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I am a salvor of Rhân-class wrecks and astral-debris

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:18:00 No.5876177 View View Reply Original Report

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In my mind I am well, my body clean and my conscience unworried…

But my experiences, lived and heard, weigh heavy on me like a bilge filthy with flora. I'm sending this text-based message out using the ship's comm array while in transit so it can scatter it across the cosmic winds as we go without trace. I don't care if the Observer Authority gets their hands on this. They will not find me.

I am a salvor in the business of salvaging scrap, materiel and artefacts from Rhân-class wrecks and space-borne debris.

I am a Virtue-type of pattern homo-sapiens-alba.

I served in the Malbolge war.

I have seen things fantastical and horrible alike.

These are my stories.

These are my confessions.

Attached: a law-former found during the campaign on Snare in the Nan'Taiek system. Few, even among the Alba-corps, have ever seen one before.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:19:06 No.5876178 Report

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After the war was decreed over by the Concordat there came a need to revitalise the space-borne economy which had been largely press-ganged into participating in the war effort. The freight sector had transitioned back to civilian, or otherwise, trade between worlds and systems, orbital docks started producing less battleships and more transports and freighters, even the privately-owned mercenary fleets found work in system or planetary defence. Combat repairmen, armsmen, search and rescue operators, cherub fragmenters and other roles that had been swollen, or even created, by the war were in too plentiful supply across the galaxy. A bloated market without enough jobs for all the walking, talking, skilled military-surplus in the form of pattern-albas like myself.

The answer came in the form of salvaging contracts. The war had left all kinds of valuable resources adrift and some of it still contained ‘bolge residue and the horrors that entailed which could spell an outbreak at the very least if not handled properly. Higher-level salvaging is largely a cleanup effort and a cover-up for malbolge itself.

We all knew what it was, the Concordat would rather it be that no one did.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:21:00 No.5876179 Report

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History lesson aside, our first job was investigating a sensor return from a moderately populated system out in the void beyond the borders of the star’s reach. A sensor ping identified it as some section of a dreadnought with a well documented service history throughout the war.

What made it R-class is the fact that it was logged as destroyed in a battle on the galactic rim, this was not far from the core near the gateway to the Orion exclusion zone. Space debris can drift, yes, but this was a year and change after the war was over. Nothing drifts that fast without help. Furthermore the satellite that picked it up triangulated its position via sensor-returns taken a standard month apart. It hadn’t moved. It was stationary, rotating, but stationary. I don’t think it takes a genius to tell you that a wreck like that isn’t just some standard drifting space-flotsam. It seemed easy; locate and identify the anomaly within the wreck and we keep any salvage we find without the local tax elbowing in, that and the standard Concordat-mandated hazard pay.

My job was an initial survey of the ship to mark down points of interest and chart a direct, safe course to the source of the anomaly for our cherub to investigate.

Given the conversion of our ship from an armed tugboat to a salvaging barge was funded solely by a fairly modest grant, I wasn’t given much in the way of equipment going over. A recently outdated void-suit with a mounted spotlight, a laser dot-array scanner, some radar beacons, three breaching charges, a cutting torch and a small tank of cutting fluid. That may sound like a decent amount of equipment but I’ll tell you as a former boarding specialist (void-borne offensive demolitions if you must know) that this was painfully threadbare. Our budget was stretched so thin that even a handgun was out of the question.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:22:48 No.5876182 Report

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We found the wreck fairly easily given its coordinates hadn’t changed at all but even then we still needed to use the ship’s spotlight and laser-grid array to get a firm lock. When you’re out past the borders of a system, in the shallows of the void between stars, you forget how much you take for granted how much a star can highlight things. Even a wreck over six times the size of ours (I never got a firm-grasp of standard units but I know our ship is just over half a klick in Venerian kilometric) was still a hard thing to get a tight lock onto. Out in the void matters of distance and location are incredibly abstract. Anyone who’s worked in comms can tell you that for free. After the wreck was found, we got a preliminary scan of the exterior. The dreadnought Talon of Her Grace, or more accurately, Her remains. It was a portion of the ventral-section, from the first glance I could tell it was dedicated to one of its tactical-bombardment guns for orbital strikes. Whatever ‘bolge-infested monstrosity/monstrosities had brought Her low seemed to have torn the entire section from the main body. Besides a few plasma burns the hull itself seemed fairly intact.

