The Black Abyss
“Draex, I just don’t get it. If Command wanted someone out here to patrol, why don’t they get the drones?” Hector asks, regarding his partner in the command station beside him. Draex, a tall and well-groomed man with a scar down his cheek looks down on his console, tapping the glass to make the pulsing icons switch to the status screens. An overall image of their cylindrical, nuclear powered Spatial Exploration Pod rotates slowly among options. This ship has been made for short term deep space missions.
“That’s a great question,” Draex says absently, “I would rather be in exploration ships discovering the universe. It sure is quiet out here.” Hector scoffs and turns in his tightly fitted crash couch to regard him.
“I don’t know what wrong decision you made down the line, but the Terrain Exploration Division is nothing more than a bunch of sissies looking under rocks for signs of life.” Hector blurts, going quiet for a long moment after. Draex holds his tongue, wanting to object with proof otherwise, but after a few moments of thought, he could only think of three major discoveries since the first deep space mission 25 years ago.
After being on shift with Hector for the last week, they have only just started talking. Now that they have set their pod in its required position just outside of the Keplar-44B Star cluster, they were able to relax to an extent. At this point, Draex thinks he would rather not have the down time.
“Oh please,” Draex begins, “They have sent out hundreds of trans-stellar class star ships for exploratory missions. Take The Excursion for example, they managed to reach, document, and return with zettabytes of data from asteroids and black holes in the center of the galaxy. Lord knows what else could be out there: maybe other life.”
“And yet they have us out here at the edge of our network’s sensor range, expecting to find something they won’t. Don’t be naive, Draex, you won’t see anything interesting in your lifetime.” They fall silent, leaving Draex to boil in his displeasure for being stuck with this guy. “You know,” Hector says a moment later. “These missions are usually run by drones. We should be somewhere overseeing mining operations or surveying nearby stars.”
Draex opens his mouth to say something, but decides not to encourage further attempts to communicate. Minutes drag by, leaving his mind to wander to his father back home. Self-righteous jerk.
“Why are you so old, private? Most kids who want to go into the Intergalactic Explorative United Nations Agency do it straight out of grade school.” Hector says, leaning against the console to regard the other man.
Draex glares over to Hector, wishing that he would stop trying, but then sighs in resignation. “I worked on a farm with my parents for the last 10 years. I finally got fed up being stuck in one place, so I went to the IEUNA Training Center to sign up.”
“Must have been awkward as an old man, right?” Hector asks forcing a smile, looking to Draex who appears at least 42.
“Look whose talki-” Draex cuts off when he glances up to the transceiver’s scanning feed.
“Everything alright?” Hector asks following his gaze. Nothing alarms Draex in particular, but he feels a tinge of Deja Vu.
“Uh…” Draex hesitates, thinking back. He has never been in this situation before. This is his first scouting mission, and was no simulation or story he read where he and another pilot were alone in space. Besides, that would make an awfully boring story. As if on cue, the blue bars on top of the display flicker red.
“Unknown frequency detected.” The computer’s high-toned British voice calls out. Draex’s fingers jolt up to the screen as he effortlessly pulls up the analysis scanner. Lines roll over the screen, jumping from the previous flatline of frequency 57293.22 MHz.
“Cosmic Radiation?” Hector asks glancing from his console.
“No, it’s too organized, and this isn’t any known IEUNA channel.”
Hector shakes his head and turns away.
Draex begins to feel flustered, being put on the spot. “I can’t make heads or tales of the data coming in.” His fingers slide over the illuminated holograms floating just above the glass, activating the AI algorithm for linguistic analysis.
“What does it sound like? I’m sure that we are good enough to figure out if it’s anything other than cosmic noise.” Hector mentions, glancing back. Draex’s fingers tap along the screen as he pulls back to the beginning of the transmission.
“Here goes nothing.” Draex mutters, tapping play. Shrieking fills the interior of the pod. They both cringe, listening to the rapid beating of screeching which undulates in tone. At seemingly random intervals, cracking, a lot like glass shattering, cuts through before the rapidly changing intonation resumes. Hector reaches over and slams the console, cutting the playback.
“Holy mother of God, man. That is definitely the universe telling us to get the hell out.” Glancing over Draex’s shoulder.
