Entity [ONC 2024]

3

Behind her faceplate, Porter closed her eyes, begging that everything went smoothly. She had trained for this, but had never joined a landing party before. The entire shuttle shuddered as clamps released, metal creaking against metal. More shudders and a sudden drop that had her stomach rising into her throat and then weightless once more. Someone sang in a language she didn't know, as though they were taking a vacation drive.

When she opened her eyes, she could only see the lights of the console before Ndara as he piloted the cramped vessel down toward the asteroid. Screens showed the way ahead, shields covering the thick windows, and she stared at those screens. One showed their ship trailing away, becoming another black shadow in an ocean of black, only noticeable by the faint running lights that looked like far-away stars.

On the other screens, the asteroid began to near. It spun in a lazy, odd orbit, if she could call it an orbit. The distended mounds and ice structures pointing up toward space, a frozen defence against trespassers, but Ndara had full control. He could navigate them through the worst of it and his deep, baritone song drifted through Porter's headset.

Blank windows upon bulky helmets peered at her through the darkness, faces obscured by shadow. She couldn't tell if anyone shared her trepidation, or whether they enjoyed the journey as much as Ndara appeared to. Only faded name-tags upon old environment suits could allow her to know who was who, but without light, she couldn't read them, and with voices coming over the headset, she couldn't place them from the sounds, either.

"Alright. Here's the plan ..." A hand moved in the gloom, pointing toward each crew member in turn. The captain's hand. "Ndara waits on the shuttle, ready to dust off if we need to. Mats and Finnegan, you look for anything that looks like an engine room. See if there's any power reserves. Porter, you're with me. We're looking for the bridge and any tech we can carry. We have six hours of air. Don't waste it."

"And I'm stuck here." Chen's voice piped in from the ship. "You all have fun while I play with my buttons."

"Not without me, I hope." A laugh and a movement of shoulders pinpointed Mats. "You just keep your pretty self occupied while we explore the spooky alien ship."

"Enough!" The captain shifted in the dark. "Chen, have GAIA match rotation directly above the derelict. If we need to bug out, we need the ship within easy reach. Don't waste time. Don't do anything stupid. And make sure we mark every part of this fucking ship as ours. Everyone got claim markers?"

A series of mumbled assents passed through the crew as another shudder passed through the shuttle. Porter gripped the cross-body straps that held her in place as she snapped her head back to the screens, where she saw a body of ice crumbling and falling behind them, as though someone played back the feed in ultra-slow motion. Perhaps Ndara didn't have full control at all, and that only added to her fears. His singing stopped for a second, followed by that deep, belly laugh of his. This was fun to him!

The derelict soon hove into view and Porter began to take more notice of the screens. It looked bigger than it had on the screens on the ship, somehow. As the shuttle passed across the ragged surface of the asteroid, itself quite different from how it had looked before, she began to feel her trepidation rise. It loomed up from the icy surface of the asteroid, pointing toward space, half-buried. Intimidating in nature, scope and size. Even Earth's biggest ships seemed small in comparison.

"Landing site coming up in three ... two ... one." The sense of the shuttle slowing down accompanied Ndara's words, brief glimpses of his hands moving with precision across his controls. "Struts deployed. Thrusters at maximum. Stays ready to deploy. Landing on my mark ... Mark!"

Again, the shuttle shuddered, followed by the sound of explosions from the four corners of the vessel as the stays shot out, burying themselves into the surface of the asteroid, clamping them tight and close to ensure the shuttle couldn't drift away. Porter felt a shift in the gravity here. A noticeable change, but not anything anywhere close to that of Earth. Not even comparable with the Moon, though she had never set foot on the famous satellite.