Exodus (The Exodus Trilogy)

by Christensen, Andreas

  Kenneth listened intently as he followed the progress of the men and women working the problem, and as helpless as he was, locked in his sealed compartment with no way to be of any assistance, he knew the technicians were capable and resourceful. Half an hour later, one of them was space walking outside, tethered to the ship by a long wire. He had to get past several cargo compartments before he could access the shield behind which the magnetic sail was stowed. But just as he located the hole, the wire that tethered him got stuck. He could see that the hole was bigger than they had thought, and that it needed immediate repair, otherwise it would widen and the entire sail would be jeopardized. Without the magnetic sail, the ship would be unable to decelerate enough to enter Aurora orbit, and they risked overshooting the planet, with no way to turn the starship around. The technician discussed it with the on-board team for maybe a minute, and it was decided he had to perform a manual repair as soon as possible. Indeed, this was a perilous situation, made more so because the technician had to unhook himself from the tether in order to reach and repair the hole. He had to be sure to maintain physical contact with the ship at all times, or risk being adrift in space with no hope of rescue. There would be no second chances, should he slip or lose his grip. Kenneth's eyes were fixed on his screen, watching the technician slowly and very carefully proceed, creeping along the ship’s hull toward the hole. When he reached it, he immediately started repairing the damage with spares he’d carried along in a bag fixed to his EVA suit.

  “All right, it’s done. Returning to airlock,” Kenneth heard the technician say. He let out a relieved breath. The danger was passed, and unless there were more incidents like this one, they should be safe until they reached Aurora. Just as he was about to put his tablet away, he heard loud, excited voices on the speaker, and he looked at his tablet again. It seemed the technician had forgotten to latch onto the wire again, and had slipped as he was creeping along the hull toward the airlock. Now he was floating away from the ship, and fast.

  “We’ll get you, Vinnie. Just hang on,” he heard someone say. There was a moment of silence, before he heard the technician, Vinnie, again.

  “Forget it, guys. You won’t get to me in time. I’m already a hundred meters out. In thirty seconds, it’ll be more than two hundred. It’s going too fast. I don’t want you to risk it.” Kenneth thought he understood what Vinnie was talking about. He was caught up in an outward motion and gaining speed. There was no way that the others would get a wire to him, simply because the wire would soon be moving slower than he was. He was lost, and he knew it. The amazing thing was that he was so calm about it, Kenneth thought. He wondered whether it was heroism or fatalism. But whatever it was, somehow, in a bizarre way, he thought the dying man’s acceptance of his fate was admirable.

  2202 ~ Interstellar space

  Secured to the outside of one of the cargo compartments, there were four large containers. They were insulated and deftly hidden from anyone inspecting the ship, either manually or using the bots. A decade ago, there had been an incident, in which one man had died, where the starship had gotten too close to a meteor tail. The hole that the now-deceased technician had repaired had been on the outer layer of the forward compartment, where the magnetic sail was stowed. The four containers were located right behind where the hole had been, and the technician had actually been crawling across them, without noticing the oddness of having containers secured to the outside, instead of having them safely stowed within the ordinary cargo containers. Thomas Dunn shook his head at the thought. Of course, the technician had probably been too busy to notice, or too busy to report the thing. Whatever the reason, the containers remained hidden.

  Besides being out of sight, the containers officially weren’t even on board. They were nowhere to be found on the cargo manifest, and just a few people knew they were even there. Even fewer knew what they contained. Even Thomas, having been part of smuggling them on board, didn’t know exactly what they held, but he could think of a few things, and none of them were pleasant. His primary suspicion was that they held weapons. There were weapons on board, of course. No one knew what to expect once they reached Aurora, but if there was some sort of animal life there, the weapons might be necessary, both for protection and for hunting. But Thomas suspected the containers held far worse weapons than rifles and handguns. If Havelar and his cronies were to establish their domain, they would need a sufficient armory, and back on Earth there was a range of weapons that would be able to perform such a role. So, although there might be other possibilities, weapons were what he thought most likely.

  He knew the area where the containers were hidden well, because he’d been out there once before, just a few days ago. He had been nervous, knowing that one wrong step would result in the same fate that had befallen the poor technician. But he’d done what he intended to, and got safely back without anyone noticing. And now he had a tracker placed on each of the containers, which would allow him to know exactly where they landed, once they were safely down on Aurora. Even if Havelar managed to put them all safely down, there would be a slight chance that one of them could be stolen away. He didn’t yet know how, but as always, he prepared to improvise. It had worked well so far.

