It took time to begin building our own versions of the Peloran technologies, but hyperspace speeds doubled in a mere five years, cutting an entire year off the transit to our distant colonies. And building an entirely new generation of starships for those journeys left us able to sell the obsolete Pre-Contact ships to the highest bidder. Companies and smaller nations bought them and followed us to the stars on their own terms. That changed space for all of us.
I’m hyperactive. For as long as I remember, I’ve wanted to do things. Sitting in class for hours on end was the next best thing to impossible. I notice everything, I want to do everything, and I never want to stop. When I was young that meant partying and playing with girls on the lakes of northern Minnesota. Now it means that I always have somewhere else to go, something else that needs doing or seeing. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever settle down.
Arkadia is a refugee. It is where the last survivors of a once powerful race of humanity came, and very few have ever left. It is such an alien world, figuratively speaking of course. It is too vast to occupy, and has too few resources remaining to be worth it. The Arkadians lost their interest in the outside worlds, and found a new one that no one else would be interested in taking from them. And they keep telling themselves that they like it that way. I wonder.
For many years, we only had a few warships retrofitted with the Peloran technologies. They were the best of the best, the fastest and most powerful warships we possessed. They went everywhere, visiting our furthest colonies, exploring new star systems outside The Wall, going where no Terran had gone before. And they sometimes fought the Russians and Chinese, protecting our colonies when they could. Unfortunately, they were too few to be everywhere.
I’ll never forget Arkadian weather. Those zero-gee storms were something else, and yes there are storms in zero-gee. They just…spread, covering the space of worlds and beyond, lashing everything in their path. And it doesn’t rain. There’s no gravity to pull the water down. It just spreads, soaking everything. And a sorry thing it is to be on the surface of the only asteroid in its path when that unending wave of lightning starts to fly.
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