• • Sunset: Heroes of the Milky Way
• September 7, 2024

Sunset: Heroes of the Milky Way (Chapter 8)

Terra’rork

Change of Plans

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I finish elevating Hideo and myself back onto the dock. 

Our mission was a bust, though not our fault. Once we realized that time had passed only two weeks it became obvious that it would be impossible for us to spend any significant amount of time here. I mean, to fix the problems on Riverteria and prepare for the Regnorian Regime was something that was supposed to take months, maybe years just to get on track. 

Instead, what we have are hours since one week is a year and a half on Acoustica, so one day would be several months. The Waverites on Acoustica can’t be made to wait that long. 

Hideo quickly jumps off my back and shakes the water off his body like a wild animal. It always gets in my eyes, and I can’t wipe it away. 

“So glad to be on land. I like caves, you know, but underwater caves? Nah, no, nope, nada, no swimming.” Then quickly he focuses his mind to the task at hand as I catch sight of the Rango on the other side of the dock. “So what do we do now? We can’t spend any serious amount of time here, and we don’t have the resources to start scouting for my people to live somewhere else.”

I’m hesitant in my reply, “I can only assume that we have to find some temporary fix for the time dissonance”.It’s not saying much if the smartest person we have is a pilot, we need a genius to with some science fix that would allow us to stay here without time passing us.

Hideo scrunches his nose and asks hesitantly, “Would that even be possible? Fix the time dissonance”

“The time dissonance itself shouldn’t be possible,” I point out.

“Fair enough.” 

When we’re within a few yards the good spaceship opens its back ramp for us. We make our way in to enter the ship. 

“I’m gonna go get a drink. See if Clay and Aleti are there,” Hideo tells me before we part ways at the stairs. I nod and walk into the elevator to get up to the bridge. 

I’m kind of glad Hideo left me alone. I need some time to think about how we’re going to get through this, and inform Alloya of what we’ve learned in case she hasn’t heard yet. I should probably also ready the ship for immediate departure upon her return.

The doors open, allowing me to walk forward and then towards the bridge of the ship. I gaze upon the empty seats and sigh, thankful that those left aboard the ship aren’t here. I move to my place at the front in the piloting seat, and wait for the helm to descend on my head. 

The first thing I need to do is call Alloya. 

I hear the ringing and wait for her to pick up. Then I wait, and wait, and wait.

“Computer, did the Captain leave her earpiece here?” I inquire.

The Rango responds, ‘No, it is on her person, I am tracking it right now.’ Why isn’t she picking up? ‘Most likely it is vibrating on her person and she is taking time to get it out. I thought that speaking on the phone could be considered rude in some circumstances.’

That’s probably it, and then the call continues ringing. 

“Damn it Alloya, pick up the—”

Then she picks up the call. 

“—damn call already.”

“Jeez, didn’t realize I kept you waiting that long,” Alloya says.

“Apologies… Captain.”

I hear her sigh as I hear the wind blowing rapidly in the background. “Don’t worry about it, we should all be stressed out right now.”

“Thank you, and sorry again Captain. I need to inform you that we know how much time has passed on this planet. It’s-”

“Two weeks, I know,” she interrupts me. “Prepare the ship to depart, we’re leaving as soon as I get there.”

“Yes, Captain. Understood.” Then I realize that I should tell her how we don’t know where Womby is. “I also have some bad news, Captain.”

“What is it?”

“We couldn’t find Womby. He was moved somewhere else by the Riverti and the people from his town didn’t know where,” I inform her.

“Well I guess I sort of knew that. I ran into him.” 

Is he not with her now then? “What do you mean? If you found him isn’t he traveling with you?”

“No, I messed up on a couple things and he’s not coming with us.”

“What do you mean?”

I can hear her sigh into her earpiece. “Nothing, just… I’ll fix it somehow.” I recognize that tone. “I started with a mistake and ended with a mistake. I’ll just have to deal with it before it really hurts us.”