I was shipped over in one of the three shuttles we had and dropped at a hallway which was still intact at one of the two points of breakage. The hallway was along the side of the hull's outer armour plate itself; a utility corridor, I was familiar with them. They run along the entire length of ships like this in order to streamline the movement of emergency crews, lined with automatic bulkheads in case the layers of armour that separate the hallway and the void are breached. Once I got firm mag-lock with my boots on the corridor, I gave the all-good to the shuttle pilot on the comms to double as a comms check for the frequency we used. The audio seemed a bit shaky but the suit’s transmitter was pre-war tech and just as old to boot, it was probably gonna be like that no matter how deep I got. I switched on my shoulder-mounted lamp and got moving, I had three hours with the oxygen and the rudimentary recycler the suit had. No time like the present. I pressed on down the hallway, scanning the path I took in order to make the path of the fragmenter team a little easier when they got briefed after my return. I reached the door and noted my first little peculiarity to note; the door was clogged with weld-material down the middle of the seal between the two sides of the dual-sliding door design. This could have been done for any number of reasons: a poor estimation of where the breakage would occur, the ship being breached before the breakage occurred or maybe even a localised mutiny. Either way, the two-way pressure gauge on the door was intact and indicated that the other side of the door wasn’t pressurised and perfectly safe to cut through.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:24:39 No.5876184 Report

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I twisted valve at the right-angle bend before the torch nozzle and watched a bright, needle-like stream of cutting flame billow out. I cut a large oval that the following team could go through and sent the metal hunk drifting out the way I came with a little nudge.

The utility corridor extended further but my eye was drawn to an inward path that would take me deeper into the ventral section; a left-hand turn with an open bulkhead up a short set of stairs. A couple steps through the open passage and I could already tell where I was.

Racks of blast-plated, armoured cases, a maglev track down the middle of the room, retrieval claws bound to the racks akin to those weird cup-things found in some drink machines that display all the bottles and cans and show your drink being grabbed and deposited; this was one of the magazines for the bombardment gun. The room was large, warehouse large with several shutter-like blast doors the size of a house bisecting tracks where maglev transporters would move munitions around the ship. I scanned the room to be thorough, walking around and looking particularly for any hazard signs. My rad-ticker in the suit was quiet, that was a good sign that even if this was the cascade munition storage that there were no radiation leaks evident. I mag-locked one of the radar beacons to one of the racks and flipped it on. Fair chunk of paydirt here even if this was just regular explosive or kinetic rounds.

While taking some rudimentary scans of the basic layout of the magazine area, I heard- no, felt something beneath me. Tapping. Not whining or groaning, tapping.

While this was my first survey mission for the purpose of salvage, this wasn’t my first time aboard a wreck like this. I knew what the feeling of a destroyed starship settling felt like. It's a long, erratic vibration you feel right through your mag-boots. If you’re seasoned enough you can even get a sense of where on the ship it’s coming from.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:25:44 No.5876186 Report

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This wasn’t that. It was tapping. Three taps to be precise. At that point I should’ve called it in. I had friends back in the war in search and rescue, the S and G-types were particularly bad for this, that would flinch if you ever even rapped your fingers across a table or surface like 1… 2… 3… It was likely due to their hard-wired desire to protect mixed with the routine of “listening” closely for survivors trapped in wrecks trying to flag down rescue teams. It was exactly that conclusion I had come to but I talked myself out of it. Sure, there was a chance that there might be survivors subsisting off of emergency nutrition bricks and the section’s auxiliary reactor but if that were the case they would’ve been able to reach us on comms or signal to us in some way more obvious way. How would they know I had even boarded if that weren't the case? In hindsight, those friends I had mentioned would’ve laughed at me at best, slapped me at worst for using that kind of logic. Regardless, I was trying to rationalise the tapping the best I could, most of my suit’s power was dedicated to the mag locks and oxygen recycler. Using power to attempt to raise command back on a ship tens of klicks away with a short-wave comms array as outdated as the one in my suit just to tell them that I might have detected signs of survivors seemed a little unwise. I’d need something a bit more firm for that.

