“Cryella?” Cynthia queried.
“We’ll talk about Cryella and the Cryellians another day,” Miss Li continued. The Sagittarians rediscovered Earth as it searched for potential colleagues. We were not advanced enough to approach as partners, so they began conscripting people from Earth, or Terrans, to help retake Demeter nearly eight hundred years ago.”
“Wait a minute. You mean we’re draftees?” asked Randy, with ire again sounding in his voice.
“Well, in a manner of speaking, yes,” Mr. Small responded. “However, if you read your agreement for the “year abroad” program, you will notice that it clearly states that you ‘will have a culturally enriching educational experience, and be provided the opportunity to offer service in your host community. Your host community is Demeter, and I guarantee it will be culturally enriching. You also signed a confidentiality agreement, that prohibits you from discussing details of your experience with outsiders. We’re very serious about that.”
“You mean you would kill us?” Joel asked defensively.
“You’ve been watching too many science fiction movies,” Miss Li said. “No, we wouldn’t kill you. But it is relatively easy to discredit anything you say and make you look like one of those UFO nuts. Of course, not all of them are UFO nuts. Several of the most vocal ones actually served a year on Demeter.”
“On the bright side, you will learn a lot,” Mr. Small added. “Twenty-five of the richest people in the world are our former students. Many technological breakthroughs going all the way back to Leonardo da Vinci can be attributed to experiences on Demeter. Our foundation has also helped over a hundred of our alumni become heads of state. The experiences you have on Demeter are better than any college degree you might earn.”
Miss Li then gave a whimsical look at Mr. Small and added, “We actually don’t recruit nearly as many students as we used to. Demeter maintains an Earth support unit of about twenty thousand people. The majority of those who come to Demeter want to stay, or return regularly. When Roger and I were recruited, we would bring in about two hundred students a year. Now we only bring in about fifty. I’m afraid in the next fifty years, we will become a totally self-sustaining population on Demeter.”
Ryder was confused. “Why will that be a problem? Then you won’t have to kid...I mean conscript people anymore.”
“Think about it, William. From what we have already told you, why wouldn’t it be a good idea not to conscript young people anymore?” Mr. Small asked.
It was actually Rebecca who gasped, then responded. “Our technological development for the last several hundred years.”
“Exactly. A lot of the technological development slips back to Earth from our year abroad program. But the majority of participants want to stay. After a year, you’ll make your own decision. Thirty-five years ago, Yara and I decided to stay ourselves.”
“Thirty-five years ago?” Ryder asked incredulously. “I know you’re old, but I thought you were about thirty.”
“Oh, I forgot to mention that,” Mr. Small said with a broad smile. “The average life span on Demeter is two hundred to three hundred years. Ryder noticed that Athena and Randy still had their arms tightly folded. He looked over at Debbie. She had a dreamy expression on her face, the same look she got whenever she was envisioning herself as the airplane pilot, astronaut, president. No one else was talking now, so Ryder asked, “What’s next?”
Chapter 6: Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Ryder argued with Mr. Small about their speed of travel when he informed them that Demeter was over one hundred light years from Earth.
“That’s impossible!” Ryder began. “We cannot travel faster than the speed of light, or we would be instantly converted to energy.”
“That is one theory,” Mr. Small responded.
“Wait, I know. We’re going to dive through a wormhole,” Joel interjected.
“That’s going to be cool,” added his brother Randy.
“That’s another theory. I’d rather not try,” Mr. Small said and then smiled.
“So we’re going to pass through a gate built by an ancient, unidentified starfaring culture?” Cynthia asked.
Ryder smiled. He’d seen that movie too.
“Afraid not,” Mr. Small said with a sigh, “but it would be interesting to find one of those.”
“So how are we going to do it?” Ryder asked.
“We’re just going to keep accelerating,” Mr. Small replied.
“Then we can’t go faster than the speed of light.”
Mr. Small pulled out a toy car. It appeared that he was just waiting to put it on the table. “How many of you have ever ridden in a car like this?” he asked.
Debbie quickly responded, “Not me. I’m way too big to get inside that.”
Everyone laughed.
