Post by Pyromaniac275 on Jan 27, 2022 23:53:24 GMT
Tarakaris was by any account a system where nothing much ever happened. The system had been surveyed by the Commonwealth’s Ministry of Settlement nearly a decade prior, surveyed a second time by the Ministry of Natural Resources, and upon finding significant deposits of various minerals and metals necessary for a number of manufacturing processes the rights to the system had subsequently been sold off to the Deep Space Holdings company, which had in turn divided the system up into plots and parceled them off piecemeal to smaller Commonwealth mining companies.
The largest of the mining companies operating in Tarakaris was the Extra-Orbital Extraction Corporation. Three years earlier they’d bought the rights to the largest and most minerally rich of three planetoids orbiting the system’s white dwarf star. The other two planetoids were yet to be sold, owing in large part to the fact what deposits were present were deep, and would be expensive to extract. Thus far, market prices had not inflated to the point where such a venture was likely to be profitable.
Surrounding the three planetoids was a dense ring of asteroids, and smaller mining startups trawled the rocks on the look out for their next big score, buying up the rights to sections of the ring and either finding something worth breaking apart, or going bankrupt when their investors ran out of confidence in their venture.
Extra-Orbital Extraction maintained a processing facility in orbit of Tarakaris-I. The barren rocky planet below was not even unique enough to warrant filing the paperwork to register a new name. And so, as the planetoid was unoriginally named Tarakaris-I the facility that orbited was unoriginally named Tarakaris-I Orbital Processing Facility. The facility housed a foundry, where the materials strip mined from the planetoid below could be processed, refined, and then shipped out to manufacturer’s deeper within the Commonwealth. A small contingent of Commonwealth Peacekeepers were stationed on the facility, and rotated out every few months. Their job was to make sure the miners, loading dock operators, and ship captains didn’t get too rowdy, but the bulk of the system’s day-to-day security needs were handled by Arunmor Securities, which just so happened to have been the lowest bidder when EOE had contracted out the work.
Arunmor personnel patrolled the mining facilities planet side, and Arunmor strike craft flew sorties to make sure the miners in the belt stayed inside of their parceled sections. Arunmor’s contractors liked to talk a big game, and carry big guns but the running joke among the miners and other workers in Tarakaris was that if anything ever really went down, all Arunmor would do was hide on the orbital facility, and cry for the Commonwealth’s navy to come save them.
The truth of that statement had never been tested. Military patrols through the system were routine enough that most pirates simply went looking for easier prey. Nothing in Tarakaris was valuable enough to risk facing down Commonwealth battleships.
Yes, Tarakaris was a system where nothing ever happened. When Vincent had accepted the position as Administrator for the system, he had done so on the rather explicit understanding that nothing happened out there, and it would be a peaceful posting where he could sit in his office, drink coffee until he had ulcers, and collect a paycheque. His divorce had been rough on him, and the middle-aged corporate necktie had wanted nothing more than to make some money for a few years and then return core ward to spend it all on a midlife crisis.
But today, Vincent was not dealing with the relative peace and quiet of the day-to-day operations. No, instead Vincent was dealing with a self-proclaimed journalist with cybernetic eyes that didn’t match and a camera drone that hovered over her shoulder and emitted a constant whine that was giving him a headache. He had hoped that a call back to corporate would be enough for Arunmor to bounce her from the station, but the call had instead produced the opposite effect. Corporate had confirmed the woman was allowed to be there. Freelance though she may be, she apparently had a friend somewhere in the Commonwealth’s bureaucracy who his corporate overlords weren’t willing to cross.
So, much to his chagrin, Vincent was forced to take a meeting with the raven haired reporter and her camera drone. He was forced to inhale the fumes of the hand rolled cigarettes she smoked, and wonder why in an age of tablet computers as thin as a sheet of paper this woman still took notes in a battered leatherbound notebook.
It’s to irritate people, Vincent had decided. Nothing is more irritating than answering a question and watching someone write down notes about your answer.
“What did you say your name was?” He asked again, massaging his temples in a half hearted attempt to stave off his growing headache.
“Cassandra Gariot,” She answered without looking up from whatever she was writing down.
“And what’s your interest in Tarakaris?”
“Yusuf Al-Hakim,” She said, now looking up from her notepad. “Know him?”
“Can’t say as I do,”
She dug momentarily in messenger bag fading from black to grey with frayed edges and took out a sheet of paper. A young man was smiling at the top of the sheet, and at the bottom was a termination notice with his signature on it.
“He was injured four months ago on the job,” She said. “Then fired and bankrupted by his medical expenses,”
She smiled at him and put the notebook on the table separating them setting down the pen in perfect parallel to the book.
“Why was he fired?”
Vincent sighed, and desperately wished for anything, anything at all to spare him the rest of this meeting.
Green Crystal had been having a hard few hundred years. Her storming out of her fathers system long ago had been stupid and swearing that she'd find a solar system even better than his to settle down in had been even more so, her cavernous geode chiming at the memory of that moment of stupidity that had since claimed her life. Not that she could turn back now, with nothing but wasted time and piss all to show, she'd be the laughing stock of her whole family.
She wasn't being completely fair to herself, the solar systems she had found, while not better than her fathers, were large and had a few planets for a rock to settle down and grow into. Not that she'd listen to that nagging voice in the back of her head to just return to her father and share what she had found so far. She did miss Grey Gravel who was now the youngest Rock in the family. The little grump was rather fun to poke around then chase around the bright rock. Green Crystal squashed these thoughts out thoroughly, she was on a mission and family be damned she was going to finish it.
Her attention returned to her task she began to slow down, her spiky surface lighting up as the gravitic waves began pushing against the void. She had arrived at the next bright point for her to explore and this one would hopefully be the one, even though she had thought the same of all the systems that came before it.
Her hopes rose as she peered at the large rocks and ice chunks that made up the outer shell of the system. Most of the orbiting debris this far out tended to be small but the larger chunks gave her more hope that this was a place she could finally call home.
She spent a while coasting further in, not wanting to risk going faster and colliding with any rocks, and yet again her hopes rose as the thick asteroid belt came into view. It had been a while since she had a chance to add more rocks to her surface so long in fact that the crystal outcroppings on the surface were starting to look unseemly.
She would need to remedy that as soon as possible and seeing those big collections of minerals that weren't stuck on a huge rock made her rush forward, her gravitic crystals putting haste into her movements as she made a tight turn into the cloud of rocks and began gorging herself, the crystal protrusions on her surface sticking to other asteroids like roots to soil.
The first to notice the asteroid’s unnatural movement was, predictably, one of the small time mining operations in the belt. This particular operation was a small family venture, and the father and son aboard their small ore ship were quick to call security when they saw the asteroid change course and begin moving into their parceled section of the belt.
Initially, Arunmor’s dispatcher received the call believing it to be an elaborate attempt at asteroid poaching. Asteroid poaching was not unheard of in Tarakaris, though ordinarily the attempts simply involved freight haulers attempting to tow mineral rich asteroids into their section of the belt, and claim it had always been there. An asteroid apparently moving under its own power raised some eyebrows, but it was initially chalked up to a miscommunication or at worst some excessively elaborate plan that would no doubt make the rounds on the net once it was understood and then fade into obscurity.
Arunmor’s dispatcher retasked three strike craft on patrol in the belt to investigate and they began weaving their way through the rocks at speed, rocketing toward the source off the apparent distress. Upon arriving, rather than finding some elaborate scheme gone awry, they instead came upon the asteroid and its strange crystaline protrusions slowly absorbing the asteroids around it. A very angry father and son were screaming over the short-range demanding to know just what had taken them so long and what precisely they intended to do about the asteroid currently absorbing their rightfully purchased asteroids before they’d even had the chance to prospect them.
The Arunmor security agent in charge of the trio of single seaters decided the entire situation was very much above his paygrade and sent a live feed back to dispatch, asking for advice on what exactly they should do next.
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“Blood tests determined Mr. Al-Hakim was under the influence when the accident with the drill occurred,” Vincent explained to the reporter across from him. “Insurance denied his medical claims and I was advised to terminate him in line with company policy.”
“Blood test results were clean,” Cassandra countered, reaching into the battered messenger bag again. She smoothed out a crumpled piece of paper on the desk separating them and picked up her pen and notebook, scratching something down in the ensuing silence while Vincent examined the page.
“I can only tell you what I was told by insurance,” Vincent said, his tone shifting to something more defensive.
“Do you have a record of what you were told by insurance?” She asked, looking up from her notebook.
Vincent was spared an immediate answer by the door to his office opening. An Arunmor supervisor stood at the threshold glancing at Cassandra and then at Vincent. He cleared his throat.
“Sir, we have a um… situation in the belt,”
Silently, Vincent heaved a sigh of relief, glad for an excuse to walk out on the reporter and her questions. He glanced at the reporter, meeting her mismatched gaze and gestured toward the door.
“We’ll have to pick this up later Ms. Gariot,” He said.
“May I speak with your employees?”
“You may not,” He answered. “There’s coffee in the cafeteria if you are so inclined, but security will prevent you from going anywhere you’re not meant to be,”
He made a mental note to send off a message instructing security to consider ‘anywhere at all’ somewhere she wasn’t meant to be. If the reporter was at all upset by her interview being cut short, she made no show of it. She picked up her papers, and her notebook, returned them to her bag and wordlessly left the office. When she was gone, Vincent gestured the Arunmor manager to her now vacated seat.
“What’s the situation?”
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The three strike craft continued to circle the strange rock with the crytals protruding while they waited for further instructions from their superiors. Orders had come through fairly quickly that they were not shoot the rock, for fear that the crystals may be volatile, and so there was nothing for the three pilots to do but circle the asteroid. They ran what scans they could, eventually calming down the father and son enough to convince them to use their more powerful mining scanner to try and determine just what exactly the crystal was made of, but for the time being there was nothing for them to do but wait.
Green Crystal focused on the rocky masses that she had recently attached to her body, the rock almost moving like a liquid as it moved over her surface. This process while not fast was noticeable to the onlookers as the crystal spikes that covered her body were slowly covered up, leaving only a few green sparkling points poking out. While she still could use some more regolith to cover up herself some more she decided to wait and let the few large asteroids finish covering her up before gorging herself further. Though her vanity streak did rear its head when given the chance, one of her recent meals had a decent gold deposit and so she slowly pushed that to the surface giving her front left quadrant a nice irregular pattern of rough gold veins.
The scans from these actions would be very unusual, primarily showing electro magnetic activity along with weird gravitic forces where the new asteroids were being integrated. Other anomalies would include a active molten or so they could assume from the similar magnetic field, along with a high anceron content of the asteroid itself.
With her basic needs and wants taken care of she turned her attention back to the task at hand. Moving from a relevant standstill to a constant and light thrust was relatively easy, the other asteroids flowing forward with Green Crystal in her gravitic wake. However she didn't much bother with avoiding smaller rocks in her path allowing the vast majority of those to simply collide with her surface or slingshot around her in wild orbits. She didn't particularly notice that the three small metallic crafts kept up with her, or care that they were following her as she headed towards the inner system to see if this place was worth settling down in.
Vincent had relocated from his office to the control room once the situation that was unfolding in the belt had been explained to him. There was a notable tension among the dispatchers and their lackeys as they listened to the reports coming in. Apparently their rogue asteroid had absorbed several surrounding asteroids, changed it’s appearance, and was once more on the move deeper into the system.
The head of security stood at Vincent’s side, puffing on a massive cigar and looking through the results of the scan before passing the tablet off to Vincent. Vincent scanned through the results, tuning out the sounds of distant pilots reporting on the movements of the rock. Frowning he passed the tablet to the intern that had brough it, trading the device for a steaming cup of bitter sludge that passed for ‘coffee’ in this part of the station.
“Has it made any transmissions?”
“Not that we can detect,” The head of security reported. “But it seems to be moving through the use of some sort of gravitic propulsion system. Definitely not naturally occurring,”
“This isn’t some Dirge thing Corporate neglected to mention was coming our way is it?”
“No,” The security officer said. “Triple checked with Corporate…”
Vincent frowned and sipped loudly on his coffee. He was at a loss. The rock didn’t seem hostile, aside for its blatant disregard for property rights. But that didn’t answer the questions as to what exactly it was and what exactly it was doing here. He lowered his coffee mug and set it down with a sigh.
“Threat assessment?” He asked. The head of security shrugged.
“No idea. Could have weapons the scanners aren’t picking up. Could just smash into something expensive too. There’s no discernable pattern to the movements at the moment.”
“Okay,” Vincent said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Request support from Central and transfer them everything we have. I’ve got no idea what we’re dealing with here but I’d feel a lot better about it with some warships backing us up.”
The head of security gave him a look he couldn’t quite identify and removed the cigar from his mouth. For a moment he thought the man might say something, go against him… but in the end he just licked two fingers and snuffed out the end of his cigar. He picked up a communicator and made the call.
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The security guard was doing an admirable job ignoring her. She’d tried to ask him questions about himself, or the stations several times since she’d been escorted to cafeteria and had received only a steely silence in response. It had become immediately apparent to her that the suggestion she grab a coffee in the cafeteria was less of a suggestion and more an attempt by the station’s administrator to keep her sequestered away from anything and everything that was happening.
The square jawed muscle head had prevented every attempt she’d made to leave the cafeteria and she had retired to an empty table to watch the man over the rim of a Styrofoam cup. She downed the last of the bitter liquid and crushed the cup in her hand. She stood and crossed to the trash compactor before turning her mismatched gaze on her minder.
“So you out here as part of the expatriation program?”
That finally earned a reaction from the man, his eyes darting in her direction.
“The tattoo,” She said, touching her forearm. “Three crossed swords. Revolutionary Front door kicker right?”
He turned toward her now, eyebrows knitting together and jaw set. He didn’t say anything but the question was obvious in his posture, in his face.
“I was VRF too,” She said with a shrug.
His expression softened and his posture relaxed.
“What unit?”
She shook her head.
“I was part of an engineering team aboard a starship,” She answered. “Had a friend who was a door kicker. She has the same tattoo on her shoulder.”
