The light, compressed to a single point in the distance, slowly blossomed like a giant flower and shattered into innumerable stars and nebulae that unfurled across the darkness surrounding the ship.
The Guāngguànhuán Drive shut down. Insomnia reappeared among the fixed stars in space, having completed its strange faster-than-light voyage. The moment it did, the boating system announced:
<Guāngguànhuán Drive operation has been suspended due to loss of interstellar gravitational potential. The vessel has resumed reaction drive navigation. Current location: 120,000 kilometers in altitude above the second planet of the Zugspitze system. Reorienting vessel to the planet and transmitting request for assistance from the nearest–>
“Terra-san!”
“On it!” The instant Terra heard Diode’s voice from the captain’s chair, she punched in several commands to cut power to the transmitter on her navigation panel. The procedure was part of their plan to avoid announcing their presence.
<Communication system malfunction detected. Warning: the vessel cannot call for assistance. Please restore power–>
“Yeah, yeah, I know already.” The boating system was eager to initiate the sequence automatically, but Terra abruptly silenced its complaints and turned around. “Okay! I bought us some time.”
“All right, thank you. Well then, let’s stay hidden and take stock of things.”
The two said that, but the moment they looked at the viewscreen on the ceiling, they couldn’t help but gasp.
“Woah, it has a ring.”
“You’re right, it’s gorgeous–”
An aquamarine crescent ringed by a bright disk around its equator glowed overhead. It was as if they’d hung a round dinner from the ceiling. It would be called a Uranus-type ice giant, in the parlance of the old Anno Domini classification system.
It was the system’s second planet, Zugspitze-2, meaning the orange light on the other side of the sky had to be the photosphere of Zugspitze, its star. Aside from the two celestial objects, the system seemed remarkably empty. They couldn’t spot anything else in the sky.
“So the planet here is mostly atmosphere, too. I’d like to go to a real rocky planet with a solid surface that animals walk around on...”
“Same. I want to try landing under gravity. Let’s make it a goal to go to one, then.”
Still, this was their first view of the Galactive Interactive. The two took in the scene for a while before Diode hummed and frowned.
“Is that ring... really a ring?”
“What? But the ring is a ring?”
“The inner section seems kind of off,” Diode replied.
Terra looked more closely at the faint atmospheric glow along the curve of Zugspitze-2’s horizon. Eyes alone weren’t enough, so she zoomed into the image being captured by remote.
The ring seemed to be in contact with the planet’s visible surface. While that could be the result of air molecules diffusing out, the ring seemed attached to the main body like the brim of a hat. It wasn’t floating above the planet.
“...It’s missing the inner gap?”
“Yeah. Is that normal for rings?”
“Uh, what did it say again...”
The gas giant Fat Beach Ball (FBB) lacked a ring, but Terra and Diode were aware that rings around celestial objects were common. Rings formed from the debris cloud of a comet or asteroid collision in orbit, and over time the debris was ground down by internal collisions or gravitational disruption and settled into a plane. Particles close to the atmosphere decelerated and fell in, which erased the lowest parts of the ring and left a beautiful, sharp inner edge to the ring system.
“So, it says here the inner part is usually transparent,” Terra stated, consulting the minicell’s database in her hand.
Diode seemed to be lost in thought, then asked, “How large is the planet?”
“The equatorial radius is 26,200 kilometers. FBB’s is about 72,000, so it’s like a kid and their parent.”
“And the ring?”
“The outer edge has a semi-major axis of about 67,000 kilometers.”
“What’s the altitude in relation to the surface?”
“41,000 kilometers... Die-san, you just need to subtract the two, right?”
“Isn’t that weirdly low?”
“Low? Relative to what?”
Diode only responded to Terra’s question by tilting her head. Being the navigator, Terra handled measurements and calculations. But truth be told, she didn’t enjoy it as much as Diode, who delighted in manually piloting her spacecraft.
“Is something bugging you?”
“Hmm... I can’t quite put my finger on it, so let’s put that aside for now. It’s more important to focus on civilization and how wary we need to be.” Diode breezily waved her hand and looked again at Terra. “Do we have any sign there’s a crowd of rogues around us? And if not, what about the assholes?”
