Reunion: Chapter 10

  “Alright everyone, I can’t wait anymore.  Let’s go over what everyone’s been up to and finalize our landing plans tomorrow.”

  Kathryn was addressing the other eleven crew members in the conference room off of the bridge, the room where they’d spent so many hours staring at the wall sized screen on the way to Earth.  It was hard getting their attention; they were all in breakout conversations with each other pouring over the data they’d been gathering.  Loose strands from her once tight bun or red hair framed her face as she enjoyed watching them for a few moments before clapping to insist on their attention.

  “There are just so many questions Captain,” Keri exclaimed.  “Before we got here of course the only thing on our minds was figuring out why Earth stopped transmitting, but now that we’re here there’s just so much more to know.  There are all these space stations and outposts across the system, each could provide clues and need to be studied themselves to figure out what happened to them as well.”

  “Well answering our primary questions should help answer all of those ancillary ones, right?   What can you say so far on that?”

  “We’ve been running continual scans of the surface since we arrived two weeks ago and while there are a few things we can say,” Felix offered, “we don’t have any real answers yet.  There are no EM transmissions to or from the surface, and we can’t detect any large-scale surface to surface signaling going on.  As you recall we had to boost to a higher orbit soon after our arrival to avoid all of the orbital debris in low orbit.  We also haven’t detected any activity from any of the other intact spacecraft we’ve detected in orbit.”

  “Anything at all left in orbit of interest to us?” Kathryn asked.

  “Oh yes,” Keri answered, “Well I mean, to me there is,” she momentarily laughed her abrasive cackle as she leaned forward to rest her forearms on the table.   “Everything down there’s of interest from my perspective, but I think you’d be most interested in the massive space station in orbit with us.  If I’ve interpreted the limited archives we’ve processed correctly, it’s called Orbital One and is actually the station the New Horizon originally launched from.  It was apparently once part of a triad of orbital platforms which facilitated numerous planetary systems, but only the large primary one is left.  The others must have either de-orbited or are part of that debris field down there.  Orbital One must have had enough fuel onboard for its automated systems to keep it in orbit.   It’s deserted of course, we can’t detect any life onboard.”

  “Is it stable?” Kathryn asked.  Her arms were folded until she extracted an arm to ask “Salvageable?”

  “Probably yes, eventually.  It’s dangerously close to re-entry in a cosmic sense, but it will probably last in its current state another hundred years or so.  We’ll want to board it and resupply its fuel to prevent that from happening, but we should have a long time to get around to it.”

  “Excellent.”   Kathryn turned to Irvina.  “Wouldn’t that station have the archive data you’d want?” Kathryn asked.

  “Negative,” Irvina answered, shaking her head which allowed her short sandy blond hair to shudder slightly.  “No, there doesn’t appear to be any persistent memory storage there.   Generally speaking, there would be no need for such a thing, backing up in that way is too time and energy intensive.   They would have only had traditional electronic data storage, which would have degraded beyond recovery long ago.   The same can be said for most if not all data storage devices we might find on the surface.  The New Horizon archives are so valuable to everyone because the way they are physically backed up can survive for millions of years.  We have no record or evidence of anyone else even thinking to do such a thing.”

  “But there’s got be physical evidence down on the surface,” Keri pressed, “things that could help you piece together the history of Earth before or after your departure.”  Kathryn noticed for the first time that she was wearing pink lipstick and wondered who it was for if not just a whim that morning.  It wasn’t usual for her.  “Even if it’s not a formal archive like ours, there must be a lot of information down there.”

  “Yes,” Irvina acknowledged, “that was our back up plan.  We’d been bandying about a mission to explore the ruins seeking information that way, but we could never get political buy in.  Once we learned of the New Horizon archive and had a way to access it, that became our primary focus.” 

  “I see,” Kathryn touched a hand to her mouth in thought.  “So what about the other two stations?  Do we know what exactly happened to them?” Kathryn asked.

  “They went down…” Irvina explained with noticeable lament.  “You can see here,” she brought up an image up on the wall screen, “mid latitude on the African continent there’s a series of small craters consistent with a large space station breaking up while de-orbiting and striking the ground in a linear series of impacts.  We could only find the one pattern on the planet though, the other must have come down in an ocean somewhere.”

  “Understood,” Kathryn said, bobbing her head in thoughtful acknowledgement.  “What about all of the other settlements?   Weren’t they spread out all over the system?”

  “Kind of,” Felix explained.  “Part of the reason for our interstellar missions was that there was nowhere in the system that anyone could be fully self-sufficient.  Wherever they spread out one way or another they were still reliant on Earth for their survival.  When it fell, the entire system must have collapsed.  There’s no EM traffic of any kind here other than our own.   No signs of any activity on any known outposts through the ship’s telescopes from here.  We only took pretty quick looks of course, but we didn’t see anything.”