“It’s so strange. The analysis is almost done.” Draex mutters, biting his tongue in concentration. The humming of the nuclear engine and tapping from his console help ease him into the mental state of technical problem solving. A few moments later, after Hector finally turns away to do some work of his own, Draex mutters just shy of a whisper, “this is weird.”
“What is it?” Hector asks leaning in.
“The language is not of modern human origin.”
“Modern? What are you implying?”
“What I mean is that it is human, just not our common means of radio signaling. It was transmitted through some kind of Slip Space communication.”
“We have Slip Space technology with radio transmitters.” Hector says as if he were talking to a child.
“I know, I know. It’s complicated, but irrelevant. What is important is that the transmission is fragmented, which made it difficult to decipher, but when the playback is slowed down…” He stops talking, pulling up a new screen, displaying the frequency levels from the recording.
“Mayday, mayday, IEUNI Facility 232 has encountered a critical failure. This is a class T event. Recommend immediate action before-” The sound of glass shattering cuts through the transmission again, just as sudden and disruptive as it was in fast playback. Then, the recording continues: “Nothing can come in range without getting caught-” Draex and Hector cringe.
“Cut it.” Hector says over the playback.
“What do think?” Draex asks, hoping to investigate further. Hector sighs as he turns to the console.
“Ugh… Who the hell is IEUNI? Some kind of branch of IEUNA?” Hector asks, staring blankly into the console.
“I’m not sure,” Draex says uncertainly. “But if we investigate, maybe we will find out.”
Hector pulls up the navigation controls and begins narrowing down the transmission’s origin. “We were trained for space travel and investigations for a reason, right? Let’s go.”
Draex risks a smile and nods, then quickly gets to work on assisting with the analysis. “Got it,” Draex blurts after a few taps of the console.
Hector raises an eyebrow and nods. “Coordinates received, plotting route now. It seems that it came from 1.2 light years away.”
“Firing up the Slip Space drive now.” They both tap away on the console until Draex sends his final route plot before turning to Hector, who nods, entering his final command.
“And go.” Hector mutters, activating their drives. The ship shudders as the nuclear engine begins putting out megawatts of energy. Draex tenses, and Hector chuckles. “You’ll get used to it, kid.” The final tap for execution makes the stars outside the external view screens spin. They spiral with long, perfectly symmetrical lines until they instantly streak away. Draex and Hector sit quietly, staring out the window while occasionally glancing down to check system status. Darkness envelops the ship until a minute later when they jerk back from light speed.
“We have arrived intact.” Draex reports. They both slide to the edge of their seats to tap the console.
“No shit. We are 144 kilometers off the unidentified ship’s port bow. Data is coming in.” Hector says, switching one of the view screens to display the unknown ship. His breath catches in his throat when he looks upon the large, space station. It is made up of five spheres, one in the center, and four others surrounding it, connected by thick, solid struts. The closest star is about 57 A.U’s from their current position, giving it a soft orange illumination.
At least, that is what this station used to look like. The general form remains, but parts of the structure are torn apart into jagged shards. Somehow, the pieces jerk back and forth unnaturally fast as if exploding away and then getting pulled back in.
The large center sphere has taken the most damage. Irregular pieces of the station are quickly shooting outward from its center before being pulled back in. For a moment, Draex swears that the station looks the way it had before the event, but as quickly as it reassembles, it breaks apart.
“What is happening?” Hector asks in a tone between awe and fear. “Is this some kind of hologram?” He taps on the screen a bit.
“No,” Draex says quietly. “There is too much mass. It can’t be… Uh sir, I am reading unknown radiation. Every time I query the Agency’s database, I get rejected for lacking clearance.” He makes eye contact with Hector who shakes his head in annoyance.
“That’s ridiculous!” Hector blurts. “They can’t classify information that could potentially be life threatening.”
Draex nods in agreement, then runs his hands over the communications console. He starts analyzing the radiation with on board sensors while simultaneously attempting to probe the base for more information. After a few minutes, he tasks the AI with radiation analysis to take another approach.
