“..warp translation is in two more days to be fair.” Taylor said to Leon causing him to blink rapidly, his wandering mind suddenly snapping back to the moment.
He shook his head slightly. “I’m sorry, what? I must admit that I slept poorly and my mind is elsewhere.”
Taylor slapped an open palm on the metal surface of the table they were seated across. The sound reverberated around the mess hall and drew the eyes of at least two others. The wide shouldered man seemed to notice the fact and hunched towards Leon, his tone growing conspiratorial. “I am worried about Terry. I am sure you have been made aware that the pregnancy has been very tough on her.” Leon nodded, he had mentioned it already at least half a dozen times over the past few weeks. “I was wondering if there was anything else I can do?”
Leon shrugged. “Why are you asking me, I don’t have kids.”
The other man’s face stayed the same barely concealed mask of worry as he leaned back into his chair. “Yes, but you are older than I am. Have been around the block as it were. I am sure that you must have gleaned some ideas about fatherhood before you left for the mission.”
His words rang true in Leon’s mind. He may not have had a wife or child, but that didn't make him totally useless in the given situation. “Well, I suppose I have learned a thing or two over the years about keeping people calm. Though I really do recommend you dig through the archives in the main storage. We have virtually the sum of all human knowledge in there, I am sure there will be something in there about children and childbirth.” He spoke the words, but as soon as he said them he knew he was talking to a brick wall.
Taylor fidgeted, his hands drumming out a staccato beat on the table as they tapped the surface rapidly, his stress evident in his unconscious movements. He leaned in once more. “I could, and I have. But there is always something missing in my opinion. Maybe you could help..” Their conversation was abruptly cut short as another person joined their table.
Leon smiled as a lightly caramel skinned woman sat next to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Good to see you too Nat.” He smiled at her warmly. Gesturing towards Taylor he nodded in the man’s direction. “Taylor has been having trouble with some personal issues. And as the ship’s psychologist I am sure you are uniquely qualified to help him.” He gave her a small nudge as he said it, the movement his way of pleading for her help in a dire circumstance.
She seemed to give him a knowing look and then swooped in to his rescue. She assured Taylor that things would be alright in a manner that seemed to both calm and invigorate the young man while not making any promises about the outcome of the pregnancy. Leon just had to smile slightly at her display of skill. She had taken a potentially volatile situation and defused it in less time than he could have cooked an egg, if they had any eggs on the ship that was.
Taylor’s eyes shined with moisture still, but the man was smiling now. “Thanks for that Natalia. I guess there really isn’t anything to feel anxious about when you put it that way.”
She spread her arms in a confident manner. “I understand completely where the fear was coming from Taylor. You two love each other and you hate to see her in any undue suffering, especially suffering that you inadvertently caused with the pregnancy. But I assure you, Blessing and Leon are here for both of you. As are the entire rest of the crew. We are standing by to help you in any way that you might possibly need.”
Leon gripped one of her hands as he agreed, “Yes. I know I may not have been entirely behind this decision to begin with. But I assure you, from the bottom of my heart. I will do anything that is required to keep this crew safe. That includes you, your wife and your child. They are a part of this crew now as well, and thus under my care.” He leaned back as Taylor smiled a bit weakly. The large man seemed especially vulnerable today, Leon wondered to himself if something had happened out of the ordinary to set him on edge. He pushed the thought away, if something drastic had happened he was sure Dr. Kimathi would have mentioned it to him by now.
Leon stood, pushing himself up and away from the bland table. He glanced around the room, he could make out Sabine and Chad sitting at one of the other tables as well as Chris. The old man seemed to be poking absently at some manner of porridge. Leon turned back to Natalia and Taylor, the two of them giving him a mildly curious look as he just looked around silently.
He gestured towards the exit, “Well, I am glad that we were able to get that matter of yours resolved Taylor. If you both will excuse me, I just remembered something that requires my attention.” They nodded politely to him and he strode out of the room without another word.
Glancing both directions quickly he took the right path. The slight curve of the habitat ring’s floor made the weight of his body seem to change ever so slightly as the combined effects of the rings rotation and the outward centripetal force combined into a single unified net positive value. He shook his head, the words would have meant nothing to him before the trip. ‘Does that mean I am getting smarter?’ he asked himself silently with a chuckle.
