The Quarry

[Rage Menelas]

[font=Lucida Sans Unicode]Saar'floe tripped across five systems in four weeks. Ryan was beginning to understand a hard rule of galactic navigation. Unlike sea navigation back on good old mother Earth, things move! ... vortices, planets, asteroid fields... everything moves! So, to any starflyer it meant that the vortices connecting the systems were farther apart at some times than at others, so that the time it took to travel between these points of entry within a system varied drastically depending on the timing of the voyage. Charlie said it was because of this inescapable fact of star travel that the trip was taking twice as long now as it would have taken three months ago. But he was uncomplaining as they were being paid well; apparently the archaeologists were in a hurry to get to the site before anyone else did.

The passengers pretty much kept to themselves for the duration of the journey, which left the crew to their own devices. This allowed Ryan to continue his training sessions undisturbed so that by the time they caught sight of the gigantic gas giant around which their destination orbited, he was that much further along in his flight lessons.

All in all, it was a long leisurely journey with no contacts, no trials, no tribulations... for they were heading out into the galactic outback of space, on the proverbial path least traveled. No contacts but one very disturbing incident...

Ryan had been sent to check on something down below when upon returning he had overheard a conversation between two of the passengers.

“... must be capable of holding 30 matched pairs!” the voice whispered. Ryan froze, melted into the wall shadow as another voice answered the first.

“It will be, Caeli'allap, but we must also keep our eye on the time-table for construction. It has to be completed by the time the first ship arrives with subjects...”

At that they must have realized they were in jeopardy of being overheard for they quickly changed the subject, began talking about the ruins on the moon... But Ryan had heard enough to make him curious. Why would archaeologists be building a facility to house matched pairs? ...matched pairs of what? And what kind of subjects were the ships bringing in? ...and from where?

These were questions that plagued him the rest of the trip. He wondered if Charlie could enlighten him on it. The entire affair had struck him as highly irregular, especially couched in the hushed tones of the participants. But maybe he was once again making the mistake of filtering things through his Terran eyes, perhaps it would be considered quite normal to Charlie. He determined to bring it up on the trip back...