“I’ve got that control over here also,” Fire Dragon stated, “But we never went over that one.”
“Well, we don’t have time right now. Hit it and get us away from the convoy,” he replied, bringing up the controls for the gravitational-reflex engine.
“What speed? Thirty-three percent like we did with the-”
“Seventy-five and do it now before we run out of ion reserves,” Hawke hollered, “I intended on us making an unorthodox jump while still in low orbit. It would most likely be destructive to the surrounding area, but I didn’t count on friendlys being anywhere around at the time.”
Hawke hadn’t even finished his statement before the Fire Dragon brought the rear thrusters online. G-forces tugged everyone backward as the ship shot forward.
“You’re going to do one of those space-folding jumps right here?” Sky Listener asked, “Has anyone ever attempted something like that?”
“I couldn’t know the answer to that,” he replied abruptly, “But we have no choice. The ion thrusters are going to shut down pretty soon and we don’t know how to launch this thing into orbit.”
“We’re down to twenty-five percent of our fuel left,” Fire Dragon hollered, “If we want to land somewhere, we should start our descent now.”
“Do you have one of those radio stars targeted in the navigational display?” Hawke asked, turning to Sky Listener.
“I figured you were going to ask, so I’ve got it already targeted,” he replied, “The closest one.”
Hawke tapped the green icon twice on his display, engaging the gravitational-reflex drive. Then he flipped the switch that released control to the navigational computer. He looked up from the display and immediately realized he’d forgotten to lower the window shields.
The sky around the ship melted into a shimmering pool of maroon light that seemed to invade the ship through the walls as well as through the windows. It was as though the ship had lost all substance. Then, a moment later, everything went pitch black.
Twenty-seven
Silence. Although Hawke hadn’t moved an inch from where he was seated just moments ago, he felt as though hours had passed since he’d last been alert. It seemed as though he’d just awoken.
Suddenly, the sounds of the ship caught up to him. Everyone was asking what happened as they rose from their seats. An alarm was chiming incessantly from one of the control panels.
“Where did we end up?” Kashuba asked, staring out at the starry field before them.
Hawke rose from his seat and walked slowly toward the window. This was only his second trip into space but it might as well have been the first. He was gaping out at the awesome expanse, amazed at how beautiful it was. The stars were spread out before them and shimmered as though a careless jeweler had tore open a bag of diamonds and strewn them across a blanket of black velvet.
Fire Dragon broke the somber mood with a reminder that they were currently aimlessly adrift in an unknown sea.
“The alarm is stating we have no more thrusters at the moment. Zero. Nothing at all. The ion engines are recharging, but that means nothing to me,” he said, “Who knows how long that takes?”
Hawke turned to Fire Dragon where he still remained seated at his station.
“Does it look like it’s requesting any action on our part?” Hawke asked.
“No, I guess it just wants us to know that if we wanted to land somewhere, it’s not a currently possibility.”
“Do we know where we are at the moment?” Hawke asked, looking to Sky Listener.
Sky Listener switched from the targeting display to the icon labeled “Locator”. It displayed the local view of stars and then began overlaying several maps that were probably programmed in its memory. After scrolling through several comparisons, it brought up the closest approximation and returned with an answer. Printed at the bottom of the map it displayed “98.3% accuracy - Weingard System; 73,820 ly from Earth; Terraform Proj 36 – abandoned 6802 CE”
Hawke read the screen over Sky Listener’s shoulder, surprised by the confusing information. The star comparisons were exact minus the presence of two dim background stars. He had no reason to expect that the maps would be identical after thousands of years had passed, though with stellar lifecycles, they very well could have been.
“Is any of this familiar to you?” Sky Listener asked.
“Of course not!” he blurted, then placed a hand on his shoulder in apology, “I’m sorry. I keep forgetting that you aren’t from the same world as me. In my time, no man had ever gone further than our nearest planet called Mars and even that local mission was not without casualties. A quarter of that crew never made it home.”
“That word ‘abandoned’ is making me wonder then if we should target one of the other radio stars instead,” Sky Listener said.
Hawke stepped back from the chair and looked out the window. He hadn’t checked the status of the reactor or the gravitational-reflex engine, but he was fairly certain they would be ready for another jump before the ion thrusters were ever back online.
“Hold that thought while I check something,” Hawke said, seating himself at one of the other control panels.
All the monitors had an icon in the corner that changed it from a touch screen to what resembled a DOS display. He then typed in the word Weingard and pressed enter. Nothing happened. He then typed Terraform Project 36 and pressed enter. Again, nothing happened.
He typed a dozen different DOS action words just to see if it operated like computers of his time. After no success, he shut off the panel and turned it back on. He tapped random icons, moving through various sub-screens in the search of anything that could assist him. Finally, although he had no idea how he’d gotten there, he discovered a library icon. He tapped it, bringing up a screen that offered dozens of categories to choose from. He went straight to the search bar and typed in the words “Terraform Project 36.”
The next thing that came up might as well have been the Wikipedia page for the project. It was titled “Terraforming Project 36 – Weingard.”
