And then it ends. The drive growls as it kicks the ship back into normal space-time, leaves you sliding toward a huge, terrestrial planet the sensors immediately label as all rock and ice. A glacier world– it shines white where it isn't speckled with dark, frozen stone or with the whirling shapes of muddy white storm systems that whip across the surface as if possessed with a slow, powerful purpose. Sensors pick up a single broken, drifting moon, but it's on the other side of the planet, out of sight.
No buoys, no ships, no stations– you check the network, and there's no entry on this planet. It's new, unseen, unclaimed. Intrigued, you move in closer, send a mote-probe to the surface, to one of the calmer places on the world. Up close, the ice moves like a sea, like an ocean, as if it were alive. It's beautiful– the landscape shifts, changes drastically with every breath you take, and for a while you simply soar over it, watch it, watch the stone and snow ripple and shift in the pale sunlight.
And then one of the storms shifts direction suddenly, sweeps up your mote-probe and crushes it in a sudden updraft. Cut off, you blink as you come back to your body, stare at the beautiful world, your mind full of questions, questions it might take a lifetime to answer. In the pause that follows, you watch Kappa Langsam Rinker 8g quietly, consider launching another mote-probe, ultimately decide against it. The world is interesting, and maybe some day you'll come back to it, but for now, there are other planets, other places, other points of interest to explore.
Silently, you make a notation in your ship's database, then spin up the phasedrive, prepare for a jump back to between-space.
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