The Wreck (RoTSA)

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=By Cannonshop=
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==Sign of Trouble==
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3132/07/27 - 48 Months
…out of Port Orphan. The direction was outward. She had a crew of volunteers-mostly from the Privateers, but there was a healthy chunk of Outworlders and a small contingent of Clan personnel here to 'keep them from going bandit'.
"What do we know today?" Esme Gomez was a Captain again, after spending entirely too long running the Alliance Privateer fleet.
Forty-eight months of deep space, stopping to survey systems, plot jump routes, and cataloging phenomena.
"It was a settlement. We have identified it as being Reunification War era, probably refugees-they lasted maybe a decade, Ma'am." Star Commander Ian was part of the Snow Raven 'minders' put on the expedition, and he'd become engrossed emotionally in what they were doing.
"What killed them off?" she asked.
"Starvation. The local ecology uses a left-handed sugar, they ran out of imported foods and tried to survive on the local life…and starved to death with full bellies."
"This is the fourth stop like this since we hit this cluster." she noted. "Erin?"
"My remote's been through their computer system, this colony was established in 2684, and had regular traffic until 2691." The ship's Artificial Intelligence explained, "They lost their supply line at some point."
"Who set it up?" Esme asked.
"Terran Hegemony-or at least, that's who supplied most of their goods and iconography, O'Ryan Enterprises and Hegemony Resources board."
“So what happened to cut their supplies? The timing is completely off for the Reunification War.”
"Based on their logs?? The colonists were wondering the same thing. The ships just…stopped coming."
“Anything from your own data cores or the records Helena and Kolossus made available?”
"We're still surveying the colony site and cataloging what we find, but this fits a pattern. What is this, the fourth or fifth colony site like this?" Ian asked. "Something bad happened in this region, and it happened several times."
“And someone wanted to make sure it stayed buried. Explorer Corps and Interstellar Expeditions did a fair bit of mapping in this area but they don’t have any published records for these sites. Then again they also missed the Sons of Plunder somehow.”
"They weren't looking." Charlene 'Charlie' Massen was the 'air boss' for Erinyes, which meant wrangling shuttle jocks and doing 'jeep shuttle' work. "No HPG, because nobody had it when these colonies were abandoned, so they assumed, like everyone else, that there wasn't anything to look for out this way."
“Or worse, that someone managed to ensure no one looked in on these specific worlds.” O’Keefe said from helm.
"Your check in said you found something interesting in the outer system, Charlie." Esme said, "What was it?"
"Your basic fueling and transfer dock-station. Unlike the planet, that one has evidence of being used a little more recently."
"How much more recently?"
"Within the last century, if Doctor Bogmant's exam is right, no closer than fifty years ago though."
“Leaves a lot of possibilities. Sons of Plunder, Jarnfolk, independent spacers, other nomadic bandits. Keep looking to see if you can find something to narrow down who we should be keeping an eye out for.” Esme narrowed her eyes.
"We'll know more once we've finished the survey on the station." Charlie said, "but I'm going to speculate it's Nomads."
"Not the Not-Named?"
"We found no evidence of them, no higher tech than Age of War, so…no." Charlene shook her head, "Not the people your people still want to finish killing off."
“Okay enough sniping. Let’s hope we are looking at evidence of just some random passersby and not a bandit group with a migration period.” Esme shut down the argument before it could begin.
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===Sign of Theft===
There were…
…records in the station. Arrivals, departures. Cargo tonnage and special instructions, most of them from the same time period as the dead colony.
Resources shipped back to the Hegemony, "Hmm….that's funny."
"What?" Dr. Elias Bogmant's professorship on Taurus was cut short by a student scandal, his reputation as an academic further sullied by accusations of plagiarism and outright fraud regarding some of his theories on the pre-Reunification Era.
"This memo says there should be over fifteen thousand tons of ore in bay nineteen."
"I take it there isn't?"
"Not even close to fifteen kilotons of Germanium at ninety percent purity."
“We know somebody’s been through here since the memo was written, could be they had some sticky fingers.”
"I wouldn't put it past an opportunist, no, but the packing method for what IS there, doesn't suggest it was an easy haul."
“We’re talking about germanium. Not too far out of left field to guess someone got greedy and didn’t know how to properly pack the stuff when they hauled it off and just left a weird ass mess.”
“Nah. Look at the containers closer. List says it is two standard shipping containers. Unless whoever came in and took the germanium also left different containers behind, they are too small for fifteen kilotons of ninety percent pure germanium. Ident codes match and everything.”
"Let's have a look…"
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==Preserved Colony and Death==
Blowing dust and prefab buildings…
… bright blue foliage interlaced with reds. But the Colony site was preserved-something about it was toxic enough to the local ecology that there were still mummified bodies where they died in the houses.
“I’m honestly not sure what’s creepier, how perfectly preserved everything is or the idea that someone made this happen. Even if it was by neglect this is pretty horrific really.”
"Yah." Carlos agreed. "It's creepy enough when it's clearly an accident." 
The two reached the site where the municipal fusion plant had been erected.
“I’ve read the stories and reports. Explorer Corps and Interstellar Expeditions actually have tons of old failed Star League colonies on their charts. So many that if we had found just one or two in this region we probably wouldn’t have even batted an eye. But four? That’s too much of a pattern. Especially how much this region was searched by Explorer Corps when they were looking for signs of the Exodus Road.”
Carlos just nodded. He could've stayed with the University on Alphard, or gotten a job in an industrial firm-instead, he chose to hare off to join the Privateers in a momentous bout of patriotism, followed by joining the Exploration Initiative as soon as it was offered to get away from the memories of what he'd seen during the war.
Just to find it out here. He levered the hatch open, "we'll know more once we've got the main power on." he told his partner. 
