Genesis Earth Page 5

  “Good,” I said. “When can you start? I think this is pretty urgent.”

  “Urgent? Why?”

  “Well,” I answered, “if we found a self-propelled object coming towards Earth at relativistic speeds, we’d intercept it, wouldn’t we?”

  She shrugged and ate another spoonful of her cereal. “Maybe. But what about radio waves? High and low frequency bands? If there’s life in this system capable of spaceflight, then the electromagnetic spectrum has got to be saturated with communication signals. Did you check for that?”

  “I did, but the results are… a little bizarre.”

  “Why? What did you find?”

  I swallowed, suddenly feeling very foolish in the face of her questioning. “I found nothing.”

  “Nothing?” She gave me a funny look. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe there isn’t any intelligent life in this system?”

  “No,” I said hastily. “That’s impossible—or, well, highly unlikely at least.”

  “But Michael, we just don’t have any evidence that there is.”

  “How do we know that the life in this system hasn’t moved beyond radio based communication?”

  “Right,” she said, rolling her eyes. “So the alien ship we can’t see is out there because of a civilization we can’t detect. And you’re supposed to be a scientist.”

  I bristled. “Are you mocking me?”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “I need you to take this seriously, Terra. Something could be out there, and we need to find out what it is.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have to do it all right this minute. I think you’re being a little paranoid.”

  I tensed and clenched my fists. Who was she calling paranoid? We had an important mission to do, and I wanted to make sure we did it right. Couldn’t she be a bit more cooperative?

  “I just want to be ready,” I said. “That’s all.”

  “Okay, okay,” she said, leaning back. “I’ll map out the system and perform those scans. If something’s out there, I’ll pick it up.”

  “Great. How long will it take you?”

  She put another spoonful in her mouth and looked up at the ceiling. After thinking for a few moments, she looked back up at me.

  “Three hours.”

  “Alright,” I said, standing up. “While you’re doing that, I’ll check the ship and make sure all the systems are functioning properly. Let’s get started.”

  I stopped and gave her an expectant glance, but Terra stayed right where she was, finishing her bowl of meal as if she hadn’t heard me.

  “Well?”

  She glanced up at me and turned her head to the side. “Well, what?”

  “Aren’t you going to get started?”

  “Michael, I’m really, really hungry.” From the tone of her voice, she seemed to think that that explained everything.

  “But Terra,” I said, “don’t you want to know what’s out there?”

  She snorted and shot me a dirty look. The expression on her face seemed to say: Do you really want to argue about this?

  “Alright,” I said, caving in. “You can take a break—just, whenever you’re ready.” No point in fighting—she’d check the system and get that scan done. Eventually.

  Before I got to the door, I heard her moan. She tried to stand up, but bent over a second later, hands on her stomach.

  “Ugh,” she said, closing her eyes. “I feel sick.”

  “Do you need some help?” The memory of the recent crisis in the cryo chamber made me forget our argument. I nearly jumped at the sign that something was wrong.

  “I’m okay.” She walked to the door of the bridge.

  “Better keep the intercom in the mess on, just in case something happens.”

  * * * * *

  Terra threw up as soon as she got to the mess. It took her another two hours after that before she felt well enough to get started with her astronomical scans. I did my best not to push her, but it was hard not to feel frustrated. Six hours into the mission and we had barely started.

  It felt extremely strange to walk around the Icarus, performing all the same system checks that I’d checked before we’d left. In some ways, I felt as if only a couple of hours had passed, not forty years. The ship certainly seemed no different.

  Forty years, though. That made my parents—what? Ninety years old? Were they dead already? Either way, I’d never see them again. My childhood friends were old enough to be my parents—their kids were probably older than me by now. I imagined Stella and her husband, surrounded by their grown children, with a couple of grandchildren on the way.

  Almost immediately, I forced the thought out of my mind.

  Terra took her time getting around to her tasks, but when she buckled down, she was good. Really good. Using the astronomical equipment in the ship’s observatory, she mapped every planet and protoplanet in the system in less than half an hour; everything short of minor Trojans and stray asteroids. None of them were artificial—or if they were, they were silent.

  While she worked on the high resolution scan, I used the data to plot a course for the third planet—the one practically identical to Earth. We were a little more than a light-hour away, but moving at nearly a thousand kilometers per second—fast enough to get there in about two weeks. Plenty of time to watch and observe from a distance.

  “Are you ready for an engine burn?” I called out from my seat in the bridge. Terra wasn’t in the room with me, but the intercom carried my words across the ship.

  “Engine burn?” she said, her voice coming in as clear as if she were sitting next to me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got our course plotted. Are you ready?”

  “Hold on—I thought you told me to do a full scan of the system.”

  “Can’t you put that on hold while we maneuver into position?”

  “Uh, no.” From the tone of her voice, she seemed more than a little pissy.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, raising my hands in the air even though she wasn’t there to see it. “It’s no big deal. Finish the scan, and we’ll execute the maneuvers after.”

