Cargo Inspection

Walking down the hallway, Heki entered the storage space. The place was full of crates housing ore. The units looked well maintained, which was proof, that somehow self-maintenance still worked.

(Probably because the self-maintenance program is stored using a different method.)

The self-maintenance program is a relatively new creation. Unfortunately, this new kind of storage device was proven inefficient, at least for now.

Heki walked down with her sensors monitoring the surroundings. She already checked the whole ship with her sense, which she forgot about, due to her panic, but she couldn’t find anything off. She still didn’t fully trust this new sense.

(Hm… Everything is the same or within margin of error to what I sensed here, nothing seems off. Let’s go to the next one.)

The cargo vessel was divided into several storage rooms, so if one gets damaged, or carries a dangerous load, the rest still could be used. It wasn’t uncommon for toxins to spread in a room. The fire would also be contained to one room if that happened. The hallways were also separated from each other, for safety and security reasons as well.

(If everything is just like how my sense shows, then looking through the rest of the ship is a waste of time. This room will be the last I look through, if it matches what my sense shows.)

There are several driving forces behind humanity’s advances, development. One of them is scepticism. Scepticism of established facts or beliefs as we look back on them. Just like how some people started questioning if diseases were curses or actually caused by something else. Of course, being too sceptical is not a good thing.

(It seems everything here is the same as I sensed. I should check out the colony this ship came from. Since we are in Uzebia, and the ships id is AVA-133-TPS, it should be from planet Avaria. Avaria mostly handles iron, copper and aluminium, since most of the rare materials have been mined.)

Heki arrived back at her ship and took off her spacesuit.

“Cecil, can you search for mining planet Avaria?”

[Yes, it is approximately 10 minutes away. Do you want to select it as your target?]

“Yes.”

[Confirmed, engines set to level 4, best route found, heading to goal. 9 minutes 36 seconds left.]

“Cecil, what is the data restoration progress?”

[Progress is at 95%, estimated time remaining 1 hour, due to high compression rate.]

(I should check out the samples meanwhile.)

Heki’s ship is called Periphery. Her ships always carried the same name, once they were removed from active duty they lost their name, while the replacement got it instead. It is more of a title than a name. The ID of her current ship is ORG-014-TIKE. ORG stand for the planet Origin, 014 means that it is Heki’s 14^th ship, TIKE is the customised ID for Heki’s ship.

Ships starting with ORG, ORI and ORN belonged to planet Origin.

The ship with ID AVA-133-TPS refers to Avaria’s 133^rd transport ship. Usually these vessels went in groups, seeing one alone was extremely rare. It was a usual sight at the beginning of space colonisation, but that was a long time ago, multiple centuries passed since then.

Why not build just one giant ship to carry it all? Because of the issue with landing, higher chance to get hit by space debris etc. Larger ships were also harder to navigate alongside a plethora of other technical issues. Only one giant ship was ever built and later it was scrapped for resources.

[Arrived at planet Avaria. Preparing for orbit.]

“Okay, any signs of life?”

[Only plant and other small lifeforms were detected.]

(Yeah, that is what my sense told me as well.)

Heki started walking toward the landing vessel. Although Heki could land her entire ship on the planet, it was fuel inefficient and would also cause wear and tear on the ship, which needs time to be repaired. If anything went wrong, she couldn’t leave the planet immediately or she would risk damaging the ship. That is why her ship had a landing vessel.

Avaria is a solid planet, which is in the habitable zone of its solar system. Since it is a relatively new planet, originally it was too hot to be habitable, but with the help of an ice planet and a lot of transport ships, the planet gained enough water and became cold enough to support life. Though still far from what Origin is capable of, due to a lot of things still missing, mostly time, it is still safe to mine on the planet, without needing to worry about small space debris, since it has an atmosphere.

Heki got in the landing vessel and started preparing for landing.

(I wonder if I’ll find any clues this time. I would really appreciate, if I could figure out what happened here, though judging by what I sense, I don’t expect much. I sense dead bodies everywhere, not even the animals survived. Only small creatures like bugs and worms still live.)

(Now I’m starting to wonder if that power that wiped out all the data was the cause for this. Too bad I don’t have any data from that time, since it got wiped.)

[Landing successful, please wait while the ship cools down.]

Heki had a lot of questions and even more guesses, but they are all pointless without the necessary data.

(Worrying about the past won’t help me move forward. I should focus on the now and here. The more data I can gather, the more accurate the picture will become. When I’m done with gathering the data, the ship should have finished the restore. After that I could finally go back to Origin, and give my report. That is going to be a headache.)