The Pathfinder Trilogy

by Todd Stockert

  *

  Adam nodded sleepily at the two marine guards standing next to the Observatory wing’s hatchways. He entered cautiously and walked slowly out into the central working area, trying repeatedly to keep from yawning. Over by the main office area he could see Julie and Glen – both were excitedly discussing something.

  “Good morning,” he said drowsily as he joined them. “What’s up with the early morning wakeup call? It’s not even five in the morning yet, for God’s sake.”

  “We had a choice,” replied Glen. “We could disturb you or we could disturb the Captain. So welcome to the Observatory!” He handed Adam a cup of coffee and the elder Roh took a sip as he surveyed all the printed material that was spread out all over Dr. Markham’s desk.

  “Okay Doctor,” Adam grinned. “I give up. What’s worth disturbing me at this hour? Did you find a neutrino with a crappy attitude or something?”

  “You’re joking right now, but you won’t be in a minute or two,” Julie said confidently, handing him a photograph freshly printed only moments before. He took the paper and studied it intently, noting that it showed mostly the golden nebula mist that they had grown used to seeing during the Pathfinder’s slow journey along the length of Poseidon’s gravity river. There were some additional red-and green-colored nebula clusters in one corner, but other than that…

  “What… what exactly am I looking at?” he asked. “This is just another one of your pictures of stellar irradiated dust.”

  “Not quite… take a look here,” Julie said, pointing to a dark spot in the upper right corner of the photo. “One of my astronomers detected this less than two hours ago. It’s very hard for us to locate individual objects with all the nebula dust floating around us, but he managed to get a decent shot of this because it’s so huge.”

  “Okay,” Adam said hesitantly. “So you woke me up at 4:30 a.m. in the morning to show me a picture of a black circle almost totally obscured by a gold dust cloud. I still say big deal.” He watched as Julie frowned and handed him another picture – this one a magnification of the object she had pointed too. Adam glanced at the new photo and did a double-take before whistling as he set his coffee cup down. “This…”

  “…is a 3 dimensional sphere of empty space,” Dr. Markham finished for him. “It’s sitting in the exact center of the gravity river like a boulder in a stream. Everything that touches its perimeter breaks apart just like the current in a normal river of water would and continues its course around it.”

  “How close are we to this spherical void?” asked Adam, suddenly intrigued.

  “Extremely close,” Julie said, tapping the picture with her forefinger. “It appears as though our CAS transit into the center of Poseidon’s river was indeed a planned adjustment to the Pathfinder’s course by someone – we’re drifting directly toward it.”

  “Well what is it?” he asked. “It looks like the result of some kind of energy source that neutralizes gravity. It’s acting just like a magnet would when you move its positive pole next to a negative one. It’s obstructing or repelling all of the dust and stellar objects that come in contact with it, forcing them to simply float around.”

  “For starters it’s almost three million light years in diameter,” Glen spoke up. “It’s also a perfect sphere – Dr. Markham’s astronomers have not been able to find any distortion or fluctuation in its shape whatsoever.”

  “So is it man made or a natural occurrence of some sort?” queried Adam.

  “We weren’t absolutely certain at first, which is why I woke Glen up first. Two of our advanced Canary Probes have extra equipment built into them including a small PTP transit drive. We sent one of them into this ‘sphere of nothing’ to take a closer look around.”

  “If nothing else, we were going to verify that standard Point-to-Point still works,” commented Glen. “The Canary’s trip was successful, so now we know that if our attempts at CAS reinitialization fail, it may take a little longer but we will eventually be able to move back out into normal space.” His expression was confident. “The Captain and the rest of the crew will be happy to hear about that part, at least.”

  Adam leaned thoughtfully against Julie’s desk and took another drink from his coffee cup, carefully studying the enlarged picture of the dark sphere. “So don’t keep me in suspense – what did the Canary find?” he asked excitedly.

