The Zariman Ten Zero

The Zariman Ten Zero was built to carry the first wave of Orokin citizen-colonists to Tau. Archimedean Yonta designed her; Executor Tuvul of the Seven was patron of her maiden voyage. Her passengers were not soldiers. They were thousands of families, each allotted a dwelling in Tuvul Commons, with agri-biomes in the Greenway, a Lunaro arena and monuments along Everview Arc, and classrooms in the Halako Perimeter where a Cephalon named Melica taught the children Orokin theory of the Void.

Tuvul's own log tablets, scattered through the ship, chart what the voyage became. They open in flattery — that the love between patron and colonists is absolute — and pass through the promise that later citizens, secure in the comfort of an extrasolar Rail, would envy these first travellers their glory. Then the colonists began to object that the ship's Reliquary Drive was not safe at interstellar range, and the register changes. The air they breathed was reclassified as a revocable privilege. Rations were cut to one meal a day. Reprisals were threatened against their relatives back in Imperial space.

What Tuvul called the attempt, in the last of those tablets, was the first Void Jump beyond the cradle of the Origin System.

The loss is fixed precisely in the oldest surviving testimony: the ship was lost making the fold from Saturn to the Outer gates.

The last ordinary hour aboard is playable. Melica's class stands for the crew pledge — sworn by the glory and wisdom of the Seven, to carry the sacred light of their dominion into the deepest dark — and is then set an unscheduled examination in Temporal Axioms, a curriculum contrasting Presentism with Eternalism and citing Albrecht Entrati's writing on the Wall of Lohk. It is worth noticing what the empire thought it was teaching children on a ship about to fold: that all moments may exist at once, and that more than one outcome can be true.

Then Zariman Actual announces a routine Reliquary field drill. Melica tells the students to watch the windows. The countdown runs.

No source states what failed. The archive marks that plainly, because the gap is often filled with confident invention: what is attested is the fold, the drill announced immediately before it, and the colonists' documented protest that the Drive was unsafe at that range. Sabotage is not attested. Deliberate experimentation on the children is not attested.

The aftermath is attested in painful detail. The adults were mind-warped and turned feral, hunting through the corridors; the children were spared that and given power instead. Four recovered logs, kept by a man remembered only as the Husband, record the collapse from inside a single apartment — bodies in the passageways, some of them small ones, and his wife emerging starved and animal. The Greenway's agri-biomes were vented to vacuum in an attempt to turn the ship around, which killed the crops and starved whoever the corridors had not.

Two children are attested as having seen the thing that was aboard with them. The first was Rell, cast out by the others, who concluded that the Void concealed an amoral intelligence older than time and gave it the name the system still uses: the Man in the Wall. The second was the child this archive's reader has most likely played.

It appears among the barricaded children, is offered a lamp, and takes it with thanks. Later it returns with terms — that it can save them, all of them, but that the child has to want it — and a hand is shaken on the deal.

What that wording did, under the Eternalism the classroom had been teaching an hour earlier, is the strangest fact in this record. Two outcomes both became true. There is the child who was saved and carried home with the others to become Tenno, and there is the child who was not, who grew old alone aboard the derelict and became the Drifter. Only one of them may stand outside the Void at a time, and they can trade places.

Whether the entity caused the accident or merely arrived to trade on it is never stated anywhere, and the archive leaves it open. Ballas, watching the recovered children later, called them devils from that other hell.

The oldest account of the return is a military tribunal interrogating Kaleen, principal investigator of the Zariman. She had ruled the disappearance a mechanical failure, notified the families and closed the case, on the reasonable ground that nothing returns from the fold.

Days later the ship came back completely intact — full environmental, as though it had never left. The crew were gone. Then the investigators started finding children hiding aboard. Kaleen broke quarantine to comfort one of them and was burned for it: skin left moon-white, her mouth a lipless gash, her scalp scarred bare, her left eye lost. What became of her afterward is not recorded anywhere the archive can find.

Tuvul disowned the project entirely and moved to destroy every trace of it, the surviving children included. What prevented him was Archimedean Margulis, who adopted them instead — teaching them through dreams to hold the change rather than be held by it, and blinded herself in an early accident doing it. From that work came Transference, the Somatic Link, and the Reservoir hidden beneath Lua. The empire rewarded her mercy with the Jade Light, and Ballas, who loved her, carried her research onward into the Warframes.

The erasure was thorough: transit recordings wiped, personnel logs destroyed, and at tribunal the flat denial that any children had ever been aboard. Erasure, in Orokin practice, was never concealment of failure. It was containment of consequence.

After the New War the Zariman came back out of the fold without warning, lodged between one reality and the other, and began to sing — a call heard across the Origin System that drew Tenno, Grineer and Corpus toward it alike.

What waited aboard were the Holdfasts, and the archive is careful about what they are. Quinn, Archimedean Yonta, Hombask and Cavalero are not survivors. They are Conceptual Embodiments: the Void, given the memories of who those people were, made them again. Quinn puts it as creation rather than survival, and calls death a blank canvas. A fifth, Kira, lost that argument and became a Void Angel — as did others of the crew, cocooned in the walls, wailing and singing and no longer recognisably anyone.

When the Grineer restarted the damaged Reliquary Drive they triggered a cascade of manifestations called Thrax; the Angels answered by tearing ruptures in the Albrecht Membrane, the boundary the ship now sits in, and loosing Void Floods through them. After Kira was put down, the Holdfasts raised a memorial to her in the Chrysalith.

And the ship stays where it is, because it must. Yonta explains that the Zariman is not merely parked between realities — it is plugging the hole its own return tore through the Membrane, and moving it would let Void Storms out into the system. The empire's greatest disaster is now the cork in a bottle nobody can afford to open.