“I’d still like to send a probe just for curiosity’s sake,” said H’Shana, to general approval.
“A probe? No, I think we need to have a human at the helm. I’ll fly a scouting mission and report back,” Kelsan said gruffly. He was clearly unnerved, as they all were.
“I don’t think that’s a great idea,” Zo’Rak said, swiveling his robotic torso so he faced Kelsan over the spidery legs of his body.
“I agree,” said Zak, nodding at his counterpart. “If for no other reason than we can’t afford to lose anyone on an unknown.”
“Not even you,” N’ixie teased Kelsan. He grinned at her a little lopsidedly, clearly annoyed, but unable to be mad. N’ixie was probably the sweetest of all of the Striders, and therefore of all of the crew, with all of Pixie’s wonderful cheer and laughter, but some of her anxieties turned down.
“So we just wait to see if they decide to drop by again?” Kelsan asked, crossing his arms.
“No, send a probe,” Elton said. “And in the meantime, shore up our perimeter and test our weapons, to make sure nothing’s been fouled up by sitting idle for all these years.”
Kelsan paused, and then nodded once in agreement.
“No time to waste,” he said, and they set to work.
The probe circled Hope twice, at different latitudes, but located no foreign craft, as predicted by Gemma. After a few weeks of no further contact, they all managed to forget about the alien vessel, in the need to take care of children and crops, machinery, and even pesky Teddies, who insisted on affection every few days or their feelings were hurt.
Much of the colonists’ time was taken in educating the children, including the five biological children born from the original Wanderer’s crew: Pixie and Zak’s girls, Gretchen and Ariana; Tanya and Kelsan’s daughter Sati and son Nippa; and Elton and Shana’s daughter Lilly. These were raised with the other kids, with the greatest attempts made by all to avoid any favoritism, although perhaps some could not be avoided.
Cap, they had discovered, had an amazing ability with the kids, as the colony children were jointly called. He told Shana once, in a rare instance when they were alone, that he’d always felt he’d been cheated out of raising his own children, which was true. He seemed to love each of the kids, with all their uniqueness and individuality, and never got exasperated—not even with Larana, who was such a handful—and the kids all adored him. He was, in fact, the favorite for bedtime stories. The kids did not seem to think twice about the fact that he appeared only as a Strider or a hologram. The children lacked all of the prejudices the Starborn may have had about such things. Although the kids were deemed children of the Starborn, as a whole, and did not identify with two individual parents (in fact, some had been engineered with three or more genetic donors, to ensure the greatest diversity), some of them did display traits that Shana could identify with one of her old friends from the Prometheus. Bard had Petya’s grin, for example, and Angela had Sica’s deep, solemn eyes. The children were introduced to many of the Prometheus’ crew members through videos that had been recorded before the Wanderer’s departure, teaching lessons, or talking about the Prometheus and the great hopes the colonists had for their children. These videos always made Pixie cry, so they rarely watched them in her classes, but Shana liked to show them. She thought they helped anchor the children to history, to the spirit of exploration that had led them to this place, Hope, where they now sought so hard to establish roots. And it gave them some concept of elders, which was merely abstract to the children in the young colony.
****
The second time Prometheus lost power, Gemma was prepared for it. She and Petya had worked hard on monitoring tools, internal and external, that might help them determine the source of the malfunction. It was almost a decade after the Wanderer had departed, and although the Old Miss was still going strong, there were signs of wearing out—even more than Petya and Gemma wished to share with Colin and the rest of the crew. It wouldn’t make a difference, so there was no reason to worry anyone. But Petya thought, looking liberally, they had another two decades left before the Prometheus turned back into space debris, stranding them to slowly die as systems failed one by one. It was a dismal thought, so they kept it to themselves. It was not like Gemma to keep anything from Colin, but she had listened to Petya’s reasoning, that panic never helped anything.
It was the middle of the night shift, again, when the second gravity loss struck.
The next morning, as Colin met with the Mayor and both of their advisors, Petya demonstrated what they had found.
“There was an energy beam, directly linked to the MCS,” Petya said.
“What do you mean, ‘linked to,’?” Amber asked with clear annoyance. She looked exhausted, after a long night trying to calm the colonists. “Where did it come from?”
“That’s the thing,” Petya continued. “It doesn’t appear to have a source, exactly. In fact, I can’t tell if it was coming from the Old Miss, or from without and into the Old Miss. It’s almost like the beam existed instantaneously, at both ends. So it may have come to the ship from space, but if so, I don’t know where it came from.”
“Do we have a direction at least?” Colin asked wearily.
“Yes,” Petya said, “But not a helpful one. The direction does not relate to any particular object that we can determine.”
Colin sighed and leaned back, running his hand through his hair, which was predominantly gray now at the temples. “Do we have any theories on what it is?”
“Or how to stop it?” Sica added, leaning forward with intensity.
Gemma’s hologram was in the room; she spoke up. “The only clue we have is that the energy seemed to resonate near the frequency in which we had agreed the Wanderer would try to communicate with us from non-space.”
Colin sat up sharply. “You mean it could be a message?”
