Preserving Perfection: Self-obsessing with body augmentation has left the entire planet of Ramos without children. But to acquire children means interstellar war! (Veiled Destiny Book 2)

by Jason Bourn

  Twenty long years. It was hard to believe. The long years in building up their battle ship fleet, training their crews and, of course, getting the jump drive technology to work. It had all taken time.

  The original promise was five years. But that had not happened – everyone was far too optimistic. The children would have been about ten years old. They could have rescued them and integrated them easily back into their earlier lives.

  But five years had turned into ten, and now practically twenty years. The children would be twenty-five years old now. They would be fully grown. She recognized that this would make their job of rescuing and returning the children back into their society much harder.

  But all she had to do was to listen to Saul. He had sent yet another message asking if the jump drive was ready and if they could go rescue his children. He was obsessed, as were all those living in the Periphery. They had massive twenty-year memorial anniversary demonstrations planned, one on every Periphery world.

  Where Saul and the Periphery were so obsessed, the Kingdom was less so. They continued to give lip service to finding the children, but with Garth steadily acquiring more and more worlds into his Kingdom every year, their focus was clearly not fully on the children.

  Nadia now had to worry about both getting the children back and ensuring that Garth’s ambitions stopped when they came to Torval 2. Torval 2 was by far the biggest and strongest of all the planets in this sector. Nadia wanted Garth to know that when the fleet of battle ships went out looking for the children, Torval 2’s entire armed fleet would be on high alert guarding the planet.

  She had met with Giliad to seek his recommendations for thwarting Garth’s ambitions.

  Giliad had been very blunt saying that if nothing changed in Garth’s trajectory, he would either take over the entire sector, Torval 2 included, using force, or determine how to take it over without the use of force. What Nadia, and Torval 2 by extension, needed to do was to develop a strategy that kept Garth in check, taking away his ability to use force. Once the large battle fleet was done rescuing the children and resided back on Torval 2, then Garth could not hope to defeat it. So Giliad proposed a plan, which Nadia had spent substantial time considering.

  Nadia shook her head, trying to focus on today’s momentous undertaking. Today was not about Garth, or the troubles he presented. Today was all about a battle ship actually using the same technology that had been used with such good effect in the “No Win War”.

  Captain Loretta Schute was starting the announcements. “We are in position and are ready for the jump. As I’m sure you are all aware, this is the first time that our jump drive technology will be used on a human being. We plan on jumping ten light years away and then we will send a message back here to Torval 2. If everything is successful, we will then jump back. Wish us safe voyages.” Then she concluded, “For the children.”

  The count-down started at two minutes and counted down steadily. As the count approached zero, all the monitors showed the ship hanging in space. Of course, they were nowhere near the planet itself, or they could never have used the jump drive. As the count reached zero, suddenly the ship simply disappeared.

  Everyone waited anxiously for news of the success or failure of the jump. After more than twenty seconds the quantum communications gear came to life. Captain Schute spoke saying with a big grin, “Congratulations everyone on such a resounding success. The quantum jump has been successful. We just performed a complete diagnostic and everything is in full, functional order. We will have to perform a few more tests, but based upon the success so far, we will be able to outfit the rest of the ships very soon and then we will be ready to go out and rescue our children.”

  – – –

  Garth, Kadar, Saul and Giliad were on Nadia’s large display in her meeting room. They were finalizing the plan for rescuing the children. Giliad was speaking, “What we need to do is to project an overwhelming force, so they have no choice but to listen to our demands. The objective is to get them to listen to us and to acquiesce to our demands, not to fight. Therefore, we will all jump at the same exact time, but to different locations. Specifically, each ship will appear around the planet from a slightly different location, so they will all converge on the planet simultaneously from every direction. Remember that each will still be three day’s journey to the planet itself, but we will start in towards the planet immediately following the jump. We will all broadcast the same message simultaneously from every ship. No one ship will appear to be the lead, so they would not know which one to attack, even if that was their intent. They will most likely agree to talk with us and that is the first step. If we can get that far, the odds of successfully getting the children increase by an order of magnitude. Are there any questions?”

  Saul asked, “What if they don’t agree to give the children back? What will we do?”

  Giliad said, we have a fleet of over two hundred battle ships. If things do get to where we have to fight, we should be sufficient fire-power to handle just about any adversary. Of course, while I cannot guarantee victory, this course of action would be in our best strategic interests. As always, I implore you to stage the battlefield conditions such that there is no need to fight. As I have said before, as soon as fighting starts, both sides have lost.”

  CHAPTER 19 – EARTH BOUND

  The jump was scheduled in five minutes. After twenty years of planning, it was finally going to happen.

  Nadia had insisted on coming along. She could not stand hearing about the account of rescuing the children second hand. She wanted to be present when it finally happened. So here she was, along with Giliad, one of the few civilians in a ship full of commissioned officers and crew. As the count inexorably moved closer and closer to zero, her excitement, and anxiety, rose. As she counted off the final few seconds, she glanced at the monitor that would show the planet with the hundreds of ships suddenly surrounding it.

