I did only promise two a month, didn't I…

Chapter 9 – Recovery, Consequences and History Lessons

"Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time."

~George Bernard Shaw

Alteran date: year 6, month 5, day 2, time 10:30

Aikino sat in front of his terminal watching as the last few reactor subroutines were restored from the backup, he had to pull them from one of the oldest backups made just before leaving celestas so they lacked the fine-tuning and various modifications that had been made over the past six years by the engineering teams. Horribly inefficient without those changes they would at least still work.

It would just be a matter of time until they could rebuild the control programs back to what they should have been. If they were lucky perhaps one of the newer backups would be salvageable allowing them to restore more of the functionality they needed.

Aikino sighed as he pushed that program off to the side of his screen letting it run in the background; he started on his next restoration project. They had argued for a short time many years ago about placing external weapons on the ship. Luckily the side pushing for them won, and several electrothermal accelerators had been constructed and mounted around the ship, these plasma cannons were loaded with a small solid cube with about two inches side length of propellant behind and a high density payload. The cube would be placed between two electrodes behind the payload when high voltage passed through it would vaporize the cube into a rapidly expanding electrically conductive superheated plasma field which propelled the projectile and plasma from the barrel of the weapon at great speeds. It had taken some time to determine a propellant that would work in the vacuum of space. Regrettably, this weapon required precious resources to construct both propellant and payload. So they had only included enough to cover each side of the city, making six in total.

The less expensive weapon in long term engagements was a particle accelerator that had been repurposed, the benefit of which was that it could still be used for research when not being used to blast a hostile ship out of the sky. The city had been constructed with the accelerator just inside the outer hull at the far edge of the ship and circled the entire city. Discharge points had been constructed every few meters around the outer edge allowing the weaponized accelerator a fairly complete firing arc at any target around the city. The accelerator made use of hydrogen which was an element found in abundance through the universe. Meaning they could rearm from just about any planet with an atmosphere and many gas giants. The accelerator worked by stripping or adding electrons to hydrogen atoms causing them to be electrically charged and allowing the accelerator to propel them around the ship until they approached the speed of light. Positively or negatively charged atoms of the hydrogen gas would meet a canceling charge at the firing point preventing the individual atoms from repelling each other and allowing them to be fired in a straight line at the target relatively close to the speed of light. The biggest limitation of the weapon was that only a small amount of hydrogen gas could be loaded into the accelerator it was still enough to sustain a few seconds worth of fire at any target in the path of the many firing tubes branching away from the main accelerator and they could even use it on multiple targets at the same time which would reduce the overall strength but was still lethal. The other limitation was the charge time with how long it would take for the accelerator to bring the ionized gasses up to the required relativistic speeds.

The beautiful thing about the particle accelerator or maticelero (roughly or incorrectly translated Sea of speed, correctly translated mass accelerator) was that the beam could be adjusted to provide near invisibility, or could be made to produce light on a desired wavelength. Of course the less visible the weapon was the more powerful the blast it provided. But this would overheat the firing magnets quickly and prevent the beam from sustaining fire for a longer period of time.

The problem was both of these weapon systems were hit hard by the virus, large sections of the control program for the accelerator and the associated various firing chambers around the ship would have to be rewritten. They were mostly defenseless until Aikino and the other weapons engineers could restore enough of the programming to make them safe for use again.

Aikino sighed again and began the long task of digging through the various databases he'd just finished cleansing of any traces of the virus for the various programs that would provide the proper control systems. Maybe if they could improve their weapons control systems this would be worth the trouble of cleaning up after the witch.

Alteran date: 6-5-2 14:15

"What have you got?" Fenri called out as he entered the bridge, he was punishing himself by not taking the four hours of sleep required for his body to repair the damage of the day but his meditations had afforded him some leeway in that he had some limited control over his body and while he couldn't completely flush the toxins and repair cellular degradation as well as natural sleep could it was better control than his ancestors a few generations ago had.

"We've analyzed the information recorded from the Filiacet incident, sir."

No one could quite bring themselves to use Phoebe's name in connection to the suicide bombing that had damaged the cell completely obliterating the researcher turned saboteur that had been hiding amongst them for so long. Her name would eventually come to mean Fiery Daughter of Lies; over time the Alterans would eventually repurpose her name allowing the name Phoebe to be used as bright or illuminating instead of Fiery and her last name would lose the first three letters and become the root word lies over time that word too would change and then be fall out of use.

"Sir, you aren't going to like this." The technician sitting in his chair brought up a schematic of the ship and a feed of the video from the cell. "We managed to analyze the compounds within the needle that she plunged into her chest shortly before exploding. Trace amounts of another biologically inert compound were found within her blood." The video feed slowly advanced to the point where she stabbed the sharp implement into her chest. A short moment later blue black lines speared their way in spider webs across her skin before the synthesis completed causing them to glow a brilliant red orange through her skin. Burning their way through they consumed her body until exposed to the atmosphere at which point they flashed brilliantly before exploding.

