Chapter 184: One Hundred Sixty Seven Part 1

Galactic Calendar 259872/ 2000 [ Sol Year 4387/ Day 155 of 365. Sol standard year]

Days after of Crash landing/ 3

Uninhabited Island / Clearing of Escape Capsule # 405

Galactic Standard Time / After 1000

Bryke

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As he whipped his forehead, Bryke looked around. After he and Zevortro had made it down to the depths of pit, Terra had come. After hearing what she and Duncan had discussed, Bryke had felt faint. He had personally thought that they were safe, but now? They might still be in the path of a supernova!

After that, they and others had split up. Some people had dug, some patrolled the shield linne. Jessie had made another null generator to use. But with just the two of them, the deckhands had gotten to work. With speed and experience, they had cleared the dirt from the hull plates in quick succession. When they had found hull plates around the, that fear had been magnified. But he had doubt, there was something about the positioning that nagged at him. But during the next hour, they had only found more questions than answers.

They so far had been able to remove the dirt around the crater, but only two more sides had the purple plates. The one side that didn’t was the side across from the first pit. The other two sides had long rectangles that went a good ten feet, and they were only three feet wide. No one had any idea what they were, and that only scared some of them. There were talk about how they had uncovered a battery of some kind, but Jones had been dismissive. He had grabbed three others and they had started to try and find the way the first pit’s plates connected to the others. But they had discovered that they didn’t. The three groups of plates were connected to the hull bellow them.

He looked up at the top of the pit, and sighed as he shook his head. With a small push, he floated upwards. In a minute, he had reached the top of the null gravity field, fifteen feet up and then he looked down.

He saw Terra and Jessie talking near one of the shield consoles. He couldd even see the group digging with Jones from up here. So far, they had moved the dirt around into a small hill around the crater. It gave then another way to defend it, and they had moved a generator there. That had been on Duncan’s orders, but before that he had put on the gravity field inside the capsule. It kept the passengers from knowing what was happening outside, and that was enough.

Personally, Bryke was of the belief that for now, it was best to keep them from knowing what was happening. There was nothing that they could do without volunteering, and most of them wouldn’t. some of them expected that they would be rescued soon, and the rest were still partly in shock. That was fine, it had barely been five days yet. But once they wised up, he hoped that most of them would man up as it were, help them fight to live.

Dalila was looking up from her tablet and scowled a little. He had heard what she was trying to do, and what her work during the War was. The rumors that had flown said something about this being a Salvage of an unknown race’s creation. He knew what that meant, he had seen the movies about this. The one thing that scared him about the Alien, the unknown, was they had rules his people didn’t. Who knows? Teses Aliens thought that every science Taboo the Scholar’s had were accepted. Mayne even part of the scientific method? Point was, they didn’t know what was going to be in the whatever beneath them. And that was the scariest thing as far as he was concerned!

Bringing out his rope, he threw the head down and moved down to the ground. Once he got there, he moved through the null gravity field swiftly. Once under normal gravity, he dashed over to her. If she had found something, then he wanted to be one of the first to know. Because one way or the other, when they cracked this thing open and found out what was inside? He was going to be at the tip of the spear on that trip.

He snorted and shook his head. Because of course Zevortro was going to be one of the ones that went down. He had been angling to join the security division, and Bryke had been right beside him.

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Dalila

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You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

As she looked up at the shield, she tried to think of a new way to break the code. She had done every trick, work around and hacking attempt to hack into the root code. But no matter what she had done, nothing! She was starting to think that maybe, the idea that this thing was set up differently. It would keep the main system safe from hacking attempts. That was a perfect way to defend if the enemy had a focus on cyber-attacks. But this meant that she would need to attack the system from the inside. She would need to find one of the internal jack in points to even think of trying to see what the main system was.

“So what’s wrong?” Bryke asked from behind her.

She fell backward in shock. Once she hit the ground, she looked up and saw Bryke standing above her looking down at her.

“I didn’t think I was someone who could shock people that much!” Bryke said in shock before he offered Dalila a hand.

“Yeah, you’re so scary,” Dalila said as she reached up and grabbed his hand. As he pulled her up, she looked at him and shrugged. “Sorry, but I was just lost in shock. You know how it is, maybe?”

“Been there, done that. Hated it,” Bryke said bitterly. But then he gestured towards Dalila’s tablet. “So no luck hacking into this thing?”

“Oh, I’ve had luck! But all of that luck was of the bad kind. Have you followed ship design debates?” Dalila asked with a hard edge to her voice.

“No but I feel suddenly that I should have,”Bryke said, a note of fear and anger in his voice.

