#orionarm

However, they were not deterred in making their message heard. One lone individual attempting to infiltrate NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center was caught by security in possession of an IED. Another held the entire first floor of Ceres Exoplanetary Manufacturing's administrative offices, located in Detroit, Michigan and founded in 2069 as an indirect result of ESA's fundraising for AHK-drive mass manufacturing, hostage for six hours before being subdued. One more attempted a mass shooting in the Tunisia spaceport, killing three people before he himself was killed. The radical Cixinists were causing unrest and disruption, and were quickly labeled and recognized as a terrorist organization. Consequentially, those who previously had outspoken Cixinist beliefs became silent on the matter.

Aside from the incident at Tunisia's spaceport, the incidents were all isolated to the United States of America. Until the week after Ann-Marie Hall made her announcement concerning toroidal warp field topology. An unknown individual somehow managed to infiltrate LCRI and set off a bomb. The explosion managed to breach the research institution to Mars' atmosphere, which caused large amount of air from the whole colony to vent outside, necessitating an emergency lockdown until the damage could be assessed. Rapid emergency response crews managed to rescue survivors before they succumbed to hypoxia or hypothermia, but four people, including the bomber, were killed instantly. Hall herself, the target of the attack, was found in critical condition, and along with other survivors in the immediate vicinity were rushed to the medical facility. The news of this rocked T'Shil, Coltrane, and Lupos, and soon the question of their own safety was raised. CPG increased security and requested police presence until safety could be assured. Lupos reckoned that if they could get to Mars, they could get anywhere.

But they were not to be deterred from work. Lupos, Coltrane, and T'Shil each promised to continue Hall's work in her absence. As they worked, discussions on the Dark Forest hypothesis and Cixinist beliefs were sparked. Coltrane revealed he used to be a Cixinist, but found the fearmongering aspect ridiculous, and the prospect of a civilization reaching even proper Type I on the Kardashev scale implausible. Lupos argued that the Kardashev scale shouldn't really factor into the capabilities for a civilization to make such a move, and that it has more to do with how existentially threatened they might feel discovering another civilization. Coltrane countered with how would they have had the resources, technology, and energy to utilize them to be able to launch an offensive of such a a scale. T'Shil argued that Humans managed to unlock the basis for pseudo-superluminal travel within 100 years of learning about nuclear energy, and Earth isn't even Type I yet. She then added that she preferred the civilization rating scale on how capable of surviving cataclysmic events they are. Lupos joked that this put Aresians one level up compared to Humans, at which T'Shil nodded knowingly.

All three of them hoped they were capable of surviving the current cataclysm they were facing....

He starts towards the test chamber when shouts and gunfire erupt from that direction. He freezes, his palms going clammy. They’re dead already. He’s too late.

But then another shout followed by more, sporadic gunfire occurs. Almost like they’re trying to track a target. Is someone still alive?? Another bunch of shots answers both the terrorists’ fire and Lachlan’s question.

He runs the rest of the way over, entering the test chamber. The terrorists are descending the catwalk down to the chamber floor, obviously in pursuit of someone, one of them lying on the catwalk below the top layer clutching his leg. Right at the door he barely registers the body of another security guard. He rushes down to follow the terrorists, attempting to keep out of sight, knocking the downed terrorist with the butt of his gun to keep him silent on the way down.

The terrorists are attempting to kick the service access door down. They succeed after a few blows, and start funnelling people down into the corridor. It’s now or never.

Lachlan takes aim and readies himself. His hearing almost completely vanishes as soon as he pulls the trigger, but he can feel each round fired off as the gun jerks in his grip like a barely-secured, frenzied animal. Three people react to his initial volley. The firsts’ legs buckle out from underneath him, and he never gets up again. The second falls to the ground, clutching his shoulder, mouth agape presumably uttering a shout that Lachlan is unable to hear. The third turns in the direction of the shots. Lachlan, almost anticipating this, stops and scrambles off, just barely missing a volley of return fire. He looks back down on the chamber floor, and they’re heading back to the catwalk, coming for him. He attempts another barrage into the group, felling two more. Lachlan is barely sure if he’s actually doing this on purpose or if he’s just incredibly lucky. But if he was to continue being lucky, getting hit himself would directly oppose that goal. He books it back out of the chamber, firing randomly into the room to goad them to follow - at least, he thought that might do that.

