Gabriel loved his job. In the two years since his father’s death he had risen from merely a guardsman of the portals to captain of a patrol. Each day he was allowed to ascend to the Sky Bridge and patrol the Great Portals while basking in the love of his god. Every day he would travel the expanse, ensuring the portals are functional and that no uninvited guests are making use of them. Gabriel was a captain of a patrol squad; it was his job to supervise them in the case of any unexpected events, it was an important job, but nothing unexpected had happened since the cargo incident where a crate of fruit had burst open and splattered everyone coming through the portal in sticky pulp and that had happened seventy years ago.
As Gabriel assembled his patrol and loaded them onto their ship, he was struck with an odd sense of unease. It felt like he had forgotten something, but when he checked all of his gear was there and he had done his morning prayer already. He dismissed this feeling as feelings from the anniversary of his father’s death nearing and loaded onto the ship for takeoff. As they left the Sky Bridge and escaped the planet’s gravity, Gabriel was once again stunned by the sheer size of the portals. Each one was as big as the moon, but perfectly flat and round. As he did every day he mentioned this to his crew, and just as routinely they laughed at their whimsical superior. It was a fairly casual environment on the ship, Gabriel didn’t like standing on ceremony with the people he spent eighteen hours a day with. They were just getting into an argument over who’s home team was going to win the championship when they approached the first portal. Even as day was just dawning back home the portals were in use, cargo ships flying through one portal and into the next. Transporting everything from precious metals to crate loads of fruit from one realm to the next.
The first portal Gabriel and his crew examined looked fine, and the gatekeepers who checked each ship’s identification reported no problems on their end, no one had tried to sneak through. However, when he examined the second of the two portals he noticed something was wrong. A small shard of the portal had splintered off and formed its own smaller portal next to the larger one. This was rare, yes, but not unexpected. The energies expended by the gods to create and maintain these portals are immense, and even a small irregularity in the flow of divine energy can destabilize a portal enough to create a fracture.
This would have been barely a blip on Gabriel’s radar, he had fixed dozens of these before, except for one small factor that shocked Gabriel to his core. A rather small, strangely shaped ship came out of this fractured portal. The entirety of the ship immediately went dead silent
“Dear god, am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?” Gabriel asked, eyes wide, mouth agape.
“I’m afraid you are sir. That’s a ship, and the sensors can already tell there are people on board, the motion trackers are lighting up like crazy. It looks like there are close to five hundred people on there,” his first mate said, shock obvious in the quail in his voice.
“I… I’ve heard stories of ships being caught in portal fractures, but I’ve never actually seen one,” the communications officer gasped, “They say any ship unlucky enough to be caught in one is struck with enough divine energy to disintegrate even the toughest of iron, how is it still intact?”
“It must have already been partly out of the portal when the fracture occurred. They still would have received a shock, but maybe not enough to kill them,” Gabriel speculated, “You said there were still life signs on the ship?”
“Yes sir, it has no power, but there is still motion inside it,” the first mate said, then realizing the implications he yelled, “They are panicking inside their ship right now sir, we have to help them!”
“I know lieutenant, and we will,” Gabriel reassured him, and turning to the crew, he declared, “Alright men! We are going on a rescue operation! Take anything you think will be useful to help the injured! Our job is to ensure minimal casualties before a real relief ship can arrive and administer aid.”
The squad immediately sprung into action. A relief ship was contacted, tools were prepared, and a safe docking was ensured. All the while Gabriel was secretly panicking. His squad was only twenty men, and this ship held around five hundred potential injured. There was no way he and his squad could handle that many, but he told himself he had to try. Even a single life saved could make all the difference. With that thought in his mind he issued the order to board the strange vessel.
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The passengers of the Void Breacher awoke as it approached its destination. A small spot in a relatively empty void with no one around for millions of miles whose only claim to fame is a significantly higher than average concentration of water and minerals, or as they would soon come to call it, home.
Construction of the main station began immediately, everyone was more than ready to get off that ship. It progressed swiftly as most of the construction had been done before departure and was more a matter of connecting the multiple parts. The station was livable, if not yet complete, in under a week and people began moving in. A vote was taken in the first month to call it Voidborne Station as they were the first to live in the interstellar void, and they were more than a little proud of that. As some people settled in, others used it as a construction platform. Voidborne Station became a launching point for dozens of other smaller, personal stations that belonged to single families or small groups. Most of these smaller stations stayed relatively close to Voidborne though, as in the cold vacuum of space it’s good to have neighbors.
