The Cosmic Adventurers

This beautiful morning gave rise to a firm conviction that the whole day, or maybe a week, or even a whole life, would definitely be no worse. A bright yellow star named Lotus illuminated the earth with a generous radiance. It seemed that every tree, house and piece of land shone in response. It is at such moments that the atmospheric anomaly, unique but familiar to my home planet Bryanskaya is best manifested - the visible rays coming from the central disk of the luminary are sinusoidally curved, forming a spherical light pattern, and indeed very similar to a lotus flower. Because of this factor, this aquatic plant with cosmically beautiful flowers, hailing from far, far away mother Earth, is quite popular with us, and has grown by self-planting in all swampy areas of the planet where the climate has allowed. Beauty!.. Eh, so tourists may appear over time. No way!.. To deploy spaceships with tourists on the approach to the star system! Kick in the a*s! Сan even use battle gravers. And to project on the Large Dust Disk framing our star system the inscription "it is not allowed here" in all the main languages of the Galaxy - Ros, Atlantic, Slint, Sein, Ansingle, Fakores, and even, just in case, on the tabular matrix writings of Gray Overseers... Although, this is unlikely. This is my cosmic-comic exaggeration. We are too far away even from the major centers of civilization of our native interstellar Republic of Novorossia. I'm not talking about the Alliance, the Empire and the Commonwealth, which remained somewhere there, in the Old Area, in the Orion arm, many centuries ago. They are even further away. However, let them stay there. We don't miss them. Someday the time will come when the tentacles of their colonies reach out to us, but for now - we enjoy the tranquility. From other star systems, someone arrives a couple of times a month, half of them are intruders and foreign scouts, who are regularly intercepted by our spaceships from the Militia of the Star System (hereinafter - MSS). Which confirms the conclusion that centuries of our autonomy will end sooner or later. It's time to think about finding another galaxy... Joke. And the surrounding xenos are not interested in us in most cases. They either haven't taken off from their planets yet, or vice versa, they consider us funny dangerous monkeys, with whom it's best not to mess with if possible. In some ways they are right. We humans can do things that many other intelligent beings simply could not think of. Some of them are aggressive, but there are few of them. We maintain relations, but this way - at the minimum necessary level. If we understand that we don't need to shoot at each other, that's fine. And we don't need more from each other. Why is the planet called "Bryanskaya"? It's simple - it was colonized by distant descendants of the inhabitants of the eponymous Russian city on ancient Earth. The planet is named in memory of the city and region of Bryansk. The names of our cities, plains, mountains, rivers, seas and other elements of planetography are a simple projection from ancient maps of the area and folklore of this small region that once existed on the native planet of mankind. More than a thousand years ago, after the Great Escape, or, as they pathetically write in historical chronicles, the Great Exodus, when after the Great Interstellar War, several million miraculously surviving Russian partisans were evacuated from Earth by the fleets of the Order of the Renaissance and the First Spacefleet of Novorossia. After that, all this broken company, fleeing from the horrors of a total space war, the sad outcome of which they could no longer change, made a record-breaking flight at that time to the neighboring galactic arm, conventionally called the Perseus arm, through the Great Inter-Arm Void, to where human gravpolar-engines had never buzzed. From that moment, the first wave of our new era of colonization began. From this location and time, the first wave of our new era of colonization started. The era of our renaissance began there. And my planet is already quite far from this point. Bryanskaya is a good planet. There are few such pearls - according to the statistics of the Society of Astrography and Astronomy, one completely suitable for human settlement without terraforming, A class A planet occurs on average per thousand stars. However, this indicator varies greatly - there are sectors where there are no suitable "living" planets at all, in which colonists have to live on space stations and settlements under hermetic domes of ecosystems in which they can survive on the surface of dangerous lifeless planets. And there are real clusters of habitable star systems… however, in most cases, they are already occupied by aborigines, often already having initial space transport links within their star systems. There are especially few good planets, given that they are not formed by every star. After all, most of the Galaxy's stars are small and cold red and brown dwarfs, around which large planets rarely rotate. But it is precisely because of this that they gather around themselves enormous swarms of asteroids of all sorts and sizes - from placers of mini-planets to vast accumulations of dust, and all this is mixed into a thick soup, in which it is very easy to disappear without reliable navigation. And it is in such terrible holes that various bastards like to hide, such as space raiders, they are also, colloquially, pirates. But not only them. Fortunately, human pirates rarely appear in our places. And their own, homegrown, and those who accidentally drifted from the Old Area. No one has seen homegrown pirates in our country for the last eight or ten years. Pirates from the Old Area sometimes fly into the outer space of Novorossia when they are fleeing from the space forces of their native states - the Alliance, the Commonwealth and the Empire. They assume that they will not be chased by us. Not quite right, but our star system militias and military space forces