  “This,” Julie said enthusiastically, handing him a third picture. The new photo had a computer date and time stamp in the lower right corner, information that was automatically supplied by the Probe’s camera. Other than that the image was completely black except for the object in its center.

  “It looks like a ring of gold,” observed Adam. “It’s just a simple oval.”

  “The photo was taken at an angle,” pointed out Julie. “But we were able to use our computer system to estimate that when viewed from above, this golden ring appears to be a near-perfect circle.”

  “But what is it?”

  “That is a small, artificially constructed galaxy containing approximately four and a half billion yellow stars similar to our own back in the Milky Way,” Dr. Markham continued. “The circular ring of stars is 80,000 light years in diameter and – like the spherical void surrounding it – the star cluster’s shape is simple geometrical perfection.”

  “So it has no spiral arms like a standard galaxy?”

  “Nope,” Julie grinned. “And no red giants, no blue giants and no black holes other than the supermassive one at its center. This is a man-made galaxy specifically built to contain stars capable of holding habitable planets in a stable orbit.” Her expression was one of pure delight. “Someone has technology that is so far beyond ours, it’s… well, more than I would’ve ever hoped to run across. Finding Poseidon was an astronomer’s dream, but this… the engineering involved in creating this is absolutely awe-inspiring.”

  “The inhabitants have to be the people who sent us the mystery transmission,” Adam decided, his enthusiasm growing as he continued to carefully examine the detailed photographs that he held in his hands. “They have to be!”

  “That’s very likely,” Dr. Markham agreed. “It’s just one of the reasons that Glen and I decided to wake you. We’re still wondering whether we should wake the Captain too.”

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Adam objected. “He had a pretty rough morning yesterday helping Colonel Neeland deal with crowd control during that deck four situation. I say we let him get his rest, if for no other reason than to give your team the time they need to gather more facts.” He turned his attention to Glen. “How far away are we from this galaxy?”

  “If we continue to drift, we’re still weeks away,” responded Glen. “But if we power up our engines we could be there within a couple of days. The Captain will have to decide that one.”

  “We’ll likely get a decision from him soon,” Julie commented, continuing to behave more excitedly than they had ever seen her. “Captain Kaufield is due in the Command Dome at 0600 this morning, so I guess you could say we have a little surprise for him.”

  The Proteus Galaxy

  THE PATHFINDER PROJECT

  Chapter XIX: Terra Firma

  Dr. Julie Markham sat quietly in the Observatory, absolutely elated. One short week after encountering an extremely advanced alien civilization the Pathfinder was moving quickly toward the home galaxy of their newfound friends. That is – she mentally noted – the small but profoundly elegant galaxy that was completely man-made and organized into its current structure long ago by human people just like themselves. She could still remember the stunned expression on Adam’s face when the Captain had first introduced them to Noah.

  As if things couldn’t get any crazier, that was about the same time Colonel Neeland showed up to notify Kaufield that an undetected, unknown shuttle had docked on the starboard side of deck one and successfully gained access to their airlock. One of the passengers had discovered the small ship by accident, happening to glance out a windo
w from just the right vantage point. Noah had chuckled at the discovery of his ship and then waved his hands while saying “Surprise!”

  She held another gift from Noah… a printed image that he had given to her created using the same software as the original mystery universe transmission. The difference this time was that the picture was a simple but effective diagram of the Proteus galaxy – as she had officially dubbed it. At its center was a standard supermassive black hole, but unlike a regular galaxy’s gravity vortex this one was very carefully monitored and artificially controlled.

  The alien society had somehow managed to gather together much of the matter from the older stars and other nearby objects that they had deemed unusable and packaged it into a series of incredibly massive spheres. The largest of the spheres was precisely situated directly above the central black hole so that the gravity well could slowly drain matter into its swirling whirlpool – but at an extremely slow and carefully controlled rate.

