Axy had barely finished her navigation training a day prior. But now was time for all the youngest crewmembers recruited by Era and other associates of Lexum Firm Shipping for initial orientation on their secondary duties as Regolith Outriders, Cartography Reserve: “ROCR”, or more commonly called, “Rockers”, an appropriate acronym for the job.
Axy, Able, and Seraph entered the midship Coreyard, meeting several other - mostly young - students from the other three crews.
Being only a few people from each crew, everyone opted to sit together on one side of the room.
A third Novoid - one from D-Crew - was present in the room, a similar model to Able and Seraph, but black metal, and a bulkier form.
[COLLIDE]
DAT5
Skillset: Orbital Navigation, Materials, General Lithography
The three Novoids immediately congregated, and began wordlessly exchanging encyclopedic levels of conversation in mere seconds.
Now alone, Axy picked a seat next to a quiet young man from B-Crew.
“Weor!” she started. “You excited for the entry burn? I was hoping you'd get to initiate it so I could watch!”
“Haha” he chuckled nervously. “I heard they let you initiate the departure burn. How was that?”
“It was... a little overwhelming, but also super exciting! I didn't think I'd like it that much.”
“Yeah, it seems like it will be pretty fun... I'm still a little nervous about it, but... it beats the last job I had!”
“What job was that?”
“Cell Array droid repair, at a big solar farm somewhere past the 30 orbital band... 14-hour shifts in a pressure suit replacing fried drone circuits and torching up cold welds. Five million employees at that station, and you'd never see any for a month at a time.”
“Dang! That sounds brutally hard. At least you've got some company around here.”
“Well, yeah. B-Crew isn't very talkative off-shift, but we do like to pick on Sethren's wardrobe when we're on observation!”
“Excuse me”, said Sethren, turning in her seat to face them. “MY wardrobe actually MEANS something!”
“Babe, you have got black leather gauntlets on” chided Weor. “You look like one of those artisan welders at a Float Fair!”
Sethren's jaw dropped as a few around them laughed.
[Search terms: “Float Fair”: an exclusive community habitat in Stoic that keeps ancient traditions alive through exhibits, reenactments, and comedy recreation events]
“To start with... these are cuffs, and they're designed to protect us from the incinerators that will probably be disposing of your body someday. Speaking of your body - at least I still have all my hair!” Sethren retorted with sass. To this, everybody paid note to his subtly forming hair peninsula and laughed and jeered.
“I love your hair, by the way, Axy. I always thought about doing silver like that.”
“Oh, thanks! I know, my roots are showing, but I've got one more dye kit with me.”
“Good thing you do. Self-dye kits are IMPOSSIBLE to find around Yaroryn. That's why I just leave mine natural.”
“Really? It's that black on it's own?”
“Oh yeah. Everybody from the Enertorium has pitch black hair. Part of our genes.”
“What do you mean? Isn't there like... other people moving there?”
“Oh hell no. It's a graveyard habitat. Nobody wants to move to the place where the ONLY JOB is processing dead bodies. Everybody in there is pretty much descended from a few families a couple thousand years ago.”
“Wow! I never realized that. I heard most of the graveyard habitats were inner-system, right? There's some joke in Illumount about how dying is expensive haha”
“Well, 65 million people die every minute in Stoic. If you could visualize every body from every habitat in the system being transported to the graveyard district, you'd see what looked like a whirlpool of bodies. So... graveyards go in the center.”
Axy was shocked. “That... got super dark, just so fast.”
“Yup.”
“And so... that's all you do there? Just... incinerate bodies?”
“Most of the incinerations actually happen in home habitats, but we do the bulk of the embalming, ritual burials, bulk organ harvesting, science work, … ”
“But they won't do OUR burials”, came a voice from behind, in heavy accent. Axy turned to see identical twins floating down from the door to seats behind them. She had almost forgotten the Coreyard was a zero-G environment, from her time spent training down here. The twins had ghostly white skin, and each had a darkly shaded external HUD lense hung over one eye, mirror opposites of each other.
[Nova and Nora Jane]
MAT5, MAT5
Skillset: Nav-eye certifications, General ship maintenance
Even a HUD AI knew to acknowledge their twinliness.
“Why? What's special about it?” Axy asked.
“Nobody else CAN do it. Only Ypnites can process deceased Ypnites. Unless you are blind, like an Ypnite, and know the full history of our traditions like an Ypnite, you cannot do it.”
