FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

"All officers to the bridge immediately," Captain Regent's voice boomed through the ship's intercom. It came to Jonas in a dreary haze, drawing him out of his nap and back into the less-than-eventful life during space travel. He rose slowly, keeping his eyes shut tight as he tried to contain any lingering drowsiness as it was quickly drained away from him. A moment later, the door buzzer sounded out, and Viridan's head poked into the room.

"Come on, Jonas. I think we're there," he said. "We should get you out of this cabin. You've probably gotten cabin fever from all the time you've spent cooped up in here."

"Things were a little strange over the past couple weeks," Jonas groaned, pushing himself out of the bed and following Viridan down the hall and past the mess. "We all probably had it a bit."

"Well, it'll be good for all of us to get out onto the station for some real food and some R and R," Viridan said. "After we get our assignment, of course."

Jonas didn't get a chance to reply as they stepped through the door to the bridge. Captain Regent was standing near the front of the bridge, and they moved to stand at her left. Jonas hadn't been this far up the ship in a long time, and was quite relieved to see such a large window. Most relieving, however, was the enormous space station just ahead of them. It was cylindrical in shape, with six long arms extending at increments of forty-five degrees from the top of the station. Each arm ended in a six pointed star, which acted as berths for a dozen ships of varying shapes and sizes. A dozen more were skittering about the station, making their way back and forth between it and the huge planet around which the station orbited. From what Jonas could see that wasn't obstructed by wispy white cloud systems, the planet was mostly covered in desert, with a few large splotches of light green grass, which were probably savannah. A sun sat fixed somewhere behind them, bathing the planet below in what must have been a staggering heat to have made that entire desert.

"So, this is the front line, then?" Viridan asked. "How long has it been running?"

"About six months now," Regent replied. "The relay to our contact isn't on the station, though. It's on the other side of the planet's third moon."

"That sounds secretive," Viridan muttered. "Why not run through the station's comms system?"

"Get a leg-up on the competition?" Regent replied with a shrug. "It doesn't really matter. We'll head over to the moon and get our mission statement, then come back to the station to resupply. We'll go from there. Is the ship ready to receive comms data?"

"Should be. I'll run a diagnostic on the antenna, and make sure it wasn't damaged during the trip," Viridan replied.

"We'll be within range of the relay in an hour. You have that long. Dismissed," Regent replied, quite formally. It wasn't hard to notice the change in her personality when they got down to business. She was very straight, to the point, and didn't even bother to cast Jonas a wayward insult while they were in the same room.

"Yes, Captain," Viridan said, and turned to leave. As they passed by the always unoccupied captain's chair, he lowered his snout to the arm of the chair and held down a large yellow button on the small console with a claw. "Ziggy, set up a test loop of the comms antenna. I'll be down to initiate it in a moment." he said into a small rectangle of holes set into the end of the chair's arm.

A moment later, a voice projected from the same area. "Sure thing, boss. Standard frequency range?"

Viridan turned away from the chair and looked to where the captain was now sitting at the pilot's console. "They didn't mention any unusual frequencies, did they?"

"It's an alternating frequency. The standard range is fine," she replied, not taking her eyes from the window as she maneuvered the ship towards the planet's eastern horizon.

"Standard range," he repeated into the intercom. "Come on, Jonas, I'm sure there's something you can do to help me."

****

"Okay, the antenna checks out," Viridan shouted into his console's intercom, the roar of the engines doing a fantastic job of drowning out all other sounds in the room. It had kicked up in volume about fifteen minutes ago, where Viridan assumed they had to fight the moon's dense gravity. If they sunk too far into the atmosphere, there would be too much interference to receive any communications from a subspace relay. "We're ready down here, captain."

"Right, get up here. I want all officers on the bridge for this," Regent replied, her voice crackling out of the console speaker.

"On my way," he replied. "Come on, Jonas."

"Wait, what do you want me to do about this big cable?" Jonas asked, shouting from across the room. He was holding the end of a large cable, about five inches in diameter, into a socket just within his reach. He had to stand on the tips of his toes to keep it fully inserted, and every time he sunk to the flats of his foot, the cable's weight caused it to slip out.

"Ziggy, get that cable secured!" Viridan shouted to his subordinate, who was currently ratcheting another cable into fixture. As soon as he finished, he rushed over to where a small stepladder sat in a corner, and ran it over to where Jonas was standing. Climbing atop the short platform, he was able to reach up and take the cable from Jonas, and began to fix it into place.

Now relieved of his post, Jonas took a brief moment to stretch his sore feet out before following Viridan out of the engine room and into the cargo bay. He'd been holding that cable up for a good twenty minutes, and was grateful for a chance to stretch his aching legs out. Once on the bridge, they made their way to an open seat on the right side of the room, behind the pilot's chair. Regent was still seated in the pilot's seat, and Slate occupied the station across the room from them, as stoic as ever.

