>>5651928>>5652525Could work with that another time.
And okay, sorry for the delay, but we're back!
>>5651748You and Videl approach the screen, Kuriza smiling proudly as he looks over a trio of results. “The one here is an older world rich in metallic resources, primarily iron.” he explains as he shows the first result.
Getting it sent to your goggles, you do a bit of analysis of your own. It’s a natural world similar to Mercury, but halfway between Mars and Venus in size, and almost a billion years older. The planet orbits a white dwarf star on average 1.4 au away, a bit closer than Mars but further than Earth. It certainly fits the description of an inert, metallic world that the Machine Mutants could start colonizing. It’s apparently on the edge of the central galaxy of the eastern quadrant, though it’s not exactly one the PTO has claim to. Still, that’s helpful.
“While this one, it may not be covered in nanomachines, but there is a significant amount of machinery present across the surface.” Kuriza shows you the next world, a bit less confident in the result.
It’s… effectively one giant junk heap. A planet with around 10x the gravity of Earth that’s attracted scores upon scores of interstellar debris across a good… 9 million years or so. Sheesh. The star it orbits is a stable red dwarf barely a light-minute away, in a system that had seen sparse colonization efforts across the millennia but none that lasted for very long, relatively speaking. Ruins of derelict space stations dot the system in general, with a vast majority either around the planet or within the Lagrange points. Kessler Syndrome’s rampant in planetary orbit, too. This one is… more of a fixer-upper, for sure, but it is technically within PTO jurisdiction, cataloged as Cold Planet 42.
(cont.)