He nodded.
“Everyone got one,” He rumbled. “We beat the shit out of anyone who got inked without actually being one of us. Still do.”
“How’d your war end?” She asked. He gave her a sad smile. That was a look she recognized. Failed revolutionaries didn’t often like talking about the moment they realized the revolution was doomed.
“Wasn’t at Levitsky. I was up in the mountains when the nukes went off. Stayed up there for a few months but I knew we’d lost. Everyone with a brain in their skull did. When they offered pardons and reconciliation I took it as a sign. Slipped off in the night, turned myself in. You?”
She shook her head.
“Ship got torched, I got vented into space then picked up by the Davians,” She gestured vaguely to her eyes. “They questioned me,”
He rumbled and nodded. Davian ‘questioning’ was well documented at this point.
“You want to tell me what’s going on out there?”
“Rock,” He said with a shrug. “Moving on its own. Has everyone flipping their collective shit.”
“Want to go see it?” She said with a sly grin.
“I’m supposed to make sure you stay here.”
“Since when do us VRF types do what we’re supposed to?”
He matched her sly grin with one of his own and nodded slowly.
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The trio of security strike craft kept pace with the asteroid as it left the belt and began heading deeper into the system. The miners who’s rocks had been absorbed remained in the belt but continued to scream ineffectually at anyone who would listen about their property and the alleged skill of their attorneys (whom would soon be in touch according to the miners). Security for their part gave up trying to calm down or appease the miners.
The call had been made to Central now, and they’d been advised a nearby military patrol was now enroute to their location. Commodore Hargrave, the man in charge, had assumed situational command as soon as he’d announced that his force was enroute, and subsequently ordered the trio of strike craft tailing the rock to make some attempt at communicating with it.
That had raised some eyebrows among the pilots and the dispatchers alike, but no one was about to tell a Commodore his business.
“Attention…” The pilot watching the approach of a fourth strike craft and trying to figure out how precisely he should attempt to address an asteroid. Vessel? Object? What? Sighing he keyed the comms back on, broadcasting on every available frequency as well as bouncing directional signals off the asteroid.
“Attention unidentified… object, you are currently entering space owned and operated by Deep Space Holdings. Alter your course to the following heading and identify yourself, over.”
As Green Crystal reached about half way through the asteroid belt, without altering her course, when her optic crystals on her back finally took note of the three shiny metallic objects that had been following her for quite a while. She had no idea what they were but from what Bluestone had said they were like the Rocks but instead of nice stones and minerals they were made of hard and rigid metals. Some of her larger eyes even saw them in some detail, as they wove through the smaller rocks in her wake, they glowed at her with constant lights that didn't say anything which again followed Bluestones admission of these Metal Rocks not being the clearest crystals in the geode. However her older brother did say that most of them could talk and were decently smart so she decided to see if these glowing rocks were some of his fabled Metal Rocks or just fancy rocks that she could eat.
Her surface lit up in green flowing patterns of light as her magnetic field boomed outwards in the Rock equivalent of a hello. She spoke it out a bit slowly and it came out pretty condescending for her tastes but she was a bit weary of living metal beings and what limited intellect they might have. She didn't stop through this attempt at communication, continuing to move through the asteroid belt munching on smaller rocks while avoiding larger ones.
Aboard Tarakaris’ orbital platform, there was now very little Vincent could do but wait for the Commodore and his entourage to arrive. There was some relief, as there was always relief when a problematic buck was successfully passed to someone else, but he couldn’t help but shake the feeling that his problem with this glowing rock was only just getting started.
Meanwhile, the fourth strike craft neglected to fall into formation with its compatriots. Instead, it came to a brief stop some distance ahead of the mobile asteroid and reversed its thrusters, flying backward ahead of the rock as it continued through the asteroid belt.
“Reversing like this is dangerous,” The security pilot commented. Indeed it was, asteroids could be unpredictable at the best of times, and that was when they weren’t moving on their own in defiance of all known laws of physics. The journalist at his shoulder may have had a snide or pithy remark, but the only answer he received from her was the rapid clicking of a camera shutter as the asteroid’s surface lit up. The clicking came in rapid succession, capturing dozens of images of the flowing patterns that danced across the rock’s surface.
The patterns ended with a magnetic burst that sent the ship’s instruments into a series of unhappy beeping.
“That bad?” Cassandra asked, lowering the camera.
“Not especially,” The security guard answered. “Sudden magnetic interference with the sensors.”
“You think those patterns were some kind of written text?” She asked checking over the images she had captured. The security guard shrugged and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Had he no imagination? No curiosity about the world? In the background she could hear the three ships trailing the rock continuing to squawk over comms.
“Flick the running lights on and off,” She said bringing her camera back to her eye and making some adjustments to better shoot through the canopy of the small strike craft.
“Why?” The security guard asked.
“Maybe it will glow again,”
He let out a low grumble and reached out a gloved hand, flicking the small vessel’s running lights on and off several times.
Green Crystal came to a rather sudden, for a mobile asteroid, stop. One of the small metal Rocks, now she at least assumed they were some version of a Rock, came around to her front and glowed at her much like young try to do before they are big enough to talk properly. The lights while pitifully small were interesting as they flashed on and off Green Crystal had never seen multiple colors on one rock before. She slowly rotated herself so that her largest eye faced the small metal being and slowly, like she did when we was talking to a baby, signaled in a very basic pattern while enunciating with her magnetic field. "H-E-L-L-O." A small niggling thought in the back of her geode said she would look like a real cloudy gem if this turned out to be just another bit of space debris.
While her entire surface didn't light up at this time the area facing the fighter craft was light up in a slowly pulsating green light crystals ranging in size from small specs to kilometer wide chunks glowed slowly at them in a slowly repeating pattern. The magnetic field coming from the asteroids molten core pulsed with a seemingly similar pattern and while it didn't match the light show exactly it was fairly close together.
The sudden(ish) stop of the asteroid was noted in the ops center much to the confusion of all those present. It was clear to everyone by now, Vincent included, that they had encountered something rather unique out in their little slice of space. The conversation around ops quickly changed from ‘what is it, what do we do?’ to ‘why has it stopped’. Vincent got his answer soon enough, when one of the strike craft pilots reported the asteroid had come to a halt in front of a fourth strike craft.
“Fourth?” Vincent glanced at his chief of security. “Did you order out a fourth?”
“No,” The security chief answered, his bushy black brows knitting together as he approached one of the consoles. “Who’s flying that fourth ship?”
“McAlister,” One of the technicians reported. Vincent sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Isn’t McAlister supposed to be minding the reporter?”
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The asteroid stopped. Turned, and then seemed to glow rather pointedly in their direction. McAlister had the control stick held in a white knuckle grip and Cassandra was stunned into silence and brief shock. She hadn’t expected flickering the lights to do much of anything, and she definitely hadn’t expected it to result in her and her companion seemingly becoming the sole focus of the asteroid.
There seemed to be a definite pattern to the pulses of the asteroid, though what it was, or how she was meant to interpret it the reporter couldn’t even begin to guess. She snapped pictures of each new light or pattern of lights that danced across the rock’s surface, glancing back through the photographs she’d already taken looking for insight.
None was forthcoming, at least not immediately, though a thought had lodged in the back of her skull, a question she was determined to answer even though she hadn’t the slightest idea how to.
“Uh,” She said, feeling her companion’s gaze shift to her for further instructions. “Do you know flash signals?”
“No.”
Godsdamn door kickers never learned anything useful.
“Okay,” She said. “Uh…”
She tore a page out of her notebook after quickly jotting down some instructions and handed them to her companion. He glanced over them, then back at her, and then sighed and began flickering the lights again. There was more of a pattern this time, not the random flashing of his first attempt. Much as Green has spelled out ‘Hello’ in her own way, now too did the small strike craft respond in kind, using an old code of quick flashes combined longer flashes to make letters and words.
Green crystal looked at the tiny creature with interest, and slight disappointment. She was interested because this was her first time meeting an actual metal Rock and from what Bluestone has said about them they were quite helpful. Her disappointment was that while this was probably a great system to settle down in she'd have to share it with others who probably already took the good orbits. Not that she'd let her mild annoyance out on this young Rock it didn't even have a magnetic field yet and Green wasn't a child anymore which meant she couldn't just throw a tantrum whenever she wanted.
Leaving her mental recriminations and sourness she turned her attention back to the small thing outside her largest crystal outcropping. The new pattern confirmed the fact that it was at least smart enough for patern recognition. The problem was that they didn't seem much smarter than that. "Hello?" She tried again her surface glowing in the complex patterns as her magnetic field pulsed out.
Vincent was having a very bad day, and all of his problems it seemed traced back to one irksome reporter. The asteroid hadn’t even been close to the reason why she’d originally come here and yet, somehow, she had convinced one of his security personnel to take her out to see it. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, it was becoming increasingly apparent to Vincent that the asteroid’s sudden stop, and subsequent flashing, seemed to be a direct result of whatever it was the reporter and his rogue security guard were up to.
All this bounced around his skull as he glared at the empty cafeteria, where the reporter and her minder were supposed to be. The administrator sighed, and lit a cigarette. There would be no hiding this from management, that was for sure. The Commonwealth patrol they’d requested was only a few minutes out now, and upon arrival he’d have no choice but to tell them about the reporter’s antics. They’d want to know what was going on with the rock, and attempting to conceal it would only land him in hotter water when the concealment was discovered.
Vincent had a sinking suspicion he would soon be returning coreward unemployed, but at the very least he’d make sure the damn security guard the reporter had corrupted would be equally unemployed.
His communicator buzzed, and after a brief drag he picked it up.
“Clearwater,”
“Commodore Hargrave’s task group has completed calculations. Wormhole generators are spinning up and they are expected imminently. He has requested a sitrep,”
“Patch me in,” The administrator sighed.
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Cassandra was barely able to contain her excitement when the asteroid flashed it’s colour patterns again. She tapped back through the pictures she’d already taken, confirming it was the same pattern the asteroid had flashed when they’d initially flickered their lights.
“It’s making identifiable patterns,” She said. “The lights aren’t random!”
“What does that mean?” McAlister asked, craning his neck to look at her behind the pilot’s seat. She was grinning like an idiot and shrugged at the question.
“I don’t know!” She declared happily. “Maybe it’s sentient? Or at the very least it can recognize that we’re flashing a pattern at it and is responding with a pattern of its own,”
“A sentient asteroid,” McAlister deadpanned. “That sounds insane,”
She rolled her eyes.
“Extra dimensional entities that can snuff out stars are understandable, but you draw the line at sentient rock formations?”
He shook his head and said nothing further. Cassandra was already busily scrawling notes and then writing up a new set of patterns for McAlister to go through. She handed it to him and he stared at the paper.
“What does this mean?” He asked her.
“Hello my name is Cassandra,” She replied. “I don’t know if it will understand,”
“What if its insulted?”
“Then you should fly fast,”
She moved away from the pilot’s seat and McAlister could hear her rummaging behind him. Sighing, he went through the motions, flashing out the message as directed on the piece of paper. Silently, he wondered if the rock could even understand their flash codes.
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Five wormholes opened a few AU starward from the asteroid belt and shortly thereafter the vessels of Commodore Hargrave’s taskgroup emerged. The largest ship, the CEXS Hadran was the first to complete the journey, the wormhole closing behind the ten kilometer battleship. It was accompanied by four smaller vessels, and upon arrival they issued a blanket order, requiring all civilian vessels to vacate the belt and return to port until further notice. Security personnel were instructed to send updates to the Commodore as his task group made their approach toward the belt.
The slightly disheveled asteroid watched the small craft as it flashed through the a the pattern again but this time it was longer. It was a bit confusing as there were still no magnetic eminations to add context but maybe this one was too small to have a magnetic core? That was possible. She didn’t get her magnetic core till she was a few kilometers in diameter.
Stopping her mind from wandering off she returned to the problem at hand. The language barrier was still clear but maybe she could try saying what they said back to them. Sadly she couldn’t do the multi colored display but hopefully they would still understand it.
Focusing on the small cluster of crystals on her surface facing the small ship she repeated the pattern back at them.
“Now it’s just copying what we do,” McAlister reported, twisting in the pilot’s seat to look back at the reporter. He muttered a curse upon seeing her slot a helmet into place and seal an exo-suit around her body.
“What the hell are you doing?” He inquired.
“I had a thought,” She answered double checking the seal on the suit. “I wondered if it realized there were creatures inside the ship attempting to communicate with it,”
“So what, you’re going to stand out there and gesture at it?” McAlister said incredulously.
“That is the plan,” She replied. He muttered curse under his breath and put on his own helmet, sealing his suit as well before she moved toward the airlock on the small ship. One could never be to careful with company vessels. They tended to do everything from manufacture to maintenance on the cheap and he wasn’t about to die because the life support system burnt out trying to repressurize.
His fears were unfounded, this time at least, as nothing immediately went wrong. The airlock opened and the reporter stepped outside, mag boots sticking her to the hull of the small ship as she moved to where she’d have a clear line of sight to the asteroid.
“Kill the running lights,”
The ship’s exterior lights went dark, plunging her into the inky blackness of the void. She fumbled with her camera momentarily, turning up the flash to maximum, before flashing the phrase at the rock again. When she had finished she raised one arm and waved. She wondered if the rock could see her, compared even to the small patrol craft she must have seemed terribly, terribly small.
Like an ant trying to talk to a colossus, She thought.
Green Crystal looked at the small metal rock ad it stopped glowing and one of its biosphere beings left and floated towards her surface. It was odd how the creature was glowing while the metal rock was not but that was probably planned so that green crystal didn’t think it a sneak invasion. She still hadn’t chosen her biosphere yet and wasn’t sure she wanted one just yet. Though this seemed to be some void fauna that the metal rock had chosen for its mating biome.
Possibly this was a way to bypass the language issue they appeared to be having? If so then it would make sense to emphasize the small creature over itself. Her father had taught her how small creatures can think at her in her geode. It was a very personal type of communication but they weren’t making much progress otherwise.
