A/N
Happy Holidays, dearest readers :)
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Far above the war-torn wastes of Earth, in the relative safety of the empty gray landscape of the moon, was a lone colony built deep into the anorthosite rocky face. In peaceful times past, it was designated as Habitat Two, an international space station aimed to bridge the gap between the commonwealths of the West and their Eastern counterpart- the communist coalition. When the subsequent wars broke out over Earth's dwindling resources, contact with the station diminished. And when the Great War unleashed nuclear armageddon, communications were eventually cut off and Earth became silent.
Before the American Commonwealth fractured into the warring waster states it was at present, one last space voyage was made. A collaboration between allies in the European Commonwealth and a last-ditch effort to preserve some form of government far from the influence of Vault-Tec, four space-worthy ark vessels brought a total of 1500 personnel and equipment necessary to transform Habitat Two into a viable extra-terrestrial colony. For the next 30 years that number of colonists, together with the ones that already inhabited the station, tripled. And the station, renamed 'Horizon', became a sprawling network of habitat facilities fashioned in the likeness of a vault city.
Dome-shaped complexes, connected to one another by tram transit railways, dotted the great craters that formed the majority of the moon's face. These habitats were vital to the survival of Horizon, as the moon offered zero resource viability other than minerals. They were classified into sectors according to the dominant activity shared in those areas such as; Resource, Living, Hydroponics, Research and Administration. Mining the moon offered a substantial selection of raw materials, which allowed the colony to grow from its tiny predecessor. Due to the cramped conditions of some areas, rooms were arranged on the vertical axis rather than horizontal. Stairs were used sparingly while ladders and elevators were abundant, and most walkway corridors were purposefully denied artificial gravity for ease of travel. To diminish the feeling of claustrophobia and create a sense of openness, floors and ceilings were tiled with safety glass built to withstand collision and strain forces as much as titanium. And to save space, medical bays often shared rooms with production assembly lines. In extreme cases, that same tech could be repurposed to scan and treat injuries.
Nothing in Horizon was made of concrete. The industrial feel of the world it left behind was replaced with a sophisticated, polymerized nano-material verse.
The colonists enjoyed a pleasant and sheltered life under the domed sectors. In contrast to the gritty post-apocalyptic state of Earth, Horizon managed to maintain an elegant aesthetic to its citizens. From their bubble homes of self-made luxury, maintained diligently by AI sub-systems, to their uniforms and jumpsuits.
30 years of peace, soon to change.
Horizon's governing body, the Council Triumvirate, had begun taking steps to reestablish contact with Earth. First, they constructed long-range listening posts designed to pick up on transmissions from the surface, no matter how small. Every time the moon's rotation aligned itself with Earth, the silence was broken. Radio emissions, bouncing from faulty signal towers all over the world, were evidence enough that life persisted despite nuclear armageddon. The next step was the construction of a satellite to be dispatched to orbit, so that Horizon could monitor survivor activity and assess atmospheric feasibility. This was to give them room to consider the possibility of returning one day to Earth.
Augur I was added to the number of orbital relics that graced the skies of the homeworld, and from the data received from the satellite the Council discovered several wasteland factions recolonizing the irradiated broken landscape below. The most prominent of them, in the South-Central part of the Americas that was Texas, was terraforming the areas around it into a lush green and livable safe haven, married together with large industrialized complexes similar to the commonwealths of old. The faction was called 'The Dominion', a militarized zone of order in the lawless hellhole of world it lived in.
Recent surface activity denoted violent engagements in the great dustbowl badlands North of Texas, to say nothing of the more savage elements in between, forcing the Council to rethink their plans regarding an exodus. As a semi-democratic government, it became the popular opinion among the citizens of Horizon that life on the colony was better than returning to Earth. A motion was pressed to focus all resource and development towards lunar expansion and total colonization of the Solar System. Though there were certain elements that objected to it, the motion for the most part was readily carried, Earth was to be left alone and any attempts at reconnection were discouraged.
On the night of September 11, 2112, an omni-terrain rover rolled silently through the dark silver valleys separating the two craters that surrounded the capital domes. It carried a crew of five, made up of a bunch of engineers and a driver. The chief engineer's name was Norn Angus, dispatched right from the Administration sector.
The craters they were bypassing, nicknamed 'The Twin Rings', were formed by a meteor shower that first introduced the exotic material known as ultracite to the colony. Ultracite crystals, highly radioactive and volatile when mined raw, presented an untapped potential for a new source of renewable energy. However, initial reports of prolonged exposure to the crystals yielded ugly mutations in the research teams that gathered them. Regardless of its dangers, the crystals were still harvested and brought to the Research sector for further study, and the mutants dealt with.
The team of engineers was tasked with locating an unresponsive communications relay tower, to investigate the problem and proceed to get it back to operational status if possible.
