The engineers on the Extraordinary Circumstances fix the umbilical that was damaged when the two ships separated yesterday.
On the Third Eye, Priorities for the repair work are set: Mich Saginaw will fix up a new probe while he recovers from his injuries, while David Markland starts on the gcarrier. Once Mich has recovered, he'll spacewalk to investigate what's causing turbulence in the area of the air/raft bay door.
Mich and Robert Morris prepare the new probe.
It's a replacement for the one that was lost on the island near the equator.
Avon launches the probe. It fires off successfully,
but when it enters the upper atmosphere it start oscillating, gets sideways,
and breaks up. It burns up in the atmosphere.
The first probe that's already in position (B) is
operating perfectly. There's nothing to see but snow, of course...
The three orbiting relays are working perfectly
too.
Marquis Marcus Crestworthy sets the new priorities: fix the gcarrier, fix the skin of the Third Eye, build all the probes they can, and only then mess with the air/rafts.
At the end of the day, to everyone's surprise, David announces that his fixed the internal components of the gcarrier. All it needs is patching the hull and it'll be in perfect shape. It's usable now provided they don't want to go fast in atmosphere (or submerge in water).
During the day, the working probe has picked up a small flying creature, about 1 kg in size. The beast is quite hot, and flies on by.
Mich and Robert have been working on building more probes. They have one working by dinner.
Vonish Kehnaan has been practicing all day on grav craft simulations. He's starting to pick up the techniques quite well. He still finds time to prepare an excellent meal.
After dinner, Avon launches the new probe.
It does almost exactly what the last one did, breaking up in the atmosphere.
There are no clues from the telemetry as to what happened. Apparently
the probe was functioning normally until it broke up. Something throws
it into an unstable oscillating mode, and when it gets sideways enough
it breaks up. The regular probe is not sending back enough telemetry
to make further diagnosis.
The Marquis does his part by taking the photo of
his eye off the ship and replacing it with a Moravian anti-evil symbol.
Mich and Robert respond by setting up a probe to
monitor what happens to it on the way down. The information this
one sends back should give them enough information to work out what's happening.
This takes them only about three hours, so it's ready to go before the
evening is out.
Avon fires off the new probe. Same target,
same trajectory. This one descends perfectly on track and crashes
into the ground (it wasn't expected to reach the ground, after all).
Everyone brainstorms the problem. Vonish suggests
it might have something to do with the time of day. The probes were
all spread out across the local day, and there's nothing special about
the last one that would make it any different.
Perhaps someone's jamming the control? It's
a very unlikely scenario, especially as there's not supposed to be anyone
else here, and why would the last one have worked, then? The probe
control channel is tight-beam, encrypted, channel-spread, and almost undetectable
-- even the telemetry data -- so having someone take control of the probe
is incredulous. As Robert says, "Only I could do that, and I didn't
do it."
The next plan will be to prepare a larger probe capable of both the scientific work and the engineering telemetry. This one will probably be too large for the launcher, so they'll push it out the back door in the tail of the ship.
Marquis Marc has decided that despite losing three probes, they need to continue and sort out that problem. He adds that he has one more piece of additional equipment that he will want mounted on a probe. It's to do with his own personal area of research, somewhat of a far-out subject. The unit will be about a cubic meter, with connectors for power input and data output.
Mich and Robert put the probe together. This
is a much more difficult project than the earlier ones, and it takes them
most of the day to put it together. As soon as it's ready (in the
evening), they go ahead with the launch.
Mich and Teri suit up and take the probe back to
the tail on a cargo lifter. They cycle the air and shove the probe
out the back.
Avon takes charge of the probe. He sets it
off on course just fine, but when it hits the upper atmosphere it starts
a bit of oscillation -- some unstable air currents seem to upsetting it
-- but with the larger size and mass, it comes through without breaking
up.
The probe takes up station successfully.
There are now two working probes observing at low
altitude. The original one is at location C, the landing site of
the free trader Donsharid in the rumor (it's just snowing there);
the new multi-purpose one is at location D, over the forest on the equatorial
island.
The Marquis prepares his special equipment.
He checks it out on board ship, getting a background reading, and making
sure it's all in order before deploying it tomorrow. He gives Mich
and Robert the details they need to mount it in the probe. The target
will be near one of the villages, and there should be room in the probe
for at least a video feed. Marquis Marc's data module requires very
little bandwidth.
Marc explains to Sagan that it's for his own unfunded
research, and he's not ready to tell anyone about it until his studies
are publishable. (Of course, Robert knows, but no-one else knows
that Robert knows...)
Mich and Robert ready two more regular probes in case they're needed.
David continues work on the air/raft.
Mich has finished his work on the probes and so is free to work on the gcarrier. It's a fairly simple task, with some vacuum welding to fix up the hull in the evacuated vehicle bay. David comes up with all the parts he needs. By late afternoon the work is complete -- the Third Eye now has a fully repaired gcarrier.
All that remains now is to check the hull of the ship. Mich spacewalks from the air/raft hangar. He soon determines that there's a slight warping in the mating surface of the bay door. He'd really need to get out there with portable fine machining equipment -- but of course nothing like that is on board. So he improvises by distorting the door itself to compensate -- rather a staggering task, but with Mich's skill he has no problem with it.
So after four days of downtime caused by the various mishaps and failures, everything's ready to go again.
Helia is bored. She'd love to take the Third Eye into the atmosphere and play with it, but simulated grav craft races hold no interest for her.
Robert would love to continue his studies of hiver computer systems, but without any traffic to piggyback, it's pretty much impossible. So he continues with his Sensor Ops studies.
The Marquis plans to wait for three days to see what
comes in from the probes, and aside from that do nothing much. He
does have a brief private conversation with Sagan that evening.
Misha has little to do; Akim and Vonish are studying
grav craft.
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(referee and those players only) (TO BE ADDED) |
At the village (location A) it's snowbound. There are mounds under the snow, but no sign of any movement. The anthropologists speculate that the mounds might be buildings connected underground or something, but they have no real data on which to base their speculations.
Marquis Marc's probe spikes. There's one significantly
high spike, as compared with known activity, and is accompanied by no other
apparent activity. The Marquis is surprised by the strength of the
reading.
The sensor can't be made directional, so the location
of the source is unknown. The strength would indicate that it must
surely be within 50m.. Marc wants another probe to help him monitor
the activity -- he hands the schematics to Mich and says "shrink it."
He doesn't tell Mich what it does, just that he wants another one, but
smaller.
The Marquis would like to put together a sensor
package to detect underground activity, but it seems unlikely that it could
be fit into a probe. Sonic, seismic, radar... Could the creatures
detect that? The surface has been subjected to radar before, so it
shouldn't violate the non-interference regulations.
The probe at the free trader landing site (location
C) is starting to see some signs of life. The snow has cleared up
a little. There is a turtle-like object in sight, but it's not moving
-- it looks dormant, or waiting, or something. It is consistent with
the description in the rumor.