The massive asteroids surface seemed to split open slowly revealing a cave following down along one of the larger crystal spires going deeper into the rock.
Not for the first time in this encounter, Cassandra once again found herself rendered speechless by the actions of the asteroid. No sooner had she finished waving than it’s surface shifted and changed, opening a cave that seemed to lead deeper into the rock formation.
“Whoa,” Was all she could manage.
“You’re not planning on going in there are you?” McAlister commented, his voice scratchy and quiet over the aging communications system incorporated in the suit. Her instinctual reaction was to agree. They had very little idea what this asteroid was, they didn’t know if it was sentient or just possessed some level of intelligence… there were a hundred and one reasons the journalist could think of not to go into a cave that had just opened…
And yet, she found herself deactivating the mag locks and pushing off from the ship, floating through the void toward the asteroid and the cave that had opened up.
“You can’t be serious…” McAlister commented.
“I’ll be on comms,” She said kick her legs so she’d land on the asteroid feet first. “It’ll be fine,”
“You could die,” McAlister cautioned. “There could be hostile…”
“It’s fine,” She interrupted. She’d been a revolutionary once upon a time, she’d had her eyes gouged out by Davian torturers, and then had to listen in darkness as the revolution failed. Danger and death weren’t the deterrents they once had been.
“What should I tell the warships?” McAlister asked.
“Just tell them what’s happened,” She answered, landing and beginning to follow the cave into the asteroid proper. “You don’t need to cover for me or anything…”
“Alright…” He answered.
The actions of the biosphere creature fell in line with what Green Crystal assumes would happen given the invitation. Though the willingness to sacrifice one of its creatures might show signs of negligence on the metal rocks part it might have just been impatience or a sign of trust? It made the Rock think about how she would treat her biosphere, if she ever got one, while she did turn down the living plant mind that had bonded to her father that was more out of a childish rebellion than anything. Shaking the thought of her father and that choice she made she reached out and grabbed the small creature in her gravitic field before very carefuly pulling her towards the opening in her surface.
A set of crystal clusters that hadn't lit up before started glowing an eerie green gold light as 1.2 G of gravity started pulling Cassandra down towards and into the hole.
The void suit’s maneuvering thrusters were old, and far from the precision tools newer rigs tended to use, but they were enough to guide Cassandra down the tunnel that had opened in the rock. She could help but be awestruck by the sight around her, snapping picture after picture in the coming hours as she descended deeper into the rock itself.
McAlister stayed near the opening, and kept in communications with the wayward reporter.
“Some Commodore is taking control of the situation,” He told her. “Demanding you come back out and hand off to a first contact specialist,”
“Well they’re welcome to come down here and make me,” The reporter replied glibly. McAlister chuckled, the sound more akin to a burst of static over the communication line.
“I don’t think they’re going to do that,” He told her.
McAlister was right to suspect as much. The warships formed a perimeter around the rock, and remaining miners and security personnel cleared out of the area. McAlister likely would have been banished too, but being the only one in contact with Cassandra left Commodore Hargrave unwilling to order the rent-a-cop to be on his way.
The warships instead focused on trying to decipher the language of the asteroid. They flashed light signals, as Cassandra and McAlister had, and let complex artificial intelligences work on finding and deciphering patterns from the response. Things were tense, and though the warships had their gravitic shields online, their weapons stayed stowed for the moment.
Wait and see very much seemed to be the order of the day, minutes becoming hours as Cassandra descended ever deeper into the twisting tunnel. Everyone, including the reporter, held their breath and waited to see what would happen next.
Green Crystal looks at the other metal rocks that now surrounded her. They were far enough away to nit crowd her but after so long alone all the attention was making her a bit anxious. Their attempts to talk at her weren’t helping much either, the bigger metal rocks were just as incomprehensible ad their smaller brethren’s attempt. Though there seemed yo be more reason behind these attempts at communication.
On her inside she slowly released her gravitic hold on the creature as it neared her geode. This wasn’t her first time using her terminal but this would be the first time she would use it to link with a living creature. If anything she was nervous that she would hurt the small thing, it looked so tiny and fragile compared to her rocky and robust self.
The corridors of rock abruptly ended as Cassandra fell into a cavern filled floor to ceiling with haphazard green crystal pillars. Her fall quickly slowed as she neared the oddly smooth crystalline floor. However the oddest thing in the massive room was the pure blue crystal shard that stood three meters tall it almost looked like a screen of sorts. The whole room seemed to tinkled silently as psioelectric reactions happened in the void all around her creating the life that made this living asteroid tick.
She touched down and turned in a full circle, taking in the crystalline cavern. She snapped a couple of pictures, but a quick glance down at her screen told her the camera just wasn’t capturing the scene quite the way she had hoped. She clicked her tongue and let go of the camera, letting it hang from a strap around her neck as she began walking across the cavern.
“What do you see?” McAllistar asked, his disembodied voice crackling out of her communicator.
“Big cavern,” She said. “All crystal. The force pulling me inward has stopped,”
She came to a stop in front of the screen, circled around it once, then snapped a closeup. Finally, satisfied with what documentation she had taken, the reporter focused her attentions on the crystalline screen.
“There’s… I don’t know exactly,” She said leaning in for a closer look. After a brief pause she put a gloved hand on the crystal screen.
As soon as she pressed her gloved hand to the screen she heard something inside her head, it was like a language made of sensations and concepts.
“Crystal-Shiny-Rock-Me attempting-trying interface-connect-intertwine-bond with biological-squishy-meat-life-mind.”
The terminal started covering itself in text from a slightly mangled version of the ancient Visone language, lines scrawling across the screen almost like a computer booting up.
“Please-request-plea attempt-try interact-think-manipulate terminal-bluerock-machine.”
Green Crystal felt weird as that part of her slowly woke up. She had no real idea how to describe it but she didn’t like the part of her that lived in that shard of herself. It didn’t feel like her but it was apart of her at the same time. Luckily this shouldn’t take long and she could turn it off.
She pulled her hand back as soon as she heard the voice in her head. It was only after clutching her hand to her chest for several heartbeats that it occurred to the reporter she hadn’t really heard anything so much as just… felt it. She knit her eyebrows together, and cast another glance around the cavern as though afraid she wasn’t entirely alone down here.
“Okay,” She said aloud. “Psionics. That’s what they call this don’t they?”
It was impossible to avoid mention of psionics on the AncNet. Afterall, a psionic gestalt had destroyed an entire planet back during the Second Ancerious War, and the Commonwealth at least, had responded by heavily restricting all psionic research. She’d listened to all manner of scientists and students bemoan the restrictions and the lack of progress their research was making as a result. Beyond that the reporter knew very little about psionics and found herself hesitating.
But, She thought to herself. You’ve already come this far.
She reached out her hand again and touched the screen, this time more prepared for the disjointed barrage of feelings and pseudo-instructions that flooded her mind. She tried to parse out what exactly it wanted. An instruction it seemed, maybe to calibrate for her thought processes?
“Uh,” She said aloud, finding the idea of purely thinking instructions to be a bit overwhelming at the moment.
“Identify yourself,” She said and thought finally, settling on a pretty easy first instruction.
The terminal screen went dark for a second before an image of the asteroid body of green crystal appeared on the screen and what felt like looking over ones own body.
“I-me-my Crystal-Hard-Rock. Name-designation-me Green-plant-good Crystal-Rock.”
Green Crystal tried to speak through that small part of her geode that was both apart of her crystal structure and separate.
“Who-Identify-indicate is-owns-controls you-individual-creature-biological?”
The sensations were followed by an arc of lightning down one of the crystal columns and the image on the blue terminal flickered a bit. Before showing what looked like a fractal image of the fighter, as well as an image seeming kilometers in length was pressed into her mind of the same.
She winced and groaned unconsciously taking her hand off the terminal and moving it to her forehead as a sudden sharp pain lanced through her skull. It wasn't until her hand bumped audibly against her helmet visor that she remembered she was in an environment suit.
The reporter took a couple breaths and then put her hand back on the terminal.
"My name," She said, still speaking her thoughts aloud. "Is Cassandra Gariot. I'm not controlled by anything. The uh... the image that you showed me. That's just a ship a um... a machine operated by another person. McAlister I think he said his name was,"
A metal rock named Mcalister. Green Crystal let that mull over in her geode. Though it wasn’t weirder than the name Cassandra Gariot, who knew maybe these were fancy rocks, all shiny and stuff? She idly reached out and grabbed a nearby asteroid and idly ground it into her surface.
The idle thoughts skimmed over Cassandra’s mind just out of reach and creating a mild feeling of intrigue. The very alien sensation of a asteroid, much much larger than her being absorbed into her skin was however not dampened.
Green Crystal pulled herself out of her sinkhole of curiosity and tried to bring herself back to her original reason for trying to talk to the metal rock.
“Owner-controler-settled-planet-home in-around-between brightness-heat-big?”
She kept her hand on the screen the second time, though the alien sensations that accompanied it were definitely... off putting. Still, she kept her hand on the screen, doing her best to process all the feelings and half-thoughts that went through her mind. She closed her eyes, focusing on her breathing for a moment before trying to figure out the next question.
"This star system is within the territory of the Vestahl Commonwealth," She said finally. "It's administered by a corporation at the moment. The planets aren't habitable for my species..."
She took her hand off the screen for at least some momentary reprieve before she returned it.
"Why are you here?"
Green Crystal tried to wrap her head around the concept of a corporation, she didn’t get a good idea of what it was from the creature standing in her geode, though learning that some old rock named Vestahl Commonwealth had control over this system was rather disappointing. The combination or trying to learn a new and interesting concept with the disappointment at having failed yet again at her mission hung there as she answered the question posed by the creature.
A memory started playing both on the screen and in her mind. A blue, red and green planet stood before Green crystal, the imposing presence of an elder talking down to their young could be felt through the scene.
Mountains down on the planet lit up in sequence and something else happened, a voice badly translated from the rocks language,
“So you are going to run forever?” Came a deep bass voice in tune with the flashing mountains below.
“Anywhere is better than here.” Came a more feminine voice that seemed more internal,
“You are being-acting unreasonable.”
“So? If I’m being-acting unreasonable maybe there is a major-big purpose behind it?”
Space seemed to shudder as the gravitic wake of a sigh from the planet below. The memory continued as father and daughter argued, it did not end well on either side until Green Crystal stormed off into the void.
“That-it-memory why-reason-logic.”
Again Cassandra felt herself be nearly overwhelmed by the onslaught of visions and feelings. Her head swam and she felt like she might lose her balance but when Green Crystal had finished her explanation she felt like she had a much better understanding of what exactly she was dealing with.
The... crystal, their species, they got bigger. Planet sized eventually it seemed. That, the journalist decided, is why she must be having difficulty communicating.
"I understand," She said finally. "But I..."
She hesitated. How did she even begin to explain governments and territory?
"Do you... have you encountered intelligent animals before? Or... only intelligent asteroids and planets like you?"
Green Crystal found answering this small creatures questions rather enjoyable, it was quite nice getting all this off her surface, however when posed this question that other part of her acted almost as if a reaction to the question.
The terminal returned to a blue screen and showed as well as emanating a trio of significant data caches. One was labeled Growth and the other was labeled Auk’Tau’Nur. The final and smaller was labeled Visone. Or so the psychic designators seemed to indicate what the series of disorderly dots and circles meant.
All seemed readily accessible to Cassandra, if massive in scale
The journalist hesitated momentarily, scanning across the three caches. She tried to guess at their contents. Growth she supposed might be about Green Crystal. How she'd been born and come to grow and be here? Auk'Tau'Nur and Visone were both mysteries... but maybe she'd have some idea of what was in them after watching growth.
She reached out a hand and touched the first cache, Growth.
The file took a second to open but as soon as it did it was like a dam breaking in a flood of information.
The Growth evolved on the planet assigned to the Experimental Crystal Data Storage two million years after planetary rearrangement. Starting as single celled chemosynthetic organisms near the major geothermal vents in section four hundred and twenty one. Primary predators included the early multi-celled organisms…..
Secondary evolutionary branches were forms of sea flora that grew in the dark volcanic area in sections four hundred and twenty one through three hundred and two……
Land varieties on smaller islands were gained as symbiosis was achieved with photosynthetic plant lines allowing it to survive more efficiently that other species in section six thousand and forty nine. Allowing for control over key niches…..
Eventually mainland variations on decomposition flora were outbred by the invasive stage of the growth….
Mineral absorption from surface patches of Visone ruins allowed a basic psionic evolution….
And so the file went on for the entire three million year evolutionary history of the Growth. Every second of every ancestor meticulously recorded in the crystal structure around her pouring into her head.
Green Crystal watched the small Cassandra as her built in purpose was being completed, it was an amazing feeling.
The amount of information the crystal abruptly tried to force into Cassandra’s brain was overwhelming, so overwhelming in fact that instinct took over and she pulled her hand back after only a couple short seconds. Even so, the information abruptly forced into her brain overwhelmed it’s functionalities, and for sixty heart-stopping seconds her whole head went dark and the journalist abruptly passed out.
It was fortunate, for continued peace, that the suit she had lifted for her excursion didn’t report her vitals back to anyone on the outside. She came to with a groan and a splitting headache…
No, a migraine she realized when opening her eyes intensified the pain and sent a wave of nausea coursing through her. She swallowed hard and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to will away the pain while she groped blindly for the pedestal.
“That’s too much,” She said as soon as she found it. “I can’t process that much all at once,”
Maybe not at all. She added non-verbally, momentarily forgetting that the nature of their communication meant her thoughts were as easy to read as the words she spoke.
“The pedestal can display written language… could you display information as text and just… help me to read through it? That might work better,” She suggested after a pause.
Green Crystal thought this one through a bit. The creature wanted the information in a specific image format. Why she wanted data on The Growth to begin with was a bit confusing to her but she didn’t mind sharing common knowledge. The only problem was that Green Crystal didn’t know the image format that this thing accepted, at least not beyond the small glimpses that had come out from the creatures interactions. Then again that was the whole beginning of this issue, she couldn’t under what their Ship Rock McAllister was saying. This would take a little bit…. Though it did seem to accept a normal visual light spectrum so maybe that would work.
