The game begins with a prologue.
The sleepers crawl out of their pods and dress, finding themselves in a large cargo hold full of nearly a thousand other makeshift chambers, including about forty made out of coffins, and two legitimate medical cryogenic units. They find their names taped to the outside of their pods, which also match the names on the uniforms found therein. One of the two medical chambers contain a Major Sherman Cottle, the other Rear Admiral Ishida Tokugawa. Tokugawa’s pod appears to have been shattered by a fire axe sometime shortly after his internment, leaving only mummified remains and gore.
The pods themselves were linked through a series of makeshift distribution nodes and connected to a central computer and a hyper-sensitive gravity sensor, presumably to trigger a thaw when approaching a planetary body, which showed a mission time of 2,056,794, and then an error fault.
After examining an observation port, the party discovers that they’re on a ship very near a planetary body and asteroid field.
The party makes their way to the CIC and finds the ship essentially in a mothballed state, all systems shut down. The systems in the sleeper bay were set to trigger the ship’s life support to activate, and for nearly 235 years the only parts of the ship that received power were the sleeper bay and a hardened locker on a utility deck in another part of the ship.
They find a star chart with the star Persephone marked, and an X marked between Persephone and the nearest star, Bernard. Also, when Kim passes by the jump station, she has a vivid flashback:
Kim Remembers – 15 March 2785 – 03:30
Leaving Captain Millet and Sergeant Blake behind to continue plumbing the ship’s current status from the CIC, the party heads to the hardened locker. The door is locked with a key-code which no one in the party can remember, but the door does have the hallmarks of having been guarded at one point. They also attempt to enter an arms locker but again are unable to breach the door – the code having traditionally been rotated by the ship’s computer on a daily basis.
Returning to the CIC, Captain Millet informs the party that the ship is almost completely out of compressed gas, and they should refrain from excessive out-gassing until they can replenish the supply. Alternately, the ship’s hydrogen fuel bottles are completely full, as the collectors had been activated before the crew went to sleep. The party digs up a ship’s organization chart and then proceeds to the cargo holds adjoining the ship’s kitchens to check in on the food supply. Rough calculations of the ship’s durable goods show enough preserved food to keep the party alive for nearly a year, but likely only enough to last the full crew a few weeks.
They decide they must wake someone from the quartermaster’s department to get a handle on their limited supplies, so the party returns to the sleeper bay and examine the scripts used to manage the sleepers. It is found that the original code was meant to first wake Tokugawa and Cottle and then wake everyone else in phases, but someone had tampered with the code in attempt to make it wake a different pod first, but failed miserably, causing the party to wake instead.
The discover a way to trigger the wake cycle on individual pods, and begin first with a cook in the human services division. After the cycle completes, they open the pod to find a mummy, the cryo process having failed centuries previously. They next try to wake Petty Officer James Jenkins, the former chief of Human Services aboard ship, who dies of convulsions in the process of being revived before the party can break into the pod to help.
Colonel Becker’s log, day 1
Waking up, not knowing who you are, what you are, where you are, or why, that is quite an experience. I don’t recommend it.
I know my name and rank only because it was written on the slip on my pod. I just hope they got it right. That would be an awkward situation, if someone had switched the name slips on each pod. But it _feels_ right, and it matches the tag on the uniform. Also, the memory from the bridge supports it.
Something went wrong with the jump. Everyone’s fear. Everything looked green until we jumped, but then, the red lights at the crucial moment. And that is all I remember. So, all I have are theories.
The red lights were the port and starboard dropship umbilicals. We should not have been able to jump if the board wasn’t all green. Still, we did. Somehow, we jumped, and there’s a very real chance that the dropships, the Cynae and the Marathon, are no longer attached to the ship, in fact, I would be very surprised if they were. I wonder what kind of damage it would do to have two ships tear away from the main ship before or during a jump. The structural damages to Agamemnon would be horrendous. And I have no idea how many died with those two ships.
So, the misjump most likely damaged something vital, enough that we were unable to make another jump, and unable to fix the problem. It could be a structural thing, it could be the jump engines, it could be something else. But somehow, we were unable to make another jump.
If that was what happened, the logical thing to do was to set course for the nearest star. Still, without being able to jump, we would all be dead of old age before we got far, so the alternative would be to freeze everyone and set the computer to wake us when we reached our destination.
Of course, we cannot have expected to not remember anything when we woke up. If we had, we would have left ourselves messages, information, logs and instructions. Granted, I have not checked my quarters yet, there might still be something there. But the logical place to put that information would be in the satchel stored in the pod.
As it is, the situation is pretty much FUBAR, with the rear admiral dead. Murdered, in fact. By one of the crew. I need to remember to tell them not to touch the cryo unit nor the axe. It has been 235 years or so, but maybe, just maybe, we can find out more from the little information we have. Of course, the murderer might not remember what he, or she, did.
Noone in their right mind would murder the commanding officer in a situation like this, unless they blamed him for our situation. Or if their interests were not those of the fleet. That is more likely. So, we have a traitor in our midst. That, or an insane murderer. I am not sure what sounds the least disturbing.
From what we could gather, he set the pods to wake not just the command staff, but also himself. It seemed to have gone wrong; it is either that, or the whole bunch of them are in on this, and _that_ I refuse to believe. But the murderer might still be one of the ones awake now. Not a comforting thought. Things are far too fragile without that additional problem.
And then there is this: That it should have been impossible for us to jump with two red lights. The computer erred, somehow. That, combined with the murder; I’m thinking a traitor. It must be sabotage. Though why someone would sabotage the jump engines of a ship he is on himself (I’m going to use ‘he’, though I’m fully aware it might just as well be a woman. Hellfire, for all I know, it might have been me), I have no idea. Except that he botched the job with the pods, so he might have botched the sabotage job as well. Perhaps he intended for the jump-engines to malfunction, leaving us drifting, a sitting duck for our enemies.
As for why he killed the rear admiral, maybe Tokugawa had suspicions. But it must have been one of the very last to get into their pods, since noone seemed to have touched rear admiral Tokugawa’s cryo unit after he was killed. I suppose that makes major Cottle one of the prime suspects. Possibly the only one. Great.
So, when waking the rear admiral failed, I suppose I was next, as XO for the Agamemnon. And the terrible thing is, I don’t know what I’m doing. I am in charge of 800+ men and women, and I barely know my own name. Of course, I can’t let the crew know this, they have to think I know what I am doing, that I know more than them. That I can somehow get them out of this.
I am going to make mistakes, people are going to die; correction, people have already died on my watch. Petty Officer first class, Jenkins. I need to remember to speak to lieutenant Casey about that. And I need to keep a list. A list of those who don’t make it. Not that there are any relatives to write to, but I still need to do it, if nothing else, then for my own sake.
I have to admit I am rather reluctant when it comes to arming people. If there were hostiles on board, we would most likely all be dead by now. We need to figure out a way to get the armoury door open, yes, but I would prefer not arming any of the crew apart from security, myself included, until it is necessary. The idea of arming a crew who no longer remembers anything at all, and who might no longer match their psych profiles, on board a ship where we might not have enough resources to survive with a full crew, a crew that might not be stable, that idea is sounding worse and worse by the minute.
They are going to hate me before the week is over.