  “Obviously, we are, well I am anyways,” Keri corrected herself with a slight giggle, “as anxious to investigate those outposts as much as Earth.”

  “Understood Keri,” Kathryn acknowledged with a smile as she put her hand on the woman’s shoulder.  “But on to the main event as they say.  What have we learned about Earth so far?”

  “So much,” Elim said with an excited little laugh.  “The onboard telescope network has really been an unexpectedly invaluable asset.   It’s equipped with infra-red scanners which allow us to detect any living organism bigger than a human child.   The big news of course is that there are indeed humans down there, or at least whatever has become of humans on Earth.   We’ve been able to estimate that there’s approximately half a million people spread out across the planet.  We’ve detected groupings of a few hundred scattered across the surface in all of the habitable environments.  Perhaps more interesting though is that we’ve detected a small number of larger groupings which appear to be based around the few remaining intact water dams.”

  “There are dams that have lasted this long?” Kathryn asked, she knew they had to be built robustly, but had no idea they could last half a millennium.

  “Apparently yes,” Elim answered.  “They didn’t build any more after fusion power was developed, but there were still hundreds of them already built when Earth went dark and there was no point in decommissioning ones that had already been built.  Building them can result in a lot of environmental damage but once the damage was done, they were then essentially a free energy source.  The extreme structural demands on them and the catastrophic consequences of them ever failing means that they tended to be over engineered.  That’s why some have survived even this long.”

  “Interesting,” Kathryn considered.  “Okay, but why are they clustered around hydroelectric dams?” she asked.  “For power?  You said you didn’t detect any EM activity.”

  “I said nothing large scale,” Felix corrected her.  “Powering small devices or machines left over from before, simple lighting… that sort of thing, all of that could be powered by the energy provided by the dams but wouldn’t show up on our scans.”

  “Has anyone found any indications so far as to what caused Earth civilization to collapse in the first place?” Kathryn asked the group.

  “No,” Francis admitted with some frustration, his frown deepening the lines in his aging, weather worn face.  “There is no indication of mass destruction consistent with a nuclear war or global natural disaster.  There are no indications that this system had a close encounter with another rogue stellar body or alien intervention… nothing.”

  “Are there any potential causes we wouldn’t have been able to detect from orbit?” Kathryn asked.

  “Biological,” Francis stated flatly.  “Some sort of disease.”

  “I see,” Kathryn put her hand to her mouth again in thought.  “Threat to us if we land?”

  “Always,” he answered.  “But it’s hard to imagine that a lethal pathogen could persist this long.  Either it’s died out since, or it’s mutated into a less lethal endemic form.”

  “Bet your life on that?” Kathryn pressed.

  Francis shrugged non-committally, and Kathryn nodded her understanding.  “Well, it looks like we’ve done everything we can from orbit,” she offered.  “Unless there are any other suggestions, we need to plan the next phase; we’re going down.”

  The room filled mostly with exchanged looks of excitement and satisfaction, but Kathryn noticed Teresa say somewhat distantly: “The station.”

  “What about it?” she asked.

  “If we want an explanation for what happened to Earth,” she leaned over the table towards Kathryn, “it might be a better place to look than the planet itself.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Well it’s been six hundred years, whatever indications or evidence there may be down there as to what happened, it’ll be badly degraded and tilled over by now.   Nature reclaims abandoned settled areas alarmingly quickly.  While there is certainly likely to be evidence of some kind on the surface, if there is any information to be found on that station it would be easier to find and better preserved.  It might be a more practical first step.”

  “We didn’t think to bring any additional atmospheric cyclers with us,” Jaren reminded them, “just what we equipped the New Horizon with.  You’d have to stay in environmental suits if you wanted to explore the station.”

  “Yes… but it’s a good idea,” Kathryn considered out loud.  “It already made sense to split into teams.  We’ll send one to the station, one to the planet, and leave a team here on the ship to coordinate and backstop.  We’ll take one of the two shuttles and drop off the station team before heading down to the surface.  If the station team runs into trouble, they can be assisted from the ship with the second shuttle.  Teresa, I’d like you to lead the station team, along with Francis, Nadelle, and Elim.   Jaren you can stay on the ship and coordinate the mission with Xion, Felix, and Ana.”  Felix slumped and appeared severely disappointed.  Kathryn put her hand on his shoulder.  “Sorry Felix, you’ll get your chance.  The first sortie won’t be the last.  Irvina, I’ll need you with me to pilot the ship, along with Keri and Deirdre.  Everyone understand?”

  “Yes Captain,” Jaren answered.  “Now we just need to figure out where on the planet you want to land.”

  “Right,” she realized and turned around to the wall screen.  “Where is the largest human settlement?” she asked, turning to the screen.

