The Last Vessel

The unidentified object entered the solar system and rapidly begun decelerating. All outside observation indicated that it was of extraterrestrial origin.

When observed, it seemed to be moving at sub-light speeds, yet mapping out its trajectory revealed it to be moving much faster than that.

Scout drones intercepted the object and sent back visual samples. It was a colossal structure, easily matching the country Europe in scale. The exterior was made of impenetrable material, and was cloaked a perfect black, almost as deep as space itself.

One of the drones found its way to what could be presumed to be the nautical underbelly of the object.

There, it found an entrance, and using primitive AI, navigated its way through twisting, winding chutes, spitting out in the hollowed insides of the object.

A wide and empty abyss. Some of the last photos sent from the drone, grainy and colorless, showed an endless darkness. The drone slowly penetrated into the unknown, before unexpectedly colliding with the surface of a body of water.

That drone was marked as waterlogged, and considered lost. Many of the other drones eventually collided with the unpredictably fast object, and no relevant answers were unraveled.

And so, with precious few weeks before the object met with Earth, the nations of the world came together to initiate Project Waterlogged.

With no means of slowing the object down and no defense against it should it collide, it was decided that waiting to see what its next move would be was a mistake.

A team of astronauts were assembled, and launched from Earth only a few days following another wave of scout drones.

This second wave of drones were equipped with Sonar equipment and directed down the same shaft as before. They made a clumsy map of the environment as they descended into the vast, empty room.

What they found was as puzzling as every other clue so far. The hollowed insides of the object was the majority of its structure. It was less of a spacecraft, and more of an egg.

There was only one entrance, and the room seemed unaffected by any sort of artificial gravity. The water, just a few hundred meters below, seemed to impossibly pool together, as if there was something more keeping it within.

The drones, even with their few days head start, were still mapping out the interior when the Project Waterlogged team touched down on the surface of the object.

The map the astronauts had to study was immense and vacuous. There was nothing of note, aside from the body of water the size of a small ocean.

While the drones were unable to penetrate more than a few meters below the surface, Project Waterlogged came prepared.

Their payload included a host of diving equipment, including a manned submersible vessel.

Assistant Liaison and Submersible Pilot Heathercroft was the one crammed into the tight, single-passenger cabin of the Intrang.

The Intrang was retrofitted from one of the most advanced models of submersible available. Still, it was geared towards navigating the deepest waters of Earth, not for the uncertain environment it was headed into.

Heathercroft, a relatively young woman, small in size and hungry in ambition, carefully guided the craft around jutting corners. The interior of the shaft was eerily similar to being out in space. The walls were made of the same impossibly dark metal as the exterior, and it confused the senses.

The floodlight of the Intrang, getting caught on the corners and the walls and the turns and the shifts, guided the entire team deeper into the object. The rest of the astronauts floated gently behind the Intrang, conservatively using inbuilt thrusters to push their suits along.

Eventually that floodlight cut into the empty abyss of the hollowed interior. It was so dark that the Intrang's floodlight carved out a perfect cone in the darkness.

The rest of the team unsteadily floated out from behind the Intrang, each of them engaging their own personal headlights. The space before them was harder to accept in person than it was in the photographs.

It was a starless space. The Intrang, several multitudes larger than a person, felt like nothing more than a spacesuit around Heathercroft as she took in the immensity of the construct.

The Captain gave their orders. The team was coordinated, slowly, uncertainly, to spread out in an even pattern, and begin taking samples from the ceiling. Heathercroft was authorized to proceed lower, until she had visual of the surface.

Heathercroft used the Intrang's thrusters, hastily retrofitted just days prior, to slowly descend. The floodlight followed the Intrang, and the rest of the team was soon left in a surprising amount of darkness. There were jeers over the radio.

Cutting down, penetrating the darkness - the Intrang moved with effortless ease, yet it still felt like Heathercroft was fighting against some vast presence.

Finally, she arrived at the surface. The still water stared back at her, and offered no reflection.

It was perfectly clear water, yet so vast and dense the eye couldn't pierce it. The floodlight dove deep into the water, but became obscured quickly.

Heathercroft rotated the vessel left, then right. She snapped pictures with a camera more powerful than the drone's. She used the feelers of the Intrang to disturb the delicate surface.

It was just like the ocean. Boundless, with its own horizon. She waited patiently for her Captain to direct her to proceed with the next steps. All the while, she felt the intense vulnerability of not only being in the dark, but being utterly lost.

When she turned the Intrang upward, even the distant lights of her team were next to impossible to make out.

She got the confirmation. The team, her captain explained, weren't coming across anything too notable. Nothing that should 'change the mission parameters.' Physical samples were being delivered back to the ship, and now air samples were being taken.

It was time for the Intrang to dive.

Heathercroft turned some knobs and dialed up some modules. She waited a few long minutes for the pressurization values to change, and upon instruction from the Intrang's onboard computer, she began submerging the submersible. Returning it to its natural habitat.

