Chapter 6:Tomb

There was one thing about Martians that Terra had to admit admiration and respect for, and it was surprisingly their fashion sense. While most Martians live in teraformed canyons, where the atmosphere was human breathable, most of mars was still a desert wasteland. So over the past hundreds of years all Martians were trained in the use of what was generically referred to as “spacesuits” even though most of them were used in inhospitable planetscapes, not space. While the first few Martian pioneers would have been all business and no riff-raff types, eventually people’s families began living on the red planet, and eventually families came to be based there. As a result all personality types began to grow in the community of Martian inhabitants and at some point, one or more of these Martian people decided they were tired of the drab look of all spacesuits. Not only were they all the same, but they weren’t that flattering. So began a radical idea to most of the down-to-earth scientists making their way in an oxygen-free desert. Fashionable space suits.

Terra’s suit was meant for people who more needed a spacesuit that didn’t get in they’re way. Her suit looked good because she looked good. The Martians looked good in space suites because their suits look good. Once the heat had repaired the ship Terra had landed it correctly, and with that the two of them were able to move around enough of the crates to get their spacesuits. Terra already wore most of her suite regularly, the skintight cybernetic flightsuit was a gift from one of her few family members she actually got along with and had promised to wear it every day. It was stylish in its simplicity; a silver grey with hints of blue in the light material, the suit was made to conform around the wearer once activated. Terra usually left that button off, but the suit complimented her figure already if she was to believe Quorbin’s opinion. In order to be effective however, she had to put the rest of the suit on, which involved gloves, boots, and a piece of material that linked her suit to her helmet that she called her “space scarf”. After putting together the rest of her ensemble, Terra looked up at the helmet resting at the top of the closet space. She gently picked it up, and after giving it a quick inspection that was more ceremonious then concerned, turned to face some kind of unseen audience and struck a pose with her helmet tucked beneath her arm and an unbridled smile showing her excitement.

Quorbin walked right past her to get his jacket, all but ignoring Terra, but she didn’t mind, she was far too happy to be getting off the ship and doing some low-g hiking. Terra looked over at what Quorbin would be wearing on this outing; if it wasn’t for the fact that she looked so damn good in her skintight cybernetic flight suit she might almost be jealous at the style and choices available to the everyday Martian. At first glance one might not even realize he was wearing something that would keep his body warm enough to walk through space and supply oxygen for him to breath. The suite was a dark almost black olive color that Terra liked in no small part from her upbringing around military types. She noticed it looked good in contrast with the red t-shirt he wore regularly, his pants and boots were the only parts he had on already. The boots masked many of their space suit features by being a uniform black and though sealed at the top to his pants, the pant legs had a layer that still covered to the ankle, giving the illusion casual clothing. The pants and jacket both seems to be made of a material somewhere between petrified canvas and denim and seemed slightly worn, accurately so since this suit had belonged to Quorbin for some time now and often got use on mars.

“Don’t forget your pack.” Quorbin mentioned to her as he began putting on his jacket. Terra lit up at the idea she had more awesome equipment to accessorize herself with and went to the closet for her backpack. While Quobin’s suit was made to be self reliant, heat and oxygen equipment in the thick layers of his pants and jacket, Terra’s suit was actually a “flightsuit” not a “spacesuit”, it was designed for pilots who would be plugged into whatever craft they were flying or driving and so required an additional backpack apparatus in order to function as a spacesuit. Quorbin, a person experienced with these kinds of suits and their needs, found the entire thing incredibly redundant. Most craft had contained atmo systems, only the most specialized of craft lacked one, and in which case they would want you to use your suits own system. Her suit had a failsafe that could supply and filter enough oxygen to keep her alive if need be, not enough to be conscious, but alive.

Terra began putting on her backpack as Quorbin zipped up the inner layer of his jacket. Terra placed all the buckles together around her and felt the contacts on her back magnetize to the pack, then began looking through the checklist on the display on her left forearm. Quorbin noticed her increasing frustration as he began putting equipment in his bag and pulled out their lanterns. Finally Terra gave up on trying to get this damn suit to work, it looked so good! Why couldn’t it work so good too!

“Ok, what the hell, I can’t get this suit to seal; I put everything on right and in the right order, aaahhhhhgg!” Terra pressed the button on her display rapidly, causing the sound of rapid denial. Quorbin paused in his actions, staring for a moment at Terra, his only movements a few quick blinks, trying to remember that she was from Earth, so it was ok that she hadn’t learned to trouble shoot a spacesuit before she was allowed to let go of her mother’s hand when they were in a public place. Terra’s eyes caught Quorbin’s slow movement as he moved towards her, keeping eye contact as his hand moved slowly towards her face, the gentle motion shifted slightly as his index finger extended beyond the others. All while keeping her eye contact, his hand stopped just below Terra’s chin, a slight moment’s pause occurred, and Quorbin pressed down the round lock centered between her collarbones. Her suit made a quick series of beeps that distracted Terra into looking down at it, then in an even quicker instant, a hiss of air became compressed out and the inset dial on the lock turned vertical, the last sound happening being a high pitched squee from Terra as her whole body tightened. She slightly squirmed around while trying to loosen her clenched jaw. She thought the suit was skintight before, now that it was sealed…

Quorbin silently created an unbridled smile of his own as he packed the last few things into his bag, thinking to himself that there was a reason those kinds of suits weren’t popular with people who really used them. Quorbin tossed Terra her lantern while he programmed his own. The perfectly round device fit into his palm comfortably; using his thumb he slid half the sphere upward exposing its controls. Once activated he slid it back, and with a quick toss the lantern hung in the air and lit up, programmed to hover just above his left shoulder. Terra did the same to hers, then began placing her helmet on and attaching the airlines from her backpack. Quorbin flicked his left wrist and his suit controls popped up into his hand from beneath his suit inside his forearm, he checked the seal from his jacket to his pants, then a quick tug on the controls and they retracted back beneath his sleeve.

