Introduction
Noone would have believed that a thing that started out so small would later have the biggest influence on how events progressed.
Something that had begun 800 years before the Axiom's launch turned out to have a more than significant influence on the events surrounding its homecoming 700 years later.
Strange anomalies during its septuacentennial cruise, some of them obvious, some unnoticed. Even stranger phenomena after its return, both of which costing the lives of more than one robot.
Grave danger arising from the abandoned ship, threatening the newly founded colony in its entirety.
It will fall to persons and robots we have come to hold dear to once more avert disaster for what is left of mankind.
This story was written with the intention to publish it in its entirety for Halloween 2009. It turned out though to become way larger than initially planned, so it is work-in-progress for now. :)
Many thanks to co-author Unreal.2K7 for brainstorming, proofreading and contributing some chapters!
Prologue
Out in space, it is cold, dark and cold.
Considering the inconceivably vast and empty expanses in the interstellar medium, it is also - beyond any doubt - the loneliest place imaginable.
Those beings of course who are lucky enough to dwell in the proximity of a star can be considered blessed by fate. They are not doomed to an existence in that black nothingness, but have a place that bestows upon them light and warmth, a place that they can call their home.
Every once in a while though, that friendly, life-giving home can turn against those that it had born. When a huge and massive star has spent all of the fuel that powers the natural fusion reactor in its core, the energy production comes to an - astronomically speaking - sudden halt. The delicate balance between gravity and radiation pressure is disturbed, and the star ends its life in an unimaginable explosion of light and stellar matter, known as a Supernova. For a few last glorious days, its remains shine brighter than a whole galaxy, and the gas that is hurled out into space sweeps everything along that dares to try and thwart the expanding bubble.
Whenever people on our planet Earth witnessed the appearance of what they called a new star in the sky, bright enough to be visible even during daylight, they credited it with being either a good or bad omen, sometimes both of it at once. Little did the people back in the days of Ancient Greece suspect, when they spotted that bright glimmering speck in the sky, that they were witnessing the terminal scream of a distant star, about 800 light years away. A scream that, unbeknownst to them, was to have way more influence on their descendants than any omen might have predicted.