The Quarry

[Rage Menelas]

[font=Lucida Sans Unicode]They trekked across the new system they now found themselves in utilizing the force of its gravity wells, swinging from one to the other like a monkey through the trees. Ryan had about three days to recover before they got to the next vortex. It was almost enough. Still, the next one hurt a lot less, recovery came much faster. And by the time they went through the third and had set course for their mission destination, he was feeling much better about star travel. (It had been the same in his brief stint in the navy. The first couple of times he got underway he got seasick, then he learned to master it.)

Charlie was demonstrably happy for him, and happy for himself as well. They had had the good fortune to make the trip uneventful. It was not always so, he assured his apprentice with a wry grin. There were all sorts of hazards to avoid... the vast majority of which were sentient.

Aside from the aforementioned species of contenders for that piece of rock that Ryan liked to call home, were a handful of other aliens. Most of them at least disdainful of the sovereignty of the Ka'Osafete Federation and the rights of her citizens. The three main powers in the sector considered these interlopers bandits. Of these outlaws were included a group of Ka'Osafetti renegades that preyed on star shipping wantonly, indiscriminately. Charlie's main concern was that they would run afoul of one of this group, the Szearfetti, as their mission destination was tangential to their normal area of operations. This, fortunately, did not happen. Accordingly, he was delighted to see Pella'agre loom ahead, growing more steadily in the bridge window with every passing moment.

Ryan was sincerely amazed by the high rate of speed of which the Saar'floe was capable. Pella'agre first became visible as a faint star, blossoming fairly quickly into a large, luminous orb of deep emerald, splashed liberally with jagged streaks of light azure. (He assumed these were bodies of liquid water.) She had ice caps at either pole and two rings of pale violet hue waisted her. All in all, she was quite breathtaking!

Charlie looked sideways at his apprentice's awe-struck expression and smiled. “I told you... you have the stars in your blood.”

Ryan just nodded absently. Now he could see twisting tendrils of white vapor dancing regally across the planet's atmosphere (although there was not as much cloud cover as on Earth). Off to their left, a pair of binary stars shone in tandem across the face of this exciting new world – well it was new to Ryan anyway. The stars – one bluish in tint, the other a pale red – mixed the color of their radiated light to bathe Pella'agre's atmosphere in a soft lavender.

Now they were close enough so that the rings were breaking up into individual chunks of ice, also bathed in lavender. Charlie, hands on the indentations on either side of the console, flying the ship, dove it beneath the plane of frozen rubble just before impact. Ryan jumped involuntarily. But he was loving it! He didn't know what his task was – felt he would have been instructed if he had one – so he didn't worry about it... just sat back and enjoyed the ride...