While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 15

  The fourth planet in the alien system was a world not entirely unlike the planets the humans had colonized, though it was distinctly drier than the others.  It had one large ocean that occupied a little more than a third of the planet, but the rest was land and the further away from that ocean, the drier and more unforgivingly desert the ground’s terrain was.

  Kathryn stood on the bridge watching on the wall monitors as the planet revolved beneath them.  She was thankful that they’d replaced many of the bridge screens along the way to the planet from storage and various crew quarters.  It wasn’t what it was, but it was still nice to have a big wide screen in front of her again.  It was surely a pale shadow of the wrap around view the bridge had been designed to provide, but it was certainly much better than the postage stamp which they’d been trying to operate with since the battle with Ralph.

  “What have we got Jaren?” she asked.

  Jaren continued to study his panel for several moments before answering.  “I’m looking at the location where Ralph claimed that base was supposed to be, but there’s nothing there.”

  “And by nothing you mean…”

  “Well, I don’t have a telescope to look in detail of course, but I’m not picking up any signals whatsoever.  Can you confirm that Grayson?”  He looked over and the comms officer nodded.  “Based on the instruments we have left, which admittedly isn’t much, there’s nothing to indicate that there is anything at all left down there.”

  “Suggestions?” Kathryn asked.

  “We have to go down there,” Ralph said as the heavy bridge blast door slid open, and the robot stepped through.  A couple days ago along the way he had decided that his quarantine was no longer necessary and overwrote the controls which had kept him there.  On the inside Kathryn had an utter fit, but eventually calmed into the serenity of being helpless to do anything about it.

  “Why do we have to go down there?” she asked him.

  “Instruments on this ship are inadequate to determine the status of the base.”

  “Thanks for that, by the way.”  The screen on Ralph’s face blinked a couple times in failure to understand her sarcasm.

  “Were there any orbital facilities?” Jaren asked.

  “Yes,” the robot answered.  “Their present absence concerns me greatly.  There was an extensive shipyard in orbit where I was built, but there now seems to be no trace of it.”

  “Hypothesis?” she asked.

  “It is no longer there,” he answered plainly, seeming to fail to understand that she was asking for an explanation as to why.

  “Jaren?” Kathryn said, standing up.  “What do you think about going down?”

  “Great concern at the prospect, obviously,” he answered.  “Flying down to an alien environment with no instruments to tell us ahead of time what we’re going to find when we get down there?  Just tell me we’re not bringing Maggie down there, too.”  He smiled at her mischievously to be clear he was just teasing her.

  Kathryn actually laughed out loud, and it was nice to have the tension broken.

  “Besides, the shuttles’ short-range sensors are intact so we should be able to take gather more comprehensive data with them once we’re closer to the facility.”

  Kathryn pointed at him.  “Right.  Okay Jaren, you, Margaret, Ralph, and I will take Shuttle One down to investigate.”

  Jaren just nodded and rose from his station, walking past Ralph and exiting the bridge through the heavy doors to go prep the shuttle.

  “How long ago did you leave this planet?” she asked Ralph as she gazed out at the hypnotic view of the planet going by.

  “Twenty-six-point-three years,” he answered, himself also now staring at the hypnotic view of the planet.  “I received my final mission update upon my projected entering of the system, but message had been in transit for eighteen and a half years due to light delay.”

  “But you seemed to effectively negate light speed delay for communications during our battle,” Kathryn pointed out.  “Why couldn’t you use the same means to call contact your home base?”

  “My ship was equipped with technology that could project a field between our ships which allowed electromagnetic transmissions to occur between us effectively instantaneously.  It was an alternate use feature of my primary weapon,” he explained.

  “Oh I remember that, believe me.” she rued.  “Why couldn’t you use the same method to be in more constant contact with your home base?”

  “The technology could only operate at short range, and the speed at which I could extend the field to facilitate its effect was limited to that of light.”

  Kathryn nodded.  It still may as well be magic, but his description at least seemed internally consistent with itself.

  “Eighteen years, hunh?” she reiterated.  “Long period of time for something like this to have happened, but there should still be some indications of what happened on the surface.”

  “Agreed.”

  “You are happy to come along on our little field trip?” she asked.

  “I would have insisted on it,” he clarified, and Kathryn smirked at him in response.  She had every reason to hate him for what he had done and continued to do to them, but sometimes she couldn’t help but identify with his uncompromising focus on his objectives.  She used to be a lot more like that, before she settled down with Jaren after having Maggie.  Once upon a time she’d been so focused on her career that she’d won the honour of being Haven’s first person to reach orbit and revisit the original New Horizon ship after they’d lost the technical ability to do so for centuries.

  Kathryn looked out the view screen at the surface beneath them.  “This mission sure is turning out to be a lot more interesting than we’d planned.  How could an entire orbital shipyard of such a powerful civilization just be destroyed like that?”

