Defence of the Realm

 

The U4-Q2V system, Syndicate 

Syndicate, or the two constellations of the Syndicate Coalition, has become my home, as God has willed it. Part of my role here is maintaining the stability of this part of space so that SynCo's interests can develop and grow both economically and spiritually.

Some of those interests include maintaining the small number of planetside colonies that exist here. You may have seen the recent press release detailing the establishment of the San Mendenaeya colony on XS-XAY IV.

One of those colonies has existed on U4-Q2V III for nearly a century, long before the capsuleer era, long before even SynCo was a thing. A detailed description of the colony's history is available elsewhere, but in short, Intaki refugees established the colony, named 'Pelsiddhakyl', in YC 39, after which it essentially minded its own business until YC115 when it received significant investment from I-RED's 'Project Dustbowl'. At the same time a group of Amarrian missionaries from the Penitent Order of St. Charduzir of Assimia-Reclaimed arrived at the colony and establised a church of their own, in apparent direct conflict with the religious practices of the established Intaki community that had been here for 77 years.

The Project Dustbowl investment only lasted a year. Between then and the present day, tensions between the two religious communities in Pelsiddhakyl have resulted in deaths, a situation that was made worse by interference from the heretic Nauplius and his 'Sedavacantist Church' which caused the near-eradication of the Charduzite mission in what was tantamount to an act of ethnic cleansing. 

Since then, I-RED has restricted access to the colony for its own safety. As an Amarrian I naturally side with the Charduzites and support them in their desire for freedom of worship. I'd like to think that the presence of the Societas and the Cathedral of Syndicate in the interstellar vicinity means that the Sedavacant-whatever won't get anywhere near it. Whether the mission can co-exist with the Intaki, who were there first, remains to be seen. Whether the colony can continue to exist at all, also remains to be seen.

For now, the colony must be supported and defended; so when I was on duty in the ops command centre in the Cathedral and saw there were seven separate 'Cosmic Anomalies' in U4-Q2V - five of which were Serpentis facilities -  I had to do something about it.

The next night I assembled a small fleet. The way the Societas operates, we're all usually busy doing our own thing when there is not a LUMEN 'stratops' mission happening, so an actual SFRIM fleet like this is quite rare, especially out here in Syndicate.

I'd recently taken delivery of a Sacrilege-class Heavy Assault Cruiser. The fit on this ship is a remarkably imaginative fusion of power grid and armor upgrades sourced from all over the cluster, so this Amarrian ship has modules on it that were designed in the Republic. I mean I knew that LUMEN always took a pragmatic approach to ship doctrine (we do operate Typhoons) but fusing Amarr and Minmatar designs into the same ship must be something bordering on heretical, right? Actually, wrong - it's something the Ammatar have been doing for years, look up the 'Autocannon Punisher'.

Anyway, our fleet set off the next evening and headed to U4-Q2V and set about cleansing the system of any cosmic threats.

We found several Havens, hollowed-out rock formations with those unregistered and illegal stargates in the centre of them.

But then this is null-security space, so the concept of illegal is... contentious...

Then we found two Drone Hives. I'm conflicted about these. We seem to assume that Rogue Drones are vermin that are to be eliminated on sight. The thing is they never put up much of a fight. We've never been able to communicate with them and establish their motives; the entire eastern side of the cluster is considered 'their' territory as fallout from Operation Spectrum Breach years ago. 

What do they want?

It's why wasting them always leaves me dissatisfied, like they were actually, really just minding their own business and doing their drone thing their own way.

But if we didn't keep tabs on them like this, what would they become?

One of these 'Strain Mother' things destroyed a Strategic Cruiser I owned a few years ago. That hurt.

But the work had to be done. The colony on U4 must be made safe again.

I have to say the Sacrilege is an incredible ship, it does the work of a battleship but in a package at least 60% smaller with all the manoeuvrability benefits that that implies. If I'd brought my Raven here the job would have taken three times as long and I would have had to stand off at like 130 kms and snipe them all with cruise missiles. Mixing it right up close and personal in the Sacrilege is more fun. 

But then whenever I think on those terms I have to go back to the Cathedral and pray for my soul as eliminating life is not supposed to be fun.

The colony in U4 is safe once again, for now, but this is our duty; this is God's work. God's work is not fun, it's serious.

Keepstar on the Edge of Infinity

 

The desire to seek remoteness is not about adventure, it's about escape - from other people, from yourself. It's a calling. An obligation, to save your soul.

from Essays on New Eden's Sociological Evolution, 3rd Edition

I've been performing a series of experiments with Needlejack Filaments: those devices that came about as a by-product of the Triglavian Invasion.

