Sliding in the behind the co-pilot’s controls, you look back over your shoulder to look at your crew. First in line you see Commander Spengler – the Orion Commando. His face is stern and serious. He is of average dimensions, with blonde hair and intense green eyes with steely determination.
Next in line, the science officer is busy buckling himself up. Officer Malcolm Spencer – having the IQ of a genius, you can imagine Spencer had already calculated that his chances of surviving this mission was slim to none. His thick, black framed glasses seemed to be a relic of the previous millennium.
You are surprised to see that your fifth and last crew member, the medical officer, is female. You estimate her to be in her early thirties, and she has an air of confidence about her. She is quite beautiful, but it seems that she has an edge about her – probably because of too many over-eager soldiers hitting on her.
“Strap yourselves in,” pilot Rodgers announces over his microphone. Retuning your eyes to the front, you see the large hangar doors sliding open.
“Pathfinder seven-zero; launch in five seconds,” the mechanical voice of the air-traffic control robot announces. “Four, three, two, one...”
The engine of your ship wines louder and then roares before launching you through the open hatch. The force of the acceleration forces you back into your chair as you speed into empty space. In a distance you see the flashes of a intense fire-fight.
“Activating stealth mode,” Rodgers says. The lights in the cockpit blinks off, followed by a red glow. “Stealth mode activated,” the onboard computer announces.
Your invisible stealth-ship slips through empty space.
“Our heading is set Captain,” Rodgers says over your ear-piece. “It takes us past three possible refuelling points. The first is Hector-Prime...a dirty little planet with not much more than some low-end vagabonds, gamblers and drug-dealers. The odds of finding Pylene on that shit-bucket is low, but not impossible. We shouldn’t find much resistance there however.
The second is Echo-Centauri. Here we have a high concentration of Miras-Guhl, but also numerous Pylene refineries. With our stealth abilities we should get in easy enough, but securing the Pylene could be cumbersome.
Last option is Procol-Kilia. It was originally built as a deep space refeuling facility but has since developed into a subsurface city. It usually crawls with both OEA and Guhl spies and therefore we need to be exrtra careful. Because it is subsurface we will have to time our landing taking its day cycle into account. The surface temperature reaches in access of 1000 degrees Celsius in day time, so we might have to hang around in orbit for a couple of hours before we can land. Since it was a refuelling station, Pylene will be easy to get. However to get there we will have to pass through an anomaly known as a Houston-Knox high energy field. Maybe Officer Spencer could tell us more about that.”
“Uh...yes...aaah”, officer Spencer starts taken aback by the sudden attention.
“The Houston-Knox field is not fully understood yet. It is basically like a cloud of energy with various types and strengths of energy. Experimentations on the fields have provided a huge mass of data, but in many cases the data is contradictory. There is even evidence that the field might influence the time-space continuum. So in short, we have no idea what that field might do to us...”
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