  Felix looked it up on his large scroll and when found, threw it up on the wall.   “Looks like there are about a dozen of comparable size across the world, but the largest population appears to be centred on a dam in the north-west of the North American continent where a large mountain range gives way to prairie land.  Coordinates fifty-six north one minute, one-twenty-two west twelve minutes.   Records suggest that that continent was primarily English speaking as well and that adds to its being a good place to start.”

  “We have no idea how they’ll respond to us if we just drop in on them out of the blue…” Kathryn considered.  “We have no idea of their own self-conception.  Do they have a sense of what happened?  Has enough time passed that they have their own new cultural creation myths?  We have to be careful about revealing ourselves until we know more about them.”   She put a hand on her friend’s shoulder.   “Bring up an image of the area for me Felix.”  He acquiesced and the wall image shifted.  “Is this real time?” she asked.

  “No.  We’re on the other side of the planet at the moment and we’ve been continually changing our orbit to cover the whole planet every week or so.  This image is as of five days ago.”

  “Jaren you’ll want to drop us near the station but once you do, take up a geostationary position over that settlement so that we can stay in contact.  It looks like the station will pass underneath you every hour and a half and should only be out of communications for an hour at a time.”

  “If I may make a suggestion Captain,” Jaren not too sweetly offered.

  “Of course,” she answered with a subdued but knowing smile.

  “It appears that the original three stations were designed to fly in formation to be in line of sight communications with every point on the planet outside the polar regions.  If the New Horizons and our second shuttle take up appropriate high orbit positions relative to the station, we can all stay in constant contact with each other.”

  Kathryn considered the suggestion for a moment.  “I don’t like the feel of being so spread out.  I don’t want to take any undue chances at this point.  Do you see any way that this would put the second shuttle at additional risk?”

  “No more risk than it is already in being in orbit and docked with the New Horizon.   It must be weighed against the risk of not being able to communicate with each other if something goes wrong,” he added.

  “It’s a good suggestion,” she concluded without giving final approval.

  “The shuttle could be operated remotely but I could send Xion out with it if that would make you more comfortable with the idea.”

  “It does actually.  Sorry I’m not as trusting as automated systems as you are yet, it’s still all pretty new to us.  You’re comfortable being left with only three people on the ship?”

  “Absolutely,” he answered without hesitation.  “It’s very automated and all things considered it’s a far safer place to be than anywhere anyone else is going.”

  “Right.”   Kathryn walked over to the wall screen for a closer look and was impressed anew with the impeccable resolution which failed to betray it was anything less than a window.  “It looks like the main settlement is several kilometers east of the dam itself.  If we approach from the west and land a few kilometers away to north of the dam and west of the settlement, we should be able to do so without notice.

  “How do you plan to make contact?” Keri asked.

  “Very carefully,” Kathryn said with a quirky look on her face.  “Look, we are going to have to make contact at some point.  Those people are themselves the best resource we have for finding out what happened here.  They’ll probably be in possession of some artifacts or keep some oral tradition of storytelling about what happened.  Make no mistake we are going down there to make contact with them, we just have to be careful.  I don’t want to startle them with a flashy entrance; I can’t see us just landing our alien spaceship in the middle of their town going over well however welcoming they may be.  I intend to get an individual or small group of them alone on the outskirts of their settlement and try to explain to them one on one who we are.  Hopefully things will go well, and they’ll be happy to introduce us peacefully to the others.  If not, we can bug out and reconsider our options.”

  “You’re making a lot of assumptions,” Jaren warned her, with an unsubtle note of concern for her safety in his voice.

  “I know Jaren, but we’re in the taking risks business here.  It’s the safest way to try unless you have a better suggestion.”

  Jaren took a deep breath and nodded his acknowledgement, not so much that he agreed with her as much as conceding that it was her choice to make.

  “Alright you all have your instructions.  Let’s get prepping for our respective missions then.”

   

  “There are other… let’s say unsavoury options which I didn’t want to suggest in front of the others,” Jaren told Kathryn as they climbed their way through the long engineering corridor where the portals to the shuttles were among all of the engineering access point to the fuel pods.  It was their staging area while making final preparations for their descent.   “We could just capture one or a few of the people down there and interrogate them here on the ship, or even just on the shuttle.  It would allow us to use their clothes to blend in and do some poking around before exposing ourselves.”

  She pulled him aside from the others out of sight.  “I considered that,” she offered with some severity.  “But that carries risks of its own.  I don’t want our first interaction to be an assault and abduction, even if it’s safest for us.”

  “I agree,” Jaren said, “but I felt obligated to point out the option regardless.  Plus… I worry about you,” he said as he gingerly drew the tip of his index finger down her arm from her shoulder.  She found it so comfortingly intimate without being sexual or possessive.  He seemed to just crave even so simple a physical contact with her, and she reciprocated by taking his hand into both of hers and holding it to her face momentarily.   “I’m worries about the rest of your team as well of course, especially Irvina of course, you know we’re close.  It’s dangerous out there.  I wish I were coming along.”

