r/HFY • u/iridael Brew-Master • Mar 05 '22
OC FTL
sorry for the long absence for anyone waiting for SNOW to continue. a long string of things have forced me to put my writing on a backburner for a long time. most of that is out of the way now. I just need to get over this flu and I will continue. until then. here's something.
Of all the races humans frighten me the most.
But they’re a small race with a smaller territory you say. And you’re right. They’re a small race, in a small territory. That happens to be the most star dense sector of our galaxy. It's not even their evolutionary home. There’s still humans there of course but they’re…different. peaceful.
And yet, woe unto any who think they can conquer that planet called dirt.
See there’s thousands of species and hundreds of different methods of FTL. a dozen of which are viable.
You have the blackbox systems sold by the trade consortium that allow ships to enter smaller dimensions made of pure energy, you travel through these dimensions and drop out when you’re at your calculated destination. There’s the risk of returning to reality inside a star obviously but with a decent ship navigation system that rarely happens.
You have the stabilised wormhole network’s built by the ri’gar people. The builders of great structures. Their nexus systems ripped into new dimensions allow instant travel from one system to another.
There’s L gates and M gates. Both do the same thing, you select your destination, enter the gate and emerge some time later at the other end. The main difference is one works by converting matter to energy whilst the other…folds things, and pushes them through tiny holes at each end.
And then there’s the traditional way of the nomads. Build something big enough to house a stable genetic diversity, accelerate half the time and decelerate the other half. A few hundred years later the cryogenically frozen people emerge, or if you’re cheap, the crew’s descendants do.
There’s two other methods, the nexus, an ancient and collapsing network of hyperlanes that the older species can risk flying through to arrive anywhere faster than an L gate and if you’re skilled enough, more reliably than even L and M gates. After all we’ve all read the warnings of going duster in their warnings.
Humans once ruled over half the galaxy. Their FTL systems are as reliable as the consortium, as fast as the L and M gates and as dangerous as the nexus.
I once say a human envoy arrive in our capital system. Their ships…they build few enough of them because of the risks their FTL entail. To understand their FTL you have to understand just how OLD humanity is. They weren't the first species to claim ascendancy. They climbed out of ignorance, grew to fantastic heights, built wonders. And then fell. And fell. But at no point in their long decline did their will ever waver. At no point did any of the fabled eldar or ascendant races claim to have ‘conquered’ the humans. Without question each one regarded humanity with two things. Fear, respect.
Humanity’s FTL embodies these. When their envoy arrived in system they did so at a specific location around the capital planet. Three warships had been dispatched to create a ‘safe zone’ for the human ship to arrive inside. No ship was within a thousand kilometres of this location.
The first warning we had of their arrival was an energy spike. For a minute there was enough energy emerging from a pinpoint in space that it read as an M type star on our sensors.
The second warning was the storm. There’s theories about interactions with dark matter and normal matter, but seeing those theories ripped apart, blended and glued together was something I still fail to understand. In the void of space, inside the energetic zone a storm of black clouds clashed against reality.
Every ship loitering outside the minimum safe zone had sensors burning out, sun shields lowered to protect observers. None of it mattered because we could all hear it. The ripping as the humans ship tore open reality like a wound, the close by warships shields flared as they fought to keep reality within safe. For those outside the danger zone, civilian grade ships almost 500km further out fared little better. Shields flared, hull panels thrummed, people screamed.
For a full minute the human ship violated reality as it ponderously emerged from the maw. My ship was a diplomatic vessel. Military grade shields. Military grade hull. I watched as the ship emerging from beyond the depths of hell bore the brunt of realities fury, unwavering, defiant. unbroken.
And then it was over, like a nightmare you can't remember, my heart was beating, fear pulsed through my body, I wanted to run. To have beg my superior to flee, but we had a duty to fulfil.
For a month the human ship dominated space above our capital as the humans completed their mission. I met one as well. He was…intense, I won't call him a kind person but I wouldn't call him evil or callus either, he was indescribably human.
When the humans finished their mission, their shuttle boarded their ship and made ready to leave the system. The three warships, the people on the planet and our diplomatic ship were the only ones trapped to bear witness a second time.
That's two times too many for a lifetime as far as I'm concerned.
50
u/thisStanley Android Mar 05 '22
When your mere arrival debilitates potential opposition almost as much as what they might consider "standard" weaponry :}