Chapter 45: Interlude Horizon Star System |
For all that humans were leaving Earth to “find something new,” most people just wound up going to very similar places to the planet they’d just left. And if they didn’t, they typically made things match, at least locally.
Anything that differed more than a few percentage points from humanity’s home typically had gravity manipulation arrays placed in homes.
And anything with a star that emitted in an unusual spectrum typically wound up with a very specific kind of window that filtered the light into something at least resembling “acceptable.”
And so on.
Humans liked their stuff just so, and there very few limits as to how much of their environment they were willing to change.
As such, even though the blue giant sitting in the center of the Horizon system should have made it a genuinely terrible place to live, and the closest thing to an inhabitable planet being a burnt husk that failed to even rotate, resulting in the starward side being burned to a crisp while the outward-facing one was icy, with just a tiny band of habitability wrapped around where the two met, it was still inhabited.
In fact, the entire damn system had been dismissed as “worthless” by surveyors … and in an instant, five thousand people seeking a challenge had jumped on the “opportunity” of cheaply obtaining a planet no one else would want to take from them. Even if said planet was almost a thousand light years from Earth.
And now, there was a single tiny city sitting right in that bad of semi-habitability, surrounded by lush greenery that was being sustained almost entirely of magic because it was functionally incapable of living off the local star’s light.
***
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Someone would clean that up in a minute, but even with how easy those spells were to cast, the mess was being reapplied too quickly for that to be anything other than futile, at right that moment.
Though even if the massive barbecue party was looking a hell of a lot like the site of a massacre, well, it was a party.
Drinks were presetn, ffood was great, mood was euphoric, yet in the center stood a man, staring up into space, seemingly transfixed, uncaring about the fact that he was staring almost straight into the star.
“Hey, there’s something up there,” he called out. “It’s heading behind the star!”
“Boris, I don’t care how high your Perception is, if it’s anywhere near the star, it’d have to be brighter than the goddamn star to be visible. You’re seeing things,” his wife grumped, currently trying to decide on how large to cut the steak. “Now come help me with this before you blind yourself. Again!”
“I got a [Skill] for that now, won’t happen again,” Boris muttered, but walked over to help regardless. The light had vanished behind the star anyway.
***
Deep space. The void between stars, the great darkness … a whole lot of names, for a whole lot of nothing, which most people entirely ignored in favor of getting somewhere actually important.
And for the most part, the odd rogue planet aside, that was an entirely correct assessment.
People, be they human or alien, liked to do literally everything in their power to skip it.
Warping space, chaining the longest teleports they magically could, pancaking themselves down into a dimension fundamentally incompatible with continued existence, trusting in their ships’ enchantments to not only keep them safe but spit them back out where they wanted to be …
Yet there was one reason why one might still want to go the long way round. A fundamental lack FTL capability, forcing a brute-force approach.
The starship’s surface was pitted and torn in countless places, micrometeorite strikes having been turned into something far more dangerous by the sheer velocity to which the starship had accelerated during the long journey, though it was now slowly fixing itself, the last few repair drones woken from their long slumber, beginning to replace damaged armor, sealing hull breaches, and beginnign the long process of waking weapons from cold storage.
Should anything problematic exist at the target star … the ship would be ready.