Uncompromising Honor, snippet #1

This passage includes the mention of stevedores and a time when there was more muscle than automation, as I once mentioned how difficult it must be for some of the poorer systems to offload the huge cargo freighters of huge containers, then the containers themselves, lacking the more modern and convenient, yet quite expensive equipment.

I had the good fortune of riding along with a coast to coast trucker (18 wheelers) before entering high school from North Carolina to California, round trip. The differences between some of the stops were incredible. Some of the destinations' docks unloaded the large behemoths that were packed to the gills in a matter of hours. Some took days because of a lack of a decent dock, help and equipment. This is real guys. No handwavium used here at all.

Please do forgive the snips. Snipped not for brevity, but for the emotional content and feel.

RFC wrote:Hope you like it.

I do indeed RFC. Intensely. I have often said that an author is only as good as his ability to invoke tears of emotional involvement. No matter the taste of the tears. No tears, no deal. I must share the emotional content of this passage that was not, is not, lost on me. If only for those who may have missed it, and for those who may not be familiar with the ballad. And for those just needing a ride back down memory lane. A quite powerful and emotional ballad it is for me, that induces many tears and the memories of a bygone, but never forgotten era. The ballad will help place you in the shoes of the young Clayton.

JULY 1922 POST DIASPORA






Unicorn Belt
Manticore B
Star Empire of Manticore

Waiting, as it happened, for Phil Clayton, and he wondered again how he’d drawn the duty. Oh, he had the engineering background for it, but so did a lot of other officers, and he hated his new assignment. Maybe they had been enemy vessels, but they’d been ships, and he’d loved the inner magic of ships for as long as he could recall.

His earliest memories were of standing with his nose pressed to the window on the south side of his parents’ modest house, watching the atmospheric counter-grav freighters drive across the heavens, splashed in sunlight and cloud shadow, gleaming like the Tester’s own promise of beauty. Pygmies compared to the doomed ships outside his shuttle at the moment, of course, but enormous for pre-Alliance Grayson.

And even more so for the imagination of a little boy who’d realized even then that ships had souls. That anything that lovely, that graceful — anything that many men had given so much of themselves to — had to be alive itself. He’d watched them summer and winter, in sunlight, in driving rain, in snow. He’d watched them at night, roaring low overhead in a bellow of turbines, flanks gleaming with their own private constellations of running lights. By the time he was ten, he’d been able to identify every major class by sight. And when he’d climbed up into the attic (which he’d been able to do only when all of his moms assumed one of the others had him in sight), he could actually get an angle down onto Burdette Port’s docks, where those massive constructs landed.

Oh, the cargoes he’d summoned from dreams of other steadings! The pallets and boxes, the containerized cargo, the nets of fruit and vegetables. He’d watched stevedores unload the cavernous holds — there’d been far more muscle power and far less automation at the time — and wished he was one of them. And he’d devoured everything he could find in print and on vid about not just the atmospheric ships, but about the freighters that called on Grayson, however rarely, from far beyond his own horizons. He’d ingested anything and everything, from the ballad of the Wreck of the Steadholder Fitzgerald to the mystery of the colony ship Agnes Celeste and her vanished crew, and he’d known what he wanted.

Do pardon my bold to call attention.


The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald(s)
Gordon Lightfoot

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven pm a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters
Lake Huron rolls, superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call 'gitche gumee'
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

A bonus just to stop and smell the coffee. You old timers will understand.

cthia wrote:This passage includes the mention of stevedores and a time when there was more muscle than automation, as I once mentioned how difficult it must be for some of the poorer systems to offload the huge cargo freighters of huge containers, then the containers themselves, lacking the more modern and convenient, yet quite expensive equipment.

I had the good fortune of riding along with a coast to coast trucker (18 wheelers) before entering high school from North Carolina to California, round trip. The differences between some of the stops were incredible. Some of the destinations' docks unloaded the large behemoths that were packed to the gills in a matter of hours. Some took days because of a lack of a decent dock, help and equipment. This is real guys. No handwavium used here at all.

Please do forgive the snips. Snipped not for brevity, but for the emotional content and feel.

RFC wrote:Hope you like it.

I do indeed RFC. Intensely. I have often said that an author is only as good as his ability to invoke tears of emotional involvement. No matter the taste of the tears. No tears, no deal. I must share the emotional content of this passage that was not, is not, lost on me. If only for those who may have missed it, and for those who may not be familiar with the ballad. And for those just needing a ride back down memory lane. A quite powerful and emotional ballad it is for me, that induces many tears and the memories of a bygone, but never forgotten era. The ballad will help place you in the shoes of the young Clayton.