I very well might, but he didn’t see any application to prove the theory, so he just smiled and pushed on. He had no destination in mind, in fact his entire itinerary for the day was relatively free as it was one of his very rare off days. Everyone on the ship got them periodically. They were essential in maintaining group morale and promoting teamwork. People could apply to have their off days together if they wanted to spend them in such a manner, he and Natalia had had several long free days to themselves in the last few months. He smiled at the pleasant memories.
Soon his internal musings found himself on the opposite side of the large metal habitat ring, if he went any farther he would be tracking back to the mess hall. He looked at the room in front of him, it was the secondary gym. He shrugged and walked inside, it was likely deserted at this hour of the day. Most of the others on the ship liked to get their workouts done in the morning before the day started, and he could well understand that sentiment. He waved a hand at the door and it opened at his presence.
Giving the room a quick once over to see if it was indeed deserted he stepped inside. The large room was sparsely decorated. Only the light orange paint on the walls mixing with the blue and fluffy white of an artificial sky overhead all that set it apart from the generally drab or clinical white of the rest of the ship. He liked the place though, to him it felt like any number of the PT rooms and training centers he had spent so much of his youth and military career in.
He moved through the room slowly and sat at a resistance training machine, the electronics humming to life as it detected his presence. He sat there for a minute, many thoughts whirling through his mind unbidden. Thoughts of the mission, of Terry and her unborn child, of the future and what he would do when the mission eventually came to an end.
He had felt Natalia dropping him hints the last few weeks. She would mention something about Terry’s pregnancy and then how she wouldn't mind it so much herself. Things of that nature. He had not risen to it, he still wasn’t sure how to respond, not now anyways.
He started to work out on the machine, the repetitive physical activity helping him to clear his mind of the stress and worry. He had always liked such tasks, where he could turn off his brain and basically just drift in the realm between conscious and unconscious. Leon continued in such a manner for a time. He knew deep in his heart that eventually he would have to face the grim reality of how things were once more, but in that moment he was able to escape reality. His thoughts focused entirely on his activity and the immediate surroundings.
**********
The last two days had passed quickly in Leon’s perception. Each day leaving little to no impact on his psyche, the feeling of time as it flew past was hard to describe. But nevertheless that was what had been happening, as it were.
He looked around the bridge, the room feeling a little emptier due to Terry’s absence. She couldn't be on the bridge though, her pregnancy was nearing its final stages. Dr. Kimathi had said she could go into labor almost any day now, her pregnancy had been a hard one. But they had all been looking after the young woman to the best of their combined abilities. Leon himself had been making sure to go and visit the mother-to-be at least twice a week, he wanted to make sure that nothing went wrong.
He shivered, what if something did go wrong? ‘No.’ he shook his head as he chastised himself silently. He could not afford to think like that. It was that kind of thinking that had led him to nearly making the wrong decision already.
No, the birth would go smoothly and the baby would be born as healthy as could be. To contemplate any other alternative was to invite disaster in with open arms. Leon folded his hands across his chest and held himself for a moment. Not long enough to get any reaction out of Joice but just long enough to impart a measure of comfort upon himself.
He had been feeling a little out of sorts for the past few weeks. Leon didn’t quite know what had been causing it, but when he had told Natalia she had just recommended he try and get a little extra sleep at night. He wasn’t so sure that was the issue, but the extra sleep had indeed helped to make him feel a little better. A well rested mind was a happy mind she had said with a chuckle.
Leon looked at the countdown timer. Nearly there, less than three minutes till warp translation. He was a bit tense, he had done the research on the Aori archives but still couldn't be one-hundred percent sure that things would have remained the same after nearly two-hundred-thousand years had elapsed. There would surely be something left over though, the system had never been inhabited to his knowledge. There would have been no real reason for the Ruiners to have destroyed it.
That was his hope anyways, he had to admit that there was a part of him that saw the entire venture as folly. But he had never let that part of him dictate his actions in the past, and he wasn’t planning to start now.
Leon felt a slight shudder run through his seat. It was likely just the warp engines switching to a lower power as they were about to translate back into real space. As the thought passed through his mind so did the crashing wave of warpshock that always followed a jump. For a bare hint of a moment he saw the most brilliant display of blue lights, the sensation of leaves or perhaps vines along his back and legs as if he were pushing his way through thick undergrowth was followed by the tinkling sound of a light rainstorm on a tin roof.
All at once the sensations were gone. He shook his head, that hadn’t been so bad as others. Maybe things were looking up finally. The positivity persisted as he looked around at the others.
