After 10 more minutes, Benedict walked up to his assistant and said. “All right. Let’s shut off this bloody thing. I am getting soft in my old age listening to these harebrained ideas from internet fools.”
Just as he had finished his sentence, the protrusion gave off a deafeningly loud, sharp and high pitched ping. The circular protrusion had expanded in diameter slightly and detached from the base. The assistant pulled it out like a cover, exposing the fire hydrant like mechanism.
“We used the wrong tool to open this sir, which is why it took so much time. I think the cover material has a slightly different thermal expansion characteristics than the rest of the hull. All we needed to do was to heat it, the cover expands faster than the hull material, thus breaking out. I suspect that we can attach it back seamlessly just by cooling it slightly, placing it on the mechanism and waiting for it to expand and seal tight.’ The assistant explained.
“All right, so the internet loonies have the first part of their theory right. Let us check the second part of their theory. What is the ambient temperature now? We have been heating this place for weeks with the new heaters brought from Earth.” Benedict asked impatiently.
“Sir the ambient temperature is +2°C, but I think we would still need to steam. The hull is colder than the air.” The assistant replied as he reached for his toolkit to open the mechanism, which looked like a valve. The mechanism had been studied earlier in the X-Ray scans, so there were no surprises.
If the VHAPS group’s theory was right, then something special should happen when they pump steam inside. This was however an invasive procedure, and there were no telling how the ship may react to it. So the steam hose was attached to mechanism, and everybody cleared out of the canyon habitat, before the steam started pumping.
After a few minutes the assistant, who was now on the surface habitat shouted out. “The crazy idea works boss! There is more water coming out of the hose than the amount of steam we are pumping in. There is water inside, and it is melting and coming out. I think we have found the water tanker of the Ka-let!”
“Are you saying that is not a spaceship but a water tanker?” asked Benedict dubiously.
“No boss, I am not saying that. You know what the group’s theory is. It is possible that they might just be right.” The assistant answered.
“Yeah… Yeah… we will see about that. I think we can all agree that it is safe for us to go back, that thing… water tank or ship, whatever it is, is not going to explode. So let’s get back in, open up more outlets and speed the process up. You can use your heating theory on the next cap you pop. There could be a lot of water inside that thing in theory. Have you thought where you are going to drain the water?” Benedict asked.
“I had not given it much of a thought boss, since I didn’t think that the idea would actually work, but I have some options I want to run by you.” Replied the assistant.
It took Benedict’s team 24 hours to drain all the water that could be steamed out. The hull temperature had slowly risen above freezing and water had started flowing freely from 20 different outlets that they had opened up. The water was being drained into a large crevice at one end of the canyon, similar to the crevice on top of which the ship was sitting. The crevice filled up into a deep pool, with thin ice forming on the top. Not all parts of the canyon had risen above freezing temperature, although that would change in another week as the heaters slowly raised the air temperature.
When all the water drained out, something magical happened. The smooth hull of the ship developed depressions at many places around the ship just above the level of the wedges. The increased temperature of the hull due to the steam and the heated air had differentially expanded the skin at the depressions, to expose rectangular lines. It was the same principle as the covering cap of the water outlets.
The assistant climbed up the sloping wedge to one of the depressions and took a heating torch to the depression. The gently sloping wedges were not just to hold the ship in place, they were also the ramps to climb up the ship. In less than a minute the rectangular crack popped, but instead of popping out, it popped in. The assistant gave a gentle push and the entire rectangular block moved in exposing a dark interior passage.
“Abracadabra, open sesame!” said the assistant.
Chapter 6
Ramses logs
Year 0
I start this log, as I start this historic journey into the unknown. I know that I will never see my beloved and beautiful home world again in my life. That sadness is offset however by the prospect of creating a new world equally beautiful as my home world. That is something no one has done before. We had taken the worlds of the two species we have defeated for sure, but those were dark and gloomy worlds not even worth the time of the travel.
This adventure is so much more exciting. We head to a bright star with the prospect of a world just like our home world, but with far brighter light. I cannot wait to stand on the surface of this world and gaze all around me, looking at the colors which would be even more vibrant I am told than our world and its red sun.
I feel privileged to find a place in this ship, the pinnacle of our technological advancement. The technologies of ship building I do not understand for I am a physician, but I am told that this ship was built with technologies so new that it is the first of its kind. We are the pioneers who would prove the technologies of this ship. If this ship and the technologies that went into building it prove itself, then the stars will open up to our kind. We will no longer be restricted to the neighborhood of our star.
The wise leaders of our world have chosen the most obvious destination for this first trip of the first of its kind ship. The fabled world and twin of our home world. The ancients have looked at this world through their telescopes for thousands of years, ever since we advanced enough to be able to look at planets in other star systems. There have been so many stories and fables built around this mystical world that looks like a twin of our home world in every respect. What will we find when we reach there. I cannot wait to find out.
