Sidereal Quest

by E Robert Dunn

  A warning pinger sounded on the tense air and the computer's asexual voice sung up from unseen speakers, "Shipwide systems' auto-shutdown sequence now in progress. Defensive systems off-line. Beryline shock pulse in eight micronodes."

  The crew attuned their hearing to the PA net at the computer's continued narration of the shock pulse countdown.

  "Primary power feeds off-line. Hyperplasmic matrix stable. Plasma/anti-matter reactor at eighty percent of critical. Engine core pressure is at forty-six mega-sorans and rising. At fifty-three mega-sorans beryline shock pulse will engage. Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine..."

  Unseen to the crew, all ingress/egress hatches secured themselves. A throbbing hum rose within Engineering as the core sprang to life. Light hued bluish green formed an expanding balloon of color starting from the engine room and moved like a watery curtain from wall to wall. As it moved forward, from engineering and throughout the entire length, width, and depth of the Podship, the tiny invaders vaporized into puffs of smoke without a trace.

  The long night's insect attack had had no obvious provocation, making the twilight of morning's relative calm more suspicious. The crew emerged from their haven inside the Eland, they stopped on the upper deck and stared stunned at the slum that surrounded them, from the piles of ash on the dusty deck to the gutted remains of the valley beyond the command-apse's bowport.

  The grassy hillocks that lined the depression looked like sauerkraut, dark and scavenged, beds of orchids and other flowers charred and denuded, whole stalks frayed and consumed. The leaves on the trees as well were devastated, gobbled up, withered. Ferns were reduced to wiry shadows, bark like impetigo.

  "I don't believe this!" Nicraan winced stoically, turning his head away from what had been a rolling carpet of botanical life.

  The wave of insects had washed back from whence it had come.

  Robotic work parties were already on-deck clearing the remaining cinders. The domestic disk-shaped appliances would scurry about vacuuming the ship’s decks, thoroughfares, and ductwork until all were polished and sterilized.

  Capel moved across the littered floor, avoiding the automated residential apparatuses on their aseptic courses. He stopped at the upper deck's airlock and unsealed the starboard hatch. The moment was unreal for him -- all of them. As a family, the others joined the commander at the airlock's outer hatch sill and could sense the violation all around them, an intangible aftertaste of penicillin or uric acid, perhaps sulfur, a wash of cannibalistic pheromones that had scoured the grasses and moved like the wind in previous nodes. All was eerily still now, save the jagged edges of the distant trees and schizophrenia in the air.

  As the Aidennians watched, the primary star and its companion red supergiant exploded over the horizon and daylight brightened. Their eccentric elliptical orbits had changed phase, to orbits nearly circular. The red supergiant drew the yellow primary sun closer. As the planet's dominant star spun around the red supergiant, a stream of glowing plasma ripped from its surface. The dying sun whirled around the red supergiant, plasma surging from it as it spun. The two stars formed a double whirlpool of light.

  As the binary rose higher in the sky, the strange harsh light blasted the second dawn out of the sky coming from the system's third star. A bizarre mottled hue was cast over the sky and the ground. Nicraan blinked, wishing for a clearer, softer, more ordinary light. He did not even want to know the strength of the X-ray flux.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN:

  Lunon Capelsire's memorial grave was beneath the shadow of a naked tree, the insects had left the trees along the eastern perimeter all chewed and rotted, so that limbs pointed up out of the sandy soil like crooked fingers, in shades of ebony and brown. The only beauty lay in the spot having a view of the crash site and the sky. Dara pushed through a tangle of creepers under the cover of approaching darkness and repositioned a rock that represented a makeshift headstone with endearment.

  Memories rushed the physician's thoughts. Suddenly she wasn't standing alone on the plateau it was a cycle earlier...