“I looked it up. I get to observe you guys, remember?” said Sethren. “I like to have a burial plan for everybody.”
“You're so morbid” laughed Axy.
Nora explained to Axy: “We do not incinerate or bury our dead. Ypnites are a survivor race, descended from a single family, actually a little like you, Sethren. We evolved in the decaying light of a closed habitat tens of thousands of years ago. When an Ypnite dies, she is a Doxote. We harvest her eggs, and bring it to Replica City, where one is carefully bred with the Hyglomyism, or Sacred Seed, and then there are two more of us! The rest of the Doxote is planted in a mushroom garden that goes on to feed Ypnite children their first meal. This is an ancient tradition that kept our race alive through the Dark times. No one is allowed in Replica City who is not an Ypnite, and no one may touch a Doxote who is not a Ypnite!”
“Eeeexcept if a deceased Ypnite cannot return home before the decay process begins. Which would likely happen on a ship like this.” interjected Sethren.
“You do have a point. We would be honored if you were to bury us, but we do not plan to die on this mission!” replied Nova. Nova's and Nora's voices were identical.
“Sethren!” exclaimed Axy, now a little more than cringing at how much Sethren seemed to push the conversation toward death.
“Everybody dies, Axy! I'm just saying, ONE of us has to be prepared!”
By now, the last of the group had joined in, a young man with brown, curly hair and large eyes.
“Dauncite, what are your thoughts? How do you wanna get buried?” asked Weor. Both Weor and Dauncite were from B-Crew.
“Buried deep enough that grave robbers don't find me, but not so deep I get subducted into the mantle before the next guy digs me up!”
[Dauncite Thrawn]
MAT5
Skillset: General Archeology, Lithographic navigation, General Accreted Geology, General Materials
“Oh, Dauncite, I've been meaning to pick your brain!” piped up Axy. “You've already done a few runs before, haven't you?”
“Eh. Mostly asteroids and one reeeally small moon. Beautiful geology there. But this will be my first official visit to Yaroryn. I already studied up on my Lithonav qualifications to be SURE they pick me for this one! I'm so excited. Apparently, we're supposed to drop down a bore hole straight into the MEDIASSIC layer!!!”
This evoked some blank stares all around for a moment.
“The... Okay, so in order to get to the Mediassic layer - which is REALLY deep, you have to -”
“Daunce - nobody knows what 'Mediassic' is” Weor chuckled.
“UGH! Okay. So, as Yaroryn was forming, one of the ancient -”
Dauncite was cutoff by Astellia entering the room from the other end of the room.
“Good morning to you, good evening to the rest of you... Please everybody take a seat and pay attention. I'd like to get this done quick.” Her voice was as commanding as ever. This time she could face them more-or-less upright.
“Welcome to orientation. Hopefully you've all sat through your syllabus, so you know the agenda for today.
To begin with, you all know me, I am Captain Astellia. To our new recruits this run, we are the R.O.C.R, or Regolith Outriders, Cartography Reserve, or as the industry appropriately calls you, Rockers. Regolith Outsiders, as you know, are ground-level surveyors who prospect the various planets and asteroids in the Nuric / Stoic binary star system. Initial surveying was automated about a century ago, with surface-level testing being done by the pre-novoid bots; and subsurface sample acquisition was and is still carried out by sublithomechs; However, sublithomechs of course need complex three-dimensional maps with active beacons to navigate by. Above ground, GPS systems and light-based visual systems have worked fine for thousands of years for conventional mining, but none of that penetrates rock. Nothing except: neutrinos. So the Cartography Reserve of the Outriders has allocated a number of labor licenses to employ people to descend through deep caverns to install Neutrino Beacons, each one emitting on a certain frequency, that sublithomechs use to navigate underground. Without these, they would be blind. And without sublithomechs, the mass miners would not know what soft boundary material they would fall into. Yaroryn has proven to be a pain to dismantle because of the unpredicability of magma pockets below and unlithified sedimantaries above.
Now, because Yaroryn has such a long history of magma pockets and underground lava flows, there are a lot of ancient lava tubes underground that make great homes for positioning these beacons. Hypershaft lasers colossoids have already bored down to create entrances to a few of these caves, and the rest of the journey will be on foot. Each one of you will carry a component of the beacon, and once your waypoint is achieved, assemble it on site, then return to station. In and out, no more than a day per beacon. I will be joining you on your first crawl.”
