Skylark and the Pit - Part 4

 

The crew of the Skylark 2 continue their explorations of the Ancient colony ship and learn the true meaning of Murphy’s Law.

This chapter is based on Carl and Kay’s notes from our February 9, 2020 session. Since we are now scattered around the country, we used Discord for voice communications and the Roll20 online virtual tabletop to connect with each other.

Continued from: Skylark and the Pit - Part 3.

Location: The Planet T’yana in the Egyrn Subsector

Imperial Date: 275-1108

0300
All tuckered out, Kipenzi and Fig headed back to the ship in the Air/Raft, minus the engineering bot. After picking them up, the Skylark returns to orbit, and we rest until late in the afternoon.

Tomorrow is soon enough to talk about things and try to come up with a new plan.

1400
More or less rested, we sat down to talk.

We thought of possible questions for the AI:

• Do you have teleportation devices? How about a black globe generator or stuff like that?
• Can you turn off the security on the doors?
• Why were they doing this to humans?
• What and how many sides where there in the war and what was the outcome?
• Star maps?
• What type of technology do you have?
• Do you know of more colonies, and their locations, like a starmap?

The ground situation was degenerating.... More visions, more troubles. Even the Professor had a vision, but had no new details to add.

First effort involved sending Sam’s hologram capable probe robot in with a set of relays so communications would be maintained. See what we can see, with it disguised as Kipenzi.

We verified that the probe COULD correctly set up relays, testing it in the cargo hold before we sent things down. One large repeater outside to relay to the ship, smaller ones dropped along the path the robot follows.

The first closed door stopped the probe. Sam had the probe push on the control panel to open the door, but was unable to get it to open. It likely needed some biometric action to open the doors.

But as long as it was in the ship, Sam moved it around everywhere he could get to with it.

The central shaft goes down about four stories, ends in pool of water, there are four doors, three are partly open. He finds some more corridors, but is again blocked by closed doors.

He has the drone dive into the water and finds dead bodies in it. Dead folks who had (presumably) been 'summoned' into the ship by the visions.

No sign of engineering drone or security bots.

After Sam had traveled all he could, he brought the probe and the relays back to Skylark.

It looked like our choices were twofold: Go back in ourselves, or give the professor a grav unit and tell him how to get there.

We decided to go ourselves. Sam, Kipenzi and Fig were our away team for this one.

Kipenzi thought of the set of Droyne coins we had and takes them along.

Medicus took the Skylark down to about two Km above the city and we took the air/raft down from there.

All flights were canceled so we had the air to ourselves.

1800
With no one in air but us, Kipenzi, Sam Fig left the air raft and went down wearing hardened vacc suits, psy helmets, grav belts, tool box, weapons and a box of relays.

Fig took his crossbow, Droyne coins and a cargo net.

Sam brought his drone.

Kipenzi didn’t have her helmet on so she could communicate with the ship when we needed.

When we got back to the control room, there was no sign of the grav belt. Hmmm, security bot cleanup patrol?

The platform rose out of the floor and the AI says “one must choose to help me die” in Kipenzi’s head like before.

The AI needs a living organism to press the button, which is why it can’t use a security or cleaning bot to end itself and why our grave belt wouldn’t work.

“What happened to grav belt?”

It explained that the grav belt was likely taken to recycling, in southeast of this level. Gone by now.

No way to lock the door closed.

Kipenzi asked it for a star map and it showed one. Without references, it was not all that useful since many of the stars would have moved relative to each other in the last 200,000 years.

She asked about when the ship crashed and after some questioning about units and doing some math, we figured out the ship had been launched before the Ancient War.

“Star map of colonies seeded?”

“Yes.”

It showed us a location on the edge of the galactic core that was the target destination. We found that there were several ships going there.

Any other colony worlds? None known.

We asked if it had any teleport disks like those we found on Fulacin.

It answered yes, in a part of the ship it can’t communicate with anymore, where pain comes from.

We got a full hologram of the ship. Well below the level of water we had seen. The ship has 12 levels, storage, spares and hanger decks are below water level. It has black globe generators; they are big and for ship defense only ...and still functional. We found that no such thing as a personal sized one.

Below us is a hanger deck, full of water now, its landing craft were used in the evacuation. They disembarked most of the Droyne crew and cargo at the edge of the swamp.

Engines? No feeling and below the water line - it feels a lot of pain. It occurred to Kipenzi that there might be radiation leaking, we were all relieved when her radiation sensor showed that we were not being irradiated.

We showed the AI the coins and it identified them as Droyne casting coins.

“Can you teleport us out?”

“Yes.”

While we were talking with the AI, Sam wander off to see if he can find something he can loot. He walks through one of the red doors and gets zapped and finds that his helmet is now welded on. It was the kind of shock that would have taken his head off it he wasn’t wearing a heavy vacc suit.

He finds some kind of engineering control room, the standard terminal was black but there were also readouts on the walls, lots of orange lights. When it passed through the door Sam’s drone took damage and he stuffed it into has back pack.

Sam told us about the engineering room and continued down the hall, opened doors and took pictures without going inside.

Sam opened one of the yellow pressure doors and got a chlorine warning on his atmosphere sensor. He could also smell it inside his suit, which was bad. He stepped back out and closed the door.

Kipenzi caught up to him and checked his suit. The helmet has been welded on and it will be difficult to get him out of it, he will probably need to be cut out of it when we get back.

Sam said that the tech on these control panels alone would be worth a lot, even the non-functional ones. He tried to get one loose but could not figure out how to release it. Fig said that we should just take one of these control panels and the information we had so far and head back to the Imperium and wish the Professor, “Good luck”.

Sam finds another living quarter, looks like an officer of some sort once lived there. There is a skeleton at the control panel and the closet contained fancy uniforms with stripes and shoulder boards. The skeleton and uniforms crumbled to dust when touched.

There was a mobile suspended by fine wires hanging from the ceiling, a fragile looking thing that looked like spun glass with lights pulsing within it.

The next room was another one of the living quarters. This one had even fancier uniforms in the closet and a golden statue of a Droyne, just over a meter tall. Sam dragged it out into the hallway for future recovery.

There was a cabinet containing a bunch of fragile-looking scrolls. No one touched them.

The next door was a red security door. Kipenzi had by this time mastered the art of opening the doors without getting shocked. She could look in and as long as she didn’t pass though it or get too close to the edges, she could see what was inside.

Looking inside there were six terminals, it looked like some kind of engineering control room, lots of blue and orange lights, none labeled.

The next secure room contained two skeletons siting at control panels. One seemed to be better preserved than the others we had seen. Kipenzi noted it on her map and we moved on.

The room after that also had two skeletons sitting at control panels. This room was obviously there equivalent to traffic control. They probably died directing the evacuating landing crafts.

Next door was a room with more terminals.

Every other time we came to a corner, we placed a relay to keep a good signal back to the Skylark.

As we wandered around, Kipenzi opened yellow pressure door and there was a security bot there. It turns to face her and looked like it was about to fire.

It started turning toward Kipenzi and Sam closed the door and we turned to run.

Back on the Skylark, Medicus says to Leon, "We just lost the feed from the away team!"

Leon replies, "I still see a signal from Fig, but we lost the others."

Continued in Skylark and the Pit - Conclusion

See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Skylark 2, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde, Shadows, Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak, Prison Planet, Leedor on Aramis, First Call at Zilla, Trade War, The Bloodwell, ANNIC NOVA, The Kinunir, Kesser's Return, Justice, Mission to Mithril and Outback.