  "We need to pray," Retho said that afternoon which, according to the old Aidennian calendar, would have been the rotate of Healing The Whole festival. A moment in the Aidennian culture when its citizenry remembered a time in its history when there was great imbalance on Aidennia when its inhabitants felt themselves torn between the priorities of healing themselves -- resolving their own inner spiritual or psychological problems -- and attempting to cure the social and economic ills that had beset their culture. Since all healing involved making whole again -- resolving the contradictions that exist between self and other, body and spirit, mind and nature -- it was befitting the holiday's title and the reason for the Aidennian survivors as they remembered their dead and moved on from the pain and loss.

  Everyone stood silent. Retho cleared his throat from the burning irritation of sorrow, and then said, "We call upon the spirit of evolution, the miraculous force that inspires rocks and dust to weave themselves in to biology. You have stood by us for millions and billions of cycles -- do not forsake us now..."

  Pray? What did that mean to us? Dara thought. Systemites had long since wandered from the traditions of their early orthodox teachings. While Systemites meditated regularly and valued times of silence and contemplation, the notion of prayer awakened in Dara a new desire -- the desire for a communal liturgy directed toward healing Mortal-Spirit relations. Systemites wanted to link their personal spiritual life with that of the entire biosphere in which they dwelled.

  Perhaps everything prays, Dara contemplated -- not only terrans.

  That was when they had planted the small tree as a symbol of Lunon's young life...as if, as the tree grew, somehow Lunon was still alive.

  Now that symbolic tree was dead, as the planet was dying, as Lunon was gone ... Night approached, a dark border overwhelming the short daylight. The land below the promontory grew dark quickly as the planet's chaotic orbit threw the normal rhythms of day and night out of sync.

  The sky that domed over the plateau reddened and deepened to purplish twilight; against the mountain-studded horizon, the flaming tri-suns slipped low, their streaming rays painting the grave's white marker stone tiger-lily orange. The words etched on its facing from a fine-tuned laser beam darkened hauntingly:

  Do not stand at my grave and weep

  I am not there. I do not sleep.

  I am a thousand winds that blow.

  I am the diamond glint on snow.

  I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

  I am the gentle autumn rain.

  When you wake in the morning hush

  I am the swift, uplifting rush

  Of quiet birds in circling flight.

  I am the soft starlight at night.

  Do not stand at my grave and weep.

  I am not there. I do not sleep.

  Dara retrieved Lunon's rank insignia pin from her uniform pant pocket. It was one of the last mementos she still possessed of her dead offspring. Reverently, she set it at the head of the grave on top of the marker stone. As the alloy contacted the mineral, Dara had Lunon's death rushing back into her thoughts.

  She bitterly remembered she had felt almost unbearable guilt; it was she who had urged Nicraan to mate with Moela, causing the betrayal of Retho. Dara closed her eyes, tried to forget Lunon's stiff and skeletal remains, the husk left behind after the crivit had digested his body. Yet the yawning horror of it all could not be closed out. Somewhere, she could hear a female shrieking in horror. Then she remembered, that female had been her.

  Suddenly Dara winced -- and not because she'd scratched herself on the headstone. I wish I could take you with us. And, for as long as this ugly hunk of rock stays intact, you'll have a marker. Some tribute to signify your physical existence -- to testify your significance to the bitter end, my son.

  Even to this moment, Dara could not accept what she had witnessed; she could not believe the fact that Lunon was dead. Swallowing her agony whole, Dara sank down to a
crouch, gritted her teeth, and crammed her eyes shut to lock inside what she was feeling. She boiled and seethed, fighting for control. The shafts of dusk shined on her hair and turned it copper. Her features looked harsh in that light, skeletal, as if having been lit from under her chin.

  Breathing like an animal, she began to quake with misery and rage; she slammed her knuckles on the verdant soil. Not even a damned body left to mourn over, she bitterly thought to herself, fighting against her internal grief. Nothing physical, not even remains, to bid farewell too!

  Dara's own thoughts lay hard around her until she could feel the weight on her legs and her heart. She tapped her chest with the flat of her hand, as though to borrow a bit of her heartbeat to swear an oath that Lunon's memory would never fade.

  Slowly she got up, looking stricken and put some space between herself and the mound. She touched her breast, her face. She still felt weak. Her head spun from more than fatigue. Gnarled black trees with twisting exposed roots loomed over her, and great broken slabs of stone projected from the ground.

