Reliquary Report: Agent 437761-Hallow
Journey to Astra provided some difficulty. On arrival found it under attack by relic hunters. Will attempt to neutralise the threat.
Maven Khosla Personal Log
This damn ship will not follow commands. I can’t work out what any of these blasted symbols mean. First jump and the ship cuts out on me. Takes hours to get things up and running again and get the drive powered up.
Then it jumps me the wrong bloody way! What’s more, it has picked up some ancient distress signal out here and decided to autopilot its way to the rescue. No reasoning with it, so there I am orbiting an anchor with nothing around except the corpses of some long dead aliens, plenty of debris and what looked like an oversized version of the Voidspider with a few holes torn through it and plenty of weapons damage. It could well have been here centuries but some residual power cell picked up the proximity of the Voidspider and I of course had to go across and turn the damned thing off.
Sure it’s just a case of hooking it up to the docking port and…no. That would be too easy. Docking port shot to pieces and shuttle bay looked like it had been opened with a tin opener as far as I could make out. So I had to suit up. Juice on the suit was pretty low after shuttling the supplies about when I acquired this ship but enough to do me a couple of short hops I thought.
So across I hop with a little suit thruster guidance and lo and behold, the entrance hatch is blocked with debris and bodies. Wonderful. So I spend a bit of time that I can totally afford to waste clearing that all out and getting into the ship proper. The inside of the ship is as messed up as the outside and between the twisted corridors and the frozen bodies it was fairly treacherous going.
At least I know now what the aliens who built my ship look like. Or at least what they look like after a couple of centuries floating in deep space. Long sturdy bodies, about the size of a horse. Six limbs, though I can’t tell hands from feet. Big heads with what seem to be some sort of tusks or mandibles. I’m sure they were a strong and noble people once, now they’re just mummified frozen corpses, which is what I was going to be if I didn’t get that beacon turned off.
Got through the twisted corridors and found what appeared to be the engine room based on what I know from Voidspider. Alas, far too damaged to be repaired or salvaged, and half the room has been blasted out into space. This at least gave me a nice view of the Voidspider, which I now realised I was slowly spinning away from as my actions aboard this derelict had altered its course. Damn. My suit picked that moment to throw up a friendly low power warning too. Double damn.
Pushing on the next section appeared to be a research lab. One wall was covered in large clear tubes with strange frozen substances in then. Some of them had cracked open leaving frozen globules of unknown substance floating around the room. Call me overcautious but I didn’t fancy doing the tango with any floating alien substances so I spent far more time than I could readily spare playing dodgeball with potentially hazardous materials.
Finally, after stumbling through another few corridors I found the command centre. After much tapping of screens, mashing of buttons and kicking of terminals I found one that lit up, just about. Clearly the emergency beacon had been hooked up to some ultra long term low powered backup supply. I found the attached power cell and yanked it out and to my delight the interminable beacon died. The last cry of some long dead civilisation silenced.
By the time I’ve backtracked through the ship to somewhere I could exit, the distance between myself and my ship had increased dramatically. Not good. I take a little time to calculate the perfect angle and time to launch myself to get the maximum thrust in the right direction and when the time comes I sail out beautifully only to have the blasted thrusters cut in and out on me randomly. As I’m trying to reroute non-essentials to the thrusters I smack into a nice big chunk of space debris and get flung in the wrong direction. That was great fun. I finally wrestled the controls into behaving and was able to make it to the ships airlock moments before the power died completely.
Home sweet home. Got the airlock pressurised and started stripping off the now dead suit only to have my leg buckle under me. I hadn’t noticed with the adrenaline and suit auto-stims but that collision with the debris has seriously damaged my leg. I couldn’t tell if it was sprained or broken but it was damned painful as I stripped the rest of the suit and hobbled to the cockpit. There is what I suspect is a medbay on this thing but I haven’t the foggiest idea how to use it yet.
No problem, thinks I, I’m only a short jump or two from Astra and their med bay, just need to bear up a little longer.
Arrived in orbit around Lament and set a course for Astra, the prosaically named research station nestled in an orbiting asteroid around the planet. Took me a while to work out what the weird flashing symbols were but turns out it was another distress signal, this time from Astra. Those troublesome relic raiders have turned things up a notch and attempted a hostile takeover of the research station, no doubt to use it as a relic mining base and use the researchers to do the dirty work of getting the valuables from the planet.
Joy.
Assuming I don’t pass out before I get there, I’m going to have to try and do something about this.
Maven out.
we all have our roles to play 