Chapter 1
Many species have said many an unkind and unfair word about the krogan; however the bosh'tet in charge has just taken it to a new level in stupid.
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya looked at mess of burnt wiring and slagged circuitry that used to be the main data core of the Blood Pack war skiff she and her only living captor were currently aboard.
The trip through the newly activated Mass Relay had been far from the usual transit, due to the battle damage from a previous fight. Only Tali's involuntary presence in the engine room, and the oversized engine and overpumped kenetic barriers had saved the ship from dying in the fight with the batarian privateer they had just escaped from. It was dead, but they had detected a distress call before Wreave's guns had breached the core.
So it was only a matter of time till a batarian force came through the Relay. Opening a new Relay was a high crime for a reason. The foolhardy Blood Pack captain who had ordered it done had already paid the price during the transit and collisions with the chunks of the shattered ice moon the Relay on the other side had been buried in, before Wreave opened it.
The energy surge from the last hit before the transit had blown the capacitors in the back-up data core in engineering, and it had only been quick manual adjustments by Tali to the energy flows that had prevented a complete element zero core overload. The landing on the nearby ice dwarf had been gentle enough not to do any more damage to the ship, thanks to the low gravity, but they weren't going to be lifting off again unless Tali could fix the remaining systems with what little remained of the ship's gear and stores.
"Well, how slagged is it?" A gravelly voice came from behind Tali.
"It's completely fried, only usable bits left are the data ports. We only have localized control of the remaining systems, and everything is operating on manual now, including the power system. We'd have to get back through the Relay and to a port for me to even begin to think about trying to replace this mess. The core is safe for now, but if we try to turn it back on before I give it a complete inspection, it might fly apart, if it doesn't just overload outright. Best hope is that the core is intact enough to power up enough to provide sub-light travel, then find somewhere with decent gravity and hopefully atmosphere nearby to set down till the Council search parties come through, and then hope they don't shoot us before we can surrender." Tali said with not a small amount of resignation in her voice.
"Fat chance; the batarian's will handle this in house, and then claim the new system and whatever is near it for their own." Urdnot Wrex said as he looked over Tali's shoulder.
Wrex had been assigned as Tali's guard while she was on duty in the engine room, and was the only other survivor; he'd been the one the late captain Wreave had paid to keep the others from 'damaging the suit-rat', as he was a less aggressive example of his species, yet still dangerous enough to be respected by the rank and file of the Blood Pack.
"This wouldn't even be an issue if your captain hadn't decided to try to activate a dormant Relay in order to escape those batarian privateers." Tali shot back.
"Would you have preferred we surrender and let them board to take what loot they wanted, and likely take yourself as a slave when they found the daughter of a Quarian Admiralty Board member in our engine room? I mean, I know you aren't here by choice, but do you really think the batarians would have been kinder masters?" Wrex asked as he looked over the read-outs in the damage control alcove that now doubled as the ship's back-up bridge.
"No, but your captain could have just unleashed a new Rachni on the galaxy for all we know. As soon as the Citadel Council hears a krogan Blood Pack captain opened an inactive relay to escape a fight with batarian privateers, the turians and salarians are going to want more punitive measures against your people. And if the Council learns I was on this ship, even as a captive engineer, they may try to blame my people too!" Tali said, throwing her arms up in exasperation.
Wrex took a moment to look back towards where the bridge of the skiff used to be, and cursed the ghost of his brother, the foolish Blood Pack captain who had led them to this point.
"You aren't wrong. When we get back, I'll escort you back to the Migrant fleet myself; this is both our people's problems now." Wrex said, leaning against the nearby conduit.
"Your captain kidnapped me from my Pilgrimage specifically to keep this ancient barge from falling apart around him. Why should I trust you to release me, since you worked for him?" Tali said, crossing her arms in front of her and staring the krogan down.
"Because now that worthless brother of mine is dead, so is my payday, and I've never thought kidnapping quarians to fix our gear was a good solution to my people's general lack of spacecraft scale technical knowledge. Plus, you quarians eat food that isn't cheap for us to have around regularly. Just bad business all around. Lucky for us he insisted we keep your food in your workspace, so you didn't lose any to decompression, and there's enough for me to survive for about a year if I extend it via intermittent hibernation." Wrex said in reply, before looking over what little navigational data was available with the few sensors that remained.
