Formidine Expedition: Entry 002
28 Apr 2016Alexia Zyxx
The Minerva has reached the halfway point of the first leg of her journey: GCRV 950 - colloquially known as the Little Dumbbell Nebula. It's a small emission nebula, home to a massive O class star with a bevvy of red and brown dwarfs circling it -- feeble suitors attending to a grand and beautiful queen. We are currently situated on the surface of a small rock in orbit around the furthest and dimmest star in the system, and the ship is abuzz with activity. The science team is overjoyed with our scanning data so far, and are currently analyzing our readings from within the nebula. As promised, our engineers have restored the entirety of our lost data and are currently re-working the scanners with multiple redundant memory cells for storing our expedition's future results. Our two SRVs have been deployed, with surveyors searching for useful materials on the planet's surface. Seated in the forward observation deck, I can see their headlights flickering down the canyon in the distance. Ugh, I think they're racing again. Spirits are high.There were delays along the way. Upon completing their repairs, engineering insisted that we give Minerva the chance for a complete diagnostic re-boot to ensure there were no lasting effects from whatever bugs we picked up at Obsidian. In smaller ships this process takes at most a few hours, but the sheer size of these Anaconda class vessels, along with the Minerva's advanced computing capabilities, meant that we were offline and out of service for more than a full day. I've been aboard ships for the lion's share of my life, but navigating the decks by emergency lighting with the only noise being the low whirring of the automated life support systems is still unsettling. Drifting aimlessly this far out in the black is decidedly not a pleasant experience.
Shortly upon entering the Little Dumbbell Sector, our sensors picked up the familiar signature of another ship in high orbit around a Class IV gas giant. Multiple hails were met with silence, and the unanimous decision among the crew was to drop from supercruise and investigate while prepping to offer aid and assistance to a potentially stranded explorer. What we found was a cloud of burnt out wreckage. The hull was twisted and broken almost beyond recognition, only the tell-tale fins left to indicate that we were looking at what was once a Lakon Asp Explorer. We spent a full day searching the nearby area for her crew's escape pods, knowing full well that we were likely the only chance for rescue they had. There were no objections from any of the Minerva's crew -- we all knew the dangers we faced, and no one wants to be doomed to an eternity of floating through space in the semi-suspended state of the RemLok escape capsules.
We never found them. I try to convince myself that they could have been rescued already and brought home, that we don't know how old the wreckage was, that the crew could be alive and with their families, telling stories over their pints about how they cheated death...but I know it's a lie. This system has not been logged in the Universal Cartographics database, and even the most determined rescue vessels are equipped with basic scanners. Scanning along their route is free money. Every long distance rescue operation out there appropriates half of their funding from the Universal Cartographics proceeds. The missing crew is dead, their ship destroyed. Before resuming with our plotted journey, we returned to the wreck site and recovered their black box -- their data cache. I've tasked our scientists with the recovery of the records from the ill fated Asp and we'll be adding them to ours with an addendum in memoriam of the lost crew. It's the best we can do for them.
Sitting here unfathomably far from home in the blue-black at the edge of the tiny molecular cloud enveloping my ship, I cannot help but feel a sense of melancholy despite the rest of the crew's exuberance. The fate of the the vessel we found wrecked in the void -- their hull charred and smashed beyond recognition -- weighs heavy on my heart. This nebula is not a place of life; it is a graveyard. Stars are not born here. Here they are in their death throes, casting off clouds of ionized gas as they shed their layers and fade to obscurity and nothingness and are forgotten. I cannot wait to move on and put this place behind us.
CMDR Alexia Zyxx, Minerva, off.