  “Unknown.”

   

  The shuttle disengaged from the New Horizon II and whisked away at moderate acceleration in the opposite direction from which its mothership orbited.  It had bled most of its orbital velocity by the time it made its way through the bulk of the planet’s atmosphere below, and casually lowered itself the rest of the way down to the planet’s surface.

  A couple thousand kilometers in from the massive ocean, the immersive projection of the exterior of the shuttle onto the interior walls showed a stark environment.  It wasn’t completely barren and dry as the opposite side of the planet was, but it was quite arid and inhospitable nonetheless.  It was obvious that very little of the ocean’s moisture made it in this far.

  “It’s heavier at the surface,” Jaren reported.  “Looks like one-point-four Gs.”

  “One-point-seven by your metric is the preferred gravity of the builders.  It is the environment they originally evolved in,” Ralph explained.

  “That would explain why their body shapes are so different from ours,” Kathryn remarked.

  “Indeed.”

  “And yet the atmospheric composition is the same,” Jaren remarked.  “Not the same, but… certainly within human tolerance.”

  “Yes.  This planet’s atmosphere has a lower oxygen level than optimal for the founders, but likewise was within tolerance.  Inside the facility extra oxygen is added for comfort.”

  “Oh hell,” Margaret uttered as a clearer picture of the area they were headed towards came into view.

  There was nothing left of it.

  The area they approached, there was only a slight crater, regular in its circular shape, and quite distinct from the terrain around it.  It vaguely reminded of the spherical excision damage their anti-matter weapons had inflicted on Ralph’s ship.  It didn’t have the raised lip one would expect to find from a crater resulting from an asteroid or meteor strike though, but instead seemed to be evenly shaved right through the bedrock.  It wasn’t terribly deep, but it nevertheless readily apparent.  It the smooth uniform cut was dozens of kilometers wide.

  “It is… gone,” the robot observed, seeming more shocked and concerned than she would have given him credit for being able to display in his current form.  “It was attacked,” he concluded, turning to the others.  “Take us down to the surface,” he ordered.

  Jaren looked at Kathryn who somberly nodded her assent, so Jaren proceeded to pilot the ship down to a soft landing at the edge of the shallow crater.

  As Kathryn reached for the door controls, Jaren grabbed her arm firmly.  “Don’t.”  When she looked back at him he was studying his screens with a furrowed brow.  “You open that door we’re both dead.  There’s intense radiation out there.”

  “So it was nuked…” she marvelled.

  “Yes,” he answered.  “And higher yield than we’ve ever been stupid enough to try to build ourselves.  By like a hundred time.  I’m surprised they didn’t vapourize the entire atmosphere.”

  “I need to get out there,” Ralph insisted.  Kathryn could sense the note of frustration in his voice and was as clearly agitated as he could be in his robot form.  New Horizon II had taken up a geostationary orbit at the equator further north from them.  It allowed them to maintain a direct data link to keep Ralph’s body and his core connected continuously.

  “Alright,” Kathryn sighed, “break out the environment suits then,” she ordered Jaren and Margaret.

  Jaren remained fixed on his instruments while Margaret opened a display screen panel on the floor, and started pulling out two sets of environment suits from underneath.  “Why do you think this happened?” Margaret asked Ralph.

  “I have no answer,” he plainly offered.  “The builders were at peace.  There were no potential enemies who could do this even if they had reason to.”

  “Have they always been peaceful?”

  “Has any intelligent species always been at peace?” he answered defensively.

  “We wouldn’t know,” Margaret answered dryly as she pulled the last helmet out and stood up.  “Are there any other species who might even want to do this if they were able to?”

  “None that we know of,” Ralph answered.  “Certainly none that would dare.”  There was something distinctly vengeful in his voice when he uttered the second half of the sentence.

  As Kathryn and Jaren pulled on their environment suits, Ralph reviewed the same data on Jaren’s terminal.  “This can’t have happened long ago.  Based on this decay rate… this only happened twenty-one Earth days ago.

  “Any indication that whoever did this is still around?” was the last thing Kathryn was able to ask in a normal voice before pulling on her helmet and having to use the suit to suit comms instead.

  “Nothing the ship or shuttle has picked up so far,” Jaren answered in her ear.  “But that’s not saying much at this point I’m afraid.  Let’s just hope that whoever did this is long gone.  Ready?” he asked her.

  “Ready.”  

  When the wall opened and began to fall away, there was a rush of air as the internal and external atmospheres intermingled.  They had already been subjected to the higher gravity but walking down the ramp they really came to feel it and immediately started becoming fatigued.  

