The Quarry

[Rage Menelas]

[font=Lucida Sans Unicode]Ryan could never have imagined what it was like to actually traverse one of the vortices that Charlie had described.

After giving his lesson on navigation, Ryan's master had set a course for a point amongst the Trojan asteroids trailing Jupiter in her orbit around the sun. Apparently vortices tended to occur in areas of overlapping electromagnetic activity, where the force of two bodies of mass exerts equal control. (He seemed to recall that these were known as Lagrange points back home.) This meant that there was generally a plethora of space detritus there also... such as asteroids trapped by the same unseen force that created the vortex. Fortunately, a normal asteroid field features huge distances between the rocks, not much of a real hazard to navigation. Even so he noticed Charlie became much more cautious as they neared their objective, which – if not for the overlying grid and green pinpoint of light marked on the bridge window – Ryan would not have been able to see it at all; it was quite invisible. He suspected the much-vaunted ship's system had isolated the location for them. What an amazing vessel!

Saar'floe now slowed dramatically nearly coming to a complete halt, a black bullet speeding out from the underbelly toward the mark, disappearing into it. They waited but ten or fifteen minutes before seeing it reappear and flee back to the ship. Charlie began pouring over his console minutely.

“Good,” he announced finally, “there is no danger on the other side.”

“I thought you only worried if you had never traversed a particular vortex,” Ryan remarked.

“I am not worried. But an experienced starflyer takes no chances that are not necessary. As with everything else in the universe, vortices are not static. As the celestial bodies in their system move, so do they. At times they may even disappear or become too weak to be useful. And there is also the chance that another ship may be coming through; or that there is a hostile ship on the other side. All of this could be problematic for us. One should always send in the probe first if there is time. How does your Earth saying go? Fools rush in where angels fear to tread?”

“Ha... I didn't know you believed in angels.”

“Oh yes... I have seen them... but let us save that for another day,” he waved off the subject and continued, “for I must warn you of what you will experience on your first traverse.”

“Okay, boss... shoot.” And the old man enumerated the side effects, trying to prepare his pupil as much as possible. It didn't work. How do you prepare someone for being squirted out of a mustard bottle? How do you explain to an adult that they have another trip down the birth canal to make? And then there was the disorientation, debilitating disorientation. Ryan had experienced jet lag before – the worst case was his trip to Russia, until now, that is; it was that by about a thousand! This first trip through a vortex was so bad he had to actually excuse himself to go lie down afterward.

Several hours later he appeared drunkenly back on the bridge.

“How are you feeling, Ryan?”

“Sick as a dog but I'll gut it out,” he responded, ashen-faced.

“You'll be fine, I suspect you have the stars in your blood... it is why I prefer harvesting Terrans. Your people are hardy and filled with the wanderlust. You yearn for the stars! The sickness keeps most of my people on firm rock; they cannot handle the effects of star travel...” he continued to drone on excitedly, oblivious to the fact that his star pupil had stumbled pallidly off the bridge, suddenly feeling like he had gotten up from his bed much too quickly...