  “Stupid,” she muttered, unaware that the intercom was good enough to pick her up. I frowned but said nothing, instead turning back to my work. Putting off the engine burn for another two or three hours threw off all my calculations—not by much, but enough that I’d have to make some careful adjustments.

  “What should we call it?” Terra abruptly asked.

  “Call what?”

  “The third planet?”

  “Its name is EB-175c.”

  “I know that,” she said, “but it needs a real name. EB-175c is just a boring catalog number.”

  At first, I didn’t like the idea; renaming the planet seemed utterly frivolous, considering all the other, more important things we had to do. On second thought, though, I had to admit it made sense. After all, ‘Earth’ was a name, not a catalog number. If this planet was supposed to be the next Earth, why shouldn’t it get its own name?

  “What do you think we should call it?” I asked.

  The intercom was silent for a few moments. The unchanging starfield shone through the bridge window, alien and unfamiliar.

  “Well,” said Terra, “our ship is called the Icarus. Wasn’t he a character in some kind of ancient myth?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Greek. Escaped from prison with his father on a pair of artificial wings. Flew too high, so the gods broke his wings and made him fall to his death.” Not the most auspicious name for a ship, come to think of it.

  “Yeah, I remember. What was the name of that place he went?”

  “Minos?” I ventured.

  “No, that doesn’t have a good ring to it. How about—‘Icaria’?”

  “Isn’t that the name of the ocean where he fell to his death?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  “Why?” she said. “Nobody saw him die, did they? His father just kept on flying. Maybe Icarus survived, and nobody ever found out.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Can you think of a better name?”

  I couldn’t, so we settled on ‘Icaria.’ It didn’t give me much comfort to name the planet after the place where Icarus met his demise, but Terra liked the name, so we settled on it. After a while, it grew on me.

  Icaria.

  * * * * *

  Cryo sleep does nothing to rest the body. Seven hours were all I could take before I needed a break. I held out long enough to bring the ship into the course I’d plotted, but after that I could hardly think straight.

  “I’m dead tired,” I said over the intercom.

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Do you want to take the first sleeping shift, then?” She’d had a rougher time of it than me, after all. I could stay awake long enough to give her a few hours rest.

  “I don’t know. Those drugs you gave me haven’t worn out yet. I can keep working for a while longer.”

  “Okay,” I said, secretly relieved. “We should time our shifts so that one of us is always awake, though.” The last thing I wanted was to miss the decisive moment of contact when it finally came.

  “All right. I can keep going for another six hours, I think.”

  I left the bridge and walked through the narrow hallway into our sleeping quarters. The bunks were little more than unmade mattresses, like a new apartment. I opened up a drawer and pulled out some bedding wrapped in vacuum sealed plastic.

  “Do you want top or bottom?” I called out.

  “What?”

  “I mean, do you want top bunk or bottom bunk?”

  “Oh. It doesn’t matter.”

  I took the bottom bunk. After the bedding was made, it was all I could do to keep from collapsin
g in a haphazard heap on the bed. But first, I took the photo from my parent’s photo album. Unlike the immaculate walls and floors of the Icarus, the photograph had noticeably aged during the forty year voyage. The paper had yellowed and frayed slightly at the edges, and it felt surprisingly fragile, as if it would crumble to dust if I were too rough with it.

  Carefully, I tacked it to the bedpost with some electrical tape. Fragile or not, I wanted the photo somewhere where I could see it.

  That done, I set the alarm clock and sprawled out across the bed. A hundred different thoughts raced around my mind, but my body was too tired to care. Within minutes, I was asleep.

  The Ghost Ship

  I woke up to the sound of the alarm clock buzzing above my head. Yawning, I reached up with a groggy hand and sat up to check the time: 14:27 hours since cryothaw. I’d overslept by more than an hour.

  Damn.

  “Terra?” I checked the top bunk—she wasn’t there. “I’m ready to relieve you. Terra?”

  No response.

  “Terra, are you there?”

  Again, no response. Why hadn’t she woken me an hour ago? The intercom would have carried the sound of the alarm to every room in the ship; it must have been unbearable. Why hadn’t she shut it off?

  A faint breezy noise mixed with the hum of the ventilation system. It sounded like it was coming over the intercom. Whatever it was, it wasn’t part of the ship.

  I frowned and stepped through a tight doorway to the staircase up to the observatory. If Terra wasn’t in her bunk, she was probably there.

  “Terra?” I called out. Again, no answer but the low, rhythmic hissing over the intercom.

  Something was on the ship with us. Something alive.

  Chills ran up and down my arms. The stairway to the observatory was steep and narrow, much more than any of the stairs on Heinlein station. I climbed quickly, passing black and yellow labels on the walls that read: WARNING! ENTERING NULL GRAVITY ZONE. Using the handles over my head, I pulled myself through the invisible gravity field. The sudden weightlessness made me feel as if I had dived into a tank of water. I pressed a button on the wall and the circular hatch on the ceiling slid open.