  Ralph exited first and immediately headed off towards the edge of the crater.  It was so wide and shallow that there was no definite edge, and one easily could have walked kilometers down the slope towards the centre rather comfortably, but there was no mistaking the outer perimeter of the devastation.

  The other three, Kathryn and Jaren in environmental suits and Margaret more casually exposed behind them, walked over and stood behind the robot.  Together they absorbed the scene around them.  The terrain had a sandy rock colour to it, a dark yellow with a touch of red.  Kathryn looked up at the familiar feeling sun and closed her eyes to feel the warmth of it on her face through her helmet before it darkened to protect her.

  “Eleven,” Kathryn remarked.  She lowered her head and looked at the others who seemed confused.  “This is the eleventh world I’ve set foot on.  Six if you don’t count moons.”  Jaren and Margaret acknowledged with a nod, appreciating her sentiment and seeming to take a moment to tally their own counts Ralph spoke up and shattered the reverence.

  “The energy profile from your shuttle’s readings suggests that our own weapons caused this,” Ralph stated with disbelief.

  “An accident maybe?” Jaren asked.

  “Inconceivable,” the robot answered softly before dropping to his knees in apparent exhaustion.  He put his hands up to its face and slowly turned his head side to side as though sobbing.  “What have they done…” they heard him say.

  Kathryn watched as Margaret sat down beside him and put her arm around him to console him.  Fifteen years later and this old simulant was still surprising her.  

  “What about the orbital shipyard?” Jaren asked.

  “Good question,” Kathryn said as she opened a channel up to the ship on her suit’s wrist panel.  “Felix?”

  “We’re here Admiral, go ahead.”

  “It looks like the base was nuked… like, severely nuked.  Scan the radiation environment in orbit, see if there’s any anomalies.  We’ve still got gamma detectors right?  You should be in just about the same orbit they would have had that station in.”

  “Hold…”

  Kathryn looked down and watched Margaret slowly rocking Ralph back and forth in consolation.  She had no idea either of them had the capacity for such sentimentality.  She certainly wouldn’t have expected Ralph to be mournful at the destruction of his ‘birthplace.’

  “Oh yeah, we see it.” Felix reported.  “Looks like something equally hellish happened up here too, and pretty recently from the looks of it.”

  “Like a few weeks recently?” Kathryn asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “Alright, thanks Felix.  Stand by.”  Kathryn walked over to Ralph and sat down on her knees beside him on the other side from Margaret.  “Well, what now Captain?” she softly asked.  “Any standing orders for this kind of eventuality?”

  “Of course,” he answered, more robotically than usual.

  She suddenly suspected that the very fabric of the universe could suddenly unravel all about them with no explanation, and he would still have appropriate contingency orders to follow.  “So what now?” she asked again.

  “Now we report in to the capital,” he answered.

  “The capital?”

  “The central planet of the Builder’s civilization, their most recent home world.  Now I am burdened with the responsibility of reporting in not only my own fate, but the fate of Infinity Base as well.

  “Admiral, fast movers coming in!” Felix said over the speaker in her helmet.

  “What?” Kathryn called out as she bolted to her feet and started ushering the others into the shuttle with her hands.  “Report!!”

  “We’ve got two… no, three small bandits coming in hot on an intercept course.  They must have been hiding on the far side of the planet.  Only picked them up when they came in range of the other shuttle’s sensor.”

  “Aggressive?” Kathryn asked as she started pushing into running the short distance to the shuttle and following behind.

  “Sure seems that way.  They’re on a collision course and they seem to be trying to blind us with-”

  And then all she heard was static.  “Fuck me, they’re jamming the comm channels!  Dammit!  Jaren get us up there now fast as you can, emergency ascent!”

  Not bothering to get out of their suits, all four strapped themselves into their seats and braced themselves for the heavy load that an emergency ascent would bring down on them.  As Jaren throttled up the antimatter drive their seats changed shape and slid out into the interior of the shuttle to reorient their bodies into a safer orientation to take the added forces on them.  

  At high acceleration it only took a few minutes to reach orbit and approach the ship.  They could see three small ships leaving the vicinity, but they were already too far away for them to be able to make out any detail about them.  Working with the computers, Jaren nimbly orchestrated a close approach and rapid dock with the ship.  When the airlock opened, a pale, panic-stricken Felix greeted them.

  “I’m sorry Kat they, they just came in too fast, there was nothing we could do!” he exclaimed.  “We didn’t even have time to start up our weapons systems before they’d already approached and boarded!”

  “Boarded!?” Kathryn exclaimed in horror.  

  “No no Kat, it’s not what they left behind it’s, it’s what they took.”

  “What are you talking about Felix?  What are you trying to tell me?  What happened?”  His state made her terrified of the answer.

  “They stole our computer core, but… my god Kat I’m so sorry, they fucking took Maggie, Maggie!”