Across the Stars: Book Three of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

by Anne Spackman

  “Colonel Kansier, since the Discovery has passed so far out of range, we do not expect an immediate response to this message. However, prompt action is warranted. We expect the Charon alien vessel to continue to follow you.” Knightwood smiled as she listened; Elena Fabrichnova, Knightwood’s friend and former classmate who had recently been promoted to Mars Division President, must have prevailed upon her representatives to deliver the news personally.

  “We must know if you are willing to continue on the course that the Discovery has set for itself.” The message continued. “We understand that some of you may intend to board the Stargazer and abandon the Discovery. However, I understand that Kansier will remain, perhaps in the event that Discovery might crash again on another world within a relatively close distance of our system; if that were to happen, then the Stargazer might be able to return you to the Earth in your own lifetimes.

  “Nevertheless, I have been instructed to inform you of the word we received some time ago from the UESF Council. The Council feels it cannot order any Earth citizens into permanent exile and that the crew must be given a choice whether or not to abandon the ship. However, there is no guarantee that the Charon aliens will not return to destroy the Earth if they attain their goal, unless monitored and drawn away by your crew, unless you keep the Discovery from them indefinitely.

  “That is what the Council hopes you will choose to do, though it will mean permanent exile from Earth. They have asked me to remind you that should you abandon the Discovery to space, it may be that another world will also fall victim to the Charon aliens, another world as beautiful and peaceful as the Earth. I myself cannot help but wonder if your present situation was the reason for the mysterious disappearance of Discovery’s original inhabitants–if they did not abandon her when they lost control of the navigational systems.

  “In any case, at your current speed and location, you know that no Earth vessel is capable of catching up to you. The council will, of course, understand if you feel the task too great, if you feel you have few supplies, or too scanty a crew, but the decision is up to all of them. What we are asking would be the most unthinkable sacrifice of all–to leave the Earth behind, perhaps forever. We will be waiting for a response, whether or not to expect the return of the Stargazer or to wish our farewells to those friends who will hereafter be regarded the greatest heroes of the Earth.”

  “We have to decide quickly,” Kansier said as the message ended, before the others could speak. “Who here wishes to go home? It’s nothing to be ashamed of if you want to leave. It seems none of us who remain will be able to see our families or friends again.”

  “What about you, sir?” Major Dimitriev asked, turning around.

  “I intend to stay with the ship,” Kansier declared, folding his arms across his chest. “Whatever those aliens are after, I pledge I’ll find it. And I’m interested to see just where we’re going. I’m willing to bet everything that the Charon aliens are moving to follow us and not to attack the Earth.”

  “You really think they’ll follow us, sir?” Rheinhardt asked.

  Kansier nodded. “Their course heading is set to rendezvous with the vector we’re traveling. And I believe Fabrichnova was right. We must keep them from attaining the Discovery. If they do, they may return to the Earth and destroy us out of spite, or because they have no other use for us, once they have gotten what they wanted all along.”

  “Very well, sir,” Hans said. “I’ll relay instructions to the crew as to where to relay their decisions.”

  “Very good,” Kansier said, nodding. So now the question is: do we love the Earth enough to leave her behind forever? Kansier asked himself. As he stared at the emptiness of space, he began thinking of all the places he had ever seen on Earth, of the beauty of his beloved native world. He thought of Greenwich, where he had trained, Okinawa, Oslo, and the Ural Mountains, the UESRC and Central City on the American continent, and the many worldwide centers he had visited; as he stood on Discovery’s bridge with the great void before him, he suddenly felt a part of cultures he had never known, a part of them in that they were a part of the Earth, the precious Earth, the home which he would never know again.

  “Any Earth-bound travelers better start leaving soon,” he added a moment later, in a voice that betrayed none of his own fears, none of his private pain. Although. he admitted to himself, with the Stargazer wedged in so tightly into the Great Cargo Bay, how they were going to leave might be a bit of a problem.