“Ok, I think I got it all working, how do I look?” Terra spread out her arms to show Quorbin that she was all sealed in and ready for a spacewalk. Quorbin’s cover that he was somehow inspecting the seals on the suit successfully overshadowed his real action to the conforming fit of the suit over the curves of Terra’s body. He gave her a nod and a quick “looks good” before using his own readout to remotely double check she was in fact, not going to die as soon as they stepped outside. The two of them climbed to the lab deck where the hatch was located and sealed the hatches leading to the upper and lower levels, then Terra locked in the rest of her suit, got all green lights, and looked over to Quorbin. “Ready?” Quorbin reached his arms behind his head and pulled over his hood, the back half looking the same as the rest of his wardrobe, the front a clear this plastic that reach all the way over him to the seal on his chest. He attached the hood then zipped the outer layer of the jacket over the belt level seal all the way up to just below his collarbone. A quick tap to his controls and the wrinkles in the hood flattened out with the pressurization of the suit and small metal cords emerged inside the hood from behind Quorbin’s neck, they snaked their way up the back of his neck, curling around his ear stopping just before the canal while splitting and extending foreword to project various readings against the front of the hood for Quorbin to see.

“Ready.” Terra gave herself the honors of opening the hatch. As she turned the lever a static field formed in the circular hatch, keeping in the air and heat. The door opened revealing the asteroids exotic landscape. Terra had landed the ship near a splintering of rock to form a sort of ramp, it was a clear meter away from the ship, but the low gravity made it an easy step. Upon trying to walk Terra immediately turned up the gravity field, she felt as though if she stepped too hard she would float away. Terra stopped and looked around at her view, she felt like an ant navigating a box of asteroid cereal. When she looked back down, Quorbin was already several feet beyond her making his way down the shattered rock. Terra turned back towards the ship and tapped a button on her controls; the hatch sealed itself and the molding of the door expanded by millimeters, making the hull once again an indistinguishable smooth texture. Terra gave a quick sprint with her enhanced gravity to catch up with Quorbin.

As they made their way towards the structure Quorbin began to notice that with the strange situation they were in, his sense of proportion had become skewed in his initial judgment of the structure. He had believed it to be a few stories tall at first from the ship, as they got closer; he realized it was a skyscraper. Terra was behind him the whole time, continually motioning her lantern out of the way to get a better view of their surroundings, she wished she could take a picture of all this, but most of what she saw was distorted shadows, nothing that would make a good picture even at the highest resolution, but the visual was amazing.

“Quorbin this is amazing! We’re WALKING though an asteroid field! I’m surprised we’re not getting pebbled to death!”

“Yeah the whole field must be moving at the same speed.” Quorbin stopped dead in his tracks, Terra not noticing until she had surpassed him and gone several feet past his motionless body with an expression of concerned contemplation, his eyes points at the ground, but flickering rapidly, Terra’s joy began to whither.

“What?” Terra was hoping he would quickly say something obscure that would alleviate her fears, this dense asteroid field suddenly felt very empty and exposed once the happy adrenalin was gone.

“The only thing I can think of that would make all the particles of a giant moving asteroid field move at the same speed is if...” Quorbin forced a smile and shook his head trying to avoid eye contact with Terra. Terra took a few steps toward him, ducking her head down and over slightly to catch is eye contact again. He looked over at her without moving his head and she raised her eyebrows, waiting for him to finish his sentence. Quorbin faced back towards her but kept avoiding her eyes. “…is if all the debris was made at the same time.” Terra straightened her posture, afraid she knew what he was implying.

“Lets keep moving.” She turned and kept walking toward the structure, now feeling more like she was going to the library to look up answers instead of heading towards a ride at Disneyland. By the time they reached the structure the ominous tone Quorbin had created had not left Terra’s mind, but she now had a new focus as they identified what seemed to be a pair of doors inhabiting an arched entryway several stories high against the wall of the structure. Terra began looking around her utility belt for what she needed. “I think we’ll need to laser a hole in or something, those doors are massive.”

“It’s like a third the Terran moons gravity here.” Quorbin walked past her and gripped the large handle of the left door, he put both his feet against the other door and began lifting as hard as he could and sure enough the door smoothly opened up wide enough for the two of them to enter. The doors entered to a great hall spanning as far as they could see, dipping down to beneath the surface of the asteroid and forking underground. The hallway narrowed out as they progressed downward, Quorbin believing the large area they had initially entered to be some kind of reception area that lead into the working regions of the structure. They decided to forgo heading any deeper and began navigating through the current level they had found, their only clear direction of altitude came from judging what hallway descended or stayed level, their lanterns scanned and transmitted to their readout a map of where they had traveled as they discovered it.