Things were going smoothly on Voidborne station. The station was already a major installation with an amount of free space that dwarfed its population. The second ship full of inhabitants arrived about one year later, just in time to witness the celebration of the first child born on Voidborne Station, the very first human born in the void. Everyone was comfortable and settling into their lives on the outskirts of civilization. The stations were getting more comfortable and secure and so moved farther out from Voidborne Station to get better access to other asteroids and comets to mine. This life was becoming the new normal, until out of nowhere one of the stations vanished from existence.
“A station vanished? What are you talking about! We can track every rock and chunk of ice from here to Neptune from this station, and even if an asteroid did go undetected we have countermeasures to prevent that! There is no possible way one of our stations got destroyed,” Hayden shouted at the intern who quailed before him.
“I’m sorry sir, but it is true, a station has vanished. Michael told me to emphasize the vanish part. The station was not destroyed, it vanished,” said a tremulous young intern, relaying the message she had been given.
Hayden froze, a litany of emotions cascading over his features before settling on a mixture of confusion and annoyance, “So help me if this is Michael’s idea of a joke… If he considered this important enough to wake me then he is in the censor room right now isn’t he? Take me to him.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The intern let out a sigh of relief and took Hayden to the sensor room. As they walked Hayden’s apprehension grew. Michael wouldn’t wake him up this early just to mess with him. And what does it mean for a station to “vanish”? Even when obliterated by an asteroid the wreckage still remained, and the intern had said the station hadn’t been destroyed. What could possibly be going on. As Hayden reached the door he dismissed the intern and continued inside. As he entered he was greeted by a scene of chaos. Michael was standing in front of a bank of monitors, staring at the data with consternation as the technicians panicked around him. Hearing the door open he turned to see Hayden walk in with a scowl on his face.
“Hate to spoil your morning like that Hayden, but this is important,” Michael said, his eyes immediately returning to the computer screens, “We received a message from station Gamma 7 asking for confirmation of some strange readings they got. We weren’t getting anything unusual so we sent a response telling them to keep in contact, they didn’t respond. We thought maybe our signal got intercepted so we sent them another few messages, that was over an hour ago and we still haven’t gotten a response. So we asked a couple other stations in the vicinity to send them a message, to check if there was some interference between us, but they also haven’t gotten a reply. This made us concerned enough to actually turn our telescopes away from the stars and take a look at where they last contacted us from, and… I’m not sure how to say this other than they vanished. There are no asteroids or debris near where they should be or along their path. All we can see is small traces of their exhaust, and even that just stops. Not like they powered down their engines, but like their engines somehow blinked out of existence.”
As Michael finished his report, the technicians stopped their frantic scrambling and turned to Hayden, searching for a sign of confidence from their leader. This was an unprecedented situation, and the first time anything had gone wrong since the technicians had started working here. Hayden let out a deep sigh, prepared himself, and took command.
“Alright then, this is obviously a bad situation, but not one we can’t handle. To start let’s rule out what it isn’t so we can zero in on what it is. First, the station wasn’t destroyed. If that was the case we would have a mountain of evidence, debris fields, a massive thermal signature from the fusion generator exploding, and probably a few hundred panicked messages to sift through. Second, this isn’t a communications failure on either end. Our signals are getting through to other stations and they can’t reach Gamma 7 either, and if Gamma 7 had communications trouble we would still be able to see her lit up like a light bulb with the heat from her generators.
With these two crossed out we are left with three options: one, there was a massive power failure that took out all three back-up generators and all personal communicators on the station, two, for some reason Gamma 7 decided to change course without informing us and without burning any fuel, probably by firing off a few shots with her railguns, and three, all of modern physics is wrong and teleportation is possible on a large scale. So start working on ruling out one of the two that is actually possible. Search the databanks for any stray magnetic pulses we recorded and any clouds of ice that are passing nearby, then get on the telescopes and search for anything going faster or slower than it should, see if they really did change course.”
