A few decades ago...
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The massive jumpship took forever to make docking procedures. With the mass of a small moon and the length of a country, accelerating this behemoth took forever. And yet, the Stargate would let only one ship pass every month. So the Federation made the biggest ship imaginable. A million smaller craft were docked inside its shielded hull. They would go everywhere after the jump.
I was trapped in my own starfighter, ready to deploy in case of any danger to my mothership. Like some Byzantine Russian dolls, my mothership was inside the jumpship, like all others. Even if something really stupid attacked the jumpship, I wouldn't be deployed. Between my craft and the void of space, we had two dozen meters of lattice steel armor. Yet my contract forced me to be in a constant state of readiness.
We Humans were condemned to live as nomads among the stars. Thousands of years ago, we lost our homeworld. The cradle of civilization, Earth. The planet was devoured by energies from another dimension. Believe it or not, these energies were nothing short of pure magic. An Apocalypse, historians called it. Not the Abrahamic Apocalypse but freaking Norse Ragnarok, the books said. I guess at least one religion had to be correct. Once the magical Apocalypse struck Earth, or Midgard, or the third rock from Sol, however you want to call it, nobody could go to the planet anymore.
Not for a lack of trying. I guess I am wrong. People could go to the planet, but not come back to space. Magic has one very peculiar effect: It neutralized and stabilized all known radioactive isotopes. Most spaceship reactors depend on those to work. If it was just that, it would be easy to come back. Strap yourself to a good old chemical rocket, and blast off. But the planet doubled in size. Something smashed other worlds along with Earth – the details are fuzzy and irrelevant – more than doubling the escape velocity and making all chemical rockets inviable due to the mass-propulsion ratio. Having to carry one's own fuel up into space was never so hard.
People gave up. We had everything up in space. Habitats, colonies on planets not contaminated by Magic, factories, asteroid mines, we even had local sector jumpships that could travel a few dozen light-years. Humanity looked at our homeworld and decided it was sour grapes.
Then we found the first star gate. Nobody knew who left these massive structures behind. Estimates said it was a type-2 Khardashev civilization at least. People were happy, meaning we got a second data point on how long civilizations lasted. Not so much now, as we approached that level of technological advance.
Regardless of how sentient civilizations get extinct, humanity gladly seized and usurped the star gates. With them, we traveled through the entire galaxy. Long-distance FTL did not cause one to travel back in time, just the appearance of something going back in time when the reference point is subluminal. People traveling at speeds higher than 99% of light speed reported seeing everything. From elder gods to their long-deceased grandmothers.
Nowadays hibernation is mandatory for all personnel undergoing FTL travel. Go to sleep near the Pleiades, and wake up the next "day" near Alpha Sagittarii. Speaking of which, time for a nap of a few years.
*
Magic was a plague. It spreads from world to world, messing with radioactivity and microscopic semiconductor chips, taking these worlds away from our reach. We can make computers that work in magic-rich areas but they are too bulky, too slow, and too dumb to be of any use. The prevalent policy is to leave magic worlds alone. They are not worth the effort and even resources taken from these places tend to explode once they are no longer near the sources of magic.
Even in worlds where the gravitational well is shallow enough to allow chemical rockets to work, it is just not worth the trouble. You see, magic awakens some dormant DNA in almost all creatures. It removes some epigenetic locks present in everyone's DNA and may cause mutations. People may become dwarves, elves, orcs, and other creatures. Some speculate that Earth had, in its past, an age of magic, nowadays called the Atlantean age. It was the cradle of many myths. The truth, as always, was mired in superstition and the fog of time.
The prevalence of these epigenetic locks in every living creature in the universe had the scientists in a bind for centuries. It was proof that the whole galaxy was magical at one point or another, perhaps in its entirety, perhaps in waves.
"Wake up. We have arrived, Lieutenant Parker," Lily the ship AI assistant called me.
Lily was a sort of an enigma. She was a digitized human, a genius who survived the process with her sanity intact. The brass then replicated her digital code across all ships. Nearby, which in space could mean thousands of kilometers, all of the AI assistants shared information. While the one talking to me was "my" Lily, I could board any ship and she would be there, already used to working with me.
And yet she had cooperated with humans and remained sane for thousands upon thousands of years. Uncountable tests have been made on her code and she was deemed safe. Basically a patron saint of humanity in digital form.
