Dark Horse Crew Bunks
This room is basically an elongated cabin with several deep bunks, lockers instead of closets and a separate toilet and shower facility. It lacks desks, but each bunk has a multi-function terminal in the wall that wraps over to operate above a reclining person's head. Each bunk also comes with a soundproofed privacy curtain.

The Dark Horse has already left the Caltrop system and is underway at not-quite-top-speed towards the Acheron Ash Zone. Unlike the First and Second Quantum Hyperdrives, the rate of travel is not fixed for ships in the Maelstrom transition space, which allows the unique, ancient vessel the ability to loiter and even expose select parts of the ship to normal space as needed.

Lacci doesn't know any of this yet, since she's been asleep and it wasn't part of her somewhat truncated orientation. Dr. Knight provided an additional sedative once the Vartan girl had been brought to her bunk after fainting at just a small subset of revelations about what she'd signed onto. But now she's beginning to stir and wake.

And so Tasha had come to make sure Lacci didn't wake up alone. It hasn't been entirely boring of a wait; she brought Blaze, for one, who is currently fast asleep in her lap next to her datapad which she's been reading. She sits crosslegged on the floor beside the bunk, back against it and head lowered with the near-universal expression of mild focus. When the bunk begins to move, she looks up.

When Lacci opens her eyes a tiny kitten paw waves back at her. "Good morning Lacci!" A tiny kitten head then seems to say, an action that seems dubious both in how the kitten's mouth never opens and in how familiar the voice sounds. The paw waves a few more times, the kitten merely purrs and looks unconcerned.

"Whaa!" Lacci squawks. "Not the eyes!" She tries to rise up too quickly and bonks her head on the terminal above. "Ouch.."

The kitten quickly retreats, while Tasha's head pops in to view. "Wow, you're kind of a disaster," she notes, tongue clucking. "What happened to being a warrior?"

"I'm not allowed to fight," Lacci replies, and rubs her forehead. "That's a Terran cat, isn't it? Not another secret alien?"

"Uhm." Tasha looks at the kitten, the kitten ignores Tasha in order to chew on the hand that had been holding it up, then Tasha shrugs. "It could be a secret alien. They're everywhere, you know? And secret. Until they're not." And so the hybrid turns to peer at Lacci. "I guess your next question is, 'If you're not what you say then have you kidnapped me,' or 'what do you want with me' or ... " Here her voice lowers to what might be a bad Terran vid novel detective, "What's your game, Tasha?"

"I'm not sure I want to know all of that yet," Lacci says, lying back and staring at the blank terminal a moment. She then turns her head to face Tasha and says, "I need a baseline first. What are you? And the rabbits? I don't want to accuse anyone of being an illegal uplift.."

"I'm excatly what I appear to be, if you don't assume that's a mezzode," Tasha answers, sitting up sraight and scootching over to where she can be better seen. "I am a Vartan-Karnor hybrid, thanks to the bizarre and mysterious wonders of old and beat up Sifran technology run amok! The rabbits are uplifts, created by the Ark acientists when withdrawl from the Primus System became impossible." She the thumbs at herself. "I am the owner of this ship, however. That's not a lie."

"Oh, we call the rabbits 'Lapi'. Don't ask me why," Tasha adds a second later, feeling it might be important.

It takes Lacci a moment to process this. "The Ark? That's from.. uh.. fill me in some more please?"

"The Expedition. Flagship of The Expedition. The great mult-galactic effort to explore the Primus System within the window, while it still could be explored. The Sifra can control how flat space is around Primus. The Ark landed on a sky island on Sinai, the planet where I was born, six-thousand years ago. I'm descended from both Clan Harbinger and the original Karnors." Tasha looks down a moment to pull her finger out of Blaze's mouth, which results in another one being chewed on immediately. Her head shakes. "We have people like Blaze here, too. Just, well, 'bipedal'. And less chewy."

"You were created by the Ark too then?" Lacci asks, sounding a bit dazed. "Lapi. More felines. How many uplifts did they make? The Vartans are allied with the Terrans there? Sky island? This ship doesn't look that old. I mean.. well, the aesthetics are a bit dated.."

"I was created by what we call 'magic', the Ark people probably called Sifran probablity-matrix-reality-warping-we-kind-of-know-how-it-works-whats-its, and I call Old Ones technology. Basically, it's what's left of the Sifran -- or Xilfrim if you wnat to be historical about it -- advanced technology. The reason I was made is kind of complicated, but I was made by an um ... An old AI system on the statistically probability I would complete a task it couldn't. And I did, so, uh, 'kudos' to me?" The hybrid looks down to Blaze. "Right?" The kitten merely flops over and paws Tasha's hand, which she takes as approval before looking up and over again. "So I'm a one-off. Unique, at least as far as we know."

"And.. how are you here?" Lacci asks. "Is the window open again? Did you fly this ship from Primus? I really don't want to deal with 'magic' just yet."

"Just think of it as really old and powerful technology, the kind that makes modern technology look a bit, um, daft." Tasha has never used the word 'daft' before, and so tilts her head to feel it out. Ambivalence. "Oh and how I got here's a secret, the kind where I tell people and people scarier than me consider killing me in return. You understand my reluctance. But! Here we are! This ship was a gift for completing a mission for them, even if they didn't expect me to use it."

