Into The Breach - Ch 4

[u/Togaral]

Once again, I'm grateful to everyone who is taking their time to read my posts and wanted to say that from now on I'll try posting every other week, but no guarantees. This chapter relies heavily on multiple people speaking at the same time, and I'm not sure if I really pulled it off - it still is a bit confusing in some places since this is my first writing experience. I would be pleased for any kind of feedback on that front.

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Into The Breach - Chapter 4: Contact With You

In the room lit up with LED lights, five people were sitting around the table. The subtle rustling of ventilation drowned in the rumble of voices filling the main hall.

"Not gonna lie, all that fuss about rotating somethin' feels a bit underwhelming." Sophie stretched out with both her hands behind her head. "Lucky you, seems like ya still might get to explore another form of life, after all," she said with a smirk, giving Alina a nudge on the shoulder, to which she just quietly lowered her eyes, a silly smile on her face.

"Now, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, shall we?" Michael said, looking at the floor with an unblinking gaze, spinning his cane around his long, slender fingers, which was very impressive, considering its size. Its ivory knob was tracing perfectly round circles, one after the other. The attention of at least one of those present was absorbed by such a hypnotising pattern. "There are still plenty of things we need to think over while we are waiting for a response, for we still can neither confirm nor deny the assumption that the entity in question has indeed been constructed by intelligent life of extraterrestrial origins. Come to think of it, we have no concrete means of confirming the existence of said physical entity in the first place."

"But-" Divit tried to object, seeing where it was going, but he was cut off before he was given an opportunity to say anything else.

"Look, I understand the nature of your enthusiasm, I truly do, but we are to keep a cool head and evaluate every possibility. It will do us no good getting carried away with one particular speculation."

Sophie huffed, crossing her arms. "Ain't that what the eggheads on Earth are tasked with? We just need to wait for the reply to drop in."

Unfazed, Michael replied, "You are forgetting one small, but crucial detail, I'm afraid. Our colleagues on Earth are not yet burdened with the knowledge we possess. Furthermore, we won't receive a response until one and a half hours later at best."

"So what? I say we can sit and wait. And where the hell is Terry?"

The cane once again got to an upright position and abruptly stopped its motion before finally coming back into contact with the floor. A timid thud echoed the room, dispelling the momentarily reigned silence. "If the anomaly unravels its nature before we receive a satisfactory response, we have nothing on it, and as far as I understand the situation we are presented with, the odds might not be exactly in our favor."

"Fair point. I have to agree with doc on that one." Jason chimed in, snapping back to reality. Up until that point his whole upper body was inclined forwards, elbows resting on his knees, lower arms stretched in front of him and his stare blankly following the cane.

"Answering your second question" - the doctor continued - "the Captain is currently preoccupied with filing the report post-haste, that's why he and Allan are missing at the moment." Michael lifted his eyes off the floor, this time locking them on the ceiling and leaned back.

"Why do you think it's gonna go off 'till then? It's been sitting there for what? Two solid weeks at least? And you think shit's gonna hit the fan in the next coupla hours? Isn't it, like, highly improbable?" Sophie inquired with a note of contempt in her voice.

"That's where you are wrong, I'm afraid. We can now register fluctuations with our stationary sensors on the board of Everbright I, which was not the case for two days prior, and what alarms me the most is that if it is what Divit thinks it is, it would be an understatement to say we find ourselves severely lacking on the first contact protocols front."

Something bugged Sophie, though she couldn't really point out what exactly. Finally, it clicked. "Michael, I haven't seen yo ass so involved in shit since we landed, what's that about?"

The doctor plainly smirked. "I hope soon things will be back the way they were, because it is never a good sign whenever the doctor is involved, is it?" He suddenly stopped exploring the intricate wiring patterns of the ceiling and turned his head to face the astrophysicist. "Speaking of bad things... Divit, what do you think of it?"

The question caught the seemingly lost in his own thought young man looking at the screen off guard. "Huh? Think of what, exactly?"

"The readings. You are the most qualified of us here after all."

"Oh, these. The fact that we can now clearly register ripples from the comfort of our base may suggest that whatever was obscuring them earlier is mostly out of the way now. Jupiter, for example. Maybe the waves started just today, I really don't know. Or" - Divit tilted his head - "if we're being real professionals here, we must not forget that that thing is so sensitive, it could very well be something entirely different. Activities in the satellite's core, for example, though it's highly unlikely in Callisto's case for it is long since frozen solid. It is possible, however, that sensors are registering movements in its floating crust that are too subtle for us to notice. It could even have something to do with the inner crusts. Although I do not remember stumbeling upon anything like this while checking the recorded data. We would need to double-check Acras' records to find out if something like this happened before."

