Justice leaned back, one foot up on the seat in front of him where the rocky alien Praggin sat. He thought to make the fearful creature more comfortable with his presence but was starting to think that maybe it was having the opposite effect. “I should probably be driving” he thought to himself. “This probably looks bad.” He had his own anxiety in this way. However, he wasn’t the smoothest behind the controls of a shuttle and the fastest way to lose the faith of these kids was to crash land on his very first command mission.
The planet, a red, rocky mass with spots of blue-green generating its atmosphere, had yet to be named. Right now it was just a long code whose meaning escaped Justice. It approached quickly, fast enough to where Justice tensely said “slow it down” as the space around it disappeared. Praggin was doing fine but, again, lack of experience made Justice unsure.
They landed on the surface inside two minutes of their departure, the Undertaking a speck in the sky as they exited the craft. They were charged with locating samples of the minerals detected by a probe using X-Ray Diffraction (whatever that was). Derglabin trundled along with the sample collector, a hovering cart bigger than he was.
“Okay, so … briefign. This planet ain’t shit. Some drone ship has already done an orbital scan, and it ain’t got nothin’ big enough to hurt us, but it’s why we’re on this rock hunt. That means any other little critters probably won’t see us as hosts for a parasite or whatever. Suck to get an alien gutworm or somethin’. Not for the worm I guess; first alien gutworm to see the galaxy! Heh.” Michaels started to laugh a little until he realized the others were staring at him and he fell silent. Praggin coughed.
“Tough room. Okay. Derglabin will hold position here with the shuttle. The rest of us will all go in different directions and each get at least ten different rocks. We need twenty unique ones so, y’know, that’s probably a safe number for us all to gather. Probably get more than twenty that way.”
“Whoa! Uh, sir, don’t you think we should use the buddy system!?” panicked Michaels. “McKinley is, uh, y’know, not very strong so she should go with Praggin. Y’know, since he’s a big tough rock guy. And I could come with you! You’re sure to survive so … I mean, I could learn something from you?”
Uncomfortable. But Justice realized that he’d terrorized the kid before and decided that maybe he should throw the kid a bone. “Ah geez, uh, sure. That’s good suckin’ up there Michaels. I’d rather take McKinley but whatever.”
McKinley was coordinating with Praggin by this point but hearing her name got her attention. “Sir?”
A shifty look from Justice. There was something about this girl that got his attention for the first time since he got dumped in this bizarre future and he didn’t want to scare her off. “Nothin’! C’mon, we’re burnin’ daylight. Or are we? How much time we got?”
Derglabin piped up “Thirty-seven Terran hours of light before sunset.” The lizard midget blinked and Justice flinched; he could clearly see that the act of blinking pushed Derglabin’s bulbous eyes down into his throat. He wondered if the little guy could see like that with his mouth open but was the sort of question you don’t ask five-hundred years in the future. Well, you don’t ask unless you want reported and Justice had been reported for insensitivity too many times already.
So the daylight lasted longer here than a whole day and night back on Earth. “Oh … well, shit, take your time then. Let’s all come back when we get hungry. Go!” Justice started walking quickly, head on a swivel, making an exaggerated effort of mineral hunting.
It was a little weird and the crew watched him go for a minute before Michaels remembered he was supposed to follow. And the two teams separated. Justice paused to squat over an unremarkable stone just so he could subtly watch McKinley as she left. Michaels caught up and looked at him expectantly. Not wanting to look like a creep (again) Justice tried to talk his body language off. “Okay, so ass, I mean McKinley is going up, we should go down.” yeah, that went well.
Michaels nodded nervously. “Yes, sir. Those are the two options. Or … a lateral movement. Possibly.”
“So, uh, do we even know what we’re lookin’ for?” Justice asked Michaels who inhaled shakily.
“Sir, uh, no … sir. I assumed you knew what you were … what we were looking for. An exploration probe scanned this world while passing nearby and unknown minerals were detected. The discovery of a new element usually means an explosion of scientific advancement. Like how the discovery of Ferrum 47 made the Orion drive obsolete.
“Uh-huh. So there’s 47 … Ferrums. What make what now? Orion’s belt?” Justice was thoroughly confused. Michaels stood up straight and turned slowly back towards his commander.”
“Sir … you don’t know? Ferrum 47 allows warp speed.”
“Oh yeah? How’s that?” Justice tried to play it off like he didn’t feel stupid. It wasn’t necessarily working.
“I… Oh lord. Okay. Ferrum 47 is an unusually dense form of iron. According to what we understood of chemistry, physics, and so on at the time it should have been impossible. It looks like iron, you can smell the iron, etcetera. The only thing is that it’s six times as dense as what we know of as iron, making it the densest metal in the known galaxy. When used in an experiment as a dynamo it was found to produce a small gravity well.
“Gravity well? Like a water well but with gravity?” Justice smiled and hoped for the best.
“What!? No! Oh no, you’re … you’re incompetent. I am going to die out here!” and Michaels clearly started to have a panic attack.
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“Hey! Hey now!” Justice looked in every direction quickly before grabbing Michaels by the mouth and pushing him into an alcove in the stone. “You need to calm the fuck down!” he whisper-screamed.
Michaels started trying to control his breathing. It was working, if slowly.
“Listen, not everybody knows this, just leadership, now you. I ain’t incompetent, not like you mean, but I ain’t from here. Got it?” He released Michaels’ mouth.
“Yes sir! I … no, I mean no sir. None of us are from here, none of us are from the ship so where do you mean? I don’t know where you’re supposed to actually come from.”
