Home Planet: Awakening (Part 1) (15 page)

Nothing.

The walkie-talkie stayed on for two and a half minutes more—still nothing. Disappointed, I replaced the two-way in my fleece and unzipped it to access the intercom badge on my chest.

After activating it, I said, “Intercom, connect me with the network.”

The intercom woman said, “The network is unreachable. The communications network is inactive.”

Her reply was getting old. No surprise, though, but I had to try.

I said, “Okay. Intercom, initiate direct badge-to-badge communications. Any node.”

“No active intercom nodes within range.”

“Intercom, repeat last command.”

“No active intercom nodes within range.”

“Damn it …”

Reichs must’ve found and switched off the hidden badges. Either that or they’d ran out of charge or were out of range. I couldn’t recall the effective range going node-to-node as we always used the network before stasis. Hoping for the out-of-range theory, I vowed to try again later and shut down the badge.

Nothing was easy on this cursed vessel. I yawned, a wave of fatigue washing over me. Everything seemed worse when tired, and as I relocated to the dark corner of a corpse-free office, I reminded myself it’d been less than a day since I’d awoken. Now the time had come for my first normal sleep in over five hundred years, I couldn’t get comfortable on the hard, cold floor. After finding a sofa in a small staff room, I crashed there savoring the delights of upholstery and cushions. Even musty, dirty ones. It took just minutes to become drowsy and I willed my mind to find solutions that sometimes came to me in my dreams. Questions plagued my mind in those final seconds of conscious thought.
Where is Reichs? Where is everyone else? On the planet below? Dead?
And where, in the vastness of space, am I?
In five hundred years, we could’ve traveled seventy light years. That brought dozens of additional star systems within range. Moments later, I fell asleep.

My dreams revealed faces from the distant past, starfields providing the canvas on which they appeared No solutions came. Just hopes overwhelmed by fears, alone in the darkness of space with only the dead for company. It’d been a huge stroke of fortune that I hadn’t joined them. Now I had to keep surviving in this radically altered reality. And I had to do justice to my lost friends and find out the truth.

I awoke for the second time in five-hundred and fourteen years. Feeling in my pocket for Professor Heinz’s watch, I checked the time. It read 8:15p.m. Nine hours’ sleep and feeling way better for it. I put on the watch, pushing the buckle tongue through the hole nearest the end. The date still read July 15, 2584. I exhaled, shaking my head, looking to the ceiling for explanation but finding none.

Once my yawning had died down, I sat up and tried again with the walkie-talkie and then the intercom badge. Same results: no radio signal, no network, no nodes within range. Wasting no time, I got up from the couch and took a left out of the staff room toward the starboard telescope dome. Once inside the oppressively hot viewing cockpit, I considered Professor Heinz but decided to leave him where he sat. I removed my fleece, laying it down on the seat beside him. He wasn’t in the way and I’d come to think of the ship like a war grave. There were few signs of a vermin problem and most had decomposed to the point of no disease risk. So, in absence of anything better to do with the dead, it was better to leave them. Moving to the eyepiece of the telescope, I noticed the temperature had relented some compared to last time. The only explanation was the ship’s orbit had taken the starboard side out of direct sunlight—or at least changed the incidence angle.

The eyepiece pointed upwards compared to the telescope tube. Next to it, sat another eyepiece connected to a thinner tube, which ran along the right hand side of the telescope, extending out through the front of the room.

The viewfinder,
I thought

I removed both eyepiece covers and put my eye to the finderscope first. All I saw was black. Next, I tried the main eyepiece, but same result: pure darkness. With Professor Heinz beside me, I pondered for a moment, then got back up and started searching the dark floor. The metal outline soon betrayed the trap door’s presence. It opened easily, telling me there was pressure below the wedge-shaped trapdoor. Had there been a breach in the cupola—due to space junk or seal failure—the door would’ve been impossible to open. I climbed down the short ladder onto the narrow platform with the cupola, telescope and space beyond. The enclosed space had kept the transparent dome quite clean. The view was spectacular. As I’d slept, the ship had orbited the planet and the planet had turned. Now I could see three quarters of it in sunlight and I thought back to the maps—one for western hemisphere and one eastern. I visualized the shapes of the continents, the mountain ranges and the forests. Then there were the candidate colony locations and the primary one:
Hyland-A.
As the planet hung serenely in view, illuminated by its parent ball of fusion, I could see none of these features. The globe in front of me was not greens and blues and browns but entirely white.

