Spaceflights of Fancy Ch. 06

For a long while there was only quiet on the bridge, a near silent stillness only broken by the steady electric hum of all their computer equipment and gentle 'hiss' from Mimi's body as she continued to deflate.

The two furs could only sit stone still and stare blankly out the large glass window that looked over the black, slowly digesting their most recent near death experience. Suddenly feeling exhausted, the young starship captain's hand slid weakly from his control stick and into the folf's lap, his body going limp as if he were a puppet whose strings had just been cut. Damien leaned his head back in his command chair, staring up at the ceiling as the weight over what had just happened finally settled upon him. "Well... that was fucking something." Damien finally managed with a weak voice.

"Yeah..." Mimi agreed, but not certain what to add. They both fell silent again, still processing what had just happened.

Near death experiences are a fact of life out in the black. On just one unlucky expedition, you might come across two or three instances of mortal peril, and if somehow you didn't have a near fatal accident? Your friends on other vessels would have, and certainly tell you plenty of horror stories once you got back to port. One might assume, given how common they were, that such incidents would merely fade into the background and wouldn't bother seasoned space hands like Damien and Mimi. The truth was no one was immune from such stress, no matter how experienced they were. People either learned to cope with it somehow, or they washed out. All space hands out in the black have their own way to handle it. For Mimi, she just wanted to know what had happened and why. It was the only way to soothe the knot in her stomach. So, the tigress began reconstructing what had happened. She pulled her keyboard over to her and began pounding out commands, typing with rapid fire keystrokes, nearly as fast her computer could carry out her commands.

Mimi was pulling data from the dozens of different sensors and cameras mounted on the hull of the BW69, which were constantly collecting terabytes worth of information. These data sponges were incredibly valuable, as the intelligence they collected could be sold to researchers as humanity attempted to conquer space, or even used as Mimi and Damien tried to perfect maps of their own. Just like a fisherman makes custom charts to record the best places to catch a bite, spaceship captains plot their favorite routes. Most importantly, the sensors were on a constant, vigilant lookout for danger. After all, there is nothing more dangerous to a starship than what its crew can't see, their current situation was ample proof of that!

As Mimi dug into the data, she quickly discovered that the BW69's highly sophisticated suite of sensors had been tracking and recording the doomed vessel's flight path long before Damien or Mimi had been aware of it. Without their ever alert electronic eyes and ears, Damien and Mimi never would've even known about the crashing starship heading right towards them. In fact, it had first picked up the ship on radar yesterday as the wreck slowly drifted its way through space, seemingly under no particular heading. Given the distance and slow speed of the other vessel, the BW69's threat evaluation algorithm had determined it was not yet a threat. However, sucked in by the gravity of the planet Mimi and Damien were orbiting, the unknown bogey had slowly drawn nearer, picking up speed until it appeared to be a vessel on some sort of attack run. So, the computer sounded the alarm even if on further study, Mimi was confident that the attack had merely been an unpiloted starship: its crew having either abandoned ship or been incapacitated, leaving the empty hull to drift aimlessly through space. It was only by seemingly impossible odds that the abandoned ship had gotten caught in the gravitational pull of the very planet Damien and Mimi had used, rather ironically, for protection by hiding their ship from detection. Still, the computer had been right to warn them. Without it, the space faring couple would've crashed and burned without ever knowing what had hit them.

The tigress based her conclusion largely off the ship's ice cold heat signature. Spaceship engines are enormously powerful, they have to be! Not only generate the insane amount of thrust required to take off from a planet or fly through space at hyper speed, the engines also fulfill the incredible demand for electricity a starship requires. The BW69, for instance, with a full passenger manifest and crew, consumes roughly the same amount of juice as a medium-sized city. Not only to keep up with the domestic demands of nearly a thousand souls aboard; but also the power hungry and complicated network of computers, life supporting systems, scanners, and thrusters that made the vessel function and kept its passengers alive out in the black. All this energy made functional, operating starships light up like Christmas trees on thermal cameras, especially out in the total coldness of the black.

