Anomalous Transmission, 512 MHz
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KNCR-C25601 is the captain of the Cantor-256, a Nation frigate patrolling the space between Heimat and Rotfront. After a seemingly uneventful journey, the ship receives an anomalous transmission, relayed to Kranich by her chief radio officer. Listening to it proves to be a fatal mistake, and after a vision of her ship under a crimson sky in a crimson desert, she wakes up to find that something terrible has happened to her vessel. She takes it upon herself to save as many of her birds as possible and find out what happened to her ship while she was unconscious.
It's what the Nation would want from her, after all.
Kranich sat in her office, her fingers gently thrumming on her mahogany table as she watched the stars outside the bridge of the Cantor-256. Life had been boring as of late; nothing exciting had yet befallen her crew during this patrol between Heimat and Rotfront. That was a good thing, she thought. Even if tensions had flared up between Nation and Empire as of late, a patrol without incident would be a welcome occurrence.
Her eyes next laid upon her desktop zen garden, which sat next to her Aldebaran Model VI computer. The three crimson stars of the Nation stood out on the black exterior. A few nuggets of polished hematite lay on the white sand, arranged in a small circle.
As she altered the sand with one of the companion instruments, her computer buzzed in morse code, the screen flickering on as it translated for her:
KA
CS CS CS RAUMFAHRZEUGVERWALTUNG DE RADIOSENDER RN KN
The captain replied:
RADIOSENDER DE RAUMFAHRZEUGVERWALTUNG = OP IS KNCR-C25601 KN
The onboard radio office responded:
RAUMFAHRZEUGVERWALTUNG DE RADIOSENDER = GT KNCR-C25601 = OP IS ARAR-C25612 = UNIDENTIFIZIERTES SIGNAL ERHALTEN KN
“An unidentified signal, huh…” Kranich muttered to herself. She typed out her response:
QIF UNIDENTIFIZIERTES SIGNAL = IS KSRLICH INT KN
The response came after a few seconds, and it perplexed her:
QIF 512 MHZ = NOT KSRLICH NOR NTNL KN
Kranich sighed.
NOT KSRLICH NOR NTNL INT KN
C = SIGNAL DE OORTSHE WOLKE KN
?
C = SIGNAL DE OORTSHE WOLKE KN
VE = OP WIRD EINTRETEN RADIOSENDERAUM SK
Kranich turned the computer off, wondering what the hell kind of signal the ship heard.
“Zwölf,” Kranich said as she entered the radio office, “do you know what the signal contains?”
“Yes, captain,” the Ara replied. “It seems like a transmission from one of the Nation’s number stations based on the data but that should be impossible given its location.”
“Huh. Play the transmission.”
The Ara obliged. The radio’s speakers crackled to life as three notes played on repeat for a short while. Then, a message:
ACHTUNG!
ACHTUNG!
39485… 39485…
Kranich felt a wave of nausea overcome her as she sat in the chair adjacent to Zwölf's. Zwölf felt a similar sensation.
60179… 60179…
“Stop the playback!” Kranich ordered, but to deaf ears as the Ara slumped over, her body clanking against the floor. She reached out to the computer, but her body shook as she struggled to even stand up.
24326… 24326…
She felt the cold tiled floor against her exoskeleton. From the corner of her eyes she barely saw the outline of Zwölf’s hair. She called out to her Kolibris, begging for aid.
01064… 01064…
As the sound of the world faded away, a collage of visions that the Replika was unequipped to comprehend flashed in her eyes. System warnings flashed all over her visual interface before a wall of blue overtook it, before fading to the blackness of unconsciousness.
Kranich rubbed her head. Red sand stretched before her, contained under an equally crimson sky. In the distance, a pillar of basalt jutted out from the desert. Behind it, her ship laid half-buried in the sand.
“My ship… My ship!”
Slowly, she heaved herself up, her polyethylene-coated hands sinking into the sand.
The Replika crawled, then walked to the pillar. As she ventured closer, a gate and a set of stairs leading up to it became resolvable. Atop it, a figure, its body made from flesh and sinew, stood.
Kranich’s hooves clanged against the rock as it turned to face her, one of its arms placed behind its back. An identification popup appeared on her interface: the figure was an Adler model, ADLR-S2301. Not one of her crewmembers.
