Starship Engineer

Chapter 19

The tunnel was 18m wide. Centered and spaced 7m apart were two rails. It didn’t take much investigation to figure out they were tram rails used to move vehicles via magnetism. I positioned my ATV between the rails and throttled down the tracks. It was spooky, an endless corridor lit only by the two high powered flood lights on my ATV. Originally I had planned to take it slow, driving around 50kph in case I needed to react quickly. However I soon found I was traveling around 80kph and felt relatively safe as I could see about 300m into the distance clearly.

My PerCom noted when I passed the mark where the drone had explored up to. I paused here to drop off a small emergency kit with some spare oxygen canisters. I decided on caution from here on and set the max speed of the ATV to 45kph. I was shocked that there were no off-shoots or maintenance rooms in the endless tunnel. It was all just a smooth walled tunnel. The tunnels were also straight enough that I could have dropped a few comm relays and kept in touch with Eve. I had thought I would have had to drop too many relays to make communication feasible so didn’t pack them. Live and learn.

I was finally approaching the space port city. A large tube shaped vehicle rested on the tracks in the tram terminal. I was barely able to get the ATV by the vehicle and up onto the landing platform. On the platform there were six alcoves for bots like I had seen in the city and all were empty. Another tram vehicle sat on the other side of the platform. It probably tracked to a different city. The trams had two large passenger cars and two large flatbeds. I found a few data slates in the tram passenger cars after a quick search for anything interesting.

The stairs heading up were too narrow for the ATV so I would have to walk. I detached one of the flood lights and plugged it’s power cord into my suit. I moved up the stairs.

Besides stairs heading further up I found a landing that led down to the other side to two more sets of tram tracks. Each track had parked trams as well. So a total of four cities had transports here and all their trams were here. I confirmed my findings by translating the script on the wall indicating which tram went where. This hub was probably a spaceport from my initial findings. Or at least that was my hope. I walked up the stairs hoping.

The stairs opened to an expansive domed area. There were crisscrossing sets of smaller tram tracks here and a few scattered buildings in the open. I decided to walk to the edge of the dome and then walk the circumference. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the tram tracks were for. The were for moving their space vehicles around. Each ‘spaceship’ looked like it had its own massive dedicated alcove. There were six alcoves and everyone of them was empty. The walls in the alcoves had numerous schematics that, as an engineer, made some sense to me. The lack of any spacecraft though got me thinking about the fate the aliens. Did they abandon the planetoid in their craft…where did they go? I made notes on my PerCom to trace the planetoid vector back in time while including stellar drift. Maybe if I felt adventurous I could go and look for the aliens.

I started noting some other structures on the perimeter. Apartment style housing, manufacturing facilities, a fueling depot that descended into the planetoid…I was curious what they used for fuel but decided to save that exploration for another time. There were a few large cafeteria style buildings. Apparently the aliens used titanium sporks as their only utensils. I think I found a movie theater but the configuration made no sense. Twenty pairs of seats facing a large screen. Maybe a briefing room? Using my scanners on the chairs I found they had emitters. It took me nearly an hour scanning and taking one apart to figure out the emitters created an opaque sound proof bubble. So maybe this was a dating vestibule? I spent too much time on this and took a sample of the tech with me. Then I made the discovery I had wanted. A warehouse!

The warehouse was large and had racks four stories high. It took a minor amount of translation to confirm this was were they stored spare spaceship parts. And not all the shelves were empty. I did a silly little dance in celebration and was thankful no one was here to see that performance. Over the next twenty hours I spent time translating scripts and scanning parts. The tech was beyond my ability to replicate and would take months or longer to reverse engineer for me.

Some things I noted was their inertia compensators seemed much more advanced than anything I had access to. It tied into a field that was generated from one of the crystalline matrix’s emitters. It should allow for faster acceleration and smoother transition from FTL.

