“Shut up. I’m trying to find the entrance.”
“It will be on the underside,” Tug explained, stepping up behind them. “You’ll see a deep crack. Go down into the crack, and you’ll see the entrance on the port side. There is an overhang that conceals it from above. You can only see it from within the crack.”
“Cool. Now we’re flying into a crack?” Josh stated as he pitched the nose down slightly and applied forward thrust.
The asteroid slid up and over them as they slowly approached.
“Aurora, Shuttle One,” Loki called. “We’re at the asteroid and moving in. We’ll be losing comms any moment now.”
“Copy that. Good luck,” the Aurora’s comm-officer called back. His voice was already sounding tinny and broken, as their signal degraded.
“Activating terrain scanners,” Loki reported. “Recording all scan data.”
“Throw some extra light on it, will ya,” Josh asked.
Loki reached up above his left shoulder to the overhead side panel. Running his finger along a row of rocker switches, he found the right one and clicked it on.
Outside the shuttle, several banks of exterior lights burst to life, washing the surface of the asteroid above them in bright, white daylight.
“Dang. Scary looking rock, ain’t it?” Josh commented.
“You’re going to have to flip over,” Tug said, “so you can hover using your thrusters. The asteroid may not be that big, but it is big enough to have some gravity.”
“Really?” Josh said using a mock-idiot voice. “It’s got gravity?” As quickly as he had turned it on, he turned his mock voice back off again. “Thanks Pops. I think we’ve got this one.”
“The gravity will change as you travel deeper into the heart of the asteroid,” Tug continued, ignoring their sarcasm.
“Yeah, we understand. Just take your seat, okay,” Loki said. He knew that if he didn’t get the old rebel leader off their backs, Josh was going to get them in trouble with another smart remark.
Tug resigned himself to the fact that his life was in the hands of these two young pilots, both of which he highly doubted had ever flown under such conditions. But he had learned many decades ago that his destiny was not always in his own hands.
“Is that going to be a problem for the Aurora?” Jessica asked Tug as he took a seat across from her. “The gravity, I mean.”
“Once we are inside and the facility is powered up, there are compensation mechanisms built into the crack and the tunnels that will maintain a zero gravity environment. The Aurora will not have to compensate as we will.”
“Well that’s something, anyway,” she muttered. She looked at Marcus, who was still sitting on the bench across from her, next to Tug, sound asleep and snoring inside his helmet. She reached out her foot and gave him a kick.
“Wake up!” she hollered.
Marcus shook slightly, opening his eyes with a start. For a moment, he wasn’t quite sure where he was. The fact that he was closed up inside a pressure suit also caught him by surprise. It was in fact the first time he had worn one, and he didn’t care much for the idea.
Scrambling to get the faceplate up, they could hear his muffled curses aimed at Josh for closing his faceplate to begin with.
“There it is,” Loki said, pointing at the crack in the asteroid over their heads.
“Lining her up now,” Josh announced as he corrected their approach course to line up with the crack above them.
Both Tug and Jessica leaned in toward the center of the shuttle, trying to see forward through the cockpit windows. But despite their best efforts, the view was not very revealing.
Josh began thrusting toward the asteroid to bring them in closer. “Just a touch, to let the asteroid’s gravity pull us down,” he said. “Rolling over.” Josh rolled the shuttle on its longitudinal axis so that its bottom was now facing the asteroid.
“Are there any other windows back here?” Jessica asked. “I’m supposed to be checking the place out and I can’t see shit from back here.”
“Lock your visors down and go to internal support,” Marcus instructed them. Marcus watched as each of them locked down their helmet visors, checked that their internal life support systems were working and then reported such to him with a thumbs up sign.
“Depress the ship,” Marcus told Loki.
“Depressurizing.”
Slowly, over a few minutes, the sounds inside the shuttle faded away as the air that carried them was sucked out of the cabin. Once they were in silence and could hear nothing other than their own respirations, Marcus moved to the back of the ship and activated the loading ramp. The big ramp, that when closed made up the aft wall of the cabin, lowered away, creating a platform off the back end of the shuttle.
“Did you order a view?” Marcus asked, gesturing toward the open back end of the shuttle.
Jessica walked out onto the platform, activating the magnetic grips in the soles of her boots to keep from falling of the end. Once at the extreme end, she turned around to face forward. The shuttle was not all the way down in the crack, which was about three hundred meters deep and more than three times that in width. It was a breathtaking view, with the massive turquoise gas-giant in the distant black sky. “This is amazing,” she exclaimed.
“The entrance is coming up on the port side,” Loki reported. “We’ll be coming to port in about ten seconds.”
Jessica could see the overhang begin jutting out on the port side for a few seconds before they turned. Moments later, they were inside the massive tunnel. The walls were ragged, but overall they were a lot smoother than she had expected. Every twenty to thirty meters, she saw strategically placed rings that went around the inside of the tunnel’s diameter. “What are those rings?”
“Lighting, gravity displacement emitters, sensors, and comm-arrays,” Tug explained as he stepped out onto the ramp next to her. “They are located all along the tunnels. It makes the tunnels very easy to navigate when the facility is operational.”
“Did you guys do all this yourselves?”
“No. We could never afford this level of construction. The facility was once a mining base. It was abandoned decades ago and has been awaiting de-orbit. We simply took advantage of its availability. We only had to provide the power plant, which we got from a few otherwise inoperable Ta’Akar ships.”
“Still, it’s pretty impressive.”
“You do not have such facilities on Earth?”
“Oh, we’re mining our asteroid belt as well, just not from the inside out.”
“It takes many generations to fully excavate some of the more massive asteroids. This one is one of the smaller ones. It is only a few kilometers across, but it was perfect for our plans. I only wish we had been given an opportunity to utilize it much earlier.”
The tunnel suddenly opened up into a much larger cavern, at least a kilometer in diameter. The walls, floors, and ceilings were craggy and irregular, and there was another tunnel that appeared to be an exit on the opposite side. All along the walls were strange boxes and domes, some joined together by surface tunnels, others seemingly standing alone and disconnected. Along one side of the cavern there was a large framework surrounding what looked like a platform of some type jutting out from the wall. There was an entrance with big double doors that led from the platform into the rock itself.
“Is that the facility?” Jessica asked.
“That’s the dock, yes. All of these buildings are the facility.”
“But they’re all at such varying angles,” Jessica commented. “Doesn’t it get disorienting?”
“Each building has its own gravity plating. It’s easier than trying to orient every structure to use the asteroid’s rather weak gravity. You get used to it after a while.”
“Take us down onto the platform to port,” Tug instructed the flight crew.
The shuttle turned to port and descended slightly. As it approached the platform, it slowly rotated until its aft end was facing the big double doors on the wall. The shuttle backed over the platform before finally extending its landing gear and setting down.