The Light Gate Project

Prologue

Amelia always found space travel so slow. She could never understand how people could spend their entire lives in space. She found the whole experience almost demeaning of human nature; the tightness, lack of space and the fake smells coming from air ducts. This was all before you took into account the artificial 1g gravity. However Amelia had spent nearly all of her life on Earth. She hadn’t explored the Solar System like the rest of this crew. The farthest she had ever went was a small mining station in the asteroid belt on business. Her current job is working as an operations manager of a small mining company that had just recently been acquired by a mining consortium. This sort of thing was common place now. As humanity pushed deeper into the moons and asteroids of space it was only natural that large corporations would rise from wide array of businesses and start to gobble up smaller companies. Amelia's current destination was a mining station based on Mars. The Earth to Mars trip would take 30 days. 30 days Amelia wished she could spend doing something else rather than sitting in what looked like a rusting ship that could potentially just snap in half at a moments notice.

Usually Amelia’s work kept her cooped up in an office on Earth, safe in a high gravity environment where she could sit at her desk and read about things rather than going directly to see them. However this was the only exception to the rule. The details that she had been given were sketchy at best. It was actually a borderline miracle that she actually agreed to go see this mining station at all. The various reports that she had been given seemed to suggest that something had been found underground. No one could tell what it was, however the device was peculiar. Amelia was going on behalf of the company so that she could see it for herself and decide what action to take regarding it. No foreign objects had ever been found on other planets before and Amelia was hesitant to call it alien as she had no proof of where the device came from. All she did know was that somehow the knowledge of the discovery had trickled out to the general public and now several other corporations had found out and it seemed everyone wanted to get their hands on it.

The Doppelgangers job was to get to the mining station on Mars, grab the unknown item and get back to Earth for analysis at a laboratory. The Doppelganger was a small passenger ship, designed to transport tourists or workers from one side of the system to the over. Sadly it was nothing like Amelia's personal transport ship Aquarius. Unfortunately she was not allowed to use it as it would attract too much attention. The Doppelganger was a ship that was designed for purpose not for luxury, many of the corridors were thin and the dorms even smaller. She even had to share her dorm with a normal worker. Something she loathed.

Her current task was sitting at a desk looking and compiling various reports about mining station outputs. The task was repetitive and generally boring and was something Amelia was pretty sure one of her assistants was supposed to do. Sadly there wasn’t any of her assistants aboard the passenger ship. She would have to do this one herself. She had been working on the task for roughly a single hour however she was already wishing she could have a distraction. Thankfully for her, one was about to come up. One of the bridge crew would enter the room, looking slightly haggard and concerned.

        “Excuse me ma’am. The captain wants to see you on the bridge. Something is wrong” The voice was broken, dry. The words broken and each word coming out of the privates mouth seemed to be strained.This was not good at all.

        “Let’s go then. Don’t want to keep the captain waiting” Amelia would put down the pen she had been using and would rise from behind her desk, following behind the private who took wide and focused strides towards the bridge.

The bridge of the Doppelganger followed the same design as the rest of the ship. It was purely designed for functionality. The room was only several square metres big and only consisted of 4 terminals lined against opposite walls with a captains chair in the middle. The private who escorted Amelia to the bridge took a seat on the front most terminal, the captain rising from his chair and looking over at Amelia.The captain was a old man. Someone who had most certainly seen many years of service. However his facial features and tone of voice suggested that he had spent most of his time serving on vessels much more important than this one.