Fuel

Beginning a wide orbit back toward the attractive monster, I locked on to another ringlet in the vicinity and scanned. Plotting the basic path in this random soup is sometimes arduous, but things were going well, as the swap drive did not perturb the soup nearly as much as the collision and slide method. This let me zero in on the ringlet ahead and match planes.

Shutting down the swap drive at the last instant, bump and slip began in earnest, setting up a shock wave of One-Eight-Ones ahead. The wavefront buffeted the ringlet ahead, nudging it closer to the attraction point. Flipping back to swap drive mode, I banked the ringlet in a swooping orbit to set up for another pass and take a scan as the monster flittered underneath.

Flipping the ringlet over so I had a better view from the elevated Six, I scanned the attractive area for other things that were not really bonded, but held "just-so" by the monster. Yes, there were things larger than the Eights and smaller atoms that make up monsters, there was a signature of Three Fifteens flanked and alternated by Eights. The triple Fifteen branch was attached to an elevated Six that belonged to a triple bubbly ring structure. Bubbly because there are a number of Sevens in a smashed pair of rings that looks like that funny "8" symbol, and none in the third ring.