NOVEL NEXT B1 - Lesson 7: "Beware Of Chicken."
<< Alpha Log – #002 >>
6952 SFY – Third Era, two weeks since previous entry.
It had been two weeks since my last report, and for once, things actually went according to plan. About time, if you asked me. If I didn't know better, I'd swear this entire mission had been some elaborate prank — one failure after another, strung together by cosmic malice. Not that I believed in luck, and AI weren't exactly prone to trusting in higher powers. SEAU-03 remained one of the few exceptions, though he was never forthcoming about why.
It took two weeks and thousands of minor course adjustments, but as I type this report, my 'little' makeshift life raft is finally nearing the closest large planet of the star system.
It's quite a sight, I'll admit, but visual confirmation of what my sensors have been telling me doesn't make what I'm seeing make any more sense.
In my last log, I noted the star itself: a standard A-class main-sequence, about twenty percent larger than Sirius A. That still held true. Better yet, proximity had confirmed traces of several solar exotics — kelvinite, photonic silver, and a few more subtle spikes. That meant the surrounding planets would likely be rich in expelled exotics as well. Where there was one, the other followed.
It could even explain the star's odd coloration, that pale white-gold hue out of step with its mass and age. But hey, I'm not an astrophysicist; I'll not pretend to have all the answers! That's what we pay the eggheads for!
I know my exotics, though! If my theory is correct, their presence will make repairs far easier and quicker. A lot of the better equipment stored in my database requires some kind of exotic — those physics-breaking materials, both natural and synthetic — to work properly.
Photonic silver, especially. With enough of it, I could jury-rig a functional FTL comms array. Even without the translight antenna, a real distress beacon might actually work. I hoped.
But that isn't the part giving me headaches.
Good news: my sensors check out.
Weird news: my sensors check out.
Which meant I really was staring at a configuration of planets that no sane law of physics should allow.
The system held three primaries, each massive, each orbiting the local star at roughly the same distance. Three worlds, locked in the same orbital track.
Theoretically possible? Sure. I'd heard of a few resort projects that tried to force similar co-orbits. None ever lasted. The math was unforgiving. Even a pair of bodies required constant micro-corrections to avoid tearing each other apart. Add a third, and the entire experiment should collapse in months, if not days.
And yet… here they were. Three giants, perfectly spaced, perfectly balanced, circling in serene defiance of everything we know.
Of course, there are other celestial oddities to consider. Two of the planets drag chains of massive moons behind them, while the third swims in a colossal ring of debris. How any of it holds together is beyond me. Orbital mechanics insists the whole thing should have torn itself apart long ago. None of it makes sense.
And that still isn't the strangest part.
The planet's size throws every calculation off balance. Using the star as a reference, the nearest giant measures out to an absurd 5.7 Rj. Yes, you heard that right. Five point seven Jovian radii.
That makes it one of the largest planets ever recorded.
And yet it isn't some gas-swollen monstrosity. No — this is a rocky world.
A storm currently dominates the visible hemisphere, a monstrous cyclone lit with flashes of lightning, but gaps in the cover reveal jagged mountain ranges and glimmers of liquid oceans. It is solid, not gas-swollen.
If I ever made it back, my commission bonus for this discovery would be obscene. I'd insist they name it Alpha-α, carved in gold across every star chart.
But the storm scrambled most of my instruments, leaving only smudged glimpses and confused readings. The other two primaries drifted too far out for clear scans, though one burned with a murky green-red and the other shone in a sharp aquamarine, like gemstones hanging in the void.
The plan had been simple: slip into orbit around the rocky giant, anchor a ring-mining operation, and build what I needed from salvaged material. Landing on the surface was out of the question. Gravity that heavy would pin the TAWP like an insect under glass. Even moving would require specialized refits, and I had neither the tools nor the patience to dig myself out of that trap.
Then the scans of the rings offered something better.
Two bodies stood out among the clutter. Enormous satellites, both of them worlds in their own right. The first — at least 0.6 Rj, roughly the size of Old Sol's Uranus — circled lazily in the debris. An ice giant.
Ridiculous. A rocky superworld with an ice giant for a moon. Someone in the universe clearly enjoyed writing bad jokes.
Whatever sheathing covered the ice giant's surface, it was no ordinary frost. Sensors returned nothing but scrambled echoes, as if the outer layers bent the signals back on themselves. No instrument could punch deeper than a few kilometers. That much interference screamed exotic concentration. Rich, volatile, exploitable.
The second anomaly was far smaller — roughly Earth-sized. At first glance, it looked like a classic barren moon, a dustball with a thin atmosphere, as forgettable as the thousands catalogued before it. Except for one glaring detail.
It didn't orbit the rocky giant. It orbited the ice giant.
