Down on the Disk (Graverobbing for Fun and Profit in an Original Science-Fantasy Universe)

Pretty straightforward result.

Winner: Try to 'hack' the door open with your Life-Shaping.

Day 80.1 - Close call

You focus, letting out a long slow breath, pushing life-energy out through your mouth and into the panel.

It's different from the other doors you worked on days ago, less dead. You realize with a start that those pockets of free-ions had in fact been the debris of microbial colonies, lysed by whatever process had preserved that section of neuroplastic channels; just the most obvious remnants of the delicate engineer ecosystem. The cousins of which you have just awoken from long dormancy.

Signals surge up and down the channel randomly, a weak, unpleasant buzz develops in the wall around the doorway. You flinch away as it runs up your arm, sharp and angry, like the bite of a frightened animal. A tingle lingers in your hand.

Okay.

That was unexpected. Previously if you screwed up the channels either failed to propagate the signal or propagated it too well, a cascade of life-energy literally shaking the delicate crystals you need apart. Nothing ever came back at you.

It's… alive.

Reaching out again, this time you use only a trickle of life-energy. A hair thin filament.The ghost of a whisper.

Gradually you spread out the ends of your probing filament like the roots of a tree until you are touching every part of the first few centimeters of the neuroplastic channel.

You're still not practiced enough to have a good sense of detail immediately. Everything is fuzzy and indistinct to start with and only slowly starts to resolve into greater detail as you sit there, waiting, for long minutes.

At first you feel only the small, life-energy rich colonies of microbes awash in the liquid crystal medium as a sort of dim geography dipping and rising with the aftershocks of your sudden arrival and departure. They form not a network, but a series of disconnected ribbons— no, they are anchored to the silicate ribbons you noticed before, living within the miniscule runes and symbols which dot the surface. Every pulse of residual life-energy leaves a strange glittery haze over some of the microbe colonies.

Not always the same ones. In fact, usually not.

You strain your mind for a few minutes trying to detect a pattern before giving it up. There are too many different clusters and you still can't quite wrap your thoughts around this sense for that.

Instead you turn your attention back to the colonies themselves and startle for a moment.

What you first took for haze is actually a cloud of silicate crystals being brought out of solution with the surrounding liquid-crystal medium over a particular cluster of microbes and coalescing into a complex three-dimensional geometry. Just as quickly as they appeared the crystals fade seamlessly back into the surrounding medium, leaving only the microbial colonies evident. Colonies which you now realize are encased in shells of the organic crystals, each one locked together with its neighbors.

As the last dregs of life-energy you introduced dissipate you feel a distant echo from above, like Nosta's cry reverberating off of canyon walls, a not-quite reflection that fades away just a second later. Then another. And another. On and on, further and further away until you lose it completely heading deeper into the labs.

Each channel is alive, responsive; capable of not only transmitting and receiving data, as well as storing small amounts of energy for attached systems, but also serving as a computational substrate. One stretching across the entire ship. In a very real sense the entire vessel would have been alive when it was in good repair, a living system encased in a shell of metal, composite, and diamond-glass.

Slowly you push your tendrils of life-energy deeper and deeper into the neuroplastic channel, riding a 'tide' in the medium that drags the energy along like a winch. You can feel the liquid-crystal layering over your probes like the layers of sediment, carrying an invisible but every present weight. Until suddenly a sharp shift nearly rips the life-energy out of your grasp, a stinging sensation runs down your scalp, making you hiss in pain, and you have to pull back.

Not completely. Just far enough that the pressure eases and you no longer feel like someone is ripping the hairs out of your skin.

That's far enough then, you decide. Spreading out your probes of life-energy you form a sort of plug just at the edge of where you start to feel pain.

Then you get to work.

---

It takes longer than you would like, just over an hour, to actually get the door open.

Because the system is the most alive of any of the ones you've interacted with so far, it's the most difficult. Though not entire for the reasons you expected. At least not completely. Sure some of it is that the locking and recognition systems are more intact than on any of the other doors you've tried over the last couple of weeks.

Like a rusted lock being easier to pick because part of the mechanism has rusted open.

There's another part of it though.