"I don't see the relay on mid-range sensors," Slate stated, not taking his eyes from the screen in front of him.

"It'll be there," Regent replied absently, guiding the ship in a wide arch around the nearby moon. It hung like a huge grey ball in the right quarter of the window, thick clouds roiling inside the atmosphere. "Bring up the comms screen in the left quadrant."

A few button presses from Slate later, and a line of glowing blue appeared from the edges where the window attached to the rest of the hull. A moment later, a large, translucent blue rectangle appeared on the left side of the window with the words 'No Signal' emblazoned in the center in a red, blocky font.

"We're within one thousand miles of the target location," Slate said. "If there's anything out there, it will be appearing over the horizon momentarily."

A stark tension seemed to set on the room as time went on. It was difficult for Jonas to imagine that something as large as a satellite, especially in a place with so little else around, would be hard to find. But as they continued to round the planet, still nothing was visible.

"You sure this is the right moon, captain?" Viridan asked.

"Positive," she replied shortly.

"Captain, we are five hundred miles from the target location," Slate read out matter-of-factly. "If there was something out there, we'd be able to see it by now."

"It's here," Regent replied stubbornly, although they all thought it was very unlikely at this point that there was anything there at all.

The next few minutes passed in a tense silence, everyone's eyes fixed on the empty space before them. Regent's claws tapped restlessly against the throttle, and Jonas could notice her wrist quaking as she held back her urge to accelerate.

"One hundred miles," Slate read.

A low grinding sound could be heard near the pilot's console, where Regent was busy grinding her teeth into a fine powder. Viridan stepped up beside her, and slowly dropped a hand unto her shoulder. He found it uncomfortably tense under his loose grip.

"Fifty miles,"

"Captain, let's head back," Viridan said, attempting to soothe the thoroughly stressed dragon beside him.

"No," she growled through her teeth.

"They paid up front, right?" he asked. "It's not like we lost anything,"

"Anyone who pays the whole price upfront is not the kind of person I want to skip out on," Regent replied. "They always have insurance,"

"Captain, we've reached the target's location," Slate relayed.

"If there was anything here, it would be plastered on the window now," Viridan said, attempting to lighten the mood. He didn't succeed.

"Send out a short-range burst transmission," Regent said. "See if anyone pings us back. They must have left a beacon somewhere."

"Sending signal at fifty miles," Slate replied. There was a long pause, where nothing could be heard but the dull rumble of the engine behind them. "No response,"

"Again," Regent ordered.

"Sending signal at one hundred miles," he called. "No response,"

"One thousand miles," she said.

"Captain, if there was anything at that distance I think we would have-" Slate began, but Regent cut him off with a harsh glare.

"One thousand miles," she repeated.

"Sending signal at one thousand miles," Slate said with a shrug. Another moment passed, a then a sudden ping burst from Slate's console and shattered the tense atmosphere. "I've got a response," he shouted with surprise. "Nothing appears on sensors, though. I can't tell where it is."

"They must have left us a stealth beacon," Regent said. "So no one could find it by accident."

"We found it by accident," Viridan replied. "Not the best way to brief your employees."

"Captain, the beacon is sending us an encrypted package of files." Slate said. "There's also some kind of key along with it. I assume that we can use it to break the encryption lock on it."

"Slate, get to work decoding that," Regent ordered, and threw the engines up. They did a wide turn out of orbit, and back toward the huge space station in the distance. "I can only imagine that those are our orders. Viridan, we're going to keep the antenna operational at all times, so I want everything completely secured. Make sure there aren't any...accidents, this time."

"Aye, captain," he replied, and strode back along the right side of the towards the cargo bay. Jonas fell in step beside him, after taking a moment to watch the moon disappear to their left disappear beyond the edge of the viewport.

"What did she mean by that?" he asked, sidestepping in behind the dragon as two other crewmen went passed them and into the cargo bay. They busied themselves by sealing up previously opened crates of food and water, and generally battening down in preparation for their arrival.

"Oh, about two years ago...ish, we were out on assignment when one of our fuel tanks had to be jettisoned when the internal pressure grew too great. We didn't have enough fuel to make it back to the resupply station, so we set out a distress signal over the radio. But the radio was busted, or so we thought. Turns out, one of the power cables had come loose, and all we had to do was reach back and pop it back in. We had been sitting out there for three days with that cord unplugged, and once the call got out, we got a tow from the station in two hours."

"Yeah, I guess you can't just get out and push the ship," Jonas remarked.

"Hey, you don't have to help me anymore," he said as they passed into the engine room, where Ziggy was up on his toes on his stepladder, tightening the bolts on a particularly wide cable. "You can go wait up in the cabin, if you'd like."

"Are you kidding? I've been stuck up there for weeks," Jonas replied. "I'd rather be with you."

