Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  The Blight wouldn’t let us.

  At first, no one could agree whether the Blight was a disease amongst the stars, or a form of attack. Until it was too late, we had never even guessed that stars were living beings. Perhaps the Blight was yet more evidence of our ignorance?

  Stored as I was in a deep-cryo compartment, I never saw the birth of the Haven-One Colony around 15 Monocerotis in the Cone Nebula, or Bridge-C as the colonists named it. It was a running joke amongst the fleet that when we explored Bridge-C’s candidate habitable planets, we would discover wide, sandy beaches and perfect ski slopes. Turned out, that wasn’t far off the truth for the world of Haven-One, but only after many centuries waiting in cryo sleep while the terraformers detoxified the atmosphere.

  I never saw its death either, over a thousand years later. At the time, I was thirty light years away in a star system we called Bastion, working lengthy, stim-extended shifts piloting intra-system mining craft amongst the Kuiper objects that fed the establishment of the Haven-Two Colony.

  Forty years previously, a Haven-One observatory had noticed an unexplained cool patch in Bridge-C, and named it the Blight. It was an anomaly – nothing more – and was logged and forgotten. And even though the Blight slowly grew over the following years, most of the colonists were unaware of its existence.

  Without warning, it started spreading exponentially.

  By then, there were over seven million souls on Haven-One. As a precaution, some of the children and a handful of adults were evacuated to an old Explorer-class ship, Intrepid. But the old ship could only berth 8,000.

  The children had barely boarded when Bridge-C was suddenly wrenched out of its natural sequence. A billion years ahead of schedule, it underwent a helium flash that was inexplicably channeled out in a concentrated disc across the plane of the ecliptic. It was like the Reaper’s scythe slicing through the planets. As its helium ash fused into carbon, the star emitted thousands of years’ worth of energy output in just a few seconds – and its atmosphere opened up like a dragon’s maw to let the energy flare out unimpeded.

  Planetary atmospheres vaporized above molten crusts. The shockwave’s photon pressure was so immense that the burning planets were even nudged out of their orbits. Haven-One died in milliseconds, and Intrepid was lost seconds later as it prepared to displace out of the system.

  When scout ships returned to inspect the scoured system, they found the star once more at peace, back in its main sequence. Having rid itself of the biological infestation amongst its chattel planets, the star was now content. That was the interpretation many placed on the loss of Haven-One, and although the First Contact Fleet and the United Earth Foundation cruelly punished anyone voicing such defeatist sentiment, it was hard to counter the assumption that the Haven Mission was doomed.

  Haven-Two was next, fifty years later, and by then the light had reached us from more stellar flares coming in from ever-closer neighbors. It was as if a line of beaters was deliberately driving us against the rimward edge of the Orion Spur, forcing us out into the immense, lifeless wastes that separated Orion from the Perseus Arm. I was in command of one of the five remaining colony vessels, and I argued that our displacement drives had enough range to take us back coreward, to reunite with the survivors of other FCF missions. But no one could tell whether the Blight was also spreading coreward. Maybe if we retraced our journey back toward the dead Earth, all we would find were other glowing embers that had once been planets. We just couldn’t tell. Not without journeying there in person.

  We had traveled so far, and lightspeed communications were too slow and the other colony fleets too distant. We were alone. Only our colony ships could return and warn the rest of humanity, but could we spare one of our surviving fleet of five for the nine-hundred-year round trip?

  Then something changed. One of my crew detected an impossible radio transmission. Jimmy Khan, his name was, and for a while I thought he might have saved our mission. I gave him a team of people whose discretion I could trust, and they confirmed that Jimmy had heard something. A beacon of hope. From the very edge of the spiral arm, where no FCF craft had ever visited, we were receiving a garbled message. It was too corrupted to decipher quickly, but its encoding was unmistakable.

  Out there at the rimward edge, from a system outside the Cone Nebula, someone was transmitting Morse code.

  3

  Talking of messages… I need to move you on, Captain. You were going to explain Death Day, remember?

