[WMCoolmon]

The Confederation was no more.
   The war had been hard and long, but in the end, they had lost. Twelve battlegroups, wiped out in the initial attack, the remaining forces rallying together to form a renewed defense. It, too, failed, and seven more battlegroups were lost the day they engaged the enemy.
   Then they started running. The coldly numerical superiority had made it a necessity, their tactics harrying and wearing down Confederate forces before they were shortly obliterated by a fleet three times their size. No one had even bothered to attempt any sort of official diplomatic communications, the attack had been so swift, so fierce.
   And here they were, the last of the fleet, perhaps of humanity, standing before the great subspace portal of the Ancients. Likely the last stand any vessel bearing the Confederacy's logo would ever make against any force, whether it Terran, Vasudan, Shivan...or Natural. For that was what they were going to do here - launch a war against nature.
   The captain turned away from the window, and his thoughts.
   "Status?"
   "The last fighter reports ready sir. The pilot...reports his thanks, sir." The sensors/communications officer was nearly tearing up...or at least he would have been if he had been human. Vasudans rarely, if ever, lost any liquid in such an emotional fashion.
   Captain Adamant turned back towards the viewscreen. The irony of his name, he thought, would haunt him if he survived. But he would not. No one would, if they failed, and only one would, if they succeeded.
   "Are the jump drives ready?"
   "Ready and hot, sir!" The ops officer replied with a little too much enthusiasm. Undoubtedly a new recruit. The captain had never heard of him before, had only assigned him Ops when his previous officer had died in the last attack.
   But the captain knew the truth. The man's enthusiasm was not enthusiasm but fear, of a man about to die.
   The captain walked over to the Ops console. The young man looked up, questioning.
   "Sir?"
   They shared a look for a moment. The captain watched as recognition swelled behind the man's eyes. Not so naive after all, he realized. As the man quietly relinquished his post, the man replied,"Thank you sir." He would not be responsible for the death of millions on this day.
   Now the captain was back in the Ops chair, where he had started his career. A fitting place to end it as well. Memories flooded back-but no, he had no time to allow himself the luxury of letting his life flash before his eyes.
   He flipped the switch. The engines warmed up. If everything went as planned....but no. It couldn't...and it wouldn't. This was merely a last-ditch desperate act to survive, a means of instilling hope where there otherwise would have been none.
   As the Destroyers had wiped out world after world, the Confederacy had soon realized it had no choice. There could not be any victory, nor could it flee. The Shivans had superior knowledge of every aspect of jump nodes - their locations, how to use them, and how to close them. And so the human fleet had almost found itself trapped, until it had discovered the Great Portal.
   For six months they were safe on the other side, one ship having detonated itself inside of subspace to stop the Shivans. There had been no time to evacuate it - the entire crew and passengers died in a horrific slaughter that had bought the survivors nothing but time.
   In desperation, scientists had seized upon the only thread of hope left - time travel. Perhaps they could prevent it, fortify the points of invasion, destroy the jump nodes. They could help the GTVA in ways never thought possible.
   But then the shivans came.
   The scientists, testing a new prototype, had been the first targets of the Shivans. The remnants of the fleet had managed to fight off the Shivans, but it was too late. The best, brightest, and only scientists who had any advanced knowledge of the time travel theory had died in the attack, grouped together on a single Faustus cruiser.
   Crews had sifted through the wreckage and found the prototype miraculously unharmed. They had installed it on the captain's ship, before the two groups split up; the Endeavour had gone one way, the rest had gone another.
   Now the captain faced the legacy of that decision. And the engines powered up, and the uncertain technology began to work. And so the black hole began to form in the middle of the portal. This was the easy part, he understood. The hard part was surviving the entry into the Black Hole. Every fighter that had traveled with the ship was now permanently welded to the Endeavour, with full power to their shields. The Endeavour's own shields were at full strength, and spare reator casing had been used to make what was now known as the capsule.
   As the great endeavour slowly moved off, there was not a word from the fighter pilots, entombed as they were in their fighters. They all hoped that the Capsule would survive, and make it through, and that they wouldn't die in vain.
   On board the bridge it was another story.
   The entire bridge was shaking now, and the ship was making a thunderous rattle. The two natural forces at work interacted with another to actually shake the multi-thousand-ton ship. "Divert coolant from the reactor to the subspace field generators!" cried Adamant.
   "As you say, sir." the engineering officer's translator replied. Tral'koth could literally feel the intense radiation from the whole as it sucked up the Knossos device straight ahead. He only hoped that the Device would function correctly. No one understood how it worked. All they knew was that it was to interact with the gravitational particles of the black whole. This would propel the ship the ship to super-light speeds, sending the ship - and what was left of its occupants - back into time. Or so it was foretold.
   The Captain wondered if diverting the coolant was the right thing to do. Was the device supposed to get hot? He realized then that it was actually melting through the bulkheads. Probably not that hot, he thought grimly. The power connections wouldn't last much longer. Fortunately, they were near the black hole. Already he could feel the tips of his fingers straining outward, the artificial gravity unable to compensate.
    At the helm, the officer struggled with the throttle. The thing had a mind of its own, it seemed. "captain, sir," he cried. "I don't think I can hold it!"
   "Keep it steady, son!" Adamant furiously tried to divert more cooling, keep the field generators running for the estimated fifteen seconds until the cutoff point was reached. He pened the blast doors in the area...no change. He shut down the lights, life support...the rate of heat increase didn't even slow. In three seconds it would be over, seven seconds short of the neceesary point. He hesitated a moment before taking his last chance - and blew the airlocks, killing the crewmen in engineering. The rate of heat increase slowed.
   And now there was nothing left to wait, and embrace the black hole, and hope the capsule made it. There, the best pilot of the Confederacy lay, inside the most advanced fighter ever constructed by Confederacy forces.
   Now it was the end, the captain knew His arms had stretched to six times their normal size, and the front of the bridge seemed to be three kilometers distant. The innertial dampner was selectively failing, and according to the ops display, it seemed that so had the majority of the shields. All selectively failing, falling back towards the capsule. The captain smiled as the Endeavour became a space-time anomaly, taking solace in the fact that at least they had escaped the Shivans. The universe had mercy on him, ripping him apart before the sensation of pain could reach his brain.