“I’m using the model as a visual aid,” Mr. Small began. “I will presume that you all have ridden in automobiles. When the car is driving at a regular speed, do you feel like you’re moving?”
Ryder remembered driving in the family van and playing card games with Debbie. “No, I don’t feel any motion except when Dad brakes or swerves.”
“Mom’s usually the one swerving,” Debbie laughed.
“If you can, imagine traveling in a car as being inside a bubble. The vehicle can accelerate, and you feel the pressure of the acceleration. If the car swerves, you feel the pressure from side to side. But in reality you’re in a sort of bubble that protects you. The inside remains constant. We can accelerate beyond the speed of light because of the nature of the exterior of our ship. That is our magic, if you will. There is nothing mysterious about the fact that we are not suddenly turned to energy, as we reside inside the protective bubble of the ship. On the other hand, I would prefer that the ship not make a sudden left turn. Imagine our cells smashed against the far wall if we were to turn at our current speed, which is?” He turned to Miss Li.
“We just passed three hundred thousand miles per second,” she responded. “We will continue to accelerate for the next thirty-six hours.”
Ryder looked out the window expecting to see long flashes of light or total darkness. The stars were still there, and still seemed motionless, except for one reddish colored splash of light to the left. “Is that a comet?” Ryder asked.
Mr. Small walked around the table and looked out Ryder’s window. “That,” exclaimed Mr. Small, “is Mars. It is close enough that the distortion of light is clear. It does sort of look like a comet, doesn’t it?”
Mr. Small and Miss Li continued leading discussions with the group. They covered mathematics, science, reading, and writing. It felt like regular school days. But they also discussed Demeter and the lifestyles, conditions, and cultures they would be facing.
“Demeter is one of three way stations between the Saggitarius and Perseus arms of the Milky Way. Control of the way stations has shifted back and forth over the past ten thousand years. Demeter is relatively small, approximately one thousand miles in diameter. One of its best defensive features is that it is located between three star systems, but nearly a light year away from each of them.”
“It sounds cold,” Cynthia suggested.
“The surface is cold; too cold for human life-forms to exist. In fact, I am unaware of any life-forms that can exist at that temperature. But that is part of the benefit of Demeter. Energy weapons have to recharge to be effective. Those weapons recharge through proximity to stars. So the best weapons in the galaxy are limited to a single charge. Of course starships have other weapons, but the effectiveness of the energy bursts are diffused by the strategic location of Demeter. In reality, if you could get eight Per-Sian Juggernauts in the right positions, and if they fired simultaneously, they could crack the shell of Demeter. At least current theory suggests that it is possible.”
“So what’s to stop them from doing that?” Becky asked worriedly.
“Well for starters, logistics. Getting halfway across a galactic arm, say Sagittarius, to the
next galactic arm, in this case Perseus, is challenging. Second, I’m unaware of more than three Juggernauts ever being in a single battle. They are expensive to construct. For either the Slicks or the Pervs, excuse me, Sagittarius League and Per-Sian forces, to concentrate that much force would deplete defenses in several sectors. Third, we have a fleet stationed at Demeter. The Slick fleet would only have to take out one Per-Sian juggernaut and the plan would be doomed. Not a very good strategy.”
“So we’re going to be stuck in dome cities, like they talk about putting on the moon?” Cynthia asked.
“Not exactly. Demeter does have eighty dome stations scattered around the surface. They are more like observatories and military watch stations. We actually live inside Demeter.”
“You mean we’re going to spend a year living in a cave?” Athena sounded disgusted.
“It’s hard to describe, although you have seen pictures of the interior of Demeter before. I had a mural of the islands off Arion in your classroom. But I think the best way to understand what Demeter is like is to see it for yourself. We’ll be doing that soon enough.” Miss Li smiled cryptically.
For dinner that evening they had a salad and pizza. Instead of a milkshake, Ryder had his standby beverage, Diet Coke. He went straight for the pizza, but Miss Li interrupted, sounding a lot like his mother “Salad first, then you can have all the pizza you want.”
