I don't believe in ghosts - Part 2
30 May 2019Zinnsei
Commander's Personal Log, 27 APR 3305I didn't notice anything out of the ordinary at first. The LY's kept rolling away, the scans were completed and the ship, now much less crowded with the reduction in crew numbers, seemed more open and welcoming. I say that knowing fully that an Anaconda is first and foremost made for business and not pleasure. The corridors were not teeming with people and the galley was no longer buzzing with banter. It felt quite good and my spirits were lifted for a time being.
Then the outs began. It started with small faults in modules, light fixtures and occasionally the odd... mess in the lavatories. At first, I wrote it off as being the neutron jumps that wrought havoc with the systems - I gathered that Faulcon DeLacy didn't put as much effort into their designs as Gutamaya, but eventually, I had to admit to myself (and a short while thereafter to Leonard) that something wasn't right with the boat. I should have acted sooner - I realize as much now, hiding away in the lower decks while someone - some thing is in command of the Audient Void.
We had to stop in some unimportant backwater system just into the Far 3kpc Arm, while the AFMU's repaired the system. I took a Scarab out to take in the scenery - there was not much to look at, but the low gravity of the planet gave me some thrilling jump options. When I came back a few hours later - just before supper - I learned that there had been an explosion in the forward engineering bay and the limpet controller responsible for hull repairs had been completely destroyed. A crewman had been injured and brought to sickbay but was not in any life-threatening state. I asked Leonard why he hadn't called me in from my shenanigans, and he explained to me that he had in fact tried, but the communications array was not operational because of the explosion.
We were stuck on that rock for two whole days.
Things got worse from then on. Not 6 hours back in the black before we blew a whole section of circuits and the Frame Shift Drive dropped us back into normal space, reducing hull integrity by a vast amount. It would seem that the old gal was starting to feel the pressure of deep space traveling. But of course, it wasn't that either.
I don't intend to go on, splaying out every little thing that transpired, but as I've stipulated to the point of repetitiveness already, the ship had a saboteur. I suspected that we'd picked up the stowaway while visiting Explorer's Anchorage but I didn't even know where to start looking.
I asked Leonard to assist me in quietly canvassing the ship to weed out our neer-do-well. He and two trusted crewmembers searched the top and middle part of the ship. I searched the lower part. That turned out to be advantageous since I now rely on my thorough knowledge of exactly that part to keep me hidden. I spent hours going through every nook and cranny - sometimes crawling through ducts only large enough to let me slide through. I wouldn't have been able to do that if we had been landed or anywhere near gravity. I barely fit as it were. At one point I nearly pierced my eye on a piece of metal, going through one of those ducts, as the ship entered Witch Space. The frame shuddered - no doubt due to the poor condition of the vessel - and since I wasn't prepared, I only had time to avert my face as the metal piece dug into my cheek. Not too much damage done, but had it been my eye? Whew. That wouldn't have been too good.
I did get a few sideward glances from the few crewmembers I came across - all people who had been on the ship since our departure from the bubble. I asked them a few questions none the less but got nowhere. There were no signs either of a stowaway - no nests or signs that anyone had spent more than cursory amounts of time in the different parts of the lower decks. All in all my search was coming up empty.
Later I rendezvoused with Leonard and the two crewmembers. They had had about as much luck as I so we decided to call it a day and continue our investigation in the morning. That night it all went to Hell.
I awoke to klaxons at around 2 am ship's time. The ship was bucking and bolting so hard, I had to use all my wits to avoid being tossed from the deck. I scrambled to the bridge only to see Leonard shouting orders to the crew members, trying to maintain the integrity of the hyperspace corridor. Leonard saw me and gave me a quick round-up of the situation:
At around 1.55 am he had been about to end his shift when he had noticed an irregularity in the frameshift drive module and had started to do a system check. That had brought the entire system on the verge of collapse. He suspected some sort of virus or tampering of the like, but his quick actions, along with that of the bridge crew had saved the onboard functions from crashing. Now Ensign Foster was battling the controls and trying to bring us out of the corridor in one piece. She succeeded and we exited Witch Space in a tumble. I went flying across the room and knocked my head painfully on the panels near the lavatories. Klaxons were still going off and I heard yelling and screaming from what seemed to be ten miles away. We weren't out of harm's way yet. When my vision stopped blurring and became a single image again, I hurried to the pilot's chair. Thrusters had cut off at the point of ingress and now our momentum was carrying us towards the main star of the system - a whopper of an O-Type. Not fast enough to bring us through the exclusion zone just yet, but the heat was building up and without propulsion, we would soon cook alive.
That's when I heard the whine of a sidearm powering up.
End of Personal Log, Part 2