We have now been on our way for over 3 months. I am told by my friend from the bridge, that our ship is proceeding according to plan. We are still accelerating as we would for a few years. I am scheduled to go into hibernation stasis tomorrow. I have completed my tasks for the shift, and handed over my tasks to the next shift physician. Everybody is in good health as of now.
Year 4
I came out of stasis a few days ago for my 1 year rotating shift. The recovery process was intolerable, despite the fact that as a physician I knew exactly how I would feel. Fore knowledge of pain does not cushion pain. I have fully recovered now, and have taken over my duties. I had been busy these first few days taking handover. The health of the crew awake as well as those in hibernation is normal. There is nothing extraordinary to report.
My friend from the bridge tells me that our flight is also going exactly according to plan, but I had been hearing ominous rumors. Our great leader of the ship is in stasis, but today his deputy addressed all of us to break the news. A new alien species has been detected, and it is suspected that they have detected us as well. We think we know the general direction of their home world, but we have not yet been able to locate it. The hope is that they have not located our world as well.
Our fellow beings had not been imprudent to blast out signals in empty space and invite unwanted attention. That was the surest way for a stupid species to head towards extinction. The meeting with the alien species, I am told was a fluke of chance. While travelling to one of the mining asteroids at the very edge of our star system, one of mining ships noticed the drive signature of another ship far out in space.
As is the protocol I am told amongst us, the mining ship extinguished its own drive signature immediately. The other ship also extinguished its drive signature simultaneously, which is too much of a coincidence. Thus it is suspected that the other ship followed similar protocol on noticing our ship. From the signature of the drive, we
know for certain that the other ship is not using our technology, and hence has to be a new alien species.
This does not bode well. I shudder to think about us entering an age of war for survival, as I have read in history that our people had entered twice before. We came out triumphant those times, but there is no guarantee that we would prevail again. We don’t know the strength of this new species. I hope that this threat goes away and these aliens do not discover us.
Year 8
This does not get any easier the second time. The awakening out of stasis was as painful this time as it was the last. I have to brace myself for the pain, for I will have to endure it many times more during my journey. My handover was smooth and the entire crew is in exceptional health.
That is more than what I can say about my beloved home world. My shift got briefed today about the disturbing news from our home world. The aliens have discovered our home world, and they launched their first attack while I was asleep. The good news is that we have discovered their home world as well and we have launched a counter attack.
The aliens do not seem to be more advance than us, which is a relief. They however have similar capabilities as us. My friend from the bridge who is knowledgeable in the ways of the war tells me that we have a few capabilities that are better than them. We might even be slightly more advanced than them in terms of our technology.
However from the reports that my friend has seen of that first attack on our home world, and the enemy’s response to our counterattack, he feels that the aliens are very ferocious and dangerous. That fills my heart with dread. I am hoping that the next news packet from home will bring better news.
Year 12
When I woke up this time, the pain and discomfort of coming out of stasis did not even register in my mind, for I was anxious to know about far more consequential events. Events that might change and end everything for our species. The deputy leader of our ship kept us agonizing for three days before he would brief us about the events back at home. He insisted that we adjust and get back to normal before the briefing.
I understood why he waited for us to normalize. The news was grim. The aliens had attacked our solar systems once more in the last four years. This time their attack was far ferocious and the scale larger. We learnt the dreadful news that the aliens inhabited more than one system. We had settled other planets and moons in our own system, but these were mere outposts. We essentially had only one home world.
The aliens came from three distinct directions. We have identified three distinct worlds which the aliens inhabit. All three are home worlds. The aliens are far more powerful than we had thought, and their resources are far greater. The combined strength of the three fleets of the aliens ravaged all our outposts and settlements in space and destroyed every space asset we had.
In contrast the fleet that we had sent to the first alien home planet we discovered was not able to destroy the alien space infrastructure. Our ships fought bravely and were able to destroy many of the enemy ships, but they were also destroyed in turn without being able to do any substantive damage to the alien infrastructure.
In effect our species is no longer capable of space faring. We are now trapped in our home world. The aliens bombarded our home world from space and killed countless living beings, and spread poisonous radiation across the planet. Fortunately we are a species that is equally comfortable underground and many of us survived taking refuge under the surface.
The aliens did land on the surface, but they were too few and we were too numerous for them to slaughter us. Still the aliens are monsters, not just in their attitude but also in their size. There is no way our people can hope to fight those huge beasts with six tentacles each as thick as our body. The only reason they were beaten back was because their numbers was in the thousands, while we were in the millions.
