We tremble before the great unknown

[Auman]

It was late, according to the cycle aboard the ARS Mollymawk and yet he could not sleep. This was a normal routine now, three months into their voyage into the unknown. The space between galaxies was great and terrifying, the thought alone of the isolation stirred disquiet. In times like these, Sean Cooper, commander of the air group for this vessel, found himself drawn to the observation deck. At this hour it was usually silent. From time to time he would find another there, watching the glimmering disk of the Milky Way receding behind them as they approached the Large Magellanic Cloud. He fished an electronic cigarette from his pocket... The Captain, a Peninsularian, forbid the real thing from his ship so Sean made due with a crude substitute. He pulled a burst of vapor into his lungs and exhaled through his nose, admiring the golden light of the galactic core as he stood near the viewing portal, itself just a projection screen displaying their surroundings.

Tabac exquis.

Stars still dappled the extragalactic void with light, but these were not merely stars... They were galaxies in their own right, many millions. He felt small and vulnerable. Back home, there was strength in being Aumanii, there was pride in being a Peninsularian and grace in knowing that one is Alexzonyan... But out here it was all meaningless. It was nothing but a shrinking circle of light upon the horizon of the universe. Out here, in the depths of the great unknown, there was only himself, his men and their allies... Probing in the dark stillwaters of a dwarf galaxy that few had ever dared to travel.

Perhaps the dread would go away once he had something to do. The air wing was useless now, the pilots and technicians holed up in the belly of the Mollymawk, making themselves busy with tedious work and sucking down contraband liquor distilled from oranges in toilet tanks. Perhaps, when he could mount his Si-22FT and take to the sky again he would finally be able to sleep... But that was many months from now and as he turned to gaze upon the approach of the Large Magellanic Cloud, he trembled.

[The Peninsular]

Captain's Quarters, ARS Mollymawk
Somewhere

Captain Lukkas Lombardener sat in his chair. 'Space is big.', the book he was reading said. He sighed. So it was one of those books again. 'You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindboggingly big it is.', the book continued on. 'You may just think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.' Lombardener tried remembering what exactly a peanut was. Some foreign fruit, probably., he thought to himself before forcing himself to continue reading. Everyone he had spoken to about it insisted that it was a 'must-read', a 'classic'. After a few hours of reading, he decided that it was apparently so much of a classic that the Aumanii Diplomatic Corps was using it as a general field manual.

Lombardener opened the lowest of the desk's drawers, placing the book inside and covering it with some paper so the neon green letters would stop shining so ominously. He sat for a few seconds, before looking at the clock. Half past one ship-time, it said. Might as well see how the night shift's holding up., Lombardener murmured to himself before standing up, taking his beret and going for a walk.

The innards of the ship were still a little foreign to Lombardener. The Alexzonyan-built ship looked nothing like what he was used to, with its almost friendly-looking corridors and dimmed lighting. The other unusual thing was the constant presence of gravity, which did feel good, but also had a little something unusual. He had served no less than four decades in the Navy now, served as a crewman on some of the first PMVK ships and had spend a huge deal of time on ships without gravity generators. That said, he couldn't complain too much about the ship. It was a masterful piece of engineering, and while it had less firepower than he would have liked, he felt the Alexzonyans had still made a lot of good decisions. Except for one.

Waste of space., Lombardener thought to himself as he walked past the hangar bays filled with the Aumanii fighter wings. He never spoke it out loud, but he believed the Admiral would have done much better bringing in any other ships - even the Aumanii corvette designs that, in the PMVK, were often jokingly referred to as 'Papierböötchen' - paper boats. The Aumanii pilots had been annoying some of his crew with their attitudes, or their reactions to perfectly reasonable discipline maintenance measures. He'd done his best to try to hide his distate for this decision from the Admiral and the fighter Commander.

After some time, checking on some of the night shifts and passing by a beverage dispenser, he arrived at the CIC. The tactical and technical data streaming over the screens had something comfortably familiar. Lombardener sat down in his Captain's seat, and looked through one of the cameras out into the void, remembering an old officer saying. 'Vigilance is half the victory.'

[Legendary Island of Atlantis]

Looking forward to a telescope that can detect elements on exoplanets.

[Ilovebenderdotcomland]

Looking forward to a telescope that can detect elements on exoplanets.

Hippie Science is on the verge of proving space time relativity revealing that those recently discovered exoplanets and unknown mega structures are observations of our own future and our own past based on these findings of observations of these exoplanets and mega structures in motion relative to our Hippie telescopes on board satellites also in different motions and trajectories swinging by known planets to save on fuel when turning corners in space making these observations over vast distances over space time, resulting in very curious effect observing where our solar system was and where the solar system will be observed from our post where our solar system's relative current spot is resulting in phenomenon known as time dilation when observing bodies in motion stretched over such vast distances in space time relative to the motion and direction from the observed bodies from the observers.

[Alexzonya]

It was almost impossible to serve any length of time as an officer in the Alexzonyan Starfleet without realizing how incomprehensibly large space really was. The concept of a lightyear as more than a concept was hard to understand until targets a few light-seconds away couldn’t be spotted with the naked eye. Even then, it took traveling space absurdly quickly, and then using conventional drives, to realize how far away a light year really was. In addition to being large, space was incredibly empty. Planetdwellers struggle to comprehend, until their first journey in a ship, how truly small a person is. How small a planet. How small a system...

From the observation deck of the ARS Mollymawk, Lt. Admiral Elana Thompson was starting to understand how small a galaxy, given the Milky Way was visible to… whatever direction that was. It was on the left side of the ship, but in the intergalactic void, there truly was no frame of reference but for the spiral arms to one side, and the much smaller cluster to the other. That smaller cluster was the Large Magellanic Cloud, and the sheer size, and sheer minuteness, of it were hard to understand at the same time. It gave Thompson a headache to try, but it was hard not to marvel.

The Mollymawk’s mission awaited in the Large Magellanic Cloud; the Aumanii had firm intelligence, through sources they declined to share, of CASM activity in the area. The Alexzonyan Origami Carrier and her FTL fighter wings would be the first attempt at close reconnaissance. Trying to surveil an entire galaxy with one ship of course would prove absurdly futile, even with a swarm of scout fighters along for the ride. The Military Intelligence Advisory had informed the Fleet that they had an idea for a solution; as a result, Thompson had spent the last two months of a busy shakedown on the class lead going absurdly far from home, into the intergalactic void, and training an oversized Ansensor array protruding from the exterior of the carrier at the LMC from a variety of angles.

The data was orders of magnitude less pinpoint than the scans that the smaller distributed OIC arrays in the Milky Way could return, but the gist was that, with enough Ansensor snapshots of different parts of the LMC from different angles, the analysts and AI back at Starfleet Command were confident they could approximately “heat map” the dwarf galaxy for activity. It wouldn’t be real-time, or tell them where CASM was, but it might tell them where CASM weren’t; the genocidal synths were unlikely to be guests of any reasonable star state, and any identified local powers might be willing to lend assistance in the SATMA endeavor. In the meantime, it was a monumentally tedious task that provided ample time to work on finish testing the ship’s various secondary system and also work towards desperately need crew cohesion among the trinational officers aboard; while the mapping project might be the most historic task before her, Thompson had a feeling that getting the various nationalities of the crew to play nice in a single ship might be the most challenging.