Reunion: Chapter 5

  After their tour of the museum, Jaren and his staff were provided with guest rooms in the presidential residence.  The next morning, Kathryn, Felix, Elim, and Keri met up in front of Jaren’s ship.  Kathryn was the only one of them, the only Havenite, to have gone to space so far, and she could tell that the others were at least anxious about it if not outright afraid.

  “So what do you think?” she asked the others.  “They hadn’t had the chance to talk about their respective encounters the night before, but Kathryn was more trying to keep things casual and alleviate their nerves while they waited for Jaren to show up.

  “Well myself I’m as excited as the first day of school to get a good look at the inside this space ship of theirs,” Felix enthused.  “They’re obviously far more advanced than even our founders were.”

  “Do you think we need to be afraid of them?” Keri asked.  

  Kathryn hadn’t known Keri as long as Elim and nowhere near as long as Felix, but they’d worked together enough years to have developed a professional appreciation and respect for each other.  Unlike herself and Elim, Keri was more naturally feminine than they were, which made it harder for Kathryn to relate to her.  People joked that the two women looked alike, and she could certainly see what they meant, but only to a certain extent.  They were both gingers of a similar build, but Kathryn had deep blue eyes, soft features, and only a slight curl to her hair while Keri had green eyes, much more angular features, and particularly frizzy hair.  

  “Does anyone think there’s any chance of… let’s say, ulterior motives?” her would be doppelganger asked.  

  Haven had not seen conflict since the first few days after humans arrived, but the four were all members of the closest thing they had to a military.  They could best be described as paramilitary; they were trained in weapons and tactics and while all taken very seriously, it was nonetheless all understood to largely be mere exercises meant to hone discipline and trust in the leadership.  

  Each member of the team had been on at least one deployment already, but the missions they’d been on so far had always been humanitarian in nature.  Several years ago, the twin cities had suffered a horrific worst storm in the colony’s history, and all four of them along with the entire rest of the service were deployed on a search and rescue mission, and then afterwards for the massive rebuilding efforts.  Several hundred people died that week, and it was the darkest period in their history since the troubles following their arrival on the planet half a century earlier.

  Kathryn reached out and felt the cool metal of one of the landing struts.  “I don’t think so…” she said with a covert smile, thinking about her conversation with Jaren late last night.  “They’ve come a long way and the way I see it, they’re really just so advanced that I couldn’t imagine them being interested in anything we’ve made for ourselves, and any natural resources they might want they clearly have the technology to find elsewhere.”

  “I for one think it all just kind of makes sense,” Keri added.  “They just want the archive.  I could see how they would think it as the most priceless thing in the universe.   The fact that they didn’t just take it from us even though they could have I think speaks volumes.”

  “Exactly,” Elim said.  “They could have taken it and we’d never have even known they were here until we got up there for ourselves and found it missing.  I also find it so interesting that they waited long enough for us to reach the ship for ourselves.  If true, it betrays a certain-”

  He didn’t have the chance to finish his thought before they all nearly leaped clear out of their skin when a section of the underside of the vessel pulled away and the boarding ramp extended. 

  “Welcome!” They whirled around to see that it was Jaren calling to them as he came down the ramp.  He so startled them because they’d all been waiting for him to emerge from the presidential residence across the way, but somehow he’d managed to beat them there.   Kathryn was doubly surprised to see the president come down the ramp with him out of the craft practically arm in arm, and with no escort anywhere in sight.  Trust them as she might, that trust remained provisional as far as Kathryn was concerned, and she felt the president was becoming too trusting too soon and assuming too much.  They were followed by Jaren’s crew and as she suspected, no presidential security detail.   Looking around she could now spot the security personnel mulling about, but it still made her uncomfortable for the president to have gone in alone with them.  She again tried to assure herself it was just healthy paranoia.  

  Still a little startled, Kathryn did her best to bury it and force an awkward smile.   She held out her hand as he approached, and he shook it.  “Ready to go?” he asked with his practiced warm smile to which her team all eagerly nodded that they were.

  “Wonderful!   Follow me then.” He eagerly marched back up the ramp followed by his and Kathryn’s teams.  Before boarding, Kathryn turned to President Sato and gave a quick but respectful bow.

  “Go make us proud Commander Barnes.  Rest assured that you are already a hero to our people.  Now go make yourself a legend.”