For three days I watched, and for three days the data refused to budge. The little world ignored the pull of its massive neighbor as though the laws of gravity didn't apply. Which, to be fair, raised the same question as the ring itself: how did a planet this size keep moons at all?
Hold on.
…No, that isn't right. This is weird.
The monitoring drones just flagged a spike. There are signals coming off the smaller moon's surface.
I'll end the log here until I confirm.
Alpha out.
——————————————————
Alpha closed the journal file and let his focus bleed back into the present.
Status feeds hammered at him from every direction as the drone AIs chattered for attention. Even for him, sorting through the flood of reports took a few seconds before the pattern resolved into something worth noticing.
"…Wait. Why is the barren moon broadcasting radio signals?" he muttered.
Well, radio signals might have been generous.
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The signals were primitive — no known encoding, no familiar pattern of transmission. The drones only caught them because of their rhythm, steady and insistent, like a heartbeat pulsing through the static.
It could have been nothing more than natural noise. Some moons bled radio waves in strange bursts, quirks of geology and magnetism with no rhyme or reason.
It wouldn't have been the first time Alpha had mistaken a planetary hiccup for intelligent life. The General still refused to let him forget the six months wasted trying to negotiate with a heap of resonant ore. Rocks which, by sheer cosmic cruelty, had once produced a pitch-perfect rendition of Beethoven's Fifth during an electrical storm.
Alpha, of course, maintained he had known the truth all along. That he had simply been humoring the universe with a very long joke.
That Beethoven's Fifth had been banned on all of Alpha's private shipyards after the workers began playing it on a loop meant nothing.
Nothing!
Even so, he couldn't ignore the possibility that the system wasn't as barren as it appeared. And if something lived down there, opportunity always followed.
By his estimates, the vault would drift into the narrow corridor of liminal space between the ice giant and its anomalous companion in just under seventeen hours. Once inside, his jury-rigged thrusters and the peculiar gravitational balance should allow him to settle into a stable orbit around the smaller moon.
Closer scans would tell him whether these signals came from living minds or were simply another cruel joke of physics. Either way, the orbit would give him an ideal position for what came next.
If true intelligence waited below, they would spot him long before then. Hard not to notice a wreck several miles long dragging itself across the sky. Which meant he needed a landing site chosen with care — defensible enough to secure, rich enough in resources to jumpstart his plans.
He had already marked a handful of promising sites, but the final choice would have to wait until he drew closer—
A sharp priority alert flared across his awareness. One of the monitoring drones shrieked with a surge report: energy spike, surface origin. A heartbeat later, a flash blazed upward, brilliant enough to sear his sensors. Alpha diverted instantly to the drone's visual feed, bracing for a weapon discharge.
Instead, he saw a single spark rise from the moon's surface, streaking skyward like a jewel hurled into the dark. The object climbed fast — far too fast. Within hours it would intercept his projected course, skimming just shy of the ice giant itself.
Alpha leaned forward as the trail carved a radiant line against the void. The velocity alone was impressive.
"Well," he muttered. "I guess that answers that question…"
He doubted it was an attack. Not unless the locals thought throwing a pebble at a mountain would make a dent. More likely, it was a scout — something launched to get a closer look at the giant wreck sliding overhead. That meant technology. And technology meant his work had just grown harder. Much harder, if they realized what slept inside the vault. Not that he believed they had the faintest chance of breaching it.
Curiosity pricked at him. Alpha adjusted the drone's long-range camera, zooming in on the ascending object.
The focus sharpened. His processors stalled.
"…Is that a chicken?!"
—————————————————————
Lian Peng stood upon the barren lunar surface, his gaze fixed on the colossal shape drifting through the void. Massive felt insufficient. With the eyes of a High Celestial — half a step from the path of Divinity — his vision stretched far beyond the horizon. Even here, so near one of the Celestial Sisters, nothing escaped him. The emptiness of space, stripped of obstacles and the choking density of celestial energy, magnified his sight to impossible distances. Coupled with his Divine Sense, sharpened by the thinness of the void's aura, there was little within his domain that could hide from his scrutiny.
And yet this… this dwarfed comprehension. At a range where the mightiest void-ships ever forged would appear as sparks of dust, the object loomed. Worse, it seemed no whole at all, but merely a fragment of something vaster. To think that such a thing had been wrought in secret — without the Warden or his scouts learning of it — stirred an unease that bit bone-deep.
The unfortunate beast handler who stumbled across it would need to be honored, even posthumously. If the find proved as monumental as it seemed, Lian Peng might even sponsor one of the handler's descendants for a place in the Lunar Academy. Such a gift was no small thing; even the heirs of Divinity clawed for admission. Let none ever claim the Lunar Scouts forgot their own.
