Here, in this Vale of Tears - A Logical World Short

[Ford Prefect]

I wrote this while I was away over New Year's when I finished reading The Chronicles of Narnia sometime in very early January. To amuse myself, I decided to make a spectacle greater than any I've done before, though I reckon I failed in this regard (it might have been the difficulties in writing on unlined paper *gasp*).


Here, in this Vale of Tears


Editor’s Note: The following was transmitted to me by the Pegasus class Heavy Cruiser Nightingale three days before the conclusion of the Battle of Keris, known also as the Third Battle for Draco and was one of the turning points of the Nomad War. As most with a passing interest in that conflict, they would know that Draco was one of the most heavily contested hotzones and by the end of the war had the second highest casualty rate of the satellite galaxies, and the Battle of Keris was likely the most brutal fought throughout the whole war (excluding both thee Battle for Terra and the Battle for No at the conclusion of the war).

The following was scribed by the Nightingale when she was under a considerable amount of distress and, after discussion with my colleagues, when it appears she was in a fractured state of conscious (the reason for her confused point of view. There is precedent for this, the hyperturing intelligence Origin began to refer to himself in the third person after ‘going insane’). This is understandable of course, ‘Gale had taken part in thousands of solar system destroying events by the time of the Battle of Keris and was likely in a state of depression (records show her as being a very compassionate young woman who in normal times would not be ascribed to expeditionary missions but rather kept as a defensive element. Of course the war had started to take its toll even then and as I was trading wits with my Nomad opposite number I was unable to review the reports from the Psychology Corps). I would postulate that the deaths of some many members of her fleet-family had a significant effect on her, as well as the amount of damage that she received (records indicate that the Nightingale suffered thirty six shield failures of varying significance).

My esteemed colleague Lord Jung notes that the Nightingale appears in four minds throughout the transcript, though only three appear in the writing. The first and most notable is a creative part of her, from whom much of the content comes, while the second is her analytical part, from which exact facts and figures would come in a report. The two clash throughout the transcript, the prose interrupted with technical detail that would not be appreciated in many cases. It can also by seen in the use of measures – both the Imperial and Metric Systems appear; this is a product of the times, reports were submitted only using Metrics, while Imperial was saved for literature written at the time.

The third part of her is of course that part that suffers her breakdown at the realisation of the madness of the Nomad War (this is a valid sentiment. The Nomad War was a dark time for the Imperial Commonwealth in terms of practices and an event of great shame for myself), and the fourth is the still and calm remains of her Sub-meson brain that recognises her broken mind. The Nightingale's is a sad case, but what is sadder still is that her story is not an isolated one; far too many participants, both orga and non, suffered psychologically as a result of the war with the No’mu.

-Olympic


She was dieing here in this vale of tears. How long she had fought she knew well – two and twenty days, three and ten hours, six point three three one six seven two four one minutes. A moment, perhaps, for her mentally, but it was an age in combat.

Over twenty two and a half days ago she and a thousand million of her brothers and sisters burst into reality so far from this system’s old sun, a giant red, bloated and cold that it was a tiny speck indistinguishable from the ever-present and seemingly eternal back drop of stars. She knew that the lives of stars were not eternal, they were spent easily enough, devoured by those living things styling themselves lords and masters of the material and immaterial universe for use as resources, or more simply destroyed; popped like boils on the face of the galaxy, or tossed like stones from the hands of children.

Such had not happened here in this vale of tears, though she had felt the desperate attempt during the death throes of one her sisters. Gravitic mass had risen high, exceeding the mass of the star by thousands of times only a few hundred kilometres away the stellar object and it would have gone supernova and briefly disrupted the combat going on around it, but the act was for naught as the star was soothed by the hand of the Enemy much as master calms his dog during the climax of a thunderstorm.

They had emerged to a torrent of hyperspace missiles, their number as countless as grains of sand, flashing brighter than a hundred stars as matriced neutronium/anti-neutronium was allowed to follow its natural course and bombard the wall of battle as it pulled itself free from the clutches of slipspace. Quark gluon plasmas were forcibly imploded by tightly controlled gravimetric beams into gamma ray bursts that lit up the shields of the wall with coruscating waves of light; like dark flowers, black holes blossomed into existence. Even though they had taken pains to hide themselves and their entry vectors and largely succeeded, there was no way to hide the transition of such vast masses from a coordinate dimension to Einsteinian Reality from the advanced and powerful sensors used by the foe.

On the other hand, the Enemy was well hidden, with no traces of radiation nor gravity, with no concentration of neutrinos high enough to indicate a warship, no evidence of a location at all, but for the faint mention of hyperspace emissions. Faint, but traceable, and in the flutter of a Hummingbird’s wing and after another salvo that immersed the wall into another surge of flesh-meltingly intense light, they were able to return fire not completely blind.

It was glorious. She had herself launched out a million or more missiles through another planar level of the universe above the one that organics normally perceive. They passed the old star and the worlds in its orbit coming back into normal existence in a suppression pattern designed to compensate for probably movements. She registered many explosions and only six thousand or so destructions caused by point defence weaponry; though there were weapons discharges amongst the missiles that had been destroyed in the picoseconds between emergence and explosion, she had not expected kills with omnidirectional weaponry.

Then with ranges so long it took light hours to cross the distance and electronic warfare thick like tar, hits were rare and no one could truly target another ship through the ghost imaging and white noise. Rather, areas where the Enemy were likely to be were saturated, areas measured in the thousands of cubic kilometres.

