Star Fields

Chapter No.23 Surprise

Chapter No.23 Surprise

There's always something better.

Molly found another nearby habitable planet in a K1 V-class star system that looked interesting. It's a binary pair with a M3 dwarf companion. This particular system has five rocky planets and three gas giants. It's listed on Space Command data lists as an exo-planet that is 1.2 times as large as Earth with an oxygen rich atmosphere.

We came out of warp a million kilometers away from the planet of interest, but it appeared that something was wrong.

"I'm not seeing any exo-planet in the orbital position that the Space Command data indicated," Molly said.

"That doesn't make any sense," I said. "I can't imagine that their data would be that incorrect."

She held a hand up while still staring at her navigation station screen. "I think we had better stop."

I gave her a surprised look. "What do you mean?"

"Look at this," she said, pointing at her screen. "This looks like gravity lensing. See the star streaks around the black circle."

I strained to look at what she was referring to, but when I realized what was happening, I turned to Judy. "Bring us to a complete stop."

Judy used several blasts of plasma ion drive from the front facing engines to slow us down quickly to a stop in space relative to the invisible planet.

"I can't believe what I'm seeing here," I said. "This planet is being cloaked. That would require one hell of a lot of energy to do that."

"I can't penetrate the cloaking," she said. "We have no idea what's behind that."

"Move us into orbit around that cloaked planet, Judy."

Judy used the back facing plasma engines to slowly move us into an orbit around something we couldn't actually see."

"Energy readings indicate that this is different than our cloaking technology. It reads as a strong magnetic field that's full of dark photons. We use dark photons but project them as a plasma field."

"All we have to do now is figure how to penetrate it without being blown to bits."

She looked back at me. "I don't think that would happen. One way we could safely get inside it would be to use a zero-insertion maneuver with our ship at full shielding."

"Okay," I said, smiling. "I'll buy that idea." I looked at Judy. "Go to full shielding and slowly insert us at the lowest possible velocity into the planet's cloak field."

"Yes, Jason."

The zero-insertion maneuver required twenty minutes to accomplish. Our main screen slowly began to clear and reveal the true nature of the cloaked planet. It was very Earth-like with a beautiful blue atmosphere decorated with swirling clouds.

"Look at those cities!" Molly exclaimed. "The structures look as if they were made from glass."

"Interesting," I said. "The alien species that lives on this planet must be very advanced."

"I'm not detecting any evidence that they note our presence," Molly said.

"Oh, I'm sure they know we're here," I said. "Evidently, they don't consider us a threat."

"Are we going to go down there?" Molly asked.

"I don't think we have any other choice. As advanced as they are, they may possess information about other alien species."