Taking Space

LET’S GO CHECK IT OUT

Daniel’s eyes lit up. “Let's go check it out.”

“What why? It's just a glitch.” Steven asked.

Daniel jumped back into the pilot seat and started the pirate ship back up. “No, it sounds like a perfect place to hide a smuggling operation.”

“You’ve been playing too many games.” Stephanie scolded.

“I don't 'play.' I use them to increase my skills.” Daniel asserted as he started to undock.

“Hey, what are you doing?!” Stephanie demanded as the ship pulled away from the station.

“Going to check it out. Duh.”

“It's a glitch. Nothing will be there, and the Heldrid field is not exactly a walk in the park!”

“Oh, yes, it is. I've flown through it before, remember?”

“Yeah, in an unmanned drone; if you goofed around and crashed, it wouldn’t be too big of a deal. You are not taking US in there!” Stephanie fumed.

Michael, once again, took manual control over the ship. “This is exactly why I said we need to sell this.”

“Hey!” Daniel exclaimed, pouting as Mike took over control. He crossed his arms and leaned back. “Fine then. I won't take the ship into the cloud. I'll just go to the edge and remote a drone in.”

Silence.

“Please, I wanna see what's in there.”

Mike looked at the others.

Catherine shrugged.

“Theoretically speaking, I would like to see if my algorithms are causing it or a locational interlacing miscalculation.”

Stephanie sighed. “I guess it wouldn't hurt to go into the field. I would like to see the quality of this ship’s logic drive. We are NOT entering the cloud, okay?!”

“Ok,” Dan replied in a saddened voice.

Michael released the controls, and Daniel eagerly grabbed them. He slammed the accelerator, and the ship burst into a speeding dash.

In under five minutes, they were at the edge of the asteroids that surrounded the Heldrid field. Daniel slowly rounded the giant floating boulders, guided the ship through the outer layers, and then abruptly floored it, sending the ship bobbing and weaving through the asteroids at an insane speed.

“Slow down!” Both Steven and Stephanie shouted at the same time.

“Why? There is no need. The logic drive and maneuvering thrusters on this thing are amazing.” Daniel aimed them directly at a frigate-sized hunk of rock.

Immediately, the logic drive compensated, spinning them straight down so fast, that simulated gravity generators could not counter the inertia. This sent everyone except for Daniel and Catherine, who had remembered to strap themselves in, tumbling out of their seats.

“See,” Dan said, with a giant grin looming from his ear to ear.

Everyone glared at him, and Stephanie spat, “I'm going to kill you!”

Daniel responded by stopping the spacecraft in a perfect reverse spin, once again sending them sprawling. “We’re here!” He antagonistically proclaimed.

“D…D...Danny!” Steven shouted

“That's it! I’m not cooking for you anymore!” Stephanie threatened. 

Michael pulled himself up, sat in the captain’s seat, took over the controls, and with a rather disturbing serious look, said, “That was not cool.”

Catherine shook her head. “That was not funny, Dan Dan.”

Daniel looked at them, then stared down at his hands ashamedly.

“I'm sorry.”

“You’d better be!” Stephanie snapped.

Steven didn’t say anything. Instead, he stood up and walked over to the radar.

“It's still saying something is in area G4 of the cloud.”

“So it's not a locational interlacing error?” Catherine asked.

“No, if it were it would have moved some now that we are closer. But with this readout, I don't see how it can be my algorithms neither.”

“So there is something in there!” Daniel exclaimed, as he excitedly pulled down the ship's probe control systems.

“Maybe, but if there is, it must have been in there for a long time. Or, whoever is using it must have a secret way in and out, or we would have detected them long ago. “

“Hmm, the intrigue deepens…” Daniel mused.

“Probe released,” the female mechanical voice of the combat vessel informed them.

Mike pushed a button, and the viewport slid down lower. A new image from the probe filled the empty space.

Dan moved the drone around, getting a feel for its maneuverability, then began to fly it into the cloud.

