15/07/335: Report 1

Well, shit.

I expected trouble, but this place is a solid eight out of ten on my personal shitshow scale.

When we came through, for a second I thought I’d been dropped inside the colon of a cancerous Corsair. Damn, I actually miss the red glow of Cayman. This system triggers every bit of bathophobia I didn’t know I still had.
The asteroids here remind me of the Kattegat Lava Field, except on steroids. Radiation goes off the charts the moment you leave the safe corridors.
The probe we sent before it melted returned readings of roughly 604.4 gray per hour. Whatever these asteroids are hiding, it doesn’t feel natural.
I’m not even sure we have the technology to exploit whatever energy source is bleeding through this place. Maybe the Science Department will start drooling over it. Maybe it’ll kill them too.

The corridor itself feels wrong in a way that is hard to write down cleanly. It is not just narrow—it feels used, like something big has been scraping through the field for a very long time. The rock around it is smoother than it should be, peeled back and cooked into glassy scars.

Speaking of hidden things, the scanners are nearly useless beyond 5k. Everything turns to gibberish. Our onboard boffin thinks the noise masks at least one sizeable astral body, plus a whole mess of anomalies.

Turns out he was right.

We’re barely into the system, our navmap is already half-asleep, and we’ve already found two anomalies. The first nearly swallowed the safe corridor whole. So that’s probably how the corridor was carved in the first place. We named it, with all the imagination we could muster, Anomaly 1-D6. It has clear destructive capability and appears to move slowly through the field, cutting its own path.

We encountered another one in the dogleg: Anomaly 1-E7. Smaller, still deadly. Judging by the damaged Pilgrim nearby, someone else learned that the hard way.
We gathered what data we could. The science crew will now try to phase our scanners to the background noise and reverberations these things throw through the asteroid field.
As for the wreck, we could only partially make out the name, Plotyma or something close to it. We did not attempt boarding. Too much radiation, too much gravitational distortion, not enough desire to die.

Crew mood took a hit the moment we entered. Not panic—worse than panic, really. The kind of silence you get when everyone onboard is pretending the system is normal because saying otherwise would make it real. Even Bob stopped joking for a while, which is how I knew Omega-97 had everyone by the throat.

Ship status: shield drain above forecast, hull still holding. Scanner arrays are taking constant interference spikes and had to be power-cycled twice. Internal air scrubbers are also working harder than usual—something in the field leaves a metallic tang in the vents, even with the hull sealed. The crew says it smells like blood and hot copper. They’re not wrong.

We’ll resume the push toward the deeper systems. Supplies are already taking a hit. Radiation is chewing through equipment faster than planned.

16/07/335: Report 2

Didn’t expect to report again this quickly.

We were closer to our objective than expected, and for once no anomalies slowed us down. Thanks to the brief study on the previous anomalies, we managed to partially filter scanner and probe data.

We triangulated three points of interest for future investigation:

• One massive gravitational object, estimated at 5–7 × 10e24 kg. Our scanner operator believes it may be a planet, as it produces relatively low noise and only faintly echoes nearby disturbances.
  
• One additional gravitational anomaly, harder to classify than anything we’ve recorded so far.
  
• One cluster of... something. Multiple overlapping signals or “voices,” if you want the unsettling version. Like a chorus of crushing flesh.
  

The last one unsettled more than just the science team. We replayed the signal twice in the lab and once in the cockpit. On the third pass one of the younger techs quietly asked us not to do it again. I agreed. I’m patient with bad data, not with hearing rocks scream.

One small anecdote for the archive: Hasegawa swore he saw movement outside the port canopy while we were drifting at reduced thrust. Not on scanners. Not on optics after replay. Just one dark shape crossing where no shape should have been. Could be fatigue. Could be reflected plasma from the field. Could be Omega-97 playing games. I logged it anyway.

Time to head for Fischer.