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Kas Balera is used...
Kas didn't join the back of the dock chain as invited and instead kept the Calista as a solo speck amongst the ever-growing mass of ships for another day.
She'd turned the engine off, something she didn't usually do in space, and was disquieted by how silent the ship was without the steady hum of power. The Calista kept a healthy charge in its capacitors that would power the ship's equipment for a number of days before they needed recharging again, and even then, Kas would only need to turn the engine on for an hour or so to get them back to full capacity.
Worm seemed neither happy nor sad to be stuck in limbo, but she at least came up out of her den for a while to take in the unusual view of the thousands of ships in orbit around Chantos. There were several hundred cap cruisers dotted around the moon's perimeter, guarding in case anyone made a desperate dive for the surface, ready to harpoon them and take them to the back of the line, but no-one was that daring. Occasionally, a medicraft would cruise by the Calista's viewport, lights blazing, on its way to tend to the sick and injured. The ones deemed to be most desperate were bumped to the front of the drag and Kas wondered how long it would take before people started injuring themselves deliberately just to get to ground.
Once she was alone in the cockpit, Kas turned to the HUD's controls and scrolled through its menu until she found the Calista's C-Ram Log. She selected it and was offered a seemingly endless list of numbers with the Calista's name as a prefix. She navigated a short way up the list until she stopped at a particular one that read:
As soon as she selected it, the viewport turned entirely black, wiping out any trace of ships, moon or stars. A blur of white shapes came into focus and suddenly Kas was looking out at Selva's wreckage once more.
Like all spaceships (save illegally modified ones, like booters), the Calista kept a real-time log of everything that happened to it inside a device called a C-Ram - a sophisticated computer that was built to remember. Where it went, what it saw and heard, what the temperature was, the air quality, weather, gravity, constellation position... you name it, all of it went into memory where it had to stay for no less than one-hundred thousand hours. It was a legal requirement for all spaceships to have a C-Ram for a number of reasons, but mostly so you could prove to the Federation where you'd been and what you'd been up to. If you got caught flying without one, you could face serious imprisonment.
But it had its uses too. Kas sometimes liked to watch back some of her more exciting encounters, usually dogfights - as much as a form of entertainment as a way of analysing her performance.
Tonight, however, Kas watched in deadly silence as the scene in the viewport replayed the aftermath of Selva's destruction, a sea of debris rolling in waves a thousand miles high. She'd watched it back several times on her way to Chantos, looking out for any small detail that might provide a clue to the cause of the tragedy, but she'd never seen anything that stood out. Branches of Selva's spine twisted and collided with each other as though engaged in a slow-motion swordfight. Huge chunks of habitation disks where people once lived and worked spun like shattered records, playing songs that no-one would ever hear. And people... over twelve million of them, all drifting chaotically, some perhaps seeking their families, the rest pursuing the stars.
Kas seemed hypnotised by it. She scanned every corner, looking for something she felt might be looking back... but she was never able to find it before the view swung down as it had when Kas had begun its evacuation. When it did, Kas reached out without looking and reset the recording to the beginning. Her finger must've touched the wrong button because the playback set itself to quarter speed.
Why didn't I think of that...?
The scene started again though this time much slower, the tranquil movements of the wreckage now even more sedate. But it still wasn't enough. Kas scanned the entire scope of the viewport, seeing nothing but death and destruction.
A sudden noise broke over the tannoy. Kas had almost forgotten about the high-pitched squeal having muted the recording previously to escape it, but slowing the playback must've somehow un-muted it because it was now audible again. Kas instinctively reached out to silence it but stopped herself abruptly.
Like the images, the noise had also slowed to quarter speed, and the effect was as if the top layer of noise had peeled away and revealed a newer, slightly cleaner sound underneath. Instead of muting it, Kas turned it up.
The squeal was now faintly musical, a furious cacophony of distant harmonics that was barely discernible, but just about there.
I'm onto something here...
Kas adjusted the controls and slowed the playback even more, down to the C-Ram's max of one-hundredth of a second. The racket stretched and pulled apart until the spaces between the noise became bigger, allowing the harmonics to become a melody - not a particularly tuneful one, but a discernible series of bleeps and bloops that belonged somewhere in the digital age. Kas had no idea what they could be, but she knew they weren't random. This wasn't the static of space, of the universe being born, of chaos. This had meaning. Design. Purpose.
She knew that she'd found something. She just didn't know what.
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