He was already sitting on the bridge chair holding Ryoshi to stay with him when the ship jumped out to the Alkagoria system.
His parents were kids when the Empire appeared and they didn’t remember much of those days and, since they grew up in the Empire first days, they were taught about humanity’s stubbornness, thirst for knowledge and unrelenting passion, which was something that they passed along to him.
So, even though he grew up in a fully Empire society, he was always taught about and inspired by humanity stories and legends, stories that he then kept on reading and finding more and more of them, getting inspired along the way.
That’s why he wanted to become an explorer like the famous characters of yore. He had read about humanity's cruel history pre-empire, with the wars and sickness and a crumbling society, and was grateful he didn’t have to suffer through any of it, so he really wanted to contribute.
And he had the chance now, not everyone would get a solo mission so early in their career but he’d been praised by every teacher he ever had; his scores had always been almost perfect and he carried humanity’s passion and burning desire like a flag.
He wanted to leave his mark as soon as possible, but he knew his chances were astronomically low.
Back to reality, he felt that familiar buzzing stop and the screens in front of him turned the blurry setting off, meaning the FTL engine had stopped and he had control of the ship now.
He let go of Ryoshi, who jumped off straight away, and started interacting with all the panels.
Release and activation of the beacon, check.
Release and activation of the exploration drones, check.
Start to download any news, updates and etc. to verify the beacon is working, check.
He saw he had a video of his mom with your typical “hope you arrived safely, let us know you’re ok”. It wasn’t that much normal to receive a video mail from her, but seeing as this was his first solo mission it wasn’t too far fetched either, he recalled she also called almost monthly on his first period at school, she looked tired now though.
He parked that thought and continued the process.
Set a course towards the center of the system orbiting as many planets and moons as possible, check.
Already there was a drawing of the system being generated in one of the terminals, filling the blanks they had with the data being received from the drones. There was an asteroid belt they hadn’t previously detected because although it was wide, the asteroids inside were quite small.
He pressed a couple of in-screen buttons and sent the data to be relayed to the screen in the leisure room, with all the systems automated and without him being needed for a while he had a few hours before having to interact with anything.
In the leisure room he found Ryoshi already laying on the couch, looking at him with a “this part is mine” look.
“Fine! I’ll take this one then” - he said out loud while sitting on the other side.
He checked the news, some storms on one planet, a tsunami on another, tectonic movement on yet another, it seemed that the only thing the Empire couldn’t or wouldn’t control was Nature and her strength on any known planet, but they had palliative systems to face those issues.
There was one particular item on the news that called for attention, it looked like J’jrhyss, the home planet of a species that called themselves Jui’kk and looked like stone golems with a feline face, was dying and nothing was working.
They had been abandoning their planet and the Empire started relocating them to some other places but there were not many that could host them, since they were a calcium based species with a particular atmosphere combination requirement, which could be reduced mainly to ‘no water please’.
He flagged the news article for more in deep reading afterwards and changed to see the system drawing that the bots were doing.
More moons appeared around the big gas planets, one of them had like 15 bodies floating around it.
After a couple hours, the Espurna stopped by the first one doing a deep scan and throwing and then recovering some detailed specific drones. He was watching it from the big screen in the leisure room reading the data and marking some new orbits and scans for the drones to do.
He would usually spend one or two days over each planet to do the deep scan of it and its moons and then travel to the next one.
The first gas giant was not so much of a giant and the composition was as boring as gas giants could be, lots of hydrogen and a bit of helium, it reminded him of Jupiter but with fewer moons, only 3 or 4 balls of various metals 400km in diameter, kind of strange for a gas giant but the Universe was nothing if not diverse.
Next planet was a big desertic rock, no atmosphere or magnetic field detected, half the size of the gas giant he had checked first, the ship was already on its course, ready to launch more explorer drones and find any mysteries that could be hiding underneath.
Alas, the second one was as boring as the first one.
Yes there were some materials that could be exploited but the Empire wasn’t so in need of materials that they had to pillage all planets and asteroids they found.
Like the first one, this one had few moons, and about the same size.
He ran the proper deep scans and again sent and recovered the detailed drones. It was a repetitive and boring task sometimes but someone had to do it.
