Starsnatcher - Trapped In An Alien World [COMPLETE]

Chapter 4.2

©Picture of a fictional spaceship from the Orion's Arm universe by Steve Bowers. It's what the Dragonfly is based on.

Day 32

"You have been accepted for the mission."

Such a blunt line, yet so difficult to digest. I had been accepted. Accepted without qualifications other than an artifact I couldn't control, against an enemy occupying several thousand light-years worth of solar systems.

To be fair, I was important to them and they had this one thing that made them kill each other. Either a mind virus or political division. Something I had to ask these two abductees.

We entered an elevator, each cowering in their own corner.

I faced the wall. Crick's mindwaves hummed with the joy of being allowed into space as well as the displeasure of heaving to babysit me.

"The plan is simple," Crick explained. "As should be expected by any rational person, I have been given command."

We arrived on the roof of this floating city; a smooth and featureless platform as black as the surrounding sea. Boring, if you ask me.

Next to us, the bottom of a grey tether as thick as a man jutted out of the ocean as an oil rig would. It consisted of several smaller vertical cables combined in a single structure, reaching into the sky until it became too thin to detect. A tiny bridge connected it to our platform.

"We are standing before our space elevator," Crick transmitted. "For the one of us unaware, a space elevator is a long and thin structure made of carbon nanotubes that reach well above the geostationary orbit. Our starship waits for us there. Once we have entered it, we pursue the ovoid ship that has brought Human here. We will be accompanied by several automated ships that will perform a boarding action to bring the other abducted humans into our custody.

"You know what to do then, Human?"

"Affirmative," I answered.

Did that sound too much like Crick?

An emerald gondola arrived at the bottom of the space elevator. The evening sun shone through its transparent walls as if they were made of glass. It cracked open by splitting its two halves.

I had expected Crick to take the lead and enter first, but instead, they took something out of a pocket.

It was my singularity stone, but not the way I had expected it. The stone lay enclosed in a transparent box that I only noticed because of how Crick held it.

"The container lets no radio wave signals out," Crick explained

A Faraday cage. Clever. Without radio wave signals, the singularity stone couldn't send sensitive data to our enemies.

Crick gave me the box with the stone. "Only remove it from the box in case of emergencies."

I took it.

Then, we walked over the bridge. It led to a ring we could stand on while entering the open gondola. 

The gondola climbed skyward. Its acceleration wasn't what I was used to from the trains, but it was steady.

Viewed from above, the floating city shrunk to the size of a coin. It felt just like taking off on an airplane. Scrap that, the airplane normally stopped when you reached the cloud cover. Considering how far we got, this felt more like scrolling up on Google Earth.

Eventually, we saw the clouds from above until even they shrunk to bits. The vast and endless sea reached defined boundaries. A crescent-shaped island swam in its middle. South of it extended a vast landmass the size of Asia. A thin strip of forest grew at its coast and a mountain range towered further inward. Below the mountain range loomed the desert in which I awoke after my abduction. If one looked closely, one could spot arcologies as tiny as pins in the endless wastelands.