Auckland - The Trap Planet
Part 1: Fortuna’s Veil and the Seeds of Disaster (Circa 2740)
The year is 2740. Humanity, a sprawling tapestry of colonies and stations, stretched thin across the stars. From Sol’s familiar warmth to the distant whispers of the Wolf-Pack frontier, vessels pushed the very limits of FTL drives, cruising at a blistering 5-13c. Human and corporate ambitions, a restless hunger for new resources, fuelled this relentless expansion. Among the most aggressive was the Endrithiko Stem Collective (ESC), not a titan, yet a family-clan-company that often prioritized profit over prudence, viewing distant worlds as mere resources to be plundered.
Beyond Scholz’s Star, where charted space blurred into whispered rumours, lay Fortuna’s Veil. It was a cloaked region, known but poorly understood, a cosmic curtain hiding gravitational anomalies that defied existing star-charts. Within this treacherous shroud spun Auckland – a rogue brown dwarf, so faint it is almost not a star at all. Auckland circled a small, red star LZ 129B, itself a dim twin to Proxima Centauri. Both, in turn, were caught in the colossal gravity well of LZ 129A, a much larger, bright main star. Stellar cartographers, blinded by LZ 129A’s brilliance, had for too long considered it a standalone star, missing the intricate dance of the smaller bodies within its shadow.
This complex, invisible ballet created a unique and devastating hazard: Trap. Trap was a planet, between the Moon and Mars in size, yet with surprisingly high gravity. It didn’t orbit Auckland directly, but was caught in a chaotic LaGrange point, tracing an unpredictable elliptical path between 6.3 AU and a staggering 197.32 AU. Its surface was a testament to its brutal seasons: “Mud and Ice and Deep Frozen.” Vast mud plains, thick with biotic life that formed coal-like structures, stretched between active volcanoes, sources of meagre heat. Its atmosphere, thin and mostly frozen, would during the “Mud season” thaw into a semi-liquid, treacherous mire that could swallow unwary vessels whole.
High-velocity FTL approaches near Auckland’s hidden gravity wells often ended in disaster. Sudden, violent shifts in trajectory, dubbed unwanted gravity assists, would shred ships, tearing them apart before impact. The sensor lag in Fortuna’s Veil was notorious; Trap remained virtually “invisible” until it was too late. It earned its chilling moniker: “The Planet Trap.”
Part 2: The Endrithiko Colony Disaster (2749–2752)
Trap offered thorium in a form that was almost directly usable without further processing. Driven by the insatiable demand for pure thorium, not the ore – an important, highly sought-after component for advanced fusion batteries – the Endrithiko Stem Collective (ESC) understandably turned its attention to Trap. In 2749, they founded Hardwicke Terminus, a bold, daring venture that was hailed as a triumph of the family clan’s pioneering spirit. Three ESC ships – the “Samar Endrithiko”, “Brisk-Bark”, and “Farsight-Bark” – delivered prefabricated domes, food supplies, the usual life support systems, mining materials and 200 colonists: engineers, bio-specialists, miners and ‘pioneers’ from the family clan, all attracted by the promise of immense wealth and unwavering company loyalty.
Upon arrival, the colonists initially perceived Trap as uninhabited, a blank slate for their ambitions. Ciiv Endrithiko, the company executive overseeing the project, surveyed the desolate, frozen plains from the bridge of the Samar Endrithiko, a triumphant smile on his lips. “An untamed frontier,” he’d announced to his eager crew, the words echoing with a hint of manifest destiny, “ripe for the taking. This will be Endrithiko’s crown jewel.”
But the icy plains soon revealed a deep-rooted, earlier presence. On a frigid afternoon, a bio-miner named Alek stumbled upon a small, camouflaged entrance to an underground dwelling. Wide-eyed, he returned to the makeshift camp. “Commander Ciiv! I… I found something. Dwellings. Inhabitants!”
Ciiv Endrithiko, ever the pragmatist, initiated cautious engagement. He offered a handshake, a gesture met with the steady, unblinking gaze of Nigera Lun, a Drifter-Kin matriarch whose eyes held the cold wisdom of Trap’s endless winters. Beside her stood the elder, Kenjata Sol, his face etched with the planet’s harsh history, his demeanour radiating a quiet, ancient authority.
“We offer technology, resources,” Ciiv said, gesturing to their gleaming ships beyond the ice-crusted viewport. “You offer… understanding of this world?” His tone was affable, but his gaze constantly flickered towards the thorium-scanning readouts.
