Fleet of Charons

 Back when I variously and at different times lived in Khanid and Genesis, a fleet of freighters was a rare sight. Now, living in a highsec 'pipe'** system, I see this sort of thing all the time, although it's no less spectacular for it:

**This pipe being what became, after the Triglavian Invasion and their 'Final Liminality' event, the new principal artery between Amarr and Jita that was for a time called the 'Silk Road' after some obscure and ancient cultural reference that is lost on me.

LUMEN Foundation Day Fleet Review

 

In honour of Foundation Day YC123, LUMEN performed a Fleet Review over several landmarks and installations in the Home System. It was preceded by some formation rehearsals in the Sarum Prime system, followed by the Review itself over the Emperor Family Academy station, the Imperial Navy Honour Guard over the Amarr homeworld, and the newly-commissioned TES St. Jamyl The Liberator and its accompanying fleet.

All of LUMEN were present including our Legionaires (loyalist non-Amarr), which explains the few non-Amarr ships in the formations.

I brought my own Harbinger, the TES Reventador, because in its short tenure under my command it has participated in several fleet actions that were crucial to the defence of the Empire's interests, and has distinguished itself far more than any of my other ships. It deserved to be a part of this formation - LUMEN's own Honour Guard, if you will.

Formation Rehearsals - Sarum Prime

Something this important needed to be practised. Flying in line astern formation is not as easy as you think when you're dealing with battlecruisers and battleships that are slow and massive and have what seems to be the inertia of a planet; but it worked well.

Part I: The Emperor Family Academy, Oris (Amarr VIII) 

We briefed on the possibility that some blasphemous or indeed criminal capsuleer group would attempt to disrupt our show of respect to God and to the Empress. The heretic Nauplius made an appearance in the Local channel, but our show of force - and Zek's Damnation-class Fleet Command ship - clearly sent the appropriate disincentive to all present.

Part II: The Imperial Navy Honour Guard Over Amarr Prime

A hugely impressive sight over Amarr Prime, such a demonstration of power, of faith, of loyalty. An honour to participate. 

Other capsuleers showed up to observe, and they were respectful. On the other hand the Megathron in the cam drone still above was commanded by some idiot capsuleer who attempted to disrupt the proceedings, but we and the Navy collectively ignored him. I would personally have preferred to call on God's Wrath to dispose of this idiot in an appropriately biblical manner.

Part III: TES St. Jamyl The Liberator Fleet 

The Navy has commissioned an Avatar in honour of the late Empress Jamyl and her sacrifice during the atrocity in the Safizon system at the hands of the Drifters in YC117 (at which I was present so many years, so many lifetimes ago, as a naive and inexperienced capsuleer). LUMEN paid its respects in the final phase of our Fleet Review. Other capsuleers were present here too, and were respectful, which is as it should be.

After the conclusion of this final phase we broke formation and headed back to our staging system. On this day I felt no distinction between my Ni-Kunni heritage and my Amarr faith; all present here on Foundation Day are True Amarr as long as their faith is strong, because it is God's will that Holy Amarr will prevail, that New Eden will one day be safe again.

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.

Deus Ex Starship

'Only through many hardships, is a man stripped to his very foundations. And in such a state devoid of distractions is his soul free to soar. And in this he is closest to God'

 

GALNET: Devoid Region (excerpt from Amarrian Scriptures)

Emperor Zaragram Ardishapur II is not a name you will be familiar with unless you are an Amarrian theological scholar.

Or a capsuleer.

The historical legacy of Zaragram has been suppressed over the two millennia since his reign as Emperor, to the extent that there are no references to him by name in anything considered public record from that long ago. Instead you get non-specific references to the ‘head of state’ or ‘the Emperor’.

The reasons for this airbrushing from history are hard to piece together from what little is common knowledge, but it involves the usual corruptions: obsession with power and greed and megalomania, culminating with Zaragram declaring himself a God instead of being content with merely being God‘s choice of Emperor.

In short, he went completely mad. Totally off his gourd. A crazed dictator with a personality cult.

Examples throughout New Eden history indicate that this level of madness invariably reaches its zenith in a serious edifice complex. Thus it was that at some point during his reign, Zaragram ordered the construction of a series of large space stations in the Shastal system in the Devoid region. This collective was named The City of God, naturally after the God Emperor Zaragram himself, but it is not clear why it was built here in Shastal, 9.8 light-years from Amarr, on the edge of the Empire.

'God' worked in mysterious ways.

