This tale saw the light of day (or the orange banner of dawn at Wattpad) in ScienceFiction's Contests book, in the October Challenge.

That was, obviously, in October, and when RainerSalt  started reading about it, he was afraid to find yet another Halloween-themed Wattpad writing contest.* As he was happy and enthused to learn, however, the contest had nothing to do with Halloween at all. So he left a comment, congratulating the organisers for their audacity and original thinking.

jinnis  chimed in, and we discussed the joys of reading a good SciFi book by the fireside, one's stomach full of well-spiced pumpkin soup, far away from any tricking-or-treating.

And then we started to spin a tale based on the competition's prompt.**

The prompt consisted of the first three paragraphs of a story:

"Captain's voice log, 2354, mission day 75.

We finally pushed into the zone where the 'Astragalus' recorded the anomaly. So far, we only found empty space. I was always sceptic about the Astragalus' reports and everything seems to support the theory this was all a big hoax and our mission a wild goose chase..."

"Cap? Need you on the bridge now. Eve registers an extensive asteroid field. And... oh my god!"

And here is what we made of this. It has a rubber duck in it.

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* What is it about October that makes all organisers of writing contests include Halloween in their prompts? We don't know. Anyway, we'd like to point out there exists a tiny but nonetheless enthusiastic group of writers who get through this time of the year without any halloweening at all.

** Note that our result is way too long to partake in the competition. We just couldn't stop.