“What the hell is going on?” I whispered, in awe of its beauty but mystified by its appearance.

There was no way they could’ve got it this wrong. The near-Earth space telescopes had thousands of viewing hours on Aura-c
as betold by Professor Heinz’s surface maps. Was this a different planet in the Aura
system? There were two other rocky planets in the system: Aura-d and Aura-e as well as gas giant, Aura-b. What I was looking at was definitely a rocky planet. Aura-d
orbited closest to its star and had a thick atmosphere of highly reflective sulphur dioxide—similar to Venus. Perhaps that was it. But the color—or lack thereof—looked all wrong. Aura-e orbited further out than Aura-c
and was a frozen, cloudy planet like the one I could see.
Unable to remember the exact habitability index, I didn’t think it was high and I’d be surprised if John and Jane Doe had settled there. But where else could the transmission have been from? They
must
have made the white planet their home.

Then another possibility came to mind: was it a different system entirely? I knew they’d planned a diversion contingency for the case where Aura
turned out to be uninhabitable, but that was supposed to be one chance in five hundred or something like that.

Long odds, but not impossible
, I thought.
Five hundred balls in a bag, one red the rest white.  What are the chances? Low, but not impossible.

With no network and little access to the few functioning terminals, I still needed to observe the planet directly to see if it was Aura-e
or something else entirely. And if John and his lady friend were there, where were they?

Dragging my eyes away from the stunning, perplexing spacescape, I looked along the telescope to its end above the cupola. I placed my hands around the tube, gently pulled down and found it rock solid. Next, I hauled myself onto it and slid along the top, pulling with my hands, pushing with my boots. On reaching the end, I looked down to see the black dust cover over the objective lens. There was some sort of actuator mechanism, which, under normal conditions, would open up the flap-like cover. But these were anything but normal conditions and I had to force it open, breaking the mechanism by the sound of it. After opening the finderscope cover, I found my way back into the observation cockpit and stood opposite the large hand wheel at the back of the room next to the entrance hatch. The sign above it said
Manual Azimuth Operation.
Another, identical wheel on the sidewall next to the empty seat read,
Manual Inclination Operation.
I turned the first wheel, yanking on it half a dozen times with all my weight to get it moving. When it did, the entire cockpit moved slightly with each turn. Next, came at least twenty round trips to the viewfinder as I adjusted the azimuth and inclination of the telescope and in doing so, the room itself. I put my eye to the finderscope. Perfect. The planet sat dead center, so I moved my eye to the main eyepiece. All it revealed was cloud cover. Swirls of higher cloud above a veil of thick, impenetrable white. I watched and I concentrated to the extent of my visual acuity, but still saw just cloud. There was something else though—the cloud appeared to be moving. Not as in swirling around as cloud does, but shifting, translating across the field of view. Whatever magnification the telescope was on, it was close enough to give away the ship’s movement relative to the planet. I stood, enthralled by the recurring shapes, which drifted hypnotically by, hoping my pattern-spotting brain was aware enough to spot anything significant.

If we’d diverted to another system wouldn’t the
Janus
be here too?
I thought.

Another theory arrived from my subconscious ideas factory.

Could someone on board—a faction—have staged a takeover then deliberately diverted here to avoid the
Janus
and any future missions from Earth? Maybe they didn’t agree with the tenets of equality and a fresh start for all. Maybe they had a different society in mind.

It wouldn’t surprise me and five hundred years travel time would cover quite a few star systems … But then I checked myself and found my mind wandering into conspiratorial back alleys. I reminded myself that it’s all about the evidence. No different from being a cop five hundred years ago on Earth.

Only two theories made sense: what I was looking at was
Aura-e
, not
Aura-c
; or this wasn’t the Aura
system at all.

Then something occurred to me. Something I’d been looking at for the last few minutes but hadn’t recognized. The higher altitude white clouds remained but had become wispier, revealing more definition of what lay beneath. And it was no longer a blanket of thick white cloud. Now I could see what looked like the surface. Shadows betrayed the undulations of hills and mountains under an unbroken covering of ice and snow. This planet looked very much like a frozen world. The question was
which
frozen world?

I stood upright and massaged my aching neck, looking to Professor Heinz for inspiration.

“Bet, you would’ve known where we are, wouldn’t you prof?”

Then I smiled as it occurred to me what to try next.

“Thanks, Prof. Heinz,” I said before picking up my fleece and exiting the viewing cockpit.

