An Echo, Resounding

Three hundred years ago the world ended.

A creeping crimson mist from someplace else moved across the surface of the deep, a rising red tide that birthed nightmares from its depths and that slowly, ever so slowy, began to consume the world entire. What remains is the province of madmen and dreamers, the prophets who saw and warned and changed and the few kings and nobels who dared listen. A half dozen civilizations forced into exile on the dying words of now forgotten gods and the fevered hopes of the learned and lettered, forced to the last untainted isles of the world. Forced to find sanctuary and to wrest it from the lives already there.

The world is now bounded, the Red Tide lapping ever hungrily, ever waiting at the shores. To sail from the Sunset Isle is to keep a weather eye upon the land: out of sight of the isles one can sail but to where the ocean turns the color of blood and even then it is at peril. To sail beyond, well . . .

A dozen cultures, a dozen races of the world reside within the confines of this prison: the old orders transfigured in the land of endings - the former wise wizards of the Tien Lung palace now lay claim to lands under the aegis of the kings of hell while the honorable Eirengarders now sell their pikes for protection and coin. The Kueh, the Eshkanti . . . all changed; Even the great empire of Xian, savior and beacon in during the exile slowly rots from within. The eleven creeds have fallen, retreating into the endless cycles of their trapped karmic doom while the dwarves prepare for their own war unending; forging golden spirit weapons to stave off the anger of their own vengefull goddess, murdered by their own hands.

And then there are the native tribes to this land: diverse, powerful, predatory, gifted of magics unknown by the races of men. The Shou seek to take back what was theirs. Once they almost did.

Yet in this simmering cauldron the people live, carving out homes from the bones of the earth and reclaiming the ruins of lost and forgotten civilizations, ignoring the echoes of a world before and beyond they do not quite understand. The live upon the forgotten tombs and surrendered lands and they try to keep the dark things at bay.

Welcome to the Sunset Isles, welcome to the Westmark: it is a land in need of heroes and villains and 'venturers such as yourselves.

Welcome to the land of the Red Tide, and may you leave an echo of your own.

T-185 Days

"Jel, are you seeing this?" Feelix's voice was raw and hushed as he leaned over the data-tablet, his forehead almost bumping hers as she maneuvered for a closer look.

"Great Maker - " Jelara's fingers danced across the pad, highlighting a column of numbers streaming across the display, routing, exploding the analyses and underlying calculations while the swiftly animated wireframe orbital schematic moved like a clockwork toy.

"The numbers have to be wrong Jel: they have to be. It's unique, singular - It's been in a stable orbit for over two hundred years. It's pre-gorram Scream for fraks sake! And there's no cause, no. . ."

She looked up at him, her mismatched eyes of violet and chrome staring at him unblinkingly as her mouth went tight and thin.

"Three Body system, Feelix. You know that. How many station-keeping corrections for just us, this past month?" her eyes drop to the wireframe model, the corkscrewing gyre cast in neon against the darkened lab.

"We're lucky we were around to see it at all."

"But six months - it's not enough time! a decade in and we've barely - " Feelix bowed his head going silent as he bit his lip, trying to stifle the welling fury and despair. " - we've barely even started. We've - " he looks at her again, his voice pleading against Einstein and Newton and everything he knew to be true. " - we've just started."

"I know." the scientist said, her hand coming down to cover his, though if it was in either sympathy or commiseration Feelix could not tell. "But it can't be helped, Fee."

"The Leviathan is falling."

Setting:
So here's how it is: the whiz-bang FTL stuff? It exists, it's awesome, it's better'n sex and Elvis combined. But it is also hellaciously expensive. You could buy an intra-system shuttle (used!) for the cost of your average cold-sleep class FTL ticket, and an actual ship is the sort of thing which can bankrupt small corporations. Not to say that there aren't any in private hands, but suffice it to say baring grand theft, murder and life on the run those hands are not liable to be yours.

And you know all this because you did it once: mortgaged your entire life to buy a ticket here, in the hopes of creds and glory. And you can find that here in spades to be sure, but until you do you're kind of stuck system-side.

For now the name of the system isn't important, fact of the matter is you might not even remember its proper designation and the local flavor of it tends to shift habitat to habitat, belt to belt. What you do know, though, are some of the systems defining characteristics:

Three Suns: you got the mega-red giant, the lesser main sequence nobody and then the big mystery burner of a white dwarf that seems just kinda itchin' to go off in a type Ia nova the next million years or so. The three pump out a nice mix of solar wind, hard radiation and rare elements that is attractive to both the scientifically and entrepreneurially minded: as a result the system is dotted with solar mining stations mag-sifting the precious isotopes and rare-dwarfstuff from the stellar wind while groundpounders strip Helium 3 and other rarities from the scorched crusts of the few iron cored planetoids dotting the system.

You've also got the belters - mining again here but for more conventional minerals, metals and elements. Still profitable, as the belts are thick and non-diffuse, and rich with rare earths in easily accessible veins. The two main belts used to be planets, at least that's the theory, 'till they got ripped apart by the tidal stresses caused by the dwarf/giant duo capturing their third dancing partner 'bout a half a billion years back.

You've also got at least one recently captured rogue planetoid - huge super jupiter sorta monster with functionally it's own independent solar system of moons and satellites and rings. Great mining and politics there as various factions squabble over resources and equipment to mine the entire sub-system dry.

