*Convergence Conclave Clerical Reply*

              RJ4 Marceus,

Your request for initial sharing of conclave logs from subject (MYSTIC) to subject (ANCIENT) conditionally approved. Phases 1 – 2 may execute upon receipt of this message. Phase 3-5 PENDING, intervention of Luminarious Rex, all light be upon him.

~Lictor Cavendish Curio, Luminous Novitiate Fourth, WARPROUTE CITADEL

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              Convergence Conclave Dispersion Log 2.2: Photonic Subject #733,682,111

WARPROUTE 37.6

I have not dreamed in many weeks, though it may have been a shorter time for you. It is difficult not to consider my audience, to tailor my tale to the particular man or woman or child – to look into your eyes. Are you seedgrown, with iris colors delightful as Old Earth stones but eminently more beautiful? Are you of the people Between, navigators between the stars whose eyes grew wider and darker, their pupils expanding to take in different wavelengths of light in the vast expanses. Their long, impressive forms grew more graceful than any elf might have been dreamed of, though frailer too. Perhaps you are bioengineered, or… I have only my pictures and my books and logs and dreams. It is lonesome without even the company of ghosts.

No no, I should not be so melancholy as that. He is here and has ever been, even in the stillness and silence of the stars. Can you see me smiling, friend? Imagine if you can, even if a luminary. Too much knowledge tends to swallow the imagination, but do try.

I promised an accounting of the Last War. My studies these few weeks have steeped me in the lores of those days. This Captain Lowan was a communications officer, skilled in battlefield interrelations, linking command to command, to soldier, to othermind-enabled shooters. I found that my dream was, somewhat, correct. The Last War began at the Crimson Sanctum on Mars. Captain Lowan rode in the hold of a transport vessel making a routine maintenance jump between the nearer worlds to Old Earth ensuring the quantum entangled linkages for the galactic Weave were stabilized.

The transport vessel from Saturn’s outer ring station had just reached Mars, and Captain Lowan and his team were preparing for a gravfloat to the surface, back door to the vessel open to the wild martian air, when a quantum void imploded. If you’ll admit me, I will dramatize a bit. I can almost see it in my mind’s eye.

I breathed steadily, leaning out over the open door, winds whipping against the buckles of my grav suit. My breath felt close and warm in my tempered crystal screened helmet. Luminous flashes of various streams played across my vision. The whole spectrum of light was visible in fading lines of varied types and hues. I thought and the neural implant reconfigured the glass to watch the ley lines of radio frequency transmissions, old waves used for centuries but now almost silent. I blinked and switched to other views rapidly, the crystal responding to each shift in my neural synapses through the spectral waves, HF, VHF, SHF, UHF, EHF, and on and on. Only a handful of remaining communications, for backups rode any of those lightborn paths. Quantum entangled linkages were infinitely faster.

The screen shifted again, superimposing the movement of the winds beneath us, and I began to map my route as the grav suit warmed up, gathering energy from the ship’s gravmag system for easy transition to the ground. My team was behind me, Telestrius, Byron, Kelon, Joash, and G34R – an othermind driven K9 unit designed as a quantum sniffer. Light can be seen, no matter its spectrum, with the right lenses, but the quantum entanglements, though made of photons and phonons at the ends, cast no light along their paths. They can, however, be perceived through olfactory senses. Othermind-enabled animals with supernaturally heightened senses are needed to find and mitigate quantum disturbances to the galactic Weave.

I have witnessed nuclear fusion bombs reduce sections of asteroids to particulate sizes nearly invisible and scatter them across vast expanses of space, the bloom of immense brightness only kept from burning my too human eyes by the intervention of crystal infusions in my protective helmet. I have witnessed old world grenades and flames and the birth of new stars, but nothing prepared me for the raw terror of the quantum void implosion. It was a flash of visible darkness that seared cold across my retina unmitigated by the nano-infused materials and centuries of scientific breakthrough. The darkness bloomed in a fractal flower pattern like infinite overlaid inverted snowflakes which drank light with ravenous thirst – not just the visible spectrum, but the bands from lowest to highest seemed to try to escape but were all violently pulled into the implosion and dismantled and devoured.

