Chapter III
FI3LD NAVIGATION
The DEEP REACH’s disjointed frame rattled as the craft eased out of the subspace lane. Due to the endless incompatibilities, the transition had to be made manually in the engine room. Greck pushed up a massive lever, swapping between the modules. It always felt like an uneasy handoff between the systems, and Dunny complained every time as the flight controls sputtered. Greck grumbled back over the comms speaker.
The ship exited subspace into a chaotic mess of floating rocks and debris. Dunny tipped her tri-cornered hat back and squinted up through the windowed canopy on the bridge, her eyes tearing up as light leaked around the massive craggy rocks. So far, gravel-like space dust began to ding the armaplast, but that was its purpose. Light, easily replaceable – or in their case salvageable - and its saved the most expensive hull from being ground down by space debris. Through the hailstorm of stellar ephemera, it was clear that the light was reflecting off the local gas giant.
“WHAT THE [redacted]!” Dunny grimaced, peeling her eyes away from the canopy as the light of the gas giant haloed around a massive rock floating over their heads.
On the outer edge of the gas giant’s ring system, the particulate had been ground down into small rocks orbited by space dust caught in the Roche limit of the gas giant’s gravity. Dunny could tell through squinted eyes that this ring was more than a cryovolcanic mass and ice; in the distance were rocks triple the size of the DEEP REACH. Whatever had once orbited here, and long ago been broken by a mighty hammer.
Carter had guided them directly into a dangerous planetary orbit straight out of subspace.
The engine transfer rumble had been the de facto alarm for the rest of the crew, rousing them from their bunk time. Nia hurriedly pulled up her overalls, snapping the shoulder straps in place, then threw her jacket around her shoulders. She hopped on one foot toward her bunkroom door, slipping on one boot at a time. Then she bounced into the doorframe and used the momentum to pivot to her left and sprinted out to the HUB’s catwalk. Her booted feet pounded the grated metal floor, and the rattle drew Carter’s attention in his bunkroom.
Carter was already awake, his fishbowl helmet stored back in his pristinely kept locker. His attached comms translator flashed green, the speaker panel in his bunkroom crackled—
“It’s a wonder you were able to pick up on anything in all of this!” Bolt shouted at Carter through the comm speaker box.
Carter pressed a tentacled finger into his handset translator, “All the more reason to believe we are first to the salvage.” Carter scratched one of his itching face tentacles and released the talk button.
“What’s this soup you flew us into, squid?” Dunny managed as she weaved the DEEP REACH around another large rock, taking a few dings from the smaller fragments. “Everything’s [redacted]’ing hazy.”
The digital communications noise inside the Longshot system had always been absolute chaos. Hundreds of tiny ships, pirate radio stations, government and military communications (sometimes even ‘top secret’ maneuver messages) bouncing into each other on the same frequencies: a morass of digital sludge.
Pirates hated regulations.
The conversation about locking the system’s radio-wave communications had been met with full-throated laughter. But now, as the crew found themselves floating at the edge of their known space, the silence mixed with signal noise was deafening.
“I’m not surprised. We’re nearly in the black between galactic arms,” Carter mentioned. “Nothing - well, maybe Ansible - would be cutting through at this range.”
Nia skidded past the engineering bay doorway, then pulled the room’s comm box handset toward her thin, dry lips.
“Sending out a radar ping,” Nia said breathlessly.
Nia eyed one of the bolted-down dial panels, massive conduit bundles running down the balcony overlook and into the large engine room control center on the floor below. She turned an old radial knob on the panel with a wavelength icon. As the makeshift knob clicked into place, a radio wave pulse fired out from the DEEP REACH, and the knob snapped back to its starting position.
The pulse returned, and the sensor mesh mapped the surrounding area. While imperfect, as smaller objects floated more freely and disrupted waves, the larger objects came into view, and the readings were relayed to Dunny to navigate through the mess.
