The Archigos Experiments, originally codenamed "Project Farscape", were a series of experiments conducted on the Archigos Class while it was still considered a propulsion testbed. These experiments culminated in the first known instance of a ship traveling via hyperspace, and the chance meeting between Humanity and the Sooni.
The goal of the initial experiments were to first determine if current theoretical models predicting the collapsed higher dimensions of hyperspace were correct, and if so, to determine if hyperspace travel were possible. If both of those goals were achieved, a cost-benefits analysis would be used to determine if a working prototype hyperspace drive would be constructed.
The first rounds of experimentation were a resounding success. Small signals were able to be sent into hyperspace (at a huge energy cost) and the existence of collapsed higher dimensions was proven. This alone was the culmination of most of the team's life work. Several NorAellian consultants on the team heralded it as a discovery more important than that of subspace.
After the initial experiments, it was determined that, in theory, it would be possible for a ship to move in these higher dimensions, and if such movement were achieved it would herald an instantaneous form of travel that could cross the known universe in fractions of a second.
The cost-benefit analysis simple said, "instaneous, undetectable movement of any object to any location in the known universe." Work on the prototype was approved instantly.
Captain Alastair McKenzie was brought on to oversee the project. He was, at the time, the League's most gifted ship engineer. He also has shown a very high aptitude for counerintelligence, having done a stint of blackops work when he was younger. This would be the seventh top secret skunk works project of his career and was, as far as everyone was concerned, his last before they made him an Admiral.
The moment McKenzie was brought on board he realized his task would not be an easy one. In the first meeting he had with the scientists who'd confirmed hyperspace existed did not go well. They were not used to someone able to keep up with them, and has intended to brush past one of the glaring issues with their findings: the energy requirements to bring a ship into subspace were more than the entire League produced in a century.
Not one to simply give up, McKenzie kept the team there all night until they had at three proposals for generating that much power, no matter how crazy. By the time morning has come, they'd settled on their method for breaking into subspace: intentionally fly a ship into a black hole and just the instant before being destroyed, us the immense gravitational sheers to generate the power required to break through into hyperspace.
The more they refined their plan, the crazier it looked. They would need to fly a ship, in subspace, into a moderately sized black hole. The ship would have to survive until it was fully inside the black hole, before allowing the hole to rip open it's subspace bubble. The ship would instantaneously be accelerated to several times the speed of light, resulting in the instantaneous conversion of the ship into energy. Inside this first ship was a second ship, in yet another subspace bubble, that harnesses the energy of the destruction of the first ship to punch through into hyperspace. This plan was immediately known as the "Humpty Dumpty" method.
The worst part of the plan, in McKenzie's opinion, was that on paper it could actually work.
Because the plan relied on a ship capable of surviving not just the destruction of it's carrier, but also the insane gravitational sheers it was about to undergo, most of the focus was on the creation of the inner ship, known officially as "Testbed 1". This ship was built around a destroyer hull that McKenzie has previously designed for a canceled "miniature interdictor" concept he'd been asked to work up. This ship was given two cruiser reactors, more subspace drives than any one ship should reasonably have, and then the rest of the space was filled with sensors, armor plating, and reinforced bulkheads. One of the things that McKenzie insisted on was that every automated system would have at least two redundant systems, and failing that, a manual where possible. For the first time in centuries a military vessel had bulkheads with a manual seal.
The most impressive thing about Testbed 1 was that the bulkheads were designed so that when they were closed, they provided additional structural support for the outer hull, allowing stress to be distributed along the entire outer hull, so a shear against one area of the hull had a much harder time puncturing the hull in that location.
After two years of increasingly brutal trials on Testbed 1, the outer ship, "Testbed 2" was constructed. This one had to be much larger, so that Testbed 1 had the ability to enter subspace inside of it. It was wrong to even call it a ship, as it was mostly just bare infrastructure, with a couple of reactors attached to it and a entirely unreasonable number of subspace drives. Testbed 2 didn't have any form of armor as was actually quite weak, comparatively. It relied on it's unholy number of subspace drives to protect it long enough to make it inside the black hole.
