![]() The memory still burned in her mind, the furious glaring eye of a star's death cutting into her mind's eye. The self-repair mechanism has gone wrong, hurt by what happened at Lysaidon." Lysaidon. The matter bound to the void bubble inside is held in place by a self-repairing nanoscale structure, it helps to dissipate heat and absorb shocks and, somehow, integrate with the ship's control systems. "It's only gotten worse since you last asked. Better metaphor?" Finally his eyes, impossibly ancient, opened a crack. "Fine, I'm an ant trying to fix the supports holding the engine in place. "You're saying you haven't made any progress on fixing the housing?" "It's not the drive itself that's broken, that's what you told me," Carina replied, pinching the bridge of her nose. We'd better just hope that the Anesidora can limp on a few dozen more lightyears." We're out in the Periphery, lightyears from any kind of civilised system. We may as well be ants trying to troubleshoot an internal combustion engine. "There's nothing much new to talk about," he said, eyes still shut. "Saeltza? We need to talk about the drive, again." Then, the pastel blue walls of the engineering room whispered into existence, Saeltza hanging from one of the reaction mass pipes which circumnavigated the cramped space, his small, simian face lost in what could almost be meditation. She opened a link to the engineering deck, watching as the telepresence fog shifted and danced through a dozen colours and patterns and forms as the connection stabilised. Despite how small the vibration felt, Carina knew it was the product of titanic energies, forces well beyond human comprehension, struggling against one another deep inside the Anesidora as the ship's systems manipulated the fine structure of spacetime. ![]() The drive stuttered, again, a shiver so small it may as well have been subliminal passing through Anesidora 's hull. Vignette - 'Decisions, Decisions' by Lily Harper ![]() While each ship is largely self-supporting and self-maintaining, the exigencies of their missions may occasionally require the activation of a Fleet Advance Support Base or even direct assistance from a sufficiently advanced system. Ship missions may range from brokering social and diplomatic agreements between conflicting parties to rescue, repair, and remediation efforts after a large scale infrastructure malfunction, natural disaster, or failed ascension attempt. Fleet vessels are able to deploy a large and diverse array of vessels, devices, and infrastructure in support of exploration, system development, and rendering assistance to worlds and systems in need. The Andian Mission Outer Volumes Assistance Fleet consists of tens of thousands of vessels rendering aid to thousands of Outer Volumes star systems each year. The core Mission eventually developed into an archival data storage concern, while the Andian Mission Assistance Fleet remains a highly regarded support organization in the Carina-Vela Outer Volumes and beyond the Aquila Rift. While the core organization soon ossified and lost sight of the original goals, the active arm remained much the same as when it was started due to the amount of interstellar travel. This idealistic organization managed to contact hundreds of lost worlds, doing much good in the following millennia. The Mission was based on a mixture of tolerant and pragmatic NoCoZo philosophies and managed to get support both from the Sophic League and the Mutual Progress Association. In the wake of the Version War and in the spirit of the ComEmp, the Andian Mission was instituted in 4744 by some groups in the NoCoZo to help the badly damaged, isolated, or poor systems of the Outer Volumes as well as try to contact the remaining fleets that were unaware of the end of the war. ![]() The Andian Mission Assistance Ship (AMAS) - Anesidora arriving at Nirauthi after the biosystem chaos collapse of 8259. ![]()
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