Nigera Lun’s voice was a low rasp, like wind over ice. “Trap has secrets. Its hunger is deep.” Kenjata Sol nodded, his gaze unwavering. “We can teach you to live with it, not conquer it. Its true riches lie in its biotics, in adaptation, not thorium. The frozen ‘mud’ at the equatorial regions, it thaws. The volcanic vents… they offer heat, minerals. But the storms, the shifting gravity… they are relentless.”
The colonists, initially hopeful, tried to adapt their conventional farming methods. A young botanist, Dr. Aris Thorne, knelt in a sterile grow-dome, frowning at the stunted synthetic crops. “They’re just not taking,” she muttered to a colleague, Engineer Jax, wiping condensation from her brow. “The soil composition… it’s unlike anything in our databases. The atmospheric pressure fluctuations are destroying the nutrient cycles.”
Ciiv Endrithiko, however, listened with only half an ear, his mind already calculating thorium yields, dismissing their warnings as primitive superstition. “Superstitious nonsense! We have algorithms, schematics, progress,” he’d scoffed at a mission debrief, tapping his data-slate. “Their ‘ghost storms’ are mere magnetic interference. Our shields can handle it.” A few days later, a massive magnetic tide swept through Fortuna’s Veil. Inside Hardwicke Terminus, systems flickered wildly. “Another reactor offline!” muttered a frustrated engineer, slamming his fist on a console. “This isn’t by the book, Ciiv. The Drifter-Kin… they warned us about the Ghost Storms. Our projections were wrong.”
“Nonsense!” Ciiv snapped, his face pale, but his arrogance remained. “Temporary setback! Focus on the thorium yields!” But the initial thorium yields, promised to be abundant, were a dismal 90% below projections. The promised riches were a mirage. Trap’s real riches lay indeed in its biotics, something the ESC, with its tunnel vision for minerals, failed to grasp. ESC’s synthetic crops froze despite desperate efforts; their advanced fusion reactors, designed for stable stellar environments, faltered under Trap’s unique gravitational and atmospheric stresses. Dr. Aris Thorne watched her last grow-light flicker and die. “We’re losing everything,” she whispered, her voice laced with despair. “They don’t understand this world.”
By 2751, the ESC’s investment dried up. Ciiv Endrithiko, without a hint of remorse, unilaterally abandoned the colony. “Evacuation,” he declared over a crackling comms channel, his voice devoid of emotion, addressed to the few remaining company staff. “Pull all family support. The project is non-viable. Every man for himself. Salvage what you can.”
The remaining 200 souls were left to their fate. By 2752, Hardwicke Terminus was a desolate graveyard of half-buried domes, its inhabitants succumbing to cold and starvation. The Drifter-Kin, observing the inevitable collapse and the colonists’ tragic inability to adapt from a distance, felt a grim sorrow. Nigera Lun had led a small, grim-faced team to the dying settlement. “You chose wrong,” she told the few shivering survivors she found, her voice laced with ancient sorrow. “You sought to take, not to live. But Trap allows some to learn.” They forced a partial, desperate evacuation of the few survivors they could reach onto a small, commandeered ESC shuttle, directing them to the only known safe jump-point out of Fortuna’s Veil. Then, with a somber resolve, the Drifter-Kin vanished back into the vast, treacherous wastes of the inner belt, taking their knowledge and autonomy with them, leaving the ghosts of ambition, and the planet Trap, behind, to teach its own harsh lessons.
Part 3: Trap’s Revenge – The Human Stories of Survival and Failure (2763–2766 onwards)
With the Endrithiko Stem Collective gone, Trap mutated into a perilous shortcut, a “Promise Trap” for those desperate enough to brave its unseen dangers. Smugglers and independents, seeking to avoid the necessity of regulations of the main-worlds or evade capture, chose the “uncontrolled” route through Fortuna’s Veil. Many were driven by a distorted sense of “freedom,” often seeking untraceable resources or information to fund burgeoning independence movements or outright rebellions in the Wolf-Pack Systems. But high-speed approaches across the complex eventualities of the LZ 129 system remained a fatal flaw, the main cause for ship averages.
Here, amid the lethal gravitational eddies and “Ghost Storms,” three distinct sagas unfolded, illustrating humanity’s contrasting responses to unimaginable peril.
