The Beacon Is Lit

Posted on Sat Apr 6th, 2019 @ 7:13am by The Narrator

Mission: S1E3: Moments Of Consolidation
Location: Carpathia Star System, Messier 4
Timeline: MD6 11.00AM

Unceremoniously the lights of Canopus Station lit up.

What would have been a ceremony or momentous event within any other organisation or group was reduced to a single push of a button. Though in all fairness a large number of other buttons, an assortment of levers, and one crank wheel had to be turned and used first before that singular red button marked ‘ON’. But with that, the large Matter/Antimatter reactor at the base of Canopus Station spun up to full life. And so the harnessing of the most destructive forces in the universe to make a popcorn machine work continued to show reality who was boss.

From the outside nothing apart from the illumination of navigation lights and the like seemed to have changed. Canopus hung in the sky over Carpathia’s dusty shores, a three-kilometre long monument to just how far curiosity can take a person. But within her armoured hull machines and great devices once silent thrummed to life. At the reactor levels, the particle cyclotron began to power up. Within a day it would b ready to smash elemental particles dredged up from the atmosphere of the gas giant Tangerine Dream together at a hairsbreadth beneath the speed of light. And in doing so begin to produce antimatter to refill her fuel bunkers, and power the exploration fleet that would one day come to Messier 4.

Life support flicked unceremoniously from its rationing mode, best described as ‘removing the CO2 and then pumping it back in after freshening it up a bit’, to genuine recycling. Vast vats of aquaponic gel began to be warm, ready for the seeding of fungus that would be fed into the replicators ready to be transformed from base matter into anything. Spare parts, new uniforms, or even a new starship within Canopus’s meagre ship foundery.

And atop the command levels, nestled within the antenna and domes of its vast and powerful active sensor array, a device powered up. Rectangular in shape, and as large as a boxcar on Earths old railroads, it drew in an incredible amount of power. This power was funnelled into a device whose theories of practice were best understood by those who stared too long into mathematical proofs, and swore they saw an Elder God move a decimal place.

The Phase Space Transceiver array went online at 11AM, on Mission Day Six of the 2nd Expedition to Messier 4. This device began to broadcast in a realm of space and time that had only recently come to the attention of Starfleet, but had allowed for the instantaneous transportation of a starship and then a space station to the distant realm of Messier 4. Now it began to broadcast, using that altered space-time to relay a communication link back to the Milky Way.

But more importantly, it acted as a beacon, cementing in place a set position in the cosmo for Project Long Jump to aim for. No longer would expeditions to Messier 4 suffer the scattering effects of the previous launches. It was curbside service or nothing from here on out.

And so Starfleet began to prepare Expedition 3 to Messier 4. A collection of automated cargo vessels, guardships for system defence, and the Curry class starship USS Please Read The Instructions. The lumbering fleet tenders of the Curry class were primarily used by the Starfleet Auxillary, with a few of them being uparmoured into Marine transports for Starfleet’s Misguided Children in green hardshell armour. The USS Please Read The Instructions bore the livery of the Starfleet Corp Of Engineers, and were to a man and woman crazy enough to go to the far edge of explored space to build things out of baling wire and bubble gum.

But Messier 4 was now open to both careful drivers, and to those who seek to wander...