I'm loath to get into this sort of thing, as it is experimental technology that is still not completely understood, which is why nobody has yet to get past the pseudo-random nature of the result of using one. Something this small, that doesn't need the power of a stargate, that burrows so deep into hyperspace that you end up 50 or more light-years away from where you activated it, but you won't know where, is to be handled very carefully. Yet these things are available on the open market, to be treated like an amusement. A laugh.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have an imagination. These things are dangerous. You could end up in another dimension. You might not ever come back. I mean, do you know of anyone that this has happened to? Of course not, because they don't come back to report on the experience. How many capsuleers do you know that have just disappeared..?

I ran this series of tests using a basic Probe-class frigate, rigged and fitted to a very basic exploration capability but with a couple of missile launchers for a token feeling of safety.

I bought ten of the 'Noise' filaments, had them set up to interface with the ship's systems and warp drive, and departed from my home system of Kor-Azor Prime. The first filament took me back to Syndicate. There was one other capsuleer in the system, ice-mining in an Endurance. I thought about hitting it for a few minutes but then thought better of it as it would be waste of ammo. No way am I going to catch an Endurance, not in a Probe.

The second 'Noise' took me to the Catch region. I'm not really familiar with it. I've never had much cause to go there. I wasn't interested.

The third one flung me way out to the extremely remote outer limits of the cluster - Cobalt Edge!

I've been here once before, six years ago. To this same system, HB-5L3. This is the end of the line - the last system on the network in the north-east. The one with the stargate that reaches out all the way through the centre of Jove space (or what's left of it) to the Tenal region in the even more remote, empty, godforsaken far north. 

But I understand why people want to go there...

The last time I passed through HB-5L3 six years ago there was nothing here, no human presence to speak of except the maintenance crews in the stargates. One of the system's four terrestrial worlds had a few automated weather stations broadcasting faint signals in the radio bands from its surface, but that was it.

But now, to my great surprise, and despite me going on about remoteness and emptiness, there's a damned Keepstar here:  

Pandemic Horde has two industrial facilities, a couple of Ansiblexes, a Pharolux Cyno Generator, and this thing, the whole complex probably housing a population equal to a small planetary colony, out here on the edge of the cluster. 

What in God's name are they doing out here?

It's possible that by advertising this facility's existence in the public domain like this has violated some sort of Horde opsec, but I doubt they'll care. The sheer remoteness of the system is its best defence. If they're building supercaps out here then there is no better location.

Of course the machinery of the faceless bureaucracy even reaches this far, which means the 'sov' out here is actually owned by the enigmatic Pan-Intergalactic Business Community, but these are Horde structures. Some kind of renter arrangement, presumably.

I couldn't hang around too much because a) this Probe is so cheaply-fitted it does not have a cloaking device, b) the ops crew of that Keepstar will have noted my presence here and told somebody, who would have undoubtedly been on their way here right now, and c) the Rogue Drones eventually showed up with those horrible mutations of ex-capsuleer ships with their probably-forcibly-cyborgised crew facing a deathlife worse than that of a Sansha zombie. 

See what I mean about having too much of an imagination..?

Cosmic Rifts and Spacetime Distortions

 

'On a long enough timeline, the survival rate drops to zero'

Overheard in a bar in Kandashi Station in M2-CF1

At some point in the deep past, the area of space that we now call the Syndicate was an unusually violent place - in a cosmic sense, not in terms of the behaviour of its inhabitants. Evidence of that past is demonstrated by three 'landmarks' located here, all of them within a few light-years of each other.

The Cloud Ring Nebula is unmissable of course; proven to be a supernova remnant by Intaki astronomer Alnadil Jouber many years ago, it has always been my favourite piece of cosmic architecture in all of New Eden. If you're in visual range of it, then more than any other nebula in the cluster, you can establish your position in the North-West Quadrant just by looking at it, and I've spent many hours during quiet duty periods in the Cathedral's tactical command centre doing just that.

Cloud Ring from Black Rise

Cloud Ring from Outer Ring

Cloud Ring from Placid

Cloud Ring from Syndicate

The odd thing is if you go to the region named after the Cloud Ring, you're in the centre of the nebula and completely surrounded by it so the effect is not so dramatic, but anyway this is about stuff going on in Syndicate.

There are two other 'things' going on here that are far more dangerous and far less visible, so you can only view them from the systems that are closest to them, but the presence of one of them is given away by the large void in the centre of the stargate map of Syndicate. The network appears to loop around something.

It's called Cord of the Elements.

