by Bodicea
Uploading: 11,500 iso-tonnes Element 151 in stasis storage. 11,000,000 litres liquified Argon gas, 12,000 iso-tonnes barinium ore, 300,000 iso-litres tritium, 9,000 iso-tonnes processed beryllium-gallium crystals.
Destination: Kalahari Colony, (System 94 226 Cygnus. Coordinates 2-.1 x —.- x 4-.2 x 1.-.-
Norma Quadrant, Cygnus Sector.) via Starlock 129 “Chesapeake” Port of Departure: Esmerelda Colony, (System 10 655 Vulpeculus. Coordinates 89.1 x 33.2 x 21.1 x 1.1.2 Perseus Quadrant, Vulpeculus Sector.)
This scrap of data represented the extent of the Odyssey Project’s knowledge of Esmerelda colony, a previous stop on the itinerary of a cargo vessel that paid a visit to Republic five thousand years earlier. No one on either Sapphire or Republic could trace an ancestor to Esmerelda colony and no written accounts could be discovered in any of the surviving literature of the Commonwealth period.
Things could be surmised from this account. The colony was relatively nearby, and so had probably been mapped and colonized within a century or two of Sapphire and Republic. Since none of the workers embarking on the Amazonia had been from that colony, it was probably pleasant enough and prosperous enough that its inhabitants did not want to leave. (An optimistic opinion, to be sure.) Because no other mention of Esmerelda appeared in the shipping logs, it was not probably not a major port-of-call on the ancient shipping lanes. So, it was, or had most likely been, a rather small colony.
Linguistic Hermeneutics thought that the name possibly derived from one of the three ancient master languages called espanol, and may have referred to a precious stone. Perhaps there was some ancient kinship between Sapphire and this other colony?
Limited information did not keep the crew from hoping what they would find on Esmerelda. After seeing Meridian colony rotted and decaying under the sway of alien overlords, after seeing EdenWorld reduced to savagery and barbarism, and after seeing Medea scoured to a lifeless hulk by a virulent, life-destroying pathogen, what they wanted to see most was a world on which some semblance of humanity, and of human diginity, had survived.
This mattered to them more than pretty landscapes, warm breezes, and glorious human achievement. Of course, none of them would have objected if Esmerelda provided those things as well.
The hyperspace jump from the dead colony of Medea to the system 10 655 Vulpeculus was relatively short. Thirty-seven-point-five Light Years in normal space or point-three-seven-five light years in the abbreviated realm of hyperspace, a distance Pegasus crossed in only twelve ship-days.
In the command center, PC-1, the crew prepared for re-entry into normal space.
“Transitional Speed in 30 seconds,” Change reported.
“Light sails fully retracted,” reported one helm officer. In hyperspace, Pegasus was surrounded by an array of coherent energy fields that drove the ship through the other universe by channeling the raw energy that coursed through it.
“Gravity Engines to full,” Change ordered.
Lt. Commander Miller appeared from the right-side entrance to Primary Command One.
Without a word, he crossed to the tactical station and drew an interface strip in front of his left ear. He was wearing the high-collared variant of the standard command uniform. It was immaculately pressed, and gave him an air of formality to which the crew was little accustomed.
“Twenty Seconds to transition,” Change reported.
“All sections report secure,” Lear reported.
“Tactical systems secure,” Miller reported.
There was palpable tension on the bridge, little diminished since the first time Pegasus had emerged from hyperspace. Keeler hoped these emergences would never become routine. Every time space opened up before them, there was a world behind it, waiting to be discovered.
Despite his past experience, the prospect still excited him.
“Ten seconds.”
“Safety Systems on-line,” reported an operations officer, which meant that the crew wouldn’t be crushed into bean-bags when the normal laws of physics re-asserted themselves on the ship. This was good to know.
“Five seconds.”
“Structural integrity systems to maximum.” This meant the ship would not fly into bits when the laws of physics re-asserted themselves. This was also good to know.
