Once Upon a Time in Vega

by bloodsword

The Vega System, Lyra Constellation, 2472 A.D.:

"Wut?" Kyle blinked as he sat up, trying to blink the sleep out of his eyes. It was then that he heard the alert coming from the cockpit, just down the short crew passageway from his berth.

"Molly?" he asked the darkness filling his small captain's cabin.

"My sensors have detected a temporal anomaly in near space, captain," a woman's voice, a warm, soft contralto, replied.

Temporal anomaly? But Molly was just an old asteroid mining ship. Her sensor package should be nowhere near sophisticated enough to detect spacial anomalies, little yet one dealing with Time.

Rubbing more sleep out of his eyes, Kyle spun around in his bunk and dropped his feet onto the cold deck. A quick surge to his feet then he was out of the compact bunk and out the door. Two steps down a short passageway and he was standing in Molly's compact cockpit.

A look at her sensor interface found the alert, a blinking light in a panel he hadn't noticed before. He then leaned down to look out the forward window. But there was nothing out there but dusty rock and space.

"I don't see a damn thing, Molly," he grumbled. "Where's this temporal anomaly...?"

Space in front of them abruptly twisted and bent before it snapped back into place with a percussive wave that washed over Molly with enough force, it sent Kyle staggering back as he fought for balance even as his sturdy ship rocked on her stubby landing legs. When he pulled himself back upright using the pilot's seat, Kyle looked back out the window towards where that twist in space had happened.

"Holy shit," he breathed when he found it was no longer empty.

Instead it was completely filled with a vast shape so big he couldn't see its edges. He was about to lean forward again to see if he could look up and see its top edge when the entire ship shuddered.

"What was that?" Kyle asked, forced to grab the pilot's seat once more to keep himself up.

"Gravitational eddy," Molly replied. "That object out there is large enough to have its own gravity, which is now interacting with the asteroid field." The ship shuddered again as if to emphasize Molly's readings.

"Is that thing out there holding position?" Kyle asked, his expression tight. He wasn't sure Molly could handle those gravitational eddies moving in different vectors through the field. Hell, he wasn't sure he couldn't handle them!

When the ship's computer failed to answer, he yanked his eyes off the massive shape in front of them to stare at the interface.

"Molly?"

"My apologies, captain, but my sensors are getting indeterminate readings from the object," the ship replied after a slight pause. "Local space-time is still in flux from the anomaly that resulted in the object appearing."

It was a disappointing answer, but something a bit more akin to what he had expected from the old mining ship. She was a grand old gal, this asteroid mining ship of his, built nearly a hundred years ago during the Second Rift Expansion that saw Humanity reach beyond their fledgling colonies on nearby worlds and into true interstellar space. After doing time as a resource corer in the United Earth Confederacy's Expeditionary Force, she spent time as a mine hunter on either side of a number of civil wars and rebellions before ending up in a junkyard on this side of the Centauri cluster.

That's where Kyle had found her. He was a much younger man then, looking to make his mark after a stint in U.E.C's Defense Force during the Rigel Rebellion. Tired of the military and its rules, he wanted something he could do by himself. Asteroid mining, an in-demand industry, seemed like the perfect answer to his problem. Finding the battered old ship, he spent the next five years and most of his military pension to rebuild her, naming her 'Molly' in the process. Then he set off for the untested asteroid fields of Vega.

Twelve years later Kyle was still here, now in the delta sector of Vega's Reinholdt asteroid field, one of the system's largest. He hadn't found enough to make him rich but it was a living. And never once in those twelve years had he dealt with anything even remotely close to the monster that now loomed in space in front of them.

Another shudder passed through the ship while Kyle digested Molly's most recent sensor report. Indeterminate readings? Local space-time in flux??

"Are we still anchored to AVU-978?" he asked, the shudder making him grip white-knuckled on the back of the pilot's seat once more.

