Chapter 0: Pre-history
Captain Hydone Aethos looked up from his sketchpad as the Gate in front of him lit up, signalling an imminent incoming connection. It had been a quiet 6 hours of Gatewatch, as the majority of the Alteran military stationed in the scientific outpost called it, and he was looking forward to his guard rest. He had been activated at the last minute as the scheduled Duty Officer had met with an unexpected accident. Being the reserve Officer, Aethos stood in with nary a complaint, happy to be on the night shift, where things rarely happened.
With his idle sketching having been interrupted, Aethos watched as the automated systems followed the long-established routine. Having been on duty before, Aethos knew what to expect. The shield formed over the surface of the gate literally milliseconds after the vortex that signified the opening of a subspace wormhole subsided, much faster than any Lantean could react. Aethos redirected his attention to the status console, which was calmly pulsing "Attempting authentication – unknown remote address". He leaned back in his chair, knowing that the connection would be automatically terminated within a few seconds if there was no response, as per the standard operating procedures. Sure enough, the message blinked a final time before being replaced by "Identity verified – new address added (Authority: Seed Ship 3)".
Aethos blinked. It wasn't everyday that a new gate placed by a Seed Ship came online, particularly from the specific quadrant of the galaxy Seed Ship 3 was in. Resigning himself to now needing to finish a significant amount of paperwork prior to the end of his shift, Aethos sat up, turning to his personal console to start filling out his watch report, paying scant attention to the status console as it went through its automated routine of connecting to the Seed Ship and synchronizing all of its data with the massive databanks that the science department kept.
Mundi Sidhe stared at the results of his experiment. As one of the many research scientists at Lithos Enterprises, an up-and-coming Alteran R&D company, Sidhe was investigating novel forms of energy production with the intent of replacing the relatively inefficient fusion drives that were currently in popular use. His team was testing a number of elaborate setups that had netted some minor improvements in efficiency, but had recently moved on from the realm of incremental improvements of existing technology to discovering (or inventing, depending on who you asked) entirely new branches of Physics, and some of the applications of those discoveries.
His latest experiment had not so much discovered an entirely new branch of physics as much as potentially coming up with world changing effects. The thought of extracting energy from a contained region of subspace had come to him while he was flipping through the daily news. A mention of gate travel to certain planets due to some solar flares from the system's sun sparked a quick review of how the flares affected the establishment of a wormhole between two Gates, which in turn led to thoughts on why subspace would be vulnerable to flares.
From that initial thought, months seemed to fly by as he spent most of his time in the lab, coming up with a coherent theory and running various simulations of devices meant to tap into and draw power from subspace. It had taken the team a number of years to come up with a working prototype, but it clearly worked, as the results showed.
He glanced back and forth between the results displayed on his screen, and the gently glowing device in the midst of a number of sensors, wires and miscellaneous tools. The warm yellow glow emitted by the device belied the fact that, according to the readings, the single module was putting out almost double the energy of the fusion drives powering the massive exploration vessels that were currently traversing the universe.
Sidhe suppressed a manic grin as he reached out to tap his creation. "I can't wait to present the findings to Domad tomorrow. With this success, I'll most likely be promoted and given a hefty bonus!"
Ryhyril winced as his body was wracked by a coughing spasm. He gripped the edge of the bench tightly as it became increasingly clear to him that his body was rebelling against the sustained late nights and early mornings that made up his past year on Galeous. Having been sent to the Galeous research outpost a number of years ago by a superior who was feeling threatened by Ryhyril's rising star, Ryhyril had since worked to make it home. While the circumstances of his posting were suspect, there was little he could do to protest against them.
While biologists made up the main bulk of the scientists stationed at the base, set up with the intention to study the newly discovered biological network spanning the planet, it was easy enough for his superior to justify sending Ryhyril to Galeous under the guise of cross-discipline study and work. But in the mix of several hundred workers, a lone electrical engineer specializing in material engineering was easily overlooked by bosses more inclined toward organic sciences.