  Kathryn nodded while making intently appreciative eye contact, then turned around and boarded the ship. 

  Once aboard, Kathryn marveled anew.  The ship was one big open area aside from the central core where she presumed the engines, whatever they were, resided.  Jaren and his people were at their stations readying the ship for launch, while her own people were standing around looking especially useless.

  “Welcome Kathryn,” Jaren offered without looking away from his control panel.  You and yours can just have a seat and enjoy the ride.” One of many taps at his glass control panel unfolded four seats from the wall, and they sat down and fumbled through securing the harnesses they were unfamiliar with.

  “Anti-matter engine warmed up sir, we’re ready to lift off.”

  “Anti-matter?” Felix questioned.

  The man who increasingly appeared to be Jaren’s engineer turned around in his chair to answer him.  “Yes, you may call it something else, but it’s the quantum inverse of normal matter?”

  “Yeah, that… that didn’t help any I’m afraid.”  Felix seemed genuinely embarrassed.  He was so used to being the smartest person in the room, Kathryn found herself having quite a bit of sympathy for him having to ask what must have seemed stupid questions to their new guests.  She figured it was probably good for him though.

  “Your people have discovered the atom, correct?  We got reports you had developed nuclear energy?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “But not the subatomic?”

  “We are aware of it, but we have only begun to work on figuring out how to map it.”

  “Fair enough.” Kathryn didn’t detect any overt condescension in the alien engineer.  Well, anti-matter is rare, but it can be created artificially.  It is inverse characteristics of normal matter in such a way that when a particle of it comes into contact with a particle of regular matter the two annihilate each other, and are both converted into pure energy, a lot of energy.  For now, you can just take my word for it.  Our drive works by streaming a beams of regular matter and anti-matter particles at each other inside of a thrusting bell.  The energy released is focused away from us, propelling us forward.  Within an atmosphere of course only the anti-matter stream is necessary since it readily reacts with the matter of the atmosphere.”

  “Of course,” Felix acknowledged, seeming to understand pretty well.  Not many people on Haven could have followed much better.   “I will take your word for it for now, but I look forward to learning absolutely everything about what you just said.”

  “That could… take a long time,” he said while smiling at Jaren and being polite enough to mask his condescension fairly well.

  “Don’t you worry,” Felix replied with confidence.  “I’ve got lots of life left to figure it out.”

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Jaren warned.

  “About what?” Felix asked.

  His answer was every surface of the vessel’s interior seeming to become transparent.  It became apparent that the interior surfaces were all sophisticated display screens linked to a network of imagers on the exterior.   The illusion was not perfect, but it was nevertheless convincing enough to be breathtaking and leave the Haven crew stifling gasps of amazement.

  Jaren’s crew member Irvina called out their countdown to launch.  “Lift off in 3.  2.  1.”

  The acceleration was immediately noticeable, but it started out relatively softly before steadily increasing.  Kathryn and her team felt themselves being pressed ever harder into their seats.  About the time they were beginning to wonder if they should be concerned, Jaren seeming to read their minds reassured them over the noise of the engines.  “This ship is capable of much more in emergencies, but for standard ascents to orbit we limit ourselves to a relatively comfortable three Gs.”

  The vibrations were moderate, but they hardly noticed with how absorbed they were by what they were seeing.  They’d all been in aircraft and seen their twin cities from the sky, but after only a couple of minutes they were much, much higher than that, and the view changed again as the ship tipped over and began directing its acceleration laterally and away from the city to achieve orbital velocity.  The Havenite’s chairs were at the high point of the ship’s circular shape as it sped around the planet, which left them staring down in awe at their planet from two hundred kilometers above the surface, racing over it faster and faster.

  Kathryn had been to space once already, but their rockets were so crude by comparison and she’d only had a small navigation window in front of her to see out of, which never granted anything more than the briefest of views of the surface.  By the time she’d arrived at the New Horizon, she’d been too absorbed in the ship to spare any thoughts of a glance over her shoulder at the planet below anyway.

  As though in a trance, they watched the surface race past them ever faster until the globe seemed to be falling away from them.  Twenty-five minutes or so into their flight, Jaren directed their attention away from the planet and towards the New Horizon.  “There she is everyone…”

  New Horizon had been left in a geostationary orbit at the longitude of the twin cities to serve as a perpetual reminder of their destiny.  It was too far away to see outright with the naked eye from the surface, but the reflective glass section of the habitat ring made it shine brightly enough to be seen as a bright star at dawn and dusk.  Kathryn thought about the countless hours she’d spent looking up at it and dreaming.  Now on their final approach, they all had the opportunity to see the ship take form physical form before them.

