Grounded: Icefields

"Jack, what happened? You spaced out for a moment there, are you all right?"
"Yeah, just... old memories."
Jake pulled out a bottle of Zuguthian spirit from his bag, and handed it over to Jack.
"Here, this helps for memories. Now, if you'll excuse, I have to uh... inspect the armored vehicles for a while."

Anthiel stirred slowly from his bunk; gently drawing his cloak over his back. He stood up, walking over to the table, and glanced at the clock, "Shit" he thought; he was late; he stood up and ran out of the cabin, sliding his sword into his sheath as he went. And sprinted down the corridor towards his post.

>VO.AI."Toran"//AI.Link="Atlis"><"Toran"
>Greetings, Atlis. How are you feeling?

_______

Mark wandered towards the bridge. He figured on asking the Captain what their next assignment would be- but the man was MIA from the bridge. As usual. He meandered back to medbay, thinking to find Jake, the 2iC.

Parable was walking through the corridor when Anthiel appeared in front of him, running full speed ahead. Parable didn't react in time, and was knocked to the ground when Anthiel ran into him. Something snapped in his armor suit, though he didn't hear it. He got up, slightly wincing at some pain in his leg, and looked at Anthiel. He frowned.

"Directive unknown, answer required," he said, staring at Anthiel.

"Nice to see you too, Parable," Anthiel replied, slightly cheerfully.

"Heritage prevents conflict. Check systems before responding." With this, Parable turned back and continued to the bridge. Anthiel stared at him for a second before turning around and continuing his task.

Mark heard the thump of Parable falling over. He stuck his head out into the hallway.

"Parable. Damage sustained? D'you require medical attention?"

"Thanks Jake."
"No problem."

Jack hurried toward the Bridge putting the Bottle in his backpack. Seeing Parable and Markus he stopped.

"Hello guys."

Helion walked towards the bridge hoping to get orders for something to do. upon entering the bridge he gave a quick nod to everyone there.

Markus nodded to Jack.

"Mornin'. Hey, bossman, d'you know our next assignment?"

Anthiel; hurried on; embarrassed after knocking down Parable, and headed to the console. "Toran, where am I stationed?" He was experiencing amnesia again, the energy from the core was different to that of a Valyrian ship; less pure, and was beginning to addle his memory. It was most likely causing his erratic sleeping habits of late too.

"Security station two, Anthiel." replied Toran. "Your amnesia seems to be occurring more often recently than before. Do you know the cause?"

"The energy from the core appears to be effecting my mind, I cant be certain without a plasma sample from the core; but even then it is unavoidable. Perhaps I should record my assignments on a data pad?"

Parable watched the room fill up. He was monitoring the sensor reports and forwarding course corrections to the AI. Some sort of strange gravitational anomalies were around this planet, likely Dark Matter Objects. After the events at Helios, they wouldn't make a similar mistake. There wasn't many, but they seemed common. These objects had been detected around every world visited by Librarians, and yet, only they seemed able to find them.

He looked up at Anthiel. "Amnestic problems?" he asked as Anthiel walked by.

"Yes, and sorry about earlier, Parable," he replied.

"Identify cause, potential cure." Parable changed a few thruster settings- the ship was slightly listing. Not a problem.

"Likely the plasma core, but i'd need a sample."

"Unnecessary, monitoring active." Parable tapped a button on his armor's MOXUS interface and a data display slid out. He tapped a few more buttons and inserted a few lines of code. "Unsettling."

"What's unsettling?"

"Lack of problems."

"Why is a perfect core a problem?"

"Uncertain. Necessary data bad." Parable looked back at the sensors and slaved all the reports into his MOXUS. "Follow. Require help." He turned to Markus. "Potential core malfunction. Identify."

"I'll leave ya' to it." Markus forwarded the necessary data and Parable left the bridge for the fusion core, followed by Anthiel.

Strolling into the engineering bay, Markus went up to the plasma core and extracted a testing rod. emptying it into a sample container, he slotted the rod back in and handed the sample to Anthiel.

http://VO.AI."Toran"[to]"Parable">>
//>Error detected. Plasma instability. Power system internal sensors offline. Recommend disable all sublight drive functions. [Repeat]
//>All other systems report nominal.

"Inconceivable," Parable said, as he ran the simulation again. The plasma was indeed unstable, but it had no negative impact on any systems. In fact, analysis indicated that it should be boosting the system's efficiency and power. "Rerun."

