Doctor Who_ Hope - Mark Clapham [28]
Whats with the ceiling? Fitz asked, never too afraid to speak his mind.
Miraso stared at him blankly, then looked up.
Huh, that, she said. Hope used to be pretty feudal a few generations back, and the Palace is built around what used to be some sort of meeting hall. The painting must come from that period, its all the typical tribal history crap, where we came from and how we got here. You know, knowledge has been lost so often sometimes communities need to go back to the basics to pass things down.
Why dont you talk us through it? asked Anji politely. Fitz glanced between the two women Miraso seemed surprised by the suggestion, but not overtly suspicious.
If you like, said Miraso. Im too wired to sleep anyway.
She stood up, stepping backwards across the room to point at a part of the mural that illustrated a handful of planets orbiting a sun. The sun was a bright yellow with a little fleck of orange along one side, while the planets were all different colours.
Right, said Miraso. This is where we begin.
Once, at the end of time, there was a solar system with several inhabited worlds. Races and peoples from across the galaxy lived there, although as time went on those species intermingled and essentially became one diverse people. While not a utopia, the standard of life in the system was good, and populations rose. As resources became tighter; space stations and other remote facilities were constructed in orbit around the various worlds, and one particular cold, watery rock, long named A245 but generally referred to as Endpoint due to its reputation as the last place anyone would want to go, was designated as the place to offload all the waste of a highly populated system. Spent fuel rods, decommissioned military equipment, every possible kind of dangerous waste imaginable it all ended up on the Endpoint, flooding the seas with poison and darkening the skies.
The fall of this system was due to no internal problem, no hubris or error on the part of those who lived there. They were simply stuck between two sides in one of the many wars that had raged since humanitys fall all those long, long millennia ago. Suffice to say a fleet of ships arrived in the system, knocking stations and moons out of orbit as these vast warcarriers sought shelter in their retreat from the enemy. An enemy who ploughed through the system, indiscriminately blasting planets to dust as they tore through their intended targets, leaving behind total devastation; all the decent planets had gone, cracked open by weaponry the inhabitants couldnt even comprehend. The space between those planets was left a minefield, huge chunks of debris colliding and intercolliding, a Newtonian system that made the whole area impossible for space travel.
Not that the rest of the universe really cared. Hit badly by the war themselves, the empires and the factions had better things to do than send valuable ships into a star system reduced to a graveyard. It was too dangerous, there was no point, no hope that traces of civilisation had survived.
Little did they know that on the planet Endpoint, the last world orbiting that sun, the survivors of the cataclysm had gathered, fleeing in their habitation pods and their ships to the only place left to go. Debris rained down on Endpoint, the remnants of their now wrecked civilisations and fragments from the great ships that had doomed the system by seeking sanctuary there. And the people who had somehow survived