You glanced to Evelyn, and she grinned.
"I'll get the corvette prepped and wake the reserve pilots," she said without hesitation, striding off through the bridge doors. You settled back in your chair.
"Alright, take us in and orient us so that corvette has a straight shot," you said, then rubbed your eyes. This had been a
long day. "I have no idea what we're even going to be able to do, but we'll take a look as promised. Oh, make sure we have comm relays laid out so we can communicate."
Yeager-1 was put into a close polar orbit, so close that you felt you could reach out the window and grab hold of the tiny orb crawling by below. The gravity of the tiny rock was so low that even this close, you barely had to be moving to maintain altitude. The corvette detached as you began to cross over one of the poles and dove away with a pulse of its engine, heading for the clearly artificial sinkhole that was revealed as you crested the edge.
It disappeared into the dark, the red and green of its navigation lights fading until it disappeared, and the screen flipped over to the corvette's external cameras. The stone around it had been polished to a mirror-like sheen, perfect and featureless.
"We're descending. Looks like a straight shot straight to the core of the planet. Take it nice and slow, though, just in case," Evelyn reported. "So… when are we going to give this corvette a name?"
"We'll organise a vote right after you get back," you assured her. "To think, our mission hasn't even started properly yet."
"That's the nature of beast, Captain. Wow, it just keeps going. Helm, watch that drift, we just got this thing."
The minutes ticked by with agonising slowness. It wasn't even clear from the visuals that the ship was moving, that the walls were scrolling by, it was impossible to tell. Like falling down a hole made of mirrors. All you had was the map on the screen and the tiny dot of the corvette slowly sinking down it. But then…
"Picking something up ahead. A platform, I think… that might be a door," Evelyn said. "It's so cold, we didn't see it on scoops. Yeah, start our braking manoeuvre, put us right up against it, and suit up. Let's take a look."
After a few minutes, the cameras switched to a helmet cam from Evelyn, emerging from the airlock. You noticed the gleaming silver shape of her slugthrower in one hand, a hand scanner in the other sweeping across the platform. There was a simple round indent in the wall, and a circular panel beside it.
Carefully, slowly, they drifted toward it, their magboots finding no purchase on the rock under their feet. She glanced behind her to show the rest of the crew, all of them wearing lines clipped to the nose of the corvette, which loomed in the dark behind them.
"Alright, I'm touching the button. Here goes," she said, pushing the barrel of her pistol into the round panel. For a second, nothing happened, then there was a soft white light, and the door was open. You didn't see it retract or split or roll aside, it was just gone. There was light inside.
"Spooky. Let's press on."
The camera tracked down the hall to what looked like a control centre, of sorts, the kind you saw on old spaceships which had no kind of artificial gravity. Controls stuck to every surface, and all of them had curious round symbols, series of dots, all around them.
"Are those labels?" you asked, and the visual bobbed as Evelyn nodded her head.
"Yep, I can read them with the translator. Uh… power, power… power! Here we go," she said, pressing it. One of the flat areas lit up, dots scrolling by. The psychic translator wasn't catching it through the camera, but Evelyn didn't seem to have trouble. "Huh. Well, that ought to be pretty easy. It's not broken, it's just a prompt. Looks like a queued work log that's been finished, the dates don't translate to anything that makes sense to me but the timescale… these jobs took years, and there's… thousand, tens of thousands of them."
"What are they?" you asked. "Can you tell?"
"I'm lookin', uh… it's a pretty straightforward interface. Ah, records." She tapped another button and started scrolling through. "Alright, opening a job, and… oh wow." Lights lit up all around the room, and Evelyn scanned them closely, taking it all in for the camera. The dark chamber was filled now with a hologram, showing a galaxy hanging in the centre of the room. "Look at that, that's a hell of a scan. Anyone recognize it?"
"Computer, identify that galaxy," you instructed.
"Image processing… processing… match with 80-ish percent certainty to NGC 4088, a member of the M109 group located fifty-ish million light years away. However, this render contains structures we have not been able to verify with natural light, and structures have shifted somewhat."
