Voyage Into Oblivion

Silence was draped over the Space Next launch sight like a hospital blanket over a coded patient. The streamlined S.R.V or Shuttle Retrieval Vehicle had been built even as the efforts of corporate elites such as Musk and Bezos were sending vessels. into space. No one thought the craft would need to be used, until now.

The bullet-esque shuttle was dropped gently on the tarmac before the SRV pilots steered the rescue vehicle back to its own launch pad. A small army of figures in hazmat swarmed the craft. Inside were six bodies all male. They had remained in the ship at all times so none of them were wearing spacesuits. Their faces had been contorted into some abominable display of both bewilderment and terror. Scarcely did they look like the strapping ,young men, that brave all American crew who were eager to touch heaven.

In his autopsy the lab the medical examiner had to only look at the dried blood around the ears and eyes and nose to guess the cause of the death: internal hemorrhaging caused by trauma to the brain. His examination revealed a series of shocking discoveries that led him to keep his report simple. The crew was frightened to death. If he had known what had caused it he would have been curled up in a corner sucking his thumb or else on the table with the cadavers.

Six months ago Space Next launched it's shuttle, Prometheus, up into the stars. The world of space travel had become the next streaming war. Even a certain prominent entertainment company was looking at expanding it's cruise lines with voyages into space. It was a race unseen since the Cold War era.

Company upon company was constructing launch pads to raise their cosmic phallus to penetrate the stratosphere and violate the virgin purity of the cosmos and plant the seed of man's destruction on other planets.

Space Next had know idea its own two week maiden voyage would be doomed like the Titanic before it. It wasn't until contact with the crew was lost that Dick Corben, the founder of Space Next realized something had gone wrong. It took six months of searching via probing satellites but the Prometheus was finally found drifting ominously through the star studded expanse.

This latest endeavor didn't seek to colonize Mars, no. Space Next wanted to push beyond the boundaries of the milky way galaxy and beyond. They wanted to go to the very fringes of the universe itself.

Three days in and the two week test flight the experimental warp drive was tested and thus was the crew's fate sealed. The fabric of space seemed to warp and bend around the Prometheus. The intention was to come out of the Milky Way, drift around for a few days and head back to Earth.

Wherever the shuttle had ended up it wasn't the edge of our galaxy or any other. It was a psychedelic cosmic hellscape were physics ceased to exist. It was a surreal experience basking in the glow of colors not seen by man but out of those nameless colors came shadows that grew in size and form.

The eyes of the crew were blasted by the demoniac visage of horrors glimpsed by the troubled artistic minds of men like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard but that were more terrifying in reality than Cthulhu or Set could ever hope to be. These were evil creatures or entities that had existed before even the Book of Genesis. One by one the crew began bleeding from ears and knows as their fragile human brains were overwhelmed by that which was not meant to be seen by mortals. One of the men just before he succumbed to his fate recalled a passage from Revelations: "They will wish to die and death will fly from them." These were clearly beings being kept from entering our world until the very End.

The crew was dead. The horrific sounds of these abominations replaced the screams of the astronaut's. Then as if plucked from the nightmare by an invisible hand the shuttle was hurled across the void and back into the Milky Way were it drifted in silence for six months.

The incident was the nail in the coffin for Space Next and would remain an unsolved mystery. To one man, a minister who sat on his porch on a rainy day reading the headlines complete with the coroner's report, it was no mystery at all. Next to him on the little table by his rocking chair was his Bible open to Genesis. He knew that Space Next had built a Tower of Babble and this time God had not confounded the language of the people but their psychies.