Congrats goes out to Aelgas who one the first part of our Screenshot Story Contest. He was chosen due to the compelling nature of his story. It was fantastic.



- Here was his winning entry.



As Dr. Deihirr Loran looked out from the bridge viewport of the Solrain Forerunner Support vessel SFS Profit & Loss, a wave of profound sadness swept over him, draining and supplanting his elation of the past few days.



Elation… because appointment to the prestigious leadership of a task force investigating newly-discovered systems such as this was what occupied the dreams of ambitious young scientists like Deihirr. But now, as he gazed sombrely on the twisted, tortured wreckage that stretched across the void of space; that reached out like a skeletal finger to point at the dead planet below, he felt almost… ghoulish.



There had been so much death and destruction in The Shift. Some people, Deihirr knew, eminent scientists among them, attributed the phenomenon to the Amananth. Such people saw The Shift as the deliberate act of a sentient, mysterious, powerful race. To Deihirr, however, it seemed more like a cosmic tsunami, a natural disaster sweeping up whole star systems on the whim of Chance and in the process depositing the Solrain, Octavian and Quantar, along with so much other galactic flotsam and jetsam, into the backwater of Space in which they now found themselves.



So, was this wreck one of the missing Solrain stations, as the Forerunner team that had seeded the first jump here had hoped for in their report? Or was it the remnant of some other race? Had some other unfortunate civilisation also been sucked into the maelstrom of The Shift and washed up light years from home? Were those tangled remains floating motionless in the airless nothing simply another mute monument to the fragility of all things in a Universe that was was, by Nature, violent?



One thing was certain, that planet and its station must have held life once, perhaps billions of souls going about their daily lives. But beneath the searing radiation of the young blue star that was the primary of the system into which The Shift had tossed them up, no life could long survive. Their new, adopted Sun had killed them.



Deihirr frowned. If all of that had been the act of a sentient race, then 'The Shift' was a superfluous label… that act already had a name, one already all too familiar in the annals of human history. Genocide. Indeed, but had the Amananth carried out that atrocity on a truly unfathomable scale?



Deihirr shuddered… there was a chill in the air by the transparisteel window which the view outside did nothing to alleviate… and there were too many questions.



With a heavy sigh Deihirr turned away from the viewport. His shuttle and its powerful scanning equipment awaited him, as did the answers that were his responsibility to find. The dead would give up their secrets… one day.

__________________





Honorable Mention goes to Cheplar who while he did not win the contest, he created an image that is now my new desktop wallpaper. It rocks and therefore so do you!

Comments

• selbie

  June 17, 2008, 06:14:37 am

  
  

  

  Such an excellent story. It kept me reading from the very beginning.