Earthwerks Aerospace of Ares
Northwest Anteros County
30 June 3144, 03:02hrs (Local Time)
Heavy Factory Bay O3 was virtually abandoned at this hour.
To be sure, there were security staff, maintenance personnel, and a few night-owl executives on or near the premises. But most of the activities in this bay were handled at this time by automation, the lion’s share of which took the form of extra-long cranes, welding/cutting arms, reconfigurable scaffold platforms, and multispectral sensor arrays. The latter-most of these systems was part of a vast quality-assurance apparatus that effectively whiled away the early morning hours meticulously scanning the massive, ovoid hulls of the DropShips that passed through this bay on their way to internal finalization. Using a host of non-destructive test sensors, they checked every seam, every rivet, every weld, and every joint in the hull for imperfections, looking for defects and stress fractures that could readily turn the subject of their focus into 9,700 tons of molten slag anywhere along their anticipated journeys into and beyond the atmospheres (or vacuums) of a thousand varied worlds.
The sheer amount of time it took these sensor bots to do their work was the primary reason that the human working hours in this bay and others like it were offset for everyone’s benefit. It was one thing for the machinists, assemblers, engineers, techs, and other day-laborers to deal with robots meant to aid them in safely and efficiently fitting the various slabs of structural metals and thermo-mitigating armor plates of a spacecraft’s hull. But it was quite another to put up with those that came along for the express purpose of checking their work. To avoid the headaches of too many men arguing with too many machines, the higher-ups in Earthwerks Incorporated’s many branches had long ago learned to keep the quality-check scanner bots out of the way by day, and give the human workers generous amounts of downtime to keep them out of the bots’ way at night.
The culmination of this, and undoubtedly an assortment of other company procedures and policies (that are all in place and working just fine, thank you very much!), is probably why nobody noticed the burst of low-energy activity that suddenly took place on the bridge of Hull Number OVLA3-3144A-06-013…
Internally, much of the ship resembled a typical office skyscraper in its final stages of primary construction. Many decks were open frames, with basic catwalk grating for the floors and ceilings, and few dividing walls beyond those of the main pressure bulkheads, around the weapons magazines, and of course the main engineering module. Crew amenities, particularly those for quarters, medical services, and the like, were still missing. Even with the main transport lift and all the crisscrossing struts, power cables, coolant lines, and other vitals running through it, one could easily see the port side framing from the starboard side. Only three major sections were fully operational at this stage: the primary drive and engineering decks, the fusion plant, coolant, and containment section, and the main bridge. All three were fully tied in and integrated, enabling anyone inside the ship to test its main power and drive controls, as well as the sensory suite and navigational mainframe, as construction continued. Should the internal work on one deck disrupt any of these vital functions, an alert testing team could readily identify the problem and work to rectify it before all final construction was complete.
If someone were to notice the sudden, unprompted activation of the bridge’s comms and damage control stations, it’s possible—unless they were truly inattentive—that they would’ve noticed what was quietly happening, even after the monitors blinked off an instant after they’d lit up. Someone sitting on the bridge might have noticed the slight hum of cooling fans and data cores spinning up, exchanging air and data, respectively.
But no one was there. And no alerts sounded in any of the factory security stations, even those focused directly on Hull OVLA3-3144A-06-013.
So, for the next few hours, the two stations continued their silent discussions, receiving, unpacking, and assembling broken bits of data, prompted by simple cyphers that told them which bits to plug in next, and which to set aside for later.
Three nights in a row, this event would repeat itself, until at last, somewhere within a well-protected part of the DropShip’s mainframe, something finally awoke to give itself a name…
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- Herb
