SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Redemption Duel 3: Once Upon a Time in Vega - @bloodsword

Once Upon a Time in Vega

by bloodsword

The Vega System, Lyra Constellation, 2472 A.D.:

"Wut?" Kyle blinked as he sat up, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes. It was then that he heard the alert coming from the cockpit, just down the short crew passageway from his berth.

"Molly?" he asked the darkness filling his small captain's cabin.

"My sensors have detected a temporal anomaly in near space, captain," a woman's voice, a warm, soft contralto, replied.

Temporal anomaly? But Molly was just an old asteroid mining ship. Her sensor package should be nowhere near sophisticated enough to detect spacial anomalies, little yet one dealing with Time.

Rubbing more sleep out of his eyes, Kyle spun around in his bunk and dropped his feet onto the cold deck. A quick surge to his feet then he was out of the compact bunk and out the door. Two steps down a short passageway and he was standing in Molly's compact cockpit.

A look at her sensor interface found the alert, a blinking light in a panel he hadn't noticed before. He then leaned down to look out the forward window. But there was nothing out there but dusty rock and space.

"I don't see a damn thing, Molly," he grumbled. "Where's this temporal anomaly...?"

Space in front of them abruptly twisted and bent before it snapped back into place with a percussive wave that washed over Molly with enough force, it sent Kyle staggering back as he fought for balance even as his sturdy ship rocked on her stubby landing legs. When he pulled himself back upright using the pilot's seat, Kyle looked back out the window towards where that twist in space had happened.

"Holy shit," he breathed when he found it was no longer empty.

Instead it was completely filled with a vast shape so big he couldn't see its edges. He was about to lean forward again to see if he could look up and see its top edge when the entire ship shuddered.

"What was that?" Kyle asked, forced to grab the pilot's seat once more to keep himself up.

"Gravitational eddy," Molly replied. "That object out there is large enough to have its own gravity, which is now interacting with the asteroid field." The ship shuddered again as if to emphasize Molly's readings.

"Is that thing out there holding position?" Kyle asked, his expression tight. He wasn't sure Molly could handle those gravitational eddies moving in different vectors through the field. Hell, he wasn't sure he couldn't handle them!

When the ship's computer failed to answer, he yanked his eyes off the massive shape in front of them to stare at the interface.

"Molly?"

"My apologies, captain, but my sensors are getting indeterminate readings from the object," the ship replied after a slight pause. "Local space-time is still in flux from the anomaly that resulted in the object appearing."

It was a disappointing answer, but something a bit more akin to what he had expected from the old mining ship. She was a grand old gal, this asteroid mining ship of his, built nearly a hundred years ago during the Second Rift Expansion that saw Humanity reach beyond their fledgling colonies on nearby worlds and into true interstellar space. After doing time as a resource corer in the United Earth Confederacy's Expeditionary Force, she spent time as a mine hunter on either side of a number of civil wars and rebellions before ending up in a junkyard on this side of the Centauri cluster.