Epistolary Experiment (24/30)

The Eye of Night (Last Darkness) System has the distinction of being the only black hole accessible to the Associated Worlds, and indeed, the primary reason for the existence of the Last Darkness constellation.

The black hole itself, Eye of Night, is designated as the system primary. It boasts a magnificent accretion disk, fueled by the asteroidal remnants of the system, and a stream of infalling matter drawn from the system secondary, the mottled red giant star Bloodshot. The three stargates into the system orbit 45 degrees off the ecliptic to avoid starships emerging directly into the high-radiation zone of the disk itself; visitors are advised to consult an ephemeris and make all appropriate drift calculations before selecting their emergence point.

Little civilization exists in the system. The majority of it is found on the Empire’s Edgewalker Research Station, a deeply-buried beehive habitat orbiting at the fringe of the accretion disk, again in an orbit 45 degrees off the ecliptic. The station is accessible for most of its orbit, with the exception of the two multi-month periods in each orbit in which it passes through the plane of the accretion disk. The station is largely abandoned during this time except for deep-level automation. Again, check your ephemeris for details.

Edgewalker Station is run jointly by Dynamic Spatial Geometry Group, a research collective, and by the Order of Endings Manifest, a monastic order of Entélith – indeed, there is much overlap between the two, as the devotees of the Lady of Death and Endings take great interest in such research. It also houses modest facilities for visiting researchers and tourists, and a small funerist, capable of performing appropriate death rituals for many species of the Worlds.

Orbiting much closer to the Eye is the Eft Sédir Containment Facility, a maximum security prison run for a consortium of Accord polities by a division of the White Hands mercenary fleet. The Facility is designed as a skyhook extending from its anchor asteroid (home of the prison administration facilities and its spaceport) down towards the hole; prisoners are held in modules attached to the skyhook and resupplied by one-way descender ‘bots. The Facility uses the increasing levels of gravity as the skyhook descends to assist in the containment of their more violent and dangerous prisoners; modules can be placed at levels offering from near-microgravity to a crushing twelve standard gravities. In the event of riot, attempted escape, or other trouble, separation charges can blow any module clear of the skyhook and drop it into the Eye, or the entire skyhook can be separated from its anchor, likewise. Approaching the Facility is not recommended for anyone except for an approved White Hands prisoner transport; the locals are unfriendly, and the station will fire on anyone entering its claimed million-mile security zone.

Points of Interest: The only other structure of interest in the Eye of Night System is the remains of a tarvic project to magnetohydrodynamically tap energy from the infall of stellar plasma originating from Bloodshot. While abandoned partway through construction, and obviously derelict, this miles-long megastructure is still remarkable, the more so that it continues to hold station within the plasma streamer despite centuries of neglect.

Leyness’s Worlds: Guide to the Ecumene


FROM: ADM. GILEON CULARIUS (GRUMPY BADGER THEATER COMMAND)
TO: CORE COMMAND

*** EXPEDITE
*** EYES ONLY GRUMPY BADGER

1. I HAVE THE HONOR TO REPORT THAT THE SARAGÓS (OSIS DEEP) SYSTEM HAS BEEN RECLAIMED.
2. ALL IN-SYSTEM ILTINE FORCES, UNDER SENIOR SURVIVING COMMANDER CAPTAIN-OF-CRUISERS MINIK HAR-RANT SATHAN, HAVE SURRENDERED AND ARE UNDER TASK FORCE CONTROL.
3. AFTER AKV ATTACK TO DISABLE MISSILE FACILITIES, CASUALTIES AMONG THE ABOMINATION WEAPONS IN USE BY ILTINE FORCES WERE MINIMAL. TASK FORCE GRUMPY BADGER HAS CAPTURED 14,896 INTACT, 37 PARTIALLY SO, 892 DESTROYED. STATUS OF REMAINING EST. 15 UNKNOWN.
4. TECHNICAL DIVISION HAS BEGUN THE PROCESS OF TRANSFERRING CHANGELING AIS TO INACTIVE TRANSPORT SUBSTRATE. REQUEST FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS ON DISPOSITION.
5. IT IS MY INTENT, PROCEED-UNLESS-CANCELLED, TO ADVANCE UPON VENERI (OSIS DEEP) AND REQUIRE EXPLANATIONS OF THE ILTINE GOVERNANCE.
6. AUTHENTICATION WOLFPACK IRON AMBER WYVERN BASKET ANVIL / 0x1195BAEB33249C65

ADM GILEON CULARIUS


RRENAC (Cordai Gap) – Chaos reigns on the former throneworld of the People’s State of Bantral. While the war has moved out of this region, officially, with the fleets of the Nineworlds, First Interactivity, other local polities, and their mercenary allies destroying the established Republican forces or driving them them back beyond the Borderline, the fighting continues.

