Stone circles

The worship of large rocks or solitary stones in a landscape goes back to the beginnings of civilization on many worlds. Huge stones or "megaliths" were pulled in an upright position, and this "orthostat" evolved from a landmark to a place of gathering, cult and worship. Often, other megaliths were dragged in from far away, and placed in a stone circle formation.

We have come a long way from megaliths to cathedrals.

Strangely, some alien civilizations seem to have never abandoned the worship of large stones, even in their space age. I think that was the case for the Talocan - they have a certain preference for large "stalagmite" asteroids, such as the one I encountered earlier in one of the Drifter wormholes (not Sanctified Vidette). 

Another notable example is the stalagmite asteroid at the center of the Takmahl labyrinth. Here, I think the Takmahl stumbled on Talocan technologies and found an ancient revered stone, and simply encompassed it into their own cult - everything Talocan so far surpassed their own capabilities that it must have seemed sacral to them. To some extent, this must also have been the case for the Jove and the Drifters - they seem keen on incorporating rectangular monoliths in their structures.

Interestingly, also in Sanctified Vidette there is a (space) stone circle, with a special assembly in the center. It is not a stalagmite asteroid, but two asteroids (a round boulder and elongated rock) that collided and shattered. A cloud of dust and small particles orbits the two, rotating with a period of about one minute. Around these two, a stone circle has clearly been assembled.

There is a wreck of ancient vessel nearby, either an exploration vessel or a cryoship, attesting to the age of this site - I think this predates the occupation of this wormhole by the Drifters. The site itself is not incompatible with other Talocan sites. There are peculiar round indentations on the rocks. These are not impact craters, they suggest erosion by continued contact with some smaller round rock perhaps carried by the cloud of dust. Whatever it was, it has vanished.

There is a blue plasma that connects the dots, and flutters around like a flame. It originates in the round indentation. It is not the glow of Tyranite, and it is light blue rather than Drifter green. The Indagatrix could not identify the nature of this glow or its energy source, the gas or plasma does not match known gas cloud compounds. I tried sampling it, but the emanations stopped when I got close. 

There is still so little we know and understand of deep space - or of the Talocan. I wonder what more wonders Drifter space will reveal!

Escape route

Amarr Navy reports show that the Drifters took massive losses in Sanctified Vidette, but despite this, very few were actually captured. At least, that we are allowed to know. What happened to the occupants of the abandoned stations? How did they escape reclamation? At least some Holders that I know are already inquiring about Drifter slaves...

I think I have found a possible explanation. I located a Drifter station functioning on autopilot. It has two factory units coupled to a powergrid distribution array feeding a ring of thermoelectric convertors. This setup generates a Talocan-type wormhole conduit, visible here in the center of the guard ring:

My guess is that this is one of perhaps several portals that the Drifters used to evacuate their population from Sanctified Vidette. To where it leads is unclear - I found no way to interface with the station or to activate the conduit. I stopped short from entering this station to explore it further, it seems wiser to leave this to the professionals of the Amarr Navy.

Remnants of the Drifter occupation

I am continuing my review of Sanctified Vidette after its reclamation.

Although the Empire secured its presence in Sanctified Vidette, there are still traces of the occupation by the Drifters, places where there structures or outposts stood. Except for the hive, none of these appear actively used. 

Most of the Drifter defenses and stations are thoroughly destroyed. Only useless rubble, such as broken station batteries and destroyed hulls, remain, floating in a swirling debris cloud. An example of this is found near Sanctified Vidette X :

Closer to the inner planets of Sanctified Vidette, I found a Drifter research station, abandoned but still with some traces of powergrid. It appears to have experienced a terrible accident, which has led to a large outgrowth of... well, something. It seems partly serpentine rock, partly organic tendrils enveloping the station as if they will consume it.

The tendrils seem to sprout from the station itself, emerging from various parts of the Drifter habitat.

There is also an abandoned Drifter manufacturing plant nearby - recognisable from it distinct flat-rectangle shaped factory. Also this has suffered a crippling accident:

The clear hint of trouble is the blue gaseous vapors surrounding the factory module in the center of the guard ring with power stations. I have seen such industrial modules before, during the Drifter crisis, and they are not supposed to be venting their atmosphere...  

