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

by Anne Spackman

“Because Erik’s your friend.”

  “This is about Erik?” Kusao said, then sensed he had touched a nerve. “It is about Erik, isn’t it? He told me you and he dated once, back at the UESRC, but wasn’t that a while back?”

  “And you, like everyone else, think I should put him out of my mind, right? You think I don’t know that I’m wasting my time? Believe me, I wish I could just forget him.”

  “You really care about him?” Kusao said, intrigued.

  “Erik was the first person who ever bothered to find out what the real me was like.” Nathalie shrugged. “For a while it seemed we were really starting something, but I guess I must have scared him off somehow. I still don’t know what I did wrong. He didn’t have to prove he was some kind of hero to impress me, you know—oh, damn it,” she said, responding to an alarm on her wrist communicator. “Someone’s checking up on me,” she added, patching into a vidigital signal of her quarters.

  “Who is it?” Kusao asked.

  Nathalie sighed. “It’s Erin. She’s been looking for me, but I turned off my personal frequency.”

  “You don’t want to talk to her?”

  “Sometimes I just need time by myself.”

  “I understand,” Kusao said, nodding. “You’re avoiding her because Erik is in love with her.”

  “Petty of me, isn’t it?” Nathalie said, staring down into her glass.

  “Not at all,” Kusao disagreed. “Not at all.”

  “You won’t say anything to Erik—or Erin—about this, will you?” Nathalie looked up suddenly.

  “Of course not,” Kusao said, shaking his head. “Now put that drink down and come get some rest. I’ll distract Erin if she’s still there.”

  “Thanks, Kusao,” Nathalie managed as he helped her to her feet, in a voice that was surprisingly vulnerable and sad now that he had worn through her initial hostility.

  “You’re welcome, Nathalie.”

  * * * * *

  Where could Nathalie be? Erin wondered, frowning in disappointment. She glanced about the observation deck nearest the crew quarters several more times and decided to try once more on her wrist communicator. Nathalie had not been in her quarters, but she didn’t appear to have gone out for a short walk in the neighboring corridors, either.

  “Well hello, Dr. Forren,” one of the Russian technicians called in the corner of the room. The man sitting by the viewport turned away from the starry view and gave a slight sound of surprise.

  “Pyotr Alexandrovich, you’re looking well.” Forren offered pleasantly. He was a man just past thirty, with keen, wide-set grey eyes and dark hair, with well-formed features, a long aquiline nose, and a broad forehead. His complexion was fair, his lips ruddy, and his gaze steady and intelligent.

  “Well, doctor, I took your advice and started Lena on the medicine. I do think her nerves are a little better.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “I’ll be in at 0600.”

  “Yes—” Forren stopped abruptly. As the Russian technician turned away, Forren’s eye was drawn to a young creature clad in blue standing in the center of the room; her face was lovely. “Who is that girl?” He said, intrigued by her and totally caught off his guard.

  “You’re looking for someone, doctor?” The Russian technician asked.

  “Yes, I believe so,” Forren said slowly, then remembered his manners. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning, Pyotr Alexandrovich.”

  “Good-bye doctor.”

  “Yes, good-bye.” Forren made a polite bow and settled back to observe the girl from where he sat as the Russian departed.

  Ten minutes later, Erin decided to give up on Nathalie. What else was there to do? Ho-ling wasn’t around; no one she knew was off-duty, so Erin decided to go for a walk. One last look towards the observation window nearby failed to produce a Nathalie or any other familiar person, to her profound disappointment.

  She turned around, colliding into a man walking past. They hit each other hard; Erin jarred her right browbone on his shoulder; he was knocked aside and almost fell.

  “Oh, excuse me,” she began to apologize, feeling more embarrassment than pain.

  “There’s no need.” The man said, stooping to retrieve a clip that had fallen out of his pocket. “Entirely my fault.”

  “I wasn’t looking where I was going,” Erin explained, gesturing, flummoxed.

