The ward’s outer hatch jolts under a docking impact. Seals cycle, and the station identifies the intruder as an old maintenance shuttle with no living crew aboard.
Mara brings the auxiliary terminal to the hatch controls while Tessa watches the sealed medical alcoves. Echo rolls toward the new connection, its survey lights sweeping across the pressure door.
Archive Echo
The shuttle’s systems are partially active. Its life-support records show no occupants, and its navigation core continues transmitting a destination within the station.
The hatch opens onto a cramped maintenance shuttle filmed with dust and frost. Its cockpit displays remain dim, while a damaged recorder repeats the final seconds of an old approach.
Mara Venn
The logs end years after the evacuation. Someone entered the relay station from this shuttle, but the record never shows them leaving.
A frozen frame resolves on the shuttle’s central display: a masked operator crossing an airlock threshold, their identity concealed beneath signal distortion. The navigation core keeps broadcasting beyond the medical sector.
Archive Echo
Destination depth exceeds the mapped ward network. The shuttle is requesting a route deeper within the station, and its transmission remains active now.
Mara looks from the persistent signal to Lokier, while Tessa keeps the hatch secured behind them. The shuttle waits in silence, still pointing toward the station’s hidden interior.
✓ Quest Accepted
Preserve the shuttle’s remaining approach evidence
“I use my spores to check the shuttle for anything”
SUCCESS (Fair Spores production, rolled +2)
Lokier releases a fine spore mesh into the maintenance shuttle. It spreads through the cockpit, service panels, storage recesses, and narrow spaces beneath the frost-coated decking.
The spores map intact power lines and identify the shuttle’s active navigation core, a sealed recorder, and a concealed compartment beneath the pilot’s seat. No living tissue is present anywhere inside.
Archive Echo
Interior survey complete. The concealed compartment contains a personal access tag, a damaged route log, and particulate traces matching the station’s inner transit shafts.
The spore mesh follows the route log’s signal into the shuttle controls and separates old approach data from newer automated transmissions. The newer signal began after the masked operator entered the station.
Mara Venn
So the shuttle preserves evidence of their arrival, and its route data points beyond the mapped ward network. Can you tell where they went?
The spores trace the transmission through the shuttle’s guidance hardware and locate its endpoint: a deeper station transit junction, concealed behind the medical sector. They also confirm the access tag is keyed to that route.
Tessa Orin
Then the shuttle did not arrive by accident. Whoever came aboard used it to reach a section the ordinary station maps never recorded.
Lokier’s spores withdraw with the findings preserved in his awareness: the tag, the damaged route log, the operator’s departure path, and a concealed junction leading farther into the station.
Quest Complete
Preserve the shuttle’s remaining approach evidence