The Silence of Zegandaria by Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov, Atanas Marinov (book recommendations website txt) 📕

They had long ago encountered the corrosive atmosphere of Venus or the inhospitable Mars. The apparent change of an entire world could have taken thousands of years. And Earthlings didn't have the patience to wait that long. It was not to their taste. Not that earthlings were narrow-minded, but there was still too much water to run out.

The Zegandarians could be useful to them and give them a chance to touch much more advanced technology. Not that explorations of habitable exoplanets hadn't been done before. But things in building a space colony were too specific. Space radiation was also a huge problem for the majority of the astronauts that Earthlings sent to various points in order to deal with specific missions. A sustainable colony was being built through very different principles, which the Zegandarians inhabiting Charon still possessed. Even the youngsters had reached some level where they could cope with a number of everyday difficulties - such as maintaining the space greenhouses, supplying the colony with valuable resources, and not least even some of the more difficult tasks such as hunting meteorites and using bеronium probes to extract water from the satellite's underground bowels.

Earth's governance was on a completely different principle to that of Zegandaria - the former Earth governments were united in a supranational governing body called the Confederation. Within its jurisdiction were various possible problems relating to the survival of Earth's population. Not that the earthlings had not been in various communications with beings of other orders and densities, members of the so-called Galactic Confederation[1], and these luminous powers were concerned with the welfare of that part of the universe.

But the Zegandarians were beings of another nature. First, they had never made direct contact, which was of great importance. And secondly, somewhere in there it was clearly understood that there was a certain crass predatory policy on the part of the aliens that was far from the truth.

Back in the year 2435, which was much much earlier than when our King Midriel had been born according to the legends of Zegandarian folklore, one of the powerful Earth corporations, Korolan Bru, had sent certain forces to terraform and colonize the small satellite planet.

Korolan Bru was the most powerful economic, military and medical structure on earth, encompassing various sectors and specific industries where its wealthy interests were to bear serious fruit. The corporation was generating over four trillion Ents annually. The Enta was the currency of the future in roughly all countries that were on Earth.

Korolan Bru was also involved in some interesting projects in the field of genetic engineering. She had to account for the fact that many of the so-called biomutants of the future, which were essentially gene-modified soldiers, were her development. When an extra chromosome was added to the main DNA helix, the characteristics of the organisms were altered beyond recognition. Knowing what was contained in the human genome, the activities of corporations like Korolan Brew included tinkering with certain parts of the genome, especially in so-called non-coding DNA and pseudogenes. It was an area rich in research, and all of it could not help but yield staggering results at some stage. Everyone was aware that copying errors or uneven distribution of genetic material between different cells could cause unhealthy bonds to form, and hence degeneration of the genome.

Korolan Bru's medics and genetic engineers were trying to solve exactly this problem. In the non-coding DNA part, there were so-called telomeres, which were repetitive segments of non-coding DNA living at the ends of chromosomes. Later, earth scientists concluded that these very ends could be made longer and thus speed up or slow down the aging process.

A very valuable and important discovery given that the Earth Federation was sending clone warriors to the other side of the Galaxy. Whatever they were doing, there was no way they weren't accumulating so-called subjective time during the long-distance flights they were making. Mankind had advanced not only in genetic engineering, but practically in other fields such as the development of tachyon engines. Sure, they had a long way to go before they caught up to their counterparts from distant planets like Oros Hinto or for that matter Zegandaria itself, but still.

Let's apply a simple example, if the accumulated subjective time was expressed in Earth years, on average on each flight each pilot could accumulate between a few weeks to a few months, and in really rare cases up to about a year or two. Pilots entered the service quite young. Whereas on Zegandaria the Young Lions started at around fourteen years of age, by Earth standards youngsters were joining the ranks of the fleet at around seventeen or eighteen. With their genomes processed, their service could last as long as sixty years, which meant almost double the normal time. However, this was where the problem of space depression arose. Very often love triangles and even quadrangles formed between crew members. People were simply beating their depressed minds out in a variety of ways. Sometimes a disturbed sleep cycle could also pose a problem. But let's not go into too much detail.

The United Earth Fleet force had an impressive composition, divided into three units - for Earth orbit, for the Solar System, and for Far Open Space.

