Aim to Engage 2023

16 Discovery

"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!"

Captain Michaels said the words I have been waiting to hear for over ten years.

"We have ignition. All thirty three engines of Starflight mission 2000 have fired and we are on our way. Don't forget to breathe correctly as we go through mission critical before weightlessness hits."

G-forces built quickly, and I started the grunting push to keep blood flowing to my head. Second nature for all the crew members, it was an effortless exercise and within another three minutes we were into orbit ready to fire second stage boosters.

I was the junior astronomer on this flight, our mission was critical. Find another in habitable planet for humans to expand to. We waited in a queue of twenty other ships and our ship boosted toward the moon. First stop for refueling and to check the quantum folding drive which would take us past light speed. The journey to the Rubquar system was merely a day even though it was almost one hundred light years away.

The miracles of physics discoveries in the last decade brought a Nobel Prize for my PHD mentor. I could only hope to be an infinitesimal tenth of his genius.

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"Captain, sir?" I needed his opinion of a star shot I was studying at the astrophysics station on the bridge.

"Spit it out, JA." He used the acronym abbreviations of our roles to address us. It made ma'am and sir obsolete and confusion about who he was addressing on the bridge evaporated.

"I see a shadow on this shot of Rubquar. I think it might be another planet in the third orbit. Can't be sure. Is there a way we can enter the system and explore before we go on to the next one?"

"Do the radio scans of the system support it?"

Captain was well educated in our abilities, and I had no fear of him misinterpreting anything I said.

"If the planet is in an exact mirroring orbit, we might have missed it. We don't train our scopes for continuous monitoring. It would require a year of constant recording to figure it out."

He held up his hand when I took a breath to continue my explanation, and I stopped to let him formulate his response. I valued his opinion, and I had this horrid fear of offending him.

"Besides, as I recall from my Academy astronomy course, multiple fully formed planets in synchronous orbit are an extreme rarity. You wouldn't be looking for them."

"Only two other systems have shown them, all in the inner most orbit, sir."

"Well, then let's go find out if your hunch is correct. When we drop to sub quantum, we will do what we were commissioned for. Discovery!"

Captain Michaels rubbed his hands together before standing and coming over to my station.

"Show me your shadow, JA."

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"I get to go with the team?" I couldn't quite wrap my head around the orders on the computer. I was happy enough I got to name the planet.

The buzz of my wrist unit, alerted me, and I made sure I had the breathing adapter firmly in my throat. It was uncomfortable to get in place, but once there it faded into the background quickly. The device could feel like it was choking you especially when it detected toxic pollutants in the atmosphere.

The planet was blue with tracts of land. The water scanned as a high concentration of sodium with other dissolved metals and elements in non-notable fractions. Land did not appear to have flora at all, but our scans were not microscopic. Life might or might not exist here. Old Earth history said life evolved from microbes.

The ride down through the atmosphere confirmed a high nitrogen atmosphere very similar to earth's with a higher concentration of helium. Interesting. There were small fractals of other gaseous elements, but our breathers would take care of anything that could hurt us. Right down to filtering out viral and bacterial elements before they could infect us.

As we orbited from what appeared to be north to south if we consider Earth norms, the outer shell passed through deceleration without incident.

"Approaching surveillance altitude, Captain." PF's hands were steady on the controls. Andrea was the only other rookie on this mission. Pilot Flying was her dream come true. Why was Michaels granting so many dreams this time around?

"Maintain altitude, PF."

"Maintain altitude, Captain." Andrea's excitement infected all of us.

"Captain, sir? Do you see the faint circle at two seventy degrees?" I reminded myself not to use the sir anymore, but it was a sign of my respect, the same as I gave my father.

"PF, adjusting course." His order came with a gleam in his eyes I had yet to see.

"Adjusting course to two seventy degrees, Captain."

Twenty minutes later, we were circling in a descending spiral. The markings on the sandy valley floor were obscured in shifting sand as it wormed it's way on a wind driven journey.

"The center glows, Captain. Where do we want to land?" PF asked for instructions.

"As close as you can without breaking the outer boundary. I think this was a very important place to the native occupants of this plant." Captain Michael pointed to the landing spot he wanted.

We all felt the buffeting of a wind far stronger that we expected.

"Captain, we are down, but I need to maintain the stabilizers, or the ship will tumble. Gravity is almost twice that of what we use on board Starflight 2000."

"Thank you, PF. Not unexpected, considering the size of of Aqualine. I never thought to see another of these circles. It is in much better shape than the last one on Jupiter's Calisto. Do you all know the history?"

"Aye," I responded, forgetting about command protocols. "The first true sign of other intelligent beings. Now we have another."

The pulsing light intensified. Did we trigger a response with our presence?

The being materialized over the course of several minutes. Captain Michaels was already out of the airlock. His massive frame moving with great effort, as he bent one knee to the ground, I wondered how he knew what to expect.

The voice growling from our speakers was deep with resonance.

"Well done. You have come a long way since we first found you."