Events were moving rapidly on Plinth, Naytani had become obsessed with replicating the FTL drive and had nearly driven the crew to violence on the way back. Wensly had been pouring over the video he'd recorded with Stuhkey, trying to identify anything they could, what purpose those things had and wildly speculating everything else. Captain Saule had kept mostly to himself on the trip, talking occasionally but often deep in thought. When they landed on Plinth, the world had gone into a fever of anything related to aliens following the release of the information to the general public.
Already reproductions of the human craft and station were being marketed for young pups. Plinth's orbit was at its furthest from the star, which meant it would be the Season of Lights, a time when everyone focused on trivial pursuits, socializing and gift giving. The Season of Lights was brought on by, Hirst, the first planet in the system. A barren rock similar to Mercury that eclipsed Plinth for nearly a month. Plant life would lie dormant after storing as much energy as possible, some wild life would hibernate as others took advantage of the darkness, to hunt and feast on the sleeping plants.
Many Glints spent the season with family, as the weather grew cold and the ecosystem went into hibernation, animals that didn't hibernate evolved ways to get around in the low light. The Glint had evolved highly sensitive night vision, with luminescent sclera to add additional light, and identify other Glint in the darkness.
Each of the crew had their plans for the season. All of them had mandatory restrictions from the prolonged microgravity, but had been provided with ways of keeping busy.
Naytani was reading any information she could about spatial distortion, gravity, and light, going off a hunch from the rippling, shrinking effect she had seen the human ship employ. Her study was littered with black papers and textbooks.The silver ink reflecting any light to help readers in the darkness. A famous physicist had proposed that the human’s vessel had warped the fabric of space time to “shrink” then use some unknown effect to travel FTL on a newsbeam.
Stuhkey was deciphering the transmissions that Eli hadn't formatted to their own style. He'd found that humans used binary coding system as well, but with a much denser ratio of information per signal second. As well he'd gotten some strange interference on other frequencies not thought to be able to be used for transmissions.
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Wensly was enamored of the human station's interior, pondering if it's layout and design had been modelled for them or after Human anatomy. He'd contacted a few architects and ergonomics experts, who agreed that the station's interior was not made for a Glint vody plan, but was about 10 percent larger. The keyboard of the terminal also indicated humans had arms with a similar number of digits. Wensly had put together a common height of around 8-9 lengths, 3 lengths taller than the average Glintish. The biology team of Yjantai had also put forth that the reason the human had come to the system, was that Plinth's atmosphere was similar to that needed by humans, and quite probably the star was of the same class as well. Which would be the only reason to investigate thier system as any interstellar society wouldn't have resource issues.
Captain Saule was consulting with several astronomers on where Eli had gone, and trying to track his movements before he had initiated contact. An old Glintish elder had been taking pictures of the night sky, and had captured a strange light around the estimated time Eli had arrived, based on his first conversation. Working with this Saule used that to find an observatory that had been cataloging that section of the night sky on the same night. By some stroke of chance, an intern had captured the white line of Eli arriving in system. Saule used the two sets of data to form a rough direction of where Human territory lay with the help of several other astronomers.
-Several cycle segments later-
The crew of the Daring Leap had met after being called by Captain Saule. Meeting in the Yjantai Space Associations research center, they sat at a table with a quaint model of the star system in the center, all 7 planets modeled, spinning slowly.
"So after our little vacation, I've found out something big." Captain Saule said, "Using the images we had of Eli leaving, and the clue of him arriving several years ago, I tracked down a photograph of his arrival. I've got a general direction of where he may have gone."
"That's amazing, I think I've got a way to pre-screen solar systems as well. Humans most likely have an atmosphere and star similar to ours, and probably used a transient event of our planet to get an idea of our atmosphere. Working back from that, we can narrow down any stars and systems along the path you found." Replied Wensly.
Naytani butted in. "That's great but without some way to get there it won't help us at all, as we said we'd meet them not piggyback there."
"I take it as our lead engineer you have a way to do this, or an idea at least." Stuhkey responded dryly. "All I've found is they don't use radios for their primary data transmission, and have some other way to transfer data."
"Yes Stuhkey, I do, but there's an issue or maybe two." She replied, "I think they warp space around themselves then use that to bend themselves forward. The problem is any drive I could make to do that would need, well, astronomical energy generation."
"Are you meaning like a fission or fusion engine?" Saule asked.
"No, I mean either antimatter/matter reaction or mass to energy." Naytani said flatly.
"Well gisht…"