Nexus Conquered

At the heart of the Drifter's operations there used to be a mysterious construct, consisting of many bar-shaped objects. It was once assembled into an "urchin" configuration, I heard. There are electric discharges between the bars, and some claim the frequency of the lightning had been increasing. Below, you see on the historical image also the beam of a Tekton Tyrannos industrial Drifter ship working on one of the bars:

Now that we have captured Sanctified Vidette, all these bars have been brought to the Amarr Navy base in Sanctified Vidette, and assembled into a long hollow needle-like structure:

The scale, as you can see, is immense. I had been told about this, but wanted to see it with my own eyes. To get an idea of the scale of this megastructure, the picture below shows the Indagatrix emerging from the top of the needle - it is nearly invisibly small, a dot that I have to circle for you to even see it.

Our scientists are investigating this - we still do not quite know its function or capabilities. The bars have been somewhat damaged during the combat operations, as you can see from the scorch marks and cracks on their hull:

The "needle" superstructure is hollow, with a conduit going from the top all the way to the bottom, which can be traversed without any adverse effects:

We can only wonder at what mysteries will this object reveal. May it bring glory to the Empire!

Litter

I made my way to the newest system of the Empire, Sanctified Vidette, via one of the wormhole connections in a system with a Jove observatory - Abai. 

It is good to see the Imperial Navy there in stead of roaming Drifter fleets. But there is still work to do! The Vidette Hive is still active, even if it seems somewhat subdued. I do not know what lies at its center, now that the nexus has been captured. It is not a site that I can explore safely on my own, remnants of the defeated Drifters are still holed up there.

The fury of capsuleer fleets has also died down. I have not seen any other pilot on d-scan anywhere. However, like a horde of thoughtless tourists passing through a natural park, those pilots that participated in the reclamation left behind a lot of litter.

Everywhere you warp around, there are discarded shuttles and corvettes on d-scan. Folks may have used them to help scan down things or go check out some site or keep an eye around, and then just left them. Or perhaps they kept them in space just in case they needed to reship and get out after losing their main vessel. Whatever the reason, dumping space junk around orbit of planets, even shattered ones, is cultivating a bad habit. 

Cleanup seems to have started. Around Sanctified Vidette IX the space junk has been cleared out. So, either scavengers or the Imperial Navy itself are taking care of removing the litter. 

Filament fail

Getting back to Sanctified Vidette appears easier said than done. Those darned filaments have stopped working! 

Their functioning relied on a connection between the Drifter Nexus structures and the structure called "the Warden" in Zarzakh. Probably, as indeed the Society of Conscious Though claims, it was the Deathless' tinkering with the Warden structure that precipitated the Drifter attacks in the first place, assuming the Drifters might have interpreted the activation of the Warden as an intrusion on their Nexus sites. 

Now, the Drifters have been chased from Sanctified Vidette (to God knows where), and the connection is severed, which renders the filaments inert. This means I have to go around, using my bookmarks of the Jove Observatories, and in those systems look for unidentified wormholes in my overview, and among those find a V928 entrance to Sanctified Vidette.

Wormhole connections to Sanctified Vidette spawn spontaneously and randomly in Jove Observatory systems, following a uniform probability distribution such that any given Jove Observatory system has only a 5.8% chance of having an entrance to Sanctified Vidette. 

In layman's terms: a lot of warping around for only a small probability to find an entrance closeby.

labyrinths

In the forums of the intergalactic summit (an inter-empire talking shop), prof.dr. Valate asked pertinent questions about the Drifter labyrinths. I can see where she is going with this: she is wondering if there is any similarity to the famous Takmahl labyrinth.

The question piqued my curiosity, so I analysed data from our LUMEN fleets, looking at several operations onder the command of governor Evelyn Arnoux or Ms. Tather Borg. This allows me to unequivocally confirm that the Drifter and Takmahl labyrinths are completely different.

The most obvious difference is the type of gate connecting different rooms of the labyrinth:

The Drifter labyrinth uses warp accelerators such as those commonly found among the Empires, derived from Jove technology (although some in the Republic claim they invented this). The Takmahl labyrinth uses small wormhole-like gates, of a type similar to those created by Talocan thermo-electric generators.