also do not favor any pirates, regardless of where they come from. In this they do not differ from their colleagues from the Old Area. Nobody likes pirates. Except for themselves. I don't think I need to explain why. And when it comes only to their own space g**g. They fight with each other for spheres of influence almost more often than with space patrols. Pirates from the Old Area have never been seen here in the Ariadne Sector. And that's probably a good thing. With xenos pirates, the situation is somewhat more complicated. Contact with them is difficult, their technique is by no means thoroughly known to us, and from the first time it is difficult to make out who was brought to your star sector- evil raiders, or a completely official space military unit that will not attack you without declaring war. And therefore, just in case, our MSS drive away all xenos ships indiscriminately- trouble is easier to prevent than to treat. We do not have large accumulations of valuables that could attract robbers, we are too far from large economic centers and busy transport routes. Most human-pirates will just be too lazy to get to us... If measured in the usual units of measurement planets- in the Earths, Bryanskaya looks quite small and discreet green-blue planet. A little more than one-third of the Earth. There are no high mountains, the seas are shallow and abound with islands, the seas and land are about equal, but the humidity is high, there are a lot of clouds, the winds are stable. All the more surprising for me is today's absolutely clear sky. And it is not more surprising that, according to statistics, the most foul-mouthed people on our planet are in the Society of Astronomers and Astrographers. Observing stars from the surface with conventional telescopes is still a torment, only orbital observation facilities connected to planetary observatories via satellite communication terminals will help out... And it was not too lazy for someone to calculate who and how much swears. Probably, the Society of Statistics at that moment had nothing with which to load its computing power… A slight inclination of the axis provides Bryansk slightly less pronounced than the standard terrestrial seasonality. And this is with a completely normal attraction of a little more than one G. That is, the planet is very dense, with a very powerful magnetic field. There is little heat from the bowels, and if it were not for a slightly closer relative position of the orbit around the star and a bright natural satellite, it would be very cold here. It is felt - the difference between moonless and moonless nights here is up to several Celsius. It looks like nonsense, but in fact it's serious. Because of this, we have two familiar phenomena in our 265-day year - the first is winter and summer global, they consistently replace each other for six months, and the second is winter-summer local with a change every two standard earth months.(or spring-autumn, depends on the date). Although we are in a distant galactic outback, we are trying to keep in touch with our common homeland and human civilization as a whole. We have quite a standard galactic (for people) Earth calendar with conditional reference to Greenwich... What is Greenwich? Something ancient Greek, it seems, from the hoary earthly antiquity? Forgot. It will be necessary to ask someone... A couple of hundred thousand kilometers away, a thousand-kilometer satellite of the Moon "Peresvet" is slowly rotating in orbit. Indeed, it is very bright, covered with a crust of snowy salt ice, on moonlit nights it is light almost a quarter of the daily norm. On a full moon, it even creates the illusion that two suns rise alternately in the sky, one bright and large, the other smaller and dim. And in a distant orbit about a million km away from us, a hundred-kilometer "tamed" comet with an atmosphere of gas and dust is quietly spinning, dubbed the Partisan. The mini-satellite is not visible from the planet, but its long gas plume is very clearly visible. Even during the day, it reminds of itself with a pale whitish stripe in the green-blue skies, even on moonless nights, in the midst of bright stars, it temporarily takes the role of the main decoration of the sky from Peresvet. I've heard that people in the Old Area are afraid of comets flying past planets. They consider it a bad sign. Nonsense, in my view. Especially now, when the comet can be towed or even sprayed. It was not possible to completely do without terraforming on Bryanskaya. During the initial examination, it turned out that there is too much oxygen in the atmosphere, and it is rarefied - almost a quarter of the earth's pressure. Usually it's not enough, but here... It was with the help of comets that this problem was solved. The colonists did not want to constantly walk on their new planet in masks, live in airtight houses and breathe through the a*s. They had to carefully bombard the planet with billions of tons of crumbs from comets, since there are comets with a high content of nitrogenous compounds in the system and they did not have to be driven by interstellar transports from no one knows where. The operation was successful, as a result, most of the local animals that were at the very beginning of the evolutionary path (even the land was not inhabited yet) quickly died, and people and plants and animals brought with us from Earth and other living planets quite successfully took root. In general, the planet is beautiful, calm and quite safe. True, gray-haired mens (and womens) from the Planetary Control Society (geologists, geophysicists, etc.) say that our planet is young, like the whole system as a whole, and in tens of millions of years irreversible geological changes may begin with a change in the composition of the atmosphere, intense volcanism, perhaps even with an increase in size and a decrease in gravity, and other delights of the planet entering maturation. Well, millions of years is not fast. We'll wait... But this is a very popular topic on amateur