While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 1
In the year 2854 of the old calendar…
Jaren burst through the door to Kathryn’s office. It was clear how excited he was by how frantically he’d entered the room, but now he just started slowly meandering across the room whistling to himself. She watched with the intended amusement as he nonchalantly wandered her office, inspecting her many awards and citations, picking up the model of the New Horizon she had on her desk, finally moving on to examining his fingernails.
“What?” Kathryn snapped with a smile, feigning irritation to play along.
“Oh no, no, no, no…” he paused, seeming pleased with himself. “Nothing really.”
Kathryn continued looking at him as her feigned irritation became less feigned. “I know you think you’re funny? But you’re not.”
He leaned against the wall and smiled his mischievously enigmatic smile at her which she’d found so intriguing all those years ago. It’s what had first caught her attention and kept her wanting to know more about him from the day he so unexpectedly arrived in her star system.
“No big deal really.” he answered, carrying on with his act. “I’m sure you have far more important things to deal with than, you know… contact from Epsilon.”
Kathryn’s mouth fell open for a moment before she scrambled up to her feet and ran out the door from behind her desk, pushing him out of the way as she rushed to the control room. Jaren smiled again to himself for a moment before pushing himself off of the wall and following her out.
When Kobol first developed the Escher Rift system which allowed them to harvest the power of a start to open portals between star systems, the first thing they did was send automated probes at sub light speed to the star systems around which the other Terran colony ships had lumbered their way to at only a little better than a tenth of the speed of light. These probe ships contained within themselves everything required to autonomously establish a rift system from scratch around another star. Accelerated to a quarter of the speed of light by planetary and orbital lasers against their light sails on their way out of the system, the were also provisioned with enough anti-matter fuel to slow them from such a ludicrous speed.
After sending these rift ships to Roma, Haven, and the Earth itself, they kept building them. Before long they’d sent similar craft to dozens of other systems which no humans had ever visited. The probe and resulting rift node sent to Earth had naturally enough been designated Alpha, their own Koboli system’s rift node was Beta, Roma Gamma, and Haven Delta. Epsilon was the code for whichever rift ship established contact first after successfully establishing a new rift system.
Kathryn rushed into the control room on Orbital One so quickly that she bowled over some poor tech in her way as she did and had to halt her momentum on one of the handrails. She hastily apologized to the man and helped him gather up his things before entering ‘the pit’, the central recessed area in the bottom of the large room with thirty or so workstations all facing the gigantic wall sized monitor at the front of the semicircular room.
She got behind one of the techs at their station and rested her hand on his shoulder as she looked past him at his screen. “What system is it?” she asked.
“Sixty-one Cygni.” he reported.
“Tell me about it.”
“It’s a binary K type system.”
“Binary? Really…” Kathryn wasn’t sure what to make of that. “Throw the data up on the wall.”
He obeyed and the rift ship’ technical readouts on the configuration and conditions of the system from its initial report showed on the wall. Kathryn stepped back to look up at it, but bumped into Jaren who had come to stand behind her. He put his arms around her waist and hugged her. They silently surveyed the data together which was being streamed through the first rift opened between Sol and 61 Cygni.
As programmed, the drone had identified the nearest Earth analogue planet in the binary system and established the rift system around the star nearest to it.
“Look at that planet,” Kathryn marveled as she surveyed the readout. “It’s mass, size, magnetic field… all like Earth.”
“Sure but look at the atmosphere readings,” Jaren added. “Mainly nitrogen is good but look, lots of methane and carbon dioxide, monoxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide… it’s a pretty toxic stew.”
“I recognize that chemistry,” Kathryn realized, and looked back at him to share. “That’s Earth without life.”
“How do you mean?”
“That’s what Earth’s atmosphere would still be like if life had never happened, isn’t it?” she suggested.
“Oh right, you’re absolutely right! Which in theory could make it perfect for terraforming. I mean eventually, of course,” he clarified. “It would be a long, long process…” Kathryn could tell he was already drawing up a plan to do so in his head.
