Weekly Drabble #220: Void of Light (Patreon)

Coming from EBB with 'no where is safe' and 'Bootes void' from LystAiP, it's another entry in Heresy and Hope. Although a galactic supervoid is a bit distant from our protagonist's position, there is some resonance there. Void of light, void of life, void of choice...

Enjoy!

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Void of Light

Fifteen million years.

That’s the main thought running through your head as you sit at your station on Hope’s bridge. It still doesn’t seem real. It’s been days since that revelation and it still haunts you. Fifteen million light-years from home. Fifteen million years since you went to sleep. You wonder about Earth. Humanity in the Milk Way is almost certainly extinct, but what else? What about the Purge? Have they continued their relentless genocide of all non-synthetics? Has the Milky Way been cleansed of all organic life now? Are the Purge enjoying their perfect, clean galaxy or have they taken their crusade to the others. Did they scour the Magellanic Clouds and the Sagittarius Elliptical Dwarf Galaxy? Did they move to Andromeda next?

Or did they finally meet a species as powerful or maybe more powerful than they? Do they even still exist? Is Eris the last of her kind, just as the thousands of humans, active crew and sleepers alike, aboard Hope are the last of theirs? Questions, questions that had been tormenting you for days. You’ll probably never know the answer to any of them. In some cases, you don’t even want to know.

Fifteen million years. Five times as long as humanity has even existed gone in the blink of eye.

The galactic void is darker than you could have imagined, even darker than interstellar space. Here, you’re not tens or hundreds of light-years from other stars, but hundreds of thousands – millions.

There is light here, though. Not from single stars. Even the brightest blue giant would be nothing more than a glint from a pinprick. But from millions and billions of them... ahead of Hope, thumb-sized on the starship’s most powerful visual sensors is a galaxy. M83, the Southern Pinwheel. A great spiral much like the Milky Way, home to countless stars, even more planets... and almost certainly, life.

Cold slithers down your back as your thoughts turn from the passage of time to something else. Life. Organic life. In perfect synchronicity with your thoughts, your gaze drifts to the close-range sensors. Even from this distance and even though she’s making no attempt to hide herself, Hope’s passives still barely read Eris’s presence. That will change if her primary reactor ignites fully. There’s no technology in the galaxy that could conceal one of the Purge’s capital ships at full thrust, weapons active and defences operational. You remember the tactical screens from your old ship, the Agamemnon, and how you saw entire constellations blossom from where there’d only been empty space, the stars in the sky seemingly outnumbered by the alien machines descending on humanity.

Even powered down, she’s more powerful than any vessel humanity has ever built. Throughout the whole war, brief as it was, no Despoiler-class Purge like her was ever destroyed. Just one of them was the end of civilizations, entering a star system where there had been life and when they left... there was nothing. And you’re bringing one of them to a new galaxy, one very probably teeming with life. Sapient life. Civilizations that have reached into space with optimism, never finding the murdered husks of their forbears: dead worlds and star systems. Species who’d never learned the answer to the Fermi Paradox... until now.

All because of you. Because of this small, tiny remnant of humanity that still clings to life.

You try to tell yourself that that’s not true. You’re not “bringing” Eris anywhere. Hope requires resupply. It’s the largest vessel humanity ever built, but even its stores aren’t infinite and the after-effects of the Heretics’ temporal burn are still present on every system across the ship. Here in the galactic void, there is nothing for you. More than that, you have hundreds of thousands of people still in cryostasis. You don’t have the resources to awaken them all. You need a world for that, a place you can establish a colony on.

Rebuilding humanity is the whole reason for this mission. You can’t do anything in the galactic void and you can’t possibly reach another galaxy from here. At best, Hope might have been able to travel to one of the Magellanic Clouds – and that only under very optimal conditions. The plan had been to find someplace safe within the Milky Way; an isolated star cluster, a sanctuary within an emission nebula, a world within the galactic core. Somewhere the Purge would be hard-pressed to find you and you might – might – have had a chance of escaping their cull and surviving long enough that they wouldn’t be able to swat you aside like they had done to virtually every other species they’d encountered.

That had been the plan. But now... M83 was the plan. You have no choice. Hope can’t survive in the void forever. It needs resources; scouring the intergalactic expanse for rogue planets and excreted star systems to pick through wasn’t enough. So M83 is your destination, but alongside you is genocide made manifest. You remind yourself again that you have no control over Eris. You might be able to kill her if Hope overloaded her reactor and rammed the Heretic Purge at sufficient velocity. If she didn’t see you powering up. If she didn’t see you turning towards her. If there was enough distance between your vessels to accelerate to a high enough velocity. If she didn’t swat you from the sky the instant you became a threat. If she didn’t power up first and let you make your charge and immolate yourself against her defences. If she didn’t even do any of that and just slip out of your path, letting you hurtle millions of kilometers through the void until you finally decelerated and realized you were being treated like a child throwing a tantrum.

Sure, it’s possible that everything possible might go right and you could kill Eris. It’s also possible that an astronaut around Earth could throw a rock and hit Pluto.

Which put you, all the engineering teams and tactical studies right, as the Captain so eloquently put it, “at the square root of fuck all” for solutions to the ‘Eris situation’. You can’t kill her. Can’t threaten her, coerce, bargain with or bribe her. You certainly can’t control her or anything she does. Only her curiousity about humanity has kept you alive, and if she ever learns the truth of that situation... well, you might as well try to take her with you. But until that moment, she drifts alongside Hope, a silent sentinel capable of eradicating entire star systems, waiting for your engines to be repaired so you can make the warp to the Southern Pinwheel to look for a new home...

...and introduce a member of the Purge to an entire galaxy.

Some among the crew have said better that you should self-destruct than let her loose upon M83, but even that belief is has its own conceit. You’re already here. The distance between Hope and Eris’s position is nothing to the Heretic Purge. She doesn’t even need her faster-than-light engines. She’s a machine. She can coast along this velocity and either change her perception of time so that a journey of thousands of years feels like seconds, or  go dormant and sleep away the millennia.

There’s only one choice you have, and really – that’s no choice at all. There’s only the hope that you aren’t condemning all other sapient life in the Southern Pinwheel to death. There’s the hope that that someone, somewhere in all those hundreds of billions of stars might be strong enough to resist the Purge, strong enough to sever the Sword of Damocles over your head. And there’s even the hope that you might be able to influence Eris herself. She broke from the rest of her kind. She preserved Hope and protects it even now. You might be able to convince her of the intrinsic value of other organic species.

You brought that idea to the captain. He laughed so hard he started crying. Better that we find someone who can kill her, he said after he regained his composure. You didn’t even disagree.

Your eyes return to Hope’s main viewscreen, looking out beyond the prow of mankind’s last tiny ember. Ahead of you is the splash of light that means sanctuary. Behind you is the darkness of the past and to your left, the devil walks.

What other choices do you have?

None at all.