Personal Log - 003 - Sara Ryder, Andromeda Galaxy / Date: 2819 (CE, 0 1:09:06, AA - After Arrival) - Off to adventure!

Oh, I nearly forgot.

Before I got to the Tempest I took a short detour, back to SAM-Node. He wanted to talk to me on a “private matter”. I couldn’t imagine what an A.I. would deem “private” so I was quite curious.

Turns out I was in for a surprise. SAM told me that Dad had designed him to be a fully sentient Artificial Intelligence, capable of directly interfacing with a Pathfinders Brain-Implant and altering the Pathfinders Brain and Body functions to adapt to certain circumstances and specified settings. The “Profiles” Dad ordered from SAM during the fight on Habitat 7. I could understand that Dad had kept that a secret. A.I. tech was outlawed in Council Space, meaning the Milky-way. People would have gone -expletive deleted- if they knew what SAM could do.

I would have to keep that secret now. Well, …

Anyway, Vetra showed me around the Tempest and introduced me to some of her crew. The Engine-Tech, Gill Brodie and our Science Officer Dr. Suvi Anwar. She seemed quite nice and wow, what a voice. Smooth and warm like aged scotch. Her accent was Irish or Scottish, gotta ask her about that. SAM can you remind me? Doc. T’Perro walked by, but I guess she was just checking things with Harry.

(Dr. Suvi Anwar)

Okay, on the bridge I was greeted by another Salarian, Kallo Jath our Pilot. He seemed unusually timid for a Salarian, but well, so did Director Tan. Well, having to survive on a marooned space station with little supplies in unknown space, might temper even the most fidgety Salarians habits. He seems like a nice guy though. told me he was part of the crew that designed the Tempest and its first test pilot. Didn’t want to miss seeing her in action, so he accompanied her to Andromeda. That’s dedication for you.

Kallo showed me how to work the navigational interface and as I looked up everyone was gathered around me on the bridge.
As I stared out of the ship's big view-screen onto the flight deck and surrounding Nexus habitats, I couldn’t help but wonder if all this was going way too fast. How was I supposed to do this? How was I supposed to be able to “find a path”, let alone shoulder the responsibility for tens of thousands of lives? I nearly puked in that moment and almost left the ship to crawl back into my cryo-pod. But then again, we were under a lot of pressure to get the Initiatives mission going. Investigate new planets and find resources to finally make settling this cluster possible. For a moment I got lost in memories of dad, of his last words to me and of the responsibility he had placed on me. The confidence he had had placed in me …

Liam stood right next to me. He was talking to me. I forced myself back to the moment and looked up. I hadn’t heard him. He seemed eager to start. The others too, well, … maybe apart from Cora. Who showed a soldier's mask again, when she gave her report of the ship's readiness. So I shrugged, drew myself up, took a deep breath and gave a short speech about what we were here to do and that we would show the Nexus Brass and the settlers what we were made of.

 

(Liam Kosta )

As we took off, my stomach flipped a bit again, but Kallo expertly took the Tempest out of the Nexus in such a smooth arch I nearly couldn’t believe we were really on our way. As we left, SAM suggested investigating a planet called Eos first.It too had been chosen as a possible habitat for humans and had seen the first attempt of the Nexus crew to establish an outpost on its surface. Sadly with disastrous consequences. The planet's high atmospheric radiation levels and unpredictable severe storms had either killed the first settlers or driven them off. Unexpectedly SAM had managed to find a signal similar to that coming from that weird tower on Habitat 7. This suggested a possibility to alter this planet's atmosphere too. Or at least to jump-start its terraforming process. Our flight was surprisingly short, due to the Tempest's state-of-the-art Faster Than Light Drive, but I managed to get a bit of sleep at last.

Approaching the planet I almost felt a bit disappointed. It looked like a giant, brown mud ball. Storms raged in its atmosphere and parts of it had a sickly, greenish hue. But it was nothing as spectacular or horrifying as Habitat 7. I guess we were lucky. Our descent was rocked by turbulence but Kallo handled it like it was no more than a bump in the road on a summer day's leisure drive. Remarkable. As we sat down in the middle of the abandoned outpost, the enormity of our mission again struck me like a fist to the gut.

