Down The Rabbit Hole
20 Mar 2022Harry The Hatchet
Once you pop...20th March 3308.
Maia, Pleiades Nebula
A lot has happened since we last caught up in 3306, logbook. I've been snatching at scraps of data archive, chasing vapors across the bubble. Tryin' to get a grip of a slippery situation.
How far do I go back? In 3304, I made a good friend. In a moment of weakness -- space trucking loneliness being the primary cause -- I opened my ship up to telepresence crew. I girl half my age beamed herself aboard. Don't look at me like that! My wife may have remarried and moved on but I am way passed the point of courtship. Anyway, the girl's callsign was Sab7. She had a boyish face, an attitude problem, and she could talk for hours. She was an effective counter-balancing force for a semi-alcohol, self-inflicted loner. In other words, she was precision engineered to annoy me. I had to admit that I enjoyed it.
Until one day, she up and disappeared -- poof! No more messages. No more telepresence. I assumed I had finally bored her enough that she moved on. Maybe to swoon over some boy, or what ever it is young people do now. But then, in 3306, I received a message through a courier. That's right, a real a flesh and blood messenger. The missive was fragged to hell, but I pulled a favor to get it reconstructed. What little that could be recovered claimed that Sab7 (real name: Sabbatine) was aboard the Xeno research megaship Gnosis. Not just aboard, but imprisoned. She begged me to bring a lump sum of credits to her to buy her freedom. It was an idiotic idea, but I never was a genius.
There were, however, two major problems: Firstly, I didn't have the money. And secondly, the Gnosis was currently under attack by 'goids. It was preparing to jump to god knows where as a tactical retreat any time soon.
I may not be a genius, but I am a practical problem solver.
The first problem was simple to solve. Every smuggler worth their salt knows how to rustle up cash in a pinch. The second problem required a very fast ship. I got my hands on one through an old contact. A beautiful, second hand Krait, tuned up by some of the finest dropouts of the Imperial Engineering Academy. It also came pre-loaded with vast quantities of some of the galaxy's finest illegal substances. Push, hush, slip, hyper. You name it, it was crammed in its cargo racks. It was a real firework.
The plan was quite simple: I run the goodies to a buyer enroute to the Gnosis and sell up. I take the profits from that deal and pay off the cost of the ship and initial drug purchase. I take the leftovers to the Gnosis, dodge the 'goids, buy Sabbatine's freedom, and get the hell out of there.
I won't repeat how it all went belly up. But it's safe to say I was three hundred million creds in the red and slapped with a fifty million credit bounty. If you need the whole sad tale, consult the previous entry.
It wasn't all a crying shame though, I ended up with a lead. On the way out of the conflict zone I picked up a decorated Fed officer frozen in an escape pod. His pod's onboard computer had taken a hefty hit, but when I got it working it fingered him as resident officer of the Gnosis megaship itself. If anyone could shed some light on where the Gnosis was heading, and why Sab7 was imprisoned aboard, it'd be Mr. Stripes here. If I wanted to have a conversation with our officer, I'd need help to pop the pod open. This is not as easy as running a can opener around the seams, especially not for a valuable officer who's big head contains sensative information. I'd need an expert, but with such a hefty bounty on me every wirehead in my little black book refused to work with me. Typical, really. Hackers work with ones and zeroes all day, and they see a bounty with a five followed by seven zeroes and they shit themselves silly.
In the end I found someone willing to help me open this escape pod. He was a nut case. It was a good thing too because if he had any sense he'd refuse to work with me like the rest. His name was CMDR BlueMonday.
Now I Stand Here Waiting
BlueMonday's Basement
When he wasn't drifting off into a Hush stupor or falling asleep with his tools in his hands, BlueMonday made good on his offer to pop the pod. After a few days of working the problem, the lid came right off. Finally, we could unfreeze and question the stiff, and get some solid info.
But the officer inside was a mess. The pod's controls must of taken a hard hit during his fight with the 'goids because the pod hadn't frozen him properly. From the waist down he was perfectly preserved, but from the waste up he was a true horror show. The battle turbulence shook him around the pod with such force that his spine had broken, and his body was nigh-on-recognizable with all the blunt force trauma. He wouldn't tell me much; a skilled puppeter couldn't get much out of him, let alone a coroner.