I pressed on to yet another bulkhead, the only I could see in the low light my lamp provided. The door panel was live but this was nothing to jump at. This one had a backup microcell in it that provided it with enough power to sense that the other side of the door was of the same atmospheric pressure and could therefore open safely. Through the door was a short corridor with a right-hand turn half-way down. I checked the closed bulkhead on the other end of the corridor. No chance, at least not here. The pressure indicator was reading that the other side of the bulkhead was pressurised. There was likely, so I would believe at the time, a sealed air pocket on the other side of the bulkhead. The air was likely stale with co-two and barely even breathable without a recycler but still compressed gas nonetheless. The failsafe on the door panel would refuse the door to open. If I made even a small hole with my cutter it would cause a high-pressure jet stream of air rushing through and not knowing what was on the other side made that prospect way too messy.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:27:03 No.5876187 Report

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Option two was to place a breaching charge, backtrack and blow it at a safe distance via remote detonator. If your memory serves you well, you’d connect the dots that explosives plus dubious structural stability plus an unforeseen decompression event plus a giant cache of even bigger explosions a few metres behind me is an equation you’d only seek the conclusion of if you had a death-wish. So I backtracked and pivoted down that turn a few steps behind me. It was long and dark, no surprises there, so dark that my lamp couldn’t see the end of it. The darkness on board this wreck was like some kind of matter in its own right; inky and dense, swallowing the edges of my light to the point where even the narrow cone I was working with had its limits. It was a far cry from the sonar systems we worked with back in the war when faced with perfect darkness. The closest thing I had to that was the panel on the side of my dot-array scanner. I started walking down the long corridor, the lasers were able to reach the end and start painting a picture by saturating everything in a cone ahead of me with dots and using the lengths of the beams to chart the topography. Two perfectly flat walls turning outwards to form ninety-degree turns at each end forming an intersection with another corridor. Floor was flat, as was the ceiling.

The wall at the end of the hall was not.

Quickly a picture formed, it came into view at the edge of my lamp’s light just as I realised what the silhouette on the scanner was; another void-suit. Similar make to mine at the time, hanging lifeless and still. I won’t lie, just the sight of it made me stop for a second. I, slowly mind you, made my way toward it to see if it was… occupied. I approached and first scanned the two sides of the hall it was in. The hall on the right probably led back to the magazine, the one on the left led deeper into the ship. Then onto the matter of the suit. I couldn’t see through its glass face-plate due to it being polarised and the lamp only reflecting light back at me. It must have been the maintenance model like mine with the face-plate doubling as a welder’s mask. Behind the head where it drifted was an open vent that I couldn’t see into unless I disengaged my mag-boots which would only cost more power. The vent cover was probably sucked into the vent itself or blown out somewhere else when this section of the ventral gun-bay underwent decompression. Occupied or not, it would take time and cutter fluid to check. Both would be better spent elsewhere.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:28:37 No.5876188 Report

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At the left turn I was in luck! There was an airlock sign above the door and the panel was still functional, all I could do was hope that the cycling mechanism was still working. In layer assignments I would’ve been given backup batteries to momentarily power said mechanisms but, again, money was tight. I twisted the panel switch and to my glee the panel’s diagnostic screen showed an “underway” animatic and I could feel the airlock decompressing ahead of me. This had me wondering if this section’s auxiliary reactor was still functional (which would fetch a handsome price) and if there were any survivors on board, that at least made me feel a little less crazy about the tapping I felt. As the bulkhead opened, I squinted and the lamp automatically shut off. Light! Yellow caution lights in the airlock. I stepped in and saw that the airlock still had a functional activation panel inside. Flicking it on, my suit detected a gravity field ahead as the airlock pressurised. The ship’s grav-generator was functional as well, as were the airlocks, the lights… This section of the ship was in much better shape than I had anticipated. I placed a radar beacon against the wall and could hear the airlock announcement voice saying something about pressurisation being complete. My suit sampled the air; it was safe to breathe as well! The airlock opened and I was expecting to see someone waiting for me, their saviour, with open arms but… no? Nobody? It was just more hallways that were lit with dimmed yellow lights to conserve power. This. This was the point I decided to call it in. I pressed a button on the wrist of my suit making the radio grille in the neck-portion activate.

