Danse Macabre: prologue

Prologue: Itinerantur Interruptus Blue and grey. Calming, relaxing colors, like the supposed tones of a storm cloud. I've seen holovids of them, in old Orokin archives extracted from some forgotten derelict overrun with Infested. I don't know how much veracity to credit those old files, though-- the Orokin were notorious for taking artistic license when depicting reality. "Ordis, time until jump?" I ask, my Loki parked in seiza at the front of the Liset attached to the front of my orbiter, with the view out the window of the Leonov relay. "With our current position in the solar rail queue, I'd estimate seventy one seconds before we can {get your lazy} deploy at the Eurasian zone." I smile faintly beneath the cover of my hood. I don't know whether he does it on purpose or not, but Ordis always manages to lighten my mood whenever I'm getting too maudlin. "Thank you." My smile slips from my face as suddenly, Grineer cruisers pop into being, dropping out of voidspace only a few hundred kilometers from Leonov relay. Two, three, then another four, they hang in space above the orbiter, each one fully capable of turning ten thousand square kilometers of planetary surface into molten slag. A cannon round wouldn't appreciably deflect or even notice an orbiter save as an interesting sensor reading during its destruction while the weapons fire continued on towards its intended destination. "Ordis, is there any intel on Grineer forces passing Sedna sector?" "Nothing has been forwarded to me by the Tenno council, from-- Operator, my sensors are registering the Grineer targeting systems coming online, weapons charging up!" "Are there Corpus ships in the sector?" I ask, an edge of alarm in my voice. If it's not Corpus, it's the Infested, and either way if we're in the line of fire we won't be more than an expanding cloud of debris if we get hit by a stray cannon bolt. "The only things in the sector are the relay and Tenno," Ordis answers, his synthesized voice laced with apprehension. "And-- OPERATOR!" My eyes widen in shock as a Scimitar lander is obliterated less than two hundred kilometers from us. The view screen zooms in, where pieces of the destroyed lander spin wildly. A split second later, the orbiter that it launched from follows suit, proving it's no fluke. But even Corpus tech can't penetrate Orokin stealth systems-- how the hell did Grineer manage it?! "Lead cruiser is sending out a narrow beam sensor sweep!" Ordis exclaims. "Operator, we need to escape!" "Ordis, what's our position in queue?" I snap, my Warframe's eyes noting the second and third orbiters blown from the sky; other orbiters preparing to take up position around the relay suddenly begin evasive maneuvers. It helps a few, but I watch four more orbiters disintegrate. "Can we still launch?!" "Operator, the Relay is being targeted!" Ordis cries. The debris from the destruction of the first orbiter announces its arrival with a clicking clattering patter of what sounds like rocks and gravel across the right side of my ship. There's no question of simply piloting my orbiter out. At half luminal speeds I might briefly evade their weapons fire but at the rate they're cleaning up the other orbiters I won't be halfway out of their killing range before they could turn all guns on me and even that's if they destroy all the others first. "Jump the line! If we don't jump out we're sitting condrocs!" "Handshaking solar rail guide-- handshake accepted! Rail powering up!" cries Ordis, readouts scrolling faster by far than I can process them. The orbiter lunges forward in a tight arc, pulling G's I can feel through the inertial dampening field even on the transference couch. Coruscating lines of white fire blaze a linear streak through guide structures, and we head for the breach in space that will lead us to safety. I note grimly that several Landers are jinking violently in approach to the lead cruiser; other Tenno launching a raid against the vessel in hopes of destroying a hopefully experimental system. Of the nine Landers, only a solitary Scimitar makes it past the defensive fire of the cruisers, but it's barely attached to the cruiser hull when Lancers and Dargun swarm it. Bare seconds pass before the lander begins coming apart under the focused weapons fire. If the warframe inside the lander managed to enter the cruiser, then the Tenno controlling it could have escaped their orbiter through transference hop. There's a chance that the cruiser might be stopped... Ordis chants out, "Entering the rail breach in three.. two... one-"  Then there's a surge of power, followed by a sputtering fluctuation. The solar rail flickers, then flares hard, a power surge accompanying the trembling of the rail as the Relay is struck by a cannon bolt. Then, the world goes white as my orbiter shudders from the rough jump. I half wonder if we were hit by weapons fire, except I've already seen ample demonstration of what those cannons do to an exposed orbiter. I wouldn't be here to wonder if that were the case. The brutally violent passage through the rail breach ends as suddenly as it began. The ship stabilizes, and I pick myself up off the floor, wiping a gloved hand across my nose. It comes away with a wet smear of