"What?"
"Thank you for this meeting. We must go. Please escort us back to our ship."
The mushbugs began to get up and Heartness interrupted, her suit making the scratching attention sound. "Excuse me. But we know consciousness is eternal. We shift from body to body. As each body wears out we go into another frequency in another form for a time, then choose a new body and grow up again."
The mushbugs saw Heartness’ message but continued leaving. "This is unacceptable. If you die, you cannot remember anything. Society cannot grow. You will end up making the same mistakes again and again. You are stuck in repeating cycles. We only move forward, never back."
Heartness looked at Hogart disappointedly as the aliens left. The other crew members remained silent. There was nothing they could do.
It seemed that the immortals were mortalists.
Hogart frowned. There was something... He quickly got up, ignoring the pain in his legs from sitting cross-legged, and ran after the mushbugs. "Wait, one more question, why do you not help the lower planet? You could bring them your advancements, your technology. Help them to mature."
"They are stuck in their cycle of breeding. Until they remove the queen and choose advancement over hierarchical power structures, they are under quarantine."
"But, that's what our plan is. We are offering you membership in a multidimensional organization that contain trillions of mortal and immortal races working together. If we decide that your society is not yet developed enough, we will quarantine your star system from the rest of the universe."
Scart stopped moving, its antennae giving strange jerking movements. The other mushbugs also gave the same movement. It wasn't translatable. Were they laughing?
They turned and headed to the hangar, entered their ship and headed back into space without another flick.
Hogart watched them go.
First Contact negotiations in this system were a lot harder than he thought.
#
Hogart and Heartness were in the Center looking glum. They should just take the queen back to her world and leave.
“We are being contacted again, Captain,” said Cuddly.
“Put it through,” said Hogart, slightly hopeful.
Scart’s image filled one of the screens, and his antennae flicked quickly.
“We apologize for our rudeness. We were in shock that we may have contracted your death disease. Fortunately, our doctors have cleared us and confirm that it isn’t something we can catch. Our analysis indicates you are all simply replicated DNA strands, and as you’re all just copies within copies, you’re bound to break down eventually.”
The translator struggled to keep up with the complicated twisting of the mushbug’s antennae.
“However, we should follow the protocol that we have absorbed from your ship to show respect for your organization. We honorably decline your invitation to join your group. We are quite happy on our little world, and have chosen a time of peace, contemplation and exclusion as we are due for metamorphosis. Alien contact has no use for us at this time. Please save your technology and resources for someone more suitable for your endeavor.”
The image clicked off before anyone had a chance to say a word.
Hogart looked stunned. “Well, that’s that, then!” he said.
“I’m not so sure,” said Heartness. “I wonder what their metamorphosis is. Perhaps they’ll be different after they go through that process.”
“So, we might have First Contact with them in the near future.”
Hogart stared at the blue and white world on his right, slowly turning, displaying the mushbug utopia. What could their metamorphosis be? Were they shifting to fourth density? Perhaps becoming less corporeal?
Geo interrupted his thoughts. “Captain. The drones have returned from the binaries and the results are, well, I think you’ll need to see my astrophysicists interpretation of the data.”
Hogart made his way over to Geo’s screen and placed his hand on it. If Geo wanted him to see this privately, it must be something particularly disturbing.
He activated his mind view system and watched as the information scrolled across it. He gasped in alarm, and gripped Geo’s stand to stop from falling over.
He took a breath and gathered himself, turning to the others. “Everyone needs to know about this.” He transmitted the information to the surround screen.
“Oh my God,” said Heartness, covering her mouth.
“Now what do we do?” returned Hogart, steadying himself.
Chapter 19
The One is All and the All are One
The Stellar Flash was speedily moving towards one of the suns of the system, which was further away around the elliptic. Its route had been carefully calculated to avoid any contact with any other space debris, asteroids, comets and, more particularly, dormant queen mushbugs.
While that would usually be easy to do with billions of kilometers between them, the fact that Queens had the propensity for seeding by launching themselves into space, meant colliding with a dormant queen that had been floating for thousands of years was a real possibility. Not to mention the occasional cloud of dormant dark mushbugs.
There was one central sun, with the other smaller sun orbiting it along with all the other planets. Even though the smaller sun was close, it had been lucky enough to remain in orbit, rather than be pulled into the mass of the main star. It was still close enough, however, to prevent any other planets from orbiting between them.
Just as well, thought Hogart. Any planet there would just be a lump of molten rock.
The ship had now reached about 3000 kilometers distance from the smaller sun and was monitoring it.
“How’s everyone holding up?” asked Hogart. He was starting to feel stubborn again, and he could see that Heartness had been banging her station a few times, when it took a few more seconds than usual to refresh. He wondered how being this close to the binary suns was likely to affect the other crew members.
Almost as if reading his mind, Amy said “Captain, I need you in my quarters, now!” Her shape wasn’t stable, and she was flicking out tendrils, trying to reach the other aliens but stopping herself. “You too, Admiral. I don’t think I can handle this.”