Part 3A: The Gravity Assist (2763)
The cargo vessel Gravity Assist, pushed hard by a sudden “Ghost Storm,” slammed into Epigwaitt Canal near Trap’s equator during a treacherous mud season. The impact was a symphony of tearing metal and screaming alarms, abruptly silenced by the crushing cold. Of its twelve crew, six survived the impact: Captain Elias Carnley, a man of grim pragmatism, his face already etched with the weight of leadership, surveying the twisted wreckage with a practiced eye; Dr. Fjord Helga, a botanist whose quick thinking had saved her from a collapsing bulkhead, already assessing the alien flora; Chief Pilot Rhys Grafton, stoic but visibly shaken, the terror of the uncontrolled descent still in his eyes, his hands trembling as he checked the unresponsive controls; Tech Specialist Lena Carnley, the Captain’s sharp, adaptable daughter, already crawling through debris, assessing salvageable components amidst the wreckage; Survivalist Kamel Fjord, Dr. Helga’s young, eager nephew, whose innocence belied a surprising aptitude for foraging; and Quinton Schacheldon, the ship’s cook, a stout, unflappable man whose steady hands and comforting meals had been the heart of the crew, now tasked with making the unpalatable, palatable. Quinton Schacheldon was the only one of this group who was not a family member, yet he was quint essential for their survival, physical and mental.
Stranded and utterly cut off from the wider galaxy, their survival hinged on raw ingenuity and unyielding discipline. “Every scrap is gold,” Captain Carnley barked, his voice raw but resolute, setting the tone from day one. “We burn what we must, fix what we can, and eat what doesn’t kill us.” He turned their small, salvaged section of the ship – mostly the aft quarters and a section of the cargo hold – into a crude but effective fortress against Trap’s relentless cold and the corrosive mud. Days blurred into weeks, marked by the rhythmic clang of tools, the hiss of makeshift air filters, and the low, constant murmur of their comms, desperately trying to raise a signal.
Dr. Helga, against all odds, managed to cultivate the resilient biotic life of the mud plains. “These aren’t pretty, but they’re life,” she’d announce, holding up a clump of biotic bacteria a likes, her hands stained with alien soil. “They’re what this planet offers, Captain. We can make this work.” Her efforts, combined with Kamel’s tireless, often dangerous foraging expeditions into the muddy wastes, provided the meagre sustenance that kept them alive. “Just enough for tomorrow, Captain,” Kamel would report, his young face smeared with mud, his breath misting in the cold air. Quinton, with his deep knowledge of nutrition and resourcefulness, stretched their dwindling emergency rations, concocting surprisingly nourishing meals from the strange biotic finds and whatever protein synthesizers remained. He was the anchor, the one who reminded them of warmth and familiarity in a world that offered none. “Another day, another stew,” he’d say, a forced cheer in his voice, his own stomach grumbling, and for a moment, the desolation outside faded, replaced by the faint scent of something edible.
Meanwhile, Rhys Grafton, haunted by the memory of the crash, worked alongside Lena with obsessive focus. He would trace the damage on the ship’s internal schematics, muttering to himself. “One wire at a time, Chief,” Lena would murmur, her brow furrowed in concentration, as they painstakingly salvaged drive-core batteries and modified a wrecked shuttle. Each connection made, each circuit repaired, was a defiant act against the planet’s crushing indifference. The “Epigwaitt Base,” a heated cave-network warmed by distant volcanic fissures, became their sanctuary. “We’re living inside a volcano,” Lena had mused once, a strange, weary awe in her voice. “What next, breathing fire? At least it’s warm.” They clung to the hope of a distant, unseen world, their conversations often turning to the simplest of desires: a warm meal, a clear sky, the sound of human voices beyond their small, isolated group. Captain Carnley would often join them, listening to Quinton’s quiet jokes, to Lena’s engineering diagrams, to Rhys’s muttered calculations, clinging to the fragments of normalcy.
After 19 months of ingenious and disciplined survival, they successfully self-rescued. Their perilous sub-light jump, a desperate prayer hurled into the void, brought them to a recognized nav-buoy orbiting Auckland A, a planet 1.2 AU, double the size of Earth, orbiting Auckland star directly together with the inwards belt. Their story, a testament to raw human ingenuity and unyielding will, would later inspire the popular “Echoes in Ice” stream-novel, becoming a foundational myth for many Wolf-Pack independence movements.
