DeepSpace: Zeta-13 (Ea)(Com)

A commission for last_of_workers!!

Stardate 3657478. Life in deep space was as normal as it usually was. The people who were actually here weren't bothering each other, and they were going about their lives as they had done since whatever happened to them that led them to deep space.

No one was expecting anything interesting to happen, as in deep space you could go years without seeing anyone, never mind having something of real interest happen, but suddenly multiple ships and their crews got a distress beacon alert.

Normally distress beacons only cover a small bit of space around them, so the signal will only reach one or two ships, if that. However, this distress was coming from an abandoned research station in the first expired sections of deep space.

It was section DS148, and the station that was sending the signal was Zeta-13, which was built on a massive rock called Jirlopos-4, which is very dangerous to approach thanks to the massive amount of meteors orbiting it.

Zeta-13 was originally built by the first group to attempt to explore deep space over a hundred years ago. They chose this rock to be their base because of a large amount of local anomalies on the rock, as well as the space around it.

It’s well-known to most people nowadays what happened to Zeta-13. It was said that the anomalies only increased in number and power, until the research team couldn't keep up with them, and their lives were put in danger.

They abandoned the station and left that section of deep space, with plans to return not long afterward with better equipment, but the anomalies made it impossible to get back, so it was totally abandoned not long after that, and its exact location was lost to time and deep space. 

However, being a high-tech base, Zeta-13 was built with a deep space relay, which allowed them to communicate back home. Because of that, when its distress signal went out, it was able to reach much further than the space where it orbits.

Several ships, alongside their captains in the surrounding sectors of deep space, were able to pick up the signal, and each one of them was quite curious about it. Each captain knew that this was a great chance to get a big score.

In accordance with deep space etiquette, whoever lands at the spaceport and makes it to the station first will be able to claim it as their own, meaning whatever was left behind, and whatever minerals there are in that area will be theirs.

Those who fail to claim it will be required to leave without incident, but most often receive a small gift from the winner as a token of peace. For a base like Zeta-13, it was likely full of gold and other precious materials abandoned by the original research team.

With the stakes high, all eleven ships that received the distress signal dropped everything they were doing and traveled by hyperspace to arrive in section DS148, where Zeta-13 was located, and immediately the struggles began for all of them.

The anomalies were much worse than any of them could have imagined. New anomalies were happening before their very eyes. Some appear and stay while others only happen for a split second and then vanish as quickly as they appeared.

One wrong move and one of the ships, along with their captains, could be goners. Here anything could happen. An asteroid could come flying from any direction, critically damaging their ships. A wormhole could open up and send them to a far-off unknown part of deep space.

They could even get trapped in a time loop, as some areas around the station seemed to be looping over and over. If they got caught in one of those, they’d never even know it, but it would mean they were trapped forever, or at least until it somehow stopped, which could be thousands of years.

Luckily, the ships that received the signal were among the best out in deep space. Each one, while a small ship, is well equipped in its own way. Alongside that, the captains are all amazing pilots backed up by an advanced AI built into the ship.

So as tough as it was, each of them was able to dodge or blast their way through the anomalies, with some of them even lending a hand to others by watching their backs and blasting asteroids the others couldn't see coming.

Each one managed to land in the spaceport just outside the Zeta-13 base with only a few seconds between them. So seconds after the first captain took the first step on Jirlopos-4 in over a hundred years, ten others quickly followed behind them.

They met at the square of the spaceport and confronted each other, not in a bad way; they weren't pirates, and most of them were acquainted with each other, as they often traded or helped each other out.

They all agreed to a clean race, where the first person at the station gets it without any issue, and the losers would get a piece of the spoils. Everyone had no problem agreeing to this, as in the end it was a win-win, and most of them were sure about remaining on the planet.

The group heads to the elevator that leads down to the surface, since the spaceport was built a thousand feet above it, and it was the only way down. As the elevator went down, each of them prepared their gear.

They checked their suits to make sure they didn’t have any damage, and to make sure they had enough oxygen. They checked their weapons to see if they had enough charges, and lastly, they connected their HUD with their ships.

That allowed their AI to help them while in the field by scanning and giving them information they wouldn’t be able to know on their own. They were each looking good and ready for anything when suddenly something they could never be ready for happened.

An anomaly occurred and caused the spaceport to vanish. Now all the captains were in free fall, and their ship's AIs were doing their best to start the engines and try to save them. Luckily they were still eight hundred feet up, and the ships were small and fast.

Each ship was able to fly by and shoot out a rope for their captain to grab ahold of. Each captain then held on for dear life as their ship tried to move through the anomalies occurring around them, but as they got closer to the surface, the anomalies got worse and worse. 

Before any of them landed on the surface, at around a hundred feet up, one of the biggest anomalies to ever occur in this sector of space happened. A wave of energy shot out of the core of Jirlopos-4 and spread around the surface and into space around it.

It caught all the captains and their ships in it, causing the ships to power off, and the captains to pass out, then all of them fell to the surface. Each of the captains survived the fall and slowly woke up about a day later, but the big anomaly caused major changes to them.

The ship belonging to each captain was nowhere to be found, while each captain had their body completely changed. Not only did they each have a female body, but they also seemed to have acquired some features resembling their ship, and the AI that controlled it.