“Shields holding,” Miller reported, atonally.
Around the ship, space was filled with a brightness and color absent of light. (While the normal universe had photons, the hyperspace had a counter-part that resembled a photon the same way a fractal resembles a perfect circle. This was the kind of light that ate things. It surrounded Pegasus in a thousand shimmering sheets of not-orange, not-white, and not-blue, like a storm of light not meant to be seen by human eyes.
Commander Keeler stood up from his command chair and stared hard into the display at the front of PC-1. While in hyperspace, he had enjoyed a conversation with one of the ship’s senior physicist, who had been studying the transition phenomenon and come up with strong evidence that at the exact moment Pegasus left hyperspace and re-entered the real universe, the ship and everyone on board ceased to exist. Keeler thought this was pretty neat. Although he didn’t understand the quantum mechanics of it, he thought it might explain what had happened to all the socks and data pads that had gone missing since he had come on board.
Eliza Jane Change did the final countdown. “Transition in three … two … one…” The moment of transition had come to be known as ‘the Black Flash.’ A specialist in the ship’s exo-meteorology sub-core had sent a dispatch to her homeworld, saying “if you could be a flash of lightning, retreating into a cloud bank, you might have some idea what it’s like to transition from one universe to another.”
When it had passed, Pegasus was cruising through normal space at half the speed of light.
“All sections report in,” Lear ordered. “Astrogation, find the nearest star and identify. 10
655 Vulpeculus is a single star system.”
“Scan the immediate vicinity for matter,” There was always a slight danger that Pegasus would emerge from hyperspace and smack into a planet or asteroid, which would and the mission and all life on board in less time than it takes to tell.
“Systems check,” said the operations officer, unnecessarily. If anything were wrong anywhere on the ship, an alert would have begun sounding by now.
Keeler looked around PC-1. “Well-done, people. Well-done. We simply must get together like this more often.”
On Pegasus’s exterior, sensors and telescopes deployed, scanning the sky, looking for the brightest and nearest star. They quickly found their mark, a brilliant point of light coolly shimmering in the night, not at all much brighter than some of the stars in its backdrop.
“We have identified a star conforming to the spectrum for 10 655 Vulpeculus,” reported an Astronomics Specialist. “It is 42.3 light days away at heading 31 mark 52.”
“Let me see that,” Lt. Navigator Change insisted, her eyes sharpening, pony tail bobbing behind her neck. She brought up the readings at her own station, read them with incredulity, and then used a Mining Guild curse word involving anatomy and intra-familial relations.
“Is something wrong?” Keeler asked.
Change spun around, with a “damb-right-there’s something wrong” look blazing in her eyes. “I missed,” she said.
“Excuse me.”
“I missed. I put us outside the thirty-light-day perimeter.” She turned back to the astronomical charts.
“Lt. Navigator Change,” Keeler said levelly. “No one expects you to nail every emergence.”
She gave him a fierce look that would have wilted stone roses. “I do.”
“You are still well within the accepted parameters,” Lear assured her. “A few seconds more of transition would have put us closer, but you could not possibly have calculated…” Change would hear none of it. “The astronomers on Republic miscalculated the star’s proper motion,” she snapped, her eyes scanning back and forth between across
the displays.
“At optimum speed, how long until we reach the system. Ship-time,” Keeler asked.
Change’s shoulders slumped visibly. She turned away from the information displays and brought up some navigational calculations. A few seconds was all she needed to give an answer. “At maximum attainable velocity, we can be there in nineteen days, relativistic time.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“Commander, I suggest in the future, we recalculate proper motion of our destination stars in the course of our exploration of new worlds. It will improve the accuracy of my calculations. The farther away from Republic and Sapphire we get, the greater the possibility and degree of error.”
“That sounds reasonable, but, Lieutenant, you have nothing to apologize for.” Change was unaware, and did not care, that no one on the bridge had ever seen her so aggravated, or displaying any such strong degree of emotion for that matter. The inscrutability of the ship’s lead navigator was as well-known as her mastery of the abstruse and arcane science of hyperspatial navigation. Most presumed the two traits went together.
