The Sprague Diaries

[jammi]

01/06/819 - PERSONAL ENTRY

Well, we've been here for a few days and there's sod-all-else to do when we're off duty. Might as well start a log. Not like I've got any other pressing matters to attend to. The survey of the topography is going fairly well. We've had a few scanner jams where sand has got into the workings, but they've been easy enough to clear. Rodge' knows how to deal with that sort of thing, so we were only out of the game for an hour or so.

We're hovering a few latitudes south of the equator, looking for aquifers - big underground lakes. Colonial Authority reckons we can just drill a borehole down and draw drinking water and irrigation directly from the underground. Of course, that depends on us actually finding anything to begin with! Other than a few major iron lodes up in the equatorial mountain ranges, we're coming up dry. The only water I've seen has been in the cabin's cooler.

Thinking of which, the survey platform's everything we were promised and more - loud, crowded, hot and unpleasant. After a nine hour shift floating in circles around some God-forsaken desert, I've just got to think of the pay cheque to keep everything in proportion. Doing this for charity or patriotism alone might make my blaster's barrel start to look awfully nutritious. I'll cut this short now before I get too gloomy. Five days down, five months to go.

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02/06/819 - PERSONAL ENTRY

Covered about 70 clicks squared today. On planetary scales that's peanuts, but we'll get there eventually. That, or one of the couple of hundred other platforms will. Still no luck on the aquifers, either. One false alarm - the scanners picked up a moisture spike on the surface rock about 7 miles south - south west of where we're currently anchored up. Closer inspection revealed a crashed ship - the sensors were picking up the leaking coolant and internal fluids.

Matt reckoned the scattered wreckage would have made it about fighter sized. Beats me how he could tell - the thing was a mess, scattered over a square mile of ground. Nice impact crater, too. Either way, it didn't look like a Bretonian model and there were no signs of life. Transponder was dead. It'd either been there long enough to run out of juice, or was battered bad enough not to work. We flagged it up with ExSec HQ and floated on past.

We've got a hydrogeologist tagging along who insists there's water around here somewhere. Says the topography is right for it - sounds like bollocks to us. He wants us to run scans along the darkside of some nearby mountains - thinks there might be some underground runoff from internal springs, or something. I'm not one for wild goose chases, but a job's a job. Captain White's up for it, so it seems we all have to be as well. No doubt tomorrow will illuminate us all.

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