[x] Prosecute the sensor contact in the outer system. It's probably nothing, but.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[X] Special Agent Atticus Lee of the Office of Special Projects
Dude just won't die.
Dude just won't die.
- Location
- Humanity's Capital - New York
We're into the next vote now but yes he lives to thwart Darlan, no matter the universe.
[X] Prosecute the sensor contact in the outer system. It's probably nothing, but.
Many of us know what happens to GolCom Xcruisers on the hypergrid when they're getting stalked by 'unconfirmed sensor contacts'. It's obviously five reapers just waiting to bumrush you. 'Expedition vanishes without a trace'.
Many of us know what happens to GolCom Xcruisers on the hypergrid when they're getting stalked by 'unconfirmed sensor contacts'. It's obviously five reapers just waiting to bumrush you. 'Expedition vanishes without a trace'.
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[X] Prosecute the sensor contact in the outer system. It's probably nothing, but.
- Location
- America
[X] Follow up on the intelligence you've gotten from OSP.
Mission 1.3
- Location
- Humanity's Capital - New York
Main Bridge, GCS Challenger
Outer Reaches of Ctesiphon System
February 2nd, 2452
You idly drum the armest of the command chair with your fingers as the Challenger finally closes in with her quarry. It had taken over a day to boost out this far, deep in the outer reaches of the system, and then a couple more just to locate your quarry. That there was some kind of refined materials signature out there, but it was small, and a star system, contrary to popular imagination, was not. The Challenger had searched a volume roughly an AU on a side to locate what they were now closing in on.
"Science team, anything?" You ask as you stare at the holotank. The Jovian Sunrise had, in fact, transitioned yesterday into the system, well behind schedule. The system defense CO had passed along their report-a blown Alcubierre tensor that should have been replaced six months ago. You're glad you trusted your gut instinct on that one, because there was no way your ship would have been able to track down the sensor signature again a week later if they hadn't run it down immediately.
"We're getting some spectroscopic returns now, sir." the civilian who was manning the science station replied. A multipurpose station with a few seats on it, it could be configured to assist in whatever specialty was needed at the moment. It could act to assist a diplomat handle a tricky First Contact or a planetologist scanning a world to map out tectonic plates. Right now, it was configured for deep space telemetry, as two remote probes closed in ahead of the ship in case the damn thing blew up.
"Throw it up on the main holotank, window two." you order, turning to look as the analysis on the sensor return came in. Chromium, titanium, iron, pretty standard in principle but the mix was strange. The mass return was small, less than five hundred kilograms. Either some kind of probe or some form of tech that allowed it to fool grav-mass sensors. You'd know in a minute.
"Twenty seconds until a visual, sir."
You nod, eyeballing the ship status screen in the top corner of the holotank. You had ordered the ship to Condition Two when you'd locked in on the return's location, just in case. Damage control crews were standing by and the shields were warmed up, but you weren't expecting combat.
"Feeding it through...now."
The feed from the probe was real-time, you were close enough that light-lag wasn't a real serious issue for what you were doing, and the image cleared up as the ship's AI, *Weiss, cleared away distortions and allocated additional bandwidth to the take. It was, in fact, a probe, of the sort built in a hundred places by everyone in order to keep an eye on someone else. You recognized it by the broad strokes for all you can't pin down the model or maker. "*Weiss, can you run that thing through the warbook, tell us who made it?"
"Negative, Captain." the ship's AI replied smoothly, his face incarnating on a secondary screen. Some ship AI preferred a physical body, but *Weiss had always considered himself an infomorph and disdained the physical unless it was needed. He did understand the value humans placed in having someone to look at when conversing, however, and had long adopted a vaguely human-looking avatar to use for the purpose.
"Really now? Not even a partial match?"
"The closest is a 24th century Hemisphere War vintage recon probe used by Cheongju. Even still, it's only a 52% match. There are also emissions inconsistent with human technology at work here. Not Open Palm or its derivations, nor does it match any known smart-matter templates."
