Arrival: Chapter 14

  “Where’s Earth?” Sadhika asked.  The question surprised her a little; her curiosity about it seemingly came out of nowhere.

  Neil pulled out his pocket scroll and after issuing a few thought commands and observing the results on the screen, he pushed it closed and pointed out to just a few degrees over the eastern horizon.  “That star…” he said, “That’s Sol.  That distant, unassuming star… out there, in the middle of nowhere, amongst so many others.”

  “It’s so… oh I don’t know, what’s the word I’m looking for Neil?  Indistinct?”

  “Works as well as any other I suppose.  Since we’re at it,” he pulled out his scroll and briefly consulted it again.  He pointed up to a couple degrees off of the sky’s zenith.  “See that bright blue tinged brownish one that isn’t shimmering like the others?   That’s the binary gas giant in the outer solar system that the ship passed on its way in.  Unfortunately none of the others are up right now though.   Apparently that one is something like a Jupiter orbiting with something like a Neptune, I really wish I could have seen that…  I really hate that they waited so long to wake us up.”

  “I know what you mean…” Sadhika sympathetically replied.

  “Those planets out there though… you know what I’ve been thinking about a lot since we woke up?”

  “What’s that?” 

  “By the time we left Earth, we knew so much about that planet and our Solar System.   Humans had spent the better part of half a millennium seriously investigating the formation of the Solar System and the planets, orientating ourselves in space and time, the geological history of the Earth and the evolutionary history of life on Earth…”

  “And?”

  “And now we’re basically starting over again from the beginning, from question one… sure the large scale and fine grain stuff of the universe at large stays the same, everything we know about stars and galaxies transfers of course, and all the physical laws are the same here, there, and everywhere as far as we know, but… but all the particulars here, it’s all different!

  “What is the evolutionary tree of life here on Haven?  What are the relationships between the myriad of life currently in existence here and in previous epochs?  What is the geological history of this and the other planets?  Did the planets here initially form as they are in this configuration or did they migrate in and out?  Back home we’d already figured out so much of that…

  “There’s just… so many unknowns Sadhika, so many mysteries, so much to newly discover and learn about.  That’s what this has all really been about for me.  That’s why I’m here…  A permanent off world foot hold for humanity is just a perk for me.  I know it’s technically our primary mission, but it’s not the real reason I’m out here, it’s not why I dreamed up this mission in the first place at all.   I’m here to explore; to discover, to be a part of the excitement of figuring out all of the answers to all of those questions!”

  “I’d like to think the same could be said for all of us…” Sadhika answered thoughtfully.   “Well, the original us in any case,” she mused.

  After a few moments of quiet reflection, the two saw a bright burning streak across the sky.   It was clearly orange and red as they watched it from where it appeared low on the horizon to the south, and then burned over the horizon to the south-west.  “Meteor showers too,” Neil reflected, “we have no idea about any asteroid or comet profiles or regular meteor showers… for all we know at this point we may have arrived just in time to be wiped out by a major impact event,” he darkly joked.

  “Sadhika, Neil, back to the FDM immediately!!” Wiremu barked in their ears.  The two sat up startled and looked at each other with dread.  They then both scrambled to their feet and flat out sprinted the short distance back to the First Descent Module and rushed inside.

  “-I repeat, Halley, Søren, Ishtar and some others have stolen the other shuttle and descended to an alternate landing site on the opposite side of the continent.”   It was Asari on the screen, incensed.

  “How do they intend to land?” Wiremu asked after nodding to Sadhika and Neil to acknowledge their entrance.

  From out of frame, somebody handed Asari an opened scroll which he then quickly reviewed.   “How did we not notice that?” he angrily asked with a turn of his head towards whoever had handed him the device.   He was clearly sitting at one of the multi-purpose auxiliary terminals on the bridge.  It hadn’t occurred to him to sit in the captain’s chair yet.   Halley after all was the captain, and it wasn’t his place.

  “What is it?” Wiremu asked.

  “He sent the other paving drone down to the other side of the continent before you four ever even left,” Asari replied in disbelief.  “I don’t have any idea how they were able to keep something like that hidden from us!” 

  “What do they think they’re doing?” In-Su asked from a top bunk, and likewise out of frame from Asari’s perspective.

  “They’ve just completely torpedoed all of our careful planning!” Neil angrily decried from where he was standing behind Wiremu.  He’d immediately had a bad feeling about Halley but he’d kept it to himself because it was just an intuition without any evidence.

  “What do we do?” the four clearly heard Aset ask Asari from off screen.

  “I’ll tell you what we do, we launch every single landing drone we have down to where they’ve made the second runway and take back our fucking property.”

  “Excuse me!?” Wiremu asked, noticeably alarmed and incredulous.  “You absolutely will not!”

  “You can’t do that!” In-Su exclaimed.  “We… we have no idea what his intentions are, no idea how he’d respond to such an action, everybody is still way too exposed at this point to just start winging it here, okay!?  We just got here; the mission could still so easily fail at this point!”

