Conference room, Research Base New New South Wales’ main operations tower.Commander Takahashi and Major Petrovich were seated along one side of a long conference table that ran down the center of a fairly large, though still barebones, room. At the head of the conference table were the holographic projections of Fleet Admiral Bianchi of the TFS Proxima and Captain Marinakis of the TES Farsight. Across from the commander and major were Dr. Standing Bear, head of research for Task Force Proxima; Lieutenant Commander Kuznetsov, captain of the TFS Revanche; and a representative of the meteorologists who had been assigned to the task force.“Good afternoon, Commander Takahashi,” Captain Marinakis said. “I wish I had better news for you, but you’ve got a potential disaster coming up on you in a few hours. It seems that a supercell formed off the coast of New Australia and is headed your way. Estimates currently have the center of the storm passing a few kilometers off of your....”He conti
(Ed note: Red Rover is a playground game that Gen X kids used to play. It isn’t played now, because, like most Gen X games, it was incredibly violent and kids would sometimes get serious injuries (like concussions, teeth being knocked out, the occasional broken bone, and bloody abrasions) and nowadays people prefer their children to come home from school uninjured. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Rover )An hour ago.A team of seismologists had taken a rover filled with measuring equipment to install on what they believed was a fault line just off the coast of New Australia. It was considered research-worthy, as they had never seen a fault line run perpendicular from ocean to land before. Parallel, sure; there were plenty of fault lines on Earth that came within proverbial spitting distance of coastlines. The San Andreas fault in California, the Cascadia Subduction Zone in the American Pacific Northwest and Canada, and the Alpide Belt in the Mediterranean region, amo
Research Base New New South Wales.The storm front had already reached the base and, as they had been worried about, the mana-infused raindrops sheeting down were having a rather negative effect on the shield. It was draining the shield capacitors nearly as fast as the reactor could charge them. But that much, they could handle.Then the lightning began striking and the fusion reactor could no longer keep up with the draining capacitor banks. And to make things worse, there was no way of increasing the output of the reactor any more than what it already was; in fact, it had already been increased to 110% of its max-rated output, and after the storm passed, they would need to tear it down and completely rebuild it.But even that much wouldn’t be an issue. The reactor could be run at the red line for thirty-six hours before they began running the risk of a containment breach. The biggest problem they were facing was one they hadn’t anticipated at all: mana.As the water built up on the
Moments before Lee Joon-ho had been attacked, he was enjoying the feeling of unfettered flight kilometers above the surface of Proxima Centauri b. He had done it before, of course—at least in the simulation and on Earth—but there was something different, something special about doing it on an honest-to-god alien planet. And having been stuck in the research base without being able to fly on his own had been like sandpaper rubbing against his desire to exercise his superpower.Before he’d been blessed by mana, he had been lost. As restrictive as the Kim regime had been, at least he knew he had a place. He was a cog. A small cog, but a cog nonetheless, and cogs ALWAYS fit somewhere. But then China stuck its fingers in the North Korean pie and triggered an attack on South Korea, the retaliation for which had completely wiped out the dictatorship that ruled the northern half of the divided country.And his place had been wiped out with it.So he lost himself. He lost himself in food, in l
“Divert the lander and pick him up,” Ayaka ordered moments after watching the recovered video.“Apologies, Commander. Orders from the fleet are that we’re to immediately proceed to rendezvous with the Khopesh. They’re non-discretionary, I’m afraid,” the lander pilot replied. The lander continued rocketing straight up with over 20 subjective gravities of acceleration pushing its passengers into their acceleration seats and crash harnesses. The pilot would have gone faster, but his passengers were no ARES troopers or fleet sailors that had been trained to tolerate that kind of force; they were scientists, and scientists were by and large a sedentary lot.Lasers from the Khopesh’s drones began firing, the ionization in the air from the storm making them visible as flashes of dim blue beams as they burned through root after root. The empire’s drones were designed to increase the strategic missile defense depth of the TSF, so handling relatively slow-moving roots was an easy task that cou
Ayaka was still standing on the bridge of the Khopesh when the last evacuation flight passed Proxima Centauri b’s Karman Line and rocketed toward the TFS Escapade, the heavy cruiser it was assigned to.She had—barely—been able to keep herself from pacing back and forth behind the drone wing commanders, but a thrill passed up and down her spine when she heard that the last lander had safely made it off the surface and she was unable to keep herself from practically vibrating in place. Only two decades of comportment and etiquette training, courtesy of her father’s expectations, kept her from showing how anxious she was.She turned to Captain Chang, who shot her an empathetic glance as he began, “Don’t worry, we’ve already prepared the rescue mission. Wing three, prepare to—”Before he could finish his sentence, the holotank in the center of the bridge turned red and an abort signal flashed, accompanied by a message: “All surface missions are suspended until further notice.”The message
Joon-ho was floating in a warm darkness, his knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped around them. ‘Is this what it feels like to be dead?’ he thought. ‘Just floating in... nothingness? Man, a whole lot of people are gonna be really disappointed when they die. No angels with trumpets, no pearly gates, no mythical beings or buddhas... and apparently no hot goddesses offering perks to be born on planets they’re responsible for.’ He sighed, or at least attempted to.Suddenly he heard a muffled thud-THUD and two other noises that reminded him of conversation. One was a low-pitched murmur—a man, he thought—and there was another, higher-pitched sound. If the first was a man, then the second should be a woman.‘Why does this seem so... familiar?’ he mused.He drifted in the endless dark, listening to the murmuring and rhythmic thud-THUD. ‘Well, if this is what the afterlife is like, then I guess it could be worse,’ he thought as he floated in the warm, welcoming nothing that surrounded h
Joon-ho felt a thrill pass through him at the question. It was a question he had been waiting for, seemingly for his entire life. He didn’t know many people from the task force, having spent the entire journey out either practicing his mana manipulation skills or in his private VR space, but he firmly believed that he was the leading expert in the Proxima Centauri system on all things fantasy, sci-fi, and anime.He began lecturing the trees on all things elven, all the way from the mythological alfar and dokkalfar to present, including the races’ representation in novels, video games, and movies. He provided every detail he could think of, and as he spoke, he saw them in his memories, including his emotions and thoughts as he first discovered the rich body of entertainment through humanity’s history. He recalled heroes and villains, epic tales of adventures, and the struggles and challenges that each individual went through in each story he recounted to the trees.As he spoke, the tre