The terminal turned the screen into fractal images similar to how she saw the ship earlier, the image was of a different sky, a different ocean, and a weird horizon with what looked like a partially terraformed atmosphere. It looked familiar as if from a memory, that wasn’t hers, and the magnified look at the collection of microorganisms that filled the ocean. The psychic feeling that came from the image gave the feeling of a real time recording and the length of a few million years.
Cassandra released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. All of this was very new to her. She’d never been part of a first contact, nor did she have any experience at all with psionics. It was a relief that Green Crystal seemed to understand what she wanted, and after a few minutes of staring at the screen she nodded.
Much better, She thought watching the screen and considering the press of psychic information.
“I think I understand,” She said. “Growth, this file is all about how your species evolved?”
It must be, there was no other reason she could think of for the file to be literally millions of years in length.
“My species evolved too, but we didn’t evolve the ability to travel the cosmos. We had to invent tools to build vessels which could take us into the void. The ship I came from is one of them. A small one, but that’s what it is. It’s not a living thing like you, it’s just piloted by one not dissimilar to me,”
There appeared to be a mixup. Assuming the thoughts of the Cassandra were correct. It would probably be best to clear it up before even more confusions were made and further made it harder to communicate.
“I-Individual-Me.” Thjs statement was followed by a image several hundred kilometers wide of a network of crystal structures making up a complex network.
“Them-other.” Was followed by a very different image, dwarfed by the crystal web work, and appeared to be a strangely familiar red fungus material.
“Different-seperate-symbiotic.”
The other words and concepts such as cosmos seemed to encompass the void with the brightness but in a much larger sense, it was the most interesting out of them to the rock.
“Story-lineage-data upload? Permission-willingness-allowance.
Cassandra smiled and suppressed a chuckle at the final feelings she received from the crystal. It was capable of handling vast amounts of data it seemed.
“Our history… okay well I’ll try my best…”
She paused. She was no historian and worse yet it would take hours to deliver a comprehensive verbal lecture about the history of the Commonwealth. But the crystal was psionic and she wondered if she could convey all the information without the need for a speaking. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, centering and grounding herself with a few inhales and exhales before she tried to just… picture all the information she wanted to convey.
The journalist did her best, but the images she delivered were disjointed. She began at the very beginning, with a burning rock orbiting a sun being bombarded with frozen ice chunks. From there is had developed oceans, atmosphere, and single celled organisms which evolved into aquatic life and then millions of years later left the ocean to live on the land.
Amphibians became reptiles, and then mammals evolved, and from mammals eventually the first humans upon Vestahl came to be. Humans roamed the pre-historic planet, settled into communities, built civilizations and then tore them apart in an orgy of blood and violence. Perhaps it was a symptom of humanity’s romanticization of war, or perhaps just Cassandra’s understanding of her own history, but the images she conveyed seemed to be of brutal war after brutal war as the humans feuded among themselves over wealth, power, territory and resources.
Bronze weapons became iron, then steel. Civilizations and governments became ever more complex as larger and larger bureaucracies became a necessary to manage growing populations. Technology advanced, culture and ideas on egalitarianism and democracy developed and still there was war. Men and women butchered each other with swords, then shot each other with primitive smoothbore rifles, and blew each other into meaty chunks with artillery shells and airstrikes. Many of the nations of Vestahl coalesced into a planetary government, then fought yet another brutal war to subjugate those nations who refused to join it. Supersonic aircraft vaporized city blocks with wire guided missiles, insurgents fought unwinnable battles in mountains and forests, and the Coalition forced all those who opposed it into submission.
Time passed, the children of those conquered people simmered in their hatreds as the first clumsy steps into the void were taken. Colonies were established on other worlds, governments grew fat and corrupt on the misery of the underclasses, and the violence simmered and then boiled over into yet another brutal and bloody conflict.
Warships burned in orbit around Vestahl, cities turned to ruin as brutal civil war ground its way across the planet. There were bodies piled in the streets, a sense of recognition as one twisted mess of flesh and bone was recognizable to Cassandra, then barely old enough to call herself and adult. The Commonwealth very nearly fell, pushed to their last defensible fortress in the capital of Levitsky. The rebels closed in, their victory within reach…
And then it was gone. Aliens descended from the sky to undo all they had achieved. Waves of superheated plasma incinerated entire forests and thermonuclear weapons reduced a once vibrant capital to naught but an irradiated crater. There was a sense of despair, hopelessness. The war was lost, the Commonwealth persisted and marched forth promising change and a brighter future as it spread from one world to the next.
A broken woman returned to a college campus she didn’t recognize to finish a journalism degree she no longer cared about.
Cassandra stopped, realizing things were getting too personal. The last thing left over the psionic link being a feeling of exhausted resignation.
“Sorry,” She said aloud. “I think I got distracted at the end. The civil war is… raw still.” She trailed off.
As she sent memories into the blue shard of stone the crystals around her seemed to glow brighter as her memories flowed into them and into the massive mind of the rock. “Data-mind-memory upload-give-arrow incomplete-missing-disperse.”
Green Crystal studied the memories as they flowed through her input node, they were the minds recreation of events and like most biological minds parts were missing or clouded by perception and emotions. But she got the general picture, it’s not like she hadn’t seen it before in her fathers own memories. The Auk’Tau’Nar were once very similar to these people only they were stopped by the growth because they were harming Big Rock when they tried mining his crystalline nervous system. Green Crystal pulled herself from that rabbit hole, they had tried to stop them peacefully and they wouldn’t listen, but maybe these people would be different, maybe these people could be reasoned with? This one Cassandra seemed innocent enough? Maybe she could be Green Crystals biosphere.
The emotions that rolled around the mountainous mind leaked through to Cassandra, sympathy high amongst them. “War-death-destruction common-often-fierce in biosphere-biological-life.” The rock went silent for a moment and the crystal pillars died down to their normal glow as the memories stopped flowing down them. It remained silent for a while before a spark of an idea arouse in the geological mind Cassandra knew that the Rock was about to do something but what she couldn’t feel.
“Trade-exchange. Repair-fix-heal (Flashes of the blasted landscape of her world rippled through her mind) for-take stories-memories-mind?”
The journalist shook her head with a sigh. She kept her hand on the console trying to keep her thoughts open so Green Crystal could read them. Decisions about entire planets weren’t made by people like her. They involved diplomats and ministers and the myriad apparatus of state. She was just a reporter, worse, a freelance reporter with no steady income.
“I’m no one important,” She admitted. “But the people out there, the ones on the warships, they’re important. Problem is the language barrier…”
Although she supposed she could help with that. Green Crystal had access to her thoughts and seemed to be able to absorb information faster than she was. She could help Green Crystal communicate with the warships.
“I could try to share my language with you?” She suggested finally. “But I’m not… totally sure how to do that.”
The green stones around the reporter seemed to look at her with confusion as her mind went to how many people were involved in such a simple decision. Then again she had to remind herself that these weren’t The Growth, they were similar with their worrying about issues that seemed insignificant to her geological self but unlike the growth these seemed to be many separate beings. It was interesting even from the small glimpse given already.
Then the small being brought the small planetoid back on track with discussing the initial problem that had led to this meeting of minds. “Share-Give-Copy language-speech-sounds-intention? Why-Reason-Rational not-dislike-disagree share-give-copy mind-memory-you or-option-choice speak-vocalize-talk for-instead?” The Rock around the reporter seemed to almost glisten with excitement at the possibility of curiosity being sated.
It took a few moments for everything to click in Cassandra’s mind. The strange, disjointed nature was still a bit difficult for her to understand, but she was getting better. At least, she thought she was. She mulled over Green’s statement, the first question somewhat… alarming to her. It was obvious, even to someone as unversed in psionics as her, that their communication was being facilitated through such and she worried about the implications of Green copying her mind memories. Maybe she was just misinterpreting, but she didn’t like the idea of her memories being copied.
“I could speak for you,” Cassandra said checking that her comms unit was still connected. She was, admittedly, a little surprised to see it was. She wouldn’t have expected it to work through so much rock.
“Um… yeah, looks like I’m still connected… just uh… well…”
She trailed off, suddenly apprehensive at the idea of speaking for the crystal. What if she said the wrong thing? Or misinterpreted something and caused a fight? It didn’t help that it felt to the journalist like her only qualification was arriving first. She shook her head, dislodging those thoughts.
“What would you like me to say to them?”
Green Crystal seemed stumped at that. What should she say to them? It wasn’t like she came out here prepared for something like this, hell she didn’t even expect to find any rock out this way much less a collection of talking creatures. She guessed this is how her father felt when he first talked to The Growth.
She stopped thinking for a moment and outside forces registered the equivalent of several deep breaths, a very weak gravity wave moving outwards from the surface before flattening out into normal space. “Relay-speak-transfer greetings-hello.” Her thoughts were more deliberate this time around as the relatively young rock tried to be more like her father when he spoke with his symbiote. She tried to cover the nervousness that arose when she recalled the destroyed surface in the Cassandra’s memory and didn’t want to have that happen to her surface or worse.
Cassandra nodded and thumbed her communicator on. There was an amount of confusion and disbelief among the people on the other end when she explained that the asteroid was in fact a sentient and psionic being, but the confusion subsided quickly. The Commonwealth had dealt with the Dirge and Elwar and all sorts of other sentients equally if not more outlandish than a living crystal.
Even so, once it was established that the crystal was alive, and not hostile it took time for the gears of bureaucracy to grind into place. The warships that had arrived set up a cordon around the crystal and after some back and forth (and no small amount of entitled corporate bitching) they deemed the situation safe enough to allow the asteroid miners to return to work.
A few snub-craft followed the crack Cassandra had navigated to bring the reporter more oxygen, but the prevailing feeling among the Commonwealth commanders was that psionic contact should be limited as much as possible and so Cassandra was left mostly on her own inside of the living crystal.
It was three hours before someone at the Foreign Affairs Office could be pulled away from their regular duties to deal with Green Crystal. Pierre LaPointe was a seasoned diplomat. He’d negotiated deals with Capitol before it collapsed at the end of the Second Ancerious War, and established working relationships with several other empires in the aftermath of the Commonwealth’s civil war. It took some time, but at last the diplomat was looped in to Cassandra communicator.
He was an older man, and had eyes tired with ceaseless march of time that gazed at the screen from behind thick rimmed glasses. He exchanged some pleasantries first with the journalist, and then with Green Crystal through Cassandra before finally he got into the real meat of a first contact scenario.
“Now then,” He said, removing his glasses to clean away a smudge before continuing. “It seems Ms. Gariot has shared some information about the Commonwealth but I’d like to know some more about you Green Crystal. What brings you into the Commonwealth today?”
Cassandra dutifully relayed the question to Green Crystal and awaited her response.
Green Crystal had relaxed a bit as she watched the smaller creatures and their metal crafts fly around her. These Commonwealths did things surprisingly fast compared to her fathers slow and deliberate tendencies. It only felt like moments to the sentient rock before she was talking to someone of apparent importance through the Cassandra. Though the question yet again drew the geological mind up short.
“Wandering-Exploring-Surveying for-looking-searching new-distant-better home-body-shell.” Green Crystal didn’t see much point in hiding her reasonings. She was still in a bit of culture shock at her discovery of a space fairing race other than her own, but with Cassandra’s explanation and donation of memories she was coping rather well. She still had no idea what was happening for the most part but she hoped that maybe these beings could help her find a new home.
Cassandra did her best to convey Green’s message to LaPointe. The journalist chose her words carefully, knowing all to well the way the media and the powers that be could twist and use one’s words against them if they were not abundantly cautious. She had to be careful, doubly so because she was speaking for someone who didn’t necessarily know the harm a misspoken sentiment could cause.
“She’s wandering, looking for a… a new home or a new body?”
“I see,” LaPointe answered, smooth and suave. “Well that certainly has some interesting implications. I’ll pull up the survey database. What is she looking for in a home?”
Cassandra chuckled momentarily, finding some amusement in the realization that she now had a seasoned diplomat playing real estate agent for a sentient asteroid. LaPointe asked her about what she had found so funny but she waved off his question, focusing on making her thoughts coherent enough for Green Crystal to understand.
She conveyed that LaPointe seemed amicable at the moment, and wanted to know in more detail what she’d need for a home.
From there the conversation continued. Green Crystal used Cassandra as a translator and through the journalist was able to convey to the diplomat what it was she was looking for. It took several hours of back and forth between Cassandra and LaPointe, followed by several more hours of LaPointe making arrangements and agreements with other members of the government.
In the end, it was decided that the easiest way to handle things for the moment was to ‘sell’ one of the barren planets in the system to Green Crystal. It wasn’t a particularly mineral rich planet, nor did it have a livable atmosphere and no one was lining up to start a bidding war over it.
The exact nature of Green Crystal’s relationship to the Commonwealth was dutifully kicked down the road to be determined at a later date. Even before the arrangements had been finalized, Cassandra could overhear some debate on LaPointe’s end of the call as to whether Green Crystal should be treated as an individual citizen, or as its own polity similar to Elwar.
“It’s all just bullshit politics,” Cassandra had lamented to Green Crystal during a pause while LaPointe had been finalizing some details.
At last, LaPointe gave the go ahead, and Green Crystal was escorted to her new planet by the fleet in system. But before she went the journalist was asked to leave. She exited the way she’d entered, and was promptly scooped up and returned to the main station in the system. There, she was informed (in no uncertain terms) that corporate had trespassed her, and she would be on the first ship out.
She supposed she should have expected that.
Days later, back in a far to cramped apartment, the journalist found herself staring at a screen. The story she’d gone out to cover in the first place had gone nowhere, leaving the question of whether or not she should write anything at all about Green Crystal. The news had already found out about what had happened, but her name had been kept out of the official story.
So what could she say? What should she say?
She stared at the blank page on her screen, thinking over her brief encounter with Green Crystal and the intimacy of their psionic communication.
