Page 191 - The Chronicles Ser2 (6-10)

Vahamat history. Our friend said he’d watched the female for some time and noted that recently she
had become furtive and secretive. It was he who had set a recording drone after her. The recording
we found in the quarters is probably the last thing the drone recorded. She had been assigned to the
Engineering crew; and because she was so careful, her tampering went unnoticed until that day”
Hubris paused and played back a copy of the recording for the benefit of those assembled and
continued to relate what the Kryst had told him. Jovhar had been monitoring the drone’s visuals
while the last recording was made from the seclusion of his room. Her earlier tampering with the
power nodes had led to minor instabilities in various parts of the grid. It was a slow plasma leak from
a conduit in the area she was working that had caused the drone’s opticals to blur and accounted for
the fuzzy image. She had been doing a check on one of her earlier “adjustments” when she was
disturbed. That power conduit and node were offline at the time. The ship encountered a buffeting
from debris and the Engineer had set the automated feeds on and had sent another crew member
to check the readings when the conduit came online. In her hurry to avoid being detected she must
have replaced the wrong circuit. That caused the rupture to the Power nodes down the plasma
stream and the disaster. She had been caught in the plasma fire that had engulfed Engineering and
destroyed the drive units.

“That explains the remains in the corridor. Our friend couldn’t make it to the escape pods in time so
did the next best thing. He emptied one of the stasis units and set the automatics to kick in once he
closed the lid. He hadn’t foreseen that in his hurry he’d accidentally damaged the timing circuits. As
a result he was locked in there for much longer than expected. The Flight Crew had sent off an
emergency recorder back to Home world and had managed to get into two of the escape pods and
launch them away. He was glad that we’d not found trace of the pods as that meant there was a
chance that they’d made it to some safe haven or other.” Hubris ended his discourse and waited for
a response from the others.

“That conversation didn’t last that long. Did Jovhar use telepathy to fill in the gaps” Stenerton asked

“Yes and a great deal of other stuff too. They found a mineral in one of the local asteroids. It has the
ability to trigger enhanced telepathy in some compatible races. The Colonists had used this upon
themselves. He told me where they located the asteroid and where they stashed a supply for future
collection. It means someone will have to use the suit and go with a heavy duty Mechanoid to
retrieve it. He also gave me the pods transponder frequencies. I’ll pass them on to Trok” Hubris
replied.

Recovery and Discovery

Trok and T’luha appreciated the details as they had been having difficulty in narrowing down
the frequencies themselves. Surprisingly the transponders of the pods were still operational and
pointed to a nearby system as the destination. Little was known of that region as there were more
gravimetric distortions there than would usually have been expected. Jovhar on the other hand
knew quite a bit about that system. It was strange to actually hear him speak Interlac, but it helped
that he could supplement his words with implanted images and thoughts. He said he found Interlac
a simple language lacking in depth of meaning, but useful never-the-less. Apparently the distortions
were caused by the remains of two destroyed “artificial” worlds; one in the system another in
intergalactic space. Both were composed predominantly of a super dense matter. It had been an
attempt by one of the earliest races at creating an artificial wormhole. It was hoped that the planets
would become so dense that the matter would collapse into linked singularities warping space into a
wormhole or conduit between the two regions. However the intense gravitational disruption was
too much for them to contain and the planet in that system became unstable. When it destroyed
itself it also caused a subsequent collapse of the other world. That however didn’t collapse
completely. Instead; it became a very dense planetismal that still causes navigational problems even