by LokiLeader Mon May 28, 2018 1:55 am
With 2 votes for smacking the alien vessel at the edge of the Accretion disk and only 1 against, you all set to work. You calculate that it will take a few of your years in order to properly strike the craft in such a way as to dislodge it from its orbit. You return a series of prime number beeps and then you seem to get a steady flow of simple binary data. It doesnt take long before you realize that they are transmitting a string of data about the black hole and that they have made several rotations around it, having been caught on the edge of the Accretion disk only a few years back.
Now, with that information, you adjust a slightly better curvature of your probes and launch. Then you all sit and wait, with years passing before the moment finally arrives. Your first probe has entered the area around the alien craft and it appears to be perfectly aligned. after a few more moments of waiting the probe smashes into the side of their vessel and immediately activates its reserve propellants, causing the small craft and the probe to push away from eachother. The second probe is on its way and it too crashes into the vessel, but this time it is set to push to object on a curved course outside the edge of the disk.
You wait and wait until the probe runs out of steam, and your third probe, properly timed, comes swooping in to finish the push. It connects with the object, BUT THEN SOMETHING GOES WRONG! Chunks of the other craft go splintering off and probe fails to grapple with the object, instead hitting a glancing blow and damaging the other craft. A noticable hole now exists in the vessel and you now read only about 1300 life signs. They are still trapped unfortunately. You wait for a while hoping for something to happen, and to your surprise something does. A single smaller vessel is jettisoned from the larger one. After a few seconds the larger vessel explodes in a wave of energy unfamiliar to your sensors and the explosion propels the smaller object a decent distance, enough that you can pass by safely and attach a magnetic cable to it, pulling it with you. You move through the surrounding dust and debris caused by the explosion, as it sent objects and particles hurling into the depths of space at near half the speed of light.
You have successfully rescued this small vessel, its larger counterpart destroyed. On board you can read 300 life signs. It seems that the object was a modified space probe of theirs, and has minimal atmosphere and has already burnt much of its fuel getting here. The object drifts helpless behind you. It appears that this soecies breathes a nitrogen heavy air content, with helium and hydrogen as their primary catalyst. Similar to human atmospheric requirements, but with no oxygen and more helium. It would be possible to turn some of the cargo spaces into a habitat for these beings, your water supply could probably last thorugh an entire human lifecycle, who knows how long it might last for them.
You could of course just refuel them and give them a sustaining life support and send them on their way to another star, but it is difficult to say if they have proper provisions or not. You must choose now, what do you do with these 300 wayward souls?