  Chapter 13

  2244 ~ Outer 55 Cancri A system

  Admiral Greg Hamilton stood on the bridge of the Exodus and looked out at the stars. 55 Cancri was far off in the distance, barely visible to the naked eye, and in just a few months, they would start waking the rest of the crew and passengers. At the moment, close to fifty people were awake, and although there was a mood of relief and joy as the journey seemed to draw to a close, most of those awake right now were just too busy to really savor these moments. For the last fifteen years, the magnetic sails had been deployed, and were giving the ship the necessary deceleration to be able to enter an orbit around Aurora. So far everything had gone according to plan, and Hamilton was relieved that no sudden malfunctions had occurred. After all, more than a century and a half had passed since they left Earth, so many things could have happened in that time. There had been the slingshots, which had put an enormous strain on the structure of the Exodus, the journey through the Oort Cloud, littered with comets and debris, a nerve-racking experience for those awake at the time, the encounter with a comet that cost the life of a brave technician, and other less costly incidents.

  The next hurdle would be to find a stable orbit, and then of course the descent to the planet. They had gathered much more data on the planet itself during the course of the journey, although many questions still remained, such as what forms of life it contained. But there were more and more data coming in as to temperature and atmospheric conditions, and so far everything looked good, and the planet still looked habitable, although it was far too early to tell whether Aurora had a breathable atmosphere. There were so many other factors that were important about the atmosphere, and whether it was breathable was something that couldn’t be fully determined until they were on the ground. Even if the composition was just right, they would have to determine whether it contained trace elements that could be harmful, or dangerous bacteria or spores, and a lot of other airborne elements that could only be detected up close.

  Greg Hamilton had reason to be a happy man, but still he worried. Although there was still a lot to be done before they were safely in orbit, and even more before they were able to walk on their new home world, those challenges were not what worried him. The thing that concerned him was what kind of life they would create for themselves, once the bare necessities of survival were overcome. He knew that George Havelar had been appointed governor by the president, back in the twenty-first century, but he also knew that a lot of people questioned what kind of authority a president—long dead, on a world probably just as dead—had to give any sort of directions. He also knew that Havelar, although an assertive and powerful man, did have enemies. Not personally, as far as he knew, but as the representative of a system that had turned oppressive and inhuman in its las
t decades. And he felt torn. A military man to the core, Hamilton knew how important it was to have a chain of command when going into unknown territory. Who knew what dangers and obstacles they’d encounter? So having a set leadership from the start was important, and could prove the difference between a mission accomplished and an utter failure, which in this case could prove lethal, not just to the ones involved, but for an entire species. On the other hand, he’d never been comfortable with the way things had developed back on Earth, and although for the most part, he’d been a world apart from everything that had happened back home, he’d seen what had happened to civilian society. So perhaps it would have been better to start over from scratch, and have an elected leadership even before first landing. But the difficulty with that was that there were no good alternatives; no one to challenge Havelar and his Consortium allies. It was analogue to the situation in America when they left. In a one-party system, there could be no well-known, effective opposition, and that was also the case here. So in the end, they would have to go with the old system and its workings, until something else could grow to actually challenge the established system. He only hoped the transition would be smooth. What he feared the most was that Havelar and his crew would try to turn him and the rest of the military contingent into tools of oppression. Although he was old and experienced enough to withstand such a course, there would always be someone ready to take his place. And a military background, although very positive in the sense of commitment and ability to carry out dangerous and demanding tasks, always held a propensity for obedience and misunderstood loyalty. Under the proper conditions, that could easily turn them into willing tools of malice.

  2245 ~ Aurora orbit

  Waking up from Sleep the second time around was not nearly as bad as the last time. The first time she woke, about two decades into the journey through space, the experience had been more painful, and she had been coughing and spitting for almost half an hour, as her body tried to empty her lungs and stomach of fluids, a ripping, agonizing fight back to life from a near-death existence. Shivering cold, wet from the life-sustaining but nevertheless quite awful liquids that had surrounded her since leaving Earth. It had taken days before she felt normal again, and even then, the memory would occasionally make her shiver. Yes, she had quietly dreaded the moment she would have to experience all that again, back when she let herself slip into her second dreamless sleep, although the adventure, of course, had always taken precedence.

  But for Maria Solis, the second waking couldn’t have been farther from the horrors of the first time around. Her expectations were based on her knowledge at the time, and since then, something extraordinary, or maybe not so extraordinary, had happened; time had passed. A long time had passed. When she later thought back on it, she realized her surprise was due to a simple fact one should not overlook, namely the fact that human minds are shaped to expect the known. And the known at the time had been her own experience; anything else would have been theoretical. But by the time she was woken again, several lifetimes had passed, and the ongoing labor of the scientists and engineers and technicians, combined with the most advanced AI ever created, had developed a better way of reviving its sleeping inhabitants. For more than a century, that work had steadily progressed, and when considering the technological development in the last century back on Earth, there was no reason to expect any of it to be even remotely the same as it had been.

