Starborn Odyssey: Voyage of the Lost (The Starborn Odyssey Trilogy Book 3)

by Haines Sigurdsson

  Shana insisted everyone continue their exercise routines, despite the monotony of their options. The decreased exercise didn’t help the edginess that worked its way into everyone’s mood, and Shana found herself, bemusedly, missing the Hydrop, where she used to run the track. “I miss running in the Hydrop,” Elton said one day, as they used the exercise wheel, mirroring Shana’s thoughts. “Just wait until we have a planet to call home. We can run as far as we like!”

  Shana nodded. “Yeah, but for now, it’s in circles. So stop talking and go faster!”

  He laughed.

  The crew seemed strained, despite their best efforts. They could not help but feel anxious about their prospects. They were alone, adrift in a ship they could barely control, without a destination, or communication with their families, and with few outlets for letting off steam. The feeling of being unable to control anything—where they jumped, and what they’d find when they got there, was particularly stressful to those of them (basically everyone but Zak) who had always been most comfortable when in complete control of every situation. Now they all lived with doubt, unanswered questions, and uncertainty. It was only a matter of time, Shana thought, before a fight broke out.

  When she expressed this worry to Elton, he was calm and reassuring. “We won’t let that happen,” he said, and somehow, she believed him, feeling more relaxed than she had in days.

  Eight days in, they were all working in the control room on different projects. Kelsan, striding with his usual sure gait across the room, stubbed his toe on a tool that Zak had left on the floor in the middle of the walkway.

  Kelsan let out a curse, and then snapped, “Pick up your damn tools!”

  Zak bristled. “I will as soon as you stop stomping around like an elephant so I have to recalibrate my tool’s harmonics every ten minutes!” The men seemed poised to lunge at each other.

  “Stop!” Shana ordered, jumping up and putting her hands out between them, one palm to each of their chests. “The ship feels awfully small with us all sharing the space, and this is not helping!” Kelsan glared at Zak as if she was not there.

  “You’re not the captain, Shana,” Tanya said quietly, looking up from the chart she was working on. Her tone of voice stopped everyone cold.

  Shana was stunned into silence for a moment. Eschewing a hierarchical leadership structure had seemed an easy choice when they were back in the Hydrop, laying out their plans for adventure. But if even a little squabble over picking up after themselves could turn into a power struggle, Shana wondered if they had made the right decision.

  Elton stood up. “She’s not the captain, but she is right. Come on, you guys, this is silly.”

  Pixie hopped up and picked up Zak’s tool, holding it to her chest because it was quite heavy. “There. All fixed,” she said earnestly, trying to diffuse the tension.

  Kelsan grunted, looked at Shana, and then grumbled. “Ok, sorry,” and went back to work. After a moment, Zak and Tanya did the same. Elton and Pixie exchanged relieved glances with Shana, and Elton helped Pixie put the heavy tool away.

  It was a relief to Shana when they arrived at the planet.

  If You Can Imagine It

  The ship floated slowly down through the mists covering the planet. The mists didn’t relent until the Wanderer was about three miles above the planet surface, revealing thick jungle as far as they could see.

  “Well, I guess there’s life here, but maybe too much,” observed Shana, thinking of the Scorpions on Narcissus. “Gemma, can you magnify to see what’s on the ground and what those dark specks are that I see passing between us and the ground?”

  “Those images are on your screens now,” Gemma answered. “Those dots are some sort of bird but they’re huge, about twenty five foot wing span.”

  The close-up of the birds revealed strange, ugly creatures. Each had a huge mouth with rings of spiky teeth, which seemed to connect without break to a bulbous back end. There was no neck, or head, or eyes that they could see, as if the torso of the creature was entirely digestive system. Huge, bat-like wings, with easily a twenty to thirty foot span, kept the creatures soaring, mouths open, through the air. The air swarmed with them.

  “They seem to be little more than flying mouths,” Kelsan said with a hint of disgust.

