Jason passed through the hustle of a dozen crew members handling…various….tasks. He probably could make out what they were up to and knew most of them by name – starting out on the crew as a Cable Runner had its advantages – but any hint of recognition or organizational protocol was buried too deep for his conscious mind to grasp onto. “Good, staying busy,” was all his mind noted even as they haphazardly offered salutes several paces too late. With the vision of the badly broken Thunderbird in view his mind has inexorably cascaded down the drain of a memory he would sooner forget and, for some reason, couldn’t shake.
—
Three hundred meters. Two eighty. Two sixty. Two forty. Two twenty. Two hundred meters. Navigator Gather sounded out distance to their approaching waypoint. A large screen projected the blackness of space and the bulging forms of unnaturally still asteroids surrounding them. Command Deck Assistant Ensign Jason Eichberg stood at his terminal at the very back of the room, all but forgotten by the rest of the Command Center personnel. As the lowest ranked officer, his job was to review the ships essential numbers – power to essential ship systems, oxygen levels, fusion reactor radiation levels, incoming projectiles, comm system hailing or radio oddities, etc. Not that he was the only one with these responsibilities, he was mostly back up or the back up’s back up in the case of an emergency. His real job was to watch and learn from the professionals. But don’t let them catch him watching or learning or else he’ll get a “to your station, Ensign” or “Dammit, Ensign, watch your systems” followed by a “no leisure time for you, Ensign” and a “Captain’s assigned you the night watch, Ensign.”
One forty. One Twenty. One hundred meters. They’d been after the latest contract for four months already, quite a bit longer than the old man anticipated. The simple pick-up-and-drop-off turned into a game of cat and mouse with another para-military crew who were presumably also working a contract for the United Nations Taskforce as they were the only player in the system (Jason had long since lost track of which system they were in) but frustratingly didn’t seems to get the memo that the T-bird was contracted to take the suitcase sized crate in. The Captain had said that it was probably a misunderstanding.
“Probably a misunderstanding” the Captain had said, “nothing to grind your gears about,” but that hadn’t stopped him from giving Jason more than his normal allotment of night shifts for staring off into space. The Captain was tense. From his vantage point all he could see of the Captain was the white tuft his mop poking above his wide high-backed chair and his right hand gripping his armrest as if for dear life.
Jason’s mindseye grinned ruefully at this observation.
Sixty meters. Fourth. Twenty. “Full stop, Mr. Gather. Let us drift the final bit.” The large screen didn’t visibly change much, but a subtle shift in gravity indicated they had come to their final rest. “Mr. Carinza, kindly let the Mazekeeper know we are here.” Like the last six stops in the field there was nothing to see. No drops. No suitcase sized crates. Nothing. Wild goose chase, Command Deck Assistant Ensign Jason thought….again. The Captain had obtained, though means he would not disclose “Which was an oddity in itself,” Jason mused, a keycode on a simple radio frequency which when transmitted in all directions returned with a new coded set of coordinates on the same frequency. So far, it had offered safe passage through what was likely literally a maze formed entirely of what looked to be thousands stationary asteroids. Likely because the Capatian was adamant about not conducting any sort of infomration scan – radar, sonar, electromagnetic, frequency scan, nothing. Apparently the so called Mazekeeper was a strict host.
Ensign Jason typed in a quick message to the Captain on his faintly blue screen:
-Still say we would full scan the system. There’s not telling what’s out there.
A short time later a message keyed back:
-MYOB.
Ensign Jason smirked at his out of touch boss for using acronymns in his message. No one does that anymore, you old coot. Jason had long since memorized the Captain’s more commonly used phrases but still had to consult his L33T speak dictionary now and again to decipher his boss. “It saves time. Its three or four letters instead of a whole sentence. That’s whole seconds in a crisis situation.” he once said. “Not if your people literally have to pull out a dictionary to figure out what you are saying!” an exasperated past Jason had replied. “Not my problem. Know your Captain. Everyone onboard lives or dies by that rule.”
“Captain, a new set of coordinates is in, transmitted from a transmitter about 4 clicks from here,” Mr. Steven Carinza said, a bit to loud and excited for a transmission that, in Ensign Jason’s mind, had become routine. “Thank you, Mr. Carinza. Mr. Gather, take us there post-haste, if you please.”
—
The broken Thunderbird still smelled so strongly of electrical fire and char such that Jason thought it could never be completely cleaned out. Hardened molten plastic and metal still ran in beads and and made strange pooling shapes on the floor in blacks, browns and yellows. Several corridors, originally hermetically sealed due to air pressure loss, were now forced open with implements of all kinds – jacks, rocks, 2x4s – but were still often uncrossable due to the damage sustained – floor being ripped to shreds, molten ceiling creating unintended stalactites down the middle of the hallway, or otherwise the whole space being blown to hell.