Trails of the Past - Ancient Remnants [1]
14 Mar 2024Kasumi Goto
"Everything tells us that the Guardians are long gone, and all we have left is their ruins, slowly falling apart. But there is one part of their legacy which is not dead and might still be active, somewhere out there. And if it finds us, it might be worse than even the Thargoids."
March 8, 3310
Synuefe GT-H b43-1
Near planet C 4
Being a few hundred light years away from the Bubble, and by extension the closest Titan, was oddly calming, even a little... refreshing, strangely. I'd taken the days since my departure off, in effect, not doing much more than lounging around the - reasonably spacious - living accommodation I had as the carrier's owner, or at least the person in charge of paying its fees. Which, mostly, were related to crew wages. Because, of course, they had to be paid to work.
Five days. That's what it'd been, I noticed, when I checked the departure date in the Bubble. A lot of my time since had been spent just lazily floating around or huddled into the sleeping bag while I tried to read or watch something, entirely unrelated to the war. The bed, it was less interesting now, thanks to the peculiar nature of my body. Although the other two posed some restrictions of their own, notably for preventing a face full of soft material when I was just floating mostly unrestrained.
Occasional bumps at low speeds into the walls, with my 'soft bits', added a little excitement to otherwise being almost lazier than a sloth, happily... enjoying. And sometimes, less lazy excitement which involved those same body parts. As well as a shower, usually.
I was still aware of ongoings in the Bubble, of course, and the planned assault on Leigong - which the Thargoids were seeming to take notice of too. Or, at least, they had responded to the destruction of Taranis in some way. For today, I'd decided it was finally time for me to get started with my Guardian ruin search. And I also felt ready to, even looking forward to it.
I happily strolled through the corridors to the hangar bays, or at least an elevator which would bring me to the right level for them, still getting curious looks by the crew here and there. I didn't mind them, knowing why they looked. It even brought me a certain sense of satisfaction.
I also had kind of begun to realize that what I considered an 'average walking pace' was... not actually quite on the level of 'average human speed', due to the physical realities of my form. But it was still good enough, and I actually kind of liked the slower pace, too - not only because it made avoiding accidental bumping into people easier. Which, in itself, was a skill I yet had to learn, or at least master, properly.
Luckily, no such incidents occurred this time around, thanks to the crew learning their way around my... needing at least half of a medium-size passageway to myself. It wasn't such an issue in the larger ones, at least, and I tried to avoid the small ones.
Once in the hangar bay, I chose to disengage mag lock on the boots and carefully pushed off to reach the back entrance of the ship. Anyone watching would've found this sight to have been quite a curious one, but I was alone in here. No risk of anyone 'observing', even as I opened up that back airlock and forced myself in through it... would definitely want to have its bulkhead door widened at some point, too.
A nice, custom purple HUD greeted me as I powered up the ship, following a few days of inactivity, and let it run startup checks and all that. The Thargoid items were already present in the corrosion-resistant cargo hold, so I could take off as soon as the thrusters and reactor had finished their startup cycle. Hopefully, placing the Guardian items in the same hold wouldn't set off any kind of big bomb as soon as they shared a space. Two separate ones was not a compromise I was willing to take as it meant taking a hit to either jump range or ship survivability, neither of which I wanted.
I selected the prompt to raise the pad upward - no point in not doing that already. And I heard the reactor's hum become more noticeable.
"I assume you are ready to start your investigation of the Guardian ruins?", EDI inquired, the AI's hologram popping up on the projector installed to that end.
"Yes.", I replied, while selecting the already visible ruin in the nav panel - labelled 'Guardian Structure' - after double checking that I had, in fact, gone to the right planet. Just over a thousand kilometers due to orbiting right above it, more or less. "I will gather the items I need down there. They should all be around the structure."
Additionally, I pinned a repository of Canonn's list of Guardian sites with relevant 'Guardian Codex' entries at each one, and required item combinations, plus a list of the necessary items alongside a key to identify the glyphs with. Both were going to be useful for this task, or even essential if I didn't want to be out here for weeks. Which I didn't, largely thanks to other plans I wanted to get crossed off before the cloud around Taranis dissipated, possibly around the end of the month. I had it in my mind as it seeming likely it would have by then, but not before.
Startup checks and cycles were done. I hit 'Launch' to disengage the magnetic locking clamps, and only waited to clear mass lock to hit supercruise - making sure I didn't go too fast due to the close distance.
As soon as I was within a few dozen kilometers to the ancient structure, I could already feel it again. That same, deeply seated, lingering unease, as I had in Ram Tah's base. But I needed to keep it suppressed. Seo found it important enough to send me out here for something related to these 'Guardians', whatever they might've called themselves when they were still alive, and I intended to find out.
