A Not So Brief Visit to the Edge - Part 1 of 2
Chronicles of Expansion: Humanity’s (Accidental) Journey to the Edge of Space
Chapter 5 – Around Zulu-9 We Go, Go, Go…
High Above Zulu-9
There is a time of day onboard the Z-Orbiter when the whole planet is at peace. It comes exactly ten e-minutes after passing over Zulu-9’s lone mountain range. That’s the sign to get ready, or so he said…
Look for the thunderstorm over the mountains… it’s always there… Once you see it, start the timer, secure both hatches, turn off the main power module, and do like the planet. Go silent. By the time you are done, the orbiter should be approaching the anomaly. All it takes to get across is five e-mins of absolute silence.
Beware! Any noise will draw them to you… that much we’ve learned.
You and I, we were the last ones, and if you are watching this, I’m a goner too. You are on your own now, Filippa. I’m so sorry…
Log anything you learn, even if it seems pointless. When they get you, and they will, log that too. Try to describe what you can in detail and attach it to this entry before… well, you know… The gun’s in the safety box. It won’t work on them, but it will on you.
Over and out.
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Filippa knew the face on screen, but it didn’t look anything like she remembered. It was just six months earlier they had shipped off world together, part of a crew of twelve charged with finding more about habitable orphan planets wandering near the edge. Now all the pods except hers laid empty, and her crewmates were nowhere to be found. Most of the logs were corrupted. She felt dizzy and nauseous. Disoriented. Plagued by questions. Where the fuck was everyone? How did they get off a moving orbiter without compromising any of its safety seals? What was the team’s leading scientist talking about, and why did he look like fifty years had gone by?
Someone had taped a rudimentary timer to the control console. Filippa had 28 e-hours to find answers. After that, the mountain range. A quick initial scan registered no blood inside the pods, and no signs of a struggle anywhere else on the ship. The orbiter looked pristine, which made her suspicious. None of her friends were known for being tidy, so she dug a little dipper. Few of the surviving logs offered any useful clues.
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We’ve discovered an anomaly on Zulu-9… you two, stop messing around! It isn’t easy to describe. Each orbit takes us what, twenty-eight hours, give or take? Yeah. We’re halfway through orbit number ten right now.
On the first go around, the anomaly appeared inside the planet’s atmosphere. We registered it as a distortion of space. A warping lens is the best we could come up with. It seemed to approach the ship on each subsequent trip. None of our instruments knew what to make of it. Neither did we.
Martinez was first to go… we saw him for the last time at the start of the second orbit. He wasn’t there when we woke up. We kept guard afterwards, to no avail. Candela and Mecha were next. They just vanished, as did everyone else… One pass over the anomaly and boom, one of us is gone. Obviously, we decided to unlock the gun, and some of the guys opted for it… can’t blame them… Not me, thank you very much… I don’t have the stomach for it.
Right now, it’s Dr. Miami and Philippa Pax, the captain and her first mate, and myself. We woke up the doctor first, and he’s been briefed. Philippa will stay in the cryochamber until the rest of us are gone… you know how it is, got to protect what’s most important to the mission.
We shouldn’t have stopped here… this fucking place is eating us alive… Philippa, if you are watching this…
The emergence of Zulu-9
Decades earlier, Zulu-9 had been charted as the mission’s first pit stop. Alone, desolate, and rotating on a wobbly vertical axis, it orbited the nearby quasar at a safe distance, with no other planets or moons for company in the blinding brightness. It was a shallow water world of extreme contrasts. At any given time, half of its ocean would be boiling, while its dark side froze. As the ice melted, flowed, and solidified again, planet wide tsunamis swept periodically across the surface, occurring eight or nine times over a 72-hour-long day.
That’s why Zulu-9 had made sense. Its predictable tides were a virtually infinite energy source, and its proximity to the edge made it ideal for a future launching station. Few other planets offered a better platform to send our probes outside of the universe, whatever, wherever, and whenever that happened to be. How could we resist such an invitation?
When they asked for engineers, Philippa had volunteered on the spot, convinced there could be no obstacle capable of stopping her dreams of exploration and discovery. Now the dream was over. Her fate, laying beyond that inevitable mountain range, had been sealed. Manually changing the orbiter’s trajectory required a crew of at least three. Comms were down. Soon, the anomaly would emerge from the horizon one last time.
Los caprichos del tiempo[1]
Time is barely ever a simple matter, and even less so around a wandering edge quasar. The same can be said about gravity. Thus, despite the orbiter’s abundant countermeasures, Philippa’s struggles to get her ship ready were worsened by the absence of any normalcy. At first, she synched her watch to the ship’s timer and spent a few hours scanning for nearby emergency relay stations. None were available. That alone was highly unusual, but when she looked at the timer again, twenty hours had passed. What the fuck? The mountain range was already within sight. She needed to hurry, secure all hatches, turn off the main power module, and go quiet.
