The Unsound Theory (STAR Academy Book 1)

by Emilia Zeeland

  “So, they could make sure it worked?” Alec guessed.

  “Probably,” Yalena said. “And now, they want us to follow them.”

  “If we die or get stuck in some freaky time loop repeating this day until the end of time, I’ll kill you,” Natalia said, pointing at Yalena. “Every single one of those repeating days.” Her eyes traced the edges of the purple strings. They seemed fluid, like they hid behind an hourglass. Curiosity was giving her agreement away.

  “As team leader, I insist that we make this decision unanimously,” Yalena said. “We have a choice —either we go back and deal with the consequences of having hijacked the mission, and then wait for an official mission to tell us what’s on the other side of this wormhole, or we go through with the clear understanding that when we come back,” she breathed out, wondering how to best put this, “we could be coming back to a different time.”

  The silence around her was deafening. “Guys,” she said, “I know this is crazy and a lot to ask for, but we know it’s Farsight that went missing here.” The argument took shape in her head as she spoke. “We’ve spent so much time trying to decipher this signal, thinking it could be alien. We’ve agonized over whether the satellite could belong to Farsight or Demonfrost. We even sent a team to check the satellite. Well, guess what? Seeing what we’re seeing now, we don’t even need the assessment from Eric’s team. Do you realize what this is? It’s a satellite going back through the wormhole, sent to provide us with the coordinates so we can follow Farsight.”

  “It must have been damaged going through the wormhole, which could have decreased the quality of the signal they wanted to send us,” Michael guessed.

  “Why wouldn’t they just send an email instead of a sound recording?” Natalia said. “Stupid old-school ancient people.”

  “I don’t know,” Yalena said. She couldn’t help but connect this hunch to the feeling she hadn’t been able to shake off since she first heard the signal. It had woken her up, activated her brain to keep working until the mystery was solved. “All I know is that they’ve sent for us. They want us to find them. And if we don’t...If they need our help on the other side, and we don’t answer, I’d never be able to live with myself. Would you?”

  It was something riskier than any of the stunts they’d pulled so far. Playing on their emotions was dangerous, but if she wanted them to follow, she had to make them imagine walking away and all the consequences of it.

  “Are you with me?”

  Slowly, one by one, they all raised a hand in the air. Yalena’s throat felt dry from breathing in the same air filtered through again and again. Tightly-knit in a ball, her stomach warned her to think twice before leading everyone through the rabbit hole.

  “Holy stars, we’re mad!” Natalia said, her eyes still tracing the edges of the wormhole, which seemed to have put her under its spell.

  “Maybe, but we aren’t thick. I refuse to disappear without telling the truth like Farsight did,” Yalena said. “We need to leave a message for Artemis to tell them that we’re going through and why.”

  “That’s it,” Nico said, looking at Yalena like he was seeing her for the first time. “I was thinking only of the code, of a way to open the communication channel to Artemis, but we don’t need that. We can leave a message behind. Mike, extract the black box capsule.”

  Michael did so, detaching it from the ceiling at the front of the cabin and turning it in his hands to have a good look at the shoe box-sized object. “It’s tough enough to survive a crash and still protect the recordings inside.”

  “All we need to do is connect a small fuse to it and direct it to find and attach to Artemis,” Nico said. “I can’t believe I never thought of this.”

  “Hang on.” Natalia stepped between Nico and Michael before they’d started re-engineering the black box. “Does this mean we’ll have no black box going in there?” Her outstretched arm pointed at the center of the wormhole.

  Nico shrugged. “Even if we sent a black box back, data will probably suffer, like the signal sent by the Farsight crew did.”

  “He’s right,” Yalena jumped in. “The most important thing we can do is immortalize what we know now—the wormhole, the signal, what we plan to do, and why. We’ve been working under the radar long enough. It’s time to come clean and at least tell Eric what we plan to do. I trust him to decide what to tell the Academy. And I’d prefer us to go in before they get a chance to talk us out of it. Can the black box find Artemis?”