A multiple-front war is in progress, here, between the remnants of the old People’s Government – deposed by the Republic’s forces in the early stages of their invasion of the Worlds – several revolutionary organizations claiming to represent new governances – empowered by ideas, technology and other assets seized during the Republic’s retreat – offworld looters, and those who simply wish to be left alone.

The most violent of these, so far, is the war against the old regime. While it retains control, in theory, of the majority of Bantine territory and the remains of the Bantine military forces and other instrumentalities, it is also the most widely despised of the competing factions. Lynch mobs operate freely in rebel territory hunting down former regime officials, and, most dramatically, the opening shot of the revolution came when the House of State was destroyed, an action attributed to the One Plane Faction, by dropping a freighter from orbit as the People’s Government reconvened for the first time after the Republic’s departure.

Thus far, even mutually hostile revolutionaries have been observed to cooperate against them. But as the need for cooperation declines in the face of the dwindling governance, the situation on the ground can only heat up.

– the Accord Journal

12 thoughts on “Epistolary Experiment (24/30)

  1. A question founded from fairly general ignorance… Wouldn’t the matter in the outer “rings” of the accretion disk tend to provide radiation shielding from the activity in the inner rings, making the outer accretion disk plane one of the safer places to be?

      • I asked an astronomer friend about this. His reply:

        “James,

        I’ll get to your other email in a bit, but I thought I’d start with your black hole accretion disk question. Yes, I worked on systems with accretion disks. I’ve done much more with disks around white dwarfs than black holes, but most of the physics is the same.

        The entire disk radiates energy. The inner parts of the disk (closer to the black hole) are higher temperature, so more of the energy comes out at shorter wavelengths (UV and/or X-rays). The details (blackbody radiation vs. emission lines) are still the subject of hot (pun!) debate after many decades.

        Broadly speaking, the radiated energy is coming from the loss of gravitational potential energy (GPE). As matter falls “down” toward the black hole, it is losing GPE. That energy has to go somewhere. As the gas moves it collides with other gas that is falling down, this heats it up, and that temperature means it radiates light. Exactly how it heats up and what kind of light it radiates brings us back to the details (blackbody vs. emission lines, etc).

        The rotation (it is disk) is because the material entering the disk has angular momentum. This is the old “spinning ice skater spins faster as they pull in their arms” business. Somehow (last I knew this was another hot debate) that angular momentum is transferred somewhere (wind? magnetic fields? space elves?) so the material can move inward on the disk, closer to the black hole.

        [One of the differences between black hole systems and white dwarf/neutron star systems is that there is no “surface” for the inner edge of the accretion disk to slam into – the material just disappears over the event horizon. This means that the hottest (innermost) parts of the disk are missing, so black hole binaries tend to have a different x-ray spectrum. They are also missing the light contributed by the heated surface of the white dwarf/neutron star and the light from the impact of the accreting material on white dwarf/neutron star surface (the “boundary layer”).]

        The disk will definitely provide some “shielding”. That is, its outer parts will generally block light from its inner parts. This is seen in many systems, but it does depend on how “thick” the disk is – its vertical (perpendicular to the plane of the disk) extent. Thirty years ago there was a lot of argument about “thick” vs. “thin” disks; I’m not sure where that argument has equilibrated. But even a thin disk will provide some shielding. Of course, a black hole accretion disk doesn’t have quite as much high-energy radiation (see previous paragraph). The outer parts of the disk will still radiate, but should be at longer (optical or even infrared) wavelengths.

