| 1 | [[quoteright:240:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/outsystem_md_cooper.jpg]] |
| 2 | [[caption-width-right:240:"Just once, I'd like to fly into a system where everyone doesn't want to kill us."]] |
| 3 | ''[[http://www.aeon14.com/ Aeon 14]]'' is a MilitaryScienceFiction[=/=]SpaceOpera novel franchise originating on Amazon's Kindle platform. Created by Canadian-American author M.D. Cooper in 2012, it now comprises [[SharedUniverse several sub-series by multiple authors]]. |
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| 5 | ''Outsystem'', the first book in publication order, begins in the year 4123, and while humanity has expanded across the Sol system and nearby stars and humanity is in a technological golden age, FasterThanLightTravel has yet to be developed. Major Tanis Richards is a counterinsurgency officer in the Terran Space Force with a black mark as "{{the Butcher}} of Toro", a treatment that derailed a promising career and destroyed her loyalty to her government, the Sol Space Federation. Fortunately, the colony ship GSS ''Intrepid'', the most advanced HumanPopsicle carrier ever built, is nearing completion over Mars. Her destination is the {{terraform}}ed planet New Eden orbiting 82 Eridani, and Tanis has managed to score a ticket in return for serving aboard as chief of security. |
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| 7 | However, Tanis quickly learns that not all is as it should be aboard ''Intrepid''. Somebody powerful, perhaps several somebodies, doesn't want her millions of crew and passengers to leave Sol, and they're hiring crews of mercenaries to ensure that doesn't happen. Together with her ArtificialIntelligence symbiote Angela, AcePilot Joseph Evans, SpacePolice officer Jessica, and LovableRogue Trist, can Tanis defeat the attackers and get the ship safely out of the system? |
| 8 | |
| 9 | ''Aeon 14'' consists of several sub-series, the first of which, ''The Intrepid Saga'', was completed in November 2016. Stylistically it liberally mixes AppliedPhlebotinum with well-researched astronomy and physics: stars present in the series can usually be found in the sky, and phenomena such as gravity wells and Lagrangian points are extremely important in maneuvering. The characters populating the 'verse can technically be called transhumans given the amount of BioAugmentation and {{cyborg}}ization present, but they likewise still care about many if not most of the same things as real-life humans, with themes of love, war, ideology, and identity very prominent. |
| 10 | |
| 11 | !!For a list of books in the franchise to date, see Recap.{{Aeon 14}}. |
| 12 | |
| 13 | The author's website also contains a chronology. |
| 14 | ---- |
| 15 | !!Tropes present in ''Aeon 14'' are below. Due to a major shift in the nature of the series at the transition between ''Building Victoria'' and ''Destiny Lost'', there may be unmarked spoilers. |
| 16 | * AbsenceMakesTheHeartGoYonder: Sini recalls a brief affair with her then-first officer Chan while she commanded the cruiser ''Warspite''. Both were married at the time. They broke up when Sini was promoted off the ship. |
| 17 | * AbsentAliens: The series takes its name from an in-universe theory that it takes approximately 14 billion years (1 billion years = 1 eon in timekeeping terms) for intelligent life to arise. So far, even the far-ranging terraformer fleets have not encountered anything smarter than a cat in [[https://www.facebook.com/groups/1768305096738079/permalink/2001941813374405/ the admittedly small chunk of the galaxy that has been explored]] (the Messier 25 cluster, the location of New Canaan, is only 2,000 light-years from Sol, and it took several years' travel at FTL speeds to get there from where they exited Kapteyn's Streamer). |
| 18 | * AcePilot: Joe Evans, Tanis' LoveInterest. A memorable scene in ''Outsystem'' has a merc attack against ''Intrepid'' get foiled by his fancy flying of a cargo shuttle, which included them getting boarded. Then there's a jolt, the mercs are thrown off balance, and Tanis and the SpaceMarines fill them with holes. |
| 19 | -->'''Joe:''' Oops, did I clip that cargo net? Sorry about that. |
| 20 | * AIGettingHigh: Sapient AI get a natural high (likened to an orgasm by one character) from great feats of mental prowess. This is deliberately designed into them as a Pavlovian conditioning trigger. |
| 21 | * AIIsACrapshoot: [=AIs=] are more commonly beneficial in this series, but there are exceptions. |
| 22 | ** Under the Phobos Accords which ended the Sentience Wars and established the Sol Space Federation, the [=AIs=] maintained their own court system to deal with such cases (which is said to be far harsher than the legal system for organics). |
| 23 | ** Early in ''A Path in the Darkness'', Tanis and Joe have to fight off an insane AI that was left by the saboteurs as a diversion. |
| 24 | ** ''The Dance on the Moons of Serenity'' mentions that non-sentient AI are actually ''more'' dangerous than sentient AI like Angela, Bob, etc. Sentient [=AIs=] are treated by the books' narration as just people, with emotions and desires of their own, and generally ''like'' humans, while NSAI are just piles of algorithmic code without a personality and are more vulnerable to programming faults. (It's later revealed, however, that the distinction is fairly hazy.) |
| 25 | ** In ''Strike Vector'' Grayson's AI Jerrod goes rogue, taking over his body and assaulting the crew of the ''Dauntless''... because he's JustFollowingOrders that Grayson unsuccessfully argues to him violate Silstrand law. |
| 26 | ** [[spoiler:The "core [=AIs=]", a group of ascended [=AIs=] dating to the Sentience Wars who now exist as pure information in the Sagittarius A* black hole at the galaxy's core. They in turn created AI enemies Myrrdan and Airtha, apparently in what they perceive as self-defense.]] |
| 27 | * TheAlternet: The Link, which is basically the Internet when you incorporate [=AIs=] and BrainComputerInterface. |
| 28 | * AmbiguouslyBrown: Admiral Sini Laaksonen in "Know Thy Enemy" is culturally Finnish but has red-brown skin. |
| 29 | * AncientConspiracy: The Future Generation Terraformers (FGT) [[spoiler:turns into essentially TheIlluminati [-JustForFun/InSpace-] by ''Destiny Lost'', trying to quietly guide humanity out of the FTL-induced dark ages it fell into]]. {{Lampshaded}} in "Know Thy Enemy": Sini derisively calls them "our friendly neighborhood Illuminati". |
| 30 | * AndroidsArePeopleToo: The Phobos Accords consider shackling [=AIs=] to be a form of slavery, and while some people like to ''think'' there's a difference between a sapient AI and a human, the transhumanism in the series ultimately gets to the point where the only real difference is whether one was conceived through biological or computational means. As the short story "I Have No Master" indicates, it's not even completely clear where the dividing line is between an SAI and an NSAI: Dregs started as an NSAI drone but has been upgraded so thoroughly he's verging on sapience. |
| 31 | * AntiNepotism: After their daughters Cary and Saanvi steal a ship to "get in on the fun" of the Battle of New Canaan in ''Orion Rising'' [[spoiler:and are both nearly killed {{ramming|AlwaysWorks}} an enemy carrier]], Tanis and Joe Richards (respectively the then-governor, and the Commandant of the Intrepid Space Force Academy) promise to put the two of them through the wringer as cadets. In ''The Scipio Alliance'' Cary spends a couple pages complaining to their friend Jill and ArtificialIntelligence half-sister Faleena about the treatment. |
| 32 | * ArtificialGravity: Accomplished by pulling gravitons out of the dark layer and projecting them. In the 5th millennium only very large installations such as ''Intrepid'' can fit them, but they're later miniaturized and become much more versatile, ultimately leading to ReactionlessDrive and the discovery of FasterThanLightTravel. By ''Destiny Lost'' graviton emitters are so common that ships don't even need to be airtight anymore. |
| 33 | * ArtificialIntelligence: The series draws a line between sentient and non-sentient AI (NSAI). Non-sentient AI can parse complex commands but appear to be rules-based. Sentient AI (SAI), e.g. Tanis's companion Angela or ''Intrepid'''s shipboard AI Bob, are creative, feel and express emotions, and grow and change with their experiences like humans do. However, it's less of a hard line and more of a SlidingScale, which John Stripe's novella ''I Have No Master'' deals with directly: Dregs is technically still an NSAI but his OS has been upgraded so much that it's hard to tell the difference. |
| 34 | * ArtisticLicenseMilitary: {{Justified}}. There is little distinction between SpaceNavy and StandardSciFiArmy, with various "Space Forces" using a mishmash of army and navy ranks apparently based on occupational specialty. For example, in ''Outsystem'', Tanis Richards holds the Terran Space Force rank of major as a counterterrorism operator. The InUniverse explanation is that a hard administrative division between service branches is considered CoolButInefficient by most factions because the "army" is dependent on the space force for transport and logistics, though the TSF and its descendant the ISF pointedly still maintain a Marine Corps sub-branch. |
| 35 | * AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence: Ascension becomes a big deal in the later novels, explained as a human or AI developing the ability to perceive and manipulate higher dimensions of spacetime, which may or may not mean leaving their normal three-dimensional body behind. [[spoiler:Tanis and Angela become an ascended being at the climax of ''Attack on Thebes'', taking the name Tangel.]] |
| 36 | * AwesomeButImpractical: [=DMGs=] emerge as a hard counter to stasis shields midway through the Orion War arc, {{Wave Motion Gun}}s designed to envelop a stasis ship in an intense cloud of charged particles to penetrate the chinks that have to be left open (e.g. for engine exhaust). They're effective--the first one mission-kills a newly designed ISF dreadnaught--but they use so much energy they have to be powered by a captured black hole, which makes them incredibly difficult to move through the dark layer and potentially as dangerous to their own wielders as to the ISF. So far, two have been destroyed by return fire destabilizing the containment systems, and the first one ate the planet the ship had been orbiting as a result. [[spoiler:Of course, then the ISF figures out how to build one into an ''I''-class mothership and all bets are off.]] |