The technicians sprang to their work, relieved to have some form of direction. Hayden called Michael over away from the group so they could talk privately, “I didn’t mention this to them, but both of those explanations mean someone deliberately sabotaged Gamma 7’s power supply and communication,” Hayden explained.
“But that’s absurd!” Michael exclaimed and several technicians turned their way, Michael sheepishly quieted down.
Hayden glared at him and continued, “I didn’t mention it for a reason. Mutiny on a space station is a deadly thing. Hopefully I’m wrong and this really is a case of mass teleportation, but in any case we need some insurance. We need to send a ship out there to settle any possible disputes. You, me, and about five other people need to get on a heavily armed ship to where the exhaust trail ends and see if we can’t track them down. If this was sabotage then we will be able to end the fighting with our arrival, hopefully before there are too many casualties.”
Michael saw the sense in Hayden’s reasoning; he wished he could think of another explanation, but no situation he could think of seemed even remotely likely. Dejectedly he acknowledged Hayden’s order, and the two of them set out for the landing bay.
Hayden and Michael sat in tense silence in the cockpit of the ship. They were approaching where Gamma 7’s exhaust trail ended and there was no sign of the wayward station. The technicians at Voidborne station had been in constant contact with them and all leads had come up negative so far. They were still as much in the dark as they were when they first set out, except now Hayden had brought himself, his best friend, and five other men and women into the depths of space to resolve an unknown situation. All of them knew the implications of their presence, they were the failsafe for the worst case scenario. They had the supplies to administer aid and even revive someone who had been frozen in space, but that was not their purpose. They were there to stop a bloodbath, and if there really was one they were probably too late.
The silence was finally broken by Michael, “Well I gotta say Hayden, the situation can’t get much darker than this,” he said with a wry smile.
Hayden looked at him in bewilderment for a second, then he burst into badly suppressed laughter. “Oh come on Michael, this is serious,” he said as he tried and failed to stop laughing. “But I have to admit, that did wonders for morale,” Hayden said, gesturing behind him at the small group they had brought along, all of whom were struggling to keep a straight face.
“Oh you know we needed this Hayden,” Michael said smiling, “We’re almost there, and if we show up with this much tension they’ll die of fright upon seeing us. It’s better to go in optimistic. That way if we’re right then we set the right tone for the rescue mission, and if we’re wrong I’m sure we’ll cool off pretty fast.”
Hayden finally calmed down and responded, “I know we need humor Michael, that’s why we need as few of your jokes as possible. They are just plain EXHAUSTing. Get it? Because we are following the exhaust trail?” No one had trouble keeping a straight face now. “Everyone’s a critic.”
As everyone calmed down from the impromptu comedy routine, the ship approached the end of the exhaust trail. The empty expanse of space stretched out in front of them, completely devoid of any indication of where the station might have gone. Nothing stood out to any of those aboard the ship. All was quiet and dark. Hayden was staring directly ahead at where the exhaust trail ended when he noticed something at the edge of his vision. A star popped out of view. This should have been impossible, sightlines are infinite in space, and there was no asteroid large enough to obstruct a star’s light anywhere near where he was. Hayden dismissed this, that is until he saw it again.
“Michael, slow down,” Hayden said urgently.
“What? Why? We’re almost there,” Michael asked, turning to Hayden to see what was wrong.
As they grew closer, an ever growing number of stars disappeared behind a disk of darkness, Hayden was filled with a looming sense of dread. Something was there, hanging in the depths of space, and they were about to be violently introduced.
“Now Michael! Slow down and bank left!” Hayden shouted.
Michael listened. As he slowed the ship Michael once again looked forward, and he saw what Hayden did.
“Holy shit! What is that thing?” Michael screamed, slamming on the brakes.
“I have no idea what it is, but I know we don’t want to crash into it,” Hayden replied, “Do we have any debris lying around? Jettison it towards that… thing, I just want to give us something to track as it enters… whatever the heck that is.”
Michael obliged, he sent out a pile of trash barely going faster than they were. It didn’t have much of a heat signature, but it was hot enough to light up on the infrared sensors. Michael and Hayden watched with bated breath as it neared the event horizon. As the trash reached the disk it vanished. One second the slug was there and the next it was not.
Hayden turned to the aghast men and women behind him, a smile on his face, “Well isn’t this exciting!”