Your eyebrows raise at that. This just got interesting. "Well if we can't figure out who it belongs to, nobody can object to us collecting the litter." you say, a couple of the bridge crew smiling at your early-shift humor. "Operations, send out a few more work drones, let's bring this thing aboard into the isolation bay. I don't want it near our fighters in case there is smart matter onboard." you press a button your command chair. "Bridge to Engineering."
"Engineering here." the relaxed tone of Gessica Hoedemaeker comes back a moment later. You are, again, thankful you managed to at least keep her from getting poached by other ships.
"Gess, we've got something that looks like a sensor drone we're going to bring onboard, of an unknown make, possibly with non-human tech. Would you be so kind as to get a team together at the secure quarantine hanger in..." you check the clock briefly. "Half an hour and work your magic on it?"
"My pleasure sir. Engineering out."
You turn back to the holotank to watch the drones do their work, considering your next option. Do you...
[] Wait until Commander Hoedemaeker completes her breakdown of the probe (Significantly faster option than default due to character selection)
[] Immediately follow up on the intel package that OSP provided you
Outer Reaches of Ctesiphon System
February 2nd, 2452
You idly drum the armest of the command chair with your fingers as the Challenger finally closes in with her quarry. It had taken over a day to boost out this far, deep in the outer reaches of the system, and then a couple more just to locate your quarry. That there was some kind of refined materials signature out there, but it was small, and a star system, contrary to popular imagination, was not. The Challenger had searched a volume roughly an AU on a side to locate what they were now closing in on.
"Science team, anything?" You ask as you stare at the holotank. The Jovian Sunrise had, in fact, transitioned yesterday into the system, well behind schedule. The system defense CO had passed along their report-a blown Alcubierre tensor that should have been replaced six months ago. You're glad you trusted your gut instinct on that one, because there was no way your ship would have been able to track down the sensor signature again a week later if they hadn't run it down immediately.
"We're getting some spectroscopic returns now, sir." the civilian who was manning the science station replied. A multipurpose station with a few seats on it, it could be configured to assist in whatever specialty was needed at the moment. It could act to assist a diplomat handle a tricky First Contact or a planetologist scanning a world to map out tectonic plates. Right now, it was configured for deep space telemetry, as two remote probes closed in ahead of the ship in case the damn thing blew up.
"Throw it up on the main holotank, window two." you order, turning to look as the analysis on the sensor return came in. Chromium, titanium, iron, pretty standard in principle but the mix was strange. The mass return was small, less than five hundred kilograms. Either some kind of probe or some form of tech that allowed it to fool grav-mass sensors. You'd know in a minute.
"Twenty seconds until a visual, sir."
You nod, eyeballing the ship status screen in the top corner of the holotank. You had ordered the ship to Condition Two when you'd locked in on the return's location, just in case. Damage control crews were standing by and the shields were warmed up, but you weren't expecting combat.
"Feeding it through...now."
The feed from the probe was real-time, you were close enough that light-lag wasn't a real serious issue for what you were doing, and the image cleared up as the ship's AI, *Weiss, cleared away distortions and allocated additional bandwidth to the take. It was, in fact, a probe, of the sort built in a hundred places by everyone in order to keep an eye on someone else. You recognized it by the broad strokes for all you can't pin down the model or maker. "*Weiss, can you run that thing through the warbook, tell us who made it?"
"Negative, Captain." the ship's AI replied smoothly, his face incarnating on a secondary screen. Some ship AI preferred a physical body, but *Weiss had always considered himself an infomorph and disdained the physical unless it was needed. He did understand the value humans placed in having someone to look at when conversing, however, and had long adopted a vaguely human-looking avatar to use for the purpose.
"Really now? Not even a partial match?"
"The closest is a 24th century Hemisphere War vintage recon probe used by Cheongju. Even still, it's only a 52% match. There are also emissions inconsistent with human technology at work here. Not Open Palm or its derivations, nor does it match any known smart-matter templates."
Your eyebrows raise at that. This just got interesting. "Well if we can't figure out who it belongs to, nobody can object to us collecting the litter." you say, a couple of the bridge crew smiling at your early-shift humor. "Operations, send out a few more work drones, let's bring this thing aboard into the isolation bay. I don't want it near our fighters in case there is smart matter onboard." you press a button your command chair. "Bridge to Engineering."