TV shows and network resources. And what about the official ones? But nothing. In only amateur, there are no other producers of the "cultural product" on our planet. Like most of everything else. The state represented by the Defense Council, the Order of the Renaissance and the political structures of the Republic of Novorossia are on their own, they carry out general military coordination, standardization, state colonization, development and implementation of the most advanced technologies and so on, we are the planetary and space settlements of the Ros- on our own. We even have our own planetary and space militia. We support each other mainly through cultural and technological exchange, unite if necessary to repel threats from outside, exchange resources if someone lacks something, but there is no direct subordination. This paradigm was formulated and established immediately after the Great Exodus by the Great Founders... (I think you've noticed that everything that concerns the events of a thousand years ago proudly bears the prefix "great, and not otherwise!")... in fact, it was a bunch of space adventurers who began their space career with anti-raider activities. Later they transformed into a real combat space brotherhood, hardened by battles with raiders. Subsequently, after the war, with the support of the Phoenix Corporation, also great and legendary, which later became the Order of Renaissance, they were miraculously able to pull the remnants of the people who almost died in the war from Earth to the other side of the Galaxy. However, the irony is not very appropriate here - the Founders were worth their current glory. They have had trials that are scary to think about now. Everyone now knows the names of the most famous of them. Vlad Pozharsky, Adele Lesnikova, Ariadna Belikova, Alexey Monin, Heydar Zeynalov, Andrey Engeld, Sergey Volin... The full list will be very, very long. These names won't mean anything to people in the neighboring galactic arm, but for us they are great heroes, thanks to whom we exist. There are monuments to them on all the planets and stations of Novorossia, hundreds of books have been written about them, movies and even virtual games have been shot, where you can immerse yourself in the role of a group of conspiratorial cyber-saboteurs, anti-raider fleet, or even participate in a life-saving Exodus... It's good that they didn't make a religious cult out of them then. It could be, and in some places, they even tried to do it - after all, the images of the Founders are a ready-made pantheon of gods whose exploits will easily surpass the deeds of ancient legends. But, the Education Society, in order to avoid exactly such a turn of events, from the very beginning deliberately did not hide all the information about them- these wonderful people with a divine aureole began like an ordinary g**g, although with noble goals, but they used quite gangster methods to achieve their goals - from murders, break-ins and kidnappings to terrorist acts. They became a group to fight raiders in space a little later. And more involuntarily than voluntarily. It so happened that they got into such a stream of events when they were no longer carrying forward their purpose, but the purpose was carrying them forward. Being already an anti-raider group, they did not take raider prisoners and did not shun any meanness towards them, in fact, differing in behavior from the pirate bastards only in that they fought with them. In fact, at the beginning of their journey, the Founders were pirates who killed and robbed only other pirates. And they handled it well. With the beginning of the war, they acted even more harshly, spitting on all the conventions and "civilized rules of warfare" that existed at that time. On the other hand, all parties to the conflict then spat on these rules. After the war, they enlisted the support of the Phoenix Corporation that survived the war. And when making a Big Escape, they bombarded the Earth-Moon system with masking nuclear bombs - there was simply no other way to break through the forces of the Alliance, the Commonwealth and the Empire and quickly evacuate the partisanes hiding in the underground network. the forces of the evacuation fleet and the opposing space garrison of the Solar System were categorically not equal - they had to get out of it, deliberately committing these terrible acts for the success of Operation Exodus. As a result of this operation, the Earth was terribly poisoned by radiation, covered with the darkness of black clouds, then billions of other inhabitants of the planet paid with their lives for the salvation of several million partisans. The earth became uninhabited for many decades. And it didn't work out to get out of the operation with their heads held high - most of the Founders died in battles during this raid, covering the departure of transports with rescued people from the Solar System with their ships. But, the last of the free and fighting Russians, locked up in the Ancestral Homeland occupied by the enemies, were saved... They are one of the few armed fleets that did not lose combat capability and survived until the very end of the Great Interstellar War, which ended with the complete defeat of the old Russian state. It was they who were able to unite all the surviving Russian forces around them and lead them away from the inevitable death to a new life. It was these people who did not flinch at that terrible time, and they did what others were afraid to do, didn't want to or couldn't cope. and they did what others were afraid to do, didn't want to or couldn't cope. And all this in the eyes of the Rosses, that is, us, redeems all their terrible sins for a billion years to come. If it suddenly happens that a bandit saves you from a burning house, you will not reproach him for being a bandit. You will thank him for your salvation. There were no saints in this war. All those who tried to be saints died. And those who survived had to become gods and demons at the same for a time.