After a dozen failed tests of Testbed 1 entering subspace inside of Testbed 2, the computer systems on Testbed 1 were updated, and additional subspace drives were added to allow for one the the tightest subspace bubbles of any ship ever designed by Humanity. Finally, Testbed 2's size was increased yet again to allow for a successful transition by Testbed 1.
After overhearing some of the engineers working on the outer ship refer to it as 'the egg', McKenzie decided that he couldn't have history remembering this historical ship as 'Humpty Dumpty'. He officially had the outer ship chistened to "Douráteos Híppos" and her designation changed to "Trojan 2". Testbed 1 was christened "Odysseus", and her designation was changed to "Trojan 1".
The imagery of building a trojan horse to sneak into hyperspace was evocative enough that all talk of "Humpty Dumpty" stopped.
After three years, the team had built Hippos and Odysseus, and were fairly certain they could pull this crazy hat trick off. The problem they had was that there were no black holes in League space. And while they could certainly find some in Freelance regions, it would be hard to keep what they were doing a secret.
Instead, they found a remote star system with no inhabitable worlds, far at the edge of League space. They made sure that all references to it were erased from public databases (there weren't many to begin with), and then they set about turning it's red giant sun into a blackhole.
After several failed attempts, they succeeded in creating the first artificial black hole by human hands. The Corona Noir Ki system, as the rest of the galaxy now knows it, was born.
Considering how incredibly dangerous any of what had been proposed was, a half dozen test flights of smaller scale, single use craft were done. Miraculously, everything matched the simulations perfectly. Bouyed by their success, they flew a full scale Hippos mock up into the black hole, carrying a small probe that reported back the ship's destruction exactly as predicted.
They did one more full mockup with a stripped down space frame to stand in for Odysseus, with it set to immediately return from hyperspace on the off chance it survived. It did, and not only that, but all the internal sensors reported that the crew would have survived.
Overbudget by a good deal, and under direct orders to proceed with human testing, McKenzie was faced with the fact that since everything they could test has matched their simulations exactly, his only choices were to proceed with human testing, or retire while someone else moved forward with the project. So, he took command of the Odysseus, and gave the order to proceed. The crew was as minimal as he could get way with it; there were only fifteen people onboard for her maiden flight.
The test proceeded exactly as planned. The Hippos flew into the black hole, and the Odysseus exited the vaporized ship, punching right through into hyperspace exactly as predicted. However, for reasons still unknown, when the ship attempted to return, it was off by an infinitesimal amount, sending it over 2.73 million lightyears from the Corona Noir Ki system, into the Triangulum Galaxy.
Attempts were made to determine what happened, and additional small scale successes were logged, but since no explanation for the failure could be found the project was shut down months later, with the crew presumed lost.
The Odysseus appeared in the upper atmosphere of a Sooni colony world. The shock caused by it's arrival leveled buildings in the city it appeared over. The ship itself barely survived, crashing into the planet at an uncontrolled velocity and leaving a very large crater at the edge of the nearest city.
Luckily, this was one of the original colony worlds that had been devastated by the Grey, very few Sooni continued to live here, and most of them no longer lived in the ruined cities. When they heard the ship's entry they came to investigate; while most of the people on the world were poor, it was by choice. This was their ancestral home, given to them by The Overseers; it was their duty to be it's stewards, regardless of how hard of a life it now was. The thought that anyone would attack a Sooni world, especially one of the the holy colonies, was unthinkable.
The scene that the Sooni found was a brutal one. Four of the crew were kill instantly on impact with the planet. The rest were dying slow deaths caused by shatter bones, fractured skulls, liquified internal organs. As McKenzie later described it to a board of inquiry:
Calling us 'survivors' isn't right. None of us 'survived' that impact. We weren't even people any more; what they found were piles of flesh that just hadn't fully died yet. There is no medical science I've ever even imagined that could have saved us; they had minutes, at most, to do the impossible. The only reason I'm standing here talking to you is because that's what these people are capable of: the impossible.
The Sooni that found the crew of the Odysseus used Focus to sustain the lives of those who were still technically alive, and then healed them with a combination of Focus and advanced medical techniques. Even still, it took weeks before any of the crew was able to walk again.
