would be shot into the void as well, and she couldn’t risk that. If she knew this, so did he. What choice did she have? Or him?

Emergency boarding on edge-space is a tedious process. The Major was first, quickly stepping into the bay, detaching his capsule’s EPEs, and helping a batch of survivors into the med bay. Each one of the pods that followed carried along a piecewise ticket to salvation. Filippa had calculated twelve kits would do, so there were parts to spare. Time, on the other end of the stick, was short. She had well under twenty-eight hours to meet, greet, debrief, and turn a dozen microgravity anchors into one functional, non-lethal orbital entry solution.

For their meeting, the med bay’s safety shield offered Philippa the only true reassurance available to her. Without the right code, isolation. Move a finger, and the cold kiss of space was next. Designed to protect against disease, nothing could cross the orbiter’s impenetrable barrier, unless the ship’s captain said so. Her word meant salvation, but how useful is power at your deathbed?

Captain or not, Philippa had no choice. She needed Mezcal and his crew, otherwise they would all fall victims to the incoming debris. Their character, at least for the time being, meant nothing. Neither did the little time left on their hands once the boarding process was over.

The edge did as it often does, devouring seconds, minutes, and hours in silence, striking at the worst possible moment. What should have been hours turned to minutes, and a rough entry was now inevitable. She disabled the shield and started shouting orders as if the decrepit stowaways had been in her crew for decades.

We’ve got thirty e-mins! This close to the edge, time means shit, so we better fucking hurry!

Mezcal, I need you and three others to help me set up the EPEs. There’s no time for a walk outside. We’ll install them along the bay’s inner walls. We’ll need four more to help us carry shit around. Get the wounded into the cryochambers, they stay here. Everyone else, follow the signs to the landing matrix. We’ll meet you there.

Did everyone understand the risks involved? She sure hoped so. Installing EPEs inside of a ship was guaranteed to cause catastrophic hull damage, but they had no other options. Most of them would not survive the plunge. There was a real possibility none of them would; not with all the work ahead and so little time to complete it. Each of the twelve kits had to be installed and programmed individually to adapt to rapidly changing conditions during the entry phase. Anything standing between two kits would be pulverized during gravity alignment. Death was out to get Filippa’s new crew. That’s prime edge-space for you right there!

Unavoidable, sudden shifts in gravity, atmospheric pressure, and air composition between the inside and outside of her ship would make matters worse. Much worse. The kits, factory-set to self-correct in real time, were originally intended as a last resort for use on small survival pods. Imagine installing and synchronizing twelve of them in 30 e-mins on a shaking edge orbiter. It was impossible. Instead, each EPE would adjust on its own, interfere with other kits, and tear the ship to shreds before reaching any sort of equilibrium. So much for real time… so much for any type of fucking time…

If her calculations were right, part of the landing matrix could withstand the shaking, and the heat, and the crashlanding. The wounded were already dead, but cryochambers did offer a humane way out of existence. For the rest of them, it was black or white. She knew this, which meant that so did Mezcal.

The Birth of a World

It had been nearly four e-centuries since the orbiter’s remains fell from the sky, crashing into the virgin marshlands, and setting in motion a series of events that Philippa preferred to forget. Other memories were gone on their own will. Whatever Mezcal’s intentions truly were when boarding her ship, those of his crew had left much to be desired. The fucking bastards could not be trusted. In a way, crashlanding on Zulu-9 was only the beginning of the fall, and generations later, descendants of those sinful few and the consequences of their arrogance were all around.

The EPEs had behaved as expected as well, blasting away the outer walls upon entering Zulu-9’s atmosphere. Anyone inside a cryochamber was instantly killed. No surprises there either. Meanwhile at the landing matrix, Philippa’s situation was dire. It is difficult to issue or follow orders when bodies are slamming against the walls, and men’s true tempers beginning to emerge. Little did she know, their precipitous descent was a microcosm of what the world below would be for the next thousand e-years.

You read that right. One thousand. And it was a rather long, insufferable millennium, during which Zulu-9’s newfound fate would bend onto itself, curling, twisting, and turning in the most unimaginable ways. Philippa was now destined to be a central part in this new chapter of humanity, written at the edge of our universe and impossible anywhere else. She would be there for the whole ride. The Elder, they’d call her. Poems would be written about her, and songs chanted through the centuries, but that was still some decades away. For the time being, all she could do was shout and hope to be heard.

You two! Stop messing around! 

Mezcal! Voice commands are shut! Pull the gravity lever down and sit the fuck down!

You two…

That’s the last thing she could remember from the fall. Them two. Those inbred devils. The Exodus twins. Cain and Abel reborn. Hanibal and Carnerus, as well as their blood would go by many names, and rule the one empire to ever grace, or disgrace Zulu-9. In hindsight, they made so quite clear aboard the orbiter, but nobody was paying attention. Otherwise, both would have been killed on the spot. Who could have foreseen the matrix breaking apart the way it did, sending the two brothers and every power-armored suit straight to the planet’s main water source?  

Other personalities, shining amidst an absence of normalcy, ranged from the naïve and innocent to those who would challenge the twins’ grip on power. Magnus had stayed true to his word, proving an invaluable ally for decades, even if his conservative views clashed with hers. It was his demise under Hanibal’s blade that catalyzed the start of Zulu-9’s First War.

The Mags, a group of three brothers and two sisters born in outer space, turned Magnus’ death into their battle-cry, and came within an inch of Carnerus’ neck. That’s as close as they got. One of the sisters may or may not have survived, but her whereabouts were never acknowledged by the victors. Other, less efficient clans met similar ends, including an Old World priestess and her acolytes, enslaved for her alleged mystical abilities. Or Mother Ann and her sixteen children, loyal to the Exodus initiative and the tenets of a long defunct, obsolete conglomerate.

Philippa often wondered how a simple pit stop had turned into the impromptu colonization of an orphan edge planet. A planet that took her whole crew, along with Magnus, Mother Ann, and the twins, whose offspring inherited power, land, and a predisposition for sadism and violence. There would be many more wars through the centuries. She survived them all, courtesy of the army of nanobots tailored to her DNA alone, a technology that to her new contemporaries would have seemed impossible. To them, she was simply The Elder. A trusted advisor to multiple clans on matters of war, politics, and family. It’s no wonder her mysterious disappearance sparked an age of darkness.

How could she stay and watch her kind succumb to carnage yet again? Too many of them were already gone. Friends, family, foes, and for what? Zulu-9 was home to so many clans, families, and minuscule kingdoms that picking a side would have been impossible. Despite facing a mighty common enemy, patches of rock and sand mattered more than freedom. With or without her, the factions would never align.  

Thus, tired of war and famine, she vanished. A cave, hidden deep in the planet’s lone, thunderous mountain range, would be where the Elder’s memory could forever ferment into legend, or so she thought…

An outgoing distress signal triggered her unscheduled awakening. The transmission was far too advanced for the local fauna… unless… How long had she been asleep? Could something else, or someone else have landed on Zulu-9? What were the chances of that?