It was a routine mission, a lot of things broke down over time even in the void of space. Perhaps especially in the void of space. Anything could go wrong at any given second. Equipment failure, a ruptured containment zone, electrical fire and dozens of other mishaps one could come up with. Engineers like Norn and his team were vital in keeping things running smoothly on the mechanical side, just as the Council was responsible with keeping the colonial mood at an all time high.
Chief Norn and his fellow engineers, all snugly suited up in their bulky space-suits, stepped into the air-lock compartment of the rover and prepared to depressurize. The driver, whose name was Neil Macintosh, sealed the cockpit ahead of time and wished the engineers good luck. Routine mission or not, space-walking was as dangerous as it has ever been. Silently, the air rushed out of the air-lock and the compartment became a part of the void. The four men stepped out of the rover and jumped down to the moon surface.
"Alright, we're off." Norn said, "Lights on, keep it tight and let's get this done."
Being on the dark side of the moon at the day's rotation, everyone had their lights on as there were no heavenly bodies to reflect the sun's light and daybreak would occur 17 hours later. Out there, it was total darkness save for a few flickering lamp waypoints set up in charted routes all along the moon valley. Waypoints acted like lighthouses, marking paths across verified stable terrain for both personnel and vehicles to pass through. The moon may be a solid ball-shaped mass of rock and ice, but it did have its own pits and hidden caverns. In the initial colonization of its surface, many poor souls found themselves trapped beneath landslides and shelf collapses. Certain safety measures had to be explored and implemented before anyone was allowed to venture into the surface again.
The faulty relay tower lay just within ten meters of the rover. Flashing their lights on it revealed that the tower had been struck by a single meteor, which broke against the support arms and all but uprooted the thing. The debris field remained scattered all over the ground. Two wires, wrapped in sheaths of industrial tubes, kept the broken upper disk from flying off into space. Norn unpacked his box of tools, set it up against the ground next to the tower and drilled it securely in place so that it wouldn't tumble around when the team started working close to it. Every tool in the box was magnetized, and as long as Norn remembered to avoid leaving them anywhere other than their respective place he wouldn't have to worry about losing them.
They fixed the relay tower as best as they could, using both the tools on hand and some spare parts from the rover. When they had finished, Norn hit a switch and the tower was once again operational. Plugging in with his pip-boy, the chief engineer calibrated the sensors and reconnected it to the main network. Upon checking the signals received from distant listening posts, Norn started hearing the transmissions beaming up from Earth. He wasn't meant to hear such things, but the man took a moment to listen.
They were mostly things of little import, radio broadcasts from long abandoned shopping malls, government automated announcements and the like. Still, Norn found it comforting to know that there were still some people down there. As he turned to look to the horizon, he spotted the birth-world of humanity in the same perspective as one would gaze up into the night sky and see the moon. A bright blue orb, with far too many specks of dead earth where the nukes had rained death in the Great War.
"Hey boss, what do you wanna do with the rocks?" One of the engineers inquired, pointing to the rock samples from the meteor that struck the tower. In the light of their flashlights, the tiny crystals in the rocks twinkled with a certain yellow glow. "They look like ultracite to me."
"That's not ultracite, but it could be worth looking into." Norn replied.
"Hey guys, look!" The same guy pointed to the sky as he saw the glow of afterburners speeding across the stars. A shuttle was heading towards Earth, the sight of which brought on more questions than answers. The way it was launched, every scanning tower for miles would've seen it too. Everyone by then knew the decision of the Council, so how exactly someone openly defied the edict wouldn't go too well for the guilty party. Norn and his team watched the shuttle fade away as it entered Earth's gravity well.
But unbeknownst to the engineer team, the shuttle wasn't stolen. It was a sanctioned operation by the Council to make contact with the most active surface government, and ascertain whether an alliance could be broached.
There was just one problem- they were heading for Enclave territory.
High Marshal Stern II scowled after reading the full report of the incident at Riverside. The scribe responsible for writing it up embellished with a lot of fancy words, but the experienced eyes of the dictator saw through them until all he read were the hard statistics. 20 dead, 40 injured, an entire block in desolation, and a psychic asset dead in the streets.
He tossed the datapad over to his assistant and stepped over to the observation deck. Below was the medical team in charge of the asset's autopsy. The doctors were cutting up the remains of one Ted Irons, the first psionically gifted individual the Dominion had the pleasure of encountering during the early colonization years. It didn't make sense to Stern that the young man would go rogue the way he did. Irons was a volunteer, and although Psy Ops kept him in isolation for their experiments, he was treated well. Somewhere down the line, something inside him snapped. "There's one thing I don't understand, why did he do it? Why go on a rampage?"
