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Vasily Incident

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Vasily Incident

When: Unstated A.L. year. Late empire, some years before The Ertian Surgeon’s final topolog trip to Aerth. Where: Orbit of Orb Ertia’s Thorne–Żytkow motherstar. Participants: Vasily (destroyed), its ~120,000 longsleepers (killed), Ivan Tellinger (bifurcated but still alive), Tabitha Dimitrova and the Empiral Special Incidents Team, The Ertian Surgeon and a boarding party of medical personnel from Ertian hospitals, and an unknown perfectly-spherical artifact that exited the motherstar at 70% c and passed straight through the ship.

Summary

The third recorded TZ-exit artifact event in the Galactic Human Empire, and the first the empire is able to extract material evidence from. Three spheres across several centuries have exited Thorne–Żytkow stars at 70% c — the first scanned from afar by a science voidship, the second tracked by an astronomy satellite at Orb Flain (confirming composition and a ~90° mid-flight course change), and this third one striking the passing hollowship Vasily during its slingshot transit through the Ertia system.

The Vasily’s presence was not accidental. As The Ertian Surgeon extracts from Tabitha Dimitrova in the Shienae operating room, the empire has been deliberately routing hollowships through TZ-star systems in the hope of another exit event. The Vasily’s 120,000 longsleepers were the acceptable cost of the observation.

Timeline as the surgeon experienced it

  1. The Vasily enters the Ertian system to slingshot off the TZ motherstar.
  2. Several days of ground-side boredom on Ertia.
  3. A wall-image shows the hollowship tearing open: “gas spilling out, bodies visible.”
  4. Aid workers press-gang Ertian hospital medics into flyers and boost them out of atmosphere.
  5. Dimitrova briefs the medics in zero-G, fits them into voidsuits, and leads a boarding party through an emergency airlock.
  6. The surgeon willtech-propels himself up the winding entry tunnel past floating body parts into the great longsleep cavern, then to the bridge, then to Lab 9 Phi, where he finds the bifurcated-but-conscious Ivan Tellinger.
  7. Tellinger is brought back to Shienae hospital on Ertia.
  8. Dimitrova threatens the surgeon with a scalpel; then breaks and explains the three-sphere pattern and the empire’s “experiment”; then threatens Eda Hamebe by name and storms out.
  9. Tellinger is shipped onward to Aerth “if he lives… if he doesn’t live, same applies.”

Consequences

  • The empire recovers silver holographic nanoparticle residue from Tellinger’s wound — the cauterisation material that turns out to be the encoding substrate for The Dictionary.
  • The story of the experiment leaks years later out of the “science division on Rosance” — the same leak that decodes the 3D-binary dictionary and makes it empire-public.
  • Eda Hamebe judges that the decoded dictionary “is going to change things, really change things. Soon.”

Appearances

Open questions

  • How many other hollowships are still parked near TZ stars on the same “experiment”? The story implies more than just the Vasily.
  • Was the Vasily’s crew knowingly signed up for this, or was it an ordinary transit ship used as bait?
  • Who inside the empire gave the order to keep the policy running, and why was it leaked out of Rosance instead of ending the policy formally?

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