Easter Dinner
02 Apr 2018Namita Pear
The bread is second-rate, but the oils aren't. The olives that made them were grown, and processed, on the garden worlds of Aeternitas. Entire Earth-likes dedicated to agriculture, greenhouse stations in orbit growing food for the pilots who ship their produce light-years away. This was where I began trading, though I now call Kokojina my home for its industry. You can see each apple in the orchards through the rotating glass, as you slide into the mail-slot, and it's a hopeless effort to find a chef for your food cartridges.
Our Easter dinner began with this appetizer, simple yet delicious loafs of bread dipped into oil, garlic, and herbs. Wade insists on reading a short passage from his bible before the meal starts proper, and I relent; the man cooks for me without the binds of our contract, and he has slaved especially for tonight's meal. An entire pheasant, kept void-frozen in the decompressed cargo bay, sits in front of us bronzed in a display that waters the mouth. We eat a salad dripping in vinaigrette and mashed tubers for sides.
My ships all have a galley plus pantry, and this bulk of armor is no different. It will be a week before we have to rely on prepackaged foods.
I am still full as I step outside. Around me are mounds of dirt that surely cover structures underneath, and interspersed between them are black obelisks that emit a haunting tone. It had been an entire weekend with no correspondence or meetup... Wade worries, but I'm sure Barrett has his own obligations. Some people out there have family to celebrate holidays with, I told him. It was the last sentence I spoke before we both lay in our bunks, silent, last night.
And so I am here. If they are detoured, I would not know; this far away from relays, communication is difficult and expensive. So, I turn my spectrograph to the stars and my drive to the interesting signals. I can't fit the equipment necessary for a Level 3 scan, but I can tell the difference between dirt and the grave of an alien civilization. If I've made Mr. Alexander spend his holiday all the way out here waiting for someone and surrounded by ghosts, we'll at least figure out some work we can do in the meanwhile. Working off of a mixture of public databases and Galnet discussion board caches, we've made a cat's cradle of known Guardian ruins near our sector and have been... well, visiting them. Not on the surface, usually. I fear Goldstein's ire (and purse) enough to not do anything too hasty without him. However, I feel the need to make myself, my skills, my crewmember and my intuition worthwhile while we still sit without a single quantum message coming our way.
To digress and return to the subject of our instruments, they are middling at best. More than this craft ever expected to have put on her, but they pale in comparison to what I've got mounted on YIAH. A long-range unidirectional scanner (working on the usual cues: gravity, blue/red shifts, you name it,) lets me see where I'm going and help to pinpoint the sites themselves.
The spectrograph is just that. Old-school, yes, but miles ahead of the relics of pre-FTL days. Where we once needed a dwarf planet to house the sensors used to prospect systems light-years away, I can improve using some bootleg power management and optics meant to be used in a laboratory. After the first day, Wade could calibrate our findings to look just for the patterns and materials used in Guardian structures; from there it's a simple matter of honing in on what we find and increasing sensitivity (or decreasing distance) until we can get some results that I can sign off on.
What are results I can sign off on? Well, to go back to the data we've been gathering...
Information concerning the history of the Guardians is undoubtedly what Isidor Goldstein wants, along with probably every other scientist interested. At the very least, for the time deficit, I can hopefully augment this information with hard-line analysis of the structures we're retrieving that info from. It's a published fact that shielding technology could cover entire Guardian megacities, yet the ruins we discover this fact from (and their protectors!) offer no such shielding. Considering this, despite the utter annihilation we've seen from their wars, why do these remain intact and searchable? It would be in Thargoid interest to wipe these off the map if not plunder them all for themselves. I ramble, but I hope this orbital analysis of the immediate areas surrounding Guardian sites will offer greater insight on why these ruins were built where they were, inferences on what happened to these sites since they were active, and possibly clues as to any subterranean portions.
And if my effort is for jack shit? Well, fuck, what else am I supposed to do?
I'm tired. Ending this update now:
Professor Goldstein, if you read this (and I'm not sending you mail!) please remember I'm out here. Your CMDR's really making me want to try my luck selling this snake oil to R<Spurious Interrupt>
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....m 15 ~~~~~~ar~ch 30th .pen the door, Wade," I call out. Immediately I can feel weight on my chest and something in my hand. I hit the.&2` door control switch with my fist.
I step from the fighter bay and into the galley, awash with intense starlight. We haven't cleaned up, and whi.le Wade sits in the rear seat the Professor is at the controls. I aim at him and he turns around to look at me. I do not know what he sounds like, but when he opens his mouth the voice of his pilot drips out ont o THM@#%!@#
"Commander, [they ?] looking right at us. Watch. Sorry. I didn't want to wake them up with my call."
I can see the main star up ahead. B-class, I ~think, drowning out everything except the other stars and debris. I can see metal and lifepods flying at the same speed as the suns towards the black hole. I reach out for them but my hand hits the [barrier ?]
Along#4Fc#O32C the event horizon I se````
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<Spurious Interrupt- Overflow>
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