Sabine and Samuel seemed no worse for wear, Joice gave him a thumbs up in response and he glanced at Taylor. The younger man had always struggled with the strange neural shock that occurred when the ship broke the rules of the universe, he had a video of the strange purple space ray-like creatures that Leon had recorded months previously. While the feeling of euphoria was no longer present in the creatures through the video screen, it still was a beautiful sight that the man seemed to have begun using to calm himself after the stress of the warp jumps.
Leon waited a minute, allowing the man a bit of time to get himself put back together before he called out to him, “Taylor. When you are feeling ready could you please run a sensor and optical sweep of the inner system. I had Samuel park us about a light week out as a precaution, no more black holes and unexpected CME flares for us right?” He finished with a half smile.
Taylor nodded slowly, tearing his eyes from the hauntingly beautiful video. “Alright. I can do that.” He seemed a bit more put together than he had been before so Leon didn’t comment on the man’s lack of focus.
He was just happy to see that Taylor was coping as well as he was even with his wife nearly ready to burst. Leon prayed in his heart that Terry didn’t get early labor induced by a warp jump, but they couldn't afford to just stay out of warp for the next few weeks it might take for her to finally have the baby. The mission was still paramount after all.
Joice seemed to muse aloud, “So this is one of the archive’s systems?”
Leon gave her a look and nodded, his posture shifting as he tried to relax the suspicion in his gut that the system was dangerous. “Yes, it was. Though it wasn’t one of their inhabited worlds. A-at least not in the archives, which may understandably be incomplete…” He trailed off knowing how weak his argument sounded out loud.
Samuel seemed to chuckle and then cough. He was plotting a course into the inner system even though Leon had not ordered one yet. He seemed reasonably confident though that one would be needed. “And here I was hoping that there would be a big ‘ol alien battleship here that we could fight.” His hoarse voice was scratchy, like a forty year smoker. A symptom of him having almost died from having his throat slashed. The angry scar had faded somewhat over the last few months, but the pale smile of the healed wound still showed starkly on his throat even now. Every time Leon saw it he winced internally, knowing deep down that it had been his fault. His hubris that had led to the event.
He tore his eyes from the reminder of the past and plastered them upon the object of their current fascination. The star at the heart of the system was a young vibrant yellow dwarf. Nearly identical to Sol back home, it hung in the void of space like a distant light. Beckoning them to approach and feel its warmth upon their skin. At least, that's what Leon was getting from it. He had been stuck on this damned ship for too long, it had been one-thousand-seven-hundred-and-forty-eight days since they had left Earth. Nearly five years of the same day-to-day tasks and monotony. Sure they had been holding up pretty well all things considered. But he would be less than human if he didn’t admit that it was starting to get to him a little bit.
He had talked to Natalia about it a lot, and she had told him the same thing nearly every time. ‘Take a deep breath, think about why you are here. Think about the others and how much you mean to us all. You are not alone Leon, we are here for you. I am here for you, Leon.’ He smiled as her calming voice seemed to speak in his head. The words acting like a mantra that calmed his nerves and gave him focus.
He sat deeper into his chair, or at least tried to. The microgravity just made him jiggle around for a moment before he again reached a sort of loose equilibrium. He snorted quietly, after all this time it was still strange. He was in space, a quadrillion kilometers from home, and he was still worrying about the same old things.
Before he could go further down the rabbit hole Sabine spoke up, “Hey, what’s that?”
She was pointing to the main viewscreen. On it were a trio of bright dots. Two very close together and one a little further away, at least a little from their perspective. It was likely several tens of millions of kilometers.
Taylor shook his head. “I don't know, Terry was always the expert at this stuff. It could be almost anything, not starts though. They have been tracked for over a minute now and seem to be moving relative to the background slightly. Could they be planets?” Leon heard the unspoken question in the man’s voice. He was unsure and doubting himself.
Leon looked closer and tried to imagine what they might look like if he was looking at the Sol system. “It looks like a binary system and a lone object. Potentially a planet with a large moon on the right and then a lone planet on the left. These are from the inner system?” He wanted to make sure before he determined if they needed to get closer or not.
Taylor nodded. “Yes, inside the habitable zone too. We are a little above the system’s orbital plane, imagine as if it is tilted in comparison to our inclination. So we sort of have a top-down view, which makes finding anything a little more difficult as there is much more ground to cover.”
