Geological Survey 23B

Geological Survey 23B is an abandoned settlement located on planet 3 of the Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1 system. It was a base camp built in 3111 for a survey team led by Professor Penelope Carver that was tasked with surveying the Coalsack Nebula. After the survey team discovered a Thargoid Barnacle and a crashed Thargoid Interceptor, Azimuth Biochemicals sent the Adamastor to retrieve the team and its samples. The settlement came under attack from unidentified hostiles during the evacuation, and the Adamastor departed early, leaving some members of the survey team and Azimuth mercenaries behind to die. The site was rediscovered almost two centuries later on October 29, 3306, when independent pilots received and tracked down an old transmission originally broadcast by one of the surveyors.

History

Geological Survey 23B was built on October 13, 3111 to house Professor Penelope Carver and her survey team, who had been contracted by Azimuth Biochemicals to survey worlds in the Coalsack Nebula. The surveyors soon discovered a Thargoid Barnacle and then a crashed Thargoid Interceptor on October 20, marking one of humanity's first recorded encounters with the Thargoids. An object was recovered from the Interceptor's remains and taken back to Geological Survey 23B. When the surveyors reported their findings to Azimuth Biochemicals, the corporation immediately redirected one of their ships, the Adamastor, to Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1 to extract the team and the alien samples.

The Adamastor arrived at the base camp on October 30, 3111. During the extraction, Geological Survey 23B came under attack from unknown hostiles, possibly Thargoids and mercenaries from Azimuth's rival Pharmasapien. Only Professor Carver, two of her team members, and the alien samples had been brought aboard the Adamastor when its captain gave the order to depart, leaving four other surveyors and a number of Azimuth mercenaries behind to die. Only one surveyor, Dr. Dominic Murphy, survived the attack since he had been at the Thargoid Barnacle site when the fighting began, but with the settlement's comms relay destroyed and no ships available, he had nowhere to go. A wrecked Scarab SRV at the Thargoid Barnacle site bearing signs of Thargoid weapons fire was likely Murphy's final resting place.

On October 28, 3306, a mysterious transmission was detected that contained part of Dr. Murphy's final audio log. This coincided with the transmission over the preceding days of an image of binary numbers in nine fragments. When the fragments were combined, the binary was translated into "The Coalsack Nebula. The stones. He keeps watching the stones." Independent pilots surmised that the two messages were related and flocked to the Coalsack Nebula to investigate, leading to the discovery of Geological Survey 23B, the wrecked Scarab SRV, and multiple Thargoid-related sites on Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1 3 on October 29. This development was quickly connected to the return of the derelict Adamastor to the Chukchan system, which happened on the same day.

Logs

Log No.	Log Text
1/4	LOG 20TH OF OCTOBER 3111 It’s Friday the 20th of October, 3111. This is Professor Penelope Carver. I’m making this log for our own records, and keeping it separate from the official logs we’re sending to our employer. Why? Well, I’m still concerned about working for Azimuth Biochemicals, to be honest. Obviously we take on all sorts of contracts for a living, and this isn’t our first top secret commercial project. But the rumours about this corporation… anyway, my people can handle anything, I’m sure. Azimuth are certainly paying well for our skills, I’ll give them that. And those debts of mine aren’t going away by themselves. The Coalsack Nebula has turned out to have a lot more scientific value than I expected. We established a site on this planet on the 13th, after we detected some very odd signals, and the whole team is excited about what we found. That’s another reason I’m logging this – if this turns out to be a big discovery, I want our names attached! The things growing here are like nothing on record. Definitely organic life, but with crystalline or metallic elements, and chemistry that even O’Keefe can’t make sense of. They’re giving off signal bursts on all sorts of frequencies. Are they living organisms or machines of some kind? Murphy and Sheng both think they’re alien in origin – as in, constructed by non—humans – but Kumalo found that so hilarious we had to turn off his comms. Our transport ship is long gone by now, but Taylor’s using the beacon to transmit our findings back to the company in the Chukchan system. She said the built-in encryption software is top of the line, which makes me think the stories about Azimuth and its rivals might be true. They obviously want to keep whatever we find all to them – Something’s going on. I can hear everyone shouting. Did the scouting party find something?
2/4	LOG 27TH OF OCTOBER 3111 This is Professor Carver, 27th of October, 3111. Hopefully this log will record – half of our equipment isn’t working properly right now. Everything’s changed since we found the crashed ship. For one thing, it’s… it’s alien. Definitely non-human technology. I should sound more excited, I know. Every scientist’s dream, isn’t it? But something about this just feels wrong. I know the others feel the same. Even Kumalo isn’t smiling any more. We’re still mostly in the dark about the object we retrieved from inside the wreckage. Is it the pilot, or the cargo, or maybe some organic component of the ship itself? It seems totally inert, but… we’ve had electromagnetic interference all over the base since we brought it back, and that can’t be a coincidence. Storing it has caused problems. Sheng lashed something together using the strongest bulkheads he could find, but apparently it’s still breaking that down. The equipment failures meant O’Keefe couldn’t fully analyse its chemical structure, making him so angry that he actually attacked Kumalo for telling him to calm down. I’ve never had to break up my people like that – we’ve worked together for years. It’s Murphy I’m most worried about, though. He can’t tear himself away from those growths on the surface. ‘The stones’, he calls them, like the Neolithic standing stones on Earth. We keep finding him out there in his suit, standing under the jet—black sky, staring at them. He won’t tell us why. We’ve been sending back reports, but Taylor just relayed a message that made my blood run cold. Azimuth has ordered us to cease all transmissions and await the arrival of their megaship, the Adamastor, which will transport us and our samples to a ‘secure facility’. And now I’m wondering why I got involved with a corporation that’s rumoured to have its own private army. Have I put everyone at risk by taking this job?
3/4	LOG 30TH OF OCTOBER 3111 I’m going to try making this log again, while the data drives are still functioning. They could go again at any time. Nothing works properly anymore. Especially not us. It’s the 30th of October. The object in our storage cage has become… noisy. l have a suspicion it’s even noisier on infrasonic frequencies, which would explain why everyone is on a knife’s edge and unable to sleep. I would ask Mahmood to do some studies, but he’s in the lnfirmary after his run-in with Kumalo. God, I’ve never seen my team like this. What’s wrong with them? But that’s not the important thing. I don’t think the ship that crashed was alone. Yesterday, O’Keefe came bursting in through the airlock like a pack of wolves was after him. He said there were lights shining down on the growths and on Murphy, who was just standing there. He couldn’t make out where they came from, only that the nebula above us seemed to be moving. He said… he said the night was opening up like a giant mouth. I don’t know where Taylor’s got to, so I tried the comms beacon myself, and found a message saying the Adamastor has arrived in the system. That should be a relief, but actually it twists my gut. What are Azimuth going to do with the thing we found? What are they going to do with us?
4/4	LOG… It’s working… suit link is working. Can anyone hear me? Is anyone still back at base? This is… I don’t remember. I’m not – Dominic! Dominic Murphy. That’s who I am, yes. This is Dr Murphy reporting. I’m a geologist, part of Professor Carver’s planetary survey team. But… I think they’re all dead. I was out here with the stones when the Sidewinders arrived. I watched them come down like birds with broken wings, lights flickering on and off, just like the base has been for days. Then there were soldiers everywhere, with rifles and armoured suits. I think they loaded the cage onto one of the ships, which took off again, just about. And then a few of the soldiers… I saw the flashes inside the buildings. Gunfire. Something exploded – the main comms relay, I think. But then came more lights, strange lights that rippled like snakes, and… and that blackness again, opening up in the sky. They tried to get away on foot, running out to where I was hiding, and I thought they’d see me, but then they were all flying up, little toy soldiers thrown in the air, pulled up into the lights… Now it’s just us. Me and the stones. They’re all I can hear, much louder now, but not hurting like people’s voices used to. Loud but far away. So far…

