~ by Andrew Robins

Free_Trader_Mistral\ Core\Private_Log_Amelia_Delaware \2825

Months of work, and it has come to this. We are thirty minutes out from our jump back to normal space.

Lepanto’s  mindstate is fully transferred into what used to be Mistral’s gestalt. Turns out that Lepanto is genuinely really nice, so we still get to camp out in there when we need to.

We also got really lucky with Bringer.

Turns out that “the horn” that we picked up back on Mission Target Three is/was an actual part of Bringer. There is some sort of multidimensional interconnectedness going on that gives us a fighting chance of preserving something that will be genuinely recognisable as Bringer, when he/she/it brings this whole house  of cards crashing down on us in about 25 minutes from now.

Of course we have had to turn most of our hold over to what Glandin is calling “the biggest quantum level Babbage machine that any one has ever conceived”, which is going to be Bringer’s new home. It glows, and looks pretty disturbing to me – but Glandin is in raptures over it.

Assuming everything works to plan, we should end up back in system at 58 Eridani. Of course, like any plan ours has its flaws.

So, the Vaders get to come back with us. And  in this case “with us” means roughly 15 thousand years in the past, relative to the time line we left. We haven’t been able to find a way around that.

The good news for us is that we have a working jump drive again so we can get out of harm’s way pretty quickly on arrival.

The bad news for us is that the Vaders are going to turn up on a planet which is chock full of somewhat decayed but very high tech artefacts.

So we are going to nuke the hell out of them before we go. Bringer has given us a comprehensive list of targets – and we still have most of Lepanto’s ordinance to expend. There isn’t going to be much of a tech base left once we’ve finished.

A couple of missiles appear to have been equipped to carry anti-matter payloads as well, so we’ve spent some time making some of this. So goodbye ecosphere as well. Some models also show most of the atmosphere being stripped away.

We figure this buys us some time to do whatever it is we are going to need to do to get ready for when the Vaders bust out and come looking for us.

Part of me feels bad about what we are about to do to them. But we do figure that most individual Vader consciousness’s are going to survive even this. They are incredibly hard to kill.

Bottom line is that we will be going back to a time that still has people in it, human and not – and we need to try to protect those people.

So that is why we are going to do what we’re going to do.

Log entry ends.

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Check back in next weekend for Episode 15 — the concluding installment of 58 Eridani.

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You can read the previous issues by clicking on the following links:

Introducing 58 Eridani, a Game Log

58 Eridani Episode 1

58 Eridani Episode 2

58 Eridani Episode 3

58 Eridani Episode 4

58 Eridani Episode 5

58 Eridani Episode 6

58 Eridani Episode 7

58 Eridani Episode 8

58 Eridani Episode 9

58 Eridani Episode 10

58 Eridani Episode 11

58 Eridani Episode 12

58 Eridani Episode 13

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Andrew Robins is a long time reader – and sometime reviewer – of science fiction, fantasy and history. People pay him to test stuff, which most of the time is more fun than it has any right to be.

To check out Andrew’s book reviews, see “Book Reviews for ‘on Anything, Really’” in the right-hand side bar.