Starbase Nexus receives you beneath the control room’s shielded arches as a battered medical shuttle seals into an auxiliary berth. Its hull glows with cooling warp scars.
A young adult woman with brown skin and tightly braided hair steps from the airlock in a white-and-teal medic’s suit. One sleeve is scorched, and her scanner trembles in her hand.
Mara Venn
I’m Mara Venn, colony medical officer. That shuttle escaped the same warp corridor where a starship vanished.
Mara Venn
The instruments caught a brief impact, or an emergence, at an impossible angle. I was preparing to transfer the coordinates when your station sealed my berth.
Amber bands ignite across the berth. The shuttle’s medical displays freeze, then flood with unreadable residue patterns as Nexus isolates the compartment.
Jack O.S.
Auxiliary berth contamination confirmed. Unknown transit residue detected on shuttle systems and personnel surfaces. Coordinate transfer suspended.
Mara Venn
Suspended? If that corridor is still open, whatever took that ship may have found another way through.
✓ Quest Accepted
Verify Mara Venn's account
✓ Quest Accepted
Learn what happened to the vanished starship
“I ask Mara to reconstruct the vanished starship’s last known trajectory.”
SUCCESS (Good Diplomacy, rolled +3)
Dj Afton
Mara, reconstruct the vanished starship’s last known trajectory.
Mara Venn
Understood. Give me the shuttle’s residue map and Nexus’s sensor archive.
Mara places the trembling scanner against the berth console. Jack O.S. unlocks the archived telemetry, and the residue patterns resolve into layered vectors across the display.
Jack O.S.
Archive access granted. I have isolated the starship’s final twelve seconds of telemetry.
Mara Venn
There. Its trajectory bends forty-three degrees without corresponding thrust. The ship entered a transient aperture at these coordinates.
A clean three-dimensional path appears above the console, ending in a narrow corridor beyond the mapped transit lanes. A faint transponder echo continues from the far side.
Mara Venn
The trajectory is reconstructed. That echo is the starship’s identifier, repeating every nine seconds. It may still be transmitting.
Quest Complete
Verify Mara Venn's account