An alarm went off. Kierra retrieved her toiletries bag and popped the lid off a cap of white pills.
“What are those?” Talon asked.
“They are my gene therapy pills. They keep…the genes deactivated,” Kierra reluctantly explained.
“What happens if you stop taking them?” Talon wondered.
“It’s only happened once when I was sick with the flu and forgot to take them for a couple of days. I started thinking about Levi again.” Kierra coughed in the back of her throat and took a generous swig of water.
“Oh,” Talon managed, wishing she hadn’t asked. Being reminded to take her own medication, she crossed the room.
“What are those?” Kierra queried back.
“Luminestal. It helps me sleep.” Soundly, at least.
“Oh, can I have one? My mind is going a million miles an hour.”
“Sure.”
Kierra began digging through her suitcase and frowned. “None of my clothes are here.”
“I had to fit somehow. I thought I left a lot, actually.”
“I only have two pairs of pajamas now,” she said, slipping one on.
“Well, if it makes you feel better, I only have one.”
Kierra crawled into bed. “You’ve always been a minimalist. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Look so pretty without trying…and you seem so relaxed all the time.”
Talon had to laugh at that diagnosis. If only Kierra knew how envious Talon was of her and her life.
“I’m serious! If my fiancé was on Earth right now when something bad might happen and I had no job, I think I would have a heart attack.”
“Thus the sleeping pills,” Talon played it off. In actuality, she wasn’t okay.
The more she was around the quintessential ‘normal person,’ the more she realized how completely unacceptable her life was at the moment. She curled up on the floor next to the bed, comforted by the cubby-like feel of the small space. She lined up a couple of pillows and wrapped her arm and leg round them, closed her eyes, and pretended they were Levi.
“Kierra? Kierra?” Dr. Phillips was yelling from the other side of the doorway.
Kierra flew out of bed, her hair a tousled mess. “Oh my…I can’t believe I slept in!” She ran to the door and unlocked it. “I’m sorry professor, I’ll be right there.”
Talon could almost hear her advisor’s sharp inhale at the sight of Kierra in her t-shirt and boxer shorts. He cleared his throat. “You’ve missed breakfast. Eat something before you meet us in 22C. We have a long day. You look…beautiful.”
“Thank you.” Kierra sighed exasperatedly and the metal door swooshed closed.
“Instead of breakfast, I’m going to teach you some self-defense moves because that man is creepy,” Talon concluded.
Fifteen minutes and a quick protection demo later, Kierra was standing with the rest of the crew in the projection room. On the screen was the dark nebulae. The nonluminous cloud looked like the hand of Hades trying to grasp the void with serpentine fingers.
“It’s two hundred light minutes across and one of the densest I’ve seen,” Dr. Unanimi said. He was the ship’s astrochemist. “The only way we’re seeing anything beyond it for right now is by using our Electromagnetic Spectral Interferometer. I don’t think it’s worth it. It’s too far away from the habitable strip.”
Kierra later explained to Talon that the nebulae was actually much less of an obstacle the closer one got to it, so by parking the ship next to the gaseous body at the end of their trip, they could see the planets beyond it much easier. When Talon pointed out the nebulae looked like a great hiding spot for terrorists, Kierra expounded that nebulae were ferocious mass vacuums. Combined with how far the planets beyond the nebula were from the sun, anything beyond it would be virtually impossible to live on.
“I agree,” Dr. Kreesa spoke. “If we’re searching for life with limited time, we have hundreds of other celestial bodies that are much better candidates. I have created a focus calendar for everyone,” Dr. Phillips said, handing out a piece of paper to each person.
A tabular list of the solar system’s bodies projected above the table, and he proceeded to outline which exoplanets and their moons should be studied on which days based on a number of factors, the ship’s location being the main one.
“This way, collaboration will be much easier. We will meet every morning to review the reports from the day before.”
Over the next eight days, the team had a routine down. Kierra and Dr. Phillips ran every biosignature test they could on every planet, moon, and asteroid, but like the rest of the crew, found nothing that could indicate established intelligent life.
On the ninth day of what seemed like a pointless trip, Kierra was walking to Dr. Phillips office with her negative reports when she heard voices.
“…not compatible with organic beings as we know them to function. I mean, bacteria might very well be all over the place here but you specified intelligent.”
Kierra listened carefully from around the corner.
“I believe you. This is not my area of expertise, but everything points to them being here,” Aberdeen fretted.
“If we don’t produce positive results, will I still get the money?”
Aberdeen heaved a sigh at the advisor’s misdirected train of thought. “Are there any planets that contain some sort of precious or rare elements? Something that could be mined and made money off of?”
“Nothing so far. It seems to be pretty…ordinary. By ordinary, of course, I mean this system is one of a kind, but not remarkable.”
Kierra chose that moment to walk in, smile politely, and hand the advisor the results. Aberdeen and Dr. Phillips looked at her, and then at each other, wondering how much the graduate student had overheard. “Same old, same old,” she said and walked out. Kierra hurried back to her room. “Did you hear that?”
