A Different Path

Trying to hack their systems proved to be tricky, Evan had to contribute to the effort as well, leaving me on my own in checking for another way through. Deeper scanning was out of the question, it would be unmaskable and surely give our presence away. There were many corridors to explore and most of them had creatures wandering around in them. I explored as much of this level of the planet-ship as I could, finding rooms where they were educating the newer spawns and a few rooms where they were caring for the young things as well. It appeared that they grew pretty quickly but they had an infancy just like anything else. I also noticed that they weren't actually all the same either, there were distinct changes in the different generations, though I wasn't sure each change was actually beneficial. Some of them seemed to be grown to be nothing more than a mindless military unit while others seemed to be grown with the intent of being overly intelligent, though these particular mutations didn't seem to be performing as they had hoped and had been locked away in their own part of the ship. The more I saw the more it seemed we had reached the bottom of the functional part of the ship, anything below us would be critical systems and things that were not to be seen. The strangest part though was that I could not sense at all that unique energy that belonged to the original creature. I knew it had to be here somewhere, it would be the one in control and would have stayed on the most important ship, most likely needing to be protected and maintain control over everything.

You almost felt pitty for some of these creatures, their living conditions were not all that great and some of them were treated as slaves to the others. They definitely had developed a hierarchy in their breeding, it was more evident down here in the bowels of the ship as opposed to when you first came in, I suppose that made sense, you wanted the slaves working the systems instead of manning the important things like gun ships or watching over the docks. The service rooms were mostly unused by the creatures, it was like these rooms would only be accessed when they had to be, the creatures had no idea how easy it was to get into their ship. This proved to be to our advantage however, but it was strange that they weren't overly paranoid considering the importance that this particular structure seemed to have. Though I didn't end up finding another way to the next level down I did find something interesting. There was a distict hollow or unused space sitting between a few of the service areas. Judging by the thickness of the walls that we had been able to observe it was just far too big, unless they really needed a huge support beam running up the whole of the ship here. I informed Evan of this and we decided to give the hacking a rest and make another hole in the ship to see what exactly was in this space.

It didn't take long to cut through, it was actually thinner than we would have expected. Once the hole had been cut we peered in to see what was there. It ended up being a massive conduit, containing a lot of system access points and it appeared to run down towards the center of the ship. The gravity in here was different, it must have access somewhere as you could walk comfortable around the whole of the thing, the ceiling being made to seem the empty space in the center of it all while all the walls were mearly floors that you walked around. After sealing up the hole we made, Evan took some time to construct a device to attach to the panels, it should allow him to start hacking into their systems without being detected, which meant we might be able to get the information we needed without having to find the device. While he did that I proceeded to move down this shaft towards the heart of the ship. I was surprised how unprotected this area was, though that was probably due to the location of it, you would have had to get pretty deep into the ship to get into it and they hadn't anticipated something being able to do that. The further down I got the stranger things became, the walls became more natural, more like what you would expect in a cave, but still covered with tons of technology and the gravity changes they had made were maintained throughout the tunnel. I also started to sense something up ahead, a type of energy that I don't recall encountering before. At this point Evan had caught up to me, he too picked up on the strange energy and noticed how the planet had not yet been completely converted into a ship, though it was still in process. We did hear near this tunnel the sound of mining, workers must be on the other side of these stone and metal walls still taking all the resources from the planet that they could, a more grotesque form of strip mining I thought. As we neared the center of the ship we came to a pair of very large doors, my guess is that these were what stood between us and the very thing we had come for.