Chapter Nine:

Everything that they’d learned, they transmitted back to where they expected Syriahs to be in five years. It would be close enough where, even if they missed by ½ a light year, the message would be received.

Syriahs would be deploying long-range probes and satellites now, exploring more and more of their own binary system. By the time this message was received, they’d have plenty of ears in space to receive it.

By the time the Academy at their home planet could give them advice, the problem would be over, one way or another.

“Why can’t we just change direction?” Belgar asked the rest of the combined scholars. They’d collected in the command module in order to see the hologram and assess the threat they’d caused. The module was almost too full for the hologram to be seen.

Hames shook his head, other scholars with him. In all there had to be thirty collected. Roo was taking no chances.

“Those objects are in motion,” he said, “and they’ll keep moving on their own. Most of them are. Our mass was huge at greater-than-light speed, but it didn’t reach back that far.”

“Well, then, the belt itself,” Belgar pushed on. “These things hit those things, collisions happen –“

More heads shaking.

“It will likely make matters worse, not better,” Rebert Thine added. He stood behind the captain’s chair – in fact, Thine was one of the people whom Roo confided with more than any other. A person of name, he was an opportunist who’d studied under Ambergee herself when he’d realized which way the future of the financial wind was blowing. He was abnormally short for a male, though not a midget, and bald-headed. Unlike Ambergee, he was known for his light spirit and his sense of humor.

“Those objects are going to hit the belt at a velocity that no comet ever achieved,” he continued, “and every large object in it is going to continue on for the fourth planet.”

“What’s even worse,” Livven Esteve added, “is that most of these objects are full of heavy elements, like iron. When they hit, they’ll hit hard.”

“Wonderful,” Roo said, seeing his career pass before his eyes, most likely. Regnal couldn’t see how Roo was to blame, but the people in the Government were certainly not going to blame themselves, and those at the Academy, historically speaking, would come up with someone who’d warned of this and been ignored, so they wouldn’t take the blame, either.

Disaster so typically fell on those whom the powerful could do without.

“What are we learning of the belt?” Hames Acuff asked the rest of them out loud.

“We are receiving visual images from the belt that are only four years old,” Efrain Zane informed the rest of them. He’d taken charge of anything that was like tactical information. “We’re bouncing radar in that direction now, and we’re calculating when we’ll be able to read it.”

“Will we have to slow down for that?” Roo asked.

Ghegee shook her head. “Two years ago, yes,” she said. “Now, no. We’ve spent a lot of time reading and interpreting radar at light speed – it’s a matter of modulation a long wave –“

She looked once around the room, and then down. “No, we won’t have to slow down.”

There was quiet for several moments as those in the room digested.

“Options?” Roo asked.

Regnal spoke up first. “We’re dealing with a mass that we’d have to measure in mega-mega-tons, if we could measure it,” he said. “It’s traveling so fast that its inertial mass is significantly higher than its resting mass, meaning that it will hit whatever is in its path even harder, on top of being mostly iron.”

He moistened his lips – they’d been dry since they’d slowed down. “The only way that we could change the path of a mass that large would be to let it catch us, then while dodging asteroids from all sides, accelerate past light speed, and then change course, still while dodging asteroids, but this time using only their gravity signatures, not sonar, radar or light sensors.”

Belgar’s eyes brightened but Roo stared him down.

“Which is a risk not worth taking,” he said.

“And we couldn’t, anyway,” Livven said. “All of that iron behind us has completely obliterated the signal from home, and we’re not moving faster-than-light anymore, meaning that we’re going to be off of the stream in a few days.”

“Do we have time?” Roo said, and then choked on the rest of the question.

Do we have enough time to get up to light speed? Regnal finished for him in his mind.

Zane answered. “If we start in a few hours.”

That left no time.

Hames shook his head. “Look, there’s a simple answer, and we’re going to have to face it,” he said. “We’ve doomed the fourth planet. It’s as simple as that. Whatever life there is on it, it’s all going to die, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“We have to start considering how to get to the third planet,” he continued, “and how to do it without destroying it, because if we just change direction when we’re off the stream, then we’re going to bring the same havoc to it.”

