Temperatures in space, in the Cosmic Microwave Background, were generally in freezing. 2.7 kelvin. -454.81 degrees Fahrenheit. -270.45 degrees Celsius. Just a hair above absolutely zero, where all molecular motion stopped.
But space, more than anything else, was dramatic and all of it, everything that existed in it, picked that up. So there were a few places in the black edges of space that reached absolute zero. Those spaces were generally called voids and unless you could maintain enough power and heat to make it through to the other side without stopping.
Stopping was death.
But temperatures near a sun star could top 300 degrees Fahrenheit and there were coronas that reached temperatures exceeding 1,200,000 Kelvin.
There wasn't any reliable way to predict what you were going to find either. Star Maps, created by an enterprising adventurer only ten years after NASA had launched Starshot, who'd seen the writing on the wall about humanities time on Earth, could record what had been found, but nothing in space was ever still.
Star Maps were massive repositories of data that took up an incredible 10% of the system memory aboard the ships. Nothing else took up that much space. Locations of every imaginable object that could be found in space and constantly updated via sensors that covered any ship in every direction. Roaming sensors downloaded updates whenever a ship came within range and the Alari and Valerii had shared their own data on star positions.
But we're getting off topic.
Dante's Inferno.
Space is cold.
Parasites.
Most warm-blooded creatures struggled in space, but there were even fewer cold-blooded animals.
Yet the parasites were cold-blooded. Ectothermic. Their body temperature regulated by their environment. In the colder parts of space, they didn't move nearly as fast as they did in others, but they could survive in all of them. During the war, the Alari-Earth Alliance had gotten lucky and stumbled on several of the hive ships in colder regions of space and had been able to destroy them simply by being able to move faster.
It was the realization of temperature's affect that led to the creation of Dante's Inferno. Contrary to its name it wasn't a fire, because fire didn't exist anywhere in space except on Earth and on ships built to mimic Earth's atmosphere.
What it was, was hot. Pure heat as such temperatures that it cut through every known metal like a knife through butter. Brenton Teller's chief engineer had come up with it. Scrambling the ship's shield molecules to increase the amount of kinetic activity and thus the thermal energy.
He turned the shield into a heated blade and while it made sense from an offensive point of view, and even a defensive one, it was another thing entirely to actually use it.
Because it was the ship's shield, it couldn't be extended like an sword or fired like a weapon, it made the ship itself the blade and because of the temperatures it reached, it could only be used in this configuration for a short period, a matter of minutes, before the heat started to fry the ship's other systems and the crew inside.
To use Dante's Inferno, the ship's shield had to be reconfigured to generate heat, and how long that took depending on how much power could be diverted to it at the time. Once it had reached the optimal temperature, the pilot had to fly the ship straight through the enemy ship before the shield became so hot it started to backfire.
The attack had to be quick, precise, and devastating because both the heat and the speed, because they had to continue moving until they were completely clear of the enemy ship, needed to survive their own attack required a significant amount of power.
There was no using the attack twice in one battle.
Teller called it Dante's Inferno because of how hot the ship became despite its cooling systems and because the Alari, who'd witnessed its first use, claimed the ship appeared to be superheated like a laser from the outside.
It was devastatingly effective against the parasite ships.
It was devastatingly effective against any ship. Finley had even used it against Republican ships during the civil war.
It quickly became a signature of forces from Earth, as no other race was willing to risk using a weapon that could so easily backfire, and humankind quickly remembered they shouldn't share everything with those who didn't share their fate.
Once the last parasite ships had been destroyed and the twenty-year conflict ended, Dante's Inferno became a rare sight. The generation of Captains bold enough to use it died out before the next major conflict and Finley had been one of only a handful on both sides who'd used it during the civil war hundreds of years later.
Dante's Inferno came to represent humankind's mastery in war, their tendency towards risk and their tenacity in survival.
Like the Light Wall had come to represent their control and their fear.
Their desperation.
With the threat of the parasites removed, hopefully forever, but unlikely when being practical, humankind had attempted to return to exploration, but a small party started to grow among the population. A group preaching withdrawal and isolation from the rest of the universe after seeing the horrors it had to offer.
It took a few hundred years for them to grow big enough to have any real say in the direction humanity was taking, but they got their eventually. A few more run-ins with less than friendly alien races that resulted in less memorable conflicts helped them along. They'd become the majority in power when Finley was a child and started building the Light Wall when she was seventeen, completely it only three short years later.
There'd been one tense, quiet year and then the civil war had broken out.
Humanity, despite fearing a lot of what they'd found outside their home galaxy had quickly realized they didn't want to give it all up just to be safe. The Republicans wanted to return to travel beyond the wall and trade with the alien races they trusted. The Federation wanted to be self-sustaining in the solar system and to avoid being drawn into more conflicts on behalf of allies outside humankind.
Finley had already been enlisted when the war broke out and she'd chosen a side without hesitation.
And now she was coming face to face with the Light Wall for the first time in her life.
~ tbc