“Home this is Away-1, I’ve located a part of the ship with breathable air and artificial gravity but with no signs of life. Thoughts?”

Nothing, just crackling. I held down the trigger of the scanner, pointing it dead ahead as I looked back the way I came. I tried the receiver again.

“Home this is Away-1, am I clear?”

Again, nothing but space-noise. I sighed and turned on the airlock again. Maybe I just needed a better spot to get a stronger signal. The airlock finished decompressing, my lamp switched on to light the dark way back down the secondary hallway to the magazine. Mind you I was still squeezing the trigger of the scanner as I went, always good to be thorough. I stepped out into the magazine, spotting the door I had initially gone into not too far down after walking onto the inactive maglev tracks.

“Home this is Away-1, do you receive me?”

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:30:12 No.5876189 Report

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Nothing. Again, nothing. I was getting frustrated but knew I’d get chewn out if I aborted now so the only other option was to go back into the pressurised section, map what I could, maybe find the reactor and let the fragmentation team do the rest. At that point I had already forgotten that the main reason this wreck wasn’t already scrapped was because its very location, existence and behaviour were all anomalous. To me it just felt like any other wreck I’d been on and that had my guard down more than present me would've liked. I marched back up to the airlock, went through the decompression process yet again and walked into the first hallway and scanned for signs to follow, preferably one for the reactor area. To conserve suit power, I turned off my mag-boots, recycler and took my helmet off, switching off the display but kept the rad-ticker on just in case, clipping the helmet on my suit’s utility belt on the opposite side to where my cutter was with the breaching charges on the back. As the suit had foreseen, I could walk around and breathe as if I were on a regular, functional ship. I began walking. There was a right turn a few paces ahead and a T-section further ahead. As a rule, most reactors are kept as deep within the section they powered as possible. A magazine explosion could be contained and the emergency purge could be activated before it got bad. A reactor malfunction introduced radiation, power surges and an explosion far worse than any magazine cooking off. The deeper into a ship it is, the more protected it is and the better access it has to maintenance crews, fire suppression and other supporting factors. At the intersection there were thankfully some signs mounted to the ceiling. The arrow pointing back the way I came read “magazine 4” and “infirmary” with the latter probably being down the turn I didn’t take. I’d check it out later. The arrow pointed left was for the cafeteria. The right was for the reactor, meeting rooms 3-8 and the personnel quarters for this section.

Right it was, then.

Walking down the hall, the subject of where the crew had gone nagged at me. So far I had only seen one body- well, one suit but there was no signs of anyone around. Since I was alone, passing by the meeting rooms, I decided to stop for a second and try my frequency scanner to see if there were any live signals. I pressed the scan button on my wrist and waited, rolling my eyes as the frequency our ship’s short-range radio flicked by like nothing. I waited a few more seconds, getting ready to move again. Then my wrist beeped; signal found and with a high strength too, must be coming from this section. I waited to see if something pre-recorded would play. Nothing. I cleared my throat and spoke the memorised ‘we’re here to help’ phrase in universal basic.

“All receivers, a rescue craft is nearby, please respond with status.”

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:32:37 No.5876192 Report

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I waited, after a few seconds a response came… in albacant.

“Hello!”

The way it was said felt… off. It was spoken in G-type cadence, sluggishly and with a certain floatiness to it, the voice of someone who isn’t so bright as one would say but unlike a goliath the tone was less gravelly and deep more… bloated sounding somehow. The kind of voice you hear from someone who’s eating a little too good, speaking like their nose is blocked and with a certain constricted softness to it. I stood still, releasing my grip on the scanner and allowing it to process the last few minutes of all the scan data it had received.

“Hello. Any other survivors? Do you need assistance?” I responded in albacant.

“Need. Help,”iIt didn’t sound like he did. It sounded monotone yet still had that bloated semi-jubilance to it, he, it, whatever, sounded way too friendly.

“What is your current location?”

“Close.”