Talon gave Kierra a look that screamed, really? “You would make a horrible spy, you know that?”
Kierra shrugged, not taking offense. “I don’t think they’re here, Talon.”
“Think like a terrorist,” Talon urged.
“Kierra?” It was Aberdeen.
Kierra and Talon looked at each other with wide-eyed panic. They eliminated all signs that a second person was sharing the room with lightning fast speed and then Kierra opened the sliding door with an unwilling swoosh.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Can I help you?”
“Oh yes, I’m here to see Talon.”
She knew, Talon slumped from inside the closet.
“Wha, what?” Kierra stuttered, trying to feign ignorance. “At first I suspected it when I saw you talk to yourself a couple of times, and then of course I saw Talon’s contacts in your eyes. You’ve brought leftovers back to your room almost every meal. Not to mention I’m a Sydces and I have exceptional hearing…you all giggle like Ohmani Academy prep girls in here every night. So no, it wasn’t just your horrible performance a second ago.”
“Yes, sorry about that…I’m taking an acting class right now and I’ve been practicing my lines for an audition ne…”
“Okay, stop,” Talon winced as she opened the closet door. Kierra would be a horrible thespian too, she decided. “You knew I was in here the whole time?” She didn’t know whether to be thankful or irritated.
“What did you do, pull the old suitcase trick? Smart,” she added. “Eon called me the morning we left. Said you quit. I should have known right then you would be trying to sneak aboard,” she shook her head in retrospection.
“I heard you’re a little desperate.”
“We are a little desperate,” she clarified “We better not have sent all these people out here on a wild goose chase.”
“Maybe our coordinates are wrong?”
“No, it was checked and double checked. This is the star.”
“I know there’s been a lot of dead and captured ‘pecs o
ver the years. Did any of them have the tattoo? Maybe it was drawn wrong.”
“No. I looked back over everything. They’ve been so quiet the last few years. We don’t have any new bodies or arrests and none of the guys in prison get it until they are released. The military ship hasn’t picked up on any radio signals either, not that the terrorists would be able to communicate with anyone out here.”
“What about radiation left over from creating wormholes to get in and out?”
“We can’t separate that from the background pollution of our own entry. There has to be something we are missing.”
“Does Kelly know I’m here?”
Aberdeen shrugged, “I tell him everything. He is my husband.”
“Wait, what? I thought that was just a play?”
“Nope…and we are both at a loss.”
“So you came here to get my help?” It felt good to be needed.
“You’re the one who’s been sitting in here for days on end like a hibernating mouse. Haven’t you thought of anything?”
Hibernating mouse…hibernating snake.
“What if…they are inside one of these planets? Like Ohmani or the moon?” Both she and Aberdeen looked at Kierra for confirmation that the theory wasn’t ludicrous.
“If that were the case, we wouldn’t want to look for biosignatures in the atmosphere because there wouldn’t necessarily need to be a biosphere…outside the planet at least. We need to look for industrialization gas emissions…carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide…basically the gases we’ve sworn off so far.”
“What else?”
“A group of people living underground would need to drill, produce heat, and create energy to run all their pumps and such.”
“The drills that were stolen on the moon,” Talon remembered. “They might had been used to excavate here.”
“I will inform Dr. Phillips that we need to carry out the rest of this search with a new lens. I’m sorry, Talon,” she said, knowing credit was being ripped away from her ex-partner yet again.
The researchers were informed that the instructions to look for signs of underground life came from the military ship. With the cloaking device in constant use, Talon had almost forgotten with the rest of them that their menacing protector was out there beyond them in the void. The trip was extended as the convoy stopped and added a few days to backtrack through the data. They re-assessed targets, re-crunched numbers, re-ran computer simulations. By the end they ended up with the same conclusion – they did not believe any of the first nine planets or their moons were housing intelligent life above ground or below it.
Talon thought it odd that the military ship had not picked up any radio signals or communications of any kind. The Sinupecs would still need to navigate in and out of the system for supplies.
Talon was becoming desperate. One night, after the crew insisted they return, she urged Kierra to reconsider the planets beyond the nebula. If they had checked and double-checked everything else, it was the only option.
“I mean, it’s very unlikely still. It’s too cold out there,” Kierra re-explained. “It would probably be lower than forty Kelvin…way too cold. That’s why we haven’t given those other planets much thought.”
“But if they are living underground, wouldn’t it be easier to trap heat? Maybe they would be using the heat from the core or something?”
“Hmmm, conduction and radiation from the core wouldn’t be enough. I mean, if the sun went away in our solar system, you still wouldn’t be able to live underground.”
“We need to narrow this down more! We’ve only got one more day out here. How else could they produce heat?” Talon said, pushing the brainstorming onward.
“A thermoelectric generator probably wouldn’t be sustainable out here. Maybe a nuclear fission reactor or an RTG… Radioisotope Thermal Generator, but they would have to supply it with a radioactive isotope. If they figured that out, they could produce heat and electricity at the same time pretty reliably.”
“Plutonium is used for those types of generators, right?”
