Last Night at the Movies

I was working on a salvage ship among Saturn’s moons.

We had found some sort of extrasolar craft. It was too big to fit in our cargo bay, so we secured it to the ship as best we could and I went out in a suit to have a look at it.

It was pretty strange, to say the least. Something I did popped the hatch to the lifesystem, which flew away from us at a surprising speed: I glimpsed it occulting stars between my feet. Inside the lifesystem there was nothing that resembled life. There was what looked like a maintenance machine next to an opened control panel. But the pilot’s couch and our reading on the remnants of the craft’s atmosphere suggested the thing was meant to be flown by something organic, which was nowhere in evidence.

By then we were, unfortunately, pretty deep into the gravity-well of one of Saturn’s moons and running low on fuel. The pilot wanted to cut the thing loose and get away; I was arguing with him. He released the grapples holding the alien ship to ours and it started to float away. Uselessly, I reached out to grab it: though we were in free-fall, the thing of course had its full inertia. Except it didn’t: I stopped it moving with almost no effort. The craft had some sort of inertialess field.

Obviously, at that point, we had to salvage it; I refused to let go. The crazy pilot called me crazy and dove into the moon’s atmosphere while I stayed outside holding on the alien ship. It got pretty cold in the suit. I started to feel like the frozen sharkmeat they send us from Earth as a delicacy (for those who like that sort of thing). I even flashed on myself as Jabberjaw, shivering in my vacuum suit (which suggests that, even in the future, terrible Hanna-Barbera cartoons will still be inflicted on helpless children, a depressing thought). The view of the moon’s outer atmosphere through the open cargo-bay doors was stunning, though: deep castlelike clouds and huge hollow distances.

The pilot’s plan was to skim through the moon’s atmosphere to refuel and blast free on the other side. It worked somehow–maybe because of the intertialess field of our salvage. (The alien ship must have made us pretty non-aerodynamic.)

The next thing I remember we were back at some space station or moonbase with Earth-normal gravity. Some details too mundane or intimate to record follow.

The thing is, about our discovery: it had a downside. The inertialess drive had some sort of dispersing, even ripping effect when stationary over long periods of time; it may have utilized dark energy somehow. Someone referred to “a hole in the fabric of space” (a Star-Trekky phrase which irritated me a lot) and was adding something like “only magic can fix it” when I woke up.