A chill went down my spine. Albacant isn’t the most expressive “language” out there but no one, no matter how brain-damaged, replies to a request for location to someone they’ve presumably have no bearing on with “close”. I switched off the radio transmitter, fearing I had already been traced. I looked at one of the meeting rooms. The door panel was damaged but it was open and the shutters for the windows were shut. Good enough. I needed to evaluate what to do next and prepare. If what I had spoken to was armed, close quarters was my only option with my cutting torch or even the threat of my hand-held breaching charges. The room was well-lit and had a table with the chairs stacked neatly in the corner…

And another limp suit slumped against the wall. Same suit type as before. I put my scanner on the table and unclipped my cutter from my belt. Slowly I approached the suit from the side, raised my foot and gave it a swift kick in the head. It crumpled over to the side and onto its front. The suit itself was completely intact save a hole in the back of the neck. Something in the air smelled rotten. The suit was occupied alright. Pattern-albas usually render down to the skeleton post-death after about a standard week while on board a ship. Whatever had killed it hadn’t done so very long ago. I reached closer toward the hole and-

“Analysis complete: one topographical inconsistency noted, one instance of motion detected.”

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:33:47 No.5876193 Report

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The scanner buzzed on the table even after it had read out the notification. I practically jumped out of my skin, scrambling over to the table and muting the scanner, crouching down and moving under the table out of sheer panic alone. I kept an eye on the doorway for any sign of movement and flicked through the first thing the scanner had mentioned. The messages themself had gone over my head entirely, overshadowed by my immediate desire to shut it up.

First was the instance of topographical inconsistency. In scanning terms that means that two separate scans of the same area don’t match up. It was a scan of the hallway leading to the airlock. Once for my first trip in, second for my quick trip back to the magazine. Before I even reviewed the conflict my stomach sank as my mind crept back in time.

When I had gone back to the magazine to try to get better reception I didn’t recall seeing the suit in the hallway.

I flicked between the two scans. First one, a suit at the end of the intersection next to an open vent. Second one, no suit. First, suit. Second, no suit. First, suit. Second, no suit.

I was beyond trying to rationalise, what concerned me even more was that the scanner had switched to motion-tracker mode at some point.

The playback was about five seconds long. It began on the little screen showing the dot-map of the hallway while I was looking back. Then a red outline as all the laser-projectors locked onto the movement.

A suit, upright, hand raised at a perfect right-angle in a stiff wave sliding out into the hall, arms at its side then sliding out of view as the airlock closed. The motion-tracker module of the scanner records at over eighty frames-per second, this was not a bug or lag.

The suit did not move at all, it slid into view and then slid back the way it came in the direction of the infirmary. This was during when I was looking back the way I came when I initially tried to radio for advice before proceeding. My heart pounded in my chest as I watched it one more time, noticing something between the suit’s legs. It looked almost like an oxygen line-

“Hello!” I heard over the radio receiver.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:34:52 No.5876194 Report

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I looked up from the scanner screen. Peeking under the other end of the long table was the face of a pattern-alba. Eyes glazed over, mouth slightly agape with its lower-lip hanging down limply. It didn’t quite blink. Its eyelid twitched and those glassy eyes remained locked on mine.

“I need. You.” The voice on the radio said. It sounded pleased.

The head dropped to the floor, severed.

Something slimy and wet wrapped around my exposed throat in an instant and pulled me out from under the table, slamming the top of my head into it in the process. I kicked my legs, trying to get a grip of the slippery appendage to no avail, looking up to see it was dragging me toward an open vent above as a second tentacle emerged and slithered down toward me and behind my head.

Burning. I felt some kind of liquid melting away at the skin of the back of my neck, the second tendril slowly burrowing into it. My skin began to crawl. My fingers twitched as it inched deeper, my mouth began to drool as it hit bone, my legs spasmed and kicked on their own. My vision began to fade. I was losing myself.

In a move I can only describe as sheer defiance, I twisted the cutting torch to full blast, closed my eyes and pointed it at the side of my head at arm’s reach away, getting the torch into position just in time to see a star born in my peripheral vision.

