The optical bus feeds a compressed archive into the alcove terminal. Four quarantine drones continue their silent scan, red grids passing over the conduits without intervening.
Mara Venn
A sealed maintenance route is opening in the archive index. Dormant memory hardware is drawing power from somewhere beyond this wall.
Mara shifts the terminal display to a structural map. A narrow route branches behind the equipment alcove, descending toward an archive chamber isolated from the command spine.
Mara Venn
The drones will keep watching here. If we leave the liaison channel open, they should continue recording rather than escalate.
A first recovered index resolves across the screen: one day missing from the ship chronology, crew recollections altered, and a single authorization recorded under multiple crew approvals.
Mara Venn
Multiple approvals for one command could be consensus, coercion, or a fabricated record. The archive may distinguish them.
Behind the terminal, dormant hardware clicks awake in sequence. Dust trembles from the sealed route's frame as the archive chamber begins restoring its memory banks, while Mara waits beside the map.
✓ Quest Accepted
Reach the archive chamber
“I follow her using my spores to find anything along the way that might hold more answers”
SUCCESS (Superb Perception, rolled +1)
Mara follows the structural map as the sealed route retracts. Lokier extends spores ahead through the opening, threading them along conduits, wall seams, and the descending service passage.
The spores return a detailed path: dormant archive banks line the lower chamber, while a side cabinet contains isolated memory wafers untouched by the recent restoration.
Lokier
The isolated wafers preserve older information than the active archive.
Further ahead, the network finds a maintenance panel with its casing removed. Its internal traces retain repeated access signatures, all routed through the same authorization relay before the crash.
Mara Venn
That is useful. If those signatures survived, the archive may show whether the approvals came from separate people or one system copying their identities.
Lokier's spores map the chamber completely and identify the isolated wafers, the altered-recollection index, and the access-signature panel. Mara reaches the archive threshold with the route and its concealed evidence clear before her.
Mara Venn
You found more than a path. We have three ways to test the record now, and the wafers may preserve what the main archive was made to forget.
Behind them, the four quarantine drones remain at the alcove, their red scans continuing through the open liaison channel as Mara steps into the restored archive chamber.
Quest Complete
Reach the archive chamber