"Affirmative. But the dwarf planet's core is being destabilized by the gravity field generated by the object," Molly indicated. "If we don't retract the drill bit, we might lose it to a shearing event."

"Then retract it, for pity's sake," Kyle growled. "If I lose that bit, then we'll have to go all the way back to Hawkings Station for a new ..."

Another alert, this one completely different from the first, squawked.

"We are receiving a signal on the universal distress band," Molly indicated in between the alert's ongoing squawks.

"From where?"

"From the object."

Kyle found himself looking back out the window at the space-dominating object.

"What's it saying?"

"Unknown. The language isn't one in my recognized list."

Kyle brought the signal up on a monitor after dropping into the still-shaking pilot's seat. Only to find himself shaking his head in bewilderment as line after line of unrecognizable symbols scrolled over the screen. At least, unrecognizable to him.

"Rodney!" he bellowed over his shoulder.

Kyle waited through two more shudders before twisting to look down the empty passageway. When he saw that space still empty, he called again.

"Rodney?" When he didn't get an answer, he frowned. "Molly, where's Rodney?"

"He's standing in engineering, staring at the jump interface, captain," the ship answered.

"Why won't he answer me? I called to him twice! I'm pretty sure you're not so big, he can't hear me."

"He appears to be jacked into his internal sound system. I'm guessing he's listening to music again," was Molly's quiet answer.

"Stupid rebuild," Kyle muttered in frustration. He had a giant alien object outside, twisting space all around them as it transmitted a distress call in an unknown language and the A.I. that might help him sort this shit out was checked out, listening to tunes!

Calling Rodney a 'rebuild' was in direct reference to how he found the humanoid A.I. on the trash heap close to where he had found Molly. The A.I., a standard liaison unit, had taken heavy damage to its thorax and head, destroying its central processor and rendering it useless. Only a full rebuild of the entire upper body had restored it to function.

Unfortunately the only parts he could afford were those he either scrounged in that same scrap heap, or bartered for with labor as every credit his pension gave him was getting used in Molly's restoration. That meant using a lot of material that wasn't in the maintenance manual. And that meant the A.I., which gave itself a masculine gender and took the name of Rodney after it finally booted back up, didn't always work exactly as he was intended to.

Still, despite the quirky attitude and unpredictable behaviour, the eccentric A.I. was a pretty damn good crewman and a decent engineer in a pinch. So, it was entirely possible that Rodney could actually figure out what that distress call was saying. If he would just answer a damn hail every once in awhile!

Slapping on the ship-wide intercom, Kyle gave it one more shot.

"Rodney!"

The comms immediately came to life as the ship reverberated with the bellow.

"You called, boss?" a masculine voice asked, the words touched with what was called a Bostonian accent two hundred years ago, before humanity homogenized its languages.

"Yes. Turn off your music and get your tin-plated ass up to the bridge. Shit's going down!"

It didn't take long for the A.I. to appear after that. He strode into the cockpit as if he was already on his way there when Kyle called over the intercom, surrounded by a dim aura. Other than the aura, he looked like a large human male. But not just any male. Rodney now had the appearance of being a tall, broad shouldered, somewhat good-looking fellow with a ready smile, muscular arms, and tattooes, including one on his right arm with his name on it.

"And what can this hustling badass do for ... whoa!" the A.I. exclaimed as he caught sight of the massive object beyond the ship. "What the hell is that?"

"Dunno," Kyle admitted, looking back at it as well. "It popped out of the middle of a temporal anomaly, and is big enough to have its own gravity."

"No shit," Rodney breathed, shifting just enough that his aura flickered and Kyle saw his real metal form for an instant through a gap in the holographic image he used to cloak himself with as part of the image he was trying to portray. "Has it said anything?"

"You mean, has it made any transmissions since popping into existence a few minutes ago? Yeah, some kind of signal on the universal distress band. But, other than it being on the band, I can't understand it."