Good people had died here. Seeing an abandoned outpost like this, all derelict and quiet gave me the shivers. Luckily the site's radiation shielding was still active despite most of the other equipment and even the housing being powered down. But beyond the perimeter the atmosphere was hazy and showed that eerie, green shimmer we’d seen from orbit and on approach. It really didn’t look hospitable at all. SAM informed us that even our environmental suits wouldn’t be able to withstand the high level of radiation outside the fence for long. So we resolved to check the outpost site first before investigating the strange signal. Some of the blocky, prefab houses and laboratories were running on emergency batteries and allowed entry to some rooms. After a bit of scrounging around we found a set of Passcodes that enabled us to access more rooms. They looked like they’d been abandoned in a hurry. With breakfast cereal and long dried up drinks still on the table. These guys had “Blast’Os”, I didn’t even know that the Initiative had brought this stuff from the Milky Way. In another room playing cards had been left on the table, right in the middle of a game. An electronic whiteboard in a laboratory still showed the project its owner had been working on. Good battery life on that thing. We also found a bunch of uncoded personal logs. Their entries show the slow deterioration of morale and conditions at the outpost. Some people though proved to be remarkably resilient and optimistic. I don’t know which entries made me more sad.

Outside we found a small supply cache that seemed to have been put up pretty recently. So we were not alone. A survivor? One or more of the Exiles from the Nexus? We proceeded with caution and soon enough we came to a door that had been closed from the inside on the first floor of the main power control building. Someone was hiding in there and it was this person who probably had powered down the main equipment. I called out and knocked on the door, a voice answered over a speaker, next to a camera above the door. No, we were definitely not Kett. But the Knuckleheads were on the lookout for Humans poking around the outpost the guy inside told us. That’s why he’d hidden and had remotely shut down the generators. These needed to be powered up manually though and he agreed to enable that, if we’d deal with the Kett patrol that would surely investigate the spike in activity and energy from the abandoned outpost. Sure enough almost as soon as we’d powered up the two generators a green shuttle puttered in above our heads. The noise it made reminded me of an ancient earth boat motor. The three soldiers it dropped on us put up a valiant fight but didn’t stand a chance. Cora body slammed one of them so hard that he bounced off the prefabs side like a ragdoll and lay still. Biotics, gotta love them.

The guy who’d barricaded himself in the Power Station finally let us in. Turned out he was a flight deck tech scavenging a bit on the side. Figured he’d find some good stuff to sell or trade for food in the abandoned outpost. The situation on the Nexus was dire. We had to figure out how to help these people. Ideally, how to make this planet viable with the help of the alien machines we could see on the hazy horizon. A monolith, quite similar to the one Dad had …

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Dad had died at. Yes, it still hurts.

Anyway, our new friend told us he’d seen a vehicle in one of the sealed cargo crates at the edge of the outpost. Perfect for exploration of the surrounding landscape. So we made our way there. Brodie nearly wet his pants as I told him what we’d found. It was funny to hear him gushing over the awesome capabilities of the ND-1 Nomad. What a Nerd.
SAM provided the activation codes to open the huge container,right after we’d installed our first Forward Station at a clear space near the outposts center. Those things are pretty cool. They enable the Pathfinder Team to stay in contact with the Tempest at all times and provide supplies as well as interfaces to check on the environment and other vital information about the planet they’re set up on.

(The ND1-Nomad)

What’s even cooler though was the Nomad. Holy -expletive deleted-! What a ride. I could think of a few upgrades down the line, but at this moment this thing will help immensely.
I might take some time to get used to handling it but it safely brought us to the nearest relics we could see. Some quite imposing monolithic structures rose from the rocky ground. Constructed from the same weird, unknown material as those on Habitat 7. They were roughly triangular, about 10 to 15 meters high and slanted toward the middle of a rough triangle. The midpoint was marked by an area raised in two stages to about shoulder height. We could easily climb it. The outpost research team had already established a perimeter of radiation sinks, which a scan revealed to be near capacity but for the moment they kept us safe. Everything was wrought though with glowing conduits or something similar. A low frequency hum filled the air and as I approached the center of the site I spotted a console similar to the one dad had used to activate the tower. The strange glyphs on it made no sense to me though and as I tapped on its weird six sided “keys” nothing happened. SAM said, an important piece of information was missing. So we started looking for clues. SAM detected Initiative Tech atop one of the monoliths, as we climbed up we found two scan-terminals placed precariously at the edges of two monoliths facing each other.

They seemed to be aimed at the same spot in front of the one atop the construct we’d just climbed. I aimed my own scanner at it and sure as hell there was a glowing rectangle with a glyph inside it. With a beep SAM informed me that this was the missing piece we’d been looking for.

Cautiously we climbed down, back to the console and just as I lifted my right hand over it to try and key in the right code, I was ambushed.

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