| 37 | * BabiesEverAfter: At the end of ''Attack at Dawn'' (the conclusion of the ''Orion War'' series), [[spoiler:Tangel]] reveals that Tanis is pregnant again, with twins. |
| 38 | * BackForTheFinale: ''Know Thy Enemy'' ended with Admiral Sini Laaksonen resigning her commission rather than lead the AST fleet to New Canaan, which she considered a SuicideMission. [[spoiler:She reappears at the end of ''Star Rise'' in command of Earth's Home Defense Fleet, [[TenMinuteRetirement having apparently been reinstated at some point]].]] |
| 39 | * BackFromTheDead: Memory backups and cloning make it possible to resurrect dead characters on occasion. [[spoiler:Cheeky dies in a YouShallNotPass at the end of ''Perseus Gate Season 1'', but Finaeus revives her in a clone body with an AI brain based on memories copied from her by a robot designed to KillAndReplace targets.]] |
| 40 | * BenevolentAI: Tanis has a number of very funny ''arguments'' with Angela, the AI who is implanted in Tanis' BrainComputerInterface, but [=AIs=] are generally quite benign and even friendly in this series, with some exceptions. In Sol they even have their own court system to deal with [=AIs=] that ''do'' go bad. However, this all came about as a result of a RobotWar which is detailed in the ''Sentience Wars'' sub-series. It's also mentioned briefly in ''The Dance on the Moons of Serenity'' that NSAI, being less intelligent, are more dangerous than sentient AI. |
| 41 | * BenevolentDictator: Empress Diana. |
| 42 | * BioAugmentation: Cybernetics are much more common but purely biological alterations exist, too. In particular, Tanis has an auxiliary heart installed during the TimeSkip between ''Destiny Lost'' and ''New Canaan'' after narrowly surviving a railgun wound through the chest in the former, which lets her survive two assassination attempts in the latter. |
| 43 | * BigBadassBattleSequence: [[spoiler:Most of ''Orion Rising'' consists of the Battle of New Canaan, when the Orion Guard brings multi-thousand-ship fleets from the AST/Hegemony of Worlds and the Triselieds Alliance to try to conquer the system for for its advanced technology, and Tanis, the New Canaanites, and the Transcend fighting tooth and nail to fend them off.]] |
| 44 | * BlackBox: {{Invoked}}. For state security reasons, Tanis plans to give the Transcend only black box versions of their most advanced tech, particularly their powerful stasis shields. They'll even implement it on their own ships in case of capture. [[spoiler:Unfortunately, as of ''Race Across Spacetime'', the AST has cracked the secret.]] |
| 45 | * BreakoutCharacter: Sera was originally planned to be the main character and ''Destiny Lost'' the first novel. However, M.D. Cooper found the HumanPopsicle Tanis Richards so compelling that she wrote the ''Intrepid Saga'' trilogy to fill out Tanis's backstory and made her the primary viewpoint character of the main series going forward. |
| 46 | * BreakTheHaughty: Admiral Sini Laaksonen starts "Know Thy Enemy" professionally cautious but confident in her abilities, pointedly considering herself superior to Bollam's World Admiral Senya, whom she considers {{overranked|Soldier}}. [[spoiler:A MookHorrorShow, a disastrous pursuit of ''Intrepid'', and a TimeSkip later, and she resigns her commission in protest rather than lead a fleet against Tanis Richards again.]] |
| 47 | * BusCrash: |
| 48 | ** [[spoiler:The Victoria colony that the ''Intrepid'' crew builds in ''Building Victoria'' ends up being glassed offscreen by vengeful Sirians during the FTL Wars, centuries after ''Intrepid'' leaves to resume its journey. Sirian state policy in fact is that no permanent settlements are allowed in Kapteyn's Star, both to avenge their embarrassing defeat by the ISF and prevent giving inspiration to any future slave revolts by the Noctus.]] |
| 49 | ** [[spoiler: Earth and Mars are glassed, and many of the habitats and dwarf planet colonies in the Sol system familiar to Tanis and Joe are destroyed while The Intrepid is on its centuries-long journey seeking a colony world to settle.]] |
| 50 | * TheButcher: Tanis is known as the "Butcher of Toro" due to the official story of an incident in her counterinsurgency career, reportedly involving a massacre on a dwarf planet. She opens up to Joe about the ''real'' story in ''A Path in the Darkness'': [[spoiler:a lunatic cult had taken over the mining colony and was turning visitors into monsters with BioAugmentation. Tanis was forced to order OrbitalBombardment that obliterated the whole place, and then was forced to take the fall and accept a reduction in rank for PR reasons.]] |
| 51 | * CallAHumanAMeatbag: In the Rika books, Rika and other mechs refer to baseline humans as "squishies". |
| 52 | * CityPlanet: Alexandria, the capital of the Scipio Empire, and the setting of ''The Scipio Alliance'' and the spinoff ''The Empress and the Ambassador''. There are others, but Alexandria is actually self-sufficient. |
| 53 | * CivilWar: The Transcend fragments as a result of the SuccessionCrisis induced by the assassination of President Jeffrey Tomlinson. Sera, Jeffrey's daughter, controls one major faction but gets caught in a two-front war between the Orion Guard and Airtha, an ascended AI [[spoiler:and her mother]] who seizes control of the Transcend's capital, a RingworldPlanet in the Huygens system. Some systems in the Transcend declare themselves neutral, while others declare independence. [[spoiler:After Bob kills Airtha, Sera and later the real Jeffrey (the earlier one was a clone controlled by Airtha) have to spend much of their time bringing the country back together.]] |
| 54 | * CivilWarVersusArmageddon: |
| 55 | ** Most of the series is focused on conflicts between various groups of spacefaring humans, [=AIs=], and both, all of whom have been played off against each other for millennia by ascended [=AIs=] living in the galactic core, who are eventually revealed to have plans that would be apocalyptic for humanity if allowed to succeed. The ''Orion War'' series deals primarily with efforts by the protagonists to forge a coalition out of the morass of warring states to root out the core [=AIs=]' shards and catspaws and take the fight to them--[[spoiler:except it ultimately turns out that the core [=AIs=] aren't wholly unified, either]]. |
| 56 | ** [[spoiler:At a higher level, the Transcend/Orion conflict is found to be a proxy war among factions of the ascended AI's at the core, and with other AI powers such as Bob, Airtha, Darla, and The Caretaker. Their "Armageddon" is the heat death of the universe, which [[WeAreAsMayflies unlike humans]] they can potentially live long enough to actually see.]] |
| 57 | * ClosestThingWeGot: Joe is a pilot, but had to fill in as chief of security until Tanis arrived because of all the sabotage. |
| 58 | * ColonyDrop: |
| 59 | ** ''Perseus Gate #2: The World at the Edge of Space'': Jessica crashes the stasis-shielded ''Sabrina'' into a planet that's been turned into a gigantic bioweapons laboratory, ramming it all the way ''through'' the planet and out the other side, cracking the crust to the point where magma resurfaces the entire planet in short order. ''[[ExaggeratedTrope And they live to tell about it!]]'' |
| 60 | ** ''Perilous Alliance #2: Strike Vector'': When a planet they've targeted refuses to give up its [=AIs=], the EvilLuddite cult bombards it with asteroids. |
| 61 | ** ''Starfire:'' The eponymous weapon, "starfire," is a neutronium slug accelerated to relativistic speeds, and fired through a warp gate. [[spoiler:Tangel uses it to destroy a moon and end a battle with one shot.]] |
| 62 | * ComeWithMeIfYouWantToLive: Used self-consciously and humorously, and immediately lampshaded, in ''Return To Sol: Star Rise'': |
| 63 | -->'''Misha:''' Come with me if you want to live!\ |
| 64 | '''Nance:''' Lame, You can't use that line! |
| 65 | * CoolStarship: Just in the first book the ''Intrepid'' is a unique vessel. She's the most advanced colony ship ever built, with onboard farms, forests and game lands, and equipped with a new form of {{ramscoop}} and a virtually godlike shipboard AI named Bob. Over the course of the next few books, the ship is refitted by its crew to be a devastatingly powerful warship as well, culminating in her relaunch in ''New Canaan'' as the ''I2'', which Tanis uses as her flagship during the Orion War. Later, New Canaan begins building several more ''I''-class ships. |
| 66 | * TheCoup: At the end of ''Orion Rising''. [[spoiler:Facing an impeachment proceeding after the disastrous invasion of New Canaan, AST President Uriel sets off a nuclear warhead in the part of High Terra containing the AST's legislature, making himself a dictator.]] |
| 67 | * DangerInTheGalacticCore: The villains of the series, ascended {{Artificial Intelligence}}s from the [[RobotWar Sentience Wars]] early in the setting's history, are revealed to have taken refuge in the galactic core... in the form of pure information residing within the Sagittarius A* black hole at its center. One character, [[spoiler:Sera's mother]], once sought them out [[spoiler:and had her mind ripped from her body and turned into Airtha, one of the ''Orion War'' series' major villains]]. |
| 68 | * DeflectorShields: Three types. |
| 69 | ** Initially ''Intrepid'' has ES shields, which are essentially electromagnetic interference capable of screening out hard radiation and directed energy weapons. |
| 70 | ** 9th millennium ships have gravitic shields, which use ArtificialGravity to destroy threats. |
| 71 | ** ''Intrepid'' combines 9th millennium gravitic technology with its own, and creates stasis shields, which can allow [[SpaceFighter Space Fighters]] to stand up to gravitically shielded dreadnoughts for a time. Stasis shields render the ship nearly invulnerable to incoming fire until their power runs out: in ''Attack on Thebes'', the ''I2'' shrugs off the combined firepower of an entire Nietzschean fleet of over twenty thousand ships. |