This is a flaw in spacetime that stretches much further than we can see; the only part of it that is visible from a stargate-connected system - the D-B7YK system - is just a fraction of its total area. You can easily guess the extent of it just by looking at that void in the map, as it forms a natural barrier between the Fed and large parts of the Syndicate.

To travel to D-B7YK from my home system of XS-XAY means traversing the perimeter of that void, some 22 stargate jumps. In reality, XS-XAY is closer to D-B7YK than Poitot is. 

From browsing the scientific literature on the Cord of the Elements, it seems to be similar to the EVE Gate in that it is a massive rift in spacetime that emits extravagantly lethal levels of hard radiation and gravity waves, preventing any close analysis or any transit of it. Probes have gone in there and never come out. Like the EVE Gate, the portion of the Cord we can see is still several light-years away from the closest system; and like the EVE Gate, the sight of it activates a primal fear in the observer. It does in me, anyway.

The residents and guests of the Intaki Syndicate Executive Retreat probably beg to differ. 

Capsuleers are not permitted to dock in this station; it's built exclusively for the owners, directors, heads, CEOs, and ruling families of the various 'city state' stations that form the Intaki Syndicate in all its cosmopolitan diversity. Maybe Silphy herself has a permanent suite here. I would expect her to.

Whatever deals get done here - I tried to look for evidence of a recent Caldari presence re: DS-M4Q - and whatever after-parties take place in those Pleasure Hubs, it is before a stunning vista formed of an incredibly violent cosmic phenomenon that cannot be explained definitively or explored without great personal risk, kind of like a metaphor for the affairs of the Intaki Syndicate itself.

When I took a trip out here, after checking out the Intaki station and confirming that I was in fact not allowed to dock in it, I took up a position in a 'safe' and observed the Cord of the Elements for a while. My sensors were all over the place, it was obviously as deadly as a magnetar in Anoikis. The D-B7YK system is a 'dead-end', uninhabited and unremarkable except for its proximity to this thing, which is, if you consider its sheer size and extent, a far more violent and threatening phenomenon than even the EVE Gate; and yet hardly anybody outside the Syndicate knows about it. Even fewer have visited it, just because it is in deep nullsec. 

 

* * *

The other cosmic phenomenon in this part of space isn't actually in Syndicate, it's in Solitude, a few light-years to the 'south'. I took some licence there, I know, but since the regions of New Eden are entirely a political invention and are mostly determined by the stargate network, the distinction is redundant because the regions of Syndicate and Solitude actually vertically overlap each other with respect to True Galactic North.

So this thing, called Trace Cosmos, is not really in a 'different region' at all. It's just down the road, in a cosmic sense.

Trace Cosmos is a field of miniature black holes visible from the Gererique system. It moves, with pulses of visible light and gravitational shockwaves ripping through clouds of dust and hot plasma . The Fed has built an installation in the Gererique system to monitor it. The Duvolle Gravitational Wave Observatory is here to do serious science; it is not a holiday resort like the place in Syndicate. 

Like the Cord, and like the EVE Gate, you can't get anywhere near the Trace Cosmos for the same reasons: deadly radiation and gravity fluctuations. There are about nine or ten black hole accretion discs visible from Gererique, bright enough in visible wavelengths, but by far the brightest things in the sky in x-rays and gamma rays; but God knows how many of those things there are in there in total, because the Trace Cosmos is like the Cord in that it covers a sufficiently large area of space that the layout of the stargate network has to take it into account. It is the reason why access to Solitude in general is so difficult and why there is another large void in the map between Solitude, Genesis and Aridia.

It's a remarkable coincidence that four violent unstable gravitational phenomena - the Cloud Ring supernova remnant, the Cord of the Elements, the Trace Cosmos and the EVE Gate are all located within about 17 light-years of each other, here in this sector of New Eden.

As to their creation, the Nebula is entirely natural; the Trace probably is too; the EVE Gate almost certainly is not; and as for the Cord, some outlandish fringe theorists have even postulated an artificial, alien origin, like an industrial or scientific accident that occurred aeons ago. That would actually place it on a par with the EVE Gate, if that's what the collapsed EVE Gate was. If aliens caused the Cord of the Elements, we'd see other evidence of their existence somewhere else in New Eden. We have more obvious evidence of our human ancestors in the form of relics from the epochs of the Talocan, Yan Jung etc. Nobody, nothing intelligent appears to have pre-dated human presence in New Eden.

If that wild theory about the Cord is even remotely true then history, from the universe's perspective, keeps on repeating itself, because just a few years ago the W477-P system in Jove space was the location of a catastrophic event that might one day produce something similar to these phenomena, millennia from now.