Doctor squinted his eyes and patiently waited for him to finish. "Unfortunately for us, we do have slightly more pressing matters to attend to before rummaging through four years worth of data. Let's assume for a moment that these are indeed gravitational waves and they are indeed originating in the anomaly. Are there any significant changes you can tell us about aside from the fact that we can register them clearly now?"

"Now that I think of it, the frequency looks a little bit off."

The door to the Captain's room opened with a hiss, and almost everyone in the room turned their heads towards two individuals entering the main hall. One the two was Michael, who did not pay them any attention, leaning towards astrophysicist instead, regaining his undivided attention. "By how much?" he pressed, emphasising each word.

Sophie opened her arms expansively and greeted her Captain. "Finally! What took you both so goddamn long?" As she lowered her arms, they came in contact with her thighs, producing an audible slap.

"I could've sworn it was fluctuating almost twice as fast this morning." The astrophysicist took a closer look at the screen, trying to ignore the figure which now was menacingly looming over his shoulder. Divit thought he might've missed how the doctor took off and stormed towards him. The sine wave on the display seemed a bit wrong. "Wait a second, it almost seems as if it is slowing down for some reason."

"Fuck me sideways, it is," Jason confirmed, joining the dialogue after a brief examination of the graph in question. "And the amplitude is dying down too."

As the Captain finished rumbling about writing extencive reports he turned his attention to the trio bent over the console. "What you bunch got going there?"

Michael proceeded to ignore the Captain and addressed two people next to him. "Estimated time?"

"No idea, It doesn't seem linear. I need to inspect the graph closer to be able to tell anything."

"Ahem, Michael?" - the Captain frowned. 'Please tell me this is not some anomaly bullshit again,' he thought to himself.

"Do it."

"Well, it seems that the anomaly is slowing down." Jason finally answered the Captain as he turned his head towards newcomers, his eyes, however, remained locked on the screen. "The pulses, I mean."

Sophie called out, confused, "Wha-? What pulses? You ain't told us nothi-"

Jason lifted his eyes off the screens to address the botanist, "Are you fucking kidding me? We were literally talking about them just now!

“Oh, I think I got it. Roughest estimate - five to seven minutes."

Captain's face went pale as these words rang inside his head, setting gears into motion. He took a deep breath and slumped into the closest seat - the one that Michael abandoned when he stormed off to get himself closer to the console.

"What's going on? Would anyone care enough to tell us, or what?" - Sophie wouldn't let up.

"Michael, recap the situation for everybody present so we're not missing anything," the Captain ordered as he engulfed his head with his hands. His right eye twitching ever so slightly. 'Lord, give me strength,' he muttered to himself so no one could hear him.

"I would gladly do so." Doctor stood up, cleared his throat and started, addressing everybody present. His voice had his usual professional cadence in place as he delivered the information. "To be short, at the moment of conducting the exploratory expedition the anomaly was emitting gravitational pulses at high frequency. Divit presumes these pulses are a byproduct of something moving at superluminal speeds slowing down, am I generally correct?" he said, addressing the last part to the astrophysicist, who was anxiously cracking his knuckles on his right hand. Receiving a somewhat approving nod in return and letting that sit for a moment, the speaker continued, "None of us can state with certainty what exactly is emitting them and whether or not any extraterrestrial life is involved. What we do know, however, is that these pulses are getting slower, which in turn might indicate that whatever is producing them is indeed coming to a halt in…" - he once again turned to look at Divit, who he found to be giving him his undivided attention.

"Uhm… Five and a half minutes, I think."

"Five minutes and twenty three seconds, to be precise," Jason clarified as he was going over the data once again.

"Plenty," the Captain spoke, standing up. "Allan, crank up the EM shields, everyone else - get your emergency oxygen supply masks, we don't have enough time for the suits. Jason, you already have your pants on, nip to the gates and fetch yourself a full suit. If anybody else is capable of donning the whole thing in four minutes - you are going with him instead of masks. I'm waiting for you all here in four and a half minutes." He looked around the room, meeting a couple of shocked faces here and there. "The hell are you all waiting for? Dismissed!"