Another difference is the layout: the Takmahl labyrinth is set up in three-dimensional space, as shown by my own telemetry, in a roughly triangular form. The gates connecting the different rooms are placed in a planar octagon, with eight gates out of which only a fraction works.

In contrast, the Drifter labyrinth's gate are set out in a square was, with acceleration gates appearing to point in the four cardinal directions of the cluster's plane. There appear to be sixteen rooms, with possible connections as if they are laid out in a four by four square grid. Nevertheless, reports affirm that these structures are in higher-dimensional space, and actually lie on the sixteen corners of a four-dimensional tesseract.

I would have liked to perform my own telemetry on these labyrinths, but they no longer appear, it seems. Apparently, the Drifters are losing their grip on Sanctified Vidette. There have been other reports of changes occuring in that wormhole system. 

I am planning to return in order to investigate, now that the dust has somewhat settled.

Meeting the press

I took coffee in Bar Marlinea a couple of days ago. That is a bar not far from Gottin's Lamp, and it used to be a bustling place for capsuleers. Ms. Yubari worked there for a while as waitress! It has gotten a bit out of fashion of late but it still has excellent coffee and pastries. So, despite some bad memories of a kidnapping there, I still go from time to time. 

This time there was a capsuleer customer again, a rare occasion nowadays. Haven Alure is a former actress in Intaki cinema, who now does investigative journalism. We struck up conversation, and I made sure to point her to the most wholesome of news agencies, Amarr Certified News. She said she prefers to work freelance and sell her work to various news outlets. 

She also says that she is investigating the growing Angel Cartel influence in and around Mehatoor. At least that is what she claims, she also said she was taking a break. And she seemed interested to interview the arch-heretic capsuleer living here in Mehatoor, I warned her about him. 

I got a feeling that she is not telling me everything. Perhaps I am being paranoid, but anyway I urged her to thoroughly fact-check any rumors she might hear about LUMEN, at the very least with me.

House Renaud wedding

Yesterday was the wedding of lady Abigail Renaud and Celeste Etoile. They had a very nice and touching ceremony, and a reception afterwards at the Royal Sarum Imperial rose gardens. 

This is a wedding that has been a long time in the making. I remember lady Renaud telling me and Luna about the engagement with Celeste several years ago, I believe it was in the bar at Farthest Shore, on our research station in New Eden, with Eve gate in the backdrop. 

I met Celeste perhaps a bit before that. She is an expert in the anthropology of the heathen barbarians living at the rim of the cluster, and I consulted her about obtaining a letter of safe passage from the then-inhabitants of Deklein. Moreover, she has been using our library's services to find out more about her ancestry - this is a service often used by many of our capsuleers.

They have plans to try and acquire some property in Dam-Torsad. That is very difficult. Renting a place, or getting a (lifelong) leasehold is rather common, though the latter is still expensive. But land... every square meter is assigned to Holders or to the Imperial House, the only way is to inherit it or obtain it from a destitute Holder, after a lot of red tape and approval committees. But I guess, if they set their minds to it and have the right contacts, it is not impossible...

Good news from Providence

As the war against the Drifters is pushed into the wormhole homeworlds of these abominations, good news reaches us from another frontier, to the south-east of Amarr, in the marches of Providence. 

Paladin-Warden Kyle Saltz, sword marchal of the Curatores Veritates Alliance, announced that the invading barbarians calling themselves the Triumvirate have been successfully pushed back from the gates of the Empire. It is not the first attempt from these barbarian hordes to breach the defenses of Providence - and perhaps it will not be their last. But to me this particular victory cements the return to power of the Curatores Veritates Alliance in the marches of Providence.

It is good to see the likes of the Praetorians and the Curatores doing well recently. Despite periods of hardships they show their resilience and perseverance. I will hold a special mass of thanks at Gottin's Lamp's chapel for their recent successes.

Commissioning ceremony

This weekend we gathered in Sharhelund for a festive occasion. The Praetoria Imperialis Excubitoris  celebrated the commissioning of a new dreadnought flagship, TES Archangel of Majesty. 

