By Matt Ahlschwede
Edited by Bryan Gahagan
From dreamless suspended animation to blazing oblivion, Rex Warburton was about to have a very bad day. Soon, his life as one of the best scouts in the Astrophysical Survey would be over, and he would be marooned on a distant, alien world. The journey to the Cat's Paw Nebula was nearing its halfway point, and Commander Warburton was being reanimated for some housekeeping and maintenance chores. Ace, Rex's holographic companion had just switched on to greet him.
The Starbreaker’s navigational system, Octavia, detected a gravitic storm too late to avoid. The Starbreaker shook against the outer edge of the storm. Equipment scattered. Cabinets flung open. The organic waste bioreactor toppled on its side. Rex, thrown against the polycarbonate shelving, wedged himself between the shelves and his loosened stasis pod and stiffened.
Everything went dark.
Projected by a hovering drone, Ace purred, and tried to calm the stricken explorer. Ace knew all there was to know about Rex. His biorhythms, his peccadilloes, his love of chocolate, his thoughts about The Planetary League. Her personality programmed to perfectly compliment his. Curious, passionate about life, a lover of nature, and impulsive. The perfect Planetary Surveyor’s Assistant, Ace and Rex shared an intimate bond built over countless expeditions.
Rex heard two words out of the softening darkness, “Hyperspatial Discontinuity.” And again. And a third time.
“Oh, fuuuuudge!”, said Warbutron.
“Now is not the time for chocolate,“ Ace cocked her head.
“No,” in time with Octavia, “Hyperspatial Discontinuity”, The nav computer added, “ in 3...2...1..."
The universe imploded, everything turned inside-out. Seconds ticked by, or eons, time had no meaning here. Rex thought he had died.
"If I'm dead, why is my heart so loud?"
He discovered that there is a sensation more jarring and traumatic than traversing a hyperspatial discontinuity, and that is traversing such a discontinuity while conscious.
Then the Starbreaker’s main systems rebooted.
The discontinuity had ended.
Rex cursed and not for fudge.
“Rex, honey?” Ace soothed, “Octavia put the ship in safe mode. I'm pretty sure we were just scattered halfway across the Sagittarius Gap and then instantly reassembled into more or less our original configuration."
Alarm klaxons started sounding. Ace made herself as cute as possible, kneeled beside Rex, and "massaged" his forehead as Rex's neural interface relayed a haptic feedback signal to his brain.
"I missed you, baby.", she cooed to Rex.
"Hate to interrupt you right now", said Octavia, "but, we are in a bit of a situation. You'd better get ready for impact."
Rex quickly strapped himself back into his crash-couch and asked, "Where are we?"
Octavia began to give a status report, "That hyperspace rift knocked us way off course. I'm trying to get my bearings, but there isn't anything like this in any of my charts. . ."
Time stood still as the Starbreaker ripped apart, the main engine pod sheared off the aft of the ship. Smoke poured from the entrance to the cargo bay. The shriek of rending plastanium was eclipsed only by the deep thunder of impact as Rex’s stasis pod tumbled end over end.
Warburton stood up and looked around. Surrounded by the burning wreckage of The Starbreaker, Ace's drone rose into the air, already surveying. The gravity was a bit under one standard gee. From horizon to horizon there was a vast sea of wreckage . The Starbreaker had not been a large ship, and she was now surrounded by the wrecks of all manner of other craft, some Rex recognized, and many he did not. Here and there, large trees with hollow trunks poked out of the wreckage, and a massive mound of hair, that looked more like a haystack with eyes rooted around. Three brilliant moons hung in the sky, one green, one white, and one copper in hue. "Looks like this is home now.", he said to nobody in particular.
Regaining some composure, Rex raised a fist, stumbled ahead and said, “Bless this wreck, in the name of the Planetary League, I come in peace.” Yelling again into the dusty green sky, “I come in peace!”