  “If you just try to brute force storm them like that,” Neil warned, “people will get hurt and a lot of people will probably die.  Mission property will be destroyed beyond repair and our ability to continue here in any way could be completely ruined, we need way more information before we take any actions of any kind, let alone such brash and nakedly aggressive ones!”

  “But they started it!!  Like always!  Dammit they’re the ones acting aggressively here!!”  Asari yelled in a roar which bordered on a scream.

  “Asari… listen to me, okay?” Sadhika offered in as soothing a voice as she could put on.   “This happening at all, already compromises the mission.  Storming them like that would put us so far out of protocol that the entire mission would surely be a failure.  Halley has already put the mission clearly at risk; that’s on him and we all acknowledge that.  But if you do this, the mission would definitely be a complete failure altogether, and that would be on you instead.  Is that what you want?”

  “They’ve landed sir,” an unseen voice informed Asari.  “Landing parties are armed and standing by at the descent pods.”

  “Asari, did they taken any of the weapons?” In-Su asked as he climbed down to get in view of Asari’s video feed.  “It sounds like they certainly didn’t take everything they could have to have secured an advantage.” 

  Asari gave an angry but inquisitive look to one of his people, and was informed that only four shotguns and one laser rifle were missing from the weapons locker.  

  “Only five weapons,” In-Su repeated,” only a small part of our entire inventory.  I think that says something about their intentions right there, doesn’t it?  If they wanted conflict, if they were working towards their side ultimately winning completely at your expense, then they would have taken all of the weapons, wouldn’t they have?

  “Right,” Sadhika agreed from over Wiremu’s right shoulder.  “If that was their ultimate intention, then they would’ve also auto launched all of the descent pods so you couldn’t go after them!”

  “We’ve had zero failures so far Asari,” Neil explained, “and we stocked everything in duplicate in principle so that there was a spare for everything, but also specifically so that if we did wind up being lucky enough to have zero failures, we could launch a second colony site or eventually even send the New Horizon off again to yet another star.  This can still work, Asari.  It doesn’t have to get any uglier than it already is.  The mission has a greater chance of success with two viable colonies… even if they hate each other.”

  On the monitor the four sims could see Aset come to Asari’s side and hold his hand.   “We should talk to them,” they heard her say with begrudging acceptance of their point.  “We should at least hear them out.  I don’t like it either but they’re right.  It would be irresponsible at best, for us to launch an invasion before we are clear about their intentions.”

  “They still haven’t responded to your attempts to communicate?” Sadhika asked.

  “No.” Asari answered coldly.  “They’re totally dark.”

  “Same here…” she said in frustration while trying to reach them through the communications system on her own scroll.  

  “Well,” she said finally and tentatively, “I suggest we simply continue as planned for now.”   

  Wiremu nodded.   “We’ll see if they make any attempt to contact us,” he added, “and then whether they do or not we’ll head back to the ship in the morning as planned and prepare for the next phase of the mission.   We’ll have to make some… adjustments, but we should be able to make it work.  Exactly how many of the crew did they take with them?”

  “Twenty-four as far as we can tell.”

  “See Asari?   Again, he seems to have only taken what he felt he needed as opposed to everything he could.”

  “Or maybe he just couldn’t round up any more traitors,” Asari snarled.  “Fine.  We’ll do it your way.  It’s certainly not going to be me who makes the mission a failure.  He’s the insurgent, not me.  So get your beauty sleep simulants… you have a long day ahead of you tomorrow.   Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight Asari,” Wiremu answered reflexively as the screen switched off.

  “You know…” In-Su offered, “we could go there.  Tomorrow morning, or… well, right now if we wanted to.  Maybe we could talk to them; maybe we could resolve this right now before it goes any further?”

  “I certainly like the idea In-Su,” Sadhika said, “but I’d be too worried that they’d be paranoid about exactly the response Asari had in mind.  I’m worried that if we were to show up unannounced in any capacity right now that they’d just shoot first and ask questions afterwards.”

  “You’re probably right,” In-Su admitted with a sigh which revealed a profound sense of defeat.   All four of them were quiet for several moments.  “How did this… how did this happen?  Was it our fault?” he asked.

  “Yeah, well… I guess if we want to claim all the good of being our progenitors we have to inherit their mistakes as well.” Neil begrudgingly admitted.

  “You know, it’s like we just transplanted the problems we had on Earth a hundred and sixty years, and… almost nineteen light years away” Sadhika complained.  “Each and every one of us,” she added, “can in our own way identify with Halley… maybe in his own way he’s just doing what we did in leaving Earth to pursue our own path here on Haven.  We thought we could just take a particular part of humanity with us and nurture it into something above and beyond… but instead we just set up this disaster of a chaotic cascading return to all the normal petty problems humans have always had…  Our progenitors failed to accept and incorporate all elements of humanity into the New Horizon mission, and now we’re paying for it.”

  “I couldn’t have said it better myself,” In-Su said.