Leg 3: Saiph tag, Mintaka's Abyss, and Alnitak's Beauty.
20 Jan 2022Aurora Bael
I'll start this one by saying I definitely have to get used to doubling back. Rigel is about 180 light-years bubble-ward of where I'm camping out tonight. I could complain about it but something tells me y'all wouldn't care. But while I was gearing up to leave camp at Synuefe OH-D c15-6 4 A, I caught this amazing view.
This will not be the last amazing vista of today's log. I was saturated in beauty this entire leg. It strains credulity. The mind quails. I can't possibly express how many times I looked up and said "wow" on this trip so far. Space is beautiful, and the fact that the bubble is so dreary by comparison says a lot about the human condition, think. Barnard's Loop keeps getting bigger and bigger in the sky and I can't peel my eyes away from it. Not that I'd want to. It's calling me. To get to the furthest point, the deepest bright star in Orion, i have to go through that nebula and out the other side. It's warm up there. Inviting.
Saiph was unremarkable. Nothing in the system but a big, purple/blue star. Say goodbye, Saiph.
Goodbye, Saiph!
Now, here's where things start to get a little bit... Fuzzy. I'm going to do my best to reconstruct the correct order of events, but I'm really not sure exactly where I found what. Space madness started getting to me. There are so many things to explore and wonders to behold and places to stand where no one else in the history of forever has stood before. I found a system called Synuefe NP-Q b24-0 which was brimming with life. Same weird bacterial formation as the previous umpteen planets I've been on with similar atmospheres. Same weird tussocks that look like nothing I've ever seen. Some stratum formations, a pale Frutexa Metallicum, but what really got me were two things: the Aleoida Coronamus, and the vistas.
The entire planet was nothing but vast canyons and basins surrounded by the tallest mountains I've ever seen with my own eyes, dwarfing anything that looked "big" to me before. 3-5000 meters from base to peak, slopes stretching for half a dozen kilometers from the ridgeline or more. Even had the misfortune of falling off a few of them in the Scarab. Luckily, gravity was low enough that it was no great tragedy, just a bit bumpy and inconvenient. Anyway, if I keep getting samples of life-forms with this kind of density, I'm going to end up not just rich, but wealthy by the time I get back to spacedock.
Right next door was another planet with life that was... eerily familiar. Tussocks growing like real grass and Frutexa hanging out like a common desert shrub. It was kinda weird to see, out here 1000 ly from the bubble. We didn't bring these plants with us. I know because I'm the first person ever to stand here and see these plants. Oh, and my favorite sneeze-looking bacterial colony. It seems there isn't a star in this sector that doesn't have that one on at least one world. Dammit, I wish I could do more out here with this data, but there is simply no room in this ship. I am living in a very nice shed with a frame-shift drive attached to it. I can't run a lab here. But if I could... I guess it'll have to wait. I need to shop ships, figure out what I need to bring to make this a functional experiment.
Here's the view as I was leaving this one. Look at all the planets around that dwarf, all lined up like pearls.
I'm pretty sure this is the point where it happened, when I started zipping around Synuefe NP-Q b24-0 A. There were...so many planets. A lot of nothing, but none of them mapped or landed on, couple bacterial signs. I just... processed the system on autopilot. A lot of zipping here and there, landing, and taking off just to get my name in the books. Round about the fourth or fifth time doing that, a blip comes up on my screen. It's a wreck. No one survived, or their name would be in the registry. So... I get curious. And when I get curious, I get ready. For what? For anything.
And it's a good thing I did, too. Ten meters from the site, two automated security drones pop up out of nowhere and start firing on me. No worries, I had plenty of cover and enough arms to take on a platoon on my lonesome. So we play whack-a-mole for a while. I pop up, shoot a drone, they return fire as I duck, I move to different cover, repeat. When the shooting was done I felt... Good. Really good. Like getting shot at and shooting back woke some shit up in me. And suddenly I miss the life. Like, no inner conflict any more, I just miss it. I found two more wrecks and liberated both of them of material wealth before I stopped to think about the rush and everything it has done, not just to me, but FOR me.
It was a bittersweet experience. First, it's hard to disentangle that time in my life with some of the worst people I've ever had the misfortune to know. And also some of the best. Bob, Lenny, Davis, Russel, Williams... if it was just them, I might have stayed. But it wasn't. It was Conrad, Travis, Jade, Mitzy, and Blake, too. Then Conrad turned up dead and it was time to get the hell out of there as fast as I could. I'm sure a few of them knew. Bob Harkness sure did, but he had the decency to keep his mouth shut. I never did thank him for that. I really ought to have. All the same, as much as I want it, that line of work just might not be any good for me. As for first steps out of bondage, sure. But do I want to still be a shooter when I'm fifty? Sixty? Will I even make it to 60 doing that?
...So after having that conversation with myself for an hour I decided it was time to pound sand and go see if staring into the abyss compels it to stare back into you. Like maybe I could purge this feeling just by tossing it into the void at Mintaka.
I'm only 5Mm from it in this picture. Twenty solar masses are in that hole. I was afraid to get any closer because, try as I might, I couldn't make out an edge on this thing. My computer couldn't either. I was terrified. A completely real and raw terror that was nothing like getting shot at (or shot) at all. Once you cross an invisible line, you can never come out. It's so much more complete than mere death. So I turned around and headed to the planet that orbits it. Something was alive down there, and by god I had to figure out what.
It was breathtaking.
They glow! The damn things glow! And they grow the purest elemental mineral crystals out of the tops of their heads. Seeing these incredibly weird ass lifeforms clinging to a rock in a vacuum while orbiting a black hole? Everything made more sense. I felt at peace again. The want lingers, but I feel at peace with it and with me and with where my life is. Damn I am flighty sometimes.
Right up there's the Black Hole. Mintaka B. It lurks in the shadow of that nebula, its distortion barely visible from this distance. It's absolutely remarkable to find life here, in such a hostile and desolate place. It makes one wonder. And that's all I can do right now is wonder.
Rather than tempt space madness again, I elected to jump onward to Alnitak and see what beauty this famous star might hold. And I was not disappointed. You want beauty? How about a ring system 200 ls across?
The activity of this dwarf is so violent I had to grab a shot of it as I was looping around.
I checked the log on the FSS when I was done sightseeing and ready to sleep for the night. There are 12 bodies in this system with one biosign and a couple other geological phenomena each. And that leaves me in a bit of a pickle. I've still got a lot of ground to cover, including a double-back to Rigel. Do I stay here, sleeping under uncanny skies for the next week, and scan them all? Or do I push deeper into the sky?
I'll let y'all know when I figure it out.
Till then,
-Rory