Skylark and the Pit - Conclusion
This
chapter is based on Carl and Kay’s notes from our March 10, 2020
session. Since we are now scattered around the country, we use Discord for voice communications and the Roll20 online virtual tabletop to connect with each other.
Continued from: Skylark and the Pit - Part 4.
Location: The Planet T’yana in the Egyrn Subsector
Imperial Date: 275-1108
As we wandered around, Kipenzi opened a yellow pressure door and there was a security bot there.
It started turning toward Kipenzi and looked like it was about to fire. 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."
--
Fig stepped back and ducked around a corner out of line of sight and moved along the wall up to the door behind us and Sam followed Fig. Kipenzi leaped to the door controls and hit the close panel and tried to contact the Ship’s AI.
Kip gets a feeling in her head rather than words. She thought, “Can you control the security bots?”
The ship replied, “Sort of.” It can override them, but they are autonomous.
Being glad that she was not wearing a psionic helmet, she talked with the ship and asked it to tell them to NOT shoot at us.
The ship agreed and (hopefully) got them to refrain.
There was a security bot behind the door. Should we open it and continue? Or maybe just go back the other way? Could we trust a 200,000-year-old AI that was probably insane?
Another question was what had happened to the now returned data feed back to the Skylark? Did the bot jam us? There were indications that it may have been a power glitch with one of the relays.
After some discussion, we decided to continue forward.
The bot was sitting on the floor instead of hovering, and did not track us as we went through. Looking through doors that were 'triggerable' and entering rooms that were not, we proceeded through the ship.
We found another bot, this one just hovering stationary.
We explore a side room with console that was not working, Kip asked the ship, “What does the console do?”
The ship replied that it was a duty station for *something untranslatable*.
We opened a red door and look through, big spherical room with hole at the bottom and a shaft going down. Elevator shaft or maybe a zero-g drop shaft. Probably used to access the lower levels of the ship. We did NOT go through, having been zapped enough times, thank you.
As we continued, we found more “duty stations” in rooms. There seemed to be a lot of the yellow pressure doors, more than you would see in a modern Imperial vessel.
Sam remarked that the ship was very poorly designed, despite the incredible technology present.
Heading east (mostly) there are two more yellow pressure doors. We open the one on the left and there was a security bot hovering behind it. Kipenzi closedthe door and we continuedto the right door on the right. There was nothing behind it but more corridor, so we closedit and went back to the door with the security bot. It glided through the door and went down the corridor in the direction we came, ignoring us.
There were more “duty stations” on the right and then we came to a half-open yellow door. We found another room with a shaft and this one went down two levels to a pool of water.
The ship was huge, probably half a kilometer across. Sam wanted to go down to a lower level but we found the passage blocked by wreckage when we tried.
Floating back up to the upper level, we found a room that looked like living quarters with a Droyne skeleton sitting at a control panel. Searching the closet, we found some decayed uniforms that were not nearly as fancy as the ones we found nearer the bridge.
Sitting among unidentifiable decayed items in a cabinet was a smooth, multicolored ball. Apparently untouched by time, it looked like it was made of some kind of plastic and was about the size of a tennis ball.
Sam put it in his loot bag.
After a couple more living quarters, all unoccupied, Kipenzi found an engineering sort of room. There were cabinets filled with tools and what was probably spare parts. Some were recognizable, some not, all made for smaller hands than ours. We took them all. It looked like life support and recycling machinery and some of the stuff was still running after all of this time.
We took everything that didn’t crumble into dust when we picked it up and stuffed it into bags that were stuffed into our grav-assisted cargo net. Much of it was made of some kind of plastic or metal that literally lasts forever.
Following a passage way north through more doors and passing more living quarter/duty station rooms we came to another security bot. It was sitting on the floor and not moving. Kipenzi found that her link to the ship’s AI allowed her to read the text written on the bot. It said “11”.
Getting a close look at it, we could see that laser rifles would be ineffective due to a highly reflective surface and it had heavy armor, we would need portable artillery to fight one. What we were carrying would be largely ineffective.
More living quarters, more passage ways.
Checking one of the duty station/living quarters on the left side of the passage, we found a skeleton with obvious impact damage. It looks like most of the ship had been evacuated, but some had stayed behind, and when it came down - it came down hard, killing most,if not all, of the remaining crew.
Kipenzi looked in one of the cabinets she found in the room and found several small cubical boxes with dirt in the bottom. One had a red slug-like thing that moved towards her when she examined the box.
She asked the ship, “WTF is this?”
The ship didn’t know, “It’s not authorized”.
Something durable, for sure. The light after the closet door opened must have 'woken' it. Maybe analogous to a kitten, maybe a life form in the dirt that grew. It was in a sealed box, there were several boxes but only one with a life form. The boxes appeared durable too, touching didn’t reduce them to dust like most of what we found.
Something in a closet. The ship didn’t know what it was... this is disturbing.
Kipenzi taps other cubes, they don’t break, in fact feel very solid. Deciding that it was safe, she put the cube with the slug-thing in with the rest of the loot.
Fig decided to work the broken seal on Sam’s vacc suit, something we should have fixed earlier.