He runs back through the Applied Technologies Department corridors, indistinct shouts and a large volume of footsteps clomping loudly behind him. Returning to the cross junction, he stops. Back up the stairwell would make the terrorists lose interest in him. Down to the other labs might put other people at risk. Same for the offices and break rooms. But the terrorists are still coming, and coming fast. He bolts to the EOT amenities and labs. The direction isn’t in line of sight of the corridor, plus he could use the service ducts to evade and hide from them.

He runs down the hall, almost passing the EOT amenities facility before skidding to a halt, pushes the door open and lets it slam loudly, and dashes off further down the corridor. He goes from room to room, lab to lab, searching frantically for an entry point into the service ducts. The ones he opened were devoid of people. Maybe the floor was evacuated? But who was being shot at in the test chamber, and why was there a dead guard?

He runs further down the corridor when a sound causes him to spin around in shock.

“Don’t move!” a familiar voice shouts.

“T’Shil!” Lachlan cries, his hands shooting above his head when he sees the gun she’s carrying.

“Lachie! What the hell are you doing down here?!”

“I...I came to-...”

More indistinct shouts echo through the corridors.

“Quick, get in here!” T’Shil hisses, pulling him into the service duct.

“Now what the hell are you doing down here?! And where did you get a gun?!” she whispers intensely.

“I came down to help...!” Lachlan replies. “I didn’t know what else to do, I couldn’t just leave you down there!”

“Hold on, was that you shooting at the Cixinists?” Jack interrupts.

“Uh-...y-yeah.”

He nods in respect. “Good job, kid. Got them off our backs for a bit.”

“Yeah, but now they’re after me!”

“Well, did you kill any?”

“Uh...y-yeah...? Two or three? I haven’t been keeping track.”

“Well, thanks. That can’t have been easy for you to do.”

T’Shil glances at Jack in a mixture of surprise and admiration.

“You see how many there are?”

“Aw, shit, I d’know, about fifteen? Twenty?”

“Minus the three, conservatively, you killed and the one T’Shil wounded-”

“I wounded one as well, I think,” Lachlan interjects.

“Then they’re down at least six...” Jack says thoughtfully.

“Not bad for a couple of untrained, outgunned amateurs, huh?” T’Shil says, smirking.

“Yeah, yeah, still ill-advised.”

“What?” Lachlan asks.

“Wait, Jack, we have Lachie, couldn’t we-”

“Think about that question before you finish it, Shill,” Jack says firmly.

“...Okay, we take the gun from Lachie, and then we-...”

“Wait, wait, what’s going on?”

“T’Shil wants to save the people trapped down here, but I think that will end in everyone getting killed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a noble idea, but I think it’s just too risky, and escaping ourselves would be the wiser option.”

“Wait a sec...” Lachlan says. “What if we did both?”

“How do you mean?”

“We lure the bad guys into the stairwell. Utilize choke points.”

“Like in Counter-Strike!” T’Shil exclaims.

“Yeah, exactly!”

“...you’re using a video game as the basis of your plan?” Jack asks incredulously.

“I mean...if you funnel people into a tight space, it gives you a natural advantage, doesn’t it?”

“He’s got a point. He taught me the choke points thing in the game, and it really upped my location control skills.”

“...Shill, don’t tell me you’re actually into this.”

“It’s sound logic! Real life tactics can work in games, too.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this...” Jack groans, dragging his hands down his face.

“Trust, it’ll work,” Lachlan says.

“And if it doesn’t?”

T’Shil and Lachlan glance between each other for a moment.

“We’ll make it work,” T’Shil says with resolve.

Jack puts his face in his hand again, letting out a long sigh. “Alright... How do you want to make this work....?”

