(BSS Mewtwo, Sol System)

The freighter shuddered, the deck shaking before it fell out of hyperspace. Too early. But it didn’t feel like the sudden stop of a tarpit trap. Frowning, Slave-Captain Lorna Crowley looked to her pilot. “Sam, what happened? Did we hit a tarpit?”

Samantha Michaels, the Nomad pilot for their Raven-class light freighter shook her head. “No way! That wasn’t any tarpit. I’ve flown into those before, and there’s no way we hit one. Sensors are also not detecting phantom mass readings, like a tarpit would have. We hit some kind of turbulence, that threw us out of warp early.”

Lorna blinked. And blinked again. “Turbulence? How in the hell can there be turbulence in space? There’s no air to go through, and we make sure that we don’t hit anything with the mass sensors! Gwen! What can you tell me?”

Gwen Armstead was frowning at the sensor console, where she acted as navigator for the freighter. “I don’t understand, Lorna. Sensors didn’t detect any objects or other problems that would cause us to fall out of hyperspace like that. The readings I’m starting to get from the system are… strange. I’m going to need a bit to go over them.”

Lorna nodded, and hit a button to open up the intercom. “Myriam! Please tell me that whatever it is that happened didn’t screw up our ship. I know we’ve had some solid jobs recently, but I really don’t want to go to the Master and tell him we broke his ship.”

The sound of her friend, Myriam Spellwaker, laughing grimly came to her from the speakers. “Oh, I’m sure he wouldn’t be too mad, considering that he commissioned this job. He might even pay for it out of his own pocket, if you went and ‘persuaded’ him.”

Lorna shook her head. If their engineer was cracking jokes, then anything that had happened couldn’t be too bad. “You know that he’s a busy man, with a lot of people trying to ‘persuade’ him. Probably would need to be a group, to even have a chance. Now, are you going to tell me how my ship is?”

“You say group like it is a bad thing. I don’t know what happened, but it seems to have knocked the hyperspace emitters out of alignment, and fused the graviton circuit. That’s what caused us to leave hyperspace, but whatever caused the shaking made us drop out. Should be an easy fix, but hyperdrive is down, for the moment. I’m going to want to do full diagnostics on the hyperdrive and other systems before we try and leave the system, but, for now, I can say that whatever happened probably wasn’t a mechanical fault.”

“Fair enough.” She closed the line, considering what she’d learned. The Master had said that there were reports of strange happenings going on in Sol system. Well, across the Empire, really. But something that caused ships to fall out of hyperspace, without the warning signs of a tarpit trap? That was concerning indeed.

Suddenly, Gwen’s voice interrupted her musings. “Lorna, I think I have something!”

Turning to look back to Gwen, she said, “What is it? Do we know what caused this?”

The navigator shook her head. “No clue as to the root cause, but I do have a possible reason we fell out of hyperspace. As you know, the hyperspace drive works by creating a bubble of space-time around the ship, and using gravity to make the bubble ‘fall’ forward, circumventing the speed of light because of a technicality. We slide down the road at faster than light speeds, but inside the bubble, we’re still moving at the same rate, relatively, so we don’t break rules of the universe.”

She took a breath, and then said, in a concerned tone, “From what I’ve seen, we hit the cosmic equivalent of a bump in the road. Or, rather, several of them, all together, and from different directions. The only thing that should be able to warp space out of its relative flatness should be mass, and gravity, but the local space is anything but flat. Something very wrong is going on here.”

Lorna considered that, and said, “Loren, Celestine, man the turrets. I don’t want any unpleasant surprises if things turn ugly.” She breathed a bit easier when she got confirmation that both her gunners, Loren Fence and Celestine Harvest, were already in the upper and lower turrets, respectively. She was glad to have competent gunners like those two on her side.

Gwen’s voice cut through her musing. “Lorna, we have an Imperial corvette that just dropped out of hyperspace half a light-second off our starboard bow. They’re hailing us. It is the INS Thornbush.”

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“On screen. And time to be professional, everyone. At least until this is over.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The main viewscreen lit up, revealing a woman in an Imperial Navy uniform. “Unidentified vessel, this is Captain Kornilova of the INS Thornbush. We’ve noticed your nonstandard entrance to Sol System. Identify and state your intentions.”

Lorna took a moment to look at the chronometer and her sensors. Twelve minutes since they left hyperspace and, judging by the sensors, they were somewhere out by Saturn’s orbit, and twenty degrees above the ecliptic. That turbulence must have shaken them off course. Not bad time to get a ship out here to check on them. It must have been on system patrol somewhere near here.

She took a breath, and then hit a button to open communications. “INS Thornbush, this is the Black Star Ship Mewtwo. Currently en route to Fallharbor Trade Port on the Aurum Throni from Star’s Reach, to trade luxury goods. Be advised, we have encountered a spatial anomaly and were forced out of hyperspace, cause unknown. Currently have damage to our hyperdrive, but believe repairs possible.”

“Understood, Mewtwo. Come to course 34 mark 24.4 mark 128, and we will escort you to Terran orbit. Be advised that attempting to land on Terra without authorization will result in your ship being impounded, if it survives the Greenwave. Thornbush, out.”

