On the Outer Rim

Chapter 3: The First Steps into a Dark Room

Date – January 22nd 3035

Time – 7:45pm

System – Outer Rim system Alpha

Planet – -unknown-

Location – -unknown-

Status – Optimistic

With nothing but the clothes on their backs and what they could salvage from the Dauntless, Justin's team sat amongst the pods as Jamal looked around with augmented binoculars. It allowed the user to zoom in with ease with a built in scanner.

"What ya see up there?" Addis called out from lying on Justin.

"Well...let's see. Grass, mountains, grass, more grass, there's a rock over there, wait...storm clouds." Everyone stood up and looked over to where Jamal was looking. Indeed there were black clouds coming towards them fast.

"We can't carry all of this crap." Covy said. Justin stood up and straightened his back looking over his friends.

"Alright, me, Addis and Covy will head out towards those mountains. Jamal, you stay here with Manlin and watch over this stuff. We'll come back for you and haul it." Jamal nodded and jumped down to accompany Manlin.

Justin, Addis and Covy all carried with them a backpack filled with tools and a full pack survival meal. It could last them the whole day if they really wanted it too. Justin handed Jamal a M4 carbine with a stern look on his face.

Jamal knew what it meant. "Shoot to kill?" He asked.

"Shoot to protect. We don't know what's on this planet." Jamal nodded and Justin ran to catch up with Addis and Covy who already started their jog towards the mountains.

About ten minutes later their jog was halted by too much tall grass. Justin pulled out a machete and started hacking a path through. "Nothing can ever put a machete out of style huh?" Addis said.

Covy smiled and Justin kept moving forward. The mountains weren't much further but so weren't the clouds. Covy was constantly waving around her holopad she managed to save from the Dauntless. She was constantly scanning things just to see how Earth-like the planet was.

Covy's holopad was scanning the grass and the dirt, practically everything, for more information on the planet and everything around them. Covy hummed to herself to draw attention to the pad so Addis took a look quickly.

"The grass has a higher iron concentration, no wonder why Justin's taking so long to clear this path." Justin huffed from another swing and looked back.

"Hey, this is harder than it looks!" He said defending himself. He continued swinging and Addis went back to look at the scanner.

A higher iron concentration wasn't common on dwarf planets but neither were plants and animals, the dirt also had a higher iron concentration to sustain such plants. Covy even scanned a small stone to see it was 82% iron and the holopad doesn't lie. Its detection rate is about 99.89% and it's wrong about 0.09% of the time.

Covy loved the holopad and loved the hyper computer along with it. Even though the holopad effectiveness is cut in half when the hyper computer is pulled out of play its still very effective to know, well, anything about everything.

It could run tests for someone simply by scanning it. The holopad scans 'look' at something or someone at the atomic level being able to see atoms. Although they are sporadic and the laws of physics talking about sub-atomic particles still apply its still very handy to know what something is by looking at how many electrons a nucleus has and making a rough estimate on what it is.