“It’s not like they all have to be bad people...”
Terra promptly began scanning the radio spectrum. For humanity, life in space required the exchange of innumerable analogue and digital signals, military and civilian—among them communications, broadcasts, active radar, and identification beacons.
As she carefully listened, she put her eyes to work, too. While static hissed, she commanded the boating system to run its imaging software. She planned to scan the space around the planet to detect tiny changes. Objects that didn’t do a thing simply orbited celestial bodies. To do more than just orbit, they needed propulsion. That meant it was easy enough to pick out light and movement, which could be detected by taking two shots of the starry sky minutes apart and comparing the difference. Even if it was an old, basic method, it still took time.
“This is testing my patience. Each scan takes minutes! I wish we could just use a radar instead...”
“Let’s be sure to take a luxury yacht next time we slip away in the dead of night.”
“I don’t think they build escape ships like that...”
The result of an hour of scanning made them frown.
“No glow from rocket plumes?”
“There weren’t any ships making an atmospheric reentry or escape. Nothing in transit, either... only flare objects in a mix of circular and elliptical orbits? What’s up with that?” Terra asked.
As she carefully reviewed the images, Diode replied, “The stuff in orbit could’ve been there for a while. All it means is that someone stuck it there at some point. Even if it’s flashing periodically, that’s probably just the star glinting off of an object as it rotates. On the other hand, rocket plumes, atmospheric reentry and escape, and transfer orbits are all temporary events. The signs of them don’t hang around. So, if we see them, we know there have to be people living here.”
Terra already knew all of that. What she wanted to know—or rather, what she dreaded to find out—was the answer that explanation implied.
“Then, since there aren’t any changes, doesn’t that mean... there’s no one here...?”
The navigator and captain looked at one another.
They looked at the radio scan, which had already finished without catching their attention. It had captured several audio recordings with environmental sounds, but there wasn’t a single active broadcast to be heard.
Terra suddenly looked around her, floated up in a hurry, and drifted over to the captain’s chair.
“Die-san...”
“What?”
Terra clutched her arm from the side and whispered, “Is there really no one here?”
“You can see as well as I do.”
“But there were supposed to be a million people here...”
Diode was silent, but before long she patted Terra’s hand. “There are still plenty of things we haven’t checked, so it’s still too early to get upset.”
Terra, though, pressed her face into the thin arm and sniffled.
“But a million people were supposed to be here...”
Space had always been empty. The ninety-nine percent of uninhabited celestial bodies trailed an endlessly long decimal sequence of nines. But there was a profound difference between bodies which had always been uninhabited, and bodies which were no longer inhabited.
There was even an artifact of the rumored prosperity they were seeking. Light glinted off the metallic walls of some sort of space facility or artificial satellite as it circled. But it spewed no flames in orbit, and neither its gaze nor voice reached out to them. The two were acutely aware of the somber silence.
And here they were, thinking they’d just arrived at a new world...
“What the... just what really happened here?”
Diode felt the pressure against her shoulder shift slightly while she stared at the screen.
Terra whispered, “Is this because of the besshu? They were causing a problem...”
“Is that how it seems to you? Besshu can’t get into space on their own, though, and they’re not creatures known for attacking humans... hm?” Diode stated, then tilted her head and quickly continued, “Given the shape this place is in, maybe the people turned on one other...?”
Diode flipped through the enlarged and filtered images. The huge facility, which appeared to be a space station, showed indications of damage, but not the spectacular kind caused by explosions or weaponfire. There also weren’t many spaceships, large or small.
“That’s some weaksauce damage for humans. Actually, there are barely any ships here. If ships had been disabled in orbit, they’d still be there, but I don’t see any... so I don’t think they died. They must have gone somewhere else.”
“Wait, really?” Terra said, suddenly looking brighter. “They aren’t dead?”
“I’m just guessing. How should I put this...” Diode looked over the empty photos floating around her and mumbled, “I’m not really sensing any danger. I don’t think what happened here was a battle.”
“You’re able to figure out that much?! That’s the experience I’ve come to expect from you, Die-san!”
“Do you hear yourself? You’re six years older than me.”
That depressed Terra for a different reason, but she perked up at what Diode said next.