Another dead end...
But then BlueMonday had an idea; Ever since the Gnosis came in contact with the xeno scum in a pitched battle, his network was buzzing with shadow-intel of the event. Every data broker was chasing snatches of cargo manifests, slivers of comms logs, FSD wake data, astro-nav diagrams. And they had managed to catch a lot of it. Only no one had managed to crack the security on any of it, it was locked up tighter than a nun's nethers. You'd need an array of crypto-computers to crack it, or the direct authorization of a high ranking officer from the Gnosis intself; an officer just like the one coating the inside of our escape pod. Blue Monday could copy his credentials from the onboard controls of the pod and crack the authorization on the Gnosis data. The officer couldn't tell us whether Sab7 was a prisoner aboard the Gnosis, but all that juicy data floating around the network could. It would take time to decrypt and organize, but I had no where else to go and nothing else to do.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Where-in we get our feet dirty in the sewer of conspiracy
After some light prodding with the officer's credentials, the data decrypted beautifully. BlueMonday sifted through it all while salivating. He was so fascinated with the data (or rather, what it could be worth) that it took me while to focus him on the task at hand. But to his credit, when BlueMonday focusses he does so to the edge of insanity. I guess that's what Hyper does to a man.
We poured over all of it again and again. But the Gnosis data showed no signs of CMDR Sab7 aboard the megaship. In fact, there was no notions of prisoners at all.
"Sure, but some Fed egg-head probably covered it up, right?" I protested. BlueMonday laughed.
"If they did, it's the best damn cover up in recorded history. Sorry, lover boy. I can say with all confidence that your girl wasn't there." He replied.
It didn't make sense. There was no reason for Sabbatine to lie that I knew of. We had spent a long time space trucking together, so I was certain that she was not some kind tryna scam an old smuggler-in-denial. The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I suddenly felt more lost than I'd had since the whole mess began.
BlueMonday, as a point of sympathy, took a look at Sab7's SOS that I had recieved by courier back in 3306. To both our surprise it ended up interesting him more than all the Gnosis data combined. The words "impossible," and "spooky" kept spilling out of his mouth.
To fully understand what was so spooky and impossible, we have to discuss the old universal constant; lightspeed. I know, I know; anyone who has sat in a pilot seat has had this lecture but it's important. To travel faster than light allows, we use the Frameshift Drive. The problem with the FSD is that it requires a lot of specialized equipment and power to run. The sort of hardware you can cram into something as big as a ship, but not into something as small as messenge pods. This means that messages have to obey the unversal constant and, thus, take hundreds of years to cross star systems. This is why we freelance pilots get paid to run documents from port to port; our ships can travel thousands of times the speed of light through witchspace in an instant and carry the post with us. We're glorified delivery boys.
As we deliver a message our journey is logged in the footer-file of the message. It gives the recipient a clear picture of where the message came from, likely for contexual and insurance reasons. Although, more than one politician has been caught getting their toes tickled on certain pleasure stations by way of analyzing the route stored in a message file. So you could say it has amusement value too.
Anyway, the message I had recieved from Sab7 had a peculiar route stored in its footer-file. You could trace it backwards from where I recieved it in Maia, to where it was picked up by the courier in Klayakarma. But the message did not actually originate in the Klayakarma system. It's point of origin was no place on record, it's arc of travel did not comply with current theories of astronavigation before that point. The log of this message claimed - unless BlueMonday read it wrong - that it had made contact with witchspace on it's own. Or, at least, travelled at such a speed that FSD would allow, and appeared in the data banks of several stations simultaniously, before collapsing into a single point in message bank in Klayakarma as a low level technician simply interacted with the file. The whole thing was alive with extra-dimensional fuzz around the edges.
As fascinating as this anomaly was, it was still no lead towards Sabbatine, if she existed at all. Luckily BlueMonday's sympathy stretched a little further and he put out feelers on his networks for any traces of CMDR Sab7, using the screwy data from my missive as bait we were guaranteed a juicy bite, if there was anything at all to catch. And we caught on hell of a tuna.