Chapter 170: One Hundred Sixty Part 1

Galactic Calendar 259872/ 2000 [ Sol Year 4387/ Day 154 of 365. Sol standard year]

Days after of Crash landing/ 2

Uninhabited Island / Clearing of Escape Capsule # 405

Galactic Standard Time / After 1640

Zevortro walked over before he heard someone fall to the ground. Turning quickly, he saw Bryke had fallen. Without thinking, he rushed back to his friend and tried to sit him up. Looking around, he smiled as he saw Vivis running over.

She dropped to her knees and brought up a medical scanner, frowning as she looked at the readings. “He’s fine. He was just….. what? What’s a ‘mental overload’?”

Zevortro blinked and looked down at Bryke. He kept trying to understand just what had happened to his friend, but nothing made sense. He knew Bryke, the man was strong. What could have caused him to pass out?

A moment later, Bryke started to stir and he blinked as Zevortro put him down.

“What a dream…. Oh. It wasn’t a dream,” Bryke said, his voice turning horrified as he got up.

Zevortro and Vivis looked at each other as Bryke ignored them. He just moved beyond the group gathering around the one who called out their find and started to dig.

“What is wrong with him?” Vivis asked horror in her voice.

As much as he wanted to get his friend help, something stopped him. Looking, down, Zevortro saw something reflect the light. He frowned and reached down touching it. In a flash, he moved his hand back, staring at it at the item in horror. “I know that texture.”

“What?” Vivis asked as she turned to face him.

He didn’t notice, Zevortro’s heart was pounding too much to even hear the wind. There was only one way that this material would be here. And he couldn’t believe it. “This is impossible!”

He took a step back and looked around, slowly. He tried to think of anything that would explain it. He needed something beyond the strange and frankly insane thought he had. But there was none, this was reality. So then that left the question, how had the capsule……. His eyes became pinpoints as he felt his blood freeze. “No. No. No!”

Without a word he grabbed Vivis’s hand and ran, pulling her along with him, dropping his shovel.

“Hey! What is it!?” Vivis demanded as she was pulled behind her friend.

Zevortro didn’t speak, only pulling her to the crater as Terra made it back with Bradford.

“But just how!” Bradford was saying as he looked at her. “ I mean how!?”

“We never checked on the state of the clearing,” Zevortro said with a scowl as he and Vivis made it there. “Terra, we need to find the edge!”

Terra looked at him and nodded.

“Yeah, we do. And we need to find somewhere to move to!” Terra said with an edge to her voice. Somewhere safe!”

Zevortro grinned, his mind already solving that problem. “I’ve got an idea about that. But we’ll need to find a way inside first!”

Terra looked at him, her mouth open. “Are you saying that we should?”

“Should what?!” Vivis demanded but she was ignored.

Bradford however looked a little excited. “That might work if we can get the gravity working. I mean think about it.”

Terra looked at Bradford with a scowl on her face. For a moment she just glared at Bradford before looking at Zevortro. “Are you even thinking?! If it activates its engine, it might destroy the capsule!”

“Wait, what!?” Vivis asked shock in her voice. “What could destroy the capsule!?

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Zevortro felt a spark of rage. “Ma’am, we don’t know that. We don’t even know the model! We need to find out what this is first, then we can plan what to do!”

“SOMEBODY BETTER EXPLAIN NOW!” Duncan’s voice echoed around the clearing.

Zevortro and the others turned and saw Duncan, heaving as he finished climbing up the hill. He looked around before his eyes found Terra.

“Well Terra, I’m waiting!” Duncan snarled. “I was willing to wait, but destroy the capsule?! I need to know what this is now!”

“Chief….. I....we,” Terra said looking down.

“The whole clearing is covering something, sir! Something purple and made out of void-ranked hull plates!” Zevortro said with a hard stare.

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Duncan blinked, sure that he had heard that wrong. But as he looked at Terra, he saw her nod. He looked down, his mind going at FTL speed. After a few seconds, he paled and looked at them as he swallowed. “We might have crashed on an engine, didn’t we?”

“That’s what I think,” Terra said bitterly. She looked up at him and sighed. “I’m having the deckhands find out how big it is. Zevortro is right, we need to get in here. We need to know what this thing is.”

Duncan looked down, his mind going dark places. This could be anything, from a freighter to a slave ship. And there could be anything down there. But then he blinked as a new thought came to him. Slowly he looked around, taking in the shape of the clearing. As he looked around, the thought became greater and greater. “So all we know is that this is made of hull plates and it covers the whole clearing. That’s it?”

Terra looked at him and nodded, a frown on her face. “Yeah. But what’d I miss?

“Could this thing be a space station? Is there anything that says it’s not?” Duncan asked and then he sighed. The others all blinked, shocked at that idea. He only chuckled a little. “Don’t ask so surprised. You have to ask everything and anything to find the truth. Isn’t that the saying of that movie star’s character?”

Zevortro only blinked and then he laughed a little. “So you're saying that we might have crashed into the middle of a space station. As in the middle of empty space in the design?”