The entire process - adjusting the Intrang for the increasing depths it would be exploring - took about half an hour, but the Intrang was fully submerged after ten minutes.

It was during this agonizing wait that Heathercroft, for a brief moment, got to feel her normal size. The immense scale of the hollowed interior seemed more manageable to her human mind now that she was below the surface. The cabin of the Intrang finally felt spacious enough to breathe.

The team chuckled over the radio, providing each other banter and crude commentary. It seemed the entire experience was underwhelming for them. Heathercroft couldn't disagree. Aside from the terror - the terror she felt in space all the same - it seemed this structure was nothing more than a vast swimming pool.

Heathercroft had the Intrang descend further. It conquered the first hundred meters with ease. The chatter from her team began to subside as they began to take on more demanding work above the surface.

All Heathercroft had to worry about, was maintaining the Intrang long enough to find the presumed bottom of this artifical ocean. If it was a pool, there had to be a ground, and if there was some purpose, there would have to be - filters? Drainage pipes?

The hypothesis was not yet clear.

The Intrang was equipped to reach near the bottom of the deepest oceans on Earth, so even if the entirety of the vessel was water, they would find out. Still, there was hope, murmured rumors and hushed suggestions, that the true purpose of the vessel may be to house some sort of underwater domain.

Intelligent life that had evolved underwater, perhaps? Maybe the team would undercover a vast city, or some sort of entryway to a deeper part of the vessel.

The Captain checked in. Heathercroft gave a confirmation. All was well. This was her zone. An insignificant particle drifting through the ocean. Too small to be noticed in the grand scheme of things. Too large, too sturdy, to be attacked.

As she drifted ever lower, the inky abyss playing tricks on her mind, her team had a breakthrough. The Captain had the astronauts repeat themselves, and begun relaying the information back to Earth.

There was some kind of atmosphere in the vessel. Very thin - the drones missed it. Not present enough to create any pressure, and, realistically, must be constantly escaping into space.

The realistic conclusion, the exciting one, was that something was in the water. Some cycle of life or bacteria were expelling gasses that were venting out into the nothing.

Heathercroft's mind raced with the possibilities. There could be an invisible ecosystem, bacteria and microbes in such grand numbers that they could produce an atmosphere. There could be an underwater city, advanced technology generating what the inhabitants would need to survive.

Heathercroft was asked for a progress report, the excited team obviously anxious to know what was at the bottom. In response, Heathercroft told them she already increased the speed of the Intrang's jets.

Several hundred kilometers before the projected bottom, the Intrang's computer reported solid ground. The spotlight came to a stop and began growing in size over the surface. It wasn't the metal the rest of the vessel was made of.

It was a vast, intricately textured set of, what looked to Heathercroft, to be panels. Oddly, and unevenly arranged, each of the panels looked to be the size of several Intrang's combined.

Heathercroft's jaw dropped. She left the communication channel open, to dead air, for a few moments. When she finally replied, all she had to say was, 'I found it.'

What she found, she was unsure of. She pivoted the Intrang around in place, scanning up and down. This wasn't the bottom of the vessel, but it was almost as vast and endless to the human eye as the ocean was.

Reporting all she saw as she went, Heathercroft ran the Intrang along the surface for several hundred meters. It was all the same. Some sort of sickly yellow texture beneath hundreds of endless, repeating panels.

Then, Heathercroft came across what could only be described as a fissure. Some great canyon along the edge of the surface. It didn't look too deep, but deep enough that the Intrang could not penetrate it with its floodlight.

Permission was requested to advanced further. More photographs were collected. Speculation was shared between the team.

When Heathercroft was instructed to pull out for now, to give mission control more time to investigate their samples, she had a rare moment of rebellious independence.

Feigning an 'Aye-aye,' Heathercroft slowly piloted the Intrang closer to the opening. She felt like a spec of dust floating into pores from flesh itself.

The floodlight began illuminating more of the canyon. The panels didn't repeat into the canyon. It was a smooth texture, almost like skin.

Then, the fissure parted. With shocking speed, the ground below opened. Heathercroft engaged the Intrang's forward jet and rushed backwards, panic clouding her judgement.

Her team were talking over one-another on the radio, but Heathercroft didn't process their words. As the Intrang flew backwards, back up toward the surface, her brain finally comprehended.

Below the fissure, below the paneled ground and sickly yellow - there was cloudy white. Then, from an impossibly far distance, an iris rolled into view.

The iris adjusted. The eye looked at her. It blinked, what once seemed to be a vast canyon now seeming more like an eyelid as the Intrang rocketed backward.

The Intrang's onboard computers rang ear-pitching sirens, warning of pressurization changes and unpredictable water patterns, moments before getting caught in a current and swung so far, so rapidly, that the pilot was surely dead in an instant.

The rest of Project Waterlogged never reported back to mission control. They too, were swept away by an unseen force, though they were lucky. They were not graced with the touch of madness Heathercroft had to witness.

The unknown object shuddered in space, its trajectory slightly altered, but still holding true.

The object would arrive at Earth in just six more days.