Timeline

10 MAR 3307

• Erik Gunnarson and Francesca Wolfe, two detectives from the Wallglass Investigations Agency, examine the background of the Adamastor megaship.
  Gunnarson: "When Wolfe and I started this project, we knew this case would come first. We're both protégés of Benjamin Chester, creator of the Wallglass Archive. He retired years ago, but that old spark kicked in when a 'ghost ship' turned up on his doorstep! The Adamastor is a 200 year old derelict that drifted into the Chukchan system on autopilot. It's still there, with the Alliance Salvage Guild poking through its guts. Chester investigated its owners, a super-secretive company called Azimuth Biochemicals. We don't know what they were searching for, but what they found was possibly the first recorded Thargoid encounter. I've since tracked down evidence that the Adamastor had a sister ship – the Hesperus – which in 3113 was sent to… somewhere! Neither ship returned, but we only know what happened on the Adamastor mission. Of course, Wolfe had to go see that with her own eyes."
  Wolfe: "Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1 is a busy system nowadays, but was unexplored when Professor Carver's survey team were there. Listening to their logs from two centuries ago while examining the research base was chilling… ghost voices from a ghost ship. There was evidence of blast scars, but I've seen enough battlefields to know what exchanged gunfire looks like. Azimuth's mercenaries weren't just firing at Thargoids, but at someone who shot back with laser rifles. Gunnarson tells me Azimuth was swallowed up by a rival called Pharmasapien. Did they infiltrate the Adamastor and try to take over? Or did the thing that Carver captured drive everyone insane? This is a seriously cold case, even for us. But maybe one day, more tantalising clues will emerge. And that’s what we live for."

12 NOV 3306

• *Pilots Federation ALERT*
  Commodities and anti-xeno support are requested as the Alliance begins exploitation of the Coalsack Nebula.
  The Alliance plans to construct several new outposts in the Coalsack Nebula. From these, commercial and scientific operations will be conducted to locate fresh sources of meta-alloys and other potential sites of interest. The initiative was prompted by the findings of a planetary survey team two hundred years ago, which were only discovered after an abandoned megaship arrived in the Chukchan system. Shipments of power generators, robotics, structural regulators and building fabricators are required, and can be delivered to the megaship Spirit of Nysa in the Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1 system. The more commodities that are supplied, the more outposts will be upgraded to starports and the greater the range of services they will offer. Commodore Morag Halloran of the Alliance Defence Force discussed security arrangements: "We anticipate a heavy Thargoid presence within the Coalsack Nebula. Therefore it is a strategic necessity that we act now to curtail the threat to future exploration. Independent pilots and anti-xeno squadrons can serve the Alliance by focusing their efforts on the Coalsack Sector KN-S b4-9, Coalsack Sector VU-O b6-6, Musca Dark Region IM-V c2-24 and Musca Dark Region PJ-P b6-1 systems, which will host the new structures."