Élite Dangereuse - Voyage au sein d'une civilisation éteinte

Journey within an extinct civilization

Summary of the adventure:

After completing your last mission, you decide to make a stop at Felice Dock in the Meene system, a place you hadn't visited in many years. You appreciate the familiar atmosphere of the space station.

As you're about to power down your onboard computer before heading to the bar, you hear a notification for a new message. Huh? Strange...

The recap

Start

Felice Dock

System

Meene

SRV (Scarab or Scorpion)

Surface scanner

4 to 8 tons of cargo

Difficulty Competent

Duration

2h30

Max distance

1200 LY

Journey within an extinct civilization

ByCMDR THARGOSU
28 September 3309
300 points

Your usual habit would have been to leave your ship and head straight to the bar without paying much attention to this alert. But something inside you urges you to check this message. An instinct, an intuition that you can't ignore.

You return to your seat, power up your HUD, and read the message. To your great surprise, it's from Ram Tah himself, a prominent figure in the field of space archaeology. The message invites your collaboration in the discovery of an ancient civilization: that of the Guardians.

Excitement and curiosity fill you. You temporarily forget about the bar and start examining the details of the message. This opportunity could be the greatest adventure of your life, a dive into the mysterious history of the Guardians, a chance to uncover secrets lost for centuries in the unexplored corners of the galaxy. A significant decision lies ahead of you, one that could change the course of your destiny.

Commander,

I have an exciting opportunity to offer you.

My research into the ancient ruins has yielded results of a sort. I have developed a way to decode the data from the Ancient sites.

Although I cannot specify the various combinations of objects and data types needed, my decoding system should help decipher the ancient data. The key is using the ancient objects with active obelisks to unlock it.

I've taken the liberty of uploading my decoding software to your ship's systems. Unfortunately, the ancient technology adapts to the cipher after a few weeks, so our task it time critical.

Please explore as many ancient sites as you can find. If you find all the data entries, there will be a bonus in it for you.

Good luck.

Inventory

Find your inventory here. Useful items will appear here as the adventure progresses.

A Megaship and a Treasure

While listening to this message from Ram Tah, you remember that you already know some Guardian sites. But is it enough to fulfill this request?

You decide to refuel and embark on the adventure. You take off from the station and begin to boost to enable hyperspace jumping.

But... barely on your way, you receive a second call from the engineer. You cut the engines to hear his message more clearly.

"Time is of the essence; the war with the Thargoids is raging. I invite you to join Professor Melville so that he can share his work on the Guardian ruins with you. This will help you get straight to the point. The amount of data to be recovered is so substantial, and time is so precious... every passing week intensifies humanity's distress in the face of this war.

I'm sharing the coordinates of the professor with you. One strange thing, by the way... it has been some time since I last heard from the professor or his crew. They may be experiencing technical difficulties."

Coordinates of Professor Melville:
Megaship 'The Cete'
Col 173 Sector LJ-F c12-0 A 3

Here's your first destination coming into focus. You double-check one last time that you have Ram Tah's mission on your left side panel. You input the coordinates of the mega-ship into your onboard computer. Heading for The Cete and Professor Melville!

Once you are in the system of Professor Melville, proceed to step 2

The Cete

After a long journey, you finally find the Megaship 'The Cete'.

The Cete

You discover a disturbing scene. The logs onboard now reveal much more to you.

Retrieve the 7 logs from the megaship...

“I'm not just going to sit here while that jumped-up mechanic Ram Tah spoon-feeds us information.”

That's what Professor Melville said. He wanted to know more about the Guardians – maybe even figure out where they came from. So off we went, with little to go on beyond the professor's belief that there were more ruins out there.

He claims to have information that will help us find more sites, but he's keeping it close to his chest. Only he and the pilot know where we're going. It's like he's afraid someone will take credit for his discovery. We've been scanning lifeless planetoids for days, eyeballing the ground for locations.

He keeps reciting the same little speech: “Xeno-achaeology has moved on. The days of exploring the outer reaches, only occasionally finding something of value, are behind us. I have found the key.”

But I'm not an archaeologist. Professor Melville is just a means to an end. I signed up for the money.

We received an update today – apparently Ram Tah has found some new sites. Melville scoffed when he heard the news. “Scraps from an amateur,” he said. “We'll find the real secrets. Trust me.”

Trust. That's an interesting thing. Why should we trust someone who doesn't trust us? Well, maybe he has reason not to: I took a look at his records while he was talking to the pilot. l don't like being kept in the dark.

Melville thinks there could be hundreds of sites out there. His hypothesis is that the Guardians occupied an area of space similar in size to that currently inhabited by humans, but that for some reason they were forced to migrate. He believes he can find that region of space and the Guardians' point of origin.

The Guardians could well have had a huge civilisation, with hundreds of sites – maybe thousands – in this part of space. The similarities across different sites are comparable to the way we reuse certain structures. After all, how many Coriolis stations are there in the galaxy?

Melville thinks the Synuefe XR-H D11-102 system represents some kind of end point or 'last colony'. Beyond that, the sites appear in clusters, with the number of sites in each cluster getting increasingly larger. We discovered a cluster of sites only a few days ago before finding a location with an entirely unique layout. So far we've found three sites in each of the following systems: Synuefe LY-I b42-2, Synuefe NL-N c23-4 and Synuefe TP-F b44-0.

There are basically three different types of site, most of which have a different codex layout. Melville thinks that each type of site fulfilled a different function. He also thinks the Guardians were the dominant species in this region of space. But he's not content with this discovery. He wants to keep going.

Are we ever going back to turn back?

Professor Melville studying a Guardian symbol

A Guardian Obelisk

This isn't a research vessel anymore – it's a prison. All means of communicating with the rest of the galaxy have been disabled. Melville has taken control of ship. His obsession has doomed us all.

I'm transmitting these records in the hope that someone finds them and comes to our rescue. But the chances of that are slim.

We're getting out of here. The ship was designed to leave the lab ship to fly solo carrying out experiments while the drive ship ferried supplies to and from occupied space.

We're going to trap the Professor in the lab ship, blow the umbilical and return home in the drive ship. The crazy old fool will have enough supplies to last him years. lt's more than he deserves, trying to trap us all out here.

There is no escape now. Somehow he found out what we were planning and welded the airlock to the drive ship shut. When we confronted him he went crazy, called us mutineers and cowards…

He shot our junior research assistant Marcus to make an example for the rest of us. The kid hadn't done anything wrong, he just wanted to get home.

The only way off this ship is…

Warning! Atmospheric processors offline. You now have 15 hours to evacuate the ship before oxygen levels become toxic.

Warning! Atmospheric processors offline. You now have 10 hours to evacuate the ship before oxygen levels become toxic.

Warning! Atmospheric processors offline. You now have 5 hours to evacuate the ship before oxygen levels become toxic.

Warning oxygen depleted.

Your onboard computer also detects a signal coming from the laboratory vessel. The computer seems to indicate that it is the carrier signal of a research console. You attempt to connect to it.

Connect to the console