When Daedalus returned from its 4th trip, it was quickly retrieved and dismantled. Plans for a manned mission scale-vehicle had been developed to maturity and were ready to be enacted. The 3 functional prototypes were brought up to spec, and 2 more were built, as construction of the drive units was very expensive, and all of them were assembled into a drive core unit, running in parallel. Experiments had determined that while mass was a negligible factor in the operation of the drive, the warp bubble had a limited effective range, and it was theorized that an inadequately enveloped vehicle would experience a similar anomalous catastrophic failure as the original Lucerne probe. This core was then sent up into orbit where a vehicle was being constructed that used the existing Lucerne II vehicle as a basis. The vehicle, dubbed Light Racer, was a collaborative effort between ESA NASA, JAXA, Roscosmos, the Australian Space Agency, and several private aerospace manufacturing companies. In addition to funding construction and providing parts, they also fronted further funds for constructing more drive core units, as well as to investigate feasibility for mass manufacturing. By the time Light Racer was complete, they were approximately 5.5 months behind the still en-route supply ship, and they estimated a few more weeks for acquiring personnel. Brakstad and Foss both volunteered and were put on the shortlist. Sdiri was considered, but scheduling conflicts prevented her from making a commitment. Montenegro, in addition to being enrolled in Université PSL and unable to delay his academic commitments for such a significant period of time, was not considered for the mission due to not having the necessary qualifications.

The supply ship finally arrived, deployed its cargo landers, containing 7.5 tons of foodstuffs, and started on its slingshot maneuver to begin transit back to Earth. Literally the week afterwards, Star Racer successfully dropped out of warp over Mars. They deployed their landers, performed one orbit to reorient, and then jumped to warp again. The landers contained a team of 12 people, 6 more buggies, building equipment for greenhouses and the start of a more permanent settlement, and 3 tons of food. The landers themselves were also able to be dismantled and their parts repurposed. Read immediately took charge, and sent 6 people, Foss and Brakstad among them, and 4 of the buggies to make contact with the 2 Aresian communities nearby and make trips to deliver 4 tons of food to each location, the remaining food and personnel to be transported to the first discovered community. Read and Hall had discovered that the communities were operating on latent geothermal energy as a power source, by way of a few power stations that functioned on a similar principle to steam turbines back on Earth, but using dry ice mined from the polar ice caps. Energy output was obviously enough to keep the walker vehicles functional and the artificial lighting in their caverns on, but the pressures from cycling the gas between hot and cold, the coolant zones long since dried up, and the planet's surface temperature doing the job in its place, to drive the turbines had been slowly diminishing over time as the planet cooled, and combined with corrosion from the CO2, Hall and Read estimated that they were operating at about 40-60% of their original output. They requested replacement turbine blades at the required specifications coated in a corrosion resistant enamel to be delivered at earliest convenience. They arrived with the third wave of landing parties, along with engineers to study the turbine system and make the repairs.

The fourth wave of landing parties arrived with two-way landers. They arrived to an almost unrecognizable scene, looking like a high-tech colony town from the American old west, using prefab buildings instead of façades. Included among the personnel were a few journalists and a film crew, who were all eager to document the ongoing relief effort, which had recently passed its first anniversary. Read and Hall, both now officially record holders of the longest time away from Earth, were told to go home. They steadfastly refused initially, but were eventually convinced that the work would continue just fine in their absence, and officially welcomed their relief: Caleb Moss, a Canadian man, astro-botanist and agricultural bioengineer; and Binyaarns, an Indiginous-Australian woman, engineer and mechanical technician with a respectable amount of flight experience. Read and Hall stayed for a another week, getting to know the newcomers and making sure the details were sorted out as the responsibilities were transferred. Read and Hall returned to Earth, and immediately became involved in the Martian relief effort Earthside.

