the wings. In space they are purely decorational and would make it difficult for the shuttle to fit through the barrel. But other than that, it is completely standard issue.”
“Standard issue? Where are all the controls? The terminals? The seats?”
“Oh, of course I had to remove them as well. Freight can’t pilot a shuttle, so we have to control everything remotely anyway.”
“So you start this thing from your terminal?” Katara asked.
“Even better!” Dwakk boasted. “It’s all automated. All I have to do is load the shuttle and as soon as I close the door the countdown starts.”
As soon as Dwakk realized in what particular scenario this form of automatization might not be the safest approach, he and Katara exchanged a worried look. They sprinted towards the door, but it was already locked because of the impending start.
“What are we supposed to-”, Dwakk started a sentence that was rudely interrupted by inertia pressing him against the back of the shuttle. With a loud, hissing noise the whole vessel then disappeared with all three of them still onboard.
Katara was the first one to wake up. First she woke Dwakk, then she reactivated Patcher, who had gone into hibernation mode.
“It is all my fault,” Patcher cried. “The door didn’t open. I should have checked it more often.”
“The door worked perfectly,” Dwakk reassured it. “It should be locked shortly before the start. Standing in the loading area without protection isn’t healthy.”
“It is fatal even,” Katara corrected him. “There is no way a living being would arrive in one piece. It would rip you apart.”
“Of course,” Dwakk said. “And as we all know, being ripped apart is very unhealthy.”
Katara took a look outside. “Where are we even? What is this place?”
“It doesn’t look like our target destination,” Dwakk said.
“It doesn’t look like any destination at all. Look outside. There are no stars, nothing. It’s completely dark.”
“Maybe we are in a void between galaxies,” Dwakk hypothesized.
“Even there we would see nearby galaxies as bright dots. But here it’s just void. Maybe we are inside some strange, very dense nebula that blocks out all light. We have to turn on the shuttle’s light.”
Without a terminal Katara had to resort to opening a panel in the floor and short circuit some cables manually. The shuttle’s light activated and illuminated the region in front of them. Still, they had no idea where they were.
“Look, over there,” Dwakk said. “That is one of our transport capsules. And over there. That’s a shuttle. It’s one of mine. And next to it is another transport capsule, but I’ve never seen that design.”
“Interesting. Patcher, could you do a gravitational scan?”
“Scanning!” Patcher stated. After a few seconds it flew to the middle of the shuttle. “Scanning!” it said again. Then it proceeded to the front of the shuttle and scanned once more. “Triangulation complete. Preliminary results. There are more than thousand small objects orbiting one massive object. The mass of the smaller objects is consistent with loaded standard issue Transcannon capsules.”
“And the central object?” Katara asked.
“Unknown. I better scan again, just to be sure.”
“Is this the place all the lost packets end up?”
Katara could not answer Dwakk’s question. “I don’t know. I never thought about what happens to them. I always assumed they are just lost. As in gone. But of course they must end up somewhere. Whatever this place is, I am sure the answer is on that central object. We have to fly there.”
“That might be a problem,” Dwakk confessed. “We can’t pilot this vessel from inside. I removed all the terminals.”
“I can short out the cables to the lights, but there is no way I can maneuver a shuttle that way,” Katara said. “We have to build a rudimentary terminal.”
“You are right!” Dwakk agreed. “Otherwise we are trapped here. I can’t breath. I think we are running out of oxygen.”
Katara tried to calm him down. “I don’t think so. The oxygen in here should last for days. And I am no expert on Dranik physiology, but shouldn’t your symbiont produce oxygen for you through photosynthesis?”
“You are right. In reality we are running out of carbon dioxide.”
“Don’t worry, I think it evens out.”
“For me, maybe, but not for all of us. Don’t you breath away my oxygen. Or my carbon dioxide for that matter. It’s mine. Also the nitrogen, I am pretty sure that is also vital for some part of my body. So stay on your side of the ship and try to breath away from me.”
“As I said, I think we will not suffocate. We would die of thirst first.”
“You are right! I am completely dehydrated. My skin is rough and my roots are parched. I don’t think I have long. Maybe minutes. My symbiont might give up even faster.”
