by S. H. Jucha
After wrestling and welding a plate into a ceiling corner, which had required them to cut out an overhead brace in order to access the hole, they took a break in the temporary airlock for water. Alex used the opportunity to ask the twins about their duties.
Étienne and Alain happily discussed their lives as escorts to Ser. The more they chatted on about their companionship with Ser, the more confused Alex became. Jealousy crept into his thoughts as the twins discussed the necessity to remain close to Renée at all times and the satisfaction and pleasure they found in her company, and vice versa.
Julian was fully engaged in multiple projects, especially in monitoring all the New Terran comm traffic his bandwidth could handle, so the changes in Alex’s physiological readings, transmitted to him via the ear comm, didn’t catch his attention immediately. When it did, he replayed the conversation, a sub-routine having been assigned to record any conversation with their all-too-important rescuer. Correlating the twin’s use of Méridien terms with those same words in Alex’s language, Julien, via priority override, interrupted Alain mid-sentence.
Julien announced privately to the three Méridiens,
Julien’s words caused more than one heartbeat to skip. The twins realized they had been explaining to Alex how much they enjoyed bedding Ser and how pleased she was with their performance. Their faces reddened with embarrassment, and they began apologizing profusely, talking over each other until Alain quieted, allowing his crèche-mate to take up the explanation.
It was Claude, standing behind Alex, who sent Étienne and Alain the image of the crushed, empty water bottle in Alex’s hand. A Méridien would have had to jump on the metal-alloy container several times to equal the damage done by Alex’s hand.
Absorbing the inherent message behind the image, the twins carefully resumed their clarification, ensuring Alex fully understood the miscommunication. They protected Ser from over-casual contact with citizens, they explained. They also accompanied her to meals when she was away from House or ship, deterred the wild fauna of the colonies, and managed the transport-delivery of materials Ser contracted for on the spot.
Later, Alex wondered about his reaction to the translation error. It was an uncomfortable reminder of his abysmal track record with university women, which is why he decided not to dwell on it.
When they resumed their work, he asked the twins about their weapons, which he hadn’t seen them wearing since their first meal together. They launched into a detailed explanation, describing the model’s mechanical-electronic components, the stun levels, and the crystals that fed the energy spooling process, allowing for multiple shots with no recharge time. What Alex took away from the conversation was the extreme care that had been taken to interweave safeguards to ensure that the weapon could only incapacitate another being or creature. He was once again struck by how vulnerable the Méridiens were to malevolent external forces.
Alex discovered that the twins had used their side arms only once, when they were forced to stun a Bellamonde herbivore that had charged them. They said Renée had cried over the creature’s huge, prone body and insisted they remain with the animal until the stun wore off since predators were in the area. They had never had an occasion to fire them at a Méridien.
* * *
Renée was in her suite when she reviewed Alain’s vid of the stun gun discussion with Alex. The vid reminded her to query Julien for an update of his monitoring efforts.
queried Renée.
Renée asked.
Julien explained.
Renée considered the information she was gathering on the New Terrans. Alex’s stature was probably typical of his people since, according to Julien, his ship’s central hub, while in rotation, delivered twenty-four percent greater gravity than the Rêveur maintained. Terese had shared that their mothers endured natural child birth. Summarizing, she had sent,
The New Terrans were very different from her people, but, through Julien’s insights, she was realizing there was value in those differences. And while she was reluctant to use her one example, Captain Racine, as a general indicator, they wouldn’t be able to return home for years, if ever, without the New Terrans’ help.
So much rode on her making the right decisions in the coming days—not just for their immediate needs, but for her people’s future. She wasn’t consoled by the fact that the attack of the Celeste and, subsequently, the Rêveur had occurred far from the Confederation’s major space lanes. A great deal of time had passed, and odds were good that the silver ship or one of its brethren had discovered her people’s colonies. In her heart, she believed danger was coming to the Confederation. If there was to be a clash with the silver ships, she wondered, who is better equipped to defend our worlds…Méridiens or New Terrans?
-9-
In the evening, one day short of the scheduled refueling rendezvous, Alex was seated on the Rêveur’s bridge when he heard the double doors whisper open.
“Good evening, Renée,” he greeted her with a smile. “Would you like the lights up?”
“No, please, Captain, this is fine.” She knew Alex enjoyed the darkened view through the bridge’s plex-crystal shield, which offered a 150-degree panorama of the stars from the ship’s bow. Julien had shared with her that Alex’s ship had no such view, only external vid cameras relayed to small bridge screens. She slid into the command chair next to him and it transformed to cradle her body. They sat in companionable silence, enjoying the stars—something that as a young girl she’d done with her father and uncles, all Captains of their House ships.