Leon shrugged as best he could in the confining microgravity harness he wore. It made sense, it was a lot easier to see everything from the side as you knew generally where to look. “At least we know that we aren't going to miss something behind the star.” Taylor nodded.
Sabine pointed towards the screen. “Do you think these are the two worlds mentioned in the archives?”
Leon didn't have an answer. Instead he just spoke off the cuff, “Well, it’s possible. They are in the proper area for habitable worlds to form. But until we actually get a confirmation of their composition and size there isn't any real way to be certain.” He paused and gave her a long look. “Though, if I had to go with my gut.. yeah. I think these are our two living worlds.”
Samuel whispered up, his gaze resting square on the main screen. “So, do we plot a course?”
Leon actually laughed at that comment. “Considering that you already have, I assume what you are actually asking is whether or not we are taking the plunge.” Sabine chuckled along with him.
Leon glanced at Joice. “What do you think? Is it worth a look? You saw the archive data as well.”
Joice was silent for a moment, her hands tapping on her keypad as she seemed to make several notations on her screen. Finally, she turned towards him and shook her head slightly. “I don’t think we have a choice, the data is simply too compelling not to at least take a closer look. We will have to make a more informed determination from closer in the system, say.. six light-hours?”
Leon thought about it. It was a reasonable suggestion, though a little closer than he would have liked to jump into the inner system without more data. He thought about Terry and her unborn child, he didn’t want to subject them to any additional stress. ‘Screw it.’ He internalised. “Samuel, jump us to the inner system, two light hours out.”
He saw a few eyebrows raise, but nobody disagreed. It seemed like the prudent thing to do given all their knowledge and the variables. He also just wanted to see if his ideas about the Aori archives were right.
The warp translation alert blared, the hazard lights flashing yellow as the countdown began. He sat in silence as the time wound down and tensed as the ship was ripped from its place in the universe. The warpshock passed through him in an instant and made his teeth clench. He would never in a million years get used to that. If the UN ever wanted to make spaceflight a widespread thing they were going to have to find a way to make warp jumps less intrusive. Maybe they would eventually come up with some sort of technology to prevent it, who knew.
The jump was short, at three hundred times the natural speed of matter they arrived in the inner system in less than ten minutes. The ship tearing through space like an impossible bullet fired from some exotic firearm.
The warp exit was much the same as the entrance with the exception of the scent of glue filling his nose for the shortest instant, so quick that he might have thought it never even happened. He shook his head and muttered aloud, “I still hate that.” He got a wave of affirmations from the rest of the crew. While it was nice for the journey not to take tens of thousands of years, the tradeoffs were still a major bummer.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
He looked up at the main screen now, the telescopes were still calibrated for their original distance and so there was nothing of value on the scopes. But Taylor was already working to fix the issue, the same video of the purple space ray-like things on the other monitor next to him. Leon shrugged internally, whatever kept the man in fighting shape.
He supposed that it wasn't all that bad, letting him try to take his mind off the many pressing issues he was experiencing. “Taylor, can you get them back on the main scope?”
Taylor nodded his head in the affirmative. “Yes, and I might be able to do even better than that. I should be able to train the secondary telescope on the other planet so we can see both at the same time.” Leon clapped his hands together.
Joice seemed just as pleased by the comment. “That’s good. It will certainly give us a dilemma though.”
Leon frowned at her, not seeing the problem. “What do you mean by that?”
She chuckled. “If we can see both worlds at the same time, then how are we going to decide which one to visit first?”
Sabine looked over her shoulder at the blond woman’s comment. Leon saw her smile as she asked, “Yes, that’s one problem. The other one is, what happens if they are both a bust. Can you handle a double dose of disappointment all at once Leon?”
He shrugged as best he was able. “Sure I can. I wasn’t even sure the planets would still be here. The Ruiners must not have known about this system, either that or they were only interested in wiping out Aori homeworlds and not out of the way uncolonised worlds like this one.” He gestured towards the main screen suddenly. “Hey, there is one of them.”
Indeed on the main screen was a planet, the dull brown sphere turning almost imperceptibly slowly in space. The surface looked dry, no telltale blue of surface oceans and no fluffy white patches of clouds. Instead it looked nearly barren, only the faint ring of diffused light that surrounded it telling of its atmosphere at all.
He shook his head. “It looks dead to me. No clouds, no oceans? How can this be a life bearing world?”