In the end she decided to say nothing at all. Green Crystal was finding her own way in the Commonwealth, making her own statements to the media and dealing with the powers that be without Cassandra. She closed the word processor and rubbed her eyes with a sigh.
Bills wouldn’t pay themselves, and she’d need another story if she was going to make rent this month
The largest of the mining companies operating in Tarakaris was the Extra-Orbital Extraction Corporation. Three years earlier they’d bought the rights to the largest and most minerally rich of three planetoids orbiting the system’s white dwarf star. The other two planetoids were yet to be sold, owing in large part to the fact what deposits were present were deep, and would be expensive to extract. Thus far, market prices had not inflated to the point where such a venture was likely to be profitable.
Surrounding the three planetoids was a dense ring of asteroids, and smaller mining startups trawled the rocks on the look out for their next big score, buying up the rights to sections of the ring and either finding something worth breaking apart, or going bankrupt when their investors ran out of confidence in their venture.
Extra-Orbital Extraction maintained a processing facility in orbit of Tarakaris-I. The barren rocky planet below was not even unique enough to warrant filing the paperwork to register a new name. And so, as the planetoid was unoriginally named Tarakaris-I the facility that orbited was unoriginally named Tarakaris-I Orbital Processing Facility. The facility housed a foundry, where the materials strip mined from the planetoid below could be processed, refined, and then shipped out to manufacturer’s deeper within the Commonwealth. A small contingent of Commonwealth Peacekeepers were stationed on the facility, and rotated out every few months. Their job was to make sure the miners, loading dock operators, and ship captains didn’t get too rowdy, but the bulk of the system’s day-to-day security needs were handled by Arunmor Securities, which just so happened to have been the lowest bidder when EOE had contracted out the work.
Arunmor personnel patrolled the mining facilities planet side, and Arunmor strike craft flew sorties to make sure the miners in the belt stayed inside of their parceled sections. Arunmor’s contractors liked to talk a big game, and carry big guns but the running joke among the miners and other workers in Tarakaris was that if anything ever really went down, all Arunmor would do was hide on the orbital facility, and cry for the Commonwealth’s navy to come save them.
The truth of that statement had never been tested. Military patrols through the system were routine enough that most pirates simply went looking for easier prey. Nothing in Tarakaris was valuable enough to risk facing down Commonwealth battleships.
Yes, Tarakaris was a system where nothing ever happened. When Vincent had accepted the position as Administrator for the system, he had done so on the rather explicit understanding that nothing happened out there, and it would be a peaceful posting where he could sit in his office, drink coffee until he had ulcers, and collect a paycheque. His divorce had been rough on him, and the middle-aged corporate necktie had wanted nothing more than to make some money for a few years and then return core ward to spend it all on a midlife crisis.
But today, Vincent was not dealing with the relative peace and quiet of the day-to-day operations. No, instead Vincent was dealing with a self-proclaimed journalist with cybernetic eyes that didn’t match and a camera drone that hovered over her shoulder and emitted a constant whine that was giving him a headache. He had hoped that a call back to corporate would be enough for Arunmor to bounce her from the station, but the call had instead produced the opposite effect. Corporate had confirmed the woman was allowed to be there. Freelance though she may be, she apparently had a friend somewhere in the Commonwealth’s bureaucracy who his corporate overlords weren’t willing to cross.
So, much to his chagrin, Vincent was forced to take a meeting with the raven haired reporter and her camera drone. He was forced to inhale the fumes of the hand rolled cigarettes she smoked, and wonder why in an age of tablet computers as thin as a sheet of paper this woman still took notes in a battered leatherbound notebook.
It’s to irritate people, Vincent had decided. Nothing is more irritating than answering a question and watching someone write down notes about your answer.
“What did you say your name was?” He asked again, massaging his temples in a half hearted attempt to stave off his growing headache.
“Cassandra Gariot,” She answered without looking up from whatever she was writing down.
“And what’s your interest in Tarakaris?”
“Yusuf Al-Hakim,” She said, now looking up from her notepad. “Know him?”
“Can’t say as I do,”
She dug momentarily in messenger bag fading from black to grey with frayed edges and took out a sheet of paper. A young man was smiling at the top of the sheet, and at the bottom was a termination notice with his signature on it.
“He was injured four months ago on the job,” She said. “Then fired and bankrupted by his medical expenses,”
She smiled at him and put the notebook on the table separating them setting down the pen in perfect parallel to the book.
“Why was he fired?”
Vincent sighed, and desperately wished for anything, anything at all to spare him the rest of this meeting.
Green Crystal had been having a hard few hundred years. Her storming out of her fathers system long ago had been stupid and swearing that she'd find a solar system even better than his to settle down in had been even more so, her cavernous geode chiming at the memory of that moment of stupidity that had since claimed her life. Not that she could turn back now, with nothing but wasted time and piss all to show, she'd be the laughing stock of her whole family.
She wasn't being completely fair to herself, the solar systems she had found, while not better than her fathers, were large and had a few planets for a rock to settle down and grow into. Not that she'd listen to that nagging voice in the back of her head to just return to her father and share what she had found so far. She did miss Grey Gravel who was now the youngest Rock in the family. The little grump was rather fun to poke around then chase around the bright rock. Green Crystal squashed these thoughts out thoroughly, she was on a mission and family be damned she was going to finish it.
Her attention returned to her task she began to slow down, her spiky surface lighting up as the gravitic waves began pushing against the void. She had arrived at the next bright point for her to explore and this one would hopefully be the one, even though she had thought the same of all the systems that came before it.
Her hopes rose as she peered at the large rocks and ice chunks that made up the outer shell of the system. Most of the orbiting debris this far out tended to be small but the larger chunks gave her more hope that this was a place she could finally call home.
She spent a while coasting further in, not wanting to risk going faster and colliding with any rocks, and yet again her hopes rose as the thick asteroid belt came into view. It had been a while since she had a chance to add more rocks to her surface so long in fact that the crystal outcroppings on the surface were starting to look unseemly.
She would need to remedy that as soon as possible and seeing those big collections of minerals that weren't stuck on a huge rock made her rush forward, her gravitic crystals putting haste into her movements as she made a tight turn into the cloud of rocks and began gorging herself, the crystal protrusions on her surface sticking to other asteroids like roots to soil.
The first to notice the asteroid’s unnatural movement was, predictably, one of the small time mining operations in the belt. This particular operation was a small family venture, and the father and son aboard their small ore ship were quick to call security when they saw the asteroid change course and begin moving into their parceled section of the belt.
Initially, Arunmor’s dispatcher received the call believing it to be an elaborate attempt at asteroid poaching. Asteroid poaching was not unheard of in Tarakaris, though ordinarily the attempts simply involved freight haulers attempting to tow mineral rich asteroids into their section of the belt, and claim it had always been there. An asteroid apparently moving under its own power raised some eyebrows, but it was initially chalked up to a miscommunication or at worst some excessively elaborate plan that would no doubt make the rounds on the net once it was understood and then fade into obscurity.
Arunmor’s dispatcher retasked three strike craft on patrol in the belt to investigate and they began weaving their way through the rocks at speed, rocketing toward the source off the apparent distress. Upon arriving, rather than finding some elaborate scheme gone awry, they instead came upon the asteroid and its strange crystaline protrusions slowly absorbing the asteroids around it. A very angry father and son were screaming over the short-range demanding to know just what had taken them so long and what precisely they intended to do about the asteroid currently absorbing their rightfully purchased asteroids before they’d even had the chance to prospect them.
The Arunmor security agent in charge of the trio of single seaters decided the entire situation was very much above his paygrade and sent a live feed back to dispatch, asking for advice on what exactly they should do next.
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“Blood tests determined Mr. Al-Hakim was under the influence when the accident with the drill occurred,” Vincent explained to the reporter across from him. “Insurance denied his medical claims and I was advised to terminate him in line with company policy.”
“Blood test results were clean,” Cassandra countered, reaching into the battered messenger bag again. She smoothed out a crumpled piece of paper on the desk separating them and picked up her pen and notebook, scratching something down in the ensuing silence while Vincent examined the page.
“I can only tell you what I was told by insurance,” Vincent said, his tone shifting to something more defensive.
“Do you have a record of what you were told by insurance?” She asked, looking up from her notebook.
Vincent was spared an immediate answer by the door to his office opening. An Arunmor supervisor stood at the threshold glancing at Cassandra and then at Vincent. He cleared his throat.
“Sir, we have a um… situation in the belt,”
Silently, Vincent heaved a sigh of relief, glad for an excuse to walk out on the reporter and her questions. He glanced at the reporter, meeting her mismatched gaze and gestured toward the door.
“We’ll have to pick this up later Ms. Gariot,” He said.
“May I speak with your employees?”
“You may not,” He answered. “There’s coffee in the cafeteria if you are so inclined, but security will prevent you from going anywhere you’re not meant to be,”
He made a mental note to send off a message instructing security to consider ‘anywhere at all’ somewhere she wasn’t meant to be. If the reporter was at all upset by her interview being cut short, she made no show of it. She picked up her papers, and her notebook, returned them to her bag and wordlessly left the office. When she was gone, Vincent gestured the Arunmor manager to her now vacated seat.
“What’s the situation?”
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The three strike craft continued to circle the strange rock with the crytals protruding while they waited for further instructions from their superiors. Orders had come through fairly quickly that they were not shoot the rock, for fear that the crystals may be volatile, and so there was nothing for the three pilots to do but circle the asteroid. They ran what scans they could, eventually calming down the father and son enough to convince them to use their more powerful mining scanner to try and determine just what exactly the crystal was made of, but for the time being there was nothing for them to do but wait.
Green Crystal focused on the rocky masses that she had recently attached to her body, the rock almost moving like a liquid as it moved over her surface. This process while not fast was noticeable to the onlookers as the crystal spikes that covered her body were slowly covered up, leaving only a few green sparkling points poking out. While she still could use some more regolith to cover up herself some more she decided to wait and let the few large asteroids finish covering her up before gorging herself further. Though her vanity streak did rear its head when given the chance, one of her recent meals had a decent gold deposit and so she slowly pushed that to the surface giving her front left quadrant a nice irregular pattern of rough gold veins.
The scans from these actions would be very unusual, primarily showing electro magnetic activity along with weird gravitic forces where the new asteroids were being integrated. Other anomalies would include a active molten or so they could assume from the similar magnetic field, along with a high anceron content of the asteroid itself.
With her basic needs and wants taken care of she turned her attention back to the task at hand. Moving from a relevant standstill to a constant and light thrust was relatively easy, the other asteroids flowing forward with Green Crystal in her gravitic wake. However she didn't much bother with avoiding smaller rocks in her path allowing the vast majority of those to simply collide with her surface or slingshot around her in wild orbits. She didn't particularly notice that the three small metallic crafts kept up with her, or care that they were following her as she headed towards the inner system to see if this place was worth settling down in.
Vincent had relocated from his office to the control room once the situation that was unfolding in the belt had been explained to him. There was a notable tension among the dispatchers and their lackeys as they listened to the reports coming in. Apparently their rogue asteroid had absorbed several surrounding asteroids, changed it’s appearance, and was once more on the move deeper into the system.
The head of security stood at Vincent’s side, puffing on a massive cigar and looking through the results of the scan before passing the tablet off to Vincent. Vincent scanned through the results, tuning out the sounds of distant pilots reporting on the movements of the rock. Frowning he passed the tablet to the intern that had brough it, trading the device for a steaming cup of bitter sludge that passed for ‘coffee’ in this part of the station.
“Has it made any transmissions?”
“Not that we can detect,” The head of security reported. “But it seems to be moving through the use of some sort of gravitic propulsion system. Definitely not naturally occurring,”
“This isn’t some Dirge thing Corporate neglected to mention was coming our way is it?”
“No,” The security officer said. “Triple checked with Corporate…”
Vincent frowned and sipped loudly on his coffee. He was at a loss. The rock didn’t seem hostile, aside for its blatant disregard for property rights. But that didn’t answer the questions as to what exactly it was and what exactly it was doing here. He lowered his coffee mug and set it down with a sigh.
“Threat assessment?” He asked. The head of security shrugged.
“No idea. Could have weapons the scanners aren’t picking up. Could just smash into something expensive too. There’s no discernable pattern to the movements at the moment.”
“Okay,” Vincent said finally, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Request support from Central and transfer them everything we have. I’ve got no idea what we’re dealing with here but I’d feel a lot better about it with some warships backing us up.”
The head of security gave him a look he couldn’t quite identify and removed the cigar from his mouth. For a moment he thought the man might say something, go against him… but in the end he just licked two fingers and snuffed out the end of his cigar. He picked up a communicator and made the call.
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The security guard was doing an admirable job ignoring her. She’d tried to ask him questions about himself, or the stations several times since she’d been escorted to cafeteria and had received only a steely silence in response. It had become immediately apparent to her that the suggestion she grab a coffee in the cafeteria was less of a suggestion and more an attempt by the station’s administrator to keep her sequestered away from anything and everything that was happening.
The square jawed muscle head had prevented every attempt she’d made to leave the cafeteria and she had retired to an empty table to watch the man over the rim of a Styrofoam cup. She downed the last of the bitter liquid and crushed the cup in her hand. She stood and crossed to the trash compactor before turning her mismatched gaze on her minder.
“So you out here as part of the expatriation program?”
That finally earned a reaction from the man, his eyes darting in her direction.
“The tattoo,” She said, touching her forearm. “Three crossed swords. Revolutionary Front door kicker right?”
He turned toward her now, eyebrows knitting together and jaw set. He didn’t say anything but the question was obvious in his posture, in his face.
“I was VRF too,” She said with a shrug.
His expression softened and his posture relaxed.
“What unit?”
She shook her head.
“I was part of an engineering team aboard a starship,” She answered. “Had a friend who was a door kicker. She has the same tattoo on her shoulder.”
He nodded.
“Everyone got one,” He rumbled. “We beat the shit out of anyone who got inked without actually being one of us. Still do.”
“How’d your war end?” She asked. He gave her a sad smile. That was a look she recognized. Failed revolutionaries didn’t often like talking about the moment they realized the revolution was doomed.