By then the exploration drones he first sent had already been done 80% of the system, only few blank spaces remained in the huge 3d sphere that was this system drawing and they would automatically communicate with the ship and point themselves to the next position to fill them all.
By the time he reached the third planet, another gas giant, he had almost lost all the passion with which he started the system exploration and he had switched to methodical and dispassionate grunt work.
This gas giant was 90% carbon dioxide, 9% argon, and 1% of other gases like oxygen and hydrogen.
This one had the most amount of moons so far but were all between 30 and 300km in diameter.
Three and counting, the Espurna moved to the next one on the list; since he had to cross that asteroid belt he had the detailed drones around him this time, so he could get a nice idea of the materials present there.
That’s when he realized this was not a normal asteroid belt, this was a cemetery. What he thought was a belt were the remnants of a galactic battle that happened who knew when.
From the leisure room he could check data and send commands to the drones but not alter the ship’s course.
“Friday, can you please adjust our course? I want to scan the whole belt, I want to see if all of that are ships or if there is a rock or something else hidden there, also prepare shields just in case they left a surprise” - he said while looking at the data on the screen
“Ok boss. Course adjusted and shields on. Do you want me to print more detailed drones?” - the ship answered
“Yes please do, print five more and we’ll leave them going the other way, we’ll collect them when we encounter them finishing the round” - he said.
He was looking into the file he received about this system, but there was no entrance before the first drone had detected and done a quick scan of it.
The belt was about a million kilometres wide and he was detecting something like 90 million objects on it, their size from 2 to 15 km long, from the first images he was seeing all of it seemed to be ship parts.
A great battle had happened here and gravity was collecting the corpses and making a belt with them.
Well, the historian guild would have a blast, he could already imagine a research station being deployed; he looked at the system 3d drawing on the screen but there was some missing data before calculating the Lagrange points; he sent some commands from his data-pad to the exploration drones to prioritize that information. He wanted to but couldn’t send an unfinished dossier unless the system was close to a cataclysmic event.
It would take him a week or so to scan the whole belt but he felt it was worth it to send as detailed information as possible, this kind of finding didn’t happen too often.
While the ship was travelling and scanning, he was examining all the pieces and trying to find their original form.
Ryoshi had already doubled her size since he got her and was hunting through the ship, he could hear some ‘miaows’ and the sound of her running and jumping was a common thing now in the background of the ship.
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So the days continued, all the exploration drones had finished their part and were coming back, he had a complete 3d drawing of the system with all the orbits and gravitational effects calculated.
Once he finished scanning the belt, he continued to the center of the system, where most of the planets were found.
The next one was, basically, a ball of frozen hydrogen that didn’t even look like it was rotating at all. A couple of moons, 300km wide.
By then he thought he was starting to understand some of the weird things, like massive planets with few moons. They must have been mined for materials, all those ships must have been made in this system.
The fifth planet he visited was a toxic planet with sulphuric acid rain, quite similar to Venus, but his deep scanning showed buildings and some other ruins that had to be done by an intelligent species. Another flag for the historian guild, he would love to go down there and walk among those ruins but, since his was a solo mission, not only was it forbidden but he didn’t even have the equipment needed and the ship wouldn’t allow him to go anyway, nor would she go down there willingly.
The sixth planet was a gas one, way smaller than it should be, with a 60/40 mix of hydrogen and nitrogen. In his mind he imagined that the species from the 5th may have absorbed the gases to power their civilization.
The seventh and eight planets were a couple more dead rocks without atmosphere or magnetic field, but the ninth… he was seeing it now.
That was the planet with a ring system around it and, looking at it, it was as if someone had applied a yellow layer to a picture of Earth and about twice it’s size, it was 30 thousand kilometres in diameter.
The ring, he could see now that they were close, was a mix of ship parts and rocks, most probably this planet had a natural ring but whatever fight happened left some remnants here.
He was sending commands to the drones to get as much data and pictures as possible while moving closer to do a deep scan, excited to see what he could discover.
The atmosphere was 80% nitrogen, with argon, carbon dioxide, hydrogen and other gases making the rest of it.
And there was life on it, plants and some animals were detected, he continued with his process of orbiting and deep scanning but quite excited this time.
As it had happened with the fifth planet, there were lots of ruins. Huge holes with some building remains that made him think there might have been a city there at some point, in some parts the planet looked scarred but not from meteorite rain.
