The Ouinhed should have had plenty of time to speciate in [the last million years] the fact that they haven’t done so more extremely on their “province-ships” is often attributed to either a brittleness of genome, or a tendency to euthanasia. [Armchair commentators] do not truly consider population size as a stabilizing factor – or how lack of new stimuli can slow such processes.
Language, however, drifts much faster. “Quenne-Seront” was certainly the name of the province-ship when it first departed the Ouinhed home system. It was written multiple times on the exterior of the inner hull, in a language lost to hose who saw it spin past, becoming in many cases one of maybe a dozen of the old words one might know. It habitually came the archaic name for farmland – for that was always what the upper deck was largely dedicated to – or planet.
The first Victim-exoplanet was not Quenne-Seront 1 – for everything identifiable as not a star was one. It was Quenne-Seront 17. At the speed the ship moved, and with the slow rate of thrust antimatter production, the 16 before were inhospitable, out of reach, or both – identified in distant flybys in the void.
These are, roughly, mapped. They have atomic time, so star charts may some day identify colonies which were successful for a time – but it’s also just a possible the ship has outlived most of them.
Their has recorded successful settlement was Quenne-Seront 5028. Quenne-Seront 5030’s description matches the N’Mob homeword – and was dismissed a the best target due to lower average temperature and significantly less farmable land. There was no time to construct a second landing craft, anyways. 5028 was the best candidate.
There were the tearful goodbyes. The loading. The great pylons energizing and carefully shooting [400 thousand] kin through the eye, on a path that would take them to a new home, clawed from an empty galaxy.
And then life went on. The Quenne-Seront barely turning on it’s course by the star, to the next candidate system. Generations lived and died, the few [years] of more harvest than the mouths merited balancing back to enough for most. The vacuum bearings were maintained, the harvest called the young to the fields and the inner constellation of the upper floor, they joked, they wept, they raised new children, the razed old neighborhoods to rebuild them. This was the life they knew.
History did, of course, happen. Inside and out. but eventually 5028 had no cousins to hear news of, even if it could be reached.
Until History hit somthing.
There had been some detection that shift. It is hard to truly hide in the black – You emit inferred, and even if you store your heat, you block the light of the stars behind you. Something had, essentially, pulled up behind them, possibly from the system they had last visited form; It was really hard to tell point of origin for these faster than light ships. One could only really tell what they were when they had disappeared. This was enough of an event; elders and scholars were called for, this might be an attempt at contact. These had happened in the past; there was usually little to actually be gained. Certainly not the strange engines that streaked between stars.
They also might just be a scout confirming observations.
There was some debate among the young of Cult of That Ahead – Should they point a laser at it? Nudge space gently with a radio? Furn on the outside lights, maybe – some of them might even work – Nobody wanted to follow the protocol of waiting for a hail.
The conversation ended with a hideous shake.
Lights were flashing that the young had replaced in ritual, but never seen operated.
The scholar, recently arrived, finally shouted the words the cult could understand.
Major Outer Hull Breech.
One had to remember the texts. Copied. Translated. Order all occupants to the vacumn-rail. Store all atmosphere possible. Activate airlocks.
The design of the Ouinhed cylinder is to massive empty columns, nestles on within the other, spinning opposite directions. As evacuation proceed over the next hours, days, the enormity of their doom became apparent. There was a chasm to space. [50 meters] wide by [2 kilometers] long. The rapidly failing air, flung out by the continued rotation of the ship, would be completely unbreathable within a week, and even now the lack of pressure meant people were collapsing as they made their way to trams, neighborhood by neighborhood. oxygen-masked Crews were split between evacuation and sealing off the doors and windows of factories – in hope that the subfloor infrastructure could be maintained in a usable state, even if the homes were lost to vacuum.
The vacuum rail cars threw caution to – well, the wind. The were filled and unloaded as fast as possible, many sustaining injuries as they were crammed in and rushed out – the brightness of the lower level being replaced with the constellation of the inner farmlands, the quickly set up camps, trying to keep people where they could be counted and found for relatives, the occasional panicked raid on seed stores by those frenzied into not trusting food was coming.
[A month] later. The lower cyl would never be truly abandoned. The air would never be completely gone – but only one or two trams were worth anything at this point. Maybe 20% of the air stores had been saved and nobody was quite sure what of it had already been in storage. The Inner cyl – well, it was never intended to be airtight. Despite this, volunteer crews roamed, looking for any sign of wind leading toward the Outer cyl.
There were still desperate debates about sealing the hole. By those who refused to grasp the situation. Industry as the Quenne-Seront had known it was gone – at this point they couldn’t even recycle burn out light bulbs properly.
It would come.
They would rebuild.
They would make plans, and be discouraged. They would mourn the thousands – that had died. Both in the the extrastellar collision and trying to flee.
They would never give an exact number. They would never release the fact that it probably was a suicide attack.
Some day, the would reclaim the other half of their world.
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