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"It is only in sorrow bad weather masters us; in joy we face the storm and defy it."
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Maelstrom Sargasso, Orion Arm, Dimensional Sea layer Sigil ᛋ (Estimated)
Sparrow watch 02 June 0065
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Tida Lanster
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Things were grim when we met again in the Captain's meeting room. The smell of burnt insulation underlines the wound dressings and splints festooning the command crew, it is odd how the absence of the tailored scent is more noticeable than it's presence.
With Merak still in surgery and the chief engineer once again delegating to Fan Liuha I found myself the senior full duty officer and the Captain signed for me to lead the meeting. She would listen but concussion and pain control was making it difficult for her to speak clearly.
"Liuha, how is the ship, " First the most critical issue.
"Damage control is still ongoing. The hull is tight, the main power core is down and that last surge pushed the secondary reactors into emergency shutdown. We have at least three hundred hours at current expenditures before reserve power drops below the level needed to restart one of the fusion reactors. We've lost both the main and reserve subspace manifolds, and thus the ansible, metric frame drive and teleporters until we rig a replacement." Fan was calm on the surface but her ears and tail betrayed her fatigue. "However most volatile memory both on devices and other independent hardware, and the main computer net has suffered a quantum encryption cascade due to baseline security protocols, and we have a shortage of quantum entropy modules to sort that out. Commander Seabring has a team looking to see if we've got the software for the reactors written to crystal. Both transition cores need a complete rebuild before charging and we can't charge them without all the reactors or the power core. Most of the core tap and transition software is on the backup crystals but not the updates from the most recent refit." She glanced at Sarika who took over.
"We lost the ansible before the storm hit, I had it trying to recover the links when the pulse hit, the overload surge on that final transition fried the offline storage with the link seeds, so even if we can get the software up, we can set up direct links with new seeds but that needs physical contact to bind the link, so we are out of contact with everywhere until we come into contact with a network node." Sarika might betray something to someone who knew her better but as far as I could see she was radiating calm confidence.
"Lieutenant Spiano?"
The supply officer looked resigned. "We don't have the consumable decryption tools to get the power back on. And while QEMs do restore their entropy over time we don't have the life support capabilities to wait that out without using power for some systems. Long-term low power life support relies on the hydroponics and those need light, gravity, temperature regulation, and pumps. If we lose power for the hydroponics for more than a day we have no more than a week to get to a breathable atmosphere. With a reactor up we can bring the scrubbers, protein sequencers, etc back online and then we are good for years."
"Basically If we have one of our reactors running we can with sufficient time fix pretty much everything. We don't have the QEMs to decrypt the reactor software or the exotic materials to make up the difference. The WORM backups we have for the power systems are from before the last refit. They should have been replaced by the ship yard, but Commander Rexton was dealing with the admin on that. I've got a team of light duty types checking to see if they've been misfiled or something." I've never met the XO that Fan mentioned, since he'd managed a major sporting accident while on leave the day before I reported aboard.
"Lieutenant Tipo. Our external situation?"
"We are currently at rest in a four light second radius gravity eddy on, as far as I can tell, layer Sigil, twelve layers in from normal space. There is an agglomeration of wreckage roughly 40 kilometers in diameter at the center of the space. I recommend once we have even limited real-space maneuvering capability that we relocate to a position where we can duck into one of the crevasses on the surface, in case the eddy contracts."
"Lieutenant Levant, what does Scrying have for us?"
"Scrying resolution inside the eddy is better than I'd expect above layer Eth. Scrying beyond the eddy wall is for all intents and purposes non-existent. As for the object Professor Scrya has been studying it and is better able to speak on it." Clarissa nods her head to the otter sitting on the table setting her black fishtail braids swinging for a moment.
"Doctor den Ihoka?"
"We have eleven dead, ninety six people on restricted duties and twenty three seriously injured, plus the archaeological team are mostly still in medical comas.", den Ihoka was brisk, the clipped tones of a formal report covering the anger I could see in the set of her ears. Roughly a quarter of the crew out of action."Most of the Mage Team and the Damage control teams are not fit for any kind of duty for at least a week, since they couldn't lock down. About half of Engineering is nominally functional. The Captain has a broken leg and enough other injuries she's only fit for light duties under an extreme interpretation of the rules. Academician Scrya should be provisionally fit tomorrow, so long as she doesn't put excessive strain on her linker core, and remains in that form for a week or so. Her device has her temporary gold and red lines on mana throughput."
"Miss Scarlet"?