Part 3B: The Invers Nessy (2764)
Less than a year later, the exploration vessel Invers Nessy, with a crew of 35, suffered a catastrophic hull shear from a gravity anomaly near Trap’s tri-pole volcanoes. The impact ripped through the ship, scattering debris across a desolate, frozen plain adjacent to the abandoned ESC settlement. Nineteen initial survivors, led by Commander Silas Invers, a rigid, authoritarian man, managed to limp to a half-buried section of the ESC domes. His Second Officer, Nimwit Thorne, a woman whose loyalty warred with growing doubts, kept her gaze fixed on the commander’s increasingly erratic decisions. Chief Engineer Roric, a brutal pragmatist, quickly established himself as a force of fear, his low growl the prelude to harsh commands. Among the crew, a desperate “Marauder” Faction began to coalesce, their eyes wild with hunger.
The Invers Nessy was a total wreck, and almost any supply by the ship was gone on impact. They faced death, not primarily from the harsh conditions alone, but because their missing and corrupted leadership failed to adapt. “We must maintain discipline! We await rescue!” Commander Invers would bellow, his voice hoarse, clinging to regulations that no longer applied. He paced the damaged comms room, futilely trying to raise a signal, ignoring the rumbling of empty stomachs. “Protocols must be followed! The fleet will find us!” But initial cohesion quickly fractured under his unyielding, increasingly desperate leadership and Roric’s pragmatic brutality.
Resources dwindled. The survivors, already weakened, found themselves scavenging the ruins of the former ESC settlement. “There’s barely anything here,” Nimwit Thorne whispered to a young technician, Yela, kicking at a collapsed dome. “Just ghosts and rust. And nothing to eat.” They unearthed some preserved nutrient bars, long past their expiration, brittle and tasteless, and discovered dormant cultivation units within the abandoned labs, hinting at what could have been. “If we could just get these working,” Yela murmured, her eyes wide with a flicker of hope, tracing the lines of a defunct hydroponics unit. “We could grow something!” But without the knowledge or true, collaborative leadership to restart them, these scattered resources offered only fleeting hope. The promises of rescue from Invers and Roric became increasingly hollow, dissolving into the biting winds and the gnawing hunger.
After 3 months of brutal blizzards and starvation, the crew devolved into warring factions. Whispers of desperation turned to shouts, then to outright threats. “They’re hoarding the remaining rations!” a Marauder snarled, pointing a shaking finger at a small group huddled together. The “Marauders” began with the dead, their gaunt faces showing no remorse. Soon, their hunger turned inward, eyeing the weakest among them. The moral fabric of the group frayed, then tore, and the cries of desperation were met with chilling silence.
When the end came, it was swift and brutal for many. Only three of the original 19 crew initially survived, clinging to life. Among them were Nimwit Thorne, a ghost of her former self, broken by the horrors she had witnessed and the failures of her commander, muttering to herself about the chilling screams that still echoed in her mind. Commander Silas Invers himself, a hollow shell of his former authoritarian self, wandered the ruins, muttering about protocols and the disgrace of their situation, his eyes glazed with delusion, yet his hand still occasionally reaching for the comms panel, attempting to cycle the radio-beacon. The third, an unnamed engineer, wasn’t driven mad by starvation, eventually heated finally the black biotic mud to eat it. These three Nimwit, Silas, and the engineer weakened and without supplies, mud-eating, endured, their survival a cruel testament to the sheer human capacity for clinging to life.
Months later, a routine freight-hauler, the Star Drifter, detoured through Fortuna’s Veil to shave a few days off its journey. Its long-range scanners, picking up the faintest, almost-imperceptible pulse of an archaic distress beacon — one that Commander Invers, in his deluded but persistent state, had managed to reactivate in a forgotten corner of the Nessy’s wreckage — stumbled upon the broken hull and the two surviving crewmembers. The unnamed and Nimwit and Silas, barely alive, were found amidst the frozen ruins. Their rescue was less a triumph of their own efforts and more a cosmic fluke, a stark counterpoint to the tragedies that had consumed their ship. The harrowing tale of the Invers Nessy would become a chilling cautionary tale of fractured leadership and humanity’s capacity for depravity under extreme duress, whispered throughout the Wolf-Pack systems, but also a strange, unsettling reminder that even in the most catastrophic failures, a thread of unexpected deliverance might exist.