Program Director Reiance Copenhagen, a short and stocky man with balding hair, cleared his throat to recite his carefully practiced explanation. "The incident was due to an oversight on my part, sir. The asset's medical background flagged him as mentally unstable, on account of his... junkie parental upbringing. We didn't have any violent episodes before, but nevertheless, I take full responsibility."
"Oversight would be a gross understatement." Stern turned to look at him, "But I assume you overlooked his background because the testing pool wasn't particularly large at the time?"
"Quite right." Copenhagen nodded, masking his nerves beneath a thin veneer of calm. As soon as the opportunity presented itself, he immediately forwarded some good news in order to salvage the program. His career was just one word away from being scrapped, "Though there were unfortunate casualties in this venture, sir, there were some promising results. Irons was classified as a 'psionic nexus', meaning his presence stimulates a form of psychic awakening in certain individuals."
Stern's interest was piqued, and Copenhagen let out a breath of relief when he entertained the idea. "Go on."
"The containment team responsible for neutralizing the asset was incapacitated moments after the deed. Upon monitoring their vitals, we discovered that Irons awakened their psychic potential somehow before his death."
"Are they stable?"
Copenhagen whipped out his own datapad and presented it to the High Marshal, "Stable and active. With your permission, I would like to resume operations."
There were three new assets, out of the five teammates that went into the zone. At this early stage, their psychic talents hadn't full manifested yet. Stern arched a brow and eyed the doctor with much scrutiny, "I want to see them."
The High Marshal was led into the holding facility where the former containment team, and the cadet, were being kept. Inside, the psykers were dressed in white bodysuits similar to the one Ted Irons wore when he escaped. As an added precaution, robots and sentry turrets were used by the security teams to guard the immediate vicinity of the cell for fear of another breakout. At Stern's command, the cell doors were unlocked and he entered the room to greet the people who would be the pioneers of a new field of warfare.
Seeing their commander-in-chief step through the threshold caused the latent psykers to stand at attention. Every one of them had glowing purple eyes, even if they weren't moving stuff around the room with their minds yet. Stern referred to the datapad for each of them, preferring to make the transition as official as possible. They didn't want to be there. They were tasked to contain psykers, not become them. Still, he found their loyalty commendable when they stuck to the task at hand.
"Sergeant Jury Heinz." Stern remarked, going through the man's dossier. Heinz straightened up at the mention of his name with the stoicism of a man from the Dominion Army. The auto-docs made a piss-poor job of removing the marks of his previous battles, leaving ample blots of scar-tissue on his face and neck. Heinz's skin had been tanned and sanded down by the harsh climate of the desert frontier, but it made him hardier than a redwood. "Long way from the front, soldier?"
"I serve the Dominion, doesn't matter where I am." Heinz kept his eyes front, "Sir."
The second psyker was Mileena Echavez, formerly a specialist in the Cerberian Guard. A woman of austere beauty who had more than her fair share under the photo-ops as the Guard's poster girl, saluted Stern when he recited her file. The raspy smoker's voice that greeted the High Marshal caught him off guard, "Sir, permission to speak freely?"
"Granted."
"What the hell are we doing here?"
Stern glanced back at Dr. Copenhagen, who was standing at a safe distance outside the cell. The news hadn't been shared with the assets, not just yet. Stern endeavored to change that, "The man you terminated, Ted Irons, left a parting gift. Apparently he's a nexus, and he's started something inside each of you. Until we can determine the extent of these changes, you will have to serve in this program. Not as a containment team, but as its testing pool. Let me be clear, you will be treated with utmost care befitting a valued resource to the Dominion- so long as you cooperate."
"With respect, High Marshal..." Heinz replied, "We know the drill."
Stern's eyes fell upon the meek little Sam Ray, who stood out from the trio. He looked way too young to be in the containment team, much less Psy Ops. "Evidently, not all of you. What's your name, son?"
Sam saluted stiffly, "Samuel Ray, serial number 20278. I am a cadet with the Justice Department... or I was a cadet."
The High Marshal skimmed through the file attached to the dossiers on Heinz and Echavez, "You acted on the incident, even if you weren't officially sworn in yet? Impressive."
"He was... he was hurting people, sir." Sam offered, "I was trained to prevent stuff like that."
"Ah, a citizen after my own heart." Stern patted him on the shoulder, "Well son, you're part of a more pivotal role than just keeping the peace. All of you included. We're on the threshold of a new kind of science, and like or not you're all gonna be on point for this."
"Yes sir." Sam said with a nod.
The aesir walked out of the room, convinced that allowing the program to continue would benefit the country greatly. If they could get the three to produce one or two nexus-class psykers, they'd have a population of psionically-gifted soldiers before year's end. He would keep an eye on Psy Ops from now on, "Don't fuck this up, Copenhagen."
The doctor nodded, turning to the little eyebot hovering next to him. "Alright, back to phase one."
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