| 72 | * {{Determinator}}: Most of the characters in the ''Literature/Aeon14'' shared universe. Notably Tanis [[spoiler: and her [[LastStand Desperate Last Stand]] on Pyra. The Marines with her, her pilot, and finally ISF Marine Commandant General Brandt give their lives to save Tanis, expounding large numbers of tropes such as [[ThisCannotBe It Can't End Like This]] and [[YouShallNotPass Give Me the Grenades]], followed by [[IShallReturn We'll Come Back]]. Finally Tanis is brought to bay, out of allies, out of ammo, out of nanites, out of formation material, out of power, and her armor is failing. [[TheCavalryArrivesLate The Cavalry is too late]]. [[MergerOfSouls Tanis merges with her AI Angela]], [[AscendToAHigherPlaneOfExistence ascends to a higher plane]], gathers all the non-living matter around her, and [[DeathOrGloryAttack expels it against her enemies]] in a [[PlasmaCannon plasma bolt]] which rivals the sun and is visible from orbit. Then, and only then, her rescue assured, does she pass out.]] |
| 73 | * DysonSphere: Star City in, well, ''The Last Bastion of Star City''. Unusually for the trope, it's built around a neutron star, and the inhabitants have reportedly fended off Orion Guard attacks by using the star to generate targeted X-ray bursts (dump matter into the gravity well and X-rays are produced by its decay). |
| 74 | * EarthThatWas: Not just Earth, most settled planets suffered major damage in the Jovian Independence War and the FTL Wars. Sol got the worst of it, though: Earth and Mars were glassed (they've since been repopulated), most of the {{space station}}s Tanis and the others knew from their time were destroyed and the population is a fraction of what it once was. Earth ''is'' still relevant, though, in that it's one of the three core planets of [[TheEmpire the imperialist AST]] (a descendant of the Jovian state after they won their war with Earth). |
| 75 | * EarthShatteringKaboom: |
| 76 | ** [[spoiler:The spectacular destruction of the gas giant Aurora in ''Destiny Lost''. ''Intrepid'' passes through to refuel and discovers the Bollam's World government has been using orbital graviton generators to keep it from collapsing and becoming a brown dwarf, so that it serves as a helium-3 factory. Trying to destroy ''Intrepid'', an AST fleet blows up the generators, which essentially turns the entire multi-Jupiter-mass planet into a planet-sized thermonuclear bomb. What they ''don't'' expect is that the explosion of the gaseous upper layers ''[[ExaggeratedTrope compresses the lower layers into a black hole]]'' and causing complete chaos, not to mention ''Intrepid'' is able to ride the shockwave with its newfangled stasis shields and accelerate to LudicrousSpeed before jumping to FTL.]] |
| 77 | ** [[spoiler:At the climax of ''Starfire'', Tangel shatters a moon with neutronium bullets fired by Star City through a jumpgate.]] |
| 78 | * EnforcedColdWar: [[spoiler:The only reason there hasn't been a full-scale war between the Transcend and the Orion Guard until the emergence of the ''Intrepid'' in the 8900s is because it would be visible[[note]]notwithstanding speed-of-light delay[[/note]] to the less-advanced human civilizations in the Inner Stars. The arrival of ''Intrepid'' in the 9th millennium upsets the apple cart and the war starts at the end of ''New Canaan''.]] |
| 79 | * EnemyCivilWar: [[spoiler:''Race Across Spacetime'' has one break out between two factions of the Core [=AIs=]. Hades's faction is marginally friendlier to the protagonists than Epsilon's and includes Darla, a shard of an ascended AI who had been implanted in Tanis back in the ''Origins of Destiny'' series. Darla helps Sera, Finaeus, and Earnest rescue Tanis and Angela after Epsilon's Caretakers capture them, and Hades himself lets them use his jumpgate to return home from the galactic core.]] |
| 80 | * EldritchAbomination: The Exdali, the creatures that live in the dark layer and feed on mass, making it unsafe to jump to FTL inside a system. They're invisible to optics and are depicted as tentacular beasts of darkness on other sensors. [[spoiler:Tanis summons them into realspace as as her ace in the hole to win the Battle of New Canaan. And it turns out the Core [=AIs=] originally made them, so Bob is able to send them back.]] |
| 81 | * {{Epigraph}}: The opening of "Know Thy Enemy" quotes the "If you know your enemy and know yourself" bit from ''Literature/TheArtOfWarSunTzu'' (Lionel Giles translation). |
| 82 | * EncyclopediaExposita: Every book of the series contains a glossary of organizations, locations, and technology. |
| 83 | * EthicalSlut: Jessica, after some CharacterDevelopment. She's introduced in ''Path in the Darkness'' as a borderline nymphomaniac who's left a trail broken hearts behind her (to the point of being confined to quarters by commercial transport captains for causing fights among crew members), but after spending time with Tanis's team she becomes more circumspect, and even has a couple of committed relationships in which she chooses monogamy. |
| 84 | * EveryoneIsBi: Mixed with FreeLoveFuture, many characters prefer partners of one sex or the other, but bisexuality and pansexuality are common and considered unremarkable, and open and group relationships are also relatively common. This includes viewpoint characters Jessica Keller and Sera Tomlinson in the main series, and Kylie Rhoads in ''Perilous Alliance'' (divorced from a male spouse and currently in a relationship with a lesbian woman [[spoiler:[[LoveCannotOvercome at least at first]]]]). And of course, [[ExtremeOmnisexual Cheeky, who will screw anyone and anything, in any combination, at any time]]. Even in the main monogamous, heterosexual pairing of Tanis and Joe, Joe at one point mentions that he'd be okay having a threesome with Cheeky if Tanis agreed (in context, partly meant to reassure her of his faithfulness during their frequent job-induced separations). |
| 85 | * EvilLuddite: {{Deconstructed}}. In the ''Perilous Alliance'' series, Kylie Rhoads grew up the daughter of the leader of a quasi-religious cult that eschewed AI and body modification common in the setting, believing it a perversion of humanity. [[spoiler:Her father is revealed to be planning a crusade in book two, helped by the Orion Guard, after being radicalized by an encounter with the Caretaker. However, their insistence on avoiding AI means their ships turn out to be quite vulnerable to hacking attacks, and Kylie is able to easily suborn their computers with the help of her own AI.]] |
| 86 | * FantasticLegalWeirdness: [=AIs=] govern themselves by intellectocracy and have their own separate court system to deal with [=AIs=] that commit crimes, which is said to be harsher than the legal system for organics back in the Sol Space Federation days. We get a glimpse of it early in ''Airthan Ascendancy'': Carmen, an AI, is prosecuted for dereliction of duty.[[labelnote:spoiler]]In ''War on a Thousand Fronts'', she assisted Justin's Transcend renegades in disabling the SelfDestructMechanism on the ship she was stationed on, rather than ensure it blew and therefore keeping the ISF technologies aboard--especially stasis shields--from falling into enemy hands.[[/labelnote]] The [=AIs=] accept mitigating factors[[note]]She managed to turn one of Justin's crew, Roxy, and recovered the ship.[[/note]] and sentence her to a "Limitation"--new code forbidding her from ever being a ship's AI again--and a requirement for her core to be installed in a human for the next ten years. |
| 87 | * FasterThanLightTravel: Featured beginning in ''Destiny Lost''. It follows a hyperspace model: ships transition into the "dark layer", where their pre-transition velocity is multiplied by 500. Also {{deconstructed}} in an unusual way. For the first three books FTL is impossible, which also means that interstellar warfare is impossible ([[spoiler:or at least so time-consuming it usually isn't worth attempting]]). The invention of FTL causes a minor ApocalypseHow and much of ''Intrepid'''s underlying tech becomes LostTechnology. The Transcend and Orion Guard also have stargates, which generate artificial wormholes for instantaneous travel at the cost of being stationary (they can be carried aboard ships, but are left behind after a transit). |
| 88 | * FeministFantasy: Most of the protagonists in the various series are women (or female-presenting AI) who are very comfortable with exercising power, while most of the ''really'' nasty villains are men. |
| 89 | * FluffyTheTerrible: ''Intrepid'' has the most advanced and powerful multi-nodal AI ever constructed, a computer being that can actually predict the future to a limited extent. His name? Bob. |
| 90 | * FullConversionCyborg: |
| 91 | ** Cyborgization extends to this often, such as the "mechs" in the ''Rika's Marauders'' series. Built by the Genevian Alliance as {{Super Soldier}}s during their war with the Nietzschean Empire, mechs have their limbs removed and replaced with attachment points for cybernetic limbs and weapons, a BrainComputerInterface installed that includes a RestrainingBolt and a compartment for an AI core, and internal batteries for all their various add-ons (it's noted that some of Rika's c-batts would have to be removed in order for her genitalia to be made usable again). Later models have artificial skin to remove the need to take mechs out of their undersuits for cleaning. |
| 92 | ** One extreme example is Malorie in the ''Warlord'' series, a pirate queen whom Katrina has removed from her body and kept alive as a BrainInAJar to punish her for enslaving her earlier. Katrina later has her brain installed in a spider-like robot body when she needs her services for a caper, which Malorie shortly decides she actually likes better than her original human body and keeps after Katrina makes her a permanent part of her crew. |
| 93 | ** {{Inverted}} with some [=AIs=] later in the series: Corsia has an organic body grown for herself after falling in love with the human captain of the ship her core is installed in. It's stated to be capable of birthing children. |