        Inside the disk you’ll be surrounded by hot gas (several thousand Kelvin) and light from that gas. The closer you are to the central object, the hotter the gas. In the plane of the disk but outside it you’ll be shielded from a lot of the radiation, although you’ll still be getting radiation from the outer edges of the disk. The best place to be (aside from “very far away”!) would be behind the mass-donating star. It would shield you from all the light from the disk. Of course, it is a star, so it is also a source of light and may be quite luminous (some black hole binaries have O or B star companions).

        Above/below the disk are definitely the worst places to be. You’ll get all the radiation from the disk (and the mass-donating star) and may well have to deal with streams of matter coming off the disk at very high velocity (a “jet” or “wind”).

        Hopefully that makes sense and addresses what you’re after. If not, ask again!

  2. I’m guessing the prison skyhook has to burn fuel to keep station and not pass through the plane of the disk. That has to be an interesting design and logistics issue.

    Otherwise it seems to be an awfully expensive way to execute all of it’s prisoners via radiation poisoning every few months.

    • They go for the somewhat cheaper route, long term, of indulging in heavy radiation shielding – especially on administration, of course – and burning fuel to skip quickly through the disk when they reach those points, and then dropping back quickly into their previous orbit.

      This _does_ tend to leave many of the prisoners suffering from various unpleasant radiation syndromes, but since to a large extent this prison serves as a convenient oubliette for assorted regimes to stick people they never want to see again but are too ‘civilized’ to execute, and since their people by and large trouble themselves with attention to and care about prison conditions about as much as we do *here*, it doesn’t trouble anybody’s mind too much.

  3. The interplay between the intersteller transport and storage of “prisoners” and intersteller rules about transporting and storing “slaves”, and the Empire’s enthusiastic treatment of people they consider to be slavers has to sometimes be… interesting. (You have mentioned what happens to transporters who list people on their cargo manifests.) Especially when those prisoners are from politics that are not as as ethically policed or as full consent based as the Empire likes.

    • Well, that provision is part of the Imperial Navigation Act, et. seq., and as such applies to Empire-registered merchanters, i.e., when policing their own. In terms of interstellar law, on the other hand, while the Accords do let you deal righteously with slave ships, prisoner transports, not so much.

      Inside the Empire, the debate on the issue runs something like this:

      Everyone agrees that this sort of thing is a horrible outworlder barbarism that shouldn’t happen, dammit.

      The idealist faction, primarily represented by the Sanguinaries, argues that therefore they should stop it from happening.

      The pragmatist faction begs to point out that first, a lot of the people that end up in these places – even though they don’t deserve to, because no-one does – are people the Empire would have shot out of hand anyway. And second, they don’t have the resources to wage war on large chunks of the known galaxy and their allies to make them do it right. And third, it wouidn’t work worth a damn anyway unless you plan on occupying them for basically ever, which is why this nation-building adventurism crap went out of fashion late in the Consolidation, sometime before the Aeon-Long Peace.

      The idealist faction grumbles that while technically, yes, imprisoning Defaulters isn’t ethically impermissible, that’s by no means all the prisoners, and killing slavers is an eo ipso good, dammit.

      The pragmatist faction points out that sure, it isn’t all the prisoners, but even the political prisoners are for the most part just as ethically dodgy as the political imprisoners, and by the way, yes, killing slavers is an eo ipso good, but so is making sure there are fewer slavers in the future, and thus picking counterproductive fights – from the point of view of the long-term plan to memetically overwhelm the universe – is obviously a Bad Thing. Shut up and multiply, children.

      The idealist faction says that that’s not the point, and this is a matter of principle.

      The pragmatist faction says that that bloody well is the point, and the sorts of things they’d have to do to make their plan work at all would compromise the Empire’s libertist principles and indeed its very soul far worse than refraining.

      Insults are exchanged, duels are arranged, and assorted other divers alarums. For the last few millennia, the pragmatists have tended to come out ahead.

      • Plus, I suppose that if there was ever a particularly sympathetic prisoner being transported or stored, there is always the option of a filibuster.

        Which then the people who are in the business of transporting or storing a prisoner, or their insurers at least, would logically then factor into their business practices, even potentially up to the point of refusing the that specific contract.

        And thus, everything, more or less, keeps on working.

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