“Well, I suggest we focus on work and don’t worry about how we are going to die. To build a terminal we need some material first. What kind of cargo did you use to transport.”
“Everything. Food, water, building material, explosives, and very rarely even industrial waste.”
“Not bad. I guess we will find what we need if we just open enough Transcannon capsules. Patcher, would you mind flying outside and rounding a few up? Focus on those with the Hexaglass reinforcements.”
“I will not fail you again,” Patcher promised and flew through the airlock. All in all it found 8 capsules, however, after it rounded them up they were 10.
“Good, Patcher,” Katara said via the intercom. “Now you need to open them one by one to see what’s inside. If it looks useful, bring it inside. It shouldn’t take much of those to find enough resources to build a rudimentary terminal. Even a steering wheel and two pedals would suffice.”
“Industrial waste again?” Katara cried. “That was capsule number 27 and again it was full of waste and nothing else. Dwakk, be honest, how much waste did you transport in the last weeks?”
“Well… most of it. You see, with that much packet loss we didn’t get any other jobs. It’s not my fault.”
“It’s no problem, really. You just should have said so right away. If you told us in time that you have capsuled waste, then we wouldn’t have wasted so much time on this capsules. Patcher, forget the reinforced capsules. Get different ones, from another company. We might have more luck with those.”
Patcher flew out for a bit and soon found different capsules, grabbed them and brought them to the shuttle. It opened the first one. It was filled with bottled water.
“Useless,” Katara sighted.
“We are saved!” Dwakk shouted. “Bring it in. All of it! I’m thirsty.”
Patcher turned its single spherical eye in the middle of its round body towards Katara, as if it was asking for permission.
“Alright,” she said. “You can bring a few bottles, but not everything. We don’t want to spend months here.”
“Finally!” Dwakk said as soon as he was handed a bottle. He opened it quickly and emptied it in one big gulp. “Oh, you must also be thirsty. I am so sorry, that was rude of me.”
Katara was flattered until she realized Dwakk was talking to his symbiont. He splashed another bottle of water on the ground and lay down, dipping his roots inside, which soaked up the water even faster than he did earlier.
“Good, can we now please focus on getting materials?” Katara asked. Patcher floated back out and opened more capsules. After opening 20 of them that were filled with food, bricks, green chemicals, telescope lenses, children’s toys, data storage devices, unidentifiable pink paste and other random stuff, Patcher finally found what they were looking for. A capsule filled with spare electronic parts. The drone brought it inside the shuttle, where Katara took a closer look.
“That’s all we need,” she said happily. “Dwakk, would you please assist me? Hand me this Protodrive.”
Dwakk looked at all the parts in the capsule an
d then reached for a small metal disc.
“That’s not a Protodrive,” Katara said. “I want the blue, cubical thing. The Protodrive.”
“Oh, I am sorry,” Dwakk apologized. “We don’t call them Protodrives here.”
“How do you call them?”
“Ahem… Bluecubithings!”
“Sorry, I am not familiar with Dranik engineering terminology. In that case, could you hand me the Bluecubithing?”
“Certainly!”
In a combined effort Dwakk and Katara were able to cobble together a working piloting terminal. Additionally Katara could improve her vocabulary and learned many new technical terms like ‘Tinyspherepart’, ‘Longcableybit’, ‘Sharpedgegizmo’, and ‘Metaldiscythingamabob’.
“It works!” Katara proclaimed. “We will not be able to make complicated maneuvers, but we can go forwards, backwards, up, and left.”
“What about right?” Dwakk asked.
“That would be redundant. If we want to turn right, we just have to turn left long enough. We only want to reach the central object. That shouldn’t be too difficult. We have to avoid bumping into capsules, but they are not really out to get us.”
After a few minutes, this particular hypothesis proved to be wrong. Most of the capsules were out to get them. Maybe they somehow got magnetized, maybe gravity was far stronger here, than everywhere else, or maybe the capsules were just bad-tempered. For some reason the shuttle was constantly hit by something and Katara had a hard time avoiding a frontal crash.
Dwakk helped her by shouting directions, but there was no consensus about