Matt sat hunched over in the scanner station chair. The well-lit cabin interior showed his uncovered expression was riddled with confusion. His brow furrowed as observed data streamed in. He glanced at the closed loading ramp from the corner of his vision. He snarled as the operation manual came back to him.

“To hell with the regulations! What is this?” Matt asked himself, his expression souring further as the onboard computer scrubbed calculations and tried again to model the system.

As it turned out, the system did not have a star. It had a fragment of a solar core with just enough mass to sustain itself. The system also contained two celestial bodies, each the same mass as the solar fragment.

“They should all be tidally locked, so why are the solar fragment and the other planet all orbiting that one?” Matt thought, bewildered. Hints of anger bled through his thoughts. And why shouldn’t he be angry? This system, which sensors didn’t pick up at all for some reason, seemed to laugh at the very notion of conventional physics. And every time through half of their orbit, there was a small burst of that same unexplainable energy that the sensors had seen.

“Focus,” Matt said aloud as he grabbed his helmet from the floor and donned it. Pressing a button that caused the scanner station’s shoulder harness to release, Matt stood and instinctively stretched just a little.

“I have other mission objectives I need to focus on,” He said to himself. “Other mission objectives” was really only one mission objective. The only directive he was given—other than observe and report—was to set up a comm-triad so he could communicate with and send data to the UEE. While he could accomplish this whenever he wanted, just as long as it was accomplished before the halfway mark, Matt found he really needed something else to do. He lifted one of the storage panels to reveal a large metallic, cylindrical object. Next, he opened the main loading ramp. Atmosphere quickly rushed out as red lights danced on the ceiling. In the lower right corner of his vision, an O2 timer informed him he had an hour of air in his undersuit. Matt walked over to the engineering corridor and opened a panel labeled “GRAV GEN.” He pressed a button on the recessed component, causing green lights on the device to go dark. In response, a multitude of flush thrusters fired all along the undersuit, causing Matt to stay firmly planted on the deck. That is until Matt thumbed a subtle control on the left side of his right index finger. He began to float up, before thumbing the control in a different direction, causing him to strafe back into the main cabin. Changing direction, he floated over the stored comm-triad and stopped. With another subtle movement of his hand, thrusters fired forcing his feet to the deck. Using his leverage, Matt gently pulled the comm-triad out of its storage before disabling the downward push of his suit's thrusters. He readjusted his grip on the comm-triad before thumbing controls, causing the suit to push him back and out into the void.

Matt had only been on a bonafide spacewalk once before. In pilot school, you had to undergo exoatmospheric SERE training. It was something that was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. A thin layer of flexible composite and a helmet were all that separated you from certain death. He shook his head to clear his thoughts. Moving to a point he estimated was fifty meters away from the Terrapin, Matt released the comm-triad and began work on setting it up. He set the triad to deploy in thirty minutes, giving him plenty of time to move his terrapin out of the way of the ten-kilometer across relay once it did deploy. Matt drifted back to the terrapin and went about sealing it and turning the gravity generator back on.

Settling back into the pilot's chair, Matt gave the ship a little throttle, causing it to awkwardly begin accelerating. The flying brick that was the terrapin eventually achieved a speed of around 100 m/s, and Matt held this speed for a while to make sure he was well clear of the triad-comm when it deployed. As he continued his burn, the primary body of the system, the planet that the other two bodies seemed to orbit around despite being equidistant and equal in mass, came into view. From this distance, it appeared as a pale blue dot. That was the other thing that irked him. The central body was a Gaia world like Earth. Ideal for the development of carbon-based life. But there were no detectable signs of space-faring life in the system, except for maybe the weird orbits.

“An experiment left behind to make a Gaia world, created by some long-gone race of aliens. Yeah right. It's more likely a practical joke if it was intentional. Which seems more and more likely,” Matt muttered to himself, whilst reaching for his quantum drive controls. He had already taken the liberty of mapping jump points to each celestial body. Aligning to the rocky planet, calculations began to run ensuring a safe jump. With one final beep, Matt squeezed the trigger on his stick and started his brief journey to his target.

The terrapin shuddered to a halt just 600 km shy of the planetary body’s mass shadow. No sooner had the ship come to a stop than Matt sprung into action. Leaving his pilot’s chair, he walked quickly to the scanner station and sat down, the shoulder restraints with mounted screens coming down automatically. The screens came to life with geological and terrain data. This planetary body seemed to be normal at least. There was no atmosphere to speak of, nothing beyond craters and impact furrows that dotted the surface. Strangely enough, the gravitational constant was 0.98 but many small planetary bodies were close to that number. Deeper, focused scans didn’t reveal too much else. The surface was formed most likely by volcanic activity that went dormant a long time ago. The primary compound on the surface was pyroxene with many purer element deposits scattered around.