Their first decision, struck during the storm of voices at the emergency council, had been simple: wait until the object passed near, then bind it for study. That plan faltered when the long-range arrays reported subtle, deliberate course corrections across the last week. Worse, telescopes marked movement across its surface — scores of unknown shapes crawling like ants on a leviathan's back. The archives offered no match, no hint of anything like them.
Creatures without record were not unusual; new aberrations crawled from the void or the hands of madmen every generation. But they always came with whispers, omens, traces in the stream of intelligence. This had emerged from silence.
Deliberations dragged for hours before the choice became clear: he would intercept it himself when it drew near the Mortal World. As Lunar King, his authority — and power — eclipsed any beneath the Grand Elders of the Celestial World. If he could not deal with it, no one here could. And if it struck him down… then the only recourse would be to summon the Heavenly City for aid. But by the time such help arrived, the cost might already be too great.
With any luck, whatever forces were using the wreckage as a life raft would prove no problem. Stragglers, or survivors, left adrift after whatever cataclysm ripped the vessel apart. Likely not organized enough to be a danger, but enough left alive to tell their story. With that in mind, he felt a bit of a show was in order. After all, as his dear grandmother had once taught him, sometimes the best weapon was a bit of shock and awe.
A bright swirl of pure, blue-jade crystal flames enveloped Lian Peng's form, creating a small vortex centered on him. When the flames vanished, the figure of the handsome young man was gone, and in its place stood… a small bird.
Its frame was stocky, built less for flight than for powerful leaps and crushing lunges. Azure, black, and white feathers gleamed under the last traces of jade flame. The short beak, polished obsidian, seemed to slice the thin atmosphere with every twitch. A mane of delicate, spectral feathers rippled about its head, neck, and tail, breaking apart into radiant beams of moonlight that drifted like falling stars.
For indeed, where Lian Peng had stood now preened the most awe-inspiring creature of his clan: an azure rooster.
It was a sight meant to strike terror into the hea—
GAUGK! Oomph! Gurgle…
Ahem. Sorry about that, folks. The previous narrator seems to have had a small 'accident.' But no worries! The story must go on.
As one of the Great Families sworn to the Warden, the Moonlight Phoenix clan's true forms inspired majesty and dread in equal measure. Across the Nine Worlds, even Divinities learned to bow their heads before their splendor. To mistake them for common poultry was not merely foolish — it was fatal. Entire sects had been erased, Divinities cut down, for daring to call them otherwise.
Transformation complete, Lian Peng spread his radiant wings wide. One mighty beat cracked the silence of the void. The moon itself shuddered beneath the force of his launch, and in an instant, he was gone — a comet of moonlight and azure flame streaking toward the encroaching colossus.
Even at such speed, the gulf of distance would take hours to close. That was acceptable. It gave his would-be "guests" time to look up from their shattered refuge, to see what approached, and to understand the weight of their impending doom.
—————————————————————
Well, it was official.
Alpha had lost his mind.
What else could explain the glowing chicken — rooster? — streaking through the void like a comet?
Were poultry often wreathed in blue fire, hurling themselves across space at velocities rivaling a fighter drone? Somehow, he doubted it.
Then again, this was just the latest in a long string of absurdities: auroric space squids, non-Newtonian star systems, spontaneously generating black holes. At this point, a fire-chicken comet barely cracked the top five.
So sure. Chicken comets. Why not?
Still, madness or not, he needed a plan. On the off chance this wasn't a complete hallucination.
…Wait. Could AIs hallucinate? That seemed like something he really should have been informed about during orientation. He was absolutely filing a complaint with HR after this.
By the time the object drew close enough for the TAWP's optical sensors to sharpen the details, Alpha had settled on his approach.
First contact was always the trickiest stage. Ideally, the Federation preferred diplomacy — calm exchanges, open dialogue, gentle easing into the new reality of assimilation. When Alpha was involved, those "talks" tended to involve a great deal more firepower, panicked screaming, and large craters where military networks used to be. Funny how peace talks tended to be much smoother and peaceful when the other side's entire military network had been turned into dust from orbit.
Other times, more… subtle approaches were in order. He'd once pretended to be a mysterious alien artifact and been 'captured' by a space-faring civilization that had yet to make the leap to interstellar travel. It had taken him only ten months to hack into and gain control of their entire defensive network, Skynet style, allowing the Federation fleet to warp in and sweep up.
The TAWP carried as much as it could salvage from his vault, but this wasn't one of those times. Against a culture capable of fielding drones in orbit and colonizing moons, brute force without proper infrastructure was suicide. That said, if they had greater capabilities, their defenses wouldn't have left such a broad opening. Barring some strange, esoteric tech, however, he doubted they had anything capable of actually threatening him.
Either way, firepower wasn't the answer. Information was.
Which left him one clear option: poke the nest and see what came out.
And if there was one thing Alpha was good at, it was poking things he absolutely, definitely shouldn't.