Page 231 - The Chronicles Ser2 (6-10)

The exploration of the installation on Pan yielded more clues as to the whereabouts of the
mysterious Curators. The alien; Twinkle Twice, was disconcertingly silent on the matter other than
habitually pointing to the star map she’d drawn. She would only eat vegetarian options; and seemed
to take great fun in fooling about with the Mechanoids Audio Sensors. She had poor Midas
reprogrammed to do a silly little dance every time he walked into the Med Lab to see Lucy. He
eventually had a chat with Hasbid and managed to filter out her sound barrage; no one other than
the Kregan Chef and the other Mechanoids could hear the ultrasonic components. This soon bored
the tiny Imp and she took to scrambling the Menu Library circuits on the Mess deck. You could never
be quite certain what you would get when you keyed in your order. Dagnor received a bowl of
Savoury Mince when he ordered a large Jekkta one day and a beaker of Cranberry juice with a slice
of lemon the next.
“Has anyone from Navigation made sense of her star map yet?” he asked angrily, three days into a
survey of yet another system
“We are narrowing down the region. It seems that a number of the star systems here have been
“Artificially” created. Sort of “Custom Built” you might say” Leeson answered
“What?” Dagnor exclaimed. Leeson explained that the Star signatures, their Quantum Identities; had
been manipulated to give them a similar size, shape and class. The Planets orbits had all been
manipulated to give at least two worlds that were compatible with whatever life form the “builders”
intended to colonize the system with. T’luha entered the bridge with the stubby wand device.
“I’ve compared this with Kryst examples. They are radically different. This one seems to be a sort of
Universal tool; whereas the Kryst units are all specialised for a small range of uses. The circuitry is
markedly different too. This uses the Pico scale modular approach. And the power source is unique.
So unique it could be used as a means of locating the Curators home world” she announced and
stopped short when she saw the image on the main viewer.

On the screen was a large image of one of the inner
planets and its moons. The planet was a Water world. It was
covered entirely by an ocean several thousand miles deep.
However this ocean was devoid of all but the simplest forms
of multicellular life. The Ocean was highly acidic; and
constantly in turmoil. What had stopped T’luha in her tracks
was the sight of an artificial array orbiting the planets
second rocky moon. “That looks like a Gantrax ship!” she
exclaimed “A Votron Class platform. I’ve only seen
holographs in the Unat Archives, and they were fragmented,
but it looks almost pristine!” she added
“That’s what we thought, but take a closer look along the
dorsal solar panels” Leeson said. T’luha had the operator scan in close. The script along the side
didn’t look like Gantrax; for that matter it didn’t look like any alien script. It looked more like…
“Egyptian Hieroglyphs; what’s going on here?” she asked
“That’s what we want to know. I’ve asked that Twinkle be brought up to the bridge. Midas and Brom
finally found a means of repairing her encounter suit. She should be less frustrated being able to get
out of the isolation field.” Leeson responded. As he spoke the doors to the bridge opened and Lucy
along with Twinkle in tow entered. The transparent globular helmet, even with its headband allowed
Twinkle the ability to see a wider field of view than for other similar suits used by other races. When
she saw the image on the screen she became very excited. Gesturing and clicking to Lucy she kept
pointing at the platform and repeating the gesture of punching the air horizontally. Lucy calmed the
tiny alien and spoke.
“It appears that Twinkle recognises that platform as being a “home from home” I believe the phrase
is. She’s excited to go there with us; she thinks more of her kind may be aboard” Lucy reported
“How is it you are able to understand her when everyone else is stumped?” Dagnor asked.