<< BACK TO RS001 LOG

QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
CLASSIFICATION: Deep survey, retrofitted cargo

First time using this thing. Found the QEC buried under
three layers of decommed nav software. The manual was
corrupted past the first page but the gist is clear enough -
type, hit send, hope the entanglement holds.

We are 14 months out from Kovacs Station, surveying dead
systems along the Carina transit. The work is simple. Drop
into a system, run the sweep, tag anything that matches the
mineral index, move on. Most systems have nothing. Some have
rocks worth flagging. None of them have anything alive.

The Aria was a bulk hauler before the refit. You can tell.
The corridors are too wide for a three-person crew and the
cargo holds echo when you walk through them. Maret sealed
off deck four because the sound was getting to her. She said
it sounded like breathing. It does not sound like breathing.
It sounds like a ship that was built to carry things and
has nothing left to carry.

Odelya runs the mineral sweeps. She is better at it than
the automated systems, which is not a compliment to her so
much as an indictment of the software. She talks to the
spectrometer. I have not asked her about this.

I handle navigation and maintenance. Also cooking, which
nobody asked me to do but the alternative was Maret's
protein blocks three meals a day. She does not understand
why this is a problem.

14 months is a long time to be out here with two other
people and a ship that echoes. But the work is simple and
the silence between systems has a quality to it that I have
not found anywhere else. Not peace exactly. Just a long
pause between sentences.

More when there is more.

- thresh3, navigation/maintenance, Silt Aria