Storm Clouds On The Horizon

Posted on Sat Dec 16th, 2017 @ 6:38pm by Captain Remas McDonald

669 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: S1:2: Rubicon
Location: In Transit
Timeline: MD 6 8.30AM

The Magellan was a new ship with an old soul.

Like its two other sister ships, the Magellan had started off life a hundred years earlier as a top of the line Leviathan class civilian cargo ship. Max rated for a million cubic tons of cargo, with a maximum cruise speed of warp 6.1 (though the sales reps for Ingram Nanoscale Systems who owned the ship builder were adamant the speed could be worked up to 6.5). For a short time they were a common sight in the parking orbits of planets and Starbase’s around the Federation.

Then Lockheed Utopia came out with the Rigel V class with the fancy Warp 8 engine and the Leviathan class began to die out.

They found their way into the poorer sectors of Federation space, becoming the tramp steamers that plied the lesser cargo routes that kept the star nation going. But even then they were difficult to keep in working trim, as Ingram Nanoscale slipped the bonds of contractual obligation to keep parts for them in production.

Eventually the three Leviathan class hulks found their way to the Oberon Breaker’s Yard of Tau Ceti, where they would be condemned and run through an industrial replicator for matter reclamation. Expect someone from Starfleet had been shopping for three hulks on the cheap, trying to augment a project already under budgetary artillery fire.

The three hulks were towed to Utopia Planitia where they were gutted and refitted with parts from a dozen different starships. Their computer cores were upgraded, their warp engines replaced, their life support functions gutted to the point that if three people breathed deeply at once a O2 alarm might go off. These three ships would have no crews, and act as the pack mules to the Long Jump Project.

To that end each ship was a little different, a little odder than its sister. And that explains why what was to happen happened without warning.

The Magellan’s central computer AI was having to deal with a lot of error checking to keep running. The magnetic bottle had a wobble, the impulse engines were running hotter than expected, and the liquid storage tanks at its rear had lost three baffles in the jump and there was a niggling little centre of gravity issue.

So when the shields reported a massive impact on its port side, enough to turn that wobble into a shimmy that error checking corrected instantly, it added the problem to the pile. A second after the event the error checking routine began to parse the data. The impact or had come in at a oblique angle and ricochet off the shield and back into the void. The impactor had been roughly 4 centimetres across, and had struck with close to 4 megatons of force.

The error checking program looked at the data, and then back at the error parsing log. The shields had never reported this error, but the shied generator had been reporting power spikes since their arrival. It looked at the damage caused, and then at similar events and the likely hood of being struck by trans galactic debris again.

Likelihood was low to laughable, so the Magellan didn’t pass on the error log to the Traveller’s central computer core.

Then the error checking program ran into its own error, and deleted the log file of the event. Had it a memory worth speaking of, the error checking program would have reported the same four centimetre object had struck the Magellan’s shields numerous times over the days since their arrival. Each time getting a little more energetic, a little more forceful. The wobble in the magnetic bottle of its power plant was a result of a continuing rise in power for the shields.

So the Traveller was not warned that a storm was brewing ahead of them, and they were flying into its teeth.

But the Magellan was a stupid ship, and so we must forgive it this one dagger in the Travellers back.

 

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