FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The second part of a collaboration between myself and Sam Gwosdz. The crew of Space Shuttle Horizon face a new day and begin to realize just how far off the map they are and how deep down the rabbit hole they've fallen.

Chapter 2: "Hic Sunt Dracones" by Golden Fox and Sam Gwosdz

---

May 10th, 2017

The seven lost souls all woke up late the next morning and wandered down to breakfast in a bleary haze. They commandeered a table in the restaurant and loaded up their plates at the buffet before they dared to look at the copies of USA Today and The Colmaton Inquirer that had been at their doors that morning. The surprises kept coming as they looked at the front pages. Their story had made the paper, if only in vague terms that only they and a select few knew the full details of. Reports of strange sonic booms and of fighter jets flying at high speed over California, and reports by locals near Edwards of something that looked shockingly like a NASA Space Shuttle landing there. The Air Force and Bureau of Superheroes were dismissing the comments. They'd all snorted when Sarah had read that part aloud. Not only had they broken the sound barrier over California for a couple of minutes straight, but the Shuttle had been on the runway for hours and they lived in the era of smartphones and Twitter. Someone with a phone had to have leaked the news somewhere and it was only a matter of time before it all leaked out. They were safe for now, though, as nobody paid them any attention and they read on as the stories got slightly stranger.

The world, it seemed, was roughly similar to the one they'd launched from two weeks earlier. The new president--though not the one they had all seen take the oath of office a few months before, they noted--was making a speech that evening on immigration and taxes. Tropical Storm Arlene was moving into Georgia that morning and was steadily weakening. England and the European Union were still having tense discussions about the Brexit. North and South Korea were exchanging words over a ballistic missile test done a few days earlier. The New York Mets had still beaten the San Francisco Giants the night before the landing, much to Sarah's irritation. The 2017 Stanley Cup playoffs were happening, although they all noticed that the teams in contention were different and their local NHL team wasn't in the league at all. Football and basketball had completely different leagues and teams, with the playoffs of the National Basketball Association in progress, rather than the Furry Basketball Association, which made them all stare at each other for a few seconds in silence.

Crime, they noticed, was also considerably more interesting. Amid reports of petty theft and burglaries came details of a world of heroes straight out of a comic shop. A few names were ones they'd noticed in the dossiers while others were complete mysteries. By the time they were on their fifth cups of coffee, the table was littered with pages from the newspapers that they'd pulled out and were discussing, and the waitress was growing concerned for both the state of the table and the mental state of the hotel's guests.

"I don't believe this," Sandra muttered around bites of a bagel she'd roughly slapped cream cheese on before continuing to read the news in the paper and on her smartphone.

"Yeah, I know." Sarah, sitting next to her, frowned and took a bite of a danish as she flipped to the entertainment section of _The New York Times_she'd gotten from another diner.

Sandra stared at her phone again. "I mean, it says here that the Thrashers moved to Winnipeg in 2011 instead of Louisiana in 2005. What the fuck is that all about? I mean--"

"Would you forget about hockey for a minute?" Roger growled and took a bite of his toast. "We've got bigger issues, I think."

"The hell we do," Ricky muttered softly, his spotted tail twitching in aggravation near him. "I've got fifty bucks on the playoffs."

Sonya groaned and buried her face in her hands, muttering something softly in Spanish. Roger leveled a stern look at him and the leopard sighed.

"I mean, Jesus, Roger! I get it, we're in deep now, but really, we gotta have some levity to it, right?"

"Levity comes when we figure out what in the name of all things holy happened to us on the way in here. Have any of you found anything interesting other than stock tips?"

"I've been looking for stories by Clark Kent and Lois Lane for laughs at this point, Roger." Sarah sighed and put the paper down, rubbing her eyes. "God, what in the hell happened to us?"

Roger took a deep breath and managed to sigh out "Beats the hell out of my striped--" before he looked up and blinked rapidly. The others noticed him and turned to look in the direction the raccoon was glancing in. A stoat, dressed in the the uniform of the hotel's concierge, was walking smartly over to their table. He stopped in front of Roger and held out a sealed manila envelope.