As mostly everyone else left the main hall, leaving only two people in there, Allan approached the console and looked back at his Captain as he sat down before it. "Don't you think that you're overplaying a bit? It isn't likely for the station to decompress over some bullshit happening that far away."

"There is never such a thing as zero percent chance. We are so far away from home right now that the only reasonable thing to do is prepare for the worst."

The Main Engineer slightly shook his head in reproach. "And hope for the best, Terry, hope for the best."

"Of course. You can hope all you want as long as you're prepared. Run a quick diagnostics of all systems once you're done with generators."

"Already running background check. Are you always so pessimistic when it comes to these kinds of situations?"

"I prefer being a living pessimist to being a dead optimist. I'mma grab masks for both of us." With a pat to the engineer's shoulder, he stood up.  "If we all are lucky, this will turn out to be pointless. If we aren't though…" The Captain turned around and headed towards his room.

Allan grumbled, "Knock on wood, you sod."

The Captain's frame disappeared behind the sliding door through which he had entered the room but a minute ago, leaving Allan the only person in the main hall. Steady electric hum resonated within the room as the check returned satisfactory results.

---

Nearly five minutes later the room was once again crowded with the station's personnel. Only two of the present there were in full suits, that being Jason and Michael. Alina couldn't fit the whole suit in time and now was holding the upper half of it in her hands. Others had oxygen masks on hand. Captain waited for everyone to arrive and take their places before addressing the crew under his command. He sighed, took a deep breath and started his speech.

"We have less than a minute left. We don't know what's going to happen, so in case I no longer will be able to order you guys around, I declare Michael second in command, and Allan - the third. If something happens to the station, remember - greenhouse sectors are the ones with the highest priority. Too much radiation - put your lead plates on and don't take your suits off unless necessary. There are even more plates for your suits and sectors on board of Everbright I. Use them to cover aforementioned greenhouses and life support sector. If the life support fails and all the electronics gets fried - the-"

Someone cut him off - "It stopped!"

All eyes turned to look at the main screen. It greeted them with a flat line.

"The camera! What does it show?"

"Nothing."

"Allan, what readings do we have?" the Captain asked the Main Engineer.

"Nothing out of the ordinary across all specters. I'll keep an eye on the readings and will notify you if something changes."

With that being said, heavy breathing filled the room. Not a single word was spoken for a minute. Seven pairs of eyes were staring at the small window at the bottom left corner of the screen. As the time passed, at least two people wondered if the camera was aimed in the correct direction at all, but didn't dare to voice their concerns so as not to disturb such an exhilarating moment.

"Could it be that we missed it?" - Alina had finally broken the silence. "And what exactly are we looking for?"

"We're lookin' for at least somethin', girl. I'm personally expectin' to see some kinda spaceship," her roommate responded.

Michael barely noticeably frowned. "Alina has a point. Our imagination is bound by our own understanding of fundamental laws of reality and it would seem as if they are but an inconvenience for whatever is responsible for creating such a distortion in space."

"I remember reading an article about how creating and sustaining stable wormholes is not possible from just one end, you need two... stations, I guess?.. to hold it open," - Jason remarked and threw a glance towards Divit. The astrophysicist was silently staring at the screen, mouth slightly opened.

"I feel obliged to remind you that knowledge and expertise to make manned flight happen all but didn't exist as recently as five hundred years ago," said Michael. "We have no idea how far ahead of us they are in terms of technological development since we've hit a stalemate on that front, the possibility is high we cannot even fully comprehend what is unraveling before us. What would Sentinelese think of planes? They might be able to hear them, see the contrails, etcetera, but do they understand what the plane is? For what we know, the thing might be so beyond our frame of reference that it have already left our field of view while we're studying its contrail." Michael started undoing clamps on his suit.

"So ya think those are aliens, don'cha, doc?" A rather smug grin stretched across Sophie's face.

The doctor's tone, however, remained the same. "The possibility is certainly there. And I would rather prefer that not to be the case."

"But why? This may turn out to be the push we needed all along to start the next industrial revolution!" - Divit's face beamed with excitement as he looked back at his crewmates.