Half the system means half the key apparently. You don't have to manipulate the life-energy nearly as finely as you were fearing, but you have to modulate it in much more complicated and layered ways to get the right response from the door. Like a whole nest of raroh hawks hunting through the canyons at once, their calls bouncing off the walls, in a steady rhythm of call and answer. Eventually you manage it.

About an hour and a half after you first arrived the door grinds open with a bone deep groan. Though the control system has survived mostly intact, the mechanical components have apparently suffered significantly more over the centuries.

You grin up at Opal-Nine from your position next to the panel.

One of his antennae quirks in response.

"That took a while."

"Wanna try? Could close this thing—" you pat the side of the doorway " —see how you do persuading a thousand year-old relic to open by tickling it with your antennae."

"No," he says with a chittering laugh.

You stand, stretching your stiff legs and back and stare at the lab beyond the door. The scent of ash smacks you in the face like a wave.

Shaking your head, you barely resist the urge to sneeze and sweep your lamp across the room. It bends off to the left, forming a wide hallway of sorts. Cabinets hang open from the walls, doors flung open, their tops lined by cracked and shattered rounded glass canisters spilling black soot over the sides and onto the floors. Scattered metal tables fill the rest of the space, pushed up against the edges of the room, a narrow path zig-zaggin between them.

You step into the room and scan further down the way. Here the prickling sense of hazy life-energy is the strongest you've ever felt it, it's so strong you can almost taste it on your tongue like a dust storm.

Dark smears litter the walls, tiny smudges of ash and soot. At the far end of the room one of the tables has a thick mound of black char laid across it.

Maybe a quarter as big as the basilisk it just barely fits on the table.

You and Opal-Nine move closer.

Whatever it was might have once had a rounded shape; maybe a meter in diameter, one end comes to a point while the other ends in a wavering, bulbous sort of 'head.' Several spindly strips that might have once been limbs are splayed out to each side, one collapses into crumbly black chunks when you accidentally bump the table. Split down the middle the 'body' was hollowed out before whatever burned it down to carbon.

"Some sort of… beetle-ish thing, I think," you say.

Opal-Nine fingers a chunk of the limb, crushing it into powder between the fingers of his midlimb, "Done with magic, I think, no signs of flame damage on anything."

"Hmm. Crash must have damaged something in the room controls, triggered the sterilization protocols, or something broke cont— "

Light pours down from the ceiling, bright and actinic, and behind you the door you'd just come through starts grinding rapidly shut.

Bright orange sigils on the wall flash by. Harsh, complicated things of savage slashes and sharp angles.

"Shit," you say.

"Egg-pith," Opal-Nine says at the same time.

You both start dashing for the doorway, but it's already too late. Whatever mechanisms had degraded in the time since the crash they were still apparently intact enough to quickly close the door when prompted.

A voice echoes from somewhere overheard in a language you don't know.

"You catch that?" you ask.

"No- not most of it, at least… uurzish, I'm pretty sure, but old. Something about good manners- I think."

You resist the urge to remind him the ship is from the Brumehad Senate Fleet, so ancient uurzish is to be expected, now is definitely not the time. Instead you kneel before the door panel again and try to activate the door again.

Unfortunately it remains staunchly closed.

The work of the last hour apparently now no longer worth anything.

Once again the voice comes on again, the sigils on the wall are flashing brighter and faster with every passing second. Overhead the lights are dimming. None of it seems good to you.

You modulate your probe of life-energy, quickening the 'rhythm' towards the end. Nothing.

Gritting your teeth, and ignoring the whistle of wind over your head as Opal-Nine jams the tips of his fore-limbs into the crack of the door, you rapidly start modulating your life-energy into the control panel on this side of the door. Changing the rhythm, flattening peaks and valleys, shifting the 'pitch.' You taste copper at the back of your mouth.

And still the doors do not budge.

Though you can feel the life-energy in the channels responding.

"Come on," you mutter through gritted teeth, shoving yet more life-energy into the system.

Sweat prickles at your forehead. Now the orange of the sigils is a constant glow, just barely flickering on the edge of your perception and the voice has completely disappeared. Something like a whine builds behind the walls.

High pitched and it whites out the rest of the room, fills the air like a thick gel. You can barely spare it a thought as you push your tendrils of life-energy through the layers of liquid-crystal until—

CRACK

Pain rips down the back of your skull and neck, flowing hot and slick. The muscles in your arms and legs seize.