I glanced at the AR monitors, and I saw our destination. The KOI-5 system in the Cygnus constellation. Its lone blue planet orbited three stars, an orbital period equal to 24,767 Terran months. Its gravity was three times as strong. People didn't care, we mastered artificial gravity ages ago. They towed the planet away from the main star, dumped massive asteroids on its surface, and created freaking floating continents. A proto-type-2 Khardshev civilization is capable of awesome feats. The planet was terraformed and made inhabitable.
A hundred thousand-something years ago, it was a water refueling facility for a growing human space empire. Until its Core awakened when a magical space monster attacked the system, was defeated, and fell on the planet, causing it to develop a magical aura. A dragon Goddess, if you are so inclined to believe.
Those on the surface were trapped, unable to use their rockets or nuclear engines to leave the world's massive gravity well. Most of their equipment became dead with the arrival of magic, including the artificial gravity plates. The survivors suddenly found their weight tripled and were unable to defend themselves when the monsters struck. Creatures born of magic and imagination out of thin air forced people away from the pursuit of knowledge and into pure survival mode.
On the floating continents on that mini-Neptune planet, cut off from the stars, the people survived the end of their world, mutating as their DNA locks came off, forgetting their origins as the ages passed by. Over the generations, they forgot many things. Unable to manufacture delicate components, they gradually lost their technology, regressing to an age of kings' sorcery and swords. Magic and sorcery replaced their lost technology, and the stars once again became shrouded in mystery. The people of the stars too forgot about their lost brethren, abandoned to their luck. Entering the planet's atmosphere was a sentence of eternal exile.
Yet it remained an important travel hub. This stargate had a Dyson Ring in the barycenter of the system, soaking concentrated energy from the satellites orbiting the two stars. The Stargate needs the energy. It connected to thousands of other gates though we hadn't decoded the access to many of them. Regardless, it was a point of interest that needed to be heavily defended. Humanity couldn't claim sole ownership of the relic.
We were at war with another space-faring civilization. The Ranarians. That's the derogatory name we gave them, not how they call themselves. Surprisingly enough, they look a lot like us.
Nature had these favored shapes. For aquatic swimming creatures, it was the fish. Hundreds of species evolved to be shaped like fish over billions of years, both on Earth and on other planets with life. For aquatic (and some terrestrial) creatures that crawl on the bottom, it is the crab. Once again, hundreds of completely disparate evolutionary paths made creatures look like crabs. For plants, it is the tree. Many of the species we call trees have less in common than a human and a goldfish.
Finally, for sentient life, it is the humanoid. Mighty humble of us to name the shape after ourselves, but that's humans to you. The shape is one everyone is intimately familiar with. Bipedal, with grasping appendages on the upper limbs, walks erect, has two legs, no tail, and a big head with a huge brain. In many systems across the galaxy, creatures that had no contact with each other, and no genetic similarities, evolved to become humanoid after developing sentience.
But that's the only thing we have in common. A rough body shape. Our spacefaring enemies didn't evolve from primates but from amphibians.
The alerts blare. I see in my AR the docking bays opening, letting our mothership off the jumpship. The inertia absorbers block the shock that would snap my spine. After the effects of acceleration on squishy human bodies became an afterthought, engineers had tens of thousands of years to get creative with their mechanisms.
As our mothership sails under the light of the blue star, its docking bays open. I feel my starfighter lock into the launch catapult, the green border in my AR indicating that I am good to go. Then another jolt and I am free.
*
One would think that after a hundred thousand years of technological development, all small attack craft would be piloted by A.I. This is not the case, for a multitude of reasons, most of which I do not know. One, people are cheaper than a good combat A.I. copy. Two, Lily refused to fight. Tweaking her code to force her to cause horrible disasters and the lockdown of entire fleets. Copyright and trademark law survived the space age perfectly well. Three, A.I. pilots can be hacked more easily than a person's brains. Three, the distances involved make radio communication delay a huge factor in coordinating a bunch of bots. Fourth, it keeps the anti-A.I. factions, the cults worried about another robot rebellion, those wary about Lily, and the politicians happy. No President will give a medal to a robot. A hero pilot who blows up a space station with a torpedo always gets a medal. Practicality is nothing compared to the strength of marketing.
Some craft did employ drones, keeping them close to the mother craft to keep them from being seized by electronic warfare suits. But life was sometimes cheaper than the drones. Fortunately, not mine. My cockpit was deep inside my craft. No windows. The AR displays projects themselves all over me, showing me life feedback from the external cameras.
