The Curse of the Topsy-Turvy | ONC 2020 Honourable Mention

7 - Unidentifiable land

Eight days after the storm, we found the planet.

It wasn't a single rock drifting in space, of course, but Ben later insisted we stumbled over it like a blind, small, furry animal with a fluffy tail over a nut. Which confirmed my suspicion human analogies were complicated, anachronistic and incomprehensible. Anyway. Woken by an urgent message, I followed Hijac's call to the bridge. An old spacer law says emergencies always happen in the middle of the captains rest period. This one was no exception.

I still rubbed the gritty remains of my interrupted sleep out of my eyes while I stepped into the command centre. "What's the urgency? Have you found a signpost pointing us back towards civilised space?"

"No, but this might be as good. Look!" My gaze followed the karjkan's spindly limb pointing to the main screen—only to scream.

A dark mass approached the Topsy at an incredible speed. Convinced we'd be hit any instant, I ducked behind the backrest of my chair. The glaring sound of a proximity alert tore through the ship, and I pressed my palms over my sensitive ear membranes.

But the hit didn't happen. When it continued to not happen, I stood up and bestowed a scolding glance upon my Number one on the pilot's seat. "Hrrovr, cut the alarm. What by the seven guardians of the thrice-forbidden gate to eternity was that?"

"Probably an as'ssteroid, Captain." He busied himself with this screen. "Or a planet? The ss'scanners report a big mass'ss of minerals'ss and froz'ssen hydrogen."

"And why didn't the scanners pick up this icy hazard of the spaceways before it was right on top of us?" My friends insist I'm grumpy when called out of sleep. Near-collisions and alarms tend to worsen my mood.

A mouldy whiff of amusement underlined Hijac's multifaceted stare. "The scanners work fine. The ship wasn't endangered."

"Right, laugh at the captain all you want. So, we just dived beneath a huge chunk of rock, setting off a collision alarm, on purpose and in the best interest of science?"

"Yes, Captain. We need all the information we can collect on this star system to locate it on the charts." The karjkan's speech box screeched out of synch and they tuned it expertly with a hind limb. "It may well be our ticket home."

"Star system?" My anger evaporated when Hrrovr called up a wider view on the main screen. It was gorgeous. A bit to our left, a bright, little yellow sun hung in the darkness of space. I could locate several planets. Number one zoomed onto a gas giant surrounded by a bunch of colourful rings and moons of various sizes.

"Wow." I had been so engulfed in the view I'd missed Aalyxh and Ben entering the bridge. The human scratched his stubbly chin. "Thanks for calling us. At least the view is worth the shock. But a simple comm call would have brought us here too, no need to waste energy on a general alarm."

Sometimes I admired Ben's stoicism. Aalyxh moved to the pilot's station, all business despite being called out of sleep. "Hrrovr, I'm taking over. Such a system must be charted, even if it's as a tourist attraction. Go look for a match in the database."

"Already running a ss'search, Lyxh'ss." Hrrovr moved to his own station. "Negative ss'so far."

"Carry on." Like Hijac and Aalyxh, I was enthusiastic. This was our best bet to find the way back home. All we needed was a single match, a reference, anything that told us where the Ticotan ion storm had carried us. "Ben, how's our energy status?"

"Reaching a third of capacity." The human studied the readouts of engineering. "If we move closer to the star, we can use solar energy to recharge. It seems to be K-class and should allow us to be operational in about two standard days."