Posted July 31, 2021, 10:12 a.m. by Gamemaster The Wrecking Crew (GamesMaster) (Sage Pennington)
Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Teebo (Chief of Keeping The Ship Together (CE)) in Main Sim [Cargo Bay] Tin Can Technology
Teebo wiped his forearm across his forehead and sighed. While he didn’t sweat like a human, enough time among them had taught him that it was the thing to do after hard work was complete. And while the keb was far from done with their new wayward trinket, he had made enough progress that it felt like an entire day’s work done. Glancing at the chronometer, he let out a frustrated croak. Only two hours?!The corner he’d appropriated for his disassembly process looked little different than if a Barzani garbage scow had unceremoniously disgorged its contents across the polished floor. Rusted casing plates and metal braces were strewn about in loose piles, with the exception being those few items where markings had been found. Those he had stacked neatly against the wall, pitiful of a find as they’d been. What was left of the pod was a wiring nightmare sizzling and blinking mockingly at him hanging in shambles from an interior frame. Either its passenger had been very angry at the time of his encasement and decided the internal systems existed for therapeutic destruction or he’d been hastily ensconced.
Possibly both?
Shaking his head again and hissing his frustration, Teebo gurgled thoughtfully to himself. Scooping up his tricorder, he began to scan the wreckage for any sign of danger to the ship such as radiation or pathogens. While the transporter’s scrubbers were extremely thorough—a point of pride in his maintenance schedule, to be sure—he had found some particularly dense plating surrounding the pod’s defunct transponder that concerned him. He logged any curiosities he found and uploaded them to the Constellation for the science teams, then began to hunt for whatever amounted to a computer system in the remaining scrap heap.
Teebo had a few ideas about how to track its origins if he couldn’t find what he was looking for. Metallurgic degradation, latent radiation and EM emissions, and all manner of astrochemical data would at least let them discern where it had passed recently. After that, it would be a matter of backtracking its likely course based on gravitational interactions with stellar bodies, propulsion wakes, or even bumps from a friendly comet or two. While they might not be able to follow the proverbial breadcrumbs back to its point of origin, it could get them close.
But that was for later, once the dilapidated hunk of tin can technology lay broken and defeated in a disassembled pile of damnable detritus at his feet.
—Teebo, Chief Engineer—
Doing these scans would show that this pod was old. old. OLD. And it had gone through a vast area of space. The ambient radiation off it wasn’t dangerous, but it did demonstrate that it’d been through its fair share of phenomena.
Backtracking its course would take Teebo to Earth many ages ago.
-GM
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