SET 017: Rojar VI Moon Charting, "Three Year Stretch"

Posted on 24 May 2013 @ 1:59am by

1,610 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: Shuttlecraft Virginia, Rojar VI Space
Timeline: MD9 1440 Hours

ON:

The shuttle burst out of the last moon's atmosphere and back into the inky blackness of space, and their speed slowed as the sensors adjusted to their shift in dimensional orientation. Rojar VI's next several moons were visible on the trajectory map which Liyar superimposed on the main viewer for Maenad. "Which shall we survey next?" he asked.

"I don't care," Maenad sighed. What difference did it make? "The closest one."

He zoomed in on one that was unusually... "Pink," Liyar cocked his head at the map. "It appears to be composed of an unusual element." The moon was a bright, neon pink spot on their map.

"Set a course," she gestured them forward.

Their shuttle cut through the space between R010 and R014 in little time at high impulse, and by the time Liyar set them in orbit around the radiant, auroral moon aerocapture had become a routine process for Liyar who had become familiar with Virginia's systems in the time that they'd been on their mission. R014 was luminous and almost phosphorescent, with spires of bright pink, fuchsia, red and orange blending together before them.

"That's weird," Maenad said, looking outside. "Is it just me or is that moon pink?"

"Pink," he agreed. "It is possible it could be an alien element on the surface that has created this color, or it could be the product of subsurface discharge which illuminates the planet in such a way."

"It looks like a ball of bubblegum," Maenad thought aloud, impressed with her rather obvious analogy. Her tongue watered as she realised she hadn't chewed bubblegum for years. There was a time in her life, she remembered, that she was almost always chewing gum. "I'm launching a probe," she told him.

"Bubblegum?"

The probe left the shuttle, sending a minor jolt felt in their feet. Maenad glanced at him sideways, smiling. "Yes," she said. "You've never heard of gum?" She couldn't believe that.

"No, I have not. What is it?"

"It's..." Maenad trailed off, not knowing what to say. What was gum? She frowned. "It's something you chew. There are lots of flavours. You spit it out when it gets too hard or loses its flavour." She shook her head. "I'll show you sometime."

"What a highly illogical substance," Liyar commented, baffled. Why would one manufacture a food item with the ultimate purpose of being spit out? Terrans were confounding. The monitor in front of him beeped once and he brought it down. "The probe telemetry is feeding in."

Maenad inclined her head to agree, but the incoming data stopped her from responding. "It seems that that bubblegum," she smiled, "is actually organisms that have frozen in the ice." A frown slowly crept on her face. "Halobacteria," she explained, "which is attracted by salt." Maenad tuned a few of the instruments to get better readings, then nodded slowly as she understood what was going on. It was probably unique in all of explored space, but she wasn't near jumping for joy. If she and Liyar hadn't discovered it, somebody else would have. And with the giant world-raping machines that were coming this way because of them, she found it particularly hard to care. "At one time, either the sun was much hotter or this moon was able to retain more heat than it does now. It was an ocean that has frozen, trapping the aerobic archaeon inside the ice." She looked at him. "I believe this is a first, Liyar."

Liyar observed the scans, piecing together what Maenad said. "Then these halobacteria are extremophiles," he determined. "Most forms of life merely tolerate excessive salt, but these thrived. Single-celled, Gram-negative, single lipid bilayer, S-layer, glycoprotein, negative charge," he interpreted the information on the frozen archaea from the terminal. "And the red carotenoid pigments in the organism created the pink color in the frozen oceans. There must have been billions of them."

"Trillions," Maenad corrected with barely a whisper. She eyed him as she turned to face him. "At least, if our scans are correct, there aren't any precious minerals here for us to harvest." It comforted her to know that this gem floating in space would never be disturbed by whatever greed motivated Lirha Saalm and her corporate sponsors.

"It is likely this moon will remain undisturbed," Liyar acknowledged. Intrigued by the data feeding in from the planet, Liyar's eyes never left the viewscreen as it formed geographic information and displayed primitive pictures of their frozen friends. "It says here that H. salinarum is among the oldest forms of life in the known galaxy," Liyar read from his PADD.