"Computer, are you just amending -
ish to things because I asked for approximate values?" you asked.
"
More or less."
"Thank you, computer. That's a hell of a long way away, so I guess there's some kind of telescope here?"
"That'd be a hell of a telescope, to show the back side of a galaxy in such details. And the shifting structures… that's time, right, stars orbiting. It must be a tachyon scan," one of the away team members added, circling around the hologram. "Right?"
"Hold on, zoom controls?" Evelyn said, and the hologram shifted, as though a ship were flying into the galaxy. Stars flicked by at high speeds, some of the brightest revealing themselves to be dense clusters. Massive structures of dust loomed like cliffs.
"Tachyon sensors don't pick up enough information for that, not in any useful timeframe. You'd need a huge sensor and a long time to gather enough data, and then computing it would take…"
"A brain the size of a planet?" you guessed.
"... I suppose, yes," she confirmed. "It's a rendering farm for a galactic scanner."
"Wait… places of interest…" Evelyn muttered, scrolling through. "They aren't labelled, let me just pick one. Whoa, okay, we're moving, you seeing this
Yeager-1?"
"We are seeing this," you confirmed, watching as the hologram zoomed in and in toward a star, then further and further, veering off toward a planet, two moons, and…
Tiny dots, moving and then resetting in a loop, all around the world. Orbiting.
Spacecraft.
"Oh my
God," Evelyn muttered. "I… I can't zoom in any further, but look, you can… that's a rocket, a torchship, you can see the fuzzy little hydrogen burner. There's hundreds…"
"Holy
shit," you gasped. I… I agree. No other words for it. "Any more?"
"Let me pick another… here…" The hologram flicked to another star, this one partially obscured by something. Dust? No… there was movement, a dyson swarm under construction. Then, shifting again, a world cracked in half by some calamity. A black hole about to swallow another. What you thought was a massive comet that on inspection might actually be a
ship. An array of sensors, looking back.
"Okay, wait, hold on. We… we came here to fix things, right? What's broken?"
"Nothing's broken, it just needs a new job," Evelyn said. "Right?"
"We… we could scan anything." Satkol said reverently." "We could… we could look beyond the cosmic horizon, see so much of the universe, as it is
now. The scans of Andromeda must be beautiful, there has to be some, right? Oh, there's so much…"
"We could use it to spy," Evelyn said immediately. "That's… we can input coordinates here, see? Nothing stopping us from peeking across the DMZ if we wanted."
"Is that safe? What if we piss the planet off?" you asked.
"The planet didn't even know that nothing was broken. I don't… I don't think it consciously understands what this is, it might not even know what it was built to do, just to guard the processes." Evelyn speculated.
"How would that be possible?" you asked.
"Do you think about your metabolism, actively? No, you just protect and feed it. Maybe it's the same, we were talking to some high-level sentient process for… this. We could, God, with a scanner like this we could see what the Empress was having for breakfast." Evelyn said triumphantly. "And we'll queue up some jobs, get
Holdfast free. Win-win, right captain?"
"I think we should put this to a vote," Satkol muttered quietly.
---
You should. However, as captain, you can frame the vote, and a lot of people will follow your recommendation if you make one. More than enough to tip things.
On the one hand, the material benefits of an ongoing scan of Aquillian space would be enormous. But would it be right? Would it be safe?
What do you vote for?
[ ] Pick a strange, exotic galaxy far away, and leave it to its work. The scientific data will be enough. (2 Credits)
[ ] Train the scanner on the Aquillian core worlds. (4 Credits)
[ ] Write In
Credits are the long-term currency, representing funding availability for your program. More is better.
3 Insight
4 Determination
Threads:
"Vehicle Fuel Interfaces"
"Structural analysis of Holdfast"
"Beamed Power Operations"
"Remass scanning"
"Metric technology bullshit"
"Hostage negotiation"
"Drone warfare"
Personality Keywords
Curious, Relentless, Shy
