10-5-2015
Dawning Star Campaign Introduction
Part I:
Lieutenant Guan Hua felt her guts twist and grind again, and wondered how her colleagues around the table didn’t notice the reverberating gastric sounds of her anxiety. It was a deep “svirfnorblin” sound she hadn’t been aware a human gut could make until now. She brushed a few strands of her gray-shot black hair back from her clammy brow, cursing for the thousandth time about space navy protocol and hair length regulation. In her carefree days of youth, she may have been a citizen of the Old United States, but her immigrant Chinese parents expected a certain conservative decorum for a young woman. Longer hair, for example. But even then, she’d had the luxury of tying it back out of her way.
Old United States. Parents. Home.
Six years after Landfall Day on the world of Eos, and she still had moments of sadness when she dwelled on the fact that her home country--including her aging parents, her brothers, her old employers--had long been smashed into atoms. Damn the Dark Object. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the giant rock slamming into Earth, ending the cradle of humanity in seconds.
Today, she wasn’t doing her patriotic duty in the armed forces of her nation. She served the cause of all human life, the mission of making this new planet a sustainable place for the survivors. For every life that escaped Earth in the colony fleet, millions had died in a hailstorm of astronomical destruction that no human ingenuity could stave off. Each citizen here had an obligation to survive, to be worthy of those lost. And the Dawning Star crew had an obligation to make the world safe and habitable for each citizen.
And thus her worries. For today, she was going to put her entire career on the line, if not her very life. Any minute now, Captain Brandes Jonah, senior officer of the remaining fleet, would arrive and call the meeting to order. Guan suspected he’d make quite an angry entrance.
To distract herself, she tuned into her fellow officers who were chattering with each other around the table while awaiting their captain.
“...got the urban generators wired to the main engines finally,” Pilcher Fuchs was saying. The Australian engineering type was one Guan knew for his reputed gambling problem. “The Old Girl isn’t spaceworthy anymore, but our Dawning Star is going to make one helluva backbone for a first colony on this rock.” The round-faced Australian took a noisy gulp from his coffee cup. “Kinda sad, though. I always wanted to imagine her as a sleek and graceful philly, running the space prairie. Now she’s a bloated sow, stuck on her side while piglets like us suckle at her teats day and night.”
“‘Disgusting, Fuchs, thanks for the image,” said a female officer across the table. “But ‘bout time you grease monkeys got the juice on.” Guan didn’t remember the Londoner’s name, and didn’t waste energy trying. The blond woman continued in her heavy British accent. “With two million civvie popsicles waiting for a place to move in and start complaining, my lads got their work cut out for’em.”
“I thought city designers were never in a hurry!” quipped a Korean man--Guan knew Kong Ja Kyung from multiple encounters in the field. He was head of the team of terraformers tasked with straining out the microscopic polygonals in the atmosphere of Eos. If his team could get their task accomplished, none of the people on Eos would need those damn bulky face masks when they spent more than an hour outside the Dawning Star’s protective bulkheads. Guan reflected that if she had to deal with one more reddened, sore throat, gritty sputum or pulmonary cramping before Christmas, it would be a miracle.
“We at least have a timetable in years, Kyung, not decades!” his urban engineering counterpart rejoined. “You guys gonna have this planet ready for our grandchildren? Amanda Polk herself will be gray and toddling about, the way you’re working.” She smirked, but passed Kyung a doughnut from the plastic plate on her end of the table to show no hard feelings.”
“For your information, we’re running quite a bit ahead of schedule,” the Korean responded before taking a bite of a crueller. “We’d projected fifty years, but we think we can get the whole planet ready in as soon as 42.”
And then everyone went silent as the electronic door hissed open and Captain Brandes Jonah entered. As Guan expected, he wasn’t happy.
“Lieutenant Hua!” the big man boomed. “Is this thing yours!?” A decorative butterfly lapel pin clattered across the table.
Guan Hua shuttered. She’d seen combat in the early years of her military career. Had even taken heavy fire inside a communications shed in a South American jungle, and kept her cool long enough to use the outdated equipment to radio HQ for an airstrike. Using nothing but old Morse code. Courage under fire had earned her the first of many commendations. Yet now, under the scrutiny of the most powerful man remaining to all of humanity, the gurgling in Guan’s stomach flared into aching acidity. She had to swallow several time to keep her esophagus from emitting a hiccup laced with gastric juice. She finally looked up to meet her superior’s stare, and nodded.
“Would you care to explain how the hell it came to be in my quarters, last night? And why I found my own dait'sya blade laying on my pillow when I woke up, right next to my face?” the captain roared.
“I put it there, sir,” she responded. She kept her normally strong, commanding soprano voice soft, hoping the Captain might take a cue and calm himself.
He didn’t.
In fact, he leaned menacingly over his side of the table, pointing his thick index finger at her. “You’re already looking at losing your rank, lieutenant. Don’t be cute or I might decide you need some time in the brig too! How did you enter my quarters past a Level 3 electronic bolt lock?”