  “We’ll both stay with the ship, sir,” Scott said; Kansier turned around and regarded the younger officer. A bittersweet smile played around the corners of Scott’s mouth, and he nodded stoically, masking his fears.

  Scott watched as Kansier turned to another communication and looked towards the monitor which held the much-magnified image of the diminishing Earth; his gaze never left the monitor until the Earth became almost a distant star, faded, and finally disappeared.

  Scott suddenly felt as though the very ground had been ripped from beneath him. He had been cast adrift in a restless sea. The Earth was gone. However, his mind refused to accept that he would never see the Earth again. As he stood contemplating the future and the infinity which stretched before them, he found his thoughts drawn back to the Earth; the Earth contained all that he knew. He could not comprehend existence without it. How could he leave it? Never see the Earth again? Never!?

  Scott had never felt this love before. He felt as though he were dying. To leave the Earth forever was like dying, like losing his life as he had known it.

  Yet in a moment, he would be reborn again, not a creature of the Earth, but a wanderer without an identity, a soldier with no more home to defend. From now on, he knew that his world was the Discovery, that his fellow crew had become his world, that they must become his only world. They had nothing, nothing but each other now.

  Chapter Five

  Shortly after the bridge received the transmission from the UESF Council on Mars, the Discovery left the Sol system; as they entered into new areas within the same spiral arm of the Milky Way, Sol had dwindled in the unending sky, now just a distant, average yellow star. Despite their decision to leave the Earth behind, the crew grew despondent and morose about leaving their loved ones behind without even an opportunity to wish them good-bye; for a long time, a funereal atmosphere permeated the ship. Two days had passed since the launch, and the speed at which the Discovery was traveling continued to increase. Still, she was averaging a rate of only .03 light speed, which meant that even the closest solar systems would take years to reach. And at the present rate, one of the shipboard astrophysicists had calculated she wouldn’t be very hard to catch.

  On the second day that the alien spaceship of the Charon aliens caught up to its prey. While the primary bridge crew slept, the alien ship of the Charon aliens activated a gravitational weapon against them, pulling the Discovery off course and slowing her down. Thousands of passengers were thrown to the floor and around the room as the artificial gravity on board the Discovery went haywire.

  Then the Discovery’s own immune system kicked in, restoring the internal gravity and supercharging its power to escape the gravitational net. The resulting power surge sent the ship farther away at a greater speed, .041 the speed of light. In another day, there was no sign of the alien vessel that had pursued them, and the crew waited anxiously for another attack. Anything was preferable to the aliens’ retreating to Earth.

  Nearly three hours after the primary bridge crew was put off-duty, Erin Mathieson had taken a break from her self-imposed studies on the maintenance of internal ecosystems to visit the Mess Hall for an early dinner. At first she and the other crew members had been concerned about the food supply, since only enough supplies and livestock to last a few months had been loaded on board a month earlier at the Ural Base.

  However, late on the day of their departure, the former UESRC and Council scientists had taken a few teams of fighter pilots inside the Stargazer to salvage materials. The f
irst priority of the teams had been to retrieve oxygen and compressed atmosphere canisters to re-pressurize the Great Bay.

  Their second concern had been removing the hydrogarden and the precious soil that contained each plant. Zhdanov’s fear that the Stargazer had not been re-supplied for space travel was allayed by the discovery of a full Mess Hall pantry. There were enough dehydrated food rations and water canisters to last the present Discovery crew for more than a year.

  Nevertheless, each person on board had been distributed only three ration chips per day for the next month. Erin had skipped lunch that day, but she thought she might be hungry later that evening after her second shift, or at least that she might begin to grow irritable from lack of food. She seldom actually felt hungry, but long periods without food tended to agitate her. The Mess Hall was running at every moment to allow the primary and secondary bridge crews the most convenience their absurd schedules would permit.