Dunny yanked the dual steering sticks back to lift the DEEP REACH over an incoming object, her face grimacing from the exertion. The vessel’s frame shuddered then wrenched as the rogue rock skipped across the hull. Part of the atmosphere vented from the undercarriage of the DEEP REACH, causing the ship to tilt forward and upward. Dunny pulled at the sticks again to course correct.
Nia hadn’t prepared a harness yet.
She fell over, sliding down the engineering bay’s second-floor walkway. The change in center of gravity—the tug between the objects in space, the ship, and the massive gas giant, all vying for their say—pulled her down toward the gap between the grated floor and the railing.
As Nia was about to slip through the gap out onto the first floor, Greck grabbed her hand, and Nia’s body jolted to a stop, mid-air, and hanging over the balcony overlook. She could feel her hand burning in Greck’s sandpaper-skinned grip.
“Gotcha,” Greck groaned, his off-hand gripping the arm holding Nia in place. He grunted, flexing his bicep to keep Nia in place, the muscled fibers contracting as he pumped all of his strength into them. Greck held her hanging over the engineering bay balcony while the ship righted itself.
“You okay down there?” Bolt’s voice crackled through the comm box speaker.
Greck snarled, a jolt of vigor pulsing through his arm and pulling Nia back up onto the walkway. Nia adjusted her overalls’ straps, then pulled the dangling handset to her mouth.
“We’re fine. But a little heads up next time,” Nia said.
“Sorry, we passed behind a big‘n, and the sunlight left us a bit,” Dunny crowed through the comms. “Visibility back. We’re caught in the rings of a giant, so stay sharp!”
Carter gripped the rail and pulled himself up the ramp to the bridge. As he stumbled into the doorway, he cursed in his head about the navigation error. In his excitement for the opportunity, he had punched them far too close to the rings.
Carter set his frame right and swiped down at his face tentacles to get them out of his sightline. It was muscle memory, a habit beyond rote at this point, as if it were part of his very nature. Another small impact shook the REACH, and Bolt had had enough.
“Can we latch onto one of the bigger ones, [redacted]?” Bolt asked impatiently, his face flinching at the censor’s boilerplate reminder about his vulgarity. “We’re a [redacted]ing shooting gallery out here!”
“Hard to say yet without a deeper scanner sweep on the makeup of these rings and the giant,” Carter replied, pulling up his tablet at the main table on the bridge. “We might dock and get stuck inside one, or we might be dragged too far into her orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.”
“Better stuck than ground to dust,” Bolt barked as another smacked into the DEEP REACH hull and bounced away, rattling the vessel frame again, but barely. The sparse armaplast shielding they had was not meant for this kind of punishment. Without the computational cycles, Dunny couldn’t initiate the thruster packages that could mitigate balancing the ship and adjusting to incoming projectiles, and she was struggling to maintain space between the largest objects.
“We’d be stuck with no emergency radio signal to ANY system,” Carter rebutted, his mouth tentacles flaring out aggressively.
Dunny fought the sticks back upright, then slowed impulse control. She wasn’t going to fly headlong into a vice grip while the captain and science officer quibbled.
“Dunny, warning!” Nia’s voice crackled in her comm box.
“Warning!” Dunny growled through gritted teeth.
Nia pulled a small hook connected to tension wire around her overall’s utility belt, then latched the secondary hook to the balcony railing. Greck was already following her lead, using a massive, frayed-but-threaded coupling cable as a rope tie. The normal lines Nia used were far too weak and fragile to hold his considerable frame. A painful fall, broken legs, and a cycle in a Junction infirmary had been a rough lesson to learn for him.
Nia and Greck had acted within seconds, and Dunny had already flipped a switch and cranked the steering sticks hard to the left to avoid a mid-size rust-colored rock swerving past them. The ship rolled to its port side, shifting its gravity at a nearly 45-degree angle. Nia stayed on her feet but slid across the floor, with her line hitched to the rail.
“Fire another ping!” Dunny shouted through the comm box. “I can’t see a [redacted]’ing thing through this digi-haze!”
Nia’s dual pincer-like thumbs gripped around the rail, and she pulled herself back over to the radial knob. She cranked the knob again. As the ping fired, the knob snapped back to the ready position.
