The chatter over the open communicator lines was getting to be annoying. Larry and Moe were swapping their favorite ghost stories about this particular part of space. You know, the ones where a ship vanishes into it but on dark long trips like this one, a faint sensor echo can be found....
For fun at one point I faked a sensor echo on Moe's readout, and he nearly had a heart attack or the equivalent for his species. Moe and Larry summarily ignored me after that, which was even better than what I was aiming for.
The tug captains were also talking to each other, but their conversation was very loudly about anything that was not the anomaly. They'd made the trip by it a few times, and they like many a pilot regarded it with a bit of superstitious reverence. Best not to mention it, the thought went, lest you call its attention to yourself.
The only people not talking were myself and Curly. Curly no doubt thought that if his squad leader weren't talking, there was a darn good reason for it and he should follow in that example. Like I said, the kid's got potential. Reminds me of myself when I was that age. Of course, in this particular reasoning, he was wrong.
I just wasn't saying anything because the anomaly creeped me the hell out.
I'll describe it for those of you who haven't seen it personally or caught one of the many movies in which it is featured: Imagine a large, irregular scar in the fabric of space. There's blackness inside and often a dark, swirling violet. Stars can't usually be seen through it but occasionally they are visible - and when visible, they do not resemble the stars that one should be seeing through it. Early after the incident that created it, it was thought that the anomaly was actually a stable wormhole. This was later found to not be the case by the brave exploratory crews who neglected to re-enter normal space at any point. Anything that enters the anomaly either stays wherever it leads or vanishes from existence.
Because chances are good that, to you, this anomaly is just one among many and you likely don't particularly want to look this up and lose your place, (and, if your job is to extract information from this text for evidence against me, your job) I'll explain how Yotia came about.
War, as you've probably noticed already, takes a number of different forms out here. The war between Tennel and its neighbor has a number of rules designed to limit how it spills over to the civilian population, while systems like Poln and Anor just beat the stuffing out of each other. The two species involved in the conflict over the Yotia system - one of them, I'm not proud to admit, was mine - had rules leaning closer to the Tennellian philosophy. One species had developed a superweapon that could wipe out entire planets - not just render them uninhabitable, because the universe is full of weapons like that, but actually physically destroy the planet. Naturally, while use of such a weapon on an inhabited planet was banned by any number of accords which went beyond this particular conflict, merely the threat of such a thing was enough to end the war right there. So the species decided to demonstrate it on Yotia IV, the uninhabited neighbor to the contested (and populated) Yotia III.
As you can guess by the fact that the entire system has been replaced with a gateway to nothingness, the weapon did not work as intended. Rather, it worked, but entirely too well. It consumed the planet it was placed upon and then proceeded to grow unchecked. While an evacuation of the third planet was undertaken, it had a population of some twelve billion, and it was impossible to get everyone out in time. Fully half the people on the planet died. Naturally, the species with the weapon was condemned roundly by everyone, and lost the war by default. Furthermore, they were forced off of their own planet, which the relocated Yotians would now call home. Punishment for war crimes are like that; the entire species is held at fault for their commission. The rationale being that, if everyone gets punished for such a thing, there will be no encouragement for it from the public, and anyone who attempts to do so in secret will be swiftly found out.
The anomaly is still growing, as it happens. Lane 971 has been moved a number of times to a more safe distance and will eventually be entirely useless as a travel lane at all. The gravity that the system used to have appears to be gone, thus supporting the 'gateway to nothingness' theory, but the anomaly causes easily twice the problems that gravity would. For one, it has a nasty effect on navigational sensors, and tends to lead ships that think they're traveling along the lane directly into it instead. I don't have that problem, of course. As soon as we got remotely close to this place, I pointed the ship in one direction, set it heading that way, and shuttered every sensor I have on this ship.
I don't need to see this place again.