  Jaren’s ship didn’t seem to be built with any kind of artificial gravity, but she was able to surmise that the axis of their propulsion would allow the effect of a floor if they ran the engines at 1 G.  However New Horizon’s most distinctive feature was its wide habitat ring which was connected by four struts to the forward section of the long narrow cylinder which made up the ship’s central engineering section.  The ring was designed to spin at the appropriate rate to simulate gravity on the interior surface along its six levels.

  The ship shifted and wobbled as their obit was aligned more perfectly with the New Horizon which appeared larger and larger as they approached, until it so clearly dwarfed their own vessel.  Their saucer ship slowly flew along the length of the engineering section until it came to a stop in front of one of the shuttle docking ports, the same place Kathryn herself had docked her much more primitive craft days earlier.  Painstakingly slowly, they carefully inched ever closer towards the airlock.

  “We sent a drone scout ship out to scan the surface of New Horizon soon after we established the Escher in your system.  We believe we were successfully able to create an acceptable docking port.  Now we get to find out if we got that part right.”

  The way they approached had made it clear that the docking port was at the centre of the top of the saucer, and when they were less than a centimeter away, Jaren engaged the magnetic seals. They all heard and felt the slight thunk as the two vessels became one conjoined orbital mass.

  “Engaging atmospheric seal,” Irvina declared.  A sheath of a material only superficially similar to rubber pressed against the hull against the force of the magnetic lock.

  “And… attempting to pressurize,” she continued.  “And confirmed.  We’re good to go,” she reported to Jaren.

  Jaren swiveled his chair around to face the Haven team.  “We couldn’t match the hard crank seal which we assume is built into the airlock,” he said as he started undoing his harness.  The Havenites took this as a cue to do the same.  “There’s only about a one in ten thousand chance that we could suffer a power loss catastrophic enough for the backups to not compensate and lose the magnetic seal, but it’s a risk nonetheless so we’ll minimize the time the airlocks are left open.  When we’re ready we’ll make our way through and close it up again.   We have the ability to remote pilot our ship if anything goes wrong, so all of us disembarking together is an acceptable risk.”  He smiled as he saw the four of them struggle in the unfamiliar absence of gravity.   Kathryn had been in this situation before and was somewhat more composed, but the others appeared to be attempting to swim through the air in vain of course. 

  With a couple of taps at his panel, a part of the wall screen beside him slid away and he pulled out airburst maneuvering belts for all of them.  He gently pushed four of them in the direction of the Havenites and passed the others out to his team.  Kathryn and her people caught them as he explained: “put them on like a belt with one block in front of you and one behind,” he explained while demonstrating putting on his own.  “Use these buttons with arrows on them to move about: up, down, left, right, forward, backwards… you’ll figure it out.”

  When they all had their belts on and had reached a fundamental understanding of their use, they assembled at the airlock.  Jaren tapped at a panel beside it, and the interior of the ship went opaque again to its original appearance.  The panel at the top of the ship, which until now had been displaying the external image of the New Horizon airlock, slid away to reveal the complimentary airlock of the ship they were in.  Jaren put his hands on the sturdy looking physical latch and his other on the master release handle.  “Everyone ready?” he asked.  

  Everyone nodded, so he pulled the release handle, swung the latch bar, opened the circular portal, and ushered first Kathryn through, and then the rest before climbing through himself and carefully closing the New Horizon’s hatch behind him.

  Once through, Kathryn welcomed him aboard with a wide, proud grin: “Welcome aboard the New Horizon.”  Her ship.

  

 

  

***    ***   ***

  

 

  “Alright,” Jaren said, “with Commander Barnes’ approval we’ll split up into teams.   Let’s pair up the way we did last night.   Barnes and I will head to the fusion core and attempt a restart.  Irvina and Felix, I need you two to stay here to assess the fuel situation and transfer however much hydrogen and xenon from our ship we’ll need to make the trip.   Xion and Deirdre, please head to the bridge and connect one of the anti-matter batteries we brought to the main power bus of the ship.  If you can bring main power online, try to boot up the central computer core, and if you get that done start working on trying to re-initiate the habitat ring’s gravity spin.  Elim and Nadelle, please head to environmental control in the arboretum.   The air is good for now, but before too long it will become toxic if we don’t connect an atmospheric cycler to the environmental system.  Since the arboretum originally served that purpose, you should be able to plug into some centralized environmental system there.  That all work for you Commander?” he asked Kathryn.