Leon and Medicus, on the Skylark, were of course watching us. They reported that a train pulled into the station up above the ship. Soldiers got out, unloading a bunch of things. Medicus was unable to contact him. Lumber, tools, cables, rope. A LOT of troops.
Professor Katzl was with them. Med tried and failed to contact the Professor. He was looking ragged, like he hasn’t slept in a while.
In the station above, one of the soldiers panicked and other said, “it’s not real, it can’t hurt you”. The ship is apparently still broadcasting visions.
TThey also reported that at the edge of the evacuated zone are police in riot gear with a horde of people trying to get in. It looked like it was on the edge of a riot.
We discussed some options.
The Away Team started feeling like it was a good time to pick up our repeaters and the loot we left behind earlier, and get out.
Outside the sun was going down and the rioters were starting to break through the security perimeter in places.
We all went back to the gold statue, picked up repeaters as we went. Sam was able to dismount the glass mobile and carefully packed it away.
While Sam was packing the mobile, Kip noticed light shining on a small crack in the slug’s container, only visible at the right angle. She alerted everyone and put the box in one of the cabins and closed the door. Sam pulled out his marker and labeled the door, “Danger, do not enter”, in Anglic.
We floated up the central shaft and heard sounds of hammering and people moving.
When we went up toward the entry way, we found that the Army had built a bridge across the first spherical room. Professor Katzl was there, with an Army officer and a bunch of troops who were extending a walkway across the frictionless passage.
The professor introduced us to the officer, Major Connor Quendich and we talked about what we found. We told him that a living organism was needed to push the auto-destruct, which is why our grav-belt failed and why the AI couldn’t do it itself.
The haggard-looking Professor said, “I’ll push it”, and started forward.
To our surprise, the Major punched him and knocked him out cold. “We don’t have time for discussions”, he says. “I’ll do it myself.”
He tells the troops to “See he gets out OK”, and tells the troops to leave the evacuated zone and they leave carrying the unconscious professor.
Fig and Sam take the cargo net up to the air/raft, and Kipenzi takes the Major down to the ship’s bridge; and the AI starts talking with him.
We agree on him waiting one hour for everyone to get out of the area and for us to get to the air/raft and back to the Skylark 2.
We are sure the King of T’yana will appreciate his sacrifice.
We
get back to the Skylark with about 15 minutes to spare and go straight
up at least twice as far as we think is needed. We have no idea how big a
blast this will make and don’t want to get hit by flying debris.
It turns out that there was no flying debris or even an explosion. Just a silver ball about half a kilometer across that appeared instantly and then faded, leaving a huge hole in the ground.
We got reports on the local news and from ground control that the riots have stopped, like turning off a switch. Suddenly everyone is sane again, if dazed and confused.
2100
Getting
Sam out of the damaged vacc suit took longer than we expected and left
him with more than a few burns and cuts. Medicus patched him up.
While Medicus was working on Sam, we got a call from Sir Lord Rahk Birkbek at the science ministry thanking us for all we did. He was especially thankful for the dictionary that we recovered from the ship.
We took the Skylark back down to the starport and decided to call it a night.
276-1108
The morning after.
Over breakfast we watched the local broadcast from the pit. It was an almost perfect hemisphere over 250 meters deep, the sides were very smooth; some areas were shiny with a polished look.
The bottom was filling with liquid, some from the severed water and sewage mains pouring down the sides.
As we watched a damaged building on the edge collapsed, sending a shower of bricks sliding down the slope, splashing into the pool at the bottom.
There was no radiation reported so far.
They were asking people to stay away from the edge since there was a slight overhang and a sheer drop.
Someone being interviewed said, “This might become a great tourist attraction”.
Another speaker expressed how grateful they were to Major Qendich, “Whose sacrifice saved us all.”
We see Professor Katzl all cleaned up with a bruise on the side of his face. He said, “We learned a lot” and publicly thanks us for getting all of the information. We remember him noticing our loaded cargo net the night before, but he didn’t mention it.
We were getting non-stop requests for interviews from the local media, but we let them roll to voice mail.
Discussion of where to go next ensued.
We decided to go back toward the Imperium, see how the war goes and drop off such information as we decide to. Candia looked like a next stop, and then back to Glisten via Craw.
Sam said that he had some solid leads on cargo and wanted to stay another week and leave with a full cargo bay.
Fig brought up the subject of us being responsible for destroying an Ancient ship and how we don’t want to tell the Third Imperium it was our fault.
We called up the Professor and he agreed to back our story if someone came asking, but there were conditions. He wanted a share of the loot we hauled out in our cargo net for their museum. We agreed.
Once he got off the comm, we decided to unpack the cargo net and see just what we brought back.
- A green metallic cube thing that expands seamlessly. When fully extended, it is flexible along one axis at a time. When straightened, it collapses back into a cube. It was found in the engineering area with the tools. No idea what it is for.
- A hollow tube made of some kind of yellow metal or hard plastic with a frictionless surface. Purpose unknown.
- Multicolored plastic ball, very smooth, slippery. The Imperium can make some very long-lasting plastics, but this shows no deterioration at all after 200,000 years. Maybe we could analyze it and get a patent?