"You're saying this isn't a Khattan ship?" Lacci asks. "Are.. we already in hyperspace?"

"Well it sure seems like one doesn't it?" Tasha spreads her hands as if Lacci could take in all the Khattaness, until the kitten Blaze tries to escape her lap and her hans come back down again. "But we are underway. Next stop ... " Here the hybrid leans in, voice lowering, ears perking and eyes widening. "The Acheron Ash Zone."

"But that's unreachable!" Lacci claims, sounding more confident now that the subject is back in what she considers the real world. "Hyperdrive, overspace and even Aldersen drive are blocked. Even the Confederate's deep-hyperspace conduits.. Err, supposedly. No ship that tried to penetrate ever came back."

"Well, I guess we're doomed then!" Tasha's grins is to wide to be mistaken for any form of nervousness. She flops back on the floor and moves Blaze to her chest. "Should I say you died in battle? Ohh, or maybe got taken by an alien virus. Or Berserkers! I hate those. But wait, I guess I'll be dead, too. I bet my sister will take all my stuff!"

"How can you have a sister if you're one of a kind?" Lacci asks, sounding suspicious. "You're telling me the truth about all of this, right? Those aliens weren't robots or something just to rattle me?"

"That's so un-Vartanly of you. 'How can you have family if they're not blood relations, Tasha?' So. Un-Vartanly." The hybrid's head shake is despairing. She looks to Blaze instead. "Do you think she ever considered maybe I adopt family a lot? Or that as an artificial being I might have conceptual or historic connections to my creators? Feelings? Or that I was born from an actual Vartan and have a mother and father? Ohh, I bet she didn't even think I could have a dead woman's memories crammed in my head and feel sentimental about her. My feelings are hurt, Blaze."

"None of that makes.. you can't just claim people into a family.." Lacci says. "These things are arranged. It's all carefully worked out! Orphans go to the next of kin.."

Tasha's head shakes all over again. She sits up. "That's what you do, but there's always another culture that does things differently, and then you can always go tell culture to go pluck itself and do things however you want. Clan Habringer is gone, all that's left are a thousand scattered settlements and a bunch of wandering Vartans who don't fit anywhere else." She shifts Blaze to her left arm, then leans in. "Even the current Galactics are just a new thing on some older civilization."

"You mean the Vartans where you come from.. are all rogues and exiles?" Lacci asks with an expression of horror.

"Ehh, I mean there are clans on the surface but I've only met a few of those. They seem kind of insular and backward," Tasha admits, head cocking to the side. "The Vartans I grew up around were 'rogues and exiles', but we worked with all the other species, so it's not like we were alone. I mean my family was just mom and me, and maybe the crew of the ship I was born on." She then grins a little, expecting her next admittance to blow some part of Lacci's mind. "It was made out of wood."

"No, you goofball! The whole planet is water and wood and forests and dying of diseases I hadn't heard of and probably would have died of until spacemen came down in to my life and told me I was from a backwards dark world paradise and taught me the real history of the Expedition. It didn't feel like a paradise, though." And then Tasha sits up, placing Blaze right down in Lacci's tummy. She sits back and stretches. "That blew my mind. You know what I used to do? Drove animals. With a whip. On a ship made of wood attached to balloons. Through the sky."

"Wood can't fly," Lacci claims. "What's a 'balloon' though? Is that the animal?"

"It's a lighter-than-air, umm, hydrostat? No, that's water ... Aerostat. It ... " It's at this point Tasha realizes show is better than tell, and so picks up her datapad and flips through menus until she has a painting of Rephidim with The Rake in the foreground. She knows the details aren't perfect since it's all from memory, but it's mostly accurate. She's seen both far too long to forget them easily.

After looking at the images with a surprising amount of nostalgia blooming, Tasha holds it up for Lacci to see.

"Why is it.. smeary?" Lacci asks. She may never have seen a painting. "That.. that is an island in the sky. How can.. why is that.. what are those.. uh.." She gives up and looks from the photo of the painting to Tasha. "I think one of us is crazy."

"All Vartans are crazy," a lapine voice claims from beyond the bunkroom door. "Don't mind me, I'm just here to tackle anyone that runs out of there screaming," Aaron adds. "Because I have nothing else to do around here."

"It's a painting. You can't take pictures on Sinai, the Sifran system disturbs reality at a fundamental level and advanced technology advances right in to not working." Tasha heaves a sigh, dropping back down again and folding her arms behind her head. "Lacci thinks I'm crazy," she whines up at Aaron. "And welcome to how I feel Aaron! Leader of the Mission, qualifications: Zippo."

"I have lots of qualifications," Aaron claims. "I keep Hakeber in check. And brew magic potions. And you're only half-crazy, Tasha, so that makes you better equipped than other Vartans. But I do outrank you when it comes to operating the coffee machine. But it sounds like nobody is about to panic in there, so I'm going to go watch the flirty fish pilot this impossible magic boat through the space-water that isn't the same space-water we came through before, but still looks like space-water. I'll let Gabriel know you didn't have to kill Lacci or anything."

