29/01/2020 - The Bridge (4)

Methodical Exploration

They take a pause and consider what to do next. They believe that the AI on the ship is trying to stop them reaching somewhere important but they don’t know why or where.

Grant resolves to cycle through all the locations and explore them with probes before the physically going through anywhere.

They soon realise that there are two types of rooms. Nexuses, which have nothing in them except irises that lead to other rooms, and individual rooms that have some sort of function, with one iris leading out. As they dial through various rooms on the ship, they find a number of Nexuses and interesting rooms.

Interesting Rooms

A room with a lot of unused Teleportals lying around.

A room with a large portal behind a transparent barrier that appears to be sucking in the atmosphere of Komesh.

A room with a large crystal lying against a wall.

A room with what appears to be a repair system, constantly building and destroying a sheet of material.

A room with many low births in it.

A room with three more robots of the same design as the one that attacked them. They appear to be dormant, but they withdraw the probe quickly just in case.

The Armoury

One room has a lot of damaged equipment but the probe finds three energy pistols of the same design as the one the robot that attacked them was carrying. Grant says it looks like an Armoury.

Del decides to risk stepping through to pick these pistols up. When he attempts to return to the main Teleportal Room, the controls randomise and he finds himself in a Nexus room that he does not recognise and realises he is lost. He has a quick check of the pistols, but decides it’s not safe to play with them and instead tries to work out the Ancient language.

In the main Teleportal Room on the upper deck, Grant, Drent and Cyrus discuss what to do about Dels’ disappearance. They try communicating with him, but their signals do not get through. Grant resolves to continue through the sequence of rooms and see if they catch up with him. Cyrus taking over control of the probes using his arm pad.

Yet More Interesting Rooms

The next interesting room appears to be the shield array control room.

A room containing a docked shuttle.

A room with blue boxes in it and some blue dust on the floor. When Cyrus has the probe touch the blue dust, its main camera changes quickly to a blue colour and the probe appears unable to move. He sends a second probe and sees the first probe is now in a small blue box if its own. A tentacle then reaches down from the ceiling, picks the box up and puts it in the pile of other smaller blue boxes. Then it melds back into the ceiling.

A room containing a lot of electronic equipment.

A huge room with another transparent divide and consoles. Beyond the divide is a huge gyro with a large Teleportal in the centre. The whole room hums with power and the console displays suggest they are monitoring power output.

Reunited

Then they dial up the Nexus room that Del is in and are re-united with him. He returns to the main Teleportal Room and they explore the last rooms in the sequence, discovering three large rooms with big engineering constructions that could be the Ancient Ships’ main engines.

There are some rooms that are still inaccessible, with error messages being displayed when they try to connect to them.

Now they have dialled through the whole sequence, they decide the most dangerous room is the one with the three robots in. They dial that room again, but the robots are still inactive. They send the probe through the iris in that room and find it links to a Nexus room with irises leading to other rooms.

The Nexuses

This Nexus is different to most of the others. This and one other Nexus only has three irises, instead of four uniformly at the compass points. Instead, these two Nexuses have two irises at compass points, and a third at a different angle.

Further exploration reveals these two Nexuses are adjacent and there is a small complex of rooms leading off them, but it is an isolated block of six rooms. There is no way to reach the rest of the locations except by Teleportal.

Getting to the Bridge

Once through they experiment with the Teleportal in the Nexus and find a couple of locations that were showing errors when trying to connect from the main Teleportal Room on the upper deck now take them back to that room. It is clear that you cannot dial to the location you are currently in.

Room 00000 still will not connect though and Del realises that this must be the Bridge. They cannot reach it because the Teleportal in that room is locked out somehow. They will need to find the Nexus that is next to it and teleport there, then reach the Bridge using the connecting iris doorway.

Robot Chatter

Cyrus decides to move over and close the iris that connects to the room with the robots in. When he reaches the iris, the robots in the room suddenly activate.

One of them moves over to the iris and begins to jabber something to them all over comms in a rapid but totally incomprehensible language. Grant closes the iris, but it is opened from the other side and the three robots move into the Nexus where they Travellers are.

The Travellers back away cautiously. One of the robots again tries to communicate over comms using its’ baffling dialect. They try talking back to it, hoping it will work out their language, but it does not appear to be able to.

Robots Go Crazy

Suddenly, one of the robots changes demeanour and moves aggressively towards Del. The other two robots grab this robot and there is a robot-on-robot struggle. The two manage to destroy the one rogue robot, but not before it is able to damage the other two.

