"Why not send in a probe?"
Nhi's voice was absent minded, and she wasn't even speaking to the rest of the bridge crew. Instead, she was sitting back in her seat, looking at nothing, holding her pad in her hands, her thumbs drumming against the handheld she was using.
"That's...not a bad idea…" Jools said, blinking. "It'd need to be cut down, though, and given a mobility rig - but the engineering boys can do that, right?"
"Huh?" Nhi asked. "Oh, sorry, I was woolgathering, what…" She blinked her lenses as she saw our expressions - or at least, the vague approximations of them. "Oh! Right, yes, that is a good idea!" She tapped at her pad - nodding cheerfully.
A few moments later, the vote was held.
Nhi's nomination won, at a bare margin. It may have been a great idea that would keep us safe in a dangerous, high risk environment...but most people in Star Patrol didn't join to send probes. You knew for a fact that the desire to go in first was almost overpowering...but you still managed to vote for the probe. Barely.
It was hard. You wanted to see what was going on in there!
Still, with the probe vote winning through, you and Nhi were sent down to the engineering bay, to ensure the sensors and communication systems would be up to snuff, as you'd had the best knowledge of what was going on.
There is a subtle but unavoidable conflict between Research and Engineering, despite the overlap. It's nothing hostile or anything, it's just that they get into the guts of the machines you're using to try and figure out what's going on. Do you know how hard it is to manage to use a scope when it is also being calibrated by some wrench-jockey? Of course, you knew that engineers saw things in their opposite upside down backwards way: They saw science as being overly distracted by ephemera when the rocket was exploding and they were the only ones were keeping things running properly.
This viewpoint had been communicated to you by Lera during the middle of your second year in the academy, and you couldn't help but think about it as you slid out of the gravshaft that ran along the spine of your ship and into the fabrication bay. The whole place felt very…
Distinctly Engineering-y. Lots of post-it-note reminders and duct tape. The engineers themselves are all happily parked around the fabricator, which is whirring and grinding away, working to construct the parts on the bot out of feedstock to go with the parts that they've already put together. The sensor package is mostly prepared - they are, after all, precisely what we put onto probes - but it seems that a mobility frame needs to be improvised.
"What the hell are you making?" you asked, and the crowd stepped back a moment so you could see. Perched atop four wheels with articulated suspension was a foil-insulated box, topped with a crude approximation of a torso with two folding mechanical arms. Wires and bolts jutted out at all angles, and as you watched a pair of probe cameras were extracted from the fabber and they got to work attaching it. The whole thing was maybe three feet tall.
"Well, it's a pair of the little grabby-arms from a utility pod, about half a surface rover, this bit here… I think Lewis just had this lying around. Cute, isn't he?" One of the techs gestured to who you presumed was Lewis.
He was about as tall as you were, and was… okay, weird, but also, just...gorgeous. His skin was coppery, shading to red, with tiny tufts of fur that smoothly emerged from around the jaw and the back of the head, which made the pair of bright red fox ears that emerged from equally red hair atop his head feel as natural as breathing. His cheeks had tiny dark freckles, and he had an expression that looked like it was built for smiling - and not just because he had just the cutest little sharp canines - actual chompers, honestly, oh my god. His eyes were green and gold, one on the left, one on the right.
Okay...he's cuuuuute, you thought, and then immediately tried to figure out if there even was a polite way to ask what species somebody was. I mean, he might even just be human, you'd heard that some people, self-modders, did gene editing on themselves for all sorts of things, but you can't just… ask. Right? That's one of those things carbon humans don't do.
"I like drones," he explains sheepishly, and he has this adorable Boston accent. A which settled that - he was an augment like you. You immediately thought of the worst thing in the universe and tried to not immediately start bursting out laughing - biting your lip as hard as you could, while Lewis patted the drone's head. "The sensor package is going here, uh, you want to make sure it runs right, nerd?"
You giggled. "Got it!"
Lewis looked at you funny. "Uh...somethin' funny?"
It popped out. You couldn't stop it. "More like Pawston!" you clapped your hands over your mouth, flushing. "Sorry! Just...the accent and-"
"Oh my god, Sandra!" Nhi exclaimed, while the other engineers frowned at you. Lewis, though?
Lewis burst out laughing.
