The Blackout Event shocked Sirian society in a way that it had never quite been shocked before. It introduced a new idea to the popular consciousness regarding the jump gates. These beacons of supposed technological innovation had become foundational not just to the interstellar economy that feeds, clothes and employs so many teeming billions but to the way humans perceive themselves as living in an interconnected universe. Anywhere in House Liberty, under any habitat dome or inside any space station or under any of her several blue skies, the phrase "Going to Manhattan", leaving home to seek opportunity, means the same thing to anyone who's tuned into the culture.
Traveling nigh incomprehensible interstellar distances is so trivial to modern humanity that it plays footnote in a turn of phrase that might've once referred to traveling a couple dozen miles from your birthplace, let alone another star system.
The Pulse was a wake-up call. Though the precipitating Blackout was hardly the first accident that had occurred with a jump gate in Sirian history, to the public it had surpassed even the Dallas Incident in sheer scope. For thirty-one grueling hours, every star system in Sirius previously connected by a jump gate became an island unto itself. The possibility that these devices on which the shape of the sector depends could one day shut off and stay off, while not inconceivable before, was now seriously considered by anyone who spared a second's thought to the current inter-House system of trade. Even the sector's jump holes underwent widespread destabilization and realignment in this period. The sector stood still. For thirty-one hours, nothing was certain.
If there was one thing about the Pulse that was certain, and surprised no one, it was that the aftermath of its effects on the sector brought great change. Sirians are all too used to the fact that with great change, comes times of great opportunity.
---
The orange hues of light reflecting off the Walker Nebula danced across the electro-optical receptors of a dull-plated M5-U48 Mining Drone, an autonomous spaceship cutting its way across the Dresden system at impressive speed. An industrial, rugged and visually indistinct rectangular craft, save for its hazard stripes and some externally-rigged H-Fuel tanks. It could be taken for any of a score of such units used by mining operations throughout the Omega Border Worlds, corporate or otherwise, but the crux of the difference here was in the software. Not slaved to a drone control console aboard a parent vessel or command center, this one was running truly autonomous, under preset parameters - parameters set by the Zoners whom it represents. It is no mission of material extraction they've set this small, utilitarian machine to either.
No, this drone gets to be a lucky first. A fact finder, set amongst the stars to glean new truths for the governing administration of Gran Canaria, primarily because the Canarian Survey Corps had nothing better laying around at the time.
At least, nothing that they were willing to lose.
Its designation: Lasso 1. Its likelihood of survival: slim to none, considering the mission it is about to undertake. This intrepid pioneer's most valuable quality: that nobody will miss it if it ends up on the universe's bad side.
The unit's operating system, moving the ship along preset waypoints, speeds the stubby spaceframe into the boundaries of the Feuerberg lava field, towards and directly into its destination: a jump hole. One that it'd have never entered, if not for the efforts of a previous ship of the Corps. When the machine's predecessors traversed this jump tunnel, that crew had stumbled into a system that was found to be vastly more dangerous than was previously recorded, before the Pulse played havoc with the jump connections outside Ageira's stewardship. And they had found something big.
The drone emerged from the tunnel, and Thuringia lay before it. Spending precious little time in the open, the machine follows its programming to beeline away from Planet Erfurt and disappear into a vivid, blood orange spew of dust and planetary debris further in system. While making nice concealment for the low-emission craft, this cloud is what holds Lasso 1's objective. Creeping between fragments and dodging high radiation pockets, approaching its final pre-programmed nav point, the subject of the day entered view.
A modestly sized planet, or what's left of it, loomed before the simple machine. With the final nav point reached, Lasso 1's free-flight programming took hold and allowed the craft to register the gravitational tear at the husk's core that had presumably fractured the world apart, to the extent that its detritus was littered across quite an impressive volume.
This is what the previous Zoner crew, in their nosing around, had stumbled into while carrying out the Walker post-Pulse reconnaissance the whole Corps was tied up in lately. Despite their freighter's jump stability monitoring hardware detecting the presence of something that vaguely resembled a jump tunnel, the rift now off Lasso 1's fore was nothing like the jump hole they had traversed, and no guarantee could be found with their limited scanners that the anomaly's gravitational eddies wouldn't flatten anything that approached into paste. The prior freighter, and now the drone, were practically swimming in proof of that, after all. With the confounding of their instruments, and a welcome reserve of common sense, those Zoners determined that barreling into the warped maw of a dead world could wait a while, and turned tail.