  “Perhaps not, but it really was my fault. I saw that you were turning around. I’m afraid I just wasn’t fast enough.” His calm voice and steady gaze had an effect upon her; she stopped gesturing and looked at him. His face was not unpleasant, though perhaps a bit reserved in expression. It was a likable, even attractive face, but his manner seemed so formal that she wouldn’t have said anything to him had he not spoken right then.

  “I have to confess now,” the strange man said after a moment with an earnest glance, “that chance had little to do with this most unfortunate accident.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “Not that I intended to make such a lasting impression, mind you,” he continued. “I saw you from over there in the corner,” he said, half-turning to point out the table he frequented. “And I thought perhaps you might require some assistance. You seem to be looking for something. Anything I can do to help?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Erin admitted. “I’ve lost my friend, you see, and the misfortune is, she doesn’t appear to want to be found.”

  “That’s a pity.” The man said, but without any artifice. His expression was such that she sensed he was a man of high ideals and moral principles, that nothing but pure truth ever passed his lips, at least as far as he had ascertained what was good and what contemptible. “By God, you know you are quite remarkable.” He said, surveying her face, then slapped his hand against his forehead. “Oh. but wait a moment, where have my manners gone? Forgive me for being blunt. My name is Forren, Dr. Forren. I’d ask how you managed to end up on this strange ship, but the er—uniform quite gives that away. I myself was invited on board at the Ural Base. Had I but known where the invitation would lead me!” he said, with a note of anguish.

  “You’re a medical doctor, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I appreciate your consideration—”

  “Forren, Lieutenant—Mathieson?!’” He cried, reading her name plate and rank. “Oh yes, I have heard of your family.”

  Erin only nodded.

  “Oh, I am truly sorry. I had no intention of upsetting you.” He said sincerely, realizing that the subject of family was a sore one for most of the people on board. “I, too, have left my family behind, and I’m afraid I have yet to make many friends apart from my former patients. There just doesn’t seem to be much time to devote to individuals.”

  “I understand,” Erin agreed.

  “However, I must admit, I’d enjoy a visit from you, if you’re ever so inclined. We could go for a walk sometime, if you ever need a companion and this wayward friend of yours isn’t around.”

  “Well, Dr. Forren—”

  “Actually my first name is Robert.”

  “Well then, pleased to meet you, Robert.”

  * * * * *

  Weeks passed, and the Discovery’s radar specialists reported no sign of the Charon aliens’ flagship, while the Discovery continued to cruise at the same speed and on the same course. Eleven days after the last jump through the wormhole, the navigators made an emergency course adjustment of about twenty-one degrees port to avoid a runaway star; the situation would not have been a danger had it not been for the ship computer’s immunity to course adjustments; at the last moment, the Discovery allowed the temporary correction in its course, but once the anomaly had been passed, the guidance computer took control of the helm once more, altering its course to rendezvous with the initial vector it had been traveling.

  “Aching legs,” Kansier said, and shifted a moment in his command chair.

  Kansier had begun to realize the strain of continuous duty on his bridge crew, as well as on his sore
and aching legs and backside from having sat in the command chair hour after hour. Some of the crew seated closest to the observation window began to show symptoms of fatigue, irritability, and unusual depression. One of the top medical doctors on board, Dr. Gheorghe Droessler, had concluded that the long hours staring at the space field had elevated the crew’s perception of the missed daylight hours and that this stimulated a fatigue which, combined with general anxiety, sleeplessness, and homesickness, had created counter-productive nervous and psycho-somatic disorders as well as severe depression and an attention span deficit.

  What to do about it, though? Kansier had wondered.

  Well, Dr. Droessler had prescribed a treatment of shorter duty hours and some time spent in the bright fluorescent light of the transferred hydrogarden. Kansier agreed that the crew could not function indefinitely under such extreme operating conditions. When he had been given the order by the UESF Council to create a primary and secondary bridge crew, the selections had been made with only a temporary test flight in mind. But who knew now how long the ride was going to last? Kansier had been taught to conserve his supplies in survival situations, and that included preserving the well-being of his crew.

