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.