Had her cell been next to the hull that section would have opened to the vacuum of space; given the extent of the damage to the computer system Fenri wasn't sure if the ship would have been capable of closing emergency bulkheads to prevent the explosive decompression of that entire level. Luckily her cell was further inside the ship and within a section mostly unaffected by the sabotage that had caused havoc with the computers onboard, as such the computer detected the uncontrolled explosion and activated a suppressive field which had just been restored to working order around the section, saving the life of Artiem Lal and her security detail.

"Sir, as a precaution we configured the internal sensors to scan for the compound that was found in Phoebe's blood and it detected three other instances onboard."

"Use the stun weapon Lal brought, locate and stun those individuals take them immediately to the brig don't take any chances have them searched, stripped, and scanned before they wake up, and make sure they get some clothing, can't have the council getting squeamish about the treatment of prisoners. See if Amelius can repair and upgrade the gauntlet of truth, they surrendered any right to believe that senseless drivel they've been preaching for the past twenty years when they chose to come aboard this ship."

Fenri reflected on that conflict which had cast his people far from their original home. The division between the Ori and the Alteran lay within the lack of life their galaxy suffered from. All worlds they colonized had needed to be seeded with plant and animal life having none of their own even within the habitation zone. It had slowed the Alteran colonization efforts considerably in the early years as sleeper ships finding mostly barren worlds with all the makings for life but no life except what they brought with them had needed to build an ecosystem on each world they settled. The Alterans never knew the strife of competing for resources as one nation among many. As one people they developed a curiosity about the universe and a desire to learn all of its secrets. They had a subtle faith one that pointed to the infinite depth of the universe and they believed that some sentient force had to be responsible for its existence and by extension their own.

Perhaps it was this lack of life on each planet they set foot on, perhaps their carefully tended terra-forming efforts which had brought forth such beauty and life on each world they claimed led them down the path. A religious group arose among them after a few who had been exposed to radiation burns ascended. The religion concluded that of their empty galaxy the Alteran people were the only intelligent beings in the universe, and as such, they were Gods. Their bringing life to so many worlds only strengthened this reasoning.

Over time followers of this religion infiltrated every sector of Alteran society and government. If only the Alteran people had seen fit to quarantine this fanaticism before it had spread to more than one world they might have succeeded, he thought. But it was not their way. Having seen religions rise and fall before they had ventured into the stars they had assumed this would be the same.

After covering a quarter of the galaxy spreading through the early experimental stargate network that had been spread to many of the worlds across the galaxy, a few of this cult managed to ascend. While the first few who ascended would not interfere with their mortal brothers and sisters they did their best to protect them from the newly ascended false gods as their power waned and the power of the Ori waxed full they finally appeared to their brothers they did their best to mask their ships as they left their former home.

There was something though that the ascended hadn't shared, he could feel it when they had talked with the remaining open minded Alteran. Something about the situation with their fallen brothers and their followers that made the whole thing worse, something they weren't sharing. He sensed that even if they had squashed the movement before it had taken root, they still wouldn't have won.

Alteran date: 6-5-2 14:30

Tav forced himself to meditate after Doctor Keller kicked him out, Keller was the name he preferred everyone use instead of his slightly longer family name Cellarius. Tav sat in on one of the meditation classes being taught to some of the younger students he relaxed himself listening to Numana Lar giving instruction on a breathing exercise he had completed several years ago.

One of the things he had noticed was that most other meditation teachers instructed the students to clear their minds but never how or why, When he asked how on his second lesson many years ago the teacher had looked at him odd and then transferred him to Lar's class. She was cryptic with her answers but at least she gave an answer instead of just calmly staring at you. Her response to those questions of how and why had been a story, "A man cleaned his house of all the junk that had collected. It took him a while but once he was finished his house clean and empty. After a short time the man began to ignore the fragments that he brought in day after day and debris began to accumulate again. He was forced to again clean and empty his house. After sometime the man decided it would be better if he created some form of organization for his house to prevent this accumulation of debris that life brought to his doorstep. So the man decided to build shelves on which to place items, and a few vaults in which to place valuable or dangerous items and resolved to carefully sort each thing to decide where in the house to place it."

He had listened intently and thought for most of the hour over her words before responding at the end of the class after everyone else had left, "So like the man I am clearing my mind of that which has accumulated and like the empty house life will fill the empty space I've just created, so I must be ready to fill that space with something else."

She had given him a look before nodding and replying, "Focus first on the meditation exercise I will give you at the start of the lesson. When your mind is completely focused on the task at hand and not distracting you with stray thoughts then your mind is clear. From there you can begin to sort through your experiences and memories and bring order to chaos." This was probably the clearest and least enigmatic response he would ever get from her as her student.

