36 Hours after Coriola's Shatterpoint Vision Silas sat next to a medical bed, on which was lying Coriola, the woman he loved. She was catatonic after her vision. Silas had sat at her side for the last 8 hours, sleeping in a chair, refusing to leave the room. And now she was finally moving. “Silas?” She said, coming slowly to wakefulness. Silas shook himself and took her hand in his. “Shhhh. Its me. Hold still. Can you open your eyes? Can you see anything?”Coriola ignored him hims and pushed herself up as though she were just waking up from a common nap. “Silas, I saw it. I saw what’s going to happen to you, to all of us.” “Coriola-” Silas started to interject. “No. You don’t understand.” She leaned over and grabbed Silas’s clothing, pulling herself to look in his eyes. “I died. We all died.” In a trembling voice, she proceeded to tell him of the vision that had driven her to seizures and tears of blood. About how she had watched a Magos Mechanicus on a warp tainted world. How he had become trapped in ancient ruins by the forces of chaos, shot his own brother, and been forced to flee through a warp rift. Of how she had seen an enormous man with 4 arms battle Imperial storm troopers on a planet made from death, only to be rescued at the last moment by a mysterious woman with red hair Of the doomed attempt to save the Dead Fjordes, the hooded and cloaked figure of Scythius Eizen, now a completely different man, and the Astartes killing all in their path. She shivered and cried as she spoke of her own death at Eizen’s hands, her throat scorched, suffocating the life from her. Silas just hugged her tightly. “Shhhh. That’s not going to happen.” He said, stroking her hair. “But I saw it. The visions-” Silas interrupted her gently “In the vision, did I have a scar on my face?” Coriola pulled back from him. “What?” “Did I have a scar on my face? One I don’t have now.” He said. “What does that matter?” “Just tell me.” He said. Coriola paused for a moment, then “No. You looked like you do now.” Silas held up his finger, leaned over and pulled his knife from the sheath on his boot. He took Coriola’s hand in his, and closed her fingers around the handle. She started to protest when he raised her hand so that the blade rested on his left cheek. “No!” She said. “What are you doing?” Silas smiled. “Trust me.” He said, then jerked her hand, pulling the blade down and digging into the side of his face leaving a long, deep cut. Coriola yelped and dropped the knife on the bed. Silas just held his scarf to the wound and smiled painfully again. “What did you do?” Coriola yelled at him. “Why did you do that?”“I wanted to teach you something.” Said Silas. “The first thing I learned about life: You are in charge. Nobody else. Not your parents, not your employers, not the visions you see or the prophecies you hear. You looked into the future, and you saw what it held. Now you have the power to change it. We can leave early for the Fjordes, we can change the plan, or we could just not go there at all. Nothing that you saw in there is going to happen to you. We won’t let it.” Coriola stared at him. “But you have to go there. You have to save them.”“And I will. Just not the same way. I’ll change the plan, come up with something.” He looked into the middle distance for a moment. “Something crazy.” Coriola lowered her head a little. “Well then, you’d better get going. You’ll need to get your people together and talk about how you are going to do it.” Silas put his finger under her chin and lifted her face to meet his gaze. “You’re still talking nonsense. I have absolutely no intention of leaving you alone here. I love you Coriola, and I don’t ever want to leave your side.” The embraced each other again, blood smearing their faces and necks. “I love you too, Silas.” Coriola whispered. ---(That’s enough mushiness. MATH TIME!!!) A day later, Silas opened the door to the “Idea Room.” Inside stood Pious Mengala, Barkus, the Station Council, and all of his inner circle of scientists and engineers who had helped him get the Hub functional. He stormed in unceremoniously carrying a large bucket and a tube of rolled up diagrams and maps. “Morning, gentlemen.” He said without pausing as he dropped the papers on the table and swung the bucket up, tossing water all over the large wall covered in scribbled formulae and equations, washing them all away. “New Plan.” The gathered technical experts looked at him agast. Mengala raised an eyebrow. Security Chief Jamery Corman and the civilian leaders all had vacant expressions like they didn’t know what he was talking about. Not that they could ever make sense of what Silas blathered about half the time. “Drop the multi-warp-core idea. It’s a dead end. We are going to need to do something else.” “What?” blustered one of the engineers. “We’ve been banging our heads on this for days. There’s no other way to warp-transit a planet than a networked core system.” “So we don’t warp transit the thing.” Said Silas. “What are you suggesting, we just get out and push?” “No.” Said Silas. “I’m suggesting we use the Hub.” The room practically exploded into discordant shouts of people yelling how it could never work, how it was brilliant, the kind of calculations it would take, and requests for clarification as to what “Use the Hub” actually meant. Silas held up his hand to silence them. “Look, I know. This is the first Idea me and QiManSho landed on for the problem, but we tossed it pretty much immediately. The math on SPC transportation is just too new and untested. There is a lot more study and proof done in the field of Warp travel, so we all decided it was the safer premise. Unfortunately, Warp-Transiting the planet is no longer an option.” “Why would that be?” asked Mengala. Silas hadn’t expected him to take part in the conversation until much later. “Certain information has come to light that indicates that it won’t work. We