Reunion: Chapter 6

  “Five hundred years…” Felix muttered to himself as he poked his head around from inside the kitchen into the adjacent main communal dining hall on the ship.  

  It was eerie to be here.  He’d dreamed about being on the New Horizon his whole life; imagined how exciting it would be.  Being here now he was left with some disorientation disorientating being confronted simultaneously with such mundanity and eeriness.  He certainly didn’t believe in ghosts or anything, but it was still difficult not to fee the weight of a certain presence here.  Hundreds of people had come and gone from this place for hundreds of years.  It wasn’t just these rooms either, in every place on this ship he could feel the weight of its history.  Granted it had been almost five centuries since anyone had been on the ship, but for the two centuries before that it had been the entire world for so many people.

  “Felix?”   

  He nearly jumped out of his skin when Kathryn said his name from behind him.  She couldn’t help herself when she saw his reaction, she laughed out loud before settling down and becoming much more sympathetic and apologizing for having startled him.  “Sorry about that.  It’s creepy in here, isn’t it?”

  “Can be,” he answered coolly, trying to regain some dignity.

  “What are you doing in here?” she asked.

  “Just poking around, really.  As curious as I am just to see all the different parts of the ship, I’m just as curious to see what half a millennium does to a place.  It’s oddly well preserved.  I suppose I should have expected as much though with the vacuum.   It’s preserved everything pretty well.”

  “Any food?”

  Felix laughed.   “No, no of course not.  Anything usable was brought to the surface when the ship was abandoned, and anything left behind wouldn’t be much use now even with the vacuum.”  He continued pawing at the random containers and equipment left behind for one reason or another.

  They were on their way now.  Having successfully powered up the ship and getting all of the required systems operating, President Sato had authorized their mission to Kobol.  They’d made one more trip down to the surface to bring up all of the supplies they would need for the multi-week trip.  They’d been given their final orders and instructions and were wished well on their trip by their people.  The president had impressed on all of them that although none were formally trained as diplomats, diplomacy was a fundamentally primary element of this mission.  

  Although they were trained engineers and scientists, required for a mission like this, in the end they were first and foremost their first emissaries from Haven to another world.  They’d each had several meetings and training sessions with chief diplomats in the president’s inner circle.  Each seemed envious of the opportunity Kathryn’s team had been given, yet at the same time quite content to be avoiding the danger and uncertainty of the mission.  The diplomats weren’t inherently explorers, so it fell on the explorers to be the diplomats.

  It took the better part of two weeks for the New Horizon to break away from its orbit around Haven and make its way inward towards the planet’s star where the Escher rift facility was located.  The first third of their trip was spent in a maximum acceleration phase towards the sun, but the rest of the trip was spent accelerating laterally to the star to put them into a stable orbit around the star.  As the ship fell closer and closer towards the sun, the increased lateral orbital speed slowed their actual descent towards the sun.  After the two-week trip they found themselves orbiting a few hundred kilometers out from the giant artificial crystal which spawned the actual Escher rift.

  Jaren had explained along the way, as well as he could to them with their limited understanding, that thousands of solar energy collecting units were swarming all about the sun.  When activated, they each unit unfurled into a much larger apparatus, and then all streamed their individually collected energy into higher compiling satellites, which in turn fed the energy further up into four massive compilers which always orbited in a line-of-sight formation with the massive kilometer wide Escher crystal sphere.  When that massive amount of solar energy poured into the crystal all at once, its molecular structure temporarily exploded into an energy rift which created a tunneling wormhole to any other star with a similar infrastructure established around it, where a similar complimentary process occurred.   Kathryn’s people didn’t understand the physics at all, but they came to understand the process and effect well enough. 

