Chronicles
In Loving Memory of Shailene...
This continues the story of Perdition’s Reach....
1019 AE. One thousand and nineteen years after Earth burned. The sky above Erdos had always been a promise. Tonight it was a graveyard. Debris from the shattered orbital ring streaked across the dark like dying embers thousands of tons of steel and glass and human hope reduced to shrapnel. Ships that tried to break through simply vanished, chewed apart by the invisible teeth of Kessler syndrome. No one was getting in. No one was getting out. Erdos was a prison planet now, and its captors were already walking its streets. In the capital of Pitt Novus, the lights had gone out. Not from the blackout those were deliberate. Someone had killed the power grid with surgical precision.. Alysia stood on the Conestoga with a heavy heart. Somehow, she felt responsible for what is unfolding. Perhaps, she was beginning to feel guilty for the sky falling.
But, the story didn't begin there, it began a thousand years earlier, a million survivors had crawled out of Earth’s ashes and planted their feet on Erdos, a world 3 percent larger than Earth. They had nearly destroyed themselves again within a generation war. Famine, the usual human appetites, and a nearly 20 year cataclysm that spiraled into chaos, and torpor dominated by the vengeful rule of one tragic villain, Astrid Bush. Then came the heroes, the Ruthanites led by Elijah and Ruth Miller, brother and sister, destined to save Erdos and humanity from the brink of annihilation. The uneasy alliance with others, the fragile peace that ensued, turned the landscape of humanity into what blossomed at the beginning of Perdition's Reach. Centuries of slow rebuilding. Then the leap to the stars.
Followers of Astrid Bush's Crimson empire found Mercia waiting in the 61 Cygni system: a blue-white twin of lost Earth, almost indecently perfect. Same gravity. Same breathable air. Same hunger for dominance. The Mercians called it destiny. The Erdians called it a backwater. Because something had changed on the larger world of Erdos. Dr. Larry Heidelberger had noticed it first. Stronger gravity. Slightly different atmospheric chemistry. A quiet evolutionary pressure no one had asked for. People born on Erdos were… *more*. A little stronger. A little sharper. A little harder to kill. His paper “The Erdos Condition” should have been academic trivia. Instead it became a death sentence.
The Order of the Purified Blades made sure of that. They had waited centuries in the shadows of Mercia, cloaked in the crimson robes of a dead empire. Disciples of Astrid Bush, the martyr. John Forbath, the ascended. Peter Voronkov, the architect. To them, Erdos was chaos incarnate too many voices, too many bloodlines, too much *difference*. And now its people were becoming something the Blades could never allow. They called it impurity. When Alysia came along, they saw not an impure woman, but the key to Mercian dominance. Her blood, was the key to Mercia's, let alone Kolya's ambition. Alysia had grown up believing she was ordinary. Then she outran every record, lifted what no girl her age should lift, and healed from wounds that should have killed her. The Mercian agents embedded in Erdos sleeping cicadas for two decades woke the moment her bloodwork reached the wrong desk. They struck without warning. Power stations. Comm arrays. The orbital ring itself. In a single night they turned the Republic of Erdos into a caged animal.
Now only scattered strongholds remained: the moon colonies of Castor and Pollux, the lonely rock of Prometheon, the twin Lagrange stations. Twelve battlecruisers and thirty-eight gunships against a Mercian fleet that was already twice their size and growing. On the bridge of the battered freighter *Conestoga*, a man named Fred stared at the glowing wreck of the orbital ring and felt the weight of every soul still breathing on Erdos. He had one job: cut a hole through the debris before the Blades finished what they started. One impossible job. But to do it, he had to command one of the remaining Battlecruisers still operational in Erdos Orbit. The E.R.S. Mammoth.
For Alysia, sitting in the mess hall with her friends and warrior companions, would call the Conestoga home. Victor Zrille, her capable commander watched her closely, seeing her potential, and possibly, his successor. Kevin, her lover, clung on desperately to hope that he would redeem himself in the eyes of the Iron Guard, and particularly Fred. New crew mates were joined with them, and Alysia, didn't know them, she didn't trust them, and she at first, would not open up to them. She sat with her click group for now. But this storm, this war, will bring them all closer together, or further apart, depending on the wills of each soldier on that ship. For Elena, she despised Kevin, she hoped he wouldn't get in the way of her feelings for Alysia, whether platonic or otherwise. Alysia became distrustful of Elena because of this, but, like a friend, she took Elena's warnings to heart, keeping her heart guarded against any kind of betrayal. It was a matter of time, before that guard, would be put to the test.
Below, in the dark streets of Pitt Novus, Oksana Velikova, in pursuit of Mercian sleeper agents pressed her back to a wall and listened to boots moving in perfect, predatory rhythm. She didn’t know the Blades had names of ever Erdos Security Administration agent. She didn’t know they were hunting her, Katya, and all the other agents. She knew she couldn't do it alone. She needed help, and soon, for Mercia's grip was tightening like a noose, and it was very, very angry. While the sky kept falling. For Lu'an and her presidency, it was her greatest challenge yet, her eleventh hour. History would be made this coming year, and it would determine, if her republic stands against the storm, or falls into the abyss...
