Oversized Trees

Well, This is interesting. The huge energy spikes indicated that the activity in the area was greater. It could be an even bigger forest. This was exciting for a few reasons. First the trees in the forest were all uniform in size. Their shapes differed slightly, but their height was equal. And they were all quite huge. The first tree that they found in the valley wasn't this big. That's why it was quite a shock when they found the forest of trees that dwarfed even the mechs!

This area also had really high energy spikes that weren't present at the first tree. So huge energy spikes at the poles of the planet entailed that there should be something even more interesting going on there. They needed to go there.

She moved onto the bridge of Yuki to look for the captain. She soon found him and told him her intentions.

"Dr. Kbom wants us to investigate the poles of the planet. As we're close to one of them, first let's visit that one. Please chart a path to there.", She told the captain.

"Will the Hawk be joining us?"

"No, I need them here to complete the JSIT scan of a tree. These trees are bigger than the one found at the valley. So we need to know why while we're here. We might find a clue about the energy lines.", She replied.

"Ok, I'll get on it right now.", The captain confirmed.

Dr. Helen turned around and went back to the compartment. This was where all the science stuff was happening. And as a researcher, this was where she needed to be. She moved to her terminal and pulled up the latest mapped trajectories of the Energy lines.

As the M-Probes went deeper the earth they needed to burrow through became more and more harder. So the deeper they went the slower they burrowed. But there wasn't anything they could do about it.

She suddenly noticed that a few other lines had also stopped partway. The projection showed that they didn't grow anymore.

"Did these probes also lost their connection?", She asked the operator behind her.

"Yes. They all lost their connection just like the previous ones."

"This is weird. Have we found anything that might be interfering with the probes?"

"So far, no."

"Well, keep me updated." She said to the operator and moved onto another operator.

"Send a few probes to these 2 locations. Dr. Kbom wants us to investigate us. I've already asked the captain to chart a way there. Send a few probes there first to see what we can expect."

"Copy that, Deploying the probes."

The Yuki released a few probes that went straight to their programmed location.

"Good."

She moved onto another terminal and then sent a message to the Hawk to stay here and finish the JSIT scan of a tree here and then to join them at the other pole of the planet.

She then busied herself as there was a lot of data that needed processing. So she began to go through them and figure out a way to process them in an accurate way. Much of the data that the JSIT and the other types of scanner gathered were in raw form. Although it also gathered some organized data. But often times the most valuable data lay in the detailed data in the raw format. Tiny details like these helped explain the phenomena the most. So no details could be left out when trying to figure out these trees and then trying to reverse engineer it.

There was a lot of data that needed organization and analysis. So Dr. Helen had to manually plan out the different sets of data that could be plotted out of the raw information according to the situation.

Soon, the captain announced through the speaker about their destination. The crew on-board the shuttle felt the sudden shake as the shuttle gently took off and headed straight towards their destination.

The ground team that was busy analyzing the trees on the ground saw as Yuki took off. The shuttle shook a bit as it picked up the speed and quickly zapped through the dense atmosphere of B1.

Dr. Helen reclined back as she finished plotting all the data and sent them back to the Shore to be processed. The shuttle possessed nominal data processing capability. The computational power of the shore exceeded that by an order of magnitude. So it was more efficient to send back all the data to be processed there.

She looked around the spacious room. Some were behind their terminals working. Other's were busy walking about. Some were busy adjusting the probes that were sent to their destination ahead. The probes were faster than Yuki as a result, they had already reached the location.

Dr. Helen got up from her chair and walk towards the terminal where a few operators were busy fiddling with the projection.

"How's the scanning coming? What are the probes showing?", Dr. Helen asked as she reached the projection table. She leaned towards the projection a bit. It wasn't quite clear. Maybe there was something wrong with the incoming data.

"It's not working Dr. Helen. The probes are all reporting the same fuzzy data. According to it, there's nothing but ocean there.", one of the operator reported to her. He was looking quite worn-down as they had been on this for quite some time.

"An ocean wouldn't have such energy spikes. There should be something else there. Have you tried other methods?", Dr. Helen looked skeptically at the projection. From the probe data, there seems to be an ocean in the area and the projection over it wasn't quite clear. There were fuzzy lines over the ocean.

"What are these lines?", Dr. Helen pointed at the fuzzy area with her finger as she asked the operator.

"We're not sure yet. The data seems to have been corrupted somehow. We've sent additional probes to the location, But all of them are acting the same. Whatever is there should be interfering with the scanners.", The operator replied in an exasperated tone.

"Hmm, that's interesting. The previous forest didn't do that. We should be reaching there soon. Let's see for ourselves what exactly is causing such huge energy spikes and interfering with our scanners.", Dr. Helen said with an amused tone as she looked at the projection with excitement in her eyes. There was a small smile that couldn't be hidden.