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The crew of the Deepnight Revelation are investigating the large orbital ring structures in the Hagavo system (0633) in the FSD Transition Spinward sector. A small boat was sent in to navigate the extreme radiation belts around the gas giant, and get a team up close to what looked like a habitat module on the side of a kilometre wide torus that was using gravitational manipulation to pull matter up from the surface of the planet.
Unfortunately the airlock didn’t just simply open to them, so Khadashi had to head out in his vacc suit to break the electronic locks. The alternative was explosive. Though it took longer than desired, he managed to get the airlock open. It was large enough to get the Boat in.
As the airlock closed behind them, they lost communication with the Deepnight. So a re-open the door to report that things were fine, then close them again and the airlock was filled with air.
There was a smaller person sized door on the inside of the airlock, as well as some cabinets containing Droyne shaped vacc suits. Above the inner door, written in Oynprith, was “Biological Laboratory Genesis Project”.
Going in, there was just a corridor heading around the habitat. The air was cold, but breathable. The design indicated that it had been designed with artificial gravity in mind, but the grav plates were not working. Khadashi went first as normal, and soon came across what appeared to be a robot drone – a small metal sphere, with six long spindly limbs that it was using to move down the corridor.
The bot moved down to Khadashi, who tried to step aside to avoid it, but it stopped and demanded identification. Khadashi tried to give some, but the bot responded that it was unable to verify because it was unable to communicate with its master node.
Khadashi then used a logic trick against it – claiming to have authority from the master node to self verify. I gave a simple INT check to succeed – the drone was badly damaged from being so old so probably incapable of clever reasoning at this point – and he succeeded. He then told the drone to shut itself down and wait for repairs. It did so.
Further long the corridor were six doors labelled as specimen labs. There were some simple panels on the outside which gave a high level view of their contents – original native specimens, engineered brain cases, seed samples and various other samples.
Beyond that were engineering and living quarters. Finally, they came to the control centre, which was dark. Alice headed inside, and a hologram flickered into life at the centre of the room. It was out of focus, and missing bits, but it seemed to work.
It identified itself as Kyrransk, Agent Intellect of the Tresskvuess. The Tresskvuess was the Droyne ship that had preceded the Deepnight on this route 300,000 years ago. When questioned, it said it had been left in charge of the Biological Laboratory Genesis Project, but had been waiting nine trillion nine hundred sixty eight billion seconds for an update. Plus or minus one trillion eight hundred billion or so. It seemed a bit unsure of itself. Several times during its questioning, it would correct itself and change its story.
However, Kyrransk was willing to communicate and share information. It was part of a project to seed this region of space with a weapon to use against the Enemy. The Enemy in this case was the Entity that sought the destruction of all life. The plan of the Droyne was to:
- Research the Entity in order to find its strengths and weaknesses
- Come up with a counter agent that could be used against it
- Seek its utter destruction
The Biologicals had been discovered on the nearby world, but they were quite simple at that point. So the Droyne altered them to give them a resistance to the fungus, provide them with a great level of reasoning and mobility, and give them a desire to spread themselves across the nearby worlds. If they succeeded at this, then if the main Droyne mission failed, the Biologicals would hopefully be a buffer between the fungus and the rest of the galaxy.
The large constructs in this system had been part of an attempt to build a huge scientific laboratory, for the testing of the new Biological variants, and also to test bioweapons against the Entity. However, the Droyne had stretched their resources well beyond what they were now capable of. They had no more capability to create the star killer devices they’d set up elsewhere (or so it said), and these orbital rings were their final attempt at something big.
The Droyne had left behind their main ship intelligence (basically, a glorified LLM) to monitor the project, then headed on to point VS-X, where the Entity was hiding within a gravitational anomaly.
Reporting back to the Deepnight, the scientists were desperate to get their hands on the specimen samples, and also to get access to Kyrransk. Taking just the computer data banks wouldn’t work, since they were encrypted, a higher technology level, and also damaged. If they wanted access to the data, they needed to go through Kyyransk. Which meant, either staying here, or unplugging the whole computer system and taking it with them.
They decided on the latter.
Kyrransk provided instructions on to safely disable itself, remove its hardware from the habitat, and set it up aboard the Deepnight. The first few sets of instructions required that Kyrransk be given root access to the Deepnight’s own computer systems, but some refining of queries got to a solution that didn’t need that.
At this point, the BioShips in the inner system were beginning to stir, so Kyyransk was transferred to the Deepnight, along with as many of the specimens that were still valid, and the Deepnight headed on its way Rimward.
The purpose of this session had been to provide the players with some answers to a lot of their questions about the Biologicals and what the Droyne had been doing in this region of space.
They now have a new NPC aboard the ship, that may give them further aid, though the accuracy of its information may not always be entirely 100%. It is 300,000 years old, and a lot of its data records have been corrupted by radiation. It’s something that I can use to give them hints and plot hooks though for the final part of the campaign.