  “They look like something out of a nightmare,” muttered Pixie. “The bizarre scene on the view screen was mesmerizing, if unpleasant. Scanning past the flying mouths, they saw an expanse of shallow water passing under them. The flying creatures were swooping down to feed on something in the water. Gemma magnified the water, and they could see what it was: snakes about fifteen feet long on average, brown and mottled. The flyers grabbed and bit the snakes, shearing them in half with one bite, but there was no end to snakes, it seemed. It was a chaotic scene to observe, and not at all inviting as a place to live.

  Question is, what do they feed on with a mouth that big?”

  “There doesn’t seem to be any place to land; it’s like one big swamp,” observed Elton. “I don’t think humans could survive here without bigger numbers to defend a perimeter from these beasts.” They all thought about the Scorpions on Narcissus, but no one said it.

  “I don’t want to even try to land here,” Shana said determinedly. “I’d do a hundred more jumps before I’d risk an hour in that morass.”

  That seemed to reflect everyone’s opinion of that world. “Should I take us out before one of those things tries to eat the ship?” Gemma asked, a bit wryly.

  At that moment they felt a thump on the side of the ship, making Pixie scream and almost knocking them out of their seats.

  “We’re already under attack,” said Gemma, sounding a little surprised. They immediately felt the acceleration of this ship out of the atmosphere, leaving the creature far behind. “I’m showing no damage to the ship but I suspect there’s a creature on that rapidly receding world, with a very bad toothache,” said Gemma with the strongest display of humor she’d shown since leaving Prometheus, making Shana laugh.

  “There are no other worlds in this system showing any potential for development, so I presume another jump is in order,” Gemma said.

  “I think we’re all in agreement,” Shana said, after a quick look at the others. There was obvious disappointment on everyone’s faces, but the choice was clear. They took their seats.

  “Jumping now,” warned Gemma, and they all felt the expected collapse and then explosion of pain, and then it was over; the next thing they heard was the word, “Jumping,” again, and the pain again.

  Shana came back to consciousness thinking, “What the hell was that all about?” She asked the question out loud along with a chorus of other voices.

  “Sorry,” said Gemma. “We were in the middle of a binary star system and the stars were very close together. I immediately felt the stress on the outer structure of the ship. If we’d stayed there much longer we’d have been ripped apart.”

  “Then I guess thanks are in order,” said Shana. “But I’d love to have seen it.”

  “I can put it on screen any time you wish,” Gemma responded. “But at the moment we seem to be in a system with no planets, so we’ll have to jump again. We need a system with at least a rocky moon to replenish the fuel we consumed circling that jungle world. We aren’t critically low but we don’t want to wait till we are.”

  “No, you’re right about that,” agreed Shana, with assent from the rest of the crew. “I vote that we just go ahead and make the jump, instead of sitting here anticipating what’s to come. Before we jump, what type of star are we by now?”

  “It’s a white dwarf that has apparently consumed any planets when it went nova a long time ago. It’s extremely dense for its size. I’m putting it on view now, magnified, so you can see it firsthand.”

  The star blazed with a pale light in the view screen, an aura of blue haze around it, flattening and spreading out towards them on one axis, small electrical charges visible around the edges. The haze moved lazily, as
if in a breeze, or caught in a tide, giving it an eerie, mesmerizing, lifelike quality.

  “Wow, you don’t see something like that every day,” breathed Pixie. “I certainly never imagined I’d ever see a white dwarf up close and personal.” She touched her hand to the view screen, as if it were a real window.

  Gemma’s hologram seemed to be gazing at the view screen, just as entranced as Pixie was.

  “Well, now that it’s all recorded, let’s get this jump over with,” Kelsan suggested, sounding a little irritable.

  Gemma nodded and launched the crystal drive without announcing it, while they stood there! As Shana came to, she realized she was still standing in the exact same position; she hadn’t fallen, and the collapse and recreation of her body hadn’t felt nearly as painful as before.