Then just last year my own Amarrian 'superiors' nearly caused the collapse of a star and the destruction of the Turnur system while attempting to replicate Triglavian technology. And then of course that lot are the only ones seemingly capable of mastering that much power, but to what end?

History does indeed repeat itself all the time, and it is only a matter of time before something happens, or more accurately we cause something to happen, that will, aeons from now, make our descendants build monuments and stations to its aftermath, and they will marvel at its stark cosmic beauty.

That is if we don't wipe ourselves out in the process.

Brief Notes on the Blackglass/Zeugma Combo

 

I upgraded my head recently. I installed a Neural Lace 'Blackglass' Net Intrusion 920-40 implant into what I've come to regard as my Explorer Clone: the version of me that has a whole bunch of very expensive implants installed in it, all to make me uncatchable, undetectable and as slippery as a Gallente politician.

The Blackglass implant is remarkable, incredible in its enhancement of my ship's hacking power. It is so powerful that the total combination of ship, modules and implants means it is now virtually impossible to fail even the most difficult of hacks.

Even when this happens:

And even then I still succeeded in hacking the Serpentis data node. But I'm not proud of this. There was no elegance, no style, no precision to this hack.

Sometimes God sends these things to test us.

Don't get complacent out there. You will die. It might even be me that kills you if you happen to be in Syndicate.

Eight Years On - Titanomachy Revisited

'Most wars start for fairly prosaic reasons.'

New Eden's History of Violence Vol III - Hedion University Archives

It is eight years since one of the biggest, most notorious, most destructive capital ship battles in New Eden history took place.

The Battle of B-R5RB.

A week ago I visited the site for the first time. This is my account.

* * *

Prologue - Tanoo II

When I made the decision to go to B-R5RB I was spending a few days in the Tebu Amkhiman, our Fortizar that symbolically orbits Tanoo II. To be specific, when I made the actual decision I was sat a table smoking a shisha on the terrace of a cafe that is on the main street of an exact replica of a Mishian souk that Directrix Lunarisse has installed here. 

The accuracy of the place is remarkable. Some of it should be impossible because we're inside a space station: sand and dust on the deck; the not-quite-uncomfortably-hot temperature; a light breeze wafting down the street carrying the scents of food and drink and tobacco and other stuff that you might not want to smell; the sounds of people and commerce - a background noise of chatter and barter and debate and argument; and enough overhang in the buildings' facades that you can't quite see that there is no sky if you happen to look up.

There was a holovid on the wall of the cafe playing a music channel. It was my soundtrack as I was randomly paging through my datapad at news articles and I found one that listed the largest space battles in New Eden history in terms of total cost in ISK, and I saw a reference to B-R5RB - the one everyone remembers, the original biggest-ever, the one that made headlines all over the cluster.

I drew a big inhale on the shisha and cast my mind back to when it happened in YC116. I was in my final year at Hedion University and still in the original baseline body my mother gave birth to. My class devoured the holovids and telemetry feeds and cam drone footage from the battle, and we took classes on the tactics involved, and had it drummed into our heads about the importance of paying your bills on time... 

In my time as a capsuleer I'd never got round to visiting the site that memorialises the battle, known as 'Titanomachy'. For some reason I'd forgotten where it was and always believed that B-R5RB was 'up north' and basically inaccessible as it was too deep and too risky to get to.

Then I looked it up on the stargate map on my datapad and realised I'd been an idiot all this time as it was in Immensea, just a few light years away from Tanoo, and that I had every reason to go there now as I owned one of the most powerful covert ops ships in existence - my Pacifier, TES Divinity's Edge.

God willed it.

I literally dropped everything and ran to the Edge's docking bay (I paid my bill at the cafe first. If you don't understand that reference, you will...).

Tanoo is in Derelik. To get to Immensea from Derelik, I needed to pass through the Curse region, so I got to the big Derelik/Curse border gate in the Sendaya system and held station for a while and went through some systems diagnostics, then went through them again, then a third time, just to be sure...

But then again, a ship that may or may not have classified Jove tech in it should feel at home in the ex-Jove space that's named after the disease that made them all leave there, so I dived in.

But nobody was going to catch me today, not at 13.2 AU/s and enough acceleration to achieve that speed in the blink of an eye. With full cloaking/EMCON protocols and nullifiers and these engines and all the other secret CONCORD Aerospace stuff, I was invisible.

This much power can make you complacent, even out here. 

But then I hardly had time to worry about it as soon enough I arrived at the border gate to Immensea and I could see its distinctive blue/white emission nebula in the distance.