The moment had arrived. The balance of her life and career on the razor’s edge of her next action. Lieutenant Guan Hua stood and walked through the table, crossing to stand next to the Dawning Star’s commanding officer. Its substance meant no more to her stride than the fog of an Eotian morning. Jonah’s face registered shock.
The room had fallen as quiet as drunken laughter in hard vacuum….
* * *
“It’s called a ‘phase field matter alignment distributor,’” Guan explained. Thirty minutes had passed, and with two cups of coffee to bolster him, Captain Jonah had finally calmed noticeably. Now that his tirade of histrionics was over and he seemed to be listening, Guan found her usual confidence returning.
The captain’s gaze remained fixed on the device sitting before him at the table. The size and shape of a thread spool, the reflective metal mechanism sported a red diode on top that was now dark. Captain Jonah cleared his throat and spoke much more calmly. “How does it work, lieutenant?”
“We’ve got the math and some theories in my report, sir,” Guan said, pushing a folder in his direction. “But the straightest answer is that we don’t know. It’s alien tech, light years beyond anything we can build. My partners and I found three of them in a small ruin about a hundred kilometers west. They were under a sediment layer our models estimate has been there at least 6,000 years. We thin--”
“I mean, lieutenant Hua,” Jonah interrupted. “How did you make it work?” He used the tip of Guan’s report to poke at the small miraculous alien technology.
“Mostly by accident. The PF-MAD has a huge power consumption for its size. Larger by several orders of magnitude from what should even be possible.” Guan stated. Her pulse raced as she discussed something that truly fascinated her. “We theorize the species that created it had some ability to store mass for it in associated ‘pocket dimensions.’ We just left it connected to a standard power grid for three days, to give it enough juice to let me pass through a door and complete my demonstration here.”
Jonah sat back in thought. “You’re telling me someone in possession of this thing can go anywhere, escape any cell, byass the tightest security?”
“Not with this one, sir,” Guan answered with a sad smile. “But theoretically--”
“‘Theoretically?’ Why not this one?”
“It’s dead, sir. Whatever tech it uses is ultimately incompatible with us. Either our power sources or our biology, we aren’t sure. We were able to get about five or six uses from the other two before they burned out permanently. Then there’s the risk of terminal de-rezz…”
“Alright, enough science talk.” Jonah bit out. The hardness had returned to his voice. Guan had hoped her explanations were distracting him from her brazen demonstration, but clearly he hadn’t forgotten her little violation of his privacy. “Help me understand why the f---” He looked around the room as he spoke, taking in the other specialists gathered around the table. And clamped down on his tongue. “Why in the world you brought alien technology--poorly understood technology--into my private quarters? Do you understand the risks of that gross irresponsibility?”
Finally, Guan felt her own temper rising. She opened her mouth, snapped it shut, and exhaled deeply, remembering the Buddhist lessons her grandfather used to teach her when they fly-fished together in long-dead Colorado. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”
Captain Jonah stared long and hard at her, jaw muscles clenching under his ebony skin. At last, he stood. “This meeting is adjourned for now. The rest of you are dismissed.”
The tension in the room went out like a resonating beer belch. The other personnel hurriedly gathered up summary reports, laser pointers and data pads, and filed out into the corridor. A few threw glances over their shoulders, obviously disappointed to miss the end of the show. Most, however, just looked relieved to be freed from it all. The bulkhead door hissed closed as the last specialist exited.
“Permission granted, lieutenant.” Jonah said afterward. “But I’m not giving you a soapbox for whatever game you’ve got going on here. If you really want to self-immolate your career, you’ll do it without an audience.” Jonah reached for his coffee cup and removed a glazed doughnut from the plastic plate. He reached it to his lips.
“I acted the way I did, sir, because you can be a stubborn, dismissive ass.”
As Captain Jonah struggled not to choke on his pastry, Guan suddenly remembered to tack on: “...with all due respect.”
Her superior ranted, loomed, blustered and threatened to have her executed three different ways including by firing squad. Guan calmly weathered his hurricane-force temper, waiting for him to take a breath. “I’m sorry, captain, but I had to do something drastic to get your attention. Sir, we have two million civilians we plan to set loose on this world. That’s two million unpredictable variables, wildcards, being spread across an alien landscape we’ve barely explored, even over the past six years. And why? Because we’re too busy taking this ship apart for sewer pipes, and windmills!”
For the first time, Captain Jonah burst into a major belly laugh. “Lieutenant, I’d say you got your head so far up your ass, you could clean your own polyps with a fair bit of yodeling! Sewer pipes might not be glorious, but they’re part of civilization. Our resources and our attention have to be rationed, Guan. That means some projects take a back seat to high priority initiatives.”
“Even when ‘some projects’ represent a danger to the entire population, sir?” Guan snapped back.