“I’ve got something here,” Hawke said, bringing everyone to his workstation.
The page was extremely detailed, offering more information than Hawke could even understand. He knew nothing of terraforming or the technologies they possessed to accomplish such things. What he gleaned from the information however was that this system contained an Earthlike planet with an atmosphere that was too rich in Carbon Dioxide and lacking in sufficient oxygen. The planet also lacked water and the amount of ozone necessary to sustain and protect living organisms.
There were a lot of terraforming projects going on when 36 was started and the others were showing more signs of success than this one. After devoting nearly half a billion man-hours and more than two hundred years to Weingard, it was abandoned in favor of others that were showing more evidence of success.
“Why are we even reading about a planet without water and oxygen?” Light Bender asked, “Let’s move on to one that offers us a place to land and survive.”
“Because the computer in my ship told me that I’d been sleeping for almost two hundred thousand years. If that’s true, the information in this particular ship is telling me that Weingard was abandoned more than a hundred and eighty thousand years ago. We still don’t know how old this ship is, so we can’t tell if its computers have been updated in just as long of a time,” Hawke stated, “We might as well take a look at the planet while we’re here to see if they decided to pick up the project again later. I’m hungry and I’d like to believe there’s a chance that the planet is populated with millions of people willing to share some food with us.”
“Couldn’t hurt,” Kashuba added with a shrug.
“But where’s this planet?” Fire Dragon asked.
“Already on the task,” Sky Listener hollered, working furiously at the navigation display, “It has records of this system and it’s telling me we are positioned about two hundred million miles from the central star.”
>
Winter Grass and the nameless paramedic from the repulsive animal lab had joined them on the bridge at some point during their discussion. They were acting as spectators, more intrigued by the beautiful scene beyond the windows than by the decisions they were trying to make.
“We’ve got more than zero power on the thrusters now,” Fire Dragon offered, glancing at his station as he walked past, “Maybe five or six percent. At least we know it operates on some form of replenishable fuel.”
“Can you operate the rear thrusters again in a way that would turn the ship twenty-six degrees to the left?” Sky Listener asked.
“Why do you ask?” Hawke perked up at this.
“If we can turn twenty-six degrees and head about seventy-three million miles in that direction, we would meet up with the planet we’re searching for as it advances its way around the star,” Sky Listener replied.
Hawke rushed over to Fire Dragon and watched as he brought up his thruster controls again. They examined the various aft thruster controls for a moment, trying to determine a way to manually move the ship in that direction. Fire Dragon continued reminding him of how little power they had available to the thrusters.
“Moving in space isn’t like moving at sea or in the air,” Hawke said for all those in earshot, “There is no friction whatsoever, so thrusters require significantly less fuel. If we shoot this ship forward at a thousand miles per second and then turn off the thrusters, we will continue to move forward unless the gravity of another body takes hold of us and alters our course or slows us down. We only need enough fuel to start us in the right direction.”
“If we use this thruster,” Fire Dragon said, pointing to the rear thruster on the right side, “We would turn the ship. But according to your statement about the lack of friction, wouldn’t we keep turning after we shut it off?”
“Yeah, that’s the tricky part,” Hawke muttered, turning to Sky Listener hoping for a suggestion.
Sky Listener looked at the two of them and grinned. Hawke held out his hands, pleading for the man to share what was on his mind.
“Seventy-three million miles is a long distance and thus, it offers us lot of time to make course corrections,” he stated, “You turn a little too far to the left? Give it a burst from the left engine to move it toward the right! If it’s too much in that direction, push the ship in the other. I’m sure you’ll get it perfect before we’re even a million miles from where we started.”
As usual, Sky Listener offered the common sense they needed.
“Then let’s go find this abandoned planet,” Hawke stated, “And once we get on the right course, I want some speed from those thrusters.”
Twenty-eight
Their joint efforts to get the ship to the failed terraforming project proved to be a success. It required an equal amount of collaboration to bring the ship to a slowed orbit once they arrived. The entire journey in the system took less than seven hours.
“It didn’t take as much fuel as you thought it would to halt this ship, Hawke,” Fire Dragon offered, rising from his control station, “We’ve got about sixty-six percent left.”
Hawke remained standing at the window, staring down at the world beneath the ship. He had been totally unprepared for the blue, green, and white globe they discovered. The presence of water should have been minimal had the terraformers not succeeded, but instead it covered a little more than fifty-percent of the planet. While that was a much smaller amount of water than that of Earth, it was still a significant presence. Had the terraformers not succeeded in their efforts, the oceans would have revealed an abundance of green color due to a dangerous surplus of algae. While he did see a span of green running along one continent, it had definitely not taken over the world’s oceans.
The cloud cover should have either been a hundred percent or none at all on a failed world. The clouds beneath the ship were spread out evenly in what could only be defined as “normal”. Nothing on the planet beneath him spoke of failure. He almost wished he had those scanners on Star Trek where he could scan for life forms. While the ship may very likely already have had such capabilities, they weren’t able to locate them.