“You’re…” the Replika said in amazement, before it was replaced with suspicion. “You’re not my commander. You don’t belong here.”
“That is of no concern to me. I need to pass.”
The Adler chuckled.
“This is a threshold. One that my beloved commander never returned from.”
“The hell do you mean?” Kranich demanded.
He remained unfazed. “Ever since I saw her body return from it, nothing has been the same. I don’t know what she saw out there, and I cannot allow you to pass.”
“What for?”
“If you pass through, what little is left of the world will be lost forever. I won’t let that happen.”
“What are you talking about? I have a crew to lead!”
Seeing as this Adler was too far gone to even comprehend what she was saying, Kranich pushed him aside. The Adler revealed a knife from behind his back and lunged forward, stabbing her in the eye as she turned around in surprise.
Kranich threw him down the stairs, feeling warm oxidant trickle down her face as she stepped through the archway before collapsing.
"Verdammit!" she shouted as she felt for her face.
SYSTEMZUSTAND KRITISCH
She tried to dislodge the knife from her skull, but the pain coursing through her veins was too great. As she grew fainter, the warnings about low oxidant levels piled up, before she shut down entirely.
The next thing Kranich knew, she was in an infirmary. After her systems rebooted, she felt various IV tubes stuck to her body and an oxygen mask on her face. She deduced that, thank the Revolutionary, she was in her ship’s medical ward.
“That… was one hell of a dream,” she mumbled. “Thank goodness the ship is alright. But what happened to me?”
Her muscles grew less numb and her breathing less labored as the pain all over her body subsided. She pulled the oxygen mask off of her and lifted herself onto the floor. However, the room felt strangely empty. Her Bioresonance module didn’t pick up signals of any Eules that had surely tended to her.
“The hell is going on here?” She asked. “Andromeda? Are you there?”
Her chief of medical staff did not reciprocate. The lights in the infirmary flickered for a moment, putting the captain on edge. She noticed that all the beds, despite having been used, were empty. Some of the blankets were strewn on the floor, and all of them (except for hers) were covered in a dark tar.
Kranich shook her head and exited the infirmary. The medical corridor, too, was empty. She reached out to her Replikas with her Bioresonance module again. Nobody answered.
Confusion took hold of the captain. Why weren’t her birds, her staff, answering? Not even the Kolibris’ song, which normally hummed in the back of her mind, was present. A stillness had settled within her ship, one which left the captain utterly alone, millions of kilometers away from their destination in Rotfront.
Before she could take another step forward, a clang echoed from below her. Then another. And another.
Tiles on the floor vibrated with each bang coming from the maintenance vents. Kranich, unfortunately, was not in possession of her personal revolver, which she would have taken out at that moment. Then, one of them slid out of place, with a figure climbing out of the newly-created hole.
An identification popup appeared on Kranich’s interface: ARAR-C25601, head of the maintenance team, had emerged from the vent, but she looked nothing like she remembered. Her face had dissolved, revealing the skeletal structure normally concealed behind her skin. Her arms had been forged into paddle-like appendages which skidded against the tiles. The Ara shambled toward the captain, her back bent at an unnatural angle.
“Eins, what the hell—”
The Replika swung her arm against Kranich’s armor, opening a gash in her shell and causing the captain to recoil from the attack.
Kranich held her chest in pain as two more Aras, Zwei and Drei, crawled out of the ceiling. In a split second, she rammed her way through her attackers, though Eins nearly struck her again as she bolted for the end of the corridor. As soon as the door opened, she ran through it, closing it behind her just as the Aras were about to enter through. The stairwell to the upper decks didn’t have any activity, which Kranich was thankful for as she leaned against the wall.
The decayed state of her Aras left her with a multitude of questions and a terror which she didn’t know she could feel until now. Just what had happened after she’d played that transmission? What was even in that transmission that made her fall unconscious in the first place? She sighed, oxidant drying up against her black armor as the coagulant flowing inside it clotted her veins.
As she stared up at the stairwell, she knew her mission: find out what the hell had happened, and save as much of her crew as she could. She was their leader, after all.