Dead Star Dockyards

"Last response before I move on." Donovan was more than happy to continue this debate, however the less than charitable pair of eyes above and behind him were telling him to get a move on. "You, seventeenth . . . eighteenth row, orange panel."

"Throughout this session you have continued to suggest you possess a far greater ability than we do, and while I must admit that which has been displayed is impressive it strikes me as unfathomably arrogant to suppose that you, alone, can accomplish what we cannot with both our numbers and wealth of experience. I think it would be prudent for you to acknowledge that there is a process to everything, and that we cannot simply permit you to run rampant as you please! There are limits, both to our grace and our willingness to accept the absurd. I believe an apology would be in your best interest."

Squinting to get a better look at this firebrand, Donovan remarked that he looked quite young. This youth was relative to the age of the room, so he still appeared a good decade or two older than Donovan, but it did imply a level of competence or awareness not expected for his age. What Donovan could not determine based upon appearances was whether this push back was out of some form of hurt pride or a legitimate misunderstanding of the gap between them. Either way, the response would be the same.

"Have you . . . conducted resource gathering operations in space?"

"That does not sound like an apology."

"How about colonized another planet?"

"We have literature of such endeavors happening many, many millennia ago." Getting excited for a moment, Donovan rapidly recalled that Mars was a different beast to the apparently quite abundant inhabitable planets littering this cosmos.

". . . did you have to terraform it? Change it from an uninhabitable rock into a miserable but survivable environment?"

"Why would we need to do that?"

"Right, of course, why would you with so many good candidates already existing?" The question was rhetorical, which thankfully translated as there was no retort. "What about asteroids? Have you ever tried to harvest one for resources? Or maybe make a base in one?"

"Any asteroid large enough to survive entry is also large enough to cause serious damage upon landing, they are not worth the effort. And to suggest building a base on one is similarly preposterous."

"Alright, what about your moon? Any moon? Has anybody landed on one and lived to tell the tale?"

"Nobody can survive beyond the bounds of a galley's bubble."

"In that case let's just say the rest of my extra-terrestrial test cases are fails. We'll save a bit of time that way . . ." Racking his brains in a hurry, Donovan struggled to determine what sort of achievements they might have touched upon. "When did you create a plane capable of breaking the sound barrier?"

"The . . . what?"

"Have you ever designed a plane that can travel faster than the speed of sound?" Possible miscommunication, remedied with a simple explanation.

"N-not to my knowledge."

"Okay. Has anyone ever traveled to the bottom of one of your oceans and returned? And I'm not talking about some shallow tour about some reef or shipwreck, I mean deep, down into the trenches between continental plates. Do you know what, if anything, lives down there?"

"I . . ."

"Let's go medical then. How frequent are organ transplants? You know, heart, liver, lung, kidney? Do you take healthy organs from donors or the recently deceased and use them to save lives?" Donovan scanned the room, begging for someone to answer. Not with an admission that they did not know, but for confirmation as to whether they had or had not. "Because, well, I've not had the opportunity to delve into the doctrines of your faith, but on the surface it seems like something you'd develop naturally. So if you haven't done it yet . . ."

". . ."

"Nothing?"

He was met with silence, something which did distress him slightly. This was intended to be a tactic allowing him to find common ground, some monumental shared achievement upon which he could illustrate the gap that separated them. Given the level of development he'd witnessed thus far, going back any further might threaten a delve into the mundane rather than magnificent, and it wasn't like he could draw parallels with the eradication of various diseases either - those were supposedly quite easy to handle on your own with even a basic grasp on split. The more he looked around at faces displaying uncertainty, the more he felt as though this attempt at connection was instead becoming condescension.

Seeing the countenances of the assembly gradually turn to shame, Donovan couldn't help but imagine that route was the only way to continue. It'd probably leave everyone in a sourer state than Diana would like, however he'd been provided an opening to hammer his proposition through. The only problem was that he couldn't think of a subject of 'Terran Excellence' simple or close enough to their current level of achievement to be impressive but 'arcane' enough that the people present would be aware of just how little they knew.

Well, he supposed there might be . . . one . . . topic, something he overheard very briefly after Cayzi's MRI. At the time Donovan took it as nothing more than an off handed remark from Trebar intended to scare the boy, a bit of friendly teasing, however it suggested a weakness - namely an incomplete set of information.

"What about the atom?" Donovan knew exposing the 'possibility' of atomic theory could prove to be a mistake in the long term, however such drawbacks were unclear given the absurd divide in capability and observed character of the Holifanians. What use could they have for an atomic bomb? "Have you managed to split the atom?"

"We are aware that atoms may indeed discharge matter nucleus should they be unstable, thus transmuting themselves into a more stable state, however this process is thought to be impossible to initiate by human hands." Judging by the voice's position, elevated somewhere to his rear, Archbishop Adiren must have been speaking. Given his position at the head of the Council of Resource Management, this much knowledge should have been expected of him. "If my understanding is correct, the last test to confirm this theory was performed some twenty to thirty thousand years after integration into the interstellar community. The failure of the experiment and verification of replacement rates for various naturally occurring fuel reserves confirmed that we were not in need of the energy such a technology would provide. At present, the only use for the field as been to examine the state of one's skeleton without incisions, however this comes with an insignificant but appreciable risk of developing a unique and uncurable variation of Split Decay."