  Beneath the nuclear bulge at the bottom of the black hole was a smaller sphere of condensed matter – still unbelievably huge by their measurement standards. By her estimation Julie predicted it was at least several thousand light years in diameter. This one was apparently unaffected by the immense pocket of gravity above it and seemed to occupy its position solely to counterbalance the black hole’s gravity and help to keep it stabilized.

  Then there was that beautiful ring of yellow stars orbiting the center of the Proteus galaxy with near geometric perfection. With well over four and a half billion of them floating out there, she couldn’t even begin to guess as to how many habitable planets might be among them… particularly after Noah had informed her that his civilization was quite capable of constructing and then terra-forming planetary bodies as well. He had described the galaxy as a vital ‘observation point’ that his people had built for the express purpose of observing the Poseidon phenomenon.

  Unlike the other galactic objects in their universe that were constantly in motion and had the natural tendency to alter course based on gravimetric conditions, the Proteus black hole was ‘tethered’ to one spot and virtually stationary. The only real movement came from the stars that continually rotated in a circular orbit around it. Then there was that huge, empty black void that surrounded the entire galaxy, designed to function just like Julie’s ‘rock in the stream’ analogy. The void was basically a no-gravity barrier that protected the inhabitants of Proteus while allowing them to carefully monitor and study the effects of Poseidon’s intense gravity on the universe.

  Orbiting outside of the ring of stars were more of the gigantic spheres of matter, each carefully kept in storage for use in replenishing the larger, central sphere that fueled the black hole. Noah had also commented that some of this matter was also occasionally tapped to ‘refuel’ stars that were older and entering the latter stage of their lifespan. It was an extremely educational point that had prompted Julie to ask just how old the newly discovered civilization was.

  Their alien friend could not say for certain but did point out that his people had been around for years that numbered in the millions. Would they ever run out of matter to keep their black hole and ring of stars stabilized? Not likely, was Dr. Markham’s final determination upon further study. Noah’s people were experts at gathering together the cooling blue giants, dying stars and massive dust clouds of nebulae that continually floated past them in the river of gravity. They currently had all of the matter and energy that they needed, so the rest was simply allowed to continue moving past them on its steady course directly out of the known universe.

  Amidst the enthusiasm over the original discovery of Poseidon had come this additional delight – even shock – over finding such an advanced civilization so safely tucked away in one of the nastiest pockets of gravity ever charted. The entire past few weeks had been more than Dr. Markham could ever possibly have imagined, and she had resolved to personally take advantage of every opportunity available to her. The rest of the Observatory staff continued to work diligently in support of her efforts, carefully executing both the short-and long-term objectives that she found herself continually developing for them.

  To make matters stranger, it turned out that the energy field used by the aliens to generate the three million light year spherical void around the Proteus galaxy was yet another contributing factor to their CAS singularity problems. It had the tendency to aggravate surrounding matter, thereby generating at least some of the interference that had forced Glen and Thomas to begin making constant adjustments as the Pathfinder approached the area. Upon their arrival within Poseidon’s river, the massive dampening field had also been the major reason that the CAS systems had overloaded… not the intense gravity of Poseidon and its captured galactic objects as originally speculated. This was the reason Noah had used his shuttle to approach and dock with them, since the small ship’s sophisticated computer system was currently nullifying the protective field’s effects on the Pathfinder and allowing it to CAS transit directly into the Proteus galaxy.

  On the 152nd day since their ship had left the Milky Way, Julie was unable to contain her enthusiasm and made the decision to get up extra early again. She spent the first half hour in the Observatory shaking her head in wonder as she continued to review the diagram that Noah had given her. This time she was comparing the picture with actual images taken using the Pathfinder’s telescopes during her off-hours. The golden ring of stars was the only part of the galaxy visible to them without the aid of gravity measuring equipment. The exact size and placement of the giant matter ‘spheres’ was practically undetectable to them even when utilizing the non-traditional methods of detecting and locating dark matter. Whatever type of energy that Noah’s people were using to trap and contain the matter in those massive balloons was also immune to its gravity.