red, but not a lot. I've had worse; as a student of the Vazarin discipline it's the work of a few moments to focus my mind, to let the void heal my bruised cheek and torn sinuses. "Ordis... status report." "We are intact, Operator, and... strange. We appear to be within four hundred fifty thousand kilometers of Earth... Except I'm picking up no communications on standard channels... Wait..." I feel a little disoriented; I sit back down on the transference couch to my somatic link. "... Wait on what, Ordis?" "Operator, I'm reading communications traffic, except it's not void comms or gravitic fluctuation transmissions. It's... monodimensional, low energy electromagnetic modulation." I can't believe what I'm hearing. "Ordis, are you telling me you're picking up radio waves?" "As {barbarically primitive} simplistic as it sounds, I believe so," Ordis answers. "What's more, I'm not registering the presence of any vessels in the area..." My eyes, however, are drawn to a sliver of shape just peeking out from behind the strangely blue and green world so small through my view. "Ordis, zoom in on the view I'm looking at, twenty times magnification." The celestial body just cresting the terminus of the planet's silhouette is a titanium oxide white with a hint of an ashy gray streak on the rim. One of the Mares, I think numbly. Despite the lack of debris, and the complete absence of the Orokin superstructure, the celestial body is unmistakably Lua. Lua, unbroken and unadorned. Radio waves. No fleets surrounding it, and by extension, us. "Am I going crazy?" I mumble, disbelieving. "Ordis, did the solar rail misjump us into the past?" Ordis's hesitation is anything but reassuring. "I... don't understand it myself, but I am finding no evidence to the contrary. And stellar cartographical extrapolations suggest your {crackpot idea} hypothesis may be correct. Barring some form of data corruption in my navigation system, we are an estimated eight thousand years earlier than when you woke up this morning. With a margin of error around sixty years." "But... but we can't be here! Ordis, we have to get back, we have to warn the Tenno Council that the Grineer cracked our stealth technology!" "Operator, even if we had a solar rail to launch from, I have no way of extrapolating the void-bridge parameters needed to reverse the event. We were inside the field; too many of the distortions affect us during the bridge.  We could only acquire that data from outside the field." Ordis pauses again. "I believe we may be trapped here." I focus my attention on the holo image of Ordis, aghast. "But... is there any way we could... rig up the foundry to..." I trail off, knowing the idea is ludicrous even before finishing saying it. An orbiter foundry doesn't have the output capacity to build a Solar Rail Relay by itself; it'd take years to manage even with a constant feed of power from ladderdown fission of platinum. Maybe if we built a bunch of foundries first? "Ordis, what do our material stockpiles look like right now?" "At the moment, we have five hundred eighteen and a half kilograms of plastids, just under three hundred kilograms of carbon steel plating, and a similar quantity of salvaged electronics, plus almost half a kilogram of Orokin morphics. We're critically short on both cryotics and nanospores, although your {plague vector} helminth can slowly synthesize more of the latter. Furthermore, we have no argon crystals, and only seven Orokin power cells left.” Ordis pauses as I groan. "Ordinarily I would recommend a raid mission to increase our reserves, but we have been busy lately." "... Maybe we can find some cryotics planetside," I ponder out loud. "I don't think there are Grineer or Corpus to interfere with excavation operations, but with only the one orbiter foundry to build excavators, it will take a while to extract cryotics in any meaningful quantities. This would be much easier if we had a few other Tenno with us." "But we do not," Ordis responds. "Operator, we have no means of communication with the Lotus, the Tenno Council, or even Cephalon Suda." Oh, right. As data entities, Cephalons are even more susceptible to isolation than organics. Communication is all they really have. I make sure my attention is firmly focused on Ordis. "I'm not a Cephalon, but I'll keep you company. Besides, there's a planet down there that's putting out radio waves; it's not impossible that there are other Cephalons to talk to." "Perhaps you are right..." Ordis replies, although his voice is doubtful. "Of course I'm right," I answer. "Now, let's prepare the Liset. The extra electronics warfare equipment can also aid in surveillance and on site data processing. If nothing else, we should get a fix on who and what's down there so we can better plan how to get home. Set a course for the Eurasian region." Ordis's tone is much more assured and cheerful. "I find your logic to be sound, Operator." --- The approach to Earth is sedate. There's no hurry. The fragmentary halo of orbital detritus, bits of corroded and shattered metalloids and plastids is all but absent. Fresher metals, intact and astonishingly crude satellites, and an elegant sculpture of a many-winged humanoid are in orbit. The sculpture especially is