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Going through the cargo door leads to a small room ending in another cargo door. This room has two more guards in it, meaning that 1.5% of the entire population of Hylara are occupied just guarding the few halls and rooms we’d walked through. There’s no way that this is normal. Perhaps the increased guard is a response to us landing, or maybe Hive’s stunt.
The room is largely empty, except for the guards, some chairs, and a table with some snacks on it. On either side of the cargo door at the far end are some big, transparent windows, looking into what I assume is the room that the guards are stationed to guard. We’re beckoned over to the windows.
I have a pretty reasonable sense of direction, and following the curves and corners of the hallways and rooms we’ve walked through, I think we might have looped back around at some point and are now near the nursery again, meaning that the room-sized box in the cavern we’re overlooking is probably pretty close to the repurposed ship. It might even be attached to it; I have no real idea how large the ship had been. Wherever we are, the box is huge, made of something white (a ceramic, maybe?) and has, in its own side, a cargo door, through which a handful of Hylarans are moving big metal crates on motorised carts. The crates they’re moving are bare metal with bright yellow painted latches.
“What are they moving?” Tinera asks.
Max shrugs. “That’s the Materials Port Supervisor’s problem. Watch.”
They fill up the vault and close the cargo doors. Warning lights and sirens begin to flash in the room; judging by the lack of panic in there, I suppose that they’re expected. After several minutes, when we’ve all started to fidget, everything dies back down, and the workers open the vault and begin to wheel the crates out again.
The crates they wheel out have red painted latches, not yellow ones.
“Materials exchange,” Max explains. “Antarctica trades goods with us via the Vault.”
“Hmm,” I say. “Yeah. That’s not real.”
Tinera cocks her head. “It does explain rather a lot. And we just saw it happen.”
“We saw some people load and unload a room! Max here is trying to convince us that teleportation is real!”
“Time manipulation is real,” Captian Klees points out. “We can slow down time eighty times.”
“That’s just chronostasis! That’s different; that’s perfectly normal physics! That,” I point through the window at the Vault, “is magic! No. No thank you.” I turn and storm off; nobody stops me.
I don’t go far. It would be incredibly embarrassing to get lost down here. I walk back through a few rooms and stop to stare blankly at a machine stretching some kind of semiliquid plastic into a long iridescent sheet that looks like the Hylaran tunic fabric. It looks like making the stuff is a fairly long process.
Captain Klees comes up beside me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. But this is some bullshit.”
He shrugs. “I’m genetically engineered for potential agelessness in preparation for being part of an electronic hivemind in an interstellar spacecraft. I gave up being surprised by bullshit a long time ago.”
“I know, I know. But teleportation?”
“You have been saying the whole time, that this colony doesn’t make any sense if it isn’t part of a trade network.”
“I know.”
“Any particular reason you hate teleportation technology in particular?”
“I don’t hate it, it’s just ridiculous.”
“More ridiculous than everything else?”
“It’s just…” I sigh. “We went through so much. Years on that spaceship. Death around every corner. We lost so many people. We got all the way out here, with Earth sixty five entire lightyears away, and suddenly they’re like, Surprise! Earth is right here! We brought it with us, right through this fucking vault! It was waiting for you at the end of your journey the entire fucking time!” I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’m being stupid. But for the record, this still doesn’t make sense. There’s no way that there’s anything out here to trade that’s worth the cost and risk and time of establishing a colony for. This planet can’t have anything that can’t be mined or synthesised closer to home. And even if it somehow did, how would they have known about it back on Earth, to establish this?”
“Maybe the alien spider queen contacted Earth with a trade proposal,” he suggests, and we both start giggling.
“Even then,” I say. “They sent javelins to so many exoplanets. They can’t all have alien spider queens willing to build trade networks.”
“Nah, only we have the spider queen. The others were all decoys. To stop anyone else from noticing in time to establish the trade network first.”
We head back just in time to hear Tal saying, “So there’s no aliens on the planet at all? Are you sure?”
“We can never be sure,” Max says. “We haven’t surveyed most of it. But we’ve never found alien life, no. The Vault is human tech, Antarctic tech – really old tech, now, about a century and a half. But they still have a monopoly on it, so far as I know, due to its rather serious limitations.”
“What kind of limitations?” Captain Klees asks.