Sabine asked, “Maybe the Ruiners got to it after all.”
Taylor spoke up, his voice a touch skeptical but not entirely without confidence. “Well, it is simply listed in the system as having an oxygen atmosphere right? I suppose it is possible that it is a dead world, just one with the right atmospheric or geologic conditions to generate a stable atmosphere.” He sounded a little less confident than Leon felt, but he could be right.
Leon speculated aloud, “Well, suppose there is life on the planet. But what if it is just too small to be seen from orbit? Like bacteria or something similar.” He wasn’t convinced, but after all they had done he wasn’t willing to concede hope just yet.
Taylor just continued the stare at the image as the console he was seated at worked on the other image. The first planet looked to be a bust, not entirely so, but he wasn't going to plan an entire expedition to its surface without at least some confirmation it would be worth their effort.
Leon saw Sabine checking the other image as it pulled up on the other large viewscreen. “Oh, that’s a bit different.” Was all she said.
Leon had to agree. Where the first planet was all barren brown and grey rock from the looks of it, this new planet was covered in white and blue. What he at first assumed were large seas or oceans started to look a little different as the magnification increased in clarity.
Taylor noted the disparity. “I guess this one is near the outer edge of the habitability zone then. Maybe the other one is too, just a bit too close to the sun. And this one a bit too far.” He shook his head.
Leon frowned. This wasn’t what he had been expecting, the archives mentioned nothing about the world being extreme in any noticeable way. But maybe that would have been in the completed survey report? He had no way of knowing, this was so far the only interrupted survey in the admittedly incomplete archive they had.
“Well, it sure isn't the same as the other planet. What is that blue? Could it be liquid oceans?” Leon asked nobody in particular.
Nobody answered him at first. But Samuel noted aloud, “Well. I don't know, they seem a bit too irregular to be.. I don’t know. We would have to get a closer look, the details are simply too unrefined.”
Leon looked around and then at Joice. “What do you think? Potentially liquid water. Still has some manner of oxygenated atmosphere. Worth a peek?” He raised an eyebrow in an inquisitive manner, causing the blue eyed woman to smirk slightly at him.
Joice made a simple gesture towards the distant world. “I don’t see any real reason not to visit either one of them. One looks like a frozen hell hole, the other one looks like somebody left the oven on for too long.” Leon chuckled, as did the others. “I mean, we have no real evidence either way to go on, so we are going to have to take a closer look.”
Leon nodded and glanced at Taylor. “Sorry, but we are going to have to do a double-jump.” Taylor just frowned but didn’t object outright. Leon knew how much the man hated double-jumps, or two warp translations in rapid succession. But it was often simpler to run the warp drive for maximum power for a few seconds than try and throttle it down for a more manageable experience.
Samuel keyed in the jump coordinates. Little more than a vector and speed, the ship would be programmed to drop them out of warp at a precise time, generally accurate to within a few milliseconds. Not nearly enough of a time lag to cause any problems, at least not at their speed. The yellow alert lights flashed on and Leon turned his attention back to the telescopic data.
Leon nearly smacked his head off the console when the ship jumped. He hadn’t been paying attention and was instead caught unawares by the sudden shift in reality. Before he even had a chance to fully grasp what had just happened the ship dropped out of warp back into space proper.
Leon rubbed his eyes as the lingering memory of impossible colors swam in his blurred vision. He flexed his arms as he shifted in his seat, his whole body tingled slightly, as if he were recovering from full body numbness. He shivered slightly and then looked around to see if any of the others had seen it. They didn’t appear to have, Leon sighed.
Samuel’s whispering voice drifted across the silent bridge. “We are here. I think we should be close enough now.” That last comment drew Leon’s attention to the screen and he did a double take.
Where the world had once been a tiny speck, distant even though magnified by the ship’s optical telescopes, it had now become a massive white and blue sphere that covered nearly half the monitor. “Scheiße! Samuel, how close did you bring us?”
Samuel looked a bit embarrassed as he answered. “Well, I was planning on five-hundred-thousand and.. well.. I think I might have misplaced one of the zeros.”
“By god Samuel. That is a hell of a mistake to make. What if you had misplaced two of those, or all of them?” Leon said, a little intimidated by the prospect of showing up inside the planet’s atmosphere or worse.
Samuel shook his head vehemently. “No, it wouldn't be possible. The ship’s detectors would have pulled us out of warp well before we ever entered the planet’s atmosphere.”