"Oh my god, I have to remember that for next FurCon!" he said, cheerfully, his ears perking up and his tail swishing from side to side unnnh fluffy tail. He gestured you forward and you grinned at him as the engineers continued to look dolorous. The two of you examined the bot, and with you, Lewis and Nhi working together, the entire thing was prepped and ready and it was time to get him onto the teleporter.
"The bot is kind of adorable, isn't it." you whispered to Nhi.
"Kinda, yeah. Like a little explorer guy."
While two engineers loaded the bot into the heavily shielded tube and you leaned against one of the dozens upon dozens of strident, yellow warning signs printed with Russian and English - warning about mass restrictions, radiation dangers, and full of repeated information about proper criteria and steps for the use of the teleporter, Lewis crossed his arms over his chest and declared:
"We should name him!"
"Phạm Tuân!" Nhi suggested. "A brave cosmonaut!"
"Robonaut!" one of the other engineers suggested. "Like the NASA ones!"
"Robin Hood," Lewis suggested. "... I just like him."
"Lera," you said.
"...Lera?" Nhi asked.
"Fearless, tiny, rushing in first. Patchwork fashion sense." you said. "Sounds like Lera to me."
"No, no, no," the Engineering super, Aliya Hashemi, said, turning to face you once she had stepped away from the teleportation tube, the glass lowering in place to contain it. "This little fella is going to be called Dummy. Like Crash-Test-Dummy, since it's going to get hit first, so we don't have to."
"Oh, I like that!" you said.
"That, and you'd have to be a dummy to use this teleporter." she muttered, beckoning everyone back as her assistant started poking the controls. "You know that thing takes more power than the FTL drive? Considerably more."
"Well, yeah, it has to make up the difference in mass and kinetic energy between the things its transposing," you said, nodding. "Especially up gravity wells, right?"
"Decent theory, but after years of study we're pretty sure it's just that the wizard in the box demands tribute." she said, "You know not even the Aquillians know how these things work, and they were using them for longer than human civilization has existed?"
"Does anyone know where the Aquillians got them?" Nhi asked.
"Ancient legend says that the third Emperor solved a riddle and stole it from the Ancients," Mr. Sythe's voice broke in. You turned and saw him walking in, looking seriously at the teleport tube. "Almost certainly not true, we likely got it through trade from some older empire who didn't understand it, just like everyone else. Is the drone ready? I...came to…" He paused. "Observe. You may require my assistance-"
"Yeah, we will!" You said, seeing that he was prepared to justify himself being here until the local primary turned red. You patted his shoulder, gently.
"Okay, no, there's officially too many people in the teleport room! You want to get your atoms scrambled?" the engineering super pointed at you. "Research, Security, you two stay in case something weird happens. Everyone else, out!" She started to make shooing gestures towards everyone else.
Everyone shuffled out, muttering, until it was just you and Mark, who you hadn't even noticed had come in. He had his laser pistol in his holster and was looking nervously at the tube, clearly apprehensive as the capacitors started charging and the feel of static electricity began to build in the room. In the sealed tube, dancing lights in a rainbow of colours started swirling, like somebody had thrown a bunch of glitter into water and was stirring it around.
"Uuuh… can our atoms actually get scrambled by this thing?" Mark asked, and you shook your head.
"It's fine, it just-"
"Wouldn't put it past it." Aliya muttered darkly.
"What are the sparkles, anyway?" Mark asked, and you wracked your brain trying to remember.
"Um, the teleporter acts on quantum probabilities to impose a new state between two locations, and the sparks are… clumps of virtual photons being created and sustained in the chamber while it activates." you said, only about half confident you were right.
"As I said," Aliya muttered, "Wizard shit."
Then she depressed the button on the console, and there was a pop. The drone was gone, and in its place was what looked like a sheet of stamped hull metal that had been sheared and then cut into a new shape. There was a hastily bolted on mounting for...was that an energy weapon? It was! Someone had put a pintle mounted heavy duty energy weapon that you didn't recognize on a chunk of hull plating. Though, while you couldn't place the specifics of the weapon, you could see that the barrel was conic.
"... the hell?" Aliya muttered, as the chamber opened with a horrible grind of metal on glass and the barricade flopped onto the ground. "Oh, fuck, that's going to leave a scratch."