“Mass, for one. You send stuff both ways at once, and you want the masses to be as equal as possible. Even a slight mass discrepancy makes the transport cost a ridiculous amount of energy; half the bother with using the thing is calculating mass as perfectly as possible. Then there’s the materials. The Vault can sent some things intact, and some things it can’t. It’s really good with very simple materials that we can remould on-site; fantastic for metals and water, workable for plastics and vitamins and carbohydrates. Anything chemically or structurally complicated is… problematic. Dome canvasses tend to show up with flaws and weak points, for example. And there’s no hope of getting life through, of course; not a person, not a frozen bacterial culture, not a dried mold spore. Even viruses get minced up in transit.”
“So the only life on this planet is what your ship brought.”
“And what yours brought. But the biggest limitation is distance.”
“We’re at a pretty big distance from Earth.”
“Exactly. Early teleportation experiments, when they worked at all, were so ridiculously expensive in terms of energy usage as to have no practical effect. There are very few situations in which it’s more economical to use a power station’s worth of energy to transport a few molecules from one place to another, than to simply carry those molecules, even taking into account the uses in espionage and suchlike. What Antarctica discovered was that there was a relationship between distance transported and energy cost that, at least at first, is inverse – the further away you are, the less energy it takes. Once you reach a threshhold, the energy costs start to increase again. Sending matter within the solar system isn’t worth the energy, but if you move outside it, and keep going… well. The ‘sweet spot’, in terms of energy usage, is a distance of between sixty and ninety light years. Once they figured this out, Antarctica put all their effort into exoplanet imaging and created the Kleiner array.”
“Why, though?” I ask. “Even with the ability to transport goods back, what could be out here that’s possibly worth the cost – ” but then I stop myself. Nothing about this suggests that they were looking for anything specific on the exoplanets. And a trade route isn’t just about the goods. There are two important factors to a trade route – the source of goods, and the route itself.
“Where can you send things with that? Does it have to be a specific place?”
Max nods. “The Vault is two vaults. We can sent and receive to two locations. A space station around Mars and a settlement on Venus.”
That has some dramatic and potentially horrifying implications for how things have changed around Earth in the last century, but that’s hardly my problem. “And how expensive is the Vault to use, in terms of energy?”
“If you were really, really careful with getting perfect mass equivalency, it would be essentially free. We’re usually some micrograms off, which means some cost.”
“Costs on the scale of the costs of transporting things through normal space?” Tinera asks, but we already know the answer. Venus to Mars orbit is a very long journey involving escaping a gravity well.
“I’m not a physicicst,” Max shrugs.
“They sent out forty three javelins,” Captain Klees says. “Do we know how many made it?”
“There are seven active sites with Vaults like this one,” Max says. “Five of them were resupplied with javelins. Six, now that you’re here.”
Six out of forty three. That’s a lot lower than I’d hoped. I tell myself that it’s possible that most of the javelins made it, found and disabled the sabotage systems that would kill them if the Vault colonies hadn’t been set up, and settled happily on their planets, out of contact with the rest of us due to the vast time and space involved. That’s possible.
“A transport chain with six hops,” Captain Klees says. “Six places on or around Earth that Antarctica can send materials for free on extremely short notice. How big of a deal is that?”
“Economically? The biggest deal possible,” Tinera says. “Antarctica can dominate any market possible, anywhere in civilisation, with that, so long as said market is in something that can be transported with these.”
“Can they transport information?” Tal asks.
“Yes,” Max says. “Printed paper, no problem. Certain old, large methods of storage that can be read digitally, sure. Electronically stored data, no.”
“That’s easy to work around,” Tal says. “If you could get your data to one of the Vaults in this chain, you can send it anywhere that another one’s set up, completely uninterceptable.”
“The cost of transporting mined materials is – was, when I was there – the biggest profit limitation in lunar mining,” Tinera says. “This changes the game. Can you imagine mining the asteroid belt for metals and sending it all back to Earth with absolutely no transport cost?”
“Traditionally,” I say, “travel and transport are the major limiting factors in establishing empires. A monopoly on something like this is…” I shake my head.
“How would they still have a monopoly after a century and a half, though?” Tal asks. “Tech is tech. It doesn’t stay secret for long.”
“The tech itself might not be the main factor in that,” the Friend points out, “if using it involves establishing a colony decades of light years away. If Antarctica revealed this tech immediately after these Vaults were actually established and tested, and any competitors got their hands on the tech immediately, they still wouldn’t have had time to establish an alternate chain.”
“Unless their space travel tech has also improved,” Tinera points out.