   Over four hundred years in the past, twenty-eight years after the end of the First Shivan War, the sole survivor of an unrecorded, disastrous, mining expedition entered the GTVA Flight Academy. Although his records checked out, neither his homeworld nor the method of his arrival on Beta Aquilae was ever determined...

[redsniper]

coooool

[neo_hermes]

Agreed I wonder what will happen next

[Lightspeed]

Fan fiction forums?

Spoiler:

Seriously, with the amount of fan fiction we have had lately, that would be a cool thing to have.

[Singh]

very, very cool indeed.

Wonder what happened to that one pilot tho :/

[pyro-manic]

Superb. Will we be seeing any more, or is this just a concept?

[WMCoolmon]

Not exactly either...I just started with the first line and went from there.

I wrote a little bit more, but I'm not sure that I'm ready for that sort of commitment...

[WMCoolmon]

Eons away, space thundered. Had the event occured inside a planet's atmosphere, it truly would have been heard 'round the world. As it was, the only sign of anything was a bright flash, and the spewing of debris from a white hole. Girders and equipment, melted down from their journey through space-time, drifted forward into the Altair system.
   In the center of it was a large, round capsule. For a ten-count, it drifted as dead as the rest of the wreckage. Then, two flashes of light blasted forth. For a moment, nothing more happened. Then, the lights reappeared, tracing twin lines around the sphere.    Another blast of light, and the two sides drifted apart, and a fighter slid out to one side, before blasting its way forward and away from the former location of the white hole. It curved away, heading towards the only planet of significance in the system.

   Just minutes away from making planetfall, a freighter and two fighters calmly headed towards that same planet. None of them saw the approaching blip on radar, for there was none.

   Seconds away from the small convoy, the fighter's pilot ID'd the vessels. The targetting computer didn't identify them, but the pilot did. The toys and games which had made him earn the nickname of vrok-tah had been miniature models of these spacecraft. Vrok-tah referred to an individual so focused on life in the past that their life in the future meant nothing - in ancient times, this had often resulted in their being left behind for the good of the rest of a tribe.
   Now that status had become an advantage to the pilot. The large vessel was a Triton, and the two fighters accompanying it were known as Perseus fighters. None posed any thread. The pilot unconsciously executed a roll, bringing his craft 'upright' to the vessels, and opened fire. The twin beams which had just minutes ago served to free the fighter from its iron womb now became instruments of death, slicing the freighter in half. They met virtually no resistance from the hull, and in seconds the atmosphere had spewed out of the freighter, along with the crew.
   The two Perseus fighters reacted instantly, going evasive as the Triton exploded. Miraculously, they executed a simultaneous maneuver - both banked outward, away from the freighter, curving around to fly behind the unknown fighter. Neither was able to get any sort of lock. Alarmed and rattled, one of the pilots loosed a flight of Hornet missiles anyway; the point-defense lasers on the rear of the new fighter vaporized them unneccessarily; the shields would have easily handled them. Then it reached out to touch the starboard fighter which had fired the missiles, blowing it to smithereens in a second.
   The other fighter was luckier; rather than firing missiles, its pilot had immediately powered up his subspace radio, loosing a distress call. He managed to juke around for a few seconds before the second laser locked on and destroyed his craft.
   The wreckage of both fighters drifted towards the planet as the unknown fighter turned and left the area.
   Meanwhile, the pilot on board that craft swore. The mining expedition he'd just wiped out had to have been stopped, but that was little solace. The instant they had touched down, they would've realized what he knew. Even so, he regretted killing the fifteen pilots and civillians on those ships to save the millions they would have unwittingly killed.