Mimi's confidence in her conclusion grew as she continued to work her computer, slowly reconstructing and studying the flight path of the 'zombie ship'. No way would a populated, functional, spaceship be moving so slowly through space, especially if they were on any sort of attack run! She next pulled the footage of the incident, and as the tigresses rewatched the scene she'd just witnessed from multiple different angles, first in a normal speed and then again in slow motion, Mimi became more convinced by her theory. The vessel had made no apparent effort to either strike or avoid the BW69, or even avert its own doom! Rather, it followed a straight path down to the planet below picking up speed as the gravitational pull grew stronger and stronger, the zombie ship's thrusters dark and inactive as it glided past them, powered by nothing more than gravity. As it free fell towards the planet, it quickly disappeared from Mimi's sight, but not the BW69. Their ship was now picking up on the doomed ship's heat signature, its hull starting to grow hot as it fell through the planet's atmosphere. Mimi couldn't watch, but could witness the empty hull picking up speed as gravity grew stronger, and was effortlessly tracked all the way to its eventual crash site.

While Mimi worked on her computer, her mate had started to stew. Damien considered himself a man of action, he was comforted by doing more than by knowing. The how and why he had almost died didn't really concern him. Certainly not in the same way it worried Mimi! Sitting here felt like just waiting for another near collision, hostile ship attack, or some other cruel misfortune of the black to strike. This anxiety made Damien's hackles rise, as if he was a feral wolf challenging another wolf, as if pirates could be scared off by looking big and bearing your teeth!

Well... to be fair, that was basically how you scared off a pirate. Just like a common mugger, pirates were just looking for an easy score. It was just your teeth were laser guns, and you didn't make a ship look bigger by raising your hackles. Yet, as badly as he wanted to move on, he didn't push the issue and instead dutifully waited for Mimi to finish her investigation. Besides, realistically, Damien was aware he was being unreasonable. You can't really outrun danger in the black, and he knew it. What was to say taking off flying right away again wouldn't just lead them into another attack? So, he sat and allowed his mate the time she needed... Nevertheless, much like a spaceship, Damien didn't like to sit in stir. As he sat in his captain's chair and watched Mimi work her computer as he did his best to patiently wait for her to finish. He found himself having to work hard to resist the urge to reach over and grope her breasts.

Currently, Mimi's body was still hissing with air as she continued to deflate, but the inflatable tigress had shrunk down to nearly normal size. Still, her belly was still round with air, even Mimi's fingers were slightly thicker than usual: which caused a few more typos than usual as she frantically pounded away at her keyboard. Damien loved all of it, but it was her breasts that really commanded his attention.

For some reason Mimi's boobs were always one of the last body parts to return to their regular size, and even as the rest of her figure had nearly returned to normal Mimi's boobs had remained three, maybe even four times bigger than normal. The fact she hadn't yet bothered to put on any clothes in her rush to get to the bridge, leaving Mimi's extra curvy body on display for Damien to enjoy, didn't exactly curb his restless sex drive. Matter of fact, watching her was leading to a slightly awkward situation for Damien, who was also nude leaving his cock totally on display. Embarrassed over his growing erection, he shifted his legs, trying to obscure his boner from Mimi's view. He did his best to focus his attention on BW69's radar, looking for any other approaching bogeys, and thinking of every unsexy thought he could.

"Found the crash site." Mimi suddenly said, her fingers continuing to dance across the keyboard. An impressive feat, given her fingers had remained rather sausage-like, still filled with a fair amount of air. Mimi really had fulfilled Damien's request for an all over body inflation.

He continued to watch his tigress, lustfully, as she hunched over her keyboard. Damien couldn't help but note her breasts awkwardly in the way, squinting her eyes at the computer monitor in frustration. "But I can't figure out much more from this distance."

Damien was relieved, finally able to focus on something other than his ever mounting desire. It sounded like Mimi was talking about action, finally! A desperately needed distraction, given he was pretty certain he was about to make a serious faux pas with his Mistress. He did his best to ignore his hard on and lustful desires. Instead asked the tough question. "Think we should go down and check on them?"