Part 3C: The Let’s Zeppelin Dawn - A Cruel Rebirth (2766 onwards)
Two years later, the news liner Let’s Zeppelin Dawn, a marvel of engineering opulence, carrying high-value archives – historical data, scientific breakthroughs, cultural records, and potentially invaluable latest AI tech – plunged into Trap. Caught in an unforeseen gravitational eddy, it crashed violently into the “Silent Sea” glacier, a vast frozen expanse. The impact shuddered through the liner, a groan of tortured metal, then a sickening crack as the hull fractured. The ship’s archives, including what was believed to be copies of quintessential Varna Papers about Sub-Quantum-Physics annotated by Elara Kovacycy, were lost, sinking deep into the depths of the frozen ocean. This was not a failure of will, but of circumstance, a crushing blow to a repository of human knowledge. Archivist Seraphina Dawn felt the loss like a physical pain, a gaping void within her. “All that knowledge… gone,” she whispered, staring at the vast, indifferent ice, tears freezing on her cheeks. “Centuries of thought, swallowed whole. What was the point?”
Of the 83 passengers and crew, 51 survived the initial impact. They were a diverse lot: scholars and socialites, engineers and simple passengers, all thrust into a nightmare. They huddled together in the broken sections of the ship, shivering. Led by Archivist Seraphina Dawn, whose meticulous intellect proved unexpectedly practical – she found herself assessing their meagre human resources with the same precision she’d once applied to data-slates; Chief Steward Zephyr Grant, a man whose easy charisma and quick thinking had once soothed nervous passengers, now tirelessly kept morale, moving among the shivering survivors with encouraging words, “One foot in front of the other, folks. We’re still breathing. That’s a start.” And Engineer Osmo General, a former engineer who provided much-needed organizational structure, his calm commands cutting through the panic, “Assess the damage! Prioritize survivors! Move! We have to find shelter!” They managed to reach the now mud-drifting, semi-buried former ESC settlement. It was a bleak, desolate place, a graveyard of corporate ambition, offering little more than ruined domes and the ghosts of forgotten colonists.
This was not a glorious survival. This was a cruel rebirth. Stripped of their precious archives, their mission, their very purpose, the survivors faced the brutal reality of rebuilding civilization from nothing but wreckages and desperate hope. The ruins became their crucible. Seraphina Dawn, despite her despair over the lost knowledge, refused to let their minds stagnate. “We may have lost the data, but we haven’t lost our minds,” she declared, her voice firm despite the cold, addressing a small, despondent group. “We will learn, we will teach. We are the living archives now.” She gathered them for makeshift lessons in the shattered domes, organizing lectures on forgotten sciences, reciting poetry, and sharing stories from memory. “What is knowledge if not shared?” she’d ask, her breath fogging in the frigid air, “We will preserve what we can, even if it’s only in our heads.” It was an astonishing act of intellectual endurance, a defiant spark against the crushing despair.
Zephyr Grant, always looking for an angle, proved incredibly resourceful. One frigid morning, he returned from a dangerous reconnaissance mission into the outskirts of the ESC ruins, mud caked on his face, eyes wide with a strange triumph. “Look what I found!” he exclaimed, holding up a small, dirt-caked automated unit. “Surviving robot-entities! And look what they’re cultivating!” He led them to a series of hidden enclosures within the ruins – small, automated maintenance units from the ESC colony that had adapted and modified themselves to the harsh environment. These entities, seemingly self-sufficient, had been diligently cultivating small pockets of hardy biotic life: plump rabbits, small, resilient pigs, oddly shaped but edible potatoes, and “yeast-wild-farms” (bio-fermentation vats) in the perimeters of the old settlement. It was a silent testament to a forgotten survival, a hidden abundance in the desolation. “It’s not pretty, but it’s food,” Zephyr said, holding up a gnarled, Trap-adapted potato, a symbol of their accidental inheritance, “and it means we don’t starve! This changes everything!”
