Let There Be Light

The Uchoshi system, The Forge, 03/10/126 

On a low-level impulse I rented some quarters in a Tash-Murkonite station in Uchoshi, in The Forge, as it was a good base for field-testing a new project: EDENCOM ships! Why all the way out here on the far side of the State? Because Jita is the best place to source these ships and their incredibly expensive components and ammo (the ammo!). The skill requirements are a different matter - only available from DED and CONCORD stations - but anyway Jita is the place so here I am. 

Ever since the class was announced during the Triglavian Invasion, I've been intrigued by the similarity between the physics of the Vorton Projector, and the divine manifestation of St. Jamyl over Mekhios at the final battle of the Elder War - namely the 'chain lightning' phenomenon witnessed when St. Jamyl brought forth God's wrath against the Elder fleet.

So after a very large investment of ISK I now have a Skybreaker and a Stormbringer, and I've been using them against Guristas installations in the northern part of The Forge. 

My God...

The power of these things...

All I have to do is target one thing to give the Projector an initial starting point, then fire it. It then chains up through the next-closest nine targets on its own - regardless of what they are - and I have no control whatsoever over where it goes. The effect is spectacular - spellbinding - exactly as it was when St. Jamyl appeared and saved the Empire.

But I'm troubled by it. Extravagant levels of destruction always does. I mean I'm still going to use it, but every time the chain instantaneously vaporises an entire complex of pirate hab modules and dock structures with their non-combatant populations, I will pray for their souls, for this is a weapon that doesn't give time to get to an escape pod. It is instant, righteous judgement. I wonder if the Consortium really knows what it's unleashed here.

Things being what they are, EDENCOM considers the Arcing Vorton Projector so secret that it only permits me to know how to use it, not how it works. An engineer told me there's a device in there somewhere that opens a dimensional portal into the heart of a star where it channels quark-gluon plasma as a power source and projects it out through the emitters. Personally I doubt that. Personally I think there is a whiff of the Drifter about it, because those emitters bear a strong resemblance to the 'prongs' on a Drifter battleship.

The tangled web of corporations involved in EDENCOM and Upwell and CONCORD and the rest means that they must be involved somewhere, somehow. 

Who do I mean?

Jovian tech!

A fleet of these things would be incredible. The Stormbringer has the shield capacity of a battleship, so I warp into a complex with it and just float there and unleash the lightning and everything melts before my neuro-linked digital eyes. So much more elegant than missiles.

I wonder if there are any real limitations to the scale of it, considering it was originally developed as a Keepstar defence system. Remember that as capsuleer I think this thing into being:

First, the chain reaction...

Then, a wave...

...of pure light...

...and pure heat.

Turns everything to dust and atoms...

Nothing is spared...

It is...

Divine...

Cassandra Tyrannos

 

Somewhere in Khanid...

There is a Drifter ship that appears to bear my name.

A couple of years ago - possibly before the Triglavian Collective appeared dramatically and cryptically out of nowhere/higher dimensions/abyssal space with those scratchy holofeeds that appeared to show them owning Drifter ships with complete impunity - a new class of Drifter ship appeared in New Eden, classified by CONCORD/DED as a 'Drifter Cruiser'.

I saw one a few months ago. It was doing the same thing that other Drifter ships seem to do, which is loiter around stargates or stations or whatever, indifferent to anything until you try to interact with them. This one was close to one of the Jove Observatories that were so sensational and fascinating seven years ago but are now almost completely ignored by humanity.

We ignore them at our peril.

'Cassandra' and 'her' ship also seemed to function the same way as the battleships do - moving by interacting directly with spacetime through those prongs; the free-floating weapons turrets; the shield thing where it seems to phase in and out of some other state.

The godless ex-Jove/Drifters are playing some kind of long-term waiting game. They were put back in their box by the Triglavians who were, at the end of the day, more proactive about their agenda.

Because I remember all those years ago when the Drifters started their invasion in the system I was based in at the time - Nandeza. I witnessed huge face-offs between the Navy and fleets of Drifters, then they just stopped. A stalemate developed. Then they came and stopped the Drifters and changed the nature of stars and pulled all those systems into abyssal purgatory. For which only God will pass final judgement when the time is right.

Now, today, the Drifters are still fighting them in that place; Drifters are still in Anoikis and their Hive systems, obviously; but there are recent reports of them hitting Upwell structures in nullsec and generally interfering with capsuleer operations, with no obvious endgame. It's like an ongoing harrassment policy towards us.

Testing us.

Waiting...

The thing is, I remember how the 'Autothysian Lancers' (as they're now known), would harvest frozen and hard-vacced capsuleer corpses from dead ships by tractoring them into their abominable insides and taking them off to God-knows-where. The speculation at the time was that they were doing this on the ex-Jove/Drifters' behalf because the godless Drifters were using the corpses to make more Drifters.

