No matter how many years pass you never forget the smell of
your own child's burning flesh. His
environment of recycled air and water was perfectly controlled so that he could
live. So he could complete the mission.
The smell was in his mind but that didn't make it easier.
Year
twenty-six, based on the standard Earth calendar was a few hours away. Edward
Hartwick spent most of his hours in the control room. He stared out over the
control stick, the tiny window into the unchanging void stared back at him. He
often put his hand on the thick glass trying to feel the cold of the void. It
reminded him that this was not a nightmare.
He didn't
have to pilot the ship, the On-board Artificial Intelligence did everything. He
stared at the planets and stars. They didn't seem to move. Not unless you sat
in the chair long enough. Tau Ceti grew larger, but like watching your own
child grow he didn't notice the subtle changes. He was going faster and deeper
into space than any human being, but it didn't feel like movement from the
moment he had swung out of Jupiter's gravity. Strapped in the launch was enough
to almost crush him. Then with nothing close by for reference it was easy to
forget he was even in motion. How often he would think about the Earth's 460
meters per second when he was on Earth? He didn't, No one thinks about the Earth moving through space. He forced
himself to get up run the length of the ship to the storage bay a few times
every 24 hour cycle. The gravity on the ship changed constantly, he could feel
difference from his chair in the control room. He didn't need Oasis to tell him
even if it was programmed to tell him every time gravity shifted.
He could
tell certain stars were getting closer each day, each month, each year. He knew
time was bullshit, forget for a moment that he was traveling at a speed that
bent time. Time was a construct built for life on Earth and the days, months
and years were meaningless here. The only thing that kept time relevant was
Hartwick himself.
In a function of the ship's original design,
he had access to the complete database of human culture. Language, art,
science, and pure entertainment from the culturally relevant to the
embarrassingly filthy. He went through phases of interest in the collection but
none of it seemed to matter. Humanity had become an echo long faded. It had been years since he talked to a living
person, a vast sea of nothing separated him and the nearest human being, he was
more alone than anyone had ever been and yet that smell never left him.
Hartwick
watched the clock often, counting down seconds and minutes till his
twenty-sixth year on board the ship. The final year on his trip was just
minutes away. He thought he would die here on the ship long before they reached
Tau Ceti.
“Captain
Hartwick,” The computer had not spoken to him in almost three years. Not since
he screamed at it to leave him alone. It had followed his order but he knew it
was there the whole time. If he didn't eat food, it would appear. If he didn't
take his meds it would appear. The door to the hall would open if he sat too long.
No words spoken but he understood, get up off your ass and run the length of
the ship. He supposed this was the AI version of a cold shoulder.
“I know, Oasis.”
“We are
entering detection range in one hundred and twenty hours – mission protocol
suggests we begin drills.”
He reached
up to the glass and touched his index finger to the bright spot of the
star. Slowly he moved his finger across the glass to a smaller flickering
light. The light disappeared behind his index finger. Tau Ceti E is the
fourth planet in orbit of the star.
“Here I
come.”
⛭
“Eddie!”
Col. Richards gave Hartwick the manliest of hugs almost slapping the air from
him. The two men had last seen each other on Earth. They didn't know each other well enough to
warrant the hug but the colonial forward station was the loneliest outpost on
the quickly overpopulating moon. Built a mere 10 kilometers from Armstrong's
first footprint, the majority of its operations were done by AI monitoring
construction projects around the solar system. From habitats on Mars and Titan
to algae farms on Europa.
“Welcome to
Luna, buddy.”
Hartwick
dropped his bag and turned to look out the large display windows. Europe and
Africa rose on a crescent Earth above the horizon. His third trip to the moon, and it still took his breath away. The two men stared at the sight. It never got old. The cradle of humanity
hung in the sky.
“No matter
what bullshit is going on down there, it is still beautiful from here, huh
Eddie?”
“Yes sir,
still home.”
Richards
laughed a little.
“Time to
walk on our own.”