   Light-years away in the Polaris system, a recently-appointed Admiral received a communique about a mysterious fighter in the Altair system. After some thought, he sent an aging Fenris to the area with fighter escort to investigate. With the GTC Trinity dispatched, the Admiral turned his mind back to the day-to-day operations.

[pyro-manic]

Again, great stuff.

[neo_hermes]

Cool

[NGTM-1R]

I need to finish my own fanfiction...

Two thumbs up.

[dan87uk]

sweet, carry it on if you can

[WMCoolmon]

The next chapter:

   The sun had risen, the day was bright, and the sky was blue. A couple of birds flitted through the air, cheerfully chirping in the warm Aldebaran day, before coming to rest on one of the many branches of the imported pine trees. But their cheerfulness soon evaporated...they were the first ones to notice something was wrong. A sound came from the patch of air in front of them, growing louder. They scampered out of the way of the invisible flying thing just before it brushed against their branch. As it the noise grew closer to the ground, the air seemed to shiver, blur, and then resolve itself into a large, black, thing, not unlike the ones Humans used to fly around.
   Inside his ship, the beleagured pilot cracked the canopy, hoisted himself out of it, tossing his helmet back into the cockpit in one fluid motion. He nearly collapsed for a moment, before getting used to gravity - after spending 15 hours in a cockpit, weightless, the feeling of earth - or, in this case, Aldebaran, felt good. The planet itself had a name, but it was a Vasudan word unpronouncable to all but the most gifted Terrans. If it still had the name, this early in history, the pilot thought. The fact that he'd survived was incredible, and even more than that, he'd managed to make it back within days of when he'd meant to arrive. Odd that he'd ended up IN Altair, though...everything he'd known about the time-travel project had suggested that one could only travel in time, not space. And the Captain had made it clear to him that even that was a long shot...no one had really known how to use the special jump cores that had come out of the project.
   The Captain. Who was now...dead? Not born yet? It was then that everything hit him at once. The human race...the world...even the universe that he knew, was now gone. Forever. Somehow he'd managed to brush the grief aside, but now he realized that everyone on board the Endeavour had died and given up their lives, and now - without the Second Shivan War, or the devastation from it, many of them would never even exist. The husbands, the wives, even the children who'd had the misfortune of surviving had also given up their lives, to lead the Shivans away from the Endeavour. They'd given up their lives, and all he'd probably done was stall the Shivan invasion for a decade or two.
   As the pilot slumped back against his cooling fighter, the birds and other animals quietly started to return.

   In orbit around Altair, in a room dark except for the dark blue of computer screens, the sensor officer of the GTC Trinity pointed to one of his displays. "Here, sir," he said. He pointed to the screen, while holding the set of headphones up to his right ear. A slight ping- "There it is again," he said, as a yellow point dimly flashed on the display.
   Captain Arthur Roemig leaned in for a closer look. "You're sure it's not human in origin?" he asked
   "Positive, sir. The only reason we're picking it up is because of the new sensor enhancements." The officer referred to the overhaul Fenris cruisers' sensors had undergone, in an attempt to turn them into a cheap AWACS. The budget cuts of late had forced the GTVA into turning an eye back towards refitting existing cruisers, rather than building new ones. "If I had to make a guess, sir," the sensor operator continued, "I'd say it was Ancient."
   Roemig's eyebrows lifted at that. They did have a landing craft, originally to have been used to rescue any survivors trapped on the planet's surface. Now, after a brief scan of the area, it was obvious there were none. And now that they were here...why not? He turned to his XO.
   "Get a team ready. I want our best technical specialists, and anyone with archaeological experience on it. Make sure at least one of them has demolitions training; we may need to clear out some nasty surprises."
   The XO looked up from his pad. "You'll be going, sir?"
   Roemig smiled tightly.
   "Of course."