"Engineering here." the relaxed tone of Gessica Hoedemaeker comes back a moment later. You are, again, thankful you managed to at least keep her from getting poached by other ships.
"Gess, we've got something that looks like a sensor drone we're going to bring onboard, of an unknown make, possibly with non-human tech. Would you be so kind as to get a team together at the secure quarantine hanger in..." you check the clock briefly. "Half an hour and work your magic on it?"
"My pleasure sir. Engineering out."
You turn back to the holotank to watch the drones do their work, considering your next option. Do you...
[] Wait until Commander Hoedemaeker completes her breakdown of the probe (Significantly faster option than default due to character selection)
[] Immediately follow up on the intel package that OSP provided you
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
[x] Wait until Commander Hoedemaeker completes her breakdown of the probe (Significantly faster option than default due to character selection)
- Location
- America
[X] Immediately follow up on the intel package that OSP provided you
I figure that we're going to have to do this at some point, and now is as good a time as any.
I figure that we're going to have to do this at some point, and now is as good a time as any.
Last edited:
- Location
- Earth
[x] Wait until Commander Hoedemaeker completes her breakdown of the probe (Significantly faster option than default due to character selection)
Mission 1.4
- Location
- Humanity's Capital - New York
Briefing Room, GCS Challenger
Outer Reaches of Ctesiphon System
February 4th, 2452
The exploded diagram of the recovered probe floated above the conference table elements of human and non-human technology bodged together with an impressive degree of ingenuity. You pace around the table as Commander Hoedemaeker and her team finish prepping for the briefing, examining the portions of the sensor probe you can recognize and where they mesh with very unfamiliar technology.
It had only taken the Commander and her team about a day and a half to break down the probe and figure out what made it tick, and the Challenger needed most of that time to work her way back in-system anyway. Yes, you could fold out from the deep reaches of the system if you had to, but you weren't sure you were even done at Ctesiphon, so nothing had really been lost giving her the time she'd needed.
"So we've got two very distinct bits of kit here." Gessica said as you stopped your pacing to scratch at your chin. "The first is, in fact, Hemisphere War-era military surplus, from Cheongju."
A large section of the probe, mostly the recognizable parts, lit up on the holotable.
"The serial numbers were all filed off, of course, but we had root level codes to the computer core of the damn thing and just pulled them off of that. The probe was part of a batch lot sold decades ago as surplus, to Johnson Dynamics. They used them for mining operations, but stopped after a while and our records show the remaining stock ended up in a warehouse somewhere. The stocks were eventually sold as scrap to some third party breakers with, shall we say, connections. One of them went down a decade ago for some shady shit, but, you know, airlock door after atmo's been vented." Gessica sighed, tossing a datapad onto the table.
"The other part's more interesting. Definitely non-human, equally definitely not OPF spec or smart-matter. Old, too, radiocarbon dating is tricky given we're talking refined materials that live in a vacuum but definitely at least ten thousand years old. Not contemporary, the metallurgy doesn't match anything we've got on file for extant species. Science team's digging in the archives for any clues on the archaeology side, but who knows. This sort of thing is tricky."
"So which parts of the probe were doing what?" you ask, squinting and trying to make sense of the hash on the screen. Engineering was not your gig.
"Looks like human for the sensors and recording, xenotech for the powerplant and the stealth features. Really solid sensor baffling built in, on spec with our top-end gear. Real luck of the draw that we could even pick it up, sir." Gessica answers, highlighting some segments of the diagram with a wave of her hand. "The power core was completely undetectable until we were within a hundred klicks of the thing, the only reason we picked it up on the first place was optical reflection off of the sensor boom."
You nod. There was plenty of junk in any inhabited system, but most of that junk was tracked by sensor networks in case it proved to be a navigational hazard. Humanity had learned the importance of that before they'd even left Earth's orbit regularly, and cleaning up the Kessler Cascade post-Collapse had been a nightmare. If something wasn't tagged in a system's orbital tracking network and was picked up by a ship sensor, it tended to get a lot of attention.