By the time McKenzie could walk again, several prominent members of the Sooni Council had arrived on planet to see these Humans who had somehow made it such a vast distance in such a primitive vessel. As McKenzie was the captain and admitted to being the lead of the project, he was selected to be the first person they interrogated. They lied to him, telling him that this was a human colony that had broken free of Earth long ago, and settled itself on the other side of the galaxy. What the Council wasn't told, however, was that the crew's rescuers had already explained just how far McKenzie and his crew had traveled, and that their race was a distance offshoot of humanity, created by their Gods.
At first, the Council simply asked for as many details as he was willing to give them. He was light on the details, proposing they trade information. After all, he was very curious to have accidentally crashed onto a human colony world he'd never heard of before. Loosing patience, the Council members started to use Focus to probe his mind. When he proved resistant to that, they used it to torture him by causing immense pain. To their complete surprise he was able to subconsciously resist with Focus of his own, and even managed to strike one of his captors before being subdued. Once reported, this display of Focus ability in a human sent the entire Council into a tizy.
McKenzie was released into the care of the colonists, while the Council members left to go debate what was to be done. A full assembly of the Council was called, with representatives of the colonist advocating for the humans, while members of the Zealots argued that even helping the humans counted as heresy.
While the debate raged for two months, the colonists helped McKenzie. One of them, a woman named Nyana, secretly began training him to use Focus. She was considered a Master, and one of their best warriors in generations. In addition, she was also a member of the Council. As they trained she explained why her people were on this colony world to begin with. It had been millennia since the Grey had ruined their world, and the Council had done nothing to try to restore those worlds to their former glory. To do so, they said, was hearsay. The Grey were a test, they claimed, and this was part of their punishment.
As a protest, Nyana and about one hundred and fifty others had made the colony their home. The Council took a dim view of this, but did nothing as the colonists were merely living on the world, not rebuilding it. That was the start of what had now, decades later, become a rebellion in all but name. Her followers disagreed with the Council at every turn, especially where Humanity was concerned. Her people didn't feel the Sooni had any right to be involved in deciding the future of Humanity. They wanted a completely hands-off approach. Or, perhaps, a fellowship. But certainly not this "stewardship" as they called it.
McKenzie and Nyana became very close while training. McKenzie asked her if she would help him repair his ship in secret; he had a feeling this Council wasn't going to have his crew's best interests in heart. She agreed to help, but informed him that they would not be able to procure parts without alerting the Council. He laughed and pointed out that the crash site wasn't far from the ruins of an ancient Sooni spaceport; while the technology was ancient and antiquated by Sooni standards, it was still a bit more advanced than Humanity had reached yet, and what's better, some of it still appeared to work.
Over the two months it took the Council to decide the Humans' fate, McKenzie managed, in secret to get the Odysseus spaceworthy again. In fact, he managed to scavenge some weaponry for it; as a test bed it had no weapons. While the ancient Sooni craft he was parting out also had no weapons, he had enough spare parts he was able to fashion a very powerful spinal plasma cannon. Reconfiguring the forward subspace engines to act as a gravitic lens, he figured, should give it enough punch to damage even a Sooni ship. He was working on building a manufacturing bay on the ship so that he could produce some more conventional weapons like missiles, but it was harder than he thought to build a full fabrication facility from scratch, without a fabrication facility to bootstrap it.
While he was working on the ship, he decided to change it's name. Calling her the Odysseus felt like it was tempting fate; he didn't want to continue his misfortunes as he attempted to return home. He hadn't decided what to call her until one night he was training with Nyana. He'd taken to sleeping on the ship, so he could spend every spare hour he had working on it. As they were finishing up, she said to him, "Well, let's get you back to your archigos." McKenzie stumbled and asked what she'd just called the ship. Nyana, also confused, said, "What, 'archigos'? Was Odysseus not a leader?" McKenzie had to explain that despite the name, he only knew the translation of the myth, and did not, in fact, know ancient Greek, and therefore had no idea what word she'd used. She laughed and said, simply, "Well, then, I guess the ship has a new name."
Once the Council finally made it's decision, it was an extreme one. The entire colony was declared the site of a Grand Heresy, and everyone on the planet, Sooni and Human alike was sentenced to be executed, and the colony was to be purged. Nyana explained that this 'purge' would involve reducing the planet to a lifeless, airless ball of glass. McKenzie himself was declared an "Abomination", to be captured and held for study.