“Yeah. Let’s go nice and slow about it though. This stuff is ancient.”
"It's a Westinghouse Eight-eighty, 'nice and slow' is the only way you CAN go with these old junkers."
“Well extra slow then. I don’t like anything about this. Seems too weird. I mean if you purposefully killed off four colonies would you really leave so much evidence out in the open?”
“You’re thinking boobytraps?”
“Yeah. If anyone does come by, what would be the first thing they’d do to find out what went wrong?”
“Turn on the power. Just when I thought I was finally getting away from having to check for this sort of stuff.”
Carlos finished the inspection, and started the power-up procedure.
The ground rumbled when he was halfway through.
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==Sudden Need for Speed==
The light was coherent…
…dense, blinding silver-white, and it speared outward from the planet's surface like nothing on record had ever…
Erin damped sensors, then, she turned them off.
The afterimage was still causing shorts, and some circuits were bridging from the externals just from the sheer intensity.
Then, it was gone…and so were the surface teams, and the settlement.
"What the hell just happened?" Esme demanded, "Erin, speak to me!!"
"I don't know!! Bow, ventral, Portside clusters are fused!! I can't see!!!"
AI aren't supposed to panic. They're not supposed to freak out…"Maintain position, I'll take a team outside, we need-"
"We need to know what the hell just happened!!"
"Do you have anything?"
Erin reached and tried different combinations. "Neutrino detector's fried, I've…I've got magnetic resonance imager!! It's still working! Aft telescope's still functional…short range sensors…"
"External comm?"
"RF systems are fried, whatever that was, it was broad spectrum and intense, I've got null contact on HPG or radio, and LIDAR is down!!"
Esme turned to the bridge crew, who were blinking afterimage from their eyes, "We need a hull inspection, all personnel to damage control stations, and get a survey of the physical damage we just took from…whatever the hell that was! MOVE!!"
She turned, "Charlie! Get shuttles out, two for external hull and positioning, one to see if we even have a surface survey team, go."
"Aye, Ma'am!!"
"Captain…" Charlie said, "I don't need to send a shuttle to look for our ground team."
"What do you mean?"
"Come here, periscope view."
Half the planet was glowing red-orange and…cracking.
"Oh shit…Erin? We need to back off, and we need to do it right now!!"
"I can't see!!"
"Yes, you can, you said magnetic resonance was still up, and the aft telescope arrays, I just need you to fire nose thrusters, and keep the planet out of sight, balanced thrust, okay? It's important…wait…one-eighty, center the planet in your aft telescope, and fire all engines when it's centered!"
"Brace." Alarms sounded throughout the ship.
A ship that big can't nose-over easily without tossing things, and people. The Gee-forces near the ends approached six gravities on emergency thrust…toward the wall.
Injuries could not be avoided.
Then the main engines fired in overthrust as the AI saw what was happening on the planet below.
The planet, was coming apart.
“What the hell? Who would, no who could rig an explosion that powerful just to cover up what they did here?”
"Nobody could." Esme judged, "Hell, to crack a planet you just throw rocks, that originated on the surface…or under it, and we never had that kind of tech."
“So what, just bad timing?”
"I have no idea, what I do know, is that without our telescopes working, we're flying blind, there's going to be an expanding debris cloud, and we have no navigation unless or until we fix the systems." Esme was in the zone again, able to subvert her feelings and the icy grip of terror behind the need to do something useful. "We also have no comm and no way to call home, so that's TWO major systems that need to be fixed, repaired, or jury-rigged around, and that's not counting needing to do a core survey to make sure that escape thrust didn't crack or warp the jump-core…and we have casualties, which must be cared for."
“Aye. Keeping us ahead of the rocks but nice and smooth. Pray we don’t have any rocks ahead of us.” O’Keefe acknowledged.
"Charlie, one shuttle in the bay, one outside flying in formation with the ship, the shuttles will have sensors, watch for debris, communicate, pass the info along the O1C between the hangar deck and CIC, and get my fighters in the air to provide supplemental eyeballs. Once we've got some hard cover from the exploding planet, we can start working on what the ****** just happened to us. Erin!"
"Yes?"
"Listen carefully-we have spares, and techs, and we can jury rig, you can't panic, okay? We can fix what's broke." her tone was soothing, "We can fix it, or do without it. Lawry, you and Zinester get on fixing our radios, Holloman and Trang, I want physical surveys of our antenna and telescopes, find out if it's burned circuits, or if we've got broken optics. Davis and Goldberg, out on the hull with man-portable telescopes, watch for oncoming debris from behind us, and monitor as best you can what's happening to that planet. Colwyn and Farber, inventory on food and consumables, we might be stuck here, we need to know how long we can last. GO!!"
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==The Report==
Captain's log, supplemental
Dave Foster once told me that the first job a commanding officer has to master, is keeping his or her head-or at least, looking like you're confident while your ****** is clenching off the blood to your brain.I don't know what caused it, or even what it was. I know I lost 50 people from the survey teams on the planet, which is rapidly becoming an expanding cloud of energetic debris. Was it natural? Was it man made? Was it alien? I have not a damned clue, whatever records might've existed in the surface facility are gone, and there was no warning from the deep orbital station. It's going to take months, maybe years, for anyone to find us even if they launched right now. It's also going to take weeks to months to get the sensors back on line well enough to plot a course at sunlight or make a KF jump…and we've got four years' food supplies left on board.Erin's…erratic, she's emotional in ways an AI should not be, in ways the AI we worked with during the war never were. Maybe it's natural, maybe it's damage. I don't know, what I do know, is that something very nearly killed us out here and we don't have the first ****** clue what it is, or why.-Esmerelda Gomez, 
Captain, OWS Erinyes - 3132/08/07, 11:00 Hours Star League Universal Time
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Finis
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