Tasha makes a iffy hand wobble at Lacci, then grins at Aaron. "Alright. Well, lets all go. Seeing the space water should help Lacci understand things are different." And then Tasha sits up with surprising energy for someone who had been doing as much lounging as the kitten she'd been holding. She scoops that kitten right off Lacci, tucks it in to her jacket, the offers Lacci a hand, "Up we go! I can't order you, but I can request it of the Captain! And I can also have you spaced -- I have many fun powers."

"I'm feeling a bit spaced already," Lacci says, taking the hand and getting up out of the bunk. "Am I taking this well? How did the others fare? Or.. are you all aliens from a world of magic flying landmasses?"

"Naw, Kaa and Moka are standard Terran space fish. Doctor Knight is a Belter Human, Yue is some sort of mutant TerraGens Chinese Breed Human, Gabriel is a original-type Karnor Elite while Katie and Hake-bear are descendants of the same style that grew up on a different world than I did. Oh, and the Jotoki are from way out elsewhere in the Galactic -- they're kind of a conspiracy secret we're working on." As Tasha talks Aaron and Lacci get lead out of the bunk room and down the corridor, heading fore towards the bridge. "As for taking it, well, you're kind of our test subject. The Galactic-types don't know the full score yet. Well, at least as much 'score' as I told you just now. They think I'm either a TerraGens project or else a Khattan."

"Just so I don't cause trouble, who here doesn't know all of this?" Lacci asks as she follows along.

"Oh just don't talk about it. If you let on, well, I'll handle it. I planned to tell them all soon anyway," Tasha admits. She steps infront of the door, which gamely slides open, and spreads her hands. "Owner on deck, you don't have to stand or salite or anything," she insists to those present. "I brought Lacci for a tour!"

"Oh, welcome back to consciousness, for better or worse," Gabriel says from his seat. The 'sunroof' above the bridge is showing the odd water-like distortion of the Maelstrom, while the mass detector and navigation sphere float in the open space ahead.

"Consciousness is better with coffee," Katie notes from one of the side stations. Yue is at an opposite station, but not really doing anything.

Tasha walks over to the railing, laying her hands on it and leaning forward. "How are we looking? I really need some sort of chair or something to sit in back here, when I'm not navigating."

"Kaa hasn't hit anything yet," Moka reports from the tank below. Kaa is under an air-dome with a lead connected to his motor-plug. "No signs of space krakens or anything else yet that could be eating spaceships, but that could change at the borders of Acheron."

"Good, good," murmurs Tasha, who pushes off again, smiles with exagerated coyness at Katie, then turns to Lacci. "As you can see, we don't use a standard FTL drive system."

"What.." Lacci starts to ask, then pauses and looks around some more. "Mass detector. So not overspace. But that's a window and my eyes aren't turning inside out so not hyperspace.."

"It's some kind of other space alright," Tasha agrees, leaning back against the rail, hands behind her. "We call it the Maelstrom, it's ... It's better explained by someone who isn't me."

"It's a non-quantum substrate between normal space and hyperspace, with one-to-one geometry but a different Higgs field metric and gravitational constant. We.. uh.. still don't know much about it, but it can have currents apparently and a different Schwarzchild radius for real masses than hyperspace does," Gabriel explains.

"I thought Galactics knew more about this stuff," Tasha remarks with disappointment, turning to look at Yue questioningly.

"Space-ocean underneath surface-space," Aaron offers. "That's how I understand it."

"I'm a historian," Lacci reminds Tasha. "I deal with socia-political context and combat tactics and a little bit of economics. That's all complicated enough without me trying to understand hyperspace field theory."

Tasha nods towards Aaron now. "Another transitional space. I'm still not sure if it's dimensional or universal, though. Hyperspace makes me think dimensional, but it's all kind of blurry anyway." She then looks back to Lacci. "I understand! I'm a pan-universal explorer, time-traveler, dimension-hopping adventurer-agent who works for and with a slew od vastly different peoples and entities. I get the 'isn't this enough?' and 'I don't know anything about this,' feeling all the time."

"Kaa and Moka came up with the ocean metaphor, but it does fit with the Dark Horse's actual operational parameters," Yue claims.

"Apparently we're like a submarine, which apparently is like a boat, except it goes under the water." Tasha shrugs a little; the world is full of all kinds. Then she glances at Katie and raises her brows. "Oh right, the old crew mysteriously vanished! And we're probably spooking spacemen a lot ourselves."

"I thought it was powered by demons," Aaron says. "Not that there's anything wrong with that. Remember the Wandering Silph, Tasha, with the elemental-whatsit engines that Springer was so proud of?"

"Oh sure, but calling them demons seems narrow minded," the hybrid notes, turning to Aaron now. "They don't deserve to be lumped in with all our nightmares just because they look like and occassionally act like all our nightmares. It's just how they are." She glances at Lacci and shakes her head. "When you deal ancient entities, D-Space life, Old Ones, First Ones, and everyone else -- the farther you get from, uh, us basically -- the more you have to just be willing to go with things. Some of those things will break your mind in to little-bitty-bits if you can't just go with it."