  Dammit, why did everything have to be so difficult?

  Already there had been a few isolated cases of space claustrophobia, and Droessler worried about the long-term effect their isolation would have upon increased outbreaks.

  Taking all of his medical advice into consideration, Kansier decided the best solution would be to create a third bridge crew according to the standards of any Earth vessel. One evening, he and Zhdanov began to peruse the crew list in the Captain’s quarters; for seven hours straight they discussed new candidates and the liabilities of decreasing the fighter squadrons’ numbers, even though so far, the fighter squadrons had seen no actual combat against any enemies and had only done flight drills thus far.

  Halfway through their meeting, Knightwood came by to report that there were enough of the blue and white alien flight suits for only one more bridge crew. If they decided to go ahead and create still another, then they would have to attach special badges to the facsimiles that had been created at the UESRC. This was no big deal, but mere information.

  In the end, Kansier felt that despite the losses to the fighter squadrons, it would be best to create four rather than three bridge crews and shorten the duty hours to six out of every twenty-four. In case of future emergencies, he would then have a wider pool of experienced crew and not have to draw upon raw replacements. Situation solved.

  The next morning following Kansier’s announcement, nearly two hundred officers reported on the bridge and with instructions to observe the primary bridge crew. Though they had been trained while the Discovery waited grounded at the Ural Base, they had not been exposed to the actual functioning of the Discovery. Many of the new crews were intimidated by the new responsibility they had been called on to take, but in due course, they adjusted to it.

  Kansier was pleased.

  In time, the addition of two new bridge crews greatly improved the disposition of the primary and secondary teams. Once their off-duty hours had been augmented with the complete independence of the new teams, they were able to spend more time on their own, and symptoms of fatigue declined. But Kansier had warned them that duty did not end away from the bridge—there were thousands of tasks needing to be carried out to make the Discovery fit for a long-term living arrangement.

  Knightwood’s greatest fear now was that the food supply would run out.

  The plants in the hydrogarden on board the Stargazer had been taken into one of the holding bays near the crew quarters and made into a kind of park that Zhdanov termed a “nature therapy” retreat. Though the garden conduced the recycling of oxygen, they had some artificial converters for that purpose if something happened to affect the plants on board. Water, too, and some materials were easily recycled. And Knightwood suspected the Discovery itself contained some kind of atmospheric regulation devices, for her calculations posited implementing additional, necessary procedures to maintain the atmospheric cycles. Yet the atmosphere remained constant without any interference.

  Who knew about the alien technology and how it regulated the atmosphere on board.

  However, once the dehydrated rations ran out, owing to the small number of livestock on board, the crew would have to rely solely upon the plants as their food supply, and the Stargazer had only 9 cubic meters of Earth soil on board when it was sent out from Central City. Hydroponics alone was not producing an adequate supply to meet the demand.

  In essence, they would all starve soon if something wasn’t done to change the situation.

  Finally Knightwood decided it was necessary to re-test the alien soil they had discovered in the holding bay near the crew quarters, part of something that might have been a playground for the aliens’ children. Knightwood had come up with a plan to ameliorate the situation, and this plan involved using the stored soil.

  To her gratification, the alien soil that they had removed from the playground harbored no detectable parasites, harmful microorganisms, or poisons. In her analysis, she found it not unlike Earth soil, though the mineral content was unusual, and there were strange nano-particles in it, but none damaging to humans. As an experiment, she then mixed a handful of Earth soil with a canisterful of the alien kind and planted several different kinds of seeds.

  Before the crew had boarded the Discovery, the recon scientists had figured out how to adjust the lighting of each room, to decrease the intensity of blue and white light and augment the other colors, creating a fluorescent beacon. They had even gone to the other extreme successfully, dimming the brightness of the room as they shifted the range of light into the infrared. A few months ago, Knightwood had given instructions to the new crew as to how to operate their lighting systems.