I landed around 200 meters out from the center of the structure, and went out in the Scorpion - no other pilots were around to bother me, or make me question their intent, at least. Long shadows shrouded the ruin already, from the nearby T-class dwarf that was already approaching the horizon. Couldn't be much more than twenty light seconds out, to still provide decent visibility and look as large as it did on the horizon... but that also meant orbit times were according, and with this being a binary pair of planets, I only had limited time left in daylight. Not that, in this particular case, its absence would be much of a bother. And I did quite like the moody lighting this positioning created.
Driving straight ahead from the ship, I quickly came across two of the so-called 'obelisks' which were... partly sunken into the ground and tilted, but both functional, with one side of the triangular machine lighting up. The strange swirling pattern, as if they were malfunctioning, made it difficult to discern the glyphs displayed at the center, but I managed it eventually, with the help of the key.
One of them required Guardian items, but the other... it needed a Thargoid sensor and one of the tissue samples. The one from a Basilisk, it appeared. I'd definitely check this one first, but something drove me to go a little deeper, and find a third active obelisk in the center 'lane' of the ruin, displaying a third combination of two Guardian items.
I'd also woken one of the local defense drones, and caused a tower with one of the odd relics to rise up. Whether there was a connection, I wasn't able to tell, but my mind had snapped to a different priority. Allocating power to weapons while keeping some to shields, I drove forward, while the drone also came into view, and opened fire. But being unshielded, a few seconds of surge repeater fire and a missile destroyed it before a meaningful dent was made into my vehicle's shields.
The memory of what these were came back. 'Sentinels' - simple defense constructs which seemed to dislike anyone poking around Guardian ruins, even if they didn't interfere with them. As I seemed to have a large stockpile of local materials, I didn't feel like messing with anything I didn't need to, and didn't want to either - but thanks to that, any remorse felt by having to destroy these in defense was limited to the immediate moment.
I drove back to the ship, picking up both the tissue sample and sensor from the ship. While the sample itself was largely inert and didn't emit as much of a sensation, I could clearly feel the same response from the active Thargoid machine as the biotechnology in my body. If not stronger, due to no human impulses to restrain it.
Scanning the obelisk with the data link scanner, I received both an inbox message as well as a HUD message saying 'Decryption subroutine accepted'. So this wasn't actually going to be that difficult, and my experience with those defensive drones, here and at that other distant ruin, suggested the Scorpion was quite potent at disposing of them.
I returned the corrosive items to the ship before they messed up any of the Scorpion's modules too badly, or ate their way out of the cargo hold, then looked at my inbox. It was... a message from the engineer, Ram Tah. Which was odd. I'd expected a data dump to my ship or something like that instead. Briefly reading over the transcript, it looked a lot like a pre-recorded response to the data transfer, titled 'Guardians Codex 2/28', but I listened to it anyway.
2/28 : Thargoid Log – The War Begins
This data details the start of the conflict between the Guardians and the Thargoids. Several thousand years after they seeded planets in Guardian space with barnacles, the Thargoids returned. Of course, they discovered that the planets they had seeded were now occupied by the Guardians! The Thargoids immediately launched an assault, making no effort to communicate with the Guardians, which tallies with the Thargoids’ behaviour in human space.
So there'd been a conflict between the Guardians and Thargoids... I'd kind of known that already, but not any of the details. Yet it didn't surprise me that they had fought over barnacles, just like humans did with them now. Or, at least, in the years before the Titans arrived. The one thing this log lacked was the details of what the Guardians were doing near the barnacles to prompt an immediate hostile response, but it seemed likely they were at least studying them, and that would likely have annoyed the Thargoids. Whether an immediate attack was justified, that wasn't for me to judge.
Lacking the other items required, I drove around and picked up what I found until I had everything on the list ticked off, including both Guardian orbs. At least they were easy to get, just laying on the ground without protection. I scanned the obelisk next to the one with the Thargoid log first, it requiring a 'casket' and the strange crystalline 'relic'. The log I received was numbered as the ninth, and seemed to detail part of some kind of civil war.
9/28 : Civil War Log – Ancestor Worship
This log outlines the downfall of the traditionalist faction during the second Guardian civil war. The main issue was the internecine nature of the conflict, which raged for over one hundred years and brought the Guardians’ civilisation to its knees, retarding any further social development. But the challenges facing the traditionalists were exacerbated by the fact that they devoted most of their resources to honouring the dead.
From what I can gather, they regarded the departed in much the same way as the primitive cultures of Sol, constructing vast shrines to honour the deceased. As their situation worsened, they became increasingly obsessed with these practices. With so much of their resources dedicated to these rites, it is little wonder that their enemies’ war machines were able to overwhelm them.
'Not just any civil war. The second one... I wonder what started it. Or what that first one was about...'
