Short 1 - Survey 227

"Bossman, we've entered the new system."

Being woken in his bunk, Jonas quickly rubbed his eyes before responding to his subordinate.

"Right, anything of note?"

"So far it is as the data the corp brought from the cartographers guild, except for the belt in question we're here to look at."

Jonas and his crew had been hired by a megacorporation to survey unclaimed systems outside the bubble of settled human space, and although everything had been mapped within 5.000 light-years by the cartographers guild, the megacorporation who hired Jonas' crew had reason to believe there was a large number of rare minerals deposited in an asteroid belt around the brown dwarf which was the binary partner to the star system's white giant.

The job Jonas and his crew were given was simple enough: go to the system in question, visit the asteroid belt, perform an inspection and take samples to return.

The only issue with the job itself was the distance, with about 500 light-years of travel from the nearest station it took weeks just to travel out to the target system, so Jonas and his crew were living off of basic rations and strictly limited water usage.

So, no showers, cramp spacing and a lot of wet wipes flushed out into deep space.

"Right, let's take a closer look at our surroundings."

"Okay, Bossman."

The countless hours together made the 5 man crew easily understand each other's attention, Jonas wanting to 'take a closer look' at their surroundings meant to exit faster than light travel, return to normal space and run their sensors. With a bang, the Jonas' ship returned to normal space and extended massive radiator fins red hot with heat from travelling through hyperspace, a special field generated by the faster-than-light drive which compressed reality outside it, allowing faster-than-light travel.

"How's it looking out there?"

"So far everything is in line with what the cartographers guild surveyed, a large white and a small brown with our destination in question… Looks like two distinct belts, but no shepherd moon to separate them… That's odd."

Normally something large would suck up the debris to separate a ring into two distinctive rings, creating a gap that would have easily been spotted and reported by the survey team from the cartographers guild, only it hadn't been.

"Marko, how old is our data from the guild? Like a hundred to a hundred and fifty years old?"

"No bossman, this system has been visited numerous times by the cartographers guild, the most recent data is only two years old."

Two years was much too short of a timescale for approximately 500 square kilometres of material to magically disappear without even leaving a shepherd moon behind.

Something was seriously wrong either with the data from the cartographers guild, or the data from Jonas' contractor, or both.

"... This might be what we were sent to look at."

"Yeah, but I wish they told us that to begin with… Well, nothing to do other than work, let's take another leg and see if it's just some sort of strange optical illusion."

But even after viewing the belt from a different angle, the void was still there, and there was now nothing else to do but take a closer look at it.

"... I don't like this."

Jonas' numerous years in not only survey work, but also convoy and trade ship protection told him there was something wrong, some kind of his subconsciousness was gnawing at him to run and hide, abandon the contract he had signed and just pay the penalty and expedition supply out of pocket.

Still, the reality was a bit different from the ideal, Jonas was behind payments on both maintenance of his ship, as well as docking fees at his home station that carried possible prison time in orbital labour camps surrounded by hardened criminals and pirates he had helped put away working with various security forces.

"Let's take a closer look, Tom, bring us close enough to where we can use the range scanners, but not any more than that."

"Roger bossman, closing to 100 Ls, I'll take us underneath the brown dwarf so we can see the entire ring simultaneously."

Ignoring his intuition, Jonas and his crew drew closer to the brown dwarf and returned to normal space about 100 light seconds underneath its south pole so they could take a closer look at the rings.

As expected there still was no sight of a shepherd moon which was needed to maintain the gap between the two rings, more concerningly, the entire area was dead silent without any sort of signals, even the ever-present microwave background radiation born from the aftermath of the big bang was absent.

"Okay, what the fuck is going on here? That much material does not just evaporate into nothing, and even if it fucking did entropy would repopulate the ring and erase the gap at some point…"

"I don't know what to tell you bossman, I've never seen or heard about anything like this in my life. There's no radio, inferred, ultraviolet, microwave or background radiation, it is like I'm looking at a painting instead of deep space."

(Well shit…)

Jonas couldn't afford to keep ignoring his gut feeling any longer, something was wrong with the entire situation, and even as things looked economically, he would rather serve time than willingly travel into a signal void like that.

"... Okay, we're not getting any closer to that ring system, period."

"Agreed, that thing gives me the creeps."

"If you say so bossman."

"Yeah, we thrust your gut, it has kept us alive so far."

"... But what are we going to do about the contract then? We still need to eat and pay docking fees to continue our business."