"Roger Mason?" the mustelid asked. Roger nodded and took the envelope. The stoat smiled at him and the the others before turning to take his leave. Everyone watched him for a moment before turning back to the commander, who slowly slid a claw under the flap of the envelope to open it. He pulled out a few pages of paper and started to read them slowly, his ears twitching a bit before stopping. He slowly looked up at the others and they stared expectantly back at him.

"Folks," he said with a long exhale. "The news is a bit mixed." He took a sip of coffee, and in a low voice, relayed the contents of the message.

Their unplanned arrival the day before had caused an incredible panic at both NORAD and the Pentagon, and it had almost gotten to the point of asking the President for permission to shoot them down before an airman at Air Force Space Command in Colorado had connected the dots about the odd track of the bogey on his radar screen and phoned his superiors. The Bureau of Superheroes had experienced its own minor emergency, but they had been too busy trying to figure out the origin of the mysterious burst of energy that preceded their arrival to do more than have the heroes escort the Shuttle down to a safe landing. Neither the Department of Defense nor the Bureau had come up with an adequate explanation for the event that had brought them there and the note simply said that it was being thoroughly investigated.

The Air Force and BOS had quickly come to the conclusion that they needed to get NASA involved. The space agency had experienced the mother of all conniption fits before managing to recall its Apollo-era rapid problem solving skills and help out. After a quick inspection of Horizon by the few remaining people at Edwards who had been on staff during the Space Shuttle era, all parties involved had managed to find some of the ground support equipment that hadn't been sold for scrap. The rest had had to be improvised on the fly. The process had taken most of the night and involved calling hundreds of former Shuttle contractors, engineers and BOS staff before the vehicle was finally declared safe for ground crews to work around. After that, they'd towed it to a hangar on the base that was large enough for it to be housed in for the time being.

By now, of course, it was impossible to hide the news from other governments. The Shuttle had been on the runway long enough for other countries to see it via satellites and the President and BOS had been forced to admit the situation to the leaders of several governments, who had responded with varying degrees of shock, confusion and outrage. It was only being kept out of the press by the sheer force of will of the BOS public relations staff, who were working overtime and then some.

It only took a few Google searches for someone to uncover the flaws in Sandra's logic of the Outer Space Treaty and the Rescue Agreement. Among other things, they required that the astronauts be returned safely to the state of registry of the launch vehicle, and it was hard to ignore the words "United States" spelled out in black Helvetica letters on the sides of the Shuttle and the American flag on the right wing. That was already causing all kinds of havoc behind the scenes, not the least of which involved the crew failing to fill out customs and immigration documents after landing. As their passports were in another dimension, this had been a bit problematic, but the BOS, State Department and United Nations had agreed to overlook the matter. The fact that they had launched from Florida and landed in California meant that, in a slightly odd sense, it had been a domestic flight. It didn't stop the crew from pondering whether they'd have to declare that they'd brought "space telescope instruments" on a form at some point, however. In the meantime, the irony of apparently being illegal aliens who had arrived in a spaceship hadn't been lost on anyone involved.

The crew's belongings were being processed at Edwards and would be returned to them once they were cleared as being unrelated to whatever had caused the situation. The checklists used by both pilots, however, and all the videos they'd taken in space and on the way down to land were being examined and copied for study, though the Bureau had compromised by offering to return the five remaining entry procedures checklists back to them.

As for the Shuttle's payload, nobody really knew quite how to handle it. After landing, the Shuttle was normally connected to ventilation equipment that pumped cool, filtered air into the payload bay to keep the cargo from being damaged while it sat on the runway. That hadn't happened this time, and nobody knew if the equipment inside was alright. There was, however, a complication when it came to checking this and Roger stared at the message for a long moment before he looked at his crew again. His face looked pained.

"There's a problem. They can't open the bay doors at Edwards."

Sarah stared at him. "What the hell are you talking-..." Her words trailed off and her ears wilted. "Oh, fuck."

Recognition slowly started to cross their faces. The ISA's orbiters were, with little exception, identical to NASA's, so there had been no need to shut down the existing infrastructure when the ISA had continued to fly theirs. However, in this world, that hadn't happened. While NASA still retained the large Shuttle hangar at the Armstrong Flight Research Center, nobody had expected this sort of eventuality. They didn't know quite yet if they could get the payload out of the Shuttle without ruining millions of dollars of equipment and contaminating the interior of the payload bay. The task of simply opening the doors on the ground was a complicated procedure requiring special equipment to begin with, since they had never been designed to operate in Earth gravity on their own. Even if the doors could be opened and the equipment within removed, the normal clean room containers used to transport payloads to Florida had, most likely, been sold for scrap. Roger nodded and looked like he was about to be sick.