It didn’t take long to realize she had missed her chance. The anomaly was almost upon her. What now? Would she be forever stuck in a timeless void of suffering? The thought of an endless death, as likely as any other demise so close to the edge, served as inspiration to send her running toward the gun. It wasn’t there. Even if it had been, something else was happening. Something most unexpected…
The anomaly had changed. In an instant, what was a spherical spacetime warp became a rippling halo, its hollow center spewing debris into and around Zulu-9. None of the logs mentioned that. Thousands of fragments of what could only be a destroyed ship radiated outwards from the mysterious void, falling prey to both Zulu-9 and the quasar’s immeasurable gravity. Some of the pieces embarked on an endless flight through the emptiness of space. Most, however, went into orbit and began their slow descent into a fiery death. It is a miracle none of them flew too close to the orbiter, but there were one or two near misses. Philippa managed to make out the characters on a massive metal panel that missed her by an inch. She recognized a word in Old World English, a largely extinct, academic language from the early Space Age. That word was “Exodus.”
What anomaly?
With most of the debris field behind her, Philippa had a brief respite to scan her memory files for answers. It only took a second. Her great-grandfather, a retired fleet admiral, had once spoken about Exodus, a mass-colonization initiative from the Classical Period. Like many other such programs, Exodus ships were decommissioned or refitted during the War of the Earths. None survived, or so she had been taught as a child. Too bad these stale memories didn’t address any of her more urgent questions. After all, how such a primitive ship made its way to Zulu-9, an uncharted planet so close to the edge, was the least of her concerns. What troubled her, and the sole focus of her weary mind, were the latest readings on the orbiter’s control console.
Immediate orbital forecast: Ideal conditions.
Current Sol Date: Recalculating. Please hold…
Orbital projection: Impact alert! Collision with debris field, imminent!
Time to impact, 27h 32m 30s.
Stunned, Philippa looked out the window, her scientific, analytical mind prophesizing what she was about to see, or not to see. Where had the anomaly gone? No wonder the orbiter registered ideal conditions all around, but the absence of a Sol Date didn’t make any sense. Maybe the quasar could account for that, except… the quasar was gone as well! It had been replaced by a massive red star, and Zulu-9 now appeared green and perfectly quiet far below. Where were the oceans? She had no idea what had just happened, and no time to waste looking for answers. Those could wait. For the time being, what mattered was getting off the ship before the clock hit zero.
None of what Philippa thought were her best ideas survived the first round of testing. She received the same result every time. Inconclusive. Even with the quasar gone, gravity was too strong, but that also happened in many other systems. So, why no Sol Date? How could the edge’s complex topography be confusing the flow of time? Exactly where, and when had she ended up? Did she have any options other than plunging into the abyss and rolling the dice on Zulu-9? With each passing e-min, the answer seemed inevitable.
A debris field that large was bound to have something useful floating around. Heat shields would do. Some orbital entry counterweights could very well save the day. All she had to do was find the right stuff, then hook it onto her moving ship, bring it close enough for a short walk out in the freezing darkness, attach it to the orbiter, and set the angle of entry into an uncharted edge-planet. Easy as that! Oh, and she better hope no other pieces smash her ship to dust in the process.
Time, for a change, appeared to be on Philippa’s side on the last orbit, and she had her ship ready when space junk appeared far in the horizon. It would be death or glory, as usual. She hit the thrusters one last time, feeling gravity revert to zero as the orbiter started approaching the field. The new fuel readings didn’t bother her. She had calculated what it would take for three or four basic maneuvers, including one final push toward Zulu-9.
Hooking onto the pieces didn’t go quite as planned. To start, the first three maneuvers proved fruitless, and Philippa was faced with an impossible choice. She could swerve away from the approaching wreckage, and risk entering the atmosphere without a heat shield. In short, cook herself to death. Or she could hit the brakes, hook onto a large, curved panel of incoming space junk and find nothing, leaving her ship forever stuck in orbit. Lucky for her, neither of these outcomes was meant to be.
In the split e-sec it took Philippa to make up her mind, she realized the panel had stopped about twenty meters away from the orbiter. It didn’t appear to be moving at all. Upon closer inspection, she saw it slowly pivot on its own axis, gradually revealing her way to salvation.
On the backside of the curved metal, an old man was signaling for her to pick up the orbiter’s intercom. He was not alone. Dozens of makeshift emergency capsules, each one attached to the metal and housing one or two tripulants appeared behind him. There had to be at least thirty of them. How they had survived didn’t matter. What interested Philippa were the microgravity anchors holding the capsules in place. These anchors, like any seasoned explorer could tell you, were the perfect alternative to those orbital entry counterweights she so desperately needed. But could she trust the voice on the other end?
This is Major Adeus Mezcal, of the Exodus 12. Our ship has suffered a catastrophic failure. I am in command of a group of thirty-six survivors.
We request permission to couple with your vessel.
We carry emergency planetary entry kits with us. I repeat, we are carrying EPEs.
Please respond…
[1] The whims of time