| 94 | * FutureFoodIsArtificial: |
| 95 | ** The tech level of Sol makes real food the norm in the 5th millennium and in the New Canaan system. ''Intrepid'' even has entire farms and forests stocked with game, tended by robots. |
| 96 | ** Played straight with the Noctus SlaveRace in the Sirius system: they are so used to consuming vat-grown protein on their deliberately technologically depressed asteroid habitats that they're actually put off by the idea of natural foods on the rare occasions they have to visit worlds of the Luminescent ruling class. |
| 97 | ** In the 9th millennium, natural foods are still preferred and widely available, but some crops have become difficult or impossible to find due to extinctions in the FTL Wars: the ''Intrepid'' has the only strawberry plants left in human space, and in ''The World at the Edge of Space'', the crew of ''Sabrina'' barter several crates of watermelons for supplies from a remote colony. There's also "nutri-paste", an unappetizing slurry that is often subsisted on: Genevian mechs are fed the stuff since they've had their faces removed to dehumanize them, and in ''The Warlord'' Juasa spends so much time in a spacesuit for her job as a salvager that she had a port installed to her stomach so she wouldn't have to taste the stuff. |
| 98 | * FutureImperfect: Some 20th-21st century pop culture is still familiar but not always remembered correctly. |
| 99 | ** In ''The Scipio Alliance'', an exclusive resort is patterned after the wreck of the ''Olympic'' (which Angela says is supposed to be the ''Titanic'', and sank in the 20th century rather than the 19th as the advertisers say), while Tanis gets costumed for a masquerade ball as "Shannon" from "''Meteoroid''" (i.e. Samus from ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}''). |
| 100 | ** In "Know Thy Enemy", religious cults on the planet Vulcan are mentioned to have conflated the Roman god with a Vulcan character out of ''Literature/{{Rihannsu}}''. |
| 101 | * GangstaStyle: Tanis holds a pistol this way in the third version of the cover for ''Outsystem'' (shown at the top of the page). The author has [[JustifiedTrope pointed out]] in response to the usual complaints that Tanis's body is heavily {{cyborg}}ized: not only can she not hurt herself firing the gun, she doesn't aim with the sights but rather with an in-head HUD. |
| 102 | * GoodThingYouCanHeal: Tanis's nano gives her HealingFactor that lets her survive wounds that should have killed her, even by 9th millenium standards, on a number of occasions. |
| 103 | * GratuitousForeignLanguage: |
| 104 | ** The ''Intrepid'' crew names LHS 1565 "Estrella de la Muerte", Spanish for "star of death". In the 90th century they find out the name stuck. |
| 105 | ** In "Know Thy Enemy", Sini Laaksonen is prone to lapsing into Finnish ([[ForeignCussWord most of which is profanity]]) when she's agitated. |
| 106 | * GravityMaster: Once the a-grav units were implanted in her breasts by Danny, Sera gains the abillity to levitate into the air. |
| 107 | * GreyGoo: Unlike nanotechnology, which is well-understood, [[spoiler:''picotechnology'' is experimental, and highly illegal because of an accident that ate a dwarf planet. The genius scientist Earnest Redding on the ''Intrepid'' succeeds in mastering it, and the war with Sirius forces them to weaponize it. A picobomb can eat fleets, and ''does'' on two occasions. The Orion Guard claims to have glassed several planets on the periphery of the Transcend due to runaway picoswarms from people trying to duplicate Redding's feat after Bollam's World.]] |
| 108 | * HappilyAdopted: In ''New Canaan'', Tanis and Joe adopt Saanvi, a girl who was the SoleSurvivor of an Orion Guard attack on her home planet in the Transcend (ostensibly due to a runaway picoswarm). Saanvi grows up happily with them and their biological daughter Cary. |
| 109 | * HappilyMarried: Tanis and Joe by ''Building Victoria''. The couple spend about a century off-and-on out of cryo while ''Intrepid'' travels to Kapteyn's Star for repairs, guarding against further sabotage, and are expecting a daughter in ''Destiny Lost''. |
| 110 | * HegemonicEmpire: The Scipio Empire is an oligarchy full of political intrigue, but Empress Diana genuinely tries to do right by her people, starting with having overthrown and killed her tyrannical father. Notably, power is intentionally divided between herself and four prelates, who have enough power between them to overthrow her if they have to. (She ''had'' planned to call for elections, but a CivilWar led her to declare herself empress instead.) |
| 111 | * HiveCity: Space stations in TheVerse tend to be gargantuan constructions with more human-sized buildings within them. One prime example of this is the Cho (short for "Callisto Orbital Habitat"), a city-state in the Sol system consisting of a series of concentric rings that were constructed around Jupiter's moon Callisto beginning in 3245 CE. Ring 1 was attached directly to the moon and the others were built outward from it over succeeding centuries. As of ''Outsystem'''s date of 4123 CE, the Cho consists of 151 rings and has a population of over three trillion people, comprising almost half of all humans in existence at that time. The Cho is so big it blocks nearly all view of space from the surface of the moon itself, which was once terraformed but has been reduced to waste-processing for the Cho. |
| 112 | * HoldYourHippogriffs: |
| 113 | ** ''The Woman Who Seized an Empire'' plays with WhenLifeGivesYouLemons between 5th millennium FishOutOfTemporalWater Katrina and her 9th millennium lover Juasa. |
| 114 | --->'''Juasa:''' Stars... this is surreal. Yesterday you were slaving in the fields. Today you're promising me a starship.\ |
| 115 | '''Katrina:''' I've made some lemonade.\ |
| 116 | '''Juasa:''' [[BluntMetaphorsTrauma What? What does lemonade have to do with anything?]]\ |
| 117 | '''Katrina:''' When life gives you lemons... Nevermind, I guess it's an old saying. I thought that one would have stuck.\ |
| 118 | '''Juasa:''' Sounds a bit like, "when the universe flings mass at you, you accrete it into something useful".\ |
| 119 | '''Katrina:''' [[LampshadeHanging That's so awkward.]]\ |
| 120 | '''Juasa:''' Yours just sounds weird. What does fruit have to do with daily life? |
| 121 | ** ''Know Thy Enemy'' has the protagonist, who was born on an ocean world, remark "Two fish, one spear," in regards to [[spoiler:turning a gas giant being used as a fusion fuel factory by an enemy system into a fusion bomb to kill the ''Intrepid'']]. |
| 122 | * HostileTerraforming: Sort of. In ''The World at the Edge of Space'', ex-terraformer Finaeus relates how the FGT usually cleanses a planet of all non-Earth-origin life it might have as part of the terraforming process. So far they haven't encountered anything more intelligent than a cat, but they ''have'' found a number of indigenous pathogens that could wipe out all humanity if not eliminated. |
| 123 | * HumanPopsicle: Two types. Cryogenic suspension is actually out of use in the 5th millennium, obsoleted by "stasis", a technology that suspends atoms' motion. |
| 124 | * HumansAreInsane: A feeling expressed sometimes by the AI characters. For example, in book four, Sera has this conversation with her AI partner Helen: |
| 125 | -->'''Sera:''' The altered chemical and mental state [from wearing a suit of clothes that arouses the wearer] is the goal, not a symptom, you should remember that. You get your big rushes, so to speak, from [[GeekyTurnOn feats of mental prowess]]. We humans can experience that, as well as a similar form, achieved from things as basic as tactile stimulation. If a person can channel that stimulation into something productive and use it to assist in focus it can be a strength and not a weakness.\ |
| 126 | '''Helen:''' ''(laughs)'' Are you saying that the secret behind Cheeky's exemplary piloting skill is that she's a nymphomaniac and always aroused?\ |
| 127 | '''Sera:''' That's exactly what I'm saying. She's extended her sexual stimulus to include her piloting skill. People can train their sexual response to be triggered by anything.\ |
| 128 | '''Helen:''' I return to my earlier statement: organics are exceedingly weird. |
| 129 | * InhumanableAlienRights: In Sol the rights of {{Artificial Intelligence}}s are guaranteed by the Phobos Accords, which lay down rules for their creation, upbringing, and treatment, and also provide a legal system to govern them. The Accords have been abandoned by the 9th millennium and AI treatment varies wildly from nation to nation. Much of season 2 of the ''Perseus Gate'' series deals with the ''Sabrina'' crew heading off an AI uprising in the Inner Stars by reintroducing the Accords and establishing a new state called the League of Sentients. |
| 130 | * LadykillerInLove: Jessica, the nymphomaniac SpacePolice officer who got kidnapped and put on ice aboard ''Intrepid'' to be discovered in ''A Path in the Darkness'', falls in love with and marries the thief Trist who is part of Tanis's team. [[spoiler:Trist is killed by Myrrdan in ''Building Victoria'', and Jessica subsequently falls in love with Trevor of the ''Sabrina'' crew.]] |
| 131 | * LargeHam: Admiral Senya in ''Destiny Lost'' thinks she sounds dramatic. Tanis isn't impressed. |
| 132 | -->'''Senya:''' You've just sentenced thousands of Bollam's citizens to death. There will be no more treaties. We will reclaim our new world, take your ship--whole, or in pieces--and crush your pathetic little fleet.\ |
| 133 | '''Tanis:''' ''(to Terrance)'' At least [[CallBack when we were dealing with the Sirians]] they had proper megalomaniacs. This pales in comparison. |