The two Aresians who were brought to Earth were also brought over with the fourth wave of landing parties to present the remaining inhabitants with an opportunity. Many sovereign nations on Earth had opened their borders specifically for Aresians to emigrate and make new lives for themselves there. The logistics of the offer would only allow a handful of people at a time, as Tsukikage Station could only accomodate a few people at a time for gravity therapy, as the station was still used for regular crewed missions. Not many Aresians took them up on the offer at first, only five people, who were quite young, took them up on the offer, and three of them came back (which was a very complicated situation and ended up necessitating a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a private space agency to send them up to Tsukikage Station so they could rendezvous with Light Racer when it returned from the next trip), but their improved physical condition spurred more to try moving to Earth. Soon, there was a small, but steady stream of emigrants. But while some were leaving, many more were working hard with the relief teams to bring their communities back to strength. Routes between the various nearby communities were established, and outposts near them were constructed. More of the communities across the planet - some of them were, tragically, completely dead - were found, contact between them was established, and suitable landing sites were identified, and more outposts established. A rough census was taken as soon as most of the communities were found, and across the entire planet there were only 1.2 million individuals. While as many were searched for and found as possible, there was an underlying worry by many people on both sides of the relief effort that some were missed.

The research done into AHK-drive mass manufacturing eventually led to more cost effective ways to construct drive units as needed, which allowed for more interplanetary vehicles to be constructed, which led to a higher frequency and volume of landing parties and supplies, which led to more orbital infrastructure around both planets to be constructed to accommodate the craft, and soon a permanent orbital docking facility was built over Mars for shuttles to move between. Fuel and spare parts for the shuttles were occasionally brought with the landing parties for restocking, and many Aresians were trained to operate as crew for the docking facility. It eventually was given the name Vaughan Hub*, after one of the mathematicians working during the Apollo 11 mission, Dorothy Vaughan. Soon, a semi-permanently settled community on the surface near the first underground community was officially established, and named New Lucerne. The underground section was repurposed for exclusively agricultural work (in addition to greenhouses on the surface), and all Aresians were relocated to houses on the surface. The interspecies Martian colony grew, and eventually became host of a dedicated research facility, where research on AHK-drive technology, terraformation, artificial gravity generation, and many more technologies would be performed. It was here that the first non-physical variable permeability barriers - in lay terms, shields - were created.

*The docking facility would eventually be renamed in 2109 to Je'Ur Memorial Station, for one of the two Aresians who first came to Earth, after extensive remodeling.

The Sol system was becoming more than just a wonder. It was becoming a home. Because of the push for AHK-drives on manned vehicles to help the people on Mars, the solar system was now able to be crossed, by manned crews, from one end to the other in a matter of days. By 2075, there was at least one crewed mission in orbit over the outer planets. The construction of an orbital colony over the Jovian moon Europa, in part to serve as a conduit to study its frozen oceans, began in early 2076, and was touted as humanity's greatest achievement (more due to good press and PR than by any objective metric - many people believed it to be stolen valor; and still considered the Aresian relief effort of even greater significance). But it wouldn't be long before this achievement, and even the Aresian relief effort, was dwarfed by a discovery even greater....

Not even 3 days before Lupos left the facility, Europa Orbital was attacked by an unknown group of people in a craft outfitted with 30mm autocannons. It dropped out of warp several hours away Europa, and upon entering range, strafed the station, causing a large section of the outer ring to break apart from explosive decompression, killing dozens and injuring many more. The station was not equipped with defensive weaponry, as it was never assumed that hostile action would ever be taken against any space construct, especially not as far out as they were. All the inhabitants of Europa Orbital could do was watch and wait in helplessness as the craft started to reorient for another pass. But before it could start a burn to head back the other way, it abruptly vanished, replaced by a cloud of debris seemingly blowing away parallel to the station. Video footage analysis revealed that the hostile vehicle was struck by an object moving so fast that the 144 FPS cameras recording it were only able to catch a streak of it on a single frame. After an investigation was launched on the attack, the hostile group was eventually revealed to be under the employ of one of the heirs, the son, contending Europa Orbital's ownership, and he was promptly arrested for conspiracy to commit terrorism. He protested that his cousin must have had contingencies in place to deal with an attack, and that's why the vehicle was destroyed, and that he should be arrested too, but the cousin was adamant that he had no idea what happened. An investigation was eventually going to be dispatched to find out just what happened to the craft, but it would be a little while before it was launched.

