It felt like forever since Alex had used his interface for what it was installed for. If you wanted to be particular about it he still wasn't, as there was no FTL involved in this little jaunt.

The setup was also heavily jury rigged - Alex was literally laying on the floor, wearing his environment suit. A chunk of foam under a pillow to cradle his head, eyes closed, body relaxed. The suit had a near-field interface built in, and it was physically plugged into a computer attached to the primary comm array. Optimally they'd have a pilot's chair that had the interface so all he'd have to do is walk up and sit down - but they weren't expecting him to be doing this much so it wasn't too big a deal. Just this one trip past the barrier.

What the barrier was, exactly, was not yet clear. It behaved sort of like shielding, but was semi-permeable and possibly soft. The permeable part wasn't unusual, but having a shielding-like barrier that appeared to flex was a bit strange. The first drone they sent up wasn't smashed upon it, like it would have been if it had run into Human shielding, but it slowed and the motors struggled like they were running in something thick - almost immediately afterwards it overheated to the point where it melted. The last reported onboard temperature was about 500 celsius, which was close to the melting point of the inexpensive, mainly aluminum, drone.

The barrier itself was not hot, though it did get warm throughout the day. Scans from the other drones attempting to probe it remotely found that the surface of it radiated heat and light - an artificial sky that mimicked the real deal, just adjusted for millions upon millions of square kilometers of land.

They had a few of those smaller drones geofencing out to a hundred kilometers from the base after the Rakaro showed up, though as of yet no more fauna had put in an appearance. That distance also wasn't a big change, but it did show that the the sun always remained overhead and the sky dimmed to mimic an east-to-west solar transit, it didn't happen all at once over the entire inside of the sphere.

What was beyond it was still unknown - the shielded drone they had sent up never fully penetrated the barrier, the automated systems aborted the run to avoid damage. Fortunately, a live remote pilot could be used to fully override the self-preservation subroutines.

Getting back up there had been considered a low priority item until now. Priorities had changed, as it would be very nice to be able to just fire up a waverider drive and take a shortcut through what might have been millions of trillions of kilometers of empty space. Yeah, there was the assumption something was up there, but for now it was a free for all. Guess what you want, put some money down. Alex had bet ten dCred on there being a planet in there, really not expecting that to pan out, and loaned Amalu twenty dC for a bet on there being a black hole. A small one.

"Alright. I am at 200 meters from the barrier, reading links to the main comm array and the repeater drone as five by five. Switching to gravitics." The Theia drone was a very conventional looking affair, tube body with stout delta wings, and the handful of sensor blisters scattered around it mostly aimed downward as it was for research, first and foremost. It didn't even have hardpoints. But, it was able to operate both in atmosphere and in space, it was large enough to sport conventional impeller thrusters, a small gravitic drive, and shielding.

So they expected Alex to be able to push the drone through that. Somehow. "Proceed?"

"Permission granted, Mister Sorenson." Williams replied, seated nearby with a selection of the rest of the crew, watching the forward camera feed on the big screen.

"Acknowledged. Proceeding with a ten degree approach." The Theia was about twenty kilometers north of the base and flying north as well. In case something did go wrong, the debris field would not be near them, or even pointed their way. He nudged the gravitic drive up a little bit, a whopping ten kph as he rolled the drone so the relatively smooth underside would make contact first. "Contact in five."

This was ostensibly a test run. Just to gather more information about what might be the best angle to approach from - though for once the oversight team was letting them take care of it.

"This feels weird." That was the first thing that he could think to say when he made contact with it. Each individual mind tends to pick its own interpretations of new inputs. "I have definitely made contact with the barrier but it's like sliding along jello. Shielding is down about two percent but stable, internal temperature change is minimal. Not as much drag as I was expecting."

"Fits for the feedback from the first drone." Williams said, pen scratching on her notepad. "Continue as you will, try not to wreck it."

Alex looked over - his eyes were still closed, keeping the input from his real eyes and the drone from interfering, but they did turn towards Williams. He wasn't going to wreck it, he was a professional. "I'm gonna increase the angle and speed here. Ten percent isn't enough. Elevation went up about two meters and hasn't changed since."

He opened up the throttle a little bit and nudged the nose of the drone deeper into the barrier, the sliding along jello feeling sticking around for a few more seconds before giving way, the drone slipping up through it into a zone without any extra resistance. "Passed through the barrier. That was a seven meter jump, no real change in visuals. The internal frame temperature is down again. Must not like impeller drives."

"Ambient luminance reduced eight percent." Kavo added, pouring over the sensor feed that Alex was ignoring in favor of flying a drone through an alien forcefield.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"The drone is still visible from the ground, but the barrier does appear to have... Obscured it a little bit?" Crenshaw was running the base's sensor network to monitor things from a different perspective on the chance that something did go wrong. "It's like a layer of a 3D display."

