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.