Prelude | The Everlight Protocol

The derelict ship should have gone unnoticed. It floated in a graveyard of debris, among shreds of metal and shattered asteroids. Wires drifted behind it like tentacles in a cloud of golden panel shards, glinting ever so slightly from the frost that had formed on them. Two of its three life support rings rotated out of habit, their windows blacker than the space around them. The hull was filled with an eerie silence. Not the breath of a life support system. Not the hum of an engine. 

The SS Moros looked abandoned. The site of an all-too-common tragedy that occurred when space stations attempted to traverse through the Sulvine Belt.

But the Eldren Navigator knew better. 

Among the carnage was the softest whimper of life, smothered beneath the noise of space—comm satellites bouncing messages between colonies, cargo ship transmissions, the whirl of relays, and the near imperceptible movement of celestial bodies. It should have gone unnoticed. It would have. 

If the Eldren Navigator hadn’t left its crater, where it grieved the loss of its world, and turned its gaze upon the stars at exactly the right moment, it wouldn’t have heard a faint “blip, blip, blip” of an outdated emergency beacon. The SS Moros would have drifted out of range, lulled gently towards its black hole doom. The Eldren Navigator intercepted it. Saved it.

The ship had been badly damaged. From what, the Eldren Navigator did not know. One of the rings—the third at the base where the solar panels should have been—had been ripped open by an undetermined impact. Scorch marks blackened the old silver sheen of the vessel, metal bent like puffy, torn flesh. Supplies and cargo floated out of a gaping hole in the hull, where her systems indicated the inter-ring accessway would be. 

No life signs transmitting. 

Karhu’s voice vibrated through the Eldren Navigator’s mind. His translucent tentacles stabilized the SS Moros, venous nodes pulsating with electricity. The dome of Karhu the great jellyfish–one of the Eldren Esin–rose over the rings, rumbling and shifting colors as he spoke. 

Ship irreparable. Sulvine Belt unstable. Turn back.

Emergency power is still running. The Eldren Navigator floated through the damaged hull, iridescent wings illuminating the corridors. It’s feeding something. We must investigate.

Idris did not approve.

Idris did not disapprove.

A rumble of the jelly’s discontent shook the SS Moros, not accustomed to deviating from the charted course.

The Eldren Navigator searched the corridors for signs of the accessway. The space station resembled nothing of the blueprints it downloaded for this model. Glass and debris hovered within. Walls were exposed to the vacuum of space, tears in the sheets of metal where the bolts had buckled and blew out under pressure. Based on the level of scorching, a fire had erupted at some point, burning through the oxygen lines that ran under the floor panels. 

Something green caught the Eldren Navigator’s eye. It grasped the hard item in its hand. A tome made of pulped paper. Poetic Edda. An earthen relic. The Eldren Navigator opened it, then paused, systems whirling with recognition. Blood. There was blood on the pages. No, not just on the pages. Its eyes scanned the room again, taking note of frozen, crimson smears on various surfaces. There was blood everywhere. It led to the hatch for the inter-ring accessway, where the door was jammed askew. The Eldren Navigator pocketed the tome, then glanced down the shaft.

Down, down, down into the pitch throat of the unknown. Accessway located.

The Eldren Navigator wrenched the door off its hinges and shot up through the accessway. Light from its wings washed over shadows, conjuring the sights of floating bodies below. An impulse jolted through it–one the Eldren Navigator didn’t understand–as one of the bodies brushed by it, stray threads from its ragged sweater catching on its belt. The Eldren Navigator unhooked it and backed away, visual field identifying half a dozen bodies in the accessway. Flesh contorted, charred, slashed. Limbs torn off, shattered and scattered throughout the narrow space. Mouths gaping, lips blue, as if still desperately sucking for oxygen. And their eyes…boiled, bloodied, blackened with frozen, obsidian tears that ran down their lifeless cheeks. 

Where are their life shells? The Eldren Navigator saw no evidence that the people knew of impending doom. They wore threadbare, casual clothing–nothing that would protect them from the harshness of space. Sweaters, nightgowns, standard crew uniforms. No space suits of any kind. A series of warning systems went off in the Eldren Navigator’s cortex. The emergency beacon, now in range, transmitted an endless stream of alerts.

Warning: low oxygen.

Warning: fire in Hull Segment 2.

Warning: accessway door is breached.

Warning: solar panels are down.

Warning: contagion.

One-by-one, the Eldren Navigator disregarded them. 

It and Karhu had traveled for nine days at the speed of light. If there were no survivors, they would take the bodies back to Tenebris. Idris would study them, to better understand why they had not traveled with the other humans. Demir would re-awaken them to investigate, to test them for anomalies and possible evolutionary changes. There was much that the Eldren Navigators still did not understand about the humans known as the homo cosmiens, who now lived among the Eldren Navigators in R-39. 