“I wonder if this is what Rain looks like from above,” Kashuba wondered aloud, standing at his side.
“It probably does,” Hawke said, sidling up next to her and putting his arm around her, “The planet I come from looks similar. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Very much so. Do you think they came back and finished their project?” she asked.
“Oddly enough, I don’t,” he replied, “I don’t see any signs of technology down there or up here for that matter.”
“Would you be able to see such things from this high up?” she asked.
“Yeah, there would be some signs. And especially in a race of people who possess the sort of technologies required to divert icy comets toward a planet’s surface in the hopes of increasing the presence of water. That’s the only way I could imagine you’d bring water to a planet devoid of it. A race like that would have maintained a presence of some sort up here in orbit,” he replied, gazing down below, “One has to wonder if nature took over after they abandoned all their efforts.”
“I’d be most concerned with questions like ‘can we breathe down there’ and ‘what’s the climate like?’” Fire Dragon hollered over to them.
“And this from a man who lived on a glacier,” Hawke taunted.
“I’m just saying that it could be one of those tropical ovens that makes your eyes sweat,” he stated, “We have a tropical island on Rain that is always more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit and inhabited by nothing but insects and snakes.”
“Actually, directly beneath this ship, the surface temperature is eighty-three degrees Fahrenheit or twenty-eight Celsius,” Light Bender stated, “I don’t know if it’s getting the reading on a beach or in a forest or over a body of water, but there you have it.”
“How do you know the temperature?” Hawke asked, turning to the man seated in one of the Captain’s chairs.
“All I did was hit the orbital icon. It pulled up several other icons, one of which was the same thermometer icon we used to check the ship’s interior temperature. Even after I hit that, it offered interior, exterior, and the surface below,” he replied, still tapping things on his screen, “And when I go back to the orbital icon and select the cloud icon, it offers to check the atmosphere below.”
“Well, what’s it say?” Hawke asked, approaching him.
“Unfortunately, all I’m getting is code. I hit the option for the surface atmosphere and it shows ‘76% N, 22% O, 2% CO2, and less than 1% of Ar, Xe, Ne, and H’.”
Hawke started checking his own control panel, searching for the icons he was talking about. He stopped suddenly at Light Bender’s words.
“Wait, read that again?” Hawke said.
He read it aloud, bringing a wide smile to Hawke’s face. Light Bender looked up at him and shrugged.
“That’s good then?” he asked.
“Yeah, it sounds similar to Earth’s atmosphere. I think ours had 21% oxygen and maybe more nitrogen, but that sounds close enough,” he replied.
“So you understand those codes?” Sky Listener asked, approaching the others at Light Bender’s station.
“Yeah, it’s the same codes we used on Earth in my time,” he said, “And the temperature sounds a little warm, but definitely tolerable. Even if no one is down there to greet us and offer us food, there’s evidence that food would exist. There’s an obvious presence of plant life and sea life. If sea life wasn’t present down there, the algae would have completely overrun the oceans. And all that green foliage that covers the land was once introduced to this planet by man… or Cheronook, so some of it would certainly be food.”
Kashuba and Winter Grass were engaged in a hushed conversation near the window.
“That whole ecosystem may have been introduced by man, but let’s not forget that they had given up on it,” Sky Listener reminded him, “What
’s to say the food down there is anything we would recognize if it might have evolved on its own?”
“Actually, you probably wouldn’t recognize it if the original crew of this ship never introduced any of our Earth crops on Rain,” Hawke replied.
“Why don’t we stop making guesses and assumptions and just go down there?” Kashuba interjected, “It sounds like you said everything is okay, so let’s just stop wasting time.”
Everyone looked their way.
“I have to agree with your wife, Hawke,” the nameless paramedic stated.
“Okay, keeping with that thought, we need to come up with a way to land this thing,” Hawke stated, gesturing to one of the side windows.
He motioned for them to follow him to the window near the rear. He then pointed toward the rear of the spacecraft where the giant metal ring circled the ship.
“We have the huge problem of trying to land a ship that has a ring in the way,” Hawke stated, “We can certainly land this and allow the forward or rear section to tumble forward, but that would render this ship useless to us from that moment onward. I’d like us to somehow manage to keep the decks level so we could continue using this ship as a shelter if needed.”
“And continue to use it as a ship if needed,” Sky Listener added, “You never know.”
“So, how do we land this?” Winter Grass asked, pointing to the ring, “Can we detach that thing?”
“Why would your people make a ship that couldn’t land?” Kashuba asked, poking Hawke playfully.
“Actually, I’m pretty sure this ship was never supposed to land on a planet. It also explains why I wasn’t able to launch us off Rain. The ship is too enormous and heavy to expend all that energy required for repeat launches and landings,” Hawke stated, “They probably docked these things in space everywhere they went.”
“So they never went down to the planets?” Fire Dragon asked.
“I’m sure there would have been shuttles at the space ports,” Hawke defended, “Smaller craft designed for easier launches and landings. But there was nothing like that circling this planet. No space ports or anything for that matter.”
Dominion Page 15
