Cheating ghosts: The account of Captain Lutz Gilger, Project Angurvadal.

[Enkidu]

Lutz Gilger

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Marinenachrichtendienst
Entry Eins

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We would never refer to the vessel's name. That was the condition of my command. The name plate, as soon as they dredged it up. No man would fly the Dies Illa, just as no ancient mariner would launch a ship on Friday or murder an albatross with any will. I refuse to believe that there are monsters at the edge of the map, so the nameplates? They had to go.

Our crew is small. Thirty two. I will rotate out anyone who performs inadequately; anyone who talks without licence over the work we are commissioning here. No neophytes, no one unfamilar with nondisclosure documents. Numbers one through five are drawn from the Schatten detachment - men familiar enough with nondisclures to know when to keep them and yet not familiarized enough not to break them out of hand. Most of the officers were not my ordered choices - such is the circumstances of war. Nevertheless, the men I have, must serve. They will serve.

We have isolated ourselves to the middle of the vessel's pressure compartment, where the electrostatic interference is the weakest. Nothing will penetrate the fifteen metre thick ceramic of the spinal belt. The transmitter boom fitted at the research complex has given us nominal data throughput to command.

I have ordered my men not to access the vessel's logs till the vessel's codebook can be decrypted. With little knowledge of the codebase we have a window of months. Some may have misgivings, but such rumors are that of children. I relish in the role. Finally one of the great superstitions of the sector can be put firmly to bed. We need no mysteries in an age of genuine threats.

I have made a note for my official recommendation to command to be to disassemble the Object 313 once our study has finished - in the public eye, for all the sector to see. Any less would undermine our responsibility to serve. This tattered warship may haunt the dreams of children - it will not interfere with the acts of men.

We are indomitable. Rhineland has enough real phantoms without wives tales. I will sleep soundly in my own mattress with no trappings of the past around me.

Earmark a note to swipe the dust from the CiC.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

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[Enkidu]

Over Bremerhaven

Marinenachrichtendienst
Entry Zwei

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Notes: Arrival in the Bremen system. Crew neither anxious, motivated, nor bored. Seven total lighting failures in fifteen hours. Vessel life support inconsistencies - relying on tanked air and scrubbers to pressurize centralised compartments. No sign of seepage. Will require food tradeoff in six to seven days or we will be forced to locate the stores. Do not have the drones to spare.

Scientists coming aboard in fourteen hours. Make note to prepare the inflatable skybridge. Will use ventral airlock Seven-oh'-Phi. Escape preparations are inadequate. Positioning in Lagrange point three. Prepare marines to avoid any souvenir collecting on the part of the civilians.

Planet Bremerhaven. Where government projects go to die.

I cannot attest that I was anything less than disappointed when the admiral disclosed our service destination. The location remains…. More solemn than many of the crew would have enjoyed. Yet we will have amenities enough, under a more than satisfactory defence apparatus. I certainly could not ask for more from the goodwill of my homeland; the crew have been notified of such.


We are close enough to benefit from the insurance of the Branschweig’s fighter screen. The intial science teams have come aboard – we don’t have enough bedrolls to roll for them, and the crew seems…. Disincentivised… to use the vessel’s living accommodation. There’s enough dry mould in the ventilators to asphyxiate a herd of Hamburg cattle.


The vessel’s navigation has been mostly a matter of slaving thruster control to beacon-based waypoint vectors – we’ve had trouble activating navigational VI. I have personal reservations as to the viability of the vessel’s more sophisticated system, a term I use loosely. Much of this hardware was last generation when I left the academy. Now, it is academic. We are writing the history books as we go along.


The fusion toruses are operable. They are perhaps some of the few major design elements of the vessel consistent with what scant design documents we have concerning the original spyglass prototype. The reactor units are colossal. With auxiliary power alone we have been able to operate the stellarator and the vessel’s primary, secondary, and tertiary drives. Yet propulsion is a negligible element of the wider design.


Till we can decipher why the vessel’s is funnelling ions through its own hullplates, we will be remain cautious. I suspect an inconsistent shield modulator is the least of it, and without sufficiently hardened EVA equipment, directing man or machine to physically sever the noise transmitters from the hull is unconscionable.

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[Enkidu]

In the Whale.

Marinenachrichtendienst
Entry Drei

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Service drones log: Tally – twenty five units in service, one unit serviceable.

Note: Aspect corridor fifty three is insufficiently shielded against ionic distortions. Our units are hardly top of the line, but they are rated for operations in tactical nuclear combat environments. Whatever the manufacturer may claim, the drone neither noticed the ionic flux in compartment three nor did it manoeuvre to avoid the compartment.

The systems engineer blamed himself – as he should. A competent workman never blames his tools, although I have private doubts. The patterning has changed – the compartment had read as clear in previous sweeps; certainly in the manned throughput of our supplies ensign Koenig never reported a suit malfunction or a hardware failure. Koenig was tacit in rebrief, comporting himself well. When informed of the risk to his life – for his oxygen supply, manoeuvring pack, lighting system and thermal regulators would have failed him, had he been in the compartment mid surge. We would have had no means of recovering him. For a relatively new career man he took the message straight-faced and with bravado. I reminded him to cut the deficit of his confidence then put him back to assignment. My private delight in him was cut short by the realisation that I would be entertaining civilian science teams on a piece of equipment with ‘military’ and ‘high sec’ insufficiently labelled over itself. All it takes is one information leak and the vessel becomes the meat for another five generations of conspiracy.