“Which is likely,” the Friend agrees. “But assuming the speed of light is still a barrier, they wouldn’t have much time to do it. And what would be the point? It’d be far simpler and safer to buy or treaty their way into using Antarctica’s chain.”
The speed of light clearly isn’t a barrier for the Vault, so I don’t feel too confident in just assuming it’s a barrier for everything else any more, but I’m not interested in speculating about travel technology right now. I stay silent.
At least a lot of mysteries have been solved with this. The lack of some materials and enormous abundance of others makes sense. Something like this could send aluminium panels for walls, send big blocks of soap to be hand-cut, and leave a lack of high integrity dome canvas.
And a lack of life.
“You don’t have farms, do you?” I ask. “Your only food source is the Vault.”
Max nods. “The algal farms that the ship brought failed early on. We have plenty of microbes, but none of them are photosynthetic. Attempts to create something to consume heat off the generators directly have all failed. It’s just us and the Vault.”
And a widespread cultural fear of accepting the Courageous’ help. And a devastating famine.
I look over the tense, cautious faces of the Hylarans in the room with us, tamp down the fury rising inside me in response to some very dark suspicions, and set my jaw. “You should tell us, I think, about the history of this colony.”
Derin Edala 
Congratulations to the person who claimed the Antarcticans had access to teleportation technology.
I was also kind of right. There is another colony that calls the shots. It just so happens that colony is Antarctica itself.
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Wow.
Mind = blown.
I didn’t actually think the teleportation theory was that likely. And I was sure the Hylarans would have some source of food on site, because not doing so is just …
But damn! Guess they have a good reason on that front.
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time for a space rebellion against the bourgois!
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FOLDGATE??? SORTA…????
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“I don’t hate it, it’s just ridiculous.”
I absolutely adore Aspen’s sense of logic and discernment system for what crosses the line of the believable. 😂 Because same, my friend, same. Extremely relatable how when it comes to teleportation, they just nope out.
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I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT I KNEW IT I KNEW IT!!! I CALLED THIS LIKE A YEAR AGO!
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congrats, I’m still reeling from this lmao
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Thanks, lol. To be honest, I’m still riding the high of predicting the twist so accurately.
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I’m glad that Aspen had to walk off that reveal because so did I. Teleportation?!?
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cannot believe the comments called it oh my god. Congrats to that person. I uh. Need to think about this (and probably so does the crew!) but I agree with Aspen about some very dark possibilities here.
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Fucking Antartica
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Dear god the Hylarans need to get themselves an independent food source, and quickly, and without alerting the Antarcticans. Being unable to function and fill basic needs independently may not be a death sentence as long as they’re considered useful, but it’s still Bad–and something about the algal farms failing early smells of sabotage, given how much care went into the other parts of the journey. I’m betting someone on Antarctica *wanted* them to be subject to famine at Antarctica’s whims.
It’s time to bring on the revolution.
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It sounds like they’re dependent on Antarctica for their food. So why are they afraid of farming their own food? Why do they prefer to remain dependent? Seems like Aspen is forming suspicions, but I’m still missing a big piece of the puzzle here.
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probably they’re worried that the antarcticans will catch wind of any attempts to become self-sufficient and cut off their current food supply before they can get any farming off the ground, hence celti’s demand for specifically ready-to-eat food. sounds like he’s cautiously considering using the javelin resupply as an opportunity to lessen the antarcticans’ leverage and maybe even establish independence
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And I bet you a dollar the “famine” happened because somone got too uppity for the Antarcticans’ (or whoever’s on the other end) taste, and they retaliated by cutting off the food supply. So if you’re gonna terraform, you’d better do it in secret and be pretty damn sure it’s gonna work, or else everyone dies ’cause nobody actually knows how to farm there
Perfectly Normal Colony
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ill have to reread this when i’m not high because currently I’m just 😮
blink blink blink
also COMPLETELY forgot abt the ship destroying stuff abt if a colony wasn’t already there , that’s fucked up
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oh yeah GOOD POINT bc like what even would be the point in destroying it? The people on the colony ship (i.e. courageous type thing) wouldntve known about the teleportation plans presumably and even if they did they wouldn’t be able to do anything about it, so what difference would it make to the antarcticans if a vault colony hadn’t been set up? Why set up something to destroy them if there wasn’t a pre-existing colony?