The stargate in KOI-5 is contested and used by both factions. Some ancient software in the Stargate dumps humans through the side facing the blue star, and Ranarians facing the yellow star. Then it's just a matter of crossing around the gate and starting a fight.
Hundreds of thousands of round spacecraft dart toward our jumpship. An equivalent amount of human craft rose to meet the While humans prefer elongated shapes for their ships, Ranarians adore the sphere. I follow the formation of my wing, moving too fast for either lasers or mass drivers. The former needs to stay on target for some time, and the latter has a heinous travel time. We still fly into a rain of metal, courtesy of our frog friends. Our starfighters propel themselves sideways, keeping our noses facing the Ranarians. The shape of our craft gives us a slight advantage while we can offer a smaller profile. We will be fucked when they maneuver to strike at our flanks, though.
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We move in an arc, forcing the frogs to either ignore us and go for the motherships or intercept our wings. Starfighters are cheap and replaceable. A mothership isn't. Also, the frog starfighters are omnidirectional. They can shoot in any direction they want but cannot focus fire. We can but we need to make sure every shot counts. Fighting in space, with the constant shift in acceleration vectors and power drawn from the weapons can eat reactor fuel like a bitch. Five minutes of combat burns the same energy as six months of system cruising. Not to mention the strain on the Starcraft systems. If I make it back to the mothership, my starfighter will be down for maintenance for weeks. Still better than forcing the fabricators to make a new one.
Spoiler alert, I didn't make it back.
Our wing maneuvered into an attack position. The order came and we engaged the rear thrusters, forcing the superstructure to endure 200G of acceleration. I felt nothing. The AR burred the edges of my field into speed lines to tell me I was moving fast. The cluster of metallic balls ahead of us stopped their approach to engage us. I unlocked my weapons and charged the capacitors. Outside my starfighter, the protective covers slid back and let the resonance barrels out.
Target markers painted my sight with red squares. The darker the red, the easier the shot. Some targets shifted to blue, indicating my wingmates claimed those for themselves. We couldn't afford to overkill the frogs. Each blast from our lasers was precious time and energy. Disabling enemy craft was as good as a kill. I marked mine, then set the guns to split fire according to the damage estimates.
The frogs then did something new. Their craft opened up like an apple cut in four, revealing a plethora of guns on the insides. The alpha strike painted my AR white as the cameras were overwhelmed. This was a new model, designed to counter our tactics. Damn.
Tokens on the edge of my AR vanished. My wingmates went down in the assault. A wireframe model of my starfighter appeared, indicating the damage with time-honored colors ranging from green to red. It was mostly red. I fired my weapons, scoring two casualties before I broke off of my wing and engaged in evasive maneuvers. I had to get out of this trap before the frogs could shoot again.
Self-preservation wasn't my only motive. I maneuvered the rear of my starfighter facing the mothership and opened the laser comm link. The servos aligned with the receiver on the mothership and I transmitted the footage and telemetry data to the fleet.
The frogs broke formation too and went on the hunt. I made my starfighter bounce in the vacuum like a pinball, trying to avoid more damage. I didn't want to die in this place. The hits were mostly aimed at my weapon systems. The reason was revealed next.
The bastards fired hunter-seeker missiles. Without my weapons, I had no point defense. Without exposing my rear engines, I wouldn't evade those either. We usually didn't load our starfighters with missiles or torpedoes because the frogs had ablative armor. Perhaps, against this new model, they can be efficient again. Fire some torpedoes after their alpha strike, and pray their insides aren't as shielded as the outside shell.
I eject the damaged sections of my starfighter, making sure to keep the discarded systems running hot to distract the smart missiles. I leave only the rear engines and cockpit attached and turn to face away from the frogs. I don't dare go back to the mothership. If the bloodthirsty amphibians want to waste time chasing each escaping pilot, then the best I can do is to lead them away from the fleet.
The rear engines engage at 10% efficiency. 20G. The inertia dampeners still worked and I safely shot away from the fleet, my starcraft taking me closer to the blue star and the planet orbiting it.
To save energy, I engaged in hibernation protocols.
*
I came back to my senses hurting from head to toe. I could barely breathe and I felt like a massive force pinned me to my chair. The air inside the cockpit was stale and heavy; Life support systems were barely functional. I couldn't move. Everything was dark and my AR implant was offline. My body was hot as if I had a high fever. Even lifting a finger or my eyelids was hard. My body had sunk into the cockpit chair.
