Day 1: Falling Stars

In the middle of the night (according to top-side clocks, at least), a shower of meteorites slammed into the bottom of SpinDizzy, far faster and harder than the field should permit such things. Though it only resulted in small vibrations on the surface, it shook Feedback City, scattered alumina glass windows across its streets like sprinkles of crystal sugar, fractured the spines of organic tenements, shattered the carapace of a stately dome here or there, and inflicted concussive drive-head collisions on a number of its innocent, synthetic-personality citizens, etc.

Maynard and Kandra set off to investigate, commandeering one of Azure's mechafoxes along the way. On the underside of SpinDizzy, they witnessed the streaks of more objects 'falling' from the sky, seemingly unimpeded by the field that all diagnostics showed as operating normally, striking from the sternwise direction. In short order they recovered a few: Not common meteorites of silicates or iron but something else. Guiding the appropriated fox to slurp a few of them up, they found objects shaped with an undeniable but ambiguous intention, somehow awkward to move without being heavy.

Just as the bombardment seemed to be tapering off and the pair were leaving with their catch, they received an extra slug for free, sent with express delivery to the hip of the Fox Bot and sending it spinning violently. Although Maynard and Kandra were shielded by the vehicle's safety measures, the spare slugs bouncing around its skull did considerable damage. With the aid of Maynard's colleagues at Priestly's, they managed to drag the crippled fox, and the retrieved, strange meteorites, back to Priestly's.

Current SpinDizzy trajectory: moving away from source of bombardment, to swing around an interesting pulsar.

Days 2 and 3: Look Before You Leap

Maynard sends out a call for further help from those so inclined:

Hey people,
  
A while ago Kandra and I found out the hard way that some
kind of railgun slugs or other shots were being fired at the
planetoid's underside. I figure either somebody's shooting
at us, or somebody's shooting at somebody else and we've got
the dumb luck to be stuck in the middle. In either case it'd
be nice to trace where these shots are coming from and ask
them nicely to please stop, or if that fails, ask them not
so nicely. What's more, the shots have weird, inconsistent-
seeming physical properties. They're hard to put into words,
but I figure they're worth looking into and seeing if
there's a chance they can be put to some more useful and
less destructive end, right? If you're interested, meet me
at Priestly's on Saturday.
  
-Maynard

At the appointed time, the others arrive at Priestly's; for curiosity, self-preservation, or just something to do. The slugs they retrieved are waitiung there. Four of them. Rough cylinders of silver metal with just a faint tint of blue where the sheen catches the light, wide enough that your average SpinDizzy humanoid could just wrap their arms around them. They've been deformed by their impact, scratched along their length by the rough sand and crags of the Underside, but some of their original shape and nature still is visible: One end looked like it was tapered before the impact, the other looked flat, heavy. There were a tremendous number of very old micro-craters under the more recent, larger dents of impact. More on the tapering side than the flat one. On some of the better preserved slugs, flattened rectangular pieces sticks out a few centimeters on one side or both.

[To be Filled out]

Day 4

Setting off to examine the point where Ember's probes detected a gravity anomaly and lost contact, the team meets on Spengo to board The Leaper and Ember's small shuttle.

It's just a hop, skip, and a leap from Spengo to this point: The Leaper and Ember's shuttle scouted out ahead of SpinDizzy to examine the point where the android's probes went AWOL while investigating a gravitational anomaly. Coming out of FTL above a barren super earth, it wasn't hard to find the source: A large trojan in the L4 point, dinner-roll shaped and about 1.5 km across, it looks like all the others, just another rock, and for the most part it shows up on your sensors that way as well.

Except for the slight trembles of gravity you detect from it for a moment before they go dead. And a large rent that travels obliquely across it, the flash of silver underneath along with faint detection of active if weak power sources. Dust hovers around it in an unnaturally thick cloud, briefly disturbed by a puff and an eddy before resettling during the gravitational hiccups.

And nearby some few, silvery debris of what were once Ember's automated probes.

What follows is a series of cautious experiments involving automated probes from the Leaper:

TheThirdPart (last edited 2017-12-16 17:37:17 by Wormwood)