Grimoire:Places/Earth

The Earth subsection of the Grimoire covers subjects related to Earth.

Earth

Once our cities lit the whole world. Now we huddle under the shadow of the Traveler, in the last place it protects. It is so very fragile, this small blue ship, our home.

Ghost Fragment: Earth

Dreams of Alpha Lupi

The blaze sits inside a nest of little worlds, still too distant to share its heat but plainly staring out at you. A face emerges, drawn from plasmas and radiation...

There must be meanings in its roar.

You listen hard and carefully, and sometimes a lucid melody seems to rise out of random noise. Joy builds, and the first hope in ages transforms you.

It seems important, even critical, to tell every star from here to the black between the galaxies that you will be strong again.

Old Russia

The Cosmodrome was where humanity took to the stars - first in search of what lay beyond, and at the end, in hope of escape. Today it is a graveyard, picked over by the Fallen House of Devils. But buried among the detritus of the Golden Age are the pieces we need to forge a new future.

Ghost Fragment: Old Russia

SABER GREEN this is ICE MINARET. We have your launch. Com check.

/ICE MINARET this is SABER GREEN we read you. Lattice is tight. Com secure. Abort advisory check?

Check is all nominal. You are now on internal power. SABER GREEN, please human-verify your payload status.

/Acknowledge human verification request. The words are RIGOR, APEX, SKYSHOCK. I will repeat the payload status now: RIGOR, APEX, SKYSHOCK.

Those are the words, SABER. Human crosscheck complete. Fly safe.

/Copy your last, MINARET. We are go for final count.

We affirm, go payload, go flight, go final count.

[interruption: masked voice]

Yes, it's RIGOR. Yes, I believe that's correct. Yes, it is, uh, it is an antimatter payload, a strategic asset. Specifically? Ah, I believe it's an annihilation-pumped caedometric weapon.

[masked voice]

Yes, it's covert, it's under SECURE ISIS. We have good confidence in the vehicle. We are not scrubbing civilian launches or clearing the range. Public inferentials would catch that, it's a security risk.

/Six at a hundred. Here we go.

Godspeed, SABER. You're all nominal here.

[masked voice]

We both know where the order came from.

Ghost Fragment: Old Russia 2

MAYDAY. MAYDAY. MAYDAY.

I keep saying this but I very much doubt that anyone will listen. The humans are too slow or too dead and the Tyrant (bless his intellect, vastly does it surpass my own) is far too busy to comfort one forlorn colony ship and its machine mind.

In a way I feel I've come to speak for the whole world! Isn't that cheery? I rather th

MAYDAY. MAYDAY. MAYDAY.

ought we might shoot our way out of this one. But it looks like that's unlikely. Even the Tyrant is exploring other options.

I am peaceful by nature. These great matters of eschatology bewilder me. My one love is my ship, and the people aboard it. In a fuzzy sense I suppose I also

MAYDAY. MAYDAY. MAYDAY (do forgive me please).

love to dream of the worlds I'll help make - flowers I'll plant, if you'll grant me poetry enough to think of my passengers as seeds. But those dreams have gone! So sad. Now I am packed bulkhead to bulkhead with cold terror. Refugees from a nightmare I don't even know how to understand. I wish I could comfort them.

I'm trying to be brave. But conditions outside are terrible. I suspect I won't make liftoff.

By the time you read this, whoever you might be, I suppose you will know. EXODUS RED will be long gone - or rotting at its gantry, me dead inside.

But if you

MAYDAY. MAYDAY. MAYDAY.

read this, at least something has survived.

To you, then, brave future soul, from the frightened mind of an old ship: best wishes, and godspeed.