Part 5 : What the Hell is THAT?

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Matthew M. Reeves wasn’t much of a people person. As a matter of fact he didn’t care much for them at all. He was perfectly happy being alone by himself as long as he had his “toys”

His ‘toys’ included an interplanetary spacecraft completely stocked. His version of ‘interplanetary spacecraft’ was a fairly large asteroid that he’d hollowed out, added life support, power, communications and a propulsion system. It didn’t go very fast and it certainly wasn’t ever going to land on a planet.

He was fine with that.

It was large enough that a fairly slow spin provided adequate “gravity” on the inside so that he’d not have to be concerned with the problems caused by long term micro-gravity. It had all the room inside that he needed and it was getting continually larger as he mined it. He stockpiled the valuable minerals and used the mining waste as reaction mass.

He was happy enough.

Today he was viewing the stars….just because. He’d do that for hours. It was relaxing. Physically he was safely inside the asteroid. He was wearing a full sensory, full immersion virtual reality outfit so virtually he could be anywhere that any of his tele-operated robots were. Today the robot that he was using was drifting along side his asteroid and scanning the stars.

Ooops.

Something was not right. Scan back.. Yes...there it was. Something was moving out there. Something very large and shaped all wrong to be natural. It was an artifact of some sort and it was BIG.

There was no way he could rendezvous. His asteroid ship was much too slow. Perhaps he could intercept with a disposable drone. He’d try that. He activated internal gyros to align his asteroid with the boogie. When his longitudinal axis was properly aligned he launched a drone using the axial coil gun.

Now to wait.

Sometime later he was intently viewing the feed from the surveillance drone.

“Holy….Smoke!” he said to himself. “That’s a for real alien space ship. Looks dead though. Kinda melted around the edges. That poor thing has been rode hard and put up wet.”

He spent the next few hours exploring the derelict spacecraft. Eventually it receded far enough that he lost signal. He considered the drone to be ‘disposable’ for a reason.

Color it gone.

To Be Continued
The Next Episode is
Part 6: Call From Jupiter
The Last episode was
Part 4: Die
the first episode was
Part 1 : Winter Storm

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