Drift-Tanker

I have spent three cycles studying what records exist of these vessels. What I have found... troubles me.

The Giants

Before the Collapse, drift-tankers carried the lifeblood of interstellar civilisation. Fuel. Supplies. The materials that kept the lights burning across a thousand worlds. They were not the largest vessels ever built—that distinction belongs to others—but they were immense. D-Class, the old designations say. Large enough to dwarf modern Remnant ships the way a whale dwarfs a minnow.

"Nowhere near as big as Drift's Edge," the engrams note. But then, what is?

What Remained

Most drift-tankers were gone even in that pre-Breakage era. Destroyed in the Collapse. Stripped for parts in the desperate years that followed. The last intact specimen pulled at Drift's Edge had been a generation before these engrams were recorded, and its hull plating formed the walls of the Vaults where Silas and his crew made their home.

They lived, quite literally, in the bones of giants.

Those that survived existed as derelicts—vast husks drifting through the black at a tenth of lightspeed, their power long dead, their crews long dust. They tumbled silently along ancient shipping lanes, patient ghosts waiting to be found.

Or to be found first.

The Derelict

The drift-tanker that drew Silas's crew into the black presented... anomalies.

Located fifty light-days from Drift's Edge, she travelled the old lanes between the station and Orpheus 1. Standard enough. But her mass readings were wrong. Too light for a D-Class vessel. Something was missing, or something was never there.

Worse: evidence of a previous breach. Someone had cut into her hull, centre deck, starboard side. The docking collar showed damage suggesting the attached vessel "didn't come away by choice."

The Temple archives contain references to similar findings from that era. Ships that were breached and then... abandoned. Or not abandoned. Two thousand years later, I am still not certain which possibility disturbs me more.

A Warning

"That stuff isn't safe," Silas warned about Choir-tech.

He meant the statement as caution. I suspect it proved understatement.

Drift-tankers of that age potentially carried Choir-derived systems—navigation cores, communication arrays, power regulators. Technology that connected to the Song. Technology that may still have remembered the music, even then.

The Renaud committed three ships to this target. Two breachers and a haulier. They knew something. Whether that knowledge came from superior intelligence networks or Oracular guidance of their own, they clearly believed the prize worth the risk.

I have flagged this engram sequence for priority reconstruction. What happened aboard that derelict—and more importantly, what was found there—may prove significant to our understanding of the post-Collapse transition.

The subsequent engrams are damaged. Fragmentary. Two thousand years of archival silence stand between these memories and my reconstruction. What Silas and his crew discovered, whether they survived to tell of it—these answers elude me still.

Some questions, once asked, demand answers. Some answers, it seems, are not mine to find.

~ NV