Karras scoffed. "Great, are we getting Truman Show'd here?"

"Yeah? Possibly?" Alex replied. They kinda were, but the full scope of things included at least Earth and Schoen, within the last century. "There's a live map like a half kilometer away in a grove of heirloom Tsla'o fruit trees. Somebody did their research."

"Fuck." Karras cursed quietly under his breath. "Man. I need to change my bet."

Alex turned his full attention back to the drone, not sure what to expect now that it was on the other side of the known barrier. Past experience told him there should be space up there - that's what his brain wanted to see at this altitude, the sky should be dark. This wasn't a planet. Right now, an endless blue sky still stretched out above the drone, the disk of the fake sun still immediately overhead. It did look different. Dimmer. "Kavo, any more penetration on the scanners?"

A quiet hum filled the silence of the room before he replied. "There is another barrier layer 24 meters above you. It reads the same as the first one you have passed through."

Each barrier layer was a meter thick? That was... unusual for a shield. It really didn't surprise Alex, this time. Everything here was unusual.

"Alright, signal degradation is only four percent, I'm going to push on that one as well." He angled back up and gently nudged the throttle again, the drone buffeting against another gelatinous surface before slipping through with much less effort this time, and quickly drew it to a stop. "Uh, that was way easier. Hit it at a lower speed, wonder if that makes a difference." The Gravitic drive had no moving parts, but smaller impeller thrusters - like you'd put on a cheap, lightweight drone - did have some that spun awful damn fast.

"The reduction in ambient luminance is the same, another eight percent." Kavo was first to react again.

"The drone is more obscured, but the connection looks fine for the time being, still over ninety percent." Crenshaw sounded annoyed, more than anything. "I had been joking before, but I think it might actually be a layered screen. Possibly in more than one way - both to produce a convincing sky and to prevent us from hurling things up there."

"Kavo, I assume there are more layers above him?" Williams asked, still writing notes manually.

"Yes, in twenty six meters. They appear to be approximately thirty meters apart." Kavo tended towards very strict measurements, but Alex had left his translator set to round to the nearest whole. Fortunately not an issue at the moment, but he would have to be mindful of that when piloting a shuttle full of people he very much would not want to crash.

"Take it up nice and slow, Sorenson."

"Aye, Lieutenant." He set the forward velocity to one kph. It was aggravatingly slow. He could, very literally, walk faster than that.

The apex of the drone's shielding in front of the nose cone hit the barrier layer and slipped for a moment. The power output dipped, a hint of cohesion lost, and then the barrier gave way, rippling as the drone slipped through. Alex could feel the squeeze of it on the shields that time, just for a moment before he throttled it back and stopped. "Easiest yet, but the connection dropped a lot more this time, I'm reading 76 percent. Still not seeing any actual space." The sky was darker, yes, the ground below was as clear as he would expect if he hadn't just flown through three layers of the galaxy's biggest jumbotron.

A quick roundtable found that the numbers had all shifted as expected, save for the signal link between the drone and the ground. Some quick math gave them rough numbers to chew over - at thirty meters between each layer, and each layer producing eight percent of the light, it was twelve or thirteen layers thick and maybe 375 meters total. The drone would be out of contact, if connectivity kept reducing at this new pace, well before they passed all the way through it.

Alex had an idea about what to do about this.

"Alright. Here's what I'm thinking: I can program a specific path and as long as I have any connection, the drone will proceed along it without the preservation directives kicking in. Based on what I've seen with that last layer, I can probably tell it to proceed straight up at very low speed and it won't trigger them even when I do disconnect." He was still laying on the floor, eyes still closed, gesturing as he watched the base from what should be the edge of space. "I'll tell it to proceed up another four hundred meters to be safe, do a roll to scan, and then proceed back the way it came at the same speed. We can retrieve the data when it's back.

Williams had the final say here, she was in charge of the expedition. "I will defer to your skills in this area. Proceed, Mister Sorenson."

Alex had already set the trip up while they were talking. He felt confident in this plan. "Confirmed, we are on our way." He pointed the nose directly up and set the throttle to five hundred meters per hour.

Meters. Per. Hour. It was glacial. Seeing that .5 on the HUD did psychic damage to him. It took more than two minutes to close the distance to the next layer. The drone traversed it smoothly, the readouts barely wiggling save for the data link to ground. "Oh, like a hot knife through butter. Connection is down to 60% that time, but otherwise exactly as expected."

The next layer slid by in three minutes, the drone's video and sensor feed starting to get choppy even with the repeater drone less than three hundred meters away. They lost the connection after the sixth layer.

Now all they had to do was wait.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.