A Gentle Rain

Admiral Vander [Character 5.05]
Commander of the First Contact Flotilla

Your story

You pushed Reflections on a Gentle Rain of Neutrinos too hard, too long, and it drained them. You could see the effect it was having on them, but they said they were fine and nicely elliptical. They weren't fine, and you told them they did not look elliptical to you, along any axis. That prompted a symphonic laugh-equivalent and a suggestion to keep looking.

For the last nine hundred years, you've been working with Gentle Rain, trying to get some sense of what's ahead at the Great Attractor. Their sensorum is better than the combined very long baseline sensors of the Fleet, which annoys many of the Scientists and Engineers of the Fleet. Apparently, it's because we can't flerk.

You've been the Admiral, the Commander of all First Contact Teams, for roughly six thousand years. You've been gathering as much information about the Great Attractor region of space all this time. The local civilizations have surprisingly little to say about it.

The First Contact Flotilla sensors have been picking up an increasing count of odd, distorted signals, as if ships were racing past the Fleet, away from the Great Attractor. You've set up sensor picket lines in normal space and hyperspace, and the signals are not coming from either place. It's almost as if they are coming from some other, private, hyperspace. If the signals do represent ships, it means there are Fleets out there that far outnumber your Fleet. The signals are varied enough that you may not have enough First Contact teams to reach out to every different species in those Attractor-fleeing Fleets.

It's all been theory and guesswork until the last year. The data has improved in quality and detail as Gentle Rain deteriorated to their passing. There are Fleets of ships, in millions of variants, racing away from the Great Attractor, in some private region of hyperspace. It was the last thing that Gentle Rain sent to you, just before they vanished into that same region of hyperspace.

They died to get you the confirmation, which you now have the statistical confidence to report to the elite Command staff you're about to meet with. Your Flotilla has an enormous amount of planning and work to do to handle the possible situations a thousand years from now.

That data was not worth Gentle Rain's death. You pushed them to it. It's your fault they're dead. Maybe someone else should be doing this job.