Finding Eden - Part 1
04 Oct 2017LongDistanceClara
I'm sat out here in the quiet deeps of the Centaurus Reach, twenty-thousand light years out from the bubble on the Sagittarius-Carina Arm. I've just powered the Cassandra down for the night and now the ship is quiet, I think it's time to try and get some kind of record down about the craziness of the last week.
My vacation in the bubble had drawn to a close without incident and it was time to get back "out there". I'd returned to the shipyards at Jameson and headed down to the Clair - no rest for the wicked!
Going through the passenger listings, something odd was definitely going on! Group after group looking to book passage out to Colonia and willing to pay a pretty penny for it. I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth though and quickly hit my quota with about fifty passengers boarding.A quick trip out to Colonia and the outlying systems and back - and for a tidy sum! - seemed a nice way to get back into the swing. Pretty soon we were eating up the plots and cruising the Colonia highway until around the Conflux, BOOM - huge supergiant.
These guys always have me in awe
I've been up-close-and-personal with their grand-daddy, VY Canis Majoris, and by comparison this undiscovered beastie was just a fledgling; but even at 1100ls, I was grazing the exclusion zone and the Clair was getting dangerously hot. It's impossible not to be utterly awed (and humbled!) by the spectacular display of these giants, quietly churning away in the depths of space.
Leaving the beastie behind (much to the relief of the Clair's hull!), we headed on to Colonia. Aside from the odd world charted for a few pennies from UniCart, it was a pretty uneventful trip. About face and back to the bubble.
And the next day, all hell broke loose.
Galnet screaming non-stop that what many had expected had finally come - the Thargoids were here. Military-grade warships were being contemptuously shredded down in the Pleiades, where the Thargoid bridgehead appeared to be forming - no doubt a precursor to the utter ruination of mankind! (I've learnt not to believe everything I hear on Galnet over the years
)Nevertheless, this sounded pretty grim. I grabbed Yari my fresh-faced slf pilot, boarded the Charybdis and pointed the 'vette towards Maia. All the way down, news kept pouring in - ship after ship from the Pilot's Federation was encountering the Thargoids, unable to deliver any damage to them whilst their hulls were slowly eaten out from under them by alien corrosive blasts. At first it sounded like hyperbole but the closer I got to the Pleiades, the more I was running into the aftermath of these encounters:
Pretty soon I was deep in the Pleiades - and almost immediately ran into a Thargoid. I'd dropped the Charybdis into a pocket to investigate an odd emission and was poking through some wreckage when an ear-shatteringly loud burst of noise scared the bejeezus out of me. Swung the Charybdis around and there it was, smack bang in front of me.
Doing nothing.
I'm not an aggressive person. I don't like confrontation but I won't shy from a fight where it's needed and I was a hair's breadth away from deploying the hardpoints - but something seemed hinky here; it wasn't doing anything. We just both sat there, looking at each other across several hundred meters of space. It briefly seemed to scan me, but that's ok big guy, you're curious - so am I!
I can't explain why, but shooting this thing didn't seem right. I know these things are out there and there's enough accounts melting the airwaves that they're hostile, shredding people left right and center and stealing escape pods. I'm not disputing that. But right there and then, this particular Thargoid and I just looked at each other. Soon after, it just turned slowly, gliding off a little and then waked out.
I drifted around a few systems, mulling the encounter over in my mind, finally deciding that I'd head back home for the night and come at this fresh tomorrow. The Charybdis doesn't have the best jump range so I had a lot of time on the plots home and I was so caught up in my thoughts that what happened next genuinely took me by surprise.
Halfway through Witch-space, all hell broke loose; systems going haywire, warning lights strobing - a total loss of control. We crashed out god only knows where and everything was offline. No idea what had happened and without the noise of the engines in the background, it was eerily quiet - right up until that dissonant blast I'd heard not too long before had me jumping out of my skin again
Finally the thrusters came back online, I heaved the 'vette around and there it was, a thargoid. Only this one was quietly drifting towards me, getting to within a few hundred meters this time before stopping. Again, nothing - no hostile moves, no discernable activity, just quietly sitting there.
I've still don't know why I thought this was a good idea, but for some reason I handed the conn over to Yari, and took over an slf. Can't explain it but I had that same feeling, that it wasn't a threat. As I got closer to the Thargoid, I could see it in far greater detail and couldn't help thinking of it as some kind of space-faring whale, quietly cruising through the void. I know this sounds crazy, like I'm some kind of pacifist wet blanket! But I parked up mere meters from it and felt completely safe.
I'll admit, I jumped a bit when after several minutes, it suddenly turned and started moving off
I flew alongside for a while and it seemed completely unperturbed, just gently floating along. Unlike my first encounter, it didn't immediately wake out, but seemed happy enough with my company - a leviathan just drifting through space completely unconcerned about the minnow flitting around it.I redocked the slf after a while and glanced back at the thargoid, who was quietly floating away. With all systems back online, I fired up the FSD and resumed course to Jameson with a whole different outlook to the one I'd had on the way down to the Pleiades. The Thargoids may be dangerous and we may well have to fight them, to preserve and protect our own and if it comes to that, I'll do my part; but mankind has a pretty shameful history of belligerence, arrogance and a complete inability to understand one another, let alone an alien race. So until I have a lot more to go on, I'll watch and see what happens.
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I needed to get away, clear my head and I can only seem to do that out in the deeps! There's something I've been wanting to do for a while now, only I never really seemed to have the time - and now seems perfect. Somewhere out there is something I've jokingly come to call "Clara's Paradise". It's a beautiful little tropical planet, slightly less than one earth gravity, with a perfect atmosphere, temperature, no seasonal extremes, no tidal locking (I love my sunrises/sunsets:D) and a glorious night sky. I've no idea where it is, but I know it's out there somewhere and I've decided that now is the time to find it. When it comes time to hang up the suit and set the Cass down for the last time, I know that it's where I'll spend the rest of my days
I got the Cassandra brought to the hangar and stuffed her to the bulkheads with all the latest toys - AFM's, the new hull repair tools, SRV's and SLF for recon - the works. As ridiculous as this sounds clearing the moorings and heading out from the station I was absolutely buzzing - I've been all over the galaxy and had my fair share of deep space excursions, both near and far - and yet this trip means something to me, more than anything else I've done to date.
One of my heroes (among many others!) of the 20th Century was Carl Sagan. He had a special talent for capturing the incredible majesty and beauty of the universe with a turn of phrase most could never dream of emulating. Oddly enough however one of the quotes attributed to him wasn't actually his (though it easily could have been!). It was written by a journalist, Sharon Begley, who after an interview with him was moved to write the following; and although this may sound overly melodramatic, to me it's a beautiful sentence that encompasses at least in part that which drives mankind to explore;
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