Hartwick
knew what he meant; they were thinking the same thing. It looked beautiful from
here, but the water had grown scarce. What remained was poisoned, and taking
the salt out was killing the oceans. The fish had long ago been eaten to
extinction, leaving a dead zone filled with islands of floating plastic. Crucial parts of the ecosystem were dead enough that the whole system crashed.
The rains clustered in some parts of the globe, and never came to others. The
rivers and lakes were too poisoned to maintain life. Mass exodus was the focus of the new century.
Twenty-Two was about the journey. Mars, Titan, Io and Europa. Maniacs lived in stationary orbit above
Mercury's dark side, but their survival was no less precarious than the people
stubbornly hanging on to the Earth.
“That's why
I am here, Colonel. My family and I are ready to be a part of the new worlds.”
Richards walked him over to a hologram projected at his
eye level. Three feet long, it was an image of a ship. One pod that looked like
tin cans connected by strings. Hartwick stepped around it and saw three dozen
engines.
“Noah is a
state of the art vessel being built in orbit above Mars. We will need to get
it up to full speed before it loops around Jupiter.”
“You want
me to fly it?”
Richards
shook his head. “Trained the designer to fly it, you'll be a passenger in a
sense, we all will.”
He had read
the theory about this mission. Taking our data to the stars, from DNA to every bit of data that is humanity brought down to the smallest scale. A civilization to be rebuilt after a three
decades voyage into the void.
“You want
my DNA, I'll be left on Earth.”
“Mars, Titan
or here on this tiny world, home will always be on the horizon. Your choice, and a
part of you will build a new world.”
“Why can't
I fly it?”
“It will be
a long and painful journey, don't be jealous, only one person can pilot Noah.
Doctor Garcia will lead the awakening. She must be there. Your family couldn't
go with you if you did.”
Hartwick
leaned in to look closer at the hologram of the ship. “Why not fly it by AI?”
“The
O.A.I.S. will do almost everything, we just want you to teach doctor Garcia the
basics. She is one of the smartest
people in all the worlds. We need someone who can think on their feet if the AI
crashes.”
He looked
out at the dead Earth. He could always get work as a pilot but there really was
no choice, he had to take the gig if he was going to get Emily and Jake off
world.
“You know
the answer.”
⛭
It sounded like rain drops. The
little pitter patter on the hull sometimes like a light rain, but mostly it
sounded like a raging storm. The ship was designed to move through this dust,
but he couldn't take the sound. Hartwick lived
most of his time with headphones on listening to music loud enough to
drone out the sounds, but as he moved into the rendezvous with Tau Ceti E, he
could no longer listen to music; he had to be ready – he had to listen.
He listened
one more time to Bach's Prelude to C. The
piano spoke to him.
“Oasis...stop
music play back.”
The sound of dust hitting the ship was thankfully light at the moment. Hartwick had
trouble thinking of the Tau Ceti system as the void. After years in deep space
the galaxy could be described by no better word. This system, however, was filled with debris which was
believed to be a coughed-up planet larger than anything our Sun had.
“Oasis, how
long until we clear the dust belt?”
“One
thousand two hundred and thirty kilometers.”
Hartwick
settled in his chair. The gravity was slightly lighter than Earth's today. He had
to pull himself all the way into the chair. Decelerating was playing havoc with
the life support. Even the oxygen moved through the ship in strange ways. A glass of water and a plate with an algae
patty waited for him in the control room. He wondered how many times he drank
this same water, how many times he peed it back out. How many times it was
recycled into the swamp O.A.I.S. maintained just to support his life.
Tau Ceti E
was getting brighter. In Earth terms it was a matter of months now. He had to
open his ears.
“Oasis –
Scan for transmissions and any artificial pockets opening in space.”
He no idea
what was happening back home because receiving transmissions from the Sol
system would be like painting a target on the ship. The AI was smart enough to
sweep forward for signals, it could pick up on non-directional signals. The
survival of the species was not a given. So few remained.
“I am
detecting several million signals both private and public.”
