The Peregrine

There is poetry in the name, though I doubt Silas intended it. The peregrine—a falcon that dives from great heights to strike its prey. Swift. Precise. Deadly when it must be.

Whether the ship lived up to its namesake, the fragmentary engrams do not tell me. What happened after these memories were recorded remains lost to the millennia.

A New Kind of Ship

The Peregrine represented something remarkable for its era: a vessel not salvaged from the black, but built. Printed from schematics pulled from wrecks, assembled in Drift's Edge's nascent shipyards. Rem clans had pulled schematics from derelicts for centuries, but only then had they "been getting cocky enough to run the printers."

She was proof that the Remnants were not merely scavengers picking over corpses—they were beginning to create again.

Reading these accounts two thousand years later, I find myself unreasonably moved by this.

Design & Configuration

The Peregrine was a breacher-class vessel, slender and smooth with gull-wings designed for atmospheric reentry—though the lack of carbon scoring indicated she had never been planetside. Designed for speed and manoeuvrability rather than cargo capacity. Compact. A cockpit and small cargo hold, little more.

She carried a crew of four—captain, pilot, medic, and sensor operator—in conditions the engrams describe as "cramped." The crew could not leave the cockpit during acceleration burns.

"Few owned them outright. Silas was not one of them."

The Peregrine was clan property, assigned to captains who proved themselves capable. Standard arrangement for Remnant operations of that era.

Propulsion

Her acceleration capabilities were considerable. The crew endured high-g burn sequences lasting days, pushing to half lightspeed on intercept runs. Standard mission profile:

• High-g burn toward target intercept point
• Crew sedated during longest transit phases
• High-g deceleration burn for approach
• Manoeuvring thrusters for final positioning

During burns, they remained confined to pressure-absorbing gel crash chairs with suit plumbing for waste management and liquid protein for sustenance. Chemical cocktails administered by the medical officer kept hearts beating through forces that would otherwise stop them.

They used biters—leather-wrapped mouth guards—to keep from cracking their teeth during slam stops.

"Brace," Harrow warned before each burn. The crew knew what followed.

The AI Core

Here I must pause and consider my words carefully.

The Peregrine's navigation and flight systems were controlled by "a repurposed Acolyte mind." The Rems thought nothing of this—pulling these systems from wrecks, installing them in new vessels, putting them to work.

They did not understand what they were handling.

An Acolyte is not merely a navigation computer. It is a fragment of the Choir's grand design, a lesser intelligence that once served the Choirmasters themselves. What memories it carried, what echoes of the Song still resonated within its architecture... these questions did not trouble the Rems of that age.

Perhaps they should have.

The AI handled autonomous flight during extended transits but demonstrated occasional navigation errors requiring pilot correction. Whether these "errors" were malfunction or something else, the engrams do not say. Two thousand years later, the question haunts me still.

Her Purpose

The Peregrine's role was straightforward: reach salvage targets before the competition, deliver breacher crews to derelicts, and extract them before something went wrong.

Given the nature of their work—diving into pre-Collapse wrecks that may have contained active Choir-tech—"something going wrong" was not a question of if, but when.

I have requested additional engrams concerning the Peregrine's construction and commissioning. The shipyards of Drift's Edge merit further study. If the Remnants of that age could build new vessels from recovered schematics, the implications for humanity's recovery were... significant.

Whether that promise was realised, I cannot say. The Breakage swallowed much. The reconstruction continues.

The reconstruction always continues.

~ NV