[NGTM-1R]

Hmm...you know, I had a campaign idea about stopping the Trinity once...

Two thumbs up. Very good work.

[dan87uk]

im still reading

[WMCoolmon]

Aldebaran

   The pilot finished entering the last of the ships into the targeting computer's recognition program. There. Hopefully, now, it'd recognize most GTVA vessels. He could've done a better job with a neural interface - but then, no one had thought to pack one along. And he didn't know if a compatible one even existed now, or if obtaining one would raise a few eyebrows. He leaned back and sighed; all he had was what he remembered from his history classes, and he'd never really paid attention to the political aspects of them anyway. Known human history was long - too long, he thought, for anyone to know all the important events. All he had as far as that went was cobbled together from a dozen children's encyclopedias and assorted articles from more mainstream ones, as file formats would allow. Most of that had to be extracted from the cache files, as most of the mainframes had been permanently wiped out with Earth.
   The pilot shook his head, trying to focus on the pitter-patter of rain on the half-open canopy to distract himself. It didn't work. He sighed, locked down the computer, and hoisted himself out of the cockpit once more.
   As his boots hit the ground, the soft scrunch of the grass being crushed caused a couple of squirrels to run away. He watched them quickly disappear into the foilage. He stared at where they had disappeared for a long time, before an echoing bird call snapped him out of his reverie. It was the silence, he decided, that was getting to him. He jumped back up onto the ship, and rustled around in the cockpit for a survival pack. He pushed aside two KEGs. Grimly, he chuckled to himself as he realized that two kegs probably would've been more useful. KEGs hadn't been invented yet. Well...he could always say they were a custom gun. They still had those, then, didn't they? He tried to tuck one into the trousers of his supposedly-GTVA-style clothing - but failed miserably. The pistol wasn't meant to be concealed, nor the pants designed to conceal.
   Feeling somewhat more at ease, he went through the survival backpack. At least that was one thing that hadn't really changed. He didn't know what exactly was in it, but it turned out to contain all the essentials - food, water, knives, a med kit, even an antique ballistic pistol the flight crew'd managed to scrounge up from somewhere. He put that back in the pack; he didn't have any sort of currency, which he realized with some alarm, and it probably was loud and not all that effective anyway.
   That done, he walked back over to the fighter and thought for a moment. What should he do with it? It was obvious it was far beyond anything the GTVA had. He could fly it to the nearest military base, and offer it to be reverse-engineered - but no, he decided. The pilot from the future didn't know who he could trust. Any individual could wreck destruction with the fighter. And, he realized as he looked at the survival pack, he'd already realized what he was going to do. He found a non-powered camo net (thankfully someone had remembered to pack it) and spread it over the craft. It took a few minutes to tie it down, but when he was done, he was confident it could remain undisturbed there for years.
   Next on the list was to get to the nearest settlement. A quick check of his wristcomp (He'd have to hide that somehow) revealed he'd have to head Fahljud - North, he corrected himself.
   As he tromped through the underbrush, he reflected on what he knew of Aldebaran. It'd originally been a backwater world, until the first war with the Shivans; then, refugees had fled to it until they were cut off by the shivan fleet. When the GTVA (Or was it just the GTA, then?) managed to destroy the Lucifer. There'd been some aborted attempts to terraform the planet to be earth-like, to attract more population, but eventually most of the refugees headed towards the big, core systems of the GTVA to find jobs. Those that were left were mostly owners of big corporations, or retired workers with enough funds to live out the rest of their years comfortably. It'd be hard to find a job here, but it wasn't guarded as well as the core systems.
   There was a rustling, and in one fluid motion the pilot turned, armed, and aimed his pistol. There weren't anymore sounds; the lazy chirping of birds, and now the distant rush of water. But the pilot put his gun away uneasily.
   He still felt like he was being watched.

