Penny thought about that as she watched the lid slide closed over her, sealing closed with a hiss as the inside of the pod began to fill with a mix of specialized gasses, carefully calibrated to Penny's exact weight and chemical makeup. What an incredibly human and horrible thing, she thought.
The most hateful, ugly part of humans on proud display, like a confederate flag waving over the funeral of a teenager killed in the street by police brutality.
An emblem not just of their history but of a lingering pustule on their collective consciousness, a cruelty that still flourished within them, like a blood infection long after the wound has closed. But that wound was not so long closed, she reminded herself.
There were still humans alive who'd seen that wound opened. She'd read once that a certain omnipotent clown-themed burger joint was founded just a few days before prisoners began arriving. What a thing to contemplate over your chicken nuggets. Perhaps with a little more time, the scars of that wound would fade a little. Humanity’s hateful blood infection might be cured.
But that image of cruelty raving, spewing hate in stark black and white, would go on bouncing through the stars till long after humanity was gone. Thinking such dark thoughts before cryosleep, Penny wondered if she'd have nightmares.
Chapter Two
She had no nightmares. Slowed down so dramatically by cold, her neurons weren't firing fast enough to dream. She drifted in peaceful darkness, untroubled by anything.
She woke for the first time just after Oshun exited Earth's solar system. They celebrated that first awakening. They were some of the first humans to ever leave Sol system, the first to ever go as far as they were planning to.
Groggy and a little freezer burned, they drank sparkling white grape juice and wished for champagne. Dr. Maurea played classic rock over the ship's speakers. Through the view screen, Hermes, their constant companion, was a reassuring silver dot of stability.
They exchanged chatter with the other crew, small talk as well as updates on telemetry as their computers mapped the space ahead of them for the first time, adjusting their trajectories by minute millimeters to compensate.
They'd received mail from ground control while they were out. Messages from family, updated orders and predictions, recordings of news spots about them. Penny asked Rivera to send the message she received from her parents to her personal data pad so that she could watch it in private, but she never opened it.
"Of course they start making actual progress on the language as soon as I leave the planet," Cho complained as she scrolled through the data she'd been sent, Salome peeking over her shoulder, obviously excited despite her feigned annoyance, "The linguists have been interpreting it wrong this whole time looking for single symbol letters. Didn't I say that in the very beginning during the whole pictograph/hieroglyph argument? It's the symbols placement on the grid that denotes meaning, not the symbol itself. Now they're thinking the symbols are actually meant to convey tone!"
"That's fascinating," Salome leaned further over Cho's shoulder, "It's like an entire language made out of Sudoku puzzles."
"Can we understand it yet?" Penny asked, leaning against a bulkhead nearby and sipping grape juice, casually observing everyone else. Rivera was watching the same video of her wife and daughter for the third time. Ian was recording an educational piece about gravitational forces with Redbird from the Hermes.
"Not quite yet," Cho replied, "But we're getting close. Now that we have a better idea of the concept of the language we can start figuring things out. It took us twenty years to translate the Rosetta stone. For a totally alien language, I'm frankly surprised we've figured out this much so fast."
There were a few chores to do once everyone was warmed up and had finished reading and responding to their mail. Small repairs to be made and medical checkups to ensure no one was having adverse reactions to the cryo sleep. But before long, Rivera was calling lights out again. They climbed back into their pods for the next leg of their journey.
Their next wakeup call was more sedate, a quick exchange of messages, repairs, telemetry. Back into the pods. The one after that was similar. By the fourth, everyone was getting tired. They were still in the big empty, the void between star systems. An unpleasant and unremarkable place to be.
Outside the window, only Hermes was visible, their guiding star. They ate as much as they could; restoring the calories burned by their chemically slowed metabolisms during the now literal years they'd been asleep.
Rivera watched the video of her daughter growing up and wept openly. No one would have dared mock her for it, not while they were watching the lines develop on their own loved one's faces. Penny still hadn't watched any of the messages sent by her parents, or sent any back.
She felt waterlogged, glutted by sleep, and at the same time exhausted, yearning for a proper, natural nap. Everyone had trained for this, they knew they could endure it.
But that didn't make it any more pleasant to do. She began to resent the waking periods, eager to get back to her pod just so that it would be over sooner. She woke and fell asleep counting down the time left. Just eight more cryo sleeps. Just seven. Just six more...
And then one day, they woke and found the Hermes was not beside them. Penny scanned the blank void beyond the view screen over and over, searching for the silver star of their companion ship.
"Oshun calling Hermes," Rivera's voice was deceptively calm as she called over the short range coms again and again, "Oshun to Hermes, we have lost visual. Please respond. Oshun calling Hermes..."
The Hermes didn't respond, even when Rivera switched to the emergency long range coms. It was like the other ship had vanished out of existence entirely.
"Something must have happened," Ian kept saying, scrolling ceaselessly through the recordings the ship made of the journey while the crew was sleeping, "Something the maps didn't predict. We can find them."