JULY 1922 POST DIASPORA






Unicorn Belt
Manticore B
Star Empire of Manticore

Waiting, as it happened, for Phil Clayton, and he wondered again how he’d drawn the duty. Oh, he had the engineering background for it, but so did a lot of other officers, and he hated his new assignment. Maybe they had been enemy vessels, but they’d been ships, and he’d loved the inner magic of ships for as long as he could recall.

His earliest memories were of standing with his nose pressed to the window on the south side of his parents’ modest house, watching the atmospheric counter-grav freighters drive across the heavens, splashed in sunlight and cloud shadow, gleaming like the Tester’s own promise of beauty. Pygmies compared to the doomed ships outside his shuttle at the moment, of course, but enormous for pre-Alliance Grayson.

And even more so for the imagination of a little boy who’d realized even then that ships had souls. That anything that lovely, that graceful — anything that many men had given so much of themselves to — had to be alive itself. He’d watched them summer and winter, in sunlight, in driving rain, in snow. He’d watched them at night, roaring low overhead in a bellow of turbines, flanks gleaming with their own private constellations of running lights. By the time he was ten, he’d been able to identify every major class by sight. And when he’d climbed up into the attic (which he’d been able to do only when all of his moms assumed one of the others had him in sight), he could actually get an angle down onto Burdette Port’s docks, where those massive constructs landed.

Oh, the cargoes he’d summoned from dreams of other steadings! The pallets and boxes, the containerized cargo, the nets of fruit and vegetables. He’d watched stevedores unload the cavernous holds — there’d been far more muscle power and far less automation at the time — and wished he was one of them. And he’d devoured everything he could find in print and on vid about not just the atmospheric ships, but about the freighters that called on Grayson, however rarely, from far beyond his own horizons. He’d ingested anything and everything, from the ballad of the Wreck of the Steadholder Fitzgerald to the mystery of the colony ship Agnes Celeste and her vanished crew, and he’d known what he wanted.

Do pardon my bold to call attention.


The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald(s)
Gordon Lightfoot

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they called 'gitche gumee'
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty
That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed
When the gales of November came early
The ship was the pride of the American side
Coming back from some mill in Wisconsin
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
With a crew and good captain well seasoned
Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland
And later that night when the ship's bell rang
Could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?
The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
And a wave broke over the railing
And every man knew, as the captain did too,
T'was the witch of November come stealin'
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
When the gales of November came slashin'
When afternoon came it was freezin' rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin'
Fellas, it's too rough to feed ya
At seven pm a main hatchway caved in, he said
Fellas, it's been good t'know ya
The captain wired in he had water comin' in
And the good ship and crew was in peril
And later that night when his lights went outta sight
Came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Does any one know where the love of God goes
When the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searches all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay
If they'd put fifteen more miles behind her
They might have split up or they might have capsized
They may have broke deep and took water
And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters
Lake Huron rolls, superior sings
In the rooms of her ice-water mansion
Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams
The islands and bays are for sportsmen
And farther below Lake Ontario
Takes in what Lake Erie can send her
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
With the gales of November remembered
In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
In the maritime sailors' cathedral
The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times
For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call 'gitche gumee'
Superior, they said, never gives up her dead
When the gales of November come early

*** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** *** ***

A bonus just to stop and smell the coffee. You old timers will understand.

Try Stan Rogers' "White Squall," "Mary Ellen Carter," or "The Last Watch."


Heck, ANYTHING of Stan's is worth listening to!

As we are talking about Gordon Lightfoot's song on a board about Sci-Fi I thought I would throw in a shout out to the "Ballad of Apollo XIII".

"There's legends galore in the pulp SF lore 'Bout shipwrecks of spacecraft a-spacing When meteor holes come 'tween men and their goals By demolishing ships that they're racing

Painting pictures with words like none you'd ever heard SF writers made frightening predictions But the terrors they tell cannot equal the hell Faced by three men in fact, and nonfiction To April 11, Nine-teen Seventy now We must let our narrative carry us Three men in a C.S.M named Odyssey Beneath them, the L.M named Aquarius

With a furious roar, Saturn leapt for the sky With Jack Swigart, Fred Haise, and Jim Lovell Toward a planned rendezvous that would never come true With the grey lunar gravel and rubble Still, they set up housekeeping in orbit, 'round Earth, And translunar insertion was kindled, But the public just yawned, for this landing was third And behind them old Terra slow dwindled