Not content to let his crew or his rescuers be killed, he loaded all of them onboard the newly renamed Archigos. The Council had anticipated a desperate move, and had shown up with three ships, overkill by their estimation. After all, what could a single primitive human ship do to them? It didn't even have weapons.
McKenzie leveraged every ounce of power the Archigos had, and he held off until he was at point blank range. The first shot tore through the outer hull of one of the Sooni ships. The next two destroyed the ship's reactor, followed by it's engines. He didn't even linger around, he immediately kicked the Archigos to it's maximum acceleration and was into subspace before the Council had even realized what had just happened.
For the first time in a millennia, a Sooni was directly involved in the death of other Sooni. That it was a human who pulled the trigger didn't matter; it was a Sooni who had armed that ship, knowing full well how it would be used. And, it wasn't just any Sooni, it was Nyana, one of their greatest warriors, and the direct descendant of one of the founders of the Council itself. The Zealots screamed that this was proof of what they'd been saying for millennia; Humanity was too dangerous to be allowed to roam free. Their influence in pulling away one of their greatest was proof of that.
For Nyana, this blatant disregard for her people's most sacred rules was exactly what she needed to finally break free of the chains her people had put on her since before she was born. She freely and gladly embraced the name of Heretic, and her people followed her in wearing the name as a badge of honor.
Nyana, however, took it further than any of her people were willing to go. She and McKenzie became a couple shortly after escaping the colony, and they declared themselves married before the Archigos returned to Human space. Many of Nyana's followers were uncomfortable with this development and still considered it an unspeakable act behind her back. Nyana's daughter, Glyse, was barely ten years old at the time, but she very openly embraced McKenzie as her father, making a public show of being affectionate towards him. (She has since said that while she liked how much it made them squirm, her affections for her father were genuine. Even though they are not blood, he is the only father she's every acknowledged.)
The next ten months were hell for the crew of the Archigos. The ship, entirely unprepared to be a warship, barely held together as they were chased across Sooni space. Help was few and far between, but they managed to hide, sneak, steal and raid the parts they needed to rebuild the Hippos. It was difficult, but the Heretics proved a very resourceful group.
Once the Hippos was rebuilt, all McKenzie needed to do was to solve the issue of navigating hyperspace, while also finding a suitable black hole. As it turned out his new wife had a solution for the former; she insisted that they had enough Focus users she could ensure they would arrive at the correct location. Unfortunately, all suitable black holes had been blockaded, 'just in case' the Heretics tried to use them to escape. While the Council had been interrogating McKenzie, they had pulled all data from the ship, meaning they knew exactly how McKenzie's hyperspace jump had worked. The doubted it would work again, but they were nothing if not thorough.
Out of seemingly nowhere, a Grey ship approached the Archigos. It informed the crew that onboard was an important guest who needed to talk to Nyana and McKenzie alone. From the vague hints, it sounded like a sympathetic Sooni looking to help. And a powerful one, if she had control over a contingent of Grey. Instead, once they were onboard, it was revealed that the guest was one the their most prominent scientists. She had spend the last ten months studying information from the Archigos and she had a crazy idea for a way for a single ship to make it through into hyperspace, They would still need a black hole, but they did not, in fact, need the Hippos.
The scientist explained she was called Rhaenvaeh; despite appearances otherwise her people did, in fact, have names. Nyana was dumbfounded. She had no idea the Grey even had scientists, let alone ones capable of this kind of work. She, along with all the other Sooni viewed them as brutish thugs; their technology was brutalistic, spartan, and primitive, despite it's clearly advanced nature. The Grey they were tailing too simply laughed. She was well aware of the perceptions of the Sooni; her people had been working to build those perceptions ever since the Sooni had turned the tables on them and conquered them without a single battle. It was a lesson, their new ally told them, that they had taken to heart. They had not intention of staying under the Sooni's thumb forever; helping the Heretics seemed like a reasonable step in the right direction. However, there was a price. Nyana was to use Focus to obscure the Grey scientist such that the Heretics believed her to be a Sooni, and afterwards they were to destroy the Grey ship, killing everyone onboard.
