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Coliz · (This post was last modified: 04-22-2026, 09:10 PM by Coliz.)

Inside the Morgenstern, 1st December 835 AS

Service corridor 2, "Unscheduled stop"

While Dr. Huber and her delegation debated the most appropriate next step, Albert, Hans, and Hermann had quietly drifted a few meters away.

For the first time since boarding, they were not looking at reports or transcripts.
They were looking at the ship. Touching it.
What had once been only the distant voice of von Tanner was now something far less abstract — steel, weight, and a stubborn, uncooperative reality.
And the more real it became, the more unsettling the idea was that it might all be dismissed as fabrication.

Above the now constant, low murmur of the reactor, Huber’s voice cut through.
“Very well. We will proceed downward.”
Her heel struck the deck with quiet authority.
“From here we will visit the astro-cartographic and astrophysics section.”

Albert leaned slightly toward Hermann.
“Didn’t she just say she didn’t want to go where we’d already been?”

Hermann responded with a small shrug that conveyed resignation more than confusion.

“Indeed, Mr. Neer,” Huber replied without turning. “However, circumstances have changed. I now have a hypothesis to test.”
Hermann raised an eyebrow.
“And that would be?”

Huber stopped briefly, just long enough to ensure she had everyone’s attention.
“Engines,” she said calmly, “can malfunction honestly.”

A small gesture toward the reactor behind them.
“Data, unfortunately, can lie very convincingly.”

Hans blinked, pulled out of an intense and entirely inappropriate fascination with a functioning terminal connected to what appeared to be a deeply questionable heat exchanger.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “what possible sense does that make?”
The question, while entirely reasonable, received no reply.

By then, the group had already begun moving toward a narrow service staircase on the far side of the reactor chamber.
The climb took longer than anyone would have preferred.
The stairs protested every step with a sequence of metallic complaints that gradually eroded confidence in their long-term structural integrity. At roughly the midpoint, one of the ministry officials slowed down noticeably.

“These were… inspected?” he asked.

“Visually,” Albert replied.

That did not help.

They eventually emerged into another service corridor. Huber was already consulting the holographic map.

“This way.”

They followed.

The corridor was tighter than expected. Cables and piping ran along the walls and ceiling in patterns that suggested later additions rather than original planning. In several places, one had to lean slightly to avoid contact with something that was almost certainly not meant to be touched.
The group moved in silence.

Then—

“Uh.”
Albert had stopped.

Hermann turned.
“Albert?”

Huber’s voice echoed from several meters ahead.

“Mr. Neer, I do hope that ‘uh’ is not a technical assessment.”

Albert pointed at a door along the wall.

“This door.”

Huber walked back toward them, glancing briefly at her map.

“Secondary storage,” she said. “Generic designation.” She turned slightly toward her technicians.
“Mark it. We will return if necessary.”

“Oops.”
All eyes shifted.

Hans stood by the door, attempting a posture that suggested both innocence and inevitability. In his hand — or more precisely, already attached to the electronic lock — was a small signal injector.

“I just wanted to see if it still worked,” he said.
“Hans,” Hermann sighed.

There was a soft click. The door unlocked. It opened a few centimeters on its own.
A stale breath of air slipped out into the corridor. Not strong. Just… old.

Huber paused for exactly half a second.
“Well,” she said, stepping forward without looking at anyone, “since the ship appears to be cooperating…”
She pushed the door open fully.
“…we may as well do the same.”
And, without waiting for permission or commentary, she stepped inside.

Inside the Morgenstern, secondary storage room #2-2A

Overflow

As Huber stepped inside, the room decided—after a brief and entirely unnecessary hesitation—to acknowledge their presence. A row of overhead lights flickered on in sequence, cutting through the thin veil of dust stirred by the opening door.

At first, it looked exactly like what it claimed to be.
Storage.

Crates stacked along the walls. Containers, some sealed, others left open. Cabinets whose contents appeared to have been removed either in haste or with a degree of determination that did not lend itself to tidiness. It was, in short, a room that had seen use, misuse and spikes of entropy.

Then, after a few seconds, it became clear that it had seen rather more than that.

“Looks like someone went through everything,” Albert murmured.
He stepped further in, frowning, hands briefly on his hips as if the room might respond to criticism.
“This makes no sense,” he went on. “No one stores things like this. You’re wasting half the available space.”

Hans placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Look again.”
Albert did, and this time the arrangement resolved itself.

The crates were not scattered. They were aligned—low, parallel, spaced with just enough room between them to move. Not efficiently, not comfortably, but deliberately. Along the walls, small diagnostic lamps had been mounted wherever there was something sturdy enough to hold them. Hooks had been fixed to the ceiling. A narrow cart stood at the far end, its wheels locked in place as if it had not been meant to move again.

“These aren’t just crates,” Hans said quietly.
A pause.
“They’re beds.”
“Beds?” echoed one of the technicians, who had not yet adjusted his expectations.

