The Butterfly

The Exploration Part 2

Captain Cohen was monitoring the progress of the away team and trying to make sense of the situation. It looks like an insectoid species lived there and they later moved to another planet or may be extinct. However, the extinction hypothesis was not seriously taken. The reason was, that there was no evidence for that. After several hours of exploring the surface of the planet, finally, Sam and his team managed to find out another faint energy signature to the north of the planet. The team moved there with a shuttle and discovered a ruined structure. It was even larger than the previous structure, but this structure looked different from other structures. It also had a long winding of electrically conductive materials burrowed down the ground. The team scanned and it was a coil gun, pointed toward the space.

“Planetary Defense System?” asked T'Yer.

“Not likely,” replied an archaeologist, “If these were planetary defence systems, the projectiles would have some of the best rides in the galaxy,” she continued, “See, these pressurised rooms? These were boarding rooms. I believe it’s an orbital launch centre.”

T'Yer and Sam couldn’t argue because they were tactical and operational members, but the archaeological team members had the best knowledge of this situation.

Those team members calculated the launch vectors of the coil gun and finally said that the coil gun was powerful enough to launch a projectile at an escape velocity of that planet. 

There were also some genetic fragments, in some cases, there were some pieces of exoskeleton lying around in a room with several strange-looking surgical instruments. The away team took the genetic material for tracking and returned to the ship. Captain Cohen was ready to plot the next jump. The science lab reported that the gene fragments were about 1500 years old. The bio scanner of the science ships could be fed that genetic information and the ship could search within 50 light-year range. However, there were some issues, for example, false-positive and degraded signals could be hard to find. Nonetheless, they started looking for those species. There were several biosignatures matches, but they were erratic. Cohen tried to find out why and came up with a hypothesis that some plagues or other problems might be the cause of the erratic signals. 

The trace was found around 70 light-years away, at an abandoned orbital station. It contained some logs of chirping and buzzing sounds and some written stuff which was impossible to translate. Humanoid languages could be easier to translate, but insect noise was alien. There were also some flight trajectories on a holographic display. They were 250 light-years away from a colony world. They again set a course and finally, reached a star system.

It was nothing like an ordinary star system. It had a huge ring around the star, which was the size of the orbit of the earth. However, the ring was completely abandoned, however, the ring had, strangely enough, humanoid structures, not insectoids. Now they had a dilemma on their hands. Should they research the ring or go for the biosignature.

“The ring isn’t going anywhere. The best we can do is, send a request for another science ship to the main team. We can always come back later,” said Cohen.

The chase lasted for 2 hours. After that, they found another clue. It was a planet, tidally locked and they managed to transform this tidally locked planet into something amazing. It was a server planet. The sun-facing side had numerous solar panels and the colder side had all the servers. The thin habitable section between had the buildings for controls. The cold section maintained server cooling while the hot section of the star contained solar panels for energy generation.

The team landed on the thin strip of land in between the hot and cold sections. They entered into a room which contained some genetic signatures of the species and to their horror, there were some really horrible things in the room.