Coming from the Liiri system(Lnar/Deneb), Lord Shaushup had been hired away, from a corporate executive position in his home system, to join the Forboldn project. Lord Shaushup had specialized in the processes of shaping the physical features of landscapes, to manage local weather and larger climates. Carrying out sustainable changes to a world's geology and biology, to interact in complicated ways resulting in weather, landform, and lifeform changes to the natural biomes causing the atmosphere's CO2 taint.
The Forboldn Project was first imagined in 987, as a plan to use Forboldn's global resources. Its execution phase in began 1089 TI. Kicking off just after the Fourth Frontier War, large numbers of colonists had been recruited, and shipped in cold sleep from the Imperial core. The ships were scheduled to begin arriving in groups between the years 1110 and 1120. Some had already begun settling Forboldn's Highlands, where baseline humans could breathe comfortably. Lord Shaushup had been a member of the teams designing environmental and climatic changes to Forboldn's Uplands and Midlands. That would open those land grants up to additional arriving colonists.
With the arrival of two waves of colonists, those with environmental and geologic specialties as well as groups of farmers and colonial farming supplies, Lord Shaushup felt he could take a break. From a wealthy family himself, well related and connected to old money, Lord Shaushup had bought a yacht to immigrate in, bringing his wife and daughter with him. He'd also hired away from his father's staff a loyal senior crew, to work the ship, then hired local crew in the Spinward Marches. Largely used to "commute" from system to system during his working travels, the ship had just completed its annual maintenance when the work of arriving colonists made the vacation possible.
When planning the family vacation, Lord Shaushup wanted to transit the Roup and Feri systems before arriving in the Beck's World system. There, he hoped to use his position and local power to view underground interconnected caverns on that world which it is suggested may have been related to "The Ancients". Past volcanic activity on Beck's World had covered much of the plane's surface with huge mountains and vast plains of solid lava long before modern settlement. During post-settlement exploration of what geologists thought to be the collapse of a huge lava tube, they discovered a labyrinth of interconnected caves. While the complex has only been partially excavated by scientists of the University of Regina, some rumors have gotten out where little fact had.
Starting But Not ArrivingAlong with his wife, Riamme, and daughter Meemri, he'd invited his daughter's fiancé. Lord Shaushup also invited a friend and his wife. Finally, Lord Shaushup invited Baron Doctor Bakeral, one of the leading lights in planetary tectonic physics in the sector. Doctor Bakeral was known to have participated on studies of Beck's world's surface. First settled as 'Frisini', in the early centuries of the Third Imperium, conditions for the colony steadily degraded for several centuries. Finally, in the early 600's, and near the end of the Second Frontier War, the pro-Arbellatra mercenary regiment 'Beck's Bruins', commanded by Colonel Vilina Beck, conquered Frisini and renamed it 'Beck's World'. The unit then settled there, supported by land grants which followed.
With his family and friends aboard, Lord Shaushup had the ship lift for the Regina system on 045-1112, to meet Doctor Bakeral and his wife. From there, the ship lifted on 055-1112 for the Hefry system to refuel before jumping to Feri. Having left on 062-1112, they reached the Feri system and spent some days with the Oberlindes family. Lord Shaushup had been known to be friendly with Baron Sergei, Baron Marc's son and current CEO of Oberlindes Lines Corporate Operations. Finally, the Coronal Flare left the Feri system for the Beck's World system on 072-1112. They failed to arrive in that system in 079-1112, and were officially declared 'over-due' on 088-1112.
On the ship, it hadn't been long into the jump when the crew and passengers felt the onset of misjump illnesses. After taking any steps they could to survive as long as possible, the crew and passengers suffered twelve days in jump before returning to normal space. From that point, everyone aboard worked to help the ship's engineer while the ship's pilot and navigator tried to work out where they'd arrived? It was during that period, when the crew located the drifting hulk of the INS Regina's Storm. In a desperate situation, with their jump drive out and power plant damaged and providing reduced power, they knew they couldn't sit and wait for rescue. And, with the ship's power not able to maintain the computer aboard, they had little access to any data beyond their personal devices and personal knowledge.
086-1112: Going From Bad To WorseThey eventually moved closer to the strike carrier, but were almost out of fuel for their normal space drives, and power losses restricted even their ability to try to make repairs. Despite being desperate for any hope, the ship's captain, a "very" Vilani man, was against trying to cross to the carrier. He was extremely cautious and feared what they might be exposed to or bring back to the yacht. Finally, Master Erlik Ilten, Dame Meemri's fiancé, decided to lead a team of the ship's gunners to a drifting naval cutter they had located nearby. Despite the opposition of the yacht's Captain, Lord Shaushup supported the action and the attempt was launched.
The gunners were confident their work moving cargo in zero-g in cargo bays had trained them for what to expect. Still, the men didn't have the skills they would need. Making the leap from their cutter to the naval cutter turned out to be more dynamic than handling cargo in a world's orbit. The results of that plan ware that Master Erlik had missed his grip on the cutter at the end of his leap. And while they had made their grabs, the gunners didn't have the skills to even try to recover him. Attempting a frantic rescue, the yacht's pilot tried to move in with the cutter and move his airlock into the drifting man's path. This was made more difficult because the cutter didn't have a cargo hatch. During all this, those on the yacht watched and listened to comms broadcasts from the three in horror.
Eventually, the pilot got the cutter into the correct position but couldn't control the closing speeds with the drifting man as he reached the correct vector. Desperately trying to spin into a head-on position with no real skills in zero gravity movement, Master Erlik only just managed to both orient his body towards the cutter's hull and hit his suit's thrusters while looking directly at the cutter. That meant he hit the craft "head first" with his face turned up, and shattered his helmet. Everyone and everything drifted in the silence that followed for several minutes. Soon enough, one of the gunners shook free of his thoughts and decided to at least get into the naval cutter and learn something or possibly even get help.
When the gunner reported the bodies and conditions he'd found in the naval cutter, he also said he wasn't able to learn anything to explain the situation. At the same time, Lord Shaushup and his wife had been struggling to get control of their daughter, after the death of her fiancé. Much more carefully, the pilot brought their cutter back to the naval cutter to recover the gunners. After they got back to the yacht, the ship's captain suggested they spend that night calming down and considering their options before taking further actions.
087-1112: How Things Worked OutThe next morning broke to even more tragedy when Lord Shaushup and his wife found their daughter had committed suicide overnight. They'd never recovered Master Erlik's body because of how he'd died. Still, Lord Shaushup wouldn't simply dump his daughter's body into space. Ripping up clothing, they made funeral wrappings for the young woman and held a service for her. Then, Lord Shaushup insisted on using their cutter to seek help. When the ship's captain opposed that, His Lordship and his wife insisted. They refused to stay aboard the craft on which their daughter had killed herself.
Bending to the will of his Lord, the captain ordered the crew to recover and pack everything they could, and everything they might need into the cutter, to prepare for their escape. The ship's crew spent the night getting ready while the navigator finally misidentified the star around which Inthe orbited to be the "Enope" system instead. Still, on the 088th day, the very crowded and over-packed cutter began its burn while broadcasting for help in a focused comms wave ahead of them as they went. Sadly, the over-worked life support on that cutter failed even sooner than the captain feared. The speed they finally reached before the fuel failed meant it would take almost twenty nine years to arrive in the Inthe system.
Left behind, the IMS Coronal Flare drifted unmanned until the 187th of 1113, when she was boarded by the crew of the dying IMS Hotel California.
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