"Thanks to your reminder as well as my basic system drivers, I have my combat system programming and spellware engraved to crystal. Including time to shuffle the locked down data structures to back up and getting my internal repair systems online, I should have nearly full combat capability available within eight hours. The majority of my informational support databases are locked but I would prioritise Professor Scrya's over them. Hers are likely to be both more detailed and useful, unless we need override codes or passwords for Caledfwlch Techniques hardware. My shipboard engineering support was in active memory and so was was backed up. The newest Alpino Heavy Industries reactor control software is two years old though." She paused for a moment lag evident in her facial muscles. "Otherwise I am surprised to be alive, I did not believe that was survivable."
"In the middle of it, the Doctor bet me we would live." I replied. "But then I'm not sure how I'd collect if we didn't."
A poor joke but I could see worry fading from the faces around the table as I asked, "Actually, now I think of it, what do I owe you, Doctor? I'm not sure I remember the stakes."
"I'm afraid for the moment those are most secret Lieutenant Commander. After we get back to Headquarters, they might actually read you on to the relevant clearance." As expected despite her fatigue Ah Ni was ready to help treat the tension that our situation had brought. Other than Miss Scarlett who appeared to be rebooting her facial expressions we shared a quick round of chuckles and grimaces in the wake of the wink she punctuated that with.
"Academician, what can you tell us about the object at the center of the gravity eddy?"
Academician Scrya gestured a forepaw at the sphere floating in the middle of the display, "Not counting minor wreckage, in the main cluster there are a number of civilian hulls, mostly larger rough landing types, a Todesschatten class battleraider with a live if low output DMR," a blue semi streamlined oblate cylinder bristling with tachyon implosion cannons and a swept back command tower, " a Maricot class assault ram," looking like nothing so much as a pair of short swords attached to a hat box, ""A Kahrian Consulate artillery cruiser" the 1.4 kilometer long, red and brown splinter camouflaged, truncated diamond core hull appeared to be lacking its rear wings and weapons rollbars, "an Altan Cybernetic Hegemony deep range cruiser" only two of the three weapon nacelles still attached to the central hull and major cracks in the green sphere of its space distortion drive. "A Belkan Grosskreuz class race rigged battlecruiser" all platinum inlaid white battlesteel wrapped around a pair of cylindrical outriggers outboard of an oversized spherical power core mated directly to a dimensional fracture lance, "at least two Type-42LD HAUs, " brutalist truncated trapezohedroid pyramidal slabs of armour roughly a match for Tabris. "a Lucky Seven class cruiser" up gunned with the second tapered cylinder of a heavy mission pack replacing the ventral thrust array under its main hull, "a Ubiq Technocracy Projekt 60 assault transport" A half kilometer long variable geometry aerodyne lifting body whose dimensional manifold blades could rotate outwards 120 degrees to provide additional lift in low speed flight. "at least a third of the wreckage we can definitively state comes from unknown sources." including it appeared an asteroid that had been fitted with five drive vanes of varying size and shape.
"I think we are going to have to send a team to scavenge for materials." The nods from the others as I said this confirmed that I hadn't missed an obvious other solution to our problems behind the summaries of our situation. Not that I liked the idea of putting the ship or anyone aboard near enough to a detectable Dark Matter Reactor to run power cables to it for any length of time. Let us call that plan Uncle, leaving enough space for even less pleasant ideas afterward.
"This will be like any other archaeology dig, we should touch as little as possible and keep as many records as possible. Military Starship crashes are one of the worst possible environments for an archaeological investigation. High powered hardware, anti-boarding measures, and deliberate destructive devices associated with information security and of course in the most paranoid cases total self destructs. Unfortunately, none of the more or less intact civilian wreckage is likely to have what we need.
We will not have all of the usual advantages, while we do have some of the exploit databases and what software we have available are generally the product of a wider array of technological ecosystems than the designers of any of the ships I recognize had access to, we don't have the access to the Infinite Library and the Academy's full archives, and military designs tend to be designed by paranoids.
Most of the wreckage is old, by TSAB standards and that means it tends to rely on esoteric material sciences that Administered space has not found efficient to redevelop, coupled with the advantage of having had access to most of the relevant civilizations' information technology bases for a couple of hundred years or so, we should be able to use their hardware. If any of it was from the Superb and Serene Republic we should have the software to get more out of a lot of it than the creators could, even limited to the adaptive tools we've got written to crystal, but without communication back to the Administration we will be more limited with respect to most ecosystems."
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