  Nico nodded. “We’ll program it to. All the Artemis crew will have to do is recover it.”

  Feeling a heat wave rise inside her, Yalena walked over to Nico’s station and recorded the message relaying what they’d found out and what they intended to do. She had to do it quickly, skipping over some of the imaginable consequences. Perhaps time dilation was the reason Farsight never returned, but whether they had sent a cry for help now or a signal for new hope, Apollo had to follow it.

  Before the team could go back on their decision, Yalena strapped herself back into her seat and gave Alec the go-ahead. His bushy eyebrows formed a black line on his forehead as he sized up the pulsing circle. It looked like liquid, a moving swirl of colors. Then, the nose of the Eagle dove forward a little to pierce the opening to a new world through the wormhole’s center.

  “No take-backs,” Alec said, and he pushed the lever, launching them into the unknown.

  Yalena had grown used to the speed of the Eagle, but the blend of galaxies and dust clouds that swept past made her feel like the wormhole had sucked in their spacecraft. Apollo rose, then fell, like a roller coaster ride.

  In her mind, the wormhole was a U-shaped tunnel connecting two points in space, points that could be light-years apart. That upwards and downwards motion felt like the curve of the U, but it may well have all been in her imagination. The wormhole spat them out after what seemed like a few breathless moments.

  “Can you estimate where we are?” The voice came out of Yalena’s throat in a painful burst.

  Nico’s speed-of-light typing only had him frowning. “Galaxies away, likely,” he said.

  “A two-sun system,” Natalia said, waving through the first zoomed-in holo images the Eagle had already taken.

  “No black hole,” Yalena observed.

  Nico must have thought the same thing because he answered her unasked question. “It’s not a guarantee for zero time dilation.”

  “It’s better than nothing, though,” Alec said. Yalena gave him a solid nod. Still, she knew the odds of that wormhole keeping them in the same time as before must be slim.

  “We’ve been dropped between planets four and five, which are about as far apart as Earth and Mars.”

  “Any sign of Farsight?”

  “Trying to detect radio waves. They should still have at least one functioning satellite, even if they sent the other one back through the wormhole,” Nico said.

  “Found it,” Natalia said in a trembling voice. “In orbit around the third planet.”

  “They landed...” Yalena whispered, feeling her head grow heavy with fatigue and confusion. Her breaths slowing, she felt the overwhelming sense of seeing all their theories lose ground, one after the other. Every time she thought she had a solid idea of what had really happened to Farsight, something like this perfectly viable solar system came to pull the rug from under her feet. If they didn’t need to travel light-years to the nearest star, why not come back for the rest of humanity?

  “Initial readings suggest there are three worlds in this solar system with Earth-like conditions, the second and third planets, as well as a moon orbiting the fourth one,” Natalia said, a half-laugh, half-cough of disbelief at the end. “They had their pick.”

  “Lucky!” Dave exclaimed when Natalia projected one of the first photos the Eagle had taken.

  The crew hummed in a jumble of checks and exclaimed at each of the new pictures the Eagle sensors fed them, but the hollow feeling in Yalena’s gut only grew. The third plane
t was a dreamy swirl of blue and red. Yalena didn’t need to run the elaborate conditions analysis to get an inkling of why the crew had chosen to settle there. It was similar in size to Earth and even looked like her reddish twin sister. But looks could be deceiving.

  “Can you run a comparative analysis to Earth?” she asked Natalia.

  “Atmospheric pressure is at 1.03 at sea level, which means we won’t need pressurized suits to walk around there. Gravity is a tad stronger than what we’re used to, but air composition is almost too good to be true. Proportions of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, and carbon dioxide are very close to what we have on Earth. The main difference is higher oxygen percentage, similar to what Earth had back in the prehistoric age.”

  “Sweet,” someone at the back said. “Do you think they have dinosaurs?”

  “I sure hope not.” Yalena frowned. “What else can you tell me, Nat? Is it safe for humans to land?”

  “Safe as in the environment of that planet won’t kill humans? Yes, it is safe. I have no idea about any local flora or fauna, though.”