“What are you doing?” Hector asks, watching him tap the blue and green keys until the screen suddenly blacks out. Draex smirks, tapping the bottom of the screen to pull up a virtual keyboard. A moment later, he starts typing away into the screen. The screen soon fills with code of a back-end program.
Hector’s command console fills with information windows titled, ”Chronical Experiments: Top Secret.”
“You didn’t.” Hector says with growing excitement. With two taps, Draex’s console returns to normal. “You did.” Hector pauses for a long moment, “but now I shouldn’t.” His finger hovering over the black information censor.
“But you should.” Draex mutters, waiting for his commander. Hector taps the screen, exposing pictures and data. Draex watches as Hector starts sifting through the file, reading about time travel experiments conducted by IEUNA within the last decade. The file doesn’t mention anything about research bases dedicated to this subject, but it does emphasize that moving back in time is impossible. Once the file ends, he looks over to Draex whose gaze has fixated to the broken-breaking deep space station.
“How…?” Hector asks, “and why is this not public?”
“They never fixed the backdoor that I found in training.” Draex mutters, breaking his eyes away. “There are a number of reasons why it should be classified.” He gestures to the space station, “And I think we are looking at it. I believe we should stay as far away from this place as possible. I have a bad feeling about it.”
Hector ignores Draex’s warning as their ship begins to thrust forward.
Despite himself, Draex smirks. “The least amount of damage is on the third sphere, straight ahead.” he reports a minute later, pointing to a sphere on the left of the destroyed center station.
They approach the structure, feeling that they did not completely grasp the size of it. Compared to their pod, the station is easily the size of the Moon next to the Sun. The enormity of this facility makes it harder to believe that it was hidden from all IEUNA databases.
“We got a cargo bay ahead, but I can’t interface with the station to send any commands.” Hector reports, glancing to Draex.
“Give me a minute. I think I can use the frequency that their original message was transmitting from.”
“It stopped?” Hector inquires, moving the ship into position. Ahead, the dull silver cargo bay door lies in the shadow of the station’s sensor-cluttered hull.
Draex nods, tapping on his console. Like before, the screen is blacked out with more running code from some unsupported programs.
“Yes, as soon as we jumped away the transmission was lost. Whatever the source was, it has been destroyed.” They both fall silent for a long minute until they glance up to the station’s entrance. “Got it.” Draex reports with a self-gratified smile.
“How…?” Hector starts, but his voice falls away as they both shield their eyes from a bright light within. Piles of crates and boxes line the steel floor, along with small docking clamps.
Hector puts the pod into manual control. “Something like this should never be trusted to a machine.” He mutters, slowly easing them into the sphere’s maw.
“Slow down,” Draex warns, tapping on the console. “I’m reading spikes from that unknown radiation. According to the Documentation, it is called ‘Entenium’. These particles are affiliated with time dilation, or when time’s continuum is changed or, in this case, broken.”
“What the heck is that?” Hector asks pointing to the left most view screen. Draex glances up to see a geometric distortion of light twisting the scene outside. It’s as though he is looking at one image that is half above water and half below.
“That is a source of Entenium. It’s spewing the stuff like radiation in a reactor leak. We should g-” A crack of the distorted light shoots out from the source like lightning. It jabs into one of the pod’s cargo chambers. They both slam forward as the pod lurches to a halt. Steel creaks and buckles from the pressure of the shell tearing away from the rest of the ship.
“What in God’s name?” Hector blurts. Draex pushes himself from the console then investigates a bunch of flaring red icons.
“It grabbed us, we are being held in place.”
“Break free!” He commands, hitting the console with clenched fists.
“We can’t. It’s got us. Somehow it has stopped time in the hull of our cargo shell.” The view screen enlarges to the portion of the hull stuck in place. The steel alloy making up the outer hull is torn and crumpled around a small piece of itself, which looks as brand new and polished as ever. Bags of food and supplies lazily float from the compartment where next week’s rations were held. Glancing to the hatch in the ceiling, a red LED displays what Draex already knew: compromised hull. “We need to go.”
“Go? No! Detach the cargo pod or something. We can’t abandon ship.” Hector throws his hands up in exasperation, sounding rather scared.
“Keep it together, Hector. The time-distortion has the hull, our ship, and they did not build this ship with Legos.”