"Some of them barge into your shop and start making a mess, and do the mages offer to clean up after them? No," Aaron complains. "I have to keep a box of thistlebark under the counter all the time. But the demons aren't as messy as the Dagh-blasted assassins and.. uh.. I ramble sometimes, ignore me."

"Are.. all of you crazy? Or are you just trying to make me crazy?" Lacci asks. Then she grabs Tasha's sleeve and asks, "Do I have to be crazy to work here, or does it just help to be crazy?"

"Ugh, assassins." Tasha gives Aaron a sympathetic look. "Did I tell you I cut an assassin's head off with an axe? I mean, I had help, he was a House Khomen super-agent and he was fighting me off like I was nothing but I chopped his head off so who's laughing now, right?"

And then Tasha blinks at Lacci, looking down at the hand grabbing her, right next to her thumbing hand. "See, Lacci ... " Here Tasha reaches out, hands on Lacci's shoulders, " ... there's a whole world of everything past what we think is the whole world. Your Clan, what your Clan does, how far it understands and what it thinks normal is -- it's just a little bubble. Or, like, uh, a sphere with the inside all black. You can't see out and think that's all there is, and there can't be more, but there is. There's a whole infinity of more outside your little world. Just like there was for mine, and ... " She gestures to the crew in general, removing a hand. "And theirs."

"Bubbles? Assassins? I can't fight assassins. Or blow bubbles. Regular Vartans cannot blow bubbles!" Lacci says, with a little bit of panic.

"I'm pretty sure the pretty one and the short are assassins," Aaron says as if trying to be comforting. "So just hide behind one of them and you should be fine."

"And Vartans can blow bubbles," Katie claims. "You probably just haven't used a bathtub yet."

"So, uh, ... " Tasha keeps her taloned hand on Lacci's shoulder, waggling her other one at Lacci herself in an indicating sort of way. She hears peoples' responses, and nods approvingly. "Well, Lacci, if you don't break down -- and even if you do, but after -- you'll be like us. Crazy, but resilient. Walking where others won't, seeing what they can't."

Some time in the lounge helps to calm Lacci down, along with Hakeber joining them and Liza getting them some mixed drinks (which she warns need to be sipped, although this seems aimed mostly at Hakeber). Everything seems to be going well until the world appears to turn upside down for a moment and an alarm sounds.

Tasha braces herself automatically, a reflex from a life spent aboard ships. Despite the reflex the sudden shift of a ship's disposition, and far worse, the calling of alarm has never failed to make her hackles raise, most likely because she knows all to well what it can mean firsthand. She immediately stands up, wishing they'd drilled more and had better emergency procedures in place. She makes a mental note to have them when the next time hits -- if there is a next time. "Alright, crew to the bridge, everyone else bunker down. Lacci, your choice where to go." And then she's off, heading bridgeward. "Bridge, what's going on!"

"We hit a reef!" Gabriel replies over the intercom. Of course, everyone is in the Bridge when Tasha and the rest get there, even Jonas.

The window is showing the blackness of normal space. Moka and Kaa are exchanging a rapid series of clicks and whistles as well.

definitely needs emergency plans. While Tasha runs her ship like a family, it irks her as a sailor to see things like safety and emergency planning made so haphazard. It's not helped at all by how she and the crew including the Niss don't entirely understand how the ship works, and thus all that can go wrong. "Some sort of gravitational eddy? Maybe the tip of a hyperspace interdiction system?" She asks.

And then Tasha stares at normal space and frowns deeply. "Enough to pop us right out of the Maelstrom, too."

"If Titanians get the drop on us, turn over communications to me," Tasha turns to tell Katie.

"G-got it!" Kaa reports, and then the scanning data is displayed in the open space. At first it doesn't look like anything, until some very small dots are highlighted."

Tasha turns back and peers for a long moment, her frown deepening. "Some sort of mine?" She hazards.

"Yes," Yue reports from her station. "Less than a meter across, so practically invisible. Perfect reflection too, so.. only a stasis field can do that."

"They haven't been," Yue claims. "From the lensing around them.. I think they're blobs of neutronium kept stable in perfect stasis fields."

"They could be old tech. Leftovers from First or Old Ones. They could be Titanian, or maybe Khattan or Imperial pulled from secret Library branches," Tasha muses, heading back to the ledge overlooking the rest of the bridhe and leaning on it. She listens to Yue and nods. "Probably old tech or Titanians, then. But the amount of them needed to block an entire region would make me think old civilization tech."

"If they're above the ecliptic there'd be billions of them," Moka claims. "Most hyperspace and overspace vectors use the ecliptic plane for local entry into a system. This shouldn't affect stellar tramlines but.. it's pretty unprecedented."

"Can we get around them?" Is Tasha's next thought. If they can't, well, on to plan B.

"Any hypership hitting this would pop out and be stranded at the least, their engine vanishing," Yue says. "A warp bubble would pop too, which would be.. very messy."

"Hah, I know where they are now," Kaa claims. "I can get past them. Just spots of extreme t-turbulence in the Maelstrom, I surfaced when the first one jumped at me in the detector," he claims.