Ryder didn’t mind salad, but the pizza sounded better. Once he got to the pizza, he found the cheese both flavorful and the way he liked it with every bite dangling long strands of mozzarella. The pizza sauce had a sweet tang to it that he wasn’t used to. He also tried a slice of the chicken and artichoke pizza with the white sauce. “I could get used to this,” he thought. But after five slices he started to have second thoughts, realizing he’d gone one too far.
As he started getting drowsy he realized that as comfortable as his seat was, it was not going to be that comfortable for five days. But he got another surprise when he went back to the bathroom. The entire room had expanded. Along with several stalls, there were also two shower stations. The room seemed to have stretched to nearly twenty feet.
Stepping back out of the bathroom, he noticed the interior starting to expand. His seat was shifting into a box. He was a bit disappointed that he hadn’t been sitting in his seat to watch this occur. Each chair had transformed into a small stateroom. His seat could be either a very comfortable lounge chair, or with the press of a button, it could fold down into a full-sized bed. The overhead bins, had shifted into compact closets inside the small, private room.
Mr. Small and Miss Li, took the next hour, explaining how the rooms worked. The main point that Ryder got out of the explanation was that the materials the ship was built out of were multi-layered, and could shift in size. If needed the captain could turn the Pegasus into a full-sized football field. The chameleon fabric panels were constantly moving, although the movement was invisible to the naked eye. Apparently when stretched, each stratum of the material was not much thicker than aluminum foil.
Joel pushed against the wall, but it seemed firm. Miss Li smiled, “It’s very thin, but it is not aluminum foil. It’s stronger than titanium,” then she snorted and laughed as Joel gave the wall a firmer shove.
To get the basics of converting the room back to a seat, was pretty simple. It was really, just the press of a button. But it was also important to understand the compression elements. If you left a shoe in the wrong spot, it might be a crushed bit of leather when you switched back to a room, and obviously you wouldn’t be able to find it if you left it in the wrong place. “Good way to get kids to pick up their room” Cynthia volunteered.
“Yeah, my mom would love this,” Ryder admitted.
There were numerous other features, but Ryder really wasn’t interested in reading a manual. Besides, he had little miss know-it-all around to eliminate hours of tedious reading.
“Ryder did you see how this works?” It’s like a computer screen without a keyboard. Push the screen here and a virtual keyboard appears. See the menu button? That’s a real menu. You can get snacks and anything on it that you want.” Debbie went on and on.
“What about a cheese enchilada?” Ryder asked.
Debbie typed and searched, but couldn’t locate a cheese enchilada. She seemed to get more and more frustrated, pushing keys and conducting searches so fast that Ryder started to get dizzy. Finally, Ryder admitted, “I already asked Mr. Small. We’re limited to the menu items programmed in. The system doesn’t know how to make a cheese enchilada.”
Debbie glared at Ryder, then grabbed the nearest throwable object, which fortunately turned out to be Ryder’s pillow.
Five days passed quickly. On day three the Pegasus started slowing, rather than accelerating. Unfortunately for Randy and Athena, they were not in their chairs at the time, and wound up entangled on the floor, with Athena on top, as they shifted from the momentum. “This stupid plane,” Athena grumbled.
Randy said, “yah, stupid plane,” but he was smiling as he stood up.
“We need to get home!” Athena groused for the thirty or fortieth time.
Getting home had been a common conspiratorial topic when Mr. Small and Miss Li were not present. Randy had suggested commandeering the ship. Athena had suggested simply refusing to do or eat anything until Mr. Small and Miss Li agreed to take them home. Ryder had listened but countered, their arguments by simply asking, “And then what?” For himself, he wasn’t really sure what to do yet.
Debbie had wangled her way onto the bridge with the flight crew, who had remained noticeably absent throughout the flight. She and, surprisingly, Rebecca had shown a keen interest in the flight crew, and had both spent hour after hour with them. Ryder now heard Debbie’s voice over the intercom. “Everybody, it’s time to buckle up. We’re going to change speeds several times over the next few minutes as we prepare to land.”
The good news was that with Debbie gone, Ryder had a chance to talk with Cynthia more and more. He pondered Cynthia’s response, when he had asked her about their adventure. “So, what do you think?”
