Prison Pit
- Characters
- Prison Library
- Logs 1
- Logs 2
- Jailbreak
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As the lights came on, Alice turned and made her way back to the Cargomaster's office (D12), taking Zugh the Vargr with her. The provision of power meant that she was able to work with the computers themselves rather than trying to pry raw data out of the dataslugs themselves. Connecting Minion to the unit, she flexed her fingers and started trying passwords. In only a few minutes, she was in, and Minion was projecting flat holograms of the footage into the air. Starting a week before the ship's last jump, she began to roll forwards through the last days of the Snow Goose, with Minion recording it all for their patrons, as well as storing Alice's selections to a summary.
The early footage was unremarkable enough; members of the ship's large crew moving in and out of the hold, loading and unloading cargoes. At one point a wheeled trolley appeared loaded with crates which were stacked where the artifact now lay; its' crate among them. It recieved no special attention, and Alice nodded to herself; the crew had not known what the thing was.
A couple of hours later, the trolley was back, bearing a single reinforced two-metre crate, misty with cold and marked up as a cold-sleep unit. They wheeled it across the hold and into the Exotic Cargo hold, then emerged and sealed the hatch. All through this process they handled it like it was a bomb. The aliens were aboard and the Goose was cooked.
Alice started slipping forward, watching the ship break orbit, secure for and make her jump. Some time passed. Concentrating on the area around the X-Hold, she managed to capture the breach, and the appearance of four full-grown adult aliens, all sinuous speed and black armoured skin. These swiftly disappeared into the maintenance spaces of the vessel, and slowly the tragedy unfolded.
Crewmembers were dragged into vents, slaughtered in empty corridors or simply vanished. Growing more and more alarmed, the crew took to carrying weapons. The resulting battles explained the corroded patches - the aliens had acid for blood and shooting them at close quarters was usually disasterous. Gradually, the humans were beaten back out of the lower decks, and the strange ribbed excretions began to cover the walls in those areas. A Queen alien appeared, seemingly from nowhere, and started to lay eggs, and later on Alice witnessed the horrible details of the alien lifecycle played out before her eyes.
Later on, as she watched a pitched battle triggered when the humans tried to seal the hold, she saw an alien, racing ahead of a fusillade of bullets, knocked off balance by a grenade explosion. It stumbled into the crates, sending them flying among the shrapnel from the grenade. When the dust settled, there was the crate and artifact much as it was now. Though she enhanced the image as nuch as she could, she could see no sign of the missing sphere. Around it, both humans and aliens seemed distraction from their conflict, clutching their heads and staggering away.
The inexplicable phenomena began almost immediately, strange things phasing in and out within the ship, sections of the ship changing without notice. Crew and aliens alike were killed and maimed by these, making it a three-way fight which the humans eventually lost, the last survivors holding out in the bridge to the end.
After that, the aliens settled in to preparing eggs, avoiding the phenomena as best they could and waiting for the fresh prey that never came.
The jump was interminable, fourteen days, but eventually the ship emerged into realspace. Over the next months, the aliens gradually died off, leaving the eggs to start their terrible lifecycle off again.
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Manx and Martha, meanwhile- the latter with her fusion gun held ready despite Manx' misgivings -had descended to the floor of the two-level cargo bay (E11) to investigate the mysterious artifact. The smashed crate it had been stored in was marked 'electronics parts' and was one of many, most containing the rather dessicated remnants of mundane cargoes. A search of the crate, and then the rest of the hold, revealed no trace of the missing sphere, which all were now convinced was the cause of the distortions to reality. They discussed moving the thing, but once more decided against it, on the grounds that it was too dangerous.
Leaving it for the moment, they moved on aft, reaching the ship's primary jump drives (E32). A glance was enough; the massive strain placed on them by tearing the ship from its' jump trajectory mid-flight had damaged them beyond repair. Sections were melted, many panels had blown out, and several maintenance hatches lay open, testament to the crew's attempts to repair the damage.