Even then each of the aliens killed hundreds of us before they died. I have seen their pictures sent to us and it sends shudders of terror down me. How can we hope to fight them if they come in numbers? Our only hope is that it is hard for them to send millions of those alien soldiers to kill the half a billion of us in our home world. We have some safety in numbers.
I am hoping that the aliens having destroyed our space infrastructure and effectively confining us to our home world, will now leave us alone and let us live.
Year 16
It is said in this ship that our kind was destroyed just as we had reached the peak of their achievement and glory. I do not have the heart to tell them that it is only logical that we would be destroyed at our peak. Our kind has been progressing continuously since the time when there was no count of time. Each step took us to a new pinnacle of our achievement. It is only logical that the day our civilization was destroyed, we were at the pinnacle of whatever we had achieved till then.
Still I understand the sentiment of my fellow beings. We had so much potential, so much promise, and yet all that has now been snuffed out. It is a terrible waste. Now that our species is on the receiving end of the struggle for survival, I wonder how those two species felt, whom we had defeated in history. I sometimes wonder what the last of their kind would have felt like. Would someone from their kind have also kept a log like mine, writing till the bitter end knowing there was no one who would ever read those logs again?
I know it is wrong to despair. Our great leader keeps reminding us of the tenets of our people and rightly reminds us continuously about the ‘litany for hope’ written in those tenets. Yet it is hard for the last of a species to find hope.
I am aware that most on this ship think we can regenerate again and get back to our old glory, but as a biologist I understand more than most that this is a long shot. Our numbers are less than the critical mass required to maintain the diversity of our genetic instructions, which is necessary for the long term survival of any species. However I choose to hope along with my fellow beings, however misplaced those hopes might be, for if I didn’t have hope, what else is there to live for?
It is ironic that a mission to expand our species has become an ark to preserve whatever we have left. This is not the way I had imagined out great journey would end. When we left home, I felt privileged and excited about the prospect of travelling the great distance to our destination. The hardship and isolation of travel worth the prize that awaited us at the end of our journey. Now it is hard for me to care about anything that happens going ahead in our journey.
I had gone to sleep in the quiet by confident hope that it was impossible for the enemy aliens to send a million soldiers to our home world to go down to the surface and physically kill each and every one of us Therein I had thought lay our hope of survival. Safety in numbers. I had not counted on the cruelty and ingenuity of the aliens.
They hit our beautiful planet with Kinetic devices of unimaginable violence. Whole ships filled with metal hurled at the surface at a few percent the speed of light. The devastation caused on our planet was unimaginable and indescribable. When they had finished raping our planet thus, they descended in their thousands to mop up any survivor. Our people were too stunned to put up much of a resistance. How does one fight against such unimaginable violence?
We were given a view of the last message packet. It was from a broken shelter with the last few remaining people of our kind. They told us that they have erased every record and reference they could from any data bank and library that was still functioning. As far as they knew, the aliens did not know about our ship. The transmission urged us to continue on our journey and settle the fabled world.
We were urged to live on, settle and rebuild the civilization of our people once more. They said that we were all that would be left of our people in a few hours. We carried all the knowledge and the tenets of our people and it was now our duty to continue the line of our species. Then the transmission cut off abruptly. We have all been in gloom ever since, and I do not feel like writing more in this log right now.
Year 20
I woke up from my last hib
ernation sleep a week ago and am going about the somber business of living a meaningless life. There has been no substantial demands made of me as a physician yet as the crew on board is perfectly healthy, so I spend a lot of my time with my friends from the bridge. Our destination is getting near now and the individual worlds in this bright star system are resolving into higher resolution day by day.
The fabled world is even more beautiful than the fuzzy images I had seen from the telescope picture back at home. Its stunning reds make me wistfully long for my beloved home world, which probably has been destroyed beyond recognition.
The fabled world is the 4th planet of this star system, but the bridge crew are also very excited about the 3rd planet of the system. They say that it shows intriguing signs, although it is not as beautiful as the fabled world. I do not understand all the technical terms the bridge crew use, but what I understood was that the 3rd planet is exhibiting signs of free oxygen in its atmosphere in their spectroscopic analyses of its light, which is a sign of life!
Our great leader of the ship has accordingly taken a cautious approach. We don’t want to have escaped extinction and travelled this unimaginable distance, only to get wiped out by an alien species at the end of our journey. We have no capability to fight back. This is an exploration ship, not a warship.
Year 21
We have reached our destination, but I don’t see a single soul on this ship who is happy about it. The fabled world has not turned out to be the Promised Land that it looked from far. I don’t know how our scientists got it so wrong. The bridge crew throws a lot of technical jargon at me, which I don’t understand.
Retribution (Shaitan Wars) Page 10