Awfully cold blooded, Regnal thought, but no less true. By all indications, the fourth planet was inhabited. It was colder than the third, but livable. It had ample water reserves – it was a planet alive.

And they’d killed it, in their ignorance. Anyone could – and would – argue that there was no knowing that this would happen, however if one points a weapon at another, and it’s fully charged when you thought it empty, any damage it did was on the holder.

Hard to say that this was different.

The meeting disbanded and Roo prepared the ship to return to faster-than-light. RF engines hummed to life, and the ship pushed forward down the stream. At the last minute, Zane took light readings from the direction of their new target, based on where it was expected to be, and then sent radar to where it was supposed to be in four more years.

The signal from Syriahs was just starting to flicker as they crossed the threshold. From there, they covered a part of the stream that they’d already drawn from, and in a week they’d returned to an un-touched portion of the stream, which they drew on for the first time.

Their means of propulsion was horribly inefficient, however in this case that served them well.

As they resumed their journey, the first thing that everyone wanted to know how much time they’d lost. For them, it would be a few more months. To the people on their home world, it would be almost a year, allowing for acceleration and deceleration.

The next thing was to study the new planet.

Unlike the fourth, it was teeming with life, mostly water and significantly warmer than their target. Many had argued that the third planet should have been their goal all along, however these were the things that actually made it less desirable.

A planet teeming with life would present dangers like a civilization which wouldn’t want them on their home world, or hostile animals to be overcome. A planet which was mostly water meant less space for them to colonize.

The warmth made it better, but for what they wanted, the temperature wasn’t really that important. The purpose of this journey was to exploit the new planet’s resources. In years, the fourth planet’s temperature would have risen significantly. On the third, they would constantly be fighting overheating the planet and destroying its ecosystem. A planet that was cold was livable – one too hot was not.

For that reason, the single-shadowed second planet was valueless to them. Even were it rich with resources, trying to get them would make them prohibitively expensive.

There was also the argument of atmosphere. That of the fourth planet was thinner than the second, which was humid and dense. Their solar technology was nearly valueless on the third planet – their cells would be a fraction as efficient. The fourth planet, while farther away, offered more access to sunlight.

Getting to it was another issue – the planet was on the other side of the solar system, or would be when they arrived. This added time to their journey, even more considering that they wouldn’t be at light-speed then.

They still had to navigate the belt. With the new information, most of the passengers lost interest in Regnal’s game. There was a lot of soul-searching going on, a lot of discussions on the cost of their expansion into space. Belgar and a few of the die-hards kept at it, but there weren’t the fans and the speculation and the excitement that had accompanied them before.

Some even argued that, if they were going to be late anyway, then they should fly completely around the worst area.

That close to a sun and other planets, their gravity drive would be sufficient to move them, and their solar cells could power their needs.

It wasn’t a consideration, though. Belgar was able to study new data brought to them by their light sensors, and would soon be adding the data from their radar, even though that would be close to the time when they arrived. With a much more accurate picture of the belt, Regnal could make a more accurate representation of the asteroids when they achieved it, and Belgar could play in a closer-to-real-world environment.

No more worst-case scenarios and no need to create and to exploit loopholes. Belgar sat a console and actually moved a rendition of the ship through what he might expect to see, and it didn’t give him that much difficulty.

Things, at their darkest hour, actually brightened.

So time progressed on Maglen. In another year, they began the slow-down that would take them gently out of light-speed. By then, they’d passed the beginning of the stream and received the radar impressions of the belt. Regnal punched them into his program and Belgar began his training another time.

He'd found a relatively clear passage through the belt, ahead of a dense grouping of asteroids which might be the core of what had been the original planetoid. Unfortunately, by their calculations, the mass behind them would pass on the other side of that mass, and then crash uninhibited on the fourth planet.

Even if the belt could have given some cover to the fourth planet, it wouldn’t get the chance.

“We’ve added to the mass behind us,” Rebert Thine informed the others gathered in the control module. Maglen would soon be dropping below light speed, weeks away from the belt. There was a lot of data to collect.

Zane nodded. He opened his mouth to speak, but Livven interrupted him.

“There was no avoiding it,” she said. “Will its mass inhibit our progress?”