“I think the lack of broadcasting isn’t because the people here are hiding, it’s that they don’t have anyone to broadcast to. Which means we have a choice to make. What do you think we should do, Terra-san?”
“R-Right! We’ll run out of supplies and wither away if we keep quiet, so let’s go ahead and introduce ourselves!”
“Got it. Their response will decide whether we simply knock them out or plunder them too.”
“I’d like to try making friends first...!”
After they settled on a course of action, Terra reconnected the power and sent a message on the common use frequency.
“To those receiving our message on Zugspitze-2, greetings. This is Insomnia. We are an unarmed 20-meter-class vessel originating from the Mother Beach Ball star system. We are a crew of two, Captain Diode Ishidōrō and Navigator Terra Intercontinental. We are sailing in search of work but are low on supplies, so we would appreciate directions to a place where we can resupply. And, if possible, we’d like to know what happened to all the people in this star system!”
Their inquiry barely scratched the surface. What they really wanted to know was whether there was work for pillar boat fishers and if same-gender partnerships were socially acceptable, but now wasn’t the time. They needed to know whether anyone was present for there to be a point in asking.
They planned to transmit the message continuously until they received a response. The two expected it to take a while, but just as they were leaving the bridge to make a meal, the boating system gave them a notification.
<You have a reply. The source is in a circular orbit 42,000 kilometers in altitude. The sender is the 278371st Unit of the Eastern Galactic Planetary Defense Fángjūn, Yínyátái base. The media format is a compressed voice recording. Do you wish to play it?>
“Wha, the Fángjūn?”
“Play it, Boating.”
With Terra stunned, Diode responded in her place.
<Understood.>
It began to play back a man’s low voice, but Terra quickly noticed a problem: she couldn’t understand a word. It was in a different language.
“That’s the Interactive’s language, isn’t it? I saw plenty of it in the Contents archive.”
“Can you understand it?”
“Not at all. I had to have everything translated. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to understand it, Die-san? Since even the Interactive uses Gendō characters?”
“They might be the same characters, but you read them in a completely different way. It’s a separate language.”
“Oh, is that how it is?”
Diode gave the boating system an oddly sulky command. “Can’t you translate this? It’s your language.”
What she apparently meant was that the ship was simply returning to its home. Thankfully, the boating system got the gist and replied accordingly.
<Understood. Assume sender’s language as Dǎncháo Guānhuà. Translating into Easy Proto-Common.>
“Easy... what?”
“Our language. That’s what they call it in the Interactive. Boating, from now on, auto-translate the voice messages we receive without our command.”
I should have known they speak a different language. We really need to collect more information—Terra thought. The boating system’s translation began to play.
“—Insomnia, I am Shàngwèi [Captain] Zǐyún, chief officer of the defense administration headquarters Yínyátái, representing Interactive command at Zug-2. I have verified the nationality of your ship—a built-in vessel originating from the Fertile-class transport ship Idaho.”
The translation seemed to preserve his voice. It was gruff, the sound of a slightly exhausted man in his prime. Dǎncháo characters spelling “Shàngwèi [Captain] Zǐyún, Yínyátái (銀涯台の紫雲上尉)” appeared on the corner of her minicell. It seemed they used logograms in these parts after all.
He was from the military, and a man from another planet at that. They couldn’t be careful enough about this.This Zǐyún provided them a surprising amount of information.
<I will begin with the state of navigation routes for the planet in question. A large obstruction above the equator renders low orbit impossible. It is an agglomerate of small bodies physically blocking the orbit, not a molecular gas cloud. Putting it plainly, there is a network of 400,000 interconnected space elevators forming a disk. It is extremely dangerous, and I would advise against orbits with periapsides under 40,000 km.>
“Space elevators...?” “400,000 of them?!”
Their voices rose in surprise, but since it wasn’t a real-time transmission their questions went unanswered. The man continued to monologue.
<Next, as to your inquiry regarding the people of Zugspitze-2. The population was concentrated on low-altitude natural satellites, with orbit largely left to spaceports and factories. It had a trade-based economy supplying interstellar travel routes. However, once orbits below 40,000 kilometers in altitude were rendered inaccessible, the economy collapsed due to loss of the natural satellites and atmospheric gas harvesting. Ultimately, a mass evacuation to the Reschen star system was conducted with the assistance of a Fángjūn interstellar fleet. This base currently continues to operate out-of-contact with other star systems.>
“Mass evacuation...”