  Five, four, three, two, one. Suddenly the star pattern shifted to a totally unrecognizable pattern. Nadia had unknowingly memorized what the star pattern “should” look like – as it always had looked like from Torval 2. This being her first quantum jump, she realized that the star pattern must be different, but hadn’t really thought that far ahead. The biggest thing, of course, was the planet. Unfortunately, there was no planet.

  She re-checked all the information, hundreds of years old, from the ship that had made the initial journey from Earth to Torval 2, about where Earth should be. It “had” to be here. There was no way that they could make that big of a mistake. And not only was Earth not visible, but none of the of the other solar system planets, nor the sun, were visible. Nadia was confused.

  Captain Loretta Schute was the first to voice the obvious. “I have just checked and double checked all of our information about the location of Earth. It should be right here. There is no debris and no radiation or any other indication that the solar system has been destroyed. It just isn’t here. We must have the wrong coordinates, but we don’t – I’m sure of it. I suppose it could be possible to hide a planet, though there is no technology that we know of to do it – much less hide an entire solar system. However, one way we could check that theory is to get closer to where the planet should be and attempt to use the quantum jump drive. If it works, then we know that the planet is definitely not close.”

  They had one ship volunteer to make the jump – this was a death sentence if there really were a massive object nearby. Without all the right calculations, the ship would just cease to exist as a whole – each of its component particles would jump to different places, never to be put back together again.

  As the designated ship ranged closer and closer to where Earth should be, the volunteers aboard nervously awaited the countdown until the jump. They planned a relatively short jump, just to see if it would work. But any jump at all could be their death sentence.

  When the count slowly dipped to zero, the ship disappeared. Immediately Nadia sent out a message asking for thei
r status. Nadia didn’t know if she was more relieved or more perplexed when the response quickly came that the ship was fine.

  This confirmed that Earth was, in fact, not where it should be. Since no one had any better ideas, the fleet implemented another jump – this time back to Torval 2. They had successfully jumped back to Torval 2, but their journey just left more questions than answers.

  A great debate concerning what to do next commenced, but never got anywhere. There really wasn’t anywhere to get to. No one had any idea where to go to find the children. Finally, Giliad spoke, “Obviously there is something that we missed. I propose reviewing the records in more detail of the three ships we captured to determine what to do next. As there were not any other productive suggestions, Giliad, along with the top experts in the information technology field, initiated a thorough review of the three ships’ records.

  – – –

  They had been working on the records for a little over three days when they finally found it.

  Looking through all the navigational records, through the user logs, and even through the mess hall records, they hadn’t found anything that showed where Earth might have gone or where the ships had come from, if not from the Earth. The more times they looked, and failed, the more anxious everyone felt that their entire effort for over twenty years would be in vain.

  The lead IT expert, Krisha Patel, finally said to Giliad, “I am quite sure that someone has gone through the records and purposefully redacted anything having to do with where they came from. The redaction was very thorough – for example they removed whole entries having to do with navigation and entries in encyclopedias that might touch on where their home was or where the foreigners might have come from.”

  Giliad replied, “Yes, it appears that they were quite good at removing the information we are looking for. Is there any way to recover the missing data?”

  Krisha smiled sadly, shaking her head, “No, their technology was quite good in this area – most likely tied in to the fact that they had body augmentation. It would make sense that their cyber security would be top notch, for fear that their body systems might be hacked. They not only removed the relevant data, but they overwrote it multiple times with strings of ones and zeros and such – the bottom line is that there is no trace of the data left. We are going to have to look somewhere else.”

  Giliad considered this for several minutes, then finally suggested, “How about if we do a search of the entire aggregated database for the word ‘home’ or any of its derivatives.” Pull in everything, even if it doesn’t seem to apply.

  Not having anything better to do, since they had tried everything else they could think of, the IT experts performed a search for anything using the word “home.” Interestingly, there were no relevant entries. Sure, there were entries for “home run” and such, but the redaction had been done amazingly well.

  Giliad considered this, then finally said, “We have checked all their digital records and they have been very thorough. Anything to do with their home world or where they have come from has been erased and we cannot recover it once it has been erased. With this in mind, our only other avenue we have left is a search of their analog records, if any. Perhaps they weren’t as thorough there.”

  This search was actually easier in some ways, in that there weren’t that many analog records, mostly consisting of sound tracks. There were hundreds of audio tracks to go through and no way to know if any were more likely to provide key information than others. So, they listened to each track one at a time.

  They decide to listen as a group to each audio track, in hopes of having someone recognize something that was important – it was deemed too important to only have one person listening, for fear that a key element might be missed.