Rebert shook his head. “Quite the opposite,” he said. “When we engage the anti-grav drive, it will give us plenty to push off from. We’ll use that to give us a push through the belt.”

“Too fast doesn’t help us,” Belgar informed the rest. He had his own console here, now. He’d transferred to command control and officially become the ship’s pilot. “I’ve trained at a steady pace which is a fraction of light speed, and we aren’t in a hurry or out-running anything. No need to change what we have good faith will work.”

Roo nodded. A light on Belgar’s console started blinking green. He spun in his console chair and touched several icons on his panel.

“We’re less than light speed,” he said. “Radar, sonar and light sensors are active. Hologram is building now.”

They found themselves in a solar system, several million miles from a gas giant surrounded by moons. Before them, the belt began to form.

Behind, they saw no sign of the huge mass of space debris that had been redirected behind them. Its mass had increased incalculably by now, stretching back for light years, yet still light years away. It came in two waves now, the original and the one they’d created anew when they stopped.

Smaller pieces could be seen much closer, popping into the hologram and radar found them and sonar delineated them. Before them, the deflector system was already repelling debris.

“We’re here,” Hames Acuff said, smiling wide.

Eyes turned to him.

“Think of it,” he said. “How much time, how much effort? How long, this dream, and how many setbacks have we overcome? We’re overcoming another right now, but we did it.

“We’re here.”

Regnal took a moment to absorb that. He leaned against a bulkhead, Kharen next to him. For the last year, it seemed, wherever he needed to be, she found a way to be there. Even through his obliviousness he had to notice that she had an eye on him.

Others had, at the Academy. Who wouldn’t want the son of the wealthiest family on Syriahs? He’d come to ignore them, to find satisfaction in the beauty of the code he wrote, the technology he furthered. It was the thing that made the days pass like moments, that let his mind be free.

What could a woman offer, compared to that? However he wasn’t at the Academy anymore, and on a new world, he might want a woman. Especially a woman who wanted him.

“Yes, we’re here,” Roo informed them all. “And soon, a whole shower of meteors and asteroids, even a few comets will be here, and they will rain down hell on an innocent planet and kill all of the life on it, and that is our fault.”

His weathered face swept the room. “I think that, if it could, this solar system would not welcome us.”

They were quiet, thinking, and the hologram filled itself in.

“We’re not going to have much of a problem with the belt,” Belgar informed the rest of them. “I mean – I’m glad we did the training, or it really would be hard, but it’s not nearly as complicated as the game prepared me for.”

Belgar was already plotting a path through the belt. Some of it they would plug into the ship’s guidance system, and other parts would require the actual input from their pilot.

A few more moments and the hologram filled in the system’s sun, two more planets close to it, and the third which was their new destination.

It was on the other side of that sun – they detected it by bouncing signal off of the other planets. Outside of the command module, the ship was preparing a string of probes which they would release the moment that they emerged from the belt, as well as two now which would take up positions at opposite ends of the solar system. That would give them a means of boosting signals back to Syriahs, as well as monitoring the outer reaches of this solar system.

They’d learned that, in space, a passing object had real abilities to do damage, and bore following.

“At speeds slower than light,” Belgar said, “it will take us months to get to the third planet. We can move into its orbit and have it do part of the work for us, but still… months.”

Roo sighed. “I’ll prepare a message for Syriahs,” he said. “Let them know, at least, that we made it here –“

Livven was shaking her head.

“We’ve got a light-years-thick wall of iron between us and Syriahs,” she said. “We’ll have to wait for Syriahs to move out of that path-“

“Wait a moment,” Regnal said, and sat down at one of the tactical consoles in the command module, moving the current occupant out of the way.

He called up his own servers from this one, and ran an algorithm he used to predict the changing positions of objects in their destination solar system. This time, he altered it with their latest data from the trail of debris following them.

“What is it?” Roo insisted.

The rest of the room exchanged glances and looked on.

Regnal dropped the hologram of the current system from viewing area between the captain’s chair and the forward consoles, and instead ran his own program in game mode. He changed the timeline to show years of time passage rather than days and weeks.

The trail of debris still followed in to the solar system, but this time hit the fourth planet with only the front end of the debris trail. The planet’s own orbit moved it safely out of the way, in an orbit farther out from the sun than it currently was.