Dauncite was nearly shaking in his seat, trying not to nerd out to everybody about the geology, bore holes, and prospect of interesting underground finds. Sethren, Nova and Nora seemed bored - this was obviously not their first trip to Yaroryn; Axy was just trying to take it all in.
“Now: there are some intrinsic dangers to be aware of. We will technically be underneath a local swamp, but there is almost half a mile of crust between our target position and it, so that's not our real concern. The actual dangers are trip and fall hazards. We will be crawling over uneven, unflattened terrain. We have special rappelling / survival suits being manufactured to your individual body specs. These come with all the cabling, oxygen, fall cushioning, and crush protection you'll need. Although a lot of the seasoned Rockers we will be going with tend not to wear theirs, I am telling you do NOT go down without it. If our ceiling springs a leak and we get that swamp water in there, the surfaces we will be crawling on will be very dangerous to fall hazards.”
Another minor concern: although this shouldn't be a problem for us, from time to time our Rockers have tangles with the Jioharad, a group of radical Conservationists who insist on colonizing Yaroryn.
I'm supposed to give you a really thorough history on them, but I'm just going to summarize:
Yaroryn is a historically geologically unstable planet. She's had quite a few civilization-ending volcanoes and tsunamis, and was known for extreme and destructive storms. Lexum Firm Industries went to great lengths to charitably donate hundreds of state-of-the-art habitats that perfectly recreated original Yaroryn environment, but without the geologic and weather instabilities, and house every member of the planet. Everybody has been re-homed in literal paradise, while we mine the planet and turn it into millions of times more and safer living area; but there is one stubborn religious sect of Conservationists - the Jioharad - who insists on returning to the surface to disrupt the mining efforts and colonize around our operations. There are four empty habitats in orbit of the planet dedicated just to rehousing them, but they still have had a history of carrying out terroristic attacks on the Yaroryn Mass Driver Array. But we have since put countermeasures in place, and now they really pose little more than an inconvenience, mostly gumming up cargo lanes and trying to fill in your cave bore holes. But you bunch will be landing pretty far away from any known Jioharad establishments, so encounter with them is unlikely.
However, IF you do encounter them: Be courteous, be cordial, but be very careful NEVER to to follow them anywhere, even if they say they are taking you away from a site for your own good. They do this before they blow a place up, but if you stay on site, they won't attack because they KNOW how we retaliate. So, like I said, do NOT follow them anywhere. We need ore, not explorers!
Beyond that, this should be a pretty routine crawl; we'll be bringing four beacons to four different locations, each crawl averaging about 4 or 5 klicks; there should be minimal digging required for positioning on these caves, and we'll have almost the full month to do it while the Cinder loads up, so you'll have plenty of down time at Mick Station, where we will be basing our operation out of. Oh, and we highly advise our new recruits here to have your HUDs off while on station - they have no advertising restrictions there, so it can become burdensome.
We have a small treat for us at the end of our run; this is my 256th run in the Cinder, and we happen to be on the ground at the turn of the fiscal year for Lexum Firm, so the Grand Broker has invited our crew to their private banquet. Please reserve your ticket in advance.
And that's basically it. Feel free to mix and mingle, you're back on scheduled rotations in 1 hour.”
With that, the austere Captain returned to her quarters.
The three Novoids floated over to the group.
“Collide, you excited for this crawl?” asked Sethren.
“Not particularly. I hate slip hazards. The only injury I ever had was from a slip in one of these caves.” He pointed to a small knee plate that had obviously been replaced with a 3-D printed part, slightly off-color. His voice was lower and rounder than Seraph's or Ables.
“What were you three talking about earlier?” asked Axy. “We were talking about, like, death the whole time haha”
“We actually had a pretty intense... political debate, to put it nicely.” replied Seraph.
“We derived contingency plans on taking over the whole star system if we needed to.” said Able.
“Able! No we did not!” said Collide.
“Able's a turd, don't listen to him. We were discussing leadership strategies of the last few Brokers planetside.” said Seraph.
“Seraph thinks the current Broker panders too much to the Industrialists, and is going to overwork the Mass Drivers and cause extra maintenance downtime for the next Broker. I think he's not driving them hard enough, and we're going to lose contracts soon.” said Collide.
