Rumors and folklore of the Alliance

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@DATA.SEARCH @PROG40062 @FILEPATH 9707/04//PER.ADB.REV2//EIB @FILEFORM..D.PAD/DOWNLOAD @START FILE: Notes on The Grand Struggle @SUBJECT..Rumours and folklore Rumours and folklore of the Alliance

In my years in this Alliance, I've heard many tall tales and spacer's boasts. I'll try to relate some of the more amusing ones here, as there may well be a kernel of truth to them. The Blinkies and the Darks

Inspired by: the short story "Fast-friend", © 1976 George R. R. Martin.

Once, long ago, there was a daring scout. This scout, an impatient human, had perfected the art of blind micro-jumps as his method of choice for getting out of the systems he'd explored. For years, this method worked well for him. But there was a time when the odds caught up with him. His trusty old scout ship Mourner collided with a small boulder the size of a torso in a teeth-rattling impact.

Our brave scout threw an emergency seal at the small hole, cussed his luck, and started getting his bearings. It turned out that he'd crashed with a small boulder, half a lightyear out from the star. The scout thus set to work patching up the hole, scanning the area for more of the troublesome rocks, and plotting another, shorter, microjump. After a while, he started getting this bad feeling of someone looking at him. A thorough inspection of the bridge and the ship's immediate surroundings later, he wrote it off as one of his infrequent attacks of paranoia. (The most fragile part of any solo scout: one's mental health.)

But not until the third attack of paranoia in a few minutes did the scout realize what the source of his fears was: The viewport was alive with a million tiny lights, pinpoints of sparkling green and crimson and blue and yellow and a dozen other colours. Not stars, no; they shifted and danced mindlessly, constantly, blinking on and off like fireflies. It was beautiful, really, but this human scout lost his mind totally and 'bounced off the walls for some time'. The real stars could hardly be seen in between all the sparkling lights.

Then, suddenly, the viewport was nearly empty again; just a scattering of stars and two or three lost blinkies winking a lonely message in blue and red. The swarm was gone. Then, with equal speed, it came into sight again. Far off, growing smaller; a fast-receding fog of light.

A perplexing event, to be sure, but one thing that perplexed the pilot of the Mourner more was the sudden dimming of starlight near another small rock nearby; and the sudden flash of light announcing the rock's total disappearance. With reflexes well-honed by his old friend paranoia, he brought his shields up, just in case. And a glance at the sensor screens confirmed what his paranoia already had told him: Something of about man-size was out there, a dark globe of pulsing energy, radiating nothing into the visible spectrum.

Whatever it was, our scout exercised caution and hyperjumped the hell out of there, to hell with patching the ship until he was out of sight of that... thing.

To date, none knows what the scout encountered out there beyond the bounds of this remote Outer Rim starsystem. A lifeform? A secret technological project of some sort? I don't know, though the story intrigues me greatly, and a biologist friend of mine is absolutely fascinated with the story.

GM notes: The Blinkies are one-celled organisms that naturally convert matter to energy. They live out in the dusty reaches beyond the planets of any star system, feeding on star dust, living in swarms of several cubic miles, sometimes attracted by passing larger objects. They can travel at near the speed of light, far faster than any known form of propulsion save hyperspace. Stats: Irrelevant. Blinkies die when subjected to gravity wells, and thus stay away from most places sentients go. Star Dragons know and enjoy the aestethics of the sparkling small motes of matter.

The Darks are cunning predators, mostly dark globes of energy with some motes of living matter within. They are vastly bigger than the Blinkies, almost the size of a man. You can't see a Dark, not really, but they do things to the light travelling through them, making the stars waver and dim. Creatures of energy, the Darks eat matter. Like the blinkies, they sweep clean the scattered gas and dust on the fringes of solar systems, moving through Blinkie swarms like scythes, carving tunnels of blackness in those seas of light. And, when they find a lonely chunk of starship spinning through the void, that too is food. A veritable feast. Darks also die when subjected to gravity wells. As for speed; well, the blinkies move at near lightspeed. The darks feed on the blinkies. The darks run faster; they go faster than light if they need to. As for weaknesses, the Darks cannot pierce ray shields, and a gravity well generator would be a very deadly weapon against them. But if they catch a ship with its ray shields down, which is most ships outside of combat conditions, that ship suddenly, in a blinding flash of light, has man-sized holes in its hull.

This predator is responsible for uncounted numbers of missing ships throughout the eons, possibly many more than hyperspace mishaps and asteroid collisions combined.

Difficulty of detecting a Dark with scanners: Heroic, or Very Difficult if operator has had prior encounters with Darks. Difficulty of identifying a Dark with scanners: Difficult identifies a power signature of unknown type, Heroic identifies it as a lifeform. Effectiveness of weapons: Physical weapons are a delicacy, energy weapons just pass through, tractor beams get no hold. Gravity well generators annihilate them. Nukes detonated nearby might get them to flee, fearing a larger predator is approaching.

Copyright ©1997-2001 Erik Inge Bolsø. Comments? Questions? Praise? Mail me at [email protected]!