Being stranded without engines is definitely not a fate Tasha would wish on anyone, enemy or no. She grimaces. "There may be salvageable wreckage in good condition along the entry ways. Keep an eye out for it while we figure this out."

Kaa then does the impossible, from Lacci's perspective. Dark Horse dives and weaves slowly through the gravitic reef, something no hypership could do.

"Sailing between whirlpools, could be awhile," Moka warns. "No telling how many layers of mines there are."

Tasha, meanwhile, frowns in thought over who left the mines and what it could mean, both for profit as well as loss. "If there's money, someone always comes along to claim it. Crazier people than us. There's a good chance there are salvageable ships out here that nobody has been able to reach, or if there isn't that makes me think someone comes to clean up -- which is interesting, too."

"Celestial ships would be reduced to a spray of cosmic rays if they hit this," Yue notes. "Hyperships should survive to get off a.. oh," she starts to say, after running a simulation.

"I guess an 'oh' is bad?" The ship owner asks, feeling in her gut she already knows the answer.

"Gravity wells become singularities in hyperspace," Yue notes, "but a solar system is so big and fuzzy that it would only affect the engine. But these mines.. they're so dense and small that the ship would be pulled in. So when the engine goes and the ship pops out into normal space, it'll be too close to a mine. Some of these perfectly reflective surfaces may have a very thin layer of dirt that is all that remains of a ship. If we'd hit one, we'd be a layer of very expensive atoms on the surface now."

Tasha lays her ears back, pushing off to stand and fold her arms. "No salvage then, I guess. I think the right thing to say now is, 'May they rest in peace,' and get out of this, uh, proactive graveyard." 'Rest in peace' is definitively a Terran saying, one she's heard Gabriel and others of the Elite use when referencing their lost crew and others besides. She wonders if it's still in use, trying not to think about the countless crews who died before they even knew to be concerned.

Everyone else is silent after that, with most eyes watching the mass detector for as long as possible before getting headaches. It's possible that Kaa is navigating via some other sense translated through the hull though, given his ability to read the flow of the Maelstrom.

Unlike most of the others, Tasha doesn't watch the mass detector. It's not that the situation doesn't worry her, but she has no illusions that focusing on the detector will make things any better. She's been close to destruction many times before this, and hyper-focus never helped. Instead she has a seat at one of the unoccupied consoles and brings up the previous survey data, or what little there is of it, and skims for understanding.

There are a few shaky points, but Moka assures them that the influence of the mines is very reduced in the Maelstrom versus hyperspace, and that they are still millions of miles separating them. "Armored systems have been speculated before," she claims. The previous Galactic survey data shows a red dwarf star with six close in planets. A later Terran telescopic survey shows seven planets. There are no official mentions of attempts to penetrate the system however, which is only noted as Acheron-A, one of several stars that make up the Ash Zone.

The Galactic survey notes the absence of a cometary halo, which either means the system is very old or else lost it.

Tasha wonders if they'll be allowed to name the worlds, if they even manage to get solid data on them. With a red dwarf at the core and close in planets, she isn't sure that she should expect any standard organic life or similiar civilixations; it seems unlikely but she's only beginning to learn about planets and habital zones. The star would be cool, but the planets may be close in enough to matter. Still, it is an Ash Zones so whatever civilization may have been here is probably long destroyed, she reasons.

The lack of a cometary halo is interesting, especially the suggestion of age which conributes to the though of older civilizations. She does a quick check and finds habitables may indeed be found around red dwarfs, and makes a mental note of it. She then runs a quick check to see if any planets would fall in the appropriate zone, though given how broad life can be -- then become -- she knows it's only a rough starting point.

Another possibility occurs regarding the absence of a halo: all of that neutronium had to have been compressed from something.

"We're inside the safe zone now," Moka announces. "Any mines this far in would have been perturbed by the outer planet."

"Alright, survey pattern beta," Gabriel says. "Let's get a full look around the system before moving inward." The 'periscope' tone sounds, followed almost immediately by a full dive and motion through the Maelstrom again.

Tasha reads a cross-ference about that, and while not understanding most of it gets the gist: Neutronium can be made from space rocks. Another link explains how, but she avoids it like a mine in space with her brain being the ship. Maybe later. Ultimately it all suggests a lot of industry may have taken place in this system over a very long period, by an old civilization, which fits with the general consensus that this Ash Zone star system was the victim, or at least co-combatant, in a interstellar war or conflict. "Alright. Well, rwading the notes, I think we may come across the possibility of old macro-engineering, war wreckage, and there may be ruins across the habitable zone -- or everywhere considering how old this system is. They might have mined the cometary halo to make the mines, which unless it was done after a victory by someone else makes me think it was a defensive line. If it succeeded, there may be a lot more functional inside."

"The system could be a fortress," Yue suggests to Tasha. "Maybe not a civilization's original system, but one small enough to make that minefield possible, and extremely stable long term. That primary will burn cool for far longer than Sol or other yellow dwarfs."