“Maybe we should just figure out a way to scan the whole thing at once, I’m not sure how many of these tunnels there could be but we’ve covered at least a mile or so already, it seems a little big for a mining operation or an outpost, I mean I figured it’de be a mine, by now it’s obviously not some crashed ship and I can’t really figure what the use of an outpost burred in the middle of a moving debris field would be.” Terra voiced her analysis as she developed it, Quorbin silently agreed with her on all points, his eyes taking in everything he could until he scanned something noteworthy.

“This actually looks like some kind of doorway, not just another hallway.” Quorbin announced threw their coms. Terra looked back and forth up and down the hall they inhabited; unlike the forked splits they had encountered this one lead to an area that seems perpendicular to their current path.

“Cool, let’s check it out.” Terra agreed. The pair made several enthusiastic steps into this new room before stopping and looking back from their suspicious lack of lighting. Their lanterns glowed and vibrated slightly while stuck in the doorway they had just passed.

“There must be some sort of metal in the archway disrupting their tracking signals.” Just as Quorbin took a single step towards the door, space seemed to bend slightly around the lanterns as they desperately tried to re-sync to their owner, and with a sudden crash more felt then heard from the lack of atmosphere, the top half of the archway broke off taking a chunk of the ceiling with it. The two lanterns fell beneath the crash of debris that blocked the doorway and the hallway beyond it. “Ah crap.” Quorbin stated more annoyed then concerned, with gravity this low they could laser chunks of the ceiling and move them out of the way till they reached the surface if need be. Luckily neither of them was claustrophobic, the lanterns had been buried completely and Terra and Quorbin had been left underground in a deep darkness punctured only by the faint glow of a few tiny lights on their suits too dim to light anything. Quorbin extended his suit controls and used their backlight to navigate to the pile of rubble and began to dig out the lanterns.

“Ooo, I get to use that feature, ok…” Terra cleared her throat. “Lights on…….Liiiiiggghttts on!.....oh damnit- LIGHTS ON!” Terra’s helmet burst with photons, the light mostly inside her helmet, causing her to stand out more then be able to see. As Quorbin kept sifting through the ruble, Terra slowly walked foreword into the room, her eyes adjusting but, the darkness still stood thick in the air like a fog she would almost feel if she reached out for. Her few steps became slower and slower as her eyes went from the high vaulted ceiling above to the floor. Just she was to about to turn back and help Quorbin she noticed a column to her left; she moved to inspect it further. She was now a full 10 paces from Quorbin, but moved another 3 to get a better look when she noticed something at the base. She walked closer to what she thought was an oddly piled stack of rocks and leaned in close. Her lighting was too bright in her helmet to see in the darkness clearly. Terra kept her stance, leaned over, her face within inches of the anomaly and tuned down the luminescence. She looked back up, and just as her eyes readjusted the blood rushed from her face.

Before Quorbin could react to her scream, a beam of light shot from the lantern out of the debris field to beside the door, and Quorbin leapt backward from what he saw. The being was not human, but it was humanoid enough to clearly define in the half decayed state it was. It seemed as a statue, every layer of it the same charred black color, but the details too specific for the mercy of ignorance to its truth. The expression on the petrified figure was unmistakable for any sentient creature. Its hands gripped its own neckline, fingers trying to claw at its own throat, its face stretching upward, and jaw open. The sockets held no eyes, only darkness a sun could not penetrate. The figure spoke one word to the eyes of any being unfortunate to catch the light that could reflect from it: agony.

They literally caught each other midway between their dashes away from fear, each seeing over the other’s shoulder as the lanterns freed themselves from the ruble and darted several feet above their owners, allowing enough light for Quorbin and Terra to see what had made the other leap in fear, terror only growing as they realized it was a second body. With the same momentum that they had crashed with they began to slide past each other, but fear stopped them in their tracks and they found themselves glued back to back. Terra continued to make noise, not so much a scream, it was the sound made from gasping breaths, passing through vocal cords not vibrating for speech, but shaking in fright.

Quorbin made no sound; he froze wide-eyed, feeling as petrified as the alien body before him. The only action he could take was to grip Terra’s left hand with his right, he remained frozen as her hand shook. She began to turn away, but the dark fog was creeping back now, the lanterns descended closer to their preset sync, orbiting each other as they fell. Terra now froze completely, Quorbin eyes involuntarily scanned across the light slowly creeping the room. With every turn of the lanterns came into view another alien body, frozen in a stance of eternal pain, then another, and another and another. The bodies became the floor, the walls, and a prison of horror for the two frightened explorers. They stood in palpable darkness despite lanterns, in total silence save a rhythm in their ears of each other’s heavy breaths, trying to regain composure, in the heart of a tomb.

Chapter 5:Rocks

Quorbin was awakened by a nagging kicking sensation around the back of his calf. He hears Terra saying something, but was still too asleep to really care, so he rolled himself over so that his body formed the hypotenuse of a triangle with the floor and the crate stack, hoping he had simply rolled over on something and Terra simply wanted him to scoot out of the way. Unfortunately for Quorbin’s immense desire to sleep for what he would solemnly swear would only be five or ten more minutes, Terra was in fact trying to wake him for a need more pressing then his prolonged sleep. Quorbin continued to not really care at all, but Terra insisted. Quorbin sat up, rubbed sleep from his eyes while he mentally tried to get all of the gears turning in his head.