The citizens of R-39 had a right to know what had happened to their ancestors on the SS Moros. Whatever had happened to the space station, the Eldren Navigator would give its inhabitants a proper home. It, like the other Eldren Navigator, had lost everything when it fled its world. This would be a small peace in a vast grief, but it would be something.

The Eldren Navigator slammed through the hatch, throwing its wings out and coming to an abrupt halt. With a flourish of its wrists, balls of light flickered into existence and floated around the room. Its systems sparked with an unknown reaction. There, tangled in its bent rings and a web of cables, were dozens of cryo-containers. The room was intact. Whatever happened in the hull and third ring did not appear to find its way here, where the survivors must have put themselves into cryo-sleep. 

The Eldren Navigator found the source of the emergency beacon and switched it off. Its eyes fell on the frosted window of one of the containers. So little power was left in the emergency reserves that the tubes were dimly lit, and it could barely make out features through the glass. 

Scan and render a visual, the Eldren Navigator commanded its systems. Then peered back down at the bodies within the tubes. It had seen homo cosmiens on Arboros and Galene before. Descendants of humans who had left a place called Earth and colonized the stars. They were nomads. Refugees. Star children, to the Eldren Navigators. 

But these homo cosmiens were different. Pink. Pallid. Frail. A sickly figure to them. Bony and long, yet smaller than their evolved descendants. There was no trace of neural nodes or other body modifications. Leaning closer, the Eldren Navigator detected a faint murmur of vital signs–the nearly inaudible and irregular thumb of a heart. Alive, but for how long?

Running diagnostics to determine extent of damage to cryo equipment. The Eldren Navigator tubbed a cable from its wrist and felt around the base of the display, sensors honing in on the outdated jack port. It tapped into the equipment’s system, data scrolling quickly across its visual field. Twelve cryotubes are offline and nonviable. The rest show extremely low temperatures. Unable to determine if cellular damage has occurred. 

Life?

It appears so. The cryotube is sustaining basic life functions, but they are running off emergency power. There is not much left… The Eldren Navigator trailed off, gazing around the space and taking in all the cryotubes.

What is it?

How do they still have power?

There were so many cryotubes crammed in the small space. There were elder kin and younglings—all children in the eyes of the Eldren Navigators of R-39. Even to the evolved humans who now lived there. Too many for emergency power to sustain this long, especially since their vessel did little to protect them from the outside. It was unsophisticated, barebones, a patchwork of shells from other ships.

The Eldren Navigator searched its databases for more information about the survivors of the SS Moros, but there was little information about them. No place of origin, no point of destination. The only clue were two labels attached to the ship’s registration: Dregs of Humanity, Useless Cargo. 

What does this mean? The Eldren Navigator tipped its head, puzzling over a myriad of interpretations. None made sense. It transferred the files to Karhu.

They were not worth the risk. Karhu rumbled. They did not fit.

But they needed help—

They were not wanted.

They were left behind, the Eldren Navigator realized. No one came back for them. Why?

Space can be a cruel place, Karhu replied, with all the wisdom of thousands of years.

Idris did not leave me behind, the Eldren Navigator pointed out, eyes glowing at the memory. 

When its world had ended abruptly, Idris–the Ahn-un or Ever Father of the Eldren Navigators–had found it floating aimlessly and took care of it. Fixed it. Given it a home on Tenebris and a name of its own: Chrysanthe. Golden flowers. Like those of your homeworld, he had said. They bloom in the radiance of the suns, but die by nightfall, their seeds stolen by solar wind to faraway worlds, where they take root once more. Where they find their place among a new cosmos. Since the death of its world, the Eldren Navigator had not been so useful, plagued with system irregularities because of its damage, but Idris swept in and found a use for it, believing it would adapt to this new world like the golden flowers of its home. The Eldren Navigator would find a use for these remaining homo cosmiens, too. 

I will not leave them behind. 

When the Callista III arrived, the Eldren Navigator reached down and carried the cryotubes onto the medical transport vessel, with all the care of a parent ushering a snoozing youngling. For the first time, it saw a future expanding before them, a bright paradise of technological advances, magical evolution, and welcomed peace. The losses would be replaced with wondrous gains. 

Within 200 hundred years, Aurora Noctis would be founded. Within 500 hundred, the Oriel Towers would be erected, terraforming Tenebris into a celestial haven rich with life. Within 1000 years, those frail homo cosmiens would become everything R-39 thought they would not: useful, powerful, beautiful in their uniqueness. 

The Eldren Navigator would also evolve, learning from the homo cosmiens. Taking their form. Speaking their language of feelings. The humans would come to love it, and it would find a purpose again in that. The Eldren Navigator did not know precisely of this future, but it would look back on this moment one day and call it hope. A hope that bound them all together. Hope that propelled them towards shining prosperity.

And a hope that doomed them.