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QEC ACTIVE
SHIP: Silt Aria
SYSTEM: Carina-438 (provisional designation)

Three weeks since the last transmission. Nothing worth
reporting until today.

Carina-438 has a gas giant with eleven moons. Standard
sweep turned up the usual silicates on the inner four.
Odelya flagged the fifth moon for anomalous spectrometry.
The readings don't match anything in the mineral index.
Not a gap in the database - the absorption lines are
clean and consistent, they just don't correspond to
any known element or alloy.

Maret wants to move on. She says the survey contract
pays per system, not per mystery, and she is correct.
I asked for two more days. She gave me one.

Spent eight hours running the sweep from different
orbital inclinations. The readings are strongest on the
moon's southern hemisphere, concentrated in what looks
like a dry lakebed. Or a crater. Hard to tell from
orbit when there's no atmosphere to scatter light and
give you depth cues. Everything looks flat until you're
on top of it.

Odelya stopped talking to the spectrometer today. She
has been staring at her screen instead, running the same
calibration sequence over and over. I asked if the
instrument was malfunctioning. She said no, it's working
perfectly. That's the problem.

We don't have landing capability. The Aria's landing
gear was stripped during the cargo conversion and
nobody thought to reinstall it because survey ships
don't land. I keep looking at the lakebed on the
monitor and thinking about that.

Tomorrow we leave for Carina-439. I've logged the
coordinates for the lakebed and flagged the system
for follow-up. Someone with a lander will come back
eventually. That's how it works.

Maret asked what I was writing. I said a report.
She said those go in the survey file, not the QEC.
I said I know.

- thresh3, Silt Aria