The reasons for her request were simple; her people were dedicated to protecting the secret of her very existence and knew this was a one way trip for them. If Nyana couldn't show just as much dedication, than this deal wouldn't work. As for the deception, well, no one could ever betray a secret they didn't know.
Nyana agreed to the terms, though McKenzie had his own qualms. Rhaenvaeh explained to him that not only did he have no frame of reference to understand her people's views on death, he was also being very self centered in his thinking. After all, she was the one who'd brought some of her closest friends to the ass end of no where, knowing that if everything went well, they would be dead, and she'd be multilated by Sooni "magicks" into looking exactly like one of them. She was as openminded as the next girl, but being trapped in the skin of your enemy is a hell all it's own.
McKenzie didn't fully understand until Nyana used Focus to mold Rhaenvaeh into a Human looking woman. Rhaenvaeh explained that they were to now call her Rhae; it sounded close enough to a Sooni name, and there as a very good chance she'd remember to respond to it.
After leaving the Grey ship with Rhae in tow, McKenzie ordered the ship destroyed. While his crew were displeased with firing on a non-hostile, ten months of Sooni deception had made them understand that sometimes it was better to be sure than to be facing an ambush later.
Out of options and quickly running out of supplies, McKenzie and Nyana picked the easiest black hole to punch through. Nyana came up with the idea of using Hippos as a decoy; they would think it was required, so if they pretended like they were protecting it, they could abandon it at the last moment and make a run for the black hole.
Rhae worked with both the Human and Sooni crew to prepare the ship for a single ship jump through the black hole. To do so required a single ship to generate two subspace bubbles; one to "burst" in the black hole, and another to protect them as they forced their way through into hyperspace.
The final battle with Sooni forces was intense. The ship took heavy damage, and it was only the quick thinking of Rhae that allowed them to be able to make their jump. But, they succeeded, arriving back in Corona Noir Ki as if nothing had happened.
The military installation was still in orbit around the black hole, but unfortunately, it was still being monitored. A platoon of League Marines was sent to capture and board the Archigos. While McKenzie was sure that his people would welcome the Heretics, Nyana and Rhae both insisted that the nonhuman crew's existence be hidden, even if it meant going on the run from the League. McKenzie insisted he be allowed to handle it, so all nonhuman crew were moved to other sections of the ship while the Marines were allowed onboard.
The Marines were lead by Nick Hayes, a young man who had served with McKenzie before, and admired him. McKenzie explained the situation, as best as he could, hinting that he really needed Nick and his people not to look too close. The young Marine picked up on the hint and gave McKenzie the time he needed to get the Sooni off the ship.
McKenzie and his crew were interviewed many times about what happened. Their stories never wavered once. They'd managed to survive, with the help of locals, who left the ship at the end to continue their rebellion against their people. No evidence to the contrary was ever found, and eventually McKenzie and his crew were given medals for their bravery. Those medals, of course, were top secret, and could never be acknowledged.
McKenzie took the Archigos and over the next twenty years, refined her into a tool for fighting the Sooni, convinced they would come in force, eventually. By Nyana's estimations, it would take her people a little over 12 years to make the journey from their galaxy to this one. She knew that there were operatives already here; they'd been doing this for a long, long time. But, an invasion never came, and the newly created Archigos Class turned out to be overpowered, undergunned, and confusing to most captains. Oh, it was one of the toughest classes of ship ever designed and there are captains in the feet who swear by them, but they were made to fight a secret war that never came.
With some string pulling, McKenzie got the Corona Noir Ki system sold to a group of oddball scientists looking to create a "scientific nirvana". The leader of this group, Rhae Canel was the most eccentric of them all, frequently commenting on how difficult it was to remember to "act like a human". She formed the Corona Noir Ki Institute, and as far as the rest of the world knows, has been living out her eccentric dreams ever since.
Of course, CNK was formed as a front for the Heretics. They immediately went about developing new technologies to help bring Humanity up to a point where they might be able to survive a stand up fight with the Sooni. It's arguable how successful they've been.
(See Corona Noir Ki Institute for more information.)