With Osmo General’s organizational genius, they integrated these discoveries. He mapped out the geothermal vents accessible from the ruined domes, converting them into a network of crude but effective heaters and atmospheric scrubbers. “We’ll bake ourselves alive if we’re not careful,” he grumbled, wiping soot from his brow, “but at least we won’t freeze tonight.” They painstakingly repaired and adapted the robot-entities, learning their strange, efficient methods, and even reverse-engineered some of their rudimentary programming to optimize food production. Seraphina led efforts to document their new knowledge, creating a living archive in their minds, not on data chips. “Every new discovery, every adaptation, will be recorded. Not just for us, but for those who might follow,” she instructed, her voice filled with a renewed purpose. Days were a relentless cycle of toil: repairing habitat domes, tending the meagre farms, scavenging for every usable part. Nights were filled with the hum of improvised heaters and the soft murmur of Seraphina’s lessons, a quiet defiance against the crushing void. They transformed the abandoned, half-buried domes into a living, if crude, settlement, a beacon of human resilience in the heart of Trap’s indifference. They learned to navigate the “Mud season” not as a threat, but as a period for new harvests, venturing out in salvaged vehicles to gather the coal-like biotic structures for fuel. The volcanic caves, initially feared, became a source of warmth and vital minerals. Discussions often centred on innovative ways to refine the raw resources, to make their makeshift colony more stable, more truly a home. “This isn’t the life we chose,” Zephyr remarked one evening, watching the steam rise from a communal biotic vat, “but it’s the life we’re building. And it’s ours.” Seraphina nodded, “A new chapter, forged in adversity.”
Against all odds, the survivors established a tenacious second settlement, painstakingly cultivating these adapted resources. Their motto, famously quoted later, became: “Glad To Surf U” – a darkly humorous play on ‘Glad to serve you,’ adapting to their new reality of living off the land and salvaged tech. It was a testament not to success in their original mission, but to their astonishing endurance and their refusal to entirely fail in the face of impossible odds. The lost archives, particularly the rumoured Varna Papers, became a legendary “Holy Grail” for salvage crews, inspiring over 40 failed recovery missions by 280, a futile quest for a lost past. These constant recuring expeditions became a foundation for the planets economy. A reason, why the new settlement, a testament to human adaptation and unexpected forms of abundance gleaned from the forgotten remnants of corporate ambition, endured till today. It’s not a large settlement, but attracts adventurous characters to visit or even live there or on the later founded Auckland-Station around Auckland A. Its history is a poignant story of “failed to succeed” in their grand ambition, yet profound success in the basic, brutal act of survival and starting anew.
Epilogue: The Trap’s Enduring Whisper
Decades later a grizzled but alert Quinton Schacheldon sits in a dimly lit rec-room on Scholz-Station above Scholz’ Star main planet, his hands, still thick and calloused, resting on a polished data-slate. A young, eager journalist named Lira working for the OCN sits opposite him, recording.
Lira: “Master Schacheldon, thank you for agreeing to this. Your survival on Trap… it’s legendary. We’re trying to understand the human element, beyond the data logs.”
Quinton Schacheldon: (A wry chuckle escapes him, his eyes distant, seeing not the station, but the endless mud plains.) “Legendary, is it? More like stubborn. And hungry. Real hungry. Didn’t have much choice but to keep moving, keep trying. Captain Carnley, he was a hard man, but fair. Kept us in line. And Lena, his girl, sharp as a plasma cutter. Always finding a way to patch something together. That little Kamel, too, bless his soul, could sniff out a biotic spore from a light-year away.”
Lira: “Your role, sir, as the cook, in maintaining morale, in finding sustenance…”
Quinton Schacheldon: “A cook’s gotta cook, even if the ingredients are mud-bacteria and recycled air. You find a way. We talked, you know. Hours, huddled in that volcanic cave. About home. About what we’d eat if we ever got off that rock. Simple things. Kept us sane. That’s the real story, lass. Not just the engineering, but the quiet moments. The shared jokes over a plate of… well, let’s just call it ‘protein paste.’” (He shivers slightly, a memory of the cold still lingering.) “The planet tried to break us. Took some of our sanity, for sure. But it didn’t break our will.”
Lira: “And the others? The Invers Nessy? The Let’s Zeppelin Dawn?”
Quinton Schacheldon: (His face darkens.) “Ah, the Nessy. That was a tragedy. Heard tales. Bad leadership. Commander Invers, they say, he broke before the planet did. And when the head goes, the body follows. Starvation, internal fighting… that’s a quick death. Trap didn’t have to do much. It just… waited.”
Lira: “But the Let’s Zeppelin Dawn survivors… they succeeded where others failed. They built a new community in the ruins of the first colony.”