“Amy, take a break and, um, take the AI pumice stone with you. Set for tangibility.” The last thing Hogart wanted was to suddenly have Amy on the Center floor. What would Heartness think?
Amy immediately slurped herself off the console and squelched, rolled and otherwise slid out the Center door and down the corridor, with the AI floating behind.
Hogart was also starting to feel strange, but in a different way this time. He recognized the headache. Rejection of his mind view implant. But he had the patches on. His body shouldn’t be rejecting it now. He shook his head. As soon as it started to clear, he felt his fear of stars returning. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth. He had to focus.
Then he smashed his fist on his station to refocus. The other aliens looked at him. “Oh, just trying to, um, get this station to work properly.”
He was thankful that Amy had taken the AI stone with her, otherwise it would probably have said something like…
“Your station is operating normally, Captain Hogart.”
“Oh, very meta. Thank you, AI.” He groaned. He decided he needed to distract everyone and, hopefully, distract himself.
“Alright team…,” then it struck him. One of the station areas was empty. “Where’s Torus?”
Heartness pointed at the floor where minor static flickers sparked and threaded towards the door. “The Stellar Flash EM field is being overloaded by the binary suns’ fields. Torus can’t hold himself together.”
Hogart looked at the other crew members. Puppy was looking like he was going to faint, swaying on his twelve legs. Cuddly had gone to the toilet again but it had been his second time in only half an hour. Only Geo and Spiney seemed to be surviving.
“Sir,” began Spiney. “I think my breedin
g cycle has been activated. I don’t know why.”
“But if you spray here, we’ll all start growing your babies inside our lungs!” said Heartness, slightly annoyed.
“I am aware of this. Permission to confine myself to quarters.”
“Absolutely, Spiney,” said Hogart. “Please do what you have to do! And quickly!”
Spiney quickly shuffled out of the Center and through the door.
“Anyone else?”
A clacking could be heard from Puppy. He couldn’t speak and his tongue was inside his mouth for once. He’d also changed color, not a vibrant green. More like a sickly yellow. Hogart simply indicated the door, and Puppy clacked and stumbled towards it, exiting quickly.
Hogart had no idea how the stars would have affected Puppy, but with his great size, anything was possible.
Heartness was rubbing her red face with a handkerchief. “How long will we have to remain here, Jon? I think I’m getting hot flushes.”
Hogart pointed at Cuddly who had just returned from another toilet break. “He’s trying to find a language. If we can communicate with it, we might be able to have a successful mission, after all.”
The orbs had brought back some incredibly startling news. While one returned with perfectly normal spectrographic results for the main star, the second one had had everyone struggling to breathe. Somehow the smaller star was made up of lots of pieces of something stuck together.
It was entirely possible the secondary star was completely made up of billions of generations of mushbugs.
Hogart looked at the zoomed screen showing the corona of the smaller star. Except that he knew it wasn’t really a Corona. It was some kind of protective force field that behaved exactly like one. In fact, the hot body was so similar to a star that they had had no way of knowing from spectrographical reports. Only when the orb brought back visual images had they been able to know for sure.
As they got closer, the second star almost blanked out the front of the view panel, its light turning everything white-orange, even with the filters on their lowest setting. Hogart involuntarily covered his eyes.
Being this close to a star filled him with dread. If it wasn't for the fact that the ship could withstand temperatures of even a blue star, he would have quite easily quit his post and gone back to running an entertainment company on Earth. Of course, his dream had always been to get into space, even creating endless dream shows and mind view series on the subject in his spare time, and he was definitely very happy to be finally in command of his own ship. Even so, with that horrifying burning ball of plasma so close, those flickers of black death, swirls of pain, spouts of fiery damnation, and the feeling he was staring into the pit of hell itself, he was tempted to run here and now.
The last thing he wanted was anyone to think he was heliophobic.
"Captain, I am detecting an elevated heart rate, increased perspiration, and a spike in adrenaline in your biological projection," stated Geo. "Are you being affected by the star in a new way?”
"It's okay, Geo," said Heartness. "I'm sure the Captain is just feeling a bit scared at being so close."
"Scared?" said Hogart quickly, slightly indignantly. He knew Heartness was deliberately teasing him to distract him. He should play along to ease her mind a little. He was sure he had got over his heliophobia when he was a child. He shouldn’t feel this fearful as an adult. "Never. It's not so scary this close up, is it! And, I know we have nothing to worry about."
Heartness winked at him and subtly made a soft fist with her hand a couple of times. Hogart looked down at his own. His fists were clenched so hard the knuckles were showing. He quickly released them and winked back at her. She didn't need a computer to tell her how stressed he was.
"Well, team. We're here. What can you tell me?"
"The corona seems to be generated on the outside, rather than coming from within," said Geo. "Outside, it is a common star, but just beneath the surface, it is not. I believe this energy is being generated from the spin of the shell structure within the star’s EM field. I have many statistics. Shall I read them out to you?"
"No, it's alright Geo. Thanks. Cuddly, you're sure this star is sentient?”
