Sentinel
Another week, another hive run, checking up on the nexus. Hopefully, major construction, when it happens, will happen everywhere at once so we won’t miss it.
The nexus is looking pretty much itself, though-- no major changes, at least obvious ones.
(There might be more lightning.)
In all seriousness, there might in fact be some changes, although they’re of the “have I just not looked at that seriously up to now?” variety.
For one, there’s these:
Sleeper engineering facilities of some type. They were in the chambers right after the fork at the entrance, on both sides. New, or old and just grabbing attention now because Tekton is also an engineering-type thingywhatsit? Nobody in fleet was sure, so we’ll be checking with ARC’s records and finding out.
Also, DutchGunner, our FC, found a woman’s corpse in one of the Drifter wrecks-- identity unknown. Might have been a capsuleer who fell prey to them, but that’s still to be determined.
Tekton was still around, of course, and still busy … surveying the job site, I guess? We interrupted its work three times, so that’s something anyway.
The local SoE floatilla. The SoE are present in each hive; I’m not sure how they get the Drifters to ignore them, but they do. Their fleet is a relatively-safe (from Drifters) landmark.
You can also kind of see one of the other major features of the hive systems. Here’s a better look.
Every hive system is “shattered”-- its planets broken, unusable for any purpose. Some cataclysm happened here (and there, and there, and also there, and then also that other place over there), and it’s unclear whether the Drifters are responsible or something else happened, natural or otherwise. The consistency certainly suggests either that such systems are desirable sites for hives or that hives somehow cause systems to become like this.
Maybe large-scale spatial wackiness isn’t healthy for planetary stability? Just a thought.
Whatever it was, it’s hard not to wonder whether the system’s destruction was an accident, an end, or a means-- and, if it was a means, what end could possibly make that kind of sacrifice worthwhile?
Oh-- one very clear change? The Drifters have really stepped up their patrols. For the first two runs it seemed like every second room we were running into a free-roaming Drifter battleship. They seemed to be patrolling much more aggressively than before, as well.
Whether the hive has new structures and so on or not, there’s a restlessness to the place that wasn’t there before. That sense of sleepiness, or of complacency, is gone; whether they were there to try to defend against us or not, the Drifters were quite awake and very active.