The Glorious Championship! [S3G5] [Round... Uh, Seven? The Oasis]

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This is my first battles in a while, it's pretty lazy and doesn't have my character in it. Shrug. Correct me if I’m contradicting anything. More posts to come, hopefully.

Decades of leadership seminars and motivational speakers, in alignment with personal experience, had taught <<native_honorific>> Fassil Quirrinal that all problems of crisis management could boil down to a binary choice. This choice goes by many idiomatic names: fight or flight, play or pass, run or gun, nut up or shut up, shit or get off the pot. To contain the damage and salvage what you can, or to make some attempt to restore a pre-catastrophic state – to recover that which has already been lost.

Of course, common wisdom in a post-Crunch civilization currently prevailed in the direction of flight. Consider crisis management in the event of a literally all-encompassing worst case scenario – an Ergodic contraction of all matter into a hyperentropic clump of matter, black holes rippling across the surface of Everything like late-stage tumors. When the prognosis was deemed terminal, the first instinct of all sentience’s greatest thinkers was to fight. But simple physics proved their error: that any possible action undertaken to stall or reverse the Crunch would cause a massive expenditure of nuclear energy, even to conceptualize, and this would accelerate entropy and close the narrow window in which fight was possible. Failure was inconceivable. So, after a couple botched attempts, nearly everybody died, hope was (sensibly) abandoned, and everyone else fled.

The lesson of the Crunch had informed the High Admiral’s command strategy throughout the battle. For six rounds it had been retreat, reevaluate, contain, conserve, survive. It had worked so far. They’d outlived the brainplague, the machine, even the goddess. Every day that Lucky stayed afloat was a victory. Right?

Right. Kind of. But Quirrinal had sailed the long dark for so long. Had stayed afloat. Gambled on the infinite uncertainty of the future, even with no reason to expect that there was anything ahead. Even the ideas of “forward” or “onward” or “future” were only abstractions on the outside of everything.

But the future came, and its name was the Hedonist, and his ability to toss VII around like (yes) a beach ball through new realities, new world that could sustain Itzel and her trillions of charges. The danger of the battle pushed Itzel and her crew even farther into their ingrained conservatism, caution, cowardice. But there was something else in the air, and everyone could smell it. Whether you were a first or second or eleventh generation refugee, the scent (for Quirrinal it was the smell of the sky in geyser season) stirred up memories that were not so much juvenile as genetic. Call it “hope” if you want to get slapped about the face by whoever was nearby.

Quirrinal hadn’t put a lot of resources into the side project, what with all the other tasks demanding his and the Admiral’s attention. But he had to do something. Because what if everything worked out and they escaped the battle? Would the Hedonist send them back out into the dark? Leaving all this new everything – this “multiverse” – a five-dimensional finger’s touch away, but forever inaccessible? It was unthinkable. So he fought a little. Threw a little energy, a little cash, a little brainpower after an uncertain outcome. Need-to-know basis (where Itzel, bless her, didn’t need to know much). He wouldn’t have risked any more than that. But if the Hedonist could drop VII into a fresh, living universe with only a snap of his fingers, why couldn’t they do it with the most sophisticated technology of a once-great universe?

He was wrong, of course. He should have kept his wings tucked in and focused on the battle at hand. Or, at least, he should have put more consideration into fringe possibilities. He was so focused on the waste of resources that he hadn’t even thought about the possibility that someone would sabotage his and Aio’s multiversal relay. All for a distraction while that same party (their symbol, apparently, some kind of black band) diverted VII’s exotic-matter output to a spontaneous terraformer protocol. Which protocol, for reasons unknown (though everyone’s best guesses were equally dire) proceeded to bring into being nothing but squids, apparently sentient squids, apparently violently anti-authoritarian sentient squids.

So here was the good news: the probability incursion triggered by the sabotage of the relay had resolved itself, and the proper bridge crew of VII had been restored (or so they were pretty sure, though it was hard to be certain that there hadn’t been any continuity tears). And the anomaly designated ‘Banksii’ had been neutralized by a black hole to the brain. The bad news was that as a result of these catastrophes, for the first time since the battle begins, the functionality of the worldship was below satisfactory parameters. To wit, barring the discovery of a new source of exotic matter, Lucky had about two weeks to live before food and energy levels became critical.

This was only partly Quirrinal’s fault, but the Admiral didn’t see it that way.

“You know me, Fassil,” said Itzel. “I don’t much believe in executions. Crew members are resources the same as anything else—when they aren’t a liability.”

Wings harnessed, talons cuffed, kneeling before the tribunal, Captain Quirrinal was of two minds. His shame was heavy and all-consuming; it circled through him like a poison in his blood, tainting his every movement and his every thought. But piercing the morass of shame was an arrow of self-righteousness. This was a smaller thing, but it burned white-hot and demanded his attention.

“It doesn’t matter what happens to me,” he told the tribunal. “This work is more important than ever. If we stay the course, there’s still a chance we can survive the battle. But if we act aggressively, this battle can save us.”

“There’s no way you’re going to convince us to risk another breach. I’m calling to a halt any projects that have the stink of extrauniversal energy about them. Stick to the subject at hand. My inclination is to put you in stasis.”

Quirrinal cawed in dismay. “And sit and wait for rescue like everyone else? I’ll take the execution, if you don’t mind.”

“Fassil!” shouted Itzel. “You have no right to be smart with me right now. Your misconduct has cost thousands of lives and threatened billions of others.”

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” Beat. “I have one request.”

“Request away.”

“Don’t put me in stasis. Give me a lander and a crew of marines.”

Beat. “You want to launch an expedition?” asked the Admiral.

“Why not? You aren’t using the ships, or me, and you’ve got plenty of cops. The fuel loss is, what, ten to the negative eighth seconds off our countdown? It’s a zero-risk proposition, now that I’m a liability.”

“Fassil,” said Itzel. “You were the one who briefed me on the feasibility of a landing party. At our scale, we have no idea what would happen if we brushed up against so much as an O2 molecule. VII’s shields are all that’s keeping us safe.”

“Well, then, at the very least you’ll get some good data out of the trip. But if the Hedonist has made all of these environments breathable for all the other contestants, there’s a good chance he’s done the same for us.”

Beat.

“Assuming you don’t immediately disperse into energy—your ship won’t be big enough to interact with anything around you. What are you planning on doing? Where are you planning on going?”

“Admiral, that was true, up to this round. But the situation has changed. The new contestant—last seen wandering off with Etiyr—is a hivemind made up of microorganisms that might be small enough for a landing party to engage. From there… we’ll see.

“With your permission, Admiral…” Beat. “I’d like to lead a Voyage to Ekrith.”

Beat.