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Because if a Javelin shows up and settles in an uninhabited system in the 60-90 LY range, then that can be a usable point for a future Lunari(or whoever)-controlled Vault. Stick a couple Vaults in a tiny ship with a big engine, launch it to the established free Javelin colony, and when they arrive include directions on setting it up. Suddenly the whole monopoly is undone. Settling a new colony is expensive and takes a century+, using an existing one is a lot cheaper and faster.
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oh god.
also:
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so we all agree the food production failed intentionally right?
One thing I don’t understand is why they’re so reticent to accept help from the ship. Wouldn’t becoming more independent be a lot better?
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Unless that food production is also sabotaged.
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I was originally thinking this when I saw the earlier comment pointing it out, but knowing empires… it doesn’t even have to be sabotage. It was probably just a much, much lower priority than everything else.
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“Can they transport information?” Tal asks.
“Yes,” Max says. “Printed paper, no problem. Certain old, large methods of storage that can be read digitally, sure. Electronically stored data, no.”
Okay how does that work? Paper and wood are chemically complex materials, not to mention the complex arrangements of ink/graphene on paper. There’s no way printed paper with something on it survives if vitamins and proteins are “barely” workable.
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My read is that the transportation process swaps* the positions of various molecules near each other. It wouldn’t take many random changes for every single cell in an entire vat of algae to die, but you won’t notice the change with a block of titanium. The midground is dome canvas, which shows up with flaws and weak points, or processed food, which was never alive but is still close enough to how it started to remain edible(they think).
Under those rules, paper(or a substitute) probably stays fine, since it just needs to hold together physically. And writing might be slightly blurred, depending on how much is changed, but if you write large(or use a system for clear letters or checksums), you can read writing that’s ben through a LOT.
*Or just destroys some molecules. Is that where the spare energy for the long-distance transport comes from, and why everything is always off by a few micrograms?
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my bet is its a sythetic limitation to make it Harder to sneak information back to earth
it also would limit how advanced their software can be
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yeah also soap is arguably complex and made of life forms, however I’d also say that paper, soap etc, is less complex than actual life forms. I just looked it up and paper is actually pretty much just cellulose, which is an organic polymer.
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I think the problem with things that don’t transfer is that they show up a little scrambled (the dome canvases with flaws), not that they don’t show up at all. The molecules of the paper sometimes being a little scrambled is fine, the molecules of the vitamins sometimes being a little scrambled is less fine but workable depending on how the problems show up, and DNA of anything alive showing up very scrambled makes anything alive being a complete non-starter.
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Hmm, okay, though now I’m imagining Hilarious Antics resulting from some letters being scrambled so they convey incorrect information
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I’d say “printed paper” doesn’t probably mean “paper made from wood pulp” and “ink printed using [chemically complex form of ink that we currently use],” most likely. Paper from some synthetic thing, like the dome canvas or something, seems far more likely, and “printed” could just mean embossed/engraved onto the surface of the printed sheets.
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What’s more: There’s no way that food could possibly be teleported! No matter how preserved.
Unless.. complexity of connection isn’t the problem so much as molecular motion, and maybe food could be teleported when frozen? Except that doesn’t work either, because then turned off electronics would be fine.
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So… it’s a slave colony. Genetically engineered slaves entirely dependent on their masters, intended to be resupplied with a dead Javelin also under the control of their masters, who’d likely trash all the terraforming equipment. And all of it… for cheaper transportation.
I am angry. And while there’s scrambling in anything complex like nuclear weapons, the notes about “defects in dome canvas” makes me think of a demon core sort of setup.
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And now that they are free of their masters?
The terraforming has started, the ship is up in orbit unsabotaged and full of supplies. Where does this lead.
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Wait, so what exactly was the point of the javelins in the original plan then? Clearly Hylara’s been doing fine (from Antarctica’s point of view) without the resources on the Courageous, so why send it at all? Simple camouflage for the rest of the project?
Like, the plan was to send Mama with a box of embryos to Hylara to set up the teleporter, and then reinforce them with a shipful of enslaved adult workers and/or a hivemind AI? Why the second step?
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Remember that Dor Delphin was on board, and all the convicts were told that he was the one in charge. He was supposed to be the leader of this colony if the ship hadn’t been delayed and he hadn’t died in transit.
With only the ship’s crew awake, they would have no obligation to wake people up in an order that helps establish Dor Delphin’s regime. With the Vault, the Antarcticans can refuse to give materials unless Dor Delphin is in charge. It’s supposed to be the linchpin that helps him grab and maintain power when he wakes up.
