Selene and The Elise

[Nocturnia]

(This was originally intended to be a backstory for a small faction, however since I doubted anyone would be interested, I decided to make it just for a single ship)

In the early days of Sirius, people seeked out habitable worlds.

A good deal of these trips met with success, and soon most habitable worlds were discovered, surveyed, or even colonized.
Still, some people had dreams of finding more, and so, in the dawn of the age of Jump Gates, in 183 AS, a private expedition was funded.

The ships chosen for this trip were remodeled and reinforced Pilgrim-class ships, a ship class designed for traveling outside of solar systems. The four ships were named Elise, Anata, Olympia and Nemura.
The expedition was scheduled to leave from the New London system toward Rheinland, hoping to run into habitable systems in the dangerous Barrier.

The ships soon took off, each loaded with colonists, scientists, mining and construction gear. And several months of deep space flight later, entered the Barrier region.
The ships continued to fly on the internal navigation systems aboard the Olympia, however unknown to them the systems were faulty and the ships were slowly drifting off course, until ultimately they were running parallel with the Barrier.
Still, this was not that much of a disaster as to what ensued, the ships ran into one of the rare dark matter clouds, and soon, most of them took heavy damage. However in a stroke of incredible luck, the cloud was concealing a solar system. The heavily damaged convoy conducted a survey as fast as possible, and revealed that the undiscovered system had two rocky worlds, and three gas giants.

The second planet from the star was soon named Mire, and it was the only planet to theoretically support Human life without closed environments. The planet was a vast desert, with temperatures ranging from -10 Celsius at night, to +60 during the day. Still, the settlers, with their ships crippled, had no hopes of making the trip back to Bretonia, and decided to settle the desert world.

While the Olympia, Nemura and Anata took substantial damage to their anti-radiation shielding and engines, the final Pilgrim, Elise, had avoided most damage. A fact its passengers, and crew hid from the others. Once the proposal to settle Mire was handed out, Elise refused, and instead decided to test its luck on a satellite of the 3rd planet, a gas giant named Olympia. They in fact planned on completing the repairs on the Elise and returning to Bretonia.

The first three Pilgrims each decided to make a controlled crash-landing on the north pole of Mire, and use the vast ships to build a shelter from the milder, yet still merciless climate.
The Elise, on the other hand, stayed in orbit of Selene, the moon of Olympia, and its crew would land using shuttlecraft.

Selene was, unlike the desert Mire, a mostly frozen world. Yet, surprisingly, the planet possessed a dense atmosphere and an atmospheric pressure close to that of the Earth. Due to its low gravity, only being around 0.7G, the atmosphere extended far higher then Earth's, and blocked out most light. Selene was much like Titan enveloped in a constant haze.
When landing the crew of the Elise aimed for a large depression, hoping to utilize geothermal energy surely created by the tidal forces from the gas giant. The depression was a massive crater, which would serve as the base for the crew of the Elise.
Within the next month, a basic base drilled in the rock face of the crater was completed, and most of the colonists, counting 1200 descended on the moon, in order to aid mining operations, and set up the food productions plants.
The damage on the Elise, while low, still demanded for Reactor repairs, meaning that certain minerals will be needed, in order to find them, survey teams were dispatched.
While rich in water and deuterium, Selene proved to be devoid of heavier elements, such as metals. And the settlers started realizing that they might end up stranded longer then expected. In the light of this realization, the rest of the crew left Elise, deciding to depressurize the ship and preserve it in its present state until necessary resources were gathered.

In the meanwhile on Mire, the colonists were remodeling their massive ships into a functional city, removing a large number of bulk heads not needed for structural integrity in order to construct massive collectors of the morning fog for water. Luckily, two of the ships, Nemura and Anata were loaded with food and industrial equipment. The "rogue" ship , Elise, was mostly loaded with science teams and equipment.

As the years passed, the crew of the Elise failed to find any deposits of the rare metals and materials needed for the repairs of the Elise. And the scientists started instead focusing on making their life on Selene more comfortable and dedicating to their scientific work.
They particularly studied life forms found on Selene, which moved extremely slowly, and lived incredibly long, by conserving energy.
Soon enough the lives on the two worlds became essentially similar, concentrating on survival rather then escape, yet, the crew of the Elise never forgot about their ship in orbit.