  Death Day. Yes… The second Death Day. Is that what I was talking about? Termination Day – yes, I remember hoping that, with the end of the world finally here, the United Earth Foundation would have mercy on a harmless old fool, and allow me to meet my doom with vacuum beneath my legs on my old command. The truth was that I was only able to take the elevator into orbit and the auto-shuttle to Spirit of Endurance because no one cared enough to stop me.

  Someone had noticed my return, though. “Welcome aboard, Captain Acualla,” greeted my old cryo officer, Lieutenant Parker. “It’s good to have you back.”

  I frowned at Parker’s crisp salute and tried to interpret the sparkle of mischief in his eyes that he couldn’t prevent spreading to his mouth. Who the hell could grin like that when all life would be obliterated from Haven-Three in less than an hour?

  I returned the salute, grudgingly. This was the man who had planted the idea in my head of meeting my end on my old ship. I supposed I owed him a little respect – but not much. “You’re an idiot, Parker. Always were prone to flights of fancy. For a start, this is Termination Day. There won’t be a tomorrow. If I’m back, then it’s not for long. More importantly, I’m not anyone’s captain. After my criminal act during the previous Death Day, I was cashiered and then jailed, remember?”

  “Negative, sir. You are still an FCF captain.”

  Sincerity hardened Parker’s words to such an extent that I regarded him properly for the first time. He wore the uniform of a UEF functionary, and the sight twisted my insides with guilt. The United Earth Foundation had used me and my unpatriotic misdemeanor on Deck 13c as an excuse to disband the First Contact Fleet throughout the system. The spacers couldn’t be trusted, they reasoned. They were probably right.

  “Say again?”

  “Captain, you were never discharged because the UEF pen pushers were in too much of a rush to shut down the Fleet. You were never transferred to the UEF, nor discharged. You’re the only member of FCF personnel left in the system.”

  “I don’t give a damn, mister. It makes no difference. Unless you’re expecting me to pilot this crate across the wastes to the Perseus Arm?”

  “Not exactly, sir.”

  I might have been a miserable jerk, back in those final days–

  What’s to say you aren’t now?

  Whoever programmed you was definitely a jerk.

  I rest my case.

  If you’re deliberately irritating me as a ploy to keep me talking, it’s … it’s probably working, but please don’t distract me. This is difficult enough as it is. Where was I? Parker. Lieutenant Parker – or rather former Lieutenant Parker of the FCF, and now extra-planetary maintenance team manager for the UEF – was up to something. But his poker face wouldn’t yield to my scrutiny, so I gave up and hurried over to the CIC, where the others were waiting to join me in the countdown to our extinction. Despite the dust and the UEF vandalism, I could tell someone had kept essential systems well maintained, because–

  Hurry up! Sorry, but that’s not important to your audience. Get to the events on the CIC.

  Shut up. I’m getting there.

  Captain Acualla, you don’t have much time.

  Okay. I get it. Yada yada death cults and the sorrow that laced every look, every word on the planet and off it in our final days. The end of everything and everybody. We were convinced these were the last moments of the entire human race. Making illicit love on a sun-dappled riverbank, Beethoven, the first people on Mars, wine and beer at a patio barbecue,
the ultimate sacrifice paid by generations in the world wars, and blockbuster movies – it all ended here and now with us. You’ll have to imagine all that because I don’t have time to tell you. Termination Day was upon us. It was our turn. The Blight had finally come to Haven-Three and the UEF plan was to hold hands and sing songs around a campfire until the wavefront hit and we turned instantly to plasma.

  Spirit of Endurance still had its seed banks, terraformers and displacement drive. We could have had one more throw of the dice, except the UEF command had declared it was game over, and taken the dice away. The decision was cowardly, but even I have to admit it wasn’t made easily.

  Taken in by the signal emanating from the rimward star that we named Beacon, the Haven Mission Senior Council gambled all on Haven-Three being our last, best chance. We sunk everything into making this colony work, and the first signs had looked good. Beacon-Five had a breathable atmosphere and temperate climate. Within weeks, the pathfinder colonists were on the ground, working.