Some time passed. I might have lost consciousness for the lack of fresh air. I woke up to the sound of something or someone banging on the outside of the cockpit. A crack in the doorway let fresh air in, instead of out. My eardrums popped as the pressure equalized but I wasn't about to be exposed to the vacuum of space.
Instead, I was on the planet. A place where nobody had ever escaped from in a hundred thousand years.
"Are you okay in there? Lieutenant Parker?" A young woman's voice, clear and sharp as wind chimes, came from outside. How did she know my name?. "Groan if you do. I know you can't talk." I groaned a snort. "Good. Welcome to Koiphyvv," she said before a long silence.
A crowbar sank its teeth in the gap and I heard the woman grunt and heave as she pried the door open. She put something resembling a car jack in the gap and started to crank. The gap opened more, letting in blinding blue sunlight. The natives had adapted their eyes to compensate for the bright blue of the mutated sun.
The hinges finally gave up as the emergency ejection engaged for some reason. The door flew away with the hiss of pneumatic bursts. I saw the woman poke her head inside. She looked as human as one could be and was wearing a navy blue wide-brimmed pointy hat with locks of dark red hair flowing from underneath the hat. She looked young, late teens or early twenties. I found the freckle pattern on her face particularly beautiful.
"Howdy?" She said in perfect English. This world was once one of our colonies but I thought that after a hundred thousand years, they would've drifted into several splinter dialects or languages. "I won't take you out of your seat before your spine grows strong enough. You have more than forty percent odds of dying if I do."
The confidence with which she gave that statement and those odds beggared belief.
"The gravity of this planet is three times your standardized acceleration. Your Grav plates don't work in the magical atmosphere of this world. Your body is not adapted to this and is struggling to keep yourself alive while your very flesh is being infused with magic. The process will take quite a while, so I'm going to nurse you."
I stared at her. How did she know all that?
"I know you're asking yourself how do I know all this," she laughed. "It's easy. I'm Lillianne Fade, the [Time Witch]. I can see past, present, and future. What I did was to look into a future where you explained everything about your spaceships to me."
That should be impossible.
"But magic makes the impossible possible!" She complained with a pout. "Do you want to see a magic trick?" She flicked her hand and a flower appeared. "Neat, huh?"
I wanted to know how long it will take. If she could see the future...
"I do. Why do you doubt me so?" She pretended to be hurt. "You'll take a week to get out of that chair safely. I have food and water here for you. Hope you like the local cuisine."
The cockpit was too narrow for her to come inside. She instead reached my mouth with a thin and long bamboo tube. On the other end, she poured some sort of soup.
"This is a family recipe, a nourishing soup potion. It will heal you and speed up your acclimation at the same time.
I had no other choice but to drink. If she wanted to hurt me, I was powerless to stop.
*
Lilianne Fade didn't kill me. Instead, she attached a bench to the cockpit door and spent the time talking to me. It was odd and I felt like she could read my mind. Every time I thought that, she denied it, stating she was just looking at the future when I told her exactly what I was thinking at that moment. I wondered if this constant violation of every law of causality I knew didn't cause time paradoxes.
"No, because the futures I see are just possibilities. With every choice and every action, they change. Perhaps they become real in parallel alternatives or I'm just doing a highly complex computational prediction. The outcome is the same. The further away into the future I cast my gaze into, the more possibilities I see and the lower the odds of any of them becoming real. What would really violate causality was if I could travel back in time. I can't."
Odd woman. A curious one and rather beautiful. I wonder why she found me so quickly.
"What? Why won't you tell me what you thought just now? Oh, naughty boy, I bet you thought something improper. Let bygones be bygones. If you so adamantly refuse to tell me what you thought, I'll let it slide. Oh. How I found you so quickly. Well, that's easy. Whenever one of the star knights falls on this world, it causes no small amount of turmoil and upheaval. Many factions are trying to get to where you fell, I obscured their [Seers] after I determined where you'd fall so they could only send people after the fact. Yes, I'm not the only one with the power to see the future, though I am the best."
Isn't it boring to know what will happen before it does?
"Nah, not really. The fun part is to get one improbable future and make it happen. You have no idea how many people I kept from marrying the wrong person, instead nudging them into someone who would make them happy. It's like playing dominoes but with Fate. A delight when they all fall in order."
I closed my eyes and relaxed. She was either reading my mind or she was really looking at a moment in the future where we talked. I decided to take a little test. I made a mental note to ask her what her age was when she asked me about this moment.
"I am a hundred and thirty-seven years old," she replied, to my surprise.
