News does not trickle like a stream upon the surface; it waits silent and gushes to life all at once, like a geyser from the deeps of the earth. I meet star ships belonging to yet two more races, neither of which is any more willing to communicate than the Psilons or Hew-Mince. At the poisonous world of Neptunus, a Bulrathi Scout elects to flee from my lone Scouter ... as does a Colony Ship belonging to none other than the Silicoids! The presence of that ship, obviously intending to land on that world, only serves as further confirmation that they are the beings of which the Artemis fragment spoke, completely immune to the vagaries of their environment. And even as the aliens depart, as a Hive Queen makes planetfall upon the fertile plains of Herculis, something awakens in the ruins of Artemis! Some Klackons taking their ease in an ancient city - you might say I am twiddling them in thought as a single Klackon might twiddle its pincers - detect a strange noise from within one of the great buildings. I hurry them inside to see what is happening, and upon the wall of what appears to be a giant meeting chamber, I see a huge flat-screen display, lit up and functioning!
What can this mean? Someone, somewhere - perhaps some centuries-old automated scanner - is watching over the stars, with wide enough scope of vision to see the whole of the galaxy, and with intelligence enough to tell that our six Klackon worlds outnumber every other race's!
OOC Note: At the rate things were going, I thought I might be the only one to reach six colonies. Our start is just that ridiculous - and if I'd pulled a construction, planetology, or non-IS-propulsion tech from Artemis, it would be even more so! With Maalor as my "homeworld," I would even have welcomed RC3!The message could be false, but to what purpose? Indeed, to what purpose if it's true? The message appears briefly, and is gone; it does not repeat, and the screen on which it was displayed falls dead. Had I not thought to record it, I would barely believe I had seen it! The temptation to approach the screen more closely, to examine its components and see if it can do more than display this brief message ... I resist. When I am ready to begin a thorough investigation of the planet's ruins, I shall do so. For now, I must wait, and perhaps puzzle out what the initials GNN mean - they seem innocuous, but may hold the heart of the secret to this display. Yet the message itself is cause for deep concern; whether or not alien beings yet possess worlds in similar numbers, the message appeared at the very moment when I formed my Herculis colony, bringing my sixth world to me. If nothing else, this GNN newsdroid or those that inform it have been watching me!
Here is my corner of space - what the newsdroid calls my "empire." Tellingly, this is the last year you'll be able to see it all on a single screen at this resolution. In 2338, already scenting the end of my quest for nuclear engines, I colonize Gion as well; I have Klackons stationed in the Artemis meeting room with the screen at all times so as to miss nothing that appears there, but it does not react to my seventh world - nor to anything else in the next few years, even including my two latest, most coreward colonies, both formed in 2341, simultaneously!
You can see three waves of my transports already en route to beautiful, lush Gion from poor Primodius - with so many planets in proportion to my population, I am using Primodius mostly as a breeding ground; it doesn't have enough mineral resources to justify factory infrastructure while it can grow highly-efficient Klackon workers with equal effort - and greater pleasure! - and while Klackons are still so desperately needed to start up my new colonies! On the whole, these are quiet years, but the galaxy's other races are not to be forgotten; indeed, in 2342, my Scouter at the fiery world of Ryoun meets yet another Silicoid colony ship, ready to plunk down its people upon the active volcanic surface, but not prepared to deal with a small, friendly Klackon star ship. Before I can make contact, like every other alien ship I've encountered, it flees.
No, those who are with us must not be forgotten - but neither must those who are gone! With the completion of our new Artemis infrastructure last year, we have finally begun to examine that which the Artemisians themselves left behind. The still-functioning viewscreen shows much promise, and I examine it carefully, open its access ports, test its controls, and look into its inner workings, recording everything with deliberate care lest I unwittingly cause some portion to come to harm. The mechanism is not so easily damaged though - its hermetically sealed, hardened casing and redundant, apparently self-healing circuits have survived centuries of neglect already - and its function is now apparent to me. The screen itself is a simple two-dimensional display of course, but it is connected to a powerful computer core as thoroughly reinforced and protected as the screen itself - it has the feel of military hardware, battle-ready - and to a what can only be a massive and highly selective receptor antenna that virtually fills the building's core, providing its structural stability as well as access to distant signals from the stars. There is nothing else resembling a sensor suite, so the source of the "GNN" report must be elsewhere, another surviving artifact or race of ancient times, still transmitting on a frequency this station was designed to receive. The rest of the computer's depths are deeply complex, and will require years of study, but it is a pleasure to have something so advanced - and still functioning! - to study at liesure this way!
2343-48: Age of Discovery
I have only the last kinks to work out of my new planetology, propulsion, and weapons designs! Some of my largest and most powerful beetle Klackons are actually capable of lifting the latest Hand Laser prototypes for seconds at a time, and I'm confident I'll soon find a way to make room within my dead-world colony bases not only for their needed life support equipment, but for the Klackons they're supposed to be supporting! And as for my warp 2 engine prototypes, they're going up in thermonuclear fireballs much less frequently! All of this is wonderful news, especially as one of my Scouters just discovered Bootis, a world up near what I take to be Hew-Mince space, but outside their sphere of influence, as rich in minerals as Arietis, but much larger and more nearly habitable; as soon as I can work out these last little kinks, I'll be able to add it to my collection of beautiful stars! Already, Gion's lesser neighbor, Vox, is welcomed into my embrace.
