The ARK had been remarkably silent for years. A forgotten relic.

Then, turned on by Dr. Eggman, the Colony had erupted from its hidden moon shell. It had been transformed, overnight, into a nightmare—part super-weapon capable of scrubbing the Earth from the solar system, part out of control meteor dropping into the Earth's atmosphere—to enforce the suicidal death wish of the crazy old man who had grandfathered it.

Then Sonic had saved the day, and it had become boring and quiet again, and generally forgotten by the world. The weapon system for destroying the planet was powered down moments before it fired, and the genetic abomination that dive-bombed the planet with the station in tow had been destroyed. The space station had no further purpose and had, in essence, gone back to sleep.

GUN Technicians had restored local function to some of the more basic services—life support, shielding, and the ability to maintain orbit—that had been damaged in the freakish incident, but the rest of the station had very quietly drifted into something like a computer coma. The ARK was a sleeping giant, now.

The only renewed interest in it came with Vince's extravagant leasing of its lower levels as a sort of cosmic raceway for an event he was holding. GUN had suffered over the past months. First, Prison Island had been melted into glass by Dr. Eggman, then Granite Island had been vaporized in what had been publicized as a munitions stockpile accident, during the escape of Coop the eagle. Either way, GUN was struggling to get itself back onto its feet, and its budget had been stretched to unimaginable proportions.

The offer of a substantial amount of money by a wealthy commercial business owner to lease the area of space labeled Meteor Herd, for the opening station of an extreme gear race, was an extremely welcome way out of a financial crisis that had rapidly been blossoming into a financial catastrophe, and GUN had leaped at the offer. Meteor herd was, essentially, a cloud of rocks situated around a large, slightly warmer chunk of rock, and no particular danger to national security, so it had been opened with very little trouble.

Meteor Herd lay on one side of the ARK's tremendous, apocalyptic nose-gun—officially called the Eclipse cannon—the weapon responsible for vapourizing a third of the moon. Now deprived of power, it was now a very large, ugly chunk of metal, and completely harmless. On the other side of the doomsday nose was another segment of space, which was not named, and was not especially well known, and was largely hidden from the outside by a battery of shields.

The zone of space had been turned inside out by the bizarre array of experiments done to it during the ARK's active years of service. Filled with artificial planetoids; giant floating capsules containing gravity wells; and other hideous mis-applications of science, it had been rendered unusable and very nearly unnavigable by the collection of space-warping experiments that had been deposited there. It had not been opened to the race, but it was such a bizarre and esoteric branch of scientific endeavour that GUN had not taken any further precaution than a very light security detail. They had assumed, for the most part correctly, that no-one in their right minds would ever try and get into the place.

It was, quite correctly, assumed to be strangest place ever, but Astrid and her Team—comprising the entire infinitesimal fragment of the sane population interested in getting into the place—were flying right to it.

The most accessible point of entry to the area was at the top—near to the space-station's surface itself, where the shields were weaker, relying on the armour of the battle station to deflect most angles of approach.

Outside of the ARK's gravity field, the small shuttle Astrid had piloted from the space elevator's docking station clung to the under side of the station, behind a huge armoured lip that extend down from the space station's edge where it had once framed the artificial moon that had disguised the facility.

A huge shield node was fastened to the space station, directly in front of the shuttle. Quietly projecting a pie-shaped segment of gently distorted space across the area, it was their entrance point, assuming anyone knew how to break through it.


[For anyone with as poor a memory of the game world as Matt has, here is a video of where they are going. Mad Space: They are breaking in at the top, near the ARK, and dropping down to the bottom to do science to one of the horrible gravity-breaking faux-planetoids. They will park their bad selves, while the science commences, in one of the huge old floating boxes that look like cargo containers.]


searchindextag
chapter3bsearch

Coop stood in his gigantic, hazard-orange space suit, feeling slight less able to move than he normally did. There was an uncomfortable rustling every time he moved his legs, and he could not feel his arms against his sides. He would not have been the happiest man on the mission, in any case, but now a titanic frown split his face in half like a deep sea trench.

Most of this was shielded from anyone else watching by the visor covering his face.

He stood silently in the corner of the locker, eyeballing the rest of his crew members.

Eventually, he saw fit to grunt across the radio.

"The inside of the area," he gestured at the wall, on the other side of which was an empty vacuum, and the large, oddly-shaped shield generator they had to disable, "is pressurized. Means we don't have to wear… these, all day."

He shifted uncomfortably, promoting a distant whooshing noise from his thighs.

"Also means I'll be able to fly stuff up and down in there—we're going to be heading all the way to the bottom."

The space suit containing the eagle turned. The coated visor made it difficult to see what was going on behind it.

There was silence for the space of a few seconds. Then the space-suit reached out and put its hand on on the weapon. There was another second's silence before Coop closed his grip on it, and took the grenade launcher back.

Coop examined the launcher. He snapped it open at the breach, and the space suit inclined towards it as he bent at the waist to get a better look over the lower rim of his helmet. He turned it a couple times, and looked down the inside of the barrel. He looked at the reverse side of the breach, glancing at the firing mechanism.

He closed the launcher again. The space suit bobbed, slightly.

"Thanks."

Coop's space suit watched Jam race for the airlock, then slowly followed suit. With a couple rolling steps, Coop made his way inside the airlock, where he began to gently detach from the floor. The rocking momentum of his last step carried him into a slow roll that shortly had his feet on, for all intents and purposes, the ceiling.

He kicked off from the ceiling, and came to rest just inside the second airlock door, where he hung in a corner, waiting for the air to drain out of the room.

"…Hah," said Coop, eventually.

The suit turned slightly to angle at Tracer, and then stopped, as Coop put his hand on the wall again.

"Here we are, huh? …Space."

To anyone listening, it might have sounded like he was addressing the whole group.