“Says who?”
“Says the personnel I spoke with in and out of cryo during our fabulous journey. If I may ask what was she to you? Baby momma? Star-crossed lovers? The one that got away?”
“She took care of me when I lost my parents during the war. She was like an older sister.”
“Oh. Well that’s noble of her. Not very sexy, but noble.”
Williams shook his head, the muscles in his face struggled to hold back a smile as he left Rivera’s quarters and made the small trek into his. He was impressed how well the air recyclers worked in keeping the cannabis smoke inside her quarters and out of the halls. His quarters, unlike Rivera’s, were still littered with unopened boxes of personal belongings, Foster’s was the same when he was last in there to check on and feed her cat. A cat that might have to spend its days living with him until she was found.
He stood next to the window and observed the uncountable number of stars as they passed by during their sub light journey . . . Where are we going? “EVE, what is our current destination?” he asked.
EVE was nothing more than an AI, she did what she was programmed to do, and performed tasks that you gave her. As he recalled he didn’t request a destination, he had simply told EVE to get them away from danger and never followed up.
“No exact destination has been set,” EVE said, confirming his worry. “You requested we leave the system, Commander, however you did not state a specific location.”
Damn it, Dom, if you’re going to be a leader you need to think things through!
He took a deep breath and tried to clear his head for he needed to prove to the crew he could handle things without the captain. Having the ship flee in a random direction at sub light speed wasn’t the way to do that. They still had a mission and a duty to protect the colonists and find them a home.
He had to make that happen now. Thousands of lives needed his leadership, and the crew needed to trust his judgment calls.
Williams placed the palms of his hands upon the smooth and cold window. “EVE, set a course to Sirius A system.”
“As you wish, Commander, ETA seventeen hours.”
Williams saw the stars move from his window as EVE changed the course of the Carl Sagan. The light from Sirius A and B slowly began to beam into his quarters giving it a slight blue hue as he stripped out of his uniform and climbed into bed. If he was going to be leading the expedition he was going to need as much sleep as he could muster for the challenge ahead.
9 FOSTER
Meanwhile . . .
SA-115, Sirius A system
May 19, 2050, 10:47 SST (Sol Standard Time)
Captain Rebecca Foster’s body tumbled like a ball rolling down a hill before she came to a stop in the middle of a grassy meadow. She quickly got up and saw the oval-shaped portal Master Chief Chevallier tossed her and Pierce through. The portal hovered in the air above the hill Foster had rolled farther down, and the strange tomb-like structure they escaped from could still be seen on the inside of the oval portal.
Well that explains the fall, she thought as Pierce got to his feet. Chevallier leaped through the oval afterward followed by McDowell and Kingston. Seconds later the portal vanished but the oval-shaped device remained floating high above. Foster walked curiously toward it, scanning it with her EAD, its composition, power source, weight, estimated age all came back ‘unknown.’
McDowell groaned as he got to his feet. “What the hell was that?”
“No idea, sir,” Chevallier said to him.
“I mean that stunt MC.” McDowell stood face-to-face with Chevallier. He angled his index finger at her face in a condescending manner. Foster didn’t need him to remove his Hammerhead helmet to know he was pissed. “I’m in command here!”
“Sorry, sir, felt like it was the best course of action.”
Foster stepped in between the two and used her body as a wedge to force the two to step back from each other. “Commander, are you seriously gonna grill her for savin’ our hides back there?”
McDowell tapped an arm mounted computer terminal on his suit. A small hologram appeared above it relaying the sensor logs of his suit. “We had backup coming; our shipboard psionic was on the way.”
Chevallier waved him off. “Should have spoken up then.”
“That the attitude you give all your Cos, MC?” McDowell said.
“You read my file, you should know, sir.”
“OK, enough already!” Foster felt the need to interrupt.
McDowell faced Foster, and she managed to get a glimpse of his angry and flustered facial expression through his helmet’s visor. “Enough? She fucked us! We’re lost with no way back to the ship. Our supplies were left on the transport, not that we brought a lot to start with, and there’s hostile aliens that want to kill us.” McDowell pointed to the grassy meadows before them. “Like, fuck man, where the hell are we?”
“We’re still in Sirius,” Pierce said as he scanned the area with his EAD.
“Ah, the egghead will get us out of this,” McDowell said.
“We can get out of the suits,” Pierce said, taking his helmet off. “Breathable oxygen nitrogen atmosphere.”
Pierce was right. Foster checked her EAD and saw comfortable temperatures of twenty-four degrees Celsius and safe air, free of toxins and radiation. She removed her helmet along with everyone else and looked at the area around them with her own eyes. She had to squint for a while, the light that was beaming down from the sun above was intense.
“This is strange, however,” Pierce said keeping his eyes on the holographic results of his EAD. He looked up to the clear azure skies and aimed his EAD in the direction of the enormous sun while his free hand shielded his eyes from the intense white light. “We’re not on the same planet we landed on, that’s Sirius A in the sky.”
“How did we travel between those two planets just like that?” Foster said.
Pierce pointed at the oval device still hanging in the air. “That device, it must be a wormhole.”
“A what?” Chevallier said.
Pierce explained. “Theoretically speaking, you could bend the fabric of space time and join two places together and create a gateway, a portal if you will, between two locations. I think we just traveled through one.”
Chevallier cursed in French while everyone’s eyes returned to the dormant wormhole.
“Any idea how to get it up and runnin’ again?” Foster said.
“You want to go back to that?” Kingston said to her.
“We should be able to contact the Carl Sagan,” Pierce said. “The distances between Sirius A and B is equal to the distances between the sun and Uranus give or take a few AU depending on their orbit. We could send a message to them, but it will take a few hours for them to receive it.”
“That’s assuming we can get our comms workin’,” Foster said as she eyed the ‘connection lost’ notification on her EAD. “We’re still being jammed.”
“There’s a barrier around us, it might be blocking our signals,” Pierce said.
Foster linked her EAD with Pierce’s to view all the data he discovered. The projection that appeared on her EAD showed that the region they were in was protected by a dome shaped energy shield.
“Shaped like a dome, so there’s probably a wall someplace,” Foster said. “Maybe we could slip past it to get a signal out.” Following the data displayed to her she began to lead the way across the fresh green grass below them. “I reckon the closest wall is this way, let’s move it folks.”
The five spent hours drifting across the flat meadows, ankle high grass slithering across their boots. There were no winds that blew past them which was understandable as the dome probably prevented strong winds from developing. The pleasant and flat landscape of the meadows had taken them into a rocky and mountainous one where hills dominated, and valleys carved their way through the region. Foster hoped they were heading in the right direction. All it would take was a cliff to block their path and force them to make a detour. Had the Carl Sagan been in orbit and the barrier not blocking their signals, they would have been able to link up with scans from orbit and get a better idea of what was around them.