Rodney's eyes tracked to the screen displaying the alien symbols for a moment.

"How bizarre, how bizarre," he muttered under his breath as he stared at them. Then, a bit louder: "Yeah, I don't recognize those at all." He looked up at a frowning Kyle. "But if it's transmitting on the universal band, that means it's in trouble. And, if it's in trouble, it's the law that we have to investigate, right?"

"And help ourselves to anything useful that we find over there?" Kyle asked, his frown deepening. "Not sure if working a hustle on this thing is a good idea, Rodney."

"Why not, boss? We're barely breaking even with the asteroid mining thing. If we can find some tech on that monster worth selling to the eggheads back in the E.C., then we might earn ourselves a nest egg. Or, at least a bit of spending money. Then you can get me that new C.P.U. that I've been asking for, for like ever."

"We could also be opening up a can of trouble, Rodney," Kyle retorted. "I mean, just look at that thing! It's alien as hell and nowhere close to anything I've seen before."

"That doesn't mean we can't profit from it," Rodney argued. "We've got right of salvage, if it's a derelict."

"Man, this sounds like the plotline of every sci-fi horror movie I've ever watched!" Kyle declared with a grimace. "Right of salvage? We go over there and start digging around and find frickin' face huggers smacking us in the kisser!"

Rodney didn't respond, having leaned forward to look back out the window at the alien object.

"Everytime I look around, it's in my face!" he muttered, effecting a South Pacific accent to do so. It was then that Kyle realized that Rodney was still listening to music, the jack into his internal sound system currently occupied by an audio feed.

"Rodney! Turn off that damn music and focus, you metal-bound fool!" he commanded. Sighing, Rodney slapped at his hip.

"Man, it was on a classic, too. 'How Bizarre', by OMC," the A.I. complained. "You know, boss, you're like the ringmaster in that song, being a downer by telling everybody how the elephant has left town."

"What?? Rodney! Didn't I just tell you to focus? For pity's sake, man!" He pointed at the object. "The elephant has just arrived in town!"

"Then let's go over and check it out!" Rodney said with a grin. "Before the E.C. gets here with their jack-booted thugs and pocket protector-wearing eggheads and ruin things." The A.I. abruptly snorted. "Stupid nerds!"

"It may be an opportunity we should consider, captain," Molly chimed in just as Kyle was about to snap at Rodney again. "After all, it is transmitting in the universal distress band."

Kyle hesitated and gave Molly's interface a look. While he could ignore Rodney's babbling, Molly was often the voice of reason. If she thought it was worth a look ... Abruptly he sighed.

"Fine. We'll answer the distress call," he said.

"And claim right of salvage," Rodney added, earning himself a hard look from his captain.

"Just the distress call, Rodney. That's it." He turned to the cockpit's entrance. "I'm going into the mining compartment to de-couple the drill head. You prep us for take off."

"Right," Rodney said with a broad smile then, as soon as Kyle was gone, he turned back to Molly's interface. "Claim the right of salvage, Molly. That big piece of alien junk belongs to us!"

Once they were decoupled from the heavy-duty drill rig Molly was using to drill deep into AVU-978's crust, it was pretty easy to lift the stubby, little mining ship off the dwarf planet's surface and make their way towards the massive object dominating the sky. Armored against stray pieces of rock that filled just about every gap and opening in the asteroid fields she was built to navigate, and equipped with multiple vector thrusters, Molly confidently moved through the intervening rocks towards the object. Those thrusters also made short work of the gravity eddies that were rippling away from the object and through the field and she flew straight and true.

Kyle found himself nodding in satisfaction as the stubby but nimble ship dodged another large chunk of nickel-iron to come into an unobstructed view of the object.

"Nicely done, Molly," he said.

"Thank you, captain," the ship replied. "I have narrowed the distress signal to a structure that looks like a beacon on the side of the object that is facing us."