Mark frowned as he stepped forward, kneeling down. "This is a microwave gun - it's a cooker, all right and...." He leaned in close, examining the side mountings on the weapon, clearly knowing what to look for. "It's set to maximum. This is a kind of weapon you set up when you want to mist a lot of soft targets really really fast. Uh… like if you were shooting up a crowd."
"... let's go check the screens." you said, and the two of you turned to go to one of the rooms, but Aliya caught Mark's arm and pulled him back.
"No you don't! Somebody's moving that hunk of scrap out of my teleporter room!"
---
The view was faintly grainy, patchy, but it showed that Dummy had arrived in the middle of a cargo hold. There was a barricade built in the middle of the room, fencing off a full half of it, with two more of those microwave guns set up at them, angled outwards.
"Pan it around," Tai'lon said, and you couldn't think of him as Mr. Sythe right now - his voice was too tense, his back was too straight. The camera whirred slowly as it began to spin and spin...and behind the barricade, there were two figures, laying prone on the ground, both of them in bulky purple space suits.
Nhi, who was at the terminal, operating the controls, sent the command line to the Dummy, and the Dummy dutifully whired forward and leaned over the two of them.
Aquillians, of course. Cold on thermals. Dead, their faces peaceful under their helmets. Tai'lon frowned, but your eyes were on their readout rigs, which were situated on their chests and backs - to make it easy for anyone to tell what was up with the suits from a distance. Their biometrics were in the black, meaning they had gone past the resuscitation timeline and were into rigor mortis and straight for the morgue. But…
"What the fuck?" you whispered. "Zoom in there, please."
The camera zoomed in and you read the atmospheric information. Their N/O2/C mixes were...zeroed out on Oxygen.
"The room has air pressure," you said. "They suffocated in a breathable atmosphere."
"Maybe life support was compromised, but they fixed it after these two died?" Nhi said. "Or… sabotage of the suits?"
Nhi worked the controls, rolling one of the Aquillians onto his belly with the most gentleness that Dummy could manage to examine the backpack. You knew what she was looking for - what you and Tai'lon were looking for too. But it wasn't there.
The backpack air units were completely undamaged. No faults, no busted components, nothing but perfectly serviceable, millenia old technology. Either they ran out of air and then life support came back, or they died because they didn't or couldn't take their helmets off. And those things had days of air. Tai'lon nodded grimly, looking at you.
"I'm beginning to suspect that cognitohazard protocols are in order?"
"Definitely," you said. "Nhi, filter audio and lower our resolution."
"Done." she muttered, chuckling nervously to herself, and only then did she tap the button on her console. "Oh, I should probably do your display too, right..."
The faint sounds coming from the speakers suddenly gained a subtly different sound - white noise being mixed into the frequency to break up any unwanted signals. The resolution went grainy and the colors bleached out, making the screen look as if it had been built during the War. One of history's little ironies - the tearing hurry the Liberty Rockets had been built at had kept fancy screens and scopes off them, meaning that when the Empire had gotten desperate and pulled out some of the ancient basilisk hacks they had discovered in their long history as a last ditch effort, they had bounced.
"Take air samples, in case there was an olfactory aspect." Mr. Sythe said. "And start looking around. Cognitohazards are usually easily recognized once seen, even through filters that prevent their effects. I'm going to step away from the display for safety."
There were three classes of cognitohazard, imagery and thought-triggers with dangerous effects on the brain: species-specific, humanoid, and universal. The vast majority targeted the mental architecture of specific species, but the strange link of similarities between humanoid species meant that there were some that worked on all of them. Universal cognitohazards were essentially theoretical, though it sounded like the Song the Sphere Builders talked about was one.
Tai'lon not watching the feed was a wise precaution in that case. But...you knew there was another reason he wasn't looking at it. You put your hand on his, and for just a moment, he looked at you. You drew your hand back, blushing. But Tai'lon did give you a tiny little nod and you smiled back at him, then put your hands behind your back.
"Okay… um, what are we looking for now?" Nhi asked. "What's our priority?"
---
[ ] Try to find the source. Maybe it's still on the ship, playing from a speaker or stuck on a screen. (Research: Insight)
[ ] Look for the surviving crew and explore the ship as a whole. The distress call was recent, maybe people are still alive. (Research: Trust)
[ ] See about accessing the computer. Having the ship's internal sensors would simplify everything, but Dummy wasn't exactly… agile. (Response: Signals. If successful, you will have remote control over the ship. Hard)
[ ] Write In