  Yalena’s stomach fluttered. On one hand, she couldn’t resist the dream of landing on a world hundreds of light-years away, only to find it was Earth’s long-lost twin. It would wash away the all the doubts she’d ever felt about fitting in at the Academy, making room for the awe of discovery. It would prove that she was right where she belonged—with her team, at the brink of a new age for space exploration and colonization.

  In the back of her mind, however, something pulled her attention, warning her that even if she reached further than anyone could have expected of her, she hadn’t untangled the riddle yet. Something didn’t add up. Something was off, and even the craziest explanation evaded her now.

  “Can you get us connected to them though that satellite?”

  “Working on it,” Nico said. “This tech is ancient.”

  It took him a good half hour, during which Alec and Dave looped around the planet for a cursory scan, and the team ran every analysis they could think of. Their voices turned hushed and cautious as they discussed the results, probably feeding off Yalena’s tense demeanor.

  “Try now,” Nico said.

  Taking a deep breath, Yalena spoke. “This is crew leader Yalena Russo from the Apollo STAR Academy Eagle. Does anybody read me?”

  Seconds dragged out as a sizzling noise came through the line. “This is the Nova Fia control tower. We read you.”

  Chapter 24. Nova Fia

  BLOOD RUSHED TO YALENA’S face, and her throat felt dry. This time, she couldn’t blame it on the re-filtered Eagle air.

  “Nova Fia,” she whispered.

  “Named after the late commander Fia Jones,” the traffic controller on the line said.

  Questions flowed through Yalena’s mind faster than she could isolate them into logical sentences.

  “Are you part of Farsight?”

  “Yes. And this is the savior planet.”

  Yalena muted the line, glanced at Nico, and then whirled around to find Alec. “I can’t believe they never came back for the rest of humanity.”

  “They must have had enough fuel to travel to Earth,” Alec said. “Unless there was some sort of an accident, leaving them with whatever the new world has to offer, which may not be much.”

  “And they didn’t know how to make antimatter fuel back then,” Dave reminded her.

  Yalena breathed out, trying to ease her mind with those logical explanations. If only logic hadn’t betrayed them before.

  “Apollo, do you read us? We’re sending over landing coordinates for you.”

  “We read you.” She couldn’t resist following that with a question, even though she knew the man on the other side must only be an officer—no one that would dare reveal essential information. “How is this possible? What happened here?”

  “Felix Francis is our leader. He’ll meet you on arrival and explain everything. Please, begin your descent now.”

  “Copy that.” They were the hardest two words she’d ever had to utter.

  At Yalena’s nod, Nico switched off the com. “That sounded more like an order than a request,” he said.

  “I know.” Intuition was the only thing she dared to trust now. Despite what the commander had said about proof, some things had to be felt, not seen.

  “The coordinates they sent lead to what looks like a desolate science center outside of the biggest city I can detect,” Nico said.

  Yalena’s eyes darted around the Eagle as if she was expecting to see the next course of action spelled out on the corpus walls. It wasn’t. She thought of turning back, swooshing through the wormhole to a world she could make sense of, but whatever was going on here, now was the best time to find out. Their appearance was a surprise, giving Nova Fia little time to prepare.

  “We have to land,” she said, and then felt most of her crew shift in their seats. Only Alec sat frozen in his. “I know something here feels off, but if we leave, we’re giving them time to cover it up.”

  “Cover what up?” Carmen’s voice wavered as she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Yalena said. “Maybe the reason they never crossed back to our solar system.”

  “If they’ve studied the wormhole, they could have found a problem preventing them from going back,” Nico guessed. “I think we ought to know before attempting to cross that thing again.”

  Yalena bit her lip, trying to think of a way out for them, but there wasn’t any. Every choice was risky. Every direction hid a danger they probably hadn’t anticipated in their wildest dreams. She shook her head, unable to stall anymore.

