Arth
Aboard ISS Belfast Windfall

The caravel hung in low orbit over the blue skies of a rocky colony world in the Windward Passage. Arella was in her small lab aft of the bridge working on the artifact she’d been given. The markings were mostly Empire in origin, but a few of them were in Veloxi. That’s odd—Empire standard, Veloxi and—hello, there, what are you? At the edge of the permalite imprint were a few symbols. Old Thrynn? “An aspiring Rosetta stone, aren’t we?” she breathed. Hopping out of her seat, Arella brought the imprint over to a scanner on a bench by the window and let the computer chew on the linguistic markings. She also ran a scan for physical residue that might have been stuck to the permalite.

The chemical readings only took a few minutes. There was the faintest trace of dust on the permalite and the report blipped up on the screen. “Silicates and iron compounds,” Arella said out loud. She panned down the display, absorbing the preliminary information on the dust. Interestingly, for a world with that much iron, there was no ferrous oxide. No oxygen to mix with, eh? Arella checked for other iron-gas compounds. Nothing. An airless, mineral-poor world with a navigation chart etched in stone.

Arella reached up and hit the comm box. “Commander Grix? Do you have a few minutes?” she asked the insectoid Commander. Grx’bzzgah agreed to come to the science lab for a look at the crew’s latest project. Arella looked out the window to see that ISS Belfast Windfall was pulling out of orbit. The journey to the ruins of the Old Empire would take a few days.

Heaven Colony
Ez Fortuit Spaceport

Boz Grabow tipped his hat to a smiling woman as she made the universal “call me” sign. Yssk was waiting for him outside the customs gate in the landing terminal. The Thrynn engineer was standing with a few Veloxi companions. “Yssk—didn’t think I’d be seeing you any time so soon. You’re not gonna believe what they want us to do—the marigolds never quit on this stuff,” said the starship skipper.

“I sssee your trip wass a pleasant one,” grinned the Thrynn. “You’ll be happy to know we’ve got a good ssstart on the project. Of coursse, we owe favorsss to nearly every dubious husstler in the colony, but I’ll let you worry about that.” The scrappy gang of space jocks and engineers made their way to Mb’x Contractors, the shoestring machine shop at the outskirts of the spaceport.

“You weren’t kidding,” said Texas Boz. There, in the center of the machine shop was a wide, squat cylinder, about fifteen meters in diameter and two meters tall. At each of its four compass points, on the top and bottom of the cylinder, were box-like magnetic clamps. “What’s it made of?”

“It iss fashioned of treated aluminum and coated with ssseramic compossitesss—we are relying on the dampening fieldsss to keep it together,” said Yssk. He pointed to six large crates stacked against the wall. “They came, too. I do not wish to know what you’re planning to do with them, but things weren’t too pretty by the time I wresstled them away from the Humna Humna at the Varmu Terminal.” Boz set his hands on his hips.

“I’m too old for this happy trash,” he said. “We got welders?”

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Next: "Construction"

Tell it like it is, T-Boz! In other news, The Great Uhl Controversy continues to rage across the ICC boards. For purposes of H&C, the Dark Lightning entities roving around various Leghk Sector worlds are baby Uhls of murky, nondescript origin. Bastard Uhls?! Stay tuned!

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