Eventually, he did find the place in the logs where the Hermes had disappeared, but it was neither as dramatic as they'd expected nor as easily fixed as they had hoped. It had been a small error. A tiny miscalculation made in predicting their trajectories. But traveling at near light speed across such vast distances, tiny errors multiplied rapidly.
Every day, the Hermes and the Oshun drifted further and further apart, their slumbering crews unaware, until they were beyond each other's reach. Penny wondered if the Hermes crew was waking up now, somewhere lightyears off course, and also realizing there was no guiding star outside their window.
"It's my fault," Ian hiccupped through his tears, his charming front abandoned in his guilt, "Dr. Nguyen asked me to check her figures. If I had paid more attention-"
"It's not your fault, Ian," Penny tried to reassure him, squeezing his hand, "The computers cleared her numbers too. It had to have been something the mapping programs missed. A rogue planet or an extra dense star. Something changed the gravitational currents to pull them off course. It wasn't you."
But Ian was inconsolable. Rivera proscribed him a sedative and sent him to go lay down while the rest of the crew discussed how to proceed.
"We keep going, obviously," Rivera said as they sat together on the bridge, their faces solemn, "We always knew this was a possibility. It's the whole reason they sent two ships. Flying into uncharted space is dangerous. The Hermes crew knew the risks."
"But we know the point where they deviated now, right?" Salome argued, "If we have that, we can calculate where they are now, maybe get a message to them. Coordinate a trajectory to get them back on course with us."
Cho shook her head, looking pale and tired.
"We can't afford to slow down," she pointed out, "If we don't stay on course, we'll lose the window we mapped out. The system we're crossing through now is littered with gas giants. Ian and the computer worked for hours figuring out the right speed to get us through their orbits without getting caught in their gravity well. If we wait, they'll move into our path and we won't just get thrown off course. We'll die."
"With any luck," Penny agreed, "We'll wake up after the next cryo sleep and they'll be beside us again."
Rivera nodded.
"But even if they aren't, we continue the mission," Rivera stood up, her words punctuated with finality, "No matter what."
They waited as long as they could before waking Ian and plotting the next leg of the journey. Seeing how out of it he still was, they all double checked each step of his work carefully before proceeding. Then it was back into the cryo pods.
The Hermes will be there when we wake up, Penny thought like a mantra as she closed her eyes, trying to convince herself, It will definitely be there!
It wasn't. Not the next time either. Rivera still did her best to contact the Hermes every time they woke, but there was never any response. Everyone had no choice but to accept it and move on.
They had been too far away for mail for a while now. The distance meant it would take decades for a message from Earth to reach Oshun. There were undoubtedly some on the way, but, assuming things went according to plan, they would likely be on their return journey before they received it.
They continued to dutifully send back their reports as well, signals drifting slowly through the stars, carrying data that would no doubt revolutionize Earth's understanding of space and space travel, but which would be old news by the time it's senders returned to see it.
Penny still counted down every time they returned to the cryo pods. Only three more cryo sleeps. Only two. Only one.
The lid of Penny's pod slid away with a pneumatic hiss and Penny opened her eyes, an electric hum coursing through her like Christmas morning. This was it. They had arrived.
"Can we see anything yet?" she asked, hurrying onto the bridge after the others, still tugging her clean suit on, "How close are we?"
Rivera was already at her console, turning on the view screen. A solar system sprang to life before them, a huge yellow sun burning furiously in the distance, the planets that orbited it tiny in comparison.
"We're on the edge of the system," Rivera explained, "We've begun deceleration, but we'll be at the source of the transmissions soon."
"Christ, guys, look at the airwaves!" Cho said excitedly, leaning over Salome's shoulder.
"It's packed with transmissions," Salome said with delight, "Just like the ones we saw on earth. It's positively noisy with them!"
"We did it," Penny was practically bouncing with excitement, hugging Ian's arm as delight overwhelmed her, "We actually found them!"
"They're originating from the fourth planet," Salome reported, "Which early mapping is saying looks just like we expected. Atmosphere, liquid water, all of it!"
"Any sign of the Hermes?" Ian asked, solemn.
Rivera nodded to Salome, who took a moment to scan for their twin ship's frequencies, then shook her head.
"No sign," she reported, "But it will have taken them time to get back on course. They might be right behind us."
"Yeah, don't count them out just yet," Penny patted Ian's shoulder reassuringly and Rivera nodded.
"Captain Gaugin is one of the most capable and accomplished men I know," Rivera assured them, "He'll figure something out, I'm certain of it. And in the meantime, he would want us to go on with the mission regardless. So, Ambassador, are you ready to meet some aliens?"
Penny's heart leaped, but she nodded, smiling nervously.
"I really wish we'd been able to learn more of language before we arrived," she said, "But I think I can handle it."
"Well, you've got another-" Rivera paused to glance at a console, "Six hours, thirty eight minutes to go over what Cho and Abdullah have got so far. Good luck."
"We only have the slimmest of grasps on their written language," Cho commented as Penny sat down with the other two women to go over what they had, "We have no idea how, or if, they communicate vocally. What will you do if we can't talk to them?"