The Javelins bring extra supplies and the people meant to oversee the colony. All the other passengers aren’t important, which means if any scientist has an experiment they want to try that requires hundreds of people in chronostasis and no accountability, those other Javelin passengers are fair game.
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Interesting implications.
Did the other javelins also have experiments run on them? I assume the other javelins were also infiltrated by antarcticans.
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so the Antarctica trick for control was apparently making sure food can’t be produced locally.
I’m assuming at least some of the javelins got their self-destruct triggered because the early probe determined their target planet was too hospitable to life for a guaranteed dependence and stopped the Antarctica embryos from being defrosted and killed the javelin when it arrived to make sure none of their teleporter tech is salvaged by anyone not controlled.
assuming the teleporters are real and work as advertised this answers most questions so I am assuming at least some of what max said is wrong
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I think i get it now. What if terraforming wouldn’t help the hylaran’s? They’re entirely genetically engineered, and the previous generation entirely died out. What if they are genetically designed to only accept a certain type of food, or designed to be poisoned unless they get a “cure” from Antarctica? I think the entire previous generation was killed by starvation in “the famine” and that Antarctica just restarted it with an automated signal or something (antarctica might have developed long-range signal comms that don’t take forever) with the threat that they would do it again. They’re so scared of terraforming because it would result in their excommunication and death, while those from the ship would be fine.
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Their limitations are lies. If you can send information you can send a virus RNA which you can synthesize like a recipe, and virus or even bacterial DNA can be short enough to fit in a book. Some have only few thousand base pairs. I think the world record is like 300 or so.
Ever read a story with a million words ? Even errors aren’t that big of an issue since there are error correcting codes. It’d take a while to send a few million base pairs certainly, but fucking hell these colonists are brainwashed if they think they can’t send algae.
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A book with an rna base pair list and a method for rna synthesis would do. Only a few thousand to a few million base pairs depending on the species. Some have less base pairs than this story has words.
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I guess that explains the weird medical needs. Electronics can’t go through the vault, but raw materials can, and they have the necessary equipment to make raw materials into stuff like cybernetic replacements, but stuff like clonal muscle tissue is just not available.
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Hello, I’ve been reading this while sick and off work, and wanted to get to the end before writing a comment, but “No. No thank you” *storms off* fucking got me. Like Aspen has gone through so many trials etc and witnessed so many spectacles and tragedies and they knew there was a “materials port” that needed supervising before they even got here, but they’re drawing the line RIGHT THERE. Tour’s over.
Anyway this is a great story, well written, really well thought out, gonna go finish it now.
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Dude, I’m actually really annoyed right now. (Not because of this turn of events)
Someone left a comment on chapter like… no idea, well before landing here on a chapter where Hylara was the topic of discussion.
They said something along the lines of “I bet Antarctica invented teleportation and they’re gonna find a bunch of colonists on Hylara waiting for them.”
That has been dwelling in my mind ever since, and I refuse to believe they didn’t already know that and didn’t purposefully spoil it. omfg
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Just in case that’s a genuine worry, the first person I saw speculating about teleportation was on chapter 81 (their comment was posted July 19th 2023).
(I was doing a re-read anyway so I kept an eye out)
I know the patreons were a little bit ahead, but I don’t think they were 9 months ahead. Some people must just be really, really good at guessing that kinda thing!
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I cannot believe the teleportation theory was real 🤯
“I tell myself that it’s possible that most of the javelins made it, found and disabled the sabotage systems that would kill them if the Vault colonies hadn’t been set up, and settled happily on their planets, out of contact with the rest of us due to the vast time and space involved. That’s possible.”
Yeah! I like the way Aspen thinks!
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holy shit
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Okay. Teleportation. Why not. I.. Think I might be with Aspen here (someone find them an ocean to walk into forever XD) though it does make sense. The only question now is why they are all so very very horrified at the thought of the crew of the Courageous settling elsewhere. I can get the whole vault thing. Somehow. But that doesn’t explain how Antarctica would monitor for ‘unauthorised’ terraforming or farming. But I guess if they answer the gift of information with information of their own, they might get to a better understanding.. (I also first misread that last sentence as them wanting to tell the history of their trip so far.. I should probably use the sleep)
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Antarctica: IM GONNA HAVE A SLAVE COLONY (MANY SLAVE COLONIES) NO MATTER WHAT IT TAKES GOD HELP ME
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