It was a real and weighty question full of risk calculations and exercises of difficult ethics. In space it is very much acceptable to leave a man behind. Recuse missions so rarely turn out well, often just resulting in further casualties without a favorable outcome. More often than not, ships simply disappeared and there wasn't even the opportunity to launch a rescue mission. Therefore, it was an accepted fact among space hands, every time you launched yourself into the stars, chances were good you were never coming back home.

Still, there are those who find it hard to abandon that humanitarian spirit. Even if not exactly practical, the idea of 'never leaving a man behind' certainly is admirable. Besides, if you couldn't rely on the spirit of humanity out in the stars, what could you rely on? Although, the question was about even more than simple goodwill towards your fellow man. Greed also had a place in the conversation. "Finders keepers" was both a gentleman's agreement and codified into space law: anything valuable left inside the wreckage was right for the taking if Mimi and Damien located the crash site. There could easily be millions of credits worth of loot aboard. Cash, cargo, the scrap metal of the ship itself. Even if they turned out to be heavily damaged, just the parts of the navigational computers could be worth flying down to the wreckage. Was it the big, romantic type of expedition they'd hope for after leaving Armstrong? No. But a fat payday is a fat payday, and they could certainly use the money.

Mimi hesitated for a moment, mulling it over. Likely the best thing they could hope to do for the crew was recover their bodies, assuming there were any bodies left to recover. Since the ship had made no effort to correct its course or even send out a distress signal as it crashed into the planet below, Mimi believed the crew had died or abandoned the ship long before it eventually crashed. For that matter, she didn't even believe the vessel was capable of supporting life as it had soared past. If, somehow, the crew had been alive as the ship had flown past them, there was little chance of them surviving the impact with the ground. Starships weren't exactly crash tested, and you couldn't build a crumple zone in a hull that was, for all intents and purposes, a pressure chamber. Still, there was a noble value in recovering bodies and with the potential for a payday on the line, Mimi nodded her head. She was ready to head down and check it out. Ultimately, it was her morbid curiosity that compelled her answer. She'd never know why the ship had crashed until they went down and checked it out.

It was the answer that Damien had been hoping for, it provided for immediate action and a taste of adventure he'd been craving ever since they left Armstrong. He shifted in his seat, doing his best to push all the other thoughts from his mind, grabbed ahold of his control stick and began following the doomed vessel down to the planet below. As he flew, Mimi plugged in the suspect coordinates of the wreckage into the ship's navigational computers, and kept a close eye on the many gauges and readouts before her. She was keeping a vigilant lookout because landing on a planet without a spaceport was risky business and things could go wrong in a second. Because you never knew exactly what you were getting into until you got there, a good starship crew kept a sharp eye to spot the danger before it was too late. Perhaps you might find a center of gravity so strong you could never take off again, other times you might find your thrusters couldn't thrust in the planet's atmosphere, and you'd go plummeting helplessly to the ground. Hypothetically, your ship's scanners or vast data banks would warn you of your impending calamity before it was too late. In practice, it was impossible to rely on. With something as big and vast as a planet, not to mention space itself, it was difficult to know or plan for every potential outcome, even with a supercomputer. Fortunately, the spacefaring couple's luck held. No calamity struck as they descended through the planet's clouds. As they flew, the ship continuously scanned for new information and reported back the planet had 'earth like' conditions. Not that 'earth like' meant very much. Even back 'home', humanities' home planet, there were countless places that were extremely lethal, particularly if you were unprepared.

As they came down from the clouds, getting their first view of the planet below, Damien didn't need BW69's navigation system to find the smoldering wreckage on the barren surface below. The zombie ship had followed a straight path through its downward trajectory, landing exactly where they'd expected too, with billowing clouds of dark and ominous smoke easily spotted from miles away. They weren't sure how much of the planet was actually desert, there was so little known about this place it didn't even have a name. Perhaps they were discovering something new after all! But from their current vantage point it looked like all of it! The sand seemed to stretch forever in every direction, with only the smoldering wreckage on its barren surface to break up the monotony.