  Kansier had dismissed some of the primary bridge crew early that day, seeing that all systems were normal. Protocol was beginning to pale in significance to what the future might hold, and Kansier found it unnecessary to keep all of his bridge navigators on duty, especially since they could not much affect the Discovery’s guidance system, anyway. All shifts had been decreased to an eight hour period per day, in order to attenuate the monotony of the Command Center atmosphere and increase the crew’s overall alertness.

  Most of the operations teams and fighter squadrons were busy at the Stargazer when Erin came off-duty. Some of the overcrowding was being alleviated by transferring the primary fighter teams closer to the unloaded fighters, into the old crew quarters on board the Stargazer. The Earth ship was also being set up to work with the Discovery’s internal communications network, in order that the crew quartered there might still feel connected to the nexus of the ship itself.

  Only a dozen or so people dotted the numerous tables of the enormous Mess Hall; Erin found a table near the cooking and rehydrating stations that had been put into the Discovery. The alien food systems had been left intact, though none of the scientists had as yet been able to get the machines to work.

  Erin sat toying with her food, her mind on other things. Her mind tortured her with recollections of her mother, father, and sister when they all lived at the UESRC. She wondered how they had taken the news that she was lost to them; she wondered if her sister Moira had returned to the Earth by now, since it was clear that the Charon aliens had left the Sol system to follow Discovery. She thought of her childhood and most beloved friend Coline and Major Watanabe, and all of the others she had known at the UESRC who had remained behind, such as Dr. Cameron. Was the Earth celebrating its good fortune? How many other families mourned the loss of loved ones? What would the future hold for the Earth they all loved so dear? The worst part was that they would never know. They were dead to her now, as dead as she was to them. They would never see each other again.

  “So, I’ve found you at last.” A voice interrupted her. “You’ve been avoiding me for months now, Erin. Something bothering you?” Erik Ross asked, but Erin only shrugged. A moment later, Erik took a seat beside her and began to drum his fingers into the table. He had already used his lunch ration a few hours before, just before his shift began. Then on the bridge Kansier had allowed Erik and four of his navigators to leave after only two hours; the navigators were the luckiest part of the crew, since their services were not really useful in steering the ship.

  For the past three days, like so many others, Erik Ross had been wondering about what the future would bring them all. In a way, he was almost glad that they had all been confined together, even though it meant they would never return home. For there were only six thousand members in their crew and little over three thousand men on board, about a third of them married maintenance workers. Thinking about the future, Erik was often annoyed that Major Dimitriev was here, but at least his fiancée Catherine Cresson had also made it on board with the research scientists from Central City.

  In any case, there was no one left for him on Earth, no family to mourn, no significant friends who had not also been included among the crew. He felt sorry for the others in some ways, because he knew what it was like to lose everyone he had ever loved, but he couldn’t help feeling a certain bitterness that the crew were all moping about the ship. At least their families were still alive, living happily on the Earth.

  “So, you aren’t going to talk to me?” Erik asked, his eyes narrowing on her.

  “I’m sorry,” Erin offered. “It’s just that I’ve been busy and preoccupied—and anyway, you know we work opposing shifts.”

  “Yes, I know,” he conceded. “Hey, I understand. I’ve had a lot on my mind recently, too. It’s sad, though. You can’t talk to anyone around here anymore. I guess—sometimes I just wish things could be the way they used to be back at the UESRC,” he said, shrugging. “I mean that at least then we knew what to expect,” he added, resting his elbow on the table, his fist pressed into his cheek.

  “So what are Hans, Nikolai, and Einar doing these days?” Erin asked.

  “Same as usual, I expect.” Erik gave a slight shrug. “They’ve accepted the situation—to an extent, anyway. Nikki seems to be taking everything worse than Einar and Hans; but then Einar’s distracted at the moment. He says he’s fallen for one of the Yokohama scientists, and there’s nothing like new love to help cure old wounds, you know? The only thing he complains about is that he can’t send her flowers.”

  They both looked at each other and laughed.

  “What about your new roommates?” Erin asked.