"So, still nothing but ice-mirror reflections on the surviving scope right now. Comms are gone unfortunately, outside of the one's in the hardsuits. Debris is still sorting itself into new orbits, and still not even sure which star is the local primary." the krogan said as he tried to see if the sensors could tell anything about the system they'd found themselves in.
"Don't waste power on the scopes right now, we need to preserve what power we have for the heaters and life support and shields. We may have debris coming down on us. I'm reading serious heat loss along the hull where it is in contact with the surface. We may have provisions, but until I get the core working safely, we only have battery power, since the back-up generator for this barge was just aft of bridge itself and has been sheared off like the rest of the front 2/3rds of the vessel in the moments after the transit. We need to pull power from everything we can to keep those systems up." Tali said as she went back to work.
****
"Wake up Holden, Charon just shattered!" James Holden heard as he awoke, the voice of Naomi Nagata having just come through the intercom beside their bunk.
"Did you just say Charon, as in Pluto's moon, just shattered?" Holden said as he groggily pulled on his pants, hardly believing what his girlfriend was saying.
Naomi had decided to take the night shift for a bit, as the side effects from the gravity meds needed for landing on Ilus were taking a toll on her sleep lately.
"I don't know what happened, but the moon is just flying apart all of a sudden on the feed from the Ring Gate, no signs of an impact. Pieces are looking like they were flung off by some large explosion inside the moon...there's something coming into view inside the debris, something *glowing* and *moving*." Naomi said, shock in her voice. They only had such a good view of the moon due to how close to the Ring the Rocinante was, with the light delay being much smaller this far out due to the relative positions of the Roci's course, the Ring, and the current position of the Pluto system.
"Naomi, what's inside of Charon's debris?" Holden answered back as he made his way towards the door.
"I don't know what it is, but it's big and putting out a lot of energy for it to be that bright. If it was buried in Charon, it had to have been there for billions of years, just like the protomolecule on Pheobe Station." Naomi told him.
"Naomi, get Amos and Alex up, I have a feeling our trip to Ilus may have just been delayed." Holden said as he headed toward the cockpit.
****
The orders from Avasarala had been clear, with her usual charm and eloquent ways of making her point, and had been exactly what Holden had feared they would be.
"You are to divert from the mission to Ilus to reconnoiter the Pluto system and act as a forward scout for the science team en-route from Titan, as no other UNN or MCRN ships besides the blockade at the Ring are present in the area. James, just get out there, act as our forward eyes and ears, and try not to fuck things up worse than they already are. Once the science team is on station, you can return to the mission to New Terra. However if this also proves to be protomolecule related, stay on station till the main survey is finished. Ilus isn't going anywhere, and this is outside of the Ring Space. Another alien gateway in our system is not a scenario I want to have to explain to the General Assembly, but if that is the case we need to know sooner rather than later." the UN Secretary General had been looking rather more worn than usual, as the prospect of yet another weird, likely alien event taking place in the solar system was not the sort of thing she wanted to have to preside over, yet was likely to be forced to, and on the eve of the UN general election season as well.
Drummer's response to the Roci's feed had been equally clear. Pluto, though uninhabited due to distance and lack of resources valuable enough to cover the cost of extracting and shipping them deeper into the system, and only visited by probes even now, was still OPA territory in theory and any investigation of it was going to have to keep Fred Johnson and Anderson Dawes in the loop on it, and an OPA expedition was be sent as well to observe and report independently on what was found.
"Another fine day in paradise, eh boss? Now we've got even more alien weird shit to deal with." Amos Burton as he looked at the image on the Roci's scope of the spinning, fork like structure that was beginning to emerge from within the ice-fields that had been Charon.
"Hey, any of ya'll catch a small glowing something on your screens? My logs show that something like that disappeared around the far side of Pluto about 5 minutes after the moon shattered." Alex Kamal said from his place in the pilot's seat.
"If it did, it hasn't re-emerged. Which means it's either in a stable geosynchronous orbit on the other side, or it's crashed on the far side. Jim we need to get this to Avasarala. If we burn hard and the UNN can refuel us once their expedition arrives, we can probably make it to Pluto in about a week at this point in the orbits. Worse case scenario if the main fleet is delayed, we have to melt some ice ourselves in order to refill our water tanks, and I can rig a mobile still in a couple hours with gear from the galley." Naomi said from looking at the engine profile and orbital position charts.