  “That wasn’t so bad!” Elton exclaimed. “What did you do differently?”

  Gemma smiled. “I had a theory that the unpleasant sensations you experience on the jump might be lessened if you weren’t tensed up and expecting it. You were relaxed, so there was less strain on your body.”

  Kelsan grumbled, “Well, I still prefer a little warning.”

  Gemma nodded acknowledgement. “As you wish.”

  “Where are we now?” Zak asked, turning to the view screen, which, unmagnified, showed a vast blackness, dotted with far-off stars, and a fist-sized ball of light at the edge of the screen.

  Gemma, as usual, filled them in more quickly than their own review of the scans could do. “This system is a yellow-white star, as you see, and I detect eight planets. Two appear to be in the habitable zone, but the scans are limited so far.”

  “Can you see anything about them from here?” asked Tanya.

  “I can’t identify whether there is an atmosphere or water, or life of any kind. We’re a month away, too far for the sensors to be terribly accurate. But there are a lot of Kyber objects we can gather mass from before we head into the system for a closer look.”

  “Good, let’s do it,” Shana said. “Find a Kyber object big enough that it has a little gravity; I don’t want to drift away or lose any of our mining robots.”

  “Agreed; I’ll locate one.” Gemma said, and her hologram disappeared.

  Shana then went to her console to review all the data collected during their last few jumps. Elton looked over her shoulder and when Shana glanced up, she realized he was looking at her, not the screen. He looked quickly away, blushing slightly. Shana glanced over at Kelsan, but he and Tanya were talking quietly across the bridge, arms crossed, and he didn’t return Shana’s look. Shana pulled up the imagery from the binary star system. It was spectacular, and both she and Elton gasped appreciatively. Shana changed the spectral array to show the magnetic field, in orange arcs across the image screen. The magnetic field completely enveloped the view screen, showing that the Wanderer had been trapped directly in it. Gemma was right to have pulled them out of there so quickly. Shana glanced up at Elton, eyebrows raised.

  “That was a closer one than Gemma let on,” he said. “Good thing we’ve got her.”

  Shana nodded. “That was just what I was thinking.”

  Two days later, while the Wanderer was perched on a Kyber object the size of a small moon, Kelsan, in his analytical way, said, “Do any of you realize how many years of travel Prometheus would have to have traveled to see this many systems and in such variety?”

  He was busily studying the systems they’d been to so far. “I mean, it would have taken them at least five thousand years or longer. It really is incredible—even if we are completely lost in space.”

  Elton raised an eyebrow. “I thought you didn’t like the old sci-fi, Kelsan.”

  “Huh?” he asked, bewildered. Everyone laughed.

  Gemma cut in, “We may not be as lost as you think. I’ve located a number of stars that are in a position that could easily be in our spiral arm of our galaxy. We may be as close as twenty thousand light years to Prometheus; of course those positions may just be coincidence. There are two Nebulas that may be Horsehead and Eagle but from this angle, it’s hard to be positive.”

  This unexpected announcement brought a stunned silence from all of them. Shana felt another pang of homesickness, coupled with a strangely comforting feeling to think that they might not, indeed, really be completely lost. They felt so isolated and alone in their small saucer ship; but really, even on Prometheus, which felt like a world of its own, there was no returning to Earth, or even Olympus. All the Starborn were travelers and the Wanderer’s particular degree of isolation was, proportionately, not that different from that of the families left on the asteroid ship.

  Shana shook herself of such thoughts and focused on monitoring the loading of mass by the spidery robots, which scuttled efficiently over the surface of the moon on eight strong mechanical legs, boring holes and gathering mass as they went. After a total of six hours the mass storage was fully loaded, and all that remained was for the robots to clean up and pack themselves back in their compartment.

  Tanya announced, “Alright, that calls for a celebration. I’m going to cook for all of you.” Elton and Zak whooped with delight.