  Along the way, both crews had a wonderful time exploring the ancient ship and learning its secrets.  The Haven crew roamed the ship with a deep reverence.  For them it was Olympus abandoned, the mountaintop home of the gods deserted centuries ago.  Beyond their reverence for the history and significance to their culture, they also marveled at the technology on the ship.  Though still significantly advance by comparison, it was much closer to their own level of technology than Jaren’s ship had been.  Where the Kobol practically seemed to operate by magic to them, the New Horizon’s technology was more relatable, the operating principles behind it more within their understanding.  They found much of it to be fully developed iterations of things which were either quite basic, experimental, or at least theoretically understood back home.  The things which were flatly beyond them, they found the Koboli crew quite happy to explain to them as best as they could.  Felix, Elim, and Kerry sometimes felt like they were learning more from the ship and the Koboli in these two short weeks than they had in all the time they’d spent in university on Haven. 

  The two crews had largely paired off according to their mutual interests and professional specialties and had become friends over the two weeks of travel.  As much as the Haven crew were fascinated with how advanced the ship was, the Koboli crew were more interested in it as an historical artifact.  They explained that their own much cruder starship which had brought them to Kobol was carved out of the interior of an asteroid, had been directed into the sun soon after their arrival.  They took on the same note of sadness when relaying the story as they always did when they recounted the tragic short-sightedness of the founders of their colony.  It was much the same as when the Haven crew recounted what had been reconstructed of the conflict which broke out between factions of the crew as soon as they arrived in orbit, and the social conflicts which brought it about, rooted much further back in their long journey.  It always made them sad to think of how far they were knocked back because of it.

  Kathryn and Jaren spent most of their waking hours together.  They spent long hours touring the ship together and sharing information about each other’s cultures.  Kathryn had never had much interest in her career taking a diplomatic turn, but it was on the shortlist of things which she thought she might be able to turn to some day when she couldn’t do the kind of work she really wanted to do anymore, the same list politics was on.  For better or worse, diplomacy was a primary element of this mission, she was effectively the lead ambassador of Haven to Kobol.  Keeping this in mind forced her to keep an appropriate professional distance from Jaren despite them working so closely together.  

  While she recognized that it could easily just be her imagination, she sensed the same from Jaren, that he was feeling the need to keep things more professional with her than he’d like to under other circumstances.  They’d shared a moment that first night in the shuttle, and though there was always the cover of a professional justification, they were certainly spending more time together than their professional duties required.   They had become quite close, even had some remarkably personal late-night conversations about what had happened between her and Tobyn, how he had in a past life been married to his ship mate Irvina but were now merely close friends.  

  She appreciated and respected his willingness to be good friends with a woman, even if it was only in the wake of a romantic entanglement.  She felt that the maturity required to foster that kind of relationship bode well for his overall emotional maturity.  She was also forced to admit that as things stood presently, she didn’t feel that she’d ever cared enough to foster the same kind of friendship with Tobyn.  The more she reflected on it with time and distance, and in conversation during those two weeks with Felix and Tobyn, the more she concluded that they’d been a poor match from the very beginning.  They’d just been too young, too naive, and too immature to realize it before the long inertia of their relationship took over and neither had the wherewithal to finally end it until it was long past the time to do so.  

  Realizing this left her with a bout of acute depression about the wasted time, but her old and new friends comforted her that no time was wasted as long as we learned from it and were able to face the future with clearer eyes.  In more existential bends in their late-night conversations, Jaren suggested to her that the experience for better or worse had contributed to making her the woman she was today.  He suggested that to will away such a substantial part of her past would be to will away the person it had made her in favour of some other version of herself that wasn’t her, that to regret such a significant part of oneself is to wish away one’s own existence in a sense.  

  There were a few moments when she realized that she’d never had moments of vulnerability and emotional intimacy like this with Tobyn and it simultaneously made her want to cry and kiss him, but she managed to resist both impulses.  Instead, she would warmly say good night and go to her quarters to lie awake staring at the ceiling and thinking about it all night.  