For a split second your vision whites out and when you open your eyes again you are staring at the ceiling of the room, your limbs tingly and shaky as they rest limply against the cool dusty floor. Something heavy and meaty thumps to the ground next to you.

You turn your head and see Opal-Nine resting heavily against the wall, his forelimbs stretched out to either side as he takes long gulping breaths. His antennae droop weakly.

"Good job," he says after a moment, his normally normally smooth voice attenuated with a raspy buzz.

You stare at him.

"That wasn't me," you say.

---

Whatever sterilization protocol you'd triggered had burnt itself out. Age and the crash having done enough cumulative damage to render it impotent, at least for more than scaring the shit out of you.

You're even able to piece together some of those fragmented moments and figure roughly how the doors and the sterilization systems are connected. Once the doors open up again, just a few moments after the system burnt itself out, you set about testing how to avoid setting off any similar reactions. You think the specific modulation of life-energy you used to open the door actually primed the system to go off; you've taken to calling a particular set of peaks, valleys, tones, and tastes (and man do you really need better language to describe all of this) the 'clean up frequency.'

Eventually you move on to the next door and the next lab. Slowly.

At each door you wait a few minutes and toss a bit of something in just to be sure. It does drag things out a bit, but it also saves you from having any more incidents, maybe, it's hard to tell.

The system only activates twice more and each time you're on the outside waiting for it to finish. And each time the system burns itself out before fully activating. You never get to see what the actual sterilization protocols do, you can only guess based on what remains from what you assume are past activations that it involves some sort of combustion process.

Hours later you finally leave behind the second, inner, layer of labs and reach the central labs.

You come out into a curving corridor running along the outside of the core chambers, off in the distance you can see where it connects to the main thoroughfare you were trying to build the gluebomb to cross. There are three rooms, you know that from the schematic.

Closest to you is Containment, a little further along is Surgery, and at the far end of the section is Deep Storage.

Which do you want to visit first.

There remain between 38 and 53 days before the Blunted Spears Caravan is estimated to return to Three Hills.

[] Containment.
[] Surgery.
[] Deep Storage.

Surgery wins.

Winner: Surgery.

Day 80.2 - Another prize

"Let's start with the Surgery," you say after a moment. "I'd like a chance to look at what gear they had."

Opal-Nine hums in response, "Wouldn't they have carted it off?"

You waggle your head as you put the personal 'frame back away in the large chest pocket of your overalls. Stepping away from the door you start picking your way carefully down the hall, given what forced you to detour in the first place you're not prepared to trust in the structural soundness of this section.

"Maybe… but that collapse— just the fact they didn't slap a repair on it tells me maybe they couldn't. Or were more interested in grabbing the easy stuff. Anything really worth it would be heavy equipment, installed when the ship was built or during a major overhaul. Difficult to pull out."

"We did not come equipped for heavy demolitions," he says after a moment.

Up ahead you can see the entrance to the Containment room, one of the doors laying bent and twisted against the opposite wall.

The hazy pall of life-energy, pervasive throughout the labs as you've worked your way deeper, sometimes weaker and sometimes stronger but always present, has grown into an almost cloying presence so heavy it threatens to almost choke you. It's a smell. Like wet soil and a thousand years of growth. You've never been to a jungle, but you imagine this must be what they're like.

"No," you agree, "But we also aren't as fussed about breaking shit. Coming back later with some bigger bang is always an option."

Opal-Nine shakes his head at that last bit, but doesn't say anything else.

As you walk by Containment you take the opportunity to peer in. You don't see much; most of the chamber is hidden from view by the architecture, a sort of anteroom wrapping around an inner wall. What you do note is there is a lot of smeared dirt and deep scratches on both the floor and walls, plus bits of scattered glass or maybe crystal.

You're tempted for a moment to immediately detour to investigate, but the possibility of loot overrides your curiosity. Nothing stopping you from looking into it when you're done in the Surgery after all.

Turning away you continue on towards your destination.

Now, with the light of your lamps shining off the composite surface ahead you notice more of those same deep scratches along the walls, at about shoulder height, maybe two or three centimeters deep. Material curling away at the edges like soft wax. Wavering but smooth, they cut off suddenly where the corridor joins the main thoroughfare.