“Your Gravity scanners getting all fuzzy.” Terra stood her ground with a stare at Quorbin, waiting for him to spring into action. Quorbin stared back, trying o find the most delicate way to imply she was stupid for having this be of enough importance to even bring up, specifically so he could find the opposite way to tell her in order to hopefully anger her enough to leave so he could sleep more. “Fuzzy, as in I can’t see what’s there.” Quorbin then realized he had gotten so caught up trying to decide what to say he didn’t say anything.

“So…….”

“So why don’t you get up and go look at it.”

“Because I can’t imagine it is anything more interesting then the dream I was having about the cheeseburger planet with the supermodels.” He was in fact dreaming nothing; he just really wanted to get back to sleep. “I’ll look at it later.” Quorbin flopped back down and pulled is blanket back up. He began the slow decent back into sleep.

Terra squinted at the useless lump of a human being trying to sleep while her sensors were being blinded. Today however, was the start of month 4 of this long, LONG mission, and she had known this annoying Martian for over a year, oh god had it been that long, and though he might want to believe that his self-proclaimed genius level intellect was what allowed him to get under her skin, she was well aware of the terrifyingly aggravating fact that the two of them were getting to know each other. Using this knowledge, Terra once again found her crate of snacks, found the driest possible type of chip, then sat cross legged directly behind Quorbin’s head, leaning over slightly to create a direct line of sound between her mouth and his ear.

Chomp. Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Chomp. Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Chomp. Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Quorbin tried to focus on sleeping, a counterproductive endeavor.

Chomp. Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Chomp. Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

Quorbin’s eyes opened. Could he kick her in the face before she had time to use those expert combat skills to knock him unconscious? Or maybe he wanted her to knock him out, no that would hurt a lot.

Chomp. Crunch crunch crunch crunch.

“Shower first.” Quorbin got up and began to remove his shirt as he opened the hatch of the shower cylinder. He removed the rest of his clothes while in the tube and tossed them just outside the hatch as Terra put away her snack and made her way up the ship’s decks. The shower was in fact a cylinder running from floor to the ceiling, like four others symmetrically aligned throughout the room just inside the hull. The other cylinders all had a purpose, one containing a toilet whose filtration Quorbin and Terra both avoided thinking about as much as possible, the other a sort of closet space containing a few clothes and their space suits, and the last a storage bay for specialized equipment and samples. This one was mostly hollow with a make shift shower head installed above. They had gone to great length to have an actual shower system installed, it had a very limited supply of water however, in fact about every minute the same water came back again. The water stayed warm and was filtered; but Quorbin tried to not think about it much. Realizing that in his haste he had forgotten to place a towel near the exit of the shower, he opened the hermetically sealed hatch, about a meter tall and a meter from the floor and looker around for any sign of Terra. Not hearing her near, he freely moved about the deck drying off and getting dressed.

Quorbin emerged on the top deck a few minutes later holding the edge of a sealed nutrient bar he would call breakfast in his teeth as he climbed into his seat.

“Ok, so…. Wait why did you wake me up?” Quorbin’s hands went from scanning his console to resting on his thighs, but then to the business of unwrapping breakfast as Terra reminded him.

“I saw it this morning when I came to check on everything, I think your sensor tweak broke something, there’s this big blur on the display that’s been growing.” Terra projected a 3-d model of what she spoke of. “It’s just some big blur on the gravity sensors, the computer can’t give me any good readings on what it is, so I think it’s a glitch, but its taking up a whole region of the sensor range, I mean it’s almost gotten over the short-range sensors and covered the ship. I don’t like being half blind out here, or anywhere.”

“Diagnostics don’t show any glitches, I feel like I’ve seen this before though… wait, the short range gravity sensors are picking it up, it was just that problem I said before about range and focus, it’s a whole bunch or really small pieces that’s why it looked like a blur, it’s a…” Quorbin’s eyes grew as he noticed the speed it was traveling, straight at their ship. “It’s a debris field” Almost the same instant Quorbin spoke, their predicament entered Terra’s mind and she gripped the controls tightly in order to maneuver, but it was too late, before she could turn the ship to flee, the violent taps of a thousand pieces of space debris began their ruthless bombardment to the hull.

“Why can’t I move?” Terra yelled over the sound of rocks smashing all their inertia into the small ship, various alarms signaling and the sound of objects being giggled out of place by the assault rang from below decks.

“Its disrupting our gravity lock, switching to standard thrust.” Quorbin punched in the commands as he spoke them. Terra adjusted her posture and tried not to show the excitement in her eyes as she triggered the first manual acceleration she had done in months. For a split second she was unable to discern anything outside the hull, but her and Quorbin had trained to work together in case of emergencies like this, and for the first time for either of them, felt comfortable with knowing each other. Quorbin activated the ships headlights and brought up an overlap projection on the view screen of all the objects in the field. While some of the objects could be noticed from the headlights, the view screen now gave a blue outline of all the projectiles traveling in a hundred meters of the ship. Terra was now in her element.

Various systems were in place on board a starship to counteract the forces caused by fast acceleration and maneuvering, especially at the breakneck speeds many pilots were capable of. However many pilots found that reducing this force too much impeded their flying abilities, abilities not just built on sight alone, but in the instinctive reaction of all senses, with little room for systems to feed them numbers of information to base decisions on. Terra had these levels set for a very broad tolerance, and one of the first things Quorbin had been forced to get used to was running a console while experiencing 3 or 4 g turns. Quorbin attempted to scan more of the debris field for an exit while Terra spun, dived, turned and possibly have bounced through the field, not only managing to avoid many large fast moving objects, but many denser clusters of small objects.

