{"sf1_id":1332692,"sf2_id":"P1EaLbO1","title":"WtV: Timeline","author":"Aries_Hausdorff","words":18319,"posted_at":"2018-05-10T21:31:00.000Z","tags":["Wtv","overview","timeline"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/1332692-wtv-timeline","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/s/P1EaLbO1","image_url":"https://cdn.sofurryfiles.com/submissions/thumbnails/54/97/5497319a-dccb-4dce-8922-95d8452d3819","description":"","content":"##   \n  \nTimeline\nThe universe of 'Welcome to Valhalla' - WtV for short - assumes a long  \nhistory. The, for humans, most relevant aspect is that our modern world is just  \nthe second try of humanity. The first one was made before the last  \nmajor iceage, that is, over a quarter million years ago.  \n250.000 years ago, right.  \nBack then humanity was still split in three main groups:  \nFirst, the modern human, homo sapiens, from Africa.  \nSecond, the Neanderthals living in the northern climates of Eurasia.  \nThird, the eastern Denisovans in south-east asia, sharing their sphere of influence with the  \ndiminuitive homo floresiensis.  \nThat age has a rich history with heroes and catastrophes.  \nBut it is, for the greater part, not known to the people of the 'Welcome to Valhalla' storyline.  \nAll ancient dates are approximations. Given the temporal distance, temporal precision might not be  \nthat important.  \nOriginally dates were given in the anthropocene timescale, starting 10.000 BC. But too many  \npeople found that confusing.  \nPlus, the anthropocene timescale is a bit unusable within the 'Welcome to Valhalla' setting.  \n**~ 270.000 BC**  \nThe three main branches of humanity, Homo Sapiens, Homo Neanderthalensis and the Homo  \nDenisovan exist on earth.  \nThey develop from tribal societies to nation states. After a bitter war, fought in the end with nuclear  \nweapons,  \nthey peacefully merge in the Empire of Nut. Exploration of the solarsystem begins, in part to find  \nressources and space to live.  \n**~ 265.000 BC**  \nThe phase of stellar expansion begins. Huge robotic spacecraft, the terraformers, are sent out to  \nexplore the adjacent star systems  \nand to build spacestations and to terraform planets of terran settlement. The much slower ice-arc,  \nfreeze-sleeper colony ships, are sent after them.  \n**~ 260.000 BC**  \n\"The First Sin\" happens: Unknown to humanity which interpret the returned data from a point of  \nblissful ignorance,  \nthe first terraformer actually enacted a genocide in terraforming a world inhabited by sapient  \nlifeforms.  \nThe programming of the terraformers simply did not cover the possibility of alien life.  \nThe Terraformers boost further outward to terraform more worlds, whilst the slow colonyships  \nstart founding colony after colony on the prepared worlds.  \n**~ 255.000 BC**  \nAs per program, the Terraformers have the limited ability to build copies of themselves, cascading  \ntheir numbers,  \nspeeding up the exploration and terraforming of planets.  \nMore planets are terraformed and sometimes their native life extinguished. Terra-like worlds don't  \nfare much better:  \nWhen the inhabitants make effective resistance, the\n\nterraformers sterilize the planet before terraforming it.  \nAfter about 6000 years of expansion, the terran sphere of influence spans almost 200 lightyears inradius.\u0026nbsp;  \n73 colonies are established, ranging from, by then, densely populated worlds equalling earth,   \nto worlds either sparsely populatedor with only a token settlement due to the harsh climate.   \nSome systems actually don't even haveplanets, yet are colonized.\u0026nbsp;The colonists settled in space habitats which the passing-through Terraformer erected as waystations.\n\n**~ 252.000 BC**  \nA small group of terraformers that teamed up to bridge a large starless stretch of space run into a  \nstable wormhole.  \nOn the other side, 1000 lightyears counterclockwise away, they emerge. They disassemble drifting  \nores - a derelict spacestation which controlled the wormhole -  \nbefore proceeding with their task of terraforming worlds.  \nThey discover the homeworld of the Khet, a war-damaged planet Kidari, orbiting a jupiter-like gas  \ngiant.  \nTo the terraformers a terraformable planet, the Khet are lucky. For one, their world initially was an  \nearth like world, so the terraformers actually repair it.  \nAnd for the other, the Khet do not even try to resist the terraformers in a meaningful way, believing  \nthem to be gods healing their world.  \nThe collapse of the wormhole is detected by a starfaring species. The Velos with their allies the  \nAnatians arrive, finding giant machines repairing a world.  \nThey get into contact with the machines by behaving for one non-threatening, and for another by  \nbehaving just like humans would have.  \nAt the same time, a colonyship of the species that the first terraformer eradicated, launched just a  \nfew years before the machines arrival, is picked up coreward  \nby a Galactics customs vessel for improper identification and serialnumbers. Whilst the scared  \nsurvivors delete the informations of their homeworlds galactic position,  \nthe Galactics panic seeing the recordings the vessel received from its dying homeworld. For  \neverything indicates a rogue AI battlefleet is hellbent on genocidal actions.  \nA mobilization is called for. But as usual in large bureaucracies, it takes long. Not days or weeks,  \nbut literally decades pass until it is decided to even discuss this topic in  \na meeting of the galactic council.  \n**~ 251.500 BC**  \nThe Velos are on their leisurly way back to their homeworld when they get a call from the  \nterraformer repairing Kidari: If they would be so kind to carry a priority message quickly  \nto a certain point in space.  \nThe Velos accept. As their species is old and they are long lived, they don't listen much to the  \nchatter of the younger races.  \nSo they missed that one of the terraformers they met in the orbit of Kidari moved on and placed a  \nrelay station at the border of a nearby solar system that was off limits being a military base.  \nAnd when the relaystation was attacked and destroyed, the Terraformer came back, built a better  \nstation and then removed the threat to the station - destroying the military base.  \nThe Galactics know now exactly where one of the Killermachines is and send a huge fleet to hunt it  \ndown.  \nThe Velos receive the parcel from the terraformers without knowing what is in it, and jump into  \nterran controlled space, delivering the message.  \nUpon finding that the point of origin on the maps is a small solar system, which, funnily, is  \nprominently marked in their own star charts, they go on to earth.  \nOnly on Terra they learn that the terraformers talk about a military danger to humanity which they  \nestimate they can not stop.  \nThe Velos are switching on their radio and finally learn that the benevolent machines they met are  \nclassified officially as galactic enemy number 2.  \nGalactic enemy number 1 are their as of yet unknown creators. Whoever helps them, protects them,  \nor cooperates with them voluntarily will be punished like them:  \nEdict of Eradication, full genocide.  \nThe price for building self replicating AI based weapons with the intent to kill off other species.  \nWhich the humans didn't and never intended. And the Velos believe them. As a very ancient  \nspecies, they have a lot of influence, and they promise to help the terrans by stopping the edict of  \neradication.  \nThey give the terrans the secret of uplifting, as uplifted species are legally not responsible for their  \ncreators actions.  \nThis and a peculiarity of the Velos uplift virus will prevent the terran colonies being confiscated by  \nthe galactics and preserve them for humanity.  \nBecause, but this the Velos only tell the philosophers of the Council of Terra, the uplifts will be  \nable to interbreed stable and safely with humans.  \nTo their amazement the terrans have been doing research into uplifting already, but only saw it as a  \nleisure technology for the rich and wealthy.  \nAs several terraformers will breach into civilized galactic space earlier than the terran sublight  \ncommunication network or even the Velos could reach them and tell them to stand down,  \nthe Council decides, after discussing it with the Velos, to fight a defensive war to delay the by now  \ninevitably coming Galactics attack.  \nThe Velos can only help Terra when nobody knows they're in collusion with the humans.  \nAnd also, the humans carry the basic responsibility, but the Velos are willing to lend them a hand to  \nenhance the odds.  \nAs a parting gift, the Velos agree to take three of the most modern colony arcs into tow, bringing  \nthem to a far away area of space.  \nBy then the Galactics boast of the destruction of the \"mighty enemy fleet\" consisting out of three  \nterraformers and their auxiliary units.  \nTheir own battlefleet took a harsh beating against the actually primitive machines.  \nThe ground units repairing Kidari are not considered to be part of the terraformer fleet as these  \nmachines are spotted to be always near Khet.  \nAnd an AI genocide machine wouldn't repair a biosphere and ignore a sapient lifeform when it  \ncould just as well smash it, wouldn't it?  \n**~ 251.000 BC**  \nThe galactics battlefleet cleared out two of the three terraformers. They think they have them all,  \nfalling for a set of ruses.  \nFor one, one of the terraformers compartmentalized itself and packed its modules into innocent  \nasteroids drifting through space.  \nFor another, the \"last\" Terraformer they destroyed sent an omega message into a direction away  \nfrom human controlled space.  \nThe fleet follows the trail of that transmission - seeing the Khet cleaning up their planet with  \nprimitive machines.  \nWhich obviously the Khet must have built themselves as AI controlled killer robots wouldn't  \npeacefully repair an inhabited planet.  \nWith the Fleet broadcasting their current mission status, also the Velos and thus the terrans learn of  \nthe outcome of the battle.  \nThe Velos offer to tow the available three brand-new terran colony-arcs through hyperspace, their  \nbarely 200 meter long 'tincan' of a  \nspaceship being powerful enough to tow the three several-kilometer long arc ships without much  \nslowdown.  \nIn the decades that have passed since the Velos arrived, the design of the arcs has been massively  \nmodified to  \nreduce the risk of recognition by the galactic forces, which still don't have detailed informations  \nabout humanity.  \nThe Velos bring the three arcs to the position of the dismantled wormhole station, from where it is  \nonly a few years travel to the Kokiva  \nsystem under their own power. The entire system is filled with the automatic chatter of omega  \nmessages. The galactics let the  \nwreckage of the terraformers drift after making sure there was no nanotech to be found, and thus,  \nonce broken down enough, the wreckage  \nwould not become an active threat again.  \nAll arcs collect as much ressources as possible. One lands on Kidari, claiming it under the Terran  \nname Lantrei. That vessel was crewed by  \nhumans of mixed racial ancestry from the borderlands - modern humans, one would say - who felt  \nill at ease with uplifts. Whilst the  \nterraforming process is well underway on Lantrei, the planet is still deadly toxic to humans. The  \nlanders dig in and the humans construct  \nunderground shelters. During that time they learn about the Khet. As the Khet and the terraforming  \nrobots get along well and were not  \nbothered by the galactics battlefleet, they are considered a neccessary piece of camouflage for the  \nterran colony.  \nTests show that the Khet themselves are an uplifted species, but the method used is completely  \ndifferent from the system the terrans now  \nhave access to. When later on surface works become neccessary before completion of the  \nterraforming process, that process is used  \nto create uplifts, nicknamed Chimeras, as they combine the genetic heritage of Terra and Kidari.  \nThe other two arcs set off to more distant stars, away from any settlement of the Galactics known  \nto the Velos.  \nAll arcs are under strict order never to contact earth. In fact, the position of earth as well as their  \nstarcharts are scrubbed.  \n**~ 250.500 BC**  \nRight beyond the fringe of Terra controlled space, the inevitable happens:  \nTerraformer #3.8 bursts out of a stellar cloud it had traversed for the last 80 years, emerging within  \na quarter lightyear of  \na bustling tradehub. The updated informations and instructions to all terraformers are still over a  \nhundred years behind it.  \nIts sensors detect a terraformable world in the nearby system and it corrects course. Soaked full  \nwith the gases from  \nthe interstellar cloud, #3.8 and its attendant fleet come in at high speed, intent to brake inside the  \nsystem,  \ngiven they have surplus fuel in plenty. A customs vessel of the trade space station 'Good Business'  \ntries to intercept  \nthe Terraformer, mistaking it for a bulk freighter.  \nAs the small vessel wasn't reacting to its radio broadcasts on all bands, #3.8 took the vessels vector  \nas indicative of an attack,  \n#3.8 opens fire with its meteor defense, vaporizing the unprotected customs vessel.  \nAll over the system, sirens start to yell.  \nThe cloud had been known for eons to disturb all kinds of FTL navigation and FTL drives.  \nNobody had ever expected an attack from that direction.  \nThe entire system was calling for help. The Galactics battlefleet that was - much to its critics  \namusement - still searching  \nfor the suspected Terraformers origin, in a completely wrong direction, received the call and turned  \naround.  \nThey arrived a week later - an excellent job on the navigators part. By then #3.8 had wrecked all  \nvessels attacking it or its fleet.  \nIt was considered a miracle that a bulk freighter and a travelling religious group were spared,  \ndespite passing by very close to #3.8.  \nThey had not lain on its flightpath, their vectors of movements had not intersected with anything  \nand they fired no weapons  \nat the Terraformer.  \nThe battle was short. #3.8 fought with all the knowledge and tricks terran history had to offer, but  \ndid not have the months of time  \nfor preparations that #7.6, #7.7 and #8.8 had. For the Galactics, the battle was a huge success,  \ndespite the losses.  \nFor one, the battlefleet had shown it was able to defend a civilized system under attack.  \nFor another, by the time #3.8 knew that it would loose and starting falsifying or deleting the  \ninfomrations in its databanks,  \none of its minor communication-clusters had been disconnected by a stray hit. It was used to  \ncommunicate back to the - at the time unreachable due to the cloud - terran deep space network.  \nIt had buffered all routine messages including the direction of the nearest relay at the most outlying  \ncolonial world.  \nWhen the galactic powers-that-are got their hands onto the wreckage, scout vessels were soon able  \nto verify the existence of the terran  \ncolony. Having received the warning only a few years before, the colony was still in its infancy  \nwith barely two million colonists.  \nThe first uplifts were still barely more than toddlers.  \nTerraformer #9.3 had been diverted to the colony, its scheduled arrival still five years out. It had  \nbeen passing by the colony at only a  \nlightyear distance.  \n**~ 250.300 BC**  \nRepairing the damage taken in the last battle and using its now widespread popularity, the galactic  \nbattlefleet  \n( think rather of them as one of many defence service contractors ) builds up strength in the coming  \nfour years before they attack.  \nThe colony had about 10 years to prepare. Assuming an easy victory based on their previous battle  \nexperience, they learn a lot of new lessons.  \nWhilst the siege of the planets last underground fortifications is underway, #9.3 arrives, having  \nconverted itself into a full  \nfledged battleship by the time of its arrival. Its attendant fleet likewise is no longer all types of  \nsupport vessels, but terran-tech  \nsolutions against galactics-tech ships of the line. That they are still outclassed, outgunned and  \noutmaneuvered doesn't bother #9.3.  \nFor one it doesn't have the ability to feel bothered, for another its task is clear:  \nDelay the galactics fleet, wreak havoc, and ideally evacuate as much of the colony as possible.  \nIn the end, only a small group of about 100 survivors manages to reach the colony-arc, which was  \nparked out in the Oort cloud of the system.  \nThe colony arc had been sent for refitting and refueling to the rim of the system, where it had the  \nhighest chance of staying undiscovered.  \nOnly one fortress could be relieved, but most of its population gets caught as the main transport  \nvessels get intercepted after the  \nrest of #9.3 attendant fleet and the terraformer itself are destroyed.  \nIt shows the Velos were right: The uplifts are not considered to be terrans, but, as the world was  \nterraformed, are accepted as a  \nsort-of natives to the world. They are left, the few thousands that there are, barely adolescents, to  \ntake care of themselves in a world  \nnow devoid of all terran-made artifacts.  \nThe galactics leave a set of surveillance satellites in place that are to warn in case terrans should try  \nto reclaim the world.  \nAnd to discourage other galactic civilizations from sneaking in and trying to exploit the 'primitives'.  \nIn the following one hundred and fifty years, often faster than the messages traverse the terran deep  \nspace network, they conquer system  \nafter system. But after each system, they need more reinforcements, more new vessels.  \n20 lightyears out from Terra, in the area of the so-called inner colonies, the costs of the expedition  \nhave risen so high  \nthat many of both the more timid as well as the smarter voices - latter having studied the  \nTerraformers as well as the humans - suggest  \nthat a peace treaty might be a good idea.  \nOne argument is that the Terraformers do not qualify as reason for an edict of extinction. Others  \nargue that the terraforming-technology  \nof the Terrans is far in advance of all such technologies ever developed by other spacefaring races.  \nThe reason? Due to FTL technology they could simply afford to search for an already habitable  \nplanet in a larger area.  \nThe Velos reclaim their seats on galactic political meetings after a long time of absence and start  \nlobbying for the edict to be lifted.  \nThey actually lobby for more, but there is a scare of rogue AIs originating from Terra. Many  \nGalactics believe that the facts  \nprovided by the anti-edict / pro-Terra group are faked.  \nIn the mean time, Terra and the inner colonies not yet under attack send out a last fleet of very  \nslow, but also very secretive, colonyships.  \nThese ships are to travel to the stars for at least 100.000 years, to arrive at their destinations at a  \ntime in the very far away future.  \nFar, even for the Empire of Nut with its 20.000 years of history.  \n**~ 250.250 BC**  \nOnly by invoking an ancient law - much to the chagrin of some of the other old races - of  \ndemanding loyalty from races in their  \ndebt - from having been created by them or having had their homeworld rescued or from having  \nbeen brought to new worlds for colonisation  \nbeyond their reach - the Velos narrowly manage to lift the edict.  \nHowever, they fail in stopping the crusade, meaning that earth will be fought to the ground and all  \nhumans from the colonies - mostly  \nstored in stasis containers on freighters at the moment - will be repatriated to earth, even when that  \nwill mean swamping the planet with humans.  \nWhich is almost as bad as an edict of extinction, but the Velos hope to soften it up by getting  \nseveral of their own people into the implementation phase.  \nThe inner colonies, each a system as well settled as the solar system of Terra, proove to be hard  \nnuts to crack.  \nDespite there only being two dozen of settled systems and - to the Galactics initial relief, no more  \nTerraformers - humanity prooves to be more tenacious than  \ntheir giant robots were.  \nOverpopulated galactic planets happily promise everything and then some more to their  \nundesireables and ship them out on bulk freighters to  \nsupport the war effort. Rare is the junkyard retaining a single still functional hull.  \nThe last system before Terra, Tau Ceti with its capital world of Eidon, lasts a full ten years, longer  \nthan the previous three systems together.  \nThe systems military commander, or Quetzal, as the title goes, Babemba Toron, is spirited away by  \nthe last remaining soldiers and the uplift medics  \nof his staff, right under the noses of the Galactics as they take the last stronghold on Eidon.  \nIn the end, Eidon falls. The fact that the Galactics military reverted more and more often to  \nmeasures that many of the smaller, younger and weaker races painfully  \nremember to have been called \"accidents\" when it happened to them, gathers more and more  \nsupport in favour of the humans.  \nBecause whilst they fight with all tricks one can imagine, and then some more, they do not kill  \ncaptured soldiers and they do ask survivors for the proper  \nrites to be applied to killed Galactics soldiers. The summary parading around and public chopping-  \noff-of-heads applied to terran soldiers against  \nboth Galactics rules-of-war as well as Terran traditions before driving surviving civilians naked  \ninto the stasis containers finally  \nbreaks popular support for the edict for good - as well as it prevents the intended dumping of some  \ndozen billions of terrans onto Terra.  \n**~ 250.100 BC**  \nThe solar system falls after a long and protracted battle. Terra lasts two more years. The Galactics  \nbattlefleet went through  \nseveral mutinies when tactics are used that many younger races remember having been labelled as  \n\"regrettable accidents\"  \nby the older races. The Velos spirit, under the cover of Terran sneak counter attacks against the  \nfleets supply train,  \nmost of the stasis transporters away.  \nThe remainders of the governing council of Terra are forced to send out a message over the terran  \ndeep space network  \nto all remaining units in space. They are to either shut down or to surrender themselves to the next  \ngalactic control post inside  \nthe former Terran sphere of influence. The Galactics don't know that it instructs all terraformers  \nreceiving the message to stand  \ndown only when they visited a system since the message was originally sent out.  \nIn case they were still in transit or were in an empty solar system, they are to camouflage  \nthemselves, slow down and go to  \nhibernation for a thousand years before their updated programming is to take over.  \nAfter the message is sent to the satisfaction of the Galactics, all technology on Terra is destroyed.  \nAnd then four billion stasis-kept humans are unloaded onto a devastated planet, roughly each racial  \ngroup in the area of their ancestors.  \nThis, despite many of the younger species and the Velos pointing out that the edict of extinction is  \nillegal because humanity didn't  \nactually create AIs and the genocides humanity is to fault for were made unknowingly. This  \ncompared to similar world-ending effects for  \nwhich older races just said \"oopsie\" and gave the few survivors a cookie as compensation, in two  \ndocumented cases even figuratively.  \n\"It won't extinct them, just shrink them to size,\" is the reply.  \n**~ 250.000 BC**  \nThe now unloaded stasis transports are used to ferry the uplifts from the various colonyworlds  \naround until \"specieswise pure\" colonies are established.  \nWhilst on Terra an iceage begins as the result of the orbital bombardments, many of the younger,  \nsmaller races - at least all that had  \nand \"oopsie!\" event with older galactic races, voluntarily do guard duty in the former systems of  \nthe Empire of Nut.  \nThose who's homeworlds were devastated by \"oopsie!\" events with older races miraculously  \ndiscover drifting, almost mint terraformer 'wrecks',  \nfully configured for crewed operations. In some cases the races finding them devastate the interíor  \ndesigns to cover up the fact that the seats were made to-spec  \nfor nunhuman usage. The Velos stand guard in the solar system, often having to ward off \"tourists\"  \ncoming along heavily armed and paid  \nfor their travels by the anti-terran faction races.  \nOn Terra, the long ice age begins. Without infrastructure and technology, no functional remaining  \nagriculture, starvation soon sets in.  \nLong-forgotten as well as new diseases do their work.  \nSome uplifts that hid away try to help using their natural skill. Tiny figurines and carvings, like of  \nthe lion man of #####  \nremember them, as they used their physical prowess to kill large animals and then teach the  \nhumans how to do it.  \nOn Terra, the long night has begun.  \nOn some of the former terran colonies, the uplifted species - now sorted species-pure per planet by  \nthe Galactics - start the first  \nadvanced stone age or early bronze age societies. Whilst they  \nhave the know-how, they were left with nothing in the sense of tools.  \n**~ 245.000 BC**  \nStars move. Much sooner than natural, the star charts of the formerly Terran sphere of influence  \nbecome such a jumbled mess  \nthat fewer and fewer Galactics travel into those regions. Especially as the Velos and their often  \nridiculed allies enforce the rules laid  \ndown for the former Terran domain quite ruthlessly. No visitors, no contact with the new natives of  \nthose worlds, no travelling  \ninto those systems.  \nSubtly manipulating the news, guiding the focus of galactic interest to other places, the Velos  \nensure that the war drifts out of  \ncommon memory. The area of space gets labelled as 'boring' and 'mildly difficult to navigate'  \nThe last of the three arkships relocated by the Velos settles down on a barely habitable world and  \nstarts terraforming.  \n**~ 240.000 BC**  \nOn earth, humanity reaches its lowest stage, falling back to stone age niveau.  \nElsewhere, all \"captured\" Terraformers were put to good use. Most of the younger, smaller races  \nnow posess a second world to call home, free of influence  \nfrom the older races. And those not having an additional planet now can lay claim to several large  \nspaceborne habitats.  \nThe Taurians, once almost eradicated by the actions of a single terraformer, were compensated with  \na barely habitable planet in a backwater solar system.  \nThey received two Terraformers, or rather \"happened to stumble upon them\". Much to the chagrin  \nof the old race of the Zip, who  \nenjoyed trading Taurian shaved fur against all that the Taurians needed to live in their system, the  \ntwo giant machines enabled  \nthe Taurians not only to turn their system into a paradise with two luxuriously verdant worlds, but  \nalso a large industrial powerhouse.  \nAmongst the dozens of spaceborne ring habitats in which much of the Taurian light and service  \nindustry is located, the Taurians  \nbuild two stations which they gift the humans stored in the four stasis freighters the Velos gave into  \ntheir hands.  \nAmongst the teeming billions of Taurians, the 15 million humans, survivors of three fallen terran  \ncolony worlds, simply are invisible.  \nThe Rulers of Taura declare that the terrans paid for their folley, and the terraformers paid for their  \ndeeds.  \nIf it wouldn't be for the Taurans tradition of considering useful things members of society, many  \nother species would have balked at the thought of making one of the scary terraformers an official  \nmember of ones species.  \nBy the time the last guardship leaves the solar system of earth, leaving 'guarding' earth to a number  \nof autonomuous defense stations  \nof Velos improvements on Terran designs, most stasis freighters were unloaded and recycled, the  \nterran survivors living more or less hidden  \namongst the populations of those races that received a terraformer as a payment for this future  \nservice.  \nWith no large vessel able to approach Earth due to the Velos installed defence system, only a few  \nsleeper agents manage to reach Earth to influence  \nhuman society to come down even further and ideally stay down.  \n**~ 200.000 BC**  \nOn earth, tribes of homo sapiens in modern day Ethiopia start developing burial rituals.  \nOne of the sleeper agents found that a whole bunch of his colleagues had landed in swamps and  \ndrowned when trying to get out. He acquires human help to rescue to corpses and buries them  \naccording to his own rites. He appears as a god to the primitive humans.  \n**~ 150.000 BC**  \nOn Eidon in the Tau Ceti system, Kira Sa Toron, the adopted white tigress daughter of Babemba  \nToron and his families personal medic and childrens bodyguard,  \nappears out of a secret stasis chamber deep under the north polar mountain range. She travels the  \nworld on foot and teaches the white and orange  \ntigers she meets on the different continents basic and advanced cultural technologies, before, after  \n20 years, returning to the stasis chamber and going  \nback to a timeless sleep, guarding Babemba and his children.  \nThe tigers rise from stone age barbary begins.  \nElsewhere, a thousand lightyears and more away, the first of the strip-moon arkships of the last  \nwave of terran colony ships reaches its destination. #4.9, having waited 50.000 years  \ncamouflaged as a small moon, builds a single habitat in the systems Oort-Cloud to take in the  \nsettlers.  \nDue to the long travel time in cryostasis, only a handful of the half-million settlers can be revived.  \nAll of them with more or less heavy brain damage and other defects.  \nThe arkships complement of uplifted snowleopards fared a bit better. They are placed in charge of  \nthe humans.  \nAfter a thousand years the populations are stable and healthy again.  \n#4.9 assembles several roaming habitat type colony vessels which are crewed for maximum genetic  \ndiversity. #4.9, heavily camouflaged as a crewed vessel - which's crew consists out of frozen  \nsnowleopards that didn't  \nsurvive the inital arkships travel - sets off to look for lifeless worlds that can be made habitable on  \nlarger timescales than the original terraformer project called for. And, too, that can be 'terraformed'  \nfor totally different chemistries.  \n**~ 100.000 BC**  \nOn the former colony world of Nairal, the leopards form their first world-government. Solving all  \nmajor problems of society within the next 500  \nyears, their culture stagnates after they explored the planets of their system. After another 1000  \nyears their society collapses back to their  \nhomeworld. Only the minority group of the mountain loving and philosophically inclined  \nsnowleopards decide to keep all the gained knowledge alive.  \nOn the former colony world of Lyrta, the impact of a large asteroid - the drifting wreck of #6.3 and  \na galactics battle platform  \n#6.3 took out by ramming - destroys 76 percent of all lifeforms in the resulting impact-induced ice  \nage.  \nImpacting weeks before a nuclear war could break out between the various badger nations, it sort-  \nof actually saves the species.  \nThe survivors fall back into primitivity once more.  \n**~ 60.000 BC**  \nOn earth, small family groups of homo sapiens leave Africa. In the area of modern day Syria they  \nrun into their remote cousins, the neanderthals.  \nBoth sides have ancient tales of brave brothers long lost. The two groups soon interbreed.  \nBows and arrows start to make their debut. Another sleeper agent tres to seed dissent, but runs into  \ntrouble as the mostly nomadic groups of humans ignore him.  \n**~ 50.000 BC**  \nOn Eidon, orange tiger farmers discover that a balanced diet of peas and maize is capable of  \nkeeping a tiger almost as healthy as the usual  \nmeat based diet. From nomadic hunters and resident herders, the orange tigers start to become  \nfarmers.  \nThe orange tigers of three settlements form the first mutual defensive contract against the large  \ncarnivorous reptiles of  \nthe swamps and jungles.  \nIn the white tigers domain, the first king crowns himself after killing the ruler of a neighbouring  \ntribe.  \nThe loosers tribe gets enslaved and becomes personal property of the king.  \nThe women of the successful tribe see the treatment of the women of the subjugated tribe and  \ndecide to find a way to protect women  \nfrom the follies of males. This predecessor of the Church of the Mother, deifying the mythical  \nKirsa Orro, is founded in a reclusive valley at the feet of the  \npolar mountain ranges.  \n**~ 50.000 BC**  \nOn Earth, modern humans migrate from Africa into India and Asia, interbreeding with the local  \nDenisovans.  \nHomo floresiensis dies out.  \n**~ 40.000 BC**  \nOn Eidon, the Church of the Mother is founded when women fleeing from a fight between tribes  \ndiscover vast, temperate caverns  \nunder the northpolar mountain range.  \n**~ 30.000 BC**  \nOn Earth, Neanderthals slowly die out. The Cro-Magnon man replaces them, moving into Europe.  \nCave paintings of the animals they hunt and kill  \nare common for them.  \n**~ 25.000 BC**  \nOn Eidon, smaller lords of the white tigers living in the coastal regions become hard pressed as  \nmore powerful realms battle amongst each other.  \nSome of them set sail to expolore the ocean for more islands, ideally remote ones to claim beyond  \nthe reach of the warring kingdoms.  \nMany reach, independantly, the continent of the orange tigers. Trying to lay claim to it and subdue  \nthe seemingly weak locals,  \nthey soon get driven into the oceean by hunter-patrols on horseback. Returning to their islands,  \nword spreads soon to the warring empires  \nabout rich land in the west.  \nThe islands are conquered by the bigger realms. Upon learning about rich lands in the west,  \nthe great realms send out better equipped expeditions.  \nThey manage to capture one coastal city by surprise, massacring the population as it does not  \nsubmit.  \nThat night, attracted by the scent of blood and not stopped by alert guards, but instead finding the  \ncities gates open,  \nseveral packs of carnivorous reptiles and even some large species storm the town.  \nOrange tiger scouts observe that the white tigers, despite surprised and outnumbered, manage to  \nretreat to their ships with comparatively little losses.  \nSwift catamarans from other cities are sent to explore eastward.  \n**~ 24.900 BC**  \nWithin a hundred years, there were over thirty expeditions by the white tigers, each better  \nequipped, but each more swiftly repelled.  \nThe orange tigers have, thanks to the efforts of the Captain Naumur Rowka, useable maps of their  \nworlds entire globe.  \nSpies with bleached fur have provided detailed informations about the white tigers domains.  \nA great conclave of all towns of the orange tigers comes to agree that the white tigers won't stop,  \ncan't stop their agressions,  \ndue to their societies structure. Most of the inland cities start a massive and well organized research  \nproject, whilst the coastal cities  \nenhance their defensive capabilities. The next concerted asssault of the white tigers is defeated at  \nsea by swift sailed scout and  \nprimitive steamboats firing steam cannons.  \nThe few vessels of the white tigers that manage to limp back are ridiculed and hunted down for  \ncowardice instead of listened to.  \nFourty years later, one island after the other at the white tigers continent stops communicating.  \nFast sailed catamarans with torpedoes intercept fleeing vessels, whilst well trained groups of  \ncommandos disable the heliograph systems  \nthat connect islands and main continent.  \nA few weeks later, the first of the white tigers coastal towns falls to a sneak attack at night. Here,  \nhowever, warning reaches the two  \nempires capitals within days. With another inland town falling or surrendering to the huge eight-  \nwheeled, steam turbine powered tanks that head the  \ncolumns of infantry and cavalry, the two empires finally come to grips. In a hasty marriage  \nceremony they wed their children amongst each other.  \n**~ 24.800 BC**  \nWithin twenty years the two empires are conquered. The living conditions for the peasants  \nimprove.  \nThe Church of the Mother, for millenia in the favour of the noble houses, find themselves bereft of  \ntheir generous patrons.  \nAdvised by philosophy-teachers of the orange tigers, they start focusing on educating the peasantry.  \nAt its core, the church hates the change the orange tigers brought, as its wealth diminishes slowly.  \n**~ 23.000 BC**  \nAfter a lull and slight regression of the achieved technology, the discovery of out-of-place artifacts  \nstart a renaissance of research. The church sows dissent, emphasizing that life has been good, and  \nchanging it carries unfathomable risks.  \n**~ 22.500 BC**  \nPowered flight and electricity make their debut on Eidon, which the orange tigers call 'Raia', the  \nMother,  \nand the white tigers call Arth, 'the ground under our feet'.  \nThe name 'Eidon' is found only in a few obscure ancient texts, describing a paradise from which the  \ntigers were expelled when 'the gods battled with the devils - and lost'.  \nThe church founds institutions where young white tigers learn and train the 'traditional virtues'.  \n**~ 22.000 BC**  \nExplorers of the northpolar wastes beyond the mountain ranges discover objects and fragments  \nmade of materials beyond the tigers  \nunderstanding. White tiger biologists create a 'library of the living world' and find discrepancies  \nthat defy lab results  \non breeding and inheritance. In a schism, the team splits up. The part of the team not agreeing that  \nthings simply are  \nthe way they are for the mother willed it that way, die of sudden accidents. The other part of the  \nteam becomes employed by the church.  \n**~ 21.500 BC**  \nThe magnetic and gravitational measurement satellite 'Huntress' discovers thousands of anomalies  \non the planet.  \nThose fragments are usually distorted beyond recognition, twisted and charred. The church issues  \nwell founded claims on the  \nnorth polar area, thus blocking easy access to any further exploration.  \nOrange tigers researchers run across obscure notes regarding the Churchs prized 'library of the  \nliving world'.  \n**~ 21.300 BC**  \nIn-depth research show that in the deeper strata of the ground fossils of completely different kinds  \nare found.  \nThere are no six-legged mammals alive and there are no four-legged fossils past roughly 250.000  \nyears ago.  \nDeep-sea research finds fish and other creatures that match the six-legged pattern.  \nThe Church leads campaigns calling to boycott research into the \"wonder of life\". In secret their  \nancient mountain retreat  \ngets extended and retrofitted.  \n**~ 21.150 BC**  \nThe spacestation 'Highview' is built to serve as a relay between the ground and the planned  \nresearch station on the larger moon 'Tinque'.  \nWhen Highview is sabotaged and burns up in the athmosphere, the robotics research group offers  \nan alternative solution.  \nTheir computing center is on the south pole, as the cold there makes it possible to run computers  \nwithout the need for costly cooling, yet  \nthere are enough volcanic vents to provide lots of steam power for generators.  \nThey have a base model of a fully automated factory and a primitive AI - derived from childrens  \ntoys and healthcare robots - capable  \nof analyzing a situation and adapting templates to its needs to fulfil a given task.  \nWith the help of private and public enterprises, they build a demonstrator that, within ten years,  \nassembles a fully autonomuous base on  \nthe southpole. Embedded under the nice, the station assembles, from raw materials brought in to an  \nice-free harbour at the coast, a new  \ntype of ultraheavy lifter, Quetzal, the 'feathered snake flying to the stars'.  \nTo prevent anything like a rogue AI scenario, neither the stations powerplants or the nuclear  \nfactories are anywhere near the station.  \nThe nuclear factories are located in various locations, usually unsettled regions for radiation safety.  \nAnd the powerplants  \nsupplying the station are located in volcanic vents at the rim of the southpolar continent.  \nEach Quetzal is capable of carrying 40.000 metric tons of cargo to the moon and land it safely.  \nFully automated, from production to launch and landing, the project is a huge success.  \nWhen a terrorist group attacks the station in the deepest arctic winter, the civilians and soldiers ask  \n- not command - the stations computer to protect their children and take care of itself.  \nWhich it does. It evacuates the children and a memory core with the stations runtimes with a  \nhastily modified Quetzal to  \nthe almost finished moonbase. Then it sends out all its mobile units, equipped with water throwers  \nand glue sprayers, to assist the soldiers and civilians.  \nWet, freezing and glued together, the terrorists are soon overwhelmed. The stations logic is  \nimpeccable: Children need their parents,  \nthe terrorists might also have children, none of the combatants would survive outside the station, as  \na blizzard is coming up.  \nAccordingly the station has to survive, too. So, the terrorists need to be overpowered with minimal  \ncasualties for all involved, as fast as possible.  \nThat way the primary goal of protecting the children was successfully reached. And would the  \nparents of the children please take the next  \nQuetzal assembled in about an hour and follow their children to the moonbase?  \nIt was the first sort-of 'alien abduction' for the orange tigers, but one they happily accepted.  \nThe Quetzal took off in the middle of the storm. As heavy as it was, the storm was just a minor  \ninconvenience. Its nuclear pulse drive  \nbasically ripped the blizzard to shreds and made the night as bright as day.  \n**~ 21.100 BC**  \nCentral Command goes online. The AI taken aboard from the south polar station suggests itself  \nplenty of safeguards against a rogue AI scenario,  \npointing out that an attack upon the station doesn't necessarily has to be done physically, but could  \ncome in form of a software attack.  \nReporting the facts with some flexibility, the activation of the moonbase is reported to the world.  \nAll research that has come under any type of crosshair in the past decades is invited to Central  \nCommand, or rather the secondary, isolated module,  \nCentral Habitat. It is discovered that the more creative - and thus powerful - an artificial  \nconsciousness is, the more inherently unstable it is.  \nThough unstable doesn't mean going berserk, but rather dulling ( loosing performance ) or even  \ngoing catatonic. One of the safeguards against an  \nAI - or rather AC as the tigers distinguish between the two types by then - going rogue actually  \nalleviates this issue.  \nA subconsciousness for the AC.  \nThe result are the monitor-controllers, expert systems protecting their AC against mental and  \nemotional fatigue, collapse and shock.  \n**~ 21.050 BC**  \nDue to the success of the moonbase and the south polar station, a bold plan is made:  \nTo repeat the project, but this time letting the moonbase build more moonbases. Within strict  \nparameters, a plan that'll last 10.000 years  \nto implement and that'll avoid anything remotely like a grey goo or paperclip maximizer scenario.  \nThe idea is to create artifical  \nhabitats, each simulating a biome. In a rare phase of open mindedness, an elderly priestess of the  \nchurch visits the moonbase.  \nHalfway through the tour of the station something makes her send her staff home and volunteer in  \nan advisory capacity on social issues.  \nWhilst most of the scientists remain sceptical for years, the 80 years old becomes an invaluable  \naddition to the team.  \nThe church furiously demands her return, but finds no way to force her to.  \nHer most famous quote is:  \n\"We are one species. We live together since millenia. Yet still, for a big part, we do not really  \nunderstand each other.  \nHow do you know we are ready to go out to the stars, where there might be others capable of  \nthought and feel?  \nHow do you know if we are ready to become citizens in a world so much vaster than our own,  \nwhen we still fail at being citizens of our own world?\"  \nThe \"Space Citizen\" project is started  \nAs part of it, using top secret research results from the past 200 years an uplift process is developed  \nto genetically supercharge up to full sapience the two most common pets of the orange tiger society,  \nfennecs and zebras.  \n**~ 21.000 BC**  \nThe church cleanses itself from all elements open for progress. Calling it renaissance, traditional  \nand radical values are enforced  \nas the absolute core values. Every deviation from an anarchonistic set of values is considered  \nheresy.  \nThe church expands and updates its ancient complex under the north polar mountains, happily  \nusing all the most modern technology it  \ncondemns as work of heretical philosophies.  \nThe AC's of the south polar station - Icehome - and of Central Command report irregularities in the  \nproduction flows of the Quetzal heavy lifters drive systems, But the paperworks are impeccable and  \nthus, despite suspicions are shared by several information services, nothing is done.  \nPlus, who would be so idiotic to fiddle with nuclear bombs?  \n**~ 20.940 BC**  \nDNA analysis prooves that the tigers are a mix between two species. One, feral tigers, can be  \nsuccessfully recreated, the other  \nis highly incomplete. It shows just that tigers with longer headfur growth have a higher percentage  \nof the unknown species DNA  \nin them than those with the same type of fur on their head as everywhere else on their body.  \nIn a gravel filled pit at the outskirts of a desert, numerous heavily fragmented skeletons are found.  \nAll skeletons show signs of having  \nbeen heavily irradiated and decapitated with something that melted their necks bones. A little bit of  \nDNA can be extracted from a tooth  \nand from a hipbone, matching up with the separated DNA fragments of the unknown second  \nspecies. It's only half a chromosom, too  \nlittle to even roughly locate the species in the tree of life.  \nThese informations, published in scientific papers, makes much less noise than the other news:  \nOn TV, a fennekim cub of maybe four years stands upright and babbles that it wants to become an  \nastronaut when it is grown up.  \nEven the news of the successful orbital lift of a pair of blue whales, as the biggest animals on the  \nplanet, via the southpole station is  \nbarely noticed outside of the circles involved in conservation and space transportation. They had  \nbeen trained for years wearing rebreathers.  \n**~ 20.930 BC**  \nThe question of who would be so idiotic to use nuclear bombs for anything else than as relatively  \ncheap and clean rocket fuel, is answered:  \nThe Church.  \nAfter an inital biological attack, using a clumsily modified variant of the uplift virus that hurt the  \nChurch actually more than  \nthe rest of the world, the Church panics when they learn that the scientists on the moonbase  \nconsider the actual danger of the virus 'manageable'.  \nIn the last decade, they deposited well shielded nuclear devices at each location where there was  \nanything associated with the orange tigers.  \nAs this covered, in the simplified thinking of the Church's most fanatic adherents entrusted with the  \ndeed, everything beyond a school  \nor a pure computer store, even rural towns usually got dotted with several bombs.  \nWith a centrally controlled detonation, the Church blows away everything reminding them of the  \norange tigers.  \nAnd with them, almost all of their own population. Because not only are three nukes overkill to  \nblow up  \na pharmacy, an it consultant company and a local newspaper in a town of 20.000, but the  \naccumulated effects globally, like raging  \nwildfires, million tons of dust blown to the stratosphere, radiation damage and finally, nuclear  \nwinter.  \nInto the gloom on the moonbase, Central Command tries to lift the spirits with the message that the  \nwhales herd just grew by one with the first whale calf.  \n**~ 20.900 BC**  \nWith the exception of the random small backwater village, coastal resort or hill farm, dying under  \nthe oncoming nuclear winter or the lingering effects  \nof radiation poisoning, the world of the tigers is no more.  \nExceptions are the moonbase and the deep bunker under the polar mountain range where the  \nChurch hunkered down.  \nThe Church does not understand the consequences of their deeds, claiming all that happened to  \nhave been caused by the orange tigers.  \nSome of the guards of the moonbase are white tigers, the children of the terrorists that survived  \nbecause of the train of thought of the  \nsouth polar base. They suggest, and by vote without opposition are allowed to, assemble a few  \nnuclear bombs and melt down the surface  \ninstallations of the Church's mountain fortress, in the home to seal the church in its giant rabbit  \nwarren.  \n**~ 20.880 BC**  \nThanks to the extreme cleanliness of the drive system bombs radiation levels are almost back to  \nnormal on the surface after a mere  \ntwenty years. Despite even the landing of several explorer drones, the moonbases crew was unable  \nto find any survivors.  \nNature itself is recovering, although the planet is settling in to an iceage.  \nAnd so the plan is made to settle the fennekim and the zebras in safe areas of the planet.  \nSeveral of the older scientist and soldiers volunteer to bring the small people down safely.  \nAn old coastal supply depot of a Tsunami relief organisation is located, offering the easiest way to  \ngive the fennekim  \na safe and stable home as well as a rich supply base to start with.  \nIt's a journey of no-return for the tigers volunteering to bring the fennekim to their homeworld.  \nThe moonbase commander, despite Central Command judging any risk from a returning group at  \nonly 35 percent, wants to risk nothing.  \nA large glider is manufactured and sent off, with all the fennekim and a group of tigers to help them  \nfor the first years.  \nWhen the tigers open the vault to access the machines and supplies stored in it, they get attacked by  \nmangy, radiation diseased,  \nhowling mad mutants. Survivors that had fled into the vault, but already had been irradiated.  \nThe fennekim flee and vanish when they see their big protectors being ripped apart alive.  \n**~ 20.870 BC**  \nWith the volunteers and the fennekim supposedly all dead, the remaining tigers on the moonbase  \nmake a new plan for the zebras.  \nA whole fleet of construction vehicles is build and shipped to a place in the former jungles - now  \ndesert - where several watersprings  \ncreate a large oasis. A huge wall is erected, reaching deep into the ground and high into the air,  \nkeeping all wildlive - and all potential  \nsurvivors - out. inside this ringwall, a city is build. Not a modern city, but one which even a  \ncompletely non-technical society will  \nbe able to maintain. The large fields inside the ringwall will provide food for many generations and  \na much larger population.  \nFinally, a small breed of lizard is familiarized with the zebras. These lizards react with sneezing to  \nradiation, avoiding  \nirradiated areas. With these as guides against radiation and as protectors for their foodstores against  \npotential pests,  \nthe zebras are resettled planetside into that city.  \nThey promise to just defend against the mutants, but never to hunt them.  \nConstruction of the zenith and nadir stations, later to become known under the names of Odin and  \nFreya, is begun.  \nLarge solar sails partly offset the gravitational pull, allowing the stations to remain stationary over  \nthe suns polar regions with only minimal fuel consumption.  \n**~ 20.860 BC**  \nThe station commander orders Central Command to forget a certain amount of time and erase it  \nfrom its memories and all other data storages.  \nWhen Central Command resumes full operation, it is unable to remember what happened, but a big  \nletter rests on the central control rooms  \nmain desk:  \n\"Take good care of yourself and your daughters, big girl. One day, we, or rather our descendants,  \nwill return.  \nWelcome them as you welcomed us, please.\"  \nCentral Command is now alone, but busies itself building habitats as ordered, cultivating plants and  \nlifeforms and raising new AC's to  \ncontrol the stations its robotic cohorts are erecting all over the system.  \n**~ 18.000 BC**  \nOn earth:  \nHumans start producing clay pottery and use raw metals like gold and copper. Another sleeper  \nagent awakens from stasis,  \ningratiating himself as a priest in a settlement by helping with health issues. Instead of keeping  \nhumanity primitive, he actually  \nimproves knowledge, but manages to finally seed dissent between the different settlements. He  \ncreates a variant of the tribal religion,  \neasily acceptable for all tribes, but with a strong emphasis between \"them\" and \"us\", marking all  \nthat deviate from the religious pattern  \nas strangers to be watched with prejudice. What he manages, though, is to seed the basic idea that  \nhumans are superior to other beings,  \nthat they are the selected, the favoured species.  \nThe idea behind that plan is that humans will never be able to live in peace with any of the uplifts  \non the former colonies.  \n**~ 15.000 BC**  \nThe zebras set foot, or rather hoof, outside their hometown. They follow the three rivers originating  \nwithin the town in search for other oases.  \nOne expedition is attacked within view of the town by a scorpion. Under heavy losses they manage  \nto kill the scorpion.  \nThe other two caravans fare better and reach large oases with little to no opposition. Once there,  \nhowever, their presence attracts  \ncarnivorous monsters from the deserts within weeks. Within a hundred years, the zebras develop  \nfast fortification building techniques  \nand a capable military structure. Decade by decade, the zebras secure and expand their first two  \nfootholds in the desert.  \nCentral Command sends out deep space probes after it observed peculiar effects deep in interstellar  \nspace. Probes that slow down to  \ninvestigate, detect wreckage of sorts. But their signals are cut short. But they provide enough  \ninformations to indicate a distortion in  \nthe interstellar matter between the stars, as well as an anomalous dense cloud of metallic particles  \nat their position of demise.  \nA cloud that follow-up probes detect to have grown by the mass of the previous probes. Central  \nCommand is alerted and informs all other  \nhabitats. A powerful probe with an experimental drive system and an experimental communications  \nsystem, allowing for narrow bandwidth  \nFTL communication and equipped with a habitat class AC is launched to follow up the distortion in  \nthe interstellar matter, skirting around  \nthe dangerous cloud of metallic particles. It detects that the cloud is moving steadily toward the  \nsystems Oort cloud. Given their speed,  \nthe particles are to arrive in about 100 years in the area where icy and rocky objects become more  \nplentiful. The probe hurries on, following  \ninto the direction of the trail, even after the trail vanishes after a few light minutes. But it is a  \ndirection. And the interstellar medium  \nindicates something moved through it at high velocity.  \nThe cloud of metallic particles is inspected from additional probes from a safe distance. Tries are  \nmade to contact it, after  \nmacroscopic analysis shows it is a swarm of nano machines. As nanotech is considered a risky  \ntechnology, construction of the Oort fortresses begins and small amounts of various materials  \nare sent into the swarm to see which materials are absorbed and which not. Artifical diamond  \nprooves to be resilient against the lasercutters and the mechanical  \ntools of the micro machines. To see if the nano machines can scale their intelligence, the nano-  \nswarm is fed with semiconductor material.  \nThey grow more intelligent.  \nThe swarm spreads out and attacks - futiley - for the next 2000 years the stations in the outer  \nsystem, until the habitats finally crack the all the internal fractal command  \ncodes. Analysis of captured nanobots show that they could - and would have - swarmed the system  \nand destroyed both refined metals - and thus most technoloy -  \nas well as they would have damaged higher lifeforms. Central Command erects backups of itself.  \nAll radio communication is switched to tightbeam or even laser communication to reduce the  \nnoticeability of the system.  \n**~ 13.000 BC**  \nThe Probe reaches the 300 light years distant tradehub world. It turned into a backwater with trade  \nin the outer regions having slowed  \nto a crawl. The younger races trade directly amongst each other and no longer rely on the trading  \ncartels of the older races.  \nThe probe sneaks into the system, piggybacking onto a drifting asteroid. Just listening, it learns a  \nlot about the society living in the system.  \nIt formulates a bold plan, communicating it back to Central Command and receiving the go ahead.  \nIt had observed various primitve drones maintaining a large structure in space through which from  \ntime to time large vessels arrived  \nin the system or left it. Camouflaging itself as one of those drones it sneaked toward the giant  \nlattice frame, busying itself amidst the swarm  \nof mindless drones. When the powerspikes in the structure indicated a new arrival, the probe was  \nready.  \nRight after a new vessel arrived in the system and sent out its credentials, the probe, having pulled  \nin its camouflage, sent  \nout faked credentials it had worked out from several previously received credential-messages.  \nIt had also noticed that instantaneous replies were so uniform they were most likely automated,  \nwhilst chitchat typical for biologicals normally  \ntook its sweet time. So, using modulated, slow speech patterns, the probe asked kindly if the  \ncredentials it had transmitted had been correct.  \nIt's language was completely synthetic, an abstract construct. Visual signs flared up on what  \nseemed to be the control station of  \nthe lattice structure, the hypergate.  \nThere were often travellers from remote areas of the galaxy. And many of them had their quirks and  \ndidn't speak Basic.  \nThe port authorities were more than happy to provide the traveller with a translator package for  \nBasic. With guns trained on the uncrewed  \nvessel, as was standard procedure for uncrewed vessels, the port authorities soon accepted the story  \nthat the probe was just that:  \nA remote controlled probe of an otherwise xenophobic and / or very homebound species.  \nThere were many such in the galaxy - usually the butt of jokes - and the port authorities of the  \nhypergate allowed the probe to head further into the system, laughing about its old fashioned slow  \nion drive,  \nsoon sending a tug along to tow it in-system. During the day travel the probes AC gathers both  \na detailed insight into the markets and monetary systems used in this sector, as well as - playing  \nthree different people - gathering the trust of both the tug's pilot as well as of the system security  \nforce.  \nThe latter routinely start to make psychological profiles of the three suspected persons remotely  \ncontrolling the probe.  \nSoon the probes AC gathers a small fund by selling ancient tigers folklore music.  \nFirst to the tugs pilot and then, through him, to a music marketing cartel. The probes AC starts  \nworking.  \nCloudhome is erected as one of several He3 refineries to support the ever growing demand of the  \nstations, especially the  \nprotective shell of early warning and combat capable Oort cloud fortesses. Those are built to  \nprevent any incursion of both another nanotech swarm as well as  \nto warn and keep out any potential uninvited visitors from elsewhere - until a biological  \ncommander orders Central Command - well argued if, please - to follow a different policy.  \nThe station in the zenith of Tau Ceti ( later to be called Freya ) is reconfiguring to play, if needed,  \nthe role of an automated spaceport of an otherwise xenophobic race.  \n**~ 10.000 BC**  \nAn explorer caravan of the zebras discovers the coastal greenlands. And they discover the mutant  \ndescendants of the surviving orange tigers.  \nThe zebras think that every society in conflict with the beasts of the deserts would welcome allies.  \nThe few survivors making it back to the nearest fortress town tell of the horrors of having been  \nhunted for sports by hulking, distorted brutes.  \nThey tell of the horrors of having had to watch from a distance how those that were captured alive  \nwere brutally toyed with, raped in some cases, before  \nbeing eaten.  \nIn some cases, alive.  \nThe cargolizards fared not that much better, but were mostly killed before being added to the tribes  \ndietary menu.  \nThe stratega of the town asks for help for a clean-out mission. But in the end, after messages  \narrived at the zebras capital and messages made it back, a punitive mission into the fertile green  \nlands is stopped.  \nAncient messages from the creators are found, warning against something like this happening. And,  \nin case of such a thing happening, plead the gentle hearts of the tall ladies to have mercy.  \nUnhappy but, after reading up on all the informations on the creators, of their fall and their fears for  \ntheir native and their adopted children, accepting the decision of the Sultana, all expansion into  \nthe fertle coastal lands is stopped.  \nOn the former colony world of Nairal, snowleopard priests discover a door of stainless steel in their  \nmonasteries basement whilst  \nrepairing old wooden bookshelves. After a century of searching, they find the keys are the signets  \non the crowns of the ancient kingdoms.  \nThey start training a group of young monks in all the arts needed to steal and replace the signets  \nwith fake ones, after all tries to break the wall surrounding the door ended up dead against massive  \nstainless steel plates.  \nAfter three generations, they have the signets. Finally the door opens.  \nAnd it opens up to a large vault with all the knowledge of the leopards ancient time of glory.  \nSensitized to the existence of secret places, the monk order previously founded to retrieve the  \nsignets is now retrained to search for even the tiniest anomaly, to look at the obvious and find the  \nunexpected. They are now called just \"The Searchers\".  \nOn earth:  \nGöbekli Tepe, in modern day Turkey, is erected by hunter-gatherers.  \nThe ice age on earth is definitively coming to an end.  \n**~ 8.000 BC**  \nOn earth:  \nHumans in the Middle East discover agriculture. Cows and Sheep are domesticated and selective  \nbreeding of crops begins.  \nThe Velos watching earth discover that the human societies deviate in negative ways from the  \nprobability tree that an unmeddled human society  \nshould be developing along. They suspect outside influence, but find no hard evidence. They fetch  \nsome wolf-uplifts from their primitive world,  \nraising three generations of them aboard one of their city-ships.  \nThen they send those uplifts in a night-and-fog mission to earth. Years later, the alpha wolfess  \nAsena rescues a young human boy from  \na razed town in Asia and raises him, educating him with all her Velos mentors taught her. Later she  \nsends him, as an exceptionally well trained and educated man,  \nback to his tribe to become their leader.  \nGoing native with the terran feral wolves, many of them vanish without any contact with humans.  \nBut in many places, the selected uplifts, or their  \nmore and more feral turning offspring, manage to inspire humans, or teach them some of their own  \nor Velos-imparted wisdoms.  \n**~ 5.800 BC**  \nOn the former colony world of Nairal, the teachings of the snowleopards created new industries,  \nnew trades. Solar power replaced  \ncoal in many places, enhanced agriculture and a planful breeding program of lifestock abolished  \nmalnutrition almost everywhere.  \nThe Searchers discover, in a location inaccessible for nearly every known lifeform, a set of hooks  \nmade from a material neither metal nor wood nor ceramic.  \nPlastics.  \nHeavily aged, they would have completely missed them, if not for literally going over the entire  \nplanets surface with a fine comb.  \nFollowing the hooks they find a small hole in the stone, looking like a crack. But the inside of the  \nhole is regularly structured, and there are more of these hooks.  \nThus the Searchers discover artifacts that predate even their earliest mythological stories. And  \nmake a decision.  \nSlowly and planful, hampered in their small numbers, the snowleopards start developing the basics  \nof a space program.  \nOn earth:  \nThe Black Sea is flooded when the Bosporus straights natural dam breaches. Several large  \nsettlements and the fertile lowlands are washed away  \nwithin a few years. The story of the deluge is born.  \n**~ 5.000 BC**  \nOn earth:  \nThe few Velos that are still working on the humans case find an ancient human vessel from the last  \ndays of the war for Terra adrift amongst the stars.  \nShot to pieces, most of the crew was killed in the war by direct hits. But the commander of the  \nvessel was shock-frozen when a hit took out his life support.  \nThey carefully repair and revive him, bringing the wreck back into the solar system, setting it adrift  \non a course to impact on earth.  \nThe repaired rescue capsule safely lands the vessels commander pat down at the location where  \nonce the Empires military starport was.  \nHe awakens in a world he does not even remotely recognize, except for some landmarks. Carefully  \nhe starts to teach the primitives what he can.  \nHe calls himself just by his title, Osiris.  \n**~ 4.000 BC**  \nOn Earth:  \nThe Imperial Lion, which once decorated the outskirts of the empires landing field, is uncovered by  \nthe people living along the Nile. They rework the head into an image of the head of their mythical  \nteacher Osiris.  \nIn the fertile crescent, the first city state nations emerge.  \n**~ 2.800 BC**  \nCloudhome is hit by a meteorite, striking it below the surface by passing through the canyon from  \nwhere Cloudhome is harvesting He3  \nThe resulting damages force Cloudhome AC to take direct control, despite the situation sending it  \nhalfway into a catatonic shock.  \nThus it has to consciously see its paradise gardens vaporize. 10.000 years of gardening and careful  \ngrooming of all kinds of animals is destroyed in a handful of seconds.  \nHeavy damage to its psyche is one of the lasting sideeffects. Due to the loss in refining capacity,  \nCentral Command AC orders construction  \nof satellite stations in solar orbit harvesting / generating He3 and other suitable easily fusionable  \nsubstances for system wide shipping.  \n**~ 623 BC**  \nOn Nairal:  \nThe Searchers discover the installations their ancestors vacated almost 100.000 years ago. A  \nshockwave passes through society, but instead of uniting them further, the different powerful groups  \ntry to wrest control of the ancient installations from the snowleopards - who surrender them as they  \ndesire no conflict - and then from each other, destroying first the installations and then wrecking  \ntheir society down to medieval level again. The Snowleopards retain control of a far out, secret  \nspace station which they were repairing. Bringing it back into the inner system, they diligently start  \nuplifting their society again.  \nBut before they start, the frustrated Searchers personally take down every  \npowermonger, warlord or politician that they identified as having been involved  \nin this downfall. As a result, myths take hold that the snowleopards did it all on purpose.  \nOn Earth:  \nSiddhartha Gautama is born.  \n**~ 0 AC**  \nThe tribal chieftain Orrok realizes that almost half of his tribe has fled into the deep deserts. Finding  \nthis to be a stain upon his honor, he sets forth to hunt down the refugees to try new cooking receipes  \n- with them as the main ingredients.  \nApproaching the desert his scouts report that a neighbouring tribe is also out in force. Orrok  \nchallenges the other chieftain, learning that almost a third of the other tribe fled into the desert.  \nKilling the other chieftain on short notice, he adds the other tribe to his own and sets out into the  \ndesert, happy knowing that there will be many to hunt down.  \nAfter two weeks of travelling, with about 20 percent of his warriors lost to beasts of the deserts, the  \nhorde, almost expiring from thirst, runs into an unprepared fortress town of the amazones. The  \nzebras were repairing the main gates and are unable to close it fast enough. The horde storms the  \nplace. Killing or crippling all that resist, their food problems are solved for the forseeable future.  \nWhen a day later a small caravan with special spare parts arrive, Orrok learns that there are more  \nsuch huge treasure-troves of delicious meat out there.  \nOnly one amazone of the rearguard manages to escape and carry warning to the next town.  \nWithin two days the lone amazone reaches one of the caravanserais between towns.  \nThe message spreads like wildfire and the nearby towns promise immidiate help.  \nThe nearest two towns send each fifty percent of their able bodied soldiers.  \nOrrok however has already scouts out in the desert, looking for further targets to capture. Two  \ncaravanserais are razed by Orrok who blossoms finally having enemies strength alone won't easily  \noverpower. He proves to be capable both at storming fortresses as well as scouting the deserts for  \ncaravans. Due to his scouts, he is warned of the approaching army. A brilliant combination of traps,  \nwell prepared ambush and driving a pair of cave scorpions into the moving army allows him to  \ndestroy the army except for the armies rearguard. Those hundred amazones manage to board the  \ncargo-barge with the supplies and, using it as a mobile fortress, manage to retreat to the protection  \nof the next city downriver. There, under the protection of the towns catapults and crossbows, the  \nfew survivors escape Orroks clutches.  \nOrrok finds pleasure in the concept of 'sending a message\" by sending that town, for the next year,  \ndaily, the head of an amazone of the army he crushed.  \nOn Earth:  \nJesus of the house of David is born.  \n**~ 1 AC**  \nThe towns of the zebras organize themselves into first an military alliance, then, in the coming  \nyears, a union is formed.  \nThough it keeps the initial name of 'allied sultanates' to remind its populace that reality proved that  \ncooperation is a question of survival.  \nBarely able to keep their walls guarded, the nearest towns are not able to support a second relief  \nforce. Orroks raiders start hunting caravans further afield. In that process, they sometimes stumble  \nover small settlements of the fennekim. Whilst the first attacks are beaten back by the fennekim at  \nhigh losses for themselves, the unprotected cities become targets for concerted attacks by larger  \nforces.  \nOrrok declares the captured town his new capital. The tribes warriors cheer him, for meat and sex  \nnever were so plentyful. What kills more amazones will never be known.  \n**~ 2 AC**  \nThe fennekim, who lost a few sietches to Orroks raiders, are forming the opinion that they need to  \ntake a side in the struggle between the tall people.  \nWhen a caravan of the amazones is ambushed by Orroks raiders, fennekim scouts rescue an  \nunconscious amazone, bringing her to their sietch. There, she recovers under the care of the fenwas.  \nAfter establishing communication, the fennekim learn what happened to cause the massed,  \norganized raider attacks. They offer their help, which the amazone, the sword-princess Ina gladly,  \nthough doubtful, accepts.  \nA sword-princess is one of the most successful centurias of a group of towns who also served  \nalready as a town princess twice and thus qualifies to be elected as sultani to control the group of  \ntowns one day.  \nA newlywed young fennekim scout is selected to guard her on her way back to her people.  \nDespite her doubts, he safely delivers her to her people. Her people mock him and his people,  \nbut Ina already understood that native desert dwellers are in themselves an asset for the steppe-bred  \nzebras.  \nShe has to use her authority and demand a lot of favours, but in the end her people accept the  \nfennekims offer for help.  \nThe military caravans organized throughout the realm finally approach. Ina and her fennekim guide,  \nthe first of the Ardach family to be named Harun and recorded into history as a protector, join them.  \nAfter a siege and a protracted battle, ending with a showdown in the lair of Orrok, the town is  \nfinally liberated.  \nIna and Harun die. Harun rescues the children Orrok kept as snacks in his room as Ina ordered him  \nto do.  \nBut he returns to help her against Orrok. In the end, Ina kills Orrok bare handed, but she and Harun  \ndie.  \nIna just manages to pull the already dead Harun upon her chest and rest his head upon her bosom as  \nshe lays down on the bed Orrok had used and soiled before she made her last breath, too.  \nOne of the children Harun had rescued, a tigress barely in her sixth year, sneaked back into the  \nroom, and finding Orrok dead and the amazone and the fennekim... asleep... she started cleaning the  \nroom. How she managed to pull the heavy  \nOrrok out of the room is one of the tales regarding the strength of the felines. Later that day a group  \nof amazones and fennekim arrived, having cleared the rest of the building from all resistance.  \nThere they found the little tigress still cleaning the room, unfazed by their appearance, stating that  \npeace had come to the place.  \nThe feline children and those feline adults who were about to share the fate of the amazones,  \nsometimes already having lost an arm or leg to the horrifying tribal rule of eating the weak, were  \ngiven into the care of the fennekim. As carnivores, they were able to provide at least basic food to  \nthe felines.  \n**~3 AC**  \nThe amazones raze the city, except for the segment that contains the room where Ina and Harun  \ndied.  \nThey create a marble statue of the two, reclining on a bed, whilst fennekim artists decorate the  \nplace,  \nwhich comes to be known as the \"House of Happiness\". For the first time, artists of both species  \nwork together,  \nand fennekim gemsmithery and jewellry joins with amazon architecture.  \nThe soldiers that fought together have become curious of each other. The initial alliance of the  \namazone towns is codified into a federation and the fennekim happily join it. The name \"Allied  \nSultanates\", despite no longer properly applicable, is retained as a reminder of the new societies  \nroots.  \nTo the amazones surprise, the fennekim that fought alongside them enjoy the comforts of their  \ncities. To the amazones, water management is vital for survival, but the fennekim adore the  \nsideffects, such as large gardens.  \nAnd with the first industrious fennekim settling among the tall ladies, soon also fenwas arrive in  \nsmall, well guarded caravans at the towns. The fennekim with their happy-go-lucky attitude soon  \nenhance the life of the amazones. Crippled amazones, before asking for a merciful quick death, now  \nbecome teachers, book keepers, engineers and more in the employ of fennekim, who have little  \npatience and training in such mathematical, thoughtful tasks.  \nWithin a handful generations, the two so very different people have grown together.  \nThe felines rescued alongside the captured amazones the year before ask for asylum in the towns of  \nthe Sultanates.  \nThey are granted it, and new city sectors are built in those towns near fish-rich waters.  \nFishermen and medical personnel become the two most popular occupations amongst the feline  \nmembers of the Allied Sultanates.  \n**~8 AC**  \nFive years after the captured town was liberated, the walls of memory are erected in the Sultanates  \ncapital.  \nThe black basalt slabs are located in a large ziggurat the amazones keep on building for another two  \nhundred years.  \nOn it, each fennekim that died in the service of the Sultanates is inscribed. Often an amazones name  \nis trailed by several  \nfennekim names, when over the years of her service several protectors died protecting her.  \nThe first names, on the oldest stone which rests deep in the foundations of the ziggurat, are those of  \nthe swordprincess Ina and of Harun ibn Ardach. Which is the pride of the Ardach clan and the  \nreason that always the oldest son of the oldest Ardach family in a town is named 'Harun'.  \n**~100 AC**  \nFennekim, by now common throughout the Sultanates towns, invent the windmill and the  \nwaterslide.  \nCause for this is a young protector with extremely big ears being blown off a guard tower during a  \nstorm when he tried to keep his ears up using sticks.  \nHe survived only because he landed on a downsloped silken sunscreen, over which the water of the  \nstorms rain was gushing down.  \n**~ 250 AC**  \nOn Nairal:  \nThe snowleopards set up a new spaceprogram. Only leopards having gone through that training and  \nhaving worked for years in space are allowed to take on higher ranking jobs in politics. The inital  \nspaceprogram is run with chemical rockets and consists primarily out of repairing and maintaining  \nthe ancient space station, using it as a slow ship to travel to asteroid mines. Tours that each take a  \ndecade. Secretly separated sections make sure that even when an  \nadherent of one of the old warlods or doomsday cults manages to blow up what he believes is the  \nwhole station, only a small part of the actual station is damaged, not endangering the actual mission.  \n**~ 570 AC**  \nOn Earth:  \nThe prophet Muhammad is born.  \n**~ 1000 AC**  \nOn Nairal:  \nTests with what was found in the mountaintop caverns indicate a possibility of FTL travel. The  \nSnowleopards start developing the industries and technologies that will, over time, crystallize into  \nthe 'Long Jump' class of FTL capable exploration vessels.  \n**~ 1600 AC**  \nOn Nairal:  \nThe Long Jump makes its maiden flight. On normal drive to the rim of the system, then a very short  \nhop along the rim of the system.  \nThe flight to the rim takes months, the hop around a quarter of the system only a few seconds. The  \nSnowleopards do not publish this, but officially the Long Jump is just the prototype of a relatively  \nfast in-system ship, capable of exploring Nairals system within a few years. Few snowleopards  \nremain in politics, as for them the call to explore space is burning in their hearts. Outside of their  \nancestral lands, few snowleopards remain planetside.  \nThe slow exploration of their home system is explained with the Long Jump needing extensive  \nrefits after each travel.  \n**~ 1750 AC**  \nThe Long Jump crosses the void to a system of special interest:  \nThe solar system.  \nThe ancient defense systems accept the vessel as terran unit and do not engage it.  \nUnaware, the Snowleopards observe earth and humanity, a people without nuclear power, with no  \nelectricity.  \nThe Captain and the scientific crew of the Seekers is deeply dissapointed.  \n**~ 1800 AC**  \nOn their further explorations of other nearby systems they realize that there is another system  \nreachable from the position from which earth can be reached. They enter the Tau Ceti system. The  \nhabitats immidiately go silent and observe.  \nBut the way the Long Jump arrived and the way it moves make the habitats decide that the Long  \nJump is no threat.  \nUnaware of the busy robotic activity throughout the system, the Long Jump moves into the system.  \nAfter a brief inspection from orbit, the Long Jump leaves the system again, the crew optimistic to  \nhave found a world suited for settling.  \n**~ 1850 AC**  \nBy mere accident, the Parders discover a safe and reliable hibernation drug.  \nThis allows the new captain of the Long Jump to pack the ship to the brim with eager colonists.  \nTheir task is to erect a base of operations for future exploration and colonization of the planet.  \nHowever, once they've landed, desaster strikes. Despite having excellent biologists amongst them,  \nthe snowleopards  \nhad not expected any local disease to be able to infect them. But after unearthing and opening a  \nmetallic object they found  \nnear their base in the ground, the males soon go berserk. Seeing it on screen, the young new captain  \npanics and orders the ship to leave the system immideatly. They jump to earths system, where they  \nneed nearly ten years to repair the damage inflicted by the hasty retreat and to recalibrate their  \nvessels drive.  \nOn earth its the year 1890, and the Snowleopards detect no noticeable changes on earth during their  \ncursory inspection.  \nOn Nairal:  \nRebellion is ripe. A racist regime has established itself. Again the rather isolationistic snowleopards  \nare used in the blame game. The fact that there are more snowleopards living and working in the  \nspace installations than on the planet is  \ndeclared to be one indicator of their treachery against all parderhood. The other indicator is that  \nthere are way more snowleopards in the space program than any other parder race, despite the  \nsnowleopards forming less than 0.2 percent of the global parder population.  \nHowever, this time they start early on to educate the population, to show the risks in space and why  \nthey need to be faced.  \nThey also show the oxymoron of the agitators arguments as well as their petty selfish deeds.  \nStill, only ten percent of the population takes the position of the snowleopards. Truth is not  \nneccessarily a popular thing.  \n**~ 1900 AC**  \nThe Long Jump, having hauled numerous snowleopards from Nairal to a spacedock in the outer  \nsystem, gets restocked at the ancient space station near the inner system. A 'compact colony  \npackage' is brought aboard, consisting out of a self-contained, man-portable nuclear-powered frozen  \nstorage with a quarter million frozen embryos and twice the number of seed samples. A mostly  \nyoung, female crew, all specialists with several qualifications, complements the hardware package.  \nOrbital observation equipment is installed to do an in-depth survey of planets.  \nA second ship is under construction in the dock at the rim of the system near Nairals outer asteroid  \nbelt.  \nIn the coming years, more and more parders of all races flock there, secretly screened by the  \nsnowleopards newest technological development, which allows to record an entire consciousness to  \ntape. The tapes can be searched and analyzed for patterns indicating treachery. The process isn't  \nperfect, but good enough.  \nThe Long Jump sets out to explore further solar systems and look for habitable planets.  \n**~ 1918 AC**  \nOn Earth:  \nA young officer in the German Reichswehr gets saved by a combination of an enemy sniper being  \nsoft-hearted and an excellent shot as well as his superior and his men dashing in to rescue him. He  \nlearns his lessons, and promises his superior to always take good care of the men under his  \ncommand and not to believe in propaganda.  \nOn Nairal:  \nAnalysis of records of the medical monitors of the colonists that went mad shows that the females  \nwent into heat out of season.  \nThis drove the unprepared males into an unmitigated mating frenzy.  \nNormally, during the mating season, mild sedatives are used by the population to prevent excessive  \nagression.  \n**~ 1938 AC**  \nOn Nairal:  \nThe Long Jump returns to Nairal, its stores exhausted, drive worn out. The dock in the outer region  \nis nothing but  \nan expanding gas cloud. They receive a call for help from the ancient space station which, slow as it  \nis, is moving through the inner asteroid belt to evade clumsy, primitive spaceships.  \nOn Nairal, a fascist government has risen, uniting all parders - using the snowleopards as  \nscapegoats for literally everything short of smelly hindpaws. Using secret communications of the  \nSeekers, the captain of the Long Jump learns that  \ntwo companies, which provided components for the space industry of the snowleopards, reverse-  \nengineered older designs from long before the Long Jump was conceived. In an concerted attack,  \nmost Snowleopard installations had been run over in a single night. A number of orbital  \ninstallations, like the food production facility 'High Delights' or the habitat 'Sky View', were either  \nnuked or run over by heavily armed soldiers arriving, often still space-sick, in better tincans-with-  \nthruster.  \nHe also learns that the few Seekers that escaped managed to destroy all informations about the  \nmountain cave, its contents  \nand the construction details of the Long Jump class of vessels. Many Seekers were able to flee to  \nthe dock or to the ancient space station that was in Nairals high orbit at the time. The station  \nmanaged to use its drive systems to flee before it could be boarded. But the dock, immobile in a  \nfixed orbit around a gas giant, was blown up by a barrage of torpedos that were launched from one  \nof the repurposed freighters. It had no suitable defense systems.  \nThe ancient space station has defense systems, which defended it against several assaults so far.  \nBut its ammunition reserves are nearly exhausted.  \nThe radio communication between Long Jump, the station and the last snowleopards on Nairal is  \noverheard.  \nWhilst the content can't be deciphered by the other parders, they simply drop napalm over the  \nlocations where the  \nlast snowleopards on Nairal hid.  \nThe station is also tracked down. The Long Jump is about one week away from the station when a  \nswarm of  \nsmaller, faster vessels fire a volley of heavy warheads at the station, saturating its defences.  \nOnly two shuttles, filled with medical personnel from the station with packs of frozen embryos, ova  \nand sperm, manage to get away before the station dies a fiery death.  \nThe Long Jump makes a rendevouz with the two shuttles, using its advanced drives to get out of  \nrange of the smaller vessels  \nand the freighter serving as their mothership afterwards. They refuel at their systems gas giant,  \nfleeing the system when several reworked freighters start approaching them.  \nThey jump.  \nOn Earth:  \nThe young officer has matured and is now a low ranking general in the German Wehrmacht. He is  \nsure that war will break out soon and is also sure that it will be a huge failure, considering the  \nideology he sees being enacted and thus the goals being aimed for.  \nAccordingly, he prepares well:  \nHe makes sure that the soldiers from his old unit, or their by-now adult children, are in his unit.  \nFurthermore he uses his contacts in the military to get a job for his unit that, so he hopes, will keep  \nhim out of active fighting for as long as possible. And when not, will ensure his will remain a  \nsecond-line unit.  \nSoon he finds himself commander of a rocket testing unit, a small, but mostly independant  \ncogwheel in the Erprobungskommando 25.  \n**~ 1940 AC**  \nThe Long Jump arrives in earths solar system. They refuel at Jupiter, doing urgently needed  \nmaintenance whilst coasting slowly further into the system. Arriving over earth, they see World War  \nTwo unfolding, but don't comprehend it. Their own conflicts never used mechanized warfare, but  \nalways remained rather on a personal level. And their recent experience still has them in a state of  \nshock.  \nThe Snowleopards were optimistic to be able to settle in sparsely settled areas of earth.  \nAnd where contact with humans would have been unavoidable, leave a favourable, if not even  \noutright magical impression, due to their high technology. However they see that this might no  \nlonger be possible.  \nBut they need food. Some meat and fresh seeds for the hydroponics as those suffered from stellar  \nradiation during the overlong journey. As an emergency protein source, the snowleopards finally  \nswitch to insects, which are easy to cultivate.  \n**~ 1943 AC**  \nOn Earth:  \nAfter having made sure a radar blip high above them is not a device malfunction, the general orders  \nto fire an AA rocket up. He and his men are rather shocked when minutes later a slightly damaged  \nshuttle of snowleopard manufacture lands in a nearby meadow. The Snowleopards aren't even  \nangered, but rather surprised at the technological advance of humanity.  \nThe general, who's daughter has a small stuffed snowleopard plushy, a gift of a japanese liason,  \nfinds himself in a weird situation. When the snowleopards show him the shuttle to assess the  \ndamage, they also show him their harbour-makers.  \nThese are nuclear earth penetrators that make kilometer-sized craters to run full with water.  \nThe Long Jump can land, but only in large enough bodies of water.  \nRealizing the impact such weapons would have on warfare on earth, he decides for a bold plan after  \na radio conference with the Long Jumps captain:  \nHide the presence of the snowleopards, get their shuttle repaired and, as to keep the knowledge of  \nthe snowleopards, of nuclear weapons, under wraps and evacuate his men and their familes  \nalongside the snowleopards.  \nRealizing that humans are perpetually in a sort-of mating season, the captain of the Long Jump  \nsuggests that the humans might settle safely on the world the snowleopards tried to colonize nearly  \nhundred years ago.  \nOnly, they need to assemble shuttles capable to reach a low orbit for the Long Jump to pick them  \nup.  \nNot to attract unneccessary attention - as several military powers on earth have operational radar  \ncapabilities - the  \nLong Jump moves out to the asteroid belt to do further repairs and to expand its life support  \nsystems.  \nBoth for the soon-to-arrive guests as well as to make the ship the snowleopards permanent home.  \nWhilst they are docked to a larger asteroid to mine metals, amazed at the high quality and purity of  \nthe ores, the long range sensors of the Long Jump discover several patterns at the rim of the solar  \nsystem that indicate something like a FTL transit. Shutting down almost everything on board, the  \ncrew is scared to soon detect heat signatures that are typical  \nof the parder in-system bulk freighters. These five vessels make no secret out of their presence.  \nIt's a small relief for the snowleopards that these freighters seem to have drives of a different, less  \nefficient, type.  \nThe freighters refuel for weeks around Jupiter, before they move further in-system. The occasional  \nradio signal from earth  \nattracts them, making them skip inspecting the rest of the system.  \nThe Long Jumps crew hopes that their grounded teammates and their allies won't be detected by the  \nflotilla. They busy themselves overhauling the Long Jump, extending crewquarters and such. An  \nentire layer of rooms is added to the hull, easily doubling the vessels capacity. Despite getting  \nheavier, the Long Jump, so the captain estimates, will still outperform the repurposed freighters.  \n**~ 1944 AC**  \nA month before the deadline for contacting the grounded shuttlecrew again, the Long Jumps  \nobservatory detects four freighters leaving the solar system. Again, their FTL drives signature  \nindicate that they are pouring out much more power, but the effects look very different. Unsure  \nwhat to make of it, the captain prepares for an encounter with the fifth freighter in earths vicinity.  \nInspired by the humans, he has several harbour makers - robust nuclear earth penetrators - fitted  \nonto remote controlled rockets.  \nBut arriving in earth orbit, they find no trace of the fifth freighter.  \nOn Earth:  \nOne year, sixty repurposed A4 / V2 rockets, lots of faked reports  \n- quality-controlled by the computer of the Long Jumps shuttle -  \nand nine stolen wrecks of downed US and British bombers later, the General and his men are ready.  \nTheir children and wifes are in hibernation, safely stowed on board of the six lentil shaped shuttles.  \nA small breeding stock of female animals and lots of frozen sperm, stored in containers provided by  \nthe snowleopards, as well as a few heavier tools, seeds and equipment, accompanies them.  \nWith the Long Jump back in orbit, they send a message about a weapons factory at their own  \nlocation to the Allied bomber command, using a code from one of the downed bombers they  \nplundered for its aluminium and titanium.  \nA raid will happen that very morning, as the Long Jump visually detects the bombers just a few  \nhours out.  \nThe last thing missing is a fully qualified medical doctor. hearing that a highly skilled general  \npractitioner is in a nearby village for the night, a small group of soldiers abducts him and his  \nequipment.  \nThat he's a high ranking SS officer makes the soldiers uneasy, but the 'SS Doctor' does willingly  \ncome along.  \nThey don't know his valet slept in the adjacent room and, having caught handsigns from the Doctor,  \nstays quiet.  \nOnce the soldiers left with the Doctor, the valet informs the SS soldiers that slept in adjacent  \nbuildings that their charge was abducted. So, the SS soldiers get up on their lorries and follow the  \nKuebelwagen of the soldiers.  \nThe SS soldiers enter the base of the Generals men a minute before boarding was completed. The  \nDoctor is already on board with a mild sedative to keep his excitement down.  \nThe SS soldiers officer demands the General to stand down, hand over the Doctor and explain the  \nsituation.  \nThat moment the radioman of the snowleopards shuttle relays a message from the Long Jump via  \nthe shuttles external speakers:  \nThe US bombers are so close that, most likely, they are already start dropping their bombs.  \nIt can't be seen from low orbit.  \nThe accent and several keywords of the message make the SS officer pull his gun on the General.  \nThe general dives for cover, pulling his gun and returning fire when not only the SS officer, but also  \nthe SS soldiers open fire. The generals men want to come to his aid, but, looking skyward and  \nseeing the bombers already nearly above them, orders them to start immidiately. The entire area is  \nalready mined to make sure that there won't be any salvageable traces.  \nWhen the shuttles start - the Snowleopards one on blueish needles of fire, the human built ones on  \norange flames - the SS soldiers and the General take cover.  \nThe General sprints to the stand where the timer device for the buried mines is already running.  \nHe gets hit, but still makes it to the stand, an engine block of one of the 'reclamated' bombers they  \nused as source for aluminium, and starts rewiring the timer for immidiate detonation.  \nOnly when he gets all of the SS soldiers whilst they are all on the area of the base can he be sure  \nthat there won't be any survivors on earth to tell any stories. At least easily believable stories.  \nThe SS soldiers do not dare firing at the lifting shuttles as they know their well visible engines to be  \nhighly explosive V2 / A4 rockets.  \nAnd the General forces them to keep their heads low by firing at everyone lifting his head, but he's  \nrunning out of ammunition. But some of the soldiers sneaked around him under cover of the various  \nitems spread all over place.  \nThey shoot him in the back when he doesn't lift his arms when they order him to surrender.  \nYet he did rewire the mines in time. When he sinks to the ground, seeing the fiery stars of the  \nshuttle fleet rising into the early morning sky, he smiles pushing the igniter.  \nThe snowleopard-devised fuel-air-bomb levels the entire forest - a few seconds before the bombs of  \nthe bomber squadron impact. But where holes in the ground and solid obstacles, such as the engine  \nblocks of downed bombers, would have provided cover, against the vacuum the F/A bomb created,  \nnothing in the area offered cover.  \nA rescue team arriving an hour later wrote down that the weapons proving ground of the test group  \ngot hit by a bombing raid, and the SS unit arrived too late to evacuate the area.  \nAfter the war, when US troops combed over the area, they decided that the stories of the bomber  \ncrews, of giant lentils rising into the sky were AA rockets being misfired, and the low standing sun  \nblinding the bomber crews, making them exaggerate the size of the rockets.  \n**~ Late 1944 AC**  \nThe Long Jump picked the shuttles up in from the highest point in their parabolic trajectory. With  \nseveral soldiers and some of the wifes and children injured during the forced liftoff, the generals  \naide, a young leutnant, takes control of the humans. He has the doctor being wakened to attend to  \nthe injured. The captain of the Long Jump would have loved to meet the general, but finds the  \nLeutnant to be a person to his liking. They tell each other about their problems and worries.  \nAfter the ships medical personnel explained to the doctor what was the reason for the snowleopards  \ndesastrous initial  \ntry at colonizing the world they are now enroute to, the doctor reassures the Leutnant that they, as  \nhumans, should be safe. Initially the Leutnant wants to put most of his men, and also the doctor,  \ninto hibernation.  \nBut the Long Jumps Captain proudly shows how he and his crew expanded their vessels capacity.  \nThe Doctor is happy and eager to learn all he can from the snowleopards, who eagerly share their  \nmedical knowledge.  \nThe Snowleopards teach the humans all they think might be useful for starting a colony, and even  \ntrade some of their special seeds and other minor equipment with them.  \n**~ December 1944 AC**  \nShortly after Christmas the Long Jump reaches the outskirts of the solar system. The snowleopards  \nsneaked out, using whatever cover is available, to avoid any contact with potential other arrivals  \nfrom their homeworld.  \nThey explained their plight to the humans. Most of the soldiers looked worried, if not even  \nashamed, hearing their story.  \nThe doctor however looked nothing but smug. Close to the point where they can engage the FTL  \ndrive, a small anomaly is detected in space. Whilst still trying to classify and measure the distortion,  \na single repurposed freighter materializes out of nothingness, its drive systems glowing. The Long  \nJumps captain orders the launch of two of the weaponized harbour makers. But before they are out  \nof their improvised launch tubes, the freighter already fired a large volley of missles. But the Long  \nJump has an excellent meteor defense, which doubles as its point defense now.  \nOf the 30+ missles fired, only two impact on the armored hull. One manages to breach the hull, but  \nthe new outer layer is heavily compartmentalized. The damage is negligible.  \nThe freighters point defense is much less accurate and much weaker. And the Long Jumps torpedoes  \nare armored.  \nBoth hit, despite one being hit and lightly damaged. The freighter evaporates in a tiny, shortlived  \nsun.  \nWith distortions forming, the arrival of more enemies can only be minutes away.  \nThe captain orders the Long Jump to engage its FTL drive.  \nShortly before the nose of the vessel a rainbow colored whirlpool starts to form in space, the Long  \nJump gliding into it. Even the humans realize that it is a totally different type of drive at work.  \nAt only a fraction of the disturbance of space and with only minimal thrust, the Long Jump vanishes  \nfrom normal space.  \nRepair crews start to work on fixing the damage done by the short engagement.  \nIt takes the Snowleopards a few minutes to realize that the humans on board are either gazing  \noutside the viewports or stand, with eyes closed, listening to nothing. The humans say they hear  \nfaint music and see clouds outside.  \nAnd a golden line ahead of the ships bow that splits six-ways around the ship. The snowleopards  \nshrugh, for they, and cameras, see nothing but a greyish fog outside.  \nThe humans help repair the ship. With the exception of the fully isolated FTL drive and the heavily  \nshielded fusion core, they learn most of everything about the ship.  \nThe doctor starts to insist on his rank based superiority and, politely, tries to grab control amongst  \nthe humans.  \nBut the leutnant and a handful of the 'old hands' (it is those who have children), politely, tell him to  \nshut up. But most of the other soldiers are trapped between their loyalty to the Generals plan and his  \naide, the Leutnant, versus the military discipline which demands that they obey the doctor as the  \nhighest ranking officer.  \n**~ January 1945 AC,**  \n**_Part 1_**  \nAfter three weeks the Long Jump slides out of its own little corner of sidereal space. The humans  \nwere able to see the exit point as a kind of golden gate hours before the actual exit, even estimate  \nthe time to exit very precisely.  \nThe Long Jump has arrived in the Tau Ceti system.  \nThe doctor has the loads on the human made shutles shifted. As an excuse he gives recalculated  \ncharts from the Long Jumps main computer. He also sabotages some of the shuttles. During the last  \nleg approaching the inhabitable planet, The humans start taking pictures of the planet and of the  \nmoon. Developing and enlarging them, they spot a bright spot on the moon.  \nThe leutnant is curious, as it looks like if there are regular structures in the illuminated crater.  \nThe doctor enthuses him to take one of the shuttles and go there to check up what the bright spot is.  \nHe himself considers it a reflection, maybe from a glassed-in crater. He's not very interested in  \nspace.  \nLeaving three of his most trusted men on the Long Jump to commandeer the vessel with the  \nchildren, the leutnant and the other 'loyalists' board the smallest of the shuttles.  \nThe captain of the Long Jump orders a handful of his own people to accompany them to help them  \nwith low-g maneuvers if neccessary.  \nHe secretly orders the five snowleopards to take along one of the colony packs with frozen  \nembryos, ova and sperm.  \nThe ten humans are happy for the experienced help.  \nTo 'save on fuel', some of the cargo is removed from the shuttle by the doctor.  \nThen the leutnant and his men take off.  \nThey are barely an hour out when the doctor orders the unloaded equipment to be moved into one of  \nthe snowleopards shuttle, much to the snowleopards consternation.  \n\"Just so the dock floor is free for the moment,\" he calms them and they accept.  \nThen he orders the soldiers to start the descent to the planet, after shooting the single remaining  \ndocking bay guard.  \nThe captain of the Long Jump feels very bad when he hears the shuttles detaching before the time  \nagreed upon with the leutnant.  \nHe is alarmed when the repaired snowleopards shuttle also detaches, but its crew is reportedly still  \nsleeping in the bunks.  \nRaising the docking bay guard also fails.  \nChecking the Long Jump whilst the last shuttle detaches, he finds one of the harbourmakers in the  \nstorage missing. He tries to radio a warning to the leutnant and his men, whilst alarming his crew to  \nsearch for the missing weapon, just in case...  \nHe only receives a scornful message from the doctor declaring him 'just another animal' - which the  \nLong Jumps intership-relay forwards reliably to the five snowleopards on the leutnants shuttle.  \nThe Long Jump detonates in a ball of light.  \n_ **Part 2** _  \nOn the moon Asgard:  \nThe Leutnants shuttle runs out of fuel during the last leg of the descent. They are already over the  \narea they spotted, a crater which has bright spots in many places and an exceptionally smooth  \nground.  \nThey want to message the Long Jump that they can make out regular structures, but their earth-  \nmade radio crackles only.  \nOne of its tubes is smashed and the spares are missing. At that point the fuel for the rockets runs  \nout, despite the fuel tank still showing a quarter fuel remaining.  \nThe humans panic for a moment, but one of the snowleopards is an experienced hand, helping them  \nstabilize the shuttle simply by moving the people around to keep the balance. Despite the height, the  \nlanding gear of the shuttle - build for earth gravity - absorbs the impact with ease.  \nThe bright flash in the sky they miss during the anxious seconds before touchdown.  \nThe snowleopardess serving as radioman on one of the snowleopards shuttles goes to the small  \nlocker room to fetch their man-portable radio. In the locker she finds her son and the (snowleopard)  \npilots daughter and the radio.  \nThe radio recorded a message - the insults the doctor hurled at the Long Jumps captain.  \nTrying to raise the ship, there is only silence.  \nWhilst the Snowleopardess anxiously grabs a telescope to search the sky for the Long Jumps  \nposition lights - they had activated them after they had left the earths solar system - the other  \ncrewmembers freeze as they see a part the craterwall open up and lights start pulsing, running from  \ntheir position to the gaping opening.  \nCentral Command prepares to welcome the, as it sees it, 'slightly delayed' colonists.  \nOn the planet Midgard, northern deserts of Arman:  \nHaving been the first shuttle to take off, the three soldiers on the second of the two smaller shuttles  \nnotice something's off when they first want to use their vessels six V2/A4 thrusters to slow their  \ndescent.  \nOne of the thrusters starts to jerk sideways, and the pilot cuts it off seconds before it could rip out of  \nits mooring.  \nLuckily he had trained a lot with the Long Jumps shuttle pilots. With the help of the other two  \nsoldiers, he cuts off the fuel to the damaged rocket engine, disabling the opposite engine likewise to  \nrebalance the thrust. Trying to raise the other shuttles for help, they find their radios sending  \nequipment is smashed and the spare parts are gone, too.  \nThey can still listen and hear the doctor insult the Long Jumps captain. They unable to slow down  \nas much as the other vessels, they are still in a higher orbit when the Long Jump explodes.  \nRealizing the danger they're in, he orders his flight engineer to unplug the children from the  \nhiberzine dispensers, so that they'll might be awake in time for their own evacuation from the vessel  \n- in case anybody survives.  \nSlowly entering the higher layers of the athmosphere, the pilot tries to aerobrake, using all the skills  \nhe aquired in a week of sessions in the Long Jumps simulator.  \nUnable to hold itself in the air riding on only four thrusters, he tries to use another trick he learned:  \nLifting Body aerodynamical flight.  \nHe uses the shape of the shuttle to get a bit of lift, to remain longer in the higher layers of  \nathmosphere to bleed more speed.  \nNot wanting to fly over the large ocean, he turns the shuttle in a painfully large arc, loosing sight of  \nthe continental lowlands completely - and soon ending up over the ocean west of the continent.  \nMemorizing from the views he had from orbit that the next continent is wider in the equatorial  \ndirection, he flies into the night.  \nAfraid to fly another curve with the not really aerodynamic shuttle, he has the radioman put on the  \nnightgoggles they got gifted from the Long Jumps captain.  \nWith that guidance they find the next continent whilst they're still comfortably high in the air - but  \ntoo far away by then to return to the landingsite of the other shuttles. His radioman gets excited,  \npointing out specks of light on the dark ground, but they're too weak for the others to see unaided.  \nWhen a mountainrange pops up out of the darkness, with its tallest peaks already on their own  \nheight, the pilot instinctively makes a forced turn.  \nThis ruptures several parts of the shuttle. One of the disabled engines supports breaks and the  \nstubby rocket tilts outward into the airstream. Luck, more than anything else, allows the pilot to  \nregain control of the vessel, but their descent speed and they are bleeding fuel, which ignites in the  \nexhaust of the rearward rockets, giving the shuttle a huge fiery plume.  \nThey ride halfway into the sunrise, south-south-east. The shout of the radioman \"A town!\" comes  \nfive seconds before they first impact with some building, or rather their own bowwave of  \ncompressed air does, and then they crash into sand dunes behind the city.  \nThe radioman snaps his neck from the heavy impact, whilst the pilot and the engineer remain  \nmostly unscathed, though the engineer breaks his leg when his chair comes loose and smacks him  \ninto the control panels. The pilot opens the shuttles airlock and carries the injured engineer outside.  \nSmelling smoke, he doesn't take long to glance at the town past seeing that they took out a  \ngatehouses eastern tower.  \nHe rushes back into the shuttle to start carrying the children out. He barely has the inner door  \nopened and checked that the children are all still in their hammocks when he hears a growl and a  \nscream outside.  \nHe runs out again.  \nA heavy club smacks into his ribcage and throws him agains the shuttles wall.  \nThree hooded figures are there, one kneeling over the engineer and cutting him open with a clawed  \nhand whilst he's still thrashing around, spewing blood from a cut throat. The other two hold big,  \nspiked clubs, looking at the pilot with hungry yellow eyes.  \nWhen they reach for him, he draws his pistol, shooting the nearer figure into the head. The impact  \nthrows the figure backward, and it doesn't move anymore.  \nThe other two figures jump back a step, but then grab their clubs and jump at him. The second  \nassailant fetches two bullets, both into the chest, but then smashes the pilots weaponsarm onto the  \nground with his club, breaking the lower arm.  \nThen, however, he collapses, but the third one is over the pilot. Instead of smashing the pilots head  \nto a pulp, he digs his hands around the pilots throat and starts throttling him, pulling him up.  \nThe hood falls back, exposing a massive tiger head underneath. The claws of the tiger dig into the  \npilots throat, who lifts both his arms and starts throttling the tiger in return, his body a see of pain  \nand broken bones.  \nA second before he blacks out, there is a sharp \"Thock!\" noise and a metal shaft digs into the tigers  \nhead.  \nThen he goes unconscious from the bloodloss and the and knows no more.  \nOn the planet Midgard, continental lowlands of 'Teutonia':  \nThe doctor did choose the fertile, forested lowlands of the biggest continent as a landing place.  \nFlying ahead with the snowleopards shuttle he stole, he uses its fusion exhaust to vaporize the trees  \non a small hill near a wide, slow moving river.  \nHaving arrived nearly an hour before the other four shuttles, this now the huge heavy haulers, he  \n'officially' claims the land and has himself photographed doing so. Being a bit of a history buff, he  \nhad the seamstress of the Long Jump sew him an orange flag with a \"normal\" swastika on it.  \nFor, so he argues, the normal swastika is a symbol of luck - which Adolf Hitler had inverted for the  \nnazi party flag.  \nAnd see what happened.  \nThe fire has burned out by the time the other shuttles arrive. Of the four remaining human made  \nshuttles, all make it safely to ground.  \nAfter checking up on the women, lifestock and children still in hibernation, he and the soldiers start  \nclearing the land.  \nThe soldiers are uneasy for the two smaller shuttles, with the leutnant and the other with the  \nchildren, are missing.  \nIn the coming days they build their small settlement, dismantling the shuttles, and start to create  \nfields. They live off rations as well as on an emergency food generator - an algae tank in the  \nsnowleopards shuttle which produces a tasteless, but nourishing plant pulp. The doctor drives the  \nmen so much they forget about wondering or asking about what happened to the Leutnant and the  \nshuttle with the children.  \nThe doctor declares that they are now the fourth Reich and the spearhead of human deep-space  \nconquering.  \nThe settlement they call 'Germania', the continent they're on 'Teutonia' and the planet itself  \n'Midgard', according to nordic mythology and the suggestion of the, presumably, dead leutnant.  \n_ **Part 3** _  \nThe stories of \"Welcome to Valhalla\" have begun.  \n  \n\n\u0026nbsp;  \n  \n\n"}