They were close to the asteroids, debris field, and the goal of this system. They had much to do, and time was ticking. They were somber now, even with Auberje’s grand declaration. The task ahead was daunting. They were sure they could do it together, but they were also sure they would have to dedicate themselves to getting bigger, stronger, more competent like never before. The threat of invasion by the Harx was a powerful motivation.

  Auberje was suited up. Helos was staying on the ship with Riley. He was her moral support. Auberje was up to be spacewalking. His suit was powered up. He slowly floated through the debris field, arcing toward the asteroid they chose to explore.

  The debris field was almost completely dust, slowly floating toward the larger gravity wells; the accretion field was a 100,000 km wide circle. A great distance on a planet, a tiny area in space. Whatever had happened here, it had been a knife fight for a space battle. 15 minutes of initial propulsion, then 10 minutes of travel time, then 15 minutes to slow back down before landing on the asteroid.

  The surface of the asteroid looked a bit strange as he got closer. Then it struck him. The formation wasn’t natural; it wasn’t even pockmarked by debris hitting it. No, he could see two jagged lines cutting deep into the rock and ice of the asteroid. Two jagged lines that were not jagged at all. They were crisscrossing ship-lazers. This asteroid had taken a pair of massive ship lasers to it. But why?

  “I guess I know why I am here. What the heck was one of the ships shooting at?” He considered, “I guess it is possible they were shooting at a ship in front of the asteroid, and it just happened to take the laser fire. Possible, sure. Likely, he didn’t think so. He entered the last phase of his landing. He came down softly on the asteroid. Grey dust and melting ice into steam swirled around him. He took a step, then two, on the asteroid's surface. He was about 500 meters from where the beams struck.

  “Comms check. Can you guys hear me?” He checked in with the Triumvirate’s crew.

  “Loud and clear. Roger Roger,” Helos’ reply came in nice and crisp.

  “Great, going to check out this laser fire scar.”

  “Sounds good, we are here if you need us, Auberje,” Riley said. She was steadier than when he left, he thought.

  Auberje walked to the edge of the scars. He looked over the edge; it went deep. Fifty, sixty meters of destroyed asteroid. Perfectly burnt into, something was gleaming at the bottom of the trench. His suit’s built-in light was good for 600 meters of illumination, but it wasn’t clear what he was looking at. “I think I am going to jump down there, guys. I can hover using the suit’s engines. I have twenty-five hours of max burn left.”

  “Sounds like a plan; be careful.” Riley again.

  He looked left, then right. No place on the surface of the asteroid looked easier to egress down to the bottom of the chasm. He shrugged in the suit. Nothing for it, he guessed, jumping over the edge and plunging slowly downward. Gravity on the asteroid was extremely slight. Not even 1/100 of Terra’s. He slowly drifted downward. The walls of the chasm were irregular strata of ice, rock, metal, and… what was that? He gasped, “You guys seeing this too?”

  “We are! Is that what we think it is?” Helos confirmed and asked.

  “Yes, I am certain that is a huge amount of conduits, HVAC systems, titanium armor plating, this was a base. Maybe it still is, but just the ruins of one,” Auberje was curious and couldn’t wait to get to the bottom of the chasm and this mystery.

  The suit’s scanners kept recording information about what was around him. The conduit in a few sections had numbers attached to them. Auberje matched the serial numbers to a Terran company from 2000 years ago. Their catalog was still available on the net, but the company that superseded them was no longer warranting the original’s products. He chuckled. He doubted they ever would have replaced conduit damaged by war.

  He was lucky the Triumvirate was able to bring a near inexhaustive database of human knowledge with it. The data crystals humans were currently using were highly effective at storing static information and allowing quick queries. The major drawback was writing to the crystals took time. Plus, writing too frequently rapidly degraded their lifespan. Most of the information they were uploading went to more RAM like memory cores. These were a better compromise for daily usage. Still, being able to access almost all of humanity’s information away from the major networks was a massive boon. He didn’t take it for granted.

  “So, definitely human in origin. I wonder why it was targeted and what this station used to be,” Auberje continued to descend as he spoke both to himself and the Triumvirate.

  A few moments later, he touched down on a solid surface of titanium plating. It showed signs of burn carbon and frozen gases. Ice formed into a myriad of twisted shapes, some of it forming “snow” that coated sections of the human made plating.

  He looked all around him. The lasers didn’t seem like they had penetrated this far. He walked along the 3 foot wide chasm. Scanning and looking this way and that. He narrated his findings, “Looks like this is the inner core of the asteroid. So far I don’t see a breach from these two lasers. I wonder if where they crossed, I will find something different. I am heading in the direction of the crosspoint. I think this is some kind of base. It was built a minimum of 2000 years ago. I have to assume the station here was the target of the attack. Do we know if there are similar attack marks on the other asteroids in the belt?”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Confirmed, at least some of the other asteroids have attack marks,” Riley said, “I think with all the interference from the debris field, our scanners couldn’t see them before. Now that we are so close… it’s obvious.”

  “Do you think the debris field is from the defenders or the attackers?” Helos asked, “I think if the asteroid you are on, Auberje, turns out to still have a base on it, we have to assume the defender’s ‘won.’ If it does not, then we have to assume the attackers won.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of a leap,” Riley scoffed, “We can’t assume anything yet.”

