The Pilgrim that wasn't supposed to be there

[Coliz]

Inside the Serendipity AKA the E.V. Morgenstern

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Bridge 4B(S), communication deck: "The Chase for Truth (or Something Like It)"

The sound of boots echoed in the dim corridors as the three of them rushed through the winding passageways of the Morgenstern. Hans led the way like a man possessed, muttering half-formed calculations and expletives under his breath while juggling a portable terminal and a mess of cables. Albert was close behind, still rubbing the shoulder Schmidt had shoved earlier. Hermann brought up the rear, a little less frantic, but clearly trying to remember the last time any of this felt normal.

“Where exactly are we going, again?” gasped Albert as they rounded a corner and nearly collided with a hanging conduit.

“To the comms deck! If the logs are still there, they’ll be cached in the secondary transmit buffer. Assuming the jammer didn’t fry the redundancy circuit. Which it might have. But I’m hoping it didn’t!” Hans rattled off, barely slowing down.

They descended a narrow stairwell, one of those emergency access shafts clearly designed by someone who hated knees, and emerged into a long, cold corridor lined with ancient cabling and flickering maintenance lights. At the far end, a rusted hatch groaned as Hans forced it open.

The communications deck was a graveyard of old tech—dust, broken panels, and the unmistakable smell of cooked plastic. Hans scanned the room, then darted toward a panel at the far end, where a narrow service conduit ran up along the wall.

“There,” he said, dropping to his knees. “That crawlspace leads directly to the base of the antenna array. There’s an old service terminal tucked behind the relay nodes. Should be just enough power to access the buffer without triggering a broadcast.”

“Should be?” Hermann asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I said should. In the academic sense.”

Before either of them could protest, Hans squeezed himself into the conduit, limbs contorting with a practiced clumsiness that suggested he’d done this sort of thing far too often.

From inside came a series of grunts, muffled curses, and the occasional bang.

“Still alive?” called Albert.

“Define alive,” Hans replied. “Okay, okay—I see the node. Dusty as hell. Some of these cables are charred... damn it, someone definitely jammed the array hard... but—yes! The terminal’s still responding!”

They heard the faint whirr of old systems booting up. Hans fell completely silent for a few seconds, then: “I think I've found them.”

“Can you pull them?” asked Hermann, now peering anxiously toward the crawlspace.

“I’m not only pulling them,” Hans grunted as he wrestled a cable free, “I’m ghosting the port so the antenna doesn’t twitch even a volt. If this thing so much as blinks, I think someone might notice.”

Albert leaned in nervously. “What kind of ‘someone’ are we talking about?”

Hans’s voice echoed faintly from within the conduit. “Uh, you tell me. The Rheinland Navy, the KPR, the MND, our wives on Baden Baden. The more the merrier"

There was a pause.

“Don’t... don’t say that,” Hermann muttered.

A few tense moments passed.

There was a soft, high-pitched beep—the kind that usually precedes either triumph or total disaster.

From inside the maintenance shaft, Hans let out a low, triumphant chuckle. “Well,” he said, crawling backwards with the grace of a startled crab, “I have good news and terrifying news.”

He slid out, holding his portable terminal like a relic retrieved from a temple floor. He was covered in dust, beaming like a man who had just defused a bomb using chewing gum and stubbornness.

“I’ve got them,” Hans said, slightly out of breath. “The logs. The whole packet. Precompiled, timestamped, indexed... everything. They were buried under a ton of crash instructions and a very passive-aggressive error handler.”

Hermann stepped closer, eyes narrowing. “And the terrifying part?”

Hans pointed at the top of the conduit. “The antenna was actually queued for broadcast on every emergency channel. Had we restored even minimal power to the transceiver...it was tuned to blast distress packets on all of them: military frequencies, emergency police bands. Every automated relay in Rheinland. We wouldn't just be noticed—we’d have the entire Westfalen battlegroup doing a flyby before you could say ‘please don’t shoot.’"

Albert went pale. “We’d be also be on every Bounty Hunters wanted list by now.”

“Assuming our camerades in the Rheinland Navy didn’t just shoot first and fill out paperwork later,” Hermann added.

They exchanged a heavy look. Then Albert took a deep breath. “So... what now?”

Hermann took a long look at the terminal, then at Hans. “Now,” he said, “we listen. Let’s find out what was worth killing an entire crew for.”