  It could probably best be described as waking up, fully rested, on a sunny day in spring, to the smell of fresh-brewed coffee, in a house on the beach, where the sounds of seagulls would compete with the surf breaking on the smooth sands. Of course, it wasn’t entirely like that, but that was how it felt anyway, and it was the best way to describe it, Maria thought. Nice. After a few minutes of coming to terms with where she was, and what she was doing there, she stood up from the soft bed, she couldn’t describe it in any other way, and took the cotton-like blue coveralls laid out for her. She was alone in a square, warmly lit room, not spacious by any means, but unlike what she remembered from before Sleep, and there was a single door, through which she could hear subdued voices. She quickly got dressed and walked toward the door. For a second, she let her hand run across her shaven scalp. Why hadn’t they found a way to fix that? She almost laughed out loud and shook her head at her girlish notions. It would grow back, of course, but she still felt naked without her hair. She paused before the door, then opened it and stepped out into the corridor.

  Outside, she almost bumped into her parents. They seemed surprised, but happy to see her.

  “Maria,” her mother said, hugging her fiercely.

  “We didn’t think you’d be up yet. We’ve been out here for half an hour.” Her father chuckled, while joining his wife and daughter in a loving group hug.

  “It’s probably easier on you young people. Me, I guess it took hours before I could even move. It was a whole lot easier than the first time, but my muscles were still sore and my joints stiff. Turns out your old man has gotten older after all.” Maria smiled fondly at him. It seemed he had a point. His half-inch long hair showed a few more grey patches now. All of them had been awake once during the flight, which meant two years, and cryo sleep didn’t completely halt metabolism, just slowed it considerably. From what she’d learned, they would all have aged from two to three years while deep in Sleep. That meant she would be what, thirty, thirty-one? Ramon’s tablet pinged, and he looked down at it. At the same time, Isabella and Maria received messages on their tablets as well.

  “Ah, it’s a message on the common channel. There will be a big meeting tomorrow, for everyone to attend via the screens.” There was nowhere to gather everyone on board, so such meetings would have to be conducted by everyone gathering in small groups in the various living quarters that each contained conference equipment.

  “I guess there will be some info on what Aurora looks like,” he said.

  “So I guess that most people are already awake then?” Maria asked. Her father nodded, smiling, and Isabella took her hand.

  “Actually, you were the last, Maria. Everyone’s awake now.”

  “Let’s all go to the viewing gallery,” her father said.

  “We can see Aurora from there. It’s an amazing sight, Maria. Our new home.” Somehow he looked like a schoolboy, his expression at least thirty years younger than his age. Maria couldn’t help but laugh before she hugged her father again. Serious businessman or not, he had always been a lot of fun, she thought. The eight years of preparations, from when Devastator was discovered until the Exodus left Earth orbit, had taken a huge toll on him, but somehow he seemed to have regained his youthful energy as the burden of responsibility had been replaced by a spirit of adventure. She thought she’d never seen him as full of life and anticipation as now. She kissed him affectionately, while thinking how lucky she was. Most of the others on board had left someone back on Earth, and of course she had left friends as well, but she had her family around her, which was something few others had. And now she looked forward to her new life, and whatever discoveries awaited her on the new world.

  2245 ~ Aurora orbit

  Kenneth Taylor was standing in a crowded room, where the large screen on the wall showed an image of the main science lab. The man standing next to him was that young administrative employee of the Consortium, Thomas Dunn, whom he’d become acquainted with just before the Exodus left Earth orbit. A strange young man, Kenneth thought, but he sort of liked him. Even after talking to him several times, he still didn’t know much about him though. It seemed Mr. Dunn was the kind of man who valued his privacy, and Kenneth respected that. It was a trait they both shared.

  The camera zoomed in on a man about Kenneth’s own age, obviously the admiral, who smiled beneath a thick mustache, and proceeded to introduce some of the other people standing beside him.

  “Dr. Karin Svensson here, our astronomer, will explain what we have found so far when it comes to the star system and atmospheric conditions on Auror
a. On her right, you have Professor Jeremiah Lowell, who will go through the findings on planetary conditions, geology, and so forth. My executive officer, Major Tina Hammer, will be leading the first landing party, and she will tell you a little of what will await you on the ground. Well, enough talking on my part, let me just tell you how pleased I am that we managed to get here.” He took a brief pause.

  “Aurora … It’s been a hell of a journey … And it’s not over yet. So let me just remind you to pay close attention to what is said here today. When we’re entering the new world, there may be dangers that we’ve missed, but the more information you’re able to absorb beforehand, the more prepared you will be for whatever may come.” He smiled again and gestured toward the others.