  “True, but I will hold to my hypothesis,” Helos laughed ruefully, shaking his head, “This looks like a pretty major engagement. Yet, we have no information from the Net about it. No records of anyone ever coming to this area of space. We are 500 light years from any major civilization. This is the backend of the Milky Way, on an out of the way spiral. Who would have been here? Who was fighting whom?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I think we were sent here to find out. And… I found a door.” Auberje was 10 meters from where the beams connected. On the ground in front of him, on top of the titanium plating was a hatch. The walls above him of the chasm on either side of the hatch were different than before. Here there were no strata of ice, rock, metal, human conduit, HVAC, etc.… instead, a long metal shaft bisected nearly perfectly in its center ran from the hatch on the ground up the 60 meters to the asteroid’s surface.

  Auberje took a long look at the hatch. Submarine style round wheel to open it, it opened upward, so he would have to use the hatch’s wheel, then swing it open. It looked nearly pristine and strangely had no damage to it from the laser. There was a small keypad next to the hatch, he realized. He bent down, the suit lit up the keypad. All the buttons were melted and the mechanism looked fried. He brushed at the buttons with his powered glove. The whole surface unit came away. He could see a bunch of wires underneath it.

  “Using one of the small hack’em, toss’em drones now,” he eyeclicked on his HUD. A small square drone with four spider legs scuttled over to the now exposed wires. The drone reached down with the two front legs, a pair of sharp wire cutters appearing from within the little square body. The wire was quickly stripped. Based on the look of the outside, he was fairly confident the little machine could get him in.

  “Do your thing, little guy,” Auberje spoke into the ether like a prayer.

  The little drone attached a pair of its own’ wires to the stripped section. Zap, zap. Two small electrical charges were sent into the wire. He didn’t see or hear anything at first. He ordered the drone to try again. Bam, the hatchway popped open like a spring-loaded Jack in the Box.

  “Well, I guess that worked.” He commanded the drone to return to the suit as he peered over the edge. Whatever he thought he might find, he wasn’t expecting what he saw.

  Trees. Hundreds and hundreds of dead trees. This looked like a forest on a planet after a terrible forest fire. Frozen, cracked, band urnt, the entirety of the view from the hatch was a destroyed forest. His suitlights switched from beam to wide dispersal. The conical light was solid and white. Here and there, branches of burnt trees were illuminated. Their shadows caused his reptile brain to rear up in fear.

  He took a long look at the forest. Letting out a ragged breath, he spoke, “I am going in.”

  “Auberje, it looks crazy in there. Be very careful please,” Riley worried.

  “I have to imagine any forest would be burnt up if it took a laser or two to it. Probably had a high oxygen environment too,” Helos said, “Not too dissimilar to what you would have on a Dyson Sphere, right Auberje?”

  “Correct, I am just confused as to who would come here and destroy this. It might have been a food processing plant, but I don’t know. It seems like it was rather chaotic in here. I don’t see lines for production or fruit processing. Almost like this was set up like a natural park or forest. He entered through the hatch, carefully winding his way between the 3-meter opening. The ‘inside’ was orientated differently than the outside he had just come from. Like a ship on its side below the ocean. He had to reorient both himself and his mind. Up was now to the right of the hatch, down to the left. He was at the edge of a half-acre room. Looking up, he could see a ceiling of broken light panels about 20 meters above him. To his left and right he could see panels on the wall of the forest room. At one point these might have been displays, perhaps extending the forest digitally. He could see before him a path through the forest.

  It meandered. Forks in the road were visible in at least three places he could see from here. His scanner sensed no power sources still active. There were frozen, burnt trees in all directions. “I am going to try and find the end of this room and see if there is a control room with some technology intact. We need a memory core.”

  “Agreed, be careful in there. Weapons hot please, don’t take any unnecessary risks.” Helos cautioned.

  “Roger, weapons hot,” Auberje turned off his weapon safety and brought their function onto the HUD’s quick slots. This was going to be an eerie walk-through history.

  He walked along the path until he reached the first fork. Always right, he thought, taking the first right and then the next and the next. The forest was drab. It was also downright creepy. He kept expecting something to jump out at him. However, he reached the other side of the room without any incident. The path was covered in ash but as he stepped through it, he could see the marble below, some it once covered in organic material, now turned into frozen ash.

  This was a hellscape.

  As he traversed it, he wondered at what it must have looked like. A beautiful garden of amazing trees nestled deep inside a discreet asteroid field. It should have been a perfect hidden place of refuge for whoever built it. Instead, it was found by some unknown enemies and burnt to nothing.

  His scanner couldn’t determine the three types, but some of them were short and squat. Others towered up to the ceiling 20 meters above. They were of many shapes, rounded, tightly spread, all upright, bent over. Cracked and splintered, still together. The shapes were easily morphed by his creative mind into anthropomorphic nightmares. He shook his head, trying to clear his vision.

  “You got this, Auberje,” Riley calmed him, her voice honey and warm tea, “it is just a bunch of trees.”

  He nodded, gulping. His suit recorded elevated cortisol levels and a heart rate a cornered fox would’ve been hard to replicate. The fear had snuck up on him.

  He breathed more purposefully. Clearing the ambush of terror, he stared at the doorway before him on the far wall. This door was arched, thick wood burnt to a crisp, showing the ‘modern’ automatic door beneath the wood fa?ade. No handle, Auberje realized as he stared at it.

  “Automated?” he pondered aloud.

  “Most likely, maybe try prying it open?” Riley replied, staring at the area around the door. His signal wasn’t perfect now that he was inside, but they were still seeing a lot of what he was in “real time” they had set up a radio to laser relay drone. It hovered just above the asteroid and shot a communication laser to the Triumvirate. It's not very stealthy, but it's highly effective for this type of mission.