"The Tynan and UNN group out of Titan will be about a week and 2 weeks behind us, if they are doing a normal burn. Lot can go wrong in that amount of time while we are out there alone, boss." Amos commented, looking over from the side.
"If this is more stuff related to the protomulecule, we need to know how it works and what it is doing as fast as possible, and we need to know what that glowing bit that ended up on the far side of Pluto is, before someone else gets out there and messes with something they don't understand. Not that we seem to have much better understanding ourselves, but well Miller seems to have some connection to the proto-crap. Might also be someone alive, hurt on whatever came out of the thing, if it actually crashed on Pluto; might not be if we get there a few days later. First contact might be more peaceful if we have survivors instead of bodies." Alex pointed out.
"If we use too much fuel burning hard to get there a couple days earlier, we'll be on the knife's edge if anything but simple survey work is needed before I can melt much ice. We cannot help any survivors if we run out of fuel a few days after we get there." Naomi cautioned.
Holden was inclined to be cautious here, and not just because of the opinion of his girlfriend and chief engineer.
Miller had been silent, even in the few moments when Holden had been alone after Naomi awoke him as he dressed, which made Holden feel that whatever this was, wasn't connected to the protomolecule, or the protomolecule hadn't registered the event yet.
However, Alex's point about survivors who may need aid, and how that could factor into a up-coming first contact situation, had to be weighed as well.
"Naomi, how much of a reserve do we need for Alex to get us hidden in the crags on the new ice field chunks?" Holden asked.
"I'd prefer we have at least 20% reserve for something like that, if we don't want to also die of asphyxiation or hypothermia." Alex said from the pilot's seat.
"I can probably ensure we keep a 30% reserve and get us there within several days, but only if we start shutting down non-essential systems as we approach. I'll see if I can tweak the engines to get a bit more margin out of the fuel supply." Naomi replied.
'Alright, sounds like a plan." Holden said, as he looked at the massive blue, glowing, tuning fork that had come into view where Charon had been.
Tali'Zorah nar Rayya looked at mess of burnt wiring and slagged circuitry that used to be the main data core of the Blood Pack war skiff she and her only living captor were currently aboard.
The trip through the newly activated Mass Relay had been far from the usual transit, due to the battle damage from a previous fight. Only Tali's involuntary presence in the engine room, and the oversized engine and overpumped kenetic barriers had saved the ship from dying in the fight with the batarian privateer they had just escaped from. It was dead, but they had detected a distress call before Wreave's guns had breached the core.
So it was only a matter of time till a batarian force came through the Relay. Opening a new Relay was a high crime for a reason. The foolhardy Blood Pack captain who had ordered it done had already paid the price during the transit and collisions with the chunks of the shattered ice moon the Relay on the other side had been buried in, before Wreave opened it.
The energy surge from the last hit before the transit had blown the capacitors in the back-up data core in engineering, and it had only been quick manual adjustments by Tali to the energy flows that had prevented a complete element zero core overload. The landing on the nearby ice dwarf had been gentle enough not to do any more damage to the ship, thanks to the low gravity, but they weren't going to be lifting off again unless Tali could fix the remaining systems with what little remained of the ship's gear and stores.
"Well, how slagged is it?" A gravelly voice came from behind Tali.
"It's completely fried, only usable bits left are the data ports. We only have localized control of the remaining systems, and everything is operating on manual now, including the power system. We'd have to get back through the Relay and to a port for me to even begin to think about trying to replace this mess. The core is safe for now, but if we try to turn it back on before I give it a complete inspection, it might fly apart, if it doesn't just overload outright. Best hope is that the core is intact enough to power up enough to provide sub-light travel, then find somewhere with decent gravity and hopefully atmosphere nearby to set down till the Council search parties come through, and then hope they don't shoot us before we can surrender." Tali said with not a small amount of resignation in her voice.
"Fat chance; the batarian's will handle this in house, and then claim the new system and whatever is near it for their own." Urdnot Wrex said as he looked over Tali's shoulder.