"What was it recording, exactly?"
"Routine traffic patterns, military patrols, that kind of thing. Pretty standard surveillance mission set. The AI on this thing is dumb as a brick so neither *Weiss or I could get much from it, but we literally were able to pull some of the unfiltered take out of the data storage."
You grunt in thought. This was definitely getting weird.
What investigation route do you take next?
[] The sensor probe is unrelated to the antimatter problem. Leave it for now. Follow up on the OSP dossier
[] Follow the data trail on the lot of probes from Cheongju to the breakers to see if you can determine where they may have been sold onto.
[] Consult with Expeditionary Command's science divisions to see if you can get any leads on the origins of the alien part of the sensor probe.
Outer Reaches of Ctesiphon System
February 4th, 2452
The exploded diagram of the recovered probe floated above the conference table elements of human and non-human technology bodged together with an impressive degree of ingenuity. You pace around the table as Commander Hoedemaeker and her team finish prepping for the briefing, examining the portions of the sensor probe you can recognize and where they mesh with very unfamiliar technology.
It had only taken the Commander and her team about a day and a half to break down the probe and figure out what made it tick, and the Challenger needed most of that time to work her way back in-system anyway. Yes, you could fold out from the deep reaches of the system if you had to, but you weren't sure you were even done at Ctesiphon, so nothing had really been lost giving her the time she'd needed.
"So we've got two very distinct bits of kit here." Gessica said as you stopped your pacing to scratch at your chin. "The first is, in fact, Hemisphere War-era military surplus, from Cheongju."
A large section of the probe, mostly the recognizable parts, lit up on the holotable.
"The serial numbers were all filed off, of course, but we had root level codes to the computer core of the damn thing and just pulled them off of that. The probe was part of a batch lot sold decades ago as surplus, to Johnson Dynamics. They used them for mining operations, but stopped after a while and our records show the remaining stock ended up in a warehouse somewhere. The stocks were eventually sold as scrap to some third party breakers with, shall we say, connections. One of them went down a decade ago for some shady shit, but, you know, airlock door after atmo's been vented." Gessica sighed, tossing a datapad onto the table.
"The other part's more interesting. Definitely non-human, equally definitely not OPF spec or smart-matter. Old, too, radiocarbon dating is tricky given we're talking refined materials that live in a vacuum but definitely at least ten thousand years old. Not contemporary, the metallurgy doesn't match anything we've got on file for extant species. Science team's digging in the archives for any clues on the archaeology side, but who knows. This sort of thing is tricky."
"So which parts of the probe were doing what?" you ask, squinting and trying to make sense of the hash on the screen. Engineering was not your gig.
"Looks like human for the sensors and recording, xenotech for the powerplant and the stealth features. Really solid sensor baffling built in, on spec with our top-end gear. Real luck of the draw that we could even pick it up, sir." Gessica answers, highlighting some segments of the diagram with a wave of her hand. "The power core was completely undetectable until we were within a hundred klicks of the thing, the only reason we picked it up on the first place was optical reflection off of the sensor boom."
You nod. There was plenty of junk in any inhabited system, but most of that junk was tracked by sensor networks in case it proved to be a navigational hazard. Humanity had learned the importance of that before they'd even left Earth's orbit regularly, and cleaning up the Kessler Cascade post-Collapse had been a nightmare. If something wasn't tagged in a system's orbital tracking network and was picked up by a ship sensor, it tended to get a lot of attention.
"What was it recording, exactly?"
"Routine traffic patterns, military patrols, that kind of thing. Pretty standard surveillance mission set. The AI on this thing is dumb as a brick so neither *Weiss or I could get much from it, but we literally were able to pull some of the unfiltered take out of the data storage."
You grunt in thought. This was definitely getting weird.
What investigation route do you take next?
[] The sensor probe is unrelated to the antimatter problem. Leave it for now. Follow up on the OSP dossier
[] Follow the data trail on the lot of probes from Cheongju to the breakers to see if you can determine where they may have been sold onto.
[] Consult with Expeditionary Command's science divisions to see if you can get any leads on the origins of the alien part of the sensor probe.