Jeff Calan watched from the cell as his crews slid out of the ship and moved toward the UO. He keyed his chair to track them as they approached the surface.
As Russell maneuvered his hopper to transit over the UO. From south to north, Charles oriented his ship opposite and the two separated moving farther from each other as they close scanned the object. At two miles apart, both stopped moving and began to descend to the surface. Upon landing Russell and Chuck started their EM checks and released a cable with a cup shaped end ‘seismograph microphones’, and began drilling into the surface. Russell read the core drill depth and drive pressure as the bit sank into the alien alloy. At three and a half meters down the drive pressure dropped to zero. As the bit had no further resistance against it. Almost at the same moment Chuck called in with a similar report “Broken through at three point seven meters depth”.
The next steps were up to Jeff. Russel called in their results and waited for his reply. “Ring Charge .001 T and monitor echoes.” came back Russell instructed his charge rack to release one 1/1000 T charge into the breach of the air gun tube already locking into place over the drills hole. Russell set the detonation signal so the charge would explode ten meters after clearing the drill hole’s mouth on the UO’s interior. These remote controlled charges made asteroid mining much more profitable and less risky. Now using the charges to take sound image pictures of the interior of planets, moons and other bodies was fairly routine. Chuck informed Russell his sound probe was on the interior now, about four meters from the inside surface. Russell launched the charge and started the detonation signal timer. At three tenths of a second after firing, the charge exploded. Chucks probe was recorded and telemetry transmitted simultaneously. When sound echoes disappeared Chuck withdrew his sensor and both hoppers retracted their seismic microphones from the surface. Russell and Chuck cut shallow surface cores in two places, one to go with the deep sample and one to plug the long hole. Their plasma cutters glowed as they superheated the larger end of the plug and then again as the core was sealed back into the hole. Russell could hear the hum and rattle as the core drill changed cutting bits below his feet. Russell and Chuck’s hopper’s continued this pattern of stopping, drilling, charging, and plugging around the UO. Every two miles they parted, till the two met on the opposite side of the ‘Twin’. They alternated dropping the charges, so pictures would be more accurate and sound shadows eliminated. Each turned ninety degrees at their meeting point with Chuck returning west and Russell going east. They repeated their earlier actions now coming around the object’s sides, relative to Jeff’s viewpoint, and meeting in front where they had started, left the surface and returned to the receiving bay of the ‘Twin’.This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.
The core samples were carried by conveyors to the pneumatic tubes, along the way they were tagged, recorded and sealed in a tough ceramic compound. All data collected by both ships was also ‘downloaded’ into the ‘Twin’s’ computer as well. Jamie Chung knew pictures and computers, and loved mysteries most of all. She was quite an expert at taking pictures with ‘Terra Twin’s’ camera satellites (cam-sats).
As Russell and his team was finishing its first pass, they began turning out of Jeff’s sight. The two high-speed telemetry cameras operated from the survey room. Jamie observed and recorded her data as fast as the ship could process it. She had already finished mapping the UO in visible light scale. She called Jeff in the command cell and asked for the two non-visible light beacons on the Twin’s communication mast to be activated. She then changed the film and visual display modes on both cam-sats and repeated the opposing spiral pattern she and Ennett had used earlier. On one side of the UO Jamie had located a dish shaped depression in the surface, oddly enough there were very few collision marks near it and none on its rim or in it. She had never seen a UO so clean before. She took several extra shots with each type film of this and charted its location on a grid reference map, used for all globular objects by the survey instruments. At almost exactly the bottom of the sphere, she noted two pairs of long lines raised on the surface like low walls, or some kind of tracks, but they were only about one hundred meters long and six inches high. When she completed her third spiral Russell was just returning with his crews.