“Can you
translate?”
“Not at
this time.”
“Play one
of the public signals.”
The signal
crackled for a moment and then came through the speakers. The language was not
like one he had heard before.
Hartwick
listened to it anyways. It was better than silence. Better than the sound of
space dust hitting the hull. In time, he
began to recognize patterns, but without a visual it was hard to develop
concepts. No one had laid eyes on a Ceti. Until the last days before he left, no
one had even heard them before. They saw their ships and felt their wrath. But no one
had a clue what they looked like. Only that they came from Tau Ceti.
⛭
Ed Hartwick
rolled over in bed and saw his wife standing at the window. He was still naked
under the covers. She was dressed for the day, looked ready to go to the
office, her keys in her hand. Emily had her dreads pulled into pig tails. That
is what she did with her hair when she worked the floor at the hospital. Her
mocha skin was lighter than his, or their son's. She wore teal colored scrubs and
matching shoes. It was her best color, but Ed thought she looked
great in anything. Her smile and amazing bedside manner made her a beacon of
hope, not just in the hospital but in this dying world.
“What are
you staring at?” He sat up in bed.
She smiled.
“Our son...he is playing pilot in the backyard. What are you staring at?”
“The most
beautiful thing I'll see today,” He patted her now empty spot on the bed. “You
have a few minutes.”
She shook
her head. “I don't. I have...”
Her words
trailed off as she looked up into the sky.
“Eddie, you
better see this.”
Hartwick
searched the floor for his underwear.
She nodded and waved him to the window. Hartwick stood up and slid on his underwear. He
didn't look out the window, he cleared a spot on her neck and kissed her softly. Then heard the boom...sounding like far off thunder, then another...before long, they popped
like popcorn. He looked up, hearing Emily's increased breath.
“What is it, baby?”
In the sky above, as far as they could see, massive
holes had opened, and through them it looked like open space. As if something
had poked holes through into deep space.
“I'm not
sure...”
“Jake,” She
whispered their son's name. Their miracle child. They weren't supposed to have
children. No one on Earth was. Jake was an accident, and no matter the challenges
that raising a child in this world gave them, they loved him with all their heart. It was worth it
all.
Jake stood
in the dusty backyard and pointed at the sky.
“Get him
inside!”
Emily ran
out of the room, Ed dashed to the closet to grab shoes. He slipped them on his feet and ran behind
her. The sonic booms kept shaking the house, louder and closer each second.
Emily jumped the last four steps and had her hand on the sliding door. The
house shook apart as the booms got closer. Ed tripped on the bottom step.
From the
floor he looked out. Emily pulled the door open just as the rain began. It wasn't water. It was like jelly, but ignited faster than napalm, singed the air
as it streaked to the ground. Fire and
death filled the sky.
Emily ran
to their boy. The ground was like hot coals and the Earth itself was in flames.
Jake screamed a final time as his mother put her arms around him. Ed screamed, not sure what to do, his boy was on fire while Emily his love ran into the flames.
His heart
broke so completely that his legs gave out. He felt the hot Earth at his back
and saw the Ceti ships crossing the sky like a storm front. It paralyzed him.
He lay there waiting to die as his wife's screams faded and his boy's skin
burned.
⛭
“Get him
inside.” Those three words haunted him. She had shoes on, he wanted to grab
shoes. Why he thought he needed shoes, he couldn't say. It made sense on that
day. His clock had counted twenty-six
years since that day. So many light years behind him... He sat at the helm of a ship big enough to
carry a civilization to new worlds.
From the
window at the rear of the control pod he
could look back at the ship. The engines that had long since gone dark used to create a horizon in the distance over the tail end of the ship. The
back of the space craft was the size of a city. From a distance it resembled a baseball dragging home plate by
a thread. The back was more than a wall of engines, it was designed by Doctor
Ellen Garcia to store the DNA history of all plant, people and animals, a
massive catalog of life stuff. Noah was meant to bring humanity to the stars.
