Aldebaran

Aldebaran

The first exploration journey of the 13 meter starship Einstein was a loop survey of the giant stars Pollux, Capella and Aldebaran.

“Aldebaran I is a world barely bigger than Earth’s moon. It’s dense, having lost much of its crust and mantle when the sun went giant. And it’s hot. Here in the terminator zone shade, the temperature is over 1400K, pretty much on the red-line limit for our systems. The suits can’t handle the heat, and I’m not going to risk our pods out there, so this has to be a superficial survey. I sent out a drone.

“We spotted the anomaly before we entered orbit. Best guess is that it’s some sort of metal refinery - a pumping station to draw liquefied metals out of the lava lake. I don’t know what the giant fins are for. Chin thinks they may have regulated the flow in the lake, and that’s as good a guess as any.

“The structures are solid macro-molecular structures – something we’ve only been able to produce in the lab. There’s no power and the place looks abandoned. We can’t get a good date on the structure and they look pristine, but that could be deceiving. Whoever built this might have abandoned it yesterday or millennia ago.

“We’ll chart, mark and flag for future study. That’s what deep explorers do.”

- Tomas Johannessen, Captain’s personal log, 7 October 2210