  “Good morning Dr. Markham,” Kari said to her as she entered the Observatory and took a seat at her desk. Julie looked at her in disbelief, wondering what in the world her young assistant was doing up at 5:30 a.m. on a Friday morning. Then she thought back a few days and nodded knowingly to herself as she remembered the small signs she had observed in the past couple of weeks that Kari and Thomas had escalated their relationship.

  “Good morning,” she replied back. “Was it your turn to use the shower first?”

  “I beg your pardon Doctor?” Kari said innocently, ignoring the bait and beginning to sort through the growing backlog of files on her desk. It was almost a complete turnaround for her… on any normal day the young lady’s desk was usually spotless before she ended a prior day’s shift. To actually have piles of documentation beginning to accumulate was unheard of.

  “It just seems as though you have a lot on your mind lately,” Julie said as they continued to work in the mostly deserted Observatory. There were still some night personnel on duty and she noted a few others had also decided to start their day early. Between Poseidon and Proteus her staff had gotten just what they needed – a thrilling diversion to occupy their time and help them forget about the devastating Brotherhood attack that had taken away their homes.

  “Thomas is a great guy… I’m glad we met and paired up before everybody else started to,” Kari said, smiling. “From what I’ve heard, a lot of people have already chosen significant others – we’re going to have a lot of children on this ship very soon.”

  “I know,” Julie said with a cheerful smile. “It will be a great sight to see.”

  They both looked at each other in puzzlement as the Pathfinder’s hull suddenly trembled a little and then steadied. Usually the ship’s course was extremely stable – several additional, larger tremors shook the large starship again before everything returned to normal.

  “Are they testing the CAS Drive settings again?” Kari asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dr. Markham replied. “I wouldn’t think that they would want to try while we’re inside the void around Proteus. My understanding was that they had it working well enough to transit us into the gala
xy. After that, we were going to rendezvous with Noah’s people and open formal negotiations or something.”

  Around them the rumbling continued and Kari quickly picked her coffee cup up before it could spill liquid all over her paperwork. The all-call suddenly beeped, followed almost instantly by the Captain’s voice.

  “Good morning everyone,” said Kaufield cheerfully. “I’m sorry to wake you this early but we’ve had an opportunity presented to us that I couldn’t pass up. Everyone whose shift just ended can go back to sleep, but the rest of you might want to get started a little earlier than usual this morning. I think you’re going to find it an interesting day.”

  The Pathfinder continued to rumble forward to whatever destination the Captain had planned for it. Julie and Kari simply exchanged looks of disbelief at his sudden mysterious behavior before returning to their work. They were still busy twenty minutes later when more turbulence – a sudden burst this time – shook the ship again. Almost immediately they could hear the sound of the engines shutting down. Kari slowly walked over to one of the open observatory windows and took a good look outside before glancing curiously over her shoulder at Dr. Markham. Julie herself had an odd expression on her face.

  “I’m pretty certain we just landed,” Kari said, astonished.

  *

  Kaufield was in Observation Dome One, still posing question after question to his new friend Noah. He was standing next to one of the large window ports in the room watching the ship’s passengers – slowly at first but then more confidently – begin to migrate out of the Pathfinder via the lifts in the front landing skid and out onto the dew-covered green grass of the meadow that they had landed in. Off to the west a brand new day was dawning, with a golden orange sun beginning to peek over the horizon at a partially-cloudy morning.

  During their abrupt departure from the Sol-system, the auxiliary lifts on all three landing skids had been available. Since that time, the rear two that were attached to the tips of the Lab and Observation wings had been off-limits. This time only the forward skid was accessible to the disembarking passengers, but it still didn’t take very long before there was a large crowd of people standing near the front of the ship taking in the fresh air and sights of a beautiful morning on this new, previously uncharted planet. It made the Captain happy to see his passengers and crew getting a chance to really get out and ‘stretch their legs’… he had every intention of joining them, once business was done.