Origination

Discovery

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

-Carl Sagan

Corporal Ondos of the Remnant Navy glanced out the window as the damaged spaceship silently glided through the dark void. Most of the stars that once lit up the expanse were dead, drained of their resources by the early galactic empires who had perished long ago. He was shaken from his melancholy by the announcement on the ships internal messaging system, Corporal Ondos, please come up to the bridge in 40 Standard Minutes.

He sat up from his seat, which collapsed back into the wall. He had some time before he had to go, so he might as well start with a full stomach. He walked over to his personal food replicator, and set it so that it would fabricate Memian spughet, one of the few foods compatible to him that he enjoyed. He likened the taste to a combination of a warm bowl of rice and a piece of tuna. The replicator emitted a loud Bzzrt, and said in a calm monotone female voice, The Captains has disabled unnecessary ship programs at this time due to lack of surplus power.

Ondos cursed out loud, after the last attack by the Brotherhood of Tranquility, their ship was too damaged to even run basic functions like this, it took working day and night to barely run the wormhole engines. He eventually settled for a bland protein bar, which was rationed to the crew after the attack. After choking down the freeze-dried mealworm powder, he sat up, brushed the crumbs off of his cobalt lapel, and exited his quarters.

When he stepped out, he was greeted by an cacophony of alarms, fires, and the groans of the dying. A squadron of privates sprinted past with fire extinguishers, only pausing to salute him, and rushing off to combat the encroaching blazes. Ondos never got why they felt the need to salute him, he was only promoted because he was in the Navy a week longer than the rest of the recruits, and the majority of the last corporals got executed by the Brotherhood in the Skirmish of Xurbeck's Maw (Xurbeck's Maw was a billion year old black hole, which was where the previous corporals died an grisly death).

He crossed over the large foyer of the starship, which had been converted into a makeshift infirmary. He stopped for a brief moment to admire the symbol of The Remnant, five circles intertwined that represented the five major galactic powers that came together in an attempt to stop the Brotherhood of Tranquility at the expense of 10 billion souls. Those planets were Earth, Xuli, Husnao, Avis, and Caeles. He never understood the intentions of the Brotherhood, they started as a religious extremist group on Earth, but during the Great Emigration from Earth, their intentions changed, they were no longer content with killing heretics, they felt that cleansing the universe of all life would return it to the "Natural State". The hypocrisy of that belief was clear, but the Brotherhood was a powerful threat nonetheless.

He strode through the cots, until finding his friend Jexa tending the wounded. She grew up on one of Caeles's harsh moon colonies, and knew more about treating wounds than just calling a med-bot.

"How are you doing?" he inquired, which startled her, causing her to almost amputate a crewmembers appendage with a scalpel. "I've been better, my cabin was damaged during the last attack, I've been sleeping here with the indisposed since." While she was talking, Ondos admired how the Universal Translator was able to instantly comprehend what she was saying, and translate it into Pan-Esperanto, the official language of humans and Ondos. He had heard Jexa once untranslated when the ship had its routine power outage to conserve fuel for the wormhole engines, and she sounded like an pre-Enlightenment Age opera singer who drowned in cheese graters (When he had confided that to Jexa, she laughed and responded that untranslated, his voice sounded like the mating call of a Twibot, a alien that consists of one cell, but can take up more than two AUs in diameter).