  It had been too long since she’d had this much time to stop and reflect on her life, or at least since she’d been forced to.  She wondered if she kept so busy and worked so hard in part to avoid having to face herself like this if she deliberately kept things loud and busy enough to never have to contemplate more deeply.  She felt like her spirit was getting a rest which she had denied it for too long for one reason or another.

  The night before they were to enter the rift, one of the long nights staring at the ceiling, she admitted to herself that she was falling in love with Jaren, then laughed at herself over the idea of admitting that she was falling when she’d already fell.  She didn’t know what that meant yet, but felt it was an important admission to make to herself, important to not deny or be afraid of it.  Whether she could allow anything to come of it, it was necessary to accept so she could compensate for it in her decision making and avoid impairing her otherwise good judgement.  

  She was a professional, and she’d worked hard her whole life to get to this place in her career.  It had been such an affirmation of the value of all her hard work to be the only person on all of Haven to be selected to be the first to return to the New Horizon.   She didn’t want to deny herself what she was feeling, but she also knew that she had to be careful about how she proceeded if at all.  It seemed obvious that while on the current mission it would be inappropriate to act on her feelings if they were indeed reciprocated.  She’d have to maintain a veneer or professionalism at least that long, and then see how things sat afterwards.  She was also mature enough to understand that although it didn’t feel that way, there was always a chance that what she was feeling was only a rebound effect from having so recently separated from someone she might have married.  She didn’t think so, but… well she wouldn’t either way, would she?

  In their conversations, Kathryn had learned that Jaren came from a family of some privilege.  His grandfather had been a member of their colony’s senate, and his own father had ascended all the way to the height of power and become President of their colony’s government.  Jaren explained though, that he himself had turned his back on all of that and had never wanted anything to do with politics.  He’d spent much of his youth exercising his privilege to discover himself and his world, backpacking around some of the less travelled places of Kobol and seeing the most important sights there were to see on it.  

  It was in this phase of his life that he discovered his passion for exploration and adventure, and when he felt the time was right to gain some more direction in his life, he’d joined the diplomatic corps of their space fleet, and soon after it was there that he met Irvina and they fell in love.  Like her he’d worked hard for many years to reach a position where he was a good pick to lead the New Horizon expeditionary team.  She easily sensed how important it seemed for him to emphasize how all through his career he resisted getting or taking any advantage or special treatment which might have been on offer through his family’s status.   He seemed unusually preoccupied with proving he was more than his family name.

  The other crew members had likewise teamed up according to their interests.  Felix had been spending a lot of time with Irvina Hansen, Jaren’s ex-wife and second in command.  She was also his lead engineer and seemed to quite enjoy Felix’s company and answering all of his questions.  They seemed to spend just as many late nights pouring over schematics and she and Jaren had spent pouring over each other’s emotional schematics.   Felix seemed to be getting a fairly good grasp of the New Horizon’s technology at least.  The Koboli technology was stilly mystifying, but his focus had been getting his head around their own ship first.  

  This was common in all of the pairings.  Each pair had a lot in common due to their respective roles, and Jaren’s people seemed to quite enjoy enlightening her own.  As Jaren’s medical officer, Nadelle Abalos likewise spent a lot of time with Elim in the medical bay examining the surgical pods and chatting about the medical advances the Koboli had been able to make.  Kathryn later learned from Felix that the two more than hit it off and had become intimate.  Knowing the kind of woman Elim was attracted to and how outgoing she was, Kathryn wasn’t surprised.  Kathryn had also noticed how strikingly attractive Nadelle was.  She was short but quite slim, had large hazel eyes and soft facial features, tawny-brown skin with a long jet-black ponytail down to the small of her back.

  Keri and Xion hardly ever left the archive room, to the point that they regularly had to be brought food or they’d forget to eat and be reminded that sleep was also occasionally necessary for human beings, so much so that Jaren and Kathryn at one point had to order them to get some sleep.  Kathryn and Jaren found themselves wondering if they too were getting a little more than professionally taken with each other, but respectfully declined to comment so long as there was no sense of it interfering with their duties.