However, life otherwise continued. The recovered graviton saturator arrays were installed, cables with higher temperature ratings were obtained, and they went ahead with another test. The process went a lot faster, though it put a strain on the facility's power grid. After a few moments, they had a stable protosingularity, but still no wormhole. They decided to keep it running until the singularity collapsed, but they eventually broke the record for the amount of time a sustained, stable protosingularity had been in existence four times over before they called it quits. They were breaking new ground, but there was still a lot more work to be done on multiple fronts before they got the results they were looking for. Coltrane decided that his department needed more manpower, and so he started petitioning for Lupos' position to be restored, while also keeping T'Shil on. T'Shil joined in as well, and the combined pressure allowed a meeting to be arranged, at which compromises were made. Each employee would have to have their salary reduced to accommodate the extra work hours being done, which they agreed to. Soon, Lupos, Coltrane, and T'Shil were working hard on the problem, and, at least for a while, the incident at Europa Orbital was forgotten.

Meanwhile, the administrators at LCRI received word of CPG's latest results in micro-wormhole generation. They realized something about their results were similar to data collected on their own experiments, and sent a query to CPG as to what algorithm they were using. They replied it was something that T'Shil had come up with. When they heard this, the administrators were outraged, and immediately sent a Cease & Desist letter addressed specifically to T'Shil. She ignored it and continued her work, at which point LCRI filed a lawsuit against her. Now outraged herself, T'Shil was determined to go to Mars and fight the issue in court. Her husband, Ke'Tus, was unable to go due to his struggles under Earth gravity and ongoing physiotherapy, and he was worried about T'Shil's impending birth date. T'Shil was confident the situation would be sorted out long before then, and this assured Ke'Tus somewhat. He then suggested that Coltrane come with her as a character witness. He agreed when T'Shil posed the question, indignant at the intellectual property squabble LCRI was making. They hired a lawyer, and were Mars-side within the week. The court proceedings - which was an amalgamated adaptation of the Western judicial system and the Aresian parriarch council - took a massive toll on T'Shil, as much of the accusations were just attacks on her character and personhood. T'Shil and Coltrane stayed with her parents' for the duration of their time on Mars. Due to conflicts in interest, Ann-Marie Hall wasn't able to come to T'Shil's defense in court, but she supported her however else she could.

The stresses T'Shil was subjected to during the court proceedings had an unforeseen side effect - it induced an early labor. T'Shil had to be rushed to the Lucerne Ccolony's medical facility while court was in session, and this was used by the prosecution as an example of T'Shil's irresponsibility. Coltrane already knew that the accusations were petty, but this caught his attention, and he decided to do some investigation. He discovered that T'Shil was fired both because of her marital status and her pregnancy. As Mars was under European Union jurisdiction, those actions were unlawful and considered discrimination. He gave this information to T'Shil's lawyer, and was successfully able to mount an offensive against her accusers. Because they unlawfully terminated her employment, they were potentially facing harsh repercussions. When this was revealed, the judge - who had been paying attention to the case and knew this wasn't actually about the algorithm at all - offered them a deal: relinquish intellectual property ownership over the algorithm, and the unlawful termination would be forgiven. With no other choice, the prosecution accepted, but since Ann-Marie Hall was a co-author of the algorithm, they had to get her okay. The judge said to just relinquish all rights to the respective authors. They reluctantly agreed.

Meanwhile, T'Shil had given birth to a healthy baby boy, and after a few more weeks of post-natal care, they were clear to return to Earth. Because the baby had been under Earth gravity for a while in-utero, he was already partially adapted, and would adjust just fine to his intended home. When they arrived home, Ke'Tus, using crutches, was waiting for them, and was eager to drive both of them home, having worked hard on physiotherapy and driving lessons while his wife was away. T'Shil, overjoyed and proud of her husband, invited Coltrane over for a celebratory dinner. Coltrane, though grateful, declined, apparently eager to get back to CPG as soon as possible.

Later that week, Ann-Marie Hall announced to the wider scientific and academic community that she had made a potential breakthrough in toroidal topology warp fields, sharing her findings in an yet peer unreviewed research paper. This revelation caused T'Shil and Coltrane, eventually roping Lupos in as well, to jump on their own research into it, implementing Hall's work into theirs. Her work was incredibly promising, and Coltrane decided he would contribute to the peer review process. It would soon be found that there were closer-reaching implications - and consequences - to this development than anyone first thought....

