by Isaac Hooke
Jacob grinned. It was an old line. The professor was down-to-earth enough to not mind when his students mocked his haughty Oxford accent, and in return, he wasn’t above returning the favor.
Moving on, the professor reoriented the ball in his hand, resting it on its side in his open palm, then gave it a quick spin.
“This, my friends, is what Haumea looks like.”
Jacob leaned forward, his brow furrowing.
“Haumea is the first new planetoid discovered in our solar system since 1930. But that’s not even the interesting part. You see, my friends, Haumea is rotating so fast, so very, very fast, that it has distended, forming, not into a uniform disc, or oblate ellipsoid, like we had assumed a very fast-spinning planet would become, but a triaxial ellipsoid, expanding outward at the equator at two distinct points, equidistant from each other.”
Jacob was immediately typing away again, and the professor started to lose his patience with the young scientist. Just once he wished the younger physicist would spend more time considering what he was talking about, instead of just codifying it.
“Like a rugby ball, Jacob!” barked the professor, tossing the ball into Jacob’s lap.
“Holy balls!” exclaimed Jacob, and the room erupted into laughter once more, the professor leading the charge with a snorted guffaw.
In this instance, though, the professor needn’t have been so concerned with his favorite student’s focus. For Jacob had not been merely documenting. His mind had been just as taken as the professor’s had with the uniqueness of the discovery, and had already begun trying to model what it might mean. Not for the dwarf planet of Haumea, at only one-third the size of the already diminutive Pluto, but for a planet, a habitable one, if such a thing could even exist.
It was a fascination that the two would share till the professor’s death a decade later. And almost a lifetime after that, it was a fascination that would see Jacob, now an aging professor himself, recruited by the UEF to join the crew of one of its famous fourteen First Contact missions.
For after the Lost Sister’s files were finally deciphered and transcribed, just such a planet was found to exist halfway across the quadrant. And Jacob was going to go there.
Definitions
“Sooo, it’s like a rugby ball,” said the female lieutenant.
“Oh, not this again,” said Jacob, rolling his eyes.
“Because that’s a thing,” said the Doctor sitting with them, smirking.
“Yes, it is, actually,” interposed Jacob, smiling warmly at the memory, before adding, “And if you’d ever left Texas, or wherever the hell you’re from, you might have heard of it.”
The man laughed, and then looked around the circular lounge, his eyes coming to rest on a two-part clock, marking the Haumea Maku’s ship time. The top counter clicked ever downward. It read now: 8dys, 12hrs, 43mns. It was counting down to their destination, Kepler 186, a main sequence M1 dwarf star not unlike our own, and the high-spin planet that orbited it, the object of Jacob’s undying fascination, the planet Indul.
But underneath that counter sat a bigger number, already at 15,908,584, and clicking upward every second. It measured distance from our own star. Its base unit was a billion kilometers.
“Texas, you say?” said Dr. Moon. Seeing where this was going, Jacob and the other marine rolled their eyes. “Well according to our little scoreboard here, I’m about 16 quadrillion miles from Texas right now, Professor. Not that I particularly care, as I’m from Kansas. Hey, if you’d ever left wherever the hell you’re from, you might have heard of it.”
Jacob and the lieutenant, a sharp-witted woman named Shellie whom Jacob had become friends with over the course of their long journey, laughed. “Fair play,” he said, holding up his hands in defeat.
But Indul was, of course, neither a rugby ball or a football, Jacob thought, as its distortion was nowhere near as pronounced as the rugby ball a professor had thrown at him years ago, or the dwarf planet they had been discussing at the time. No, their destination was no Haumea. It was the planet Indul, and it was massive, bigger even than Earth.
Indeed, if it weren’t for its incredibly fast rotation, and the resulting merry-go-round’s worth of centrifugal force at its equator, they would barely be able to survive the gravitational press.
Jacob, smiling into the distance as he contemplated their destination, was suddenly drawn from his reverie by a new voice, an angry voice. “Is this Expression and Countenance Conditioning, people?” barked Nathaniel Hystad as he dropped down the stem ladder into the lounge, his face set in something close to fury.
“Err, it doesn’t look like it, Nathaniel, no,” replied Shellie, but Scott and Jacob were already rising, their faces drawn with the resignation of children reminded of bedtime.
“No, Shellie,” said Nathan, face set, “It isn’t. And yet, here you all are.”
“Would it make a difference,” said Shellie, even as she propelled herself up off her couch, and joined the two men ambling toward the ladder-lift in the lounge’s quarter-g, “if I said I felt appropriately…conditioned?”
Nathan seemed to think a second, then he pushed his head unnaturally forward, made a strange face, then contorted his jaw to one side and slapped his thigh. Shellie laughed before she could catch herself. An hour a day of ECC had been designed specifically to stem just that kind of response. Nathan had just displayed disgust, à la Indul.
Now he showed a far more human response, fury boiling up to make his shoulders tense, and left eye twitch.
“Now, now, Ambassador,” said Shellie, moving quickly past the senior diplomat, “that’s hardly appropriate.”
