Colonization
Page 14
“Hey, I think I’ve got the crater’s edge!” Nancy shouted.
On her screen, the radar was showing us the terrain that existed beneath the ice. It was showing us images of what appeared to be a mountain range shaped like a crescent. Leah cheered loudly as the shuttle seemed to creep along. She steered it to follow the mountain range on the screen. Indeed, it continued to curve around, creating a bowl that was many miles in diameter.
“Are we recording all this?” Nancy asked.
“You bet. Visuals, radar, sensors, and ground radar,” Leah said, “What the…”
Her focus was no longer on the radar screen, but now instead she was looking out the window toward the crater’s center. The glacial ice which didn’t seem to properly reflect the terrain beneath it offered us a confusing sight. It appeared from where we were hovering that there might have been a giant hole in the center of the crater. It was as though while the ice and snow kept piling up over the years, it refused to cover the very center of the bowl.
“What are the scans saying?” I asked, worried about whether we should get any closer.
“We’ve got an x-ray source right in the center of this crater and if these readings are correct, I believe we’ve got something of an ice cave down there,” Leah stated, “I’m seeing a lot of open space.”
I looked at the ground radar scan and could see now what she was talking about. What appeared to be a smooth semi-flat glacier was actually just the roof of a cave. The crater itself was probably dry ground without so much as a snowflake resting on it.
“I’m going over the hole in the ice. We need to see what’s down there,” Leah said.
“Are you sure this is safe?” Renata asked.
She was playing the role of a frightened child, clinging tightly to me. For now I’d allow it just in case she wasn’t pretending. I put my arm around her.
“If the black hole was strong enough to pull us in, it would have pulled everything else in by now,” Leah stated.
We were finally over the hole in the ice. The belly camera picked up nothing in the darkness below, but the ground scans told us that once we dropped about twenty feet into the hole, we would be in an enormous cave surrounded mostly by ice. Leah turned to me with a question in her eyes. I nodded and so did Nancy.
We had no exterior lighting along the starboard side due to the damage from atmospheric entry. Most of the other lighting still worked which Nancy immediately switched on. We slowly descended into the hole and once we got beneath the ceiling, it was nearly pitch dark. The only things visible outside was what our exterior beacons highlighted.
“Look how bright it is out there when I switch on the x-ray camera,” Leah said, hitting a few keys.
Beneath us it looked like we were viewing the sun itself on the screen. I knew this was the black hole of course, but suddenly I worried about how large it was. Everything I knew from science class told me that we couldn’t survive coming within a billion miles of a black hole and here we were situated about fifty feet above one.
“Look at the lay of the ground,” Nancy said, pointing to the screen, “The crater remains bowl shaped as it comes down along the edges and then sinks abruptly for the half-mile diameter in the center. The singularity was submerged when the ship crashed here. I’d guess it settled about two hundred feet below the base of the crater.”
“And it remained small enough to go unnoticed for a while,” Leah added, pointing then to the walls and ceilings of the ice cave, “Then by the time it was already covered by a young glacier, it had swallowed the ground around it and then started in on the ice. I’d like to add that the temperature in here is a balmy forty-nine degrees, so you can see why the ice isn’t here anymore.”
“Why are you relaying all this as though it were a good thing,” I said, pointing to the bright sun at the bottom of the crater, “We’ve got a black hole that is eating the planet… excuse me, I mean eating the moon.”
“Because it’s still microscopic, exposed, and able to be contained,” Leah said, “But we have to act now.”
“You call that microscopic?” Renata blurted, pointing to the same spot on the screen.
“Much of what you are seeing is radiation. If the black hole were even as big as your fist, we’d be dead now,” Leah replied, “We need to head up and send the colony all the information and recordings we have so far. I want them to be fully in compliance even before we land.”
“Oh, they’ll most likely have a change of heart if you’re sending them everything we’ve seen,” I said.
Sarai
Chapter Sixteen
I’d never felt so betrayed in my life. He didn’t just betray me, he betrayed me in front of the whole colony. Just one day ago I’d become the Captain, thereby promoting Commander McEwen to the position of XO. We were struggling to fit in to these new positions of command and hoping to gain the necessary respect of the colony in the process.
One single day ago!
Captain for a day!
A single day was all it took to have my own husband show the colony that the Master Chief was the one in charge! If my own husband was going to follow the orders of an enlisted woman over my own, what would the rest of the colony do? It was all we needed to cause a substantial rift in the newly established colony.
“No matter what punishment you decide, ma’am, I’m behind you one hundred percent,” Petty Officer Richards stated as she came up beside me.
Of course she was behind me. She saw the way her daughter Renata looked at my husband. She would have gladly pulled the trigger if I had ordered him shot for treason. She didn’t want her daughter to end up with a married man.
“I can’t believe that Renata would do that to me,” she muttered.
