Unto the Ages

Far away in a distant galaxy somewhere in deep space, a relatively small ship gets spit out into real space looking like it's been through more than a few firefights, shoddy rough repairs and being held together by spit and the sci-fi equivalent of duct tape.

In that ship is the disgraced and wanted by law scientist El-Vrac-Tal. The once celebrated scientist was slumped over his ship controls and bleeding from a nasty gash on his forehead above his 4 eyes. Groaning, the scientist righted himself and checked on his current situation. Besides taking notice of his bleeding forehead, his console was blaring warning sounds and listing out a litany or error and damage reports.

After organizing his thoughts he ordered the onboard ship Artificial Intelligence to deploy what was left of the operational maintenance robots to concentrate on the primary life support system, propulsion and warp translation drive. After which he checked the ship activity log.

“Dammit! If I am not fast enough with the repairs, those backstabbing bunch of government loving excrement will catch up with me again.” El-Vrac-Tal ranted to himself as he slammed his hand in his chair repeatedly in frustration then got up to go check on his cargo while continuing his rant.

“All that research I did for them to create the perfect soldier goes down the drain, just because a lab technician was ‘highly disturbed’ and leaked the info to a news agency. So what if I was using society's undesirables, it was the government that was helping me get them anyway, so what if we had no viable successes, we may have just not found any subjects strong enough to withstand the procedure.”

El-Vrac-Tal arrived in the cargo hold that he was using to store what he could salvage from his research and personal life. El-Vrac-Tal may be eccentric and devoid of all morals but he was sharp, after the news got out, he could see the political winds shifting and those winds were going to throw him off a damn cliff to save themselves.

“They could have just crushed the story or just disappeared that lab technician and everyone he came in contact with, it's not like they never did that before.” The cargo hold was a mess due to the rough exit caused by his somehow working warp translation drive. He began re-securing the more sensitive equipment and proceeded to join in on the list of repairs the maintenance robots were working on.

“Luckily there were still some military higher ups that still owe me some favors, I managed to set fire to the lab with the data and get off the planet in time. If the government would not have me, I'm sure some warlord in the Rogue Stars space would be happy to have my services, I most likely would have a lot more test subjects there.”

El-Vrac-Tal  went glassy eyed imagining “Just think of it, an army of soldiers that are biologically immortal and can genetically adapt by ingesting bio matter in their surroundings…. The perfect soldier…. Might just need to lobotomize the subject first and install a neural impulse command chip before I can call it the perfect soldier.”

“Too bad that all subjects so far either ripped their own muscles, organs and bones while just moving and in some cases had full circulatory system rupture. I need more robust subjects.” 

About an hour later the repairs for the propulsion and warp translation drive were repaired to barely operational levels and when the repairs on the life support just began, an alert blared throughout the ship.

 

*WARP TEAR DETECTED*

 

*WARP TEAR DETECTED*

 

*DISTANCE 2965KM*

 

*TIME TO INTERCEPT 6 MINUTES*

 

The moment El-Vrac-Tal heard the warning, he sprinted towards the ship’s bridge. “Dammit! It is too soon, how did they track me so fast!? Did that bastard of a general give me a ship with a tracker? Wait a minute…. So far they have only been aiming to disable me….. Does that general want to imprison me in some research lab, never see the light of day and also hide his involvement?” He ranted while running and full blown paranoia was taking hold of him. As he made his way onto the bridge he began cackling as he opened his navigation.

“They oust and shun me from society but they cannot deny my genius! They still want what they rejected publicly…. Well they can’t have it! IT IS MINE! Computer, display all areas within range of warp with high gravitic interference. The high gravitic interference may mess with their tracking, if they are tracking me and the ship they are chasing me with greatly out classes my ship in terms of mass, but is more susceptible to high gravity”

 

*2 RESULTS FOUND*

 

“On display”

The first result was a super blackhole and was immediately rejected, even with his ship having relatively small mass, if he got anywhere close he had no chance of getting out, the super blackhole has devoured any planet or asteroids nearby long ago leaving no where to hide. The second option was a cracked planet in a nearby solar system, it was most likely that one or multiple asteroids of considerable size impacted on the planet.