 The B-R5RB System in Immensea - 01/16/YC124 - 21:09 hrs

I will refer you to the usual media outlets and search algorithms for more detail on exactly what went down during the twelve-hour battle that happened here (you could start with this one).

In summary, in what you might consider a typical capsuleer mistake, the whole thing started because of a bureaucratic omission. Not an argument, or a loss-of-face, not even a grudge. It happened because of an unpaid sov bill! 

That fact kept replaying in my head - the sheer unbelievability of it - as I got closer to my destination. I jumped into the dead-end, single-gate system and was pleased to see I was the only ship there. I warped to the battle site's marker beacon and just held station for a while, taking it all in through the cam drones.

I've seen Titan wrecks before. I saw 'Steve' once. Most Amarrians have seen the wreck of St. Jamyl's ship in Safizon (peace be upon her) as the wreck is a holy site and indeed a pilgrimage. I haven't seen this many Titan wrecks in the same place.

It's incredible.

Spellbinding.

The sight of any Titan at any time is intimidating, which is the point of them. But even a dead one has the same effect. More than ten of them in the same place is another thing entirely.

These massive ships all shattered, snapped in two, pulled apart.

The wrecks are so big that I speculated that there would still be pressurised compartments in there, holding irradiated corpses with frozen memories of eight years ago. I refrained from finding out because to scan them and establish for sure would be to desecrate the wrecks. In another time or place they might have been classed as war graves and just being here would be illegal, but this is nullsec. 

After the battle, the authorities and the capsuleer community of the time moved quickly to declare the site a monument, as its significance as the largest battle in New Eden's history up to that point - by far - was immediately obvious.

A token boilerplate dome was installed here which has the whiff of ersatz Amarr about it. Kind of kitschy, not really appropriate - because the wrecks themselves are the monument here.

It's not just Titans. There are Dreads, carriers, diminished in scale to bit-part players - afterthoughts.

This battle stands apart from those that eventually surpassed it years later - those other two during the Delve thing - because this one had an element of spontaneity about it. It's always seemed to me like FWS-whatever and the other one had a degree of competition about them, like an intent to set a record for destruction. 

The vulgarity of that.

This one in B-R5RB just happened organically, if you will, and the wrecks are a more morbidly authentic memorial because of it.

But that doesn't mean I admire it. This place inspires awe, sadness and contempt all at the same time; and there are other memorials to it, like the historical record of the price of Tritanium.

I'd like to say this battle is more readily remembered, but then eight years is a long time and I wonder how many new, optimistic, and, let's face it, naive young capsuleers coming out of the AIR cookie-cutter basic training thing today are aware of the existence of this place. What happens in the media feeds on the actual anniversary of this battle will tell you everything you need to know.

With these thoughts riffing through my neuro-linked and enhanced mind, I found I was becoming angry. I shook myself out of it - as much as is possible when your body is jacked into a capsule - and I concentrated on moving Edge around the site, carefully, as small chunks of wreckage occasionally pinged off my shields, and I stopped near one of the big Avatars. Some of their cores still burn. In other wavelengths of light they shine brighter than the system's red giant primary.

I discovered it's actually possible to establish a datalink with the dome. It has a brief explanation of what this place is, and it lists the names of the major participants:

With something like this I always wonder how many of them are still capsuleers or whether any of them have retired or even submitted to permadeath. And I always note how this sort of thing never bothers to list the names of the tens-of-thousands of baseline crew members that will have died in those ships. I said a prayer for them.

I was getting angry again. The thought that all of this was the end result of somebody missing a payment deadline. 

Madness...

I was done here. There was nothing more to say or see or do, which is how it should be. This is not a tourist attraction.

I turned away from the site and prepared to warp out of the system. I left the wrecks to deep time. I'll probably never come this way again as nothing will change within my lifetimes as long as the bureaucrats and nullsec dwellers leave it alone, which the latter certainly will, because of the highly specific code of honour that exists in this part of space. 

From around 10,000 kilometres away, a flourescence of what appears like charged particles is visible surrounding the site. I did not take the time to analyse this phenomenon using my sensor suite, but I speculate it is either fine dust particles from the wreckage interacting with the gas giant's magnetic field, or metal and alloy fragments simply reflecting the red giant's light in the manner of a high altitude cloud. The effect is stunning - almost like a warning.

There is nothing here now but coldness, emptiness, and intense radioactivity with unfathomable half-lives. Nothing will change here for millions of years. The wrecks are massive enough that they will outlast the red giant itself and its inevitable supernova. 

One day, they will be alone with God.