5 teams ventured into the depths at Delta Site: Bennu, Sarus, Amur, Osprey, and Kūaka. They all had a simple objective; find the source of the primion beam. Slow, careful exploration is eschewed for a mad dash over the course of 2 weeks, fueled by friendship, love, and duty to everyone who’s slowly dying aboard Nysa’s Wake in the meantime.
T+ 15h from primion beam initiation
Sarus is assigned to a path with fractal tunnels; as the largest expeditionary team, they intended to brute force their way through. Several explorers go MIA, seemingly lost to shifts in the tunnels. A Sarus sub-team discover a very direct route which covers over 100 kilometers. While many of the other branches narrow down to holes which appear to be just a single hydrogen atom wide, this route’s throat is a full 9 meters wide. It’s the best start yet discovered, so the expedition continues on (thruster assisted) foot from there, since most exploration craft can’t fit.
T+ 85h from primion beam initiation
Kūaka, meanwhile, navigates a massive ocean full of a solution of water and a metamaterial comprised of fluidlike nanoparticles, which becomes increasingly opaque to basically all EM radiation as it gets hotter. the nanoparticles appear to basically be like a strange protein that convert heat to EM blocking, for whatever reason. progress is slow, as there are huge masses in the fluid, further confounding navigation, although Kūaka takes advantage of this fluid being enourmously effective as a thermal conductor, allowing for fast movement if they’re careful, although an early attempt to use this fluid as propulsion reaction mass results in an explosion comprable to a warhead. Further research reveals that, when in the presence of amorphous hydrogen and oxygen (such as when water is ionized by a thruster), the nanoparticles are converted with seemingly impossible efficiency into a plasma. This causes a chain reaction which is eventually contained by the conductive nature of the fluid as it becomes a larger and larger sphere, but the pressure and thermal effects on anything nearby resemble an instantanious, tiny star.
T+ 184h from primion beam initiation
Osprey headed down the most direct tunnel that Talus had found. This route looked promising, but as they make their way, several Osprey members are sucked down spiral holes in the walls of the tunnel, a gravitational anomaly pulling them in. As the remaining members attempt to rescue, Dr. Lemaître sends an urgent warning that the anomaly is increasing in strength, her high sensitivity instruments picking up the change, but it’s too late. The rest of the team is sucked in, with only the TL barely escaping.
T+ 210h from primion beam initiation
The SAR team gets an alert to a confusing SOS; just a single ping from Bennu, and then nothing. They head to the tunnel and review the logs; Bennu was travelling at 93 m/s on thrusters when they all seemingly just went dark for no reason. Initial, battery powered recon probes are able to get to Bennu, who are banged up, but appear to be intact. Just… dead. SAR sends in a heavier, fusion powered platform to fetch their frames, and as it approaches the downed team, it also instantly powers down. After some experimentation, the SAR team realizes that there is a zone where the weak nuclear force appears to be nearly 730x weaker, measured by testing beta decay of a sample as it passes over the threshold of the zone. After requisitioning some batteries, fetching Bennu is trivial, although the team is rattled; if the zone had the opposite effect, Bennu Team and the rest of the tunnel would be destroyed by the force of a tiny star.
Despite the hazard, the tunnel is nearly linear, so battery packs are gathered from Delta Site and moved to the start of the void to allow teams to make the sprint across.
T+ 349h from primion beam initiation
Amur discovers a zone with incomprehensible, non-euclidian geometry. Parrot relays that they were using as breadcrumbs keep getting lost in spaces which are revealed, and then dissapear, further frustrating exploration as the parrot network’s link back to Delta Site is spotty due to attrition. A mathematician at Delta eventaully realizes that the zone appear to be a localized 4 dimensional space, and with cartographic updates, navigating the area is better understood; movement and rotation through certain areas, while appearing to be in 3d, actually has consequential movement and rotation in the extra spacial dimension of the zone, although the way this happens changes on a fixed period as the zone rotates in 4-space. This discovery reveals that the zone seems to be some sort of routing point, with new potential routes revealed intermittently, although exploration must be cautious; a given route becomes unavailable and circular for extended periods.
The Team is marked as Missing-in-Action days before the zone’s geometry is discovered, vanishing into the zone just like the parrots that preceded them. When their time of dissapearance is later compared to models of the zone, their estimated route won’t be available again for 7 years. Without a fix, the SAR team makes the difficult decision to not attempt a rescue, as it would likely result in further casualties.
Parrot relays appear to avoid the zone if they can, seemingly frustrated by the hacky, shitty algorithms that are hastily bolted on navigation systems to accommodate the extra spacial dimension, with a crew AI mentioning offhandedly that the parrots are scared and confused by the zone. “They’re flying blind, poor things.”
T+ 413h from primion beam initiation
Despite the expedition’s casualties, Kūaka Team finally finds the source of the beam; a massive, hot, perfectly spherical structure suspended in the ocean, utilizing the strange water solution as coolant.