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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/stargazer_hfy on 2025-05-11 15:45:37+00:00.
Author’s Note: TLDR this is a repost. See the bottom for the real Author’s note.
Foreword: The Aurora Drive.
It was called by its creators the "Aurora Drive." Quite beautiful, the drive creates vast ripples in the electromagnetic fields which trigger an aurora in the atmosphere of any planets near either the source, or the destination. It had been theorized not as an improvement to the previous method of faster than light travel, colloquially known as the ‘skip drive,’ but as a way to render all other forms of FTL travel obsolete.
It exceeded all expectations.
Unlike the skip drive, the initial velocity of the spacecraft was irrelevant. Unlike the skip drive, which requires the craft to accelerate to an appreciable percentage of C, the Aurora Drive could be engaged from a dead stop. And most importantly, unlike the skip drive, the Aurora Drive delivered its passengers to the destination instantly. While the activation energy to engage the Aurora Drive is one of the most energy intensive controlled reactions known to science, the net cost of the reaction is only slightly higher than the energy cost of any alternative method. While the skip drive itself is fairly efficient, the entire energy requirement for the Aurora Drive is less than the acceleration cost of simply reaching the velocities required for the skip drive and then decelerate from relativistic speed at the destination.
Once the initial cost is met, a craft with the Aurora Drive may cross vast distances in a heartbeat. The first view of the Milky Way from the outside came from an observatory launched ten thousand light years above the galactic disk, for an energy cost of only three hundred seventy percent more than a jaunt between sol and proxima centauri. For all beings of earth decent, space exploration, travel, and colonization would never be the same.
Not always for the better.
Early colony ships arrived began to arrive at their destination to find their homes already terraformed and populated. Conflicting governments and claims to habitable planets gave rise to the seventh space race. Interstellar war, once assumed logistically impossible, suddenly seemed not only possible, but inevitable.
The United Earth Origin Sapience Council was established in 2687 AD with the express purpose of resolving conflicts in matters of resources, migration, and governance before they resulted in violence. Modeled after the historic United Nations of pre-diaspora Earth, the UEOSC’s influence expanded rapidly, with six hundred signatory colonies within thirty years of founding.
The UEOSC does not establish interstellar law, but rather works to mediate conflicts, with the express purpose of preventing violence, and improving the quality of all sapient life forms, and establishing both rules of engagement and mutual defense treaties for all members. The UEOSC grew exponentially alongside the spread of earth-descent life throughout the milky way galaxy, with rumors and talks of sending expeditions to Andromeda and the other proximal galaxies.
All of that came crashing to a halt in 2874 when a decommissioned earth space force craft known as the ‘Elizabeth’ reported first contact with intelligent life of non-earth descent.
- Stargazing.
Stargazer was stargazing.
Her three sensitive eyes were well suited to it, having evolved on a world around a dim red dwarf. The heavens had been first described to her by the false songstress. The first betrayer, the weaver of false hope, liar to children and fools. The songstress’s faux image had sung to her and her litter-mates in the first days of her memory, before even Stargazer had opened her eyes. From her songs had Stargazer and her siblings and the other Aurealians learned to sing. But the Songstress’s song of hope and joy outside the confines of their prison had been lies.
Stargazer had dreamed of the stars, back then. Longed for the day that she would see them. To see the promise of prosperity and peace for her people. She had been so young, and even in the squalor of the prison in which she was born, she had been full of hope. That hope was long since crushed. Crushed on the very night she had first seen the stars. Along with the skulls of five of her litter-mates.
Before that night, she had never questioned the songstress’s teachings. She had never wondered why there were no songs about the Others. They had never hidden themselves, after all, and so the songstress must have known them. The others were a colorful race, with amphibian skin and reptilian structure, despite their bipedal nature they could easily catch a galloping Aurealian in a sprint. Terrifying were their claws, but worse were their maws, with their dreadful fangs. In the days before the culling, before sending Stargazer and her sisters to the hunting rounds, the Others had walked among the cells dividing the litters, running their claws against steel bars in a ritual so old it had worn grooves in the metal, just to wake the young Aurealian and fill them with a nameless dread.
"Clack clack clack clack." Even now, she remembered the sound.
The dread that sound inflicted was unexplained, instinctual, and well placed. For it was never freedom that the Aurealian received when the Others finally took a litter from their cell. The fortunate ones were sent to the hunting grounds. The fortunate ones were also forced to witness the fates of the unfortunate ones.
She looked away from those memories and back towards the sky. She could do nothing for the dead, nothing for the past. She could do nothing for the rest of her litter. Of those sisters she had seen when she’d first opened her eyes, only she survived. When she died, their names would die with her. She stubbornly defied the fate set out before her. She would not give in to despair, as she had seen so many of her Kin do in the hunting grounds.
With each new arrival, she would teach them to make a spear, like the one she clutched now, and she would teach them the true songs that she had inherited on the night after that awful night. She would tell them to run, yes, run from the Others when the horns blew. But hold on to the spear, for when the Others cornered you, the spear was your only hope. And if you did not have a spear, then a sharp rock. But not for yourself.
She held in her heart not the empty songs of the false songstress, but the true Song of Defiance she had heard as a shell-shocked kip, her sister’s blood still matted to her fur. She still remembered that scarred veteran’s haunting voice, the scars on her torso and hind legs, and the glassy look in her central eye.
From this veteran Stargazer had taken her name. It had been given in spite, for the veteran’s defiance of was bitter and angry and the memory of the false songstress’s enraged her. How could she not be bitter, when she had lived through so many hunts, seen so many of her kin die young? The veteran had been mocking her, but Stargazer had embraced the name. She would be happy with no other.
The veteran – Strongarm had been her name, it was important to remember that – had fallen not so long after that. She had exhorted five of the other elders into ambushing one of the hunters responsible for the worst atrocities. Strongarm and her party had all perished. They had blooded the hunter badly, but he had been rescued by his own kind. He was forever marked for his sins, but he survived and hunted still. Less frequently, but still.
The eldest surviving veteran had taken up her post in arming the new arrivals with spear and song, as was tradition. It had not been long, and yet had seemed like an eternity, before that role had fallen to Stargazer herself. She was older now than Strongarm herself had been. Or at least she believed so, but by Strongarm’s word she had survived three hundred and nine hunts before her fall. Stargazer had stopped counting at five hundred. It was hard to be certain how that translated into time, because there was no set interval. The Others hunted at their pleasure and at their leisure. When the game was scarce, they simply brought a new litter of kips to the hunting grounds.
They would always kill several, releasing them one by one, only to chase the kips down before they escaped the clearing and, well, what followed did not bear thinking of. Then, after several demonstrations, the cages were opened, and the new litter would scatter into the forests of the hunting grounds, chased by predatory howls and nightmares. The howls would end at daybreak, but the nightmares never would.
Stargazer would not scream when she was finally caught. She had heard enough screams in her life. That was not how she would die. That is not how she would be remembered by the other Aurealians that she had armed with spear and defiance. She would not bring others into the light with her, as Strongarm had, but she would meet her fate with the same icy silence, when it was her time. It would be her final defiance in the face of the Others, in the face of fate itself.
Until then, she would do her duty. Duty which she had never asked for, but had been thrust upon her. She would sing to the new arrivals. She would show them the food dumps and the water sources, she would show them where to find wood for the spear, and how to knap flint and sharpen it as she had been shown. Not just that second night, but every nig...
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