“Wasn’t at Levitsky. I was up in the mountains when the nukes went off. Stayed up there for a few months but I knew we’d lost. Everyone with a brain in their skull did. When they offered pardons and reconciliation I took it as a sign. Slipped off in the night, turned myself in. You?”
She shook her head.
“Ship got torched, I got vented into space then picked up by the Davians,” She gestured vaguely to her eyes. “They questioned me,”
He rumbled and nodded. Davian ‘questioning’ was well documented at this point.
“You want to tell me what’s going on out there?”
“Rock,” He said with a shrug. “Moving on its own. Has everyone flipping their collective shit.”
“Want to go see it?” She said with a sly grin.
“I’m supposed to make sure you stay here.”
“Since when do us VRF types do what we’re supposed to?”
He matched her sly grin with one of his own and nodded slowly.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The trio of security strike craft kept pace with the asteroid as it left the belt and began heading deeper into the system. The miners who’s rocks had been absorbed remained in the belt but continued to scream ineffectually at anyone who would listen about their property and the alleged skill of their attorneys (whom would soon be in touch according to the miners). Security for their part gave up trying to calm down or appease the miners.
The call had been made to Central now, and they’d been advised a nearby military patrol was now enroute to their location. Commodore Hargrave, the man in charge, had assumed situational command as soon as he’d announced that his force was enroute, and subsequently ordered the trio of strike craft tailing the rock to make some attempt at communicating with it.
That had raised some eyebrows among the pilots and the dispatchers alike, but no one was about to tell a Commodore his business.
“Attention…” The pilot watching the approach of a fourth strike craft and trying to figure out how precisely he should attempt to address an asteroid. Vessel? Object? What? Sighing he keyed the comms back on, broadcasting on every available frequency as well as bouncing directional signals off the asteroid.
“Attention unidentified… object, you are currently entering space owned and operated by Deep Space Holdings. Alter your course to the following heading and identify yourself, over.”
As Green Crystal reached about half way through the asteroid belt, without altering her course, when her optic crystals on her back finally took note of the three shiny metallic objects that had been following her for quite a while. She had no idea what they were but from what Bluestone had said they were like the Rocks but instead of nice stones and minerals they were made of hard and rigid metals. Some of her larger eyes even saw them in some detail, as they wove through the smaller rocks in her wake, they glowed at her with constant lights that didn't say anything which again followed Bluestones admission of these Metal Rocks not being the clearest crystals in the geode. However her older brother did say that most of them could talk and were decently smart so she decided to see if these glowing rocks were some of his fabled Metal Rocks or just fancy rocks that she could eat.
Her surface lit up in green flowing patterns of light as her magnetic field boomed outwards in the Rock equivalent of a hello. She spoke it out a bit slowly and it came out pretty condescending for her tastes but she was a bit weary of living metal beings and what limited intellect they might have. She didn't stop through this attempt at communication, continuing to move through the asteroid belt munching on smaller rocks while avoiding larger ones.
Aboard Tarakaris’ orbital platform, there was now very little Vincent could do but wait for the Commodore and his entourage to arrive. There was some relief, as there was always relief when a problematic buck was successfully passed to someone else, but he couldn’t help but shake the feeling that his problem with this glowing rock was only just getting started.
Meanwhile, the fourth strike craft neglected to fall into formation with its compatriots. Instead, it came to a brief stop some distance ahead of the mobile asteroid and reversed its thrusters, flying backward ahead of the rock as it continued through the asteroid belt.
“Reversing like this is dangerous,” The security pilot commented. Indeed it was, asteroids could be unpredictable at the best of times, and that was when they weren’t moving on their own in defiance of all known laws of physics. The journalist at his shoulder may have had a snide or pithy remark, but the only answer he received from her was the rapid clicking of a camera shutter as the asteroid’s surface lit up. The clicking came in rapid succession, capturing dozens of images of the flowing patterns that danced across the rock’s surface.
The patterns ended with a magnetic burst that sent the ship’s instruments into a series of unhappy beeping.
“That bad?” Cassandra asked, lowering the camera.
“Not especially,” The security guard answered. “Sudden magnetic interference with the sensors.”
“You think those patterns were some kind of written text?” She asked checking over the images she had captured. The security guard shrugged and she resisted the urge to roll her eyes. Had he no imagination? No curiosity about the world? In the background she could hear the three ships trailing the rock continuing to squawk over comms.
“Flick the running lights on and off,” She said bringing her camera back to her eye and making some adjustments to better shoot through the canopy of the small strike craft.
“Why?” The security guard asked.
“Maybe it will glow again,”
He let out a low grumble and reached out a gloved hand, flicking the small vessel’s running lights on and off several times.
Green Crystal came to a rather sudden, for a mobile asteroid, stop. One of the small metal Rocks, now she at least assumed they were some version of a Rock, came around to her front and glowed at her much like young try to do before they are big enough to talk properly. The lights while pitifully small were interesting as they flashed on and off Green Crystal had never seen multiple colors on one rock before. She slowly rotated herself so that her largest eye faced the small metal being and slowly, like she did when we was talking to a baby, signaled in a very basic pattern while enunciating with her magnetic field. "H-E-L-L-O." A small niggling thought in the back of her geode said she would look like a real cloudy gem if this turned out to be just another bit of space debris.
While her entire surface didn't light up at this time the area facing the fighter craft was light up in a slowly pulsating green light crystals ranging in size from small specs to kilometer wide chunks glowed slowly at them in a slowly repeating pattern. The magnetic field coming from the asteroids molten core pulsed with a seemingly similar pattern and while it didn't match the light show exactly it was fairly close together.
The sudden(ish) stop of the asteroid was noted in the ops center much to the confusion of all those present. It was clear to everyone by now, Vincent included, that they had encountered something rather unique out in their little slice of space. The conversation around ops quickly changed from ‘what is it, what do we do?’ to ‘why has it stopped’. Vincent got his answer soon enough, when one of the strike craft pilots reported the asteroid had come to a halt in front of a fourth strike craft.
“Fourth?” Vincent glanced at his chief of security. “Did you order out a fourth?”
“No,” The security chief answered, his bushy black brows knitting together as he approached one of the consoles. “Who’s flying that fourth ship?”
“McAlister,” One of the technicians reported. Vincent sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Isn’t McAlister supposed to be minding the reporter?”
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The asteroid stopped. Turned, and then seemed to glow rather pointedly in their direction. McAlister had the control stick held in a white knuckle grip and Cassandra was stunned into silence and brief shock. She hadn’t expected flickering the lights to do much of anything, and she definitely hadn’t expected it to result in her and her companion seemingly becoming the sole focus of the asteroid.
There seemed to be a definite pattern to the pulses of the asteroid, though what it was, or how she was meant to interpret it the reporter couldn’t even begin to guess. She snapped pictures of each new light or pattern of lights that danced across the rock’s surface, glancing back through the photographs she’d already taken looking for insight.
None was forthcoming, at least not immediately, though a thought had lodged in the back of her skull, a question she was determined to answer even though she hadn’t the slightest idea how to.
“Uh,” She said, feeling her companion’s gaze shift to her for further instructions. “Do you know flash signals?”
“No.”
Godsdamn door kickers never learned anything useful.
“Okay,” She said. “Uh…”
She tore a page out of her notebook after quickly jotting down some instructions and handed them to her companion. He glanced over them, then back at her, and then sighed and began flickering the lights again. There was more of a pattern this time, not the random flashing of his first attempt. Much as Green has spelled out ‘Hello’ in her own way, now too did the small strike craft respond in kind, using an old code of quick flashes combined longer flashes to make letters and words.
Green crystal looked at the tiny creature with interest, and slight disappointment. She was interested because this was her first time meeting an actual metal Rock and from what Bluestone has said about them they were quite helpful. Her disappointment was that while this was probably a great system to settle down in she'd have to share it with others who probably already took the good orbits. Not that she'd let her mild annoyance out on this young Rock it didn't even have a magnetic field yet and Green wasn't a child anymore which meant she couldn't just throw a tantrum whenever she wanted.
Leaving her mental recriminations and sourness she turned her attention back to the small thing outside her largest crystal outcropping. The new pattern confirmed the fact that it was at least smart enough for patern recognition. The problem was that they didn't seem much smarter than that. "Hello?" She tried again her surface glowing in the complex patterns as her magnetic field pulsed out.
Vincent was having a very bad day, and all of his problems it seemed traced back to one irksome reporter. The asteroid hadn’t even been close to the reason why she’d originally come here and yet, somehow, she had convinced one of his security personnel to take her out to see it. As if all that wasn’t bad enough, it was becoming increasingly apparent to Vincent that the asteroid’s sudden stop, and subsequent flashing, seemed to be a direct result of whatever it was the reporter and his rogue security guard were up to.
All this bounced around his skull as he glared at the empty cafeteria, where the reporter and her minder were supposed to be. The administrator sighed, and lit a cigarette. There would be no hiding this from management, that was for sure. The Commonwealth patrol they’d requested was only a few minutes out now, and upon arrival he’d have no choice but to tell them about the reporter’s antics. They’d want to know what was going on with the rock, and attempting to conceal it would only land him in hotter water when the concealment was discovered.
Vincent had a sinking suspicion he would soon be returning coreward unemployed, but at the very least he’d make sure the damn security guard the reporter had corrupted would be equally unemployed.
His communicator buzzed, and after a brief drag he picked it up.
“Clearwater,”
“Commodore Hargrave’s task group has completed calculations. Wormhole generators are spinning up and they are expected imminently. He has requested a sitrep,”
“Patch me in,” The administrator sighed.
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Cassandra was barely able to contain her excitement when the asteroid flashed it’s colour patterns again. She tapped back through the pictures she’d already taken, confirming it was the same pattern the asteroid had flashed when they’d initially flickered their lights.
“It’s making identifiable patterns,” She said. “The lights aren’t random!”
“What does that mean?” McAlister asked, craning his neck to look at her behind the pilot’s seat. She was grinning like an idiot and shrugged at the question.
“I don’t know!” She declared happily. “Maybe it’s sentient? Or at the very least it can recognize that we’re flashing a pattern at it and is responding with a pattern of its own,”
“A sentient asteroid,” McAlister deadpanned. “That sounds insane,”
She rolled her eyes.
“Extra dimensional entities that can snuff out stars are understandable, but you draw the line at sentient rock formations?”
He shook his head and said nothing further. Cassandra was already busily scrawling notes and then writing up a new set of patterns for McAlister to go through. She handed it to him and he stared at the paper.
“What does this mean?” He asked her.
“Hello my name is Cassandra,” She replied. “I don’t know if it will understand,”
“What if its insulted?”
“Then you should fly fast,”
She moved away from the pilot’s seat and McAlister could hear her rummaging behind him. Sighing, he went through the motions, flashing out the message as directed on the piece of paper. Silently, he wondered if the rock could even understand their flash codes.
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Five wormholes opened a few AU starward from the asteroid belt and shortly thereafter the vessels of Commodore Hargrave’s taskgroup emerged. The largest ship, the CEXS Hadran was the first to complete the journey, the wormhole closing behind the ten kilometer battleship. It was accompanied by four smaller vessels, and upon arrival they issued a blanket order, requiring all civilian vessels to vacate the belt and return to port until further notice. Security personnel were instructed to send updates to the Commodore as his task group made their approach toward the belt.
The slightly disheveled asteroid watched the small craft as it flashed through the a the pattern again but this time it was longer. It was a bit confusing as there were still no magnetic eminations to add context but maybe this one was too small to have a magnetic core? That was possible. She didn’t get her magnetic core till she was a few kilometers in diameter.
Stopping her mind from wandering off she returned to the problem at hand. The language barrier was still clear but maybe she could try saying what they said back to them. Sadly she couldn’t do the multi colored display but hopefully they would still understand it.
Focusing on the small cluster of crystals on her surface facing the small ship she repeated the pattern back at them.
“Now it’s just copying what we do,” McAlister reported, twisting in the pilot’s seat to look back at the reporter. He muttered a curse upon seeing her slot a helmet into place and seal an exo-suit around her body.
“What the hell are you doing?” He inquired.
“I had a thought,” She answered double checking the seal on the suit. “I wondered if it realized there were creatures inside the ship attempting to communicate with it,”
“So what, you’re going to stand out there and gesture at it?” McAlister said incredulously.
“That is the plan,” She replied. He muttered curse under his breath and put on his own helmet, sealing his suit as well before she moved toward the airlock on the small ship. One could never be to careful with company vessels. They tended to do everything from manufacture to maintenance on the cheap and he wasn’t about to die because the life support system burnt out trying to repressurize.
His fears were unfounded, this time at least, as nothing immediately went wrong. The airlock opened and the reporter stepped outside, mag boots sticking her to the hull of the small ship as she moved to where she’d have a clear line of sight to the asteroid.
“Kill the running lights,”
The ship’s exterior lights went dark, plunging her into the inky blackness of the void. She fumbled with her camera momentarily, turning up the flash to maximum, before flashing the phrase at the rock again. When she had finished she raised one arm and waved. She wondered if the rock could see her, compared even to the small patrol craft she must have seemed terribly, terribly small.
Like an ant trying to talk to a colossus, She thought.
Green Crystal looked at the small metal rock ad it stopped glowing and one of its biosphere beings left and floated towards her surface. It was odd how the creature was glowing while the metal rock was not but that was probably planned so that green crystal didn’t think it a sneak invasion. She still hadn’t chosen her biosphere yet and wasn’t sure she wanted one just yet. Though this seemed to be some void fauna that the metal rock had chosen for its mating biome.
Possibly this was a way to bypass the language issue they appeared to be having? If so then it would make sense to emphasize the small creature over itself. Her father had taught her how small creatures can think at her in her geode. It was a very personal type of communication but they weren’t making much progress otherwise.
The massive asteroids surface seemed to split open slowly revealing a cave following down along one of the larger crystal spires going deeper into the rock.
Not for the first time in this encounter, Cassandra once again found herself rendered speechless by the actions of the asteroid. No sooner had she finished waving than it’s surface shifted and changed, opening a cave that seemed to lead deeper into the rock formation.