Lorna took a breath as the Imperial Navy officer disappeared from the screen. With a touch of her finger, she opened up the intercom to the entire ship. “All right, girls. We’ve got an escort leading us in to the Aurum Throni. Might be a bit longer of a trip than we initially thought, since whatever that turbulence was threw us off course and damaged the hyperdrive.”

“Sam, set course, we’re not looking to cause trouble. Then I want you to check the local Nomad networks, to see if any of your people have any idea what is going on. Gwen, same thing for the civilian networks. Loren, Celestine, rotate breaks, but I want at least one of you on the guns at all times until we are docked. Myriam, I’m on my way to help with repairs, see if we can’t get that hyperdrive working quicker. Something very wrong is going on here, and I don’t want to be out on our own longer than necessary.”

(Nomad OOC Chat – Sol System)

SammyBaby has entered the chat.

Doritobreath: Ooh, haven’t seen that tag before. You a new player, or just visiting?

QuentinHarlech: You cad. Don’t go trying to flirt with them the moment they log in, or you’ll scare them off! Besides, you don’t even know whether the character is male or female!

Doritobreath: You say that like it should matter. Futa means I don’t have to choose!

Inquisitor: Don’t encourage him, Quentin.

SammyBaby: Sorry, not interested. But, for the record, I am female, both RL and here. And, no, I really am not interested in a fling, which is all I would have time for, as I’m just visiting these parts.

Goblin: Well, if you want to get away from it all, the hiking out in Yellowstone is spectacular, especially since Greenwave ate all the factories.

Treehugger: You know, the forests are regrowing in that area way faster than is normal. It hasn’t even been two years, in game, but we’re seeing trees that look like they’re at least twenty years old.

Hotshot: Huh. Hadn’t thought about it, but yeah, the wildlife also seems to be recovering fast in parts of Europe, too.

Inquisitor: The regrowth is inconsistent. Some areas are far faster than others, you can see that from satellite images alone.

Arcanus: You know, I overlaid the current game map with an old RL map of ley lines, and it looks like those areas with heightened regrowth all lie at nexus points for ley lines.

StrandedKojima: That isn’t all. I work as a courier going between different settlements. The plants aren’t the only things coming back fast. The animals are, too, but there’s something… off about them.

Inquisitor: Off? Off how?

StrandedKojima: Well, I saw a Doberman the size of a horse, and barely got away from this puma with some kind of shadowy powers.

Arcanus: Greenwave may have given some animals different mutations and psy abilities.

SammyBaby: That’s not all. Our freighter just hit turbulence. In hyperspace. Threw us off course as we entered the system.

Inquisitor: Wait, WHAT?

Hotshot: How is that even possible?

SammyBaby: No clue. Best we can tell, we hit some pocket where space just… twisted, and it damaged the hyperdrive as we were thrown back into ‘realspace’.

Goblin: Whelp, that’s not worrying at all. No-siree.

Inquisitor: Sammy, could you get me a copy of your sensor logs? I want to run them by a couple people I know. This could be huge.

SammyBaby: I’ll have to run it by the Master. The BSS Mewtwo isn’t exactly mine.

Doritobreath: Wait, BSS? You’re on a Black Star ship? Like one of those big freighters?

SammyBaby: No, the Mewtwo is a Raven-class light freighter. But yes, it is owned by Black Star, and we can’t exactly give away sensor data without permission.

TickTock: Interesting timing, Black Star sending one of its Ravens to Sol, just as things are getting a bit unusual. Most freighters I’ve seen coming from Star’s Reach have been flagged as belonging to Imperial companies, or independents. Black Star sells more ships than products in the Empire, after all.

SammyBaby: Well, I can’t say that it was entirely a coincidence. You know that the forums have been blowing up with all the weirdness going on, right?

Inquisitor: Naturally.

SammyBaby: Well, apparently one of the Nomad science types working for the Master says that something’s about to rip loose, because of the way FTL screws with the universe.

Doritobreath: That’s bad. That’s bad, right? I’m pretty certain that that’s bad.

Inquisitor: Yes, it could be very, very bad.

TickTock: Hmm. And why did Black Star send a freighter, instead of the owner coming himself?

SammyBaby: Hah! He doesn’t want this to be his fault, so he’s keeping away from it until something happens, one way or the other.

Doritobreath: Then why send a ship at all?

SammyBaby: Because if this turns out to be a thing, he’d rather hear about it before things get to universe-ending scale. But if he came himself, or sent one of the Navy ships, then things would become very official, very fast, and a whole lot of bureaucracy would get involved.

Goblin: There are drawbacks to being the most powerful Nomad in the game, huh?

TickTock: I can see that. I doubt he is able to travel anywhere without a full team of bodyguards, and at least one warship covering him, if he’s not at the head of a fleet. Any one of the hats he wears would require him to have some form of protective detail, just to keep idiots from griefing him.

Inquisitor: Hmm. I really do need to get in touch with him, and get those sensor readings.

SammyBaby: Well, forward me contact info, and I’ll pass it along for permission. He might ask for some quid-pro-quo, especially if you have any data on what is happening, but that’s up to him.

Inquisitor: Right. If this is happening like I think it is, we need to be prepared.

Goblin: What are you talking about? Is there a party going down?

Inquisitor: …

Inquisitor: Anyway, I’ll send you the information.