Dr. Matori's work had been stalled by the recent turbulences in command. He needed to follow up on his last spectralanaysis of ceritian nomad assault sites, but there still were't any flights out of the Omicrons, so when he contacted me, and nearly begged, I couldn't say no. What it led to was hours of bordome, broadcasting the same message and waiting for the spectral analyzer to spin up and take its data..Rinse, repeat, angle after angle. Of course, through at least a little of it, Simon was a jackass. "Freeport 7 is blown up. Same as its been for the last 17 years. Report it!" Thing was, so far as Matori was concerned, Freeport 7 was vastly different, today, than it had been right after the explosion. There are energy signatures and radiation tied up in the debris, and in the rocks and stations all around that system, a much slower progression that is following the same vectors as the orriginal explosion, tracing, for those who can see it, the shadow of the station's highly elliptic orbit around the system. Being out here dredges up old memories, memories and greif best left burried. Hopefully I'll be done soon.
Next stop is Tekagi's Arch, which, I'm told, is amazing. I don't know. Never been there, and not really sure how to get there. I'll drop in on some Blood Dragons, ask them to show me the way. They worked with us during the war, I've read some reports. Never met one before, kind of excited.
That was not the reception I'd expected. Not at all. Those Nova people were rather rude. Hostile, even. Guess I'll find it myself, the long way. Or, uhm, well, something. Might head back to Minor and find a Kusari native for help.
I returned scans of the Arch to Dr. Matori, who thinks they mean...something. I don't have any idea what. But it is important to his weapons development and energy research, so he changed some settings on that scanner, so as to provide more of a snapshot sort of an image, and guess what? He sent me out to get images of actual nomad and wild arms discharges. Which means, basically, I have to go fight them. And make it out alive, and go back, fight them, make it out alive, the kicker being, these scans, they don't work when my shields are up, and consume most of my powerplant, for noninvasive imaging. Sooo...how I'm going to get images of their capital weaponry, I've no idea. So far, I've only gotten images of their first laser types, and even that's a challenge...I'm keeping a repair bay open and dedicated on Lisbon....Hope I don't need it.