“Whoa,” Was all she could manage.
“You’re not planning on going in there are you?” McAlister commented, his voice scratchy and quiet over the aging communications system incorporated in the suit. Her instinctual reaction was to agree. They had very little idea what this asteroid was, they didn’t know if it was sentient or just possessed some level of intelligence… there were a hundred and one reasons the journalist could think of not to go into a cave that had just opened…
And yet, she found herself deactivating the mag locks and pushing off from the ship, floating through the void toward the asteroid and the cave that had opened up.
“You can’t be serious…” McAlister commented.
“I’ll be on comms,” She said kick her legs so she’d land on the asteroid feet first. “It’ll be fine,”
“You could die,” McAlister cautioned. “There could be hostile…”
“It’s fine,” She interrupted. She’d been a revolutionary once upon a time, she’d had her eyes gouged out by Davian torturers, and then had to listen in darkness as the revolution failed. Danger and death weren’t the deterrents they once had been.
“What should I tell the warships?” McAlister asked.
“Just tell them what’s happened,” She answered, landing and beginning to follow the cave into the asteroid proper. “You don’t need to cover for me or anything…”
“Alright…” He answered.
The actions of the biosphere creature fell in line with what Green Crystal assumes would happen given the invitation. Though the willingness to sacrifice one of its creatures might show signs of negligence on the metal rocks part it might have just been impatience or a sign of trust? It made the Rock think about how she would treat her biosphere, if she ever got one, while she did turn down the living plant mind that had bonded to her father that was more out of a childish rebellion than anything. Shaking the thought of her father and that choice she made she reached out and grabbed the small creature in her gravitic field before very carefuly pulling her towards the opening in her surface.
A set of crystal clusters that hadn't lit up before started glowing an eerie green gold light as 1.2 G of gravity started pulling Cassandra down towards and into the hole.
The void suit’s maneuvering thrusters were old, and far from the precision tools newer rigs tended to use, but they were enough to guide Cassandra down the tunnel that had opened in the rock. She could help but be awestruck by the sight around her, snapping picture after picture in the coming hours as she descended deeper into the rock itself.
McAlister stayed near the opening, and kept in communications with the wayward reporter.
“Some Commodore is taking control of the situation,” He told her. “Demanding you come back out and hand off to a first contact specialist,”
“Well they’re welcome to come down here and make me,” The reporter replied glibly. McAlister chuckled, the sound more akin to a burst of static over the communication line.
“I don’t think they’re going to do that,” He told her.
McAlister was right to suspect as much. The warships formed a perimeter around the rock, and remaining miners and security personnel cleared out of the area. McAlister likely would have been banished too, but being the only one in contact with Cassandra left Commodore Hargrave unwilling to order the rent-a-cop to be on his way.
The warships instead focused on trying to decipher the language of the asteroid. They flashed light signals, as Cassandra and McAlister had, and let complex artificial intelligences work on finding and deciphering patterns from the response. Things were tense, and though the warships had their gravitic shields online, their weapons stayed stowed for the moment.
Wait and see very much seemed to be the order of the day, minutes becoming hours as Cassandra descended ever deeper into the twisting tunnel. Everyone, including the reporter, held their breath and waited to see what would happen next.
Green Crystal looks at the other metal rocks that now surrounded her. They were far enough away to nit crowd her but after so long alone all the attention was making her a bit anxious. Their attempts to talk at her weren’t helping much either, the bigger metal rocks were just as incomprehensible ad their smaller brethren’s attempt. Though there seemed yo be more reason behind these attempts at communication.
On her inside she slowly released her gravitic hold on the creature as it neared her geode. This wasn’t her first time using her terminal but this would be the first time she would use it to link with a living creature. If anything she was nervous that she would hurt the small thing, it looked so tiny and fragile compared to her rocky and robust self.
The corridors of rock abruptly ended as Cassandra fell into a cavern filled floor to ceiling with haphazard green crystal pillars. Her fall quickly slowed as she neared the oddly smooth crystalline floor. However the oddest thing in the massive room was the pure blue crystal shard that stood three meters tall it almost looked like a screen of sorts. The whole room seemed to tinkled silently as psioelectric reactions happened in the void all around her creating the life that made this living asteroid tick.
She touched down and turned in a full circle, taking in the crystalline cavern. She snapped a couple of pictures, but a quick glance down at her screen told her the camera just wasn’t capturing the scene quite the way she had hoped. She clicked her tongue and let go of the camera, letting it hang from a strap around her neck as she began walking across the cavern.
“What do you see?” McAllistar asked, his disembodied voice crackling out of her communicator.
“Big cavern,” She said. “All crystal. The force pulling me inward has stopped,”
She came to a stop in front of the screen, circled around it once, then snapped a closeup. Finally, satisfied with what documentation she had taken, the reporter focused her attentions on the crystalline screen.
“There’s… I don’t know exactly,” She said leaning in for a closer look. After a brief pause she put a gloved hand on the crystal screen.
As soon as she pressed her gloved hand to the screen she heard something inside her head, it was like a language made of sensations and concepts.
“Crystal-Shiny-Rock-Me attempting-trying interface-connect-intertwine-bond with biological-squishy-meat-life-mind.”
The terminal started covering itself in text from a slightly mangled version of the ancient Visone language, lines scrawling across the screen almost like a computer booting up.
“Please-request-plea attempt-try interact-think-manipulate terminal-bluerock-machine.”
Green Crystal felt weird as that part of her slowly woke up. She had no real idea how to describe it but she didn’t like the part of her that lived in that shard of herself. It didn’t feel like her but it was apart of her at the same time. Luckily this shouldn’t take long and she could turn it off.
She pulled her hand back as soon as she heard the voice in her head. It was only after clutching her hand to her chest for several heartbeats that it occurred to the reporter she hadn’t really heard anything so much as just… felt it. She knit her eyebrows together, and cast another glance around the cavern as though afraid she wasn’t entirely alone down here.
“Okay,” She said aloud. “Psionics. That’s what they call this don’t they?”
It was impossible to avoid mention of psionics on the AncNet. Afterall, a psionic gestalt had destroyed an entire planet back during the Second Ancerious War, and the Commonwealth at least, had responded by heavily restricting all psionic research. She’d listened to all manner of scientists and students bemoan the restrictions and the lack of progress their research was making as a result. Beyond that the reporter knew very little about psionics and found herself hesitating.
But, She thought to herself. You’ve already come this far.
She reached out her hand again and touched the screen, this time more prepared for the disjointed barrage of feelings and pseudo-instructions that flooded her mind. She tried to parse out what exactly it wanted. An instruction it seemed, maybe to calibrate for her thought processes?
“Uh,” She said aloud, finding the idea of purely thinking instructions to be a bit overwhelming at the moment.
“Identify yourself,” She said and thought finally, settling on a pretty easy first instruction.
The terminal screen went dark for a second before an image of the asteroid body of green crystal appeared on the screen and what felt like looking over ones own body.
“I-me-my Crystal-Hard-Rock. Name-designation-me Green-plant-good Crystal-Rock.”
Green Crystal tried to speak through that small part of her geode that was both apart of her crystal structure and separate.
“Who-Identify-indicate is-owns-controls you-individual-creature-biological?”
The sensations were followed by an arc of lightning down one of the crystal columns and the image on the blue terminal flickered a bit. Before showing what looked like a fractal image of the fighter, as well as an image seeming kilometers in length was pressed into her mind of the same.
She winced and groaned unconsciously taking her hand off the terminal and moving it to her forehead as a sudden sharp pain lanced through her skull. It wasn't until her hand bumped audibly against her helmet visor that she remembered she was in an environment suit.
The reporter took a couple breaths and then put her hand back on the terminal.
"My name," She said, still speaking her thoughts aloud. "Is Cassandra Gariot. I'm not controlled by anything. The uh... the image that you showed me. That's just a ship a um... a machine operated by another person. McAlister I think he said his name was,"
A metal rock named Mcalister. Green Crystal let that mull over in her geode. Though it wasn’t weirder than the name Cassandra Gariot, who knew maybe these were fancy rocks, all shiny and stuff? She idly reached out and grabbed a nearby asteroid and idly ground it into her surface.
The idle thoughts skimmed over Cassandra’s mind just out of reach and creating a mild feeling of intrigue. The very alien sensation of a asteroid, much much larger than her being absorbed into her skin was however not dampened.
Green Crystal pulled herself out of her sinkhole of curiosity and tried to bring herself back to her original reason for trying to talk to the metal rock.
“Owner-controler-settled-planet-home in-around-between brightness-heat-big?”
She kept her hand on the screen the second time, though the alien sensations that accompanied it were definitely... off putting. Still, she kept her hand on the screen, doing her best to process all the feelings and half-thoughts that went through her mind. She closed her eyes, focusing on her breathing for a moment before trying to figure out the next question.
"This star system is within the territory of the Vestahl Commonwealth," She said finally. "It's administered by a corporation at the moment. The planets aren't habitable for my species..."
She took her hand off the screen for at least some momentary reprieve before she returned it.
"Why are you here?"
Green Crystal tried to wrap her head around the concept of a corporation, she didn’t get a good idea of what it was from the creature standing in her geode, though learning that some old rock named Vestahl Commonwealth had control over this system was rather disappointing. The combination or trying to learn a new and interesting concept with the disappointment at having failed yet again at her mission hung there as she answered the question posed by the creature.
A memory started playing both on the screen and in her mind. A blue, red and green planet stood before Green crystal, the imposing presence of an elder talking down to their young could be felt through the scene.
Mountains down on the planet lit up in sequence and something else happened, a voice badly translated from the rocks language,
“So you are going to run forever?” Came a deep bass voice in tune with the flashing mountains below.
“Anywhere is better than here.” Came a more feminine voice that seemed more internal,
“You are being-acting unreasonable.”
“So? If I’m being-acting unreasonable maybe there is a major-big purpose behind it?”
Space seemed to shudder as the gravitic wake of a sigh from the planet below. The memory continued as father and daughter argued, it did not end well on either side until Green Crystal stormed off into the void.
“That-it-memory why-reason-logic.”
Again Cassandra felt herself be nearly overwhelmed by the onslaught of visions and feelings. Her head swam and she felt like she might lose her balance but when Green Crystal had finished her explanation she felt like she had a much better understanding of what exactly she was dealing with.
The... crystal, their species, they got bigger. Planet sized eventually it seemed. That, the journalist decided, is why she must be having difficulty communicating.
"I understand," She said finally. "But I..."
She hesitated. How did she even begin to explain governments and territory?
"Do you... have you encountered intelligent animals before? Or... only intelligent asteroids and planets like you?"
Green Crystal found answering this small creatures questions rather enjoyable, it was quite nice getting all this off her surface, however when posed this question that other part of her acted almost as if a reaction to the question.
The terminal returned to a blue screen and showed as well as emanating a trio of significant data caches. One was labeled Growth and the other was labeled Auk’Tau’Nur. The final and smaller was labeled Visone. Or so the psychic designators seemed to indicate what the series of disorderly dots and circles meant.
All seemed readily accessible to Cassandra, if massive in scale
The journalist hesitated momentarily, scanning across the three caches. She tried to guess at their contents. Growth she supposed might be about Green Crystal. How she'd been born and come to grow and be here? Auk'Tau'Nur and Visone were both mysteries... but maybe she'd have some idea of what was in them after watching growth.
She reached out a hand and touched the first cache, Growth.
The file took a second to open but as soon as it did it was like a dam breaking in a flood of information.
The Growth evolved on the planet assigned to the Experimental Crystal Data Storage two million years after planetary rearrangement. Starting as single celled chemosynthetic organisms near the major geothermal vents in section four hundred and twenty one. Primary predators included the early multi-celled organisms…..
Secondary evolutionary branches were forms of sea flora that grew in the dark volcanic area in sections four hundred and twenty one through three hundred and two……
Land varieties on smaller islands were gained as symbiosis was achieved with photosynthetic plant lines allowing it to survive more efficiently that other species in section six thousand and forty nine. Allowing for control over key niches…..
Eventually mainland variations on decomposition flora were outbred by the invasive stage of the growth….
Mineral absorption from surface patches of Visone ruins allowed a basic psionic evolution….
And so the file went on for the entire three million year evolutionary history of the Growth. Every second of every ancestor meticulously recorded in the crystal structure around her pouring into her head.
Green Crystal watched the small Cassandra as her built in purpose was being completed, it was an amazing feeling.
The amount of information the crystal abruptly tried to force into Cassandra’s brain was overwhelming, so overwhelming in fact that instinct took over and she pulled her hand back after only a couple short seconds. Even so, the information abruptly forced into her brain overwhelmed it’s functionalities, and for sixty heart-stopping seconds her whole head went dark and the journalist abruptly passed out.
It was fortunate, for continued peace, that the suit she had lifted for her excursion didn’t report her vitals back to anyone on the outside. She came to with a groan and a splitting headache…
No, a migraine she realized when opening her eyes intensified the pain and sent a wave of nausea coursing through her. She swallowed hard and squeezed her eyes shut, trying to will away the pain while she groped blindly for the pedestal.
“That’s too much,” She said as soon as she found it. “I can’t process that much all at once,”
Maybe not at all. She added non-verbally, momentarily forgetting that the nature of their communication meant her thoughts were as easy to read as the words she spoke.
“The pedestal can display written language… could you display information as text and just… help me to read through it? That might work better,” She suggested after a pause.
Green Crystal thought this one through a bit. The creature wanted the information in a specific image format. Why she wanted data on The Growth to begin with was a bit confusing to her but she didn’t mind sharing common knowledge. The only problem was that Green Crystal didn’t know the image format that this thing accepted, at least not beyond the small glimpses that had come out from the creatures interactions. Then again that was the whole beginning of this issue, she couldn’t under what their Ship Rock McAllister was saying. This would take a little bit…. Though it did seem to accept a normal visual light spectrum so maybe that would work.