"Target that structure then, Molly, and take us in," Kyle said as Rodney reappeared from a check on the sublight drive down in the Engineering compartment. The A.I. glanced at the object, now completely filling Molly's forward window to overflowing before dropping into the co-pilot's seat.

"Are we close, yet?" he said, leaning over to look at the interface. "There's nothing on the surface to give us any indication of its size so we can see if we've come any further."

"I am using sensor data to get us an approximation of the object's size," Molly indicated. "It is still emitting a strong tachyon field, so whatever technology allowed it to warp local space-time as it did, may still be active."

"At least it isn't crashed on a deserted planet, just waiting for us to discover its dead alien crew with their chests burst open from the inside ..." Kyle muttered.

"Boss, you gotta drop that. Seriously. It's starting to give me the creeps," Rodney growled from the co-pilot's seat.

"I can't help it," Kyle said with a shrug. "Like I said, this reminds me of so many sci-fi horror movies ..."

"My sensors have detected some sort of door opening beneath the beacon," Molly interrupted to report.

"How big is it?" Kyle asked, leaning forward in an attempt to catch sight of it. In doing so, he did, a triangular opening that, to his naked eye, looked like it was the size of a pin head. Which, taking into account the size of the rest of the object, made it pretty damn big.

"Never mind, I can see it," he said.

"I am detecting an Earth-like atmosphere through the opening," Molly revealed as they steadily flew closer. "A bit higher in oxygen than Earth's current levels, and significantly warmer, but definitely breathable."

"Put us right in the center of that opening, Molly, maximum sublight," Kyle said. "If this thing is rolling out the welcome mat because it has detected our approach, let's make sure we go in the door that it's opening for us." He looked over at Rodney. "Just so they don't get any ideas about us being here to do anything other than respond to their distress call!"

Rodney quickly threw up his hands in a gesture of surrender.

"Answering the distress call, just like you said, boss," he indicated and Kyle jerked a nod of satisfaction.

"Let's stay focused on that, shall we?"

By this point they had flown close enough to have most of their forward view occupied by the now-open doorway. Through it they could see what could only be described as a planet's surface, complete with dense forests, glimmering blue seas, and drifting clouds.

"Is it some kind of ark?" Rodney asked, alternating his attention between the view and the interface in front of him. "An artificial world built to sustain a population in case of some kind of environmental catastrophe?"

"Maybe," Kyle conceded, also looking at the world that was stretching out beyond the portal. The idea of an ark had been both discussed and realized by many civilizations within the U.E.C. and beyond. So the possibility that this was such a device wasn't as far fetched as one would think. But what was with the temporal event?

"It sure looks big in there. Maybe even bigger than what the outside looks like. Are you reading any sort of spatial distortion technology at play, Molly?"

"I'm afraid that kind of investigation is beyond the limits of my technology, captain," Molly replied with a note of regret in her voice.

"Can you detect any sort of sentient life in there, Molly?" Rodney asked, obviously pursuing his idea of this thing being an ark of some sort.

"Negative, Rodney. But I am detecting sub-sentient life on a very large scale. Along with some significantly large structures."

"Ha!" Rodney declared with satisfaction. "I told you it was an ark."

"With no sentients at the wheel? I don't think so, Rodney," Kyle said, his expression thoughtful.

"We are approaching the doorway's threshold, captain," Molly took that moment to point out. "I can station-keep against the object's gravity, if you wish to continue your investigation from our current position. Or we can cross over, and through what appears to be some sort of energy barrier, and go inside."

"We can't answer the distress call if we don't find out what's going on," Rodney pointed out. "And I think we have to go in there, to figure out what's going on!"

"I agree," Kyle said almost immediately, earning himself a stunned look from the A.I.. "Move us across the threshold, Molly, but keep our position relative to the ground and doorway."

"Acknowledged, captain. Moving us in," the ship reported and they smoothly passed over the threshold.