“I’m excited. I think this is going to be even more interesting than a year in Europe. I want to investigate their medical advances. I’ve always planned to go to medical school. Imagine what this could mean if they’re as advanced as Miss Li says they are.”
Ryder had thought about that several times since. Cynthia’s excitement about going to Demeter reduced his own anxiety. A year with Cynthia anywhere sounded appealing wherever they were. But Cynthia knew exactly what she wanted, and what she hoped to get out of the experience. Even Debbie seemed to know what she wanted, even if it did change every ten minutes. But what did he want to get out of it?
Chapter 7: Arion (Hold Your Horses)
Demeter looked like a small planet, although Ryder knew that it had a diameter of only about half the size of the Earth’s moon. For him, it would be better to think of it as a large asteroid. It was basically round, although elliptical like an egg might be more accurate. The surface was heavily pockmarked. In fact, there seemed to be craters inside craters and then more craters. It was very uninviting, increasing Ryder’s sense of foreboding and concerns.
“Is that metal?” Cynthia asked as she looked out the portal from which Ryder was observing the surface.
“Where?”
Cynthia put her arm on Ryder’s shoulder for support then pointed to a spot slightly off to the left.
Ryder got goose bumps at her touch, but then followed her pointing finger. “Yes, I think so, but I’m not sure,” he added cautiously.
“Hey!” Joel called from the other side of the ship, which had reconfigured to a comfortable, nearly round, two-level shape. “Come and see this.”
Cynthia released Ryder’s arm as they hurried over to join Joel. “What are we looking for?” Ryder asked.
“Fried eggs.” Joel laughed.
Ryder had to look down at an acute angle. Joel was correct, it looked like
a fried egg, a giant fried egg.
“What is it?” Cynthia asked, turning to Ryder.
“Well I can see what looks like three toy ships on the white part. But the yellow dome? Look closely. Can you see the antennae? It has to be a base of some sort. Assuming those ships are fighters, that has to be a pretty small base.”
“Look, there’s another one!” Joel called out, pointing toward the horizon.
Mr. Small joined them at that moment. “Yes, we have eighty monitoring centers around the exterior of Demeter. When I was on fighter training, I spent a lot of time out here. Not much room inside those domes though. I thought I’d go crazy when I was posted at old number fifty-nine for two Demeter weeks” he paused, then added "twenty days."
“Will we get a chance to visit the domes?” Cynthia inquired.
“Not much to see,” Mr. Small reiterated. “Unless you’re in fighter training or the K-Corps, I wouldn’t think you’d make it out here. So take it in while you can. Two minutes would be enough for me.” He snickered and then left for the pilot’s cabin.
A few minutes later, he returned. “I thought you might like to catch a glimpse of something a little more impressive, so Captain White is taking the long way to the locks.”
Ryder and his friends assembled at what was currently the front of the ship, staring out the four portals at the bow of the Pegasus. They rapidly approached a massive structure. Much like the asteroid itself, the complex was oval and extended for several miles. At first it seemed a chaotic maze, but as they drew closer they were able to differentiate structures. There were eight huge starships docked or secured to eight of the dozen different berthing facilities. Cranes expanding hundreds of feet from the airless surface surrounded each vessel in dry dock like vultures.
“Is that a battleship?” Joel asked in awe.
Mr. Small laughed. “So you have been studying the materials we gave you,” he said, then shook his head. “No, that’s actually a light cruiser. That dock is about six city blocks in size. Look forward and to the right. See that huge empty series of cradles? It would take that entire gallery to bring in a full-sized battleship. This,” he waved his arm expansively toward the facilities, “is the reason that Demeter is considered a prize. You would think that the Pervs or the Slicks would just blast it to oblivion and be done with it, but if they did, crossing the gulf between the galactic arms in this region would be impossible. So no matter how many times this planetoid has changed hands, this facility has never been damaged or attacked. It’s neutral territory. In reading the histories, it’s very ritualistic. Once one side or the other has control of the surface, the other side relinquishes control of the facility. The workers are either exported or take up defense in the interior. It’s a massive time-out when that happens. Last time it occurred was over two hundred years ago.
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