Leon heard the words, but part of him was still shaken by the sudden appearance of a planet. It was so close, he felt as though he could simply reach out and grab it. Leon shifted in his seat uncomfortably. It wasn't just the microgravity that was getting to him, but the thought of the fate that had befallen the Aori. Here he was in an alien system, looking at alien worlds. What if they discovered the Ruiners too, what if the Ruiners discovered Earth? What chance did a single underdeveloped planet like theirs have against a force that wiped out a race as advanced as the Aori?
He frowned and looked back out into the darkness. The planet was close enough for the telescopes to resolve images on its surface in low detail. The thoughts of ancient wars and terrible cataclysms of days gone by were pushed aside as he realised just what he was looking at.
Sabine spoke up before he could however, her voice not exactly surprised, but neither did she sound calm. “Wait a minute, are those trees?”
Leon saw it too, on the screen was a magnified view of one of the dark blue areas. Areas he had previously mistaken for dark water or thick ice sheets. Instead they seemed to be huge forests of dark blue trees. They seemed to have a similar structure to pines, or some vaguely coniferous design plan.
Taylor panned the view around a bit till he found a clear area. The ground in the clear spot looked like snow or maybe ice, there were smaller flecks of blue though. “There appears to be some manner of undergrowth too. I wonder if that means there might be animal life.”
“Well, if there was, we may not ever see it from here.” Leon turned to look at Sabine and gave her a smile. “I think if there was ever a time to send in a probe..”
Sabine spoke up excitedly, “Oh, yes! I can do it, should we launch an orbiter too?” Leon gave her an affirmative nod.
Joice was sitting back in her chair. She had been silent up until this point. “Leon, are you thinking of sending another expedition?” She broke her silence with the slightly dissatisfied sounding question.
Leon shrugged. “I have no plans as of yet. Though imagine the possibilities if the planet’s surface is in any way habitable or safe. We could potentially..” She waved a hand.
“No, nuh uh. We are not even getting into that right now. Put that thought out of your head until we get a clear and in depth look at the risks involved with such an action.” Joice was being a little overprotective in his opinion. But she did have a fair point, he should not be thinking about sending a ground team until they had a better idea of what they were dealing with on the surface. For all they knew it could be populated by nightmarish tentacle monsters made of fire. Unlikely, but technically not impossible.
He just nodded instead, taking the more diplomatic approach. The ship shuddered twice in quick succession as Sabine launched an orbiter and a probe towards the planet. He checked her trajectories and noted that she had launched the probe at a lower speed. It would take the same path towards the planet as the orbiter but it's much lower velocity would allow it to dip down into the world’s atmosphere without too much chance of an explosive issue. They had such a limited number of the probes that the use of each one was felt dearly.
This did seem like a good enough reason to use one, and if they descended to the planet’s surface there was the chance that they could recover the probe’s complex machinery. They had never done that before, but Leon was willing to give it a try for the sake of future missions. They could manufacture more solid rocket propellent and heat shields on the ship, but the complex microprocessors and delicate scientific equipment was impossible to reproduce with their means.
Not for lack of trying though. Sabine and Chad seemed to always be hard at work with Chris in the fabrication room. The trio were always working on some project or another, their latest was patching some of the more damaged outer hull plates. The constant wear of micrometeorites combined with more significant impacts had started to degrade the structural integrity of some of the outer hull plates on the storage ring. The loss of the special coating caused a dangerous heat buildup that would only continue to worsen if it was not fixed.
Fortunately for them the brainbuckets back in Area-51 had seen ahead to that eventuality. They had enough of the powdered primer to mix thousands of gallons or more of the special polymerised coating. They should not have any issues with their supply, but somebody still had to go EVA to apply it.
He nearly laughed at that, that was where Chad shined. The young engineer had discovered a true passion for space walks that Leon found more than a little unnerving. Something about having all of infinity stretched out below and around him, well, it was far from the most comforting thing Leon had ever had to deal with. Sure back on Earth they had been trained for it. But there was a massive difference between training for the eventuality and then actually having to experience it first hand.
Leon was getting much too far ahead of himself with his thoughts. He looked towards the main screen again, the progress of the two launched satellites was displayed in bright blue text. The orbiter had already reached the planet and was moving into a stable orbit as he watched, the small craft’s retro-thrusters firing and bringing its orbital path under fine control.