Two years later, one of my Scouters finds Sol, a planet so thoroughly developed that it must be the Hew-Mince homeworld; had their age of space travel begun long enough ago for one of their colonies to build 168 factories, we would surely have encountered them far sooner than we did. Having come to the very doorstep of the Hew-Mince home, I hope to finally make contact with them, but the hope is vain; they have a worrisome aptitude for living up to their name, with eight missile bases in place on their planet's surface, all of which fire upon my harmless Scouter as soon as it appears, forcing me to make like an alien and flee. I hope this threatening behavior does not extend indefinitely, but for now, it occupies little of my attention; examination of what must have been spaceport facilities on the surface of Artemis has suggested some simple modifications to my plans for nuclear engines and hand lasers, and prototype models of each are now working flawlessly! Better still, what I take to be a spaceport repair facility holds what I can only deduce are plans for ancient starships, some of which used Sublight Engines even swifter than the drives I just developed, and something called dotomite to extend their range. My fleets are the life-blood of my star-spanning self, and the faster they move, the healthier I'll be, so I concentrate on the sublight designs, not forgetting to examine the maintenance logs for defensive systems; Neutron Pellet Guns seem much simpler devices than Ion Cannons, and so I begin to study their construction too ... just in case the Hew-Mince continue to live up to their name!
Yet two years more, and research in what must once have been a hydroponics lab opens the way to the development of any planet more hospitable than fiery Ryoun - and suggests moreover that not only Ryoun, but even toxic worlds like Arietis might be tamed in time! I fear I'm proceeding too quickly though; in spite of our reduced waste levels, pollution cleanup remains a laborious process on all my worlds, and with no better methods at hand than those I originally conceived, I return to the matter of Improved Eco Restoration that I put aside so many years ago. Colony bases for toxic worlds would be nice to have, certainly, but we're struggling just to maintain the worlds we already have, with many more to come!
Here you see most of the worlds (Imra is well off the screen to the right) that I currently claim outside my homeworld of Maalor, and the floods of Klackon transports crossing the galaxy - a fairly typical scene for this period. I've been sending small numbers of transports in each wave to ensure that the source worlds don't drop too low in population. Also visible of course, officially in the ship queue at Primodius, though that world will never build one (or any other ship) is my latest star ship design. How do you resurrect a dead world? Send in a live Klackon queen! Naturally, these ships carry our new controlled dead colony bases, nuclear engines, and deuterium tanks. You can see the relocation route here for the first to be built: Maalor will send one up to Bootis by way of Gion.
The rate of discovery we have made since settling Artemis is astounding, but perhaps most telling are two things we have been utterly unable to find. The Artemisians were a deeply cultured, peaceful people; their surviving art is astonishing in its scope and creativity, from static and kinetic sculpture to shapings of light and shadow to literary texts and trimensional and tetramensional holographs that have survived the centuries in environmentally sealed computer facillities far beyond the scope of anything I had ever dreamed possible. The very architecture of their cities - spires and domes and shapes of purest beauty, melding form and function seamlessly - is awe-inspiring. And yet in all this treasure-trove of artwork, I have found not a single instance of an Artemisian's likeness - neither in sculpture nor in detailed description. I have had to rely on the shapes and locations of control boards and maintenance panels, and on scanty information surviving unprotected in otherwise heavily-encrypted medical databases as we discover the few not destroyed by passing years, to piece together an image of what the Artemisians must have looked like ... and what I have pieced together is hard to believe! They were ungainly amphibious creatures, arthropods like outselves, but with bulkier antennae, stretching out like spikes from their backs instead of their heads, with several eyes on long, articulated stalks, and short, thick arms with gigantic clawlike pincers, moving ponderously about on stubby, scaly legs. It is difficult to properly describe the sheer ugliness of the picture I have formed of these creatures - and as I find more and more of their artwork without a single representation of their own forms, I begin to wonder: Is it possible they found themselves as hideously repulsive as they seem to me?
While pondering the possibility that a race could loathe its own appearance, I have other matters of still greater moment to occupy me: We have had trouble digging through the Artemis computer systems, mostly because of the ravages of time, partly because of files encrypted in the time when the Artemisians lived - such as medical records apparently kept secret for privacy reasons - but especially in some of the areas that interest me most, such as the final period of their history, data appear to have been purged from the computer banks deliberately! I shall have to study it more closely, and even this bare assertion could only be made after years of study, but all the signs are there, and I do not know what it means. Who can have purged the files, and when ... and perhaps most importantly, why? If the people of Artemis were murdered, and their murderers are still at large, the motive would be clear enough ... but I shudder to think that such a thing is possible!
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Next: Triad Rising
