Casual Play Astrogation

Beta Iola Shriner 92g (Hyphomonii)

You drop out of between-space, cruise to an orbit over a shining world with a single silver moon hanging just over the blue-pink horizon. Initial scans turn up promising results– an atmosphere high in silicates. Not breathable, but with a few decades of processing, it might be.

Curious, you put a mote-probe into the atmosphere, skim the data it pulls as it descends through fluffy, iridescent clouds, cruises low over the mud flats and stretching, shallow seas that cover most of the world. Everything has a shine to it– the soil, the water. It's all rich with metallic particulates, mostly tin and zinc, but there are traces of platinum, titanium and silver as well. There are no tides, there's no life, not even bacteria. The water is like smooth white chrome, like a mirror, and as the sun begins to set, the seas pick up shades of pink, of soft, purple-red and silver-blue.

It's beautiful. You linger a while to watch it, to watch the shift of shades across the water, and when night finally falls, leaves the world dark and depthless, you draw back from the sense-feeds of the mote-probe, watch the world turn slowly beneath you. When the probe finally docks with your ship again, you give Beta Iola Shriner 92g one last look, upload the data you've collected to the network, then turn away, turn toward your next destination. In silence, you spin up the phasedrive, hold the activation sequence for just one moment, then finally make the jump back to between-space.





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