Dunny looked up at her viewscreen and saw a massive moonlet materialize out of thin air, rolling toward them. She slammed the sticks down, skidding the massive object across the top of the DEEP REACH, scraping the sensor-mesh antenna network in the process. The jolt also caused the ship’s lights to lose power for a moment.
The engineering bay went dark, and Nia felt her body lose its center of gravity and her stomach drop out from under her. Her body had floated up, and then - like a whip - bounced against the gridded metal balcony walkway. Nia felt her body slide clear off the second floor and hang for a split second over the first floor. Her hook snagged, her body wrenching at the torso as her head and legs whipped back to her roped midsection.
Nia’s vision went black - really black. Just a simmering in her lattice, the frantic emotions of the crew bounced off of her like itchy, searing heat in her subconscious.
When Nia came to, Greck was pulling her limp body back up, one aggressive pull after another. Nia finally felt her hands listen to her, and she grasped the walkway floor, bringing herself up the rest of the way.
“Thanks, Greck,” Nia gasped through exhausted breaths. She looked at the railing where Greck’s hand had bent the metal into a sharp, pointed 45-degree angle. Greck grumbled something in fishfolk and slumped back against the engineering bay walls with Nia.
“If we stay out here like this, we’re going to be space dust,” Bolt groaned at Carter, as a cloud of methane ice and dust washed over the DEEP REACH hull like grains of sand. Dunny lifted the REACH out of the heaviest concentration, leaving the ship hovering over it. “Have you gotten enough data from the sensor sweeps?”
“I think we need at least one more,” Carter replied.
“More?” Bolt roared.
“Hold the [redacted] up. What is that?” Dunny said, pointing up through the bridge’s windowed canopy. Bolt and Carter looked up from their spat and saw a flat, metallic shape glinting on a massive moonlet gliding in the ring above them. The light from the gas giant enveloped the object, casting a dark shadow beneath it and obscuring the source of the specular twinkle. Dunny tipped her three-pointed hat up to give herself a better look at what her mind was having a hard time comprehending.
“Greck, ready the spotlights,” Bolt said through his comm box handset, his eyes still fixed to the flat surface above them in the bridge.
“Understood,” Greck answered through heaving breaths as he groaned his way to his feet. He took his anchor cabling, latched to the railing overlook, then slipped himself over the edge, and - just as he was about to be caught by the line - he unlatched and fell to the ground with a loud bang. His legs hit first, then he fell over onto his right shoulder, and finally, his head slapped against the metallic flooring.
“[redacted] dammit, Greck!” Nia yelled down from the overlook.
Greck shook his head to knock the pain free, an amused smirk curling in a long line around his mouth. He pressed his arms against the massive console that operated the engines at the back of the ship. Next to the engine controls was a welded panel, a complete bastardization of engineering and electrical principles if you asked Nia. Greck grabbed a small metal plate that opened outward like a tiny door, revealing a set of huge levers. He pulled the levers, one at a time, which connected to the ship’s hull plates. The plates screeched, metal scraping metal, shifting away to reveal protected floodlights. Hopefully, Greck mused, the lights still worked. Greck grabbed his handset. “Ready!”
The piercing spotlight washed over the flat surface, scarred but uniform, with protruding equipment boxes. The light cascaded across the paneling of what was a ship of some kind, resting upside down against the compressed planetoid surface. Bolt sucked in a sharp breath as an inscription was illuminated.
[RES HORIZON]
“Holy [redacted],” Bolt said slowly, his tone rumbling in a low timbre.
“Rhyno?” Dunny questioned, tipping her hat up with a raised eyebrow, her mouth agape.
“What?” Nia’s voice cracked over the comm box speaker.
“It would appear so,” Carter replied, his voice pitched high and intrigued. “The original Rhyno.”
They couldn’t see his smug, curling lips from behind his tentacles. But Nia could feel his pompous mirth all the way from engineering.
We’re going to be filthy rich.
TO BE CONTINUED!
THE CREW OF THE DEEP REACH