Wrex had been assigned as Tali's guard while she was on duty in the engine room, and was the only other survivor; he'd been the one the late captain Wreave had paid to keep the others from 'damaging the suit-rat', as he was a less aggressive example of his species, yet still dangerous enough to be respected by the rank and file of the Blood Pack.
"This wouldn't even be an issue if your captain hadn't decided to try to activate a dormant Relay in order to escape those batarian privateers." Tali shot back.
"Would you have preferred we surrender and let them board to take what loot they wanted, and likely take yourself as a slave when they found the daughter of a Quarian Admiralty Board member in our engine room? I mean, I know you aren't here by choice, but do you really think the batarians would have been kinder masters?" Wrex asked as he looked over the read-outs in the damage control alcove that now doubled as the ship's back-up bridge.
"No, but your captain could have just unleashed a new Rachni on the galaxy for all we know. As soon as the Citadel Council hears a krogan Blood Pack captain opened an inactive relay to escape a fight with batarian privateers, the turians and salarians are going to want more punitive measures against your people. And if the Council learns I was on this ship, even as a captive engineer, they may try to blame my people too!" Tali said, throwing her arms up in exasperation.
Wrex took a moment to look back towards where the bridge of the skiff used to be, and cursed the ghost of his brother, the foolish Blood Pack captain who had led them to this point.
"You aren't wrong. When we get back, I'll escort you back to the Migrant fleet myself; this is both our people's problems now." Wrex said, leaning against the nearby conduit.
"Your captain kidnapped me from my Pilgrimage specifically to keep this ancient barge from falling apart around him. Why should I trust you to release me, since you worked for him?" Tali said, crossing her arms in front of her and staring the krogan down.
"Because now that worthless brother of mine is dead, so is my payday, and I've never thought kidnapping quarians to fix our gear was a good solution to my people's general lack of spacecraft scale technical knowledge. Plus, you quarians eat food that isn't cheap for us to have around regularly. Just bad business all around. Lucky for us he insisted we keep your food in your workspace, so you didn't lose any to decompression, and there's enough for me to survive for about a year if I extend it via intermittent hibernation." Wrex said in reply, before looking over what little navigational data was available with the few sensors that remained.
"So, still nothing but ice-mirror reflections on the surviving scope right now. Comms are gone unfortunately, outside of the one's in the hardsuits. Debris is still sorting itself into new orbits, and still not even sure which star is the local primary." the krogan said as he tried to see if the sensors could tell anything about the system they'd found themselves in.
"Don't waste power on the scopes right now, we need to preserve what power we have for the heaters and life support and shields. We may have debris coming down on us. I'm reading serious heat loss along the hull where it is in contact with the surface. We may have provisions, but until I get the core working safely, we only have battery power, since the back-up generator for this barge was just aft of bridge itself and has been sheared off like the rest of the front 2/3rds of the vessel in the moments after the transit. We need to pull power from everything we can to keep those systems up." Tali said as she went back to work.
****
"Wake up Holden, Charon just shattered!" James Holden heard as he awoke, the voice of Naomi Nagata having just come through the intercom beside their bunk.
"Did you just say Charon, as in Pluto's moon, just shattered?" Holden said as he groggily pulled on his pants, hardly believing what his girlfriend was saying.
Naomi had decided to take the night shift for a bit, as the side effects from the gravity meds needed for landing on Ilus were taking a toll on her sleep lately.
"I don't know what happened, but the moon is just flying apart all of a sudden on the feed from the Ring Gate, no signs of an impact. Pieces are looking like they were flung off by some large explosion inside the moon...there's something coming into view inside the debris, something *glowing* and *moving*." Naomi said, shock in her voice. They only had such a good view of the moon due to how close to the Ring the Rocinante was, with the light delay being much smaller this far out due to the relative positions of the Roci's course, the Ring, and the current position of the Pluto system.
"Naomi, what's inside of Charon's debris?" Holden answered back as he made his way towards the door.
"I don't know what it is, but it's big and putting out a lot of energy for it to be that bright. If it was buried in Charon, it had to have been there for billions of years, just like the protomolecule on Pheobe Station." Naomi told him.
"Naomi, get Amos and Alex up, I have a feeling our trip to Ilus may have just been delayed." Holden said as he headed toward the cockpit.