“Careful, this craft only has two other probes, and they look like their junky hacking units, not scouting units, so they probably don't have good maneuvering jets,” Steven warned.

Daniel nodded at Michael, and gingerly guided the drone through the ever-changing maze of rocks.

As he came over the top of a large pockmarked asteroid, they watched two smaller asteroids colliding in a shower of sparks and gravel. Instantly the whitish gas around the collision exploded, and the flames raced out, devouring more gas.

Daniel slammed the probe into full downward reverse, barely managing to hide behind the pockmarked.

The explosion lasted for a millisecond more. Then, having consumed all the gas in its reach and now without any form of an oxidizer, it vanished without a trace.

“Wow, that was a big one,” Daniel exclaimed, as he cautiously continued to guide the probe. “How come all this gas had not been exhausted?”

“It's very thinly spread out over the field. I doubt more than a quarter of a gallon was expanded in that explosion, and there are billions of gallons out there.” Steven explained.

“Where did it all come from?” Daniel asked.

This time Catherine answered. “There used to be two planets more in the nearby system, but in the war three hundred years ago, someone used a graviton weapon to pull them from their orbits. They collided and formed most of the asteroid fields in this sector.”

“Ouch. I guess that's why most people lived in space nowadays, huh?”

Darkness washed over Catherine's face. “Yes. It's disheartening how easily and how many planets have been callously destroyed.”

Silence descended. The others remembered. Back in Catherine’s reckless days, when she took that epic trek on her own in a self-powered spaceship across the galaxy, she had actually been to one of these planets before it was destroyed.

 “Hey, you're going the wrong way!” Steven declared breaking the silence.

“Oh, oops. Wait, ain’t it near the middle of the cloud?” Daniel asked.

“No. It's G4 along our Z-axis, and four in the Y. Mike show him.” Steven said.

Michael nodded and brought the ship into low-level alert. Additional viewports turned on, revealing more of the outside.  A 3-D hologram appeared on the right side of the cockpit. 

Dan took note of the green dot, which indicated where the probe was, in relation to the yellow dot of the unidentified object.

“I see,” Dan commented as he re-angled the remotely controlled spycraft.

He carefully bobbed through the field, dodged from two much smaller explosions using the floating boulders as shields, and abruptly came to a clearing, leaving the gas cloud and asteroids behind.

He stopped the probe at once and spun it around to get a quick look of the area. “Wow, it's a perfect sphere-shaped clearing. It's like there's some type of invisible shield keeping everything out.”

Steven stood ramrod straight as he glowered at the viewport. “It indeed does, but there is nothing here other than this unexplainable empty space!” He turned, and perturbedly began tapping at the console, “Catherine the radar detected this place either through energy fluctuations or odd frequencies, help me pinpoint witch.”

“Ok,” Catherine said as she brought up her console.

As they worked, Michael started to fidget and looked anxiously out the viewports.

Stephanie noticed. “What’s wrong, Mick?”

Michael shook his head. “I don't know, something just feels… off, all of a sudden.”

“It a frequency. There is a magnetic barrier and a paper-thin reverse gravity field being generated. I think that’s what is making this clearing and the energy powering it is being generated from the middle of it.” Catherine announced.

Michael glared at the image being sent from the drone. “How is that possible? There is nothing there.”

Steven waved his hand. “It's not. There has to be something there! Fly in deeper.”

Daniel nudged the probe deeper into the clearing. It flew solemnly forward, and without warning, smashed into something and bounced off.

A ripple rang out from its impact point. For a millisecond, the outline of a massive ship flashed into view.

All their eyes went wide. Daniel breathed, “Oh my word. Oh, my word!”

All the alarms in the ship blared to life, as hundreds of red dots appeared on the 3d hologram radar.

Michael slammed the ship into combat mode, and the cockpit's walls faded away into a 360-degree viewport.

The blood drained from Michael's face as he watched hundreds of asteroids opened up, revealing fixed g*n emplacements.

At once, the transforming asteroids opened fire on them.