He detected a really weak radio signal, he sent a drone to explore and configured two more for a more meticulous scan. The signal came from under a pile of building remnants in the north-east of one of the more massive continents, it was radio only and had a soft voice but he couldn’t understand words and the translator also drew a blank, making an error beep and accompanying it with an ‘error - unknown root’.
So he flagged it and left the drones making a 3d map of the whole zone, while he checked the rest of the planet for more radio signals. Now that he knew their specific frequency he found 10 more but so, so weak and so buried that he couldn’t have found them unless looking for them.
He deployed or moved the drones to do the 3d mapping of where the radio emissions came from and finished a few more analyses of plants, elements and materials found on the planet.
His first report was going to be an interesting one, hundreds of people would read a report with discoveries like the ones he made so it had to be perfect and with as much information and detail as possible.
He would change between typing the report himself or dictating it to Friday, depending if he was walking in circles while phrasing a part, or really inspired and crazy for typing his findings.
They had been in this system already 4 or 5 months, time was a confusing thing out there, and he still had 3 more planets and the binary system to deep scan and report all.
While the ship abandoned the 9th planet and changed course to the next one he looked at the 3d drawing of the system and zoomed in to see the next planet orbit in more detail, that’s when he realized something he hadn’t seen before, as his zoom was too far.
The closest planet to the binary system had an amazingly fast orbit around the stars, a complete orbit around the star was taking that planet less than 10 hours and it was tidally locked towards the centre of the binary stars.
While on course to his 10th planet he decided to spare a couple detailed drones and send them towards that planet, he didn’t want to spend much time following that gigantic piece of molten rock around the binary stars.
The 10th planet had a debilitated magnetic field and an atmosphere that was losing its fight against the gravitational forces emitted by the stars so he put a note to check that too.
“Friday, wouldn’t you say this planet would fall within the goldilocks zone?” - He asked out loud.
“I looks like it to me, but I’m detecting some strong solar winds, we’ll learn why when we analyse the stars” - was the ships reply
So the task finished on the 10th planet and they were moving to the 11th when the data from the drones sent to the 12th arrived.
That was not a planet, that could not be a planet. It was a perfectly manufactured giant sphere whose task would be unknown, the drones couldn’t find any door or any sign at all; no emissions of any type, not even radioactivity. Its flat surface decidedly metallic, it had to be forged, nothing in nature could create this.
He was looking at the drone results while on its way to the next planet, there was something that didn’t quite fit, maybe just a feeling.
“Friday, stop the ship” - he said and felt the ship stopping
He looked at the quick analysis from the next planet, then at the detailed ones from the last one, the one that was definitely NOT a planet, all the information on the big screen in the leisure room.
“Friday, we’re done. Jump to the beacon please” - he instructed and heard the buzzing of the jump engine starting
“Calculating, why are we leaving before finishing the scans boss?” - asked the ship, the AI always wanted to learn and was designed to do so.
“Because that’s a trap. I don’t know what is going to do but I have the feeling that, that planet right there” - he said pointing to the planet closest to the binary stars - “that is a bomb, or something similar, maybe worse.”
They jumped out close to the beacon he had first installed, he collected everything in his report and sent it then went for a shower, Ryoshi now resting on the couch, eyes closed and a soft purr coming from her.
After the shower he thought enough time had passed to compress, encrypt and send his report so he decided to call the historian guild.
A drow-like face appeared in front of him. A dark purple skin with shining violet eyes and a mane of silver hair dropping in a braid, with a researcher robe and the historic guild emblem on it.
“Historian guild, this is XDR-9087234122, but you can call me Kin’tara. How can I help?” - said the drow-like with a sweet as honey voice.
“Hi, this is XEA-6889475861, explorer full-grade, reporting. I sent a few minutes ago a report and would like your thoughts before continuing. I know it is not a normal procedure but I would like someone there to take a look before I leave the system for good.” - he responded
The girl, Kin’tara, arched an eyebrow, looking at him with a smile.
“Very well, let’s see what you have found” - she said, sounding amused.
The first thing he saw was that this drow-like race, whose name escaped him right now, had the same pupil dilation happen to them as with humans when they were surprised.
Her smile was now frozen and he could tell by her eyes she was reading and checking the pictures.
