>>6154886"How can you tell?" You wonder.
<span class="mu-i">["The warping of light is uniform. I applied a filter to the incoming video stream to compensate."]</span>
As she says that, a digitally altered version of the video feed pops up on your helmet.
...It's really a space station.
Not built into an asteroid like Xebric or Thekia, but an honest to god steel panel construct.
And it is in fact massive.
There are six huge discs that, hilariously, look a lot like flying saucers. However, you can see several large ships docked to them at their edges.
They circle a central sphere of some sort, which doesn't seem to be connected to the external ring surrounding it.
The gigantic sphere floats freely and is rotating slowly. Lights glow across it's surface, while a pair of rings rotate rapidly across it's surface, north to south and east to west.
It's all so close together, it looks dangerous to your eye. If any piece of this construction shifted for some reason, those rotating rings would tear the whole thing apart.
But it makes you wonder what that sphere is for. With those rings moving across it's surface, forget docking, you couldn't even physically reach the thing safely.
Surely that whole sphere can't be responsible for creating this pocket space? It takes up half the volume of the whole station, at least!
You can't imagine the power draw of such a device, if it has to be that size.
As you pass a certain point, the image through your cockpit glass flips again, and you see the station coming into view in front of you...
There don't appear to be any ships patrolling the area.
You see at least a dozen other "Metal Gears" docked to the station here and there, across the six UFO-like discs.
In theory, you could try just docking...
You're not sure how else you could get into the station quietly.
Maybe...
"SHODAN, you're familiar with the Metal Gear's code. Do you think you could hack into one of the other scout ships, spoof it's ID and get us docking permissions?"
<span class="mu-i">["That is a tall order, Captain. Altering the ship ID would not be difficult, but it may take me some time to acquire a functioning code from another ship."]</span>
"You could do it, though?"
<span class="mu-i">["It would require using standard high frequency communication bands. We would risk being spotted."]</span>
So that's a yes, then.
<span class="mu-i">["Further, there is a non-zero chance that they may notice the discrepancy. Two ships should not have the same identification code."]</span> She adds.
...Options are options, and you have more than one.
