“Another concern has arisen,” George suddenly said. “Oh what now,” Sarah replied, and Loff simply buried his face in his four hands. The view turned to the sun itself. A red dwarf, cooler and dimmer than most stars we like to live around, it was still too bright to look at. The screen stopped the brightness down a few notches so we could see it. It looked normal enough for a red dwarf… splotchy. Lots of sunspots, prominances, even surface storms… but it had something else. The surface was writhing, like a wet blanket over a pile of snakes. As one of the “snakes” moved under the surface, the surface would darken just above it. Cooler, I guess. So I guess there was another one of those things, bigger even than the one eating the gas giant, living inside the star. I don’t know if it was eating the star or not. Maybe it was using it as a nest. Maybe it was mating with it. How the hell would I know?
A few minutes later, as we watched the smaller things continue to track us down, Sarah had had enough and ordered another, longer jump. This took us about a light hour out. When we stopped to get our bearings, George announced that the stars were now fixed; they were no longer dancing. We looked back in-system… and found that everything was where it was supposed to be. The sun didn’t seem to be a mass of snakes; Landis was happily orbiting. Gunston Station could be seen as a bright speck. Chatter, both radio and hyperwave, could be heard. Everything seemed normal. There was no question of us trying to head back in. We were done with that system. George finished repairs there in deep space, and we went home.
By the time we got back to Atlantis, we had been reported as overdue by Gunston Station. We’d been gone twenty-one days… time to get there and get back, with a day spent dealing with weirdassery. Space traffic control was quite surprised to see us; communications with Gunston via hyperwave were perfectly normal. And that was the problem. How do you explain that an entire solar system has been eaten by giant space monsters when the people who live there are telling you in real time that everything was hunky-dory? Well, you start by not explaining a damn thing. Instead, you start by finding the nearest military vessel and demanding a meeting with the captain, which we did. Captain Holverson of the cruiser Terax Gehrut took some convincing just to see us, since we refused to explain why. But with the announcement that a passenger had been left for dead, he had no choice but to take a police interest. And once we were able to see him, and George was able to interface with the military ships aivatar, we simply started showing shipboard, bot and suit records. The arrival, the silence from the station, boarding, the conditions we found there, the dark squishy something in the jungle, and, of course, the things that were busily eating the worlds. After all that the captain and the command staff were dubious, to say the least. But where we mere mortals might be out to try to pull a prank or some sort of scam, the Terax AI believed George entirely, and informed the captain that our story was on the level. We were asked for an explanation of what we had experienced, but we had none, apart from some guesswork. The interrogators were not happy with that, but they just grumbled and accepted it. At least for the first few hours. Suddenly, the tone changed. They became quite interested in Mr. Cranston, his sister and the project she was working on. Interesting that it took that long… I’ve always guessed that that’s how long it took for someone higher up the military food chain to come back with more specific orders.
A day later, a military scout vessel left for Gunston. Scouts are of course far faster, and inside of six days it was back. I saw it leave, and I saw it come back, and I saw it fairly scream into the fleet yard orbiting Atlantis. There followed a level of activity and, I think, panic that I wasn’t to see out of the military again until The War. Whatever the scout ship saw, it must’ve been along the lines of what we saw. But with the weird time effects, who knows if they saw something earlier or later. I was a civilian, and had no access, no clearance; I never heard anything about Gunston Station that the rest of the public didn’t hear. Like everyone else, I know that hyperwave communications with the entire system was blocked, the spacelanes blockaded, the system quarantined, just a few days later. I’ve never heard of anyone from Gunston Station coming back to the rest of civilization.
You’d think that the military would have warned them via hyperwave to get outta Dodge. And maybe they did… the place looked like the people had simply up and split. Fast, but without panic. But where — or when — did they go? Why did the stations rotation stop? What was the big thing in the jungle? I sometimes wonder if some of the anomalies, like the stopped rotation, were because that’s just what we found: the military would have sent the Station all the records we had, and so as they evacuated they would have made sure that everything was as we saw it. Predestination, of a kind.
When The War started some years later, I half expected to see more of the things. The Enemy was certainly powerful; in the very early days, we didn’t know just how powerful they were. I thought they might’ve been behind the things. But no. Even The Enemy was nowhere near that powerful. During the war the quarantine of course collapsed, as we didn’t have enough ships to spare, but I’ve heard rumors that there were at least a few missions that tricked Enemy forces into the Gunston system. Messages or ships were sent out with misleading information indicating that we had a major base of operations there. It’s my understanding that none of The Enemy ships that went in came back out. These were just rumors, of course. In war, the facts get muddled. So who knows. And of course, there are rumors that similar areas popped up elsewhere during the war. Rumor has it that the home star systems of The Enemy encountered some disaster similar to what happened at Gunston; at the very least, they certainly have their own quarantines. And it wasn’t the Segregators or the Olympians or some military black op or some corporate advertising stunt.
After we were debriefed and the scout ship came back confirming our story, we were, shall we say, induced to stay silent on what we’d experienced and seen. Our cargo and passengers meant for Gunston Station were hustled off the ship and the rest of the transport fee was paid to us, with a surprisingly lavish “shut the hell up” bonus. Since then, nobody has ever come back to me to tell me if anything new has been learned. I have found out things from back channels, from informants and even spies… the system itself is still off-limits, and a source of unease for the better-informed military leaders and analysts. The few scouts and probes that have managed to get in and get back with information have provided lots of information about the nature of time, I gather; some of the theoretical physicists apparently think that perhaps practical time travel might actually be possible based on the scraps of data they’ve gleaned. I think I could use a time machine. I’d like to see Sarah again.
I’m keeping my ear to the ground about those things. They had to come from somewhere. And when they’re done in the Gunston system, then what? Can we fight them? The Enemy apparently couldn’t. The gun camera footage from when I was shooting at the ones chasing us showed that most of the slugs went through them like they weren’t there… not like shooting though paper or mist, but like shooting though a hologram. Absolutely no effect whatsoever. But a few slugs, just a few, seemed to bother them. I’ve wondered over the years if maybe these things were only partially in our universe, or something. All the mass they consumed and made disappear had to go somewhere. Sometimes they were more in than out, and at those times they could be hurt. It’s pretty thin, I admit.