Solar system

Dr. Marcus was appreciating the rings from a very unique perspective, although she shouldn't be doing this but Angela convinced her, this is a configuration that they used before, and nothing wrong ever happened before, but this time as soon and the ring activated something went wrong.

The first thing they noticed was the trembling of the shuttle, the disturbances were never big enough to cause this, the people felt them yes, but it wasn't even enough to disorient people, more like being on a plane that was banking a little to the left or right, but the shuttle never was affected enough to shake

"Move us out of here Angela" Paul said, it was easy to notice the fear in his voice

"I am trying, but somehow we are being pulled forward" She says

"We are feeling it here as well, we are being pulled further toward the rings and its intensifying, we can't break away, What the hell is that!?" Right in the center of the middle ring things were going strange, throughout all these experiments although the instruments sensed it and the people felt the disturbances there was never a visual change, now it looked like the light was distorting, like passing through a transparent balloon filled with water that was being squeezed by the second, and the ship was being pulled towards it, but now the shaking stopped and the ship was simply being pulled toward the now sphere like balloon, there was light coming from there but it was completely distorted.

"Something is happening, out there and we are being pulled towards it, GET US OUT OF HERE" said Angela

""

"WHAT DO YOU THING WE ARE TRYING TO DO HERE, DO YOU THINK WE...." the shuttle was pulled into the distortion with its passengers screaming.

Unnamed star system a few minutes later

Alex had a problem, when he triggered the wormhole, the initial power consumption spiked, it was a lot more than what he planned, and the system was working overtime trying to keep the wormhole stable, he still hadn't launched the probe, but kept it near the portal, the probe had a quantum link with his main ship, so all the data could be recorded in real time in the ship. Nearly an hour later he thought that everything has been stable enough for long enough, just before he was going to launch the probe an object came out of the wormhole, it took him a couple seconds to react, since he was wearing his reader headpiece the shuttle responded to his thoughts so, when he decided to take action everything happened very quickly.

First he identified the object and realized that it was a shuttle from earth, which made him falter. Although what he did would not be considered criminal until now, that is only because he never put anyone in danger not even himself. The rest would be covered under independent research laws, but if he somehow pulled people from earth there could be a lot of problems in the future.

All this passed through his head quickly but it didn't stop him from attempting a rescue, at least it didn't stop him for long.

He issued the commands necessary to send the shuttle in an intercept course, the shuttle was going toward a small asteroid and if it crashed anyone inside would be very dead. He accelerated toward it, in the heat of the moment the only thing he could think of was a preprogramed maneuver.

He positioned his shuttle in front of the earth's shuttle, since his shuttle was very fast it was easy. When he was positioned in front of it he matched the speed and activated the repulsors while slowing down. Repulsors create a force that pushes normal matter away from it. This allows for Alex to push the earth's shuttle the other way slowly, basically bleeding out its speed.

But he miscalculated, and the asteroid was still closing in too fast, at this rate his shuttle would hit the asteroid before he managed to stop the earth's shuttle, he activated his ship forward repulsors and when he got close to the asteroid both their speed was slow enough that the crash was not fatal, his ship could easily survive a crash like that with barely a scratch

He was dazed for a few seconds, the inertial dampeners work best when the acceleration was anticipated, the effects of a collision are reduced but it still rattles you, luckily not enough to cause any type of injury,

But the result of the repulsors, the crash, and the few seconds he stayed dazed was to push the earth's ship the other way, back towards the wormhole and it was spinning.

His shuttle was fast, especially when compared to any vehicle or ship created on earth, and with the inertial dampeners it was easy to accelerate to five g's without feeling a thing. This allowed him to catchup to the runaway shuttle even faster, and, repeating the previous maneuver he managed to slow it down before it reached the wormhole.

The problem is that it was now spinning, around an axis, after a few seconds of consideration he decided on a course of action. Since the shuttle was elongated and the rotation was forward he was going to need to do some careful application of repulsors, luckily, his main ship had a quantum server cluster, doing calculations like this was easy and it had the standard programs all spaceships had.

He had his shuttle scan the rotating earth's shuttle to get its shape and rotation and the ship was able to calculate the needed amount of force and direction of force needed to slow down its rotation, he positioned his shuttle in a tangent to the rotation of the other shuttle, and used repulsors to apply the force required to slow it down whenever the nose of earth's shuttle became perpendicular to his ship, the slowing down was gradual and not abrupt abut after 5 rotations he was able to slow it down enough to not be uncomfortable to whoever was inside.

Solar system, same time,

After the shuttle disappeared into the phenomenon the station suddenly had gravity pulling toward the anomaly, the only reason it didn't hurt people is because it was not immediate it took a few seconds and the people were able to brace themselves, it took them a few moments to get accustomed and now everyone was walking while holding the hand holds located in the walls, just in case something else changed and the gravity either increased or disappeared suddenly.

The problem is that although the shuttle was built in order to utilize little fuel in its thrust and the small nuclear reactor would last a long time, the shuttle was not made to be able to handle gravity, its low thrust didn't allow it to leave gravitational pull of the phenomenon, it was not designed to be anywhere near a gravity pull of that magnitude, the only reason the station was not affected that much is that the phenomenon appeared right in the exact center of the rings so the force was distributed equally.

Communication with earth was slow, it took a few minutes for the signal and response round trip, so no response yet especially since they would need a very long time to make sense of what was happening and formulate a response, so for now it was on their hands.

The scientists at the station were at a loss on what to do, some wanted to shut everything down to prevent whatever happened to do more damage to the station, the other group wanted to keep it on to see if they can find a way to retrieve Dr. Marcus and the rest of the team, some just wanted to get more info on whatever happened because it sure looked like what they imagined a wormhole would look like, the problem is there was no response on the attempts at communication, either they were incapacitated in some way, or the signal didn't reach them.

Although the phenomenon was stable now it was still drawing an enormous amount of power to maintain and they would need to cut it loose at some time. Everyone was stressed and a scared and people knew that if whatever happened disappeared they would drop on their heads because of the stations artificial gravity being in the opposite direction, but what they were afraid is what if it got worse as in it increased enough to suck in the station itself, this was unchartered territory, this is why the station was built so far away from earth in the first place.

But the decision was made for them after a while the phenomenon things started to destabilize and just as suddenly as it appeared it was gone again, the accelerator was not designed to maintain the beam at full intensity forever.

Unnamed solar system, same time

Now that he managed to slow down the shuttle's rotation it is just a matter of opening his hangar doors and backing toward the shuttle, the earth's shuttle was 35 meters in length and had a 10 meter diameter, his hangar was big enough to hold it with some room to spare, the repulsors inside the hangar would ensure that it didn't do much damage on the way in keeping it centered, the computer could handle that since he already had a program designed for these situations, they were handy in getting cargo in quickly without making a mess.

Before he was able to execute it something changed in the wormhole, he got an alert from the system that it was trying to compensate for a change in the structure of the wormhole itself, since he and the earth's shuttle were too close to the wormhole he decided that he needed to speed up the process, but suddenly the earth's shuttle was pulled toward the wormhole, he decided to accelerate toward it to see if he could stop it from entering, because if it entered before the system managed to stabilized it was going to be crushed inside, he got ahead of it but realized at the last moment that he wasn't going to be able to stop before entering not with this force also pulling him if he applied the reverse thrust with enough force to not go in he was going to crush the earth's shuttle with the impact since it was now behind him.