Quinton Schacheldon: (A slow nod.) “Aye. Different kind of people, I reckon. Less about protocol, more about… making do. Seraphina Dawn, she was a scholar, but she had grit. And Zephyr Grant, the steward, he had an eye for opportunity, even in a wasteland. Found those robot-farms, bless their mechanical hearts. And Osmo General, he got ‘em all working together. That’s the trick, see? When you hit rock bottom, you either splinter into a thousand pieces, or you hold onto each other. They chose to build. Not what they wanted, no. Lost all their fancy archives. But they built a life. A rough one, but a real one.”
Lira: “So, the ‘Trap’ isn’t just a physical place, is it? It’s a test of human nature.”
Quinton Schacheldon: (He leans forward, his voice a low, resonant rumble.) “Exactly, lass. The Auckland Trap. It teaches humility. Greed comes with speed, they’ll get you shredded out there, or starve you cold. But respect for the void, for the hidden dangers, and a profound appreciation for just plain resilience forged in the void… that’s what keeps you alive. It’s a paramount cautionary tale, alright. For every aspiring interstellar navigator, it reminds them: true understanding of the cosmos requires humility. And sometimes, the toughest survival isn’t about escaping the monster, it’s about not becoming one yourself.”
(Quinton leans back, a faint smile on his lips, the memories still vivid, but now, finally, shared.)
The dramatic events of 2763-2766—multiple star-ship wrecks, stranded crews, and survival against impossible odds—became a foundational dark chapter in the lore of the human galaxy. The tale of the Gravity Assist crew solidified their status as icons of resilience and self-determination, while the Invers Nessy and Let’s Zeppelin Dawn served as chilling reminders of the void’s indifference and humanity’s enduring, often fatal, quest for untamed freedom and forgotten knowledge. The inherent dangers of outdated star-maps and the lurking celestial bodies they miss became a paramount cautionary tale for all aspiring interstellar navigators charting a course for independence.
The Drifter-Kin remained the most enigmatic figures in the Auckland lore. They were the descendants of original African-Asian colonists, stranded on Trap decades earlier, shortly before 2700. Through generations of brutal adaptation, they had subtly integrated gene-mods and extensive AI-cyber improvements to withstand Trap’s harsh environment – sub-zero temperatures, low natural light. They had even reinvented basic “artificial sun” tech for localized use within their nomadic ship-station tech culture, adapted to Trap’s volatile surface and subsurface cave systems. They held a profound spiritual connection to Auckland, worshipping it as “Keeper of Secrets”—a cosmic entity that guarded hidden truths and punished arrogance. Following the forced evacuation of the ESC colonists in 2752, the Drifter-Kin retreated entirely from direct interaction with outsiders, vanishing back into the vast, treacherous wastes of the inner belt and leaving the planet Trap behind. They would not re-integrate with interstellar society until centuries later, coinciding with the establishment of the orbital station of Auckland A. Their reputation as “Wolf-Pack’s Ghosts” solidified during this period of reclusion, a legend whispered through the frontier.
By 2775, Fortuna’s Veil had become an officially designated “black spot” on all new galactic star-charts, a forbidden zone for FTL travel above 5c. The lessons learned were slow to spread across the vast expanse of humanity’s reach, but the horrific stories deter most. The Endrithiko Stem Collective (ESC) collapsed under the weight of its failed Thorium ventures and the devastating legal fallout from the colonial disaster, its name now synonymous with corporate hubris. Wolf-Pack independence movements, steadily gaining traction against Inner-Stars dominance, swiftly adopted the Gravity Assist’s story as powerful propaganda, emphasizing resilience, self-determination, and the dangers of corporate greed. Conversely, the grim fate of the Invers Nessy served as a counter-narrative, a stark warning against internal fracturing and the collapse of human dignity. Trap’s surface still held its dark allure, concealing: frozen remnants of the failed ESC labs, rumoured to contain advanced Thorium data and abandoned experimental tech – relics of a catastrophic enterprise; and the Let’s Zeppelin Dawn’s archive, a treasure trove of lost advanced AI tech, now a legendary “Holy Grail” for desperate salvage crews, its depths guarded secrets that still beckoned, even as the Dawn survivors themselves, a stark counterpoint to the frozen labs, continued their improbable existence.
The Auckland Trap epitomized humanity’s fatal rush into the unknown—where speed and greed meet cosmic indifference. It stood as a paramount cautionary tale, reminding all aspiring interstellar navigators that true understanding of the cosmos required humility, respect for hidden dangers, and a profound appreciation for resilience forged in the void.