He knew that the smart systems aboard the tiny vessels were the most sophisticated money could buy, but that didn’t stop him from experiencing a small pang of worry every time they launched one of them at something like the bullet from a gun.
Sabine chimed up, “The probe looks to be on a perfect trajectory. Damn, I'm good.” she said with a small appreciative whistle to her own work. Samuel chuckled wetly before doubling over in a coughing fit. Sabine leaned over to the young pilot and patted his back a few times as the coughing subsided.
In his head Leon scratched him off the potential landing party list. He would still need to pilot the SSV as he was the best pilot out of them by a lot, but Leon didn’t want to risk the man having an issue inside his suit on a hostile planet’s surface. He would need to stay on the shuttle.
He adjusted his microgravity belts a bit and waited for the probe to make it to the planet. The dull buzz of banter echoed in his ears but he largely ignored it, his primary focus was on that small blip of light that was slowly making its way across the dark void to the world that seemed to hang in the depths of space like a white and blue marble.
Not for the first time he found himself wondering what the planet’s history had been like. What had led it across all these eons to being in this exact spot at this exact time in the state it currently was in. Was it’s past just as convoluted and twisted as they of Earth’s? Maybe even more?
He was shaken back to the present by a voice talking insistently in his ear. It was Sabine. “I think we are already on our final approach, actually Taylor. Look at the Q readings. We have touched the atmosphere.”
Taylor’s eyebrows seemed to raise slightly. “Already?”
Sabine nodded. Leon wondered what the significance of that meant, almost as if she had heard his thoughts she answered, “The atmosphere seems to extend out much further than Earth’s does. Maybe there is less solar wind to blow it away allowing it to be thicker.. or perhaps the planet just has lower gravity than Earth.” She mused, her voice petering off as she seemed to mull it over in her mind.
Leon wasn’t sure what the point of the atmosphere being thicker meant intrinsically. Maybe the probe would slow down faster or perhaps be subjected to higher drag than she had anticipated. He decided to ask. “Sabine, what does it mean? Is there a problem?”
She shook her head, her long hair was tied in a ponytail to keep it from floating around in the zero gravity too much. This swung around behind her in a crazy arc as she made the movement “Problem? No problem. But it does present a unique opportunity for me to perform a plunge drop maneuver.”
Leon was forced to ask again, a glance at Joice causing her to shrug. “A plunge drop maneuver? What does that mean?”
Leon watched the main feed of the probe’s progress as it seemed to dip towards the planet in an ever increasing arc. Sabine made a gently curving motion with her hand as she explained, “A regular atmospheric reentry consists of several carefully calculated stages. The first involves bleeding off orbital velocity by impacting the planet’s atmosphere at a shallow angle. This slows the craft fast but produces a lot of heat, that is why they have the heat shields.”
Leon nodded. “Yes I understand that…” he interrupted her quickly.
She gave him a glance that seemed to tell him to quiet himself. “As I was saying. A standard reentry produces a lot of heat but slows the craft quickly. With a very thick atmosphere like this I can hit it at a much higher angle. In a normal atmosphere it would tear the probe apart in seconds, but the planet’s atmosphere seems to be much less dense, or at least more spread out than Earths. So the probe will be able to drop almost straight down. Bleeding its speed at about the same rate but passing through the atmosphere faster and thus through maximum Q much quicker. The parachutes can also be deployed at a much higher altitude, once the speed dips below mach one-point-five we can actually deploy them.” She stopped and looked back to the computer. “Watch.”
Leon watched. The console had a wealth of information on its small screen. Wind shear speeds, atmospherics, heat and pressure. All of these numbers scrolled by faster than his eyes could effectively pick up on them, but Sabine’s eyes apparently absorbed all this information and more at truly terrific speed. He once more found himself a bit lost in comparison. What he did notice though was the probe’s speed as it hurtled towards the ground. Its suborbital speeds dropped quickly and dramatically to almost eighteen hundred kilometers per second when the probe’s icon changed. It snapped from a ghostly white dot to a solid blue, the craft’s information indicating that its parachutes had been successfully deployed at supersonic speeds.
The velocity number was dropping like a stone now, from tens of meters per second to over a hundred. This number continued to drop for another few seconds before it began to stabalise at only a few tens of meters per second.
“Maximum Q passed. That’s it, now all we need to do is set it down somewhere clear and that's a wrap. See, easy.” She said with a smug smile, and Leon had to give it to her. That had indeed been impressive.
