The Other Side
From The Pardusian Chronicles
Prolouge
It took me several months to decrypt enough data from the ancient fiels I found at the ruins. Ket'shul was really helpfull and supportive, however his knowledge in data encryption is not much better than his education in ancient languages, so I had to do most of the translationing myself. I've still up to this date only analyzed small fraction of the huge libraries, but it didn't take me too long to stumble across the so called "basics of sub-space jumping".
Now this being a very intruging, yet extremely complicated and technical piece of information immedialty stole my focus from such things as "theories on the evolution of space dragons" and "practical application of Jeff Karmono's theory on exotic radiation - focusing rays into harvestable fields". As I am no warp engineer even the basic theories on standard wormhole jumping used to be a mystery to me, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't get the idea of crossing into a space previously not known by any of the modern species of our galaxy. Ket'shul had found the Y-hole by accident, and it had saved his life, but maybe there was more to it? What happened to the mechanical race that once lived in these ruins, were they the same who constructed the yellow cubes such a long time ago? What if they had just left through another exit of the Y-hole? Maybe, if I just could figure out what all these documents said, I'd be able to find my way into their homeworld. Perhaps located in another dimension of reality...
You can probably guess where this is going. Even if it took me several months to tap into these "basics of sub-space jumping", I still decided to set up a fixed date for my first test jump. The date I chose was the memorial of the Christmas War, in which several federation pilots, led by the almost legendary star pilot Frank Black, launched a massive attack on the heart of the Empire. I was just a child during the wars, so I never participated myself, though I found the date to be fitting, as it would be easier for me to go unnoticed during the memorial services for all those lost in the conflict.
I equipped my ship with verious droids, from scouts to buccaneers to researchbots and simple test dummies. I also brought along all equipment for setting up a small sized but self sufficient habitat on any heavenly body where temperature, gravity and atmospheric conditions would allow it to remain intact for years if neccessary. I bought myself a mining laser and some micro smelting and electronics production machinery, in case I needed to do reparations to the drones, droids or other equipment. Lastly I stocked up on water and food in case I couldn't get back the same way I got in nor find a fitting body to install the habitat on.
The last few months I spent a lot of time double checking all the input data I had deciphered from the ancient data bank and I would get out little. Some of my friends and fellow alliance members even started to speculate in if I had decided to end my existence all in all, of course I couldn't tell them about this, as I couldn't compromise the confidentiality of my plan. For anyone of you reading this, I'm sorry that I had to lie, I wasn't truly locked out of the cluster as I claimed at my return, I was simply way too bussy in making the preparations.
Well, I spent some time making sure Canaab would be stocked for at least a couple of moths and then, when the day came, I executed the jump...
To be continued...
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