  Standing at attention, Dara stayed motionless several moments in the cooling air, reflecting on the loss of her cheerful, carefree child. Tears began to sting her moist eyes as she turned her attention skyward toward the brilliant suns-set above the darkening landscape. Although any observer might have thought her tears were from eyestrain, Dara knew otherwise. It was her heart that was under duress and not her eyes.

  Oh, Great Oversoul of the Collective, Dara spoke to herself, I pray for myself in order that I may be healed. I pray for my cleansing and the renewal of my spirit...

  The trill of her commpin captured and diverted her attention away from her mournful reverie. Using her right hand's index and middle fingers, she applied a gentle pressure on the insignia.

  "D-Dara, here. Go," she responded, after clearing her throat of emotion.

  "Eland en route to retrieve you," Capel's voice echoed solemnly off the brisk air.

  Capel had left Dara to pay her last respects to their son while he went on to retrieve the last of the remaining outer perimeter gear. His voice held a trace of regret for not having the psychological strength to touch and deal with his emotions concerning the death of their youngest. Dara understood, she always seemed to understand.

  "Understood." Dara tabbed off the pin, then lifted her gaze overhead at the sound of a droning antigrav engine.

  The Pioneer Pod 4's shuttlecraft streaked through the brackish sky blinking its running lights as it moved to settle gracefully, softly in the clearing, with only a minor stirring of dust as its three-point landing gear made earthen contact. As the whine of the compact shuttle engine signaled stand-by mode, in the background, there came a sound that could have been from some great cannon. The gentle quake that followed the shock wave left the ridge undisturbed, but the entire region suddenly erupted with startled life in response. In flocking waves, flying wildlife took flight and darted with all urgency through the sky. On the valley floor, ruminating herds stampeded with a maddened fury. A series of roars, squawks, hoots, whistles, caws, honks, and screeches filled the air as the multitudes of congregating animals either quickly flew overhead or ran away from the suddenly unstable caldera.

  Dara hesitated, thinking one more time of her son.

  "Good-bye, my love, may you be at peace within the Collective," she whispered, and then suddenly the only thing she wanted was to return to the ship, and get off this damned planet.

  CHAPTER TWENTY:

  The planet had become a world of silvery, roiling sky. Land masses on the planet’s night side had been dominated by countless fires as continental plates collided under the duress of unimaginable tidal forces, buckling in a massive molten hemorrhage. The entire three-quarters of planetscape occupied by land were outlined by a blaze of cracked mantle flame resembling a burning patchwork quilt. The one-quarter ribbon of water boiled and percolated under the influence of erupting undersea volcano chains going apocalyptic. Columns of smoke rose like soiled pillars in the spreading daylight as the terminator passed into the harsh glare of the ternary solar group’s primary, a yellow-white F-type star.

  This world only had isolated pockets of gigantic inland seas; but now there were oceans on the horizon, roiling and heaving under the shining clouds that were slowly edging themselves over the ragged mountainscape that encompassed the valley floor. With terrifying rapidity, clouds gathered over the surface of the planet; rain scattered, pelted, and scoured the land.

  If the Aidennians could have peered down on the planet at the thunderstorms, they would have sent a shiver of fear through each. Over the northern hemisphere’s western inland sea, the gathering clouds were some thirty mets high, the top twenty mets. And, then they were have seen another one, farther south.

  Clashing together into the supercontinent’s gulf coast, the thunderstorms rolled, one piling on another, colliding like an avalanche in the sky. Gourd-like trees were tossed on their stilted roots, the shore awash with runoff. Thunder boomed and lighting stalked the desert landmarks, striking the plateaus. Wind poured in, wet and dank, the kind of wind that flails and leaps around at the base of a big storm, the wind that worries between the gusts that crush.