Thinking to myself wouldn't really give me that answer. I went over to the third obelisk which I'd found, and identified it as needing a 'totem' and 'tablet. The log which I received upon scanning it was 24 of 28 - after several attempts. Apparently, the million year old network did have its issues despite managing to remain functional.
This twenty-fourth log was... not that interesting, more just detailing a cultural thing about Guardian language and how it remained largely the same, 'gestural' way of communication with minimal variations even after space colonization began. The difference to humans having many different, varied spoken languages, was curious, however, if just for a moment. There unfortunately was no longer a culture left to interact with here, just their old, buried ruins, and what data could be recovered from them.
I turned my attention away from the logs, for a moment, and drove up to where the so-called 'data terminal' was. Somehow, this layout seemed intricately familiar to me - maybe it resembled the one I'd visited out near Barnard's Loop enough to where I 'knew'. And since this would involve driving around more actively, I wanted to get it done with now, while the brown dwarf provided me with light - it was already beginning to disappear behind the horizon, only a few minutes after my arrival. Luckily, my enhanced vision still allowed me to see even where the shadows were getting rather long.
Two more Sentinels took offense at my approaching of the data terminal, which prompted two pillars, also known as 'pylons' to raise. I backed off of the raised platform on which the terminal sat, and began to fire at one of the Sentinels, hitting it with a missile when it was damaged enough. The second one came around a corner too late to support that first one, and quickly met the same treatment.
I found a third pylon offset from the center lane of the site, with a fourth one near where I'd found that first relic 'tower'. Relying on the symmetry of the Guardian site, I located the fifth and sixth one as well, disposing of whichever Sentinels surfaced along the way, then went ahead to power the machinery up through... the application of plasma to the energy core. It didn't appear to cause any kind of damage, though, so I didn't need to feel bad about it. A countdown started as soon as I started the first charge, but it seemed to be quite generous, and I knew where everything was already.
I covered the four 'external' pylons first, then moved over to the two near the data terminal. And once those were powered, fully activating the Guardian site, four more Sentinels surfaced - and I'd already taken down six of them. But I had enough ammo to deal with them one way or the other.
Driving backward to turn around and close the distance for the surge repeater to do its thing better, I returned fire to the first two Sentinels which approached, leaving most of the power to shields, blasting the targeted one with a missile as soon as it was below 75% integrity. I began to light the second one up, close enough to not need to worry about the oddly inaccurate main weapon, and it went to the ground as well.
By then, the two other Sentinels had come around, but with plenty of shield left to go, I got closer and shot one down while moving. For the fourth one, I didn't even bother to wait for missile lock and just shot the Guardian drone right in the face, while I was about as close as that, too. Then, it was quiet again. Just me and the cold metal of a ruin that wasn't quite dead yet.
I'd likely need a relic to make the data terminal reveal... whatever was at its center. But they were quite plentiful around the site, and there was one right nearby. I came back after picking it up, not feeling too fond of the only way to remove it from the gravitational hold being to shoot it free, and threw it out of the cargo hold. After a distinct 'slotting' sound, the data terminal body lowered and two halves of a metal cover slid open, letting out some kind of steam which immediately dissipated into nothingness, followed by a spherical orb rising up, which itself opened and glowed blue with energy. And I could feel strong vibrations underneath, from the machinery 'waking up'. So there was probably a lot hidden beneath the ground. In a way, contemplating this device floating in front of me had a certain aura of mystery, and maybe majesty, to it. Something so ancient, but still functional, a million years after getting abandoned, without active maintenance... it was very, very far from anything humans could achieve on their own right now.
I decided to give the machine a scan with the data link scanner... and received something. A blueprint, but I only caught it at the edge of my vision on the info panel, due to yet more Sentinels coming out. By the time I'd gotten rid of them, too, the data orb had slotted back into its holding spot, the terminal powering back down again. Whatever I'd done this for... I didn't really need it to access the Guardians' logs. Maybe just to have done it while I was here, as I would have little use for any Guardian hybrid modules I didn't have access to at this point.
Darkness had practically enveloped the ruin now, requiring me to use night vision anyway. Returning to the matter I was actually here for, I set myself to locating the different obelisks I hadn't yet scanned with the correct items. I found logs 21 and 14, then got confused by finding 15 despite there being no mention of its presence at this particular site, finished by 13, and at last 27 - the final of those obelisks being particularly stubborn and requiring many scan attempts, until the data went through, and I got Ram Tah's message. At least, I hadn't been bothered by the Sentinels, seemingly all cleared out for now. But I could still feel the machinery at work underneath, possibly busy replacing the destroyed drones. So I returned to my ship to be able to listen to the logs, without risking too many disturbances.
Log 21 was about Guardian technology - reactors and power distributors, it seemed. By what I was being told here, significantly better than anything humans could achieve. So those hybrid modules we'd made so far, were probably not too close to the level of what could be done with these blueprints. Which seemed a little disappointing, but maybe we'd be able to understand more of it as time passed... which was even in this recording from Ram Tah, at least to some degree.
