Intergalactic

Two black shadows suddenly turned into brightly illuminated artificial objects hanging in space against the backdrop of the stars.

One, a patched-up junk of a spaceship with several parts clearly bolted and welded additionally, but on second glance sporting a surprisingly powerful engine, had its name painted in large letters on both sides: Grimalkin.

The other, a gigantic sphere sporting a pristine metallic sheen and antennas of various sizes sticking out was of obvious alien design, carefully built to exact specifications and just as carefully maintained. It appeared as if it had just come from the factory and glinted in the artificial light emitting from an opening along its equator large enough for the Grimalkin to fly through.

The light was aimed at a nondescript point in space just ahead of the patched-up vessel, where an especially astute observer might notice the stars in the background warped and stretched ever so slightly around a central point, which seemed entirely empty.

This central void was now swallowing the light streaming from the wormgate station. At the same time it expanded. The more bright light flowed into the black void, the larger it became.

From the side, one might have noticed that the void also stretched out towards the Grimalkin like a hungry mouth reaching for a meal. As the darkness reached the ship, at first nothing seemed to happen, the void flowing around the outside of the human spacecraft. As the void began to close around it, the ship seemed to stretch in the direction of the original void-point, a trick of perception and warping in space.

Inside the Grimalkin, the only occurrence throughout all of this was that the stars slowly disappeared from the viewports. Once they had all gone, the ship began to vibrate slightly and the outside world was replaced with swirling colors of purple, blue and red mixing and weaving into strands of ghostly apparitions. An unnerving silence enveloped the craft.

The sensor output was going wild, showing nothing at all at times, impossible readings at others, or imaginary objects speeding past. Twitch knew that none of these were actual sensor readings, but simply the result of the sensors being unable to make sense of the warped space the ship was moving through. It still made him grab the armrests of his chair and hold on to them. He stopped himself from fiddling with the sensor controls, knowing no matter what he set them to, they would not relieve him with sensical results.

Red, meanwhile, was calm in the way people who had expected the terrible were when it finally arrived. Never taking her eyes off the sensor displays, but gripping the edge of the console until her knuckles turned white, and forgetting to blink until her eyes were dry, she sat frozen in her seat, like a deer caught in the headlights.

Grubs was the least affected. When the vibrations started he looked around, dazzled and trying to make out the source. Like the others, he dared not leave his seat during the transit, even though the ship was stable and upright, the artificial gravity working perfectly.

After what seemed to be an eternity that did little to calm their nerves, the shapes and colors began to fade away, and soon after they found themselves motionless near a similar megastructure, with only the different stars in the background showing that they were hundreds of light years away from their previous location. The clock showed that barely an hour had passed.

Grubs went to work, inspecting the engineering screens and soon reporting: „No damage, all systems normal.“

Twitch’s fingers were flying here and there over the two keyboards and three screens in front of him, where prominent stars were identified and their relative positions and distances calculated to determine their current location in the galaxy.

„Looks like we arrived as promised, captain.“, Twitch summed up the result the ship AI had estimated.

„Captain?“, he added after two seconds, looking to his right.

Red shook off the paralysis and let go of the console, straightening her spine.

„Good, good.“, she said coarsely. „Let’s get out of here. Twitch, set course for the Chromatica System. Grubs, make those engines burn.“