Apollo XIII traveled on down the track laid down by the three laws Of Newton At fifty-six hours into lunar bound coast Lovell said, "Houston, we have a problem" Now, they might have been struck by a meteorite Maybe something had just overloaded But their panels went red with their malfunction lights And in Odyssey something exploded

That blast blocked or ruptured their fuel cell line Their electrical energy faltered With no hope at all of a rescue in time Thirteen's mission profile had just altered To physics and God they commended their lives For no power on Earth now could save them Although NASA let the men talk with their wives Of goodbyes there was never a mention

Three men in a CSM bound for the Moon Reached two hundred and six thousand miles Did they have enough air to get all the way there? Could they trust what they read on their dials? And when they reached Luna, could they change course for home Would she trap them, or loose them at random Untested advice and contingency plans Were the only things NASA could hand them

When Apollo 13 crossed the limb of the moon And death came from the receivers We knew the next signal would speak of their doom Or answer the faith of believers "Apollo Thirteen, This is Houston, Do you read?" Dear god let them answer us quickly The world held its breath and in mission control Every screen lit a face pale and sickly

"Apollo Thirteen, this is Houston. Do you read?" ... That empty sound stretched on for years "Houston... This is Thirteen... We're coming home!" said a voice And the world found relief in its tears.

At T plus one hundred and thirty-eight hours They jettisoned Odyssey's wreckage That module was shattered and blasted apart A symbol of death in the space age Aquarius served as their lifeboat to shore Till they knew they would no longer need her. At T plus one hundred and forty-one hours With a deep prayer of "Thank You" they freed her

Ed, Roger, and Gus must have smiled on those days Knowing theirs was the path not to follow But their souls were with Swigart and Lovell and Haise Riding home on the thirteenth Apollo At T plus one hundred forty-three fifty-four Apollo XIII hit the waters Three men returned home, shaken up, but alive To their wives and their sons and their daughters!

There's legends galore in the pulp SF lore 'Bout shipwrecks of spacecraft a-spacing But all of them now do cause men to reflect On three days when the world's heart went racing Painting pictures with words all too few people heard, SF writers could make their predictions But always recall that in spite of them all, The truth was much greater than fiction

Yes always recall that, that in spite of them all The truth must be greater than fiction."

Filk Version of Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Julia Ecklar. YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbL3oNEDvJ0

So sad. This reminds me of the transcripts from the sailing vessel El Faro. They really didn't know what they were facing. And at the end you could hear the despair.

https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archiv ... sb/510662/

runsforcelery wrote:Try Stan Rogers' "White Squall," "Mary Ellen Carter," or "The Last Watch."


Heck, ANYTHING of Stan's is worth listening to!

"Northwest Passage," "The Idiot," and (of course) "Barrett's Privateers" are particularly worth looking up in addition to those three. I wonder what the Graysons would think of "The Field Behind the Plow."

Though if you have Honor listen to "Mary Ellen Carter" I will cry.

cthia wrote:
==========================================
SPECIAL COMMUNIQUE FROM THE ADMIRALTY
==========================================

Alright. This is the time to check the gut and fess up. I became very aware of all of you die hard captured Solly junk fans and I studied and tracked your behavior across many threads and I know, I KNOW, that many of you are fanatic in your love for all things captured. Which leads me to the meaning of this emergency communique. I know that there are many of you still holding on and holding out. You simply can't let go of those captured Solly ships, those floating, hulking, mindless, spiritless pieces of junk. Therefore, I hardly believe that all of you have given up every single ghost. SO! I'll give you exactly 24 hours! That should afford you plenty moments of silence to reflect and forget. Then, remove the — stolen is such a strong word — misappropriated captured Solly ships from under your beds, closets, basements and from under your very special hand-sewn fluffy pink pillows and send them to the breakers, now! BECAUSE GODDAMMIT!...

IF ANOTHER SOB COMES IN HERE WITH SOME LAME ASS IDEA ABOUT HOW TO USE A SOLLY SD I'M GONNA BEND HIM OVER PULL DOWN HIS LITTLE PINK PANTIES TAKE ME ONE OF THOSE WORTHLESS PIECES OF JUNK AND GREASE HER UP REAL GOOD WITH SOME WD-40 STAND HER UP ON END AND SHOVE IT UP HIS CANDY ASS!"

Admiralty out!