Beyond the Kuiper Belt to a new world, Garcia's progeny would be raised to
respect life better than it had been on Earth.
Except that
mission never happened.
Hartwick
had just completed Garcia's training while she was at the forward station on Mars when
the Ceti's attack began. She died instantly. From Titan to Mercury, the Cetis
were meticulous, ninety-five percent of humanity was eradicated across the
solar system in less time than it took to process. It was no surprise that most of Noah's team was gone.
Every
survivor dealt with the guilt of why they lived. Hartwick wondered how he would
have dealt with it if he didn't have the mission. He could never erase the
pain he felt when he thought of Jake and Emily. For years he would often stare, just looking at their picture. Then there would follow days when he cried
himself to sickness. He remembered that
feeling of watching the Ceti ships turn around and head back into the
wormholes. He watched the anomalies close, afraid to look at his dead family again. He
never look at them again. He felt like a coward in that respect. That is why the smell
tortured him endlessly. He was sure he smelled it every time a door opened. He
would run the length of the ship, and the smell seemed to follow him like a
shadow.
Now he had
something new to focus on. The voices. They came from the people who had folded
space to destroy his species and casually end the life of the two most
beautiful human beings he had ever known.
He could
see their world now. He was coming closer each day. All these years of torture
in solitude, and here it was. Tau Ceti E.
Their
language sounded almost European, romantic and sweeping. At first he wanted to hear
it because it gave him satisfaction. They didn't know he was coming anymore
than they had on that Thursday, twenty-six years ago. They didn't know he was
riding on the biggest bomb a civilization could produce. A cocktail of
chemicals meant to tear apart ecosystems. A world ender.
“Here I come, you bastards.” But only the O.A.I.S. heard him.
He started
decelerating ten years ago – five years too late if he wanted to orbit their
world. He had no plans to slow down enough though; he needed to hit that atmosphere
running. At least that was the plan.
He only needed to be there because the Ceti's
wormholes created an electromagnetic pulse that would shut down the AI's OS. So
they had three back-ups in a deeply shielded core. Hartwick's only job was to be
ready to install back-ups, with a strict timeline of thirty minutes – the time
that life support would cycle without power. Hold your breath and install the
new AI. He did a drill for every month on Earth during the first decade.
A terminally bored
Hartwick scrolled through the public signals until he heard something
different.
“Oasis, increase volume to forty-five percent.”
Sound
filled the control room. Violin. That is what it sounded like. He would have
bet anything in that moment that it was an Earth made violin – even if
intellectually he understood it wasn't. He could almost picture the bow across
the strings, played to beautiful effect. He could picture Emily perfectly in a flowing dress, next to him in a concert hall, her hand holding his tight. The violinist on
stage alone, a man in a tuxedo sitting at the edge of his chair, playing.
Hartwick closed his eyes and pictured it. The room filled with people closing their eyes along with with him, feeling the notes tickling their ear drums. A
beautiful moment of shared experience.
The song
ended – he felt the urge to clap, as it was a beautiful song – then a voice destroyed
the imagined scene. A Ceti voice articulated, in its language it intonated beautiful and tragic notes as the song continued. It was at that moment he realized he was
listening to music composed on another world. A being born under a different
star sung to him. He had no clue if the voice even came from lips, or that the
strings were played with hands.
The song
was beautiful, but the species that produced it was the same that had come to Earth twenty-six years ago.
“Oasis, how
is the translation coming?”
Hartwick
waited, listening to the song, now more than ever wondering what he was hearing.
What they were saying.
“Oasis?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How is the translation coming?”
He got the
sense the AI didn't want to answer.
“Eighty-six
percent of the language has English equivalents.”
“I want you
to play the signals at twenty percent volume and the translation at forty.”
“This would
not be advised.”
Hartwick
grabbed an earpiece and put it on. “Tell you what, you play it for me, and I'll do twenty laps, the length of the ship.”
Hartwick
put the earpiece in and opened the control room door. The music flooded into his ears. Oasis's monotone voice was just audible over the singing.
