Editing TANoTerrans:Tales (section)

==Gatecrashers - 16.11.14 03:05==
Lithyl stared through the telescope at the mysterious gate. Its surface shimmered, boiled, and turned, and shifted from one second to the next. It was a fluid, metallic surface, glowing from within as if lit by a light source that wasn't readily apparent. To Lithyl, from where she was sitting in the observatory, it seemed alive. On the panel in front of her was a console with a monitor reproducing the view she had just been examining, a handful of other screens, dials, counters, and an array of buttons and switches filling the spaces between. Suddenly, the surface went still and rigid, and a moment later, a small instrument beeped as she saw the small speck she had been looking for reemerge from the surface of the boiling sphere in the distance.

She leaned over, keyed one of the buttons at her station and spoke softly, "Cailmes, your dog is back. What does he tell you?"

Cailmes came back over the intercom.

"The far side seems to orbit a planetoid... Atmosphere... Carbon, Nitrogen, Methane, a handful of noble gasses in trace elements... Seems to be..." Lithyl could hear him tapping the keys, and the thoughts going through his head almost as audibly through the intercom. "Very cold... Oh my God, Lithyl, come take a look at this. The probe recorded some images of the surface, and the footage is... This is incredible..." His voice trailed off as Lithyl drifted away down the hallway. Out the viewport, the probe drifted into the silhouette of the ship.

The crew and captain had gathered around Cailmes on his monitor. As Lithyl joined them, the screen was playing back images of a dark, barren, rocky landscape, over which the craft was flying toward a tower like a giant needle. After a minute, its true size became apparent as it finally seemed to grow on screen, and the base of the tower was revealed as it came over the horizon. Cailmes skipped forward and the camera flew a circle around the tower, before taking back off into the sky.

All the huddled faces around the screen looked astonished. Standing structures, especially ones as tall and fragile looking as the tower, were rare to find. Structures beyond the unmarked gates were often either bombed to pieces in the war or home to Raive, or home to savages left behind after The Fall.

----

Lithyl's eyes snapped open to flashing red lights, blaring sirens, and a pre-recorded female voice warning of a collision. She lay there not understanding for a moment. She was in a stasis pod. The ship had been just entered the gate. She and the rest of the crew had gone into stasis for the long journey to the other end of the gate, where the ship would release them from stasis when they neared the other gate in time. Could it have failed to wake them somehow, passed through with everyone in stasis and hit something on the other side?

Her internal dialogue was broken by the face of her captain in the pod window.