After a while, she broached the subject that had been preying on her mind. “Captain, Julien has learned that your home world was settled 732 years ago and he calculates from your calendar and planet’s solar orbit that this happened at about the same time my ancestors landed on Méridien.”
Alex looked over to her, “Yes, he shared those calculations with me. Our colony ships probably left Earth within a decade or two of one another.”
She struggled with how to ask her question. Finally she said, “What happened to your people?”
“You mean how is it we appear to be your backward cousins?” he replied, offering her a lop-sided grin.
She reached out and rested a hand on his forearm, intending to lessen the awkwardness of the moment, but pleased to have an excuse to touch him nonetheless. “It’s only technology, Alex.”
The touch of her hand and the use of his given name, a first for her, softened his discomfort. “To answer your question,” he said, and he related the story of his people as he had been taught it.
Their colony ship, the New Terra, was one of the two ships launched from Earth’s orbit by the
North American Confederation (NAC), Israel, and Japan. The New Terra carried 52,000 passengers in deep sleep modules with 1,200 crew members rotating in shifts of one hundred, one year on and eleven years off.
En route to their chosen star, Cepheus, they ran into an enormous asteroid field, their huge ship unable to dodge the wide swath of oncoming pebbles, stones, and boulder-size space rocks. Penetrated in hundreds of places, the ship sustained major damage to its engines, environmental support and deep-sleep module bays. Over 28,000 men, women, and children died in their sleep.
Their original destination was now beyond reach. They had one option—Oistos, a yellow star that had been an alternate choice in the original mission planning. Probes had graded the system’s goldilocks planet only seven points less, on a scale of one hundred, than their original destination. They’d pass near it. It required they hold the ship together for seven months and then abandon it, launching shuttles loaded with food, supplies, and the few colonists they could carry.
Once the decision was made by the New Terra’s Captain, Lem Ulam, the crew sealed off many portions of the ship, preserving air and environmental services for a small living and storage space. Six crew members crammed into cabins, designed to accommodate two people.
The Captain and officers planned the shuttle trip—best exit time, trip requirements, planetfall requirements, and the maximum number of people that could be carried. Unfortunately, the New Terra carried just twenty-two shuttles. Once the extensive supplies necessary for a successful colony landing were loaded, they only had air and space for 2,400 passengers and crew. The fact that less than a tenth of the remaining survivors would be able to make the trip was a difficult concept for the crew to absorb. Arguments often broke out as opponents of the present plan pushed forward alternatives, although none of those proved feasible.
The Captain, First Mate, and the Chief Medical Officer formed a committee to select the colonists who would be given space on the shuttles. Healthy families, comprised of young parents and children older than seven, were given priority, especially if the parents possessed multiple skills—combinations of mechanical or chemical engineering, manufacturing, applied physics, bio-technology, medicine, law, celestial navigation, or crop and livestock cultivation.
All of the heavy terra-forming equipment and large-scale manufacturing machinery had to be left behind. Premium space was allotted for small items—computers and their libraries, navigation and comm equipment, medical diagnostic equipment, laboratory test equipment, hand weapons, human and animal ova-sperm stock, seed stock, and tool and circuitry production machinery.
When the time approached, the crews readied the shuttles, knowing that only half of them had been selected by the committee. The Captain waited until two days before the exodus to wake the 2,347 sleepers who would join the fifty-three crew members. The sleepers, groggy from their recent awakening, were told that an accident had necessitated that they abandon ship. When the shuttles were filled, they exited the landing bays and set course for nearby Oistos.
The colony ship, with air and power running low, was left to glide on into the dark, its crew of forty-seven, led by the Second Mate, monitored the 21,000 plus humans still in deep-sleep.
Originally, the Captain had announced he would remain aboard the New Terra, but it was the opinion of the crew, to a person, that their journey and their survival, if they made planetfall, would require a strong leader, and the Captain was an imminently respected man. So, at the crew’s near maniacal insistence, the Captain joined the First Mate, the New Terra’s primary navigator, in the lead shuttle when they set course for Oistos, their last hope.
Additional oxygen tanks, CO2 filtration units, and racks of algae tanks had been crammed into each of the massive shuttles to bolster their chance of making landfall. Though each shuttle had been designed to seat 340 passengers, all the seats had been torn out before the exodus. The approximately one hundred passengers and crew, traveling in each shuttle, slept on the equipment crates.
Of the twenty-two shuttles that launched, twenty-one successfully reached Oistos. One unfortunate shuttle suffered an engine malfunction soon after launching. While the senior officers were examining their rescue options, the troubled shuttle exploded in a massive fireball.
