Writing Soundtrack: SN-1054 by Amie Waters

“Alright everyone, jump confirmed, Wyrmspace Drive cooling down. We have officially arrived in the deadzone”, Captain Ki’Aral spoke on the bridge to her only two passengers.

As expected of my Lady she was glued to the Bridge windows, despite nothing being visible. It was part of the reason she was so fond of this ship, one of the few remaining ones with physical windows. Most ships these days had camera and screen setups, which was much safer, but my Lady Princess Fis’Ennanis wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those ships. In her words: ‘Screens aren’t authentic enough!’

How it made any difference if you couldn’t see anything anyways was beyond me, but I was just a Maid. I was only supposed to love and support my Lady with all my heart, never had anyone said anything about fully understanding her motives and ideas.

“Wow… Okay, that is… interesting”, Captain Ki’Aral spoke once more, looking at the instruments of the ‘Call from the Abyss’’ main sensor suite.

“What is?” And of course Princess Fis’Ennanis jumped at it immediately. Despite being already close to a century in age she hadn’t lost her childlike curiosity and sense of adventure. Otherwise we wouldn’t even be here.

I sighed when I thought about the inevitable punishment awaiting us, we were not supposed to be even close to our current position, not that the Princess cared much.

“Wreckage. Like lots of it. Way too much of it in fact. Almost looks as if this system had once hosted a major conflict between massive fleets. Some of the signals are massive! But I can’t tell if they are one or more ships, too far away from here.”

Neither Captain Ki’Aral nor myself were surprised when Princess Fis’Ennanis immediately ordered the Captain to fly closer.

The ‘Call from the Abyss’ was not a big ship, nor did it have any special weapon systems. The only reason I wasn’t begging the Princess to return us was the fact that it had the best defences the Coraar’Ath’Nu had to offer, despite being barely big enough to qualify as a small corvette. Yet, I couldn’t shake the fear I was feeling deep down. We were far, far beyond the Coraar’Ath’Nu border and deep into the forbidden sector.

Many Maids would probably have a heart attack knowing that, it was called the forbidden sector for a reason after all, but I have served Princess Fis’Ennanis long enough to know that she would not let herself be talked out of it. It wasn’t the first time we were here either, and while the Queen was obviously against the Princess venturing so far out, it was the reason she was given the ‘Call from the Abyss’ and Captain Ki’Aral as a personal ship and crew. The Queen may be unable to fully prevent the Princess from venturing out, but at least she could rest easy knowing she was aboard the most heavily defended ship of the fleet.

That being said, this was the first time we ventured this deeply into the forbidden sector, entering what was often referred to as the deadzone, a section of space that was once part of an ancient empire if the old scriptures are to be believed and had been until a couple hundred years ago been entirely unknown to modern society. Only with the advent of the new AI systems that were able to piece together some of the old scriptures that had so far been untranslated did we even know that there even was a safe route.

And of course, once the Princess learned of it she wanted to visit it. Until now myself and her other attendants had been able to keep her from doing so, but eventually she had set her mind to it and now here we were.

As the ‘Call from the Abyss’ activated its FSD to coast closer to the signals Captain Ki’Aral had picked up, I decided to prepare some tea, mostly to have something to calm my nerves.

While the new AI systems uncovered the existence of the deadzone safe routes, they couldn’t find anything about why there was absolutely nothing there. We were so far outside the Perseus Arm that I couldn’t help but be nervous. Current times were mostly peaceful, the last war was a few hundred years ago, but there were always some who postulated that there was another unknown sentient race out there ready to go to war with us. And with us being so far out in the forbidden sector those discussions wouldn’t entirely leave my mind.

“Here, my Lady”, I said a few minutes later, placing down my Lady’s favourite tea next to her.

“Thank you, Cla’Ama!”, she said with a wide smile, before hugging me, turning my brain to mush for a moment.

She eventually realised my heavy blush and took a step back with a cheapish expression, “Oh, sorry… I… I didn’t want to distract you like that…”, she mumbled while averting her gaze.

I took a moment to reengage my brain before I bowed, my gaze avoiding her as much as hers did mine, “I-It’s okay, my Lady. I apologise if my behaviour makes you uncomfortable.”

With that said I quickly fled to escape the awkward atmosphere that was created. Both of us were fully aware of the situation between us, but neither wanted to talk about it. So I did the next thing that came to mind to distract myself.

While my job as a maid was to care for my Lady, I was also here as a member of this crew as well as my Lady’s friend, and as such I had the task to collect as much data as possible for her to add to her growing collection.

