Prison Pit
- Characters
- Prison Library
- Logs 1
- Logs 2
- Jailbreak
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 DM Note: No Allan or Gord this week, so we swapped Martha and Gripper - see what I did there? |
the snow goose, 0404/menkor, shipboard time 02:55, 201/1106
Martha had noticed a slight leak in one of the joints of her armour, and returned to the Vanguard to sort it out and take over the pilot's seat, freeing Gripper to join the boarding party. He had some theories about the strange happenings aboard the Snow Goose; he suggested that the ship's jump drives were somehow still active in some way, and had distorted time to open links to other timeframes. While there was no sensor evidence to point to any such thing, with the other undetected stuff going on that was hardly conclusive. Certainly, no-one had ever heard of any misjump involving temporal anomalies, but then by definition any misjump to which there were witnesses was a minor one; crews caught in a major misjump usually didn't come back.
Continuing to move with caution, the party advanced on the bridge, skirting the ominous black hole in the floor that had once been an iris valve. Like the hatch into the bridge, this had been torn from its' mounts, a feat of strength that didn't bear thinking about - iris valves took a lot of breaching. Once through the hatch, they gazed around at whay looked very like the last stand of the crew of the Snow Goose.
(B1) Heavy pieces of equipment and metal were scattered around near the inside of the hatch, evidence of the barricade that had not held. Bullet damage was visible on the bulkheads and even the ceiling while corroded patches indicated more acid damage from the fighting. Here, for the first time, were casualties of that fighting. Skeletons were scattered across the room; after three thousand years, only brittle husks of the bigger bones remained. Enough to show that only some of the corpses had been human; around a third were half again as tall though thin, tailed, with huge elongated heads and far too many teeth; probably the Findlay Creatures from Bragg's log. Oddly, some of both kinds had apparently died from massive displacement trauma, large sections of their bodies simply missing. Nevertheless, it was clear the humans had had the worst of it.
(C9) With the others watching his back, Gripper lowered himself through the hatch and down to the deck below, then covered the area while Alice, Scarrow and Zugh lowered themselves down to join him. Turning right, they headed forward. Gripper's new cyberarm made very short work of turning the handle to wind open the iris valve.
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The escape capsule room (C2) was dotted with abandoned rescue balls,and it was easy to see why. The inner iris valves of the launch tube airlocks were gone, replaced by horribly real teeth, apparently made of the same metal as the missing hatches. The severed halves of a deployed rescue ball lay across the threshold of one tube, mingled with the shattered bones of the unfortunate who'd tried to use it.
Alice picked up one of the packed balls - a cylinder 1m by 20cm - and poked it experimentally into the 'jaws' of one of the tubes. Nothing happened. The iris valves at the far end seemed normal - though no-one wanted to go inside to check.
The lift shaft gaped open, its' hatch torn off. The forward fire control room (C1) appeared unused; again, useless in the face of the disaster that had overtaken the Snow Goose. Or disasters; Alice suggested that the results they could see might be the result of two or three separate events.
Heading aft, they discovered the ship's electronics spares store (C4). If they managed to find a repairable power plant or computer, this would be a gold-mine. Next door was the secondary sickbay (C7) - like nearly everything else, this ship had two - which held four bunks, each occupied by a recumbent skeleton, still rigged to the remains of a medical monitor. One was missing most of one arm and leg, with damage to the bone ends suggesting acid. Whatever had killed these patients had been sudden and nonviolent; they lay as if sleeping.
Captain Bragg's stateroom (C10) was strongly barricaded from the inside, requiring all their enhanced strength to break into.Inside, as they feared, a single skeleton sat in a chair, an antique revolver lying on the floor next to it on the right, a single bullet hole in the side of the skull. A computer terminal stood on a desk in one corner, and Alice extracted the data storage crystal from it, though at the price of smashing the machine to fragments. A small safe in one corner proved easy to crack for battledress-enhanced hearing, and yielded another dataslug, some things that may have been currency, and some dust that might once have been paper.
At this point Scarrow was sent back to the Vanguard to deliver the datacrystals to Martha and stash samples of the creature bones, the acid-damaged metal, and a skull from one of the dead creatures. While she got to work on those, the remaining boarders carried on investigating. The common room was much like the other staterooms; tumbled sad personal effects, but here with bones and some battledamage mixed in. As they headed aft through it, the twisting sensation of misjump, now unpleasantly familiar to them, rippled through them, and everything changed.
Surrounded by grim stone walls of cyclopean blocks, lit by lurid, flickering reddish-orange light, they stared as pentagrams and occult symbols drew themselves in orange fire on the floors. Moans and screams filled the air, and blood rilled down the walls around them.
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All the cons were rational products of the Age of the Third Imperium. None the less, aeons of buried racial memories surged as supertitious fear rose out of the depths of their subconciousness, and each had to struggle to retain his or her control against blind panic. Of them all, Alice's will proved the strongest, and with a herculean mental effort she forced down the belief in the reality of what she was seeing. What she got instead was almost worse.