  She nodded her to Jaren then said to her crew: “You have your orders.”  She turned to Jaren.  “Shall we?”

  Jaren, Kathryn, and the two teams who were heading up to the habitat ring used their maneuvering belts to make their way to the far end of the engineering section where the two sections of the ship were joined.  By the time they’d traversed the distance, the Havenites had already become fairly adept at using the belts in the microgravity.

  “Alright up you go, no need for the belts here,” Jaren stated.  “Just pull yourself along with the ladder rungs there.”  He and Kathryn watched as the four people climbed into the tube and disappeared above them into the dark.  They then proceeded towards the central core room which was just beyond the strut access points.

  Kathryn watched as Jaren held up a small display screen and waved it in front of the walls.  What appeared on the display was the internal structure of the walls, and he appeared to be looking for something.  Seemingly finding it, he pulled a panel off and attached a device to the wall beside the opening he’d created, and clipped some connections between the device and the internal wiring of the wall.  The room lit up to an almost painfully brilliant degree until her eyes adjusted and she could comfortably see the room around her.  

  “This small battery will only power up this room.  We’ll need a lot more punch to power up the core,” he explained.

  It was a round room with a spherical reactor in the middle.  It followed the contours of the wall of the room and was molded into the floor.  Opposite the entry hatch was another closed hatch.  It somewhat clashed with the smooth unibody aesthetic of the rest of the room, giving the impression that it hadn’t been part of the original design.   The portal they’d entered the room through was beautifully molded into the wall, whereas this other one appeared to have been created by cutting into the contoured surface.

  “That looks odd,” Kathryn remarked.  “I wonder what’s through there,” she said.

  Curious himself after having been asked, he shone a laser beam at the hatch and observed the read out on the device.  “I don’t know, but on the other side of that hatch is hard vacuum, best not try to open it.”

  Jaren turned his attention to the reactor in the middle of the room.  It was three meters across, and even though there was no gravity or any indication of instability, being near it nevertheless made Kathryn instinctively conscious of the risk of being crushed by such a large and imposing object.  It was covered entirely by the same white ceramic polymer material as the rest of the room.

  Kathryn watched as Jaren busily surveyed the state of the reactor, tapping at control panels and shining his mysterious laser device at things.  She’d never seen anything like it, coherent laser beams sure, but not one that could scan like that.  She found herself somewhat amused watching Jaren go about his work.  It was a delight to watch even if she didn’t understand what he was doing, he clear did at least.  He moved with a purpose and deliberate intent of a professional and she recognized it with appreciation.  It was the way she hoped others observed her when she likewise working intently.

  “It’s quite impressive,” he finally observed.  “For a fusion reactor I mean.”

  “What do you mean ‘for a fusion reactor’?” she asked.

  “Well,” he seemed as though he was trying to figure out how not to offend.  “From our perspective fusion power is a somewhat antiquated technology,” he offered with an apologetic shrug.  “Don’t get me wrong, I mean we still use it,” he offered, “mostly for grid level energy generation but that’s about it,” he said as an afterthought as he tapped at a panel and continued to investigate the device.   “Nevertheless, I can assure you this is a remarkably advanced reactor design.  In fact, for the size and application, I doubt we could have engineered a better one ourselves.”

  “Are you an engineer?” Kathryn asked.

  He smiled warmly at her before looking back at his hand device and continuing to work.   “I have been many things Kathryn, same as you.”  He moved around to the other side of the reactor as she watched.  “I read your file, quite impressive…” he offered, and she got the impression he was referring to more than her resume.

  “Oh and by the way, I never really had the chance to congratulate you.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For being selected to come here first,” he answered.  “Of all the people on your planet, you alone were selected above everyone else to be the person to realize the primary singular goal of your entire civilization.  You were deemed worthy of having your name be remembered by your people for time, very impressive indeed,” he explained with a glance of clear admiration.

  “Then you have me at a disadvantage Jaren,” she admitted, “There was no such file made available to learn about you.  What do you do on your planet?  What position do you hold?  What’s your professional background?”