  “Alec and Dave, prepare for landing in the new world’s conditions. Nico and Michael, find a way to document everything we do and see. Natalia and Carmen, I want to know everything from what the weather’s like down there to any equipment we may need when we land. Dai,” Yalena turned to the logistics officer, “prepare sample tubes and equipment for taking scientific probes of the Nova Fia environment.”

  As soon as she finished speaking, everyone busied themselves at once, and for a short while, they worked in remarkable synergy. Yalena double-checked everything, jumping from one discussion to the next before she returned to her seat.

  “Alec.” She looked into his warm eyes as he turned back to her from his first pilot seat, but she couldn’t read his expression. “Take us down.”

  “Landing at the city’s coordinates commencing.”

  Compared to Earth, the planet’s water resources were shallow, but more ubiquitous. The two suns shining strongly almost blinded Yalena as Apollo entered the planet’s atmosphere. Yalena’s eyes drank in the beautiful mixture of colors that was this new world. Still, the alien landscape didn’t ease her discomfort.

  “Based on the locations of the suns and the thirty-degree angle between them, I estimate it will be around six in the morning local time when we land,” Nico said. “Nights on this world should be around six hours in length only.”

  Yalena heard the “wow” sounds that followed. What a day to make space history under the breathtaking two-sun sunrise on a new world.

  The rest of the landing, however, was much less scenic. Alec and Dave navigated inside the gray clouds, lowering the ship closer to the provided landing spot. A battle raged inside Yalena. Meeting the inhabitants of Nova Fia was their priority, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was better to use this risky landing to also gather as many data samples from the local environment as possible. Once she met the locals, it was politics that would take over, and an opportunity to take samples might slip out of their reach.

  “We’re landing in the forest,” she said to the pilots. “Position us close to the science center, but not on the landing space they provided.”

  “Copy that,” Alec replied, his hands glued to the navigation lever.

  “Any remarks on physical conditions on the planet, Natalia?” Yalena needed to distract herself from feeling the full-speed landing.

  “The temperature is thirty-
five degrees Celsius and humidity is eighty-five percent.”

  “We’re going to sweat like pigs, aren’t we?” Alec humored them, despite the concentrated way he was performing the landing.

  “I also detect a higher than normal density of sulphur compounds, emitted from the ocean algae,” Natalia added.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It’s going to smell funny down there, perhaps a bit sweet,” the science officer snickered.

  “Crew, prepare for landing!” Dave said, and Yalena took a deep breath.

  Why she wasn’t used to landings already was bound to remain a mystery. Still, it was all made better by the fact that Alec was piloting. He lunged down with Apollo, a spacecraft perfectly capable of operating as a regular air transporter within atmospheric conditions, and zigzagged inside the maze of trees Yalena had selected as their landing spot. With Apollo’s small size, the maneuver was certainly possible without crashing. However, the colorful trees surrounding them on all sides made Yalena dizzy, and she sort of wished she had chosen differently.

  When they finally came to a halt, it was much smoother than Yalena had anticipated. She hurried to unbuckle her belt and get to Alec’s side. He was wiping off the sweat from his temples and Yalena put a hand on his shoulder in appreciation.

  Despite the days spent cooped up in the Eagle, the contact with Nova Fia and hearing a descendant of the Migration mission speak back to them had zapped the students into action. They prepared conservation cooling boxes and high-resolution cameras for taking in everything they could from this environment. Yalena’s heartbeat was strong as she stood in front of the Apollo gateway to the outside world.

  “Final confirmation, the air outside is breathable,” Natalia’s voice was impatient.

  “Dai, open the gate.” Despite the feeling of tense expectation inside her, Yalena felt the corners of her lips curve into a smile when the gate lifted.

  Nova Fia was a sight much too surreal, like it belonged in a fantasy dream. Sunlight crept through the colorful leaves in the forest. The tallest trees were enveloped in green foliage, but nearer the ground, bushes and grass blended in shades of red, orange, and purple. It would have been too overwhelming if it hadn’t been natural. The moist air filled Yalena’s lungs, and she smelled a faint sweet scent, just like Natalia had predicted. With a small hop, Yalena landed onto the soft ground.