Serveral hundred years passed on both worlds. The Mire colonists thrived and even increased their numbers on the metal-rich world, soon constructing a fledgling orbital infrastructure. Their numbers reaching 6 milions, they took the Elise and its crew as most likely dead on the frozen world.

The Selenians, as they called themselves however managed to survive, using their scientific expertise to engineer plants that would succeed in hydroponics plants far easier.
They had also found that Selene in fact has indigenous life, several lakes located in massive fissures were warmed up by the moon’s hot interior and kept liquid at all times. The life forms in the oxygen-less and light-less environment moved extremely slowly, conserving energy at all times. But far more surprising was the discovery of life on the moon’s surface.
As mentioned before, Selene was a frozen world; its temperatures never went over freezing point. However the temperature due to its thick atmosphere varied very little, the temperature was ranging from – 10 to – 30 Celsius. Besides this, the atmosphere of Selene was extremely rich in Nitrogen and CO2, this caused for an extremely resilient type of lichen to appear, the plant sucked all its nutrients from the air and produced a compound which prevented water from freezing, while still keeping its chemical properties.
Accompanied by the lichen was a small rodent like life-form feeding on it, the animal, despite looking like an extremely furry rat moves extremely slowly, following the lichen fields.

The settlers did extensive research on these two animals, and managed to extract the substance that keeps the water liquid up to – 25 degrees Celsius. As energy gained from the geothermal plants was precious, the scientists looked into the substance, and would drinking water enriched with it have any undesirable side effects.
The substance appeared mostly safe to use, with minor side effects, such as it storing itself within the hair and nails, much like drugs and other chemical substances, besides that the substance had a slight effect on aging, increasing the lifespan of creatures using it by 10-20%. Other then these effects, the substance naturally tied itself to all the water in one’s body, causing said people to withstand slightly lower temperatures, but still nothing noteworthy. Due to the substance having such unworthy side effects, and being easy to mass produce they decided to use it in the water supply. Allowing drinking water to be stored on far lower temperatures. It also found use in food supply, as stored food treated with the substance would not contract ice crystals its structure would not be compromised, yet the bacteria couldn’t grow on it, besides for Selene indigenous bacteria which could not contract diseases to Humans anyway.

In the meanwhile, the Mire settlers finally repaired several “Surveyor” type miners, almost completely ignoring the scientific research of their world, and focusing on engineering. The Surveyors scouted out the 1st planet from the sun, a dusty world dotted with craters. Tidally locked with its star, the world was a living hell on one side, but much like all inner system worlds, the planet was rich in metals. The world was named Planet Dakar.
Still lacking orbital infrastructure to support settling and mining out another world the Mire settlers decided to scout out the vast system of moons Olympia had. Since the Elise, still orbiting Selene was completely deactivated, the scanners initially did not pick it up, and neither did the Surveyors detect the underground settlements of the Selenians. They instead focused on several other satellites, two rocky worlds like the Sol Ganymede, and one small world much like Io.

The Selenian radio telescopes and scanner arrays however, did detect the Mire vessels, and they became worried.
After all, they decided to flee with their ship and abandoned the rest of the colonists. It was easy to assume that they wouldn’t be too friendly towards the Selenians, due to this repairing the Elise became far more urgent.
One of the Selenians, "Aqua Audacia Eos" was set with the task of repairing the Elise and defending Selene, a hard task since only light metals were present on the moon.
In order to repair the ship a new reactor would have to be projected, rather then the old, massive fusion core, the new core would rely more heavily on magnetic fields, reducing use of heavy metals. The new reactor was designed and produced within several years, the ship was also upgraded with a new autonomous computer system, an AI capable of operating the ship while the crew will be in stasis, external disposable hull plating that will soak up the deadly radiation and reinforced hull to traverse the deadly barrier.

The repaired Elise, however, couldn’t harbor the entire population of Selene, instead, the ship was loaded with the stellar coordinates of Elysium and the best pilots , scientists and engineers Selene had. They would return to the rest of the Sirius sector and obtain resources needed to arm the Selenians before they were discovered.

As such the ship was launched, the ICCE AI system was instructed to seek out radio signals and other forms of Human communication as soon as they clear the dark matter cloud around Elysium…