A larger portion strafed the gas giant in the next year, the bulk of it passing by and then being directed into the sun, caught up in its gravitational pull.

As the solar system moved through the debris field, a huge mass from the first wave ran like a swarm of insects across the paths of the third, second and first planets, destroying them all.

“What is this?” Hames Acuff demanded.

Rebert Thine sighed. “We forgot to allow for the movement of the solar system, and how the trail of debris behind us would continue on without the influence of our own gravitational pull.”

“I thought we weren’t affecting all of it,” Enigmat insisted. She accessed the program from another console, displacing another crewman, in order to check the code.

“We aren’t,” Regnal said. “That’s the problem. The forward part of the closest wave is going to hit the fourth planet, just as we expected, because we dragged part of it here and set the rest of it in motion in this direction. The rest, though, will continue on in that direction, independent of us. The target, though, is still moving through space, also independent of the wave and of Maglen. The first wave is going to arrive here and collide with it.”

“Any chance of using the sun’s gravitational field…” Roo began, but heads shook immediately.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Rebert said. “We have the gravitational field that you can turn on and off, the sun’s is a constant. It will take its share of the debris, but in fact that’s just going to draw even more debris into the path of the inner planets.”

“We’ve doomed this entire solar system,” Regnal said.

“Um, Captain,” one of the crewmen, from the damage control console, spoke up.

“What is it, crewman?” he demanded.

“I don’t mean to pile on bad news,” she said. “But we have other problems as well.”

All heads turn to her.

She brought up her own screen, local to her own console, where she’d tapped into the sonar on one of the probes they’d launched to survey the solar system outside of the belt. She’d thought to scan the ship as it departed.

It revealed a tear in the outer hull yards long.

“What is that?” Roo demanded.

“We must have struck something in the last year,” she said. Livven and Hames moved to her screen to peer at the sonar image.

“Our defense against debris in our path is either to push it out of the way,” Hames said, “or to roll off of it, without touching it.

“There was always the possibility of encountering something that we couldn’t push and that we were at the wrong angle to roll off from, and that looks like what happened.”

“Can we repair it?” Roo asked.

There was quiet throughout the command module, then Kharen stood up from where she sat against the bulkhead.

“If we land, sir,” she said. “We’ll have time once we’re on the third planet to make repairs and to get off-planet before the debris field hits.”

“But it will never be as strong as the rest of the hull,” Livven finished for her. “Another strike there, right where we couldn’t protect the ship the first time, will punch through and jeopardize the second hull.”

“Maglen is no longer space-worthy,” Efrain Zane informed them. “I have to agree – we have to find ourselves a place to set down, where we’ll be safe for a rescue mission.”

“The nearest solar system is just over four light years from here,” Livven said. “We discovered it through our gravimetric readings as we came here. We’re sending radar out in that direction now, but we’re eight years from knowing if it has a planet.”

“And I wouldn’t say that the ship is safe to travel for another four years,” Rebert said. “Especially considering that we’ll be cutting across some of our debris field to get there.”

“So we wait in space for decades?” Roo said, “until Syriahs can be contacted and respond with another ship?”

“That is, if they have a ship ready to go,” Hames Acuff said.

“They will,” Regnal inserted. “My family began construction of the next ship the moment this one left. The idea is to get intelligence from this voyage and improve on Maglen’s technology to make a faster trip.”

“I have no interest in living on a crippled ship in a destroyed solar system for that long,” Roo said.

“Nor I,” Efrain said. “Which means, as I’ve always believed, we have to do something about that debris field behind us.”

He looked around the room.

“Look,” he continued. “Do we want to be a race of destroyers? Do we want to be a scourge on the galaxy, who’ll come to a new solar system, destroy all life in it and then take no ownership of our actions? Is that what it means, now, to be a Sirayan?”

“I don’t think it ever did,” Rebert said, “however we’re not all-knowing, either. Part of learning from one’s mistakes is making them.”

“And another is making up for them,” Efrain said, “and that’s what we have to do now. We owe it to the living things in this solar system to find a way to save them from the consequences of our actions.

“Or believe me, people,” and his sharp, hazel eyes swept the room, “we will share their fate.”