"Alright, but I'm going to have to put you to work," he said. "And you're not on the ship's payroll."

"I don't care about that," he replied. "I want to help,"

"Okay then, why don't we start you off with something easy?" he asked. He headed over to a large equipment storage cabinet, and from inside brought out a large broom-style device attached by a rubber tube to a huge canister that rolled behind it.

"Is that," Jonas began, pondering at the device that was now being handed over to him. "A vacuum,"

"Good guess," Viridan replied with a grin. "You can clean this place up before we dock."

"Really?" he asked, thumbing the device on and off, as if to make sure that the dingy-looking device still worked.

"You said you wanted to help," he replied with a shrug. "Have fun."

And with a slight nod, he made his way over to Ziggy, leaving Jonas alone, with his vacuum.

****

"Alright crew, listen up," Regent shouted over the tightly-packed mass of writhing bodies in the cargo hold. "It's going to take Slate and his team a few more hours to decrypt the files we got from the beacon, so you're all off-duty until then. Now, I'll take a minute to remind you of your obligations while on station. Don't do anything illegal. Don't get yourself thrown off the station. And drinking is prohibited one hour prior to our departure, which is planned to be three hours from now, after resupplying and such else is complete. Now, don't not drink yourself into a stupor. I say that every time we dock somewhere, and yet we always have one or two of you showing up on gurneys. So here's the deal, if I get slapped with a 'medical transportation fee' when they haul your drunk ass back to my ship, I slap you with it, in turn. Plus, a little something extra for tarnishing my standing as a captain. Alright, everybody take some time to relax, and nobody push anyone off the side of the lift before it hits the floor."

With her speech over, Regent hammered a button on the wall next to her, and the floor of the cargo bay dropped out and headed towards the floor of the hangar bay, with most of the crew aboard. From his place still inside the ship, Jonas could see from above the building anticipation as the lift slowly descended. As soon as the bottom of the lift collided with the metal deck, the crowd surged outwards in all available directions, leaving the lift barren and considerably faster without all the extra weight. This gave plenty of room for Regent, Viridan, Jonas, and a few other stragglers to offload in a much calmer manner.

"Alright, I'm going to go get us some more fuel and food before heading over to the bar," Regent said, a somewhat short list of items scrolling across a small computer that was fastened to her wrist as she spoke. She took a few steps down the corridor, in the opposite direction that the rest of the crew had gone. There were only more parked ships in the direction she was heading, but figured that it would be easier to reach the resupply outlets from that direction. "I'll see you around. Try to remember where we parked."

"See you later, captain," Viridan replied, and led Jonas in the opposite direction, towards the bustling crowd.

Jonas couldn't really relate the scene before him to anything he'd seen in his lifetime, but he'd seen pictures of crowded city streets and Indian streets in school that reminded him of this. The entire corridor was a big shopping center, with small or moderately sized shops that lined both sides. The mass of bodies seemed to roll and flow around itself, with people fitting into whatever space was available to move in a general direction. All the while, carts laden with crates and barrels rolled or hovered down the middle of the corridor, forcing surges in the crowd as people pushed out of their way. The entire structure sported a roof about ten feet high, making the whole place look quite claustrophobic. Jonas thought that he could see a window on the far end of the corridor, but then the starry image changed to a scale polish advertisement, and he realized that it was just a monitor.

"We'd have better luck staying together if you get up on my back." Viridan said, drawing him away from his thoughts. "I wouldn't want you to get lost in a place like this. Or trampled."

"Yeah, I can agree to that," Jonas replied, and let Viridan help him up onto his back. Once he was seated on the dragon's shoulders, with his legs hung around the base of the neck beneath him, Viridan joined the jostling crowd, thoroughly screwing up the whole flow with his large body. It did manage to clear them some room, though.

"Well, I want to head up to the information kiosk. I always like to learn a bit about the planet we're plundering when we're late for the party," Viridan said. "That's at the bottom deck of the station, the observation deck."

"Sounds like a plan, although I would like to see if we can get something to eat here that's not a powder or a paste," Jonas replied, glancing about at the various stores that they ever-so-slowly passed by.

"I'm sure they'll have some local food at the bar," Viridan replied. "We can meet up with the captain later, and get something to eat while she breaks her own rules."

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"The captain likes to...overindulge on alcohol when we first come into a port," Viridan replied, cutting his way through a busy and particularly dangerous-looking intersection. Just off the main corridor, with its own little steel plate, was a row of elevators. They got into the shortest line they could find that didn't stretch into the perilous intersection they'd just crossed. "It's a bit of a ritual we have. She likes to say that we're 'christening the station', although she empties the bottle before smashing it on the deck. Most of the time, the barkeep doesn't appreciate it."