Hector curses, turning around in the crash couch. He eyeballs the man-sized airlock to the right of the pod, along with the two space suits hanging next to it. Draex taps the console fast, looking as though he is backing up some systems. A moment later, the two space suits’ helmets illuminate with their informational HUD. Hector glares at Draex.
“No.” Hector insists stubbornly.
“Hurry.” Draex says, spinning around, ignoring Hector’s objections. After unfastening his restraints, his body easily lifts from the seat. With a small shove, he floats forward, gliding over to the suits. “Or you will slowly get consumed by time itself.”
“Pfft,” Hector scoffs. “I would blow the reactor before that happened.”
Draex grabs the suit closest to him and begins to slip into it. “Uh, no, you won’t. The connection between the command station and the reactor would get severed. Besides, you’re too proud for that.”
They both share a long silence while Draex tries to hold back a teasing smile.
“F-fine.” Hector grumbles, clicking himself free. As he moves forward to get out of his seat, his body recoils from the sound of further tearing. “What the f-” He blinks, and the next thing he sees is a diffracted shard of bent light inches from his face. His gaze lowers to the pair of aluminum tags and a small portion of his shirt being held still within the fracture’s grasp. Hector starts to pull on it, but in 0 G, he starts moving toward the time shard.
Draex’s gloved hand grabs Hector’s arm and pulls him back, then his other hand pulls around to tear the necklace free. “We need to go, now.” Draex repeats more hurriedly.
By the time the airlock cycles to empty all air from the main pod, the time fracture has spread to the main console and rear of the pod. “We don’t have long now.” Draex says, tapping on his utility watch’s interface. Hector looks over to see that his screen is again in some kind of tech geek mode. White text appears from his finger gestures which fly in front of him.
“For a farmer, you are very tech oriented.” Hector says skeptically, pushing open the outer hatch. He feels himself get pulled out by the pressure slightly, which he uses to his advantage. Both Hector and Draex leave their pod to float out into the cargo bay. Glancing around, he feels like an ant looking up at the World Trade Center. His gaze follows long, thick girders which hold the sphere together. The walls of the cargo bay are made up almost entirely of glass, allowing them to look into the large rooms, cafes, and offices which are stacked like blocks on the other side. There is no movement to be seen, or machines to be heard.
“Shit.” Draex blurts, glancing up to the cargo bay doors slowly closing behind them. “I gave us 10 minutes. The sooner we get out, the better.” Hector glances to Draex who looks fatter than before in his space suit.
“What now?” Hector asks in dismay, looking over to his colleague. Draex has his arms to his sides as small plasma thrusters along the side of his suit start spitting blue fire. He turns around rapidly, then begins thrusting to the cargo bay’s floor.
“Artificial gravity will activate in this compartment as soon as those doors close. Unless you want to fall to your death, I recommend you follow me.” Hector sighs, feeling that this whole situation has gotten out of hand. He pulls around his watch and taps Thruster control. With the ease of a small child riding a bike without training wheels, he begins to transition to the relative floor of the cargo bay.
Their feet clunk against the metal floor right as the gravity shoves them down. Hector stumbles at first, but slowly regains his composure. Draex has already started moving to the closest entry way into the facility.
“Hey!” Hector blurts, grabbing him on his shoulder. “Listen, you have some questions you need to answer.” Draex shrugs his hand off.
“No, you listen Hector.” He stops and turns abruptly, showing a rage that Hector never thought he had. It made Draex look older, showing strained wrinkles on his face which he never saw earlier. “That ship has been grabbed by some anomaly which is suspending parts of this facility in some kind of no-time state. Once it reaches the reactor, this part of the bay will flood with radiation. I would rather avoid cancer, thank you.” He turns back, “also, the moment we left that ship, your rank has lost precedence over anything. The fact you’re still alive right now is because I need someone to reset the time matrix.”
Hector blinks, raising his hands and stepping back. “Woah wait, the what now?” Draex groans and turns away.
“In the files, they spoke of a device that is used to keep the flow of time constant while a vortex is opened to travel through time.” Hector blinks. “You know, to send messages to and from the future. Clearly that failed, so whatever rift they opened has begun to expand.”