Does it mean we can't play interplanetary darts with them after they 've been stripped after all then?

cthia wrote:

munroburton wrote:Thank you!

I wonder why Honor/Shannon thinks it might be necessary to upgrade defences against wormhole-based assaults. Ten thousand Chekhov's cannons, eh?

Because she thinks the answer to this would be a resounding yes, in their mind.

munroburton wrote:I don't see the relevance. Bolthole itself does not have a wormhole terminus. On top of that, the other end of the wormhole to Calvin is deep inside Haven territory and thus probably even further away from the Alignment.

It's well established that Manticore already has massive defenses at its Junction. The firepower there is more than sufficent to defeat multiple maximum-mass transits via more than one termini. An upgrade to graser mines would be nice, but hardly essential.

Waitaminute! I seem to be confused here. Will someone help turn the turtle back over off of his back please?

Bolthole does have a wormhole. Refuge has a wormhole. Isn't Bolthole located there?

cthia wrote:

munroburton wrote:I don't see the relevance. Bolthole itself does not have a wormhole terminus. On top of that, the other end of the wormhole to Calvin is deep inside Haven territory and thus probably even further away from the Alignment.

It's well established that Manticore already has massive defenses at its Junction. The firepower there is more than sufficent to defeat multiple maximum-mass transits via more than one termini. An upgrade to graser mines would be nice, but hardly essential.

Waitaminute! I seem to be confused here. Will someone help turn the turtle back over off of his back please?

Bolthole does have a wormhole. Refuge has a wormhole. Isn't Bolthole located there?

Nope.

runsforcelery wrote:No one in Nouveau Paris had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus less than seventy light-years from the Haven System, associated with the planetless, barren M3 dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L).

The discovery had been a distinct shock for the survey crew which detected the J-156-18(L) Terminus in 1879 PD literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the thoroughly useless star. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) System to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known . . . only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.

J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. A crew of proper hyper-physicists had been dispatched immediately and quickly discovered that it was one terminus of a 583.8-LY warp bridge . . . and that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.

KCR-126-04.

That news must have struck the Legislaturalists as one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe, because that star system — also known as the Calvin System — lay at the heart of one of the great tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.

<Massive Snip>

No one knew how she’d come to her final resting place, 14.4 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of the KCR-126-06 system and its solitary moon, but they did know it must have been the stuff of legends.

The wormhole connects J-156-18(L) to KCR-126-04(aka Calvin System).

Bolthole/Refuge/Sanctuary is KCR-126-06, ~15 light years away from KCR-126-04. No wormhole at Bolthole.

munroburton wrote:I don't see the relevance. Bolthole itself does not have a wormhole terminus. On top of that, the other end of the wormhole to Calvin is deep inside Haven territory and thus probably even further away from the Alignment.

It's well established that Manticore already has massive defenses at its Junction. The firepower there is more than sufficent to defeat multiple maximum-mass transits via more than one termini. An upgrade to graser mines would be nice, but hardly essential.

cthia wrote:Waitaminute! I seem to be confused here. Will someone help turn the turtle back over off of his back please?

Bolthole does have a wormhole. Refuge has a wormhole. Isn't Bolthole located there?

munroburton wrote:Nope.

runsforcelery wrote:No one in Nouveau Paris had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus less than seventy light-years from the Haven System, associated with the planetless, barren M3 dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L).

The discovery had been a distinct shock for the survey crew which detected the J-156-18(L) Terminus in 1879 PD literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the thoroughly useless star. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) System to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known . . . only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.

J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. A crew of proper hyper-physicists had been dispatched immediately and quickly discovered that it was one terminus of a 583.8-LY warp bridge . . . and that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.

KCR-126-04.

That news must have struck the Legislaturalists as one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe, because that star system — also known as the Calvin System — lay at the heart of one of the great tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.

<Massive Snip>

No one knew how she’d come to her final resting place, 14.4 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of the KCR-126-06 system and its solitary moon, but they did know it must have been the stuff of legends.

The wormhole connects J-156-18(L) to KCR-126-04(aka Calvin System).

Bolthole/Refuge/Sanctuary is KCR-126-06, ~15 light years away from KCR-126-04. No wormhole at Bolthole.

That's from the original Dark Fall snippets, which have been superseded because of massive continuity problems.