"My hull armor is being polarized by the energy field, but my structural integrity isn't at risk," the ship indicated as they went through the field. "Re-vectoring my thrusters to compensate for a shift in gravitational perspective."

Kyle slowly nodded as the landscape they were looking at, slowly swung beneath them until they were flying 'above' it.

"Initial scans of the surface are yielding surface area approximating that of Earth, with significantly smaller bodies of water," Molly reported as she continued moving over the terrain below. "I am also detecting large populations of quasi-reptilians."

"Quasi-reptilians?" Kyle repeated, confused by the term.

"Comparison with library files on species now extinct on Earth and other Earth-like worlds with similar development cycles indicates these creatures are exact matches to those called 'dinosaurs' by Earth-based paleontologists."

Dinosaurs? What the hell was going on here?

"By dinosaurs, you mean something similar to what existed on Earth over 65 million years ago, right, Molly?" he said.

"No, captain, I mean these animals are exactly the same as those that existed at that time," Molly gently corrected him. "As if they were somehow transported ..."

"Into the future," Kyle finished for her, sagging back into his seat.

So that's where the temporal anomaly had come into play. Somehow, the object had traveled back in time and took a broad sample of the dinosaur species that existed on Earth 65 million years ago. And, if he were a betting man, he'd wager that if he ran a list of the species Molly was scanning now, past a legit scientist, they'd say those were the species in place right before the asteroid that wiped the dinosaurs out, actually hit.

It was a pretty big leap in logic. But it also seemed to be the only answer to the 'how' and 'why' of what was going on here.

"Well, Rodney, looks like you were right," he said, his thoughtful expression returning.

The A.I. threw him a puzzled look.

"I was? I mean, of course I was. On which part, boss? I'm right about just about everything. I kinda want some specifics so I know which part to pat my back on."

"About this thing being an ark."

"Ha! Told you. Not just a pretty face, over here. I got smarts, too."

"Yeah, before you go and throw your shoulder out congratulating yourself, it's not the kind of ark you thought it was," Kyle pointed out, earning himself a second puzzled look. "This kind travels back in time and rescues species about to be wiped out by a world-killing event." He looked over at the frowning Rodney.

"It's a rescue ship." He pulled in a big breath and let it out slow as he considered the ramifications of what they had just found. "A rescue ship carrying a world lost for over 65 million years!"

"Well, what the hell are we going to do with dinosaurs?" Rodney wanted to know, a look of annoyance flashing across his holographic face. "I mean, we could open a park and show them off to tourists, but I have a feeling that'd go bad in some way and we'd have people running and screaming before long."

"If you stop thinking about the hustle just for once, you'd see that scientists across the U.E.C. would love to have their hands on this thing, for the pure science of it," Kyle said reproachfully.

"Fuck those nerds," Rodney fired back, folding holographically muscular arms over his chest. "Give me tech that I can sell to make a quick buck any day over an article in some dusty scientific journal that nobody will read."

Before Kyle could retort, Molly was stepping back in.

"I'm detecting a structure ahead that is emitting high levels of tachyons and chronitons," she indicated. "It is likely the source of the temporal field the object uses to move through Time."

"At last!" Rodney crowed, leaning forward in his seat. "Some tech we can plunder!"

"Don't get your hopes up, Rodney," Kyle said, also leaning forward in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the structure.

Molly was flying over the edge of a fairly large body of water at that point, with a massive island in the middle made spectacular by its triple peaks of jagged stone, around which he could see pterosaurs flying. It was a mute testimonial of just what kind of place this lost world was, where ancient creatures dominated the land, seas, and skies like the pterosaurs over the island were.

"I'm fairly certain that whoever, or whatever built this place, has some pretty amazing tech to be able to send something this big, back in time to scoop up dinosaurs. They're not going to want you to just walk away with it."

Molly finished her pass over the sea and the giant island as Kyle finished speaking and was now advancing over a thick jungle that was broken only by the long necks of ponderous brachiosaurs that were plundering the upper branches of their leaves.