Actually reanimating them and producing multiple copies!

So if any of these things have found my podded corpses...

For the love of God, does this mean that all the Cassandra Tyrannos are actually me??!!

No, no, it's just a coincidence. 

I've been out there too long...

It's just a name some intelligence analyst in the DED gave them, like a codename, for a category of hostile ship...

Right..?

Heaven

I have a vast and ever-growing archive of cam-drone stills, because New Eden is a staggeringly beautiful part of the cosmos when viewed through the visual enhancements and augmentations that are intrinsic to being jacked into a ship through a neural link. In fact it is an aesthetic unavailable to baseliners as it is not possible to, for example, view the galactic plane with a star in direct line-of-sight. But that is not the point of this journal.

I was reviewing some of this archive on a datapad while I was enjoying some downtime in 'Gottin's Lamp', which is SFRIM's bar in our HQ in the Mehatoor system (in the 24th IC station). I came across some stills from an excursion I'd taken some four years ago and which I'd completely forgotten about: a flight through the Heaven constellation in Curse.  

The Heaven constellation is of course the former home of the First and Second Jove Empires. Then the Jovian Disease happened and the Jovians departed the constellation, leaving the afflicted behind to die, believing they had escaped the Disease - or the 'Curse' that the region is named after. What happened to them after that is history. Or speculation, or rumour, or myth.

The Jove homeworld itself was Utopia III. I came here just because I wanted to visit it. Just because I could visit it.

I knew I would find no trace of the Jove here. Only the Cartel.

I docked in a station orbiting Utopia VI and took some quarters for a couple of days, and just hung out here, with no specific intent. The station was Cartel - an assembly plant for Dramiels and their other designs, that may or may not have benefited from whatever relics the Cartel found here when they moved in.

Centuries have passed since the Jove were here. There is zero trace of their existence now, yet their ghosts - or the suggestion of them - are all around. Or maybe it's all in my mind, given that I read about them so much.

We know where they went. Whether any of them exist at all today is not certain after the events of Caroline's Star and the collapse of the gates in the three regions we knew they inhabited.

It's possible - and there is evidence to suggest it - that the Drifters and those Sleeper artifacts are and were Jovian evolutionary offshoots. Other certain 'Emergent Threats' of the last couple of years mean the Jove are becoming a fading memory of decreasing relevance. How much influence the Society of Conscious Thought - their successors in CONCORD - has within New Eden culture today is uncertain. 

There are still stations all over New Eden that are owned and run by corporations and organisations that were Jovian in origin. Who owns and runs them now..?

Curse is now a pirate-infested wasteland. All that exists here now is destruction and decay. To think that it really was once a Utopia of pure technology and transhumanism. 

But now, who the hell cares..?

Epicenter - Beyond The Infinite

 The J012635 System, Anoikis Cluster, 22:05 hrs NEST

The 'wormhole scanning lottery' - where you can't tell with any certainty which system in Anoikis you're going to land in without passing through, or taking that leap of faith.

It's been several years since I landed in one of these places.

There are just over a hundred of them. A hundred that we know about, anyway.

During my time in Signal Cartel I participated in a project that attempted to precisely locate the 'shattered systems' with respect to the rest of the Anoikis Cluster. The data concluded that they are a separate sub-cluster of star systems some 120 light-years distant from Anoikis. Not actually part of Anoikis at all. Whether the two clusters are gravitationally-bound is not yet known.

A single event, causing the disruption of all the blue giant stars in these systems that were all common to the same region of space; a disruption that caused all the planets in these systems to be laid waste. All the stars have, or had, these 'Epicenters' in a close yet stable orbit around them, all containing similar structures, all containing Sleeper and Talocan artifacts. 

They have been here for millennia, but probably not always in this state of disarray. Question: was this 'Epicenter' a facility? Were these pieces of wreckage once a functioning entity? What is it the 'Epicenter' of? Are those wormholes part of this structure or did they form later, after the event? Why are the wormholes too gravitationally-turbulent to approach?

Hypothesis: the 'Epicenters' were nodes of an ancient Talocan transportation network.

The rift phenomena were their wormholes; their gates to other systems - all the systems that are now 'shattered'. These systems were their homeworlds, after New Eden.

The rift phenomena are still powered, God knows how.

But wherever they went, whatever caused them to abandon this network, long preceded the 'event' that caused this spectacle, which is intriguing...

fascinating...

terrifying...

...because here is evidence of a power known only to God.

Because this is the power of a race that wanted to be Gods. 

Did they succeed?  

Where did you go?

The Sleeper Drones continue their surveillance of this place with all the patience of the Universe itself.

And yet they were not here first.