The hull plating was thinner and lighter than anything the Union used. It also had radiation shielding built into the alloy rather than a separate layer like I was familiar with. I did some quick tests on the plating and it was 30% stronger than the warship plating the Union used. Comms systems seemed a bit archaic. Deep space sensors where more advanced than anything I had even seen and way too complex to even scratch the surface. They utilized ultra fine lenses and gyroscopic gravimetric modules and a module that had elements I recognized as possibly a miniaturized FTL drive…or at least was my best guess. If this civilization had FTL…why were they on this planetoid? Was this planetoid a base? Looking back at the sensor I examined it was twenty meters long and five meters in diameter, not something I could take with me. Unfortunately the racks that were suppose to hold the replacement generators and ship power cores were empty. One curious thing I noted was there were no racks for weapons for their starships. I was fairly tired and decided it was time to head back. I did spend some time trying to find a way to open the doors high up in the ceiling and failed.

Back at my ATV I had twenty some odd alien data pads as loot. Most of them were from the warehouse and if Eve didn’t find anything useful in the archives maybe these would something interesting on them. As I got into sensor range and communicated with Eve she said there had been no issues. Vanessa and Shinade had worked diligently and she had made significant progress. She had a translation program running on the disks and was sorting them. Each disk had thousands of hours of video and large book libraries. She didn’t have memory available to store the data herself but she was sorting the disks by genre. Even more spectacular was she had found the general history of the planetoid and the race that inhabited it. I excitedly raced back to the my shuttle so Eve could share her findings. I entered and gave her the data pads and stripped. I took time to shower in the cargo container as we had a tunnel hooked up from an airlock and while I was heating two meals I asked Eve for what she had found.

The race called themselves the Hy’Nar. They were mostly humanoid in appearance and Eve showed me an image. It looked like a thin gangly human with gray skin and a long oval face, The Hy’Nar lived 350,000 years ago. The planetoid was actually one of their three moons. A cosmic debris storm was found to be entering their system. They had almost five hundred years warning though. The storm would bring thousands of asteroids and intense radiation lasting more than 100 years. It would erase all life in their system. Pooling resources, they moved resources and people to this moon. They used science and force to throw the moon out into space. The civilization continued to develop over 4000 years, advancing technology and keeping the population under strict control. But resources started running out. They had some starships with short range. Collecting rogue comets and asteroids couldn’t sustain their people. They built a massive gravimetric drive inside the planetoid to steer it toward stars hoping for a system with a planet that could support life.

In order to choose the best star to focus on they focused their efforts on improving their scanning capabilities. It took 300 years to adjust their trajectory and pass close to a system they thought would support them and unfortunately it could not. The two planets in the system with breathable atmosphere were toxic. This caused a lot of problems in the citizenship. Many wanted to put effort into inserting their planetoid into orbit of one of the planets and terraform it over thousands of years. The other camp wanted to continue on to another star with promising readings. There was a breaking. Over half the population fled, taking more than half of the supplies with them. This left the remaining people short on supplies. They had an 800 year voyage to the next star. They consolidated the remaining people in five cities and brought all the remaining resources to these cities. When they finally reached the system the planetoid gravometric drive did not have enough remaining power to insert into an orbit of the one planet that could sustain life. So they used their spaceships to transport everything they could as the planetoid passed through the system. There were 4,196 who decided to remain on the planetoid due to some religious reasonings. Eve said it took just 300 years after that before they died out. Eve guessed the planetoid was uninhabited for around 325,000 years before we landed on it.

Wow. Eve had supplied images and short videos during her story and I was impressed. She even had the coordinates of the home system and two resettled systems...if her stellar drift calculations were correct. Shinade and Vanessa entered the shuttle at that time. I had Eve redo her presentation and they were both speechless. Shinade started asking questions about this massive gravity drive they used to move the planetoid. It had to be a world bending powerful machine. I interrupted and asked Eve if it had any fuel left? Eve pulled some disks and scanned them on the alien device for 20 minutes before commenting that it should have some fuel left. Not enough for any big changes. I asked her if we could deflect the planetoid and maybe accelerate it a little? Samantha and the crew would get to safety and even though I had erased their navigation data it wouldn't take long to find the large planetoid in the database. If we could alter the course and accelerate it...we may be able to get if far enough off course that they wouldn't be able to find it. A mischievous grin appeared on my face that was soon shared by Vanessa and Shinade and Eve followed suit but a little too late to seem natural. We had some work to do.