Journal Entry 2: The Roanoke
Year: 2546
Date: Dec 3, Friday
Location: Roanoke Research Station
I arrived at the Roanoke base camp 4 days ago, but have only just found time to resume my writing. The shuttle ride itself was not all that spectacular, identical in most respects as my voyage from Brussels to Ceres City, just a lot faster. If only the political situation were less tense, perhaps the USSC could expand its internal net of gateways to the inner Solar System.
The Roanoke was a particularly impressive construct. The main body was a long cylindrical habitation module, connected on one end by a ring and the other an icosahedral science module. I thought it a particularly fitting augment to the base station, but was later corrected that the base station was actually an augment to the module, once part of a climate observation array for Proxima b in days long past. Though the Roanoke was not nearly as big as Lagrange Point colonies in near Earth orbit, it was still sizable, as long as an aircraft carrier by naked eye; I imagine it housed about the same number of people. There are allegedly plans to expand the Roanoke to accommodate for the rapidly inflating scope of Rhynia’s exploration, but that was all I could gather from overheard chatter.
They stripped and sprayed me the moment I got off the shuttle. The technicians told me that cross-contamination avoidance was the greatest priority lest we want to die by a Rhynian plague or kill the alien construct with a human one. I was reminded of an anecdote of an explorer taking off their hazmat gear in one of the domes and dying two days later to rapid convulsions. They checked his organs post-mortem and found them full of hatchling worms.
In between the inductions, ranging from wilderness survival to the inferred taxonomy of Rhynian organisms, I was allowed to roam the station quite freely. Of course I was not allowed in any of the labs, but I had free reign in lounges and even a greenhouse - granted it was for Earth plants. I had a hard time coming to terms with everything happening, even given the preambulatory information. Everyone seemed to speak in tongues, mentioning entirely alien clades between organs I was sure were not real. I saw a diagram depicting what seemed to be a fighter jet with tentacles growing from its belly, while another showed a colossal fish, swimming in reverse to crush ice. I spoke to some other new recruits, mostly physicists heading for the newly uncovered lower decks, and they were just as bewildered at their assignment as I was mine. One of them kept going on about gravitrons, infinite power, and weaponization. I guess physicists are just like that.
I board the vessel to the Rhynia tomorrow. At the final induction, they told me at last my designation. I was to join a team of surveyors in Dome 4, whose last captain had suffered a fatal injury from a ‘two-legged torpedo ram’. Their captain was also their palaeontologist, and thus I was needed. Among my team are an astrobiologist, an engineer, a geologist, a security officer, and a few other Earth biologists. Apparently I will ‘get to know them once you’re in Dome 4’, so I was not even told their names.
Dome 4, alleged one of the retired explorers on break, was one of, if not the friendliest dome to human life. Dome 4 was also where two teams had vanished without a trace back to back. At least it was not Dome 2, where apparently, ‘even the air had it out for you’. To get to Dome 4, we would soon need to ascend the decks, just as the first Rhynian explorers had. Luckily, the paths were now fairly well traced and lit, but we were given grave and cryptic warnings about what might happen if we did not follow the tracks step by step. Getting eviscerated was apparently a nice way to go in those umbral corridors. We were also told that the decks were not worth looking through anyways, because they were on the whole ecologically dead - what the first explorers saw were merely pareidolia. A strange comment considering the one about evisceration, but I cannot think of why the USSC would lie about such a mundane and insubstantial matter. I will keep my eyes peeled in the coming months though. Perhaps I will be the first to stumble upon a deck ecosystem, like the marine geologists who found vent worms in Galápagos Rift! Only time will tell.
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