"That's about what I was thinking, too, minus the part about being set up later as a fortress. If it's a live fortress, or even if the automation is still working, we could be seeing a lot more defenses. Uhm." Tasha leans back, arms folding, tapping her chin with a hand. "I guess if it were me, I'd want something past the mines like ... Could a sun-mirror laser still work with a red dwarf? Any physical missile would be useless at these ranges, so something fast-intercept, or else the next line of defense would be around the bodies themselves, wouldn't it?"

"Hopefully the neutrino scan will give us a better layout," Gabriel says. "I especially want to see the mass distribution of the star itself."

"To see if anything is distorting it? We should check for obstruction too, if we can, to see if anything is built around it. Star based defenses seem like one of the biggest threats, and I don't know how close mirrors would need to be to a dimmer star. They may also be using it for long-term power, and if they planned to stay a while they'd probably want as much as they could get -- and if they can mine a whole star system builing a sphere seems like something they could do. Uhm, though maybe they'd need to import materials?" Tasha shakes her head, it still amazes her to be talking about structures the size of the world she lived on, all hammered out by someone's will.

"The minefield suggests a Type II civilization, certainly," Yue agrees. "You want to check for a Dyson swarm around the star, don't you Gabriel?"

"What's a ... Oh, is that a bunch of movable mirrors or power stations?" Tasha asks, turning ehr chair with a kick of her hoof to focus on Yue. "Like a sphere, but modular I guess?"

"Like a net," Yue suggests. "They'd have to be in close orbit for a star that dim, but could probably be managed with sails."

Tasha then has an idea, which seems obvious in hindsight but none-the-less came when it did. She drops her voice to the inaudible and leans closer to her terminal, whispering, "Niss, do you recognize this place or the technology involved?" She then awaits the reply, thinking that, like always, it will just materialize in her brain in a manner she's still not certain of. "That's clever. I'm always impressed by seeing what civilizations can do. Uhm, are there any other defenses we should concern ourselves with? Can the mine field be defeated and removed in any way?"

"It could probably be destabilized, but that would just make it more dangerous," Gabriel suggests.

"This system is unfamiliar to us," the Niss reply. "We left before Galactic Civilization became viable."

"I'm just wondering if it could be beaten, because that would probably shape how this civilization would form its next line of defense. Wall impenetrable? Well, you don't need guards! Wall easily broken? Better have a lot of guards. Guards defeatable? Better ahve something else!" Tasha tells her mate, hands out to show an ever-gowing worl of possible defenses based on failure possibilities.

And then Tasha leans back, a little too subtly. She isn't sure if she manages to hide the movement of her lips, but at least tries to appear to be murmuring to herself, perhaps in thought. "Alright, thank you Niss. I guess we'll see who lives here, soon. Or lived here."

"Making that much neutronium from regular mass would require antimatter implosion," Yue notes. "Which requires antimatter. It has a specific quantum resonance that can be checked for."

"That'd definitely suggest an industrial complex, probably an isolated one because who wants an antimatter factory next to their dorm room?" The hybrid remarks, sitting back up again. "Any luck on the scans?"

The periscope chime sounds at regular intervals, as the Dark Horse stops, surfaces the sensor fins, and then dives and moves on to the next spyhop point.

"I feel like we should have a decoy system to drop whenever we surface in places like that. Maybe something inflatable? Then we can see if our dummy ship is still in one piece at the next hop, see if they're shooting," the hybrid suggests, looking across the others and wondering if her idea has any merit.

"It'll take a while," Gabriel says. "This is the broadcast pass. Then we'll do the pickup pass after a bit of inertial dilation so the neutrinos have time to traverse the system. We can time it so it's all virtually instantaneous from the system's perspective. No way for anything to pinpoint a source."

"We're pretty much invisible," Yue notes. "So a decoy would be needed. But we should pick up any scans on the second or third pass."

"It's nice to be everywhere at once," Tasha agrees. She pushes herself up and stretches, then walks over to Lacci and promptly punches her in the shoulder, though not too hard. "How are you holding up? I bet you want a souvineer mine." She pauses to nod at Yue. "Well, glad my idea is good. I guess I'm getting better at this! We'll see about it next time we've got acess to the materials. I bet we could even make ourself look like a small fleet of ships jumping in from every direction."

"That would appear to be a ghost fleet," Yue notes. "But it's not a tactic anyone's tried before, since it really isn't possibly with the known methods of FTL travel."

"I'll be happy if it's named after me or something. The Argentine Ghost Fleet Manuver. Nora would be thrilled." Tasha decides a little levity couldn't hurt, with everyone so tense. The system may still be an unknown, a knife in the dark just waiting to pounce, but that's true if the crew is nervous or not. "We'll keep it in our pocket in case we need to be an army."

After a dozen more spy-hop maneuvers, Moka announces an inertial shift - internal stasis is going to be engaged to allow time for the particle bursts to traverse the system.

"I like that I can live and not age. It's way better than where I get older," Tasha asides to Katie, having walked over to join her for the stasis trip. "You can wow people by looking young forever!"

During the second orbit of the system, each spy-hop builds up a better picture. Both the Galactic and Terran surveys were inaccurate. There aren't six planets, or seven planets. There are actually fourteen! But six of them are grouped to look like a single large one. "You don't see that every day. What are we seeing? Moka? Yue?"

