Avaria

Avaria is a century old mining colony, which is still operational, with over a quarter of all explored resources still left on the planet. It is most known for its relatively large rare earth metal reserves. It is one of the most important planets for Origin, since it is relatively close as well.

[Depressurisation in progress... finished. Unlocking the door. You can now exit anytime.]

(Still have to wear the space suit, since there isn’t enough oxygen here, the air pressure is also low, the temperature as well.)

Avaria is a bit smaller than Origin. about 9/10^th of the size. The density of the planet is similar, which means that the gravity is a bit lower here.

(This colony should have some backups, if I’m luck, it has a snapshot of the data, that was measured during or just before the wipe.)

Mining colonies were also a source of research data, and they served as a data centre and waypoint as well. The older the colony was, the more purpose they served. They also had more data backed up as well.

(It should be below the central building.)

The colony was made up of dome shaped buildings, since the inside of these buildings were pressurised, and a dome shape was the best shape to keep the building from bursting and they were easy to make.

(Come to think of it, where are the mining vehicles? Did the wipe happen during mining operation?)

A mining colony usually had mining vehicles, unless they suffered a mining accident. Though nowadays, with special mining equipment, which can mine out the materials needed, while obliterating or discarding the waste, mining was a breeze. A few hours of mining could exhaust a mid-sized vein.

(Well, no use in thinking about it. I will find the answers here… hopefully.)

She arrived at the data and communications centre of the colony.

(Hmm… I need to hack into the door’s controller, since I put a small OS on my chip, it should be easy as pie. Though hacking isn’t the right word to use here, since it has no data on it.)

(Here is the maintenance port for the door, and here is my little wireless to wired converter. Should be able to make it work.)

Heki loaded a small operating system onto the door, which opened with a hiss.

(Since they are controlled by the same chip the other one should open when this one closes.)

It was your usual airlock, basically.

The door closed behind her, and the airlock was put under pressure, until it reached a satisfactory level.

(I still find it funny, how the volatile memory still works to some degree, but the storage drives were wiped.)

Heki stepped inside the building and the sight that welcomed her was…

(Well, I already sensed that no one was alive here, but still… I’m starting to feel nauseous, better not look in the direction of the bodies… Though this might be a good time to get used to the sight, bit of a mental training, I guess.)

(Thankfully, I have my space suit on, otherwise the smell… ugh, let’s just move forward.)

The data and communications centre were like an onion, it was made up of several layers. It was further divided into sections. This was mainly to reduce interference from outside, though another was for safety, if something goes wrong, it is only that section, that goes down. Each section had their separate independent source of power.

Some use solar panels, others use tiny nuclear fusion reactors. There are a few other, bur most use a variation of these two, for example a few satellites orbit around the planet, which can transmit energy wirelessly to their designated section, from another satellite, or straight from the power source.

Most of these are no longer operational, due to a variety of reasons. Some lost power due to interference, and since their storage was wiped, they didn’t restart, some due to seismic activity and the list goes on.

(Section N1 still has power, let’s hope for the best.)

Section 0 is the innermost part of the facility, where a backup fusion reactor can be found, to power the basic functions of the facility, including the section status panel, that Heki checked, which lists the functioning, the partially functioning, and the non-functioning sections. It also lists if there is an emergency in one of the sections, as well as the kind of emergency.

(Too many doors are in the way, since they don’t have their authentication database, they can’t do anything, have to open them manually every time. So repetitive.)

Section N1 is dedicated for research, it immediately writes any data it gets to multiple storage devices, and doesn’t need to load anything from storage. Its only purpose is to gather data, nothing more. While in case of other devices, they need to read files or directories, the research section doesn’t have the time to do that. It is constantly writing data, if it can’t find the location to write, it creates it, if it cannot create it, then it uses something else.

(Finally, I’m here… This is surprising… The still use the old type of solid-state drives here, extracting data from them is going to be slower. Though reliability comes first for research. Let’s just write the bare minimum of code to access the filesystem for this computer.)

(The time should be store in memory for this kind of system, so the files should still be timestamped. My stupid chip and ship used hybrid memory for storing the time. Technology can get worse in a way overtime, or so it seems. So, let’s see…)

(The filesystem seems to be okay, though a big chunk is missing. Let’s get the timestamp from the first few files… It says 3525 23 02:23, everything before it was wiped. Hopefully the backup storage still has them or more precisely, the files about what happened between the 22^nd and 23^rd.)

(I should also check the time stamp on the latest files for reference…)

“WHAT?”