Bling of War: Except for the brief chunk of time that matched our Industrial Age, played mostly straight by the Imperial Legions. Beforehand, for much the same regions as Napoleonic (and previous) armies were quite dressy – well, that, and the giant steam clanks stomping around on the battlefield – and afterwards
CS Unyielding Order, Litash high orbitals. The circumambient skies over Litash burned three times over; with the pin-point blazes of wounded ships venting hot gases and of ongoing warhead detonations in the low orbitals, with the long bright streaks of hulks destroyed before they made it to orbit reentering uncontrolled,
The crystals fizzed as they dissolved, salt lattices slipping apart into their ionic components, releasing tiny pockets of oils, aromatic compounds, and CO2 trapped within them. Nanomachines, too, came free from encapsulation within the crystals. Their triggering conditions met – the latent heat released by the crystal’s dissolution and the
Blank Slate: The maintenance-mode “personality” run by unoccupied cybershells and bioshells to enable teleoperation, maintenance, minimal mobility, and self-diagnostics.
The World Shaft (under construction), two-thirds below Mile Station 23 Project Elapsed Time: 15 years The bottom of the great shaft resounded with the clangor of Mahánárel’s own forge. A few hundred feet apart, the space between crammed with the steam-driven drills, hammers and other machinery that carved the
Black Box: Quite a few of them lying around in the form of leftover elder race artifacts and other archaeological recoveries. Sensible civilizations and corporations (like Probable Technologies, ICC) really hate this, because they know exactly how Sealed-Evil-In-A-Can dangerous that sort of thing can be, and the likelihood of unknown
Black and White Morality: Depends on the angle you look at it, really. Outside observers would argue that the Imperials, for example, must practice a black and white morality; after all, they have an objective ethics, or so they claim, and a mathematical calculus of ethics by which to measure
“Well, firstly, we’re a civilization of dozens of different species with hundreds of races and clades each. Given the sheer number of shapes we come in, why would you possibly assume that we’d be invested in your morphological bigotries?” You’re idiots. “And even if we were inclined
You may notice that in “Purpose” I used the male-default pronoun and person-reference – i.e., “men of every kind”, “him and his”, etc. This is, of course, a decidedly imperfect translation of the Eldraeic original, which uses, of course, the word daráv – “person, sophont” – in formations like the former, and
”MirĂĂ«. Idaharis. JĂrileth. Order, progress, liberty. These are the principles to which we have dedicated ourselves, we of this new-forged Empire. ” ”But not the externally-imposed kĂłrasmirĂĂ« of the dark times before the Drowning, nor that of the benighted lands beyond the mountains and the ocean. We believe that mĂşratmirĂĂ« – cooperation
Morality Kitchen Sink: The way the universe works, people being complex – sophonts can be found spread all over the moral spectrum from shiny white to deepest black, often at the same time in different contexts. More importantly, bearing in mind the sheer variety of sophont minds despite the constraints placed
“Thus it is said that an eldrae thinks pacing; a dar-bandal, sniffing; a galari, hovering; a kaeth, fighting; a dar-ĂĂche, floating; a sssc!haaaouĂş, blowing; a mezuar, standing; an esseli, twitching; a codramaju, merging; a kalatri, sitting; a járaph, of itself; a selyĂ©va, basking; a vlcefc, hanging; a spinbright, watching;