Alloya is being vague and cold. Instead of calling her by her position, I say, “Alloya, tell me what happened.”

“Don’t worry about it.”
“Not so fast. You’re not a soldier anymore, we need to talk about this.” 

“You literally call me Captain.”

“And what banner do we fly under? You’re captain of a pirate ship at this point, the title is more out of respect than command.”
That makes her laugh. “Oh really?”

“Yes, and that means you can talk to your second, you can talk to me. We’ve know each other too long for you to feel like you can’t be honest with me.” 

There is a pause for sometime. I can assume that she is struggling with herself, whether or not it is right let something out. 

“I let Rega push me. I didn’t realize it when it was happening, but I let her push me into doing something dumb, violent. I made a terrible first impression with the new Prime Minister, and now Womby also thinks I’m uber-violent. Can’t say that I blame him.”

‘Ah, Rega is a mean one,’ my demon tells me, ‘she likes to toy with her Guardian. Has an acquired taste for bloodshed, and just a little gets her going.’

I tell Alloya, “I know the impact that the demons can have on us. Don’t blame yourself, we’ve all fallen prey to them at some point.”

‘Excuse me? I don’t push you that far, she has it way worse than you do.’ 

I think you’re missing my point.

Apparently, I took a long pause because she asks if I heard what she said, “Terra? Are you still there.”

“Yes! Sorry, can you repeat that?” I ask of her.

Before answering she asks me, “Is your demon giving its opinion?”

“Sort of, more like its own defense, but more importantly tell me what happened? What did Rega force you to do?”

“She didn’t force, so much as put the idea in my head that I wanted to attack this kid. It worked and the leaders of the Rivertans, including Womby, saw it. Probably think I’ve turned into a maniac over the years.” 

It is imperative that Team Sunset have a good, working relationship with the Rivertans, but no one should blame her since it doesn’t work out that way. If only she could believe that. 

If we want to confront the Regime, we’re going to need all of the species of the Milky Way backing us. We’re going up against an empire that spans the stars, and with the Lupians gone, it would take everyone to confront them.

“Don’t beat yourself up, not your fault.” I am a little afraid to ask, but it is necessary. “How did the new Prime Minister react?”

“He was actually very friendly and not as angry about it like Womby was.”  

“Sounds like someone we want to be friends with.”

“More like incredibly suspicious. I’m not sure what it was but somethings about him bothered me, like the fact that he knew about the time dissonance.” 

Well, that is strange considering the Rivertans are practicers of isolationism. Who would have told them, or sent something to them that would let them know how much time was passing? They don’t trade or communicate outside of the communication through their Guardian, but Womby has been with them. They don’t have compatible technology with everyone else either so I can’t fathom how such information would make it to the Prime Minister.

“Did he tell you how he knew?” I ask.

“No, but I’m right about to walk into the Rango so let’s finish this in person.”

“Sure thing.”

Right before I think she is going to hang up, she adds, “And Terra, thank you.”

“Anytime,” I assure her.
“I forgot how much I like talking to you.”

“Now you remember, and don’t forget again,” I joke.

“I won’t,” she says before she hangs up and I hear the ramp of the ship being lowered. 

Then I put an announcement through the ship as I gear up to enter the atmosphere. “Everyone, come to the bridge for takeoff.”

As soon as the ramp is up I start the engine and the ship is ready to lift off back into the atmosphere. I just have to wait for everyone to get here.

Clay, Hideo, and Aleti come up as a group together and take their seats. I can already smell the smoke burning from the edges of Clay’s eyes. Aleti appears far more still, deep in thought. Unlike Clay, this is new to her. She hasn’t learned to be upset or angry yet.

I assume Hideo told them of what we found out on our trip. They’re all gonna feel that and more when Alloya gets back.

No time, Alloya comes onto the bridge and takes off her duster to rest on her chair. Then she slumps right down in it and groans. 