"If this thing that Molly is picking up, is the object's temporal drive, do you think it's broken?" Rodney asked, earning himself a look from Kyle. "I mean, it was sending out a distress call, right? What if it wasn't supposed to get dumped into that asteroid field in Vega, and in our time? Maybe it was in transit somewhere and somewhen else and this temporal drive went down, stranding it?"

Kyle frowned. The A.I. was actually making a good point, something he did on the odd occasion.

"And what if that distress call wasn't meant for us?" Rodney went on to say, a thoughtful expression of his own on his holographic face. Obviously what Kyle had said about the builders and not wanting people to take their tech, was something the A.I. was ruminating on.

"Well, if it was for the builders, then maybe we should turn around before they get here," he proposed. And Kyle was surprised to see Rodney slowly nod in agreement.

"Yeah, maybe that's a good idea, boss," the A.I. said. "I mean, even if we actually fix this temporal drive thing, assuming that's what's broke, what would that do for us? Maybe trap us in here when this thing resumes its original course? Fuck that!"

"Calm down, Rodney," Kyle said, his frown deepening. "You're jumping to conclusions. We don't know this structure we're approaching is actually ..."

"We are over the structure," Molly abruptly announced, cutting Kyle off. "I have confirmed it's the source of the object's fluctuating temporal field."

"A fluctuating field, in engineering terms, usually means something is broke," Rodney pointed out.

Kyle shot him a tight-lipped look. Sometimes he just wanted to smack that smug look off the A.I.'s face. Then he was focusing on the structure itself. In doing so, he was immediately rewarded with its unique and amazing appearance.

It began with what appeared to be a truncated pyramid as a base, cut into three tiers from what looked like an actual mountain range. That made the base dozens of square kilometers in size, not surprising when considering how big the entire rescue ship was. A smaller flattened pyramid sat on its left, perhaps serving as a secondary reactor or something.

In front of the two pyramids were two equally massive stone pillars, easily the size of several skyscrapers put together, both hovering off the ground. And hovering over the first pyramid was a giant stone ball, which slowly rotated counter to a small blue ball of what appeared to be glass and metal that orbited it in a clockwise direction.

The two balls orbiting each other, planet-and-moon style, were further enclosed by a thick stone ring that hung at an 45 degree angle versus the equator on the large stone ball in the middle. It was as Kyle was examining the ring that he noticed four more stone balls moving through the space over and around the main structure. They varied in size and position, as well as speed of movement versus the original pair, and all were relatively much smaller than the blue ball of glass and metal while still being quite huge.

"Amazing!" he breathed at how the massive objects were slowly moving in synchronicity around each other.

"And busted to shit!" Rodney exclaimed with a frown.

Brow raised, Kyle pulled his attention back from the rotating balls to look at the structure as a whole. He immediately saw what Rodney was referring to.

It started with the stone ring, which, by all appearances, looked like it was missing half of itself. Pieces the size of city blocks were strewn around the top of the base, as if they had been flung haphazardly about by an explosion. The balls themselves appeared to be untouched, but the columns out front were missing large chunks from their front and bottom edges, revealing blue energy cores glowing in the same color belonging to the glass and metal moon orbiting the big stone ball.

"I don't think that's ordinary wear and tear on those frickin' things," Rodney added, the A.I. also leaning forward to stare at the obviously damaged structure, which Kyle was privately calling the 'temporal drive'.

"I would agree," Kyle said. "Not sure we could fix all that, even if we had the materials. The scale is too large to ..."

"Sorry to interrupt, captain, but my sensors have picked up a very large ship entering the doorway behind us!" Molly tautly reported.

"U.E.C.?"

"The Confederacy doesn't possess a ship of this magnitude."

"Visual!"

The monitor set into the piloting interface flickered then cleared to show a massive flattened diamond shape that was barely clearing the doorway as it passed through.

