Cataphractoi

  Abigail watched with amusement as Miliam struggled to pull an ill-fitting spacesuit on over her clothing. She held a helmet under one arm and was now wearing gloves, evidence of the skinsuit she’d brought along and worn under her robes this entire time, much to Miliam’s surprise. It was something Miliam hadn’t thought about when making preparations back on West Gate Station but she would definitely be budgeting for a full set of skinsuits for the crew after this mission.

  “Can you hear me?” Abigail asked after she followed Miliam’s lead and slid her own helmet on. Unable to properly nod within the stiff spacesuit she was wearing, Miliam checked the controls on her wrist for the comms. Aoibhe had preset the channel on the st suit Miliam had worn, but she’d since learned enough to activate the system herself after a bit of fiddling.

  “Yes. Testing?” Miliam said tentatively once she was fairly sure the built-in communicator was active from her end.

  “Excellent. A word of forewarning: there is likely a yer of regolith on the surface of the asteroid. As the enchantment used on the boots of spacesuits will only lock onto whatever touches them directly, it will be unable to adhere to anything but the soil itself. Do not rely on your boots to remain pnted,” Abigail warned Miliam as she opened the inner door of the airlock and stepped in.

  “Um…shouldn’t we be bringing some kind of tether, then?” Miliam asked as she followed Abigail in. The schor proceeded to activate the airlock, which began to cycle air out of the chamber.

  “So long as you take care to step lightly, the asteroid’s gravity should hold you in pce.” Abigail paused, gncing over at Miliam as if remembering something. “Ah, to be clear, you were correct in your evaluation earlier. While this asteroid is of sufficient mass to possess a noticeable gravitational field, it is not strong enough to cause a cave in on its own.”

  “And if it’s…not acting on its own?” Miliam inquired, not quite certain what else might lead to a cave in but worried about the possibility.

  “Not to worry. I am not a particurly powerful mage, but even I can counter acceleration one-fortieth that of Earth as best,” Abigail assured her as the outer door slid open. She moved forward, almost sliding her feet rather than stepping, and miraculously failed to float away after leaving the Astrum Vitae’s artificial gravity. Miliam mimicked the peculiar motion, bouncing a bit on her first few attempts but not gaining more than a couple feet of height.

  Once she was clear of the ship, Miliam looked up, having to arch her back to do so properly. The Astrum Vitae was parked perpendicurly to the asteroid’s surface at the bottom of a crevice, so she saw stars above her. Aside from the running lights on the Astrum Vitae, the only illumination avaible seemed to be coming from a headmp built into Abigail’s skinsuit, which reminded Miliam to turn on her own.

  Returning her eyes to the ground, she looked for the door mentioned by Min-ji, finding it at the end of a man-made tunnel with concrete walls and steel supports…or at least, materials resembling those things. It cut off at the edge of the crevice like the earth had split right there and torn away whatever it connected to, but the edges didn’t look as ragged as one would expect if that were the case.

  Following Abigail, Miliam slide-stepped until she was walking in the tunnel, at which point she went ahead and activated her boots, finding the ground solid enough to support the enchantment on them. As they neared the door, Miliam examined it, finding it to be composed of two panels with no visible knobs or handles, likely meaning it was a two-paneled sliding door rather than one sitting on hinges.

  “…how are you going to open it, anyway?” Miliam wondered as Abigail id a hand on one of the door panels. In her other hand she held what could only be her grimoire, which Miliam was seeing for the first time. Unlike the smartphone-esque grimoires carried by much of the Astrum Vitae’s crew, Abigail’s resembled a tiny bck book connected to her belt by a thin chain and sized so that it could be easily held in one hand. It was currently folded open, and she was operating it with her thumb.

  “Any wards pced upon this door are long expired, and if the materials were mana-infused once, they degraded over the ages. As such…hm. Stand aside,” Abigail replied, following her own instructions. Once both she and Miliam were out of the way, Abigail triggered something on her grimoire and cast two spells. The first caused a fsh of light along the seam of the door as whatever mechanism held it shut was melted instantly, allowing the second to force the doors apart.

  There was a brief burst of air evident only through the scant regolith particles in the tunnel that were carried away by it.

  “How mysterious,” Abigail remarked as she peeked around the door frame. When Miliam looked as well, she beheld the inside of an airlock. “Now, why would a structure built on the surface of a pnet have an airlock at the entrance?”