  By then, we survivors of the Haven Mission had acquired hard-won experience of colony building. With a grim determination, we constructed floating agri-islands in a tenth of the time we had spent on Haven-One. We had developed a ruthlessness too, and who could blame us after the way the galaxy had treated us? Instead of treading lightly on the new planet’s ecology, we brutally tore down mountains and cut off whole ice shelfs to feed our need for raw materials. And all the while, Spirit of Endurance was on the mind of every colonist. If the Blight reached us on Haven-Three, the ship could become a lifeboat, but only for a few. Who would live and who die?

  Knowledge of the signal – the very reason we were here – had been heavily suppressed by the UEF, who became more dictatorial with every passing month. Maybe they had a right to be. Before the Earth Death day, there had been a botched attempt by frightened colonists to seize my ship, the reason why my left hand is prosthetic. A permanent state of emergency was declared throughout Haven-Three, all in an attempt to keep a lid on the pressure cooker of a doomed colony while the authorities pieced the garbled message back together.

  But when they did, the message we had placed so much store upon – the reason the star had been named Beacon – turned out to be a warning about the Blight. It told us a few details we didn’t already know, but not nearly enough to defeat the oncoming threat.

  The UEF kept the secret of the mystery signal to the end, but they no longer pretended we had hope. Haven-Three took a collective vow to limit its people’s suffering. There would be no further colony mission. No false optimism. There would be no more children. It became the greatest of society’s taboos: to bring a life into the world, knowing it would be cruelly cut short. Only a tiny number of malcontents were selfish enough to break this prohibition.

  And that was why I was no longer a captain. I presumed the daughter I had fathered so scandalously was still alive somewhere down on the planet below. She would have been nineteen, but she would never make twenty.

  Such a tragic waste!

  Haven-Three had started strongly, but then gave up the fight. We made ourselves comfortable and waited for death.

  Captain… the CIC?

  We had learned a lot about the Blight by the end; all of it useless. But we did know enough by Termination Day to put a timer on the screens of my old ship’s CIC as we counted down to our end.

  At eighteen minutes and two seconds, one of the young UEF-uniformed crew announced, “Incoming transmissions. Multiple signals, they’re coming from Beacon… From the star.”

  I had strapped myself into the command orb. I don’t know why; it just felt the most comfortable place. But when the signals came through, many nervous faces on that deck naturally looked to the command position for direction. And, despite the years that had passed, it felt natural to give it.

  “You,” I said to the girl who had spoken. “Can you run the Spirit’s core systems?”

  She blinked. “Ah, yes, Captain. Mr. Parker taught us basic operations so we could demonstrate them to tourists.”

  “Tourists!” God, I hated what the UEF had done. “Never mind. What’s your name?”

  “Schraeve, sir.”

  “Well, Schraeve, I’m making you my communications officer. Find out what the hell these transmissions are. Everyone else, you’re working for Schraeve now. Do what she says. Now, where the hell is Parker?”

  My old officer was nowhere to be seen. There were only a handful of kids and a few old dignitaries trying to ignore this interruption to their deaths.

  “Sir, transmissions are coming from science probes positioned very close to the sun.”

  I had to nod at Schraeve to continue.

  “It’s not just sensor data, there is a distributed AI analyzing the data and piggybacking its conclusions in real time onto the raw feed. It’s… Oh. There is a virtual watermark. It’s HOPE.”

  “Shut it down,” I growled. “Bloodsucking shits.”

  The Movement for Humanity, or HOPE as everyone was calling it by that time, was one of the many death cults and fringe movements that challenged the UEF’s lockdown on dissent. HOPE was the most hated, because it preyed on the despair of its victims to screw them out of every credit they had.

  “Belay that!” shouted Parker, who jetted into CIC with a grin on his face and a thruster unit on his back. “By God,” he said, “we’ve actually done it!”