The man’s face only contorted further, bubbling with rage, but Shellie was already kicking off with some haste toward the ladder-lift, leaping past Jacob in the low-G to escape Nathan’s infamous wrath.
Greetings
The expression conditioning had not been for naught, though, and neither had the many other briefings, long and tedious though they may have been. For now, dumbstruck by the sight below them, the crew had something to at least buffer this, to add meaning to the stunning sight.
They were in orbit, though it did not feel like it. It felt like they were hovering. They had managed to achieve geostationary orbit in a most unnatural seeming place, matching the planet’s rotation only twenty thousand miles above its distended surface, and it was as if the planet was rearing up to meet them.
They sat squarely above one of the vast equatorial axis-topping cities and they stared, united in their speechlessness.
And they were not the only silent ones. They had broadcast a message upon entering orbit. Unlike the records for some of the UEF First Contact destinations, the Lost Sister’s files on Indul had been relatively complete. They even had a lexicon, a Rosetta stone that had allowed them to formulate a translation algorithm.
Some among them, most notably the ship’s appointed Ambassador Espéce, Nathan, had even tried to learn the language, though its pronunciation was extremely difficult, and most, including Nathan, doubted that he would be able to navigate its nuances in practice.
But he and his team would try, nonetheless, resorting to the Hub AI’s translation system if proceedings went south. But such things were yet to come. First the Indulakan’s must respond to their carefully crafted, thoroughly vetted and internationally accepted First Contact Message, hopefully with an invite to the surface.
Everyone on the ship was patched in to Nathan’s suite comms, the Embassy Suite, as they had dubbed it, as they waited for a reply, though no one but Nathan could send anything in return.
“Seems like such a solid idea to me,” whispered Shellie to Scott and Jacob, lounging in the low-G beside her, “having such a sweetheart as Nathan as the point-person for all humanity.”
They laughed. In truth, none of them really doubted Nathan’s expertise in this. He could be diplomatic when he needed to be, ingratiating even. He had just never felt the need to be nice to any of them.
As they waited, another tension—unique to Raf and Shellie, perhaps, as members of the ship’s security detail—sat in a corner of their minds. They, along with their two other sec-team members had a dual mandate on the mission.
First, they were here to protect the mission, to protect the team. For all four of them, along with the Captain, of course, that was their primary mission, but none of them, least of all Shellie, could have been called grunts. Like the bulk of the ship’s crew, they had another, more complex role.
Jacob was tasked with gauging the Indulakan’s level of prowess in physics and math. Then there was the ever-pleasant Rabbi Palmer, with his pursuit of mutual theological understanding; Dr. Moon, the noted anthropologist; and Dr. Bailey, here to share Earth’s medical knowledge in a hopefully beneficial exchange.
And so the sec-team was here to keep their eyes open as well, to learn what they could about the Indulakan’s militant capabilities, and perhaps more importantly, their intent. And for Shellie, and the two drop-marines under her command, there was a deeper purpose still.
“Bhram sthiti banee lagaataar.”
The words came suddenly, and were followed by silence. Then, in a voice they all recognized from the last decade aboard ship, the Hub AI added, “Confusion remains persistent.”
The members of the crew that had gathered in the main lounge turned to each other, and when no one else said anything, Shellie offered helpfully, “What the fuck does that mean?”
***
In another part of the ship, the Ambassador and his two assistants reacted with no more understanding, but far more activity. It was a reply. It was coming from the surface.
“I want any possible, and I mean any possible other interpretations of that sentence, Chris.” He turned to his other aide de camp, Richard, but did not look at him directly, adding, “And you, review the Contact Message again.”
“B…” began Richard, the junior of his assistants, but still a seasoned consular attaché. He did not finish his objection. The First Contact Message had been reviewed some thousand or more times even before they had left Earth. It was not a confusing statement. But he would review it again nonetheless.
Nathan was deep in thought. Years of work in more countries than he had ever bothered to count had prepared him for almost anything from their would-be hosts: anger, indignation, and, yes, even confusion. But for some reason he had expected none of those during the countless times he had acted out this moment in his sleeping cradle.
“Hamaara samajhauta sakriy rahata hai?” they now heard suddenly, and Nathan even understood, he thought, though he waited for the full translation.
“Our agreement remains active. Yes?” came the Hub’s translation, and then, “The tourists are welcome on Indul, per treaty.”
Agreement? Tourists? Nathan was about to echo the choice sentiment Shellie had said a moment ago in another part of the ship, then realization dawned on him.
“Agreement!” said Nathan, turning to the Captain, till now silent in a corner of the Embassy Suite as he waited for the Ambassador to get his vital job done, “Of course. They think we’re them!”
Captain Rob Campbell’s left eyebrow went up, and Nathan explained, “The Lost Sister. The Sphere-ship. They think we are them, the original owners, the designers. We knew they’d been here before, and I guess they made contact, signed a treaty. So, naturally…”
Nathan turned back to his team, “OK, we can work with this. Good. Chris, I need response articles five through eight. We have a reply, people. We have a plan, let’s get to it!”