  Like Keri, Xion Hildebrandt had a humanities background and seemed the only of the Koboli driven to find out what happened to Earth after the Mormon generational starship had left.  He had brown hair with a blend of Caucasian and East Asian features and was somewhat portly.  The man seemed friendly enough but kept to himself enough that he could be hard to read.   Xion poured over the archived records of Earth after their departure while sharing with Keri about the history and culture of Kobol.  For the people of Haven, what happened to Earth had been the only mystery greater than what became of the other colony ships which had launched before the New Horizon did.  

  Both were savouring the satisfaction of being able to fill in critical gaps in their understanding of the greater human narrative.  For those seeking understanding it was just one part of the greatest story ever told, the one starting with early cosmology, through star and galaxy formation, planet formation, the development of life and intelligence, and all leading to the extra solar colonization that gave rise to their respective civilizations.  Nothing could be more exciting for either of them than filling in these missing chapters of that great epic, and they were loathed to resign themselves to wasting time with sleep.

  As planned as they approached the star, became necessary for Jaren and Irvina to augment the New Horizon’s artificial magnetosphere with technology from their own ship.  New Horizon’s own field was only designed to adapt to the relatively low-level cosmic background radiation and solar radiation at the distance of Earth or Haven from their stars.  The Escher technology required getting much closer to the sun, as close as 5 million kilometers from the surface where the Escher crystal orbited, and required a far more powerful magnetic shield to deflect the intense radiation.

  The closer they got to the sun, the more time both crews spent time in the ship’s zero-gravity bubble marveling at the sight.  They had discovered the bubble of transparent material beyond the unexpected additional portal in the core room beyond which Jaren had originally detected hard vacuum.   It wasn’t in the original design of the ship; they discovered that the original crew had constructed it as a zero-gravity playroom and observatory along the way.  It was a sphere of synthetic material which the Koboli crew were easily able to repair and reinflate.

  Although it had never been intended to be used this way, the advanced adaptive shielding materials it had been constructed with to safeguard against transitory bursts of cosmic radiation, worked equally well at this distance from the sun as a continuous shield against the continuous strong solar radiation.  The bigger and brighter the star became in their field of view, the more the material of the bubble darkened, which not only prevented immediate and fatal burning of their skin, but it also allowed them to look directly at the star without damaging their eyes.  They found themselves hypnotized looking into it.   The closer they got, the more detail of its apparent surface they could make out, the roiling and bubbling surface of the massive continuous nuclear fireball raging before them. 

  The crystal only finally came into view the day they were to enter the rift, and although they knew it was a brilliant violet colour from the schematic pictures provided by the Koboli, the darkening of the bubble required at such an extreme proximity to the star left it merely looking black in contrast to the star when it finally came into view.

  As they looked around, they saw the star appear to noticeably darken as the unseen collectors unfurled and began absorbing the energy of the star’s light.   Streams of unfathomably brilliant light energy began crisscrossing over the surface of the sun until four frighteningly impossible massive pillars of light all converged on the crystal at once right before them.  The crystal exploded into a massive field of energy hundreds of kilometers wide, diffuse at the edges but an infinitely bright purple colour at its core as they sailed directly towards it.

  As they passed into the centre of the vortex, they felt a shudder and disorienting rush of colours around them.  The disorientation soon passed as the forward half of the bubble slowly began to lighten to reveal the blackness of space behind an alien field of stars which gradually came into view.  

  “Welcome to the Eta Cassiopeia system,” Jaren offered with pride.  As they cheered in celebration, Kathryn hugged Jaren with a lingering tightness which was a little indulgent, but not altogether inappropriate to the situation.  He hugged her back equally warmly, seeming to wait for her to pull away from the embrace, long enough for her to be certain that her feelings were reciprocated whether openly acknowledged or not.