Bowex InfoNet (inRP)

[11of10]

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Source: Newcastle system, Scarborough Shipyard
Sender: Brian Gray, chief engineer aboard the Lionheart
Target: Bowex flight reports
CC: Bowex Archive
Topic: Severe situation

This is chief engineer Brian Gray, aboard the Lionheart, filing an after flight report:

Yesterday, the day was as good as it gets, the engines working like a charm, no pirates, we were hauling ore to Rheinland for some miners of Dublin. On our second return trip, however, when we exited the second trade lane in Stuttgart, and were about to jump in the Omega 7 system, something happened on the bridge.

At first, we were just standing there, near the Border station Ulm, dead in space. I heard an intercom call for medical crew to the bridge. By the voice, I'd say it was the Navigator, Mister Green. Poor Manfred sounded scared.

Anyhow, I decided to go up there, but while I was giving orders to the engineering crew about the maintenance, the ship started moving. I thought everything would be allright, and we all braced ourselves for the system jump.

The jump never happened.

Instead, the ship had hit something while at full speed. The entire hull started to whine, as the engines slammed us against an obstacle. If we weren't in our seats, we would've been dead.

Anyway, to my amasement, the ship continued to move on.

We checked all systems, only to find out that the secondary reactor was overloading with fuel, a pump stuck by the shock of the collision into maximum setting. It exploded later, luckily only damaging some more hull.
I and my two men ran up to the bridge, but the doors were locked. When we finally managed to cut open a hole inside, the sight we saw was eerie:

Only the emergency red lights were working, and there were bodies and blood everywhere.. tossed around by that collision.

The captain was "lucky" in that he was stuck between a gunnery console and a chair, which kept him from flying around. However, he has some broken ribs and is uncontious. To my knowledge, he is still out. The navigator, Mister Manfred Green, was also alive, slammed against the auxillary engine control console. It seems that he was the one that sent us into the gate, as we had later discovered. I don't know what caused all of this. Some rare recordings we got from some Rheinland Military vessels indicate that the Captain went berserk and started to jump around the bridge, at one moment discharged the weapons, and then fainted. After him, the Navigator was in for a similar ordeal, walking around and finally stumbling down, hitting his head and in the end, punching the engines into emergency speed.

To cut the long story short, we managed to get some control of the ship back, and limped back into Stuttgart space on manouvering thrusters, and finally dragged ourselves back to Scarborough. We lost almost all of our cargo, our supplies are also floating somewhere with Rheinland.

Here I attach a photo from a Scarborouh surveilance camera, taken when the ship docked. It shows the extend of the damage taken:



I still don't know what caused all this, but I heard there were some other occurances of temporary madness in Stuttgart at the same time. Personally, I'm scared, and I hope the ExSec will soon investigate this. I know that there are a lot of things out there in open Space, but I really never ever heard of something like this.

Chief engineer Brian Gray, signing off.

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Be excelent to each other!