On their returning report to the Survey Corps leadership, there was a universal desire among them to send a properly-kitted science vessel to the system to examine this rift in detail, and a universal recognition that the security situation in Thuringia didn't allow for this. They weren't entirely aware of the facts of what had occurred in the Rheinland territory all the way back at the Van Hoerbeck Mission Control Center in Maspalomas, Gran Canaria, but they discerned enough to make a decision. The evidence left behind made plain demonstration of local conditions: the debris ring near Thuringia's navigational center, as well as the presence of the same hostile Rheinland ships that have lately been terrorizing the Omegas once again. Survey Corps commissioner Florentin Abreo declared to his subordinates that the system was just too dangerous to risk assigning a Corvo and her crew for extensive scans to determine the properties of this tunnel.
Lasso 1, on the other hand, was no Corvo. Following its refit and reprogramming, it existed for only one reason. To test one simple theory, and not bring unwanted attention down on the heads of the civilian spacers while doing it.
Its diminutive engine ignited, and its jump pathing subroutines initialized. Its last status update, sent before traversing the Dresden jump hole, slowly rebounded across the Zoners' Walker Nebula net relays back to headquarters in Omega-48, which would inform them that by this time, Lasso-1 would have committed to its objective, barring any interception. Fortune had seen fit to spare the drone that fate. It propelled itself into the gaps between the broken crust and into the core, vanishing beyond the event horizon of the unexplained anomaly.
The Canarian Zoners would not receive another direct transmission from it again.
Propelled through a rift beyond Einsteinian space and ending up somewhere else altogether, Lasso 1 was perhaps unexpectedly in one piece.
A flood of information from its surroundings crashed against its limited sub-expert CPU. Immediately, the machine detected truly staggering energy emissions off its front, though compressed into an inconceivably dense point of space almost akin to a singularity. The presence of this enormous blip on the drone's feed nearly renders the rest of the sensor suite worthless against the background of such a blinding EM signature, save for at extremely close ranges. Its on-board cataloguing matrix can't even label the object properly.
A well-informed human pilot would have since recognized this shifting green infinity before them to be the ever-puzzling Earhart system. Its discovery by a multitude of factions sector-wide, utilizing a quirk in the functionality of the recently released line of Kishiro jump drives, has made it Sirius' most promising new frontier for economic exploitation. It is also the most inconvenient, namely for groups lacking straightforward access to the technology. Lasso 1's arrival in this space would no doubt be an exciting occasion for the under-funded Canarian Survey Corps. Discovering this mysterious rift in Rheinland space might just save them the trouble of having to get a hold of a whole jump drive, after all. The financial prospects of this throwaway scout were becoming promising indeed, more than its handlers knew.
Unfortunately for the CSC, Lasso 1's attempted post-traversal status update would fail to find its way over the Neural Net back to them. The rift it had moved through closed behind it, and if there was some other medium for a message to route through the Net to even reach Sirius in this strange region, it wasn't presently apparent to the machine.
Until then, the most they could know back home was that Lasso 1 had vanished with little ceremony.
It was alone. Nobody was coming.
If there were any capacity for cognition within the drone's optronic circuitry, space might have begun to seem impossibly vast. Lasso's free-flight programming, ineluctably procedural, determined its next course alone in this alien expanse. In the local space was a multitude of debris and other ships, as well as massive superstructures. This called for an investigatory sweep in absence of a clear return route. No doubt the extra H-fuel was going to be handy here.
A number of threats come close to adding Lasso to the imposing debris field. Investigating a ruined Liberty battleship brought the drone perilously close to the defense matrix surrounding the singularity, enough to draw fire from the ancient constructs. Spears of charged antimatter scream at startling speeds past the evading craft, saved by virtue of its tiny size and high speed. It manages to escape beyond targeting distance no worse for wear. Passing through a prominent cloud of dark matter costs the drone dearly in spent repair nanobots, before an exclusion zone was automatically created within its navnet parameters. Even mundane near-collisions with drifting ship debris almost take their due in damage.
This impromptu recon was eventually forced to a head. Lasso had explored all that it could within Earhart, taking up-close visual scans of the ring gates equidistant from the central defensive array. The only thing it hadn't attempted was approaching the outer bounds of the "system", such as it was, as its priority remained finding a jump hole to return to catalogued space. Protocol would have guided to the drone to escape through the most suitable jump tunnel, if there was one, but there was no suitable path for returning to Canaria that the drone could recognize.
Several of the alien rings it had scanned did not match any known variation of alien structure. Whether they functioned more like stabilizers of some kind than proper jump gates was of little import to the drone, but they did appear to be supporting more of these rifts. To the primitive drone's jump stability scanners, one extraspatial tear was as good as the next, and this was deemed as suitable of a traversal point as the rift inside Planet Gotha promised to be. It picked the nearest available opening, and proceeded into yet more uncharted territory.