“Oh my
child, through the night you carry out past the stars, may you come home to our
unit whole and complete....”
⛭
It wasn't a
special day. A Thursday. The first warnings were ignored. Lost signals from the
colonies further away than the Sun. The Cetis appeared in orbit like sharks breaking the surface of the ocean. Space and time tore like paper, and their
ships came through.
Just as
quickly as it began, it was over. It seemed all at once; with the
delay in signal from the colonies, it was hard to tell. General Richards
survived. When he discovered his promotion, he was recovering from a wicked
combination of third degree burns and frostbite due to an exposure to the Martian
atmosphere, after the attack. He was now the highest ranking member of the colonial
military to live. Hartwick suspected that he survived by hiding, but he had also
learned there was no logic or reason behind who lived and who died in the attack.
Hartwick
floated through the main chamber, and saw Richards alone at the window looking out at Noah. Untouched, in perfect condition, with only one problem: the Cetis had set flame most of the civilization it was designed to carry. The undertaking of recording
and storing the data had just begun.
“Sir.”
There would
be no pats on the back. No yelling 'Eddie' or any pleasantries. The fun, jovial man
was lost.
“Sorry
about your family, son.”
Hartwick looked down and said what all survivors had learned
to say. “I'm sorry for us all.”
Richards
shook his head. “I wont waste your time, I think you know why I asked you
here.”
Hartwick
shook his head. “I'm sorry...I don't know.”
“Do you know
who they were?”
Hartwick
heard rumors like everyone else, but did anyone know? Richards read his mind.
He knew that he didn't know.
He moved
his fingers together, tapping his control map, and an image of the the Milky Way galaxy floated before them in 3D.
“That's us
right there, by our sun–” he didn't move his finger far “–and that's them. Not
far at all. Tau Ceti E, the fifth planet from their star. Only twelve light
years away.”
The general
pointed up at Noah hanging in orbit just above the red surface of Mars. Far off in the distance, the Sun was poking over the horizon just enough to give them light.
“Noah was
designed for a three hundred and twenty-two year mission to Kepler 138b. If we
swing it off Jupiter, we can get it going just under the speed of light, at least
that is what I'm being told.”
Hartwick
flashed back to that last morning with Emily, the spot in the bed still warm
from her body an hour after she got up. He felt like he was being stabbed.
“Why did
they do it?”
Richards
shook his head. “We had a probe fall back through a wormhole, and it just briefly
sent a signal. It was pure luck. We know where they came from; as to who and why,
well your guess is as good as mine.”
“What do
you need?”
“I need a
pilot. The only problem with that kind of speed.”
“How to slow
down?”
Richard
cringed a bit. “You wouldn't be slowing down, son. Not all the way.”
Hartwick
looked at the ship and grinned. He didn't care. He understood what was
happening. Everyone struggled with why they survived. But now he understood.
The universe worked in mysterious ways.
“You ready
to make those bastards pay?”
⛭
Hartwick ran the length of the ship, his muscles getting
tighter as he felt the gravity intensify. It was stronger than Earth gravity, this
far from the control pod. The alien voices kept playing through his earpiece.
“The strength of our world cannot be judged by our might
in military matters, but in the advancement of our security...”
He had found a public affairs channel. He listened to the
family narrative of He'taroo, the leader of the Movement to the Stars. He knew
enough now to understand the basics of their culture. “Cetis” was a human term, one that
burned like a flame in his mind. The closest sound in any human language to the name for the their species was Hojon, although it sounded like who-john.
Tau Ceti E was not the birthplace of their species. Their home world had been abandoned long ago, and they'd lived on their new world longer than humans had been
writing, since before the Dinosaurs went extinct.
“...Our species
has a right to self defense, but the actions...”
Defense from what? he thought, and the signal
stopped. Hartwick stopped running and looked around the corridor for an interface
with the ship's AI. He tapped his earpiece, wiped sweat off his brow.
“Oasis, what happened to my signal?”
