Secrets of the Ancients - Otherworld, Part 1

The crew takes advantage of their contact with the Ancient ship’s AI while in jump. Afterwards, they are deposited in a starship graveyard in what looks like another universe.

This chapter is based on Carl and Kay's notes from our October 8, 2022 session. Since we are scattered around the country, we use Discord for voice communications and the Roll20 online virtual tabletop to connect with each other.

Continued from: Secrets of the Ancients – Descent, Part 3

Location: In hyperspace out of the Boughene System, Regina Subsector

Date: 304-1110 

•    While we were in jump to (presumably) Pixie, we had plenty of time to talk with the Ancient ship’s AI and explore the ship. We had spent a large part of the jump week exploring and learning about the ship that got us out of a real situation.  Interacting with, and hopefully getting on better terms with the AI, we felt a little better about our new home.

•    We discovered that the gizmo that Medicus found was a universal translator… and it sticks to skin.

•    The AI let us have a teleport disk and a portable control panel from its stock of spares. It gave us address code 2+6 (was for a missing capsule) and with the AI’s help, we set it up in our cargo bay. We were informed that the range was about 30-light minutes… that was over 54 million kilometers, larger than many star systems. If we get shot at in the ship, at least we might return to the Ancient cargo vessel and stay alive.

•    We discovered the pistol-looking item Kipenzi picked up in the room with blue cubes is a device that dissolves the blue substance; the cubes have perishable cargo plus one local life form that got trapped when it brushed up against a cube. If you brush up against a cube it will engulf and preserve you. It may be a great way to survive under certain circumstances.

•    We ask the AI what other buttons on the bottom of the teleport control panel do. It gave us a full explanation; they controlled the teleport’s appearance, duration and privacy settings.

A couple of days in, Fig and Kipenzi decided to risk it and explored the upper deck of the ship.
From the southern tip of the ship (oriented from the antenna arrangement on one end being north) where a cube-shaped room with grey walls you can move through is located, there is an area that slopes downward to a tangle of cables. From the lips of the depression, we can see braided tangled cables with terminations all over. The cables go down into the ship providing power and data to the room modules; we could see that the cables can move on their own, like snakes.

North of that is a large free-floating sphere that looked like it was made of spun metal wire like a ball of twine, surrounded by three triangular pillars. There was a hexagonal panel below. The AI said it was a weapons system and to steer clear of it, as it’s radioactive. The sphere is the weapon, some sort of energy projector.

Going north from there toward a dome, we noticed damage to the ship’s hull, like huge gouges.
The dome had only one opening and we went inside. There were two-meter-tall plinths with panels, and dozens of panels on the walls. When touched, they showed maps of the Boughene system from 300k years ago.

Experimenting with the controls at the edge of the panel allowed us to scroll the map, zoom in or out, or switch the planet displayed. Another control causes features on the map to shift but the display became increasingly fuzzy and confused when that control was used.

The old maps had some differences from what we knew from our travels, including some systems that are now just space dust. Checking out the Regina subsector, it showed three more stars than we have now. This trio of systems occupied locations 2107, 2206 and 2307. Also, it shows that Shionthy was a planet, not an asteroid belt as at present.

We asked the AI what happened to the stars; it didn’t know that the three stars were destroyed. Basically, a dead end for history lessons in detail.

We asked more about the Ancients’ war. It said the war was between Grandfather and his children; all his children were on the other side, but the main enemy was “7”. Kipenzi asked, “What were the names of the other children?”

The answer: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8…. 400”. Kip asked how long had the war gone on before the ship ended up in this gas giant?

Answer: about 20 yrs.

The ship was a freighter that was attacked during the war and infected by an AI virus and spent most of the time shut down; the ship’s AI can cycle faster than the virus. When the virus started to spread, it would shut itself down, restart and then do a few tasks before it needed to shut down again. Only days have passed for it in all of the millennia since it was infected.

Where did the first fighting begin? A: a planet in the Trojan Reach sector, Cordillon near Pax Rulin. We are aware of no recorded Ancient site there.

We asked the AI to compare our map of the Imperial known space and overlay its own. How big was their space? A: it stretched from the Solomani Rim to the far side of Zhodani Consulate, just about all of what we consider known space.

Speaking of the Zhodani, we understood that the Ancients appear to have interfered with humanity evolution. The AI says humanity was a servitor race that Grandfather had uplifted; he created several different varieties and 6 different species. Vargr were uplifted from Terran wolves. However, the Aslan were not uplifted; they were known to be confined to one planet as hunter/gatherers at the time instead of the large interstellar empire they are today.

We ask the AI what species were they; it says the Ancients - grandfather and children - were the Droyne species “at first”; some changed themselves into other things.

At the far north end of the ship was what the AI identified as an antenna array.

The Low Berth pods were also worth checking out. We opened the one low berth pod that had a Droyne skeleton in it; the pod also contained a pile of dust, cryptic pieces of metal and plastic, another universal translator, which we gave to the researchers to help them, and an Artifact - we could not figure out what it was, at least not so far... It was a... thing. It might be worth something to a collector, but we couldn’t figure out what it was for.

We discover the universal translator could only translate audio, but could translate what we looked at when we tried to read text by scanning our brains. We used it to translate what we thought was non-Ancient text we found at Fulacin.

According to the AI, the Fulacin base belonged to Grandfather. The script was used by one of his children, 78, and was technical notes about equipment found there. We noted them down, just in case. We had dated the material the notes were written on as being 40,000 years old.

We asked the AI if it would give us more of the universal translators and it had a servitor deliver a box of them to the ship, one for each person. One of our researchers, Kenton, said that the devices were probably tech level 25+ and were probably psionic devices. Psionic devices are illegal in the Imperium, but since we don’t know for sure, we’ll keep using them.

311-1110  0651
Out of jump.

The AI provided an outside view.  It wasn’t the Pixie System. We had just jumped into a system near a large portal, who knows where. Fig says, “Guess we better try to figure out where we are as soon as we can.”


 
The ship went through the portal, and there was a bit of nausea as if we had mis-jumped. We looked out to see that we were approaching a planet from about 10 planetary diameters instead of the usual 100.  It was orbiting a main sequence G-class star; there were two other stars in the sky, but nothing else. Just blank. Background radiation was warmer than the usual background (12 degrees Kelvin vs the normal 3 degrees background).

We asked where we were, and the AI said, “Home”.

Dropping into the atmosphere, we saw a lot of big structures below.

With a shudder, modules and pods started to detach and fly past: the cargo ship started delivering its cargo, sending the pods off to predetermined sites.  A bit late, but better late than never.

Looking below, we could see cropland, forests, plains, some clearly artificial mountains, and up ahead a starport with a lot of large ships parked but no other traffic. The cargo bay door opened as we approached the port, and some machines attached to the Star Hunter and lifted it out of the bay and carried us down toward a field, and as we went, the cargo bay itself detached and went on its way.

We landed at the starport, one more in a row of ships. It looked like an abandoned starport. There were lots of ships; some were Imperial ones that we could recognize.  Like a graveyard of ships with no people of any sort in sight.  Some battle had damage, some looked stripped. There were ships that dated back to the First Imperium, several Zhodani vessels, an Aslan Freighter, and some clearly ANCIENT! Many had Droyne and Ancient script on them.

0724
On the ground, no activity we can see.

Continued in Otherworld, Part 2


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, Outback, Skylark and the Pit, Last Flight of the Amuar and One Crowded Hour and Secrets of the Ancients.