Challenger strikes again

The Challenger's FTL engines had done their job. They were now inactive and venting the massive amount of heat they had produced as a by-product of the jump. The retro-thrusters had now switched on and were gently reducing the forward momentum of the ship. In the cockpit, Dr Ana Smith leaned back slightly to compensate for the inertia. She remembered being scared before the first jump, despite her detailed understanding of the workings of a FTL engine. Theory could never prepare one for dealing with the primordial fear of death after all. But after a thousand jumps over the course of a month, it felt just as commonplace as starting her car on Earth.

She waited patiently for the ship to come to a complete stop. Ideally, FTL engines produced no residual velocity after their use. They simply jumped a ship from point A to point B. But Humanity was still new to these engines and some inefficiencies were inevitable. Besides, the bigger problem to solve was the very limited range of the FTL engines. The maximum jump distance they could achieve was limited by the heat produced by the engines and the burst of energy required to power them. Their present journey had taken close to a month and a thousand jumps. And considering the fact that they only had three months' worth of supplies on the ship, two-thirds of their available operational time would be spent travelling to and from their destination.

But the mission was worth it. This was Humanity's first foray into intergalactic space and Ana was lucky enough to have been chosen as the Science Officer for the mission. No amount of inconvenience from the adolescent FTL engines could dampen her pride. To her left, the leader of the mission, Capt. John James thumbed the knob that activated the specially built Gamma ray scanners to scan their surroundings for Baryonic clouds of matter. But the scanner found nothing. For a minute, it seemed like Humanity had sent a state-of-the-art spaceship halfway to the milky way's closest neighbour only to find nothing but empty space.

But Ana was far more optimistic. She was a scientist. She would have celebrated if an unusual looking space rock had hit the viewport in front of them! Ana asked the captain to switch to the laser sensors. He complied and they saw the virtual representation of the scanner's beam move across the cockpit's viewport as it started scanning their surroundings. The system tracked matter in its surroundings by firing a high-powered laser into it. Whenever the laser encountered matter, even gaseous matter spread out sparsely over the vast vacuum of intergalactic space, it would be at least partially reflected. The receiver on board the ship would then use the time taken for the reflection to be visible to calculate the distance to the found matter.

But something was wrong. The reflection was too bright. It almost looked like the laser was igniting something. The captain increased the reverse thrusters to make sure they didn't hit...whatever they were on course to hit. The laser continued its dance across the viewport, creating dazzling lines of radiant white luminescence across their fields of view. All three crewmembers stood mesmerized by the display long after the ship had fully stopped, now only a Kilometre away from the cloud of unidentified matter. It seemed they had found their Dark Matter, whatever it was.

*

Ana watched from the cockpit as the captain and her other crew mate, Lt. Generic Name spacewalked their way to the wall of undefined matter that stood between them and the rest of the universe. Alone in the dark and cavernous spaceship for the first time since the start of their journey, she could not help but feel a little apprehensive. Her crewmates were gliding their way towards a wall of mystery matter which did not in any way resemble their theoretical expectation of dark matter. Selfishly, the first thought that came into her mind was how she would make her way back home if something did happen to her crewmates. She knew enough about the ship to pilot it back home. All three of them did. This scenario had been an integral part of their training and the appropriate procedures, which involved saving the ship and everyone on board at the expense of anyone caught outside, had been drilled into them repeatedly. Remembering this part of her training eased her guilt a little. Maybe the reason why this was her first thought was because she had been explicitly trained to think this way.