Matt stood and returned to the pilot’s chair and pushed the throttle forward, burning down to the surface with his thoughts preoccupied. Another interesting fact had become apparent. The main body of the system was saturated with the same strange energy the sensors had picked up and its study would be invaluable. The other planetary body and the solar fragment both had near-non-existent levels by comparison, but the rocky body he was rapidly approaching had significantly more. As Matt closed in on the surface, the onboard sensors quickly established an altitude of 110km and a pitch ladder appeared on his HUD. He pulled the throttle back just a little and rotated the primary drive array to prepare for a VTOL landing.

Minutes later, Matt pulled back on the stick, causing the craft's nose to rotate upward, bringing the ship’s vertical momentum to a halt. The primary drive arrays roared in response, the whine of their inner mechanisms permeating the interior. Now just five kilometers above the ground, Matt let out a terrain ping to find a suitably flat landing area. Once he found one, he pushed the ship’s throttle forward, causing the secondary drive array to come to life. The secondary drive array wasn’t very powerful and only served to get the Terrapin up to enough velocity in high-gravity environments to transition to completely horizontal flight without falling back down in the process, but for now, it would suffice.

Just a few hundred meters above the landing site, Matt came to a halt. He turned the stick in his right hand inwards and slowly descended, dropping the landing gear in the process. With the cessation of hissing hydraulics as his cue, he increased his descent rate. With a thud, the large dampening shocks of the struts met the ground, large clouds of gray dust kicking up around the craft. Matt killed the engines, their dying whine slowly vanishing with their blue glow. Dust quickly settled as he made to leave the flight deck.

Grabbing a simple soil sampler from the sample containment section, Matt opened the loading ramp and set to work. He could not feel any change as he stepped out from his ship and onto the rocky surface. A fine layer of dust collected on his helmet whilst he was walking away from his ship. After about thirty meters, Matt noticed that most of the surface was covered in fine dust no more than a centimeter deep. His ship hadn’t disturbed the surface this far out. After walking what he estimated was a hundred meters, he took the small cylinder in his hand and stuck it into the ground. The device vibrated in his hand for a moment before a light on top lit up green. Pulling the device out of the ground, Matt carried it back to his ship.

After reaching the Terrapin, he placed the sample in its sealed environment before closing the main ramp. The interior cabin was filled with the smell of oxidizing rock as the dust still on his suit was exposed to elements that had never been present in its former environment. Wiping away some of the dust from his visor, Matt walked into the shower toilet combo, closed the door, and pressed a button that read “DECON.” His vision was washed out as an aggressive stream of pressurized chemicals battered him.

While Matt knew nothing could live out in that environment, protocol dictated that he had to go through the hastily installed decontamination cycle the Navy had added to all their exploratory craft. Stepping into the now sterilized interior, he quickly made his way towards the flight deck and made to take off.

With the landing struts retracting, Matt rocketed off toward the blue and green planet almost giddy with excitement. While he was somewhat irked about the physics defying nature of the system, he was much happier about having something to actually do. The quantum drive was spooled as soon as the struts were stowed and locked. The familiar buzz of energy permeated the interior and moments later he shot off at near-light speeds, his destination rapidly approaching. With a reverberating shudder, the quantum drive deactivated itself moments later, stopping just short of the predicted mass shadow. With no detailed planetary beacons, a spline jump was unavailable. Before beginning his burn to the surface, Matt left his pilot’s chair and moved to the scanner station. The planet seemed to be mostly ocean with two major landmasses. One stretched from near the north pole of the planet to just past the equator, while the other was more circular and had a larger range of longitude than latitude. The more circular continent seemed to house an interior desert, with most of its greenery on the periphery. The other continent was more temperate, covered in much more greenery.

Matt mulled his options over in his head for a moment.

“Not a big fan of sand,” Matt muttered to himself before making his decision and standing from the scanner station. With a new energy to his movements, he quickly began his burn to the surface.

Author's Note

INCOMING TRANSMISSION
ORIGIN: SOL SYSTEM
DECODING

Yes it's a short one, and yes it took me much longer than necessary to get this out, but we're getting there I promise. Please issue feedback and critique as you see fit and thanks for reading!

END TRANSMISSION