The vessel's trek continued through space so distant from Sirius that scientists haven't yet managed to name stars as far from home as they were. Lasso's extended H-fuel tanks were draining at a steady pace. For every unknown wonder and megastructure recorded, its potential operational range burned away. So many of these places were many hundreds of light years beyond humanity's grasp, eons from the nearest link in the supply chain that pushes every ship through the uncaring void.
The good news, at least, was that after each excursion, it was necessary to double back to the nexus of the Earhart system by the simple lack of other jump holes to explore through.
Considering that new jump holes very well could have led the unknowing automaton further from home rather than closer in such distant space, that limitation was likely to its benefit. Instead of being swayed to wander unknown space forever in a fruitless search, its forced return to Earhart eventually found the drone stumble through a rift that would return it to its home sector. Plummeting through the opening and its EO sensors registering a brief torrent of formless light, Sirius saw the return of the retrofit mining drone, having by sheer luck survived the crucible of uncharted space in and beyond Earhart, only suffering superficial damage and depleting half its nanobot reserve.
The return, however, would not be as gentle as its handlers would have wished for, if they'd known it survived or a message could still reach them. Not everywhere in the Sirius sector is equally welcoming, or conducive to Neural Net communications.
Some places close to home are more dangerous environs than the furthest, most desolate reaches of space.
Missile proximity alerts flared within the drone's CPU scarce moments after exiting the rift. In a modest response time for such a hack job machine, it surged into processing the relevant and fast-approaching data. Catastrophic collision imminent on anterior port side. Evading. Emergency thrust vectoring successful. Avoiding impact against shield screen by 78 degrees of deviation. Munition detonated. No damage sustained.
A bleak crimson red gulf of space dominated by an overwhelmingly bright star comprised the system, made even brighter by continual coronal mass ejection that seared across the backdrop of the dogfight that Lasso-1 has just abruptly emerged into. Moreover, the system was dominated by alien structure profiles detected at long range, some of them in extremely close proximity to the trajectory of the star's mass ejection and seemingly drawing from it. It was of little import right now, however, until it could escape from the middle of this brawl. Two squadrons of Rheinland ships were tearing into eachother, some modified and bearing weaponry of a distinctly non-human origin, carrying out their maneuvers in deathly silence.
Their opponents though were plenty talkative, their comm-chatter parsing itself over the drone's local transceiver.
>"New contact, close!"
>"Where the hell did that thing come from?!"
>"Gamma-3, Valkyries three o'clock high."
>"Hostiles seen!"
>"From the rift, Gamma-1! Earhart has sent us a tourist."
>"Transponder reads as Zoner - a scouting craft do you think?"
>"Maybe it will do us a favor and eat a missile, make our lives easier!"
>"He's breaking off!"
>"I'm on his tail."
Lasso-1's first priority was clear: escape the danger zone at its best possible speed. A direction of travel was rapidly chosen and simple evasion protocols enacted. This was necessary, as one of the ghost Valkyries turned its attention opportunistically to the fleeing robot. Searing violet energy bolts passed just around the meager shield screen, but as the fighter closed in, the mining drone rapidly cycled its solitary cruise engine. A disruptor was bound to follow, but the luckless Valkyrie then caught two missiles from its six-o'clock. One against its shield and another into the rear starboard fuselage. A secondary internal explosion splashed the entire aft of the Rheinland fighter across the battlespace in a MOX-fueled eruption, its forward momentum still carrying it helplessly in Lasso-1's wake.
>"Boom! Target down."
>"That drone's rabbiting, it's getting away!"
>"Focus on the enemy. We'll track it later!"
The autonomous drone, now free of weapons range, rapidly opened the distance between it and the deadly furball still ongoing near its exit rift. Traveling at full cruising burn put it beyond radar range and into relative safety, and the system lay before it while the battle carried on.
A problem, however, had existed from the moment the ship had been deposited here by Earhart's mystifying travel network. Automatic attempts to send a message to any Zoner relays within range came up with not a single one of them detected, the same as in the Earhart system itself. Conventional communications were being disrupted, the guilty culprits most likely being the immense output of the local pulsar, as well as the dark matter storm sheathing the system in all directions. Either that, or the drone was hopelessly beyond range. The presence of living Rheinland pilots would have confirmed otherwise if the machine possessed the cognitive capability to recognize this.
But that's expensive, and if Lasso-1 was special in any way to the Zoners that made it, it was for being inexpensive.
Regardless, transmitting any collected data was still a no-go. The only choice available was to search for an escape.
