The Missing - The tragic stories of the generational ships - Atlas, Artemis, Lycaon
19 Nov 2020Glaivas
At the dawn of the colonization of space, humans embarked on huge spaceships that traveled for centuries at subliminal speed to distant worlds that now, thanks to modern technology, can be reached in a few hours.
During the voyage, entire generations of crew members were born, procreated and died while the ship was traveling using traditional propulsion.
Most of these ships no longer exist because the colonists, once they reached their destination, dismembered them to reuse the materials to support the construction of the colonies.
Not all of them, however, completed their mission successfully and disappeared into the obscure immensity of space: they are the Missings and the ships on which they traveled have become nothing more than huge sarcophagi.
In orbit around the white dwarf Charick Drift A, there is the Atlas now a huge mausoleum in memory of Tom Edwards, the ship's last chief engineer.
By interfacing with the ship it is possible to download the last audiologs that tell the last moments of the mission when Tom discovered that, due to a factory problem, they would not be able to stop the ship once they arrived at their destination. Short of time, Tom devised a system that would still allow the crew to land at their destination and start the colony.
The plan was to bring the ship as close to the planet as possible and launch all the escape pods and life shuttles loaded with all the necessary equipment. The plan had only one problem: someone would have to stay behind to launch the pods and Tom volunteered.
From what can be retrieved from the listening station that allowed to discover the location of the ship, the plan worked and Tom's sacrifice was not in vain. However, I would have liked to have a word with the guy who designed the ship's emergency system, what the hell did he have in mind when he designed the system if whoever operated it was doomed to suffer the same fate as the ship? Couldn't he put it close to the capsules so that everyone would have time to reach them and escape?
The history of the Artemis is macabre: the records that can be obtained from the ship tell of a murder case that was attributed to a dog illegally boarded because the victim had bite marks and scratches. The following logs tell of the killer's delusions that suggest that the murders continued without the ship's security crew being able to do anything to the point that the other inhabitants tried to appease the murderous fury with sacrifices but without success. In the last message you can hear the killer damaging the reactor, an action that surely killed all the survivors. Really disturbing.
The crew of the Lycaon was completely eliminated by an alien pathogen that was brought aboard the ship by a scientist named Gottleib, who brought on board a sample of a mineral taken from an asteroid that passed in the vicinity of the ship. This alien pathogen caused an epidemic that spread rapidly infecting all the people on board. With no one on board anymore, the ship's systems shut down and reached the current resting place.