The odd thing was there were a bunch of mini wormholes that open and close intermittenly throughout the solar system but mainly around the cracked planet, the cracked planet looked like a good place to hide and buy some time to make more robust repairs to the ship.

“Plot a course for the solar system with the mini wormholes and head for that shattered planet”

 

*AFFIRMATIVE* 

 

And with the acknowledgement of the command, El-Vrac-Tal’s ship began to pick up speed and the warp translation drive began to hum to life and two minutes before the Government Cruiser managed to get within firing range El-Vrac-Tal’s ship translated into the warp.

When a ship is translating in and out of warp, time is relative, so El-Vrac-Tal only experienced warp travel for about 5 seconds, so the 5 seconds was not enough time for him to react to his barely held together warp translation drive failing halfway and in real time he was not in real space for more than 5 hours. More than enough time for the Government Cruiser which proved El-Vrac-Tal’s paranoia correct because not only was El-Vrac-Tal’s ship being tracked, it was feeding telemetry and data back to the Government Cruiser for the short time it was chasing El-Vrac-Tal’s ship before his latest warp.

The Government Cruiser keyed in El-Vrac-Tal’s latest plotted course and warped to the location only to be pleasantly surprised that El-Vrac-Tal’s warp exit tear was still open and all they had to do was wait near his warp exit tear and disable him when El-Vrac-Tal entered real space.

El-Vrac-Tal was also surprised, though not very pleasantly, when less than 5 seconds after exiting the warp tear he was being fired upon, his propulsion systems destroyed and the computer notifying him that boarding shuttles were incoming.

“No….” El-Vrac-Tal growled. “IT’S MINE! YOU CANNOT HAVE IT, I WILL NOT LET YOU!” El-Vrac-Tal shouted to the empty bridge and looked rabid by his species standards.

 

*ATTENTION HULL BREACH IN PROGRESS IN CARGO BAY*

 

“DAMMIT….. AHHHHHHHH!!!”

 

“YOU WILL NOT TAKE WHAT IS MINE! COMPUTER INITIATE SELF DESTRUCT, SET FOR 5 SECONDS”

 

*AFFIRMATIVE* 

 

*ATTENTION HULL BREACH IN PROGRESS IN CREW ROOM 3*

 

*WARNING SELF DESTRUCT IN 5…4…* 

 

While the count down was happening, El-Vrac-Tal was giggling like a mad man while curled up on the chair wanting for his final moments.

 

*3…2…1 SELF DESTRUCT INITIATED*

 

And with that El-Vrac-Tal’s ship exploded along with the 2 boarding shuttles that were latched onto his ship. And that explosion caused a certain highly protected storage container which contained a sample of the mutating agent that was supposed to turn a living biological sentient being into the perfect soldier to be flung at high speed out into the solar system only for it to be sucked into wormhole when the storage container got too close, a few seconds later, that the wormhole collapsed.

 

—

 

Somewhere in another different galaxy, in the galactic equivalent of the ass end of nowhere, near a blue and green planet. A wormhole opens up, spits out a storage container flying at an intercept course with the blue and green planet and collapses a few seconds later.

On that green and blue planet was a young man, out on his coming of age hunt when a bright light in the sky caught the corner of his eyes and thought to himself 'that is weird, why is there a second sun? Does the shaman know what this means? Why is the new sun getting bigger?' It took the young man a few seconds to connect the dots and remember seeing meteors streaking across the sky when he was younger and came to the dreaded conclusion that a meteor was falling straight to where he was.

The young man screamed and started running away from the meteor. “BY THE SPIRITS! SKY ROCK!” and just as he got about a hundred meters, the meteor impacted at a shallow angle behind him. The meteor that was suspiciously cubicle in shape, shattered upon impact, yielding a smaller case flying at high speed and impacted in a rock, which caused the smaller case already damaged from previous impacts to split apart, yielding yet an even smaller cylindrical object which unbeknownst to this current world was and injector for a certain mutating agent. Due to the whims of fate, the Spirits, the Great Ju-Ju up the mountain or just plain good/bad luck, the injector flew with enough force to impact into the boy’s right shoulder point first, delivering its payload and knocking him slightly off course head first into a tree, knocking him unconscious.