There was time to fill before they would reach the system, to keep the crew and their families contented and efficient. For the pilots of the Aves, there were flight drills and simulations. For the Marines who protected the ship from hostile outside from hostile adversaries, there were battle drills.
The ship also had Guardians, a kind of internal security force. They were mostly staffed by part-timers from other cores and sections of the ship, since there was little need for them.
Theses were sent on “familiarization” tours of the UnderDecks at the orders of Executive Commander Lear.
The technical personnel checked and double-checked the ship’s systems, keeping everything at optimum. Science personnel reviewed the data from the other worlds they had passed.
Off-duty, more athletic competitions were scheduled. Sapphire trounced Republic in hockey, football, and ultimate frisbee. Republic prevailed in soccer and foosball.
The tavern houses and social matrices on the recreation decks were more crowded than usual, and six of the ship’s women would become pregnant before they reached the colony they thought was called Esmerelda.
The day after emergence, Keeler returned to PC-1 and after seeing that the ship was, in fact, one day closer to the system but still surrounded by nothing of interest, he proceeded to the tactical section. Miller was seated next to a member of the crew Keeler did not recognize, a wiry male in his later twenties, with the straight dark hair and folded, almond shaped eyes like Eliza Jane Change. Keeler always wondered where those came from.
“Good afterdawn, Commander,” Miller greeted him.
“I had a dream about you, last night,” Keeler told Miller. “I dreamed we were school children together, and you were much older than I was. You were trying to talk me into eating some brownies, but I didn’t want to because I thought you were playing some kind of trick on me. Care to interpret?”
“Ummmm, I’ll pass.”
“As I was going through my morning hygiene exercises, I checked my log and it said you left a message to check in with you, first thing, and so I am here,” Keeler announced. “This better be interesting. I’m supposed to give a talk to the ship’s children tomorrow. I have yet to prepare the presentation.”
“Words of inspiration for the next generation?”
“Nah, mainly I was going to flush some things through an airlock and watch them explode.”
“I would consider that inspirational.” He called up a series of sensor images. “The ship’s sensors have been focused on the system, trying to map it and find a colony. The third and sixth planets look promising.” His voice was very subdued, Keeler noted.
“While we have been focusing on the star system, Specialist BladeRunner has had the thankless task of monitoring the aft sensors. To his credit, the last two guys on his watch missed it entirely, but Bladerunner found a gravitational flux anomaly, almost directly astern of us. He initiated a mutli-spectral sensor sweep, and got some definition on it.” The image displayed looked to Keeler like a bowl of very lumpy cosmic mashed potatoes.
“What is it?” Keeler asked.
“Something trailing Pegasus, about 5.4 light days behind us, moving at point-22 light speed, and leaving behind a wake typical of a gravity-based propulsion system, and radiating black-body radiation.”
“You think it’s a ship?”
“It could be a ship. If it is, it’s got fifteen to twenty times the mass of Pegasus, maybe more.”
Keeler shuddered. If there was a ship out there that big, he really did not want to cross paths with it. He had a Sapphirean sense of practicality, which meant that, regardless of the circumstances, he preferred being on the ship that was larger and better armed.
“Objects in your rear sensors may be larger than they appear,” BladeRunner said. “It could also be planetary debris thrown off by a supernova or stellar implosion. Anything that large moving at that speed could create a wake that would resemble gravimetric propulsion.”
“Stop making up words,” Keeler said, raising his arm as though to swat him.
The specialist blinked nervously and continued. “It could also be a clump of dark matter.”
“The point is, we don’t know, and it is worth investigating,”
“What do you suggest, Phil. Probes?”
“I think it would be better to dispatch a reconnaissance mission. Two Aves, just to check it out at close range and identify it. They can rendezvous with Pegasus inside the system.”
“Three ships would be better,” Keeler said. “Other than that, I approve your plan.