“Wait,” I turned to her, “Do what to you?”
“Like I said, ma’am, I’m behind you no matter what you decide. It doesn’t matter that my daughter is on that shuttle.”
Renata was up there?
I wanted to scream!
Zane was cheating on me and with a girl ten years younger!
There was only one reason she would have joined him. There was only one reason he would have allowed a kid to come along on a dangerous trip. She offered nothing scientific to an expedition searching to find a black hole. She offered nothing of assistance to their cause. She hadn’t even offered any assistance to him while he was working on the greenhouse yesterday. The only assistance she offered was between her skinny legs.
“Ma’am, we’ve got a lot of data coming in,” Electrician Edwards interrupted, “A ton of data from Shuttle Two.”
I hollered for the commander and then joined Lane Edwards in the pilot’s cabin. He called up the data on the command panel and my jaw immediately dropped. The first image was an x-ray image of what was labeled a black hole inside what appeared to be a cave. It was enormous and bright.
“Commander!” I hollered again.
Before I knew it, several people had joined the commander and me in the pilot’s cabin. The images scrolled past, first showing the blip that they were originally following, located nearly nine hundred miles from us. Soon it showed the ground images beneath the glacial ice. The impact crater was estimated to be thirty-six miles across in diameter peak-to-peak. Then we saw the hole in the ice followed by many images of the descent. We were then given the image again of the black hole along with a page of text from the Master Chief explaining what we just witnessed and why it was the most important thing to contend with at the time.
Unfortunately I agreed with her. Unfortunately I secretly agreed that she did the right thing today. Unfortunately I agreed that I shouldn’t be captain of this colony any longer.
“Captain?” the commander nudged me, “What do you suggest?”
What do I suggest?
I suggest I be removed as captain!
I obviously didn’t have what it took to lead a colony. I couldn’t keep us from danger. I couldn’t even manage my own household. I had to get it together th
ough before anyone realized that I was second-guessing my life.
“That definitely poses a danger to us as a colony and to the generations to come,” I replied, “We’ll have to forego having nuclear power for the time being and use the reactor core to contain that thing like the Master Chief recommended. Let’s make it priority number one. If we have anyone who understands the physics of such a task, I want them placed on her team to retrieve the thing.”
The commander turned around and started barking orders. A moment later, I was left standing by myself in the main portion of the shuttle. I was going to have to forfeit my command and forfeit my husband. I no longer had what it took to keep a hold of either.
Chapter Seventeen
When the shuttle landed, the community was quick to load up all the supplies that the Master Chief had insisted upon. Zane exited the shuttle and quickly located me standing near one of the storage tents. I had secretly hoped he’d have approached me with more of a defiance in his demeanor, but instead he appeared worried and penitent. A defiant Zane would have made this much easier.
“We can’t do this anymore, Zane,” I blurted before he had a chance to speak, “Something’s… missing.”
I fought back the tears as I saw his shoulders slump. It was almost like he had expected those words from me.
“My loyalty is always to you, Sarai,” he said, “I may have chased after what I thought was right, but I needed to be sure. I needed to know for certain.”
I slapped him hard across the face. He stepped back, pressing his hand to his cheek. My own hand stung from that, so I had an idea how bad it hurt.
“She’s just a kid, Zane!” I spat, “Did I ever deny you anything?”
“What? What are you… I was talking about going out there and chasing the black hole hypothesis! I needed to be sure!” he stated a little too loud, tears welling in his eyes, “You thought I was talking about Renata? I told her I loved only you and that there would never be anything between us ever!”
It was my turn to step back and look at him. His cheek was bright red where his hand didn’t cover it up. I looked at the man who now had tears fully welling in his eyes and it most likely had nothing to do with the physical pain of the slap. It had to do with the blindness his wife had from the very beginning.
He had to put me in my place back when we were in our quarters while the captain was briefing the crew on the ship. I had believed I was skinny, pale, and ugly and there he was wanting to make love to me. He had to remind me last night that he believed I was the most beautiful woman in the colony even though I personally had decided that it was Renata. At no point had I ever seen him giving me reasons for any of these thoughts in my head. Even now, I had assumed that he was cheating on me with Renata when I’d never seen any actual evidence of him pursuing her. She simply was on the shuttle with him just the same as she had followed him to the greenhouses yesterday.
“Oh my,” I muttered, “It’s just…I…”
He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me, holding me tightly to him as he ran his hands along my back. I couldn’t even put my own arms around him because I didn’t deserve to. I’d never hit him before in my life and now I hit him harder than I’d ever hit anyone.
“I love you and you’re the only one I’ll ever give all my heart to until my dying day,” he said, his breath near my ear, “I meant what I said when I made my vow to you. Can you please stop wondering? Can you please accept how beautiful you are?”
“I’m so sorry, Zane. Can you please still love me forever? I really need that right now,” I pleaded.