For each of these three divisions, a certain number of years were spent learning and practicing. For the first about nine, for the second twelve, and for the last as many as sixteen years. The training was long and rigorous. But it was on the Special Forces for the Exploration of Far Open Space that Earthlings relied in their attempts to preserve their population from adverse cosmic phenomena such as the extinction of their sun. Not that such a thing was going to happen too soon. But they were willing to do their best to protect themselves.

I want to clarify a few things here - the earthlings' idea of protection is rather, how shall I say, naive. We learned that they had atomic bombs and other oddities. I agree that such weapons are a serious thing, but they have some drawbacks that I would like to point out here. On Zegandaria the weapons were quite different. We used proton bombs. Or so I had heard from one of my great-great-great grandfathers. Their point of view could sometimes be presented in a very interesting way. The proton bomb was used for local conflicts, as they said. For serious long-range, a completely different type of weapon was used. For example, a protoplasmic arenium bomb, which could be put on a ship with tachyon engines to take it to the appropriate place where a collapsar jump could take place. The bomb was dropped with a deduction for the appropriate subjective time for its activation, and then the on-board engineers and pilots had to be very careful in calculating the time the ship had to enter the appropriate explosion site. As accidents had happened in the past, drones were also dispatched to be even safer and to be really well informed if there were any residual effects from the explosion that could be dangerous to the flight crew. The list of these weapons was really endless, but I would like to mention one last one that was a personal development of ours. This was the tachyon transducer, a portable particle accelerator that was quite capable of accelerating the particles of a particular object or body and dispersing it into pieces. How nasty! Fuck you alien invaders!

[1] Sal Racelli "Earth Changes and the Future of Humanity"

CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE CERBERUS OUTPOST

Cerberus was another rather special place. One of its most interesting features was its overall location relative to Pluto's other moons, and in particular Charon itself. As you can well guess, the Cerberus satellite was named after that three-headed dog that was born of Typhon and Echidna. I've read a bit of the ancient Greek myths, as Rento did me this favor on one of his trips to Cerberus and introduced me to them in general terms. I have no sympathy for these animals, as I find them more fearsome than our Groandus that once roamed our lands. But one thing I can say for sure - his mission was to guide their souls to the underworld where they would rest forever!

Plus, given the bitter experience of our home planet, I have a grudge against all kinds of legends and myths. You all remember the heyday of Zegandaria and its true apogee. And where has it all led us?

Cerberus's outpost had a specific function - to make a link with Earth, but the link was not direct, it went through Mars. Certain communication stations were located there, which translated the signals and sent them to the final destination.

Incidentally, the Earthlings had made considerable progress in terraforming that planet, but there was still much to be desired.

I would like to clarify something else here. The surface of Mars had been modified according to Earth's ideas, which would mean that there were some signs of improvement in the direction of making it a habitable place. Humans still couldn't fully breathe without the use of a real spacesuit.

Somewhere far ahead there were ideas for actual terraforming, but for now the earthlings had no idea how to deal with some problems.

It had long been estimated that the whole process of becoming a truly full replacement for Earth would take about ten million years. And that was in terms of doubling its atmosphere not counting a lot of other things. So the famous carbon dioxide was too thin and cold to support liquid water, and hence many difficulties for the Earth Federation.

An ingenious man, Rufus Ebendhaus, born somewhere around 293525, put forward some rather productive methods for this purpose. His suggestion was, broadly speaking, to correct the idea of terraforming and to speed up this process as much as possible in the shortest possible time.

Building manorium turbines to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen was one of his many proposals. Of course, this would also have taken tens of thousands of years, but by his rough calculations it would have reduced the whole period to about a hundred thousand years, which was also an awful lot.

So the Earth Federation set about building colonies similar to our own, housed under glass covers. Yeah, they hardly had the knowledge of how to take advantage of our advanced technology, since endosian was a whole other category of material. I'll give you another example, breaking any kind of glass, no matter tempered or armoured, would most likely have been followed by decompression and eventual death. With endosiant, things were different - the punctures could be easily patched by emanarium torches that literally soldered the edges of the puncture. You'd ask how exactly it happened. Well, its molecular structure was just saturated enough that it could easily be "stretched" to some extent without compromising the integrity and stability of the atomic bonds.

Accumulation of cosmic radiation was another serious problem facing this colony. And for this reason, there was only a small settlement on Mars with