"I can see why," he said, ducking his head as they passed under the low ceiling of the elevator. Once inside, Viridan tapped the lowest button on the column of buttons next to the door, and waited as the lift sealed itself before dropping rapidly.

The trip to the observation deck was a short one, and a moment later the elevator slowed and stuttered to a halt. The door slid open with a shrill chime, and there was someone there to take their elevator as soon as they had cleared the door. This level was far less crowded than the one they were just on. The entire deck was filled with tables and benches, where various species of aliens sat eating foodstuff from a row of four-foot high counters that seemed to have vending machines built into them. Every wall featured a large window, which created a seamless, three-hundred sixty degree view of the space around them, and to the planet they orbited.

"Let's see if there's any useful information on this station," Viridan said, and headed off towards a small counter tucked into a back corner. Above it, projected from a circular cutout on the desk, was a holographic image of the planet behind them, about three feet in diameter. Viridan reached up and swiped a claw over its ethereal surface. In an instant, the planet's surface because far more vivid, with different information displayed on a separate windows that hovered a few inches off to the left and right. He tapped on one of the separate windows, and the planet's map changed to included cloud formations and projected weather patterns. As Jonas had expected from his original look at the planet, there wasn't a lot of cloud cover.

"It's pretty dry," Jonas remarked.

"Yeah, this planet looks like she's on her deathbed," Viridan admitted. "Only a few scattered lakes with the capacity to irrigate a large area, and those seem to be on the far side of the planet right now."

"So, it's half desert, half savannah?" he asked.

"That sounds about right," Viridan replied, spinning the map with his claw to get a look at where the grasslands broke out into desert. "The two biomes separate right at the equator. It's almost a perfect line, all the way around the equator."

"That's weird," Jonas said, crawling forward a little to get a better view of the hologram. "Does that happen in space?"

"What?" he asked.

"Is this a thing that happens on planets sometimes?" Jonas asked. "Does terrain just change like that?"

"No, it doesn't look natural," Viridan replied, and turned away from the hologram. The planet itself was visible from the other end of the room, and the station had been placed directly above the equator. Even from there, the line looked too straight. "There don't seem to be any mountains in the equatorial region. Or anywhere on the surface that I can see."

"There was a little topography window on that hologram," Jonas said. "The chart made it look pretty flat all the way around."

"A flat planet," Viridan said quietly, mostly to himself. "It's unheard of."

"I wonder if that's why so many people are searching out here," Jonas remarked. "I mean, we don't even know what we're looking for. But if you find a planet that's weird, especially with so many planets out there, you get drawn to it."

"You're right," Viridan sighed. "We don't even know what we're looking for. I hope Slate finds something useful in that package, or else we'll be combing the planet completely blind."

"Yeah, and the Pathfinder isn't big enough to cover a lot of area at a time," Jonas said. "Not like the some of the other ships I've seen. Not like that one."

"What one?" Viridan asked, pulling his gaze away from the planet below.

"Over there," Jonas replied, pointing off to the right of the station.

Viridan's mind lagged behind his eyes as the object of attention loomed into his view. The ship in question was indeed massive, about half as long as the station itself. It was constructed as a series of rectangles, which jutted off the central column of the ship. Two platforms rose at the rear of the ship to form the bridge, while one that rose near the bow and probably served as a living space for the crew. One particularly long platform, with a roof that angled in towards the ship on the bow end, looked to be a launch bay, with a wing of escorts currently on approach. Along both port and starboard sides, a shallow platform supported a series of cylindrical housings, six in all. The bow, stern, and two in the center looked like sensors and relays, but the other two housing were armed. Massive double-barreled gun turrets, undoubtedly plasma-based, glimmered in the rays of the distant sun. The thought of such a powerful leviathan patrolling the area only made Viridan uneasy about why they were out here. The final noteworthy aspect of the ship was its name, stretched horizontally across the central column, and emblazoned in blue.

"It's a military ship," Viridan said, his expression bleak. "Araka's Pride,"

"Is that its name?" Jonas asked.

"Yeah," he replied. "I know that ship. Admiral Araka had it built to be the flagship of the draconic fleet. A massive, technologically-superior carrier, capable of deploying into heavy combat situations without any escort corvettes or frigates. It was leading the charge into the Quariot Expanse, last I heard, but that was a few months before I got taken. What's it doing out here, refitted with sensor packets?"

"Maybe it's looking for the same thing we are," Jonas wondered.

"The military, after some treasure?" he asked. "The more I here, the less I like this job."

"What's so bad about that?" Jonas asked.

"The military has never gotten involved in surveying and treasure hunting before, and least not as openly as this," he replied. "I mean, the military could have hired surveyors to look for them, but never refit ship of such cost and strategic value to do it."

"Whatever it is, it must be important," Jonas reasoned.

"Yeah," Viridan replied. "I'm starting to think that we're in over our heads."