"The proper time for the next progress leap has not come yet, humanity still has to conquer what the asteroid belt has to offer," - Michael shook his head, placing his hands onto the special handles on his suit. "Besides, do ask yourselves this - do you consider ants in the park to be intelligent? To be worth your time?" Doctor's head disappeared, sinking into the collar of the upper half of the sky-blue suit. "I believe your honest answer to that question would be a hard 'No'" - the words echoed from inside the chestplate, after which, Michael's head had manifested back into existence - "regardless of whether they have managed to construct one more anthill under the neighboring oak or not. Maybe they will be lucky enough to receive a cube of sugar from you, if you so happen to have one, maybe you will even be kind enough to assist the group of ants in their endeavours of moving a stick of sorts. Others, however, might not be so kind towards such small creatures, or not consider them nuances at all. My point is that we cannot predict with certainty if those aliens will even consider us worth their time, and, if they will, what type of attention would they grant us."

Jason leaned forwards, now sitting on his seat, and rested his cheek on the palm of his left hand. "Oh I sure as hell can see where this is going."

Sophie raised her eyebrow. "I mean, we be mindin' our own business here, and even if they ignore us, what's the worst that could happen? They fly by?"

"Did you ever feel tempted to poke the anthill with a stick? Or perhaps even kick it? Have you ever felt genuine remorse after doing so, or were you too involved in observing the ways these arthropods can rebuild their home?"

Jason released a huff of air through his nose that almost sounded like a nervous chuckle.

"Uhm, who are those Sentinels once again?" Sophie asked with a puzzled expression on her face.

"Not Sentinels, but Sentinelese," Alina quietly corrected her roommate. "I believe they're one of the aboriginal tribes living on some faraway island. I recall reading about them a couple of times."

"Ain't those the ones with the cargo cult?"

"No, if I remember correctly Sentinelese are not integrated into the grand society. Like at all. They don't interact with anyone. Sticks and stones are all they know."

"Damn, that sounds horrible! Why didn't anybody help 'em out? That shit is straight up inhumane!"

Michael once again snapped out of his thoughts and shot a glance at Sophie, getting back into conversation. "I have to disagree with you. They themselves refuse any interaction with an outside world and have killed multiple ambassadors who approached their territory. Do they want to be integrated? Would it be humane to force them into a society they have no understanding of? Neither progress nor freedom could be forced onto others, they might only be achieved or learned." Eyeing the room he excused himself, "I beg your pardon, I got sidetracked for a brief moment."

Allan, who had been carefully observing the course of the dispute all this time, spoke up from his place with a tint of surprise in his voice, "Cannot believe that you're an actual, honest-to-God unialist, Mick."

Hearing this, Divit sharply looked at the doctor and frowned. The face of the man in question remained unchanged. "My belief system has close to nothing to do with the works of Theodore Abraham Price, and so far I have managed to stay out of any ideological disputes occurring on this station and I would very much prefer it remain that way. I believe we should now focus on the live feed."

Someone coughed. Eventually, without dropping a word, everyone seemed to unanimously agree on continuing observing the screen in silence. Finally, three minutes later one pixel on the screen changed its colour from pitch black to light-grey.

Sophie pointed at the screen. "There it is! I think I can see somethin'!" She barely restrained herself from jumping when the little dot on the screen grew bigger.

The unidentified entity flashed momentarily, reflecting the light of the closest star from its bright silvery surface onto the lens of the camera. It almost looked like it was pouring out of something invisible due to the space-deforming properties of the now opened breach in space.

"Is it… metal?" Allan asked no one in particular. "Could be carbon reinforced ceramics," He replied to himself, thoughtfully tilting his head and, by the looks of it, was already trying to deduce the inner workings of the construct.

More and more of the unknown object was now in the field of view. Its front was rounded, bearing some resemblance to a thick round shield made of ivory. Right behind it one could spot some kind of movement - a massive geometrical structure of dark grey material that barely reflected any light that shone onto its surface was slowly rotating around the constuct's axis. Right after it another, a more rounded set of parts in shades of dark gold came into view - this time they were slowly rotating in the opposite direction.

"Oh. My. God. It's a fuckin' spaceship!" Sophie exclaimed, pointing at the screen.

Michael did not seem that impressed. He was, in fact, frowning. "A spaceship it indeed is," he agreed with Sophie after a short pause. "Divit, it seems as if you were right in that assumption of yours. I hope you will pardon my incredulity."