  “Kusao and Garrick?” Erik responded. “Well of course Kusao and I get along really well. And Garrick’s really great, too—they both are, when I see them. Actually, as you know Kusao’s on the primary bridge crew, and Garrick’s a fighter pilot now—and they’ve been busy helping the technicians do the rearranging around here.”

  “Well, I’m glad. Anyway, Erik, it was good seeing you, but I should be going. I have to report to duty soon, and I want to get a few hours sleep in before I go,” Erin got up to leave.

  “Wait, Erin, there’s something I want to talk about—” Erik said, standing, reaching out an arm to stop her.

  Erin sensed that he was about to say something, something akin to his confession almost a year ago, just before they left the Earth for the Charon mission, and tried to avoid him.

  She had tried to blot out the memory of that day. Erik had told her he loved her that spring morning, but they hadn’t spoken of it since, not since she walked out on him, leaving him behind in her own quarters.

  She felt that he hadn’t changed his mind about her in all the time since, but she hadn’t changed her opinion of him, either. She really cared about Erik, which made it so difficult to speak ill of him or speak the truth to him as she saw it. But she didn’t love him enough in return. If they were ever drawn together, she felt that they would destroy each other, or rather that he would destroy her. They had been friends, and friendship was all she wanted.

  On these grounds she had rejected him, not only because she already loved Scott and did not love Erik. Yet many months had passed since those simple days at the UESRC. Erik was no longer the idealistic young man he had been; she felt as though she were an impediment to him, a false ideal he held on to that also held him back, when all other such fantasies had fallen by the wayside.

  Another big problem Erin knew about herself she kept a secret from everyone. The only other person who knew that she had never had a menses cycle was Dr. Cameron, who was still back on Earth. Erin had been hiding the fact that she had something wrong with her ovaries for several years, and it meant that she probably could not have children. When she had asked what was wrong with her ovaries, Cameron had said that they just didn’t work normally, and that there was nothing anyone could do to fix them. He had reassured her that her vagina was normal, and that she could still have sexual intercourse someday, but her ovaries were dead. Erin had shelved
the issue only temporarily, hoping to get back to Dr. Cameron sometime to figure out what could be done to get her ovaries to work. However, there was always some reason she had to be busy, and now it was too late. She’d eventually have to find a gynecologist, she had thought, and get a second opinion on her ovaries, but something always held her back… and she kept putting it off.

  Deep down, she knew she didn’t want to know what was wrong with her. Why she was different than everyone else. So she avoided doctors like the plague and kept things hidden that were wrong with her body.

  Erin also felt awkward in forging relationships with men, knowing that she had no menses and could never have children. It mattered to her that she couldn’t have children, but she suspected it might matter even more to her future husband.

  Erin was about to say something when Erin and Erik suddenly collided with each other. The ship’s interior had become surreal, the ground not steady, the walls diaphanous. Even Erik did not feel quite real as Erin reached out to hold onto him and hold him up. Everyone around them had lost consciousness; the room felt hazy, somnolent, unreal as a dream, and the objects around them seemed distorted. The table appeared to have grown in size, her tray now on the floor seemed to have shrunk. The spoon in her hand had grown infinitely heavy and dropped but never reached the floor, hovering in mid-air.

  Erin had begun to imagine that she felt the motions of every molecule in her body, pulling in all directions. All of her thoughts became a jumbled mess, memories as far as ten years before becoming temporarily crystal clear, as if they were about to occur again. And yet her awareness of where she was remained.

  Mass to energy, her mind repeated a dozen times or more, but she heard the words as if from far away.

  She could not say how long she was trapped in the distorted reality. Time seemed to have lost all of its meaning. A shadow of Erik Ross appeared seated on the table, and a semi-visible facsimile of the food she had eaten appeared at the table beside him.

  But she herself remained whole. She felt as if she were losing control of her mind, as images of the past came clearly to her mind. She heard a computerized voice calling out a warning to her. She recognized it and recalled a dream long ago when she had heard a warning alert and the same voice had calmed her, putting her to sleep.