"Oh shit," Rodney exclaimed in dismay, leaning over to look at the monitor. "That's ... big."

Kyle grimly nodded. Big, sure, but taken into context, it fit. Which, if he were to make another leap in logic, would suggest that they were now looking at a ship belonging to the ark's builders.

"Can you detect any weapon systems, Molly?" he asked, hoping that she'd say no because that would mean they weren't about to die. Only to get nothing but silence.

"Molly?"

There was an abrupt burst of static from the comms. Then:

"Forgive the intrusion," a smooth, sexless voice said, its tone apologetic. "We've taken your ship's A.I. offline while we learn about your people and assess the impact your presence has had on the sample population."

"Uh, sorry if we did anything wrong," Kyle hesitantly began. "We were just responding to a distress signal."

"We appreciate your willingness to help," a second sexless voice replied, its tone and cadence different from the first. "But, as you can see, your technology is insufficient to repair the damage."

The massive ship, dwarfing Molly like a whale dwarfs an ant, came to a halt a thousand kilometers to her starboard, silently dominating the sky.

"We have completed our assessment," the first voice returned to say. "Since you didn't land, the pristine nature of the sample has been preserved. We will now repair the damage and correct the malfunction. Once that has taken place, the sample container will resume its original course to our research facility. Which is neither in this universe, or this time period. We would suggest that you and your vessel not be here when those repairs are completed, to avoid you being trapped inside."

"Ah, of course. As soon as I have my ship's A.I. back ..."

"I have returned to full function, captain," Molly interjected to say.

"Good timing," Rodney muttered, the A.I. looking rather worried at facing the aliens he had been suggesting they rob. Not to mention their rather specific warning about getting trapped inside!

"Very," Kyle couldn't help but agree, the feeling that they had narrowly escaped a much darker fate resonating through him. "Molly, reverse course, maximum velocity!"

Both Kyle and Rodney silently watched as, with a ripple of light and motion, the massive rescue ship winked out as abruptly as it had first appeared. As it disappeared, Kyle couldn't help sighing in disappointment.

Despite his earlier misgivings about Rodney's plan to claim salvage and get their hands on a bit of that tech, Kyle had to admit that it had been a pretty damn good one. If they had gotten their hands on something good, like a piece of that temporal drive, they would've been set for life! Instead, they were standing on Molly's tiny bridge with pensive looks on their faces as that opportunity disappeared with a twist of tachyons and chronitons.

Kyle sighed again. Looking at the bright side, at least they weren't trapped on board when the rescue ship resumed course. Or were caught red-handed as they tried to take some of that tech with them. He could only imagine what the aliens would've done then, considering they had basically rendered them helpless just to investigate their presence there.

Still, it was disappointing to have walked away from the whole thing with nothing to show for it. At least they'd have a great story to tell the next time they were in Hawkings Station, getting supplies. 'Once Upon a Time in Vega, we were mining asteroids and this moon-sized rescue ship dropped out of temporal warp ...'

"Captain," Molly quietly asked, momentarily interrupting Kyle's rueful second guessing. "I've got a considerable amount of sensor data from my sweep of the rescue ship's interior and its temporal drive. Do you wish to archive it?"

"What? You got scans of that temporal drive?" Kyle repeated incredulously, almost unwilling to believe his ears.

"As detailed as my technology would allow, captain," Molly confirmed. "So much so, it's taking up nearly all of my internal memory."

"That's a lot of data," Rodney said. A grin abruptly appeared on his face. "Bet there'd be a whole lot of nerds interested in that data."

"And willing to pay top dollar for it," Kyle added, a smile appearing on his own face. Huh, maybe this little adventure with giant time-traveling rescue ships and lost worlds wasn't such a waste after all!

"Molly, open up a channel to Hawkings Station. I need to talk to the U.E.C. Science rep immediately!"