The force of the vacuum sucked my team and I out of the back of the vessel and out into the open scarlet sky where winds ceased whipping in terrified deference to the unnatural devastation. I tumbled once, blinked up at the vessel above us as it was twisted to one side, lurching in the sky like a drunken thing, and then a rocket blast pulled it away from the dispersion vacuum and pushed me further from it into the pull of the implosion horizon.

G34R spun wildly in the air, his tail streaming behind him as he snapped at the empty air within his own suit helmet. Telestrius careened ragdoll limp passed me as the implosion solidified in its fractal stain of mute light over the emptiness that was once the Crimson Sanctum and the surrounding city, now reduced to a floating dark-gray fog that crackled with the dying embers of electrodynamic bonding energy tracing its way backward toward the center of the event into a pinpoint of impossibly pure energy.

I arched my back and stabilized looking side to side for the rest of the team. Byron and Kelon steadied to my left, and Joash reached G34R on my right and steadied the K9 in the sky to thankful quantum telecom barks translated into an emotive connection we all felt as relief.

My visor burned with error messages in the direction of the implosion’s center, but I ignored it, instead tucking my arms in and going head down toward Telestrius who fell wildly. The implosion’s edge was a sharp cut in the sky like the severing of one world from another, and Telestrius fell closer to it. I had no sense of what might happen – possibly nothing, but a foreboding filled me. I heard gravmag whines behind me and heard Joash’s voice in the comms, “Gear’s steadied, popping float.”

Kelon and Byron’s voices echoed in assent, “Popping Float.”

Telestrius drew closer to the edge of the darkness, arms still flailing. I reached down to my side and tuned my gravfloat to a delayed release. If I fell too low too fast it would fire on its own, but I had to reach him. All my focus was bent on him, on the edge between red dust and dark absence. I reached him at speed, almost in a tackle, and we spun nearer and nearer the light-bereft edge. I gripped him tight, grunting with exertion and reached back to initiate the floatation system. The pre-staged gravfloat fired at a hair’s touch and we were wrenched out of our fall into a dead stop in the sky in the fraction of a second. My shoulder popped with the strain of carrying my companion, and I cursed into my visor.

Telestrius hung limp in my arms, so I pulled him up over my shoulder, the float anchoring me to the sky, and fiddled with his own gravfloat system finally initiating it.

“Nice catch, Cap, but what in the fifth dimensional hells was that?” Joash’s voice was boisterous but tinted with unease.

“Could’ve just let him fall. Float would have slowed him before he hit the dust anyway.” Byron’s tired fatalism was a continuous timbre.

Kelon hit Byron but said nothing as the two controlled their flotation with minute thought patterns sent to their suits through implants.

I took a few deep breaths, letting the suit’s photosynthetic filtration purify the CO2 built up in my mask. I closed my eyes, then opened them to the errors blaring. “Couldn’t have let him hit that.”

My voice sounded distant to myself as I drew out a small pouch of rations and tossed one, letting gravity take it into the fractal darkness. The edge of the night touched the ration’s wrapper and a ravening darkness devoured the electrodynamic energies and dissolved the ration into a super-fine dust which then vanished entirely.

Silence was the only appropriate reply as I looked up toward my floating comrades and locked eyes with Byron. He blinked and looked away.

What embellishments I may have added to the strict events of the reports, I hope you will not begrudge me. The news called it an attack of terror elements – vicious religious zealots intending the destruction of the expanding Solar Accords of Old Earth and Nova Martian Royalty. The Luminous Legions were already widely feared among the weak and distant elements – and this was the heart of their military might – as well as policing power. It was a convenient narrative that enabled decades of manhunts across the stars and the eradication of untenable elements in the galaxy.

Still, the hindsight of distant history seems to indicate other potentialities. My own research indicates the possibility that the first blast of quantum atomic void (QAV) weaponry which reduced the Crimson Sanctum to a hollowed ruin of black dust staining the surrounding color of the red planet, was accidental. More than five-hundred thousand of the luminous legions, including families were stationed at the Crimson Sanctum and surrounding city. An accident, though, does not a great story make. An accident has not the force to shape the hearts of men to action – and the Luminaries needed action.