“But how would a space station even crash here?” Vivis asked as she looked down.

“And the size of the clearing! It’s too small for any station. They just don’t make them this small!” Terra said as she threw his hands out.

“Well, maybe not. There was a station in my home system. There was a part at the top, a hoop this size, and about fifty feet tall. Multiple chambers there were just gantries hovering in open space so you could see the sides. The place had all. Classes would go there to walk around and see the wonders of space or the ocean in four dimensions. I think the local military used it too. Or they let the system’s schools use it,” Vivis said, looking down as she thought about it.

“Well, to be honest, the size isn’t that bad given how wide this place is. My company made observation stations during the war. They were around this size, it was so just two shuttles could move them through FTL. This might be one, but ours were solid, no empty circles in the middle,” Bradford said as looked down.

Duncan only shrugged as the others all looked at him. “We need to find a way into this thing anyway. We can figure out what this is after, right?”

As the others nodded, Duncan looked around. He took in the shield, the clearing, and the capsule. After a few seconds, he came to a decision and nodded. “Zevortro, Terra. I want you to tear apart the hill facing the direction that our first team went. I want to know what’s next to the capsule. Dig down three feet and go out. Fin the edge of the whatever’s there.”

“I already found it, sir!” Bryke said from Duncan’s right.

He turned and sawBryke standing there, his eyes hard and hands empty. The others all reacted in shock, Bradford even holding his chest.

“What was it?” Duncan asked and Bryke shook his head.

“Don’t know sir. But it’s straight, about five feet down, and still going,” Bryke said as he pointed behind him.

Turning around, Duncan saw the other three deckhands digging away. Two of them were making a pit while the others were digging to the right and left. Turning back he looked at Bryke who only shrugged.

“Once I found out how far it went, I figured I should get some help to find out the shape. Was I wrong sir?” Bryke asked.

Duncan only chuckled and laughed. “No! Good Incentive. So it’s not a circle then? Could that be an observation bridge?”

“Sir?” Zevortro asked. Dunant turned to look at him and nodded, letting him continue. If it’s a bridge, we can break through it. We’d need to take stock of what tools we have but it might be the best chance if we can’t find an airlock.”

“And if we find the airlock, we’d need to hack into it. If we can even read the code. But it might not be we’re in a thruster after all. But this, Nova!” Duncan said and shook his head before he put his hands over his eyes. Finally, after a few minutes, he looked up at Terra. “Terra, get back to finding out what those monsters were. Bryke, you’re in charge of finding out what that is. And who found it in the first place?”

“Jones did,” Terra admitted.

Duncan looked at her and then sighed, shaking his head in disgust. “Of course it was him! Forget about that. Mr. Bradford, I need you to go and talk to the passengers. See if any of them have any skill at breaking code. Maybe there’s a hacker in the group.”

“A hacker? Why would…… oh. Well, I’ll ask. We might be lucky,” Bradford said with a sigh, shaking his head.

Duncan sighed and turned around, moving towards the crater. “Good. Keep the shield secure, and that Roch locked up there!”

“Locked where?” Bradford asked, looking around.

Duncan kept his back turned and then he heard the snickers that slowly turned into laughter. Duncan kept a smile on his face.

“Oh sirs, that is wonderful! I fully admit, you people have a wonderful sense of humor!” Bradford said with a note of glee in his voice.

“His powers are touched based, that was what we had to do,” Terra admitted.

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As he looked around the clearing from near the shield, Jessie sighed before turning around. His off arm was injured but he didn’t need two of them to work a station. And the way his biology was, it would be fully healed by dawn. He wondered how he would explain that, maybe the poison the patch sped it up? That was known to happen sometimes. He looked out at the forest, trying to keep calm. There was something out there, he knew it. The way the trees moved, there was something that was out there.

Maybe it was just nerves based on what happened to him, but he was almost convinced he saw something move. The way that he had missed the bug that got him, made him feel that he was just losing his touch. There was a time in his past that he would have seen that coming, maybe his skills were a bit rusty. But that was fine, he expected that. This was his vacation after all, then it was back to training before he went back to work. He thought that a nice working vacation would let him recover, so he signed up for a tour aboard the Spirit. Not his best idea.

“Still, it was nice,” He muttered as he looked at the readings. He frowned a moment as he looked at something, wondering if it was just the system. The power requirements, was it him or was there something there?

He blinked and then called up one of his old nanite strains. He activated the record function and felt it activate. Looking down at the readings for a good minute, he closed his eyes. Activating his nanites, he looked at the minute he just saw and slowed it down to ten seconds to one. After thirty seconds he saw it, he had seen something!

For a good half a second, the power that the shield needed spiked! It was as if something was hitting the shield doing enough damage to force the spike. But what was doing this? Deactivating the nanites, he stepped back from the station. He looked out at the shield and tried to find where the drain could be. Somehow, he had a mystery here and he had to find out what it was. He had a terrible feeling this was going to be bad.