Damien pulled the ship into a slow and steady stop, and soon they were simply hovering about a thousand feet above the wreck. Even though they were fairly positive the ship was abandoned and incapable of attacking, they had their weapons on full alert, ready just in case and not certain what to expect next. In fact, they'd already received their first surprise.

Given the zombie ship had been in a free fall from space, Damien and Mimi had expected to find the ship destroyed. Only, to their great shock, they discovered the stricken vessel was remarkably intact: even with all the fire. Either the ship's hull was incredibly strong or the desert sand had made for a very soft landing. It was buried, bow first, into the sand. Although it was impossible to tell how big the ship was or how far it had buried itself. It stuck up above the shifting sand like some sort of monument, its metal exterior gleaming in the sun.

"What's burning?" Damien asked, perplexed by the unexpectedly good condition of the ship.

"Looks like it started a brush fire." Mimi responded, pointing to some burning desert scrub.

As they dropped through an upper layer of clouds, Damien started to slowly pull back on the stick in order to slow their descent. Eventually, he stopped the BW69's descent, and started circling the wreck about three thousand feet overhead, zooming in their camera and scanners to get a closer look and continue to collect intelligence. While Damien did consider himself a man of action, he did believe that haste makes mistakes. Cowboys who rushed into things didn't last very long in space, and rushing into something without taking the proper care or planning was a great way to get yourself killed. What would happen if you boarded a wrecked spaceship without your space suit because the ship's computer told you the atmosphere was breathable, only to find the old crew had become incapacitated by a highly contagious and deadly disease? Who was to say the wrecked spaceship hadn't been pursued by a hostile foe? If a pirate ship showed up to collect their bounty and decided to attack while Damien and Mimi were exploring the wrecked ship, with none aboard the bridge to fight back, the results would be catastrophic! As such, he was in no hurry to board the wrecked starship down below. Instead, they hovered over the wreckage for quite some time, suiting up in their space suits and combat gear while carefully ensuring their equipment was all in good working order.

As they prepared themselves, performing weapon checks and trying to anticipate every possibility, their ship's computer continued running through routine scans looking for any useful information. After all, intel could be just more valuable as bullets in combat. Mimi also tried a few hailing attempts, just in case she'd been wrong and there was someone still alive aboard the vessel but, as expected, there was no reply.

Unfortunately, the scans didn't reveal much: although it did hit on one major score. The computer managed to identify the wreckage as The Prestige, and using the ship's name looked up its records. Mimi was able to determine the ship had been owned and operated by a courier service that specializes in hauling high-value freight. This was promising news, as it greatly increased the chance of valuables being aboard. It had never been officially reported missing, at least not according to the records they had access to, but that didn't mean much. There could be any number of reasons why the ship would have never been recorded as 'lost' in the official ledger. Information slipped through the cracks all the time due to honest mistakes or just good old-fashioned fraud. No doubt, there were tens of thousands of starships that had gone missing without a trace. More helpfully, their computer even managed to produce blueprints of the ship's layout, which they were able to upload on a tablet computer they would take with them while boarding. Now they just had to determine the best way to board the downed craft.

"Look at this..." Mimi had, now suited up and ready to rock, had been bent over her computer terminal trying to come up with a plan. Damien followed her finger, which was pointing at a screen, and saw a small hole in the side of the ship. It appeared like it was an empty escape pod bay and could be their way aboard. "Maybe they escaped?" The tigress mused.

"Let's hope for their sake." Damien replied with a shrug of his shoulders. It may have seemed like a cold reply, but Damien had known too many friends to have gotten lost out in the black to worry about a bunch of strangers.

Mimi zoomed in, getting a better look at the empty escape pod bay. Without question the open door would certainly be the easiest way to get aboard The Prestige. Otherwise, they'd have to cut through the thick triple walled hull, which would be a lot of hard, time-consuming, work that would risk whatever valuables might still be inside the ship. However, while it was as if the universe had handed them yet another gift, there was a problem. The BW69 was many times too large to fit in the escape pod door directly. Mimi suggested they could land on the desert floor, and scale their way up to the escape pod hatch: but with as soft as the sand looked, Damien was worried if they landed the BW69 they would sink too deep into the earth to take back off.