What happened next is again not clear because it was two thousand years ago, but Zaragram died not long after the completion of the City of God, and his death coincided with the inception of the renegade, underground Order of St. Tetrimon as well as inciting a whole raft of purges and doctrinal schisms within the theocracy that went on to last several centuries.

So nothing’s changed there, then. As an agnostic Ni-Kunni in charge of a starship, I can say things like that, even in public.

The City of God was abandoned and left to decay after the demise of Zaragram and his power structure all those centuries ago. It may have been mostly forgotten about by Amarrian rank-and-file since then, but to those of us who have a cosmic perspective it is impossible to ignore, because it still exists today and is a marked and beaconed navigational hazard which appears on our star charts.

Last week I did the wormhole shuffle from Anoikis and emerged into the Hakshma system in Empress of Amarr. I did a standard operational procedure sitrep to see where the hell I was, and I saw that the Shastal system was just one jump away. The City of God was right there on the map, so I headed straight over there to check out another example of Amarrian architectural abandonware (because I already did the Traumark Installation last year).

Sidebar: Empress of Amarr now looks substantially different from the last time I featured it in this journal. The ship's designers mandated a systemwide upgrade requiring the entire aft half of the ship to be rebuilt in order to accommodate a totally new subsystem architecture, resulting in a massive performance improvement across its entire operational envelope. I never said this before, but I was never totally happy with the ship’s capabilities in its previous iteration, because I came to realise it was never quite as good as it could be for what I wanted it to do; but now, after this upgrade, it’s transformed. It’s a new ship. It’s the ship it could be and now is.

So I arrived in Shastal, saw the City of God on the Overview and warped straight over to it. I expected it to be camped out by Sansha’s Nation pirates as they usually hang out at derelict space stations in this part of space, but no, I had this place to myself.

As well as the sole remaining station hulk, there were also a couple of those jury-rigged, ad-hoc asteroid complex things floating nearby: the ones where they hollow out a bunch of rocks and network them together with access tubes to form industrial facilities in arrangements that have no symmetry and must therefore be dynamically unstable ['cos you know how important that is, right? Mass/balance etc.?]. I got the impression the complexes were relatively recent additions to this site as they appear to be active, but you can never tell for sure whether there are people in these things as they can be run on automatic by robots, or occupied by slaves jacked up on Vitoc and living the eternal deathlife of the trans-cranial microcontroller. Or even miners. All those possibilities probably amount to the same thing to be honest.

There is a hemispherical dome monument here with a statue on it, presumably of Zaragram. I assume this even though I couldn’t find a single image of him to confirm it, because it makes sense that he would do a statue of himself here. The rest of the complex has that familiar vibe that we’ve all seen in derelicts throughout New Eden: failure, hubris and nemesis. The site has been here for two thousand years. If it’s lasted this long, it will be here for all eternity.

And yet if this structure is such an abomination, such an offence to Amarrian orthodoxy, then why doesn't somebody come down here and blow it up, destroy it, dismantle it, scrap it, remove it from the face of the cosmos? Why leave it here where it can be found? It's another core Amarrian trait: tell everybody that something is wrong and to forget it, then leave evidence of it so everyone can remember what to forget.

I drifted across the top of the giant station, the design of which is still in use in the Empire today. I had no idea they were this ancient. In the modern equivalent of these stations, the central core dome usually contains its docking bay. Under normal operations, a ship will emerge from that docking bay through the large opening in the top of the dome, so it represents a means of seeing inside it; but all I saw when I coasted over the dome was an impenetrable dark void, which is something that activates my inner Amarrian and causes me to blur the division between science and religion. Some parts of that station will still be pressurised. There will be corpses in there. Frozen meat popsicles. Ancient Amarr on ice. Perhaps Zaragram himself is in there, at one with his greatest achievement. Nothing I read about him suggests he died elsewhere.

I became aware of a certain kind of historical contrast going on that I had caused by showing up here. Empress of Amarr is the cutting-edge of Amarrian starship technology and embodies the perfect merger of human and machine like nothing else in New Eden. Zaragram declared himself a God in order to become closer to God, but all he had to disguise his mortality was his word. Today, two thousand years after Zaragram and his God complex, I jack into this ship and I become that ship. I get it to do things just by thinking about it, committing actions by thought. I can harness the power of a sun, break the universe's speed limit and traverse a thousand light years in a single breath.

I can also live forever.

To some societies, that kind of power would make me the God.