“Clearly?” Hector blurts, not attempting to hide his cluelessness. “Wait a second, if you could send messages to the future, how were you able to get messages back? From their point of view, it would be traveling back in time.”
“And yet, no matter what tests they did, opening a vortex to the past nearly tore open space time.” They reach the large cargo bay doors which scan them with red lasers.
“You read all of that between the time of our transmission and now?” Hector asks, watching Draex get scanned by the first sequence of lasers.
“Welcome Captain Quintin McCanton.” The metallic female voice calls out. The laser begins scanning Hector and stops almost instantly as eye level. “Unauthorized personnel detected, Commander Hector Margeson has not been cleared for access within Instillation 232’s grounds.”
“Shit.” Draex echoes, rapidly tapping his fingers against his wrist. His helmet darkens as the HUD reads off whatever he is working on.
“Informing station security and activating trespassing proc-” The voice cuts off, followed by a long moment of silence. “Welcome Commander Hector Margeson.” The doors begin sliding open, curling back into the roll of plates which make it up. Draex hurries forward, starting to move into a run.
“Quintin McCanton?” Hector asks. Draex outwards groans.
“I had to make up something on the spot.” Hector steps forward, puffing out his chest like a jock trying to make his status known.
“No, don’t give me that shit. You have not said a shred of truth since this mission started. You were no farmer. You’re too techie for that. You didn’t go to academy and find a back door. No, that was something you learned elsewhere. Who are you? A traitor? A Thraxian spy?” Draex pushes him back and watches the cargo bay doors close. Hector watches as he seems to check his HUD’s status before it flicks away.
“You want the truth?” Draex says, turning to Hector. His face tenses, showing forced restraint. “I was Captain Quintin McCanton until I was court martialed for doing the right thing. The idiots running the show here needed me, but when they demanded I make a machine to move back in time, I knew space-time would shatter like the fragile glass that it is. I refused to defy physics, but they decided to do it anyway. This event, the rewinding, fast forwarding, pausing, and looping in time is caused by that project in the center station being activated without the means to do what it was built to do. If we can’t stop it, these time distortions will expand until it tears our dimension to chorographical shreds.”
“How did you-”
“Escape? Get back into the military? Get my own ship? Start my own recon mission? Hector, none of this matters if we don’t stop this.”
“What do we need to do?” Hector asks, scratching his helmet.
Draex takes a deep breath and sends a map to Hector’s HUD, allowing him to see the internal schematics of this station. They appear to be in the cargo and office sector. Within each sphere is a Fission Generator, an extremely sensitive, volatile machine which uses a form of nuclear fission to generate Terawatts of concentrated power.
“You guys have four literal Star Generators in this place?” Hector asks in exasperation. “One of these machines could power Planet Earth for 100,000 years easily, and also have enough to sell to the Lunar Colony. Four of these machines in one place must mean there is something which either uses or stores that energy. Millions of things could go wrong!”
“Breaking physics requires a lot of electricity.” Draex says casually, beginning to move forward into the station. He approaches a red painted airlock door. Upon placing his hand on the translucent, white lined console, it thunks and begins to wurr open. Four bolts spiral free from the surrounding manifold locking the door in place.
“And elaborate doors,” Hector muses, watching it swing open. Flickering white lights illuminate the inside, making the room feel like a dance club rather than the mass of cubicles that it is. He follows Draex into the wide room and approaching the closest cubical. Supplies and personal effects have been scattered and thrown about the floor. He takes a moment to pick up a small photo frame from the ground, dimly displaying a man, woman and child.
“They must have evacuated to the evac-disk.” Draex mutters, walking through another large, red lined airlock. Hector nods and skips after him.
“Do you think they made it?” Hector asks, shining his headlight past Draex. He wonders where they would have gone from the middle of nowhere, but the questions get caught in his throat when his flashlight shines into the next room.
Computer consoles line every wall in the room, including 4 screens as wide as an Earth passenger hover car hanging down from the ceiling’s center. People from a variety of races and backgrounds are standing up from their computers as if they have seen something horrifying, then froze.
Once the door opens all the way, the total extent of people in this control center becomes clear. About 200 people are scattered around the room with half fallen tablets and emphatic looks of fear, seemingly stuck in time.