When the shuttles passed a gas giant, now called Seda, as they entered the Oistos system, wild cheering and celebration broke out. The back-slapping, hugs, tears, and kisses doubled when they made orbit around their target planet. To the survivors’ amazement, the original probe’s information appeared accurate. The planet had many similarities to Earth—1.12 gravities; half the planet covered in ocean waters; large lakes dotting the continents; and abundant tall trees. Later they would discover the darker realities of their world, but from orbit it appeared as if fortune had smiled on them. They called their home New Terra, in memory of the tens of thousands of passengers and crew still aboard their colony ship.
The oxygen and fuel in the shuttles was nearly exhausted by the time they reached their new home, forcing them to land within days. And while the world looked picturesque from on high, it held some nasty surprises, which eventually cost the New Terra survivors more than half their paltry number.
Botanists, analyzing the plants and soil, announced the bad news that the flora was inedible. Alkaloids in the plants made them poisonous. Even worse, bacteria and other bio-forms in the soil consumed their precious stock of Earth seeds before they could sprout. The colonists built elevated sheds, cleansed the soil of microbes pail by pail, and planted their remaining seed stock. Their food supplies dwindled while they waited for their plantings to bear fruit. An enterprising bio-chemist discovered she could remove the alkaloids from several varieties of local mushrooms and fungi after they were pulverized into a mush, and starvation, if not completely averted, was slowed.
But the most heart-breaking trauma the colonists endured was the loss of every baby. Most were miscarried or still-born. A few mothers, who were able to give birth, lost their children within months. It would be years before bio-chemists and doctors identified the problem as a subtle disruption of the fetal hormonal levels. Then more years would pass before they identified the responsible pathogens and found a way to protect the growing fetuses.
An auspicious day arrived when a new born reached her first birthday. Mothers had given up naming their children, the names only adding to the pain of their loss. Now, the little girl, named Prima on her first birthday, became a moment of great joy and celebration. Hope, so long buried and forgotten, rose again. Of the 2,291 castaways who had landed, 938 colonists saw the beginning of their new society.
Later generations came to love their second home despite the tragedy that had befallen the colonists. Theirs had been the second colony ship launched from Earth, so they expected many more intrepid adventurers to populate their corner of the galaxy. They never learned that Earth, continuing to succumb to systemic pollution, global climate change, coastal city flooding, droughts that killed crops and animals, and unceasing regional wars for dwindling resources, especially for clean, fresh water, would launch only three more colony ships.
On the eve of the population surpassing one hundred million, legislation was passed by the Assembly authorizing the funds for the Niomedes Experiment. Although their footprint on the land was still minimal, the populace remembered why their forefathers were forced to abandon Earth. They would conquer space before they exhausted their planet’s resources. Eighty-three years ago, under the government’s supervision, science and industry had produced a plan to construct self-contained habitats on the next planet outward of New Terra, Niomedes, a large ball of rock and frozen gases.
The habitats were designed as experiments to test various construction processes, energy systems, life environments, and methods of food production, attempting to find the cheapest yet safest ways to build self-contained and self-supporting habitats, while ensuring the mental well-being of the inhabitants.
As the history of his people came
to a close, Alex continued with his family’s story. His parents, with the aid of government funding, had joined the Niomedes Experiment, contracting to supply ice asteroids for the Niomedes Habitats and the mining companies on Ganymede’s moons, which supplied much of the processed metals needed to build the habitats.
While their ship, the No Bounds, was under government contract, his parents earned salaries, and all of their reaction mass and supplies were provided by the government. After their eight-year contract was up, the ship was granted to them.
When Alex completed university and re-joined his family aboard their tug, he sold his parents on his g-sling program despite the early failures of so many explorer-tug captains. Their greatest initial challenge was finding a buyer who was willing to take the same gamble. Alex’s thought was to enlist his staunchest supporter, Dr. Mallard.
According to Professor Mallard’s story, which she later relayed to him, she’d listened to his message and immediately met with her Dean. Moments later, the two of them made their way to the Chancellor’s office. The Chancellor, convinced by the Dean and the professor, had commed his friend, the Honorable Mr. William Drake, the new Minister of Space Exploration and the individual in charge of the Niomedes Experiment.
Dubious though he was, the Minister accepted the Chancellor’s recommendations. He, in turn, contacted the President of Purity Ores, Samuel B. Hunsader, at his fishing retreat. Hunsader wasn’t as quick to acquiesce. So a deal was struck. Purity Ores would contract with the Racine family at a discount and the Ministry would cover any losses, at double the creds.
Duggan and Kathy Racine received a message several days later from the Purity Ores General Manager on Cressida stating, “We will contract with the No Bounds for six ice asteroids to be delivered within a 200 day period, following the arrival of the first delivery, on passive approach. In recognition of the risk we’re taking, we will pay seventy-five percent of market price for each. Ten percent will constitute a non-refundable down payment and the remainder will be paid on delivery within a 100K km approach.”