The side of my face and neck was engulfed in a plume of cutting-fire, catching the tendril drilling into my neck and strangling me with it. The wall rumbled. Something down the vent shaft squealed. The side of my face bubbled. I felt the ground beneath my feet, the back of my neck burned but nothing was burrowing into it now. I should’ve fallen but instead, in an act of repeated, practised muscle memory, I primed a ration can-sized breaching charge without activating the magnet, unclipped it from the back of my belt and threw it hard down the vent as those tentacles, charred and severed at points, tried to withdraw.

I hit the detonator switch mere seconds after I had thrown it.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:35:53 No.5876196 Report

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The concussive blast sent me flying back but the backplate of my suit caught the brunt of the impact. The whole room rocked and the squealing intensified from within the vents. I unclipped my helmet from the belt, locked it back onto my head, fired up the oxygen recycler and attempted to get back to my feet.

Before I could, the shock of the moment ceased and I fell over onto my side.

The section of my face caught directly in the fire burned where I could even feel it. I felt air on my tongue even though my mouth was shut. With shaky hands and blurred vision I hit the scanner button again on my wrist. Frequency locked on. Whether it was what had tried to kill me or the ship, they could lock onto where I was transmitting from.

“Assistance needed,” was all I could croak out, the sensation of air coming out of places it shouldn’t was too awful to say more.

I couldn’t feel my legs anymore. I placed a radar beacon next to me for good measure, flicked it on and shuffled into the nearest corner with my free hand. Thankfully in that fluid motion of arming the charge my unconscious mind had turned off the torch. I had some fluid left. Not much but enough to make it hard for whatever was likely coming for me.

I waited, torch in one hand, eyes glued to the vent. I placed

a freshly primed charge in my lap. I wasn’t going to let this thing do to me what it had to the person in the suit now slumped in the opposite wall I had found it on.

I waited some more, detonator in one hand, torch in the other.

Tapping through the ground. Mag-boots. Growing closer. Closer still. I look up and I see three men in armoured suits entering and scanning the room, guns in hand having just walked into my peripheral vision. I tried to get to my feet unsuccessfully. The noise made all of them flinch and whip around to point their weapons at me till they realised it was me. Just me. One of them holstered his pistol and ran over to me, his helmet’s speaker grille turned on.

“Vincent! You’re ok?” It’s Cowern. a power-type, one of the nicer powers I’ve met in my time.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:36:57 No.5876198 Report

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“Help me,” was all I could say. The relief that I had been found at last told my body that it was time for me to close my remaining eyelid. Cowern fumbled with and took off my helmet. My last memory aboard that wreck was seeing them all recoil in shock at the state of me through an eye I couldn’t close nor hardly even see through, just shapes stepping back in disgust at my half-destroyed face.

When I finally woke up I was in the infirmary in a comfortable bed with a mirror hanging above me. My face had been reconstructed back to normal with stem-bact and my neck no longer burned. I felt the back of it, flinching a little expecting the bore hole the thing had made, finding nothing but smooth, freshly regenerated flesh instead. Someone else was sitting on the bed opposite, getting his eyes checked by Maria, a Venerian and our specialist doctor. The one getting his eyes checked was Reno, our fragmenter and the only cherub aboard at the time. She was likely checking to see if any fragmented malbolge had seeped in anywhere it shouldn’t.

“How’d it go?” I asked, Maria looked over at me as I sat up with Reno speaking before she could.

“Successful. Successful enough. We found the anomaly. Got rid of it. The wreck’s being gutted as we speak,” he said in that monotone, nasally voice of his.

This is largely the end of it. My captain had no qualms and nothing bad to say, he was more surprised to see that I had survived almost getting my spinal cord breached and having half my face (willingly) burnt off. For what it was worth, the radar beacon I had placed had put the salvage team on a direct path to the reactor so it was something of a job well done. Apparently my radio was fully functional but the transmitter for the ship’s comms had blown a fuse. They could hear me but say nothing back, explaining away the radio troubles. I asked the captain what they had found. The captain, without giving away his identity, is a yur’nei, four-arms, pale-blue skin, two sets of eyes and some grey-ish white hair. When I asked him what they had found, his skin somehow took on a lighter shade of blue. He said he had asked Reno and Cowern and the rest of the boarding party. None of them wanted to talk about it. The best he got was from our ship’s principality interpreter, Taured.