Clay asks her first, “I guess your trip didn’t go any better than theirs.” 

She shakes her head. 

Then she gets back up in her chair. “Terra, get us into orbit and then wormhole into Regnorian space so we have time to plan.”

“Alright, let’s take off.” 

I quickly maneuver the Rango away and then up from the docks. I gun it to reach the necessary velocity to break into orbit.

The ship shakes as we enter and exit the different layers of the atmosphere. When we eventually get into orbit I power up the wormhole drive and begin the transition. Even at this time everyone feels too uncomfortable to speak. 

After a few minutes of the wormhole forming I ask, “Everyone ready?” 

Someone would have said something if they weren’t, but I want an excuse to get a reminder that everyone is still alive.

“Yep.”

“Yes.”

“Let’s go.”

“Ready.”

I don’t turn around to see who said what, but I can count. As soon as the wormhole is complete I push forward and we are taken on a ride through space towards the Regnorian time zone. Suffice to say, the Rango is in a very different mood leaving Riverteria from when we arrived. 

When we exit we all sit for a minute and I swivel around in my place. I see Alloya rubbing her fingertips against her temple as she thinks of what to say. 

I ask her, “Do you want me to explain what happened with you?” 

“No, I will,” she says. “When I was heading to go speak to the Prime Minister of Riverteria, I let,” then Alloya takes a pause to catch her breath, “I let my demon set me off. A civie was being, well, pretty fucking rude and I overreacted. Almost killed him when Womby saved him, all in front of their new Prime Minister.”

“Oh jeez,” Clay comments.

“Mom,” Aleti says softly from her seat, reaching forward practically standing to reach and take Alloya’s hand. Alloya moves her hand away from her so Aleti couldn’t, leaving her daughter sits back down in her seat.

We’ve never been soldiers here on the Rango, but no matter how much Jackal and I had tried to change that, we were never really touchy-feely. Our leader was raised from her youth to serve, and now that she’s back here on the ship, her daughter is going to see what that looks like.

“Can happen to the best of us,” Hideo says. Then he realizes she is the best of us. “I mean-”

“I know what you mean Hideo,” Alloya assures him. “After that Womby wasn’t so keen on coming with me, and then it came up that the government I used to work for kept the time dissonance a secret, and it all fell apart after that.”

Everyone seems to get a little more tense after her retelling. Then Clay asks her, “You said new Prime Minister. What happened to the old lady?”

“Supposedly fell ill and died,” Alloya informs him.

“Ahh.”

“It’s like that, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” Alloya mumbles.

“And the new guy, how is he?”

Alloya opens one eye and turns her chair to face him. “Lamberine was his name. He was strangely polite considering the circumstances, but something about it felt off. He knew too much.”

“Hmm,” Hideo grumbled to himself.

Aleti turns to him and asks, “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing with any merit, yet,” he replies. I’m glad he keeps whatever conspiracy theory he has to himself this time.

Hideo decides to try and take the topic off of Riverteria entirely. “Well, any problems we left behind with the Rivertans is going to have to wait. We can’t even think about going back until we can do so without time flying by, in case anyone forgot…”

Alloya turns around to Hideo, to assure him, “We haven’t forgotten. Acoustica has a few years, but that doesn’t matter if we lose those years in a week.”

“How would we go about fixing that?” Aleti asks. 

Clay is almost comical. “Yeah, time seems like a pretty complicated thing to fix.”

Alloya grumbles at that remark. “If we wanted to figure out some way to get around or fix the problem of time, we would honestly need to find the someone who caused it.”

“Too bad Rogar is dead,” Clay mutters. Then he thinks about what he said, and corrects himself, “Well, maybe we don’t need him.”

That got everybody thinking.

“We need someone who understood what the Dyron sphere was,” Alloya reminds us. “We still don’t know for sure what it was supposed to do. 

Clay takes a shot in the dark with his offhand comment. “Maybe this whole problem was on purpose to screw up everyone.” 