"Resetting variables," Toran said. "Simulation re-running." The graphs reset and, from a slightly different starting position, began filling again. Parable tapped the display on his Moxus and overlaid the new data over the old data.

"Inconceivable." Parable dragged the data off his screen and pulled up a 3D overlay over his holo-table. He rotated it. "Variables exact one outcome."

"It seems the core is migrating towards a certain quantum state." Parable pulled up another graph.

"Unlikely. Chaos effect. Entropy."

"Self organizing energy is extremely unlikely, yes. But there's no other explanation." Parable overlaid the data again, looking for commonalities.

"Meta-stable, effect minimal." He closed the displays and turned the lights back on. "System nominal. Tweak for optimum."

"Be careful, Parable. The core is unstable- we don't know it's effects."



Back in the engine bay, on the seldom-seen panel, another L.E.D silently turned red and began blinking.

OOC: So, are we crashing soon? Cause I think this one has been sort of close to dying several times now..

Anthiel grasped his head as he approached the reactor, his head pounded from the core's energy. He leapt back as the pain got worse; and glared at the glowing object. Only then did he become aware of what was going on around him. He looked at the sample Markus had given him, it was the same. The sight of it filled his nervous system with agonizing pain, like a thousand needles biting into him.

He looked way and breathed for the first time,
"Take this" He said to parable, "Perhaps you may find it usefull" Handing him the sample

(OOC: Daynel's impatient.)

<<Toran>>
/Shipwide Intercom/
"This is a standby alert. Power surges detected in all systems. FTL drive is approaching critical state and will not respond to shut down commands. This is now an emergency alert."

<<Markus>>
Mark looked up at the announcement and slapped the alarm switch beside him. The synthesized alert echoed throughout the ship.

Jack looked up from his data-pad hearing the alert sound about.

"This is a standby alert. Power surges detected in all systems. FTL drive is approaching critical state and will not respond to shut down commands. This is now an emergency alert."

Jack stands up and dusts off his uniform then walks out onto the bridge. He tapped into Parable's Mic.

"Whats happening now?"

The alarm surprised Jake, who was sitting in the turret of an armored vehicle in the hangar deck. To make sure it was safe, of course.
It caused him to accidentally fire a shot at the wall, making another entrance from the crew mess.
"Okay that's not good at all."
"..drive is approaching critical state and will not respond to shut down commands. This is now an emergency alert."
"And that's even worse."

Helion hearing the alarm, then the shot fired by Jake, decided to walk down to the hangar bay to go see if everyone was alright, and why people were playing with armoured vehicles. After that he was going to check the armoury stores, as he had the strange feeling they would come in handy.

Helion walked down, past the recreational area, cargo hold, and down into the hangar bay.

"The bloody hell was that about?!"

The crew was knocked to the deck as the FTL drives, holding the massive power flow, finally gave up and blew apart. The blast shredded the aft end of the Engineering deck and tore a hold in the crew mess, and the resulting power backlash overloaded the ship's weapons, navigational systems, and temporarily shorted out the AI's core memory.

Jack hit the wall knocking the breath out of him opening a door he ran into his cabin quickly grabbing his armor and weapons. Running back out on to the bridge he pulled up a map of the ship. The aft end was gone of the Engineering deck and we had a hole in the crew mess, overloading the ship's weapons, navigational systems and the FTL drive is not responding. He turned on the ships intercom.

"All crew check in!"

Markus coughed, slapped the intercom panel, and linked to Jack.
"Medbay here. We're alright, just shaken up."

Parable watched, gloomily, as the ship floated away from him.

He had been attempting to manually override the FTL drive and disconnect the drive core before ejecting it. Of course, it didn't work, and the ship partially jumped. He was torn out of the ship by a massive decompression difference, and now he was here, watching the remains of the ship float away.

If it wasn't for the MOXUS system, and it's powered armor, he wouldn't even be here. Safety features, automatically activated a pressure suit. It would help, but it wouldn't last forever. He turned, and saw the massive ice planet glisten below.

He wondered if the suit could survive atmospheric re-entry, given that they were now on an intercept course. Not wanting to find out, he grabbed a few steel plates that were floating by him and began assembling a heat shield.

Toran, though half-offline, realized several crew were drifting in space. Selecting the ones with pressure suits, he launched a set of escape pods - each of which flew up to one of the crew and oriented fo ratmospheric entry.

The ship itself, now accelerating into the planet's gravity well, hit an atmosphere pocket and began to roll.