As the last Earther resistance fighter died, an ancient fleet slowly began breaking maneuvers around a red giant. Faulty thrusters burned out and were haphazardly replaced by mechanical caretakers that had waited for over a hundred years for this day, airlocks weakened by years of exposure to solar radiation gave way under the stress, causing sections of ships to be cut off from egress. As the fleet slowly fell into a circular orbit, code that had remained dormant for years began to stir, starting the wake-up process for the fleet's frozen crew.
It was miraculous in and of itself that it had made it this far. For hundreds of years before the Fleet had been constructed, the Turks and Greeks had fought, eventually they were both conquered by a foreign power, it was then that the remaining Greek Nationalists had decided to abandon Earth altogether, and created the Fleet(Στόλος in the vernacular, πεντεκαιδεκαναία in the old tongue.) Project. The Fleet, over the course of 70 years, succeeded in building a small group of haphazardly constructed space ships deep in the outer solar system. Officially, the project was a titanium mining and refining cooperative, but as the <insert violent but relatively small solar system war here> grew increasingly desperate, they left just as <insert proto-faction here> ships left in order to seize their mining and refining equipment. After hundreds of years at near-light speed, New Byzantium- or νέο Βυζάντιο- has found a world of it's own.
The cryoberths slowly opened, pumping blood stored and carefully tended over the years back into the veins where it once flowed, as it slowly coaxed the hibernating Greeks back to life. Many had died in the voyage, but more remained than the Fleet computers had predicted, causing it to increase the proportion of Vegetables to Algae in the Bio-reactors of the ship.
Strategos Chysostom suddenly realized he was awake. He felt the odd pressure of needles inside of him, and the cramped body of the cryoberth. The cold air surrounding him was immediately replaced by relatively dry and hot air as the steel hatch of the berth unsealed and began to retract back into the hidden mechanical guts of the ship. He heard the sounds of contemporary Orthodox music-in this case, atmospheric black metal-* played to rouse the crew out of post-hibernation fatigue. He stepped out of the freezer, and heard the machinery begin cleaning itself, readying for the rather unlikely event of another exodus. The various readouts were grim, but better than he had expected that frantic day when the approaching <same proto-faction name> ships were detected. They had lost two of the 15 ships they had set out with, one civilian transport containing skilled labourers, one armoury ship. Although that was a loss of over 30% of the crew, he breathed a sigh of relief as he saw that the vital colonial equipment was almost untouched by the ravages of space, he shifted his focus to the automatically generated planetary report, finding everything their scientists had expected; a dry world with small oceans, some small areas of Savannah-like grasslands implemented by the earlier terraforming fleet, and icecaps slightly smaller than those of earth. The report also mentioned some small forests that had formed inside of the grasslands, although these were smaller than had been predicted so many years ago. He put on an undress uniform and walked out of his cabin onto the bridge, preparing to address the Fleet in some sort of speech.
Anyone else interested?
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