An instance of malbolge code had gotten into one of the infirmary’s stem-bact tanks while it was occupied. One can only fathom what horrors might come to a person subjected to stem-bact hijacked by the shaping code of malbolge.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:38:31 No.5876200 Report

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From that day onward I never stepped foot on a wreck without a proper weapon.

That concludes the main story but here’s a few smaller ones about the oddities you can encounter in my line of work.

It was about a month or so after we had concluded our work, hauled the salvage to the system’s capital, got our pay and was en-route to the nearest major shipyard for some further refits to the ship and to stop in at a military surplus depot in the same system. I had gotten control of my legs back a week ago and had wandered into the comms room. Several different species and Taured were scanning frequencies as we travelled at light-speed toward the system’s jump-beacon. Our ship uses faster-than-light beacon-lock tech, probably the most standard form of inter-system travel and therefore the most cost-effective and safe. There were enough horror stories of non beacon-lock ships hurtling into a system’s star or worse that beacon-lock computers are required by law on every ship with FTL engines. I was talking about this exact fact with Taured to pass the time and he brought up how some unsanctioned explorers and treasure hunters shunt or remove the beacon-lock system to explore places without a beacon nearby. As an engineer by design the very act of meddling with the fragile tech of an FTL engine made me cringe but I asked what they’d even be looking for or where’d they would even be trying to go.

“My best guess? Probably into the orion-spur where all the beacons have been shut off, maybe elsewhere in search of weepers.”

“Weepers?” I asked.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:39:33 No.5876202 Report

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“About five years ago when I was an albacant interpreter on a survey mission aboard a transporter to a potentially salvageable system that had gone silent, I was in a comms room just like this one scanning the frequencies. As we got within about one light-year away, I get a signal lock on something registering as coming from right next to the system’s star, so close you could be fairly mistaken for assuming it came from the star itself. I’ll never forget the noise. It was garbled, real garbled but it sounded like someone crying. Not screaming or wailing, just sobbing, real unnerving stuff. It went on for about two minutes. I wanted to see if it would loop over but every bit sounded novel. My superior saw my face, my discomfort must’ve been showing, and asked me why I was locked onto the star and why I was looking the way I did. First I told him ‘I’m not locked onto the star but something next to it’ then I handed him my headset. This officer, he’s alba likes us, somehow gets even paler than pale. A new shade of alba-white after just a few seconds of listening to this weeping transmission from some unknown location near the star we’re racing toward at faster than lightspeed. He rushes out of the room and minutes later we’ve stopped at the nearest beacon and changed course. I tracked him down the next day and asked him what had happened. First he thanked me for being so sharp, then he told me that he couldn’t tell me and that it was privileged info or something. All he could say was that if you ever hear weeping out in the void, no matter where you are, go the other way. Immediately. Sometimes I still hear them when I’m scanning around, most often far off in the orion-spur but sometimes I get a lock on a system that’s not on any of the maps of the galaxy, like whatever’s causing the weeping in those systems is so bad that some higher authority took it off all the charts to prevent anyone from going there. Who knows, with the jobs we’re licensed for, maybe we’ll be sent in the direction of one real soon.”

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:40:47 No.5876203 Report

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The last story for a while is less a story and more a side-effect of the job. This is after about ten years of experience with R-types, not counting my work during the war. I still to this day don’t know what causes it but the first time I sleep after returning from the wreck, I always have the strangest dreams.

I usually dream regular dreams for my kind; a mix of past events and predictions of future events blended together with some absurdity mixed in. These dreams I get after a job are something else entirely. I can’t tell if it’s the ‘bolge radiating into my mind and the dreams are some kind of purge or what. I started writing them down when I started having them during the war and they all have to do with some kind of desert, a flat-topped mountain and something on top of it. The most recent one I had was vivid enough to write it in my dream journal which I’ll just copy here.

“I’m out in the desert again, greenery all around me and then red-soil desert stretching beyond the horizon. Ahead is that mountain again, flat and wide like a giant, knocked over grave-stone fallen onto the earth. I see a light reflecting off something on top of it, it stings to look at. The light flashes sometimes for half-seconds sometimes for a full second. After a minute or so of watching I began to take note of a repeating pattern. A code? Each interval of flashes was broken up by a pause of 3 seconds with no light reflecting.