Descending to F Deck, they discovered that the Vanguard's sensors had been right; half the craft hangar area (F3) was filled in liquid metal, glowing with a malevolent deep red radiance and - according to their suit sensors - radiating considerable heat - though the effects were somehow restricted to inside the hangar. Wisely deciding not to descend into the inferno, they checked the rest of the deck.The Survival Equipment (F7) store had the words 'I want my fuckin' money back!" roughly etched into the wall with some kind of laser tool. Further aft, as indicated by Alice's research, they found the corpse of the alien queen, reduced by time to mere bones (and really impressive teeth!) in the Exploration Equipment Store (F16). It was among these bones that Martha finally found the missing sphere from the artifact in the hold. Glancing around, she reached to pick it up, and everyone edged away from her instinctively. Her armoured fingers closed around it and everyone winced, then relaxed as nothing happened. Everyone except Martha.
Martha stood motionless for a moment, unable to shake the sensation that there was someone behind her. From the corners of her eyes, at the edge of her vision, things moved, shadows hinted, shapes partly revealed themselves. Her head shifted this way and that, trying to get a better look, but whatever it was stayed at the fringes of perception. The really disquieting thing was that the central telemetry wasn't picking any of it up - none of the others could see it at all, just her head and viewpoint moving around as she tried to catch sight of it.
This made everyone nervous all over again, so the idea of creating some kind of remote arm or waldo to deposit the ball back in its place while the cons retreated to a safe distance in the Vanguard. Gripper and Manx set to work on this while Martha and Alice continued to research the data they'd recovered.
the snow goose, 0404/menkor, shipboard time 07:12, 201/1106
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Once the arm was ready, a problem was identified; the remote control and video feed was only reliable out as far as five kilometres. This wasn't nearly far enough for either Martha or Manx' peace of mind. Rather to everyone else's surprise, Gripper volunteered to remain alone within 5km of the Snow Goose, in his battledress, and operate the device while everyone else retreated to a safe distance.
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With the ship's sensors focussed on the derelict from a hundred thousand kilcks - beyond the artifact's baleful influence - Gripper flicked on the remote control and took the joystick. Slowly, the arm lifted the blue ball and swung it towards the artifact as the crew watched through Gripper's battledress. Gently it moved it into the mist above the empty indentation - and the screen went black.
Nothing visible happened as such but the radar shadow and density of the Snow Goose instantly dropped by more than half. That seemed to be that, so Martha brought the Vanguard in to pick ip Gripper and return to the wreck.
Wreck it was, now; more than half the ship was missing, randomly and without pattern. Fragments and debris drifted aimlessly, including things that had no right being there at all - frozen water, boulders, some human bodies from some primitive pre-tech world. As they closed, the pale blue glow of the artifact revealed its location.
Opinion was divided over whether to take it back. To researchers studying jump and reality, or Ancient artifacts, its value was incalculable. But was it going to kill them all? Martha thought of an idea. If any of the jump torps had survived, they could load it into one and perform a microjump to test the results. Once again, Gripper volunteered, this time to load the artifact into the torp, but when he lifted it, the mutters and whispers of sight and sound on the edge of his perception were too much for him and he released it, shivering with revulsion. It was left to Martha - either more psychically resilient or better attuned to it - to finish the job.
Once loaded, and the torp programmed, the Vanguard retreated once more to a safe distance for the jump. The torp vanished as planned, and the crew settled in to wait.
the snow goose, 0404/menkor, shipboard time 23:26, 209/1106
A week later, their hearts began to sink. No recorded jump had ever taken longer than this, and it looked as if the torp - and the artifact - weren't coming back. Disgruntled, the cons turned in for the night, planning to leave in the morning. They had, after all, fulfilled their mission; the disappointment of losing the artifact did rather spoil the success, however.
It was the middle of the night, however, when Burkins woke suddenly, the memory of something he'd heard said during the replay of the security footage ringing in his head.
The last jump of the Snow Goose lasted fourteen days
Session Date: 28th September 2011 (271/-2507 Imperial) |
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