Amber interrupted, “That doesn’t make sense, we experienced the first gravity loss before Wanderer left. So messages from Wanderer couldn’t be causing it.”
Gemma said, “It’s not the identical frequency—but close enough to make me wonder. I still have not received a single message or any indication that communication through non-space is possible, but I am monitoring everything in hopes of receiving a message. I’ve also been transmitting messages, but so far to no avail.”
This, at least, everyone knew.
Sica asked, slowly, as if he was barely sure what he wanted to ask, “Is it possible that these are messages, but scrambled somehow, so we can’t recognize them? Could non-space be warping the frequency and actually causing the damage?”
“You mean, are we inadvertently crippling ourselves?” Colin’s voice was cold with dread at the thought.
“I don’t think so,” Petya said, but he looked puzzled. “We never saw anything like it in all of our experiments with the crystal drives before or after the Wanderer left.”
“Well, what then?” Amber asked in exasperation.
“We don’t know.” Gemma said simply.
And they all sat silently, thinking about that for a long time.
“We’d better figure it out,” Colin said. “Because last night when the gravity went out, I thought I heard a voice. Your voice, Gemma, say my name. And that happened the first time, too.”
They all looked at Colin in surprise. “Why didn’t you say anything?” Petya asked, bewildered.
“I thought it was crazy,” Colin said. “But now that we know the frequency is so close . . .”
Gemma shook her head. “The messages we programmed for transmission did not include your name.”
“Then something much stranger is happening,” Colin said.
“And we’re in big trouble, aren’t we?” Sica asked, looking pointedly at Petya. Petya sighed and rubbed his eyes in an uncharacteristic sign of fatigue.
“Yes. But big trouble is an understatement.”
Colin mumbled, “I wish I knew if The Wanderer still exists. I wish my sister ha
d never decided to go.”
“What if the beam we’re receiving is from another ship other than one of ours? I even wonder if we’re actually under attack from some alien race,” said Petya.
Colin looked at Gemma and asked, “Do you think we could get turned around and make it back to Olympus before the ship dies, if that is in fact, what is happening?”
Petya answered before Gemma, “It would take two years to completely reverse direction so I would say that’s not even a practical consideration from our current position.”
They all looked at Gemma. The face she was showing was unreadable.
****
Ten years passed on Hope with no further contact from the visitors, with the exception of two sightings about four years apart. The colonists began to suspect that the visitors were waiting for something; but what? Gemma was also disturbed by the fact that she couldn’t detect their presence except when they came close. They apparently could block radar and sensors. Though she was sure they should be able to detect them visually if they were within five thousand or so miles, given the size of their ship or ships, they’d never, as yet, spotted them until they were within a few miles. It definitely suggested technology that Gemma and Cap didn’t have at their disposal.
The Teddies, over the years, became more than visitors, and more of them joined the colony as permanent pets or companions. They were gentle with the kids, and even stopped them from going places that would be dangerous. Every child had at least one of them with them a good deal of the time. It made child care much simpler! The Teddies rarely came inside of the human dwellings however—they did not seem to enjoy the enclosure, although they lived just fine in caves. Indoors was the domain of cats and dogs for companions and they seemed to accept the Teddies as if they were people. Of course, the animals were introduced to Teddies as kittens and puppies so they were totally accustomed to each other.
Winters on Hope were really quite cold with a lot of snow and ice storms, but made for a very explosive spring which was more than welcomed after the four really cold months. The colonists discovered skiing, sledding and ice skating for recreation and in no time at all the children were considerably better than their elders. This, of course, resulted in numerous broken bones, but nothing too serious. Some of the Teddies also liked playing on the ice and would ride the sleds, which Zak had taken to making when he wasn’t teaching physics or leading exploration walks with the kids. All in all, it made up for the unpleasant cold—which the children did not even seem to find unpleasant at all!
Gemma continued to send out regular messages into the void, and kept a beacon going at all times, in hopes of getting an answer through the non-space region. So far there’d been no response but she didn’t give up hope that one day she’d at least hear from one of the three mini-saucers out there, trying to chart non-space and learn to navigate the crystal ships. It had been decided that additional probes might speed up the process, though their supply of crystals was nearly exhausted.
As the children reached their pre-teen years, child care became less burdensome, and the Wanderer’s original crew and their Striders, as their schedules changed, realized that for the first time in over a decade they would have time to go and explore a little more of the solar system. The moons of the giant planet, nearly half a billion miles away, warranted some investigation, mostly because many of them could have significant life, even that far from the sun, just from internal heat generated by the flexing of the mass as they moved closer and farther from the giant in their elliptical orbits.
At least three of the moons showed definite signs of atmosphere and even thick cloud cover that could be holding in heat —or, for that matter, holding heat out—so investigation was truly in order.
They decided to build a second ship for exploration, so that the colony was never left without the Wanderer. They called the second ship Curiosity, since it was going to hunt for other life and minerals, especially more crystals. It only took six months to build the ship, with the help of the Bots and Striders, but they still hadn’t settled on who would go on it. Nobody wanted to be left out of the real exploration, having been stuck on the planet for so many years.
