A bit of an authors note, I have a bunch of notes to really fully flesh out this into a full kinda short novel deal. It’s a bunch of fluff to something that can be summarized, but I hope it’s a fun read at the very least. If you’re intrigued by this concept, please do comment or tweet at me and let me know! I’d love to continue if there’s interest.
Pluto had its five minutes of fame as children across the US learned about its planetary status, and five more when it was declared a dwarf planet. Even despite the fact Pluto had shifted hundreds of thousands of miles from its original position in orbit, the governments of the world would do their damndest the planet would never get a devastating five more minutes. Kayden Copper, a budding new-hire astronomer, was one of few regular folk to notice how Pluto was not where it was supposed to be. Questioning this online on an astronomy forum, he was unpleasantly surprised by men in suits, who quickly arrested him and cuffed him inside a black hummer. His perception and skill didn’t go unnoticed, as his captors did make an offer to them as they sped away from his home: Either he could become a stellar navigator for the Juno project, or spend his days locked up until the governments of the world could go public with this information, if at all.
Taking the more sensible option, what met Kayden was nothing he could have ever expected: His building where he studied was a massive space center, surrounded by several factories and industrial buildings churning out building materials. Several tons of steel, munitions, and missiles all being hauled by rockets up into presumably high orbit. Stellar Navigation was more memorizing the stars, something he had done years ago, and learning how to use new navigational computers. Amongst classes, he still had time to think: Are we militarizing the Mars base? I’ve never heard of ships constructed in-orbit before. What does this all have to do with Pluto?
A year of training later, which included rocket conditioning and zero G training, Kayden was strapped in with a few other personnel and launched into orbit. He must have been the only one who was forced into this position, as what he saw caused him to audibly gasp: Thirty massive spacecraft all sit together, each one varied in size yet larger than all the spacecraft he’d ever read about, docked at a large wireframe space station. Mechanical suits twice the size of a human worked to weld on armor plating to the last few nearly-finished craft. Astronauts were hooked to the sides of the ship’s bridges, doing whatever checks could feasibly be done to such behemoths of starships. And the final crowning jewel to this fleet was what he could only assume to be the flagship to all of this: An even more massive ship doubling the size of most of the smaller ships, receiving its last tune-ups from dozens of the mecha-engineers. He turned to one of the men seated next to him.
“Did the Mars colony revolt or something? Is this all to blow up mars?”
“Wrong planet. It’s Pluto we’re gonna blow up.”
Fish Stories 