****
The orders from Avasarala had been clear, with her usual charm and eloquent ways of making her point, and had been exactly what Holden had feared they would be.
"You are to divert from the mission to Ilus to reconnoiter the Pluto system and act as a forward scout for the science team en-route from Titan, as no other UNN or MCRN ships besides the blockade at the Ring are present in the area. James, just get out there, act as our forward eyes and ears, and try not to fuck things up worse than they already are. Once the science team is on station, you can return to the mission to New Terra. However if this also proves to be protomolecule related, stay on station till the main survey is finished. Ilus isn't going anywhere, and this is outside of the Ring Space. Another alien gateway in our system is not a scenario I want to have to explain to the General Assembly, but if that is the case we need to know sooner rather than later." the UN Secretary General had been looking rather more worn than usual, as the prospect of yet another weird, likely alien event taking place in the solar system was not the sort of thing she wanted to have to preside over, yet was likely to be forced to, and on the eve of the UN general election season as well.
Drummer's response to the Roci's feed had been equally clear. Pluto, though uninhabited due to distance and lack of resources valuable enough to cover the cost of extracting and shipping them deeper into the system, and only visited by probes even now, was still OPA territory in theory and any investigation of it was going to have to keep Fred Johnson and Anderson Dawes in the loop on it, and an OPA expedition was be sent as well to observe and report independently on what was found.
"Another fine day in paradise, eh boss? Now we've got even more alien weird shit to deal with." Amos Burton as he looked at the image on the Roci's scope of the spinning, fork like structure that was beginning to emerge from within the ice-fields that had been Charon.
"Hey, any of ya'll catch a small glowing something on your screens? My logs show that something like that disappeared around the far side of Pluto about 5 minutes after the moon shattered." Alex Kamal said from his place in the pilot's seat.
"If it did, it hasn't re-emerged. Which means it's either in a stable geosynchronous orbit on the other side, or it's crashed on the far side. Jim we need to get this to Avasarala. If we burn hard and the UNN can refuel us once their expedition arrives, we can probably make it to Pluto in about a week at this point in the orbits. Worse case scenario if the main fleet is delayed, we have to melt some ice ourselves in order to refill our water tanks, and I can rig a mobile still in a couple hours with gear from the galley." Naomi said from looking at the engine profile and orbital position charts.
"The Tynan and UNN group out of Titan will be about a week and 2 weeks behind us, if they are doing a normal burn. Lot can go wrong in that amount of time while we are out there alone, boss." Amos commented, looking over from the side.
"If this is more stuff related to the protomulecule, we need to know how it works and what it is doing as fast as possible, and we need to know what that glowing bit that ended up on the far side of Pluto is, before someone else gets out there and messes with something they don't understand. Not that we seem to have much better understanding ourselves, but well Miller seems to have some connection to the proto-crap. Might also be someone alive, hurt on whatever came out of the thing, if it actually crashed on Pluto; might not be if we get there a few days later. First contact might be more peaceful if we have survivors instead of bodies." Alex pointed out.
"If we use too much fuel burning hard to get there a couple days earlier, we'll be on the knife's edge if anything but simple survey work is needed before I can melt much ice. We cannot help any survivors if we run out of fuel a few days after we get there." Naomi cautioned.
Holden was inclined to be cautious here, and not just because of the opinion of his girlfriend and chief engineer.
Miller had been silent, even in the few moments when Holden had been alone after Naomi awoke him as he dressed, which made Holden feel that whatever this was, wasn't connected to the protomolecule, or the protomolecule hadn't registered the event yet.
However, Alex's point about survivors who may need aid, and how that could factor into a up-coming first contact situation, had to be weighed as well.
"Naomi, how much of a reserve do we need for Alex to get us hidden in the crags on the new ice field chunks?" Holden asked.
"I'd prefer we have at least 20% reserve for something like that, if we don't want to also die of asphyxiation or hypothermia." Alex said from the pilot's seat.
"I can probably ensure we keep a 30% reserve and get us there within several days, but only if we start shutting down non-essential systems as we approach. I'll see if I can tweak the engines to get a bit more margin out of the fuel supply." Naomi replied.
'Alright, sounds like a plan." Holden said, as he looked at the massive blue, glowing, tuning fork that had come into view where Charon had been.
