Archeotech 2 – Treasure Hunt (RPG IC)

[Trokair]

As you get more familiar and used to your new surrounding of the gunnery deck, and piece together a greater understanding of its layout and content it becomes apparent that everything is heavily automated. The ten marc cannon on this deck, with their support machinery and ammunition feed, take up a little more than one and a half kilometer stretch.

 

The way on either end is blocked by secure bulkhead doors almost 200m wide and a bit taller. Smaller human sized bulkheads are set into them at floor level. Perhaps the giant doors connected to further gunnery decks, opened only when machinery needs to be moved from one compartment to another.  As you explore you do come across accesses hatches to various parts set into the floor and walls. Of the ones you manage to open and take a look into they are much as you would expect, cables and pipes and crawl spaces to access other more hidden parts.

 

Steps leading up into the warren of catwalks that surround various items of machinery also lead you to a central control blister set into the wall. Inside two bank of control terminals in a tiered semicircle overlook the gunnery deck. It is clear from even a cursory inspection that none of them are functional, though not from damage but merely a lack of power.  

 

It is Helene who voices it first, though some of you may have already noticed the same, or rather the lack of it.

 

“Where is the devotion?” Helene asked. In all of what you had seen so far, while clearly of human manufacture, there were none of the sights you would find anywhere in the Imperium to one degree or another.  No Eagles or skulls, no devotional scriptures or incense burners. No little shrines tucked into corners, and for a vessel so heavily mechanized no emblems of the Martian Priesthood at all. The lack of the other could just about be ascribed to a need of functionally and perhaps in other areas of the ships such as the crew quarters you would find them, but the Aeeptus Mechanicum embossed all their machinery, always.

 

As you explored you found several bulkhead doors leading out of the gunnery deck in addition to the ones set into the giant doors either end. While they are closed they do have manual releases and a tentative test turn on a few showed that they had not seized but where stiff and would require some effort to open.   

[Machine God]

Varn:

 

"You ask 'Where is devotion' Helene. No cogs or wings of Big Sky God. Ravia sez not Arkytek" said Varn.

 

"Obvious innit. Dis shipis Old Ancient. Dark Ancient 'erd them Magos say once. Ship is older than Mekanus!"

 

 

Of Sestas.

[A.T.]

Aria

 

With each step this vessel seemed less like home, though perhaps may ships were like this. The Orichalcon had heaved with life as hundreds slaved over each of the ships vast macrocannons pulling the shells into position under the watchful eyes of the overseers, Aria had learnt early to watch for signs that the twistcatchers were seeking to replenish the ships combat losses from the dregs below decks when the fighting was too heavy to withdraw to a safe port.

 

Battle damage frequently caused power to wane and surge especially in the out extremities such as the gun ports, the smell of burning machinery the sound of metal grinding on metal as impacts twisted even the thick adamantine out of alignment. Men could be replaced faster than metal repaired and even if the gun crew were decimated by flame and shrapnel after each shot the command of the captain always boomed clear in her memory that the guns must fire.

 

"Perhaps the vessel was unfinished and untested. A shell?"

[A.T.]

Aria

 

Odd that the doors were not open, had the previous expedition sealed the ship on the way out? "Why are there no tools here, no lights or generators? No remnants of the prior explorators?"

 

Had they found an alternate route and never emerged? Aria passed her flashlight across the other bulkheads seeking an open portal while awaiting Helene and Ravias decision on how to proceed.

[Trokair]

Aria’s rechecking of the bulkheads revealed nothing further, they were closed but not locked. Sufficient effort would allow any of the emergency hand powered systems to open their corresponding door.

 

Out of all of them the one that stood out the most was the one at the back of the control blister. It was the only one on that level that you had found, the rest being at floor level, and as it led to the gunnery deck command perhaps the corridor behind it would connect to other important locations, but that was just a guess.

[Trokair]

 

As the bulkhead door release, several minutes of hard labour at the manual release mechanism had brought you to this point, there is an audible rush air from the corridor beyond into the gunnery deck. For a few seconds you can feel this breeze before it abates. There is a slight tinge of something on the air, but not something any of you can place, and it persists only for a few seconds.

 

Swinging the bulkhead door fully open the corridor that greets you is just as dark as the gunnery deck. A few meters in you come to a stairwell and junction. The paths multiplying ahead of you, left, right, straight ahead, up or down. You would think that at such a junction there would be some directional indicators or even just a location marker so that the crew of yore could tell where they where, but there is nothing, the walls blank and featureless.

 

Over the next few hours, as you explore this labyrinth of corridors and stairways, interspaced with larger space, some you cross at floor level, others on raised gangways, you cannot shake the feeling that you are lost. Despite rigorous mapping and tracking of your turns and choices, and even doubling back a few times to check. Given the featurelessness and sameness of the corridors the decision had quickly been reached to mark your way whenever you could.  The little splashes of colour from the markers the only evidence of your passage. The few smaller rooms you had found and entered where universally bare.

 

Taking a meal break in one large chamber, by your reckoning about two kilometers leftwards of the gunnery deck, and perhaps a dozen levels down, you spot the first irregularity as you are about the leave. The far wall is not uniform. Coming closer your torches quickly reveal wreckage. The remains of some form of smaller void craft or flyer, wedged awkwardly into the wall. Deep scratches run along the ground to the remains of the craft. A closer examination of the space leads you to conclude that this had been some sort of hanger bay, the regularity of the pipes and machinery in evidence proportional to what the crashed vehicle could have been. Space for 18 crafts by Ravia calculation, each large enough to be a inter ship shuttle or perhaps large atmospheric.  

[A.T.]

Aria

 

The presence of void craft would suggest that the starship had crashed or landed here rather than having been an incomplete construct, though she had never heard of a star vessel making a controlled landing upon a planetary surface and nothing that they had seen so far suggested an impact.

 

"Such a vessel would have its own cogitators and generatorum systems would it not?" she inquired. A starship was a vast and complex thing requiring many thousands to operate but this small vessel was a different matter. Looking about the hanger she sought to locate access ways to the repair and re-armament bays that would normally attach to such a place as this.

[Trokair]

Your search is not in vain, for taking one of the door that run along the wall opposite from the empty shuttle berths leads you into another similar sized space. Work benches and heavy machinery, clearly intended for repair and maintenance. However as with as much of this ship the shelves where empty, the tool draws bereft. If the empty rooms and corridor had not already birth the idea for you, this emptied workshop shouted it. Someone had spent a fair amount of effort to clear this place out, removing everything that was not too heavy or too integrated into the ship structure itself.  

[Lord_Ikka]

Ravia

 

"This ship was stripped of its components, harvested. We must press on- there will be power stations and computer banks too large to easily remove that may have answers."

 

The lack of machine-cult symbols or alters of the Omnissiah were disturbing. That usually heralded a ship of the heretical or rebellious, unless it was very, very old. As of yet, Ravia couldn't tell which.

[A.T.]

Aria

 

"Harvested but not stripped", Aria notes, "it might have taken months or years to scour the vessel so thoroughly of tools and trinkets yet the macrocannon was untouched".

 

As thorough a search as it was shallow, there had not been a sign of those that came before, no discarded flares or charge packs, no broken glow-globes or empty ration packets. No sign at all.