  Before I could ask what it was, Schraeve reported unauthorized boats entering the main hanger. We were being boarded!

  I remember glancing up at the countdown.

  Whatever the hell was going on, it would all be over in sixteen minutes and forty-two seconds.

  4

  Cameras in the hangar bay showed it unexpectedly filled by two GP-13 shuttles coming in hot, rear ends first. GP-13s were bruisers, designed for heavy haulage of big, dumb objects. I thought the crazy pilots were going to wreck the ship, and we would die a spacer’s death in hard vacuum, but they slowed their approach with a perfect thruster burst that did no more damage than scorching the hanger deck. I gave a low whistle. That was one helluva piloting display.

  My missing left hand itched as I looked up from the hangar feed and watched for the guns I expected to be drawn on me in the CIC. But everyone here was as surprised by this boarding as me. All except for one person.

  “Mr Parker, explain yourself!”

  “We’re carrying on the FCF mission,” Parker replied with a worrying tone of wonderment. “We just brought in additional seed banks, robot landers, terraformers, and 827 colonists. And what’s more, the sensor probes we scattered around the sun have just given us the data that will one day beat the Blight.”

  “Who are we?” I asked grimly, praying that they weren’t the boneheads I thought they were.

  “The Movement for Humanity. Commonly known as HOPE.”

  They were said boneheads. Crap! I sighed, regretting ever coming up here. Then I remembered that it had initially been Parker’s idea and all became clear. “And I suppose you want me to pilot my ship to a new colony site?”

  “We can override the controls if need be. But, yes, we prefer you in command.”

  Should I play along? I watched the boarders scurrying out of the shuttles. The equipment they brought, and the probes around Beacon that had brought back the data that had gotten Parker so excited – to do all that under the nose of the United Earth Foundation must have cost trillions. And every credit had been screwed out of brainwashed cult members.

  I didn’t care about those dumb cultists now. It was the children of the people down there in the hangar I was thinking of. The ones not yet conceived. It wasn’t fair to bring false hope into a doomed world, as I had done with my own daughter.

  So I decided to stall. We had only minutes left, barely enough time to spool up the displacement drive. “I won’t do it,” I told him. “Dammit, Parker. It’s the end of the world and you’re forcing me to admit the UEF were right all along. I’m not going to displace Spirit of Endurance ou
t of here.”

  “I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to pilot through the wormhole.”

  “Are you completely nuts? Every signal given off by that thing says that it’s faulty. It’s not even the right color, and the probes sent through thirty years ago didn’t survive to send back a test signal.”

  “You’re wrong,” said a young female voice over a general ship-wide comm channel. “The probes did survive. I found their transmission. I heard them report back.”

  “Who is this?” I snapped in irritation.

  “Dad. It’s me.”

  Dad! My memory of the next few seconds is totally blank. I imagine I was flapping my mouth like a landed fish.

  “Dad?” she prompted.

  “Why? Why didn’t anyone else find the probes?”

  “Because they weren’t looking in the right place. I detected the signals transmitted from the moment the probes emerged from the far end of the wormhole, 651 light years away.”

  My mind described a downwardly spiraling orbit about the stunning implication of what she had just said.

  The probes transmitted their data at lightspeed and they had flown through the wormhole thirty years ago. To reach Haven-Three from a distance of 651 light years, the probes must have sent their signals 621 years before they passed through the wormhole.

  I had been a First Contact Fleet captain; I’d been taught all major theories and practice of space-time travel. If you took the mathematical models of faster-than-light travel and flipped them through a half turn, then you were no longer describing travel through space. As my old astro-navigation lecturer liked to tell us, FTL travel and time travel were the same thing; it was only the woefully limited human perspective that drew such a sharp distinction between them.

  Unfortunately, I was a woefully limited human, and it took me several seconds to change my perspective. But when I did, it felt as if I’d been woken from the dead.

  “All hands!” I announced across the ship. “Follow the arrows to the nearest acceleration station. We’re getting out of here. Fast!”