The robot that communicated before then resumes its attempt to communicate with the Travellers. When verbal communication fails, it moves to the Teleportal and dials up a location, gesturing for the Travellers to go through.

Cautiously, they send a probe first and discover it is the damaged Nexus (00110) they explored earlier. The Travellers go through and the robots follow. The lead robot gestures to one of the irises, but is suddenly attacked by the other robot.

Del attempts to intervene to save this lead robot, but its head is broken off by the aggressive robot. That robot then moves to attack Del. Del keeps shooting it, but his weapon has limited effect. Suddenly the last robot has some sort of cascading failure and falls to the ground, inactive.

The Bridge

Drent gets a sudden flash of a horrible, disturbing skull image on the doorway of the room the robot gestured towards. Despite this, they decide to open the iris. It reveals a complex room with a myriad of displays around the outside and a central area where clearly a person would stand. This is obviously the Bridge of the Ancient Ship.

Del is nominated to move into the pilot / captain position. A holographic system scans him and then a soft computer voice begins to babble at them in the same unfathomable language the robots used. Del talks back in English and after a moment the voice begins to repeat what he says. Del continues to talk to it and it parrots him back, while the others strike up conversations as well which the computer listens to.

At one point it makes an intelligent response in their language and Grant says it is beginning to understand them, which the computer voice confirms. Del then has it scan his portable computer to fully understand their language. A small connector attaches to his computer and in a few seconds uploads its content.

Completing the Ship’s Mission

The computer then greets them all by name in their language. It apologies for what has happened. The Ship was damaged by enemy fire some 300,000 years ago and the computer banks were infected by a virus that has been scrambling the systems and is preventing the Ship from repairing itself.

In order to stop the virus from spreading, the computer took a policy of remaining dormant for thousands of years at a time, only activating occasionally to check its status.

It needs to complete its mission and reach what it calls a Trans-Dimensional gateway. In order to activate the gateway, the Ship has a super massive key code that can be transmitted once at very close range.

Taking Control of the Ancient Ship

Del tells the computer to give them all the instructions they need to get there, but the computer says it cannot do that without awakening the virus. It has a very limited time before the virus becomes fully active. Instead, it will grant them control of the Ship from the Bridge. They must complete its mission and get to the Trans-Dimensional gateway.

It asks if they will do this. Del agrees and the computer then goes silent.

Del beings to try to familiarise himself with the controls of the Ship. It begins to react to this and the holographic displays and controls begin to take on an appearance that is familiar to him. He eventually is able to get the Ship to move and after a slow start it quickly moves out of the atmosphere of the Gas Giant and into space, accelerating fast.

Spooked by how fast the Ship moves, Del has it stop until he can get his bearings and work out a finer level of control.

That Alien Ship

An alert then tells him there is another ship nearby. Overwhelmed by doing so much at the same time, Del asks the others to man positions that are also available in the Bridge, which now reveal themselves as further crew positions.

As though the ship can sense their skill set, Drent finds himself at a weapons console and has remote control of the two “ball weapons” of the Ship, one on the upper deck and one on the lower deck.

Cyrus is at a sensor console and determines that the ship nearby is the same one that attacked Liberator in the Phosos system and has been in the sub-sector news attacking various ships. It is clearly dangerous.

Grant finds himself at a comms console and starts off by making contact with the Liberator. Dirk answers and tells them Liberator was not affected when the Ancient Ship started moving. It seemed to project some sort of warp field that encompassed everything within the force field, including the Liberator. Everything within the warp field moved with the ship without causing inertia. He was only aware that they were moving when Zen reported what was happening.

Stand Off

Cyrus then gets a notification that the alien ship is transmitting a signal. He has Grant investigate this and is able to determine that it is not transmitting to them, but into sub-space. The Ship is able to de-code the message and interprets it as “I have found them. They are here. Come quickly.”

There is a pause and a stand-off between the two ships. Drent has been able to get the weapon systems to lock onto the alien ship and he begins to direct one of the ball weapons to it. He is not sure whether it is the upper or lower deck weapon though. Grant is concerned that they do not break the upper deck energy field and risk losing the Liberator next time they move.

It’s Uncle Vlen!

Just as Drent is about to risk firing, another ship jumps in. It is an odd, cone-shaped ship. Cyrus is able to work out it has a massive power signature.

Then suddenly there is an incoming transmission. Grant answers and a video display shows someone surprising – Uncle Vlen Kennedy, the man who is supposed to be dead!

Vlen tells Grant he is glad he has found him. He has a lot to tell him about what is really going on.

End of Episode Four