Hideo starts itching his chin as he remarks, “Eh, chaos wasn’t Omniguard’s M.O. They were the opposite, they wanted control. They would infiltrate and takeover, and then fund their own projects. Why would they want a project that would break down their own organization?”

“The explosion had to be a mistake, or at least something that Rogar wanted on his own,” Alloya continues Hideo’s line of thinking.

 Rogar though, now thinking about it, most certainly was not the only one who was working on the project. The Dyron sphere was similar to a Dyson sphere. A Dyson sphere is built around a star and gathers energy from it. With all of that energy a society can power interstellar travel. 

Regamorphs figured it out, Lupians figured it out, and so did Waverites, each in a different way, but the results were the same.

Rogar’s Dyron sphere wanted to take that idea to black holes, the only thing that could potentially have enough energy for more than interstellar travel. Maybe… intergalactic travel. The worst always wanted more.

And he decided to build his Dyron sphere to take energy from the biggest black hole in the galaxy, the Dion, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

The Dyron sphere was nowhere near the size of the Dion. The different between the Dion and a typically sun was bigger than the different between a planet and its sun, and the Dyron sphere was even smaller. 

But even still, that’s a huge machine, that couldn’t have been built in the orbit of the Dion. It had to have been started at least somewhere else. Which begs the question, “How would a scientist be able to work on a contraption the size of a planet without knowing exactly what it was?”

Everyone turns to look at me and thinks to themselves. 

“They wouldn’t,” Alloya says with certainty. 

Well, now we are onto something.

“But they would have all died on the Dyron sphere. Even if they knew what it was and weren’t on it when we were, we wouldn’t be able to find them,” Alloya notes.

“Heheheh,” Hideo starts giggling.

“Hey, man-bat,” Clay calls out, “whatcha laughing about?”

“We got off the Dyron sphere,” Hideo points out, “why wouldn’t anyone else?”

“Well, I supposed that’s true,” I admit, “but what does that matter?”

“Could they have gotten off without getting past you?”

“I… I suppose.” This feels like its about to me my fault. “I wasn’t exactly watching the windows.”

“Yeah, no shit, you’re normal, but what here isn’t?”

We all sort of stare at him.

The Rango’s operating system speaks up, ‘I believe he’s referring to me.’

Alloya asks Hideo, “Are you suggesting that the ship would have caught sight of anyone who escaped?”

At this point, I had begun to catch on. “And wouldn’t the ship have caught on to their wormhole signatures?”

It’s the ship itself who answers. ‘Would you like to know?’

“If you knew this already why didn’t you say anything?!” Clayton yells at which amounts to yelling at the ceiling light.

‘I am virtual intelligence, not artificial intelligence. I respond solely to your commands.’

“And private conversations, apparently,” Alloya grumbles.

‘Apologies, Captain, I fail to see how a conversation on the bridge is private.’

“She got you there,” Hideo snickers.

Alloya groans before ignoring Hideo. “Alright, ship, if you know where they would have went, tell us.”

‘Their wormholes were intercepted by Regnorian colony station, Noland.’

“The fuck is that?” Clay asks.

“What is sounds like a space station that houses a small province worth of people,” Alloya informs him. “There are a few around, and they would have the space drives capable of grabbing ships from wormholes. But the Noland… that’s a strictly civilian science one if I remember right, we visited it once, remember, Terra?”

The memory is somewhere in the corners of my mind. “I believe so, but not well.”

“Most colony stations are military bases or prison barges. Noland was one of the first, hence why it was an actual colony, a proof of concept.” 

Aleti asks the question we all knew. “But why would it intercept Omniguard escape pods?”

Alloya tries not to look at her, but the others do not reserve their looks of pity for her naivety. 

Clay tells her plainly, “Because they’re traitors, that’s why.”

Aleti’s doe-eyes fail to hide her shock, but we all watch how she comes to the conclusion that people generally shouldn’t receive the benefit of the doubt.