“Mushbug pieces arranged in a sphere shape billions of kilometers in diameter, with no breaks or mismatch of any kind? Yes.”
Hogart didn’t know if Cuddly’s sarcasm was intentional or not. “How do we make contact?"
Cuddly zoomed the cameras into a section of the star. Soon, the surround screen was completely enveloped in swirling, broiling sunspots and fiery gas plumes. The image was thousands of kilometers away, yet Hogart seemed to feel the heat. He was sure his skin was starting to burn. His perspiration increased.
The image zoomed further, breaking through clouds of gas to focus directly on a blurred area beneath the surface. A faint outline could be seen through the wavering image. Cuddly enhanced the image. A giant hexagon.
"You're kidding me," said Hogart, suddenly realizing exactly what Cuddly had in mind. "No, no, no."
He lifted his hands up in a stop gesture and began backing away from his station before stopping himself. Sweat beaded on his temple and began running down his face. I can’t do this. I can’t do this.
"The field is only 7,000 degrees Celsius," said Cuddly. "The ship can withstand that. But the field would block any kind of signal we try to get to it. We need to touch the star. The only way to do that is to land."
"I can't risk 300 people! I need something more definite." Hogart’s voice sounded higher than usual.
"Captain." Heartness turned to him, not wanting to take command, wanting to give him the confidence, but knowing that Hogart was on the borderline of a panic attack. She had to relax him somehow. "We have several options, but only one is going to work. You could send a probe, but they may not notice it. You could send an android in the scout craft, but they may not identify it. We could shift into a slightly different frequency where the heat won't affect us, but we would still need to shift back to make contact. At the end of the day, this is your mission. Imagine it. You would be the first captain in human history to land his ship on a star!"
"Well, it's not really a star," said Hogart, thinking. But everyone else would still think it was. It would look great on his resume. And the stories he could tell girls at the bar...
Hogart put on a grin, trying to focus on the more positive aspects. "Well, Admiral. You've persuaded me." He said, lightly. Outwardly he looked composed and confident and was no longer sweating. Inwardly, he shuddered at the thought, swallowed, then turned to speak with the AI, then remembered the rock had disappeared. He looked around the ship, slightly confused. Where do you look when there is no AI avatar to look at? He looked at the hexagon on the front screen, its shape warping under the intense heat and plasma plumes.
"AI, plot a course to land on that hexagon."
The yellow hexagon seemed to fill the screen as the AI replied. "Confirmed."
There was a slight hum as their EM drive engaged, and the ship quickly flitted the last few thousand kilometers through two flares, and slowly settled down onto the hexagon-shaped pseudo landing pad. As the Stellar Flash settled, Hogart saw, disturbingly, the billions of hexagons stretching out under the fiery surface, an entire star made up of them.
Without warning, the hexagonal platform dissolved into gas, and the Stellar Flash plummeted through the surface.
#
Heartness had been given the pilot’s station, and she had tried to avoid even looking at it, let alone using it. Having recently argued with Hogart about the lack of a pilot, the last thing she wanted to do was be one. But, as she wasn’t officially there, and she wasn’t entirely comfortable about throwing her rank around, the pilot station was hers.
When the ship fell through the gaseous opening, she grabbed the station for support, and as though sensing her danger, her little shuttle craft, the Stellar Breeze, communicated with her through the console.
“What?” she said in surprise
. Then she looked about to see if the crew had heard the voice.
From their slow movements Heartness knew something had happened to everyone else except her. Perhaps her ship had sped her timestream up.
“Consciousness is faster,” said a voice in her head. Heartness looked at the image on the surround screen. They had slowed in their fall, almost frozen in time. Only she was unaffected. Why?
“Paradox here. Paradox being created. Paradox already destroyed,” said the voice. “You were there at the beginning.”
“What can I do?” Heartness slapped at the console, trying to get images to be displayed in her mind view system without success. “Can Hogart fix it?”
“Torus will be the one. You must help him.”
Briefly Heartness thought how annoyed Hogart was going to feel when he found out he wasn’t going to be the one to save them. Still, he couldn’t expect every mission to be completed by him.
“How?”
“EM field boost to recombine him. Be the conduit between myself and the Older.”
The Older? The Stellar Flash?
Heartness placed her hands on the white pilot’s panel and this time images began rushing through her mind. This station used to belong to Leafy, Heartness’ previous pilot. Earth had found the Stellar Flash consciousness responded better to female plant-based lifeforms. Earth hadn’t been comfortable with that but the type of brain frequency required meant no human pilot could completely merge with it. But her little ship said she could. Perhaps all those hours she’d spent on board had changed her to be closer to the Stellar Flash’s frequency. And now she had her own ship to help her complete the connection.
What would it be like? How would she know?
Heartness blinked, and the entire Center disappeared. She was floating in space, with a wall of fiery yellow, hexagons as far as her eyes could see. She immediately began to panic as she wasn’t wearing a nanite, force or standard space suit. How could she survive? Was there an atmosphere?
Then she noticed that she couldn’t hear her own breath or heartbeat. She wasn’t physically in space.
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