T'Shil grew up between the subterranean and surface districts of the Lucerne Colony. She had a strong desire to go and live on Earth from a young age, especially after meeting Hall, to the point where she purposefully weighed herself down so she was as close to her Earth weight as possible. She was seen as an irritant by the Aresian parriarchy, but her spirit was also magnetic to those willing to hear. Not long after she got a job working with Hall at LCRI, she married an Aresian man named Ke'Tus. Due to the Aresian's previous situation of being on the brink of extinction, their culture's law prohibited a married woman from working, as she was supposed to be taken care of to help propagate the next generation. Unfortunately, the culture didn't keep up with their rapidly changing circumstances, and as such much of their previous laws out of necessity became legalistically adhered to regardless of logic. As such, she kept her marital status secret from the administrators - who, out of trying to give the Mars natives agency within a rapidly changing culture, were all Aresians - for as long as she could. However, when she and Ke'Tus were expecting a child, it was only a matter of time, and she was eventually fired from her position from concealing her marital status, much to Hall's protests.

Not to be deterred, T'Shil decided that it was time to fulfill her dream of moving to Earth. Ke'Tus was behind her completely, and soon she had arranged passage on one of the regular supply ships to be taken on its return trip. She sent her resumé to several research institutions on Earth, and Centro de Pesquisa de Grávitons (CPG), the graviton technologies research arm of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), located in Cuiabá, Brazil, wrote back, eagerly expressing interest in her coming on board, one of their previous employees - Moira Lupos - transferring to the research facility aboard Europa Orbital. There she would meet an American man, Jack Coltrane, who was head of the applied technologies research department, and her next colleague. Their relationship, both professional and personal, did not go off to a good start. Coltrane found T'Shil headstrong, opinionated, and inexperienced, while T'Shil found Coltrane to be callous, rigid, and arrogant. However, Coltrane was working on Hall's toroidal warp field topology research, having heard of her work and believing it to be of great benefit, and that became a small inroads to breaking the ice between them. However, like at LCRI, their research grants were focused on micro-wormhole-based telecommunications, and as such was their primary focus during their work.

T'Shil and Coltrane would often butt heads over the algorithm used to generate micro-wormholes. Coltrane was using one that he had created as his graduate thesis when he graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and had progressively iterated on over the years. T'Shil kept insisting on trying the one she and Hall (though T'Shil had done the bulk of the math, not that she would have admitted that) had developed at LCRI, but Coltrane was adamant that his would work if they could just tune the variables or achieve optimal energy distribution or graviton saturation. Frustrated at his unwillingness to even hear her out, after Coltrane left, she swapped out his algorithm, transcribed into programming code used by the system, and transcribed her own in its place, and made sure the system would initialize on a warm start the next day, so there would be less opportunity to a comprehensive systems check and so they could get started immediately. Her plan worked right up until she initialized the graviton saturator array, at which Coltrane immediately realized something was amiss. Coltrane briefly interrogated her, suspicious that she changed the algorithm behind his back, and after unconvincing deflection and excuses, she managed to hold him off from aborting the operation long enough for a complete cycle (which, back then, often resulted in singularity collapse), which delivered data on the process. The results showed the protosingularity's maximum size was 38% the size of Coltrane's standard output, but 300% more stable. T'Shil realized the stunt she just pulled may have ended her career, but Coltrane was intrigued by the vastly differing results. He said he'd help tweak the algorithm, on the condition that if it was a dead end that T'Shil put her efforts into Coltrane's. She agreed, and further tests were performed with T'Shil's algorithm.

