While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 5

  Kathryn spent the next few hours giving Sirius and Sengupta a personal tour of the station.  It seemed like the least she could do given the circumstances, and there were things it was unofficial intel which could be useful to past to the new commander of your post on your way out.  They toured all of the critical engineering, research, and command areas, and the newcomers were introduced to all of their new senior staff.  Later that night a formal reception dinner was held after the formal transfer of command ceremony with all of the combined senior staff of the station and ship.  Margaret turned out to be the star of the event since none of the crew of New Horizon II had ever seen or met a simulant before.  She feigned exasperation with having to perform, but the teen idol still somewhere deep inside her still relished the right kind of fawning attention.

  In the morning, Kathryn, Jaren, Maggie, Margaret, Patricia, and Felix, with P4 cautiously plodding along behind, all made their way down to the central engineering section, through the long docking prong, and then finally into the ship itself.  Kathryn could tell it had obviously gotten the spit and polish treatment in anticipation of a new command taking over with how gleaming and spotless everything was.  The cleanliness of still being such a new ship didn’t hurt either.  The bulkheads were of some strong polymer material, and while bright they had a certain dirty white porcelain colour which gave the ship a remarkably bright and welcoming feel.  

  Welcomed by the senior staff upon boarding, they then went to their respective quarters to put away their gear and personal effects.  Kathryn’s accommodations were not even a pale shadow of the luxuriously spacious suite she’d had on the station.  In reality, on a ship like this having her own suite at all was a luxury afforded only by her rank.  Most of the other crew had to bunk four to a room to save space in the area of the ship with simulated gravity.

  The ship had a standard crew compliment of twenty-four, so space was limited for any extra personnel.  Kathryn and Jaren would share the commanding officer’s suite, and Felix would share the traditional first officer’s suite with Maggie, and Margaret and Patricia in another.  

  Simulants were originally built with the need to sleep, but only to fully simulate the human experience.  Since being reborn into her new body though, Margaret had arranged several hacks to her systems but had kept a certain mysteriousness around what exactly she’d had done.  She referred to them as upgrades, and always with a wink.  The only one they were aware of for sure at this point was the elimination of her need to sleep.  She retained the ability to simulate sleep when she felt the desire to and would still sometimes relish in an afternoon nap.

  Having settled in, they convened on the bridge to conduct their departure from the station.  Working on the old station, Kathryn sometimes forgot how beautifully the Koboli finished the interior of their ships.  Stepping onto the bridge took her breath away.

  Although it was located in the core of the forward section of the ship, an elaborate illusion made it appear to be inside a transparent perfect sphere.  The top three quarters of the apparent sphere were one giant perfect display screen on which external cameras projected what they saw outside.  Below them, the floor created the same effect.  To step onto the bridge gave the perfect impression of floating in a soap bubble through space.  

  It was possible to make the rest of the ship appear in a ghostly transparent way to be able to judge distances and for docking, but for now it was set to complete transparency, and a couple dozen meters to their left they could see the open docking port of the Orbital One prong seemingly connected to nothing, and then the massive station looming beyond it, but all dwarfed by the brilliant blue and white planet beyond.

  Kathryn floated her way over to the central captain’s seat which could quickly swivel completely around either way with button presses once occupied to allow her to see all about her while strapped in.  Once she had done so she watched as Jaren, Felix, and Margaret all did the same, Jaren in the XO seat beside her and the other two joining the rest of the bridge crew at the half dozen multi-purpose stations surrounding her.

  Kathryn took a moment to close her eyes and slowly draw in a deep breath before evenly blowing it out just as slowly, reorienting the remainder of her spirit to the new path before her.  When she had savoured the gravity and significance of the quiet moment long enough and she felt adequately focused on the new task at hand and the weight of her new command, she opened her sharp, purposeful eyes and launched her new mission.

  “Please request departure clearance from the tower Commander Grayson,” she ordered her new comms officer.  She’d be happier having one of her people do it, but she had to let the existing crew execute the roles they were trained for and avoid upsetting their rhythms as much as possible.

  “Orbital One this is New Horizon II requesting clearance to disengage from the station.”  Kathryn had only met Lieutenant Commander Grayson for the first time at her reception upon boarding the ship earlier.  The deep darkness of her skin gave her away as a Havenite before the crest on her uniform’s shoulder did.  

  The other colonies had been religiously motivated; the Koboli were a Mormon mission and went first, then the Catholic Roma mission went second.  What limited genetic diversity they’d brought with them had homogenized into a generalized light brown skin colour before the colonies had reconnected with each other.  In an effort to preserve genetic diversity, the original New Horizon crew had been selected in part as specific broad ethnic cohorts which were carefully preserved on their journey.  