<Lastly, with regards to Yínyátái. It monitors and provides information on system conditions, inspects traffic arriving and departing the system,records legal documentation on incorporation, birth, age of majority, marriage, and death, as well as offers services such as embarkation reservations for Xúnniǎo interstellar vessels. However, due to the unique circumstances currently affecting the system, the base cannot break station or dock other vessels. Consequently, combat, emergency rescue, supply and repair, hospitalization, and prisoner transfer services are unavailable. I hope this information satisfies your inquiry.>
“...I see.”
Although Terra expressed understanding after listening to the man, she was taken aback. The number of problems was nothing short of astonishing.
“So what he’s saying was... there’s no more society at Zug-2, right...?”
“Yeah. Well, that's exactly what it looked like.”
“So the ring was the reason, and the ring is actually 400,000 space elevators... but then, what even is a space elevator?”
“They aren’t a thing back at FBB, but they’re a structure where a cable is dangled down from geostationary orbit and used to pull things up from the surface.”
“So they don’t need a rocket?”
“That’s exactly it. They have the advantage of not needing propellant to reach orbit.”
“I see. But Die-san, why would they build something like this?”
“Yeah, he didn’t really explain why—anyway, we probably shouldn’t concern ourselves with that for now. I don’t think it has much to do with the matter at hand.”
“You’re right. We need to get our supplies figured out first.”
“That, immigration, and how we’re getting to another system. Doesn’t seem like we can get by here.”
“Going by what that Shàngwèi Zǐyún said, they also offer Xúnniǎo reservation services, right?”
“Yeah, he did mention that. Looks like we’ll need to negotiate with him if we want to go any further.”
“I wonder if we can apply normally...”
“We could take advantage of the situation to bribe him, but let’s try asking first.”
“Okay, that settles that.”
Terra gave the command to the boating system to transmit their greetings and request to the Yínyátái base. A response came immediately, but unsurprisingly none of it—immigration, travel reservations, or resupply—was possible. He also denied them permission to dock, citing dangerous conditions. Her doubts became concerns.
“What did he mean by dangerous...? Could it mean they’re carrying explosives?”
“Maybe, or they might be victims of an epidemic?”
“An epidemic?!”
Diode’s suggestion sent a chill through Terra. That had been one of their concerns. The Dàxúnniǎo that visited their homeworld of FBB required a virus check before embarking, which could mean that there was an interstellar disease, even now.
Diode spoke in a calculated way. “We only have access to printed medicine, and it won’t beat an epidemic head-on. We have enough food and water for six months, so let’s listen to them and–”
“If they’re dying of disease... doesn’t that mean we’re going down with them?”
It was Diode’s turn to be taken aback. “Terra-san?”
“They’re an isolated base, and if they’re really experiencing an epidemic, then they’re not in good shape. Maybe they need help.”
“If that was true, they would have said so. Besides, if it's a disease, then we have no way of saving them, and we’ll get infected.”
“That’s exactly why we can use our spacesuits to our advantage!”
“You... aren’t wrong.”
“And even if it’s not a disease, they can’t leave the ship or go anywhere because there’s a problem! Plus we have a talented pilot and a satisfactory net caster who decomps in her own way, so they might be grateful if we save them and–”
Terra kept going on and on, so Diode held up her hand and glared at her.
“So, in short, you’re hoping we’re a convenient solution to their problem, and you really want to go help right away.”
“I...! I mean, yeah, I guess...”
“Terra-san...” The small girl gently jumped her way, put her hands on Terra’s shoulders, and shook her head. “You’re such a nosy weirdo!”
“So that’s a no?”
“Let’s go.” Diode replied succinctly, then hopped in the captain’s chair. “If they can’t fight, then we shouldn’t have any problem approaching. Boating, in addition to our previous requests, inform them we will be performing a rendezvous. Terra-san, full elements, please. I’m aiming for a transfer orbit.”
“Okay!” Terra jumped and slid into the navigator’s seat in one smooth motion.