Instead of everything around her being replaced by the hellish scene, what she saw was the two things superimposed. The infernal walls were still there to touch, and the blood still flowed across her hand, but when she pushed hard she could shove an arm through. The scene was real, but for a lesser value of 'real'. Unpacking a glass jar from her kit, she scooped a sample of the blood and sealed it in. Holding it up, she was horrified to see it squirming, trying to crawl up the sides of the jar. Hastily she pocketed it, then rammed herself through the 'stone wall' in front of her. It resisted, stretching like some kind of membrane, then gave way, sending her stumbling out into the common room beyond. She turned to see her shipmates still inside, gazing at the wall where she'd disappeared in surprise - for them it was still solid. Scarrow had touched the wall and his sleeve was saturated with blood.
She was still wondering how to get them out when - with another visceral jolt - the whole scene vanished, leaving them standing as before in the darkened interior of a derelict ROM starship. Scarrow's sleeve was unbloodied; when Alice checked her specimen bottle, she found the bottom third missing and no sign of the contents. Gritting her teeth, she went back and walked across the threshold of the affect as she had done the first time, but nothing happened.
Everyone had just about had enough of wandering around in the dark, and Manx and Martha were directed to plumb a pipe between the Vanguard and the Snow Goose so as to feed some fuel into the latter's tanks. An hour's spacewalking later, the message came back that the fuel would be in place in a little over an hour.
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Descending to D Deck, the adventurers discovered the forward hatch into the massive primary cargo bay (D10) was welded definitively shut from the forward side. Although Gripper was carrying enough explosives to blow it in, they hesitated to do so, unsure what other damage they'd do in the process. With this in mind, they climbed back up to C Deck and headed aft before descending by the aft lift (D17). They descended from a starship into something quite different. Dark, ribbed, organic-looking material coated the walls, floor and ceiling, transforming the D Deck common room into a part of some alien lair. "This doesn't look good," commented Gripper. They scanned the stuff for everything they could think of, and determined that - by any standards they could recognize - it was dead. Not very reassured by this, they headed forwards towards the cargo bay once again. The iris valve here had also been welded shut, but had then been torn from its mountings, allowing access to the bay.
The bay (D10) was two decks high, with catwalks at either end and steel steps going down to the lower level. At the end of their catwalk, they found the cargomaster's office (D12) which contained the internal security video equipment, one of their primary objectives. Plundering all the neatly-indexed data crystals, they turned to head back - and Gripper spotted something. A spot of pale blue light, far away on the deck of the lower level of the cargo bay. The whole lower half was plastered in the alien ribbed material; mouldering crates and containers stuck up out of it here and there, mingled with bones from dead humans. One of the crates, tipped on its' side, had something in it, something that glowed faintly and unevenly. Gripper zoomed the telescopics of his visor in on it and discovered a remarkable sight.
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The artifact was made of an unknown metal, faintly blue, in the form of a block 3' long, 2" high with sloping ends and three 1" hemispherical depressions in the top. Each emanated a pale, glowing mist that seemed to support a small metal sphere in the air 3" above two of the the depressions, the middle one slightly larger than the outer one. Where one was missing, the mist fluctuated with fitful randomness.
The most amazing fact about this, they agreed, was the simple fact that it was still powered on after three thousand years. But then, if it was an Ancient artifact, as was quite possible, it was a lot older than that when it first came aboard the Snow Goose... But what was it? Had the creatures, whatever they were, emerged from it in some way? This possibility was rather unnerving, and the pair agreed to leave the thing alone for the moment. Continuing aft, they located the main sickbay. Like everything around it, this was plastered in the dark ribbed material, but in this case with some other purpose. Large dried oval shapes around a metre high stood or lay around the room, some complete, some peeled open at the top, and some shattered. Embedded in the stuff on the walls were several human skeletons, twisted into distorted postures, and most showing signs of severe abdominal trauma.
| DM Note: Everyone back together ready for next session - see what I did there? |
Unsure how to interpret this, but darkly suspicious, the boarders reached the lower drive room around the time the fuelling was completed. Martha and Manx had come aboard after completing the spacewalk, sending Zugh back to the Vanguard to take the pilot's chair. An hour's work on the power plant by all four managed to lash together enough of the ancient systems that Manx felt ready to start the plant.
Snapping down a rusty toggle switch, he watched with satisfaction as indicators lit, needles stirred in their dials, and a faint hum stirred the deck plates. Slowly, the fusion reaction lit up, the thermal generators began to revolve, and power began to flow. All the massive ship's systems except the interior lights were switched out of circuit, in order to conserve fuel; as they began to come alight, several of the lights exploded in showers of sparks. Enough remained on, though, to light most areas of the Snow Goose for better investigation.
Session Date: 21st September 2011 (264/-2507 Imperial) |
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