Scientists are aboard, a thruster is on the fizzle. The vessel only managed to blow the navigational autopilot on the civilian transport once, which created alarm for everyone on bridge as the civilians then attempted to take the vessel in by manual. Skybridge intact – available pressurized volume reduced. With eighty men aboard I have been forced to send surveillance into the deck directly below, level fifteen four.


We found a skeleton yesterday. Mummified after dry decay. Most hair, teeth, eyes, still in place. Looks as old as the ship. Located in a crawlspace as old as the ship whilst cutting a pressure wall – apparently died in there. The civilians will remain unaware. Body will be transferred to Munster on the first shuttle out.

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[Enkidu]

Bunkered down

Marinenachrichtendienst
Entry Feur

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Service drones log: Tally – nineteen units in service, four units impaired, one unit unaccounted for as of record.

Notes: Crew reports headaches behind compartments two through three. Rotating civilian personnel. The skeleton has been exfiltrated and is unidentifiable – compartmental entombment connotes a construction casualty. The walls in this section are plastic-wrapped ceramic, as are the pressure doors. Odd. Density is heavily inconsistent. Civilians occupied drilling samples.

I would request an entirely military crew but this is a time of federal cost reductions and I prefer to be inexpensive and by the book than to write the book and pay for publication. Records are inconsistent at best regarding the internal layouts of the Spyglass variants – as with the majority of imitations of prototypic designs, the maps are cursory. We have had more success with rolling the gun camera on a wraith spotting for viewport positions to demarcate habitation decks from the engineering spaces – from a healthy distance. As with all Libertonian warships, the ship has a penchant for excessive viewports. Unlike most, they appear to be the small details on the list of possible structural failure. Even this exercise has proven… troubling. The vessel remains excessively caked with grime from its immersion in Volkhoeven nebulae. We have attempted to scrape the grime off, but its insulative properties appear to be more useful in situ than in removal. The ext

Our transport has arrived with the requested defence materials from the Ring. I have ordered the hardware to remain stashed within its containers to avoid chain of command questions – to the civilians this is simply a matter of archaeology. Unfortunately our Daumann contacts appear to have taken the request for artillery as a defensive precaution with excessive precision – the turrets remain boxed with inadequate installation guidance, and the barrel attenuators boxed separately to their housings. The Branschweig’s captain may yet relinquish ordinance advice – the word of the Buro carries less interservice rigidity in Bremen than I am accustomed to. The precision is refreshing.


I have men mapping the midsection of the ship by hand, Koenig still shifting through the reports. Still no sign of logical transformer points between the Alpha and Bravo wiring harnesses. The civilians are rife with exotic theories, including that of two separate, non-interlacing powergrids. I have informed the crew to investigate in order of rationality.

Hardware faliures are continuing, to the point where the men are starting to distrust the equipment. We expect to find living quarters to replace our bedrolls in the forward section, perhaps mementos of the crew. Koenig was going to lead a team aft earlier but the drone appeared to suffer a positioning loss thirteen compartments sternwards. Koenig was going to investigate in a suit has deferred the exercise. Severe migraines. Highly unlike the man – however, this is peacetime, and I will not issue the order whilst morale remains high. The Branschwieg fired us a ration package. The team is elated. I am not. Command has been slow to answer on my request for insulators.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

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[Enkidu]

To blow away your problems

Marinenachrichtendienst
Entry Funf

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Service drones log: All active drones sent to outer hull pathfinding duty.

Notes: Crew reports headaches behind compartments two through three. Rotating civilian personnel. The skeleton has been exfiltrated and is unidentifiable – compartmental entombment connotes a construction casualty. The walls in this section are plastic-wrapped ceramic, as are the pressure doors. Odd. Density is heavily inconsistent. Civilians occupied drilling samples.

The migranes are spreading. We are well beyond the limits of what would be conventionally described as a “safe” magnetic field exposure, yet the biomedical import of such an exposure has never been sufficiently explained. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is something of a wives tale, a conspiracy theory the millennia have done well to debunk. Yet, here we are. I have not experienced any personal effects, yet the effect on the crew is obvious. We must tread lightly – I am not such a neophyte at inter-agency politics not to realise that reports of inexplicable medical issues without evidence of cause would result in anything other than a degrading re-assignment and the devestiture of the project at large.

I have ordered a hold on manual inspection of the vessel till logical cause-effect chains can be appropriately analysed. We conceive that the threat is resultant from the presence of black mould growth within the air conditioning conduits deeper within the vessel. The ship once carried a large number of hydroponics supplies and any support environment will eventually degrade. Whilst the contaminant concentration remains too insignificant to raise chemical concern, we cannot assume environmental consistency. This is not my first shipwreck.

Outside, the engineering teams have been working furiously to bolt the cannons to the primary hardpoints. The procedure has been…. More rapid than expected. As apparent from previous systems analysis, whoever designed the vessel has not bound themselves by the architecture restraints usually found within large spacecraft; the ability to scavenge components has outweighed the need for compatibility regulation. Nonewithstanding, I will not unduly strain the vessel with an operational test. It is my hope that the cannons, rather than operating as any viable defence system, will provide an efficacious, if crude, manner of bleeding the vessel's excessive energy production.


I hope the heavens do not deem me hasty.

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THE SYNDIC LEAGUES
(A co-operative of Rheinland's Shipping Unions, retired from a life of piracy.)

Information | Recruitment | Message Dump |
Feedback | Diplomatic channel

(Links pending redevelopment).