The Praetorians are an old capsuleer organisation, I think they are even the oldest one still in existance. They are traditionalist warriors, with a strict code of conduct, and an unwavering dedication to the Empress. As a capsuleer organisation they have been honored and recognized by none other than Empress Jamyl!

The non-capsuleer praetorian guard itself goes back many millennia. They started out as a small elite unit assigned to the close personal protection of the Emperor or Empress. Sometimes one sees explanations that the "excubitor" suffix means "those out of the bed", i.e. (night) watchmen. However, historically the  meaning comes from the fact that they were housed in the exits to the inner chambers of the palace, the 'exkoubita'. In contrast with the more general palace guards known as "Scholae Palatinae", the Excubitores would stand guard not in the whole palace but just outside the imperial quarters - keeping a close watch, ready to be called in at any time.

But I digress...

It was a nice ceremony, with a marked speech by Paladin commander Arline Kley who recalled the life of a martyr, a young man who gave his life for his faith, showing fortitude and courage in the face of betrayal. There was also the presentation of a vial of prayer-ash, purified and consecrated at the Cathedral of Zakara the Martyr, destined for the reliquary of the new ship. A fitting relic for a ship that commemorates an exemplary martyr.

May this new ship invigorate PIE, and draw its gaze upwards, from planetary concerns and from the chapterhouse on Oris back up to the stars, where its destiny lies!

Too much isk

Truly, the vow that is the hardest to keep for a capsuleer is the vow of poverty. I have no problems with the vows of non-violence and chastity, but folks keep giving me donations. 

I am still figuring out how to return the 1.5 billion ISK from the Amarr Navy, and now I found out that I also received 4 billion isk from the Comitia Centuriana for my efforts against the Drifters. I am a friar, not a wildly overpriced mercenary! 

The four billion gift is already whittled down - apparently in this prize my efforts and those of ms. Stoner from our corporation were tallied up, for reasons unclear to me. After she took out her share based on her contributions during the crisis, I am still left with a 1.8 billion prize. In total I have now 3.3 billion ISK that I consider to be in excess given my vow of poverty. 

No doubt I will get more advertisements for battleships or expensive implant sets.

I could put some in the wallet for the skillbook programme - it should be a good time to advertise this again. Or perhaps a donation to the New Eden writing contest can be in order? Or perhaps simply hand out ships to the poor?

Science for humanity

Should Amarr share its findings from the Drifter wormhole with the rest of the universe?

The Servant Sisters of Eve and the Arataka Research Council discussed this during a conference in Jita, polling many capsuleers. They claim that yes, the factions occupying the Drifter wormholes should share their findings with all, because Science thrives best through collaboration. Science is a joint human endeavour to understand creation and obtain true knowledge for all. 

Sed contra, scripture in the Code of Demeanor teaches us that "Pure Thought is the Instigator of Sin".

I answer that putting knowledge for the sake of knowledge first, without moral considerations, is a grave error (one that I have committed in the past, confessed to and did penance for). In the present case, intellectual collaborations with those that seek to destroy humanity, such as the Triglavians, or those that only look for their own profit and power, such as the pirate factions, will definitely not lead to a betterment of all humanity. They will either give humanity's enemies weapons to destroy us, or be kept by the pirate factions for their self-interest.

Nevertheless, it can not be denied that collaborations do accelerate research, and pooling of findings allow to complete the picture faster. So, my own preference would be that the four remaining Concord signatories, the core Empires, work together as they did in the past to cope with the Sansha and Triglavian threats. Together, they control four of the five Drifter wormholes (EDENCOM being already a collaboration between the Empires), and this should give them an edge.

So, the refutation of the argument given by ARC and the Sisters is that sharing knowledge with any of those non-Empire factions will not help humanity. The Triglavians are not to be trusted, let them battle their mortal enemy in the Redoubt. They can hardly be called human! As for the Society of Conscious Thought, my feeling is that they no longer represent the Jove -the fifth Concord signatory- but merely their own interests, and in that respect they are not much different from other pirate factions. The Sisters? Just like the Society of Conscious Thought, they keep their research to themselves, so they should not expect us to do differently.