A diagram of the six-planet cluster is displayed, showing three large bodies and three small bodies, with the smaller ones between the larger ones in a hexagon patterns. "They're orbiting their common barycenter.. uh.. in each other's L4 and L5 libration points. The three big ones are equal mass.. the little ones equal each others masses too. That's.. engineered," Moka reports.

Even Tasha knows the grouping to be unusual. The interplanetary orbit mechanics, tidal forces, and just general habit of the universe all play havoc with that kind of planetary arrangement. It speaks of meddling of the macro kind, and a great deal of it. The hybrid explains to Katie. "See, that just doesn't happen. I mean, maybe it could, but it's very unusual. I think they usually slam in to each other, becoming a larger mass, or the orbital mechanics knock one or more out. I think larger worlds annnd--" The young woman breaks off at Moka's report, eyes wide. "Someone not only moved planets, but balanced their mechanics and probably shaved the worlds to be exactly right for their masses to balance out. It's very impressive within this civilization's developement range. They really liked this place, or else they are or were a big, big galactic operation."

Information keeps coming in, showing mass and density anomalies around the star and inside the planets. "PTUs confirmed. A fortune's worth," Yue reports. "Antimatter resonances. Those three smaller bodies in the Klemperer rosette are antimatter. Gigatons of it."

"Oh, wow," breathes Tasha. Gigatons of antimatter, like one big fuel depot except having the depot ram in to any other part would reduce the ... She doesn't even know how much destruction three small worlds of antimatter would produce. Quickly she turns to the console and tries punching in the numbers while asking distractedly, "What's a PTU?"

"Post Trans-Uranic," Yue explains. "Ultradense elements that don't occur naturally. Great for making starship hulls from, but nobody can actually synthesize them in the current era. Some Celestial dreadnoughts use them, but those are Artifact hulls." The numbers that Tasha gets back have to use exponents to fit, but it's certainly enough potential energy to vaporize a planet with.

"Can I get a time-lapse of the deep-radar on the outer planet?" Gabriel requests. A hazy sphere appears, with several 'belts' of PTU materials moving at different speeds around the planet's axis, but beneath the surface. They seem to alternate between clockwise and counterclockwise direction. "Okay, that's scarier than the antimatter. That planet is clearly artificial."

Titanains would wag their tail at this level of an explosion, Tasha decides. The Titanian part of her kind of wants to see it; every other part does not. "So, well, a fortune in materials. That has to be worth some survey shekels. I mean, no one can get them right now except us, but maybe some day." After scratching her nose and turning to stare at the large display, she adds, "Som they have tons of shipmaking material the same as the Thennenin hulks, which were the bodies of the Thennenin if I remember right? Then what are they making with-- Oh." She stares at the artificial planet, blinking. "Uhm so they have a planet factory?"

"Factory may be accurate," Yue suggests. "Could be the antimatter factory. Could be a ship. Or an inside-out world, with each band representing a different spin-gravity section if it's hollow."

"It it's a ship, that would explain the planet-count difference between surveys," Moka notes.

"I say we go steal it. We can call it The Dark World and fly and populate it with our favorite species and civilizations. Make everyone jealous," Tasha suggests, though she isn't serious. Well, not entirely facetious, anyway. Having their own mobile planet has many possibilities, of course ... "If it's mobile, and not just regular-orbit mobile, then it's doing things. Maybe leaving, maybe things here in system?"

"No chatter being picked up," Yue reports as the continue their data gathering passes. "Anyone watching would have noticed the neutrino bursts. We need to be closer to pick up an digital cognizance resonances."

"I wish we had probes," Gabriel mutters, rubbing his chin. "Do we have interferometry images yet, Moka?"

"Then in we go. I doubt anyone is going to say 'lets leave now'," Tasha insists. To provide some morale support, because there's little she can do to be directly useful, she rises and retakes her position near the railing overlooking the lower level and the extended control chairs. Hands behind her back, face all smiles, she feels like some perversion of a command figure. Commanders should not be smiling, but she smiles, they shouldn't be teenagers, but here she is, and a handful of brilliant people don't follow people like her, but there you go. She smiles in the face of danger int he hopes the rest will be inspired by it, whatever she feels. The anticipation definitey real. "We'll see about probes for next time."

"First two inners are dark," the Phin reports. "As in black, almost no albedo. Number three is the rosette, four looks like an exposed core, five shows an atmosphere and is in the Goldilocks zone. Spectroscopy shows water and oxygen, so may have plant life at least. Six is pretty small, smaller than Mars. And seven is the spinny scary one."

"The first three worry me, plus whatever is in close orbit around the primary," Gabriel says. "We should be able get good readings on things from number four though. I want to see if it was stripped down to construct the rosette. Keep us in the shadow with regards to seven Mr. Kaa."