On entering the cold observation hall, I donned my fleece and walked briskly over toward the printed maps, still on the desks beside the conference room. The network was out of action, but Professor Heinz’s preference for paper could provide some answers.

I went to the large plot drawers and searched each one in turn, not stopping to re-read the labels on the front. Star charts were what I sought and star charts were what I found—dozens and dozens of them. After laying all of them out on the unoccupied third table, I flicked through the pile, skim reading the information box in the top right corner of each.

Three times, I did this before concluding that these were
three
series of star charts—one set for each of the three telescopes. I placed the A0 sheets on the floor and picked up only the ones related to the starboard telescope. Counting sixteen charts on the table, I realized that each was a snapshot of the sky for each of the sixteen light years from Earth to Aura. What practical use this had, when, for most of the time we’d be in stasis, I couldn’t work out. Perhaps it was contingency or maybe just the pet project of an eccentric old academic. It didn’t matter, I had what I needed and took the sheet marked
16.1 light years
—in other words, how the sky should look once in the Aura
system.

I rolled up the star chart and jogged back to the telescope with just the hint of a grin on my face. Through the airlock, into the heat and fleece off, I went to the finderscope. Then I looked down at the star chart and back to the finderscope. Sighing deeply, I went to the azimuth adjustment wheel and turned it to a region of dark sky, away from the glare of the alien sun. A few constellations looked recognizable: one called
Perseus
and another called
Taurus
—which looked nothing like a bull to me. But did this confirm I was on a ship around in the Aura system or not? I crouched down, read the small print under the information box, and sighed. Part of it read:

Only valid for scheduled month and year at specified point in approach trajectory.

“Of course,” I whispered, disappointedly.

So in other words, this star chart was hopelessly out of date. Besides, I was nowhere near expert enough to make a call on the ship’s position from this. I shook my head and decided to move the scope back toward the planet. I had a rapidly filling agenda to keep—Reichs, the long-range transceiver and then the shuttle bay—but I wanted a last look at the planet for clues.

Once more teeing up the finderscope with the manual wheels, I aimed the giant tube at the frozen planet. With only half of the planet in view, I made a double take at what I thought I’d seen. I scrunched my eye, shaking my head.
How could it be?
Rising through the glowing blue fringe of the planet was the gray arc of another orb, something unexpected peeping above the planet’s atmospheric haze. A satellite—a
natural
satellite. Unless I was mistaken, this frozen world had a moon.

“Huh, would you look at that …” I whispered as I watched the gray dome edge upward from behind its parent world.

As it gradually revealed itself, I thought back to training, exploring all the accessible neural pathways on the subject.

Did any of the Aura planets have a moon?

Aura-c
did not, that was for sure. But as good as my memory usually was, I couldn’t remember if the other planets in the system did or not. I guessed that with so much focus on the one habitable world, it was natural that the instructors paid lip service to the system’s other planets.

If I ever got out of this mess and had kids, I’d remind them how important it was to listen in class. I thought about the children I’d once wanted and started down a well-worn path to melancholy before checking my thoughts and focusing on the present.

I supposed it was possible that Aura-e
had a moon, although my best guess in a quiz would have been two tiny moons as Mars had. But this was no trivia quiz, played for prizes and kudos—this was part mystery, part nightmare and ultimately about survival. Maybe, I could eat for the rest of my life most probably, just staying on the Juno, but how long would it be before my mind turned? And what life would it be drifting around an unknown star, with only the dead for company?
No life worth living
was the answer.

I lay down on the floor and thought about times past, about my mom, my sister Nikki and, most of all, about Juliet. A tear rolled down my cheek and welled in my eyes. And then I let go and sobbed like I hadn’t since the sixth day of June in 2066—six-six-six-six. Four sixes, not three, but still the work of the Devil. Other faces came to my mind’s eye: Blanco and his wife, my old boss from Boise PD and many other individuals I’d known. Every single one of them had died centuries ago. Even their children would be long gone. And their grandchildren, too. Nothing left of them, not even their memory—except for the memories of them living in my mind. Once I died, those memories would be gone, too. If I told no one about these special people from my distant home world, then everything they’d ever been would be lost in the mists of time. I wanted to find out how they’d lived out the remainder of their lives. Did Nikki meet a nice guy, get married, have children? Did she become famous the world over? How did Mom live out her final years? Did she ever love again? How did she pass away? So many questions that I’d probably never learn the answers to. So it wasn’t just my survival, it was about knowing what happened to those I loved on a distant planet, in a distant time. It was about honoring their memory and telling someone, anyone about their story.