And so Ryhyril had spent the past few years mostly being ignored by everyone but the maintenance crew – and what few the base had were slowly being replaced with automated systems as the company tried to do more, despite ever scarcer funding.
In the lack of oversight and direction, Ryhyril had taken to spending his time working on his own projects. His most recent was an inadvertent discovery about the properties of a very strange mineral. The mineral was unlike any he had seen, and yet was abundant in minute quantities everywhere on the moon. A biologist friend, knowing Ryhyril specialized in materials engineering, had passed a sample to him, with the simple note that they had "discovered a sizable quantity on a recent expedition". Not expecting much, Ryhyril had left it on his shelf for ages, and had only recently gotten around to investigating the mineral with the lack of anything else to do.
What had initially been intended as a diversion for a week or so quickly turned into an obsession that lasted a year and counting. Quickly discovering the superconducting properties, Ryhyril soon decided to integrate it into the project that had condemned his career. Having been transferred from the team working on improvements to the Potentia, the revolutionary power modules first created almost 100 years ago, Ryhyril decided to rework the internal structure of the Potentia, using the new mineral to improve the efficiency of the device.
The thought of showing up in the old lab and presenting his improved version of the Potentia to his boss's boss, complete with accolades for Ryhyril and condemnation for his boss, drove Ryhyril onwards, with him spending time running test after test, simulation after simulation, all leading up to this moment, with him extracting three newly created modules from the stereo-lithography machine.
As he gently placed the devices on his workbench, connecting his testing equipment to one of them, he resolved to go to the medic and get checked out after finishing his experiments, the grand conclusion of his efforts. Flipping the switch, he was greeted with an intense white glow emerging from the module lying on his workbench. Looking at the power readings, he slowly increased the power draw from the module. Little by little, his screen started plotting an ever steeper curve showing the sustained increasing power draw. Soon, he had broken the maximum power draw record, and grinned as he recorded "Broken max power of normal Potentia. Increase still ongoing, no upper limit reached yet" in his testing records.
Over the next hour, he slowly and painstakingly recorded the ever-increasing figures before the graph started tracing a plateau. Shutting down his equipment, he broke out into laughter, which quickly turned into coughing. Feeling a wet sticky substance on his palm as a result of his coughing fit, Ryhyril looked at his hand before rushing towards the medic station, only briefly stopping at the door control to lock his room.
As Ryhyril ran off, a trail of dark droplets was left behind, glinting red as the hallway lights reflected off droplets of blood suspended in the slimy substance.
Kedyb winced at the blood staining the walls and floor as he walked along the corridor. The scene of death and sickness would have had him retching, except that he had vomited up all that his stomach held hours before, and even the sense of nausea passed with the constant exposure. The sight of the aftermath of the plague was one he was becoming very familiar with. With the majority of the base personnel being lost to the fast moving plague, the decision had come down that the company was cutting its losses and closing the base. Kedyb and his co-workers were sent to pack up and recover whatever research could be recovered.
Coming to a locked door, he attempted to override the lock with the master control code, only to get an error. "Damn it, I don't have time for this," he muttered as he entered his master control code again. When the door stubbornly remained shut, he reached up to his headset, contacting his co-worker at the main control terminal.
"Hanob, this is Kedyb. I'm at " - there was a brief pause while Kedyb looked for a room number. "Uh, room L3-62. The door here won't open. Can you unlock it from the inside?"
"One moment... Mmm, nope. System says here it was locked out jointly by the medic and the head of research. I think that has to be patient zero's room"
"OK then. I'll log the room and move on then."
Inside the room, detecting the shutdown commands being transmitted through the outpost's master control system, Ryhyril's systems turned themselves off. Screens flickered briefly before going black, overhead lights extinguished themselves, and the sounds of the ventilation system turned off echoed through vents in the wall.
As the air in the room stilled, the white glow from the modified Potentia started to fade before abruptly going black, leaving the room in total darkness.