  “Maybe it was underwater originally. Or it could have been built on a moon,” Miliam proposed as they stepped inside.

  “Reasonable hypotheses. Should we be fortuitous, perhaps we shall learn the answer inside,” replied Abigail as she cast several more spells, closing the exterior door and opening the inner one. This door she opened only a crack, allowing air to enter gradually until the pressure equalized and she drew it open all the way.

  When the two women stepped inside, Miliam noticed as she entered that the ceiling was less than an inch above her head. The room they’d entered seemed strangely empty, occupied only by a single pedestal in the center and a door on the other side. Miliam awkwardly turned at the waist to cast her fshlight around the room, looking for any other furniture or fixtures, but she found nothing aside from lightbulbs recessed into the ceiling, all of which were unpowered.

  “This is…a projector,” Abigail observed, crouching in front of the pedestal. Looking over the schor’s shoulder, Miliam found that it had a magic circle on its surface using a script she couldn’t read, unsurprisingly. “I believe it should be safe to activate, assuming you have no objections.”

  “What if it activates something else?” Miliam asked, head full of all the possible traps or arms the device might set off.

  “Even presuming it capable of such a thing, it would have no way of triggering anything remotely without a power source for the other devices,” Abigail expined calmly. “Aside from that, any security system which relies on intruders injecting mana into a suspicious magic tool in the entryway themselves would be rather poorly designed.”

  “Oh. Good point,” Miliam acknowledged mely. “Then I guess I don’t see why not?”

  “Very well.” Abigail wasted no time providing power to the projector before stepping back. It came to life like switch had been flipped, creating in midair a solid-looking hologram of an alien creature. It was hands down the most bizarre thing Miliam had ever seen.

  The alien had six legs arranged like those of an insect, but clearly possessed an endoskeleton rather than an exoskeleton. Two more limbs jutted forward like the cws of a scorpion and while they did not appear nearly as strong, they did have three dexterous-looking fingers, not pincers. Atop its six legs, the creature had a bulbous torso with no distinct head, its six eyes arranged around the front. The two rgest of its eyes sat above its maw, which contained teeth that seemed to move independently to rend food where normally the jaw itself would do that work, while the remaining eyes were along the bottom of its mouth. Silvery scales, closer to those of fish than lizards, sheathed its body.

  After a few seconds of dispy the image vanished, repced by a scene where several of them working together to build a Rube Goldberg Machine of a trap. The complex construct compensated for their small stature by tying a noose made of vines around the neck of a great beast; the other end was soon affixed to one of the creature’s mighty legs, and a series of triggers activated one by one, driving spikes into sensitive points all over the animal’s body.

  Blinded by pain, it tried to escape- only to snap its own neck.

  “This is…a recounting of a species’ history,” Miliam whispered as the scene shifted once again to a vilge built into the walls of a ravine. “But there’s no sound. Is it broken?”

  “Audio would have little purpose if the audience did not know the nguage,” pointed out Abigail as the scene progressed. “Consider: this projector was located in a structure that miraculously survived the destruction of the pnet or moon it was built upon.”

  “You’re suggesting this was a time capsule. Is that it?” As Miliam spoke, the projector moved onto the next era, showing the discovery of metallurgy.

  “Perhaps. Or it could merely have been a stylistic choice. Who can say?” Abigail asked teasingly.

  Silence fell over the two women while they witnessed history unfold. The unnamed species developed writing, architecture, and medicine. They fought wars and made peace. It was impossible to say how much time passed between the start of the projection and the point where this civilization finally developed space travel in reality, but in this format it occurred in mere minutes.

  Soon the aliens had spread across their home system. It took several seconds for Miliam to realize she and Abigail were the first people to know what the pnets here had looked like among the entire modern gactic community. But just as the images progressed to the point where the aliens were testing their first translocation drives, disaster struck: a bck splotch appeared on the map, visible only because it wasn’t set against the backdrop of outer space.

  “The cthulid,” Miliam stated solemnly.

  “Indeed. This is the beginning of the end,” Abigail agreed.

  Every weapon the locals could imagine was flung at the void invading their system, failing to prevent it from advancing until it reached the outmost pnet. Miliam watched as the living absence stretched out its long limbs and tore into a rocky world dwarfed by its assaint. Debris was flung in every direction, some of it managing to obliterate ships caught by surprise.