  Jaren smiled but didn’t look away from his work.  “Oh it’s no secret,” he clarified, “just remind me when we’re back on my ship.   I’d be happy to provide you with detailed personnel files for all of us, you’re certainly entitled to know who you’re working with.  Myself I was a research engineer until I got bored with the minutia of it.  I wanted work which had a broader scope, so I applied to the diplomatic corps and eventually worked my way into the highly coveted inter-planetary division.”

  He paused his work for a moment to speak to her.  “You might be surprised to know how much all of this means to us as well Commander.   The day we made contact with Roma… it was the happiest day my people had known in a very long time.  Family is very important to us, and we consider you other colonists lost relatives, family we were eager to reconnect with.  When the day came I fought hard for this job, and I was similarly lucky and privileged to be selected for it.”

  Kathryn was pleased with his reassurance that it meant a lot to his people to reconnect with them beyond just the access to their data.  It made their unwillingness to take it by force or surreptitiously easier to believe.

  “Well, the fusion core appears to be fully intact…” he finally surmised.  Do you know if it was powered down before the last people left?   Or did it just stop working at some point and force you to abandon the ship?  Did they ever have any problems with it?” he asked.

  “From what I understand it ran continuously and operated flawlessly for over two hundred years,” she answered.  “I believe it was deliberately powered down at the end when we put the ship to rest up here and finally abandoned it for good.”  She felt a hint of sadness at the idea of putting the New Horizon to rest, even now after having returned to it.

  “Excellent…” Jaren said.  “Then in theory we should just need to get it started again.  The anti-matter batteries should have no trouble doing that.”

  “What’s the difference?” Kathryn asked, “I mean between the two technologies?”

  “Well… if you don’t have any understanding of nuclear physics, it would be hard to explain in any detail,” he offered, trying not to sound condescending.  “You know about the different elements, right?   Oxygen, carbon, gold…”

  “Yes, we know that much,” she said, trying not to sound insulted.

  “Well simply put a fusion reactor like this takes isotopes of the smallest element hydrogen and fuses them together into slightly larger elements like helium and lithium.  It takes a lot of energy to get them to do that, but when it does you get more energy out than you put in and the excess energy can be used to power a city, or… well a starship,” he said, briefly waving his hand about to indicate he meant the starship around them as his example.

  “The strength of fusion power,” he continued, “is its ability to generally operate continuously forever like this one did; it provides solid reliable power output over long periods of time.  It’s the same process which lights the stars, and they keep burning for millions of years.   It’s weakness as a power source though, is its inability to punch a ton of power through all at once.  For that you need to pair it with a system of capacitors.  It can be done but it’s not natural to the technology and you need to build up the charge over time before you can discharge it all at once.”

  “And anti-matter?”

  “Is… almost impossible to explain if you don’t know anything about quantum physics but Xion explained it pretty well on the way up.  Basically, you just need to accept that there is normal matter that makes up things like you and me, this ship the planet below… but there is another kind which is its inverse.  When the two meet they mutually annihilate and release tremendous amounts of energy in the process.”

  “Guess I’ll just have to take your word for it,” Kathryn lamented.  She didn’t like being told she couldn’t understand something, even less when it seemed to be true.

  “Anyways that’s why we call them batteries and not reactors, because they are more a store of energy than an energy generation system.  We use fusion power plants to create anti matter as a kind of battery.  It can be dangerous, there are sometimes catastrophic accidents resulting from failed containment of the material, but it has an incredible energy density that generally makes it worth the risk.  The batteries we brought with us?  One of them could power this whole ship at full power for a few hours and if need be, we brought enough of them to get us down to the Escher rift.  Or, we can hopefully use this one for a faster discharge and used it to juice this reactor up into a self-sustaining reaction.”

  Kathryn just nodded her head.  She felt she at least knew enough to believe that he knew what he was doing and that he had good intentions.

  “Speaking of which, hey Xion?” he asked of the ceiling.  “How are things coming on the bridge?”  He behaved as though he were hearing a response, but she couldn’t hear it.   “Oh, yes, of course.”  He tapped a few times at a control panel.  “Coming through now?” he asked.

  Kathryn heard Keri’s voice.  “Commander Barnes?” her voice asked.

  “Yes Keri, good to hear you.  How are things going up there?” she asked as she made her way over to the panel which was emitting her voice.