--
The drone scurried across the system on free-flight, searching for any anomalous gravitic reading that could indicate a jump hole through which to flee. The luck that was with it wandering across the furthest of stars, though, seemed to have abandoned it. Every direction promised only more danger, and its lengthy search for a jump hole revealed nothing in the few safe grids nearby between the dark matter at the system's edge and the fatal cosmic emissions of the young pulsar.
In absence of options, it picked another quadrant of the system to scan, and cruised towards it to perhaps find its escape, before those fighters from earlier might pursue it.
What it found, instead, was a viciously supercharged dark matter pocket that intersected Lasso's drive course. With its sensors blinded by the background radiation, the poor drone couldn't help but slam straight into it. The corrosive clouds rapidly eroded the molecular structure of the drone's pitiful armor, but the real trouble began when the external H-Fuel tanks burst under this shroud. Thrown into violent disarray from the force of the sudden rupture while at cruise speed, the change in heading brought the drone perilously close to the pulsar beyond safe ranges. Previously weakened surface plating became intensely brittle and nearly cracked apart under extreme exposure to radiation. Though it managed to pull away, its meagre nanobot complement was expending nearly all of its energy on maintaining hull integrity. The fuel tanks were a total write-off, and at this rate of damage accrual, running dry on fuel was unlikely to really matter.
Lasso-1's lifespan was becoming dangerously short. Something in this hell was bound to finish it off, before long.
Unflappable in its commitment to preprogrammed objectives, even in its increasingly decrepit state, the automated explorer still made record of nearby points of interest and unknown phenomena. A massive planetary fragment or asteroid of some kind was catalogued on long-range sensors, surrounded by alien energy signatures and replete with unknown defense turrets. These nearly swatted the curious craft at maximum range, again saved by its compact size making it an inconvenient target. Fleeing from the weapons fire, Lasso's adapting course returned it to where it had entered the system, towards the rift that had deposited it here. Unfortunately for Lasso-1 and with a puzzling inconsistency, this rift appeared to only deposit travelers in one direction as judged by its jump monitoring system. Dangerous results were likely if it attempted to force entry, and so it lingered here in the abode of the dead.
Where once there was a dogfight, there was only wreckage now. Ruined Rheinland fighters, both human and those twisted by alien design, littered the area. It had been perhaps an hour or two since Lasso fled the vicinity. Only silence remained. There was no sign of which side had won the engagement, or where they had come from. Eerily, not a single escape pod remained to be found near any parent ships. The machine didn't tarry here long.
Finally, the search revealed another curious rift, and Lasso's stability monitoring system detected a very salient traversable tunnel. When the drone dived into it with what might be mistaken for eagerness, though, its extraspatial journey simply deposited on the far end of the same system. Whether this is due to proximity or properties of the local star, the refitted mining drone is insufficient to examine the why. Its escape was denied, either way.
No matter its efforts, there was no jump hole promising escape from this place that it could find, only death and increasing magnitudes of stellar and dimensional phenomena that it isn't equipped to understand.
And yet somehow, by fortune or rugged design, it's still in one piece. But only just.
Exposure to more dark matter pockets had completely worn out every last repair nanobot, and fuel reserves were reaching dangerous levels. Even if it could escape from this system, the writing was on the wall: it would never survive a Sirius-wide journey to return to HQ. Protocol dictated that in absence of any obvious fallback points, upon expenditure of fuel, it would begin to transmit an open SOS to any receiving craft. While not ideal, no other option remained for the disposable scout...
...at least, until the radar cross-section of a distant modular depot graced the scout's long range scanners.
Though it had no luck investigating signs of habitation before, its approach to this point of interest was conspicuously bereft of retaliatory fire. Even more curious, it seemed to be completely abandoned, docking controls entirely relinquished to any craft that happens by. Luckily, there were still emergency docking override priorities written into the drone's behavior. A leftover mining drone prerogative that guaranteed its survival if site conditions turned hazardous and operators were overwhelmed. A simple consideration from a past life, but it's created an exploitable opportunity that might just keep this explorer intact.
Remotely activated from Lasso-1's emergency ping, the depot's docking bay doors creaked open, and the ailing scout disappeared inside, with still nary a soul living knowing its whereabouts.
![[Image: uY0bfj2.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/uY0bfj2.gif)
![[Image: vgUTUOS.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/vgUTUOS.gif)
![[Image: WwMCZvz.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/WwMCZvz.gif)
![[Image: ZX8qxs1.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/ZX8qxs1.gif)
![[Image: cIOrJXn.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/cIOrJXn.gif)
![[Image: B1q7NPM.gif]](https://i.imgur.com/B1q7NPM.gif)