Chapter 60: Newsletter |
After thinking on it for a couple of seconds, Derek decided to lug the tablet back to the bridge to read the message within conversing range of whoever was in there.
As it turned out, he was the only one who’d even left.
“So, where to, captain?” Atticus asked, spinning his chair around.
In response, Derek instead raised the tablet, newsletter already open. “In here, somewhere. I figured we should read it together.”
“The newsletter is the biggest adventure we’re going to find?” Ye-in asked, not even bothering to try and hide her disbelief.
“No,” Derek shook his head. “But the information in here is, apparently, going to lead us somewhere that’s more interesting than anything within three hundred light-years.”
“That bad?” Atticus asked.
“That empty,” Mimi guessed, leaving Derek to nod half-heartedly while he mirrored the newsletter on the main viewscreen. A mistake, as it turned out, not even a full minute later, as they apparently had very different reading speeds.
He was, not all that unsurprisingly, the fastest. [Lightspeed Learning’s] buff to the speed of learning having translated to him also being able to set an absurd pace when it came to reading in a way that hadn’t been obvious until he compared himself to others. Though Mimi was a close second, the [Skill] he knew she had for quickly taking in the entirety of blueprints likely having similar “alternative” applications.
“Please tell me that’s not where we’re going,” Atticus sighed, interrupting Derek’s train of thought, making him look up to be greeted by one of the discoveries he’d already read past.
“Thankfully, no.” He said empathetically.
The planet in question was, apparently, objectively and scientifically acknowledged to be the single smelliest world in the known universe. To humans, at least.
Previously, the “worst” atmosphere had been found on the Dromon homeworld, which had more fluorine than every human-habitable planet presently known put together, filled with compounds that inevitably set off the human body’s instinctual response against toxic gases, slamming the throat shut to preserve the lungs’ functionality in case one did manage to get away from the toxins, a quirk of biology that did not get overriden by magical resistance or outright immunity to the chemicals in question, though practice and exposure could erode it away over time.
This new place, on the other hand, Gongce, smelled like skunk spray. With enough variety in offensive odors that becoming scent-blind was almost impossible. Also, somewhat amusingly, the western spelling had sufficiently confused the origin of the name that no one noticed the planet had, effectively, been named after the Mandarin word for public toilet before the name had been officially confirmed.
Honestly, Derek was just glad he couldn’t picture what that place had to be like, despite all the descriptive language. The one skunk he’d met had been the well-behaved and adorable familiar of a mage, but he also understood why people really didn’t like them. After all, the little stinkers were one of only a handful of animals that could still inconvenience a decently leveled human. Even he was at a point where he could just wipe the venom of a Mozambique spitting cobra from his eyes and not be any more troubled than if he’d been sprayed with water.
“All I’m getting is boredom,” he added after trying to get an impression from his [Skill], one that it wasn’t naturally providing. He could practically hear the damn thing sigh, complaining that it was the [Call of Adventure], not the “boredom radar” or something to that end.
Though if it had actually complained, or even just given him a sensation other than an absence of information, Derek probably would have shit his pants, because [Skills] were not, in fact, alive.
After the universe’s stinkiest planet came a few astronomical observations, some interesting, some meh, some that would likely be Earth-shattering to someone who knew enough to understand what it all meant. He very much did not, though he did find himself wasting several minutes trying to see what he was supposed to anyway, to the point where Mimi clearly overtook him, because she suddenly gasped and spun around in her chair, e-reader turned to show the rest of them what she’d seen.
“Fuck,” Derek breathed when he saw it, followed by Atticus muttering something in French he didn’t quite catch but was clearly a profanity of some stripe.
The image splashed across the screen was that of a dead world, but one that had clearly once been inhabited. After all, while some natural formations could look like clusters of buildings, and it wasn’t inconceivable for something that could be mistaken for a city from orbit to exist, the sheer density of structures spoke of a place more densely inhabited than even today’s Earth.
Once.
A titanic crater had pride of place in the picture, a gigantic hole in the surface of the planet, kilometers deep, doubtlessly old, judging by the way many of the edges had begun to crumble, others were peeled outwards, as though the world’s biggest beer can had exploded, what seemed like metal deposits forming the strangest shapes as they cooled after being liquefied by the explosion’s heat.
It did not seem to have been made by an asteroid. No, something in the planet had exploded … and Derek was near-certain that “something” had been the creation of the inhabitants.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Mimi flipped her device back over to begin reading the related information, so Derek did the same on his tablet.
He’d expected it to be bad.
The worst his imagination could produce fell well short of what had actually happened.
Though, admittedly, the fact that he had the ability to learn what happened was incredible, that all those records now summed up in the article he held in his hands should have been impossible, but someone’s [Skills] had made it possible.
Incredible. And impossibly depressing.
What had actually happened was that, well … “mutually assured destruction, idiot version” summed it up shockingly well. Instead of an arsenal of nuclear weaponry, they had created planet-wrecking bombs that they could keep under their control. And when their enemy had called their bluff …
“They were idiots,” Derek finally decided. “Sad thing is, humans are almost as stupid.”
History was, unfortunately, even more of a horror show when you looked at the things they didn’t teach in school.
