The Second Book of the Alienbutt Saga. The Rise of Mr Fluffy. Part 68.

For the next hour as Alienbutt flew further into the unknown space claimed by the Wantooaninyougo priests he tried to get his arm talking again. The thought that he had gone totally mad began to cross his mind, so finally he gave up. He had to find the gateway and get home fast. The closer he got to the gateway, the more a feeling of foreboding was growing within him that he would be too late. His arm had destroyed two of the priesthood’s ships and he knew nothing about them. Did he have a mighty fleet waiting for him or was this priesthood just a small bunch of nutters who liked to throw people into an abyss?

Suddenly an alarm went off on the flight desk and Alienbutt brought his ship to a stop while he checked the readout on the sensor computer screen. His sensor sweep had picked up an abnormality ahead of him that he didn’t expect to find out here. Flicking to a visual view he began to magnify the space directly ahead of himself and there he saw proof to confirm the warning. At the edge of his viewing range a large fleet of ships sat frozen in time, marooned in dead space. Alienbutt sat back in his chair. The reason no ships ever came back from Wantooaninyougo space sat before him. Alienbutt had been taught by Ruck Bodgers how to find and navigate around the strange phenomenon while he had acted as a guide to Alienbutt on a bounty hunt. Now when Alienbutt flew, it had become second nature to set the scanners to include a dead space scan after seeing up close the consequence of getting trapped in it.
Quickly Alienbutt sent out a dozen probes to get a wider view of what was before him. As they sent back data the computer converted it into a three dimensional holo-map, the area of dead space showing up purple. Alienbutt looked in shock at a wall of dead space, expanding as the probes sent back more information. Standing up he walked to the back of the flight cabin and grabbed a bottle of whiskey. With a curse he downed over half of it before looking back to the map. It was then something caught his eye.

“Computer, pan back on the image and then compute possible outcome of data.” Alienbutt watched as the computer decreased the size of the image and then filled in the most probable outcome of the data the probes were sending. Alienbutt walked back to his chair and sat down. Before him was a sphere of dead space over fifty million miles in diameter. “Computer, I want the probes looking for any tunnels leading into the centre of that sphere. I’m gonna bet my bottom butt plug I need to get to the centre of that thing.”

To be continued.
All images are mine.