You continue on a little further until you find your destination.

Etched into the wall above the doors are characters in what you assume are some ancient uurzish script that assumedly say Surgery. Or at least something like it.

You don't even have to try to make the doors open, they part with a long high-pitched groan as soon as you approach. A slight breeze tugs gently at your hair and sleeves, leaving you staring at another small anteroom covered in polished, almost slick looking, tiles the pale blue of early morning. To your left stands a wide metal trough over which hang five separate conical apparati from cables, a sink you guess, that comes up to just below your chest, and on a shelf above row after row of soft pink towels are stacked. Glancing to the left you see some sort of cloth receptacle with stenciled writing on the side.

When you approach the sink there is a brief sputter from the nearest spout, followed by a deep pair of chuffs, before a splatter of brown liquid is expelled and then you hear a far off and muffled clang. You try some of the other spouts. Nothing.

Whatever life the plumbing was clinging to, that was apparently it's last gasp.

You touch one of the towels. It is soft and dry. Pretty good quality, better than most of what you could afford on the trip to Mu.

If nothing else you've gained some decent towels.

This room was well sealed, maybe even completely purged of atmosphere— no, you only felt a slight breeze when it opened. Means the pressure differential couldn't have been too great. Or the seals failed semi recently.

You frown. Clean facility like this, you'd want positive pressure anyways to keep out contaminants but the flow of air was inward.

Moving back towards the door you lean close to inspect the jamb and find sigils and runes pressed deeply into the composite there, you have no idea what they are but there is still something almost familiar about them. Something in their structures that pokes at you. Like a stone in your boot, or a twist in your underwear.

Closing your eyes you try and sense for any life-energy, but are surprised to find it as empty and dry as the cold vacuum of space. Nothing. Not even a wrinkle.

"Ivan?" Opal-nine asks.

Opening your eyes you glance back at the khar and find him watching you worriedly, his antennae high and tight in the air, twitching back and forth. Right. Sealed ancient laboratory not the palace to start poking about without forewarning.

"Sorry, just curious. Place like this, you want positive pressure— higher pressure inside than out —but the air flowed in when the doors opened, thought that might mean some sort of spell on the inside of the door. And there is. No idea what it does though," you stand up, nod towards the next set of doors, "Something for later."

It takes a few minutes to force open the inner doors.

What you see beyond is a large rectangular chamber, reaching twelve meters over your head and another six below your feet, spreading twelve meters to each side, and extending more than thirty-five meters ahead of you to end in a slightly curving back wall. You stand on a platform just under five meters wide, a half disassembled enclosed walkway reaching out another five meters from the wall to wrap around the equator of a sixteen meter, oblate spheroid of white hexagonal patches. Below your feet stretches a broken geography of machinery, shadows seeping like rivers through canyons, innards torn open in a scene of mechanical butchery. Above looms metallic stalactites, darkness dripping from every crack and crevice. Tubes connect the sphere to floor and ceiling like a cold, dead, monstrous heart.
Inside is a circular room of yet more pale blue tiles. Floor ever so slightly concave and tacky with a faint layer of yellowish hardened residue. Doming ceiling hovering only four meters over your head.

Long sinuous segmented arms hang from above, you see only five at the moment, but count at least another score of openings the same size and another dozen or so larger openings around the room. Not counting those on the floor. Six metal plates protrude from the floor on many-jointed limbs, their ancient and cracking padding covered in streaks of the same residue splattered across the ground. Pushed to the edges of the space are several bulky shapes; one like a blunt clawed hand, another two like cabinets infested with snakes, a fourth like a maw of needle-sharp teeth flensed of all flesh and bone, and the rest too nondescript to make sense of.

When you enter there is a far-off hum and a second later light briefly blinds you as lights all around the edge of the room flare to brilliance for an instant. Arms twitch and flail as power surges through them, their ends glinting with razor sharpness. Something sizzles. And a high screeching whine shrieks in your ears.

Then the light goes out, arms fall limp once again, the shriek fades, and a deathly stillness settles over the space.

You have discovered what seems to be a fully equipped, but nonfunctional surgical suite. What is your next step.

[] Containment.
[] Deep Storage.
[] Write-in: Subject to approval.

So that's for Deep Storage first.