  “Very well actually, we have one of their batteries hooked up into the grid and we seem to have gotten primary systems up.”  Kathryn watched as Jaren pulled himself over to the wall his smaller power device was attached to and disconnected it.  He seemed to look around waiting for something that never happened as the room remained powered up without it and he smiled.

  Still looking at him she reported: “Jaren says the core is in good shape, and he’s ready to attempt a start up.”

  Jaren looked up at the ceiling again.  “Irvina?   Nadelle?  Can you patch into the open channel in the ship’s comm system?”

  “Sir?”

  “Sir?”

  “Excellent.   What’s the status of the fuel system Irvina?”

  “Bone dry, I’m afraid.  Xenon was down to point zero three percent, hydrogen not much better.”

  “Really?   Well I suppose that was to be expected,” he observed as he turned to Kathryn with a quizzical look on his face.   “You were to be left with a significant reserve from what I read.”

  “Yeah well, we… had some trouble along the way.”

  “I see,” Jaren said with a shrug.  “I look forward to hearing all about that at a more appropriate time.  I’m glad we opted to bring as much as we did then.   Have you transferred over all of the hydrogen and xenon we brought then?”

  “Transfer is nearly complete,” Felix answered over the comm line.

  “How’s environmental coming along Elim?” Kathryn asked the panel.

  “We’re almost finished installing the cycler they brought.  I don’t know how, but they claim that this thing can do the job of the entire arboretum.  Well, the air part anyways.  I’m pretty sure it doesn’t grow any food.”  She could hear the smirk in his voice.

  Jaren was likewise amused and smiled as he shook his head.  “Apparently not,” Kathryn smiled.

  “Alright we’re going to attempt a core start up.  Irvina and Felix, if you’re done there why don’t you head up to the bridge and help Xion and Deirdre get the rest of the main systems online.  Nadelle and Elim you can do the same when you’re finished up there.  If we’re successful here, then we’ll meet you all up there once I’ve run diagnostics.”   He was met with a chorus of understoods and yessirs, before closing the channel.

  “Alright.   Firing up the magnetic accelerators.   Now we just have to wait a few minutes while everything gets up to speed.”

  Kathryn nodded, then after a few moments she spoke up again.  “Jaren, I need to ask you about something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “My people and I, we… didn’t know what to make of your… lack of curiosity about what happened to Earth.  For us, what happened to Earth, why they stopped transmitting, it’s… the ultimate mystery, for us right up there with… how the universe got started, whether or not any other colonies survived, or… what’s in the centre of a black hole.”

  “Well that last one we actually solved,” he said with a chuckle.  “But another time I suppose.” 

  “How can you be so obsessed, go to all this trouble to get your hands on the archive, and yet have seemingly zero curiosity about how Earth fell?”

  Jaren seemed contemplative if not concerned.  “I would think that the distinction between the two would be apparent.   When my people left Earth, we left everything behind, far too much in hindsight.  History, science, art, philosophy… everything which contradicted or otherwise conflicted with our religious teachings was deliberately left behind.  In the intervening centuries we’ve changed a lot, and we’ve come to discover what a mistake that was, what a tragic loss it was for us.  What we left behind, though we weren’t wise enough to see it at the time, was a part of ourselves, our own history, all of the antecedence of what we had and would become.  The archives are our history too, our own past and origins, it’s everything we so deliberately left behind with such callousness.”

  He paused to let out a heavy sigh.  “It took centuries Kathryn, but eventually we did realize what we had done to ourselves, and we mourned it.  We mourned that we had to start from scratch, but we also took on the challenge of recapturing it with the spirit of our pioneer ancestors.  We reinterpreted our commandment to be ever more like God, as a commandment to develop ever more God-like powers through technology.  As impoverished as we discovered ourselves to be culturally, we also had a growing sense of loneliness in our isolation.  We lamented shutting ourselves off from Earth and the other colony planets.

  “Another thing Kathryn, a foundational dimension of our faith was the commandment to spread it, to bring the light to others to bask in.  But preaching to the choir takes on a whole new meaning on a planet of people who already believe.  So between our wish to find others to bring the gospel to and the fundamental loneliness of our isolation, which I know your people have suffered as well, we focused our technological development on faster than light, on figuring out how to reach out to the other colonies and whoever else might be out there.  That’s how we came up with the Escher system.”

  “So… you’re here to convert us all?” she tried to make light of what could suddenly become a very real problem.

