IWTTD Chpt 13

==If We Turn To Dust - The Wicker Man - ==
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index
----
===A Coda===
INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION, LOW ORBIT
TERRA, SOL
NOVEMBER 16TH, 2020
----
A man who had not thought the name 'Asha Blackwing' in sixteen years floated quietly in the cupola, drinking in the sight of humanity's homeworld and its nighttime city lights through the windows. His host waited quietly until he looked away from the vista. 
 
"It's something, isn't it?" the older man said.
 
"Everything I dreamed," he replied.
 
"...Is that why…?" the astronaut asked, gesturing at the new module that had come into orbit aboard the same rocket as his guest.
 
"Sort of," the inventor said, after a moment's thought. "Turning the principle into a thermal rocket was easier than a powerplant. Even as much as we were limited by materials, that was enough thrust to… waste weight being cheap and fast."
 
"The end of an era," the astronaut said. "And good riddance."
 
"People will romanticize it later," the inventor said, shrugging and then grabbing for an anchor point as free-fall took its toll of dignity. "But no, I won't. So; not just to come here. The rest of it already made me rich enough to afford a tourist's ticket even here. Partly it was because it was… much simpler than it looked. But mostly because of where this can, will, lead. There are too many people on earth living in ways that the planet can't support. Reactors can slow, stop, carbon dioxide and so on, but they can't do anything about ecology - overfishing, collapsing food chains. For the people's sake, even more than the planet's, we needed a better way of spreading the load than chemical rockets."
 
"Even unlimited power and lift won't make Mars easy."
 
The inventor looked at his counterpart for a moment, then turned back to the planet as they approached the orbital dawn.
 
"A couple of physicists have noticed it in the math, I think," he said quietly. "Not published, yet, because something so incredible isn't something you want to say and be wrong, but... I brought a couple of tests of my own, to confirm it, along with the tank farm. That's why we'll be heading out to L1, next."
 
"More incredible than proton-proton fusion?" the astronaut said.
 
"The protons," the inventor said, "are a lightshow. The beat that makes the song is hyperspace."
 
There was a long moment of silence.
 
"Are we talking about actual mathematical hyperspace, or bad science fiction hyperspace?" the astronaut asked, quiet and intense.
 
"Both, if I'm right," the inventor said. "In practice, probably more like teleportation than Star Wars, and… Well. Relatively range limited. Three or four parsecs."
 
The inventor flinched slightly as the sun lifted above the curve of the Earth, stabbingly bright after the night-side.
 
"...The end of an era," the astronaut repeated softly. Then he shook his head and smiled. "They're going to have to call you Prometheus."
 
"I found it lying around," the inventor said, looking up as the world turned blue through the window. "Don't give me too much credit."
 
"I think that they call that relay race 'science'... But this turn with the baton was yours."
 
The inventor chuckled. "I guess. As long as it works. 'Say goodbye to gravity and say goodbye to death…' And anyway, I always wanted to visit Tau Ceti."
-------- The End -------- 
----
===Chapter/Coda Note===
*; Word from Valles: The reason for the timing the coda mentions, is that Asha was exactly twenty when V-In-Asha woke up on January 1, 3015.Equivalent exchange.
==The Lost Book==
* Wiki Editor : So the duology concludes. Originally, Valles planned a three book story, last focus on Omniki and her legacy. Here is his summary.
*; Book 3 - Through The Shifting Sands : Under the originally planned arc for Asha's stories, several details of TTD would have been different as well. Natasha Kerensky would have escaped Vega, but rather than heading to the Cauldron of Dieron, she'd've been one of the considerable number of former Combine warriors who ended up as pirates, in her case preying on the coreward edges of the Rift Approaches in the probably vain hope that some agency of the Clans would find her first. Asha's arrival on Dieron, and her operations there, would have been used to repeatedly hit the theme of Asha getting Newtype Flashes of another, hostile presence, to foreshadow the eventual firestorm confrontation with Yorinaga Kurita. The incendiary bombardment started with my mental image of Asha, realizing who she was fighting, having the thought, 'OK, if I don't deal with him he'll cut my entire force apart, but he's lots better than me. What can I do that he can't?'And the answer is 'realize the limits of heat management'.The all-out collapse of the DC and the FWL's decision to get in on the FC deal while the getting was good were not long-term planned, but were organic developments in the course of writing unrelated to the decision to truncate the plot structure.The interlude between TTD and Through The Shifting Sands would have been Natasha, finally back in contact, reporting to the Council of Khans on the military developments and hardware since their last contact, Snord's report on the destruction of the Wolf Dragoons at Solaris, and her receiving permission to create a dishonored/solhama shock unit to carry out her revenge with. TTSS itself would have had three major arcs. The first arc would be the Clans attempting a full-bid invasion, something like twelve frontline Clans and six reserve, with a Ghost-Bear style population movement, running into and getting absolutely mulched by the FedCom's preparations, similar to but less evenly than Drakensis' Along Came A Spider. There would probably have been an invasion of Finmark in the process; the chance to have Asha quote at a Jade Falcon CO would have been overwhelming. "If you think that you can run, if you think that you can stand, then you forget who turned this city on, you forget who plugged this city in!"This'd give us at least one clash with Natasha, of course, and also an introduction to our Next Generation cast, in the form of (justifying details to-be-decided-later) Asha's command lance and larger command company; Carmen Payne, Baby Phantom and mechtech, a Solaris native who rebuilt Legend-Killer's wreck out of the boneyard, Omiko Kurita, less different from canon than you'd probably think, driving Yorinaga's old Warhammer, and Melissa and Morgan's oldest, Victor's equivalent, Marie-Katherine Steiner-Davion, gung-ho hothead and Awesome driver.Omiko and M-K's romance would have been an ongoing thread through the rest of the story.Arc 2 would have had the foreground cameras focused on the efforts to settle, integrate, and deprogram the Clanner populations into the LC's territory in the wake of their immense cultural shock, including terrorist insurgency against the FedCom government, with background elements on the romance reaching the spats-between-very-different-people stage and the nagging question of where the heck Natasha disappeared to this time. First as a one-or-two word footnote and then repeatedly with increasing urgency there'd be a plague spreading across the Rift and Inner Sphere and growing increasingly worse as time went by.For the record, this plot element predates the year 2020.Arc 3 would start with the reveal that the insurgency was backed by The Society, who had determined that since the Warriors had obviously failed their duty to Kerensky's Vision, it was time for the actually competent part of the power structure to take over. Shortly thereafter, it would surprise no one to learn that the plague was actually a Society bioweapon. The rest of the arc would concern efforts to track down the Society's research center and blast through its defenses to claim the vaccine/antidote/treatment needed to stop the plague, ending of course with a headlong frontal assault to smash through the last line of defense: Natasha Kerensky, the Society's head training officer, and her best students.
----
<<Next Chapter - Return to Story Index
013, Chapter