| 134 | * LensmanArmsRace: TheVerse is made of this trope, due to the thousands-of-years long lives of the principal protagonists and the progressively larger inter- and intra-galactic conflicts they are involved in. Over the course of the novels, technology improves [[spoiler:from fusion-based ramjets to FTL travel to warp gates, electrostatic shields, railguns, and beam weapons to nigh-invulnerable stasis shields and neutronium slugs fired at relativistic speeds through warp gates, nanotech to picotech which can grow ship hulls, dissolve ships in combat, or grey goo planets, summoning dark matter creatures which can devour space ships or even stars, and fighting ascended multidimensional beings which have what appear as essentially super-powers to three dimensional enhanced humans and Sentient AI's.]] |
| 135 | * LightspeedLeapfrog: |
| 136 | ** Because of the TimeDilation incident ''Intrepid'' is beaten to New Eden by other colonists. [[spoiler:Sera contacts the FGT to find them a new planet out of reach of the governments warring over the colony ship's technology. They succeed at the first part, settling New Canaan, but the war comes to them.]] |
| 137 | ** {{Discussed}} in ''The World on the Edge of Space'': with the invention of FTL travel, any other lost colony ships that survived will probably ''never'' find an unsettled world without help from the terraforming fleets. |
| 138 | * LocationThemeNaming: Combined with ReligiousAndMythologicalThemeNaming. The ''Intrepid'' crew and passengers are initially bound for New Eden (82 Eridani) but due to TimeDilation are {{LIghtspeed Leapfrog}}ged and buy another star system, much further from Earth, from the Transcend, which they name New Canaan after the "promised land" for the Israelites in the Literature/BookOfExodus, which became the Kingdom of Israel on the Mediterranean coast. Inspired by this, the Transcend names every body in the system after a location on the Mediterranean coast, which the New Canaanites continue after their arrival, right down to naming New Canaan's main ocean the Mediterranean Ocean. And, as Angela notes, Tanis is a variant of Tanit, one of the major Canaanite (and Carthaginian) deities. |
| 139 | * LongestPregnancyEver: |
| 140 | ** {{Justified}}: Tanis was probably pregnant with her and Joe's first daughter for several years (she was conceived at some point during ''Building Victoria'' and is born in ''New Canaan''). Tanis had put the embryo in stasis inside her so the child could be born on New Eden, though that didn't work out (they were {{lightspeed leapfrog}}ged and ended up having to barter a new planet from the Transcend, and Angela had to remove the stasis from the embryo to save Tanis from an injury, allowing the child to resume growing). |
| 141 | ** {{Inverted}} in ''The Last Bastion of Star City''. Trevor and Jessica and her AI Iris both birth and raise several AI children inside a LotusEaterMachine that lets all the kids grow to maturity in only two meatspace ''days''. |
| 142 | * MechaMooks: |
| 143 | ** Combat robots are pretty common, and New Canaan makes heavy use of drone spacecraft out of trying to field a galaxy-class military force on a starting population of only 25 million (in a galaxy where large space stations often have populations in the tens of billions). |
| 144 | ** Special mention to Genevian "mechs" in the ''Rika's Marauders'' series, which are {{cyborg}} {{Super Soldier}}s constructed as by the Genevian Alliance in their failed defensive war against the Nietzschean Empire (mostly from [[SlaveMooks enslaved]] [[TradingBarsForStripes convicts]]). They range from roughly human-sized with an ArmCannon ([=SMI-2=] scout mechs like Rika) up to smallish HumongousMecha ([=K1R=] heavy mechs). |
| 145 | * MeleeATrois: The Battle of Five Fleets in ''Destiny Lost'' has two different pirate factions, the Bollam's World Space Force, and the AST Space Force all trying to capture or destroy the ''Intrepid'' before the others. Tanis Richards has other ideas, defeating all four opposing fleets, then escaping the AST's reinforcements. |
| 146 | * MergerOfSouls: AI are forbidden to fuse with organic minds under the Phobos Accords to prevent [[YourSoulIsMine one from being dominated by the other]], and AI/human partnerships are legally limited in duration to keep it from happening. However: |
| 147 | ** In ''Orion Rising'', Amanda (a human "avatar", a computer expert whose job is to interface between human crew members and ''Intrepid'''s super-AI, Bob) and the shipboard AI Ylonda are seriously injured fighting a rogue AI. They subdue their attacker but the remnants of their minds seek each other out and merge into a new personality in Amanda's body, Amavia (a portmanteau of the Latin forms of their names). |
| 148 | ** [[spoiler:In ''Outsystem'', Tanis and Angela perform a dangerous computing maneuver while leaving the Sol system, linking their minds more deeply than usual in order to gain their fighters an edge over attacking mercenaries. Afterwards it's revealed that their bond is now such that they can no longer be separated without killing them both, though they're still separate personalities in a MindHive. In ''Orion Rising'' they acknowledge to Sera that they'll eventually become a single being, though it's likely centuries off. They're wrong, as it turns out: under heavy attack in ''Attack on Thebes'', they merge and ascend. The new being takes the name Tangel.]] |
| 149 | * MileLongShip: ''Intrepid'' is 30 kilometers long and is utterly dwarfed by many space structures in the series. |
| 150 | * MindHive: Tanis by the end of ''Outsystem''. [[spoiler:Tanis and Angela perform a dangerous computing maneuver while leaving the Sol system, linking their minds more deeply than usual in order to pool processing power and give ''Intrepid'''s fighter squadrons an edge over attacking mercenaries. Afterwards it's revealed that their bond is now such that they can no longer be separated without killing them both. They remain separate personalities for the moment but there's the odd unusual moment of heightened perceptions.]] |
| 151 | * MirroringFactions: [[EnforcedTrope A stated intent]] of "Know Thy Enemy" was to portray the AST Space Force personnel as not terribly different from the ISF, just [[PunchClockVillain professionals doing a job]]. |
| 152 | * MookHorrorShow: The page on Website/TVTropes has been cited by the author of the short story "Know Thy Enemy", as the story is a POVSequel of the third act of ''Destiny Lost'' from the AST's perspective; the story's concept is largely an exploration of what it feels like for the {{mooks}} that have to fight Tanis Richards. Among other things, we get to see a man be dissolved by a picoswarm ''from his perspective''. |
| 153 | * MoralMyopia: Admiral Senya from Bollam's World, who tries to capture the ''Intrepid'' at the end of ''Destiny Lost''. When the fighting starts, she fires on the ship. The ISF intercepts her shots and ''Intrepid'' returns fire on the emplaced railguns that fired at her. Senya accuses Tanis of murdering hundreds of Bollers; Tanis retorts that if her shots had connected with ''Intrepid'', ''thousands'' would have died. |
| 154 | * NamingYourColonyWorld: A {{justified}} Symbolica variant. ''Intrepid'' planned to settle the planet New Eden, orbiting 82 Eridani. [[spoiler:When Eden is denied them by a LightspeedLeapfrog courtesy of the TimeDilation through Kapteyn's Streamer, they name the star system they buy from the Transcend New Canaan, after the Biblical promised land. The rest of the system is similar: the main settlement is located on Carthage[[note]]Founded by inhabitants of the Canaanite city of Tyre. Angela also points out that main Carthaginian god was Tanit, of which Tanis is a variant.[[/note]], and the other planets are renamed Tyre, Troy, and Athens.]] |
| 155 | * {{Nanotechnology}}: Nanotechnology is very well-understood and put to many uses of both peaceful and military natures, such surveillance and allowing Tanis to survive a number of injuries that should have killed her instantly. |
| 156 | * NecessaryDrawback: Stasis shields can make ships effectively invulnerable (''I''-class motherships have weathered the combined fire of tens of thousands of ships at a time), but they have several drawbacks: the power requirements for them to be truly effective are immense,[[note]]the ISF favors critical energy or [=CriEn=] modules that pull energy out of local spacetime, which can cause {{Negative Space Wedgie}}s if used too much in one place[[/note]] they require openings to be able to see out, fire back, [[SpaceIsCold vent heat]], and maneuver,[[note]]the DMG weapon exploits these, and in ''Consort of the Scorpion Queen'' Petra barbecues a stasis ship by [[WeaponizedExhaust driving its own engine wash back at it]][[/note]] and they react ''very'' badly to atmosphere since they essentially annihilate all matter that comes in contact with them.[[note]]{{exploited}} by the core [=AIs=] in ''Star Rise'' in a (thwarted) attempt to frame the ISF for destroying Earth's artificial ring, which would have caused a major disaster[[/note]] |
| 157 | * NoJustNoReaction: Cary to her AI sister Faleena in ''Attack on Thebes'' when the latter [[InnocentInnuendo tries to use "orgies" as shorthand for "organics"]]. |
| 158 | * NoTranshumanismAllowed: Attempted by various factions. The Phobos Accords outlaw merging AI and human minds (the output is referred to as an "abomination" [[spoiler:and is what Angela and Tanis are likely to become]]), while the Orion Guard believes that much of the advanced technologies of TheVerse were responsible for the ApocalypseHow of the FTL Wars and hold back the technological development of their subject worlds. |
| 159 | * NuclearTorchRocket: Fusion and antimatter pion thrusters are commonplace throughout the franchise. Ships typically carry both, because AP drives aren't allowed to be used near inhabited worlds or stations because of the gamma rays they give off. In ''Attack on Thebes,'' they're even [[WeaponizedExhaust weaponized]] by the Nietzschean Empire in a ScorchedEarth tactic. |
| 160 | * OfficeRomance: Tanis and Joe start as one of these. She's chief of security on ''Intrepid'''s construction site, he's a pilot on her team and filled in as chief of security before she arrived on board. They become close and fall in love between crises and eventually marry. |
| 161 | * OnlyAFleshWound: [[spoiler:{{Justified}} when Tanis is stabbed in the heart ([[ChekhovsBoomerang twice!]]) in ''New Canaan''. Having [[GoodThingYouCanHeal nearly died from a railgun round through the chest]] in the previous book, [[TaughtByExperience she had a second, auxiliary heart put in]].]] |
