The Mine that Time Forgot
09 Feb 2019Gatimũ Kamau
CMDR’s Log, 3305.02.09, Sol Calendar; Every now and then we chance upon something...interesting. The SOA, as Na'Kimuli is so fond of pointing out, is a big bitch with a fat ass. And even with massive 7A thrusters and a power distributor to match, she has quite a time moving about the field. Especially since we added the tonnage of her new hull.
But we're nothing if not lucky. Some time ago, I was given a priority tasking by one of the Federation's most important commanding Generals (due primarily to my Elite exploration status and my, as of yet, still unapproved proposal to plant the Federation flag in the galactic centre) to locate a supposed Guardian site and return with some of the lost civilization's tech for the eggheads to study.
A totally different story for another log.
Needless to say, the entire ordeal ended with our ship, our HOME, being retrofitted with hull augmentations and an FSD booster that are all Frankensteined together form human and alien technology. A $1B CR guinea pig that it would cost the Federal Navy nothing to loose. I don't understand a bit of any of the strange hodgepodge of tech or how any of it supposedly worked but, needless to say, the new drive components significantly increased our jump range despite our girth; taking our Anaconda from a short-range brawler to a mid-range heavy scout without the need for stripping her down.
Amazing.
Anyway, while shaking down the modified drive, we picked up some "white noise" on our systems that I nearly brushed off as background radiation from the system star of Col 285 Sector GN-H b11-0 since we'd just completed a jump until my wife pointed out its irregularities. Closer investigation proved it to be an old listening post. And since it was so close, we dropped in for a listen.
The message was still pretty garbled, but we defiantly understood the words "buried alive". It was a distress call.
The source of the message was a mining colony in Hyades Sector DR-V c2-23. On the system's fifth planet. Dav's Hope. Needless to say, we were far to late to help anyone. The mines that ran around and apparently under the ghost town had completely collapsed and it was little more than a tomb for those caught inside when it happened. But, fortunately, according to the transcriptions we were able to pull from the computers that were hastily left behind, Lucy Minneux was able to get the vast majority of the miners to safety afterwards against the advice of her boss, Nicholas Baker.
I don't know who Baker is/was, and I'm not familiar with the company that ran the mines, but given the callousness of all supervisory parties involved, I'd imagine that it was either run by a Mars based consortium...or the Empire. It stunk of the rich taking full advantage of the disenfranchised for credits.
I fucking hate the rich. And I hate the Empire even more so.
Regardless, we downloaded all of the information we could from the data stores for our superiors to dig through should they be so inclined, we gathered some personal effects in the hopes that we can get them to the families of the people who worked, and dies at Dav's, and we salvaged all of the loose components that we could that could be useful for the SOA. There's still quite a bit of work that we need to do with many of her systems to get things to "gel" together better. Power usage is nearly off the charts thanks to all that alien tech, (no small order seeing as how we're pushing a bleeding-edge 7A powerplant), and we're also running hotter than I'd like. But, much like the acquisition of the alien tech itself...that's a log entry for another time.
So up and out we went. There were more Ly to cover, engineering to map out and more performance reports to send up the chain of command. An officer's work is never done.