F = flash

H = hold

- = pause

FH - FHF - HHF - HFHH - FHFF - F

Over and over until I woke up.”

I went to Taured and described it since he knew a thing or two about coded languages and all that and he said it might be something called “morse'' which works off of short dits and long dahs, it’s outside of my purview and I’m not getting paid to study cryptography in my spare time so for now I guess I just don’t know what it might mean.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:41:48 No.5876205 Report

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I asked Cowern about the dreams post-mission since he and his squad escort Reno all the time. Cherubs don’t really dream so I didn’t ask Reno himself. Cowern talked about the patrolman and the detective, a pretty common theme in the dreams of powers. Common enough that those two figures had garnered a fair share of reverence, there even seemed to be different versions across the dreams of different types. The seraphim dream of the paladin and the tinkerer, the meteor and the comet amongst the principalities and whatever other interpretations existed. Dominions, to my best knowledge, had it the worst. Hadn’t met one since the war but after boarding actions, late in the simulated night cycle on the ship I was on, one would sit up in his bunk and begin whispering, eyes open but unresponsive. The first pages of my journal were the transcriptions of these eavesdropping sessions of this dominion officer by the name of Balarn. It’s in albacant so it’s more illustrations of what I heard but they give enough of a memory to paraphrase.

“Clouds like mushrooms in the distance beckon me like fate made manifest. No river shall impede, no “rubicon(?)” shall drown me, march on, march for my sun(?), make them pay, make them pay. “Abracax(?)” one and two will guide me through just as they led me to the giant sleeping under “ayers(?).” I will never die, I will never.”

Thankfully at that time I had gotten a vague grasp of the venerian alphabet and could spell out the letters that made up the words I had never heard before. I feel bad about it to this day. When I told someone about it, word got around and he was subjected to an “elected” mind-cleanse after the war was over. Something in those dreams he had disturbed someone higher up the chain of command enough to wipe him clean. Kept my mouth shut about anything regarding dreams to this day unless I knew it wouldn’t be spread around.

Dreams of recurring figures to the point of mythology, my own dreams containing encrypted messages I can’t decipher and recounts of memories that weren’t even real in the case of Balarn. What secrets hide in dreams? To this very day, I’m uncertain.

6EQUJ5

6EQUJ5 ID:tJMtMBHm Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:42:51 No.5876206 Report

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In a time of my life where the soothing comfort of ship-rocking barrages, of urgency, combat demolitions and danger-close fire has given way to slow terrors spawned from festering wounds in machine and reality alike, I remind myself;

The galaxy is rife with horror, horrors I have seen and am yet to see.

Every jump into a new system orbiting an ageing star.

Every drydock I step foot on,

Every pay spent on implements for my own survival,

I will prevail another day.

If I’m lucky, any directed responses will find their way back to me without the signal location being revealed or worse, being actively traced. I look forward to answering any questions about what was said here. I'll do my best to address any questions. Even just sending these three recollections has lifted a great deal of burden off me.

All the best,

“Vincent”

construct, salvor, dreamer

Anonymous

Anonymous ID:q9DCFZUI Thu 28 Dec 2023 11:48:13 No.5876209 Report

Quoted By:

didn't read all this

Anonymous

Anonymous ID:ByWNHOl1 Thu 28 Dec 2023 12:20:55 No.5876216 Report

Quoted By: >>5876233

cool story, bro

Not in the ironic sense though, I honestly think you're a bro and that your story is cool

Anonymous

Anonymous ID:UZqwiYsh Thu 28 Dec 2023 12:32:27 No.5876220 Report

Quoted By:

maybe try submitting it to clarke's world or something

Anonymous

Anonymous ID:vcpeLodR Thu 28 Dec 2023 13:37:30 No.5876233 Report

Quoted By:

>>5876216
It'll be even cooler when you google "I am a salvor of Rhân-class wrecks and astral-debris."
This isn't a writefag dump board but I'm guessing this was moved here because /tg/ hates any creativity now.

Anonymous

Anonymous ID:HWW6fzwt Thu 28 Dec 2023 16:13:56 No.5876275 Report

Quoted By:

Certainly intriguing, now present some follow-up options for us to vote on.

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