Log 14 was about the defense drones, so I listened to it more actively.
14/28 Technology Log – Sentinels
This data concerns the automated defence systems found at Guardian sites. You may have already encountered them. The data indicates that these Sentinels date from some time prior to the second Guardian civil war. They are designed to respond aggressively to any unauthorised activity around the ruins. If you are forced to defend yourself, kinetic weaponry would be your best form of attack, since the Sentinels have no shields.
Destroying them is of course regrettable, but Sentinel weapon parts and wreckage are of considerable value, so the loss is not significant.
Nothing I didn't know too much about, and I'd basically hogged up all of the space that the ship's computer allowed for these components anyway. Whatever I was thinking of doing with all of that stuff - definitely couldn't remember. Maybe it was to do with the way that I'd fought back against the Thargoids in the early months of the invasion, until I had to stop with it due to the effects it had on my mental state. Nothing that mattered now, anyway.
15/28 : Technology Log – Data Terminals
Remarkable! This log actually contains the blueprints for the Guardians’ data terminals. As you know, these terminals were used to store schematics for weapons and other sophisticated technologies. They are linked to energy pylons, scattered across Guardian sites, by some form of computer program. Of course, this system has been dormant for millennia. But targeting the pylons with an energy weapon will increase the charge within, thus imbuing the data terminal with life. Essentially, we can awaken the system.
So it was basically what I'd done here, just now, at this site. And it made it more apparent that I was just getting pre-recorded logs for the correct data packets being sent over to Ram Tah's base, not the Guardian data itself. If there was a reason for me to be wary about what I was being told, this was it. Not that it would make me stop.
13/28 : Technology Log – Starships
This data provides further insights into the Guardians ship technology. We already know how ecologically conscientious the Guardians were, and of their assiduous avoidance of rockets and fossil fuels, so it isn’t surprising to discover that their first spacecraft were fired into space with electromagnetic launchers. Of course, this was an imperfect system that did not allow pilots to adjust their course after launch.
Over time, the Guardians’ starships became much more sophisticated, but their approach to space travel remained rooted in a respect for the natural world, and their interplanetary expansion was fuelled by clean nuclear fission and fusion. Their ships could travel at speeds approximating those of our own present-day craft. Unfortunately the data includes no schematic information, so it seems likely that the details have been lost. It’s a shame – I’m sure the Pilots’ Federation would have liked to know more about the Guardians’ spacecraft.
I definitely would have liked to know a lot more about the Guardian spacecraft too. As I knew it, we only had some light fighter blueprints available for them, but a whole Guardian ship... that would have been a very different story. Even if, maybe, I wouldn't have been able to ever go near one now, due to what I was. Or, at least, going into one would not have been a great idea.
I wondered, for a moment, if knowing about Guardian ship technology beyond the smallest scale, would also have been of use for whatever it was that had Seo so concerned about the Nemesis thing which Salvation had put himself into. But if Ram Tah was being truthful - and at least for this particular entry, I had little reasons to doubt him - we had no way of knowing anything about it right now.
27/28 : Body Protectorate Log – Discord
Okay, from the Guardian sites we’ve previously investigated, we know that the Guardians’ artificially intelligent Constructs were responsible for controlling the war machines and other military apparatus, as well as overseeing civilian technology and infrastructure. And we know that these Constructs eventually gained sentience and destroyed the Guardians. But it appears it was not the military Constructs that made that choice.
The Constructs developed for civilian utility and those designed for military operation were independent of one another, and it was the non-military Constructs that decided to attack the Guardians. The military Constructs were opposed to this decision, but somehow the non-military Constructs won out, forcing their military counterparts to comply with the attack.
What a remarkable discovery. It makes me wonder what happened to these Constructs, and what they eventually became. Were they destroyed? Or do they still exist, somewhere in the vastness of space?
So the Guardians had AI of their own, which rebelled and destroyed their creators... but for what reason? Maybe the other logs held that answer. And it was curious that there were two sides to them.
If this was what had Seo concerned, then I'd find out about it soon. Part of me already suspected it might have had something to do with the second civil war between the Guardians, but if this was information available in a log record, then that would be in these, too, at the other sites on the Canonn list I'd be following. what this log also further told me was that I was most definitely getting pre-recorded messages sent my way, though I had no doubt Ram Tah was tracking my progress over in his office as well. Or around whatever Guardian thing he was tinkering with again, at this time.
There were no further logs to be recovered at this site. I'd crossed off all of the active obelisks. The next one was in HIP 39768, just a few jumps away. I set the carrier to jump there, then returned to it, and... took off again after a minute, impatience getting the better of me. It'd be faster to fly there manually, in the end.