from the star.
"for the moment it looks promising" said Aria, his second in command. "We won't know what it's made of for sure for a while yet but we should know if its liquid within the hour."
"Well it darn well better be, I didn't spend the last month pocketing for nothing" Finn grumbled half to himself.
He hated working the cargo tugs and he hated prospecting duty even more. the long, monotonous journeys from system to system, the spartan, bare and rusting state of the crew quarters and the dullness of his work. somedays he longed to go back to his Navy days of space battles and daring raids on enemy colonies, but when he had hit fourty the Bureaucratic Corp of the United Worlds of Humanity had moved him to cargo duty, and Finn knew you never argued with the government.
So here he was seven years later searching the galaxy for ever dwindling supplies of the most valuable substance known to man, or to any of the other handful of species inhabiting the Milky Way. it was clearer than diamond, more fundamental than electricity and rarer than platinum. Wars had been fought for it and poems had been written in its honour. Without it the United Worlds would fall as had happened to the Terran Empire and the Central Galactic Republic not to mention the thousands of independent colonies founded by foolish visionaries. It was the lifeblood of the human race and it was running out. He may not have enjoyed his job but Finn Kant felt strongly the pressure of his responsibility and as his prize got ever nearer, hope and fear overcame him, running round his head over and over again like the dark blobs of the planets circling round the red giant.
Telemetry from the scanning array mounted on the front of the Poseidon was sent to the main computer core and then split into three categories of information which were streamed to the sensory terminal where Aria sat. he walked over and looked intently at the bank of wall monitors trying to decipher the impenetrable charts and graphs shown thereon accompanied by long lines of scientific formulas, trying to grasp some concept of their meaning, to find out the nature of the ring but instead only realised just how little attention he had paid to hydroscience as a child.
"for the moment it looks promising" said Aria, his second in command. "We won't know what it's made of for sure for a while yet but we should know if its liquid within the hour."
"Well it darn well better be, I didn't spend the last month pocketing for nothing" Finn grumbled half to himself.
He hated working the cargo tugs and he hated prospecting duty even more. the long, monotonous journeys from system to system, the spartan, bare and rusting state of the crew quarters and the dullness of his work. somedays he longed to go back to his Navy days of space battles and daring raids on enemy colonies, but when he had hit fourty the Bureaucratic Corp of the United Worlds of Humanity had moved him to cargo duty, and Finn knew you never argued with the government.
So here he was seven years later searching the galaxy for ever dwindling supplies of the most valuable substance known to man, or to any of the other handful of species inhabiting the Milky Way. it was clearer than diamond, more fundamental than electricity and rarer than platinum. Wars had been fought for it and poems had been written in its honour. Without it the United Worlds would fall as had happened to the Terran Empire and the Central Galactic Republic not to mention the thousands of independent colonies founded by foolish visionaries. It was the lifeblood of the human race and it was running out. He may not have enjoyed his job but Finn Kant felt strongly the pressure of his responsibility and as his prize got ever nearer, hope and fear overcame him, running round his head over and over again like the dark blobs of the planets circling round the red giant.
Telemetry from the scanning array mounted on the front of the Poseidon was sent to the main computer core and then split into three categories of information which were streamed to the sensory terminal where Aria sat. he walked over and looked intently at the bank of wall monitors trying to decipher the impenetrable charts and graphs shown thereon accompanied by long lines of scientific formulas, trying to grasp some concept of their meaning, to find out the nature of the ring but instead only realised just how little attention he had paid to hydroscience as a child.