“I’m not sure I can do this forever Quorbin.” Actually she thought she could, she just didn’t want to let him know how much fun she was having.

“This debris field is going for hundreds of miles, and traveling fast.” Quorbin cringed at a few points while talking at the harsher pings against the hull.

“Quorbin, I’m blind again.” Terra looked outward at distorted blackness in a rare moment of calm.

“There’s a huge field of small debris coming through, I have an idea, turn the ship around brace for high thrust.”Quorbin inserted the setting, having their gravity drives push them while he opened the rocket thruster at the rear of the ship and amped up the reactor. Quorbin tried to visualize the effect, as the ship stayed almost motionless, a massive flame of plasma and light erupted from the exhaust port, vaporizing the small fragments. “Awesome it’s working, damn the gravity drive is weakening were starting to accelerate foreword, I guess actually that would help us move with the debris, try scanning for-“

Quorbin would not even recall what he had meant to say next. In an instance, the navigation computer detected a massive object behind them, Terra and Quorbin felt the massive whiplash of the collision. Neither of them had a chance to make a sound, not that one could have heard it over the sound of creaking metal surrounding them. Silence befell the room for the next several minutes. Had a third passenger been present and conscious, they would have felt the ominous tones of silence and darkness that filled the ship. Their senses would not have felt the hull of an exploratory spacecraft, but been stricken with fear at the presents of a tomb, now ridding and asteroid through a debris field. Outside the view screen, dots of stars flickered wildly as small and large chunks of rock passed between the ship and the light, even in and abyss deep in space, they found a darker place.

It was this gothic imagery that Quorbin awoke to with a gasp, he felt the fear brought on by such silence between every breath he took, periods that felt like lifetimes despite the heavy breathing. Quorbin tried to push himself upward, but fell again, his wrists felt sprained, so he lifted himself with the other arm into a sitting position awkwardly against the back of the deck looking out the view. Whatever they had landed on, it was an object large enough to give them some kind of gravity, he was too disoriented to try and feel how heavy he was, and it wasn’t his first priority. Terra lay cramped between the seats of what the gravity well had made an awkward floor, if not for the fact that her chest rose with air at the same second he glanced over, Quorbin would have entered shock out of fear for the worst. He called out to her, still too disoriented to really hear himself. Her lack of answer worried him further and he reached on to her shoulder, dragging her in the low gravity across to him.

Terra awoke to a blurry vision, as she blinked it became clearer and clearer until she made out the dim image of Quorbin’s face above her. She wanted to speak her questions and wanted to hear the reasons for the bruises she was registering on her body more and more by the second. She spoke once, but Quorbins face remained pointing out the view screen. Thinking maybe she had not actually spoken in her disoriented state she tried to ask again, but still Quorbin remained transfixed. She squinted slightly and made out his facial expression, and she became worried instantly, he had a look of bewilderment and awe she had not seen on Quorbin before. Terra attempted to reach up to get his attention but was only able to muster a soft motion with her arm that left her hand giving a light tap to his jaw. This did the trick, and Quorbin’s face moved slightly towards her direction, while his eyes stayed outward.

“Terra, tell me what I’m seeing.” Quorbin spoke slightly too loud for someone who had just waken, leading Terra to think he had been glued to this position for several minutes, but she was slow to understand the question, still disoriented. “Seriously, you need to make sure I’m actually seeing this.” Quorbin moved his face back to its original position and Terra’s hand rested against it still, until it dropped next to her and felt an odd state of adrenaline forcing her to sit up. She blinked repeatedly, rubbed her eyes, and stood.

The light inside the ship was coming from one of the headlights, still working outside on the hull. It projected across the landscape of the gigantic asteroid for at least a few miles. At first glance the view was dull, mostly flat with just enough inconsistencies to seem natural, but off in the distance, at least a mile, maybe farther ahead, the light reflect back not from the asteroid’s surface, but higher. Amongst the brown dull surface of dirt dust and rocks, a grey obstruction protruded almost perpendicular to the horizon. Focusing in closer, lines could be seen running along it, lines where pieces were put together or had now fallen apart. Here on a giant rock flying at hundreds of miles an hour in the middle of a field of debris, there stood a structure, a building, implanted on the dirt.

“Is that what I think it is?” Terra looked for confirmation from Quorbin, who was trying to get a better view and his bearings. “I can’t see any marking on it but it doesn’t look like any human design I know of. So could this be, yaknow…” Terra helped Quorbin up, her pain and disorientation replaced with a child like excitement as though they had found a magical gateway back earth to Disney land. Plus she was a little tougher then Quorbin, though in his defense his ribs were barely healed.

“We need to get the sensors up to check, it’s possible that it’s another crashed ship, you did say we ran close to some lanes.” Quorbin reached out for the dead console to reactivate it.

“Oh no, first we check for concussions and make sure our organs didn’t get rearranged.” They helped each other through the hatch and into the lab deck that was now sideways. After searching around Terra remembered that she had thrown the med kit down to the next hatch, so they went down there. After they found the kit they began scanning each other for injuries, more regen-gaus was applied, heads were checked for bumps, all around they counted themselves lucky they weren’t bleeding all over the floor, cause THAT would be annoying to clean and they wanted to check out that structure. Deep down Quorbin knew they’re survival was probably due to the dozen safety systems installed on the ship to use gravity fields to counteract sudden forces. The systems were safe but the shift in gravity often caused blood flow issues resulting in loss of consciousness, an issue that sometimes became as dangerous in its self. This train of thought reminded Quorbin:

“Oh crap, I need to check the reactor.” Quorbin began to rise from the sideways crate he was sitting on, making sure not to disturb the regen-gaus or muscle repair cybernetic he had applied.