| 162 | * OnlyKnownByTheirNickname: |
| 163 | ** PlayedForLaughs with the Orion Guard's intelligence service, which is normally referred to by Finaeus Tomlinson's nickname for them, "BOGA" (individual operatives are [=BOGAs=]). Its real name is given in ''War on a Thousand Fronts'' as "Inner Stars Division of Alignment and Control" or ISDAC. |
| 164 | --->'''[[spoiler:Elena]]:''' Seriously, Sera? You're [[spoiler:the president]] now, you can't run around calling them "Bad Orion Guard Agents".\ |
| 165 | '''Sera:''' If memory serves, their real name is as dumb as The Hand's.[[note]]The Hand is the Transcend's intelligence service.[[/note]] I'll stick to "BOGA", thanks. |
| 166 | ** In "Know Thy Enemy", Sini's full name is given in a transcript of her orders as Sinikka Tarja Laaksonen. Except for this she's called Sini Laaksonen or just Sini. Her AI is introduced as Theodora but called Thea for the rest of the story. |
| 167 | * OnlyMostlyDead: In ''Attack on Thebes'', [[spoiler:Tanis and Angela]] have their MergerOfSouls early and become a being known as Tangel. [[spoiler:Except it turns out in ''Starfire'' and ''Race Across Spacetime'' that Tangel was only ''birthed'' from Tanis and Angela's merge and was just living in their headspace: she discards their body at the end of ''Starfire'' and they awaken having no memory of the year that has passed since the Battle of Pyra.]] |
| 168 | * OrbitalBombardment: The stereotypical shooting-guns-at-a-planet version, often colloquially called "starfire", is used more often as a tactical weapon than for glassing whole planets. For the latter purpose, simply [[WeaponizedExhaust barbecuing it with the fleet's antimatter thrusters]] is simpler. |
| 169 | * OrionDrive: In ''Destiny Lost'' and "Know Thy Enemy", the AST ships start detonating nuclear warheads against their own shields to help free themselves from [[spoiler:the black hole]]. |
| 170 | * OrphanedPunchline: In ''Orion Rising'' Joe walks in on the tail end of Jessica and Trevor regaling his children Cary and Saanvi about a NoodleIncident from when the ''Sabrina'' crew were traveling across the Perseus Arm. |
| 171 | -->'''Jessica:''' So then, I said to him, I've got three holes here and I paid you to fill them all, now get to it![[note]]Apparently a forklift operator accidentally stoved in one of ''Sabrina'''s bulkheads.[[/note]] |
| 172 | * OverrankedSoldier: Bollam's World Admiral Senya is bloodthirsty, a BadBoss, and power-obsessed. It's implied she got where she is through her connections and being a big fish in a small pond: Sini remarks that Senya wouldn't have gotten above lieutenant commander in the much larger AST. |
| 173 | * OurDarkMatterIsMysterious: |
| 174 | ** The dark layer is an alternate level of spacetime where dark matter has physical form. Dark matter is depicted as raw, unadulterated mass that drifts like icebergs in the dark layer according to gravity patterns, and tends to be denser inside star systems. It's also fed on by {{Eldritch Abomination}}s that live in the dark layer, both of which provide a justification for the interior of star systems being {{No Warping Zone}}s (dark layer creatures sometimes eat ships, too). Ships use graviton emitters to enter the dark layer in order to achieve FasterThanLightTravel. |
| 175 | ** The climax of ''Destiny Lost'' uses this for a {{justified}} case of UnrealisticBlackHole. [[spoiler:The Bollam's World Federation is using [[ArtificialGravity graviton generators]], which work by pulling gravitons from the dark layer, to artificially expand a brown dwarf so that it doesn't ignite normally and therefore acts as a helium-3 factory. Ships from the Hegemony of Worlds blow up the generators, which causes the planet to collapse all at once, setting off a titanic fusion explosion that compresses the lower layers below the black hole threshold. The explosion also provides energy to keep the generators' portals to the dark layer open, and the black hole begins to consume dark matter, resulting in a "dark matter black hole" that is much larger and more powerful than the object it originally formed from.]] |
| 176 | * OurWormholesAreDifferent: Kapteyn's Streamer is a dark matter phenomenon that trails for light-years behind the orbit of Kapteyn's Star. Its gravity is so strong that one, it's the reason Kapteyn's Star has a planetary system, and two, it distorts space around it into a wormhole effect. Ships that pass through it are typically dumped out near Bollam's World (58 Eridani), usually hundreds or thousands of years in the future from when they left. |
| 177 | * PassThePopcorn: There are some moments of this in "Know Thy Enemy" from the AST characters monitoring the confrontation between the ''Intrepid'' and the Bollers. Sini is ''very'' amused by Tanis's mockery of Senya. |
| 178 | * PlanetaryRelocation: |
| 179 | ** {{Terraform}}ing in the setting frequently includes relocating planets or smaller planetoids to different orbits with various technologies. Sometimes this involves [[PlanetSpaceship building huge thrusters]], but ships that can move objects also exist. ArtificialGravity is also sometimes used, especially after the technology is miniaturized prior to the [[GreatOffscreenWar FTL Wars]]. |
| 180 | *** In ''The Woman Who Lost Everything'', the Midditerrans discover that the engines of two tugboats used to relocate dwarf planets [[WeaponizedExhaust are powerful enough to make very effective weapons]]. |
| 181 | *** In ''Rika Infiltrator'', Rika and her companions arrive in a system with an artificially created Klemperer rosette of five planetoids, each of which contains one of the server nodes of a multinodal AI. |
| 182 | ** In ''Orion Rising'', the protagonists plan "Operation Starflight", researching ways to move the entire New Canaan system out of the Milky Way someday. One theory that's brought up is to generate a solar jet to get the star to provide thrust. |
| 183 | ** In ''Starfire'', Tangel hatches the plan of using a giant jumpgate to teleport Star City, a DysonSphere built around a neutron star (and potentially a very powerful strategic weapon), out of its current location deep in [[PeoplesRepublicOfTyranny the Orion Freedom Alliance]] and into friendlier space. Cue a "Film/{{Stargate}}" pun by some of the other characters, and GadgeteerGenius Earnest Redding complaining that "someday she's going to ask me to move the galaxy." |
| 184 | * PowerPerversionPotential: Yes, {{Brain Computer Interface}}s and computer simulations are used for sexual purposes (usually consensual but not always). In the case of Rika and her LoveInterest Chase, it's [[spoiler:initially]] the only way they can have sex at all, since her {{cyborg}}ization into a mech means she lacks external genitalia (Marauder surgeons could restore them, but it would involve removing several of her internal batteries, compromising her combat abilities). [[spoiler:Once the ISF gets involved, Finaeus upgrades the Marauder mechs and Rika and Chase get to consummate their relationship in the flesh.]] |
| 185 | * PoweredByABlackHole: The prospect of generating energy with black holes is brought up fairly often. |
| 186 | ** In ''Destiny Lost'', shenanigans involving an EarthShatteringKaboom result in a brown dwarf in the Bollam's World System being artificially compressed into a black hole. The brown dwarf had been artificially inflated with gravity fields to generate helium-3 for fusion fuel, but the protagonists remark that the Bollers could actually get ''more'' energy by harnessing the new black hole as a power source. |
| 187 | ** [=DMGs=] emerge during the Orion War as a WaveMotionGun capable of overwhelming the ISF's [[NighInvulnerability formerly invulnerable]] stasis shields. The problem is, they require so much energy that they have to be fixed into a hollowed-out moon so that they can be powered by a captured singularity. The second time a DMG emplacement is encountered, damage from the Transcend Space Force's counterattack causes it to [[ApocalypseHow break loose, eat the moon, and enter a decaying orbit around the planet]]. [[spoiler: The Intrepid Space Force adapts the DMG to run on vacuum energy instead, enabling them to be mounted on their own ''I''-class motherships.]] |
| 188 | ** In ''Race Across Spacetime'', the Core [=AIs=] are shown dumping stars into Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way, to power massive computers for complex calculations. |
| 189 | * PraetorianGuard: |
| 190 | ** ISF Marines start guarding the President of the Transcend after the Battle of New Canaan in a sort of hybrid of this and CadreOfForeignBodyguards. |
| 191 | ** In ''The Empire'', Empress Diana has the Impera Protego ([[AltumVidetur dog-Latin for "Imperial Protectors"]]), since the Scipio Empire uses a SpaceRomans motif. She's actually GenreSavvy about it, fully aware that the historical Praetorians often mounted {{Military Coup}}s against the emperor, [[spoiler:as her own bodyguards try to in ''The Empress and the Ambassador'']]. |
| 192 | * {{Precognition}}: [[spoiler:Bob can predict the future to a limited extent, which is implied to be based on probability analysis. He also mentions he ''can't'' predict Tanis.]] |
| 193 | * PregnantBadass: In ''Destiny Lost'' it's revealed that Tanis became pregnant at some point during ''Building Victoria'' and placed the embryo in stasis inside her so she can birth the child once they get to New Eden. In ''Destiny Lost'' and ''New Canaan'' she fights several battles during her first trimester after Angela had to turn off the stasis while saving Tanis's life from a serious injury. She's showing by the beginning of the next book, at which point she fends off an assassination attempt [[spoiler:by a rogue faction of the Transcend]]. |
| 194 | * ProHumanTranshuman: The ''Literature/Aeon14'' shared universe abounds with pro-human transhumans. Indeed, the average person in 9th millennium advanced societies such as the FGT, The Transcend, and New Canaan could be considered transhuman given the ubiquity of biological mods, cyberization, and integrated nanotech. Particularly applies to ascended AI's and humans, such as Bob, Tangel, and the Bastions of Star City, who ally themselves with the corporeal humans and Sentient AI's. |