“Yeah,” Dalila said with a sigh. “There was a proposed design style a few years back. Would have made ships more expensive so I think only a few test types were made. The idea was to split the ship’s systems, make it less wireless and more quantum network. We’re talking point to point transmission with the ship.”

“Interesting,” Bryke said as he scratched his head. “Okay…… I have no idea what you mean. Mind saying that with a basic high school vocabulary?”

Dalila looked at him for a few seconds before she started to laugh. For a few moments, her laughter was the only sound that she made. After a while, she finally got control over herself. She looked up and smiled.

“Thanks, I needed that,” Dalila said as she whipped a tear from her eyes.

“Happy to help!” Bryke said with a grin that Dalila could see was forced.

“The idea was to split a ship’s systems. Make it so the sensors, communication and engines set apart. So the systems are cut off from the outside world. No way to hack into this thing from here,” Dalila said bitterly.

“Ouch. So we won’t know what’s inside with going in?” Bryke sai as he looked towards the largest pit.

Dalila nodded, her own eyes looking towards it with a somber feeling. “Yeah, right or wrong. The only way to get answers is to cut into that thing. And who knows what kind of security it has on the inside?”

“Depends on what this is. And we can’t know until we get into that thing,” Bryke said with a hard look down at the ground.

“But if we open that door, will we be able to close it?” Dalila asked with a hard tone of voice.

She knew what she was talking about. The number of missions that she had almost opened the wy in but instead almost died from security? That was something that she would never let others know.

“Maybe not, I mean the place we’d be going into would be the Pit,” Bryke muttered as he looked at the first hole in the clearing.

They all heard a call, and looked up. They saw Jones waving his arms as he climbed out of the left hole.

“We found the last end! Now what!?” He called out as everyone looked at him

“Gather up people!” Terra called out. “We all need to talk about what to do next!”

Dalila only scowled as she heard this. She didn’t know what Terra was doing, a leader must lead! But then a leader must also be smart.

“Time to see what the second wants, this’ll good!” Bryke said with a smirk.

“How so?” Dalila asked dryly. She didn’t understand anything about this. Terra might be the second in command, but she wasn’t acting like it at all. Just what was going through her head? But what Bryke said next totally shocked her.

“Simple,” Bryke said with a grin. “Our girl Terra knows what she doesn’t know. That means she knows to ask others for help.

Dalila stared, and looked at stunned so much her mouth dropped open.

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Terra

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Terra looked around and nodded as she saw Jessie nodding at her. This was too big a choice for her to make alone, she needed to bring the others in. The way she saw it, there were two choices. And the wrong one might kill them.

“People, we’ve got a lot of things to talk about!” Terra called out as everyone gathered around.

“What’s there to talk about!?” Jones demadned from the right side near the downed trees. As everyone looked at him.

Terra glared at him as he crossed his arms, a bottle in his right hand . She met his glare with one of his own. “We need to talk about the next step. We could cut into the whatever it is, or we could destroy the two things we found.”

“How would we destroy them?” Vivis called out.

Terra blinked, and then she realized that they didn’t know what she was talking about. “Oh. Well, we have those two modified rifles. I was thinking that we just cut those two rectangle things off of the hull. Then we use the null gravity field to carry them up, maybe use them as barricades.”

“But there’s a chance that we might not do anything to them. How’s the hacking been doing?” Zevortro’s voice echoed.

Terra looked at Dalila who nodded and stepped forward.

“In a word. Terrible!” Dalila exclaimed. As everyone looked at her she kept talking. “I think it’s how its set up, the system I’m working with is separate from the main one. I’ll need to go inside that thing to even have a chance of figuring it out.”

“Then why don’t we just go in and do that!?” Jones asked with a hard edge.

Terra glared at him and was about to say something when Jessie did.

“Because we don’t know what kind of security that thing has! This is a complete alien construction! We don’t know what it is, or what’s normal for its builders!” Jessie said with a tone that he was shocked that Jones even asked the question.

Terra nodded and pointed at Jessie. “See, that’s why we’re doing this. That’s my fear. Well, a robot or sleeping army killing us. So I was thinking that we leave it alone.”

“But its beneath us! And Duncan thought the thruster might be beneath the capsule!” Jones spat as he threw his hands up.

As everyone looked around, Terra cursed Jones in her head. How he knew that, she’d like to know. But with the reports that she gave him, he admitted that he might have jumped the star. “Yes, he did. But listen. For the last few days, we’ve been fine. I think that the whatever it this is why the trees won’t grow here. And we have a lot more things to worry about here.”

“Like what!?” Jones snarled.

Terra was about to speak, when they heard a roar.