Tales from the Iconian Empire, Part 2

1 Jul 2225

Much has happened in the past months since my last entry. There were of course many victories during that time: our second colony, Nexus, was established, we met two other space-faring gibberish-speaking races, and we developed an Ion drive based on data found in an artifact recovered from a meteorite. However, the single most important discovery arrived just a week ago from our flagship: they have discovered Paradise. The fourth planet around the star Primus has been so named, and our flagship was the first there, our scouts the first to set foot upon the verdant world lying directly at the center of our star cluster. I am told the planet is even more beautiful, more usable than our homeworld, and upon hearing the news our starport immediately rushed the production of a long range colony ship, at great expense to our treasury.

Let me speak for a moment on the geography of our star cluster. All the stars in the cluster lie roughly in a plane, along the edge of our galaxy. When we refer to this plane, we can then label one axis arbitrarily to be galactic north, and the other galactic east. The intersection of these two is then arbitrary, and we thus let that location be the center of our star cluster. Thus one can imagine the coordinate system upon which I will then describe our geography. Our homeworld, New Iconia, lies almost two parsecs galactic south of the center. Our first colony, Labyrinth, is then a parsec west of the homeworld, and our second colony Nexus is a parsec south of the homeworld. Paradise was discovered within a half parsec distance of the center, and thus is quite far from our homeworld. Along the way there, our flagship also discovered an important source of rare metals (which they named Draconium) and that would be about a parsec north of the homeworld.

A sample of those rare metals were recovered and brought back for study by our scientists. Alas, they proved to not be useful for our technology, but the scientists did come up with another purpose: those metals did make a very exquisite jewelry, possessing an inner glow of different colors, and thus would make excellent luxury goods for our citizens. Thus, immediately prior to our third colony ship (the one which we recently rushed into final production) we sent out a starbase construction ship to establish a mining outpost for these rare metals.

Our research also shifted after the discovery of ion-based drive propulsion, examining some artifacts which previously had been assumed to be junk, but now revealed their basic design to be some sort of translator. With this research we contacted those races we had met before, and established good relations with them. Well, not in the sense of having sent over an embassy, but in the sense that they indicated their good nature and we did the same. The ones we met first were the Torian Confederation, whose homeworld appears to lie one and a half parsecs east of the core. There were also the Akilians, who have not developed star travel, but do have a very large population on a planet a half parsec southeast of the core. Finally, just today I received news that representatives of the Altarians, and the Dominion of Korx were encountered by our flagship. I do not know yet where these lie, but I fear that they will soon discover our Paradise, and attempt to gain it for themselves.

Tales from the Iconian Empire, Part 1

It is now two months since I took over as the leader of the Iconian Refuge. "Emperor Zifnab" has a nice ring to it, and I have already started taking the empire in a new direction. It was fortuitous indeed that my ascension to the throne came merely a few months after the news of the hyperdrive reached us on New Iconia, and the government had already pushed for the creation of a new interstellar colony ship based on this new drive.

The first weeks were where I had to make the toughest decisions: What path of research should the government take based on these new developments? Where should we send our two available interstellar capable ships? What improvements do we make to the infrastructure on the planet, to improve life here while people are yearning for expansion?

Clearly the most difficult and important of these was the research decision. This, however, turned out to be one of the easier decisions: Scientists had put forth a proposal already to build enormous Xeno Laboratories, to research artifacts and other items we proposed to find on other worlds. It would take only a few weeks to begin the first testing stages and for us be able to build these vast laboratories, both on our home planet and those we hoped to colonize. Further choices up until now were also easy, as we had a large need for improved drive technology, the basic hyperdrive units taking up so much space that our lowly scouts would take months to manage a single round trip to a nearby star system and back.

The next decision was more complex: there are six different star systems within the range of two parsecs, and any of them could contain planets viable for colonization. We have only two ships, one which we have called Haplo, a flagship in name, but merely a scout in purpose, and the other being the stately colony ship, ready to transport thousands of our populace to a new world.
We could colonize any of the star systems if we could find a habitable planet, or one of the outer planets of our system, a poor choice perhaps due to the terraforming which would be necessary, but perhaps better to take the known quantity. I quickly narrowed down the choices, thanks to our well developed observatories: only four of the systems contained a significant number of planets, and so we sent our flagship towards the nearest of these, the star named Markus. (Don't ask me who names these. Clearly, if I had been in charge they would have been named differently.) Word reached us even as the flagship was enroute that one of the planets orbiting Markus would be suitable for life, and may even be as habitable as our own homeworld! The colony ship was immediately sent, and the flagship diverted towards the nearby system of Iversonia. This however led to a change in decision, as even as the flagship approached Iversonia, it discovered that the system had two habitable planets, the second and third out, and they were individually even better than the reports from Markus! The colony ship changed course, and the first important achievement during my reign occured a few weeks after that: The empire's first colony world was named Labyrinth, and our colony ship set down and immediately began building the infrastructure necessary to become an asset to the empire, rather than a huge drain on our resources. A sad reality of our colonization efforts is that we must sink huge amounts of money and industrial production into them, and it is only months later that we begin to see a return on that.

As I finish writing this entry, I just received word that there have been ruins discovered on Labyrinth, vast relics of an ancient civilization. It is not expected to further our research any, which is a disappointment, but there is hope that it can be turned into a cultural site, preserved for visitors from our worlds, and others, to see. Our second colony ship has entered production, and we are spending great amounts of money to be able to complete work in just a few weeks, as with every week passing we discover more and more habitable worlds near us.