"All-black worlds ... And close to the sun. They didn't manage to, or want to, halt their rotation, and if that black is artificial, do you think they're accumulating solar energy for something too? But with the swarm, why darken them, unless the swarm avoids blocking light to them?" Tasha asks, still standing in her commander-but-not pose, appearing to be having a nice time, even if she's a bit more low key on the inside. "I guess four was used for materials, five might be food production? Or habitat. Taht suggestes life similiar to our own, not machine life. At least not only machine life." She pauses, frowns a moment, then nods. "Oh. All black. Nothing to reflect, power egenration and also you can't get a good look at them. Of course."

"Just like threading the needle of Grinder back at Encante," Kaa says, bringing them in submerged.

"Yes!" Kaa says. "Stand outside and look fierce! We can also use harsh language." Close in, the exposed iron core of a former planet shows signs of gouging. It also provides a close enough spot to really get a good look at the six-world rosette. "Uniform density on the larger bodies.. ice. They're made of water ice," Yue reports. The inner two are still too far off.

"Makes me think of a supply dump," Jonas remarks. "Water and antimatter fuel dump. Iron for manufacturing, automated factory for.. whatever repairs you might need. Biosphere for organics. Not sure what the black bodies are for though."

"Water-ice and antimatter. And a whirl of shipbuilding materials. It's like one big super-depot, and clean too. Somebody runs a very tight ship." A ship that may be the size of a planet, possibly capable of making other planets and certainly makign entire fleets of smaller vessels. "And an exposed core, for all your iron needs. They really setup for the long haul, didn't they? So a depot, a factory, two black worlds, one green world, and a small world we don't know much about." She pauses. "If everything else is factory, organic supply, and supply, then those two black worlds are where the military probably bases itself. It's near the star defense system and deep in the gravity well."

"Are ours the only neutrino sources in the system besides the star?" Gabriel asks. Yue starts doing an analysis. "Looking for artificial sources now."

"I feel like beneath that black layer, there's a world-sized warehouse. Or a port, or a city, or all of those. If this place was just a depot for materials, they wouldn't need the rest, would they?" Tasha speculates, leaning in despite not needing to. She stares for a long moment before answering Katherine. "Yes, they have the power to relocate entire worlds. I doubt they shave them too, but they can move them and I know for a fact some older civilizations knew how to secure and direct Harrowers." It gives her an idea, albiet a unlikely to pan out one.

"Niss," she hisses. "We're a D-space ship with a D-space generator. Can we use that to search for D-space pockets? Can we make any sort of communication system through taht realm?"

"We do not know that this vessel can enter D-space," the Niss reply. "While the horse appears to be a dark-matter based entity, it is akin to a creature that still lives near the surface of an ocean, in the sunlight. D-space would represent the abyssal depths."

"Not finding anything," Yue finally reports. "If they're there, they're too faint for us to see. Not finding any annihilation byproducts that would indicate the use of antimatter. No idea what's powering the dynamo world."

"Kaa, bring us around to get a look at the Goldilocks world," Gabriel says, and the ship moves out from the stripmined world on a path that keeps it hidden from the outermost planet still, until the periscope can be raised again.

"I wish I knew more about hyperuniversal mechanics and D-space communication -- uh, nevermind me. I was hoping we could probe for a stasis pocket within which a Harrower was located, but I don't know how or even if it's possible." It was, afetr all, a long shot. She doesn't know enough about D-Space and pockets there-of to even know if a point-to-point beam style communication makes sense, nor if the presence of a pocket would disturb the topography enough for sensing through exotic means. She straightens. "I guess we may be about to see who lives here, or did, anyway. Maybe their taste in gardening."

The telescoping view of the fifth planet shows some extreme contrasts. There is a single continent, which looks dull yellow, with a very thin black border and a red colored ocean surrounding it.

"That doesn't look like a planet bound civilization to me," Tasha admits, brow narrowing as she tries to make sense of yet another inexplicable mystery. "To me it looks like a wall keeping red stuff from getting in their yellow. Like another depot."

"The red stuff is algae on the surface of the ocean," Moka reports. "Red chlorophyll. The border is in motion? We need to get closer, Kaa."

"Algae is used in food production, isn't it? With the amount in that depot, I wouldn't be surprised if they also had a world sized farm here." But Tasha leans in further, wondering at the boarder. Is the continent moving? Maybe two kinds of something being mixed? Or a factory, taking one thing and producing another, red to yellow. It's definitely not the setupa civilization would live in, but anotehr factory-world.

It takes several more hops, until they're effectively in orbit, before enough detail can be made out. The continental interior is barren and dry - a desert. But the black border is made of moving figures. At maximum resolution, it's possible to see the border as a mass of struggling, matte-black figures the size of humans. Features are hard to make out due to the light-absorbing skin, but activity is clear. Those at the edge are feeding on the algae, until they get pulled back so others can get in. It's a massive, continent bordering feeding frenzy, with those at the rear starving or.. there's a lot of cannibalism going on as well.

Tasha just stares for a long, long moment. She expected machines, perhaps a mobile wall sorting and processing algae in to a continent-sized ready-to-ship form in an endless dance of fill, process, transport repeat. One big farm and bakery all in one, so much like the perfectly balanced depot of water and antimatter. What she didn't expect, was what she's looking at. Because to her it looks like a nicely engineered, world-spanning hell.