“But look at those other planets, wow…” Jaren further mused. “An ice giant further out from that proto Earth, binary dwarf planets beyond that… oh and the other star, a big gas giant at four AU, and binary frozen terrestrials beyond.”
“Oh wow, look at that!” Kathryn pointed. “Two ringed giants orbiting each other, together orbiting the center of gravity of the two stars. I never thought I’d see so much… what, binarism? Is that a word?” Kathryn asked.
“I guess it is now,” Jaren mused.
“Ohhh, we so have to go check this system out!”
“Itching to get back out in the field hunh?” Jaren asked with a note of concern.
“Ugh, yes!” Kathryn exclaimed with a force that surprised herself. “Commanding this station has been great for the family; us getting to work together and having a stable environment for Maggie has been wonderful, but it’s been fifteen years since we settled down here Jaren. I’m a born explorer and this is glorified desk job. It’s been killing me just a little bit every day.” She put her fingers very nearly together to indicate just how little a bit it was killing her daily. “Okay maybe not that dramatic… but you know what I mean?”
“I think I do. I’ve quite enjoyed the peaceful life this job has granted us but I agree it’s high time to get back out there. With our records and background, I’m sure we can pull strings and get assigned to this project if we want. We could get the old Earth team back together, it’d be fun!”
“Too bad we can’t get the old New Horizon out of mothballs and take her out again,” Kathryn lamented, but not seriously.
The New Horizon was the original generational starship Kathryn’s people had taken from Earth to Haven some six centuries ago. It had been retrofitted to go on a mission back to Earth fifteen years ago when Jaren’s people had made first contact with Kathryn’s after six hundred years of silence across the void. Kathryn’s people had lost the technological ability to conduct such an expedition, while Jaren’s had taken that long to discover the will to.
Jaren laughed. “If we really wanted to we probably could, but I’ll be much happier to take the new one. Where is the New Horizon II?
“It is…” Kathryn trailed off as she looked up the answer at one of the empty workstations in front of them, “currently on assignment studying the outer binary gas giants in the Haven system.”
Kathryn leaned back against the railing behind her with her hands out to her sides, grasping the cool smooth round metal. “A whole new system to explore…” she distantly mused. “And I was just getting my head around the systems we are already familiar with.”
“I know,” Jaren mirrored with similar reverence. “I know…”
“Well, New Horizon II is a joint project, we’ll have to convince all the governments to reassign it but I don’t think that’ll be a problem. The harder part will be convincing them to let us go ourselves when there are so many others on the way up even more desperate to get out there themselves.”
“Oh please,” Jaren scoffed, “Star Fleet has gotten out there plenty and all the younger officers have had their chance at a tour on New Horizon II. Besides, we’ll be taking the best and the brightest with us; there’s plenty of opportunity to go around. Just keep in mind that Epsilon is just the first of many.”
Star Fleet was the new umbrella organization developed to jointly oversee all of the shared colonial exploration projects had been developed. The Koboli had the most robust navy themselves, with the Romans having a far more modest one, and the Havenites even further behind. Haven had only developed the capacity for achieving orbit themselves fifteen years ago, but since then had been developing quickly with the assistance of the Koboli.
New Horizon II was their first collaboratively built ship, specifically built for exploration and research once the new drones began opening rifts back home. Star Fleet Command had also been chartered to assume responsibility for the operation of all Terran facilities, such as the massive Orbital One space station orbiting around Earth which they currently stood in. It was a relic from before the plague on Earth which they had lovingly refurbished after finally making their way back to Earth fifteen years ago. The handful of research facilities down on the surface as well as the few refurbished off world bases elsewhere in the system also operated under Star Fleet.
“We’ve sent dozens of seed ships out there by now and this is just the first one to signal back successfully,” Jaren thoughtfully observed. “Pretty soon we’re going to need a whole fleet of ships like New Horizon II to explore them all.”
“Definitely exciting times to be alive,” Kathryn mused. “Well,” she said as she pushed herself off of the railing. “I’ll start drafting the press release, how ‘bout you start notifying the governments, then we’ll start figuring out how we’re going to worm our way into the mission.”
“Yes Admiral, right away.” Jaren offered with a wink.