-continued from July 26th-
Some remaining engineers -now mummified corpses- had locked themselves in the control room and barricaded the door. Ishta bypassed the door to the engineering control room via a service tunnel, and it is a good thing that she did, even though she got a leg injury while crawling through. The door was rigged with all sorts of explosives, including an antimatter device that would certainly take out several floors of the station.
With the Takmahl biodroid controller in place in the control room and activated, Aria was able to transfer her consciousness to the biodroid, much in the same way as we board a ship and gain control over its functions.
Well, there was a little snag: the biodroid's system identified Aria as being eight years old - the number of years that passed since her infomorph was sabotaged. The biodroid, naming itself Barney, conversed with Aria using children's rhymes. Not visible to us, Barney appeared only to Aria, like the ship's AI "Aura" appears to us when we command a vessel. She managed to pacify the biodroid and steer it to the hangar of the Indagatrix, where it remained inoffensive.
Meanwhile, Prince Seraghis managed to collect a sample of the versipellus entity, as per the MIO's instructions relayed by mr. Firth. We were able to extract from the station. Upon our departure, some instability set off the antimatter device, probably destroying the rest of the fungus, albeit not the entire station.
As we were certainly carrying spores on our suits - and on all material we retrieved from the abandoned station, an unpleasant decontamination procedure was due in the lamp's Medbay. Also unpleasant was that we had to surrender all material to the MIO - I would have liked to study Barney in more detail, even though I was able to download a lot of information stored in its memory. It will take some time to research all this new information but I do not doubt it will shed new light and give new insights into the history and customs of the Takmahl civilization.