"There are other methods of communication," Penny explained calmly, "Like math. Math is, at least as far as we know, a pretty universal concept necessary for the development of a species. So, if we can't communicate, I'll try to start counting for them. If math is as universal as we think it is, that will demonstrate a lot of things about our species, least of all being that we're intelligent and non-aggressive."
"And if math isn't in fact a universal concept?" Salome asked, "Or if we land in the alien equivalent of Kentucky and none of the aliens finished grade school?"
"I'll figure something out," Penny told them both, scrolling through the data, "Now show me that thing you were talking about the other day, the concept grid?"
"Okay, so, each quadrant of the grid has a distinct meaning. And there are further quadrants within each quadrant, going from simple to complex. The closer you are to the edge of the grid, the more 'pure' the concept is. The closer to the center, the more nuanced the meaning becomes..."
For about six hours, Penny studied, and then went to rest until they arrived at their destination. She climbed into her bunk and lay staring at the bottom of the bunk above her, trying to calm her frantic heartbeat. She heard the bed creak and realized Ian must be in his own bunk resting as well.
"Are you excited?" he asked after a moment.
"Very," she answered, "I've wanted this my whole life. Are you?"
"Losing the Hermes like that," Ian confessed, "It's kind of spoiled things for me."
"I know you and Redbird were close."
"Catharine was a good friend. A great scientist."
The resignation in his voice caused a pang of sympathy in Penny. She hadn't known Catharine that well, but she'd known the astronavigator was a serious, driven woman, patient as she was tenacious. Nothing got in her way.
"There's still a chance," Penny tried to encourage Ian, "They might still be on their way here now. You can't give up yet."
Ian didn't answer, and Penny couldn't guess at his reaction. After a while, Penny let the conversation lapse and closed her eyes, trying to relax. In a very short while, she would be representing all mankind, making First Contact with an alien race...
Chapter Three
The crew gathered on the bridge as they approached the planet. Penny trembled with excitement, seeing immediate signs of advanced civilization. There were artificial satellites in orbit and a web of light spread over the planet's many continents. It was almost familiar.
The sun was older than Sol, a deep red color, and the different wavelengths of light it put out meant the continents they looked down on were a rich blue color, almost teal, rather than predominantly green, because the plant life (real, alien plant life, Penny thought giddily) had adapted to absorb more of the long wave red light.
"Look, look at that structure!" Salome said excitedly, pointing towards a sprawling hexagonal shape near the coast of one of the largest continents, "That looks man made, right? I mean, not man made but-Do you think it's a monument? Or a city?"
"If it's visible from space, it must be massive," Cho added, awed.
"How close do you think we can get before they notice us?" Penny wondered, a moment before the ship shuddered to an abrupt, impossible stop above the planet's atmosphere.
They were all frozen for a moment, too confused to react, before Rivera darted to the console, pulling up cameras on either side of the ship and throwing their video onto the view screen.
What they saw baffled them for a moment, because it certainly didn't look like a ship. A weird constellation of hexagonal shapes connected by a lattice work of golden metal, it warped the eye like an Escher drawing-an optical illusion. It didn't look like it should be able to fly. It barely looked like it should be able to exist.
"I think they've noticed us," Rivera deduced, "Ambassador, are you ready for first contact?"
"I think so?" Penny swallowe
d a nervous lump in her throat.
"You've got the wheel from here on," Rivera squeezed Penny's shoulder encouragingly, "You can do this. We're all behind you."
Cho, Salome, and Ian all nodded in agreement, sharing reassuring smiles. Penny took a deep breath.
"Okay," she said, "Assuming this is a craft and not some kind of automated security, let's try and hail them. Try all the frequencies we have until we get a response."
"Got it," Salome nodded and turned to the communications console, Cho near her with all the documentation they had of the alien language.
"When we meet them, be as nonthreatening as possible," Penny continued, "Like with a scared animal. No quick movements. Don't show your teeth or look them directly in the eye. Calm, quiet voices. And let's hope that's as calming to them as it is to all the life on our planet."
The ship jerked and Penny grabbed the back of a seat to steady herself.
"We're moving again," Ian sounded worried, watching the view screen as the planet began moving closer to them, "They're pulling us towards the atmosphere."
"Any luck with those communications?" Rivera asked Salome, who shook her head.
"I tried the frequency their transmissions are on but I'm not getting a reply."
"Keep trying," Penny took another deep breath, trying to ignore the worry creeping in at the edges and stay in the moment, "Try other frequencies too. The most important thing right now is to make sure they recognize us as intelligent living beings."
But their attempts at communication went on being unheard or ignored as the ship was pulled with careful and deliberate slowness down into the planet's atmosphere.
As they grew closer to the surface, pulling generally towards the largest continent, Penny saw cities coming into view, taking shape spread out below them.
They didn't sprawl the way human cities did, but fell in precise, clearly very carefully planned lines, always favoring hexagonal shapes. The biggest cities, larger than any on earth, were visible hexagonal grids even from this far away, almost like cells in honey comb.
The Warrior's Proposal (Celestial Mates Book 7) Page 9