“I thought you said if a nuke went off in the ship it the only thing that would be left IS the reactor.” Terra was unsure if he was being worrisome or if she should be worried he had instilled false confidence. Quorbin just stared back in a slight childlike face and tone.

“Yeah but, I still wanna check on it…” Quorbin entered the engine room and fumbled around the floor/wall for a light switch. When he finally got it he realizes how bad they had been hit. The symmetrical room was now a looked like the inside of a crushed can, the internal systems were made to withstand this kind of distortion, but it looked like some of them had been pushed to their limits. Quorbin came back up, or rather over, to where Terra was removing some of the gaus from her shoulder before re-adjusting her clothes.

“How long until we can get power back so I can plug this thing in.” Terra’s skintight cybernetics flight suit had many functions similar to repair her body, but it required a power source, and its normal one was buried sideways beneath a ton of crates, so she would instead plug into the ships power once available.

“I’m ganna have to reroute some systems until we can get the hull repaired, you can still fly it as long as the gravity drive wasn’t damaged right?”

“It’ll be a pain with the ship’s mass all distorted but yeah, I’d rather just use the reactor to heat up the asteroid, oh but it might melt part of it and we’d be stuck, yeah, I can fly it, we need a star or something though, or a volcano, I always wanted to do that.”

“Actually I think your right, even if it liquefies the surface should be able to heat up enough to activate the memory metal, which we’ll need since I don’t know if the hatch is ganna work so we can check out that structure.” Quorbin was reoriented to a stare at Terra as she let out what he surprisingly identified as a squee.

“I’ll go get my space helmet!” Terra excitedly started moving the crates around trying to get to the cylinder with her gear. Quorbin assumed she had forgotten about all her injuries in her excitement to go walk around in low gravity in an empty desert. Quorbin decided to be more productive and actually fix their ship. Rerouting all the systems needed was going to suck, it wasn’t hard, just annoying. All this trouble because of a bunch of rocks.

Chapter 4:Drift

“Blackness, dark, and empty.” Quorbin stared at what he saw ahead of him: sure there were the dots of stars, but his scientific mind barely saw them. His mind was wired to include the truth in what he saw: that each of those stars is so far away it was amazing that he could even see them. Terra was never going to forgive him for this if they didn’t find something. He had sent a signal probe toward the Savepoint station nearest their location. Along with the data of their most recent findings, he included instructions for them to spread deeper into the abyss region. He still estimated it would be at least a month before any of them were in position though, so he had wired up some extra external drives to keep some data safe. The fear of losing their proof of anything interesting out here was starting to get downright paranoid for Quorbin.

“I’m surprised this hasn’t come up before.” Terra joined Quorbin on the bridge level with a tablet of star charts and logs she handed to him. “From what I can see this region actually comes within scanner range of a few trade routes to some deep space systems.” Quorbin looked over the star charts she had handed him.

“Which planets are these?” Terra leaned back over toward Quorbin and tapped a few buttons on the tablet. Quorbin looked over the courses and their destinations and after some thought shared his theory. “These are all pricey neighborhoods, really exotic colonies out here. Any ship that’s on these lanes is probably either some high end cruiser looking more at the needs of its rich snob passengers, or cargo ships manned by people too poor to try exploring.”

“But even the initial expeditions that planed out these routes?”

“They might have been set up before they had the sensor capability to realize what was there. Back when our gravity-lock FTL was first established it was really more of grabbing a point and just taking off, it wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now; all you really could scan was where you were and were you ended up.”

“But seriously, nobody realized they were passing by, or in some cases right through, hundreds of light years of emptiness?” Terra looked out the front of the ship inquisitively.

“There’s also the very likely possibility that nobody cared enough to look.” Quorbin handed her tablet back and continued looking through the sensors. Terra relaxed in her seat, but continued to feel an inward uneasiness. As often as she tried to convince Quorbin that the people on Earth weren’t as selfish and self absorbed and he liked to think, his conclusion seemed sound. While her first instinct had been to leave the region free, it was Quorbin who thought maybe someone should check out the big empty region—a ridiculous sounding proposition—but he was one of the few people who was willing to ask and look into questions like why the region was empty, what made it empty, and was it really empty at all. This knack for wanting to be in everyone’s business, or his “sense of exploration,” she assumed he’d call it, was one of a few elements of his character that had made him at odds with many Earthicans, including Terra herself.

Terra sat more upright in her seat, a movement she realized went unnoticed to Quorbin once she glanced over to his station. She had been assuming that he was stereotypical of all Martians since she couldn’t think of any Martians she knew other than a few high society friends of her parents, but most of the system’s exclusive rich club were about the same as each other, so not good representatives of any of the places they lived. Quorbin often accused her of having traits he had seen in other humans on Earth, and so she had just instinctively generalized Mars to be like him. Perhaps this was a misjudgment on her part however: maybe one of the reasons he had been so quick to leave had to do with him having as unpopular ideas on Mars as he did on Earth.