just don’t have the manpower or the hardware to pull it off before the Imperials hit the planet in force.” Silas knew by Mengala’s stare that he would have to level with him about Coriola’s vision, but that was unavoidable anyways. “So, it's back to an SPC jump. And before you ask: No, we are not going to build another SPC drive. That’s not possible right now. What we need to do is jump the planet and the Hub in tandem.” QiManSho piped up “But the Hub can’t carry a planet. Nothing can. It's too big. Not possible.” “Yes it is. It's just a question of Mass and Energy. When the Hub jumps, it sends out a kind of pulse, an envelopment field of space, and everything in that space gets quantum tunneled to the target location. That’s why we, the lights, the air, and the ships docked with us don’t all get left floating in space as the station disappears. So, hypothetically, increase the size of this envelope, and you can carry more with you when you jump.” “But the amount of power that would take-” Cut in another scientist “I was getting to that. As it is now, the Hub has 5 core power cells. Each time we jump, it takes one cell, and the central reactor recharges these cells at a rate of one cell per 5 days. That means that we can jump once a day like we have been doing ever since we got the system restored. The energy required for each jump is proportional to the mass that you are jumping. Now, the Hub is approximately the mass of a an M class planet, like the Dead Fjordes. So, hypothetically if we can daisy-chain two power cells together, it will give us the juice we need to jump us and the planet.” “But what about the gravitational forces of the two objects? We’re dealing with planets here, if we get close enough that it only takes two cells to complete the jump, the tidal forces will rip us both to shreds.” “That’s where it gets fun.” Said Silas grinning maniacally. “We have to do it all in a matter of milliseconds. 3 jumps, 4 cells.” Silas unrolled the diagrams and started pointing. “We plot all the jumps beforehand. First, we jump the Hub to the planet. We will have to get as close as mathematically possible, within centimeters of their atmosphere, maybe even inside it. Then, the second jump, with the planet in tow, to a suitable location. Somebody can volunteer to track down a spot in the hinterspaces. The third jump will be to separate the hub and the planet before we all die. These jumps will have to happen instants from each other, I’m thinking all of them done inside the .005 second mark.” Silas looked around the room. All the scientists were slumped in their seats with the weight of the prospect. “Cheer up.” He said. “This is the easiest possible version of this problem. If we had to jump any other planet, I wouldn’t even consider it. But the Dead Fjordes is a single rock, no moons, no sister planets, no solar system. That being said, we still can’t hope to do the math on this one ourselves. That’s why Mengala is here.” Sials turned to the old man. “I need you to work your magic. Pull some strings, see if you can track down a computer. Not just any computer, we need something special. Specs we are looking for are the ability to parallel process at least 5 seperate tracks of data at upwards of 15 yotta-FLOPS per track. We know the Elipsis had that kind of capability, but we don’t have a working example on the station now. The Eldar, maybe, but I doubt they’d be willing to let us borrow it. That leaves the Imperials. And trust me, if they have something like this, it would be criminal to let them keep wasting it in their vaults while we could be using it to save lives.” The assembled experts were beginning to nod. The prospect was moving from impossible to hypothetically feasible. Silas left them with a few delegated regions of focus and beckoned to Mengala. The two of them walked into the hall. “Alright. So I know I kinda put you on the spot in there, but thing is we do need you. If this kind of tech exists, you’re our best shot at finding it.” He said. Mengala nodded. “I understand. And yes, I will agree to help you. On one condition.” Silas braced himself “That would be?” “If we succeed, I want a cabin in the forests of the Dead Fjordes. Would be nice to retire there if I live that long.” Silas laughed out loud. “Old man, you pull this off, I’ll build you fracking a mansion.”“I’ll hold you to that.” said Mengala. “One more thing.” Silas checked his surroundings to see that they were alone. “Keep an ear out for any change in the enemy’s movements. I want to know if they respond to our change in plans.” Mengala raised his favorite eyebrow. “You believe we have a spy in our midst?” “I don’t know. Look, the reason I knew the old plan wouldn’t work...Coriola had another vision. Bad. Put her in a hospital bed for 2 days. She told me she saw the imps hit us in the middle of trying to warp transit the Fjordes. Way she described it, what the people said, how fast the Imps moved, too many things went wrong for it to have just been chance. Look, it might be nothing, but just...keep a few feelers out.” Mengala Looked at Silas intently. “How do you know I’m not the spy?” He said. “Because if you are, I’m already fracked nine ways to rimward and there’s nothing I can do about it.” Said Silas. “And how do you know She isn’t the one trying to deceive you?” Silas locked eyes with Mengala. “You didn’t see her pass out in a seizure with blood pouring out of her eyes, so I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that and not smack you in the mouth.” “Very well, Silas.” Said Mengala. “But remember, be careful in the future. You place too much trust in too many people far too easily.”“I’m not a spy Old Man. I’m not good at constant paranoia. Focus on dealing with the treats I can see, not inventing ones I can’t be sure are there. That’s the secret to not killing everything you meet. To not ending up like the Imperium.”