  “I know,” she said as she released his hand.  “Don’t worry.  We’ll be careful, all of us.  While I have you here though, there is something I was wondering about.  We won’t be able to get the Orbital One systems back online because all of the operating system data will have been corrupted beyond salvage over the centuries.  The systems themselves should still be pretty much intact though right?   Could you or your people maybe write a basic program which could allow us to start it up again?”

  Jaren chuckled, and then took on an apologetic look when he saw that she didn’t take his reaction well.  “I’m sorry I didn’t mean to laugh at you.  It’s just that an operations system for a station of that size and complexity, even a rudimentary one, would take a whole team working for months to reverse engineer and re-code.”  Her question seemed to give him an idea though.  “But since you ask…” 

  He led her back to the others.  “Teresa, Felix, an idea of Ka- the Captain gave me one of my own.  I would bet that for something like Orbital One station… well see, there’s no reason to think that the New Horizon’s physical archive was a new technology developed solely for that mission’s one massive archive.   It would make more sense that it was an existing technology developed for any number of other applications.  In an entirely digital world, computer systems do inevitably fail, and some sort of manual full rebuilding of systems and databases would be a useful technology.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Felix asked.

  “I think there might be some chance that on a facility like Orbital One they would have stored somewhere a similar physical archive of at least the basic operating system.   Any number of things could go wrong and require them to reboot their systems entirely from scratch, and that’s exactly what they’d need to do it.  It wouldn’t require anywhere near the amount of data sheets as the New Horizon’s archives, it’s just an operating system as opposed to the total sum knowledge of a species.  It won’t be easy to find them, especially not knowing for sure if they exist or not.   There won’t be any kind of functioning map or directly to look them up in plus you’ll have limited time, but if you could find such a backup, we could re-load the operating system and start turning its systems back on again.”

  “I have an idea…” Felix said as he pulled a medium scroll out of a long skinny pocket on the leg of his flight suit and unfurled it.  “I asked your people to send us regular updates of information we may find relevant as they unpack the archives back at Kobol.  They may have gotten around to the specs of the station.”   He poked around on it for several seconds and then his face brightened with a broad smile.  “Here,” he said as he turned to be beside Jaren so he could see the screen as well.   “Here it is, we’ve got it.”

  “Excellent!” Jaren exclaimed.  “Good thinking asking for those updates Felix.”

  “I have my moments,” he answered with a self-satisfied smile.

  “So where does it say the backups are located?”

  “Conveniently just beside the computer core along with all of the required reading and transfer equipment.”

  “Well, that’ll will sure make things easier,” Kathryn remarked.  “Great work, people.”

  “Presumably we can get the computer systems online using power supplied by one of those anti-matter power sources you brought with us,” Felix suggested, “but that’ll only do so much for so long.  To really get the station going again we’ll have to restart the onboard fusion reactors which shouldn’t be any trouble for a man of your talents, and if we can do that, we might be able to fire up the ion engines to stabilize its orbit.   Unfortunately, there’s a good chance the deuterium and xenon stores are depleted, and we don’t have enough with us for anything like that, even if everything still works.”

  “One thing at a time Parker,” Jaren offered.  “You said we had a hundred years before we had to worry about that.  Our primary objective at present is just to figure out what caused Earth’s collapse.  There’ll be plenty of opportunity to come back and do things like salvage Orbital One and explore the other outposts across the system.  Once there’s a clear path forward for that sort of thing, I believe the Koboli government will be more interested.  There could very well be novel technologies worth investigating on the outposts elsewhere in the system.”

  “Well, it’s good to hear your people would be interested in something out here,” Kathryn teased with a tone bordering too closely with sarcasm.

  Jaren gave an acknowledging nod with a raised eyebrow which suggested that he agreed with her frustration to some degree over his people’s somewhat dysfunctional views and priorities.

  “That being said,” Kathryn concluded, “it’s worth knowing if Orbital One’s operating system can be restored even if we can’t keep it running indefinitely.  If you can boot it up, poke around and see what you can learn, but at this point it’s only a means to accomplishing our primary objective, which is…” she pointed at Felix.

  “Figuring out what happened,” he answered with heavy concession.  Kathryn snapped her fingers and pointed at him that he was correct with a sarcastic smile.

  She turned around and faced the rest of the crew.  “Everyone ready?” she asked.  She surveyed them as they all in their various ways affirmed that they were.  It was gratifying to see her excitement mirrored in every one of their faces.  “This has been a long time coming,” she said.  “Let’s get to work.  Be safe, get it done.”