Launch Day

Dirk doesn’t respond to Spay right away as he tries to decide if his eyes are playing tricks on him.


"I’m…I’m not sure…you are seeing this right?"

Suddenly worried, Dirk opens comms with the men outside.

"Benton, you seeing anything strange outside on the ship. Hard to say what. It’s nearly invisible but there’s definitely something there!"

"Dirk, I'm seeing it too. I, I just don't know what I'm seeing."

"What are you guy seeing? What is it?" Dierdre tries to see around the globed heads in front of her.

Dr. Turner looks just in time to see the fractal distortion enter into the nose of the space shuttle and disappear.

Shaking her head as if to clear the impossible image she just saw ....

With it settling on the nose, Dirk will look down at his instruments, scanning each system to ensure none of the sensors are being affected.

Speaking to Spay:

"Something is definitely out there. Should we reel the guys in?"

One of the interior camera monitors catches Turner's eye. The distortion emerges in the cramped mid-deck, below the flight deck, coming through Turner’s personal locker. The handwritten label on the locker, "TURNER," distorts to a meaningless gray smear behind it.

"My locker ... it's ... my name on it .. it's smeared I don't understand." she says, shaking her head, emphasizing her bewilderment.

"Some kind of distortion. But what for?"

"I don’t know, but I say we check it out."

Dirk will head down to the mid deck to try and see it with his own eyes. He’ll try to look at it from a safe distance, moving his head at different angles to see it better.

"Okay Dirk, but come right back, don't linger." insists Spay. He continues scanning the instruments, picking up where Dirk left off.

"Little busy out here, Commander. Plus, we're in space. There's nothing there. I think this whole thing just has you feeling some type of way. You're good. Belton out."

I do not have the time to hold their hands through their little anxiety issues. I'm piloting an MMU with a civilian through space towards some Blackops Satellite that I'm gonna die to disable because... magical science shit. Fuck man, need me to cut your food for you too?

Maybe O'Neil was waiting for a distraction to cause Belton as little distress as possible, but when Belton is communication back with the shuttle, a green gas begins filling Hamlet's helmet. He makes a choking face but no noise as his comms have been disabled. What Belton does here is O'Neil begins chanting in a language that sounds totally unknown and with too many consonants.

---

McMillan heads to the mid-deck and sees the distortion. You can't help shake the feeling it is like looking at completely transparent crystal with a geometry of planes and angles that shouldn't be possible. The distortion shifts and a thin distortion of angles seems to reach toward you.

Dirk takes a step back from the distortion, he’ll look around for something relatively long and firm and try to poke it to see what happens.

McMillan finds a slim metal pipe used for cleaning small-bore barrels and reaches out. When it enters the distortion it bends and folds along the strange geometry. The distortion seems uninterested in it and keeps moving closer.

Spay calls back concerned, but not really mentally prepare for the answer he might get, hoping that Dirk tells him some obvious, mundane explanation for what they all saw, "Dirk, what's going on back there? Get a better look?"

Dierdre can offer no explanations and fights with herself in her mind as she thinks she's losing it.

There HAS to be a logical explanation for all this. Just has to be!