Puckering his face up Justice struggled to find a short, easy explanation. “Oh … yeah, uh, okay. So … I’m from (Jesus this sounds stupid) from another universe’s Earth. American, 1869. This time traveler dude had an experimental time machine, lookin’ like a twentieth-century car, but I guess he was jumpin’ universes every time he tried to time travel. So I got dumped here with Ensign Gentle. They didn’t let us get the whole Academy education because they wanted to experiment on us and here we are.”
Michaels shook his head in disbelief. “What the hell? I can’t believe … Spacefleet doesn’t operate … doesn’t do stuff like that” The boy was twitchy as hell.
“Yeah, well, a wiser man … well, thing, than I set me straight when I thought the same thing kid. They’re the government … it’s pretty much all they do.”
The kid was starting to get it. “So … you’re competent like sane and smart enough but you don’t know our technology and stuff. Or … how we got out into the galaxy? Whoa, you’re from before combustion engines!”
“Uh, yeah, pretty much. I been on a train but I guess that’s steam which is different.” Justice shrugged.
“Okay. I’m okay.”
“Well hallelujah he is saved. Let’s find some rocks.” Justice started to turn away.
“Oh, uh, hey … can I ask you something?” Michaels gave a small, solicitous smile.
“I guess.” Justice kept moving. Michaels followed.
“Is it true? Is Ensign Gentle just a talking bear?”
Beat. Justice sighed and looked back at the kid. “A talking bear with gloves that give him thumbs but yeah.”
“I knew it! That blue Telemitri girl said that’s why she dumped him! He told her on the third date and she thought he’d been hiding it.”
“Great. Well, that’s basically my kid so I’ll have to ask her politely to stop with the rumor bullshit.”
“Oh … sorry…”
“It ain’t you kid so don’t sweat it. Look, there’s a cave. Element sample central. Let’s do it.” Justice took off at a brisk pace.
“Uh, a cave, sir?” Michaels voice dipped down into a whisper.
Aware that the kid hadn’t followed him Justice stopped and half turned back. “Yeah, soldier. What’s the problem?”
“It’s just … underground? We haven’t seen much life on the surface, soft things the size of bugs, but do we know what’s down there?” Michaels was clearly still shook from Justice’s original introduction.
“Look, kid, I know I made a few jokes about how you’re the kind to die on a mission but what do I know? This is my first mission in command!” Justice threw his hands up and smiled.
“Oh. Oh! That’s right. And I’ve actually already been on a few. So … I’ve already survived multiple times!”
“Right! Ain’t nothin’ down there dangerous except me, man, and look. Look at me now.” Justice quested for eye contact.
“Yeah. Yes. I am looking sir.” Michaels didn’t get what Justice was getting at.
“These hands here? This man? Justice Haymaker, Lieutenant Commander in Spacefleet, also a former Private in the Union army, he ain’t gonna hurt you.” Justice waggled his fingers comically.
Michaels actually chuckled, then thought. “Wait, Union? You don’t mean the Galactic Union. Do you mean United States Civil War!?”
Justice chuckled. “Ayuh. Guilty as charged.” The pair chatted as they descended into the cave.
—
“Yeah, man, c’mon.” Justice moved way too quickly in the cave, an 8’ tall, wider than that, beauty with plenty of stalactites and mites. “Check this shit out! A man could live in here. Hell, a whole neighborhood of apartments with a long hall on one side.”
Destabilizer out Michaels followed. As he caught up to Justice he realized that his officer was well past the point of natural lighting and yet extremely well-lit. “Uh, sir, remember! Buddy system. It isn’t safe!”
“What you talkin’ about? Lookit this shit. Don’t know what it is but it’s crazy pretty.” He held up a slightly luminescent gemstone whose color was a gradient from yellow to red. “That shit ain’t never been seen on Earth, tell you what.”
“Right. And I know you reassured me about living threats but still.” Michaels turned on his own body light, the Spacefleet symbol on his chest, creating just enough of a spotlight to overpower the glow around them and point to things with it. “Look at these rocks. Thousands overhead, waiting to fall, potentially just because of a loud sound. Trip and impale yourself on the floor. And, sir, wait, look.” Moving over a mere five paces, Michaels reached down under the ground, demonstrating that he’d found a drop-off that was difficult to see. “Looks like about a hundred feet straight down into more stalagmites. What if one of us had fallen in our eagerness to collect samples?”
“Well damn, man, you really do got a head on your shoulders! And here I thought you were gonna die prematurely!”
“Right, but you said that was a joke.” said Michaels.
“Oh sure it’s a joke … now…” The pair shared a hearty laugh. Michaels pantomimed shooting himself in the head. They laughed again. Then … they stopped. The cave, already massive, had been sloping up but, here, where the slope started to descend again it opened up into a space akin to an amphitheater. Everywhere were luminescent blue rocks and iridescent red rocks. “Damn. It’s … magnificent.”
Michaels cleared his throat, took a knee and started scanning a small rock he picked up. “So … I’m looking at this blue stone. It’s giving off light, sure, but also … chronal radiation. That’s unusual. The radiation’s actually masking the subatomic composition. I don’t think it’s a single element but, rather, in flux between the different states an element evolves through over time.”
“Say what now? Rocks change into other rocks?” This was new information to Justice.
“Under the right circumstances. If this rock were under pressure, high heat or other stressors, yes, it could change. Like how lead will turn to gold when exposed to sufficient amounts of Alpha Particles.” Michaels tapped the screen, focusing hard on the rock. “Yeah, there’s no way the Multispec can break this data down. Guess this is mineral sample number one.”
From nowhere a low vocalization was heard, seeming to be everywhere at once. “What the shit?” asked Justice. “Michaels, get close to me, boy. We ain’t alone…