Yang Liwei

The Yang Liwei was a spacecraft commissioned during the Golden Age. It was the lead ship of Project Amrita, a colony mission intended to find and settle a habitable planet where humans could live without the Traveler's involvement in their affairs. It was captained by Alice Li and had a crew complement of 900. Mara Sov, Uldwyn Sov, and their mother Osana Sov were all part of the crew. In addition to its crew, it carried 40,000 colonists in stasis. An incomplete census of the total number of humans aboard tallied 30,111 women, 10,295 men, and 485 other.

The ship could be described as umbrella-shaped, consisting of a long spine with an engine on one end and a large shield on the other that doubled as storage space. It carried many smaller ships near the shield. Because several previous colony ships had vanished mysteriously while exiting the Solar System, the Yang Liwei was built "armed to the molars" against possible extrasolar hostiles.

The Collapse began before the Yang Liwei could leave the system. Rasputin attempted to conscript it and its weaponry in defense of the Solar System, but the ship was intercepted and trapped by a vessel of the Darkness. Intuiting that the entity was targeting the Traveler, Captain Li broadcast a declaration of neutrality in an attempt to buy its indifference. As she did so, the Traveler intervened by sending out a beam of Light to push back the Darkness, but failed to fully repel it. The immense energy of the interaction between the two paracausal entities resulted in the formation of a kugelblitz, which swallowed the Yang Liwei.

In the pocket universe within the kugelblitz, the Yang Liwei manifested fully intact in the Distributary, though planted shield-first in the bedrock. However, its crew and colonists had been sublimated into pure potential, and when they reincarnated themselves as Awoken, they had forgotten nearly all their history. They named the tower the Shipspire, and the technology it carried formed the foundation of the new Awoken society. Nine members of its 900 crew could not be accounted for, however.

Trivia

 * Yang Liwei was the first person sent into space by the Chinese space program, during the Shenzhou 5 mission in 2003.

List of Appearances

 * Destiny 2
 * Forsaken