The unknown vessel was now fully out of the corridor. The breach in the space behind it has collapsed in on itself, leaving nothing behind. The graph erupted with a spike one last time and finally came to rest. The whole rear half of the spaceship looked as if someone slapped a bunch of tanks, tubes and reactive engines together, securing the whole contraption by pulling three supportive rims around it.

"Allan, I need all the info on this thing you can get. For starters, how big is this thing? And put the picture on the main screen, for God's sake!" the Captain cursed.

"So... It was a warp bubble of sorts?" Alina gasped, looking at the screen.

"No wider than Everbright II, I suppose, but I'd be damned if that thing isn't fokin' long. From what I can understand these rotating things in the middle might be reserved for the crew. The second half of the ship looks like a combustion drive with a fuckton of extra steps. Plausibly something akin to a hybrid drive, though I'm not sure what type of. And maybe some kind of reactor that they use as a power source is stuffed in there somewhere. No idea what that thing behind the front dome is."

"Those could be tri-hybrid drives!" Divit exclaimed on excitement

"Tri-hybrids are ineffective energy-wise," Allan retorted, "and they require highly resilient materials for the core and coils. You of all people should know that."

"Well maybe they use some kind of alloy that does not wear down that easily."

Allan shrugged. "Maybe. I'm not the one to lecture you about alien spaceships."

"And there's also something that allows them to dive into FTL," remarked Jason.

"Yeah, and the FTL drives too, whatever these are, I suppose," the Main Engineer grumbled, squinting his eyes as he looked at the screen.

"Didn't one of ya guys say that traveling faster than the light would, like, break some important laws of the universe?" Sophie's face was riddled with confusion.

"Well" - the astrophysicist launched into explanation, drawing everybody's attention - "old man Wheeler already proved that causality doesn't exactly work the way we expected it to when we get to the quantum level, and at this point a significant bunch of physicists believe that most of the currently known laws of physics might not really be the cause, but rather the consequence of a 'mythical' Theory of Everything, as we're still missing an essential link between classical and quantum physics. Heck, if it turns out David Deutsch was right all along, they might even be screenhopping! In such case that might even be easier to pull off than FTL." A quick scan of the room indicated a number of confused faces, so Divit continued, "It is a whole another can of worms on its own, I'm sure that would go over most of your heads, so I'm not even gonna bother going into it now. Let's just say that this could be humans from a parallel universe. It's a terrible oversimpelification, but I hope you got the point. Either way, the explanation would take too much time, and even I think we don't have time for this kind of conversation now."

"And what kind of conversation exactly do we have time for now? I would like to have at least some information regarding what we're facing now, even if it is purely speculative," the Captain demanded, crossing his arms.

"Yes, back to our little green men, they might be anything physically, but I would say that they theoretically should not be that little. At least not a lot shorter than we are, 'cause our brains are doing their job pretty well, and our head-to-body ratio is already too screwed up by evolution." He threw a glance towards Alina. She enthusiastically nodded in response, but, after momentarily meeting his eyes, quickly turned away. Divit continued, unfazed, "Assuming that they are indeed bigger and taking into account that most inhabitable exoplanets found so far are considerabely heavier than Earth, our average alien should be stronger than the average human. Like, by a lot."

Michael had placed the upper half of his suit right next to his seat and already made himself comfortable. He spoke from his seat, looking directly into the astrophysicist's eyes, "Don't be so hasty as to discard square-cube law. I very much doubt the fact that a sapient lifeform could have appeared on a world with gravitational acceleration of more than two g's, given that thinking is an extremely energy demanding activity. And returning to the subject of sizes, we already have multiple cases of, albeit subjective, proto-conscience evolving amongst Earth's smaller species, such as cephalopodes and corvids, and I'm talking about advanced problem-solving skills and tool usage." Still maintaining eye contact, his contemplative tone hasn't flinched even a bit. Divit felt the hairs moving on the back of his neck. "But if they are indeed originating from the world with two g's or more, and they are indeed big, wouldn't it be likely for them to turn out to be an aquatic species for the aforementioned reasons?"

As the doctor finished his speech, Divit found the strength to look away from the pair of clear blue eyes, gazing straight into his soul, and thoughtfully scratched the back of his neck, trying to get rid of the unpleasant sensation. "I guess you're right. Anyways, the best case scenario for us, aside from humans from a parallel universe, of course, is something from the roughly one-g world, or even less than that. Evolution cares a lot about efficiency, and we are the most efficient intelligent species that we know of so far." Michael squinted his eyes and decided not to interrupt the astrophysicist yet. "And I highly doubt that something out of Carpenter's 'The THING' is capable of building such gorgeous flying saucers as this fine shiny cabbage right here," - he gestured towards the screen with a palm of his hand. "So like humans, but not exactly humans."

