[Silent Running] McCutechon's World
Yet another adventure hook for the ever-popular Silent Running, the roleplaying setting that goes to eleven.
One of the few constants in the Strategic Action and Response Teams is that your problems don't tend to follow you around for very long. When you make your living hopping from crisis to crisis, it's pretty much guaranteed that sooner or later either the viral epidemics die out, the alien kill-beats get blown into kitty kibble, and the insane computers get deactivated, or everybody on the team gets killed in a fairly grisly manner. Once that happens the mission goes into the filing cabinet, usually never to reemerge save as a barroom story.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. One of them is McCutechon's World. It's second planet out in the Algol star system, called "El Ghoul" and "the Demon Star" by medieval astronomers. And as it turns out, it probably would have been better if we'd taken the hint from them and stayed the hell away.
But, nooooooo...
McCutechon's World is a planet-sized object slightly smaller than Earth, completely covered in what appears to be a single massive urban complex several layers deep. Whether the "world" is a planet completely overrun by cities or an artificial construct is still unknown more than a century after it was first discovered, for the simple reason that no one has gotten deep enough to find out and lived. Five layers have been mapped to some degree of accuracy, and expeditions have returned from four more. Nobody knows how many layers might still be undiscovered, or might have swallowed every STARTer ever to enter them.
What we do know is that McCutechon's World is really, really dangerous. The previous inhabitants attained a ludicrously high level of technology before they all transcended or were wiped out, and they don't seem to have been a very trusting bunch. Recovered records suggest that as the resources and power available to individuals grew their society degenerated into anarchy, and by the end everyone seems to have been pretty heavily armed and suspicious. Naturally, they left all their security systems on when they went wherever they went, including aerosol viruses, guard beasts, automated weapons systems, and pretty much everything else in the book. The first ship to go to McCutechon's was one of the first wave of exploration ships out from Earth, and nobody from the landing party came home. Things have improved a bit since then, but only a bit.
So why do we keep going back? I mean, this sounds like a planet that should move right to the head of the "lift off and nuke the entire site from orbit" list.
Unfortunately the former inhabitants of McCutechon's world, in addition to being screaming lunatic paranoid bastards to a being, were *also* bilaterally symmetric oxygen-breathing bipeds with left-handed amino acids, iron-based blood, and a DNA-based genome. Bastards even used silicon for their computers. All of which means that an abnormally high percentage of their science and technology can be turned around and used to improve the life of good old homo sapiens- after suitable clearance, of course. The artifacts and data files that have been wrested out of McCutechon's over the last century have cured deadly diseases, improved crop yields, made faster computers possible, and given START a crucial edge in countless other crises. It's a planet-sized treasure house of knowledge that's put the human race decades ahead of where it might be otherwise.
Too bad some poor bastard still has to go in there and get the stuff, isn't it?
Yes, kids, it's a Dungeon Crawl. In Space.
One of the few constants in the Strategic Action and Response Teams is that your problems don't tend to follow you around for very long. When you make your living hopping from crisis to crisis, it's pretty much guaranteed that sooner or later either the viral epidemics die out, the alien kill-beats get blown into kitty kibble, and the insane computers get deactivated, or everybody on the team gets killed in a fairly grisly manner. Once that happens the mission goes into the filing cabinet, usually never to reemerge save as a barroom story.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. One of them is McCutechon's World. It's second planet out in the Algol star system, called "El Ghoul" and "the Demon Star" by medieval astronomers. And as it turns out, it probably would have been better if we'd taken the hint from them and stayed the hell away.
But, nooooooo...
McCutechon's World is a planet-sized object slightly smaller than Earth, completely covered in what appears to be a single massive urban complex several layers deep. Whether the "world" is a planet completely overrun by cities or an artificial construct is still unknown more than a century after it was first discovered, for the simple reason that no one has gotten deep enough to find out and lived. Five layers have been mapped to some degree of accuracy, and expeditions have returned from four more. Nobody knows how many layers might still be undiscovered, or might have swallowed every STARTer ever to enter them.
What we do know is that McCutechon's World is really, really dangerous. The previous inhabitants attained a ludicrously high level of technology before they all transcended or were wiped out, and they don't seem to have been a very trusting bunch. Recovered records suggest that as the resources and power available to individuals grew their society degenerated into anarchy, and by the end everyone seems to have been pretty heavily armed and suspicious. Naturally, they left all their security systems on when they went wherever they went, including aerosol viruses, guard beasts, automated weapons systems, and pretty much everything else in the book. The first ship to go to McCutechon's was one of the first wave of exploration ships out from Earth, and nobody from the landing party came home. Things have improved a bit since then, but only a bit.
So why do we keep going back? I mean, this sounds like a planet that should move right to the head of the "lift off and nuke the entire site from orbit" list.
Unfortunately the former inhabitants of McCutechon's world, in addition to being screaming lunatic paranoid bastards to a being, were *also* bilaterally symmetric oxygen-breathing bipeds with left-handed amino acids, iron-based blood, and a DNA-based genome. Bastards even used silicon for their computers. All of which means that an abnormally high percentage of their science and technology can be turned around and used to improve the life of good old homo sapiens- after suitable clearance, of course. The artifacts and data files that have been wrested out of McCutechon's over the last century have cured deadly diseases, improved crop yields, made faster computers possible, and given START a crucial edge in countless other crises. It's a planet-sized treasure house of knowledge that's put the human race decades ahead of where it might be otherwise.
Too bad some poor bastard still has to go in there and get the stuff, isn't it?
Yes, kids, it's a Dungeon Crawl. In Space.