NationStates Jolt Archive

The structures hover on light-pressure and what one could euphemistically call solar wind, here at the altitude where the Sun's gravity is a convenient Earth gravity. They slowly move over the star's surface, keeping at 60 degrees longitude or so and opposite from Earth.

Big, flimsy things, collecting vast amounts of energy and volatiles. Not that there has been much production save more colonies. Some items that requre excessive amounts of energy to produce of course.

But most traffic is just data. Data and Territory ships custom-built to survive in one of the more extreme environments colonized by panhumanity.

[OOC: Just setting stuff up. No, I'm not gonna blow up the Sun.]

The pulse signal slowly meandered towards it's master. There was no urgency, it was more of... a curiosity. Daedalus had noticed that something was there. Something seemed harmless however, which confused the rudimentory logic circuits. Daedalus didn't recall seeing anything here except dust and plasma.

When alignments were proper that a picture could be taken without annihilating Daedalus in a puff of smoke and charred metal, the camera activated. A few photos were sent the distance back to the Hack. No rush. Low priority. No big deal, probably.

Daedalus turned, and resumed photographing Mercury. Oh, look, there's more ice... click click click.

There are more than a hundred of the structures - and they're huge. Great flat rings in a point-down conical arrangement, wreathed in immense bowshocks of electromagnetic fields channeling plasma, and in the center and to the sides lesser structures. Through the center a filament of intolerable brightness, the whole thing perhaps eight hundred kilometers wide and four hundred kilometers tall.



Or, to put it into perspective, a hundred-odd miniscule rat turds floating on the thermals inside a giant spotlight. Barely noticeable unless you happen to look in the right place from an odd angle. The lesser shockwaves of moving ships even less noticeable, the sort of thing that turns up in later analysis.