Ye-in raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Project Sundial. The United States thought about building gigantic nuclear weapons to be stationed on its own soil, with a yield of ten gigatons, capable of creating an apocalyptic nuclear winter. The idea was that if mutually assured destruction would wreck the planet in the event of war anyway, they might as well simplify their arsenal.”
“But they didn’t go through with it … right?” she asked.
“They still built enough bombs to wreck the planet anyway,” Atticus pointed out. “And he did say ‘almost.’”
“I … I was happier not knowing that,” Mimi added after a long moment of silence.
“So could I,” Derek admitted.
A lot of the “untaught history” was simply too local, too lacking in impact, to take up some of the highly limited time history teachers had.
Other parts had been hacked off for more political reasons. Even now, two centuries after the fact, the only thing that was taught about the Third Reich were the politics and genocide, the Second World War barely being mentioned beyond “it happened” to avoid even the faintest chance for patriotic feelings to develop for the disgraceful fascist clusterfuck that had been Hitler’s “empire.”
And then there were certain stories that were simply terrifying.
Project Sundial was arguably one.
The details of the Cuban Missile Crisis were another, where an attempt by US destroyers to force a Soviet submarine to surface via practice depth charges was misunderstood as the war having started, resulting in the near-launch of nuclear torpedoes, the two people required to authorize the attack, the captain and political officer already having given the go-ahead … only to be stopped by Vasily Arkhipov, the flotilla’s chief of staff who had been the third person whose go-ahead had been required, on that ship at least, this being the only sub with that kind of structure. If someone else had been in his place, or a different vessel had found itself in that position …
Humanity had come within minutes, if not seconds, of armageddon, and all most people had ever heard of the whole affair was “yeah, they almost shot at each other, but then everyone regained their sanity, and all’s well that ends well and all that.”
Part of Derek felt the impulse to head to the shattered world they had been presented with, to see this “path not taken” and the dark curiosity of wanting to see what a true post-apocalypse looked like. And while he was certain he was only scraping the surface of what [Call of Adventure] could do, he had also already gained the ability to differentiate between its “advice” and his own emotions.
Though he still added it as somewhere to visit if they wanted to take a break from exploration.
There was, in fact, a second dead civilization to be found in the newsletter, this one more akin to the Roman Empire in terms of advancement, having gone extinct to something rather more complex than “big bomb,” the text referring to it as a “more complete version of the Bronze Age collapse,” Earth’s own early history clusterfuck that they still hadn’t entirely figured out.
It had been the Trojan war, or rather, the historical war Homer’s epic had been based on, shattering the trade routes that had allowed for the manufacture of bronze, combined with the systematic collapse of empires that had found themselves unable to maintain the complex creations of their civilizations while also lacking the ability to survive their loss, both of the previous problems had been massively exacerbated by the attacks of the “Sea People,” raiders that had attacked all over the mediteranian and thoroughly wrecked any chance at recovery, their actual identity/origins still largely unknown even to this day.
This, he also mentally marked down as a target for a potential vacation/break from exploring. But he’d already had his fill of “leisure” on Barcode for now, and longed to find the adventure his [Skill] had promised was located in this newsletter.
Though first, he came across an article that had him actually checking the date, because even though it was presently December, the idea that this message could be real, rather than an April Fool’s joke, bordered on the unthinkable.
It was some manner of “cosmic anomaly” which was visible to the naked eye, and only the naked eye, any and all other kinds of image capture or transference, up to and including memor-reading [Skills] merely displayed an innocent-looking asteroid field, utterly devoid of anything even remotely interesting.
Yet when someone did look at it directly, they were greeted with something else, different not only from what the computers saw, but also from everyone else.
Usually, it was asteroids to form little pictures along the lines of those ancient 8-bit games, or nonsensical messages, but apparently, a not insignificant portion of people saw something, be it text or image, that was “shockingly unprintable.”
Now, something like that existing wasn’t entirely out of the question in the universe they all lived in, but as per usual, in the absence of an overriding supernatural force telling the natural rules of reality to get bent, those natural rules should take precedence.
And that “force” simply did not exist. At least not here. It was a fundamental anomaly that made zero sense, neither in a natural nor a magical universe.
Which was concerning. Both because it was weird as hell, and because it wasn’t the only such anomaly that had been found, the chaotic and ever-shifting “caves” that had been nicknamed “R’lyeh” had been quarantied for far longer than any of the people on the bridge of the Dragonfly had been alive.
But no, even that wasn’t where [Call of Adventure] was guiding him. Instead, it was a fairly standard star system listed under “last known location of lost ship,” one of only three.
Granted, with well over a thousand new exploration craft flying through the black, the likelihood of them all staying perfectly intact was relatively low, accidents did happen … but “adventure” spoke of there being something more to it.
“I found it,” Derek announced, once again mirroring his tablet on the main viewscreen. “Five hundred light-years from us, the location of a disappeared ship. Do we still want to …”
“Let’s just go,” Atticus sighed. “Unless you were planning to barge in without taking any precautions?”
Derek chuckled softly. “Wasn’t planning on skipping those.”
That seemed to have settled the situation. And with that done … he had spent an awful long time studying without actually using his studies to fuel his basic [Class], hadn’t he? It was time to change that.
… Right after they’d gone FTL. Given a little over forty days’ travel time, he should be able to cook up something nasty. Several somethings, probably.