“There’s a few different elements that could be used. Elements that are unstable like that are very rare. If I was a terrorist leader and I had a large supply of a radio-isotopic element available, a planet to hide in and a nebulae to shield me, I would hide there for sure. We can see the planets well enough now though. None of them fit that description. I’ve already used the alpha emission detector and received nothing of value.”
“But what about something even further out….beyond the Bravon system.”
Kierra jumped up. “Let me see that tattoo!” She gasped with excitement.
“What! Tell me!”
“The original pioneer plaque specified Earth was the third planet from the sun. This tattoo is missing that vital piece of information. Any terrorist given that tattoo wouldn’t know where the hell to go in this system! It’s huge!”
“So, how would they know then?”
“The arrow,” she snagged the chip from Talon’s computer and made a pass for the door.
“Hey, where are you g—” Kierra sprinted out into the hallway. Talon sputtered an expletive.
Talon looked at her screen, which showed Kierra’s point of view, with confusion. Her friend had already made it to the lab and was shoving the chip into the computer. Kierra’s eyes were darting fast between the image of the tattoo and the keys she typed on like a maniac. She was referencing the star in the Bravon system B-58167 to the solar system’s sun and developing a three-dimensional coordinate system. Then she lined up the two ray-like designs, leaving the direction of Sagittarius’s arrow.
Kierra next darted to the state-of-the-art observatory and threw herself in front of the long range telescope. It was hooked up to a computer and Kierra typed away again. The telescope moved with the data points it was given. When it finally became still, Kierra peered through the lens with the concentration of a brain surgeon.
“Do these fancy contacts have a thermoimager?” She asked into the air. “Talon? Activate thermoimager,” she tried. “Activate heat imaging…technology. Damnit!”
“Activate infrared thermography,” Talon charged into the observatory.
“Talon, what are you doing here?!”
“It only responds to my voice and you’ve got me really excited. Now blink!”
“Activate infrared thermography.”
Kierra peered back through the lens, turning nodules to refocus the image.
“Holy shit! There’s a planet we didn’t see before out there!” She pointed to the void beyond the nebulae.
“Why couldn’t we see it? I don’t see it!” Talon through her face into the lens.
“It doesn’t produce light and it’s too far from this star to reflect any. It’s considered a rogue planet…out there on its own.”
“Then how did you see it?”
“That rogue planet is spewing heat.” Kierra’s brows furrowed in thought and then her pointer finger popped up. “It’s an exotic matter nursery. These planets are so rare.”
“Exotic matter? Like the stuff humans and midaki fight over all the time.”
“You’re not supposed to be out of the room, Talon! Someone might see you!” Aberdeen scolded as she walked into the room.
“I don’t care. Kierra, what are you thinking?”
“Yes, exotic matter is needed to make wormholes…and…it’s chock full of radioactive isotopes.”
“Could they be inside of that planet?”
“I shouldn’t be happy about this,” she said with a contradicting grin, “but I have a gut feeling your terrorists are there.”
“See, now you’re thinking like a terrorist!”
“Do you want to name it?” Kierra asked, sitting back in the chair like she had run a marathon. “The planet?”
“Die Sinupecs?”
“What? No, you can’t name it that. It has to sound like a planet, Talon.”
“Sinupecs-die?”
“No,�
�� she sighed exasperatingly. “Just think on it.”
“And get to the room!” Aberdeen commanded. “We have preparations to make!”
17 EXOTIC DESTINATION
“I want to go!” Kierra whined like a child.
“It is way too dangerous for you to come,” Talon professed, shutting down her pleas. “I’m sorry. You have a good thing going with your job and Marco’s waiting. You wouldn’t want a terrorist to kill you and ruin everything, would you?”
She frowned. “You have a good thing going too…except for the job part. Levi is going to be so mad at you!”
“Levi cannot know I’m out here, Kierra!” Talon imagined her friend trying out her acting skills again and added, “Just ignore him until I get back.”
The girls embraced, feeling much closer than they ever had.
“Be careful,” Kierra turned serious.
“I will. See you soon.”
Talon walked to another hallway in the sleeping bay and waited outside Aberdeen’s room. Just when she couldn’t endure one more perplexed look by the people she only saw through a computer screen, the sliding door swished open.
“…sworn it was the right spot. Aberdeen, seriously? Some criminal drew a tattoo, it’s not like he was a cartographer and I’m not an intelligence analyst. Hey,” Kelly greeted Talon, although the acknowledgment seemed anything but warm. “Please, for God’s sake let me help you.”
“I said I’ve got it!” Aberdeen limped out, dragging her suitcase behind her.
For the first time, Talon actually believed they were married. The threesome boarded a small cruiser and left Cousteau behind, flying in the direction of the nebulae. The ship glided into the void a good ways, slowed to a stop and then lifted upwards. One minute Talon was looking into the outer-reaches of space and the next a wall started to fall in her field of view as the transporter rose into the body of the cloaked military ship. A buzzing sound accompanied a steady vibration that tickled her seat.
An Eagle's Revenge (Across the Infinite Void Book 2) Page 21