  After listening to over a hundred tracks of varying types and quality, but with no useful information, they finally hit the jackpot when they found an old audio recording of a song that was evidently a young child’s voice singing a song. The quality was very poor, which was both endearing, but probably also why it hadn’t been converted into digital format. The sweet child-like quality would have been lost if it had been cleaned up during digitization.

  The song was a simple lyric, but the line that everyone focused on, and instantly galvanized everyone, once they heard it was: “If mommy or daddy would spend some time with me, the happiest girl on Ramos I’d be.”

  Everyone stood in place, shocked at what they had heard. Finally, Giliad said, “Play that last sound track again, please.”

  Krisha queued up the track again. When they heard the words “happiest girl on Ramos I’d be” again, in that soft child’s voice, they knew that they had hit upon something.

  Krisha quickly said, “Scan all records from the three ships for the word “Ramos.”

  When Krisha saw the results, she frowned. “Nothing, not even a small mention.” Pausing, she then said, “I guess that we have been grasping at straws.”

  Giliad paused, then said, “Not necessarily, this may actually be good news. If they were very good at redacting their home world from the star ship records, then this is what we would expect. How about if we crosscheck with the records from the ship that originally brought everyone to Torval 2, the Starfire? That star map should be uncensored. Please check that database for a sun or planet called Ramos.”

  After another flurry of activity, a look of triumph showed on Krisha’s face. “We did it! We found a planet called Ramos!”

  Nodding his head, Giliad asked for the foreign ships’ databases. Scanning quickly, he announced, “This is very suspicious. Every sun and planet within 150 light years of Earth have names assigned to them, with the exception of Ramos’ solar system. We never noticed that because there are hundreds of billions of stars and planets outside of 150 light years that have no names, so this didn’t stand out, unless we specifically looked for it. Based upon this evidence, I would say that we have found our destination. It is extremely likely that if we go there, that we will find our missing children.

  CHAPTER 20 – FINDING RAMOS

  Dorial could scarcely believe it. Next month would mark the twenty-year mark that they had returned with the children. But they were children no longer. They were now between twenty-four and twenty-six years old – old enough to qualify as adults. And incredibly, they had shown none of the narcissistic signs that every native-born child had shown. The council had rightly assessed that the first four to six years of parenting made all the difference.

  Rheana broke into his reverie saying, “There are two things on the agenda that we have to discuss.

  “First, we have pushed off telling the children about their pasts several times now. We really should tell them – they are old enough now. And I think that they have been indoctrinated enough into our society, and especially into their body augmentation, that they will have no issues with the truth.

  “Second, we have to decide when, or if, we will allow them to command battle ships on their own. They really haven’t been old enough before, but now I am sure that they are. The real question is whether we can trust them. This goes back to the first point.”

  Dorial responded, “I agree that the children are now effectively ‘of Ramos’. Based upon our last several interviews with them, the children all say the most important possession of theirs is their body augmentation. They say what they’d like most is more sophisticated augmentation and what they fear most is that their critical augmentation either fails or is taken away. The children’s scores are very similar to our scores in this area, so I feel that their assimilation of body augmentation has been fully successful.

  “Also, although we have never brought up anything with regards to their parentage, they only asked us about their parents for the first month or so and we always replied that they were far away and they couldn’t see or talk to them. The really telling part, though, is that they stopped talking about their parents after about six months, about the same time as their bodies were fully adap
ting to their body augmentation. Since then, they haven’t even discussed anything about their parents, even among themselves.

  “So, I agree that they are ready to learn the truth.”

  Dorial continued, “As for the second point, we really don’t have a choice of ‘if’ they are going to command the battle ships. As we all get older, they will be the only ones left. So at least some of them have to command the ships. Otherwise, when we are gone, there will be no one to do so and we will be vulnerable to any and all outside threats. So, it is not a question of if, but when.

  “Right now, we have the ten battle ships available, but we really only have eight of us that are willing and able to command them.”

  Rheana nodded her head, “So we both agree that we do need to tell them about their pasts – so the question really is when do we tell them and when do we allow them to take command of the ships.”

  Dorial responded, “Let’s set up a meeting to tell them collectively about their parents and their pasts. I think it is better to let them come to grips with this first and let them have some time before we give them possession of the battle ships. How about if we set up a meeting with all of them next week?”

  Rheana smiled, happy that they had made a decision. She just hoped that they were reading the children correctly.

  – – –

  Garth felt his plan was full-proof. He knew that once the battle ship fleet left for Ramos, there would be no stopping his fleet from conquering Torval 2. All the best commanders were all leading the battle ship fleet. The only ones left defending Torval 2 were those that were not competent enough to command one of the new ships. Garth had even paid off a few of them to ensure that their ships put up no opposition when his armed ships swooped in. In addition, the leader of his battle ship fleet, Darian Johnston, was well-known to everyone who knew him as the meanest, cleverest leader that they knew, Garth excepted. Garth knew he could count on Darian to accomplish this mission.