Coordinate with Flight Commander Collins. I assume you’ll want to join the mission, Specialist?”
A grin broke out across the specialist’s face. “Za, sir. I’d like that very much.” Keeler tapped him on the shoulder with his walking stick. “See how easy that was?” Miller stood in the landing bay, just in front of Prudence’s main hatch. He knew he would be spending at least the next fourteen days inside a space only 42 meters long and 14 meters wide, and intended to remain outside for as long as possible beforehand.
He had chosen Prudence mainly because he knew Matthew Driver was probably the most skilled Flight Lieutenant in the ship’s company. He would be in the ship with Medical Technician Jersey Partridge, who had been part of the Meridian landing party, and Marine Specialist Ng, whom he had also worked with on that unforgettable mission.
The other Aves picked for the mission were Xerxes, under the command of Flight Lieutenant Dylan Canada, and Hector, under the command of Flt. Lt. Adrian Lowell. Xerxes would carry the ship’s Marine Commandant, Lt. Honeywell. Miller had not requested Honeywell for this mission, thinking it not a good idea to have both ship’s tactical officers engaged, but Honeywell had insisted, and had prevailed on Commander Keeler to weigh in on behalf of his conclusion.
Miller snorted, thinking of this. While he had been self-absorbed, he had left the commander vulnerable to the entreaties of other members of the crew. He had forgotten the degree of management his commander required and would have to be more careful in the future. Honeywell would bring Specialist Buttercup, an enormous, terrifying Marine, and a Medical Technician improbably named Honey Pilar, a middle aged woman who had to have been fabulous in her youth. Her curves were still inviting, but her breastline had inched closer to her navel, and there was too much regret in her eyes.
Hector would carry a science crew. There was a tall young woman from Planetology Section, Specialist Grace Jones, who was no relation to his wife although they shared the same rare and unusual last name. She was a tall, solid-looking woman who wore her hair in what Republickers called a “Sector Fourteen North” braid. Specialist Ahmed Ford Zoetrope from Astrophysics Section, as well as Specialist Cree BladeRunner, who had discovered the “trailing object,” as it was being called.
“Good morning, Team Recce One,” he told them, looking around from face to face. “If y
ou like challenging the unknown, you’ve come to the right place. I’m Lt. Commander Miller, but if you don’t know that already, you should return to your quarters immediately and send me back someone who is smart and aware enough to be useful on this mission.” He waved his hand and a mission display appeared behind him. It showed graphic representations of Pegasus, the system 10 655 Vulpeculus, and the mysterious trailing mass (which looked like a mass of potatoes labeled “Mysterious Trailing Mass”). “We will launch from Pegasus in 40 minutes. We will accelerate to point-seven c, and charge full on toward the MTM.”
“I will be on Prudence, with Flight Lieutenant Matthew Driver.” Driver stood off to the side, looking just a little bit sullen. He had gone to the quarters of Eliza Jane Change to say good-bye, but she had been too involved in making her navigational calculation revisions to give him much attention. “Prudence will be on point. Xerxes will trail us on our right wing.
Hector will trail Xerxes, directly on her tail. We will hold formation continually, and should encounter the MTM in five days.”
“Our plan is to slow to point-oh-five light speed and make a pass to examine the object, or objects, and then loop around from behind and match the objects course and speed. We will try and hold off until we make a positive identification on the MTM.” Zoetrope raised his hand. He was an older man, with a politeness so complete as to be overbearing “In all likelihood, we are looking at some planetary debris. There is a stellar nursery about 1,100 light years from here. A supernova could easily have thrown off this pattern of debris.”
“We will not be able to tell until we examine the objects more closely…,” Miller began.
“We may also be dealing with an entirely unknown type of astronomical phenomenon,” Zoetrope continued. “We may be looking at some kind… of disintegrating dark matter, neutron star debris, or something highly exotic that we have never seen before.” Miller nodded. “We have outfitted Hector with our best sensor and analysis equipment.