So I went over to the navigational seat of the bridge, it was the one of the only four seats present on the bridge and the one farthest removed from the Captain’s and Co-Pilot's chair, which made it perfect for me when I had to calm down my raging emotions.

I took a few minutes to fully analyse the data on screen before I started recording the interesting details.

The System we were in had no modern classification, the only one we did have was from so long ago neither knew when or by whom it was named. It was entirely unlike modern designations, so the collection of letters and numbers didn’t mean anything to me. LTT 24556 had three planetary bodies that the records spoke of, but only two were visible on the scanners. I ran a quick calculation on where the last one was supposed to be and found only a debris cloud near its suggested location. The distance of the debris from the calculated position of the last planetary body, even including some leeway for unforeseen stellar events, didn’t seem to hold any meaning and could either be part of the large engagement Captain Ki’Aral had spoken off, or be connected to the missing planetary body. We wouldn’t get any more details until we arrived there and from what I could see our current trajectory was, we wouldn’t get there before we flew by the first two debris fields.

Now, as I said, I am a Maid. I had no extended education in astrophysics nor was I an expert in Stellar navigation, not more than anyone who went to normal school anyways, but even I could see something was wrong with this Star System. First off: The metallicity of LTT 24556 was far larger than what the spectroscopic data of the system would have suggested. In Layman's terms: The amount of mass in this system was far higher than what the composition of its parent star would suggest. As far as I was aware, as I said I am neither an expert nor a scholar, this means that something or someone had to introduce the additional mass from out of system. Even if, by whatever stellar mechanics possible, there would have been a natural large influx of rogue objects into the system, the amount present was far too high for such an explanation to be feasible.

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Now, as we have already established, there had to have been some kind of conflict in here considering all the sensor data we had, so most of it could have come from there, but I didn’t know enough about stellar mechanics to know for sure if that was the only contributing factor.

Secondly: Some of the debris from the conflict was ridiculously massive, easily enough to qualify as a small moon, in terms of mass. The Coraar’Ath’Nu navy had some truly massive battleships, but even all of the currently active Super Battle Dreadnaughts wouldn’t mass as much as the debris clusters present in this system.

A quick calculation showed that most of the Coraar’Ath’Nu Navy would have to have fought on both sides of the conflict to create this much debris. And we were one of the biggest Navies in the currently populated space. Only the Determite Empire had more and only by a small margin!

The last thing that was odd about LTT 24556 was the presence of large scale magical phenomena. Space was big and with so much space and any collection of mass the presence of magic was all but unavoidable. It was part of the reason why the Fleet had to visit all populated systems of Coraar’Ath’Nu at least once every half decade, to ensure nothing big was happening in the populated systems. We all heard the horror stories of Deep Space Leviathans being born in far away systems and migrating to the more populated areas in search of food, wreaking destruction and devastation. Luckily Deep Space Leviathans in normal space were rare, most of them were born in Wyrmspace and only very few were capable of traversing the veil between realms to enter normal space.

All that being said, the amount of magic present would have normally caused Leviathans to be born on mass, yet for some reason there was nothing even remotely active on the sensors.

That was until we finally arrived at one of the two planetary bodies of the system.

The first was a small rocky planet tidally locked to the star. On one side the average temperature on the surface was around seven hundred degrees while the dark side had an average temperature of around negative two hundred.

It was a forgettable piece of rock that had nothing going for it outside of the abundance of metals in its crust that no sane person would try to dig up without an entire mining company.

The second one was a small gas giant with four large moons, although only three were designated by the old data we had. LTT 24556 2-A, LTT 24556 2-B, and LTT 24556 2-C.

The first two were only just barely large enough to qualify as moons in the first place, the last one was nearly as big as a small planet. And from what I could see from the sensors was that it had a large concentration of metals and heat in a few spots, although nothing on the frozen surface hinted at the presence of life. My best guess would be undersurface volcanos of some sort.

“Hey, look at that!”, Princess Fis’Ennanis pointed to one part of the console of Captain Ki’Aral, “That debris field is comprised mostly of metal from the sensor data. Let’s take a look, I’m curious to see just what those big splots of mass are!”

And of course the Princess had found something interesting. Most personal maids of the other Princesses complained about how boring life in the core systems was, with politics left, right, and centre. I had the opposite experience. The Princess I was the personal maid for was much too curious for her own good.

Despite that I could only smile at her energy. Sure, the reason I felt these strong emotions were only because of the imprinting we Maids had to go through to ensure loyalty, but even outside of that I couldn’t help but admire her constant curiosity.