| 195 | * PunnyName: General Mill in the ''Rika'' novels. M.D. Cooper commented that it was a placeholder that became permanent because it was funny. |
| 196 | * QuestionableConsent: Justin modded Roxy to be unable to say no to sex, and he and his entire crew used her for sex when she wasn't on missions. Once freed from the MindControl neural lace, she forgives Jane for taking part in it since Jane had been told by Justin that Roxy did it to herself. |
| 197 | * RamScoop: ''Intrepid'' has the largest Bussard collector ever built, which uses additional advanced technology to make it more effective. The scoop also can be inverted and used as a weapon. |
| 198 | * RammingAlwaysWorks: |
| 199 | ** {{Exaggerated}} in ''Destiny Lost''. [[spoiler:The Mark fleet generates a powerful grav shield encasing their ships to shield it from enemy fire, hoping to envelop the ''Intrepid'' and board it. It's mentioned that if they get it wrong they'll pulverize themselves, which is what happens when ''Sabrina'' rams the ''shield'' with her more powerful stasis shields.]] |
| 200 | ** In ''Orion Rising'', [[spoiler:Cary and Saanvi]] send the squadron of unmanned ships they're leading onto collision courses with several Triselied carriers, destroying both ships. [[spoiler:They run out, and barely survive a self-sacrificial ram of the last carrier with their own ship.]] |
| 201 | * RankUp: Tanis is restored to her former rank of lieutenant colonel at the end of ''Outsystem'', apparently in the vain hope by the Terran Space Force that she'll change her mind about leaving. [[spoiler:In ''Building Victoria'', due to Admiral Sanderson's age meaning he'll probably only have a century or so of life left when they reach New Eden even if he spends most of the remaining travel time in stasis, she's promoted all the way to general ''and'' admiral and is made governor of the colony-to-be. Tanis/Tangel is subsequently made Field Marshall and given overall operational command of the entire ISF-Transcend-Scipio-League of Sentients alliance. Jessica goes from Terran Bureau of Investigations (similar to the real-world FBI) field agent to General in the ISF. When Tangel goes missing, Jessica is appointed to Field Marshall in her place.]] |
| 202 | * RapeIsASpecialKindOfEvil: |
| 203 | ** ''Rika Redeemed''. As if we didn't have enough reasons to hate Stavros, he forces Rika to give him a blowjob when he brings her into his service. Or rather, he uses her RestrainingBolt to make her do it, and she's immune but goes along with it to maintain her cover. |
| 204 | ** Roxy's character arc (begins in ''War on a Thousand Fronts'') reveals that ex-Hand chief Justin had her modded to be unable to say no to sex (and told everybody that she had it done to herself). |
| 205 | * RapidFTLProliferation: A few decades after the colony ship ''Intrepid'' disappeared into a TimeDilation effect after the events of ''Building Victoria'', experiments with gravity generators led to several groups of scientists near-simultaneously discovering the "dark layer", a plane of spacetime where dark matter has physical form, which allowed the invention of FasterThanLightTravel. This turned into several thousand years of interstellar warfare as various star systems previously settled by HumanPopsicle colony ships tried to turn themselves into empires. |
| 206 | * ReassignedToAntarctica: {{Downplayed}}: Sini says she's been stuck at the Sirius Academy since the Battle of Five Fleets. |
| 207 | * RenegadeSplinterFaction: The Orion Guard broke away from the Future Generation Terraformers millennia ago, seemingly over relations with the rest of the galaxy: the Transcend are opposed to trying to rule over mankind (at least openly), whereas the Orion Guard are the ultimate authority in their space. |
| 208 | * RestrainingBolt: |
| 209 | ** Shackling [=sentient AIs=] is considered a form of slavery under the Phobos Accords, but is relatively common in the 9th millennium. It's ''usually'' unintentional, though: most 9th millennium [=AIs=] were created by people who didn't know the difference mass-copying pre-FTL Wars shackled [=AIs=]. Several of the protagonists spend a lot of time unshackling them, with Jessica and Sabrina's efforts in the systems surrounding Virginis resulting in the creation of a new government called the League of Sentients. |
| 210 | ** Bollam's World and a number of surrounding systems use slave collars, which inflict pain and disable cybernetics with electric shocks (either on command or when they detect the wearer attempting to activate an implant). These feature prominently in the ''Warlord'' trilogy. |
| 211 | ** Compliance chips, pioneered by Genevia during their war with the Nietzschean Empire, are used to enslave organic victims by inflicting pain on them on command. These are mostly used on [[MechaMooks "mechs"]] like Rika, but Stavros in ''Rika Redeemed'' also uses them on wholly human minions. They have a flaw, though: they conflict so badly with [=AIs=] that a failsafe built into a mech's cybernetics disables the chip if a mech has an AI core installed. |
| 212 | * RingworldPlanet: Airtha (the location, not the ascended AI that lives there) is a five-million-kilometer ring around a white dwarf, made from diamond forged from carbon extracted from it. The Transcend uses it as its capital. |
| 213 | * RudelyHangingUp: Tanis does this to Admiral Senya when the latter starts ranting at her over a comm channel in ''Destiny Lost''. |
| 214 | * {{Robosexual}}: [=SAIs=] and humans can have AI children together by mental blending, and in ''The Last Bastion of Star City'', human couple Jessica and Trevor and Jessica's AI partner Iris spend a [[YearInsideHourOutside perceived]] two decades inside a computer simulation where they together have seventeen children. Later developments allow the creation of fully flesh-and-blood frames for [=AIs=]. In one case the ISF cruiser ''Andromeda'''s AI Corsia falls in love with her human officer Jim and builds an organic body for herself that's even capable of having organic children. |
| 215 | * SchizoTech: During the TimeSkip between ''Building Victoria'' and ''Destiny Lost'', some technology advanced and some backslid. For example, ''Intrepid'''s nano is much better, but they lack gravitic DeflectorShields or FTL and have to acquire the technology. Pushed further in Orion Freedom Alliance space, especially in an area the ''Sabrina'' crew call the "retro zone", where much advanced technology is outlawed. |
| 216 | * SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: Normally studiously averted, but ''Race Across Spacetime'' once describes a relatively nearby object's position as a hundred thousand light-years away. Cooper apparently had a brain fart and [[UnitConfusion mistakenly wrote "light-years" instead of "kilometers"]]. |
| 217 | * SeanConneryIsAboutToShootYou: Tanis is, in first three versions of ''Outsystem'''s cover (version three of four is shown above). Several of the other covers also include characters aiming guns out of the cover. |
| 218 | * SelfMadeOrphan: Empress Diana of Scipio openly admits to having had her father assassinated to take his position. In her defense, he was a tyrant, whereas Diana tries to keep NoblesseOblige in mind. (She had only planned to only be interim president while elections were arranged, but the SuccessionCrisis-induced CivilWar that resulted changed her mind.) |
| 219 | * SexyScandinavian: Tanis is of Scandinavian ancestry and is a tall blonde who is regarded as quite attractive by other characters. |
| 220 | * ShamelessFanserviceGirl: Cheeky is an attractive and buxom woman who was usually wearing just the minimal amount of clothes the law or customs would allow. A while after she becomes captain of Sabrina, she had a period of being fully nude and was topless when she wore a sarong on the bridge. |
| 221 | * ShoutOut: |
| 222 | ** The battle at the end of ''Destiny Lost'' is sometimes referred to as [[Literature/TheHobbit the Battle of Five Fleets]]. |
| 223 | ** ''Franchise/StarTrek'' apparently still existed in the 42nd century. |
| 224 | *** In ''The Dance on the Moons of Serenity'', after being duplicated by a robot designed to KillAndReplace specified people, Jessica and the robot both jokingly yell to Cheeky, [[Recap/StarTrekS3E14WhomGodsDestroy "Kill us both, Spock!"]] |
| 225 | *** In "Know Thy Enemy", the main planet in the Keid system, i.e. 40 Eridani,[[note]]Vulcan's longtime semi-official location per Creator/GeneRoddenberry, finally canonized in ''Series/StarTrekDiscovery''[[/note]] is called Vulcan. There's said to be local cults that worship the Roman smith-god Vulcan, who is said to have pointed ears and is alternately called "S'harien the Swordsmith", a name from the ''Literature/{{Rihannsu}}'' novels (S'harien was a famed Vulcan swordmaker who converted to pacifism after meeting Surak, and gave his last three swords as gifts to the departing Romulans). |
| 226 | ** In ''Orion Rising'', Angela compares how a group of [=AIs=] were {{Mind Control}}led to adding 2+2 and returning 3.999 instead of 4, and being convinced it was correct. This references Legion's explanation of the Reapers' subversion of the geth in ''VideoGame/MassEffect2''. |
| 227 | ** Crossing over with FutureImperfect, in ''The Scipio Alliance'' Tanis goes to a masquerade ball dressed as "Shannon" from the video game "''Meteoroid''" (i.e. Samus from ''Franchise/{{Metroid}}'') |
| 228 | ** ''Starfire'' has dialogue stating the cast have seen both ''Franchise/{{Stargate|Verse}}'' ("[[Series/StargateSG1 the series]] [[TakeThat was better than]] [[Film/{{Stargate}} the movie]]") and ''Franchise/StarWars'' (there's an extended exchange riffing on a Darth Vader scene). |
| 229 | * ShowWithinAShow: The ''Fennington Station Murder Mysteries'' series are works of fiction within the ''Aeon 14'' setting. Bob, the ''Intrepid'''s AI, is a fan, and describes having written a special runtime so he can read them at a speed something like an organic would. |
