As the meeting dispersed, Jeff turned to leave, but Jamie, standing closer to the doorway, cut off his escape. She positioned herself directly in front of him, her stance firm, throwing her towel over her shoulder in a display of passive defiance. The dim lighting of the ship's corridor cast sharp angles across her face, making her expression all the more unreadable.

  “I believe I am owed an apology, sir,” she said, her voice calm but laced with unmistakable authority.

  Jeff exhaled, shifting his weight uncomfortably. “Look, Ja—”

  Before he could finish, Jamie raised a single finger and pressed it lightly against his lips, silencing him. Then, leaning in just enough for her presence to be undeniable, she continued, “You will do everything you can to make it up to me tonight. And I’ll be taking your gym slot at twenty-hundred hours. Rest assured, Commander, after that, you will still owe me plenty.”

  Jeff swallowed hard, momentarily stunned. “Okay,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper.

  She smirked. “Good boy.”

  He told himself he had gotten off easy. Jamie had let him walk away, which meant she wasn’t truly angry. If she had been, she wouldn’t have stopped at just words. It wasn’t the first time they’d clashed aboard the ship, and it wouldn’t be the last. As he made his way down the corridor, he found himself both dreading and anticipating their next encounter.

  Inside Terra Twins’ receiving bay, hoppers One and Four stood on four splayed legs above their floor conveyors. Harsh industrial lighting illuminated the vast chamber, reflecting off the metallic surfaces of the mining vessels. The air carried the scent of coolant and machine oil, a constant reminder of the ship’s mechanical heartbeat.

  “Damn, it’s cold in here,” Shawn muttered, rubbing his arms.

  Russel barely glanced up from the console. “It’s a receiving bay, not a damn lounge.”

  Each hopper was a workhorse of engineering, built for raw efficiency. The ore gathered from planetary bodies could be carried from the hoppers to any of the eight storage bays, each capable of holding four thousand cubic meters of material. The conditions in these bays could be precisely controlled—temperature, pressure, vacuum, radiation shielding, humidity, even lighting—to ensure the integrity of whatever they hauled in.

  “Still. They could at least pump in some heat,” Shawn grumbled.

  Russel smirked. “Or you could work faster.”

  Shawn rolled his eyes and climbed into OH-#4. The interior was cramped, the scent of worn-out machinery and metal lingering in the cockpit. As they initiated the preflight cycle, the hum of systems booting up filled the space. Meanwhile, in OH-#1, Charles Midden and Owen Reed mirrored their preparations.

  “#4 preflight check complete,” Russel reported.

  “Same for #1,” Chuck responded over the comms.

  Russel reached for the pressure control panel. “Depressurizing bay compartment.”

  A low hiss filled the chamber as the lights switched from white to red. The external pressure gauges ticked downward, counting to zero.

  Shawn tapped the console. “You ever get that feeling we’re just cogs in a giant machine?”

  Russel snorted. “You just figured that out?”

  “No, but sometimes I like to pretend it isn’t true.”

  Russel shrugged. “Beats being broke planetside.”

  Shawn sighed. “Yeah. Guess so.”

  The receiving bay reminded Russel of an ancient rail transport building he had once seen in historical records—a roundhouse where locomotives would enter, be serviced, and exit in a continuous cycle. Here, the four hoppers were arranged in a similar radial pattern, each aligned with its own exterior door. The compartment spanned fifty feet in diameter, with conveyors stretching beneath each ship, leading to four pneumatic shafts at the chamber’s center.

  “Opening bay doors,” Russel announced.

  As the bay doors fully opened, the vast, star-speckled void stretched endlessly before them. The ship’s interior, all metal and machinery, suddenly felt small in contrast to the infinite black beyond.

  “Still amazes me sometimes,” Shawn muttered, staring out at the abyss.

  Russel paused, his hand hovering over the console. It wasn’t just amazement. It was something deeper—something that never quite left him, no matter how many times he saw this view. Out here, there were no towering cities, no crowded streets, no artificial lights drowning out the sky. Just the quiet hum of the ship and the endless, unknowable dark pressing in from all sides.

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  He’d seen a thousand sunrises from orbit, watched the light of distant stars bend and scatter across ice fields on nameless moons, felt the rumble of his ship cutting through the silence of deep space. And yet, every time the doors opened to the void, he felt the same pull in his chest. A mixture of awe and insignificance. A reminder that no matter how much metal they wrapped around themselves, space would always be bigger, older, and completely indifferent to them.

  “Yeah,” Russel finally said, his voice quieter than before. “It does.”

  He didn’t say more. He didn’t have to.

  Jeff watched from the command cell as his crews deployed from the ship, moving toward the UO. He keyed his chair to track their progress as they approached the surface.

  Russell maneuvered his hopper over the UO, traveling from south to north. Meanwhile, Charles positioned his ship in the opposite direction. The two pilots separated, increasing their distance as they conducted a close-range scan of the object. At two miles apart, both stopped and began their descent. Upon landing, Russell and Chuck initiated their EM checks and deployed a cable with a cup-shaped end—seismograph microphones—before beginning to drill into the surface.