After a moment Captain Ki’Aral set course for the debris field and after coming close enough she dropped us out of supercruise, the FSD slowly winding down as we jumped back into normal space.

Immediately my jaw hit the floor.

I knew from the sensors just how big this debris field had to be. I had seen the numbers. I had done the math. But to see it in person? It was… stunning.

The debris field we found was a massive collection of wrecks and rock, the two largest ones being half the size of a small moon! They looked creepy in the near total darkness of space, only sparsely illuminated from the parent star of LTT 24556, but the headlights of the ‘Call from the Abyss’ were more than strong enough to illuminate the debris before us.

Modern Military ships were heavily armoured rectangles of metal, boxy would be a perfectly acceptable term to describe them. The larger the ship the more it deviated from the typical boxy look, but even then they kept rigid lines and sharp corners that made up the majority of spaceship designs. The only exceptions really were the pleasure yachts of high society and ships designed to fly in atmosphere, who needed the more aerodynamic designs to prevent drag and overheating.

The ‘Call from the Abyss’ was one of the largest ships designed for in atmosphere flight and therefore was a far cry from the typical design of modern spaceships, yet for some reason its elegant design was closer to the ones most prominent in the wrecks than the military style.

At least for a majority of the ships.

Sprinkled in between weirdly elegant designed wrecks were some even stranger, almost organic looking. From what I could gather from the entirely different design philosophies, those were the ones of another faction compared to the first. And in general the ships from the second faction were significantly larger. While the first faction had deployed both small and big ships, as well as fighters, the second one only had really big and even bigger ships. The two giant masses belonged to the second faction as well and were, and for all intents and purposes, looked just small planetoids with artificial design. It was so strange to look at.

During the entirety of our flight through the debris field everyone was silent. I kept a continuous record of every sensor, camera, and data feed I could, all the way until Captain Ki’Aral overrode my control of the system and spoke up. “I’m getting a weak short range signal from one of the wrecks. From the telemetry it seems to be a ship around the size of our frigates. One moment.”

She played around with a few controls before her eyebrows rose.

“UNESN Determination… The data it sends is a mess, but the designation is understandable at least. Hang on…”, there was a nearly two minute pause before she spoke again, “I can’t make sense of much of the data, and even the designation is only a rough translation of what the new AI could decode from the old data, so I’m not sure if UNESN means anything or if it is just an attempt to translate something the system doesn’t recognise.”

“How is that thing even powered?”, Princess Fis’Ennanis asked with a frown, “Everything around is dead, like entirely fucking dead, there is nothing there, not even radiation signals. How is that signal even powered?”

“I couldn’t tell you… Let’s fly by and see what we can see”, the Captain answered.

It took us about five minutes to arrive at the signal. Once we came into visual range I tried to make sense of the strange design. It was a mostly sleek and long one, obviously sustained heavy damage with entire sections of the ship missing and open to space. It was surrounded by small craft, at first I thought them smaller fighters, but upon closer inspection they seemed to be something similar to escape pods. Strangely enough all of them were cracked open with no bodies to be found. In space things didn’t decay, so for absolutely nothing to remain was… weird.

After our second tour around the wrecked ship we still couldn’t figure out how this thing was powered. No sensors showed any kind of radiation beyond the normal background radiation from outer space and outside of the weak signal coming from it there were no signs of electronic systems being active.

“Okay… Prepare the Space Suits. Let’s take a closer look!”, Princess Fis’Ennanis declared and I could only sigh. As a proper Maid I should try and persuade her otherwise, but I knew I couldn’t so I didn’t even try. All I would do would be wasting two minutes worth of air before things would resume regardless. So I got up and smiled at the Princess, “I’ll make sure our space suits are ready. I shall be back soon, my Lady.”

To my knowledge I was the only personal maid in service to one of the royal Princesses with extensive combat training both in atmosphere and in vacuum, and this was one of the reasons why. I was also the only personal maid to have her own arsenal of small to heavy weaponry, courtesy of her Majesty the Queen. She knew how her daughter was and made sure I was equipped to handle any and all situations as best as I could.

With a sigh I made my way to the armoury. This deep into the forbidden sector I would definitely need heavy weaponry. And despite my misgivings and the underlying fear I felt for being here, that made me excited. I knew it was unbecoming of a maid, but I loved weapons. The bigger, the better, and I had access to some truly devastating weapons. A small part of my mind was looking forward to finding some strange aliens out there, dead set on hurting my Lady. But only a small part, I was still my Lady’s personal Maid, and her safety was more important than my bloodlust.