Hector’s flashlight shimmers off of translucent shards of frozen space which glow with the red of alarms and whites of their flashlights. The longer his light shines on it, the more intense the glare becomes. Computer monitors and lights that were on at the time of the freezing remain lit with partial images: some windows and icons are still visible, even if the rest of the screen is completely black.
“Even photons can’t get past the stopped time.” He whispers.
“This is worse than I thought. We need to get to the next room.” Draex says, pointing past a group of people turning and starting to run in that general direction. “H-How?” Hector murmurs, stepping to his side.
“It’s likely that time is greatly slowed as opposed to stopped. If it weren’t moving at all, the light on the opposite side of the broken time would be black.”
“I mean how do we get over there?” Hector points where he was, looking at the cracks of captured light which jerk back and forth in midair. They appear to be slowly closing in and expanding, making the safe, passable space hazardous.
Draex doesn’t answer the question as he steps forward. “Don’t be stupid, Draex.” Hector warns, cautiously following behind.
“It’s either we try this and fail, ending time in our universe, or we don’t and time ends in our universe.” Draex retorts, glancing back.
“Well uh…”
“Come on, old man. You can move that old wrinkled body of yours. You made it through class of 2368’s physical training program, you know, before they loosened up for us weak folk.” Draex says with a chuckle.
“Please, I could do it in my sleep. Ballerina’s should be afraid for their jobs.”
Draex turns forward to the matter at hand. “I’m sure that would be right up your alley.”
Hector scoffs, watching as he turns and inches through the enclosing shards. He waivers slightly, but after leaning forward an inch, he is able to move on. Hector watches as the normal people around Draex seem to shift within their small block of frozen time, moving back and forth slightly as if undoing and redoing their action. “Damn.” He whispers, realizing the full extent of what they’re dealing with.
Draex hurries past the frozen obstructions, finding that it seems to have been emanating from the computers and electrical equipment. No wonder. The radiation must have been able to conduct through fiber optics. He turns around to see Hector beginning to contort himself into an ‘s’ shape to get past. “Be careful.” Draex warns, staring for a long moment. His attention is pulled away when a nearby fracture jumps out at Hector, nearly grabbing his suit. “We need to reach it.”
“What is it exactly?” Hector grunts, staring at the glowing light inches from his face plate.
“It’s a device we developed alongside the time vortex, in case manipulating micro-black holes created a hole too large in the fabric of spacetime.”
“English please, son.”
“It’s called Recollection. The idea is to break the fracture.” Hector throws his weight past the rest of the shards, falling to Draex’s feet.
“You’re an idiot.” Hector blurts bluntly. “If you shatter a tablet, you won’t fix it by throwing the pieces against a wall.”
“That’s because the pieces aren’t malleable. Time on the other hand is a form of radiation, in a way. It can be contained, expelled, or eliminated. In theory, these chunks of broken time are created by that radiation clinging to matter in this universe and affecting its time flow.”
Hector blinks at him. “Kind of like a cancer cell converting other cells?”
Draex smiles and nods. “Yes, maybe back when cancer was still a problem.” He begins to laugh dryly. “I guess back when you were a child?”
Hector scoffs, starting to pull himself to his feet. When he pulls on his leg, he gasps when it doesn’t budge. “Shit!” He exclaims, tugging on it sporadically. His foot seems to move freely, but the suit isn’t budging.
“Hold up,” Draex says, pulling his suit’s blade free. He leans down and has to look at his foot from a different angle to see where the shard is hold him. He quickly cuts away the suit, reaching the LCVG layer, the one directly above his skin. Draex then tugs the suit free, tearing a large chunk away.
Hector scampers backward, slamming into another red, heavy iron airlock. Smiling down at him, Draex shakes his head as his body is scanned by the station.
“Welcome Captain.” The AI says as the door begins thunking open behind Draex. “Attention, there is a message for you.” Draex looks up to the disembodied voice with surprise.
“I do not know how you managed it, Quintin, but your business at that station was revoked permanently last year.” Draex recognizes the gruff voice of Admiral McManton, his father and commanding officer.
“Installation 232, what is the origin of this message?” Draex calls out, stepping back for the next door to open. It swings open to reveal a dark room on the other side.