  Russell monitored the core drill’s depth and drive pressure as the bit cut into the alien alloy. At three and a half meters, the drive pressure suddenly dropped to zero—no further resistance. Almost simultaneously, Chuck called in with a similar report.

  "Broken through at three point seven meters," Chuck confirmed.

  Now it was up to Jeff. Russell reported their results and waited.

  "Ring charge, point zero-zero-one T. Monitor echoes," Jeff ordered.

  Russell keyed his charge rack to release a 1/1000 T charge into the air gun tube, already locked in place over the drill hole. The detonation signal was set to trigger ten meters inside the UO’s interior. These remote-controlled charges had made asteroid mining safer and more profitable. Now, they were being used to take sound-image scans of planetary interiors, a routine but precise process.

  Chuck reported, "Sound probe’s in, about four meters from the interior surface."

  Russell launched the charge and started the detonation sequence. Three-tenths of a second after firing, the charge exploded. Chuck’s probe recorded and transmitted telemetry data instantly. When the sound echoes dissipated, both crews retracted their seismic microphones.

  Next, Russell and Chuck extracted shallow surface cores, one to accompany the deep sample and another to plug the long hole. Their plasma cutters glowed as they superheated the plug, sealing it back into place. Russell could hear the hum and rattle as the core drill switched bits beneath his feet.

  Their hoppers continued this pattern—stopping, drilling, charging, and sealing—across the UO’s surface. Every two miles, they parted ways, meeting again on the opposite side of the "Twin." Alternating charge deployments ensured accurate imaging and eliminated sound shadows. Upon completion, they each turned ninety degrees, Chuck heading west and Russell east, repeating the process along the object’s flanks. When they met at the front, where they had started, they lifted off and returned to the receiving bay of the Twin.

  The core samples traveled along conveyor belts to the pneumatic tubes, where they were tagged, recorded, and sealed in a tough ceramic compound. All collected data was uploaded into the Twin’s computer.

  Jamie Chung, an expert in imaging and analysis, worked swiftly in the survey room. She had already mapped the UO in the visible light spectrum using the Terra Twin’s camera satellites. As Russell’s team completed their first pass, Jamie called Jeff from the command cell.

  "Can you activate the two non-visible light beacons on the comm mast?" she requested.

  "On it," Jeff confirmed.

  Jamie adjusted the cam-sat film and display modes, then initiated another spiral scan, following the pattern she and Ennett had used earlier. On one side of the UO, she spotted a dish-shaped depression. Strangely, there were almost no impact marks near it—and none on its rim or within the depression itself. She had never seen a UO this pristine before.

  She took several extra shots using different filters and marked its location on the grid reference map. Near the bottom of the sphere, she noted two sets of parallel lines, slightly raised like low walls or tracks. They measured approximately one hundred meters long and six inches high.

  As Jamie completed her third spiral pass, Russell and his crew returned, their mission complete.

  Russell stretched as he stepped off his hopper, rolling his shoulders before unstrapping his gear. “If I never have to drill through alien alloy again, it'll be too soon,” he muttered.

  Chuck smirked as he pulled off his gloves. “Oh, come on, Russ. You love drilling into stuff we don’t understand.”

  Russell gave him a flat look. “Not when my drill suddenly drops through solid metal like it’s cutting through air. That’s not normal.”

  Jamie entered, holding a tablet loaded with telemetry data. “Speaking of things that aren’t normal,” she said, flipping through the scans, “our new friend out there is cleaner than anything we’ve ever seen. No impact marks, no debris, no erosion. That’s weird.”

  Jeff joined them, arms crossed. “What about that depression you found?”

  Jamie nodded. “Yeah, that’s another oddity. Perfect dish shape, untouched. No signs of collisions inside or around it. Either something's been maintaining it, or it’s built from material that repels space junk.” She exhaled. “And then there are those parallel tracks near the bottom. Too precise to be natural, but too shallow to be functional—at least by our standards.”

  Russell frowned. “So… what? Landing gear? Docking mechanism?”

  Jamie shrugged. “If it is, it’s not for anything we’ve ever seen before.”

  Chuck leaned against the wall. “Let’s assume for a second this thing was built. Someone—or something—made it. That would mean…”

  “That it wasn’t just floating out here by accident,” Jeff finished. His expression darkened. “And if it’s been left alone this long, maybe there’s a reason.”

  Silence settled over the group.

  Jamie tapped her tablet. “Well, one thing’s for sure—we’re gonna need a hell of a lot more data before we start making guesses.”

  Jeff nodded. “All right. Get everything analyzed. Jamie, I want you running comparisons with every known material on record. Chuck, help catalog the core samples. Russell, go over the charge imaging and see if there’s anything beneath the surface that we missed.”

  Russell sighed dramatically. “Great. More drilling.”

  Chuck grinned. “I thought you loved drilling into things we don’t understand?”

  Russell pointed a finger at him. “I hate you.”

  Jamie smirked. “Save it for after the report’s done, boys.”

  Jeff exhaled and glanced back at the screens. Whatever they had just uncovered, it was only the beginning.