  Chaos ensued as society unraveled. There were riots, attempts to build arks to save even a fraction of a percent of the popution, and every-more desperate efforts to slow down the cthulid. Footage that Miliam suspected to be authentic rather than a recreation briefly showed the crew of a space ship tearing each other apart after venturing too close to the creature.

  Each time the projection returned to a dispy of the system map, the cthulid had trespassed further inside, gradually tearing apart every pnet until it fell upon the st one standing between it and the cradle world of the natives.

  Suddenly, the image disappeared.

  “They wanted someone to know what happened to them. To remember them,” Miliam said to Abigail as she fought back tears.

  “A worthy endeavor. This, however, is merely the first room.” Abigail knelt again and ran her fingers over the base of the pedestal. After some examination she found what she was looking for and there was a click as the projector came loose. “With this, we shall not need to worry about recording anything- fortunate, as we would then loose the three dimensional images.”

  Abigail stood, leaving the projector where it was.

  “You’re not going to take it with you?” Miliam wondered.

  “While we explore it would be little more than dead weight. More efficient to leave it here and retrieve it on the way out,” Abigail expined as she walked to the door leading further inside. “Now, shall we see what else these people have left for us to find? They must have gone to great trouble to create a tool that would remain functional after all this time…I look forward to discovering what else is in store.”

  Codex Entry: The Evacuation of Enza

  Unquestionably the greatest tragedy in recorded history, the Evacuation of Enza was predicated by the invasion of the githune home system by a living cthulid in 71GC. Although the cthulid took nearly an entire local year to complete its destruction of the system, the first few months were wasted on attempts to destroy the creature involving both Enzan Authority and allied fleets, none of which are believed to have resulted in damage to the creature. Only once it became clear there was little to no chance of destroying the cthulid did evacuation attempts begin in earnest.

  Githune society never entirely moved past its tribalistic roots, and pnetary unification was only achieved by force. Off-world colonies were mostly poputed by the descendants of subjugated tribes and nations and segregated by pce of origin. The only reason the Enzan Authority had not fragmented already was its overwhelming monopoly on force- a monopoly it lost during its months-long campaign against the cthulid.

  It is still debated to this day how much of a hand the colonies had in what happened to the Enzan fleet, and the answer will likely remain unknown until another cthulid appears. The official story is that the cthulid struck out one day and annihited the attacking ships after months of ignoring them, but many historians argue it is far more likely that the githune colonies cobbled together a fleet which they used to ambush the Enzan navy when it had exhausted itself attempting to slow down the cthulid.

  With the home fleet destroyed, Enza was deemed as good as lost. An outpouring of humanitarian support emerged from the colonies at this point, which pooled every ship avaible, both civilian and military, in order to evacuate as many people from Enza as possible. A strict condition was imposed, however: adults would only be evacuated once all minors were rescued. Any adults caught on a ship attempting to leave the pnet would be spaced, a rule which was ruthlessly enforced in the first hours of the mass evacuation.

  Modern analyses have concluded that this was an overt attempt at both ethnic cleansing and destroying the Enzan government in one fell swoop. Realistically, there was no chance of evacuating even half of the popution before the cthulid destroyed the pnet. Even once other nations contributed ships to the effort, less than a percent of the popution could be taken off world each day. While it was an utter miracle that the evacuation efforts succeeded in its stated goal of saving Enza’s children, barring those whose parents refused to allow their children to be taken, very few adults made it off-world in time.

  The unintended consequences of this policy destroyed any chance of continued githune independence. Inundated by children with no caretakers, the githune colonies suffered combined housing, caretaking, economic, and agricultural crises that they had no way of resolving. The only solution that may have saved their society would have been a massacre of the children they had saved, but the colonial governments had successfully sold the policy of prioritizing children to their constituents as a genuine attempt at saving the most innocent and helpless members of society and turning against them now would have been untenable even if they had been inclined to.

  In the end, the neighboring senali stepped in and provided just enough support to prevent mass famine and homelessness, but their help came at a price. The githune became a client species of the senali and remain so five hundred years ter. Senali governance has carefully prevented the githune from regaining enough strength to regain their independence. In their desire to escape the yoke of the Enzan Authority, the githune colonies only doomed themselves to eternal servitude.