  Now Knightwood set the lights in her living area for a twelve hour fluorescent period, to create comparable daylight hours for the seedlings while she was away in other parts of the ship.

  Then—success!

  After three days, one of the bean sprouts pushed through the soil, unfurling after another day. A week later, most of the seeds had developed into tiny plants which Knightwood examined for mutations or anomalies. However, after hours of circumspect study and experimentation, she braved the final test and ingested some of the sprouts reaching maturity.

  Zhdanov wondered why Knightwood seemed so edgy that day, but he could not have known that she was fretting over the consequences of her private risk. Was she going to die horribly from some alien poison that could contaminate them all? For hours, Knightwood lingered near the newly created medical unit as if expecting some sudden affliction, but nothing happened to her. Zhdanov wasn’t blind; the next morning he demanded an explanation of her behavior as Knightwood emerged from the examination room where Dr. Droessler had conducted the second series of tests on her vital signs in less than a week.

  “I’m fine,” Knightwood had insisted, and then explained what she had done.

  When Knightwood, Zhdanov, and Cheung broke the news that the forgotten alien soil which had been removed to a distant Great Bay produced viable and innoxious vegetables, Kansier granted them permission to instigate Knightwood’s solution. The team of scientists then recruited volunteers to collect as much of the unused Earth soil in the hydrogarden as possible and help them mix 100cc with each cubic meter of the alien kind.

  They had a plan.

  Each crew member, technician, and family was to receive a small canister of the mixture and a limited choice of seeds to grow. They would all grow their own food! And, at the end of the growing season, they would each get to keep half of what they had produced for themselves. Knightwood wanted everyone on board to have an incentive to produce high yields, and isolating the plants would itself be an experiment to determine what kind of growing conditions were ideal.

  So everybody would stay alive if they grew their own food.

  While Kni
ghtwood was busy cultivating a green thumb, Dr. Ilienko, one of Cheung’s old comrades from the Ural Base science team, approached him with a problem that the maintenance crews and their families had been experiencing. Before the Discovery’s second test flight, the 234 children stationed on board with their parents had been tutored by a team from the Ural Base that had departed shortly before the second test flight. It had now been four months since any of the children had been given any schooling, and the maintenance crews were still too busy converting sections of the Discovery for other uses to devote time to their children’s education.

  What to do about the children?

  Cheung had been wondering when the maintenance teams might voice this particular problem, for it was not unexpected. Most of the crew had been formed with younger officers and new graduates from the Earth bases. But what the families of the technicians had put off and sacrificed in the short term for the crew’s overall benefit could not remain neglected forever.

  The scientific teams from Central City, the UESRC, and Yokohama Base had met during the second week to suggest future developments, knowing that life must eventually continue as it had on Earth, and that certain routine aspects of it should be restored. One of their proposals had been the establishment of a school, staffed by volunteers from among the fighter squadrons and bridge crews. Kansier, Cheung, and Zhdanov then approached several other candidates who might devote a few hours per week to the new school.

  Forty days came and went, and there was still no sign of the Charon alien ship.

  Kansier and his crew could only pray for their Earth.

  * * * * *

  Robert Forren’s steady grey eyes were the kind that sought to seek out the secrets of others rather than reveal their own, Erin decided after some time in his company. Though in dealings with his patients he was nothing but patient and kind, when he met her from time to time, she began to notice more and more that he often scanned her features, replies, and comments for signs of her character.

  “Are you enjoying the walk?” he would often ask. He seemed seldom to listen to simple replies, but was attentive to anything substantial. Having convinced himself at last that Erin’s attitudes and sensibilities were as good as her face and form, he spoke more freely to her concerning his own fears and concerns for the future of all on board the ship and turned his attention to the doings of those around them.