Hector shines his light in first, cautiously hobbling over the metal frames.
“Starbase 01, Earth, transmission received 1.43 minutes ago.” The message continues quickly after.
“When I raised you, I did my damnedest to teach you loyalty and respect, but to cover as an Ensign? No wonder ‘Draex Canton’ managed to jump through classes skip entire sections of IEUNA Training, he hacked the systems and cheated. I have never been so humiliated in my enti-”
“They have no idea.” Draex whispers angrily, “Delete transmission. Return message.” He takes a deep breath before turning back to the doorway. “Dear Father, nobody listened, and now look what happened. If I manage to stop this, we will both know who the real failure is. End message. Relay status report.”
“Center Sphere: connection lost after implosion within… classified… approximately 20.5 minutes ago. Connections with relays and slip space stations in section 9-150 within spheres 2-4 remain in contact, but within the last 2 minutes sections have been getting cut off. Installation 232 will be lost, presumed destroyed, in t-7 minutes.”
“What is this?” Hector calls out from the next room.
“Include with the message. Send.” Draex calls out, skipping forward into the next room. Entering, he glances to the walls of the spherical room to see shards of distorted light inching in from everywhere, even the entrance is beginning to get covered by the radiation directly above it. Sitting on a pedestal in the center of the room is a cylinder connected to a nuclear powered, self-sustaining base. Clear wires and tubes spiral out and back into the device, leaving a lot to look at. Sitting on the top is what he spent hundreds of hours developing - the time-slipstream device which he built in attempt to reverse this catastrophe. Silver emitters stick out from the top of the tube-cooled core meant to create time stimulating radiation. Below the emitters, a sphere illuminated with blue light warns that the device is in standby.
“Installation 232, transfer all command functions to this station, and put all Recollections on spheres 2, 4, and 5 on standby for instructions wirelessly sent from this console.” Draex commands, approaching the computer.
“Acknowledged,” The computer responds through the suit’s radio, no longer having access to speakers outside of the time distortion. “Warning, main computer core is losing power. Warning, Command centers on all stations have gone off line.” Hector looks out through the door to see that the room has become fractured and disfigured with light. It appears to still exist, just not in their timeline. Sweat beads on Draex’s forehead as he begins pulling up the command console to start the activation process.
“Hey uh, Draex.” Hector says nervously, “Not to add pressure or anything, but the shards are expanding faster.” He pauses for a long moment, turning to Draex to see him typing away. “Oh no, this is an exponential thing, isn’t it? The more radiation that is released, the more it expands? In a few minutes it will take over the station, then this star system, then this star cluster, then the galaxy!”
With a sudden whirring, the Recollection device flashes to green.
“Startup initiated.” The computer reports.
“This better work…” Hector says, turning to see Draex’s progress on the computer screen. He can’t make sense of the white text flying past.
Draex stares into the screen, biting his tongue and making sure there are no errors.
“Success!” Draex shouts, jumping to his feet and throwing his arms up. His glove slams into a shard, holding him in midair, but his eyes remain fixated on the Recollection which flashes a more intense green. They both hear it before they see anything, the cracking, glass-shattering-like sound which was not even muffled by their space suits. An instant later, the silver emitters burst with opaque shards, as black as empty space. Draex opens his mouth to scream, but nothing comes out. All he feels is the cold embrace of nothingness.
“Hector, I just don’t get it. If Command wanted someone out here to patrol, why don’t they get the drones? I signed up to be on exploration ships exploring the universe.” Draex taps the glass console, making the pulsing icons switch to status screens of their Spatial Exploration Pod. Hector scoffs beside him, turning in the Crash Couch slightly to regard him.
Hector opens his mouth, feeling excited for a chance to bash the IEUNA’s fake exploration division, but then stops to look around. The feeling of Deja vu tingles his spine until they both make eye contact. Staring into the other man’s eyes, visions never experienced, and yet so real crash against their thoughts, flooding the scene with familiarity.
“It failed.” Draex murmurs.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed!
This story was written and Edited by Dean Sheldon with copy right reserved there to. Please do not copy or distribute without the author's consent.
You can find another one of his works at: https://www.wattpad.com/story/185647260-europa-escape