“Wait a second please” - she said and ran out of the plane. She had muted the audio but the camera was still on and he could see her in the background calling some people and nudging some others, asking them to call and see.
Before he realized there were like 5 beings of different kinds in front of the screen, all of them with a surprised or excited face.
“Hi, mr. Jordi. “ - said a profound guttural voice, and something like a humanoid wolf wearing that same researcher robe with the historian guild logo, was in the centre of his screen now - “What made you believe this planet artefact, the closest to the stars, might be a bomb?” - the researcher asked.
“Well you see, I’m human. Maybe you know about humanity 6th sense, our brains process things that we cannot comprehend and send us messages that we need to interpret.” - he explained
“Sometimes we don’t even understand after well past the moment and sometimes never.” - he continued -”and when I saw the thing, the planet artefact as you call it, and saw that it didn’t have emissions of any type, something inside me screamed. Especially after seeing those many ships destroyed throughout the whole system, and the 10th planet magnetic field was weird.” - he finished
This time they didn’t muted the sound and he could see and hear them arguing
“10th planet? Oh right! Explorers count from the outside in!” - said a ringing voice, and all of their faces started looking and analysing what they were seeing.
“DX-203LB… that’s a nice exploration drone but if we could add the RKI module” - said a voice
“The explorer guild doesn’t have the RKI!” - another one responded
“Well then I say we sent him the blueprint! And he can leave 5 RKIs for when we get there!” - said yet another
“Sounds good to me! Who can give us authorization?” - said the ringing voice he had heard before
Then he saw that Kin’Tara, that drow-like girl, had just realized the camera and everything was still on, she jumped to cover the whole screen.
“Please wait by the beacon for a while, we’ll contact you shortly” - she said with a smile, shutting down the call quickly afterwards.
He discussed the conversation with Friday then decided to wait while checking some more news, sent a holo-message to his mom and dad wishing them well and hoping he could trust some ‘exciting news’, and played with Ryoshi a bit.
Then the sound of a call coming in.
“Hi, mr. explorer, Jordi… sir” - the same drow-like girl as before, Kin’Tara, was on the screen.
“We would like to ask you for a favour. It turns out that we need some drones with a specific configuration but you are not yet authorized for it.” - she continued
“So, we would need for you to set up a 3d printer as per the ..” - she looked at some piece of paper somewhere was giving her - “10532 specification, book 7 of exploratory mysteries” - she read out loud, then looked at the screen.
They had already discussed this possibility, he was too green to receive this kind of authorization so they would probably request that he manufacture a 3d printer, leave it with material nearby and send them the details for them to take control. Why was this module so secret that he couldn’t even be in a system where it was being used? He couldn’t know and Friday wouldn’t say.
But they were prepared for this possibility.
“Friday?” - he inquired out loud
“Printer has already been deployed boss, 300kg of material attached to it, as per specification 10532.7” - the ship said as an answer
He looked at Kin’Tara. “Sending the encryption details so you can take control of it once I’m gone, please allow a couple of hours for me to finish the set up and leave the system” - he informed
“Details received” - she said while her head was turning to a screen by her right - “Communication established, ready to work.” - she finished, looking at the main screen again.
“And thank you for letting us know! Where are excited to find out more and we’ll be there shortly” - she finished, with a smile
“My pleasure! I look forward to reading about it when I come out of jump on the next system” - he finished, smiling as well.
And with that he prepared the ship and left the Alkagoria system.
-------------------------------------
The Emperor was looking at the last report that passed in front of him, the Alkagoria system, that rang a lot of bells.
He stayed pensive for a couple minutes, exploring deep in his mind, then he remembered.
He had heard them in the early stages of his Empire, two belligerent and passionate species sharing a system.
He had analysed the situation and considered it was too early for his Empire to face those races so he did what he thought was obvious, he isolated them and removed any data from the archives. Modified the maps to show as an abandoned sector of space and put a reminder to check on them when the Empire was ready to face something like them.
That reminder had been activated once humans were amongst their ranks and a part of him had even selected a human to go there and check, he was looking at the images now.
Then he saw the artefact closest to the binary stars, why was it so familiar?
Oh well, the historian guild had already gone there to study it. He made a mental note to read the results the moment they were available.