A breakthrough came when Coltrane's daughter, Sarai, was brought to the lab by Coltrane's ex-wife, Lindsay Hunt, for his court-granted period of shared custody. Sarai mostly talked to T'Shil for the duration of the working day, having never met an Aresian before. Questions about Mars came up, and Sarai said that Aresians were so much taller than humans because of the lower gravity. T'Shil, delighted, confirmed the fact, and said that the gravity was about 38% that of Earth's. Coltrane realized that this percentage was familiar, and he looked through the logs, and saw that the protosingularity's size was always within 35-39% the size of Coltrane's algorithms. He asked how T'Shil's algorithm accounts for gravity, and she said it was just a constant decimal variable she defined early on. One that she didn't change to account for Earth's gravity when she transcribed the algorithm. They immediately set to warming up the equipment for a test, which was unscheduled, but their new direction was too urgent to wait. They adjusted the code and executed the test. Power draw was higher, but protosingularity formation was the steadiest Coltrane had ever seen - something that T'Shil and Hall were used to back on LCRI. Eventually it reached 105% the size generated by Coltrane's algorithm, and held. They started getting new readings, ones that only mathematical equations predicted. But the graviton saturator array's power draw caused one of the power cables to overheat and explode, rendering the entire applied technologies wing of CPG without power for just under an hour. When power was restored and a damage assessment made on the graviton saturator array, they found that most of the components had been pushed past their intended strain threshold - it just so happened that the power cables were the first point of failure. Frustrated, Coltrane explained that he'd been pushing to get newer equipment for years, and the constant cycles of activation and deactivation had definitely worn them down more than this one test did. With their graviton saturator array temporarily out of commission, they filled the time by working on Hall's toroidal warp field model via computer simulations.

A few weeks later, a strangely-shellshocked Moira Lupos returned to CPG from Europa Orbital, under a part-time contract. Something had happened on the station, and Lupos seemed to give the impression that she had escaped somehow. It would take only a few more days before news of what happened began being reported on by the wider media....

Not long thereafter, the second buggy arrived, its headlights on at maximum strength. Foss was inside, and helped Read find the other buggy, at which point they were better equipped to try finding Montenegro. They found him mere minutes later standing incredibly still with something held close to his body. When they got him into Read's buggy, they saw it was the missing drawing tablet. Montenegro was silent for the almost the entire trip, refusing to show anyone or even let go of the tablet until they got back to the habitat module.

Once they arrived, Read gathered everyone to the common room, and Montenegro showed them the drawing tablet. A strange series of symbols were drawn on the screen, over the unfinished sketch he started the previous evening. Their shapes were too deliberate to be random inputs, and Montenegro swore that, after he fell down, the tablet just dropped onto his chest. He also remembered the sensation of being pulled backwards, but he wasn't as sure about that. Read told Montenegro to save the file and upload it to the habitat's internal server so it could be studied later. The crew became very quiet as they complicated the implications of what came back on Montenegro's drawing tablet.

Later that Sol, Montenegro went to Read with an idea: go back to that same location and leave the drawing tablet behind again with a message on it and space to write a reply. Read questioned his plan, asking what sort of message they would leave, how long they would leave the tablet for, and how he was so sure there was someone out there to leave a reply. Montenegro answered each one with as much confidence he had in him: the message would have simple figures and landmarks on it; they would leave it over night inside of a plastic bag; and he still could not shake the feeling that he felt someone grab onto him and drag him backwards after he fell over. He had checked the suit telemetry, and the only people out at the time were himself and Read, followed soon by Foss, so if it wasn't either of them, who was it? Read was sufficiently impressed by his answers and approved the attempt at contact. He and Sdiri left in a buggy within the hour and left the tablet behind again.

Upon returning to the drop off spot the next morning, Sdiri and Montenegro found the tablet had disappeared completely. They had left it under a reasonably heavy rock, so they were certain it couldn't have blown away. They looked around for a few minutes, but Read recalled them to the habitat, warning them there was another dust storm incoming. Sdiri and Montenegro packed up and left that minute, though they were well ahead of the storm this time.

The storm got to peak density that afternoon, and continued well into the night. The crew were basically languid from boredom, the storm preventing them from doing much beyond what little duties they could perform indoors with what materials they had available. However, their boredom would soon be be forgotten, as a pair of lights peaked out from the dust, growing in intensity over time, and soon stopping right outside the habitat module....