“I think I might have an idea to make this take less than a bajillion years to get through.” Quorbin announced to with more than a small amount of pride in his voice. “I’ve been looking through all the different setting for the long range sensors and I think if I recalibrate them for the amount of emptiness out here I can let us get through faster.” Quorbin projected a hologram of the region ahead of them in the cabin. “The way our gravity scanners work is we have to take in a balance of range and specificity. Gravity is always there but the farther away it is, the weaker the signal is, so to scan something farther away we have to sort of tune out the stronger signals closer to us.”

“Yes Quorbin, I know this. I went to school.” Terra gave him a stare similar to one she would give if someone inquired whether she knew what it was like to be female, however Quorbin was too proud and caught up in own idea to let her mockery of his presentation techniques get in the way.

“SO…” he continued, “The sensors have a reciprocating effect with range and accuracy; if we focus the field to lock onto gravity wells inside the abyss…” A few taps on his screen and a pink, luminous bubble formed around where the ship sat on the blue glowing hologram, its border just inside where most stars ended and darkness began.” We can use the longest range sensors, the gravity ones, to only scan the region directly in front of us as we wander through the center of the abyss. If they detect anything we can just fly over there, check it out, then go back to our original path. It’s not exciting, but I doubt there’s anything out here of interest that doesn’t have mass so it’ll work.” Quorbin sat back, satisfied with his plan. Terra was of course, less satisfied.

“With the gravity sensors down that low we can’t scan for any wells to lock on to, making us blind and unable to reach FTL if loose the gravity locks we already have.”

“Why would we lose them?”

“I don’t know what if we mess up the calibration on the scanners and can’t get them long range again or something?”

“It’s just a change of the settings; it involves me pressing a few buttons and you sitting there doing nothing like always.” Terra glared; she did not wish to be reminded that she often had nothing to do on this ship. “All I have to do is change them back.” Terra stared longer.

“That’s the kind of statement I would post on a website of famous last words.” Quorbin was annoyed at this reference and did not wish to display the humor he found in it. “It seems a little riskier then you’re making it out to be.”

“It’ll be fine.” Quorbin offered reassurance instead of sarcasm…..this time……. He input the modifications to the sensors, and then looked up at the display, waiting to see what popped up… Nothing changed. More emptiness. It was unlikely there would suddenly be something right now that they didn’t already detect (this course would take them about 3-6 months to scan entirely), but when they were done they would still be able to reach home within a reasonable variance to their scheduled arrival date. Terra laid in the course, and off the ship went: snaking through the tunnel of barren darkness, waiting for something interesting to happen. Then she once again decided she was hungry and went for a snack.

Terra began rummaging through the crate of food that was meant to have flavor instead of the nutrient packs designed to actually keep them alive. They saved a lot of space and money for a long term mission like this, but some more common food was brought along as well to keep the body used to digesting normal food. Terra typically earned her athletic body through an active lifestyle of scaling things, climbing things, sometimes fighting things, and now she found herself looking at the backs of packages for nutrient information, realizing that sitting around on a ship all day meant she couldn’t eat quite the same way she did when she was spending her free time playing paintball or laser tag. She missed laser tag, though all she could remember of it now was the long rant from Quorbin about how it was a misnomer, that firing a gravity wave developed for anti-riot squads at other people had little to do with lasers, or that he wasn’t really sure he could be aggressive enough to really be a good player. Terra, however, expected the game to be a satisfying experience and was eager to have an excuse to knock Quorbin on his ass with a pulse weapon of some kind, even a child-friendly, non-lethal one. A few quick insults to his manliness and Quorbin was memorizing the game’s rules and practicing his aim. She did admit, privately to herself, that he had earned some respect in her eyes the way he took getting thrown into a wall at the fault of her aim and got back up into the fight all 17 times—the first game. She remembered each of them fondly every time he annoyed her.

This instance of attempted bonding was part of the time period before the mission launched but after they realized that lack of funding meant the two of them would be stuck by themselves on a ship for a year. They had decided they should get to know each other a bit before getting thrown into this situation so that they would get along better. It lasted all of a week, at which point they then decided to see as little of each other as possible until they absolutely had to. The two knew they couldn’t kill each other while they were on the mission, since obviously there would only be one other person to blame and all…

Terra decided she would risk the possible extra weight and opened her snack joyously. She sat in the makeshift space between the stacked crates, leaning up against them while she happily chomped and crunched. She got up only for a moment to activate a panel on the wall of the room to allow some music to play while she waited for something to do, preferably something that didn’t blow up and try to smash her face. Though she knew it was only a matter of time before she became so bored she would risk that too.

Quorbin stared out into empty space, no longer pure black from the distortion of FTL travel. He could hear Terra’s music playing from two decks down. Although he was sometimes bothered by her selections, her tastes were growing on him, as he figured his were growing on her. He felt a slight hint of sleep come upon him and after a quick look at the time realized that it was rather late. He found himself missing the day/night cycle a planet offered—something he always wanted a planet for—even though he enjoyed space flight so much. The satisfaction he got from surviving off a system of his own design and moving throughout the galaxy as he willed was infinite. Many people would find the idea of having to produce your own air a scary thought, but he often felt that part of the allure of space travel for all humans, present and in history, came from the feeling he got every time he looked at his reactor. As his mind drifted off, he wondered what Terra got out of this. He had seen her piloting first hand, not only as an outside observer but from the seat next to her. At first the experience was terrifying, but he slowly began to feel the comfort in having such an accomplished pilot guiding their ship. His first realization that he was getting used to her came from him noticing how he slowly began to think very little of any other pilot’s ability. Terra always referred to being “one of the best” as a pilot, and they had not once had an argument where he spoke against that claim.