Did she read my mind? It was stupid of me. If she could read my mind, she obviously would see through my ruse. I decided I would talk about something random.
"I can see what you are doing. In one future you asked about my mother, another about my father, and another if I was married. I am not," she said with a wide grin.
It took me a week to get strong enough to be removed from my chair. She lifted me like I was a child. To my eternal shame, she stripped me of my jumpsuit and washed my body. "Think I am a [Nurse] if you can. I don't mind either way," Lillianne Fade, self-proclaimed [Time Witch], commented.
*
"We don't have much time. You will surely survive traveling now, but we need to go," Lillianne said.
For someone who could allegedly see the future with perfect clarity, being out of time was a curious occurrence.
"Hey, I'm working miracles here," Lillianne protested. It was easier to believe she could read minds than see the future. "The moment your silver boat started to burn in the re-entry, a dozen factions dispatched their fastest salvage teams our way."
And yet it was a month since I crashed on the planet. My fever was gone and I could walk, albeit with feeble legs. As magic infused my body, I grew stronger and tougher, able to endure the crushing 3G gravity of this planet.
"Yes, a month is a short amount of time. I wish to give you as much time to grow stronger as possible. Now, we need to move. Don't forget your light weapon. You'll need it." As if I would forget my plasma pistol. "In futures where I don't warn you, it stays behind almost 40% of the time."
This woman was obnoxiously certain of everything. But her confidence, her aura, and the fact she had saved my life made me trust her.
"You better," she laughed and smiled. "You know, we'll be great friends. Once you overcome your suspicion, you laugh with me at how silly you are right now. Scaredy cat. Get the AI box too. Lily is coming with us. Let me go get our ride."
I removed the survival kit and my plasma pistol from the cockpit, making sure the weapon worked. This model was specifically designed to work in magic-rich areas. Magic not only stabilized radioactive isotopes but also messed up with any microcircuit smaller than 8nm. Most of the chips in the ship were useless now, short-circuited by whatever crazy distortions to laws of physics this magic world caused but the plasma pistol still worked.
I also disconnected Lily's AI core from the ship and strapped it to my backpack. Lillianne Fade came back with a quadruped lizard equipped with a double saddle. I attached my backpack to the saddlebags and secured it with leather ties. I thought that if they had any risk of falling, Lillianne would warn me. I mounted on the rear seat of the saddle.
"You bet I would. It's fine but now better hold tight to me. Heya!" Lillianne spurred the lizard ahead. I hugged her waspish waist as hard as I could. The lizard ran without shaking us too much as she guided it to avoid our pursuers. It was so deft that it didn't lift much sand as it walked over the scorching dunes.
"What will happen to my ship?" I asked.
"It will be stripped down, broken into pieces, then sold as souvenirs. You see, there are thousands of kingdoms in this world, and many noble families claim to have blood ties with the sky people. Your people. Anything that looks nice or fancy in your ship will be sold as mementos, or heirloom relics so these Nobles can brag to one another. Quite the lucrative business."
What the? "Won't they try to reverse-engineer my technology or something?"
"Why would they?" She asked with a chortle. "The people of Chomskyland have all the blueprints to sky people's technology, and most of it is useless around here. Whatever that pile of metal can do, magic can do too. With much less hassle."
So much for the edge of scientific knowledge. I felt depressed. "Why save me then?"
"Traveling with you will be very exciting! We'll have a ton of adventures together!"
"You can see the future, right?"
"That's my entire build. Seeing the future and making the best out of what I see!"
"Then you already know what adventures we'll have."
"I do."
"If there's no surprise, then why bother?"
"Parker, let me tell you. Seeing something and living it are entirely different things. You can watch a theatrical play a hundred times, but can you then get on the stage and play it? Recite the lines, make the faces, enchant the audience?"
I felt humbled. It was something one needed to get used to to travel with Lillianne Fade. "I get your point."
"And yet, I don't know exactly how things will play out. The future is in constant motion. If I don't tamper with it too much, there are many possible outcomes. You'll make some very interesting life choices, Lieutenant Parker. I look forward to seeing them unfold!"
"Will you at least spare me of the bad ones?"
"Certainly. I wish your story a happy ending, Parker. I truly do," she mellowed out and stated her intent softly. "But getting there is up to you. And even if you reach a bad ending, at least I want you to have fun."
"So you can watch me having fun?"
"So I can have fun with you."
Though I could only see her back, I was sure the redhead [Witch] winked.