  People were free to pair up with whoever they liked, but their one allotted daughter was always a genetic blend of their mother and another of her ethnicity from their genetic catalogue, and their one allotted son likewise a blend of their father and another genome of the same ethnicity.  After arriving and setting up the colony, people just naturally paired up and mated with whomever they wished, leaving a greater ethnic diversity in the population overall.  Some were the same homogenized light brown as the other colonies, many were more novel and interesting blends, and some like Grayson retained one of the original ethnicities remarkably intact.

  “Permission granted, New Horizon II.  Safe journey.”

  “Acknowledged,” Grayson answered before turning to Kathryn, who rested her elbows on the captain chair’s arm rests and rested her head on tented fingers before giving Jaren a nod.

  “Then by all means take us out Mr. Snow,” she commanded.

  “Disengage docking clamps Mister Byrne,” Jaren smiled and ordered the operations officer on her behalf.

  “Aye Sir, disengaging docking clamps,” The light skinned Roman man called back as he tapped at the glass control panel in front of him.

  Margaret sighed heavily from her station to Kathryn’s left and slightly aft.  “I really miss thought control,” she lamented.

  “I believe they built the receiving technology into this ship,” Kathryn explained.  “Pretty sure that’s the relatively easy part of the technology.  They did it so the ship would be ready when we do have breakthroughs in that technology.  It means you at least should be able to access all of the systems by thought control.”

  Margaret closed her eyes and after a moment the rest of the ship came into ghostly semi-transparent view about them.  “Well how do you like that?” she mused.  “How novel.”

  “Glad you’re having fun Margaret,” Kathryn said as she turned back to the station in front of them.  “Just try to remember I’m in command here, alright?” she urged in her practiced command tone of kindness backed up by implicit threat.   

  Margaret responded with a sarcastic “Yessir” and overdramatized salute which likewise made clear that she didn’t respect the trappings and protocol of Kathryn’s organizational authority, but that beyond all that she nonetheless held adequate respect for the woman herself.   She closes her eyes for another moment and the ship once again became fully transparent on the surrounding screens.  Kathryn nodded at Jaren again to continue their departure.

  “Please take us away from the prong easy Mister Byrne, steady as she goes.”

  “Yessir,” the young man answered.  As he activated the appropriate control thrusters to push them gently out of reach of the prong, Kathryn spared a moment’s thought for how young the ship’s crew was and how easily she forgot how much older she was.  Though pushing fifty her impression of herself was still as a much younger woman, closer to their ages of thirty plus or minus a few.  They had their whole lives still ahead of them and for a moment she was acutely aware of how much less she had left than they did.

  “Mizz Grayson please report to the station that we are disengaged and ready to burn,” Kanthryn asked.

  Grayson gave a few taps at her panel.  “Orbital One this is New Horizon II.  We have disengaged form the station and are ready to leave orbit and burn sunward.”

  “Acknowledged New Horizon II,” they heard Sirius’ voice say over the comm channel.  “Good luck and safe journey,” the standard well wishing to a departing ship.

  “Thank you Captain,” Kathryn answered before closing the channel, “I hope you find your time here stimulating.”  She pointed to Grayson who dutifully closed the channel in response.  “Ship wide please,” she then asked, and Grayson tapped at her panel a few times before nodding to Kathryn that the channel was clear.

  “We are conducting our first burn,” Kathryn reported to the crew, hearing the faint echoes of the ship wide speakers beyond the heavy doors to the bridge.  “This is final warning to brace yourself for our exit from orbit.”  She’d already checked that Maggie was safely secured with Felix in the astrometric secondary observation room, another bubble screen room which was like the bridge but much smaller and designed more for navigation and observation.  She could be reasonably assured that the burn protocols would be second nature for the rest of the crew by now after having served on the ship for a while.  

  Although Felix was amply qualified to have assume the chief engineer position, Lieutenant Commander Singh was left in place.  He was amply qualified himself, and the less disruptions to the normal workings of the crew the better for everyone.  Being unassigned general duty also freed up Felix to continue work on P4 along the way and assist more with the science once they arrived in the new system.

  “Whenever you’re ready Mister Byrne.” Kathryn offered.

  “Yes Admiral.”

  The acceleration crept up on them as the engines steadily added more and more speed to their orbital velocity, bringing them further and further from the surface of the world below.  The ships’ maximum safe acceleration as 4 m/s², less than half of Earth’s gravity, allowing them to move around the ship under thrust somewhat comfortably while they accelerated up to the halfway point of their journey, then flipped and reverse burned to slow their velocity as the approached the sun.

