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RimWorld Legends

AGC-2715

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AGC-2715 was a commercial transport ship. Its dull metallic silver hull was long and sleek, built for speed and stealth as it sped through the vast emptiness of space unimpeded and unnoticed, just as it was intended to. Built in a time of peace, the ship only had light armor and weapons, relying instead on its speed and maneuverability to escape from any hostile forces. Currently, it was transporting twelve passengers, all of whom were secured in separate cryogenic chambers and unaware of the passage of time or space.

The ship was fully automated, run by a full suite of interconnected and highly sophisticated computer programs that allowed it to operate entirely without a crew. Equipped with a state-of-the-art quantum communications array, it was connected to human controllers who could monitor the ship in real time and make adjustments to ship systems as necessary from their control center many lightyears away.

If there were any problems encountered during a voyage, the ship computers were pre-programmed with a multitude of procedures, contingencies, and fail-safes that were triggered depending on certain conditions being met. And if none of that resolved the issue, the humans tasked with overseeing the myriad of deployed company ships would step in from their control room often many light years away.

It was exceedingly rare these days to lose a ship to anything short of catastrophic system failure, random acts of the universe, or outside interference by pirates. Even rarer was an outright attack by corporate rivals, though it has happened in the past. Still, losing a ship happened from time to time and more often than not the incident was swept under the rug so as to prevent any potential negative press, lawsuits, and subsequent drops in company stock value.

Space anomalies were nothing new. Most were persistent and located in relatively fixed points of space and were therefore easy to avoid. If they ever shifted, constant observation of them from passing ships as well as deep space sensor arrays and outposts made sure that galactic maps were updated to reflect any changes. Some, however, appeared randomly and didn't exist for very long. These anomalies were incredibly dangerous, and unfortunately for AGC-2715, one such anomaly just happened to occur right in the path of the ship as it exited hyperspace.

Despite being run by computers, the ship had no time to properly react in order to save itself as a wormhole flared into existence in front of it. This hole in spacetime swallowed the ship in its entirety as it disappeared from sight within the star system it had just entered, and by the time the human controllers many systems away were notified, the ship was already lost to them.

The corporate drones who were tasked with monitoring these types of ships scrambled to figure out what happened, and judging that it was something well beyond their control, they quickly went about consolidating all internal data on the ship and its voyage into a secure server while simultaneously wiping the existence of AGC-2715 from all external sources. Its cargo, while highly valuable, was not irreplaceable, and while it would not be easy to replace them, it could be done. Once the report was filed with their superiors, who read it with mild dissatisfaction, the incident and the ship were soon forgotten.

The journey through the wormhole was turbulent and chaotic, and the hull began to bend and fracture under the immense strain. Many ship systems were damaged and malfunctioning, and the quantum communications array was the first to go. Fires erupted on several decks and many sections of the ship lost power as the ship computer struggled to maintain enough integrity and safety in the passenger bay for its inhabitants to survive the ordeal. It was programmed to prioritize their survival at all costs.

When AGC-2715 was spit out the other end of the wormhole in an unknown sector of space, the ship was tumbling out of control and had already lost its navigation systems. The engines were offline, damaged beyond the limited self-repair that the ship was capable of. Judging that the ship was therefore doomed, the ship computer activated one of its protocols to save the passengers, using what remained of its sensors to pinpoint the nearest habitable planet.

As fate would have it, the ship had been transported to the fringes of a star system that happened to have such a planet. But because the ship was spinning wildly and unable to correct itself, venting atmosphere and leaking radiation among other things, the computer was forced to calculate separate ejection times for the escape pods that the passenger cryogenic chambers had been automatically loaded into.

It fired them off in pairs, though they had to be shot off at different intervals because each time they were ejected the ship changed course and the computer had to recalculate trajectories. The computer also made sure not to eject them too close together in order to prevent them from somehow hitting each other.

Eventually, all twelve tiny pods hurtled through space towards an unassuming planet deep within the habitable zone of this system. With the last of its power, the ship sent what supply pods it could after them, and then emitted a burst distress signal before it died and the ship went completely dark.

Thus ended the voyage of AGC-2715, and the journey of its unlucky passengers began.

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Author's Note: Just a random idea I had and wanted to get it down somewhere while I had some creative juices flowing for it.