reassuring, since the presence of artistry in orbit suggests a relative ease in escaping the gravity well. Although the way that the sculpture appears to stare at us as we approach the planet is unnerving. Maybe it's a trick of the contour? "Ordis, is it my imagination or is that statue looking at us?" "I do not see how it could be," Ordis replies after a moment. "Analysis of external recordings show no movement. Although its rate of angular rotation is extremely close to our own descent profile. I suppose we were just lucky." "Lucky," I echo quietly. Illusion borne of motion or not, it seems to be staring my Loki in the eyes. "... Increase flight speed by twelve percent for fifteen seconds, please. It's creeping me out a bit." "Understood," Ordis answers. "The altered delta V will put us closer to one of the smaller coastal cities on the North Eastern edge of the Oro continent. Given our inability to access the Tenno exchange to acquire additional life support, power cells, and provisions, perhaps it is just as well? Scans show that there are large patches of uninhabited land and water in close proximity." "Probably," I agree. "Oro looks a lot healthier and more full of vegetation than it does from our time. The whole planet does, aside from the various groves New Loka practically worships..." "Much was lost to the decadence of the Orokin," Ordis says, his tone darker than his customary exuberance. I try not to think too hard on it; I've deciphered enough fragmented and dispersed data to know what was done to him. Another sin to stuff into their station lockers, lockers so full and deep that they'd neither notice nor care about if they did. Instead, I change the subject. "Ordis, how long til we arrive?" "We will arrive in seven minutes, forty one seconds." "Thank you. I'll be taking a nap; please take scans on the way down, and give me a detailed map of the area in twenty minutes." "Understood. Rest well, Operator." --- At four hundred thousand kilometers and surplus, the Earth is a thumbnail crescent, shadowed by the rising Lua behind it. From the eyes of my Warframe, though, as we approach within two thousand kilometers, its presence is overbearingly dominant in my field of view. I feel a flicker of a smile cross my lips, at the healthy, vital, unsullied world beneath us. A world before the Orokin. Could I prevent the Orokin from rising? Thinking about it... probably not. I don't have much information on temporal theory, but I'm guessing that the fact I'm here means I didn't do it. Won't do it. Couldn't? I don't know how to say that. Through the Loki I feel the Liset lander tremble slightly as we cross the boundary of the thermosphere. Unusually rough entry; the atmosphere must be a bit thicker than it was... will be, when I'm from. Ahead, the coastline stretches to the right towards a polar region, and to the left towards more temperate climates. "Ordis, what's the estimated population?" "My initial assessments may be... Unreliable. Only the eastern part of Eurasia was visible to scanners during our approach; furthermore the density estimates based on developed urban regions does not smoothly coincide with power generation or consumption. My current estimate is somewhere between four and nine billion based on visible surface area development, but only two billion based on energy use." I grunt. "Kar scale?" "An estimate of .7 on the Kar scale," Ordis replies. That's not very reassuring. "That's improbable, isn't it? At that level of advancement, I can't see how they would get a five meter statue into orbit, especially one as intricately shaped as that one." My Loki nods in the direction of the drifting figure. "Either they launched it intact, or else they spent a considerable amount of time carving an existing rock in a deliverately preserved orbit.*" "Perhaps it's an object of worship?" Ordis speculated. "I believe this period in human development is closer to the stone age than it is to our time." Primitive humans. Barely above animals. This is what we're going to be dealing with. I'll probably have to deal with them like feral kubrow. Thankfully, this first excursion isn't dealing with them at all, not directly. I'm just observing them, getting a feel for what resources they have. Gathering samples. Did they even have money back then? Back... now? "I don't suppose your files have a general overview of what we'll be getting ourselves into?" I comment. "Unfortunately, no," Ordis answers glumly. "Orokin records only go back about seven thousand years, to the Diaspora, and very little of even those records have ever been recovered." "At least there should be little down there that's a threat to a 'frame," I say lightly. Famous last words. --- *Hauser Aelin is referring to the fact that carving a fifteen foot statue in orbit not only is massively time consuming-- how to do so in free fall, what kinds of tools can be used in zero gravity, actively preventing recoil from ejected mass knocking it out of a stable orbit-- but from an engineering standpoint an impressive and likely almost impossible feat from a civilization whose launch efficiency probably requires tens of thousands of tons of fuel and non reusable equipment to get so little as three to five people in orbit.