Uncompromising Honor, Snippet 1 wrote:Still, Bolthole’s location did explain why the Legislaturalists had selected it as a site for their secret naval base once the system more or less fell into the People’s Republic’s lap. And as a Gryphon Highlander — not to mention someone who’d married a Grayson — Angela Clayton had a better idea than most of what it had taken for the people of the planet Sanctuary to survive until Haven’s survey crew rediscovered their existence at the end of the J-156-18(L)-KCR-126-06 warp bridge.

Note the last words.

Just to recap the differences: the original Dark Fall had Calvin 395 ly from Sol. The expedition was in a cold sleep ship traveling at 70% of light speed that left Sol 40 years after the Beowulf expedition. The system had been found by early hyper-space survey crews.

The new Dark Fall has Calvin at 105 ly from Sol. The expedition is in a generation ship traveling at 50% of light speed and left Sol 150 years after the Beowulf expedition. The system had been spotted by advanced telescopic observation.

The wormhole terminus is probably in the Sanctuary system, although there are other ways of reading the Uncompromising Honor snippet.

To put it politely, nothing from that first set of snippets can be trusted.

Update: added the launch times.

munroburton wrote:I don't see the relevance. Bolthole itself does not have a wormhole terminus. On top of that, the other end of the wormhole to Calvin is deep inside Haven territory and thus probably even further away from the Alignment.

It's well established that Manticore already has massive defenses at its Junction. The firepower there is more than sufficent to defeat multiple maximum-mass transits via more than one termini. An upgrade to graser mines would be nice, but hardly essential.

cthia wrote:Waitaminute! I seem to be confused here. Will someone help turn the turtle back over off of his back please?

Bolthole does have a wormhole. Refuge has a wormhole. Isn't Bolthole located there?

munroburton wrote:Nope.

runsforcelery wrote:No one in Nouveau Paris had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus less than seventy light-years from the Haven System, associated with the planetless, barren M3 dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L).

The discovery had been a distinct shock for the survey crew which detected the J-156-18(L) Terminus in 1879 PD literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the thoroughly useless star. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) System to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known . . . only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.

J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. A crew of proper hyper-physicists had been dispatched immediately and quickly discovered that it was one terminus of a 583.8-LY warp bridge . . . and that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.

KCR-126-04.

That news must have struck the Legislaturalists as one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe, because that star system — also known as the Calvin System — lay at the heart of one of the great tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.

<Massive Snip>

No one knew how she’d come to her final resting place, 14.4 LY from her original destination, in the L5 Lagrange point between the second planet of the KCR-126-06 system and its solitary moon, but they did know it must have been the stuff of legends.

The wormhole connects J-156-18(L) to KCR-126-04(aka Calvin System).

Bolthole/Refuge/Sanctuary is KCR-126-06, ~15 light years away from KCR-126-04. No wormhole at Bolthole.

JohnRoth wrote:That's from the original Dark Fall snippets, which have been superseded because of massive continuity problems.

Uncompromising Honor, Snippet 1 wrote:Still, Bolthole’s location did explain why the Legislaturalists had selected it as a site for their secret naval base once the system more or less fell into the People’s Republic’s lap. And as a Gryphon Highlander — not to mention someone who’d married a Grayson — Angela Clayton had a better idea than most of what it had taken for the people of the planet Sanctuary to survive until Haven’s survey crew rediscovered their existence at the end of the J-156-18(L)-KCR-126-06 warp bridge.

JohnRoth wrote:Note the last words.

Just to recap the differences: the original Dark Fall had Calvin 395 ly from Sol. The expedition was in a cold sleep ship traveling at 70% of light speed that left Sol 40 years after the Beowulf expedition. The system had been found by early hyper-space survey crews.

The new Dark Fall has Calvin at 105 ly from Sol. The expedition is in a generation ship traveling at 50% of light speed and left Sol 150 years after the Beowulf expedition. The system had been spotted by advanced telescopic observation.

The wormhole terminus is probably in the Sanctuary system, although there are other ways of reading the Uncompromising Honor snippet.

To put it politely, nothing from that first set of snippets can be trusted.

Update: added the launch times.

Thank you JohnRoth. I thought I remembered reading that somewhere, and got the same thing out of it regarding the feeling there was an accompanying wormhole. ISTR other details as well, of the Legislaturalists originally seeing dollar signs of having a similar setup like the Manticorans, only to find out that the wormhole led to a desert of a planet -- so, no cigar.

And of course it follows, that IF Bolthole does have a wormhole junction, then I'd like to definitely reenter my thought upstream that those grasers surgically removed from the Solly ships will definitely be bound for Bolthole. At least in part.