Hermann stepped forward, taking in the room with a slower, more deliberate gaze.
“A field infirmary,” he said at last.
He gestured around them—not at the disorder, but at the structure beneath it.
“And this isn’t chaos. It’s what happens when you run out of space and start using whatever is left.”
That seemed to settle something in the room, or perhaps only in those observing it. The distinction was, at that point, largely academic.

Hans, in the meantime, had already moved toward the terminal mounted on the far wall.
“Hermann, Frau Huber?”
He didn’t need to elaborate.
“Yes,” Hermann said. “Let’s see if it still remembers.”

They leaned over the console together. Behind them, the others lingered—watching, recording, or simply trying to reconcile what they were looking at with what they had expected to find.
Huber did none of these things. She simply observed.

For a few seconds, the terminal resisted the idea of cooperation. Then, slowly, the interface reassembled itself—a familiar green-tinted system that looked as though it had been designed in a more optimistic era and had not been meaningfully updated since.

Hans navigated quickly, his initial curiosity giving way to focus.
“Medical logs,” he said. “Partial corruption. A lot missing.”
“Expected,” one of the ministry officials replied, in a tone that suggested expectations had been met rather more often than anyone would have liked.

Hans opened the first intact entry.
The text appeared in fragments at first, then settled into something readable.

INFIRMARY LOG, 1 FEBRUARY 710 AS

Hans scrolled.
Another entry emerged, this one less orderly, as though written under less accommodating circumstances.

INFIRMARY LOG, 9 FEBRUARY 710 AS

Hans leaned back slightly.
“There’s more,” he said, though his tone suggested that more would not improve matters.
He scrolled again.
“Radiation, again. Burns. Exposure from unshielded sections…”
He paused.
“…and fatalities.”

No one spoke.
Hans opened another fragment—short, incomplete, but legible enough.

Patient: S. Keller — cardiac arrest following systemic radiation collapse. No response to intervention.
Patient: R. Vogt — severe thermal injury, multi-organ failure. Deceased.

He closed the file without comment.
“They’re not isolated cases,” he added quietly. “It keeps repeating.”

Hermann spoke, almost to himself.
“They stayed in that environment for a year.”

Hans let the terminal scroll for a few more seconds, then stopped it with a small, almost reluctant gesture.
“There’s more,” he said quietly. "Same pattern.”
He did not turn the screen this time.
“Radiation. Burns. Systemic collapse. It doesn’t really… improve.”

Albert exhaled slowly, still looking around the room.
“But they made it out,” he said. “They found Freeport 5.”
“Twenty-three days after the registered ambush,” one of the technicians corrected, without looking up from his datapad.
Hans nodded, though without much conviction.
“Yes.”

A pause.

“They got supplies,” Hermann added, almost automatically. “Medication. Stabilizers. Enough to keep systems running.”

Hans glanced back at the terminal.
“Not enough to fix anything.”

Silence settled again, thinner this time.
Albert shifted his weight.

“So this just… kept going?” he asked. “Even after that?”

Hermann gave a small, restrained nod.
“If these logs are consistent with the others—yes.” He gestured vaguely toward the room.

“They didn’t stop being sick when they found Freeport 5.”]
Hans closed one of the files.
[color=#FFBF40]“They just stopped getting worse quickly,” he said.

Another pause.
“And started getting worse slowly.”

No one commented on that. Albert looked once more at the makeshift beds.
“A year,” he said quietly. “They stayed like this for a year.”

No one answered immediately. So Huber spoke into the silence.

“Curious,” she said.

Albert turned toward her.

“Curious?”

She inclined her head slightly, as if acknowledging a point that had not yet been made.
“That we would, by chance, open this particular, anonymous, compartment,” she said. “Among all possible rooms aboard this vessel.”

Albert frowned.
“I’m not sure what you’re implying.”

Huber’s expression did not shift.
“Only that this is… a fortunate discovery.”

Hermann’s tone sharpened, though only slightly.
“These logs match what we already found. Dates, conditions—everything.”

“Yes, it's exactly my point,” Huber replied.
She glanced at the terminal, then back at him.
“They align with the documentation you have provided.”

A brief pause.
“Or rather,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “with the documentation attributed to Captain von Tanner.”

“Doctor,” Hermann said, more firmly now, “we did not write these.”

“Mhm,” she said, in a tone that suggested the statement had been noted and set aside for later consideration, if ever.

She turned toward the door.
“Let us move on. The air here is… inadequate.”

She paused just long enough to issue instructions.
“Extract everything from that terminal.”
Then, without waiting for acknowledgment, she stepped back into the corridor.
“We will reconvene at the designated deck.”

The group followed, one by one.
Behind them, the improvised ward remained as it had been—ordered, functional, and quietly indifferent to whether anyone chose to believe in it.

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