And then you've got the Leviathan.

It's stuck in near orbit within the rad belt of the Rogue Planet: nasty place to visit, nastier place to stay and it's what kept the Leviathan untouched for as long as it has. After the Scream, when they first found it during the re-colonization there weren't resources to go around and even now shielding tech makes the place just barely survivable.

But oh Maker above does everyone want a taste anyway.

Who wouldn't, I mean, it's a ship almost twenty five kilometers long.

What, you though they named it the Leviathan because it was tiny?

No one really knows what it is - current surveys seem to suggest it was some sort of mega-colony generation ship, though nothing like it was ever built on Earth in the pre FTL days and if the Leviathan still has people (or things) aboard they've been awful quiet about it; and it's engines - some sort of huge planet busting pre-FTL fusion monsters - have been dark for, near as anyone can tell, millennia. It's just there this tantalizing monolith of a ship constructed out of alien tech that makes pre-Scream earth look like a backwater in comparison.

And so people go in, explore, bring back what they can. It's made some men rich and other men dead all the while driving the scientists and the poets of the planets mad. It was your ticket, your shot at the big time: you were gonna score enough credits off the ruin huals and scrap-jobs to put a down payment on your own ship, make bank on a crew and burn your name into the stars.

But now, now the Leviathan is falling.

T-180 days until impact.

SAR Operation A5-124: Just off Jupiter-Saturn Hohmann Tranfer Orbit

The headlamp of her suit cut through the frigid darkness of the compartment, casting stark and impossible shadows upon the controls and consoles of the lightless ship. Motes of frozen water vapor danced in the air, mingling with glass and dried blood from the damaged controls, all tumbling in lazed turbulent trajectories across the weightless span of the room, reflecting the light like miniature stars.

She could hear the sound of her own breathing, heavy and labored from within her helmet and she checked the O2 mixture for the fifth time that quarter hour. Cutting through the wrecked life support compartment had taken more time than they'd budgeted for the first run: but CNC wanted confirmation so . . .

At least the ship was still pressurized: it was marginally more reassuring than if she had been moving through vacuum.

She disengaged the mag soles of her boots and pushed herself off from the far bulkhead gently, not quite a meter per second as she craned her head, sweeping the light about the room.

Her breath caught as she found it and the click of her teeth brought the mic online as she reached out and halted her forward momentum.

"This is Aoki to SAR-1, Aoki to SAR-1: I've found them."

Her light swept over them again, a family of four, huddled beneath the impossibly thin mylar emergency sheets. A father, two daughters, and his fiancée. Something from the briefing tickled in the bck of her mind: there were supposed to have been married on Io.

"Roger Aoki, understood. Can you confirm - '

"Ident? Yes. Chipscans being fed to you now. Any word on next of kin?"

There is a quiet moment of static as data fills the airwaves. A voice clears at the other end of the line.

"Affirm: no next of kin. It's a drag and dump, Val. Get moving, the leasing company wants the ship on free-return inside of . . ."

Valeria tuned out the rest of the chatter as she began to move, maglocking her boots to the floor as she began to wrestle the frozen and lifeless forms of the Gabriel and Elziabeth Dyson out of their rigor and towards the secondary airlock.

Just another day in Search and Recovery.

JVC-1564 SAR. That's the flight designation you call home. To any Oneilite or groundpounder in the confederation, or even the whole Solar Authority for that matter, SAR stands for Search And Rescue. But you? You know better. That R? It's not for Rescue. It's for Recovery.

Thing is, space? Space wants you dead. She'll rip the breath from your lungs, boil your blood and laugh as the last thing you hear is your own eardrums popping. And if that isn't enough she floods the void between the world with radiation that eats away at your cells, poisoning the marrow while microgravity turns your bones to brittle twigs surrounded by atrophied muscles of warm jelly. Space? Space kills.

So when things go wrong, when somebody needs a rescue out in the black, well . . . that last thing about space? Space is big. A distress call from inside the orbit of S/2003 J takes a minute and a half to reach Jupiter Station. Twice that to cross the satellite system entirely. By the time you hear that cry in the dark it's all over. And getting there? Point to point the transit from Jove to the far moons is about half the trip from Earth to the Mars, so three weeks, if you're burning for speed. So that rescue? Best speed it's gonna be a long time coming.

But they do it anyway, or rather, the powers at be tell the public that's what we do. Truth is that we're after the ships, not the people: mankind might have spread across the solar system but money still makes the world go round, and the sorta tech that goes into a run of the mill torch-ship costs enough to bankrupt a third world nation or two. A few lives in the black, regrettable. A ship lost? Unthinkable.

You get a cut of course, but not much of one; and occasionally you do get to do some actual good and help the living rather than loot the dead: but in the end it's brutal, dangerous work that sees you in the Black and harms way more often than not and will make your ties to the planets wither as the weeks and months click by without a sunrise. You didn't choose this job, it choose you - one act of insubordination too many, one accident too big to sweep under the rug, one judgment call gone bad: whatever you did they would have grounded you, ended your life in the stars. They offered you this instead, a jobs listening to the dying and burying the dead; a planetary shepherd bringing the lost ships home. It's ugly work, and tiring, and Space looms out there waiting for you to slip up just the once and turn the game around. But you got to stay in the void, someplace beyond the sky.

Fair trade.