"Yes," Maenad nodded. "It's true." She had worked with H. salinarum before, having used it in several of her graduate studies. It was a common substance in ancient life everywhere, and she thought his fascination with such a mundane substance, something she never thought twice about, was adorable. She blinked, restraining her lips from parting into a wider smile than she already had.

"And-" Liyar continued, hunched over his PADD, "-the average isoelectric point of H. salinarum proteins is 4.9, overwhelmingly negative in charge. That is how it remains in solution at extreme salt conditions. Fascinating. It must be that the negative charge stabilizes the lattice," he postulated with an owlish blink. "Each crystallographic vector as an integral linear combination of base vectors creates a similar lattice point among integers U1, U2, U3, which results in symmetrical points that demonstrate extreme resistance to acidic degradation." His head twitched to the side and then he shrugged, setting the PADD aside and configuring the sensors to a deeper angle.

"Well," Maenad shook her head, "it's obvious, isn't it?" She scratched behind her left ear. "Everything is frozen solid. Nothing is going on down there."

Liyar's mind began forming the cell automatically, devolving into nonsensical numbers and vector patterns and primitive axes and parallelograms. It was topsy-turvy in his head, and he flipped it over and backwards and upside down, examining it from every angle. Perhaps there was nothing going on down there, but like a sponge, he was rapidly soaking up as much knowledge as he could about the mundane phenomenon. About to launch into another theory, fortunately for Maenad he was distracted by the beep of the computer systems. "It appears to have an iron core, and a tenuous molecular oxygen atmosphere, with a surface pressure of approximately 0.1 pascals. There is evidence that it was formed through radiolysis, not biology."

"It is impossible to know," shrugged Maenad. "We don't even know for sure where our first oxygen came from," she explained. "Radiolysis is the more convincing theory, I believe. The lack of vegetation here would suggest that," she hesitantly agreed.

"Solar ultraviolet radiation, ions and electrons from Rojar 6's magnetospheric environment collide with R014's surface," Liyar hypothesized, explaining the reason for his statement. "It would split water into oxygen and hydrogen constituents which are then reintroduced into the atmosphere. That radiation would form collisional ejections of those particles which simultaneously create the atmosphere." He gestured with both hands parallel and crossing over one another to visually represent his idea. "As molecular oxygen is highly dense in the atmosphere, being long-lived, after it returns to the surface it does not freeze but desorbs and begins another arc. Molecular hydrogen would not reach the surface, it is light enough to escape R014's gravity well," Liyar said tenuously. "Because every atom and molecule in R014's torus would be ionized, it would provide a source to Rojar 6's magnetospheric plasma." It was almost a question.

Maenad nodded again, more slowly this time, and her smile held. "When did chemistry find its way into your economic projections and whatever it is that you do all day?" she asked him.

"Aside from economics, my secondary field of study is quantum physics," Liyar answered wryly. "For these SETs, I have been doing research into astronomy and planetary formation."

"Oh," Maenad bit her lip, then turned back to her console. "Well," she began, "I'm ready to leave, if you are."

Liyar spared the glass panel another glance before inclining his head. "Our scans are largely complete. They will continue forming on our way back." He engaged the shuttle's engines again and prepared to break their orbit.

As the shuttle took off and sped away from the moon, Maenad sat back in her chair and crossed her legs. She stared intently at the screens in front of her without actually internalising anything that she saw; instead, she pressed the right side of her head into her fingertips and played with her hair. She didn't know that Liyar had scientific interests as well; he had never shown them. In fact, if she remembered correctly, he had always tried to avoid anything scientific and had even complained once or twice about not being a scientist. Despite that, he had just seemed more intelligent than half the scientists she had ever worked with. She looked over at him once, nonchalantly, before returning to her disinterested gaze at the blur of colours on her computer screens. She wondered what the day meant for them, where they were headed; would she lay in bed tonight teeming with regret, or would she be pleased with herself? It wasn't often that a crush so readily gave back. Really, she had nothing to worry about, she told herself.

END.

OFF:

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer, SSC
USS Galileo

Lieutenant (JG) Liyar
Diplomatic Officer, VDF/SDD
USS Galileo

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