Joice nodded, her knuckles gripping the armrests of her chair hard enough to whiten her knuckles. “Yes, that was fast. Maybe a little faster than I am used to doing things, Sabine.” the woman didn’t seem upset, not really. Joice looked over at him and Leon gave her a thumbs up and a smile which she shakily returned.
It wasn’t exactly his favorite pastime then who was he to argue with her obviously effective methods. As long as she got things done, he was willing to humor her. “Alright, we have achieved reentry without any trouble. Do we have a landing zone picked?”
The camera from the probe switched abruptly. The dark purple sky being replaced with darkness that soon fell away revealing itself to be the underside of the heat shield which presently dropped towards the distant trees far below. Streamers of thick grey smoke followed it down until it disappeared as a speck against the immensity of the world below them.
He was immediately transfixed.
Samuel whispered something unintelligible under his breath, the buzzing of his whisper only just audible to Leon’s ears. Sabine seemed to have heard him though as she responded, “Yes it is. Though I still would rather they were green like back home.”
This caused Samuel to laugh quietly. Leon smiled in spite of not being included in the conversation. They would all get a chance to talk about the planet, but first thing first, they needed to find a place to land.
He thought he spotted a clearing, but with the probe’s altitude still being nearly one hundred kilometers it was exceedingly difficult to focus on things smaller than the continental scale. Leon waited, his breathing shallow and excited as the ground and those strange blue trees grew closer and closer. After a time the craft had reached a mere ten kilometers and the ground radar switched on.
The screen became overlaid in layers of reds, yellows and oranges as the terrain was mapped. Sabine made a happy noise, “We found a clearing. We can land next to that outcropping about one kilometer from our current vector. Not a problem at all. Samuel, would you like to do the honors of landing our bird?” she asked the other man sweetly.
Samuel’s usually grim face cracked into a smile and he nodded. “Yes, I would love to.” He took control of the program with a few taps on his keypad and Sabine leaned back into her chair to watch.
Leon sat and smiled as the younger man piloted the craft with the precision of a machine towards that small clearing in the strange blue trees. The bottom camera recorded the thrusters as they fired, the ground rushing up to meet them before slowing to a crawl as the rockets halted the probe’s downward movement. For a second nothing seemed to happen before the probe’s landing feet extended and absorbed most of the shock of the landing. The bottom camera stopped recording as its view was largely obscured by the thick layer of snow that covered the ground.
Sabine looked around and let out a loud sigh. “I will never get over how cool that is.” She seemed to relish the moment as Taylor nodded.
Joice glanced at Leon and he spoke, “Well. Now that the probe is down on the surface we should begin taking readings. Sabine, can you get me the atmospherics? I want to know what the planet’s surface is like.” She gave him a thumbs up and hunched over her console, her fingers flying over the keys. He glanced at Taylor, the man looking back with an unreadable expression. “Taylor.” The man twitched and looked into Leon’s eyes. “I want you to prep the probe’s chemical lab to extract some samples from the surrounding rocks. Maybe even get a basic chemical analysis of some of the nearby flora if we can.”
Taylor gave him a nod and hopped to it. Leon was left once more in silence. He coughed into his elbow and looked around the bridge, it was always a well oiled machine. But something in his mind noticed Terry’s absence. It wasn’t that she was gone per-se, more like the fact that there was a person missing from the space made it feel slightly awkward.
He shook his head slightly. He needed to focus, why had he been having such a hard time paying attention to things lately?
Sabine spoke up abruptly, “The surface is cold Leon. Cold but incredibly similar to Earth. Mostly nitrogen atmosphere with Oxygen and carbon dioxide, traces of nobel gasses are present, not argon though. Looks more like neon. I wonder if that changes anything?” She asked nobody in particular.
Leon shrugged. “I doubt it, the noble gasses don't really have much of an impact on the environment from what I know. But we could ask Oliver. He knows more about biochemistry than anyone else on the ship, that being his specialty of course.” Leon added, not that Oliver’s specialty was in question.
Joice looked at him, her blue eyes narrowed slightly. “It looks like you might get a chance for your expedition after all. I want no part in this one though, last time we went down it nearly ended in disaster. As you should well remember.”
Leon grimaced, oh he remembered. The slight twinge in his side came from the memory of him collapsing his own lung on accident while trying to save Oliver’s life. This time would be different though, they had the knowledge. And they would not make the same mistakes twice.