Although Jonas' crew agreed with his decision, there was still the issue of their contract, as Tom said, they still needed to eat, and they had paid out of pocket to get all the way out here in the first place so returning home empty handed would be unwise.

"... We'll do what we can from this distance, I'll take it up with the corp when we get back and we should get at least a part of what was in the contract. I'll take that hit, after fees are handled I will make sure everyone gets what they're owed, even if I have to take out a loan."

Jonas was the owner and the captain of his ship, but he was still deeply aware that he couldn't do any sort of work without a crew to support him, even if were to take a financial hit he would make sure his crew didn't, in the long run, that was the smart decision.

"Tom, you said only visible light is getting out, yeah?"

"Yes bossman, the dwarf is normal but the belt seems to be a void of some sort."

"Then gather as much information about it using visual only, we'll do a wide scan and enhance it in software, that way we can all work at the same time. Start with the gap, find out if it's clear or there's something we might have missed, who knows we might have just discovered the first-ever naturally occurring wormhole."

Motivating his crew, Jonas started working like everyone else, photographing, mapping and cataloguing the natural satellites that made up the belts starting from the gap and moving in either direction.

"Bossman, look at this!"

Although it was a tedious and slow process, some results did start showing up after about 2 hours when Marko spotted something on the edge of the 2-kilometre gap in between the belts.

Focusing on the area Marko was surveying, Jonas quickly found what he was talking about, a single rock had slowly started drifting into the gap between belts, driven by entropy; it was only natural that the gap would start to disappear if it wasn't maintained by something.

"So the gap is slowly decaying?"

"Yeah, it seems like we're just witnessing the start of it, with that big of a rock moving inward it'll disrupt the inner belt and erase even more of the gap unless something really is maintaining it."

"And we can figure out if that is the case by simply keeping our eyes on it, that's great."

Getting exactly what he wished for even faster than he could have expected it, Jonas barely managed to finish his sentence before the 400-metre wide rock was hit by something, shattering apart into numerous fragments that cleared the void in a matter of seconds.

"What the fuck was that!?"

"No idea bossman! I'm getting a high-speed replay of that!"

Pulling up the records at lighting speed, Marko put the feed up on a display that everyone gathered around, their eyes peeled to the screen as Marko went through the footage frame by frame. Going back to the impact, Marko only had to scrub back a few frames before some sort of smear became visible, although none of the crew had any idea what it was, it was clear that the object was about 50-metre wide and travelling at a high fraction of the speed of light.

"... That explains how the void formed, that 'thing' is clearing out everything that even comes close to it as it orbits around the brown dwarf."

"But what the hell is it? It's clearly dense or armoured to not have sustained any damage from ramming into all those natural satellites, and is maintaining a perfectly circular orbit without giving off infrared radiation from all the collisions."

Now faced with even more questions than answers, Tom made a decision that would unknowingly seal the fate of himself and all his crewmates.

"Our fire control system can track fast-moving objects, if we can lock up that thing the system should tell us at least what it is."

Working as he explained, there was no way anyone could have stopped Tom from what he was doing, by the time he had finished explaining he had already fired up the ship's weapon system and gotten a target lock.

Not that anyone else on the crew would have done something different, curiosity had won over and perhaps because humans were the only intelligent life in the known galaxy, no one thought what kind of response they would get to pointing their weapons at something just to get a look at it. With a light speed delay of 100 seconds, Jonas and his crew had precisely one minute and 40 seconds to observe the 50-metre wide, black metallic orb before it realised that there was someone pointing a tracking laser at it.

After that time had run out, the black sphere disappeared.

"What the? Did we lose target lock?"

"No bossman, it just disappear-"

Before Marko could explain, the black orb appeared about a metre in front of Jonas' ship, its 10-metre large, glowing red composite eye peering into the cockpit as hundreds of organic, synthetic and mechanical eyes locked with the crew, making them scream in pain as they started bleeding out their eyes, ears and noses, the entire cockpit transforming into pandemonium until the screaming finally stopped and the crew went back to their work without even wiping the blood away.

Although Jonas and his crew completed survey 227 flawlessly, the megacorporation that hired them regarded it as a failure as the rare minerals weren't present in the belt, it turned out to just be an ordinary collection of rocks, just like the cartographers guild had recorded. After completing their contract, Jonas and his crew seemingly disappeared overnight, they weren't seen for almost a month until they reported numerous flight system errors inside a busy star system far away from their home base of operations, crashing straight into the system's star afterwards and parishing with all the evidence of first contact with alien life in the history of humankind.