- One gold statue of a Droyne, hollow and made of some gold alloy, nearly a meter tall. Spectral analysis says that it was made in zero-g, since the component metals would have separated a gravity field before it could have hardened. From the way it was dressed, probably a leader of some kind, there was no label or writing of any kind on it.
- A number of miscellaneous tools, spare parts and small electronic devices that look like they may be some kind of test equipment, none functioning. We set aside some of these for Professor Katzl’s museum.
In addition, we have the recording of the dictionary, it is not translated aside from the six words that we already have. Professional linguists should be able to puzzle it out.
Kipenzi’s psychic link with the AI also gave her another word, Yasterdray is a corruption of Yaskoydray which means Grandfather as well as the personal name of one of the leaders in the Ancient War.
And of course, we still have The Eye.
One loose end was the cave where The Eye was found. There were things in the floor and behind the wall that we had found with our x-ray sensors. Calling the museum, we found that they were not going to excavate anything for months at least, long after we would be gone. We wondered if the dictionary would help in figuring out what was there?
We also confirmed that we would be left out of the official history of the destruction of the Ancient ship.
Over the next week Sam was able to fill our cargo hold. He got some good deals since it appeared that everyone wanted to sell to him. He picked up some very nice-looking marble, some cotton-like fabrics, and other local products. We would also be carrying ten tons of the local beer.
282-1108
Jumping out for Candia.
288-1108
While in jump we celebrated Kipenzi’s birthday, she turned 42.
289-1108
Out of jump into the Candia system got a call from the Adamdun which
is also in system probably doing anti-pirate patrols. She is a 1200-Ton
Kuninir class frontier cruiser. We last saw her in the Regina Subsector
on the coreward side of the Spinward Marches. Apparently exiled here
but at least out of the war. (We have a history with that ship).
We landed on the main world to sell our cargo. Candia is a vacuum world, low population only 7 million people here total. They live in man-made cave systems where they grow mushrooms and produce medicine.
There are six other worlds in the system, all officially uninhabited, a good place for a pirate base – or two.
We asked about news of the war, we heard nothing newer than we had already learned. Candia, like T’yana, is fairly low-traffic. News travels slowly this close to the edge of the out-rim void.
296-1108
As we are ready to leave, we are hailed by the Adamdun.
They are friendly, the Captain remembers us and offers us dinner. We
accept and bring along some Zila ice wine. The news is the war is not
going well at this time, but the industrial might of the Third Imperium
is second to none. It might take a while, but we’ll win. Right now, it
is a hard fight, Regina is under siege, Lunion is getting raids, the
Vargr taking territory coreward of Regina and Aramis.
297-1108 0200
Jump out to Craw.
298-1108
This week is Leon’s turn for a birthday party, he is 39.
304-1108 0600
Out of hyperspace in the Craw System.
While we were in-bound to Craw, we passed another inbound ship at 87 diameters. It was a launch from the Capella, a 400-ton Type-R merchant. We swapped greetings and continued on to the planet.
Around noonish we were parked on the ground, there was only a low port here and it was only class-C. We ordered a load of unrefined fuel and Sam got on the comm to find a buyer for our cargo.
That afternoon we stripped Sam’s vacc suit for spare parts and dumped the rest in the recycle bin.
We also started on a list of things to take care of once we got to Glisten:
- A new vacc suit for Sam.
- Get Medicus’s arm fixed.
- Maintenance on the Skylark 2.
- Replace our engineering bot.
- Replace the radio relays that we left behind on the Ancient Ship.
We also got some TNS news, it was old, but better than nothing:
⑆ EQUUS/LANTH (2417 B55A858-B) 204-1108
¶ Equus authorities have learned that the disappearance of the merchant vessel Harun-al-Rashid was due to barratry, not terrorism as had been originally suspected. Testifying in admiralty court today, in return for immunity from prosecution, the navigator of the vessel stated that he, along with the captain and engineer, wrecked the ship after surreptitiously selling its ship's cargo. The crew, transferred off the vessel before it was set on a collision course with an outsystem planetoid, were offered a cut of the profits to keep quiet.
¶ The two officers were convicted on the basis of the navigator's testimony, and were each sentenced to 25 years on Equus' penal island. Charges against the ship's navigator were dropped. Ω
So it wasn’t the Ine Givar after all.
And...
⑆ BENDOR /GLISTEN (2336 A756656-C) 228-1108
¶ An Imperial Naval Intelligence spokesman, in a press release issued today announced the interception and arrest of an Ine Givar cash courier. The courier was transporting an undisclosed amount of money in the form of precious stones. Intended to finance local terrorist activities, the stones are rumored to be worth in excess of cr25,000,000.
¶ The release stated that the stones were of Sword Worlds origin, although no definite proof of the culpability of the Confederation government was discovered. The Sword Worlds government has been suspected of financing Ine Givar activity for many years. Ω
So the Sword Worlds are supporting the Ine Givar terrorists, or someone wants people to think the Sword Worlds were supporting them.
Continued in Glisten.
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.
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