“And that’s exactly what you’ll have,” he replied, “It’s forever.”
And in that moment, I forgave him and the others for their defiance. I wouldn’t relinquish the position of Captain just yet and as far as I could tell, no one expected me to. At the moment, the colony had come together as one unified machine and they still accepted that I was part of that machine.
Zane
Chapter Eighteen
The shuttle left an hour later with a crew of six. It had only taken them about that long to load up the supplies they would need. The commander had decided to join them. Capturing black holes wasn’t something that interested me, so I stayed back and returned to my duties with the greenhouse. It wasn’t even midday yet by the time the shuttle had headed out, so I hadn’t lost much time. And now, thankfully, it wasn’t snowing anymore and the temperature was in the forties.
Much to my dismay, Renata had stayed behind as well and insisted on helping me with the greenhouses. Fortunately some of the framework I’d constructed was ready for the windows to start being installed. That gave me something for her to get started on and it would keep us working in two different areas.
The shuttle returned about six hours later with a bunch of pomp and circumstance. I had to set my equipment down to go see what the commotion was all about. When I approached the back of the shuttle where the ramp had been lowered, I found Lane there gesturing me over to the sturdy structure near the back of the shuttle.
“Check this out, Zane,” he said, still waving me over.
The reactor core looked like a giant safe - like something you’d see in a bank. It was a sturdy metal box about seven feet on all sides with a thick window on what I assumed to be an access hatch. I was unfamiliar with nuclear reactors and only knew this to be something called a mini-reactor because someone had told me that when we were offloading the shuttles yesterday. I was supposed to construct the reactor plumbing at some point, but that would likely never happen now that we technically didn’t have a reactor anymore. I wondered in that moment what would ever come of the fuel rods that still waited uselessly in a lead-lined safe beyond the storage tents.
He stepped aside and pointed to the window, “You can literally see the black hole. Something that hasn’t been done in all the history of mankind.”
“Unless the people who created the Hawke Jump engines had seen one before,” I replied, peeking into the window.
I had expected to see a black baseball somewhere in there but instead I saw hovering in the center of the ‘room’ a black dot that barely even existed. But because of its sheer darkness and the way the blue radiant light swirled around it, that little pinpoint was very clearly visible. I wasn’t sure where the blue light was coming from, but it acted like a whirlpool pouring into the dot from all sides and angles. It didn’t form into a disc like the Milky Way galaxy or drawings I’d seen of black holes in the past. It was both beautiful and intimidating at the same time.
“Is it safely contained?” I asked.
“Perfectly safe. It’s now no different than the core of a theoretical Jump Drive,” Leah said from behind me, “The only thing I lacked was how to create the black hole itself. Now that I have one, I might have to see what I can do with it.”
“Wait, you’re not planning on turning one of the shuttles into a Hawke Jump craft are you?” I asked, turning to her.
“Definitely not,” she replied, “Besides, who says you need a spaceship to fold space?”
I looked at her suddenly as she turned and exited the shuttle. I worried for a moment about what she may have been inferring. If I learned anything about her today, it was that if she had a plan in her head, she would pursue it with everything she had.
By the time I went to bed that night, the chicken barn was fully built, though it lacked any heating units at the time, not to mention chickens. I had the framework completely built on two of the greenhouses with about half the windows installed in both. We had a black hole that we kept about fifty yards away from the shuttles in its lonesome containment unit. And best of all we had a community.
At dinner, we all met in one shuttle and discussed the colony that was made up of a mere seventeen people. It was agreed upon that we no longer needed to act like we were part of a ship. After all, as future generations would come and go, you couldn’t keep referring to your leaders as “Captain” and “Executive Officer”.
It might have been a fantasy to believe such a place could exist, but we would plan on that being a reality nevertheless. A community or a nation such as the one we lived in needed each other, so truly we wouldn’t be able to survive in a world that fought each other.
Although she was very reluctant, my wife had finally accepted the position of the first President of Kepler Moon Alpha and Darius McEwen accepted the position of the first Vice President of KMA. We toasted them at dinner and agreed that from that day forward, we were no longer the crew of the Colonization Project-4. The CP-4 was merely a tomb that would orbit KMA for eternity.
BOOK THREE
The Gateway
Rigel Knight
Chapter One
I, Lieutenant Commander Rigel Knight, after much thought and consideration, have decided that I’ve finally reached a time in my life that I must turn in my resignation from the USN-SD. While I have enjoyed my-
My hand paused over the keyboard as I reread the words that I had just typed. The last partial sentence demanded a continuation that I wasn’t sure I could provide. I was resigning for a reason and that reason was that I didn’t enjoy my current command and I still had another year to serve here. I didn’t enjoy transporting people and supplies back and forth between Europa and Earth. I didn’t enjoy doing those mindless twelve-hour watches on the bridge.