He had long since constructed the mental lockbox in his mind for storing unwanted and potentially disturbing memories. It was a variation of what would have occurred naturally in undisciplined minds, and allowed him to place memories behind a filter that made them more distant and less painful. He would still know they were there and vaguely what they contained but they wouldn't make him unstable or crazy as they would if he had left them out in the open. The side effect of this process is that for the rest of his life he would have to continually sort his day to day experiences in this manner deciding which ones needed to be available for instant recall, which ones needed to be buried as deep as possible, and which ones could go somewhere in-between.

Forgetting to do this necessary maintenance would result in headaches as his mental representation of his mind would grow more cluttered and eventually he would be unable to do much of anything. Some people not wanting to devote the time to this mental cataloging would over time re-establish an automatic sorting system similar to the one that would have started involuntarily had they not taken control of the sorting to start with. The problem with such was that it tended to file everything in such a way that newest information was most easily accessible but after a while older information would fall into the fog at the back of the mind and be forgotten.

Thelya sat calmly in the meditation room a field had been established that would limit or adjust the sounds in and outside the room so that the perfect white noise could be achieved to aid in the process of distracting the mind long enough to trick it into the state required to properly meditate. For some it came easier than others.

She had noticed when her brother had walked into the room, looking a little ragged around the edges; she ignored his entrance mostly, sensing that he needed the time to meditate.

Lar greeted the class as usual with a cryptic greeting "There is a large boulder." She said pointing to the rock she had the engineers place within the room for the lesson. "Do you consider it to be inside or outside your mind?"

One of the other students particularly known for trying to outdo themselves in answering her questions responded, "Well from the teachings of Obisek everything is an objectification of mind, so I would say that the stone is inside my mind."

"Your head must feel very heavy," observed Thelya tilting her head to look at her fellow student slightly lopsided, "if you are carrying around a stone like that in your mind."

Lar just inclined her head slightly at Thelya's response though a slight crinkling of the skin around her eyes exposed her amusement at both responses. She continued the rest of the way in, taking her usual place on the not uncomfortable mat on the floor at the front of the room and began the lesson.

Alteran date: 6-5-2 14:50

Arwen blinked his eyes open, it had surprised him the results from his aptitude test, while he had scored similarly to his previous exam in tactics and security as he suspected he would, the surprise came that he was far more suited to medical the score there having surpassed his previous scores in tactical, all Alterans where required to learn basic tactics, medicine, engineering, and programming among other disciplines. All the varied disciplines shared some overlap with each other making it useful to be capable in each field.

He had assumed that his results would be the same but new body, new capabilities. He was taking different classes now, having to retake the last few years' worth of study to gain the medical knowledge required to be of any use in that field. He'd proclaimed a desire to look into the technology Ianas had used to clone him. He was certain that while he shared DNA and memories with his former self the artificially created cells that made him up where different enough to change the results in some way. His research into that process could provide the answer.

Thelya mastered the basics of the lesson very quickly and spent the rest of the time completing the exercise until she was certain she could fall into the breathing pattern without much difficulty. She continued to listen to the teacher while doing her own organizing of the space in her mind. She listened as the teacher ended the instruction part of the lesson to allow the group time to practice.

"In the field of quantum mechanics there is a principle known as the Observer effect. It states that the act of observing by definition changes what is being observed. The same is true in reverse your Observing changes you, the most subtle way is that you gain an experience, information relating to what your observing is stored within. We must remember that the act of not acting is in itself an action and all actions not only reflect who we are but change us as individuals. If we study the universe solely through the lens of detachment and speculation we may lose sight of the truth within. Remember to meditate frequently or you may lose sight of the beauty around you."

Hope the heavy philosophy in this chapter didn't push anyone away. Trust me though it is necessary in order to learn something meaningful about the psyche of the Alteran people. Next chapter, bring on the giant aliens?

The full council of the Alterans is split into two main groups, High council, and Low council; the high council oversees matters of judicial and military importance and ensures the low council responsible for executive and legislative power as a whole does not abuse that power. Matters that affect the whole of Alteran society require a meeting of the full council.

The high council is made up of seven members from each of the areas of importance. Each high councilor is elected by only the members of that particular field of study. Life sciences, engineering covering material sciences construction and maintenance, Tactical, Security, computer science, culture and education, and the presiding high council member elected by the entirety of the Alteran people.

The low council is elected for more the precise fields of study that fall under each of the other categories either as subsets or as unions of two or more of the main fields, such as biology, botany, and archeology (though not much needed), linguistics, medical engineering, tactical engineering, and so on.

Tactical could be described as covert operations or things relating to defense/offensive actions from or against outside forces and Security would be law enforcement and internal defense against invasion, both share a close relation.