Captain Campbell nodded. They think we’re them, he thought. So they can see us. And they can tell what kind of drive we’re using, at this distance. The Captain sent a note to the Hub AI, adding this snippet to his deeply encoded personal log file, and then returned his focus to the Ambassador and his team as they set to work.
Tremors
With the Haumea Maku’s displacement drive shut down, the ship’s inner-self was revealed. When the Indulakan mission had been put together, they had spec’d a diplomatic team, with only a semi-militant capability.
Given the planet’s size, fully twenty percent more massive than Earth, and the inhabitation centers focused on the two axis points, the most distant parts of the planet, they had tasked two shuttles to the mission, mounted to the top and bottom of the ship, taking up the upper and lower portions of the sphere and leaving the central band for the ship proper.
Nathan had discussed the landing party at length with the captain in the months preceding their arrival. And now they were aboard Lander One, disconnecting from the Haumea Maku even now.
“Drop-prepped,” said Raf, the pilot and Rob’s second in command. “Released and free.”
His eyes were closed, taking fly-by-wire to the nth degree. The shuttle had no manual controls to speak of, or at least the ones it had—crude, gruff things—were mounted only as a precaution, like the vestigial steering wheels still being put in cars, even though most countries had long since banned human drivers altogether.
Raf piloted via the same direct link Captain Campbell used to communicate with the Hub AI aboard the Maku. It wasn’t quite the rush that the famous Susan Skarsgaard had first felt upon breaching the Lost Sister’s sensor periphery, but then, they still barely understood the psi-tech.
It was hardly a comforting thought, so most of the crew tried not to think about it at all, but Raf was a little more mad than most, thus his proclivity for piloting drop-ships.
Eyes closed, Raf thought at the ship.
Raf’s view was reorienting sharply this way and that as he mentally glanced about, his eyes flitting under his lids like those of a restless sleeper.
Sweeping upward, he switched to the cams aboard the Sphere ship as the shuttle’s wing-point engines flared briefly forward, slowing the ship, and beginning its orbital descent. He’d studied for this. He’d run sims pretty much every day for the last five years of their journey. This was going to be fun.
“Hold on, everyone,” Raf said aloud.
Shellie glanced from Raf to Scott and Jacob, the two members of the scientific team aboard. The men smiled almost convincingly, then the doctor said bravely, “All right, Lieutenant. I think we’re ready for whatever you’ve got.”
Shellie shook her head.
“Whatever you say, doc,” said Raf, eyes still closed.
Something in their stomachs told them the ship was adjusting. It felt like they were angling downward, and indeed, the physicist could see through the four small portals in the far wall from him as the planet’s gleaming white surface rolled.
The doctor looked confused, so Shellie put on her best call-center voice and said, “We’re entering the atmosphere of a planet whose equatorial points are rotating at over four thousand miles per hour, Doctor. It’s a planet whose coriolis effect alone will make an unprepared person lose their breakfast.”
Scott nodded, feigning stoicism. He’d done the motion sickness training. Eating and drinking while being spun this way and that. First with eyes open, then with blindfolds. He smiled again, honestly thinking he understood what was about to happen.
Shellie pursed her lips, then added, “So that means we don’t slow down for entry…”
The ship’s engines proper blared to life, making the whole shuttle shake, and a maniacal grin spread, unbidden, across Shellie’s face, “…Oh no, Doc,” she shouted above the mounting noise, “We go straight…the hell…down!”
The noise, already loud, continued to grow for a while, but then rose precipitously as the ship hit the upper thermosphere. They had broken their orbit, not with ballistic grace, but with brute force, and now they were plummeting.
Though it was barely a minute, it seemed like an interminable time
in the budding maelstrom before an innocuous little beep inside Raf’s head said they were approaching their feather line.
He nodded, grimaced, then shouted, “Feather-line!”
It was not, it turned out, a very apropos moniker. For it meant they had reached the point where Raf would start to feather the shuttle’s control surfaces in order to further slow them. Now the metal around them screamed even louder, throwing in a profoundly disturbing warble for good measure.
Raf was fighting the planet’s atmosphere, as insane as that sounded, and he fully intended to win. Their actual speed was plummeting now, seeking the slightly less insane balance of terminal velocity, and as they approached it, Raf felt as the ship’s control surfaces, all but vestigial until now, became real for the first time since leaving Earth.
Jacob and the doctor were white-knuckling it, hanging on for dear life. The doctor was mumbling something under his breath, an atheist’s prayer, perhaps, but he was still conscious, and hadn’t started screaming yet, so Shellie gained a dose of respect for the man.
The doctor, the physicist and the Ambassador were the only people aboard without military training, and Jacob, given his role, had been one of the architects of this madness, so he was even trying to smile, though it looked more like he was having an unpleasant bowel movement, and no one would have blamed him if he was.
As for the Ambassador, for some reason Shellie had just assumed that Nathan would shrug off this barrage as he did any other nuisance. She’d been right.
But the doctor?
Shellie nodded at the man. Good for him.
The cacophony seemed to alter once more, not diminishing, but becoming slightly more constant, and Raf spoke once more from his pilot’s cradle, “And we…are…flying.”
“Amen to that,” mumbled the Captain, with as much reverie as Shellie had ever seen from the man.