“So far, the only one who has made this a danger is you,” Jonah stated. “If you wanted a project green-lit, you should have went through official channels--”
“I filed three requests with the quartermaster and requisitions officers, captain, and not one bothered to send me so much as an official denial!” She paced back and forth in frustration, forgetting the possible consequences of raising her voice to the highest ranking member of the Dawning Star crew. “They ignored me, sir, treated my work like it didn’t matter, when it does matter! You saw what I did with the PF-MAD...what if it had been discovered ten years from now by somebody’s kids? Or worse, by terrorists or antisocials we’ve got sleeping even now in the bay? Can we afford to let the civilians roam willy-nilly through alien cities, finding who knows what and doing untold damage to themselves or others?”
“Lieutenant, I don’t think you understand the risks of--”
“The fuck I don’t!” Guan shouted, and from the way Captain Jonah’s eyes blazed, she knew she’d overstepped again. “Um...with all due respect, captain.”
He stood up again. “That’s it, Lieutenant Hua, I think we’ve exhausted this discussion. You’re relieved of duty, and confined to quarters pending--”
“I almost died, sir!” Guan blurted.
“What?”
Realizing she had at best a few seconds to save her case if not her career, Guan pushed on hurriedly. “The power flow problems we had with the PF-MAD weren’t the only complication. The test subjects--animals we thawed--with the other two modules suffered de-rezz approximately one time in every three in which the devices were activated. We didn’t have enough trials with them before they burned out to determine when it would or wouldn’t happen.”
“De-rezz?” Jonah asked.
“Particle dispersal of the subject while within solid matter.” Seeing his blank look, Guan explained. “The subject passing through something would suddenly rematerialize inside the item. Their atomic structure immediately dispersed...it’s instant death, sir. They died of disintegration.”
“One time in three, this happened? And you used it…”
“Three times, sir. In and out of your quarters, and the demonstration here.”
Captain Brandes Jonah’s ebony features paled noticeably, and he fell heavily back into his chair. “Then the risk you took--”
“Statistically, I should have died at least once. Of course, I only get once, but…”
“God, lieutenant, you took that big a risk just to make a point? You could have disintegrated right here in front of everyone…?”
“I’m fully committed to this work, sir. It needs doing. The ruins must be explored, the technology in them discovered, catalogued, studied, before someone--maybe thousands or millions of someones--is put at serious risk. I felt like my own life was worth the sacrifice to make the case. If I wasn’t alive to lead it, you would have appointed someone else. I believed you’d see reason sir, if only I could get your attention, cut through the red tape.”
The captain pinched his nose between index finger and thumb. Then he ran his hand over his closely-cropped hair, smearing a layer of sweat on his forehead that had suddenly appeared. “Fine, fine, Lieutenant Hua. You win, I’m hearing you.” He looked up, meeting her gaze with an unblinking, level stare. “What is it you need?”
Guan’s heart raced, and she felt a thrill she schooled her features not to show. “The details are in my report, sir. But stripped down, I want to establish an initiative I call the Recovery Unit for Intelligence Nonterrestrial. The unit will need at least a seven-member team assigned to it. But not just any team. They need advanced scientific education, technology skills, even backgrounds in robotics and implants if you can spare them. Ideally, they’d know weapons and ordnance too.”
“Weapons and ordnance? I thought you said these ruins were thousands of years old, abandoned. Who do you expect to have to fight?”
“That’s just it, sir. We don’t know. We don’t know anything about this world once we get into all those artifacts not built by human hands. Sure, there’s lots of orbital data, but it won’t tell us what to expect when we get boots on the ground of these places. It’s all unpredictable.”
Captain Jonah picked up her folder. “I’ll read your report, lieutenant. Now, get out of here before I give in and do half the terrible things I feel like doing to you right now.”
“With all due respect sir, am I still relieved of duty?”
Jonah growled. “Get out of my sight, lieutenant. I don’t care what you do, just keep yourself busy somewhere else I’m not, until you hear from me.”
Lieutenant Guan Hua saluted, turned abruptly, and fled through the hissing bulkhead door. Only when it slammed decisively behind her did she let herself smile broadly. She headed through the corridors of the Dawning Star colony ship, her stride lighter than it had been in months….
Lieutenant Guan Hua, Officer in charge of the Recovery Unit for Intelligence Nonterrestrial
50-year old Chinese Female
ST: 15
DX: 11
IQ: 15
HT: 13
Advantages: Disadvantages:
Military Rank Science Fanatic
Rapid Healing Sense of Duty, Team
Military Skills: Academic Skills:
Leadership- 15 Architecture- 18
Tactics- 17 Mathematics- 15
Electronics Operation- 16 Language, Cantonese- 15
Shuttle Pilot- 11 Language, Mandarin- 15
Morse Code- 14
EOF Auto Pistol- 13
EOF Assault Rifle- 11
Samurai 300 Ion Blade- 12
Karate- 11
First Aid- 14
Part II:
