You wanna drive a shuttle through it?

Posted on 2026, Tue Jan 27th, @ 1:51am by Lieutenant Jep Fallo & Commander Cormac Situs & Corporal Roy Fitzroy & Fleet Captain Dean House & Lieutenant Katie Harlow

1,699 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Episode 2 "Demons of the Past, Friends of the Future" - USS Halo
Location: The desert worlds surface
Timeline: Day 14

After a few hours of working away inside the structure one of the science techs asked Situs "just took some measurements boss. If wewanted to, we could fit one of those sleak type 14 shuttles through the main entrance through that doorway, and right into the Gateaway. It would be a tight fit, but it could make it."

''Sleek?'' Situs exclaimed. The type 14 shuttle was anything but, 25 metric tons of metal and nearly 4 meters tall this behemoth of a craft was second only to a runabout. He resisted the urge to order the crewman to report to the medics to get his eyes checked.

"Best news we've had all day, I would not like to risk enlarging the tunnels further"

"I meant Type 12. Those are the smaller ones right? Sorry I'm a science officer not auxiliary craft pilot.

Corporal Ray Fitzroy (inner voice of Moo) looked at the P.a.d.d. , then said. "What.... NO Way! " Rapidly scrolling up, then down, then back up. "Wow, glad I'm a backseat passenger. They'd better give me a good set of pilots!" Roy muttered out loud. Corporal Roy E. Fitzroy would sit at the enhanced sensor processing suit in the middle of the cargo portion of the back half of the heavily modified Type 12-class shuttle. The pilots would still be sweating, trying to thread the needle.

Roy could fly in case of emergency, but he normally didn't; it was just to tedious and boring. His hands and brain would be occupied launching the probes at just the right time, heading just the right direction. Then he would process the data. The science department would be impatient to get the raw data as well as the processed data to play with. Operations got both the compressed live data stream and his processed data stream in real time. This data was also saved to the Black Box, just in case something happened to the shuttle.

Roy looked up and at the schedule. They had time, not a lot but he would set up the holosuiet in the back of the shuttle and run a few simulations to prepare for this bug nutz mission.

Dean was watching all of the other officers as they worked. He was pretty pleased with their performance so far. Giving a peek in on what Roy was doing. "You might want to adjust for gravitational drift."

Roy looked up with a perplexed look, thought for a second, then said. "Wait, there will probably be gravitational shear forced from within the gate path itself. We can launch a Class IV probe, 12 milliseconds after we cross the event horizon. This will allow for the gravity compensators to be more efficient, and give us a hopefully smoother ride..."

Roy pulled up known data concerning event horizons and trips to the edge of black holes. If they got too close to a black hole. They would either be stuck, have a thirty-year cruise outside the normal time stream, or implode.

Roy looked up at Dean, then said. "Just so you know, what I will be doing, other than trying to map the network. I will use a full complement of our probes and make a string of pearls. Then, try to capture all the data from inside the gate network prior to us leaving the network. Dont worry about any sensor lagg, or controls that may seem sluggish. I will be setting up a low-level warp field inside here to allow the computer to keep up with the tasks I will be assigning it. That tingling in the back of your neck, it's not fear, it's the proximity to said warp field."

Lt. Jep Fallo did one last pre flight check on the Type 12 shuttle and nodded to himself, considering the ship ready for the mission they were about to take it on.

Fallo looked at the doorway infront the shuttle. They had easily gotten the vessel into the main entrance of the long buried structure, the tricky part would be getting it through the door leading to the gate room, and then into the gate itself. He'd have inches on either side. But it was doable.

"Alright lets do this...all aboard who is coming aboard.."

Situs sealed the last of the equipment cases and climbed aboard. "Anyone who's not in the shuttle should move behind the force field. I don't know how the gateway will react to contact"


Fallo took a deep breath and gave a quick nod, not to anyone in particular, more as a positive affirmation to himself. He then engaged the shuttles repulsors and maneuvering thrusters and began to pilot the vessel slowly towards the archway that led to the Gate room. As the shuttle got within a few feet of the door he double checked his proximity sensors and lowered the bottom of the shuttle down so that the nacelles were a mere inch above the stone floor.