Quorbin played some of the videogames he had brought with him, thought about watching one of the movies he brought, but decided it was time to sleep. He left the ship to guide them as they had programmed and dropped down to the lab area, double checked his equipment was working properly, and then dropped down another level. Terra was already pulling out the crate of sleeping gear. Trying to dismiss the comfort he felt in the fact that their day night timing was yet another part of their lives they were forced to have in common, Quorbin dropped down to the engine room, just to have a look around and check on things.

Quorbin remembered a conversation he had overheard unintentionally between Terra and her richer-then –should-be-reasonable parents. Her mother has expressed an unreasonable amount of concern about her being alone with a strange man on a space ship for a year, even though she had met Quorbin quite a while ago and due to being involved in the same project as Terra, saw her often. Terra had explained that if she couldn’t feel safe in the same room as some geeky nerd who spent more time sitting in front of a computer then she did rock climbing would render all the time she had spent in martial arts classes, military combat training from her father, as well as centuries of progressive female empowerment entirely mute. While Quorbin couldn’t understand why she insisted on saying things like geek and nerd as though it was a bad thing, he was slightly aggravated that she sighted her combat skills in the argument instead of his strength of character, which he had. Though as difficult and irritating as Terra found her parents, Quorbin found them a hundred times worse, especially her mom, and so if her argument that she couldn’t simply overpower Quorbin was what it took to silence her intensive criticism, he would let sleeping dogs lie. Also she wasn’t really lying about being able to take him; even with the added muscle mass he had from earth’s higher gravity she could really kick his ass.

Quorbin climbed back up a deck and began laying out his sleeping bag, which was actually a thin mattress and a thin blanket made of special materials to act as efficient as a space blanket, but the nuance had stuck. At first the amount of space they had arranged to sleep in seemed far too small, since they didn’t want to have to talk to each other, let alone actually bump into each other physically. However as they got used to the arrangement and each other it became less of a problem. In fact they were more than often finding each other asleep already at different places. In front of monitors, in the piloting seats, once even Terra found Quorbin sitting against the wall in the engine room, his tools still in greasy hands. Part of the reason there was any hope of having this mission even work came from the fact that despite the constant arguing and differences of most opinions, other people could instantly tell how well the two of them were able to work together. Possibly because these differences allowed them take on the many, many obstacles the project had run into in a diverse amount of ways. One could always find the answer and the other could always find the way to execute it. So due to the mutual respect found through either side rarely being able to truly one up the other, blankets often found their way across the backs and shoulders of whoever was found asleep in a strange place. Though only one other party to blame, the awkwardness of such rivals excepting such a courtesy was too eerie for either side to find willing to address.

Still the idea of both of them sleeping in the same 5x10 foot area, or 5x10 mile area, hadn’t been the first choice for either of them. This level was the only one really made to accommodate sleeping properly, insomnia and long term deep space voyages did NOT mix well. The idea of alternating sleep schedules was brought up many times, but they discovered in the training the received that not only was it conducive to sanity to keep standard day night cycles as real as possible by doing things like a steady sleep schedule or eating different foods at certain times, but it was counter-productive to such efforts to have some crew on New York time and some on Australia time. So eventually they came to agreements and rules, and the 8 hours a day they spent asleep became the calmest, quietest times they were ever in the same room together.

Quorbin lay with his feet towards the ladder and hatch of the deck and his pillow pushed up against the stack of crates. Terra laid the same, after too many instances of and alternated pattern causing each other to get kicked in the face. Terra plugged in a large pair of headphones and set them around her neck while she sifted through a display of her music. Quorbin had a similar set up, but found he enjoyed the hum of the engines and reactor a far more soothing tone.

“How long do you think it’ll take us to find something?” Terra asked while still scrolling.

“I guess it depends on if were near the beginning or the end of what happened out here.” Quorbin answered while gazing at the ceiling of the deck, watching the stars go by from his mind’s eye view of how it would look seeing through the ship.

“Oh damn, I forgot.”Terra got up and walked around the edge of the crate stack, passing into a small area of space Quorbin could not see from where he was and she began to change of her skintight cybernetic flight suit and into a pair of thin sweat pants and t-shirt with a logo for the branch of the space military fleet her father was in. Quorbin closed his eyes out of respect even though she was out of view, the original rules for her changing involving him being turned the other direction, blindfolded and wearing headphones. He had said he could just leave the room, but she insisted he be where she could see him. He had suspected she really just didn’t wasn’t to admit that his was a much simpler and better idea.

“Done.” Terra spoke casually as she re-assumed her position on her sleeping bag, without showing how she too was uncomfortable with how comfortable they were becoming with each other. “Tomorrows the start of month four right?” Quorbin agreed. “Well, see you then.” Terra replied with a yawn, she put on her headphones, turned her back toward Quorbin and pulled up her blanket to her neck.

Quorbin raised his hand and snapped twice, a holographic display of environmental controls emitted before him. He slightly weakened the artificial gravity to make sleeping on the metal floor more comfortable, dimmed the lighting to about half a Terran moon, then pulled his blanket about waist high, put his arms between his head and the pillow, and let his mind drift.