"1938." He'd keep the specifics to a minimum, but give enough context to make the achievement clear. "That was the year an atom, Uranium, was intentionally split for the first time. Four years later, the end of 1942, a structure that permitted self-sustaining reaction was constructed and tested successfully. Two and a half years after that, 1945, we figured out how to make such a device small and light enough to fit in a bomber while powerful enough to level a city, tested it once in the middle of a desert, then made two more, with different designs mind you, shipped them halfway across the planet, and dropped them - all within a month."

He paused to let the implications set in; the Earth was not politically unified at that point in time.

"Now it took a bit of time to figure out how to make the energy released from the reaction commercially viable, the reactors only started to come online in the 1950's, and there were a few disasters over the years relating to poor design or management, but they were far more effective than coal. Around the same time, we managed to make a weapon that fused atoms instead of separating them, though I should clarify the first instance of atomic fusion was performed a  few years before fission, around 1935 I believe. Lighter atoms were so much more difficult to work with, in fact, that a reaction suggesting a commercially viable design could be possible didn't occur until damn near a century after it was first discovered. And wasn't put into practice until much later, but I can assure you such developments did occur.

So did everything else I mentioned, actually. The first successful organ transplants started happening in the 1950's. The dive to the deepest point on our planet was achieved in 1960 - eleven kilometers beneath the surface. The sound barrier was broken in 1947. The first spacewalk was in 1965, moonwalk in 1969, and semi-permanent orbital station was 1971. I'd elaborate with later milestones, but at this point I'm confident none of you would understand the significance!"

He stood with hands out to the sides, challenging them to respond. None answered.

"My people, the brightest there were, had ten years to figure out how to let just two of us survive, to figure out not just a method of producing usable energy but also propulsion from 'Split', something they could not sense much less measure, and would proactively kill them if ever the concentration got too high. And that ship out there? The Pegasus? That was designed a built in less than six months, the Trawlers taking even less time. In your current state I think you'd be hard-pressed to design something similar in a decade, much less construct it.

We've been faced with problems you can't fathom and solved them with far fewer resources than you possess now, so don't start lecturing me on arrogance."

The challenger returned to his seat, if not satisfied with the retort then certainly shamed. None of the jovial if contentious energy remained.

"And I don't think what you're seeing is a variant of Split Decay, Adiren." A small olive branch would hopefully breathe some live back into  the room. "I won't be able to do anything about it until we have proper facilities, but if it's what I suspect it is then there are treatments, even if complete cures are impossible in some scenarios."

". . . is that so?"

"If the dose is low, it's almost certainly cancer - likely leukemia. Granted it could be the other side effect if the dosages used are too high, but if it's just an x-ray then I don't think you'll have that problem."

"I see. We'll uh, have to speak about it later then. Perhaps once you are prepared to handle such a request."

"Of course. Now I'd like to make inform everyone of some of my plans in the shorter term such that they may prepare to handle related requests."

"Please, go ahead."

"Winter." Donovan turned back to face his audience. "We aren't certain at this point, however there is an uncomfortably high chance that winter will put a stop to colony expansion while those on the ground struggle with rain, snow, and shorter daylight hours. In that scenario I am going to request a temporary relief zone be established on the planet with the shortest time to Nekh. I'm not sure how I want to organize resupply just yet, if foodstuffs can be stocked and resupplied on Nectar then I would like to utilize the capacity of the Trawlers to transport as many dense items as possible, however I can be certain these zones shouldn't be needed for more than ten or fifteen years. Questions?"

A few seconds passed before someone built up the courage to raise a blue paddle.

"This bishop would like to know the scale necessary, and if we should make multiple."

"Uh, by that point in time we'd need to be able to handle a few hundred thousand people every month, perhaps closer to fifty thousand per week. Obviously I'd like to keep them centralized, but if an influx of that magnitude can't be managed in a relatively small locale then there wouldn't be much choice in the matter." He stood in silence while doing a bit of mental math. "Granted, we would only be bringing people to this zone over the course of winter, so expect a maximum of a million, million and a half."

"And will we need similar zones for subsequent winters?"

"I won't discount the possibility, but ideally our construction sector will outstrip the rate at which people are brought in sometime in the next six months."

"What of food?" This man hadn't raised his paddle, inviting a few sour expressions from those nearby. "Will you have enough food to last the winter?"

"Fortunately we should have enough time to get a couple of harvests in before frost starts to become an issue, so most of the galleys have been instructed to carry clothing and blankets as their excesses in preparation. Should we need more food for any reason, one of the Trawlers will be retooled and reassigned for that purpose. Trawler number 15 has been earmarked as a cargo hauler rather than a passenger vessel as that's when we expect our orbital foundry to exceed the input rate of the galleys."

"How do you plan to distribute these sites between planets? We need to spread opportunities for salvations across our territory." Another chose not to raise their paddle.

"Wha-, um, are you fucking serious?" Donovan really tried to stop himself from using coarse language, but the patent absurdity knocked him from one inappropriate phrase into the path of another. "Which is more important, the lives being saved or the equalization of opportunity? Get a grip."

"I, uh, of course, of course." Cowed, the man sat back down. The twin mistakes of failing to follow parliamentary etiquette and make a proper judgement on the order of priority between objectives earning him the unmasked scorn from his neighbors.

"Anyways, the Nekh have a few particularities related to how their women select a partner, so I would suggest their residential areas not be integrated into an already existing community. I think it would probably be fine if a few matches were made, but as it stands we face something of a matchmaking crisis. I see no need to exacerbate the issue into the realm of deciding where a couple should live."

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