“We could draw straws,” suggested Elton.
“At least half of us have to stay with the children,” Shana said. “Pixie, as you’re pregnant, I suggest that it’s safer for you to stay here. But perhaps N’ixie can come in your place.”
Pixie agreed. They tentatively agreed that of each crewmember-Strider pair, one would go and one would stay behind. Only Pixie and N’ixie didn’t seem too concerned about which lot they drew.
Several days later, Gemma had another sighting of the alien ship, and this made them all anxious.
“I have the feeling that this exploration trip is really important,” said Shana one morning to Elton and Gemma, when the three of them were alone in the control room. She could see the children in groups around different Striders, taking their lessons in the fields around the colony buildings. The children looked so bright and excited about life, listening earnestly to their teachers, or sneaking glances at other groups to see what they were up to, pink and blond and black hair catching the bright light of Hope’s sun. Shana sighed, loving them all more than she could bear. “I just hope that this does not signify something bad for our little ones.”
“Not that little,” Elton said gently. The children were growing up so fast.
“I know,” Shana smiled. Krenek, in fact, had begun showing some signs of genius in his recent science work, as well as great maturity in everything else; he was becoming a leader, already—whether because he was first born or that was just coincidence, they did not know. Krenek was bold like Kelsan, and kind like Elton, practical like Tanya, curious as Zak and joyous as Pixie. Shana saw all of them in Krenek, but he was also his own person; had his own sly glance when he knew he was doing something he wasn’t supposed to, and he had private jokes with H’Shana that sometimes made Shana a bit jealous. It was like that with all of the children, in one way or another. Shana wondered if that was what parenting was all about, seeing one’s self reflected, expanded, improved upon, and having to realize that no matter how many traits one passed along to one’s offspring, the child was irrevocably its own separate entity, and thus unpredictable. It applied to children, and, for that matter, she supposed, Striders.
Gemma interjected, “I agree that this trip will be important. I’ve finally been able to get a trajectory analysis for the alien ships and I think you’ll find it more than a little interesting.”
“What’ve you got?” Elton asked excitedly.
Gemma pulled up the view screen to demonstrate as she spoke. “Twice now I’ve calculated that the ships are coming from near Goliath, the gas giant, with our planet being in different locations each time I spot them. So I suspect there is a base somewhere in that vicinity, possibly even their home planet or a colony. If that’s the case however, I suspect they will be nothing like us since I haven’t detected anything there with an atmosphere in which we could survive. There are a couple of moons there that have a cloud cover and I can’t be sure of what the atmosphere is within that cover.”
“But, with almost eighty moons around Goliath, there’ll be a lot of hunting to do,” said Shana. “I wonder if they’ve been watching us to determine if we’re a threat to them. Perhaps they detected us as we came into the star system. I think it’s a safe bet they’re not humans as we know them, or I don’t think they’d have avoided contact for this long.”
“We have no reason to think they’re a threat,” Elton said. “Do we?”
Gemma shook her head. “I don’t know. But there are too many of us now to leave in Wanderer, if it comes to that. I suspect that if they’d intended to attack us they’d have done so already but there’s no guarantee there either.”
They all sat quietly pondering that difficulty for a moment. Not only was their ship too small, but they did not have sufficient source for crystals on hand. A new ast
eroid ship could possibly be built, but with their limited resources it would take a very long time. By waking all the children at once, they had committed to Hope as their home.
“I refuse to believe there is a warlike race living in this system,” Shana said, “or I agree with Gemma that they would have attacked by now. I think the issue is one of communication, not extermination.”
“Well, I think we need to make the exploratory trip as soon as possible to make sure,” said Elton. On this point, everyone was in agreement.
The Curiosity, slightly larger than the Wanderer but otherwise similarly equipped, was ready to go within the week. The production capabilities of the Striders were quite incredible!
Shana, Elton, Kelsan, and Tanya prepared to embark, along with Zo’Rak and N’ixie, and of course a copy of Gemma and Cap. Zo’Rak piloted the ship out of the atmosphere. After so long being planet bound, it was a little unsettling leaving. What if something went wrong and they couldn’t get back? It was the first time the group was going to be separated in a very long time, and the first time they felt how strongly their planet had come to feel like home.
But it was time to go and see if they could answer the questions of the saucer ships and many other questions about Goliath’s moons, so they shook themselves, tried to remember their old adventurous selves, and took off into space.
The Journey of the Curiosity
It was a damp and cloudy morning when they took off. Pixie and Zak watched the Curiosity depart from the field, with almost all of the kids. Krenek, Larana, and Nippa had led an expedition of some of the more adventurous children into the woods to climb a high hill several miles from the village, and as the Curiosity rose through the fog, Shana could see them waving wildly from the summit, above the tree line. Gemma made the lights of the ship blink in rhythm, and they could see the kids cheer; and then they were out of range, and into the blackness of space.
Starborn Odyssey: Voyage of the Lost (The Starborn Odyssey Trilogy Book 3) Page 19