The Empire's Research Ships were vessels equipped with comprehensive extreme-environment adaptation systems and a full set of basic laboratories, capable of being refitted with specialized laboratory modules whenever necessary. They had been designed so that Imperial scientists—whose fervor was hardly inferior to that of Imperial Soldiers—could travel into any environment and conduct whatever experiments they wished. Naturally, this included analyzing strange items collected on-site. More often than not, Imperial scientists lacked the patience to send samples back for rear-area study and instead began their work right on the front lines. The Research Ship Tawell had sent was the latest model. Its primary laboratory was a sample analysis center capable of performing structural and comprehensive property analyses on any material. It could conduct thousands of different tests, from physical properties and internal structure to energy spectra. When connected to the Imperial Database, it could even look up a sample's world-wide "registry information." It could be said that Tawell had crammed every function she wanted into this ship with downright insane enthusiasm.
To everyone's delight, less than a tenth of those functions proved useful when faced with the spindle-shaped unidentified object we had found.
The "space shuttle," five and a half meters along its long axis, pitch-black all over, with red light glowing from both ends, was now quietly hovering above the analysis center's zero-gravity platform. Under the pull of a tractor field, it slowly rotated while several small probes busily darted around it, using scanning beams and other things that sounded very impressive to examine its structure bit by bit. Unlike the crystal sphere from before, which had been a kilometer in diameter, most of this black shuttle's structure could be directly scanned—though the resulting images still left everyone baffled. Around the zero-gravity platform, assistant technicians bustled about. These white-robed researchers