out of the cargo bay.
“We can chat later,” she said. “Move, Q — I don’t know about you, but I’m not that fond of stun guns.”
Again, he’d lost his moment. He’d just have to bide his time. Surely, he’d have a little privacy with her on the trip to the Portath Cloud, and then — if he could gather up the courage — he would tell her that he loved her.
Excerpt from “Cloud of Mystery: The Portath”
by Zippy the Voracious
“To enter the Cloud is to die.”
That is the first communication ever received from the mysterious race known as the Portath. With very few exceptions, that promise has held true.
In this day and age of faster-than-light travel, cities so large they cover the entire surface of planets, and the regular interaction of over a dozen sentient species from all over the galaxy, it seems unbelievable that there are races we still know almost nothing about.
We know almost nothing about the Portath.
In fact, there is not a single credible sighting of a member of that race. To quote the lingo of ancient Earth, the Portath are the “Loch Ness Monster” of sentient species. Unverified tales abound, describing the Portath as gray Humanoids with large black eyes and oversized craniums, as creatures made from pure electricity, as an offshoot of the Ki race that has six arms instead of four, and so on and so on. Every sentient who claims to have seen the Portath describes them differently.
We don’t even know if the Portath are biological creatures, like Humans, Sklorno and Ki, or if they are artificial in origin, more akin to the Prawatt. And, we may never know — every scientific expedition into that region has been lost, never to be heard from again.
A ZONE OF SILENCE
The Portath Cloud is a nebula. Dense gas contained within generates significant interference across the electromagnetic spectrum. Due to this “interference zone,” ships that enter the Cloud are unable to communicate with ships outside it. No signal has ever been received from a ship that was lost in the Cloud. In addition, not a single beacon from a lost ship has ever been recovered, including punch-space beacons. It is unknown if beacons malfunctioned due to the Cloud’s interference, if they were destroyed in transit, or if whatever befalls ships that enter the Cloud happens so fast that ships don’t have time to send a distress call.
THE SURVIVORS
The one exception to the long list of lost ships came in 2539, when a fourteen-vessel fleet from the League of Planets entered the Cloud in hopes of avoiding a vastly superior Purist Nation force that numbered seventy-eight ships. The Purists pursued the League of Planets fleet into the Cloud. Of those fourteen League vessels, only seven escaped. All seventy-eight Purist vessels were never heard from again, bringing the total to eighty-five ships lost in that single encounter.
Of the seven League ships that escaped, not one encountered anything within other than dust and gas. That means, unfortunately, that the only sentients to enter the Cloud and survive to tell about it saw nothing at all.
SCANT HISTORY
Punch-drive signatures were detected near the Cloud’s outer edges in 2530, marking the first indication that a sentient race might exist within. However, no signatures of early punch-drive testing or pre-punch technologies were detected as coming from that area, leading scientists to speculate that the Portath may have evolved deep within the Cloud’s interference zone. Or, possibly, that the race did not evolve within the Cloud at all, but rather arrived there from some other location — a location possibly outside of our own galaxy.
If the Portath are an extra-galactic culture, it would mark only the third known species to have not originated in the Milky Way, following the Givers and the Collectors (see the standard historical timeline for more information on those species).
The three systems that border the Cloud — the Tower Republic, the Leekee
“We can chat later,” she said. “Move, Q — I don’t know about you, but I’m not that fond of stun guns.”
Again, he’d lost his moment. He’d just have to bide his time. Surely, he’d have a little privacy with her on the trip to the Portath Cloud, and then — if he could gather up the courage — he would tell her that he loved her.
Excerpt from “Cloud of Mystery: The Portath”
by Zippy the Voracious
“To enter the Cloud is to die.”
That is the first communication ever received from the mysterious race known as the Portath. With very few exceptions, that promise has held true.
In this day and age of faster-than-light travel, cities so large they cover the entire surface of planets, and the regular interaction of over a dozen sentient species from all over the galaxy, it seems unbelievable that there are races we still know almost nothing about.
We know almost nothing about the Portath.
In fact, there is not a single credible sighting of a member of that race. To quote the lingo of ancient Earth, the Portath are the “Loch Ness Monster” of sentient species. Unverified tales abound, describing the Portath as gray Humanoids with large black eyes and oversized craniums, as creatures made from pure electricity, as an offshoot of the Ki race that has six arms instead of four, and so on and so on. Every sentient who claims to have seen the Portath describes them differently.
We don’t even know if the Portath are biological creatures, like Humans, Sklorno and Ki, or if they are artificial in origin, more akin to the Prawatt. And, we may never know — every scientific expedition into that region has been lost, never to be heard from again.
A ZONE OF SILENCE
The Portath Cloud is a nebula. Dense gas contained within generates significant interference across the electromagnetic spectrum. Due to this “interference zone,” ships that enter the Cloud are unable to communicate with ships outside it. No signal has ever been received from a ship that was lost in the Cloud. In addition, not a single beacon from a lost ship has ever been recovered, including punch-space beacons. It is unknown if beacons malfunctioned due to the Cloud’s interference, if they were destroyed in transit, or if whatever befalls ships that enter the Cloud happens so fast that ships don’t have time to send a distress call.
THE SURVIVORS
The one exception to the long list of lost ships came in 2539, when a fourteen-vessel fleet from the League of Planets entered the Cloud in hopes of avoiding a vastly superior Purist Nation force that numbered seventy-eight ships. The Purists pursued the League of Planets fleet into the Cloud. Of those fourteen League vessels, only seven escaped. All seventy-eight Purist vessels were never heard from again, bringing the total to eighty-five ships lost in that single encounter.
Of the seven League ships that escaped, not one encountered anything within other than dust and gas. That means, unfortunately, that the only sentients to enter the Cloud and survive to tell about it saw nothing at all.
SCANT HISTORY
Punch-drive signatures were detected near the Cloud’s outer edges in 2530, marking the first indication that a sentient race might exist within. However, no signatures of early punch-drive testing or pre-punch technologies were detected as coming from that area, leading scientists to speculate that the Portath may have evolved deep within the Cloud’s interference zone. Or, possibly, that the race did not evolve within the Cloud at all, but rather arrived there from some other location — a location possibly outside of our own galaxy.
If the Portath are an extra-galactic culture, it would mark only the third known species to have not originated in the Milky Way, following the Givers and the Collectors (see the standard historical timeline for more information on those species).
The three systems that border the Cloud — the Tower Republic, the Leekee
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