  From the Pioneer Pod 4 crew's point-of-view, there seemed only to be sky. Even the mammoth flatlands that covered hundreds of mets of acreage seem dwarfed by the sudden attention the sky now demanded. There was a peculiar atmospheric aura now to the sky, a kind of shimmer in the stratosphere that rippled and flowed with strange effects before the forefront of the first thunderheads’ crowning the distant bluffs. The red supergiant's influence on the expanse of the planet's seas increased enough to cause submarine volcanoes to erupt, distorting the purple-tint of the seawater into a fierce red and yellow, an enormous orange wave burst upward and exploded into steam; tremendous volumes of tangerine-hued water vaporizing. The effluvium darkened as it continued to rise into the atmosphere and collect with the already present adumbrated cloud cover. Coupled together the two brume formations rapidly thickened and spread, obscuring the surface of the world.

  Enormous cactus-like trees stretched bulbous fingers to the smoky sky. On the sandy, rocky surface, gray, leathery succulents spread their thick leaves like wounded wings, soaking up what little sun shone. The ground quivered gently, like a caress – an illusion as desert gravel crunched as it slid into ancient rounded, weatherworn stones.

  The rumble of the temblor surrounded the crash site caldera. On the horizon, it began to rain as the quake faded into a temporary calm.

  Capel Perezsire finished his glass of reconstituted fruit juice and studied the image out the bay viewport before him. Working the tactical panel on the command spread below the panoramic bowport, he pulled up enhanced images of the planet’s surface, displaying them as inserts in holosets corners, superimposing them over the view of the planet as seen from the podship’s atmospheric-orbital refractory scans.

  The commander’s efforts yielded a dispiriting montage of burning landscapes, panicked, fleeing herbivore herds that resembled hives of insects, massive winged migratory jams, funnel clouds, floods, and other extreme weather phenomena. Yet the strangest sights were the intermittent, multicolored flashes – the angry reds and bilious greens of energy discharges – released by the relentless unraveling of ever-larger volumes of planetary crust. He touched a contact point on the command panel and leaned over to look closely at another flickering holoset. The countdown to launch glowed hauntingly before him... nearly thirty nodes had passed since Operation Evacuation had started. Would there be enough time? Capel asked himself.

  The planetary sensors had been reacting to the world since the moment the countdown had been initiated, but the commander barely heard it. Now the indicator forced itself on his attention. The planet’s core readings were extremely unstable, and changing rapidly --. He rubbed his brow and scrunched his eyes shut. He could feel a truly brutal headache coming on. Opening his eyes, he turned to look over his shoulder at approaching foo
tsteps.

  “I’ve been tracking a severe and unnatural age curve for the planet,” he said without any salutation. “The harmonic motion of the core is increasing in amplitude at a rate that is making me very nervous.”

  Data pad in hand, Nicraan Matasire moved toward Capel from the quarterdeck computer wall. The pilot scrolled down at the hand-held tablet before him, "I've run a full diagnostic on all the ship's systems, Commander," Nicraan reported, handing the data pad to the alerted Capel. "Even though we’ve attuned the navigation system, still looks like we're going to have to hand inspect some of the navigational equipment as well as the gravitational hardware. Other than that, most of the main systems are on line."

  "Where do you suggest we begin at this stage of the countdown?" Capel sounded frustrated.

  Giving his commander a sympathetic grin, Nicraan said, "I've already alerted each of the crew on what system to investigate within their area of expertise. For you and I, all that remains is the astrogator and its support hardware and the unitectic gravity field projector."

  "The field projector? On the undercarriage?" Capel sighed.

  Nicraan understood the commander's reaction. A by-product of the antigravity drive technology permitted a normal gravitational field to be maintained within the spaceship during interstellar flight. This was all made possible via an eighty kilowatt inverse gravity field projector located directly below the antigravity drive situated on the Pioneer's underside. At present, the Pod was primarily buried in a landfill and this circular concave track projector on the lower region of the spacecraft was almost inaccessible except for two approaches: one was aft from down the sloped grade to the 'Rover's garage and the other was through the access utility panels’ mid-deck on the lower level. "Computer reports that the energy radiating fins need adjusting," he said. “But, not to fret, the field projector’s iris is closed so we can use the utility panels’ access mid-deck, lower level.”