  Jaren laughed aloud at the idea though.  “No, no… no of course not.  Well,” he reconsidered, “some of us will of course try, but certainly not me and that’s certainly not why we’re here today.”

  “It’s not a coincidence that you showed up on the same day that I boarded the New Horizon is it?” Kathryn asked.

  “Well… no.” Jaren answered with uncharacteristic sheepishness.  “We sent a covert scouting mission first to determine how amenable you would be to us showing up, and to learn about you before introducing ourselves.

  “And what?   You were afraid of us?  Of how we’d react to you?” Kathryn asked, inadvertently coming off as more defensive than she’d intended to.

  “Oh no, quite the contrary actually.  We found you to be a most open and friendly people.  We knew you would be as excited to meet us as we would to be met by you.   We could tell how alone you felt, and how much it cut you to not know if any of the other colony missions had made it.   What a weight that must have been…”   He seemed to reflect on it for a moment.

  “No, the reason we resisted formal contact, was that we discovered how much the New Horizon meant to you, how singularly your people had focused on reaching it, and how close you already were.  It just felt wrong to swoop in at the last moment and steal that glory from you.  After some heated deliberation and soul searching, the decision was made to wait until you had reached the ship for yourselves and only then show up to introduce ourselves.”

  “Part of me wishes you hadn’t waited…” she said, but then conceded: “but another part is glad you did.”

  “We were very divided on it ourselves,” Jaren said.

  “You still haven’t answered my original question though, why the complete lack of interest in the Earth of today.”

  “Well… it’s not for any overriding reason.  We have launched some basic reconnaissance missions.  A few even went down to the surface to meet the locals, but they were… well, primitive.  I don’t mean that to sound as condescending as it does, but they didn’t seem any more interested in getting to know us as we did them.  All scientific study of Earth and the rest of the solar system is more easily gathered from this ship’s archive.  We’re just far more interested in what it was like before we left than learning about the wasteland it has become, so missions like this came to take much higher priority over time.

  She was beginning to understand.  Remembering their conversation, she newly came to suspect that they were simply technological chauvinists.  There was no technology or data on Earth they could use, so they had no interest in the place.  Haven’s level of technological development was far inferior to that of Kobol, but they respected how hard Haven had been working at it, how strong of a technological upswing they were on, and that the ship which had brought them here was so technologically advanced for its time.

  “If you and yours are more interested in Earth than my people are, you’ll find much common interest in that regard with the Romans.  They have the interest in Earth, but not the technology to explore it.  They have a permanent embassy on Kolob, I’d be happy to introduce you to them when we arrive.  I’m sure you’ll get the full diplomatic honours there like we did here.”

  “What are they like?” she asked.  “The Romans?”

  “Oh, they’re good people just… well, very let’s say contemplative compared to us.  They value harmony and wisdom over what we would consider advancement.  They brought a lot more technological know-how with them, so they didn’t have to start as far back as Haven or Kolob, but their progress is slow.  You could say that they prefer to study while we prefer to build, though I doubt they’d frame it that way themselves.”

  “I just realized that I’m actually going to get to see your planet,” Kathryn boggled.   It hadn’t fully hit her yet that this really was in the cards for her.   “To meet them, to see everything else… it’s hard to imagine.”  She’d understood that this was the mission, but she’d been so focused on meeting the coming challenges that she hadn’t thought enough about what it would mean for her personally. 

  “Hold that thought Kathryn, everything’s cycled up and we’re ready for the final phase.”   He tapped the comm panel.  “Bridge how are we looking?”

  “Everything is nominal Jaren, and we’re reading plenty of juice for you to punch through.”

  “Excellent.”   He said with satisfaction.  “Stand by.”  Monitoring the display panels over his head and periodically tapping at them, Jaren started counting down.  “Three, two, one…  Firing up secondary accelerators.”  He pointed her attention towards a particular screen.  “We need a hundred percent on this monitor to initiate self-sustaining fusion,” he explained.

  Together they watched and listened as Xion counted up the numbers.  “Ninety-six, ninety-seven, ninety-eight… ninety-nine…”

  They both held their breath.

  “One hundred percent.  The reaction appears stable.  Congratulations Jaren.”

  Jaren pulled Kathryn towards him and hugged her tightly.  Her startle at the unexpected gesture gave way to her enjoyment of it and she hugged him back in celebration.