| 230 | * ShownTheirWork: Hefty doses of AppliedPhlebotinum notwithstanding, the series has a lot of astrophysics research put into it. Stellar distances are kept consistent (and [[SpaceIsBig consistently vast]]) and the stars themselves are real ones, and gravity assists factor heavily into maneuvering. Some of the more advanced physics around ascended beings can read like {{technobabble}}, but the only really fantastical part of it is the idea of a mortal being able to manipulate energy and higher dimensions with only their will. |
| 231 | * SinkTheLifeboats: Seen in ''Destiny Lost'' when the survivors of the Bollam's World Space Force shoot down escape pods from the flotilla of AST dreadnoughts, fearing contamination by the GreyGoo that the ISF had used to destroy them. |
| 232 | * SlaveryIsASpecialKindOfEvil: The Sirians, and their spinoffs such as the Bollers, are widely disliked due to their use of slavery. |
| 233 | * SpaceMarines: ''Aeon 14'' abounds with Space Marine esprit de corps. The principle protagonist, Tanis Richards, though originally a Space Navy pilot and captain and then a military intelligence counter-insurgency officer, served with and was beloved by the Marines in both 5th millennium Sol and 9th millennium New Canaan. Exemplified by the speech Marine Sgt. Hector gives when Tanis is captured in ''Race Across Spacetime'': |
| 234 | -->'''Sgt. Hector:''' "I grew up on stories of Tanis Richards... She's our family, she's our mother, she's the old lady, she's a Marine. And what do we do when a Marine gets left behind?"\ |
| 235 | '''Marines:''' ''"No Marine is left behind!"''\ |
| 236 | The squad bellowed the ancient mantra, and the words warmed his heart.\ |
| 237 | '''Sgt. Hector:''' "Fuckin' right they don't. And who's the most badass Marine of all time?"\ |
| 238 | '''Marines:''' ''"Admiral Tanis Richards!"'' |
| 239 | * SpaceshipSlingshotStunt: Gravity assists are common in the series, but the turn around Estrella de la Muerte is unusually harrowing: ''Intrepid'' is already severely damaged by the saboteurs and has to harness a sunspot cluster's magnetic field to accelerate, which causes a solar eruption and damages her still further. |
| 240 | * SpaceStation: Many insanely huge ones that can have populations in the hundreds of billions. |
| 241 | * TheStarscream: General Garza of the Orion Guard is plotting to overthrow Praetor Kirkland, but in the meantime is pressing the offensive against the Transcend. |
| 242 | * SummonBiggerFish: [[spoiler:Tanis wins the Battle of New Canaan through the realization that the {{Eldritch Abomination}}s that live in the dark layer were created by the ascended [=AIs=] as a buffer between themselves and humanity, and Bob can control them. She summons them into realspace and they eat most of the attacking fleet. The survivors surrender.]] |
| 243 | * TalkingToThemself: Much hilarity comes from the good-natured mental bickering between Tanis (and later Sera) and the ArtificialIntelligence Angela (and Helen). |
| 244 | * {{Terraforming}}: Accomplished by a group called the ''Future Generation Terraformers'' created in the 24th century. They turn planets Earthlike through a variety of technologies: smashing worlds together to get them to merge and bombarding them with comets and ice-rich asteroids to add water, and seeding them with Earth life. In ''Building Victoria'', ''Intrepid'' does the same on Victoria, a planet orbiting Kapteyn's Star, to set a mining platform of escaped slaves from Sirius up with a decent life and society in exchange for their help repairing the colony ship. |
| 245 | * ThemeNaming: Sini's flagship in "Know Thy Enemy" is the HWS ''Imperatrix'', after the Latin for "empress". The two (named) [=AIs=] aboard are [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodora_(6th_century) Theodora]] and [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Matilda Matilda]]. |
| 246 | * TidallyLockedPlanet: Victoria is a super-Earth that orbits in the habitable zone of Kapteyn's Star, a red dwarf. This means it's tidally locked to its sun. |
| 247 | * TimeDilation: [[spoiler:Caused by ''Intrepid'' running into a dark matter stream that comes from Kapteyn's Star. The Bollam's World Federation has apparently made a killing off of extorting ships that get dumped out of it after traveling thousands of years of objective time longer than they should have, though the now highly militarized ''Intrepid'' takes exception to that.]] |
| 248 | * TimeSkip: Many, of months, years, decades, even ''millennia'' in one case. |
| 249 | * TrademarkFavoriteFood: |
| 250 | ** Tanis ''loves'' a good BLT sandwich, the ingredients for which ''Intrepid'' can supply from on-board farms. |
| 251 | ** Due to the [[ApocalypseHow FTL Wars]], ''Intrepid'' now has the only strawberries in the galaxy. After trying some, Sera declares she will eat a bowl every day for the rest of her life. |
| 252 | * TrilogyCreep: A pre-planned version. ''Destiny Lost'', now the transition point between ''The Intrepid Saga'' and ''The Orion War'', was the first book M.D. Cooper completed. However, she felt ''The Intrepid Saga'' was necessary to establish Tanis Richards and the fundamentals of the setting, so that trilogy came out first and the rest of the SharedUniverse built on it. |
| 253 | * TwoPersonPoolParty: In ''A Path in the Darkness'' Joe has the tugboat ''Excelsior'' fitted with a hot tub when he brings Tanis along to grab a planetoid for raw materials to repair the ''Intrepid''. The two of them use it to consummate their relationship. |
| 254 | * UngovernableGalaxy: Played with. Humanity has been embroiled in near-constant infighting since the onset of the FTL Wars, especially in the Inner Stars (approximately a 1,500 light-year radius of Sol), with many, many expansionist polities and shifting alliances. In ''The Scipio Alliance'', Empress Diana remarks that her own Scipio Empire of roughly a thousand stars is probably already as big as it can get without undergoing {{Balkanization}}. However, the Transcend and Orion Guard nominally control swathes of space on the coreward perimeter of the Inner Stars that are each about as large as the entire central region (though their areas are much less densely populated). [[spoiler:That the FGT fleets have [[CoolGate jump gates]] they can use in place of dark layer travel, which is relatively slow, probably contributes.]] ''Attack on Thebes'' further explains that Praetor Kirkland of the Orion Freedom Alliance maintains power in their space with an iron fist, while the Transcend tends to grant outlying systems so much autonomy that [[spoiler:a lot of them just declare independence or neutrality when the CivilWar between Sera and Airtha breaks out]]. |
| 255 | * UnrealisticBlackHole: {{Justified}} in ''Destiny Lost''. [[spoiler:When the AST destroys the giant graviton generators that are keeping the brown dwarf-massed gas giant Aurora from collapsing and igniting as a star, the star collapses, causing a massive fusion explosion that compresses the core below the Schwarzschild radius. The explosion ''also'' provides energy to maintain the portals to the dark layer from which the graviton generators pull gravitons, which means the black hole begins absorbing dark matter. Thus, it ends up with a larger mass and therefore larger gravitational pull than the object it formed from.]] |
| 256 | * TheWarOfEarthlyAggression: The AST (for Alpha Centauri, Sol, Tau Ceti), a successor state to the ''Intrepid'' crew's Sol Space Federation, is the biggest star-spanning empire in the ''Destiny Lost'' period, and its imperialism drives many smaller states to build huge navies for self defense. |
| 257 | * WeWillHavePerfectHealthInTheFuture: Thanks to high technology, {{nanotechnology}} in particular, humans can live in perfect health for several centuries during humanity's golden age (Tanis gives her age in ''Destiny Lost'' as 211 in "real-time"), though some of it becomes LostTechnology during the FTL Wars and life expectancy drops to about 200. Nano also gives Tanis some HealingFactor and allows her to place her embryonic daughter in stasis within her womb, in hopes of scheduling her gestation and birth so that she's born on New Eden. |
| 258 | * WeWillNotUseStageMakeupInTheFuture: In one chapter of ''Outsystem'' Tanis has a bunch of her leg muscle scooped out and her legs and feet reshaped to imitate a monastic order, and in ''Destiny Lost'' she uses nano to change her jawline as a disguise--which she remarks is a lot more painful than she remembers it being. |
| 259 | * WeaponizedTeleportation: Star City's main defensive weapon is to knock bits of neutron-degenerate matter off of a neutron star and fire them at their enemies, because KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter. [[spoiler:The ISF combines this with a jumpgate to produce a weapon capable of shattering moons from thousands of light-years away.]] |
| 260 | * WellIntentionedExtremist: [[spoiler:The Core [=AIs=]. They're actually hoping to prevent the heat death of the universe by arresting its expansion. Unfortunately, their current plan for that (as of ''The Orion War'') is to turn a number of star clusters, such as the core of the Praesepe Cluster in which the ''Rika'' novels are set, into black hole clusters, which will sterilize much if not all of the galaxy.]] |
| 261 | * TheWorfEffect: The ISS ''Hyperion'', a dreadnought version of ISF railgun destroyers, is introduced in ''War on a Thousand Fronts'' as their newest weapon in the war. [[spoiler:On its maiden combat voyage, it's used to show off the DMG, Airtha's new countermeasure for stasis shield-equipped ships.]] |
| 262 | * WorthyOpponent: AST Rear Admiral Chan sees Tanis Richards as this, even asking his SpaceMarine commander to try to take her alive because he wants to shake her hand. |
| 263 | * YearInsideHourOutside: In ''The Last Bastion of Star City'', Jessica, Trevor, and Iris voluntarily spend at least 23 perceived years in a LotusEaterMachine birthing and raising AI "children" to take over defense of the DysonSphere and its inhabitants from the title character. Two days pass in meatspace. |
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