“So… sounds like we go to this Noland station, find someone who worked on the Dyron  station—

“Sphere,” I correct.

He sticks his tongue out at me.

“—and get pointed in the right direction?” 

“One problem,” I point out. “How would we find the Noland?”

“We ask the Rango, it is connected to the Regnorian database,” Alloya points out. 

That can’t be. 

I point out, “Surely no shady government would let us have access to-” I am interrupted by the Rango listing places.

‘Chrome, Installation F-Zero, Noland, Ju-’

I forgot that giving the enemy the ‘benefit of the doubt’ also refers to believing in their abilities.

“Rango, bring up the location of that installation, and tell me the source of your information, I wouldn’t trust that the Regnorian Regime to have left us everything,” Alloya commands. I turn around in surprise. “A company has a monopoly on the technology market, which means that the people and the government are on the same network. Even if the servers and programs don’t talk between the military and civilians, all it takes is a little push by a good hacker.”

“Since when did the Rango have the tools to hack anything?” I ask. 

Alloya smiles, and informs me, “Since the best hacker alive decided to upgrade it.” Jackal. Even though he’s gone, his tech remains.” I’m glad to see she didn’t lose anything with your restorations.”

Wait a minute, when did Jackal and Alloya mess with my ship?!  

Bringing us back to task, Clay asks, “What’s up with this place?” 

He is asking about the installation that the Rango’s holographic system brought up.

“A weapons experimentation and test facility. Apparently the Rango has found our station,” Alloya clarifies.

That’s interesting, that would also imply that it’s hiding in a solar system we commonly go to. “We’ve never known of its location before. How would it be undetectable by our powers?” 

Alloya waves her hand and the Rango then brings up information about Installation Noland. “Well, I may be interpreting this wrong, but I’m pretty sure that platinum and lead make up the exterior of the installation. That way if you’re in the solar system, even you can’t sense it, Terra, even if you tried your best.” 

Ah yes, lead and platinum, those fake non-planet metals.

“It’s also an installation that floats in space instead of being on a planet,” Alloya continues, “this way it wouldn’t have any sound waves bouncing around it.”

“Jeez, these guys went all out,” Hideo snorts.

“How are they hiding their water?” Aleti asks, wanting to know how they hide from Womby.

“Or just being seen,” Clay adds.

“By the planet it hides behind,” Alloya says. This time she lets the Rango explain.

‘Noland orbits the large planetary gas giant, Apoderus. The planet is made mainly up of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, this would likely hide any amount of water from Oceanbeast’s train of thought.’ The Rango also continues to say that, ‘The installation’s orbit around the sun is also purposely designed so that it never comes in contact with any light from the solar system’s star. This would hide them from Solar Flare.’ 

Whoever leads this station clearly had us in mind. They even knew that Clay and Womby both could and have found people before by sensing where light and water touches someone.

“Noland is our destination,” Alloya says. “It has someone we want, and someone others want to keep from us. This really is the perfect place to hide him, too bad they didn’t anticipate Jackal.”

I swivel around in my chair, and start to look for this place in the galaxy. “It’s in the Regamorph home solar system,” I point out. 

“So then,” I ask for clarification, “do we have a destination?”

“Everyone good with this?” Alloya asks the bridge. She looks specifically at Aleti. “Aleti,” Alloya asks her daughter softly. “Are you okay with this?” 

“I’m, alright,” she mutters. “I get what you’re worried about, but I think it’s necessary to see places like this… to know just how far gone some people are. There’s also no guarantee that they’ll attack us. They may welcome us, people still respect you, mom, and Team Sunset in general. We shouldn’t look for a fight if there doesn’t need to be one.”

“Agreed,” Alloya says.

“Eh,” Clay grumbles. Alloya shoots daggers at him. “Jesus, I’m kidding.”

Alloya then turns back to me. “Start up the wormhole drive.”

“With pleasure.”