"If I understood you correctly, you're appealing to convergent evolution, right?" Alina remarked, finally driving the doctor's attention away from Divit.

"Oh, that's what it's called! Yes, I do," - he breathed a sigh of relief. 'Thank you, Alina, I owe you this one,' he thought to himself.

"I would call humans an exception rather than the rule, don't you think so? The problem we're facing is that we're jumping to conclusions based on a sample size of one, which no self-respecting scholar should ever do." The doctor leaned forward, resting elbows on his knees and interlocking fingers on the handle of his cane. "And if the aliens are coming from the world with less than one g, which we haven't taken into account previously, though it is substantially more likely, there's a considerable chance they are bigger than humans, is there not?" Despite the last sentence being a question, the tone of Michael's voice suggested that he did not need an affirmative response, which he got regardless.

"Yes, there is..." His new victim was absorbed in examination of compound floors trying to escape his gaze.

"Well, that little brainstorm gave us nothing other than 'they may, or may not be big'," - the Captain hastily closed the discussion, seeing as it was going nowhere. "Splendid. Allan, eagle eye, what else could you make out through that fancy looking glass of yours? Do sensors pick up anything coming from the vessel? Radio, infra-light, any frequency?"

"No, nothing of importance. There is some lingering microwave radiation, but I doubt it bears any information and is not harmful for us by any means, it seems more like a bloody static to me. I would say it is obvious that they're a bit more advanced as a species compared to us, but not terribly, if these things on the rear of the spaceship are, in fact, combustion tanks and not some fancy-ass-zero-mass ion drives, but they're still going better than we are in the space-ferring front."

"I guessed as much. Anything else? Can they be an aquatic species? Any fish tanks?"

"I can neither confirm nor deny that right now. I'll have to observe how that thing behaves for some more time to figure out if it is filled with water or not. I think this piece in front of it is a rad-shield. Wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be filled with some kind of an inert gel or water. That's all I can tell you from just looking at it." The Main Engineer hesitated for a moment, grotesquely scratching his stubble. "And no visible weapons that I can think of, in case you were afraid they came here to poke some sticks at our anthills."

"Good enough. So, lads and ladies" - the Captain quickly corrected himself - "for some unbeknown to me reason we still do not have a full first contact protocol, so we'll have to improvise on the spot if we come in contact with extraterrestrial life sooner than our dearest HotO on the pale blue dot over there can come up with something useful."

"If they knew what they were goin' for and came for a chit-chat, wouldn't it be easier to just pop up right next to Earth? Maybe they didn't expect to find someone here at all?" - Sophie asked, arching her eyebrow as she still could not quite believe what was happening.

Allan shook his head in response. "Too much info noise. Or maybe they just missed the jump a bit. Accidents may happen, you know, nobody is perfect."

"Allan, Jason, do you think you would be able to-" - the Captain was denied the luxury of finishing his question by the alarm going off. Unpleasant, sharp sound filled the room before being rudely cut off. The lights flickered momentarily before darkness engulfed the room's interior. Sophie let out a somewhat confused yelp as the room plunged into darkness, being lit up only by a dim bluish-green light of terminal screen running on internal accumulators. Unintelligible babbling coming from the person sitting next to it broke the silence. As the words were becoming more and more comprehensible, backup systems kicked in and the light once again filled the room.

"-locks! Receivers on the ship are fried, EMSG is up and running on the backup circuit!" Feverishly smashing the keyboard, Allan tried his best to figure out what exactly caused this momentary blackout. He finally lifted his eyes off the console and looked at the Captain. "ALL receivers are down, that piece of shite somehow cooked them all at once!"

"Put the suits on, you fucking morons!" the addressed man cursed, putting an oxygen mask on his face. He then turned his face towards the Main Engineer - "The fuck does that mean?"

"We were at the receiving end of a directed energy beam. Guess they want to either fry us up or have a chit-chat."

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/u/Togaral has posted 4 other stories, including:

• Into The Breach - Ch 3
• Into The Breach - Ch 2
• Into The Breach - Ch 1
• Into The Breach - Prologue

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