Now, after weeks of battle where millions of ships had been reduced to misshapen hulks that bore no resemblance to the noble warships they once were and had been replaced a hundred times over. Now, after she had run through her missile magazines again and again and again and again and had replaced them ten times tens of times, after her crew were at last starting to collapse from exhaustion, now, here in this vale of tears, it was near impossible to miss. Vessels were as close as ten thousand kilometres and indeed closer again. They were amongst each other; all around were the Enemy, the Comrade, the burning, utterly destroyed remains; a shifting mass that stretched from the chromosphere of the red giant to the devastated remnants of the third, once habitable planet.

She had not been nearby when that world had been shattered as though an egg rather than a might ball of iron, but now she came upon it, a field of little pieces of dispersed rock a hundred, two hundred thousand kilometres across so faint to be unnoticeable. The Enemy had done it when striking at one of her brothers. Their blows were feral and the planet suffered for those shots that were bent away.

The left over bones drifted to surround and orbit her, to cling to her. Some pieces the size of a man’s fist, though most closer to the size of a man’s head. It was almost as if what was left of the planet to help strike back at the Enemy, but they did not as directed ultra high energy electromagnetic radiation created from the artificial stimulation of a quantum singularity with a reverse gravity field as well as more exotic energy weapons and weapons based on quantum decoherence, on fission and fusion and gravity and nuclear force suppression sliced through the shell, billions and billions of tons of iron, as though it were air and flashed against the shields embedded in her monomolecular hull, for her first bubble had failed her. Much did not manage to hit her as she twisted the fabric of reality, turned it back. Her own fire pounded the Enemy, but she could see that he was fresh and vicious.

In the second salvo of trading fire, her shields failed her and she felt the final nanoseconds of his fire against the parts of her hull naked and vulnerable. She shuddered like a wounded beast as she took the brunt of hundreds of thousands of gigatons against her superconductive armasteel hull, opening a rent some twenty kilometres long and nary a hundred metres from a mile deep. Floods of white hot liquid metal cascaded into the canyon carved into her flank armour. Parts of her simply disappeared into mighty atomic explosions as they underwent fission and fusion and nuclear force suppression, both strong and weak. Quantum states underwent collapse but before a score of clean tunnels could be bored through her body she reached out and halted them. She rolled on her axis, presenting her shielded underside, moving quickly lest she feel a full barrage and not simply the dregs of one. Refire times are measured in the thousandths of thousandths of seconds, but so too are the movements of a heavy cruiser.

The thousand kilometres betwixt them became as solid death, filled with searing energies that in the blink of an eye would erase a world. The combatants were not even discernable shapes but instead points of retina-searing brightness that could be seen a hundred lightyears away, brighter than the stars that twinkled unknowingly. It was unwatchable for it would blind you, but it was a spectacle that could not be missed for it was a beautiful as it was destructive, like the birth of a new universe as seen by man.

And she wept with sudden frustration for she was tired and spent. Weeks without reprieve, of constant fighting. She was beaten and battered and though she tried she could not prevent herself from faltering. Her thirty kilometre Imulsion Reactor was at full burn, emptying in microseconds as the superdense superfluid was annihilated. Her neutronium storage tanks did not have time to refill, so she simply had the fuel hypergated directly into the reactor. But even this was not enough to match such a fresh ship, one whose surface was not scare and burnt cleaned and covered in rebuilt weaponry and other evidence of self-repair. The Enemy felt her moment of weakness, redoubled his efforts and approached triumphant as she halted her fire and began to reinforce her defenses.

Her mind reeled here in this vale of tears. Instead of being calm and temperate, she raged and burnt hot as the sheer stupidity of this whole thing struck her. Why did she have to die? Even as her body was torn asunder by black holes and gamma ray lasers she howled and beat her fists and ignored the attempts of her frightened and exhausted crew to calm her. Not because trillions of tonnes of armour were being boiled away every second or because her frame was creaking under the forces of a thousand singularities, but rather because she realised that everything, absolutely everything, was irredeemably stupid. This battle; the thousands of others happening simultaneously across Draco, across the other dwarf galaxies surrounding the Milky Way and throughout the home galaxy itself, this whole damned genocidal war. It was all so stupid, and it galled her so.

[Pick]

Wow, I really liked that! You have an excellent sense of imagery. Good work!

[Admiral Bravo]

Incredible job, Ford. This is one of your best Logical World shorts that you have made. Keep up the good work.

[Hawkwings]

*sheds a tear*

I really enjoy these Logical World shorts... This has got to be my favorite one. Nightingale just seems so *human*. You're an incredible writer, did you know that?

You've got to compile these stories and get them into the Cleaned Up Fanfics forum.

[Ford Prefect]

Aww, shucks guys, you're making me blush. I think as time gos on, my writing has matured somewhat (especially since I have a more solid picture of The Logical World in general, which is self evident in both this short, and my previous one, Big Love), but I am glad that people enjoy them.

I'm especially proud that I was able to touch you with the Nightingale though Hawkings. She was my attempt at jerking people's emotions.

Again, thanks for the compliments (I thirst for them) and yours are all better than 'You remind me a lot of Edgar Allen Poe' or 'You know what, you give me a distinct feeling of Lovecraft' (which is odd, because I haven't read any Lovecraft).

[Kwizard]

I just saw it on the thread list and went, "Yay! Another Logical short!"

But indeed, spectacle like this seems to be your thing. Have fun writing.

[darthdavid]

I love your shorts, but when are you going to write more stories (preferably long, multi-chapter ones) about our favorite librarian?

[Ford Prefect]

I love your shorts, but when are you going to write more stories (preferably long, multi-chapter ones) about our favorite librarian?

Eventually. I have to get the motivation together to finish off the current chapter (I'm currently not happy about how I've written a fair chunk of it), plus I have to write a chapter for my other, fanfic, story. But it will probably be my next task.

[Hawkwings]

Hey, I don't mind these shorts! Keep writing them for all I care! If you keep turning out stuff like/better than this one and Big Love, I wouldn't really care if I never heard anything else about that librarian.