  “You are the best,” Pixie told Tanya, who rolled her eyes.

  “You just love me for my meatloaf,” she laughed. Well, it’s true—it’s hard to dislike someone who feeds you and cooks extremely well.

  While Tanya cooked, Zak and Kelsan checked the ship’s weaponry, in view of what they’d seen on the beast world. It seemed that any habitable world always had its share of creatures willing to kill or even make a meal of visiting Starborn, and they wanted to be prepared. The saucer’s laser cannon was intended for clearing meteors from their path, when navigating in real space, but it was capable of being used for defense if necessary. Kelsan expressed his intention to ensure that it was properly calibrated for such a contingency.

  Once the mining robots were finished cleaning and crawling into their storage space, Zak piloted the ship toward the inner solar system. Shana felt hopeful that they would find a habitable planet where there were fewer predators.

  They were almost three billion miles from the star, and as they went they scanned the nearby stars as well. The nearest was a red supergiant and was less than three light years away. The scans detected only one planet at such a distance, a gas giant circling its star only about ten million miles from it, though the star was easily ninety million miles in diameter. The system had probably had other planets that the star consumed as it cooled and expanded correspondingly. There were ten stars within a four light years’ distance but one was an orange and didn’t seem to have any planets big enough to detect. Another was a blue with several detectable planets and the rest were in the yellow to yellow/white range, two of which boasted half a dozen planets and would have made good candidates for ‘Roid ship trips for colonizing in the distant future if the current system revealed itself to have a habitable world to set up home.

  Observing and gathering information while in the ship was important because, in the event they wound up staying on a planet in this system, the planet’s atmosphere would make observations a lot more difficult and less accurate. Data gathering occupied a lot of time, and fueled most of the onboard conversations.

  That Pixie and Zak were on their honeymoon—probably the most unique in all human or Reeshian history—was also a topic of discussion. They spent plenty of time alone, and when they did, the other four crew members were faced rather pressingly with the idea that they, too, would have to eventually select partners. Shana began to wonder if her arguments against marriage had been wise. After all, their small crew would be starting a whole new branch of humanoid history wherever they ended up. The level of responsibility was sobering.

  “Three Adams and three Eves,” Elton said once, when the newlyweds were off alone again, citing an old Earth origin tale. The four singles were doing tedious routine maintenance on the mining robot circuitry—basically removing, cleaning, and replacing a thousand tiny pieces. It was
monotonous, but soothing in a way, and they sat in a circle on the floor as they worked, and chatted.

  “Perhaps we should have married on Prometheus, like Zak and Pixie did,” Shana said, finally putting words to the doubts that had been growing in her. No one said anything for a moment.

  Tanya snorted, “Well, it does certainly seem to help them pass the time.”

  Shana and the boys burst out laughing, and Tanya grinned, pleased with herself. Tanya then glanced slyly at Kelsan, and Kelsan was looking back at her, with a silly smile on his face. Shana realized, with a shock, that she felt a pang of jealousy. Not that she had ever wanted to marry Kelsan, as annoying as he could be, but it was strange to find her options suddenly constricted. She looked over at Elton, who was looking down, thoughtfully, as he worked. Shana had never really thought of Elton in a romantic way, but now she evaluated him more carefully. He was attractive, and kind, and intelligent. Certainly there was no reason not to like him.

  “We could always marry now,” Elton said, still looking down, and then blushed.

  Kelsan shook his head. “No need to rush it, we’ve got all the time in the world ahead of us.”

  “Yeah, but which world?” Shana asked.

  No one had an answer to that one.

  The three planets on the outer edge of the star system, which the Wanderer passed first, were all ice worlds. Only one of them was close enough to be seen in any detail. The features were pretty much the same as Pluto but slightly larger, earning its title as a planet rather than a sub-planet or Dwarf planet classification. Oddly, it registered a high concentration of metals in its composition.