It was indeed a very tight fit with little more then an inch and a half on either side as they slowly slid through the archway into the Gate room. The top left corner of the shuttle lightly scraped an uneven corner of the curving upper portion of arch causing a minor and superficial 3 inch long scratch that was accompanied by high pitched screech and short grinding sound.

"Oops." Fallo said feeling a bit embarrassed.

Roy felt the shudder and slight pull to the left. "Hey, no playing pinball!" Roy said.

A few seconds later they were through and Fallo began gently swinging the shuttle first to the right, then angling back to left to line them up to proceed through the Iconian Gateway itself.

"Alright, well, we're ready to head in through sir. Permission to proceed?" Fallo said to House.

"Proceed, just be careful, and slowly. We certainly don't want to go blasting through and slam into something on the other side," Dean cautioned.

Jep flew the shuttle through the active Iconian Gateway. Being unsure about what might be on the other side, he used the little ship's thrusters only. All they could see was sky with a greenish hue and some brown hills in the distance.

Roy was still processing the data stream. The shuttles Communication aray had received over two hundred Terra bytes of data, before the probes lost cohesion. Roy had a headache from the low-level warp field. Half of the data in the stream was above his IQ. Theoretical physicists would love to get their hands on it. Roy shook off his aching head, neck, and just about everything else.

"Oh for Kirk's sake. No way." Jep said as he shut down the ships thrusters, leaving them hovering just on the other side of the gateway and quickly began a full sensor sweep before gazing back out through the shuttles from window.

Sitting before them, roughly 10 miles to their front right was a massive Doomsday Device ship. Fallo had learned about the ancient and immensely powerful constructs during his time at the Academy. Only a few had even been encountered, and no one had seen one many in well over a hundred years. He never thought he would ever see one himself, mostly due to the fact that most people who had seen one hadn't survived.

Situs felt the urge to hit the console he was using. The large construct was completely filling their view from the cockpit. "I am not reading an energy signature from it. In fact I don't read anything useful, I can't even triangulate our current location. Do you read our point of entry?"

Roy said, " I have nav data to the Gate, and our flight plan from the gate back home, but it looks like almost ten thousand points of interest cycled until we came out. We will have to figure out our entrance and exit times. Given enough time, and maybe we will be able to plot a path home... maybe... I hope..."

"We're on a planet, but the skies are socked in, but that is stellar daylight over there...without stars there's no way I'll be able to fix our location."

After confirming the doomsday was uncovered and there.was not other lifespans or tech signatures in range House ordered Fallo to take the shuttle up above the atmosphere, to a fix on where they were.

House nodded a little bit, once they came to a stop he visually looked around. "Let's get as many detailed scans as we can. Keep an eye out for anything that may come in range out of the blue."

Roy counted his probes. Twenty-nine left, only one class four and 3 class three probes left. Roy said, "Launching our last class four probe. initial scans, say nothing in 24 standard AU from this plant, not even a sun. Remains of asteroid belt, mostly dust, at 1.2 AU. There has to be something in the center, but nothing is registering on our scans. I am dispatching a class two probe to slowly approach the center of gravity of this place in a spiral course." Roy had to be careful with his use of the probes. They would need to save some to use to get home.

Fallo waited for Roy to complete his scans.and then fly the shuttle up to the upper thermosphere of the planet, above the cloud cover and any other atmospheric interference. After a a few seconds Jep grunted.

"Hmmm. Based on the positions of the stars out there...were roughly 10000 lightyears away from the dig site. Noear the coreward edge of the Delta quadrant in fact. Everyone in the shuttle took a few seconds to look out at the vast and dense starfield infront of them. Since they were much closer to the core of the galaxy, there were far more stars per parse then any other region of the galaxy, what ancient Humans referred to as the milky way, was far more pronounced and twice as wide running through the mid line of the Patch of sky they had popped up through.

"Take as many readings as you can Corporal. I was head back to the gateway soon. This is only supposed to be a recon." House said.

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