  The observatory was a dome-shaped room that jutted out above the rest of the Icarus like a bubble, or perhaps a turret. With a ceiling almost four meters high, it had a lot more open space than the rest of the ship. Wide windows graced the walls on either side of the retractable two-meter telescope, reminding me of the observation deck back home. The hatch opened on the floor at the center of the room, just in front of Terra’s workstation.

  I pulled myself in and found Terra drifting unconscious in midair, curled up in the fetal position. Her hair waved lazily, giving her the appearance of a drowning victim.

  I nearly panicked when I first saw her, but to my relief, her pulse was still strong; she was alive and well. The noise I’d heard over the intercom must have been her breathing. She was fine. Nothing had happened to her.

  That’s when I noticed the blinking light at her workstation.

  I frowned and pulled myself up to the computer terminal. The alert was coming from the program monitoring the automatic scans. It read:

  Significant non-natural disturbance detected at 43V 29H. Source: unknown distortion of starfield. Time: 12:14 hours.

  My heart jumped. Whatever the computer had detected, it had showed up nearly two hours ago.

  “Terra,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders and shaking slightly. My heart was beating hard by now. “Terra, wake up!”

  She moaned and turned towards me in midair, but didn’t open her eyes. “Wh—wha?”

  “Wake up,” I said again, shaking her with more urgency. She opened her eyes a crack.

  “Whas… wassa matter wichew?” She pushed me away weakly, making us drift apart. After a second or two, she curled up and fell asleep again, drifting near the starry window.

  She was completely out of it. She probably hadn’t even seen the alert.

  I examined her workspace. All of her programs were still running. Notes and calculations scribbled on dozens of pieces of adhesive paper covered the space around the computer. It seemed that she’d fallen asleep in the middle of her work.

  The alert was programmed to go off when the scanners detected a self-powered object—an alien spacecraft, for example. If it had been blinking for hours, the thing that had set it off could be anywhere in the system by now. For all I knew, some unidentified, alien craft was on the other side of the hull, listening to everything going on inside our ship.

  Maybe they’d even found some way on board.

  I kicked off the wall and took hold of her again. “Terra, what’s going on? What happened?”

  “Go away,” she scowled.

  I floated with her in the middle of the room, unsure what to do next. Run a medical scan to make sure she was alright? Go down to the bridge and start analyzing the emissions? Check all the outside video feeds to see what the hell was out there?

  First things first. Check the scanners.

  With shaky hands, I pulled myself down to Terra’s work station and opened the scanner history. The disturbance had occurred nearly four light-hours out from our position, beyond the orbit of the furthest planet in the system. The data was contradictory and difficult to interpret—it looked as if the fabric of space-time itself had warped, if only for a few seconds.

  The event following the disturbance, however, was much more familiar. Eerily so. A burst of high frequency emissions, exactly like the anomaly we’d detected at EB-175c nearly forty objective years ago. They came from a massive object that had materialized on the scanners the moment we’d detected the signal. In a matter of minutes, it had accelerated to over three quarters the speed of light, at which point our equipment could no longer track it.

  There could be no doubt anymore. We weren’t alone in the Icaria system.

  My stomach fell, but in the zero gravity, it had nowhere to fall to except in, making me sick. I had no idea what I should do. How could Terra have slept through this? I felt powerless, as if everything was slipping out of my control.

  I shook my head and forced those thoughts out of my mind. After all, the best scientists were always calm and rational, even in the face of danger and the unknown. My father’s words came immediately to mind—I was standing on the shoulders of my parents, performing a work that would surpass their own. One little slip up didn’t mean we were on the brink of failure.

  Terra looked uncomfortable sleeping in zero gravity, so I carried her out of the observatory and down the steep stairs to our sleeping quarters. It was something to do, something to calm me down and keep me busy. I laid her on my bunk; hers was still unmade.

  As I stood in the narrow room that was our sleeping quarters, I felt that I was as far away from home as I could possibly get. The walls were utterly bare, the lights too bright, the room too new. I had an overwhelming urge to get out of the ship, escape to someplace familiar, but of course I couldn’t—there simply was nowhere else to go.

  Snap out of it, I told myself forcefully. Get a hold of yourself. I took a deep breath and stepped out into the hallway.

  Instantly, I felt as if I were being watched.

  Space was narrow and limited on the main deck of the Icarus. The bridge, the mess, sleeping quarters, cryo chambers, observation room—these were all within a few steps of each other, connected through the main corridor that traced a straight line from the bridge to the engines. The door separating the living quarters from the storage and equipment rooms lay a few meters from where I stood.

  The glass window on the door was dark. I walked slowly to the window and peered through it. With the lighting turned out, shadows covered the far end.

  I switched on the lights on the other corridor and peered through. Nothing there. A strip of halogen lights shone brightly along the top corners of the corridor, and cast a virtually shadowless light.

  Fifteen meters down, however, I saw another door—the one that led to the reactor and engine rooms. The window there showed nothing but darkness.

  I knew in my mind that what I was doing was silly, but I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that something was on the ship with me. I could turn around and go to the bridge, but I knew that the fear wouldn’t go away on its own. Alone on the bridge, my thoughts would drive me insane. I had to be sure there was nothing out there.