“We DID discuss the prospect of how we would run it ourselves. The finances, ship operation, mining, etc. But basically it boils down to motive.” said Able.
“What do you mean by motive?” asked Dauncite.
“Well...” said Seraph, gently, as though stepping into a sensitive topic, “If Novoids run the whole show, Novoids would likely want to run it in a way that benefits Novoids. Between just the three of us, we determined there is about a 66% chance we would use the industry to craft primarily Novoid-friendly worlds; ones far more suitable for beings like ourselves. We don't need oxygen, food, or any particular gravity to exist; we need simply power. And we'd get a lot more power by turning Yaroryn into close-orbit solar fields than into spin habitats.”
“But...” added Collide, “THEN it comes down to what we would do for humans. Essentially, we concluded that a system that works FOR everybody is best motivated to do so when run BY everybody. So, diversity is key for diverse survival.”
“Without accepting diversity of survival...” continued Seraph -
“One species would have to bury the other” interrupted Sethren.
“...exactly.” continued Seraph again.
“We know, for our part, what it is like to be a buried species” injected Nora Jane; Nova, on the same thought, continued: “To be buried AND SURVIVE. It changes who you are as a species... it embeds the species with... bitterness, like poison. Then, when it re-emerges, it can no longer be a part of the society that rejected it. And then war, death, more poison.”
“I can't help but wonder about the... what were they called again? The... “terrorist” people?” said Axy.
“The Jioharad. That's not their real name, though. That's what Lexum Firm calls them; they call themselves the Desozhiem, or Final Survivors of the Desolation. They ABSOLUTELY see themselves as a 'buried race'” said Dauncite. “And that may be more literal than we think. When I was studying up on known Yaroryn archeology, I learned there are ruins buried under not just tens but hundreds of thousands of years of ash and meteorite deposits. Meteorite bombardments that do not match up with an accepted accretion timeline.”
“Meaning...” said Weor.
“Meaning Yaroryn's weather phenomena that Captain Astellia was describing may not have, in fact, been natural.”
“Captain Astellia, by the way... ” interjected Collide, “...will be arriving back at her quarters about now. Meaning live monitoring will probably kick in. She is a staunch Industrialist, and may not take kindly to Jioharad-sympathetic speach on her ship.”
“Are we really that tightly monitored?” asked Axy.
“It's gotten tighter throughout the years. Last run, she expelled a Novoid right out the airlock because she suspected her of Mutinous Conversation. Of course, it was right over an asteroid base, so she would have been fine, but... we don't talk about it, just in case. So... hush hush.”
With that, the conversation wrapped up in an unfulfilling and quick ending, and besides some empty small talk about the upcoming Cataclysmation, everyone started heading back to their pods.
Axy was left with, again, a mix of feelings. Initially, she thought back to Kai-Val's belief that “more brains” can reach higher thoughts; these three Novoids had just pressed through - what would for humans be - days or weeks of deep political, religious, and existential philosophy. Maybe there was some weight to this idea.
She also felt a new sense of fear or tepidation, upon discovery of having even her conversation monitored. Suddenly, the sense of freedom of traveling in Free Space felt tainted by an expectation to present a facade of a certain political perspective she did not subscribe to.
But, also, deep down, began an unsettling of her own deeper philosophies... something getting pulled apart inside, from the discussion about the Desozhiem... even just the fact that she refers to them as the Desozhiem, instead of Jioharad, in that internal voice of thought, betrayed her stance on sympathy for them. She quickly suppressed the thought, of course, as they are genuine terrorists, and that is inexcusable!
...right?
...what defines terrorism, vs simply desperation? What is the difference between bombing some mining equipment vs strip-mining somebody else's world? Is, perhaps, all war merely pitting survival against survival?
The allure of “escape” presented by the fantasy VR worlds most of the men on the ship indulged in suddenly didn't seem quite as bad. Maybe these men aren't just sex-crazed hedonists, but simply felt as overwhelmed as she did about the universe's problems, and felt otherwise powerless to make change.
What is the correct response to watching your entire planet be destroyed in front of you? Action through extreme violence? Escape into pleasureful paradise?
The words of her barber back on Anaxon reverberated in her mind:
“If you don't like where you are... Change it. Don't keep chasing escapes. I've watched lifetimes worth of worry sit in that chair, hun, and no one ever finds that escape outside black hole."