The terminal turned the screen into fractal images similar to how she saw the ship earlier, the image was of a different sky, a different ocean, and a weird horizon with what looked like a partially terraformed atmosphere. It looked familiar as if from a memory, that wasn’t hers, and the magnified look at the collection of microorganisms that filled the ocean. The psychic feeling that came from the image gave the feeling of a real time recording and the length of a few million years.
Cassandra released a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. All of this was very new to her. She’d never been part of a first contact, nor did she have any experience at all with psionics. It was a relief that Green Crystal seemed to understand what she wanted, and after a few minutes of staring at the screen she nodded.
Much better, She thought watching the screen and considering the press of psychic information.
“I think I understand,” She said. “Growth, this file is all about how your species evolved?”
It must be, there was no other reason she could think of for the file to be literally millions of years in length.
“My species evolved too, but we didn’t evolve the ability to travel the cosmos. We had to invent tools to build vessels which could take us into the void. The ship I came from is one of them. A small one, but that’s what it is. It’s not a living thing like you, it’s just piloted by one not dissimilar to me,”
There appeared to be a mixup. Assuming the thoughts of the Cassandra were correct. It would probably be best to clear it up before even more confusions were made and further made it harder to communicate.
“I-Individual-Me.” Thjs statement was followed by a image several hundred kilometers wide of a network of crystal structures making up a complex network.
“Them-other.” Was followed by a very different image, dwarfed by the crystal web work, and appeared to be a strangely familiar red fungus material.
“Different-seperate-symbiotic.”
The other words and concepts such as cosmos seemed to encompass the void with the brightness but in a much larger sense, it was the most interesting out of them to the rock.
“Story-lineage-data upload? Permission-willingness-allowance.
Cassandra smiled and suppressed a chuckle at the final feelings she received from the crystal. It was capable of handling vast amounts of data it seemed.
“Our history… okay well I’ll try my best…”
She paused. She was no historian and worse yet it would take hours to deliver a comprehensive verbal lecture about the history of the Commonwealth. But the crystal was psionic and she wondered if she could convey all the information without the need for a speaking. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, centering and grounding herself with a few inhales and exhales before she tried to just… picture all the information she wanted to convey.
The journalist did her best, but the images she delivered were disjointed. She began at the very beginning, with a burning rock orbiting a sun being bombarded with frozen ice chunks. From there is had developed oceans, atmosphere, and single celled organisms which evolved into aquatic life and then millions of years later left the ocean to live on the land.
Amphibians became reptiles, and then mammals evolved, and from mammals eventually the first humans upon Vestahl came to be. Humans roamed the pre-historic planet, settled into communities, built civilizations and then tore them apart in an orgy of blood and violence. Perhaps it was a symptom of humanity’s romanticization of war, or perhaps just Cassandra’s understanding of her own history, but the images she conveyed seemed to be of brutal war after brutal war as the humans feuded among themselves over wealth, power, territory and resources.
Bronze weapons became iron, then steel. Civilizations and governments became ever more complex as larger and larger bureaucracies became a necessary to manage growing populations. Technology advanced, culture and ideas on egalitarianism and democracy developed and still there was war. Men and women butchered each other with swords, then shot each other with primitive smoothbore rifles, and blew each other into meaty chunks with artillery shells and airstrikes. Many of the nations of Vestahl coalesced into a planetary government, then fought yet another brutal war to subjugate those nations who refused to join it. Supersonic aircraft vaporized city blocks with wire guided missiles, insurgents fought unwinnable battles in mountains and forests, and the Coalition forced all those who opposed it into submission.
Time passed, the children of those conquered people simmered in their hatreds as the first clumsy steps into the void were taken. Colonies were established on other worlds, governments grew fat and corrupt on the misery of the underclasses, and the violence simmered and then boiled over into yet another brutal and bloody conflict.
Warships burned in orbit around Vestahl, cities turned to ruin as brutal civil war ground its way across the planet. There were bodies piled in the streets, a sense of recognition as one twisted mess of flesh and bone was recognizable to Cassandra, then barely old enough to call herself and adult. The Commonwealth very nearly fell, pushed to their last defensible fortress in the capital of Levitsky. The rebels closed in, their victory within reach…
And then it was gone. Aliens descended from the sky to undo all they had achieved. Waves of superheated plasma incinerated entire forests and thermonuclear weapons reduced a once vibrant capital to naught but an irradiated crater. There was a sense of despair, hopelessness. The war was lost, the Commonwealth persisted and marched forth promising change and a brighter future as it spread from one world to the next.
A broken woman returned to a college campus she didn’t recognize to finish a journalism degree she no longer cared about.
Cassandra stopped, realizing things were getting too personal. The last thing left over the psionic link being a feeling of exhausted resignation.
“Sorry,” She said aloud. “I think I got distracted at the end. The civil war is… raw still.” She trailed off.
As she sent memories into the blue shard of stone the crystals around her seemed to glow brighter as her memories flowed into them and into the massive mind of the rock. “Data-mind-memory upload-give-arrow incomplete-missing-disperse.”
Green Crystal studied the memories as they flowed through her input node, they were the minds recreation of events and like most biological minds parts were missing or clouded by perception and emotions. But she got the general picture, it’s not like she hadn’t seen it before in her fathers own memories. The Auk’Tau’Nar were once very similar to these people only they were stopped by the growth because they were harming Big Rock when they tried mining his crystalline nervous system. Green Crystal pulled herself from that rabbit hole, they had tried to stop them peacefully and they wouldn’t listen, but maybe these people would be different, maybe these people could be reasoned with? This one Cassandra seemed innocent enough? Maybe she could be Green Crystals biosphere.
The emotions that rolled around the mountainous mind leaked through to Cassandra, sympathy high amongst them. “War-death-destruction common-often-fierce in biosphere-biological-life.” The rock went silent for a moment and the crystal pillars died down to their normal glow as the memories stopped flowing down them. It remained silent for a while before a spark of an idea arouse in the geological mind Cassandra knew that the Rock was about to do something but what she couldn’t feel.
“Trade-exchange. Repair-fix-heal (Flashes of the blasted landscape of her world rippled through her mind) for-take stories-memories-mind?”
The journalist shook her head with a sigh. She kept her hand on the console trying to keep her thoughts open so Green Crystal could read them. Decisions about entire planets weren’t made by people like her. They involved diplomats and ministers and the myriad apparatus of state. She was just a reporter, worse, a freelance reporter with no steady income.
“I’m no one important,” She admitted. “But the people out there, the ones on the warships, they’re important. Problem is the language barrier…”
Although she supposed she could help with that. Green Crystal had access to her thoughts and seemed to be able to absorb information faster than she was. She could help Green Crystal communicate with the warships.
“I could try to share my language with you?” She suggested finally. “But I’m not… totally sure how to do that.”
The green stones around the reporter seemed to look at her with confusion as her mind went to how many people were involved in such a simple decision. Then again she had to remind herself that these weren’t The Growth, they were similar with their worrying about issues that seemed insignificant to her geological self but unlike the growth these seemed to be many separate beings. It was interesting even from the small glimpse given already.
Then the small being brought the small planetoid back on track with discussing the initial problem that had led to this meeting of minds. “Share-Give-Copy language-speech-sounds-intention? Why-Reason-Rational not-dislike-disagree share-give-copy mind-memory-you or-option-choice speak-vocalize-talk for-instead?” The Rock around the reporter seemed to almost glisten with excitement at the possibility of curiosity being sated.
It took a few moments for everything to click in Cassandra’s mind. The strange, disjointed nature was still a bit difficult for her to understand, but she was getting better. At least, she thought she was. She mulled over Green’s statement, the first question somewhat… alarming to her. It was obvious, even to someone as unversed in psionics as her, that their communication was being facilitated through such and she worried about the implications of Green copying her mind memories. Maybe she was just misinterpreting, but she didn’t like the idea of her memories being copied.
“I could speak for you,” Cassandra said checking that her comms unit was still connected. She was, admittedly, a little surprised to see it was. She wouldn’t have expected it to work through so much rock.
“Um… yeah, looks like I’m still connected… just uh… well…”
She trailed off, suddenly apprehensive at the idea of speaking for the crystal. What if she said the wrong thing? Or misinterpreted something and caused a fight? It didn’t help that it felt to the journalist like her only qualification was arriving first. She shook her head, dislodging those thoughts.
“What would you like me to say to them?”
Green Crystal seemed stumped at that. What should she say to them? It wasn’t like she came out here prepared for something like this, hell she didn’t even expect to find any rock out this way much less a collection of talking creatures. She guessed this is how her father felt when he first talked to The Growth.
She stopped thinking for a moment and outside forces registered the equivalent of several deep breaths, a very weak gravity wave moving outwards from the surface before flattening out into normal space. “Relay-speak-transfer greetings-hello.” Her thoughts were more deliberate this time around as the relatively young rock tried to be more like her father when he spoke with his symbiote. She tried to cover the nervousness that arose when she recalled the destroyed surface in the Cassandra’s memory and didn’t want to have that happen to her surface or worse.
Cassandra nodded and thumbed her communicator on. There was an amount of confusion and disbelief among the people on the other end when she explained that the asteroid was in fact a sentient and psionic being, but the confusion subsided quickly. The Commonwealth had dealt with the Dirge and Elwar and all sorts of other sentients equally if not more outlandish than a living crystal.
Even so, once it was established that the crystal was alive, and not hostile it took time for the gears of bureaucracy to grind into place. The warships that had arrived set up a cordon around the crystal and after some back and forth (and no small amount of entitled corporate bitching) they deemed the situation safe enough to allow the asteroid miners to return to work.
A few snub-craft followed the crack Cassandra had navigated to bring the reporter more oxygen, but the prevailing feeling among the Commonwealth commanders was that psionic contact should be limited as much as possible and so Cassandra was left mostly on her own inside of the living crystal.
It was three hours before someone at the Foreign Affairs Office could be pulled away from their regular duties to deal with Green Crystal. Pierre LaPointe was a seasoned diplomat. He’d negotiated deals with Capitol before it collapsed at the end of the Second Ancerious War, and established working relationships with several other empires in the aftermath of the Commonwealth’s civil war. It took some time, but at last the diplomat was looped in to Cassandra communicator.
He was an older man, and had eyes tired with ceaseless march of time that gazed at the screen from behind thick rimmed glasses. He exchanged some pleasantries first with the journalist, and then with Green Crystal through Cassandra before finally he got into the real meat of a first contact scenario.
“Now then,” He said, removing his glasses to clean away a smudge before continuing. “It seems Ms. Gariot has shared some information about the Commonwealth but I’d like to know some more about you Green Crystal. What brings you into the Commonwealth today?”
Cassandra dutifully relayed the question to Green Crystal and awaited her response.
Green Crystal had relaxed a bit as she watched the smaller creatures and their metal crafts fly around her. These Commonwealths did things surprisingly fast compared to her fathers slow and deliberate tendencies. It only felt like moments to the sentient rock before she was talking to someone of apparent importance through the Cassandra. Though the question yet again drew the geological mind up short.
“Wandering-Exploring-Surveying for-looking-searching new-distant-better home-body-shell.” Green Crystal didn’t see much point in hiding her reasonings. She was still in a bit of culture shock at her discovery of a space fairing race other than her own, but with Cassandra’s explanation and donation of memories she was coping rather well. She still had no idea what was happening for the most part but she hoped that maybe these beings could help her find a new home.
Cassandra did her best to convey Green’s message to LaPointe. The journalist chose her words carefully, knowing all to well the way the media and the powers that be could twist and use one’s words against them if they were not abundantly cautious. She had to be careful, doubly so because she was speaking for someone who didn’t necessarily know the harm a misspoken sentiment could cause.
“She’s wandering, looking for a… a new home or a new body?”
“I see,” LaPointe answered, smooth and suave. “Well that certainly has some interesting implications. I’ll pull up the survey database. What is she looking for in a home?”
Cassandra chuckled momentarily, finding some amusement in the realization that she now had a seasoned diplomat playing real estate agent for a sentient asteroid. LaPointe asked her about what she had found so funny but she waved off his question, focusing on making her thoughts coherent enough for Green Crystal to understand.
She conveyed that LaPointe seemed amicable at the moment, and wanted to know in more detail what she’d need for a home.
From there the conversation continued. Green Crystal used Cassandra as a translator and through the journalist was able to convey to the diplomat what it was she was looking for. It took several hours of back and forth between Cassandra and LaPointe, followed by several more hours of LaPointe making arrangements and agreements with other members of the government.
In the end, it was decided that the easiest way to handle things for the moment was to ‘sell’ one of the barren planets in the system to Green Crystal. It wasn’t a particularly mineral rich planet, nor did it have a livable atmosphere and no one was lining up to start a bidding war over it.
The exact nature of Green Crystal’s relationship to the Commonwealth was dutifully kicked down the road to be determined at a later date. Even before the arrangements had been finalized, Cassandra could overhear some debate on LaPointe’s end of the call as to whether Green Crystal should be treated as an individual citizen, or as its own polity similar to Elwar.
“It’s all just bullshit politics,” Cassandra had lamented to Green Crystal during a pause while LaPointe had been finalizing some details.
At last, LaPointe gave the go ahead, and Green Crystal was escorted to her new planet by the fleet in system. But before she went the journalist was asked to leave. She exited the way she’d entered, and was promptly scooped up and returned to the main station in the system. There, she was informed (in no uncertain terms) that corporate had trespassed her, and she would be on the first ship out.
She supposed she should have expected that.
Days later, back in a far to cramped apartment, the journalist found herself staring at a screen. The story she’d gone out to cover in the first place had gone nowhere, leaving the question of whether or not she should write anything at all about Green Crystal. The news had already found out about what had happened, but her name had been kept out of the official story.
So what could she say? What should she say?
She stared at the blank page on her screen, thinking over her brief encounter with Green Crystal and the intimacy of their psionic communication.
In the end she decided to say nothing at all. Green Crystal was finding her own way in the Commonwealth, making her own statements to the media and dealing with the powers that be without Cassandra. She closed the word processor and rubbed her eyes with a sigh.
Bills wouldn’t pay themselves, and she’d need another story if she was going to make rent this month