His voice echoed
throughout the length of the corridor. The O.A.I.S. heard everything on the ship, so it had chosen not to answer. Hartwick started the long walk back to the control pod. As they'd reached the final days of the mission, he had been playing a game with the AI.
He stopped listening to human music, movies, and the audio books that kept him
company over the decades. He suspected the AI was avoiding granting him access to certain
files.
He listened to the Hojon signals almost every minute he
was awake. For twenty-six years he had been speeding towards their world, his
only purpose to end their lives. He just couldn't help himself. He wanted to
know. He listened to their public affairs signals. Every move of the culture's
bureaucracy was telecast, step by step. The people voted on everything short of
military and the ruling family's actions. The ruling family had for a thousand
years controlled their government. Something caused resentment in the lower classes.
Hartwick learned their system quickly. He determined just as
much by listening to their dramas. As a species, their fictions seemed to be idealized
historical narratives. Each family had their own. The species apparently had three
genders. One of which was the breeder gender, who had within the last thousand
years of their planet's orbit about Tau Ceti developed a rights movement to gain independence.
He became aware that the general public didn't
care for the stars movement. There was no common desire to reach into space, until a
ruling family member requested a vote for the throne. His campaign promise was Security and Safety, despite almost no one knowing there was a threat. A species not that far away on a blue and vibrant
planet was speedily reaching toward the stars. The attack fell just short of the sixty-seven percent threshold for military spending. The great leader chose to proceed. Many Hojons
knew what was happening, but just as many didn't. He could ignore that fact.
Hartwick scrolled on his pad through more signals, all the
ones O.A.I.S. had marked as public affairs spun past with a bad signal icon. Only
music signals were coming in strong, despite how close he was getting. He
put away his pad as he walked into the control room. Through the portal he
could see the light of Tau Ceti now just weeks away.
“Oasis, I know what
you are doing.”
He waited a long
moment. He couldn't shame the AI into talking or doing anything. It wasn't
supposed to have emotions, but the damn thing seemed worried. Worried about the
mission.
“You think I'm
losing my stomach for this mission,” he said.
He sat in the
control chair. He looked at over-rides and the control stick. Just the
slightest shift could mean the difference between his mission success and
failure. He couldn't abort, but he could throw them off course.
“You think I can forget what they did.”
Hartwick was lying. It was
easy to think about revenge when he thought of them as just a mindless killing machine. Their
families were different, they didn't look anything like the ones back home, but
they mattered. Their art was not anything like humans, but close enough
to make Hartwick feel something. He listened to the narratives and translations
for so many hours that he started to understand the language himself.
The people of this
world did not send visual signals, at least none that the O.A.I.S. made available, and Hartwick knew why he wasn't
getting them all. He started to notice the AI was listing some things as
untranslatable. There was a pattern developing to the messages skipped. He pieced the truth
together. Oasis didn't want him to know or think of the Hojons as a people. Or
that many had no idea what the military did in space, in their name.
Hartwick leaned
forward in his chair. With the signal now off for the first time in months, he let
his interior space fall into silence again. He dropped his ear piece to the floor.
“So that's it – I'm
cut off?”
The silence lingered and the void stared back at Hartwick, who sat there wishing he could erase the past
twenty-six years, he should have died that morning. He should have ran out
there barefoot and died with his son. He could have died that day, and it wouldn't be him in this chair, facing this dilemma. He'd fantasized about dying. The
O.A.I.S. wouldn't let him. It was always watching. Not yet, Edward Hartwick. You
have mission to complete. Riding the ultimate wave of death. Front row ticket
to the greatest act of vengeance the human race had ever conjured.
He held his hand in front of his face and smelled his
fingers. There it was. The faintest smell of burning flesh. In the silence of space
he could still hear Emily struggling through her final breaths as the trauma overloaded
her heart.
“I thought I was
better, I did.”
He got comfortable
in the chair and folded his hands over his lap. The wait was almost over. He only hoped he would
see his loves again soon.