[dan87uk]

this is good

[neo_hermes]

i need more

[WMCoolmon]

Things get a little confusing at this point. But they also, IMHO, start to get a lot better.
Interlude - Altair

   The landing craft Darwin's Folly touched down in the dense forests of Altair, over five hundred miles off its designated landing area.
   But it wasn't trying to land at its designated landing area.
   Halfway down, the craft had been 'pinged' by a remarkably strong radar pulse. With a little help from the Pocketseeker in orbit, and the two Perseus fighters flying escort, they'd been able to narrow down the location of the pulse to a large tower in the forest. The strangest thing was, none of the original survey maps seemed to indicate it - and they were VERY thorough, as the Parliamentary of Vasuda had directed a huge expedition to the planet after the Shivan presence in the area had been 'sanitized'.
   With this mystery, the crew of the newly-purchased Folly had decided to land near the tower, rather than check the original landing site for easily-mined mineral deposits.
   Had the team been composed solely of miners, the ship never would have diverted course. But it didn't; there was a paper-pusher type aboard, with an archaeologist, in addition to the pilot and two mining engineers. It was a tight fit, but they managed to reach the tower without much incident. There was a sense of excitement aboard - no one had ever seen an Ancient before. Well - at least one person was excited.
   "The Ancients never left any, uhm, images behind. They were more concerned about their legacy. Wouldn't you not worry about, uhm, taking a picture for yourself while your whole species was dying?" The archaeologist asked.
   "'Spose I might." One of the engineers sitting across from the archaeologist, Frank, said. He let the archaeologist get as far as opening his mouth before he cut him off. "But not really, no, I guess. But who cares about a bunch of dead bodies? I mean, they're just like any ol' body, right? And they're all dead too. Not like one of them buggers is gonna come back tah life and haunt us."
   "Well, that's just the thing. We don't know if they CAN." The archaeologist spread his hands. "I mean, the Ancient Egyptians mummified humans in ways that still would keep them preserved until today, without any technological intervention. Maybe the Ancients were able to do that, but without dying. But just think of what it'd tell us about them - we don't know if they're similar to Humans, shivans, or Vasudans - although of course they're probably similar to Vasudans, since many ancient scrolls make reference to them, we think." The other engineer, Matt, sighed, but the archaeologist didn't seem to notice. "Maybe they were incorporated into some religion on earth, and shaped human development. For all we know, the entire course of human history could have been an attemp to engineer a utopian society by the ancients!"
   The rest of the passengers were silent, even Joe, who had been sent along to help assess the profitability of the region. How, the rest weren't sure, some red-tape nonsense no doubt. He had no doubt he was necessary, though, and never seemed to cease to remind everyone of either that, or just his presence. His quiet now was even sufficient enough to subdue the Byron.
   "Well," Byron admitted, "maybe that is a little improbable. But we don't know. That's what's so important."
   There was a sudden thump. "We're here," Jezebel informed them unneccessarily over the intercom. "I hope you boys remembered to stay buckled up, like I told y'all."
   Frank muttered, but the comm wasn't two-way, and Jezebel had closed and locked the door a little after Joe had gotten on board.
   "Okay, listen up," Joe said, as everyone - including Byron - did anything but that. "We're not staying here for very long, and the company's not going to pay you for the time expended here. You'll be lucky if the fuel doesn't come out of your paychecks." Joe was the only one who'd voted against going, so undoubtedly he felt completely unresponsible. In fact, Matt and Frank had voted to come just to annoy him. "Everybody keep in mind that this is fact-finding only. We're not taking anything back with us. We still have to get those samples from the site. If you find any good data, tell me, and I'll make sure that it's stored safely. Remember that by GTVA regulations, anything found is the property of the company before it's yours." He pointedly glanced at Byron - who knew enough to know the Freedom of Archaeology Information Agreement declared anything regarding the Ancients as free information, and glared back.
   "So that if anything happens to anyone, I want all of you-"
   "Holy ****!" Matt interrupted. "I thought we landed in a forest."
   "We did land in a forest, Honeybuns." Jezebel walked out of the cockpit and pushed past everyone to get to the rear airlock. Matt had just opened it, and was staring at the large clearing beyond. "We just landed in the middle of the clearing of a forest, that's all." Although short at 5'9", Jezebel's fiery hair, southern accent, and air of unrestrained self-sufficiency demanded attention. Though the southern accent wasn't genuine, it was especially popular among those born on earth. Jezebel had been whisked away by her parents just before the nodes had been collapsed by the shivans.
   "Huh." Matt grunted, as he moved out of the landing craft. "Well, let's get going." Privately, he was beginning to regret voting to come. It'd seemed fun at the time, but pissing off Joe maybe wasn't the greatest thing to do. He did have some pull with the management, but Matt doubted he'd have the balls to actually fire one of them.
   Joe and Byron followed him towards the tower, Joe lugging a briefcase, Byron with a miniature archaeologists' backpack. Frank and Jezebel paused as they lit cigarettes, then brought up the rear, talking and laughing quietly.

[dan87uk]

lol i like the build up here