Frontier's Reach: A Space Opera Adventure (Frontiers Book 1) by Robert James (beach read TXT) 📗

a down geoprobe, and well, there was no trace of moisture anywhere. It was sealed tight.”

Erik furrowed his brow. Even in the most confined spaces, there were traces of condensation buildup. “What do you make of it?”

There was a long pause on the other end of the commlink. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”

“We’re all nuts, Chris, we wouldn’t be out here otherwise. What’s your theory?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say this tunnel was not of nature.”

“Not of nature? As in, man-made?”

“That’s right.”

Bloch snickered. It was hard to blame the kid. To suggest something man-made had been discovered on Orion V was laughable. Since Yuri Gagarin ventured out into space all those centuries earlier, humanity was yet to come across any extraterrestrial life outside bacteria and some small animal life. It wasn’t to say that no one believed intelligent forms of alien life didn’t exist, it had just become par for the course that none did in their tiny corner of the galaxy.

“I think you’ve been off Earth for too long,” Erik said.

“We’re prepping an elevator down the shaft to take a look. We’ll have a definite answer in an hour.”

While Erik didn’t believe the tunnel was man-made, he couldn’t help but be a curious. If there’s no meteor down there, what’s creating the magnetic disturbance?

Sleep would have to wait.

“All right, I’ll head on over.”

“Right, Chief.”

After traversing the subterranean rail network beneath the surface of Orion V, Erik’s carriage came to a halt at the end of the line. Chris Bowers and his team were split in two. One group were repairing a large drill head, while the other were doing a final inspection on an elevator they’d installed down the shaft.

“We’re ready to go.” Bowers handed Erik a helmet, which he put on.

The pair stepped into the elevator. Bowers closed the safety rail and pressed at the controls. Within seconds darkness surrounded them as the elevator car lurched downward. Both men turned on the lights on their helmets. The top of the shaft rapidly became little more than a pinprick of light, but eventually the elevator slowed and within seconds came to a halt, touching down with a slight thud.

Bowers opened the safety rail. “After you, Chief.”

Erik walked out onto the rocky surface and kneeled, touching it with his hand. It was like all the rock on Orion V they’d been boring through, but there was a stark difference. It was smooth. Too smooth. And shiny. “It’s as if it’s coated in some kind of protective layer.”

“Like a waterproofing material.” Bowers rubbed his hand against the walls of the tunnel. “What’d I tell you?”

“That explains the lack of condensation.”

They continued down the tunnel until they found an opening at the end. Erik stepped through, stumbling and falling flat on his face.

“Chief!” Bowers came up behind him and pulled him to his feet. “Are you okay?”

Erik nodded and looked behind him, curious to see what the culprit to his clumsy tumble had been. “Steps?”

 Clear as the light of day in the middle of the dark were steps fashioned into the rock.

Erik turned around. “What is this place?”

The lights of their helmets illuminated an expansive underground chamber. But it was what was sitting at its center that made Erik’s jaw truly drop. Stepping toward it, he couldn’t help but feel he was now indeed farther away from home than he’d ever been before.

I’m not in Kansas anymore.

Nine Months Later

Two

Outpost Watchtower

Commander David Ortega took a sip of his coffee as a transport pod whizzed past the viewport to his office. Beyond it lay the dark-green world of Delta-Hera IX, entrancing as ever. Sometimes he imagined the surface was covered with lush rainforests, much like the ones that once inhabited Earth in his school text books. Somehow it made him feel like home wasn’t that far away.

Unfortunately, he could only fool himself so much. Delta-Hera IX had an average temperature of two-hundred and sixty degrees below zero. It was a frozen marble amongst the stars. And Earth was a whopping twenty light-years away. One sometimes forgot that beyond the orbiting Outpost Watchtower there lay Frontier’s Reach—the outer rim of the United Earth Commonwealth and the great unexplored mass of nothingness that marked the boundary of humanity’s grasp.

“Ah, Commander…”

Ensign Erwin nudged his door open and peered inside.

“Yes, what is it Ensign?”

The junior officer pushed the door wide open, and the meek young man walked in. Erwin had been stationed at Watchtower for six months and it’d been his first assignment since graduating from the academy. As Watchtower’s executive officer, David oversaw all the new assignments of officers and civilian staff at the facility. He remembered the day Erwin arrived from Earth fondly. Clutching his bag, the fresh-faced officer seemed out of his element. He didn’t appear to know what to expect by his surroundings or his fellow officers. David didn’t know how he’d got through three years of his cadetship with his strange idiosyncrasies and wondered how long he’d actually last out on the Reach. He’d taken Erwin under his wing and in the last half a year saw the socially awkward man blossom. Now, David couldn’t imagine what the outpost would be without him.

“We have data from one of the deep space probes we sent out last week,” Erwin said.

David took another sip of his coffee and placed it back on his desk. “Which one?”

“Probe one-four-nine.”

David thought back to the report he’d looked over a week earlier. “That was sent into sector three-two-seven, wasn’t it?”

“Three-two-eight, actually.”

Well, I was close.

“What has it come back with?” David asked.

“It might be best you see for yourself, sir.”

David finished the last of his coffee and followed Erwin out into the buzzing operations center of the outpost. The ensign took a seat at one of the central stations while David stood behind him, studying the information scrolling down the monitor.

David glossed over the numbers. It all seemed relatively standard. Low-density particles, low-level electromagnetic radiation, and with almost everywhere in the vacuum of space, dust. He