  Over the first half day, the ship boosted its orbit higher and higher above the planet until its gravitational hold was low enough for the ship to easily break orbit and start burning for the star and within a few hours they were well beyond the orbit of the moon.  Instead of burning directly for the sun, they burned the ship in the opposite direction of their solar orbit, the reverse of how they left Earth.  When they were halfway there they would turn and burn in the opposite direction to speed up their orbit and slow their descent, and if the navigators and pilots did their jobs right, then by the time they arrived at the sun they should be pulling in right alongside the Escher crystal when they arrived.  

  Along the way, Kathryn, Jaren, and Felix coordinated on trying to provide an appropriate duty roster for Maggie which was adequately stimulating and challenging without risking overwhelming her.  The truth though, was that there wasn’t much to do in this phase of the mission, so she was mostly tasked with continuing her school programs.  The real hard work and long hours would begin when they began taking in and processing a tsunami of observational data on the other side.  In addition to her schoolwork they gave her and Patricia a fair amount of the regular crew’s regular maintenance and diagnostics tasks, the crew who would otherwise be doing the work happy to take the time off while someone else did the glorified busy work.

  Margaret of course left no one unaware of how bored she was yet did her duties with such disinterest that they rather stopped bothering assigning them to her.  Patricia took to it better, she’d trained on all the systems and procedures but had stopped short of formally seeking commission with Star Fleet.  She was enjoying putting her training to practice and getting real world experience with the ship, and when Margaret wasn’t spending most of her time tormenting Felix and P4 in the lab under the guise of helping them, she seemed content to assist and continue mentoring Patricia.

  Kathryn and Jaren found themselves enjoying the relative down time.  Though their life on Orbital One tended to be uneventful, their positions aboard kept them quite busy and it was the first time they’d had a few day together relatively free of duties.  They felt justified taking this time to relax given their anticipation of the tremendous amount of work waiting for them on the other side of the rift.  All in all it was a relatively quiet few days on the ship for everyone aboard.

  As they came ever nearer to the star, their increasing proximity to the unrelenting nuclear blowtorch weighed on their consciousnesses ever more.  Despite being protected by the ship’s sophisticated magnetic shield which deflected the otherwise lethal particle storm raging at them from the unending nuclear explosion they were sailing into, and the existence of the both the backup and redundant backup shields, Kathryn couldn’t shake her primordial sense of proximity to lethal danger and the barely contained fiery hellscape on the other side.  She could tell that the rest of her people felt the same thing to varying degrees, but the regular crew seemed to have done this enough times by now to at least be used to the feeling, if still not completely immune to it.  Eventually though, the massive kilometer wide crystal came into view, and the current leg of their journey was almost over.

  When they were near enough, they signaled the array of solar collectors which swarmed the star like locusts to unfurl their collectors and begin streaming all of the power they soaked up towards secondary collectors, which then streamed energy to the four massive tertiary collectors.  When they had absorbed enough energy, all four simultaneously pounded the crystal with blinding pillars of light, causing the molecular structure of the crystal to explode and expand into a violet energy rift which became an event horizon on one side of a temporarily stable artificial wormhole.  

  It was hard not to notice how much brighter the brilliant pillars of light streaming unimaginable amounts of energy down onto the exploded crystal of light were than the star itself.  The filters which dimmed them enough to be viewable left the star itself remarkably dark by comparison, but this was on top of its dimming which resulted from the swarm of solar collectors absorbing so much of its energy for the short time.  It was hard to notice between how blinding the final pillars of light were by comparison, and how darkly filtered their view of the sun had to be to safely observe it, but the star darkened considerably with the swarm of solar collectors blocking so much of its output in their unfurled state.  The effect was always so dramatic that everyone on the current day side of Earth noticed the temporary eerie dimming of the sun whenever a transit was initiated from this side of the rift.

  It could only be kept open and stable for a few minutes, and could not be activated again for several hours afterwards so their timing was critical.  The crew was expert and experienced though, so some thirty seconds after the rift formed New Horizon II sailed through it.

  It didn’t seem to take any time to make their way through the rift; they all merely felt the now familiar disorientating shudder and momentary rush of colours which always accompanied the moment of passing through a rift.  Someone had tried to explain to Kathryn the cause of the effect but in the end, she only really understand the trans dimensional physics of the rift causing the her brain to hiccup somehow.  In any case they’d been repeatedly assured that it was safe and there had yet to be any evidence to the contrary.

  They emerged from the rift on the other side, and as per protocol, full safe thrust was applied as the exited, increasing their orbital velocity to enlarge their orbit and pull away from the star.

  As she felt the thrust push her down into her seat, Kathryn reached out to tap at the panel at the end of her arm rest and opened a the ship wide broadcast channel.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the 61 Cygni.  We are the first life to ever be in this system.  You should all take a moment to reflect on that, I think it warrants some reverence.”