Hypothesis: the semi-stable, pseudo-randomly-occurring wormholes that have persisted ever since the same event In New Eden that caused this over a decade ago; the wormholes that we humans parasitically use to serve our whims and our purposes, our greed and our bloodlust and our constant need for conflict: those wormholes are a reactivated transportation network between Anoikis and New Eden and within, but it is a network that is malfunctioning, and there is nothing we can do about it.

May the Lord guide those with true faith safely through this abomination of a pretense to His power, His awareness, His benevolence, His wrath, for there is only one God. Only one true Faith.

Amen.

J164710 - Vidette

The Drifter faction hasn't been seen in New Eden since the Nandeza Incursion several weeks ago. The incursion followed soon after the brazen assassination of Jamyl. Then - nothing.

No proliferation, no mass assimilations, no futility in the face of deadly superweapons and no more 7:1 kill ratio.

Starting it in the remote, underpopulated parts of Khanid made no sense either.

Where did they go?

Since then, occasional sightings and loggings of the 'Unidentified Wormholes' that led to the four Drifter complexes known as Barbican, Conflux, Redoubt and Vidette, have continued, so one way to find out what happened to them would be to go and ask them.

I've wanted to dive in and explore one of the complexes again (I did the Barbican a while ago) but whenever I saw them on Overview, I was either in the wrong ship for the task or committed to some other job for the corporation.

The situational geometry wasn't working for me.

Then I saw one while passing through Ashmarir two days ago - an Unidentified Wormhole with the attendant massive Sleeper constructs that appear to be an essential piece of the puzzle.

I was in my Anathema - perfect. I dived straight in.

I found the Vidette complex.

Deserted.

No Drifters.

Just the massive structures as previously reported by others; still active yet attended only by a token Sleeper drone presence.

Shattered planets, with the same type of Turbulent Blue Subgiant star as in all the other shattered systems - Seyllin, T-IPZB, Thera etc. - except here, they're all shattered.

As is always the case with all these places in Anoikis, wherever you are, there is always something sinister nearby (in astronomical terms) which generates that constant feeling of helplessness because, unlike a Drifter battleship, it threatens death on you in ways you can't see and can't do anything about.

J164710 is a 'magnetar system'. A magnetar: a deadly neutron star - a supernova remnant - only 20 kilometres across but more dense than a K3 yellow dwarf like Mishi; saturating the vicinity with X-rays and gamma rays, and generating a magnetic field so strong that it would be lethal within 1,000 kilometres of it, because it takes the atomic nuclei that make up your ship and your body and your brain, and distorts their shape from spheres into cylindrical rods. Can you imagine what that would be like..?

It's a common theme in the cosmos: the deadliest stuff often shines the brightest. Drawing you in, seducing you.

Sidebar: Magnetars give off gamma ray bursts that should be detectable from the New Eden cluster, which would allow more accurate determination of where Anoikis actually is. If Anoikis is 1,300 light-years away, it can't be possible that this magnetar and the others within Anoikis all formed within the last 1,300 years it would take for detectable gamma ray bursts to reach us, because we would have seen and recorded the supernovae that generated them. Also, a powerful gamma ray burst from that distance has the ability to make a planet's own magnetic field ring like a bell. We wouldn't miss it...
 
The Sleeper structures in the Vidette complex are still there: one damaged yet still powered. Whatever dreams the Sleepers were having; whatever world they were inhabiting, would this corrupted shape be a part of it? Would they be living in a virtual hell?

Eventually, one Drifter battleship showed up. I dared not decloak. Would it have ignored me, or one-shot me? A 50/50 chance. One that I'm not wasting a ship on.

I couldn't progress any further into the Vidette complex because it is still necessary to be part of a fleet in order to achieve the simultaneous hacking of the complex's data cores, so I saw no more reason to stick around.

I tracked down a few exit wormholes and dived into one of them, emerging in MOCW-2 in Insmother, 49 light-years from home base in Danera. A single-gate dead-end system that serves no purpose except to cultivate sov-fodder.

Another sidebar: the Ginnungagap Nebula near the Kalevala Expanse is prominent and easily visible from MOCW-2. More than any other nebula I've seen so far in New Eden, this one looks terrifying, because whatever is in there that is causing those directional jets of incandescent gas, nothing good can come of it. Unlike the other nebulae in New Eden, this one is active.

I tried docking at the resident Outpost in this system in Insmother just for the hell of it, but I got a big fat lockout signal that was very rude. I'm not having that...

So nobody followed me out of the Vidette complex with its angry magnetar. No Drifter battleships were hovering around on the 'normal' side of the wormhole either.

I had no more answers than I did when I went in there. I only had more questions.

What the hell are the Drifters doing in there?  

What are they waiting for..?