"That's part of the problem, yeah." As he finished, a second wave of recognition passed over them and Sandra clutched her head and whimpered.

"Oh, crap..."

Roger nodded once and continued reading.

NASA, having no need for any of the remaining Shuttle hardware, had torn down the Mate-Demate Devices at both Edwards Air Force Base and at the Kennedy Space Center. The large, crane-like machines were what had been used to put the Orbiters onto their modified 747 carrier airplanes for flights back to the Kennedy Space Center. There was, the letter noted, a contingency plan for this involving a pair of mobile cranes which NASA had used when transporting the Shuttles to museums in Los Angeles and Virginia, but it was overshadowed by the next problem.

The agency had also sold the 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft themselves. One sat next to the parking lot of the Johnson Space Center visitor center in Houston, with a replica Shuttle on the top. The other was in mothballs in the desert, serving as spare parts for the SOFIA airborne observatory.

The final nail in the coffin was the fact that, as in their world, SpaceX had leased one of the Shuttle's original launch pads at Kennedy Space Center and had built a hangar across the Crawlerway used to transport vehicles to it. NASA had also torn down the launch tower and servicing equipment used by the Shuttles on the other launch pad in preparation for their large SLS rocket and commercial cargo flights. The three new launch pads that the ISA had built to support their fleet of Space Shuttles had never been constructed, and the assembly lines for most of the hardware used by the program were being retooled and converted to other uses.

As Roger finished, nobody spoke. They all looked like they were about to be violently ill and only Yuma dared to speak after a long pause. "So that's..." She took a deep breath and her ears splayed out. "... shit."

"We're fucked," Sonya breathed out softly, covering her eyes with one hand.

Roger rubbed the back of his neck and coughed. "Yeah... yeah, that about sums it up. Even if they could figure this out and reverse whatever happened during our landing, there's no way to fly the Orbiter to Florida and no infrastructure to launch it. There's some note about Boeing possibly doing a refit or something in Palmdale, but it was vague as hell. Other than that, they've got a couple of spare engines from NASA, but--"

"But that's beside the point anyway," Sarah finished. Roger slowly nodded and sighed.

After a minute Ricky looked up, his claws slowly raking the tablecloth. "Well, look, this place has freaking superheroes. I mean, didn't the giant bear in the army outfit tell us they had procedures for this sort of thing?"

Roger nodded and sighed. "Yeah, the last part of this says that they're working on it and have their best people on it, whatever the hell that's supposed to mean. Still, though. Even we never had a full plan for this level of fuck-up on our end. Closest thing was the first Vandenberg launch that aborted to Easter Island, and even that wasn't this bad."

Sarah snorted softly. "Well, yeah, we still had a thing to fly the Shuttle home on. Besides, they were in the same dimension they launched from."

Roger sighed and held up his hands. "Alright, alright, look. This can't be as bad as we're making it out to be." There was complete silence at that and the raccoon glared at the others. "Well, you know what I mean. Look... they said they'd help us. If that panther, as nutty as he was, can fly next to us at 30,000 feet and this can happen," The raccoon reached for the Inquirer, where a headline screamed "COMBAT HANDLES GANG OF JEWEL THIEVES". "Then they can damned well figure out how to get us back home. I mean, I've seen enough Justice League episodes to know this kind of thing ought to be a walk in the park for them, right?"

None of them looked entirely convinced by that.

"Your source is a goddamn cartoon," Sonya muttered softly.

Roger shot her a stern look. "You got a better way to look at it?"

"No," the wolf admitted, rubbing one of her arms.

"Then we'd better damned well hold on to this bit of hope, because that's all we've got left right about now."

---

The crew of Space Shuttle Horizon and the ISA belong to yours truly.

Super co-author extraordinaire Sam Gwosdz.

Slipstream belongs to GameGod210.

Combat belongs to jrcarter.

The City of Colmaton, CA created by TRAIN.

The Bureau of Superheroes created by MojoRover.